I felt for the guys pacing the perimeter behind the wall. A very late afternoon tea was going on up on the lawn and they knew nothing about it.
What I learned from my hours of observation was that while the place wasn’t technically remote, it was hidden enough in the hills to feel like it was, and that, while the place wasn’t bounded by a perimeter fence, it was certainly secure enough. If you weren’t part of the gang then you didn’t get in without an invite, and those who did make it past the stone lions up at the top of the long drive were eyeballed all the way down to the house, and once inside you were rarely out of the sights of a .22 lever-action rifle. Falzarano’s little army was doing a fine job of keeping their boss secure.
So far, so good. I figured I could come and go, because I wasn’t like the men with the guns. I was part of Falzarano’s other little family, those entrusted with “initiative,” those who he sent out on personal errands. Let’s call it Falzarano’s inner circle. The old man had taken a shine to me and I wasn’t sure where he had unearthed Alfie Micklewhite from, but he seemed pretty pleased at the team we made. We were even dressed the same now.
That didn’t mean Falzarano wouldn’t have his eye on me, of course. For all I knew I really was being watched, maybe by the men with the rifles, maybe by Alfie. So I could come and I could go but there was more than a fair chance my movements beyond the walls of the castle would be watched and reported on.
Which meant I had to be careful. But I knew how to lose a tail. So long as I picked my moment I was fairly sure I could make my way back to the office in West Hollywood without much of a fuss. I considered my period of careful observation at the window of my room to be time well spent. Soon enough the day grew dark and I watched as the lights down by the bottom of the trellis outside my window and the lights buried in the shrubbery by the low wall came on and lit the whole building up like it was the residence of the French ambassador and not that of the most infamous criminal mastermind on the West Coast.
A few moments after the outside lights came on I heard a humming sound and the lights all dimmed, just a little, all at once, before coming back up to full strength. That number of bulbs was bound to be a fair draw on the power. Either the main city supply up here in the hills was running through old thin lines that took a moment to adjust to the increased load, or Falzarano was running a generator that had to do the same.
I waited a little longer, counting the ticks of my internal chronometer to pass the time and the ticks of the old house cooling in the evening air. The lights stayed nice and bright.
Then I got to work.
I pulled the blinds and then I pulled the curtains and in the dark I walked across the room until I got to the bedside table. There was a light on it that was a thing of gold and glass that looked like it belonged in the Louvre. I turned it on. It cast a warm glow. If anyone came by the passage outside my door they’d just figure I was reading my paperback book.
I moved to the door. I listened at it. There was no sound from the other side. I reached for the door handle, and then I heard it, and then I stopped.
It was music. Piano music, faint but with a clarity that didn’t come from a record or a radio. I opened the door a crack and the sound of the piano got a crack louder.
Someone tickling the ivories in Falzarano’s study. It was a slow and steady tune that was neither happy nor sad nor particularly memorable and whoever was playing was good but not that good. Maybe that was how Falzarano relaxed after a hard day sitting behind his big desk, smoking his cigars and handing out assignments to scare old friends of his to death.
Bully for him.
I headed out in the corridor and closed my door. I turned and checked how much light leaked out from underneath it. It was good enough.
I looked both ways and then I picked a direction and headed toward it.
19
I made a left and then a right and then I walked some more and started hoping for a street sign, because navigating Falzarano’s castle was turning out to be a royal pain in the posterior geometric field stabilizer and the decor was rich and stuffy and it all looked the damn same to me. I wished I’d picked up a wool sweater at Jerome’s because at least I’d be able to unravel it and leave myself a trail back to my room. But I didn’t have a sweater so I had to make do with creating a three-dimensional integrated vector-plot field map as I went instead. That would do just as well as a piece of thread.
The place wasn’t empty but that didn’t mean I saw anybody. I heard talking and laughter behind closed doors and I saw shadows moving in the light cast from within. There were people in the house but I stayed out of their way. The guards were still creeping the carpet but there seemed fewer of them in the night shift. Even a hood needed his beauty sleep.
Whatever I was looking for, I thought Falzarano’s study would be the place to start the search. According to the house plan I was drawing up, the room was a windowless box set more or less at the center of the whole place. Nice and secure. A place to keep secrets.
The problem was that it was not currently unoccupied. Someone was in there playing the piano. Maybe Falzarano himself, although he was an old man and it was late and I had always figured that old men went to bed early.
I walked on and aimed for the music. It had been with me the whole time as I moved around the house and it sounded like it was somehow following me, coming and going like the ebb and flow of a tide, the wood paneling and the thick carpet doing strange things to the acoustics of the place. But with a little concentration and a few adjustments to the vector plots in my head I got a fix and I soon found myself back where I had started on the big landing above the entrance hall. Falzarano’s study was down the stairs and through the door and down the long passage.
My return must have coincided with the intersection of several guard patrols, because now the landing was home to five men with rifles. Two had their backs against the balcony railing across from me and were talking in low voices, their faces lit by the red glow of cigarettes as they smoked and chuckled quietly. Their rifles were leaning against the rail next to them.
On the next side another guard had sat himself on a wingback chair big enough for the queen of England to recline in with a little whiskey sour. I watched him get comfortable with his hat pulled down low over his eyes and his rifle laid across his knees. Nobody else seemed to mind but I wasn’t sure Falzarano would be pleased to see one of his precious boys asleep on the job.
There were two more men and these ones were doing what they were supposed to be doing, which was patrolling the house. They were on opposite sides of the landing and as they walked they looked down into the entrance hall, their gazes as slow as their strides.
I did as best a job I could of holding my breath and then I walked out into the open and wheeled around toward the stairs. There may have been a quicker way to Falzarano’s study from here but I didn’t know it.
The reaction of the guards was nothing to write home about. The two men huddled in their cute little chat looked up briefly then returned to the conversation. The patrolling riflemen may have glanced in my direction but I didn’t notice. The fifth wheel snored in his chair.
This was good news for me. As I had suspected, any interest in the new boy had evaporated already. So long as I was in the house, anyway. I still thought I’d have some eyes on me once I got outside. If I were the boss I’d trust the new boy only so far myself.
I wasn’t at the stairs before one of the doors on the balcony swung open, and sharply too, the man on the other side of it hanging onto the doorknob for dear life as his eyes fought for some kind of focus.
The door in question was right by my elbow and the man clutching it jerked back and then his gaze focused somewhere in the air above my head. I stopped and I saw that the guard nearest me had stopped too.
The man used the entire length of his forearm to scratch under his nose and I saw his knees sag as he got a better grip on the doorknob. He was the balding round-faced man, the man fr
om Falzarano’s little conference, the one Alfie said drove an E-type Jaguar in British racing green.
The man that made my circuits buzz like a wasp nest that had just been given a good hard poke.
He was still wearing his suit and it looked like he’d been sleeping in it. His tie was still in place but the knot was steadily heading south. His jacket looked stretched out on one side. There were socks on his feet and drink on his breath.
“Hey, you, you!” he said, loudly at first and then his eyes went wide and he looked around and he exhaled, short and shallow. “Come here, come here,” he said, in a stage whisper you could have heard down on Sunset Boulevard.
He stayed in the doorway and gestured for me to come closer, each wave of his arm causing his whole body to rock. By this point all the guards who weren’t asleep were looking in our direction and the one nearest had stopped just a few feet away. He looked amused.
I moved closer to the man in the doorway but not much. He nodded with some vigor.
“Listen,” he said, “can I go now? I mean, really, thanks a whole lot, but I have things to do, you know? Places to go and people to see. I’m a businessman, you know? I have work to do. A lot of work. Mr. Falzarano is going to be real annoyed if this doesn’t go through, okay? I mean, really, this place is swell, it is really, but you know.”
Then he stood tall and he puffed his chest out. His cheeks were doing a fair amount of puffing as well.
“Look, I’m a busy man, a busy man,” he said. “I’m important. A V-I-P.” He patted his chest and grinned and then went back to huffing. “The old man, he knows that, and listen, you can say thanks to him but no thanks from me, okay? Okay. Good. I have work to do. I have to go to work.”
Then his gaze shifted and he saw the guard standing not quite beside me. The man’s eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed and his voice went up a few decibels.
“Hey! Can I go now? I need to go now. You tell the old man, okay? Okay.”
He swayed in the doorway and he looked at the guard and then he looked at me and then he looked at the guard again. He swayed again. He had gotten his drink on and it turned his face into a cartoon of emotions. He scowled at the guard, and then that scowl turned into a leer.
“You think you can keep him safe with that kind of hardware?” he said. “They had machine guns, bub. Machine. Guns.”
Then he let go of the door knob and he bent his elbows and mimed the restaurant shootout, his lips flapping and a good deal of saliva ricocheting like bullets off the sideboard next to his room.
Then he slumped his shoulders. “Ah, forget about it. You don’t understand a word, do you? Stuck in a house full of them, I am. A whole damn house full.”
“Keep it quiet, Ellis,” said the guard with the rifle in an accent that was pure sun-kissed Californian. “I’d be happy to let you walk out that door, but I don’t think the boss would be too happy when we drag your dead body off the road and into his office, now would he?”
Ellis.
My circuits buzzed and I had no idea why but it sounded pretty important.
Ellis mumbled something, and then he sniffed and looked at me like I was the one who had spoken. “Okay, fine, you’ve made your point. But listen, you just have it all ready to roll, okay? Okay. We can have it all set up, no problem, but the longer I’m here, the longer the old man has to wait. And he don’t like waiting, do he?”
He was still looking at me. He looked at my face and his eyes crossed. Whether he even knew I was a robot or not, I couldn’t tell.
“Alfie?”
I shook my head. That answered my question.
“Ray,” I said.
“Hey, Ray, have a nice day, okay?” said Ellis. He gave the guard a glance.
I knew Ellis was important to me and I wanted to find out why, so I turned around and gave the guard a nod. “I’ve got it,” I said. The guard sniffed and looked at me. Then he turned and walked back to his patrol route, only stopping once to look over his shoulder at us.
I pushed Ellis a bit farther back into his room. He had replaced his grip on the doorknob with a grip on my arm. He leaned in and spoke in the whiskey-soaked stage whisper again.
“I don’t like those guys,” he said. “I don’t like guns. Too many of them around, you know what I mean?”
I watched the guard’s back as he moved away from us.
“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I think I do.”
“Right. Anyway. I need a drink! Dammit, I need a drink and you need a drink. Do you want a drink? Let’s get a drink. Oh.”
The piano played on somewhere in the house.
“Oh?” I asked.
“I’ve run out,” said Ellis. “They don’t make bottles like they used to, do they?”
“Ah, no.”
“Get me a new one.” Then Ellis pawed at his mouth with one hand and then he grinned and nodded. “Oh, listen to that, listen.”
We listened. I watched Ellis. He closed his eyes and lifted his chin and did something with his fingers.
He was listening to the piano.
“Nice tune,” I said.
“Oh, nice lady,” said Ellis. “Hey! She has the key to the old man’s liquor cabinet, Alfie. Say, say, you go down and you send her up here and send her up here with a bottle, okay? Okay. And then we’ll have a little drink.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll do that,” I said, and I began to gently push Ellis back some more. He let me push him and his Oscar-winning leer reappeared. I pushed him inside and toward the messed-up bed and he sat on it still leering and then he fell onto his back with his arms outstretched. He hummed something that was a vague approximation of the piano tune but only just.
I watched him for a whole minute. His eyes were closed and he seemed to have forgotten I was there.
“You’re important, Mr. Ellis,” I said. “You’re important and I don’t know why.”
He might have heard me, the way he hummed and smiled. But his eyes stayed closed.
“You want to tell me why you’re important?”
The humming began to fade and a moment later the snoring began.
“I guess you don’t,” I said.
As I left the room I closed the door behind me. The guard reappeared at the end of the landing. I knocked a finger against the brim of my hat and the guard did the same and then went back to his patrol.
I turned and headed for the stairs, following the music all the way and thinking that the important Mr. Ellis had just given me an excuse to get myself alone in Falzarano’s study.
20
The doors to Falzarano’s study were closed. The piano was loud out in the corridor so I knocked with volume on the dark wood. The piano didn’t stop but a woman’s voice said, “Come in!”
I pushed the doors open and walked in.
“Ray, darling,” said Carmina. She was seated at the piano and was playing it while lifting her arms up and waving them around in a way that didn’t look very efficient. The music bounced off the books and the couches and the thick carpet in a way that would be pleasing in a concert hall but in the low-ceiling room was too loud. You wouldn’t be able to work in here with all of that going on. Maybe that was why Carmina waited until Falzarano was in bed before she came in here and practiced.
I eyed the desk. It was big and it had lots of drawers that looked good enough to hide lots of secrets in.
Then I eyed the drinks cabinet next to the desk. It was a big wooden thing on a big wooden pedestal and locked with a big brass lock. If I could get Carmina out of the room I could have a good sniff around while Falzarano was counting sheep.
I made it halfway to the desk when Carmina stopped playing. There was a clunk. I turned around and found her now draped against the study doors, which she had apparently closed with the length of her body. She was wearing a silky dress in a burnt orange that did wonders for the tone of her skin, which I could see an awful lot of thanks to the split down the side and the split down the middle.
“Better not distur
b the others, Ray,” she said, and she said it over her shoulder and from underneath a long strand of hair and when she pushed herself off the doors and sailed toward me the hair stayed just where it was. She had the tools and she knew how to use them. I could see that, even though I was a robot who had no firm opinion one way or the other on the allure of beautiful women.
But that allure was a tool. Like the dress. Like the hair. You didn’t move around in the world she did without knowing what you were doing and with whom you were doing it.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss—”
“Carmina, please. All my boys call me Carmina.”
Of course they did.
“I just came down to get Mr. Ellis something to drink.”
Carmina was within touching distance and touch she did. The fingers of her hand played up and down my left arm.
“Emerson Ellis is a pig,” she said quietly. “The sooner he is out of here, the better.” Her fingers trailed off my arm and across my chest as she walked over to the drinks cabinet.
“Why is he here, then? He doesn’t seem like he wants to be part of Falzarano’s little family.”
Carmina looked over her shoulder at me. “Oh? What’s he been saying?”
The question and the move that went with it were both designed to be innocent, a passing interest, nothing more. But I’d been a private detective once and I was programmed to recognize that kind of body language when I saw it. She only wanted me to think she wasn’t particularly interested.
I had no real idea of who Carmina was, but she interested me. She was more than just Falzarano’s companion. Maybe she kept some of those secrets that I was supposed to find out about.
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