Jack shrugged. "A horse, of course. What else?"
"What else, indeed. But I bet that some of your friends in Paella—"
"SESOUP."
"Whatever—would probably imagine a herd of zebras of wildebeests, am I right?"
"Or UN invaders on horseback…or hoofed aliens…or the legions of hell…"
"That far out we won't go," Abe said. He'd finished slicing his muffin in half and was reaching for the bag with the margarine. "Wildebeests will serve fine. But you see my point? We're in the country in Connecticut where a lot of people keep horses. I should expect wildebeests? No. Horses require very few assumptions.
Wildebeests, however, require assumptions like someone has been importing the creatures and keeping their existence secret—I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any stories in the paper about a black market in wildebeests. So Occam's Razor demands we assume, until proven otherwise, that the noise was made by horses and—"
Abe had pulled the Smart Balance from the bag and was staring at it like a wino contemplating a bottle of O'Doul's.
"What on earth is this?
"It's a kind of margarine."
"Margarine? So? What happened to my Philly? Or my nicely salted Land o' Lakes?"
"This is supposed to be good for your heart."
Outwardly Jack remained casual, but inwardly he cringed, waiting for the explosion. This was sacred ground. Not counting a few friends like Jack, Abe didn't have a hell of a lot in his life beyond his business and his food.
Yeah, he had every right to eat himself into an early grave, but Jack had just as much a right to refuse to shorten that trip.
"My heart? Who should be worried about my heart?"
"You," Jack said.
"And I suppose this is a low-fat muffin?"
"No fat, actually."
Abe looked at him, his face reddening. "Since when do you worry about my heart for me?" Before Jack could answer, he added, "Maybe I should worry about my heart, and you should worry about yours."
"That would be fine if you seemed to give a damn, but—"
"So now my doctor you've become?"
"No," Jack said levelly. He was acutely uncomfortable with this role, but wasn't going to back down. "Just your friend. One who wants you around for a long time."
Abe stared down at the Smart Balance, and Jack waited for him to toss it across the store. But Abe surprised him. He flipped the lid, peeled back the seal, and dug his knife into the yellow contents.
"Well," he said with a sigh. "Since there's nothing else…"
Jack felt his throat tighten as he watched Abe spread a glob on the muffin. He reached across the counter and clapped Abe on the shoulder.
"Thanks, Abe."
"You should be thanking me? For what? For poisoning myself maybe? Probably full of artificial ingredients. Long dead and in the grave I'll be from chemical preservatives and toxic dyes before my cholesterol even knows I'm gone."
He bit into his muffin, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then swallowed. He picked up the container and stared at it.
"This I hate to say, but…not bad."
"Keep this up," Jack said, "and maybe someday you'll die of nothing too."
They finished their muffins in silence.
"Nu?" Abe said finally. "You next look where for this missing lady?"
"That's the million-dollar question. I get dizzy and disoriented whenever I talk to these people. They've got an elaborate answer for everything except where Melanie Ehler might be." He shook his head. "Isn't life complicated enough without seeing a conspiracy behind everything? I mean, why is everybody so into conspiracies lately?"
"Lately?" Abe said. "What's lately about it? Conspiracy theories have been with us since humans could organize thought. What were the first religions but conspiracy theories."
"You mean like Olive's Satan and the Antichrist conspiring to take over America?"
"No. Long, long before the Bible was dreamt up. Cavemen I'm talking. Hut dwellers. Gods were created to make sense of the seeming randomness of nature and everyday life. Why did the lightning spare the tall tree but strike my hut and kill my wife and children? Why did it not rain during the growing season, and then pour after the meager harvest? Why was my child stillborn? Powerful supernatural beings explain it all very nicely, so early humans created a pantheon of cosmic kibitzers—a god of thunder, a god of trees, a god of wine, one for each aspect of the world that affected them—and imagined them conspiring against humanity. You think these Finnan Haddie people—"
"SESOUP."
"Whatever—you think their conspiracies are elaborate? Feh! Look at the old mythologies—Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Norse—so rife with divine plots, either against each other or against humans, your head will spin."
Jack nodded, remembering tales from Bullfinch's in high school. "The Trojan War, for instance."
"Right. Gods conspiring with gods, gods conspiring with humans, such a mess. But no matter how many entities we humans created, the purpose was the same: When something went wrong, we had an explanation. Bad things happened because a certain good deity was angry or displeased, or an evil deity was at work. We might be at the mercy of these entities, but at least we've ordered the randomness, we've appended a name to the darkness, we've created symmetry from chaos."
"Sort of like the old fairy tale thing that if you know someone's name you can control them."
"Control is the key. Once we identified the deity, we tried to control it—sacrifices, chants, dances, rituals anything you could dream up was tried. And sometimes certain actions did appear to work. If slaughtering a lamb at the vernal equinox seemed to convince the deity to bring rain for the growing season—or stop the recurrent floods that were plaguing the area—suddenly a lamb was not such a healthy thing to be."
"But dead lambs have no effect on El Nino."
"They can seem to if the timing is right. And I'm sure knowledge of El Nino would have done wonders for the lamb population. Still, we now have to wonder what causes El Nino."
"UFO exhaust," Jack said. "I have it on good authority."
"Then someone should inspect those things. Fit them with catalytic converters, at the very least."
"Could also be CIA solar mirrors."
"The CIA," Abe said, shaking his head. "I should have known. But the point is, the effect of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge is a general pushing back of the darkness. As we discover more and more non-supernatural explanations for the formerly inexplicable, the gods and demons recede. The magic goes away. But—a certain amount of randomness remains."
"Shit still happens."
"How eloquent you are today."
Jack shrugged. "It's a gift."
"I envy you. But as you say, shit does indeed still happen. So, people who don't use Occam's Razor tend to go two ways. Some drop into denial and reject all our centuries of rational and scientific evidence; they seek shelter in orthodoxy and cling to potty beliefs like creationism."
"Some of them must belong to SESOUP. I saw a flyer about a book exposing 'the Evolution Hoax.'"
"With Darwin as the chief conspirator, I'm sure. But if you're Occam-impaired and choose to keep your head out of the sand, you must come up with new brief systems to explain what's wrong with your world and who's pulling the strings attached to your life. For half a century international communism was such a wonderful bad guy, but when the USSR went kaput it left a huge vacuum that had to be filled—because we all know there's something in those shadows. King and the Kennedy brothers weren't killed by lone meshuggeners, the changes in family life and society aren't part of long processes—they're all part of a plan. The result is that fringe groups, with the help of a jaded, sensation-hungry public and accommodating mass media, get main-streamed. We find comfort in the wackiness."
"I don't know," Jack said. "Aliens, antichrists, New World Orders…that's comforting?"
"For lots of people, most certainly yes. There's a certain comfort in bein
g able to point a finger and say 'That's why,' in being able to explain events, no matter how scary the explanation. If the cause is a conspiracy, then it can be identified, it can be broken up, and the world will be on track again."
"Which brings us back to control. You know," Jack said, remembering his conversations with various SESOUPers, "the fear of mind control seems to play a big part in all their theories."
"And shadow governments. A shadow government you need, subverting the will of the electorate in order to implement mind control."
"Yeah. Olive worried about the 666 chip, Zaleski talked about mind-control devices implanted by aliens, and Kenway went on about the CIA's mind control programs."
"That you should lose control over your thoughts and actions is a terrible fear. You would think about things that frighten you, you could injure or hurt people you love."
"Start talking about mind control and I start thinking about Dirty Eddie," Jack said, referring to a homeless guy of indeterminate age and race who used to wander Columbus Avenue.
Abe smiled. "Eddie…where is he these days? Haven't seen him for a year at least."
"Me neither, but you remember the aluminum foil cap he used to wear? Told me it was to keep out the voices that kept telling him to do things."
"I'm sure any conspiracy theory has its paranoid schiz mavens; that sort of stuff is tailor-made for them. But for the rest who haven't completely broken with reality, the cult aspect is probably as important as the conspiracies themselves. Fellow True Believers form a sort of intellectual commune. Not only do you share The Truth with them, but appreciation of that common knowledge sets you apart from the workaday schlmiels who remain in the dark. You form an elite corps. Soon you're associating only with other True Believers, people who won't challenge The Truth, which in turn reinforces The Truth over and over. I'm sure no small number of people are involved for fun and profit, but the core believers are searching for something."
"Control."
"Yes…and something else, maybe. Something they're not finding in modern society. Family, I think. Fellow believers become a family of sorts. And in this rootless, traditionless, culturally challenged society America has become, family is hard to find."
Family…Jack thought about how violent death had hurled him on a tangential arc from his own family, how his father and sister and brother were scattered now up and down the East Coast. And he thought of how Gia and Vicky and Abe and Julio had become a new family of sorts. Anchors that kept him from drifting into a dark no-man's land.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess everybody needs a family of some sort."
"And this fish yoich group—"
"SESOUP."
"Whatever—is a sort of extended family. And like any family, they have squabbles."
"Deadly squabbles?" Jack said. "Neck-twisting, eye-gouging, lip-removing squabbles?"
Abe shrugged. "Hey. When the police find a dead body, who's the first suspect? Someone in the family. And here you're dealing with one meshugge family."
"Yeah, maybe," Jack said. "But I've got to tell you, Abe, after what's been happening, I'm starting to wonder."
"Oy, you're not serious? I'm starting to think maybe you've been hanging around these people too long."
"Something's, going on, something a lot bigger than a bunch of conspiracy nuts sitting around and trading theories. I sense it, Abe. Someone's moving around behind the scenery. I don't know if it's one of these fabled secret organizations or a government agency—"
"If it's a government agency, then you should include yourself out of this mess immediately, if not sooner. You and government weren't meant to mix. Let someone else find the missing lady."
"But I can't," Jack said, wishing he could get out, but haunted by what Melanie Ehler had told Lew.
"Why the hell not?"
"Didn't I tell you? Because only I can find her. Only I will understand."
5
Jack closed his apartment door behind him and froze. He scanned the front room as he snatched the Semmerling from his ankle holster.
Something wrong here.
He listened. No sound except the hum from the computer's CPU fan and the ticks and tocks from the various pendulum clocks—a Shmoo, Felix the Cat, Sleepy the Dwarf—on the walls. No unusual odor.
He didn't sense anyone in the apartment, yet something was not right. With his pistol against his thigh, he did a quick search of all the rooms—he knew every possible hiding place, and each was empty. All the windows were double-locked with no sign of forced entry. Times like this he wished he'd put bars on the windows; trouble was, bars worked both ways, and there might come a time when he wanted to go out one of those windows.
Jack and his fellow tenants had a mutual watchdog society and were extremely careful who they buzzed in. A four-way bar-bolt secured his door. No one was going to break it down, but as he well knew from experience, no lock was bypass-proof. No system was perfect.
Long ago he'd considered and rejected an alarm system; that would bring the police, and the last thing he wanted was a couple of cops—city or private—snooping through his place looking for an intruder.
He thought of Kenway's motion recorder and wished he had one. That would have settled the question once and for all.
Jack turned in a slow circle. He was the only one here now. And from all appearances, he was the only one who had been here since he'd locked up and left yesterday.
But he didn't put the Semmerling away. His hackles were up and his nervous system was on full alert.
Why?
He couldn't put his finger on it, but the apartment and its contents seemed subtly out of kilter, just the tiniest bit askew.
He checked his computer, the filing cabinet, riffled through the papers on his desk, did a count in the weapons cache behind the secretary. Nothing appeared to be missing, everything seemed to be just where he'd left it. He checked his shelves, still crammed with all his neat stuff. Nothing had been disturbed—
Wait. At the base of the Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine shake-up mug…a crescent of clean wood reflecting the sunlight from the window. The rest of the shelf's lacquered surface—what little wasn't obscured by the crowded mementos—sported a down of dust. Jack had never been one to expend much energy in the housekeeping department, tending to wait until the situation reached crisis proportions, and now he was glad of it. Because that bright sliver of polished wood meant the mug had been moved.
If Jack were searching this room, he knew he'd want to know if anything was hiding in that old red domed mug. And since it sat at eye level, the only way to check would be to take it down, lift the cap, and look inside, then replace it.
No question—the mug had been moved. But by whom?
Me?
Had he adjusted the mug or looked at it when he'd bought the Daddy Warbucks lamp? After all, Daddy and Annie were connected. He couldn't remember.
Damn. If he'd known it was going to matter, he would have paid more attention at the time.
Or was all this simply his imagination? Maybe all the hours he'd been spending with the SESOUP crowd were having an effect.
Is this what it's like? he wondered. Is this how Zaleski and Kenway live, suspicious of every little inconsistency, always looking over their shoulders and under the bed?
Had somebody been here or not, dammit?
He was surprised at how rattled he was by the mere hint that the seal on his sanctum had been broken. And rage accompanied the rattle. He had to get back to the hotel, but he didn't want to leave. He wanted to hunker down in the easy chair with a scattergun across his knees and wait. Anybody came in—men in black, men in blue, men in chartreuse or paisley, Jack didn't care—they'd get bellies full of magnum double-O buck, fifteen pellets per round, one after the other.
But he had to find a missing lady…and talk to a weird guy with a monkey.
He holstered his pistol and stepped into the bathroom. Positioning himself before the mirror, he pulled up his shirt, exposing his c
hest. He stared at the three ragged lines, angry red now instead of pale, running diagonally across his chest.
How could Roma possibly know about these scars?
And what was it he'd said? Something about being "marked by the Otherness."
They're not marks, Jack thought. They're ordinary scars. No big deal. I've got lots of scars. These are just part of the collection.
You are much more a part of this than you realize.
No. I'm not part of anything, especially this Otherness junk. And you're not sucking me in. I'm not like you people.
But were these scars why Melanie had said that only Repairman Jack could find her…that only he would understand?
And he remembered something else Roma had said yesterday, just minutes before that creature had attacked him.
You would do well to take care, Mr. Shelby. You might even consider returning to your home and locking your doors for the rest of the weekend.
Had Roma known he was going to be attacked?
Too many questions…and he could think of only one man who might be able to answer them.
Roma.
Jack tucked in his shirt and—reluctantly—left his apartment. But in the hall, after locking the door, he pulled a hair from his scalp, wet it with saliva, and stretched it across the space between the door and the jamb. After the saliva dried, it would be invisible. A crude little telltale, but very effective.
He headed back to the hotel, glancing over his shoulder all the way.
6
Jack sat on one of the benches in the common area on the second floor as various SESOUPers wandered in and out of the huckster room and the MK-ULTRA panel. He watched them smile and greet each other, laugh at an in-joke, throw a friendly arm over another's shoulder, and he thought about what Abe had said. They truly were like a family, not genetically related, maybe, but they did share a heritage of sorts. He'd bet the majority of them spent a lot of time alone, their contact for most of the year limited to newsletters and the Internet, and maybe an occasional phone call. This conference was a family gathering of sorts…a gathering of loners, mostly.
Loners…Jack knew the Loner family…he was a charter member.
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