Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  “No. I don’t know. I love police work. How’d you manage it?”

  “I thought like a man of my time. It’s a rare mind that can do otherwise alone. I never had time for my family, for Kelly especially. That was my first mistake of a lifetime.”

  “But look how Kelly turned out!”

  “We should always be patient with the people we love. And that should include ourselves, not to go all Randome on you. But take the time, Brigid. Make the time. It’s all we’ve got: this is not a rehearsal for the real show.”

  “Time. Which right now we’re running out of. Hear those SWISS buggers? But who ever has an hour to spare?”

  “No one. So don’t waste it on what’s not dear to your heart.”

  She met his eyes directly. “I do love my work, and I’d die to have children with Mike.”

  “You’ll find the balance, you and Mike, the time, don’t do what I did. But for the present, Brigid, we’re both lost, I’m afraid. Finished. I’m taking the heat on this, it doesn’t matter to my career anymore.”

  A literal heat had risen between them, assisted by the hothouse of the Dome. As they breathed, their bellies touched and he felt her chest rise. He had no problem with that; he could stand happily in such human complexity forever. But he was the first to let go fully, trailing his hands off her upper arms.

  “Thank you, Brigid.”

  They stood apart, like dancers comfortably awaiting the next waltz.

  “What’s a partner for, Kevin?”

  The dome lit up and a shattering crack was followed instantly by another explosion of lightning and thunder. She jumped but he hardly startled. He looked up, in a lingering stupefaction that he welcomed as his lot for the remainder of his life.

  Ertelle glanced sideways at his face. “People seriously believed it was never going to rain again… Kevin?”

  He looked star-struck. “People seriously believed…serious people will seriously believe just about anything, Sergeant Ertelle. The defences I’ve had to sit through.” He spoke mockingly: “When I was born, Daddy refused to bite my cord and Mummy disinfected the stub with an abrasive cleanser, and that’s why I cluster-bombed the orphanage. Mummy got breast cancer just so she wouldn’t have to nurse me, and that’s why I poisoned the infant-formula factory. Uncle Willy changed my diaper funny, and that’s why I took out the daycare with a rocket-launcher…” He threw his head yet farther back, free associating into the thunderous dome about the ways criminals who can’t think for themselves have learned to justify their murdering madness. “Once upon a time, my living loving God sat down and dictated to His prophet a book commanding us to live together in love, and that’s why we kill all infidels, and that’s why we all need guns in this here-n Christian ’merica, and that’s why, and that’s why, and that’s why…”

  Through her own sputtering laughter Ertelle tried to stop him: “Look, let’s at least give this place a close casing before the SWISS and Frank’s troops come piling in. We’ll start right here together and spiral outward, just like the SWISS themselves do… Detective Beldon!”

  He wouldn’t be reclaimed by sane routine. “Eventually there’ll be no more true crime, you know, so no more call for the likes of Beldon and Ertelle and their procedures. All crime will be understood as biochemically caused — everything good and bad: nursing babies, Macro porn babies, mothers killing babies, Mother Teresa, makes no difference! The one and only criminal left will be the Almighty Creator Himself. No more human good, no more human evil. He’s to blame! In the near future our legal system’s punishments will look as primitive as Sharia morality looks to us. Innocent, guilty? Don’t make me laugh! I didn’t choose to be like this! That’s why I drone-incinerated the Salvation Army old folks’ home! That’s why I nuked the Buddhist Detox. The devil didn’t make me do it — God did! That’s why…”

  Ertelle saw that he would continue lost in his own near-future nonsense. So with chin tucked, and half-consciously rubbing circles on her stomach, she began a slow circuit of the brown stone memorial, talking aloud to herself, actually reciting nonsensically against the rhythm of Kevin’s mad ramblings about a guilt-free future, their two voices droning like duelling Gregorian chants in the vaulted dome:

  “The Dome, DeLint’s Button, Mother, the mummy button, always with the mummy button to push for blame. I know you’re not listening, Kevin, but my mom and dad used to play a game with me, walking their fingers down my front to tickle me, chanting buttony buttony who’s got the buttony, then tickling me around the belly button till I begged them to stop. It was nothing, just a thing they did together with me. But I made the big mistake, well, not really a mistake mistake, of telling Mike. It’s one of the most sensitive spots on the body, you know, mine anyway. The navel, twirling back through history to buttonless Eve. Material evidence that links us maternally and insists we’re all complicit in each other’s lives. Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon’s one elegant solution. We studied that at the college, you know. There just has to be more here, some connection! Why would DeLint place this smaller button within the big empty button unless to connect? Buttony buttony, why a button inside a…button…inside —

  “Beldon, c’mere.”

  Something in that arrested him, and he walked round the stone to her.

  “Look sharp.” She pointed, he squinted.

  Close to the floor on the back corner of the stone was a big brown button the breadth of a hand, same brown colour as the stone, as indistinguishable as a modest green burial mound in a rolling green field.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty!” He was instantly self-possessed again.

  “This is no time to get superstitious, Detective Inspector.” She was already bending to the big button and pressing with her whole hand. The slab slid smoothly aside, away from them, opening on a narrow staircase into darkness. Ertelle gaped in answer.

  She managed, “But there’s no structure for that, unless…”

  “That’s right, Sergeant Ertelle: we’re standing on a false floor.” He stomped, it echoed. “That explains the six-foot ladder between the ceiling of DeLint’s office and this room. Look up: imagine how high the Dome itself looks from outside, even from the ground. I knew it and still I missed it.”

  “And,” she answered, “remember how the last vid cut from this room to the smaller room with the divider! Look at my hands, I’m shaking, is that normal?” She held out trembling hands. “Kevin, I think I was…I think I was factioning there!”

  “I think you’re full of shit, Sergeant Ertelle, so you may well have been. You were thinking routine procedure while I was losing my stupid factioning mind.” He sandwiched her two hands in both his, smiled like a father at a child’s accomplishment: “Brigid, you may just have saved my life, whatever happens from here!”

  “Let’s move, partner.”

  His face lit up in another flash and he turned to the hole in the floor. “We’re going in.”

  The thunder exploded continuously around the dome now, peeling in his ears like the few times he’d been ordered to use the shooting range and had ignored the muffs.

  “But in where?” she said. “Or into what?” She stepped to the opening.

  “Please, Brigid, I have to go first.”

  He had to turn half-sideways to step down the steep and narrow wooden steps, descending with head deeply bowed and left hand first on the ledge of floor, then touching the rough wall for guidance, and almost immediately he was in total darkness. After about half a normal floor’s number of steps, his right foot hit bottom and, expecting another step down, the knee buckled backwards.

  “Shit.”

  “Here,” and a thin beam of light shone from the miniature flashlight dangling before his face. He took it from her hand and held it like a cigar at chest-level, playing the beam along the floor immediately ahead.

  “Amazing, it’s a run of enclosed hallway, a tunnel
really, hanging between seventeen and the Dome. Christ, this really is the Hardy boys.”

  “Beldon, Trixie.”

  He’d been sweating from the strain of not thinking about it, which made it worse when his nightmare claustrophobia ambushed him there in the wide-awake passageway — just as he made a right turn and pitched into cool dark space, where the thin penlight made even less impression.

  “Search for a light switch,” Ertelle said, fingertips on his back. “You’re hyperventilating, Kevin. Settle down.”

  He controlled his breathing, then searched with the thin light until he held it on the opposite corner. He lowered the beam to the floor and drew it back to them, and Ertelle followed the point of light back to a switch plate. She flicked up three toggles and the room was blindingly illuminated.

  He squinted…squinted harder, blinked strenuously and shook his head, but not from the shock of light, or not only. The room — with its lower ceiling and no windows, with the divider they’d seen on the last vid folded like accordions to each wall — the room was emptier even than the Dome: with no stormy sky above, no memorial stone breaking the blank expanse of floor, and no colour but white in a dead silence like sensory deprivation. Yet another great discovery was stinking to high heaven of absence — when he saw it, the glint in the middle of the floor.

  Meeting Ertelle there, Kevin picked up the machete, whose blade was stained with black dried blood. A scrawled note was attached like a price tag to the crusty handle. He read aloud:

  “Welcome to my private office, O Great Detective. No suicide quote, this! You should do the honourable thing now, Kevin, and fall on this sword. As scans will show, this, the real murder weapon, is already polluted with Beldon DNA anyway. I win. You lose. Yours for a factioning future, Ewan.”

  Ertelle looked. “At first blush, I’d say that is the same handwriting as the graffiti on the monument above. Ewan?… That’s Dr. Randome’s name, right? What’s he mean, already polluted with Beldon DNA?”

  Kevin spoke from a daze: “I missed it as obviously as a smoking gun sitting out in the open. I don’t know how, I just don’t. A Trixie Beldon reader would have twigged before now. The Hardy Boys would long since have been sipping sodas on the veranda with their fat friend Chet and explaining to him the whole chain of cause-and-effect! Watson would have dozed off during the explanation! And now Randome’s gone.”

  “Dr. Randome?… But of course: the two women you traced to his Santo Domingo clinic, the expertise in hypnosis, all those poor women made to look like suicides, his access to everything Omphalos. It all makes sense. How could we have missed him!”

  Kevin spoke in something like wonder: “Not we, partner. Me. I kept saying exclude no one, while all the time I excluded Randome, the Widower. DeLint? You were right about DeLint. DeLint was too big a boob even to stay out of stupid sex trouble! I’d made DeLint the Widower on no material evidence whatsoever! That’s factioning for you!”

  “Easy, partner, don’t go there again.”

  He drew breath, still in amazement at his own immense stupidity. “I mean, I never even seriously suspected Randome till I read the writing on the monument above. He crossed my mind only once earlier, but I concluded it was the Widower — DeLint — conniving it that way, and counting on me thinking that he was counting on me thinking that. It was Randome phoned my home the morning Cynthia died and said the trigger word!”

  Ertelle concealed her concern, only glancing at him, and gestured round: “Where are all those vid coins and old cassette tapes MYCROFT detected? Does this ever feel weird, eh Kevin?… Kevin?”

  “All gone!” He said it as might a child whose empty plate has satisfied a coaxing mother. And he was hearing himself say it that way. Watching himself too, not from above but from everywhere at once in this anywhere tomb of a room, this white whale’s belly. Kevin Beldon was passing, gleefully, into a whole new way of hearing and seeing.

  Heedless of procedural regulations, he hoisted the stained machete like a fencer and addressed some ghost opponent, then actually lunged with it — en garde! There was real madness waiting, full-blown, just over there.

  “Evidence, Kevin!… But this is fucking impossible, that machete! A thing can’t be in two places at… Oh, I see. The one on McNicol’s bed was a plant, as you did warn it could…be…uh, Kevin?”

  He threw back his head and brayed his laughter. Look, he’d become a regular Macro jackass of tears and laughter! Finally, at long last, his true self! A jackass from the jackasses, as his ould Jew of a father would have called him.

  He tipped far forward and from below saw that his face was indeed the face of what he’d become: a madman. His eyes appeared red-rimmed in the garish white light, and brimming with something other than tears or laughter. Ertelle looked so funny, like a little girl about to cry again because someone had taken her dolly! Poor Brigid, wanting so to be a Trixie Beldon! A tricky tricking Beldon! Beldon tricked! What a treat! Why had he never seen the world this way before? Truly. The rule of law? Absurdity ruled! Nihilism ruled! Randome dictated the rules!

  He took a step backwards and, hoisting the blade, hailed her from the rollicking bow of his foolish Pequod: “The mystery of the missing mystery!” No response? Well then: “The mystery of the mysterious meaning of un-meaning!” Nothing still? Go for it. “The one elegant solution is a white whale shitting white ash from his white ass!”

  His own wit overwhelmed him and he bowed deeply and snorted powerfully.

  Froze.

  Dropped the machete — clang.

  He sniffed again, and twice more, and was straightened up by a tincture more powerful for him than a full dose of smelling salts.

  “Kevin, maybe we should —”

  “Don’t move.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  He moved, actually scampered, sniffing desperately like a dog in some arseholeless hell. He sniffed all around Ertelle, then up and down her — “Kevin!” He widened the range of his snout-work. In the middle of the floor where the two sections of the room’s divider would have met, he stalled and stopped sniffing. He cranked back his head, then walked quickly to the wall on the right and looked to the top of the long black rubber. He raised his left arm and snapped fingers, pointed, then clawed the top of his head with both hands, in pained enlightenment at his incremental stupidity. He looked to the top of the divider again, grinned and waved.

  Sniffing, he covered the rest of the room in a minute and ended near the entrance they’d come in. Drawing a long breath, he held it and turned to the white wall, placed his palms flat against it, and rested his forehead between them there.

  Brigid came over looking more surprised than when he’d come up with the computer moves, if also alarmed now. She placed a hand near the nape of his neck. He turned round; he was no longer childishly joyful, but that at least looked sane.

  “Kevin, are you —”

  “Yes, factioning, but don’t ask me to explain, and I’m not insane. Or not anymore. Tell me, Brigid: why do women wear scent?”

  “Are you sure? I mean, with a non sequitur like that?”

  “Yes.”

  She made to answer — stopped, trying to think ahead of him, or to keep up. She frowned, deflated. “To cover what we are? Men, too, you know. It’s not a gender issue, more a social thing, what with water rationed so tightly.”

  “Sure. But scent can be individual too, can’t it? A signature scent? Your body spritzer earlier?”

  “If you can afford the real pheromones-enhancer, it does make you smell more like yourself sans bacteria, yes, everybody’s distinctive. I can’t really afford it; mine was an anniversary present from Mike.”

  He smiled sadly. “You know, I think I really lost my mind there. It was the most incredibly energizing experience, unadulterated mania. Freedom! Maybe I’ll lose it again sometime. Maybe it’s still lost, because I believe I’ve whiffed esse
nce of Beldon here, an odour I know like my own nose.”

  She looked worried again. “Kevin, you don’t really expect me to follow that, do you? You promised no more holding out on me. Give already.”

  “The rule of law is back, Sergeant Ertelle, I’m almost sorry to say. Because it rules a world polluted by Beldons and Randome.”

  “Kevin, please, no more foolish talk. Wait: the surveillance cam hidden at the top of the room divider, that’s what you were waving at. But it’s probably long inoperative. Besides, we’d need a MYCROFT connection to even try to trace it, and neither of us has a tablet.”

  “Two things, Brigid. One: the cam is operative and I already know where it feeds.”

  “Tell me already!”

  “And two: like I said, I know what Beldon smells like, and no Beldon has ever been…in this room…be…fore…”

  They were both drawn to the ceiling, where there was a rumbling like thunder, but only like thunder, because the pounding was rhythmic, continuing, and drawing nearer. Kevin looked around in some panic, like he really might run in circles with dithering hands. Instead he loped to the machete, tore off the note and popped it into his mouth. He returned to Brigid, holding the machete and chewing ferociously.

  “Settle down, Kevin. That is evidence. I need to know what you’re thinking and there’s no time like the present!”

  The stomping feet were more deafening, and the low ceiling right above their heads began cracking like spider-webbing ice.

  He mumbled comically through his munching: “No time to explain, Brigid. When Frank has security release us, if he hasn’t ordered them to kill us —”

  “What!”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple pistonning like a living machine. “I want you to requisition an unmarked car and wait round the corner from my old home at eighteen-fourteen Lundy’s Lane. Got that?”

  But her gaping answer was lost in the thumping of high-alert security down the stairs and their explosion into the room. They were outfitted all in black, their helmets beaming unnecessary lights now, their shock-sticks waving dangerously about. Instantly Ertelle was surrounded and Kevin semi-circled against a wall.