by Robert Pobi
It was a miserable rainy day and the dog’s breath came out in big wafts of condensation that gave the impression he ran on a steam engine; Lucas half expected the raindrops to sizzle when they hit his fur. Which meant that a cold front had moved in.
While the dog did his business in the dead chrysanthemums, Dingo peeked out from his window overlooking the yard. Lucas didn’t wave—he wasn’t in the mood for conversation; his propulsion was fine, but he wasn’t sure his communications programs were up and running. At least not without the prerequisite jolt of coffee.
Dingo watched him the entire time he stood out back waiting for the dog to finish up his morning constitutional. After Lemmy left a mastodon-sized turd in the flower bed, Lucas waved him inside. The dog clomped up the steps and Lucas slammed the door.
He dried Lemmy off with a towel that hung on a hook beside the door for precisely that purpose, then fed the brute—six big scoops of overpriced human-grade health pellets that Erin lugged home from the store. Which was a miracle considering she was five-feet-one and the bags were the general proportions and weight of a body rolled up in a carpet.
Lucas fired up the coffeemaker and laid out his day. He knew what he needed to do, but not how to do it, and he got lost in his thoughts as the machine chemically converted grinds and water to emotional salve. When the pot was a third full, he filled a mug decorated with hand lettering that read: World’s Greatest Dad—from world’s greatest kids (and Hector)! WE LUV YOU!, took a sip, and went upstairs.
Again, he somehow made it without spilling either himself or the coffee.
He let the shower run and peeled off his clothes. He took out his wallet and the handcuffs he had been carrying since their guy had tried to blow up Saarinen. He didn’t bother with the hamper; he shoved yesterday’s suit into the garbage can, using the plunger to tamp it down like pipe tobacco. Lucas thought the whole exercise would feel a lot more complete with some lighter fluid and a match. Maybe a Marine playing “Taps” on a bugle. But you had to go with what you had.
It was hard to reconcile eating two suits in a week; he was going through clothes like Super Dave Osborne. Maybe he could bill Kehoe when this was all over if both of them were still alive.
He unspooled the cranial bandages, and it was a slow, painful process. But the shower running behind him was filling the chamber with a thick steam, and even though he knew it was illusory, the warm condensation felt like it helped the process.
When he was done, he leaned in, wiped the glass with a towel, and surveyed the damage.
Erin’s Sebastian Krüger analogy wasn’t right; he looked more like a Ralph Steadman design—dripping ink and all. There was a new line of creation on the right side of his face—a semicircle that began behind his cheek, circled up over his ear, then back down to the base of his skull at the back. The windshield had taken his ear off, but not completely—it had still been attached in a loose flap that they had sewn back on with tight little blue knots highlighted by red antibacterial ointment. Describing his eyes as black would be a misnomer; the Mascheranda mask left in the wake of his flight through the windshield was actually a mixture of purple, green, and red. The damage around his prosthetic eye was less severe—the scar tissue there had less capillary action and there were fewer vessels to break and flood the skin with dead blood. The bruising would heal in about ten days, but the new scar tissue on the side of his head would take some time. Until then, he needed to get used to frightening little tigresses in convenience stores.
The rest of him wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t what anyone would call good. But he would have taken a much worse beating if the laws of physics had dictated a slightly different collision. Most of the scrapes and scabs were superficial—they’d be gone in a couple of weeks. The bruising on his ribs—now an ugly green and purple—would fade, and disappear. But they were broken, and he knew that they’d feel like a side full of melted rivets for the next two weeks, especially without painkillers. The Klaus Kinski hair was still there, if a little singed. So for the most part, he was serviceable.
After a shower, he finished the somehow still warm coffee, then rebandaged the side of his head. He dressed, putting on a dark suit and black shirt—no tie—with the belief that bloodstains would be less visible. He got his wallet, his phone, and the handcuffs and stuffed them into the appropriate pockets.
He preferred his prosthetic eyeball to a patch—the kids called it his pirate look—but the swelling would make it an exercise in pain management, so Pirate Luke in sunglasses it was. Then he swallowed a handful of Tylenol, stuffed another pocket with paper towels, and left the house with an umbrella.
75
The East Village
“This the place or not?” the cabbie asked a third time, his voice carrying an islands rhythm.
They were pulled over on the right side of the street, and Lucas had to crank his neck around to see the building with his good eye. Rain rippled the image of a typical East Village row house, with a stone stoop, flower boxes on the ground-floor windows, and an army of mix and match garbage cans at the curb.
He wasn’t hesitating because of uncertainty over the address—this was definitely the place—he was hesitating because he didn’t know if this was the right thing to do. If life had taught him one thing, it was that his luck was contagious. The first big whiff had been when he had killed Kehoe’s brother. Sure, it was one of those random culminations of fate that all the caution in the world could not have prevented, but no one could deny that the guy would still be alive if he hadn’t been with Lucas. And now Whitaker was on the fence between here and the afterlife. So even though it was a small sample, it was easy to see a pattern.
“Well, is it?” the man asked again, eyeing Lucas in the rearview mirror. “Huh, mon?” He was a Jamaican guy, with long healthy dreads and two gold incisors.
“This is it.”
He credit-carded the fare, adding a ten-dollar tip that was more an apology for the way he looked than for making the guy stand at the curb for five minutes, and got out without waiting for the machine to burp out a receipt.
He opened the umbrella and stood there among the garbage cans. The rain was coming in at an angle and his pants were getting wet, and the last thing he needed was pneumonia on top of everything else, so he climbed the steps.
The woman who answered the door was tiny—much smaller than Erin. She was dressed in a lilac salwar kameez, and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She had a compact disk in her hand and an expression on her face that could have converted to a scream or a laugh.
The little woman said, “Yes?” The sound of cable news delivering ramped-up paranoia was on in the background, at least two rooms away. They were talking about the bomber. And the protests. And the fires and the accidents and the injuries.
“I’m Dr. Page. I was hoping I could speak to your son.”
She eyed him skeptically as she ran through some internal checklist, then nodded as a line of code delivered the right bit of information. “Dr. Page, the teacher? Oh yes. Yes. Please come in.”
Lucas closed the umbrella, shook it off, and stepped over the threshold into the tiled vestibule. The smell of cooking hit him and he realized that other than a handful of codeine, a belt of scotch, a coffee, and some Tylenol, he hadn’t eaten anything since the hospital yesterday.
The little woman went to the base of the stairs and yelled, “Priy!” up into the void. She then switched to English with “You have a visitor.”
Someone upstairs yelled back a response that was lost in the sound of a CNN update.
“A visitor!”
Another mumbled reply.
“A teacher!”
There was the sound of heavy footsteps on the floor, followed by a fast gallop of socked feet down stairs. Bobby Nadeel rounded the newel-post and stopped cold when he saw Lucas.
Nadeel’s expression said that he would have been less surprised to see Siegfried and Roy carrying a giant wheel of cheese through the front door. “D
r. Page?” He gave Lucas a once-over. “You don’t look so good.”
Lucas pointed at a chair in the living room. “Can I sit down?”
76
Lucas spent two hours at Nadeel’s house, talking with Bobby and eating dish after dish of his mother’s cooking. Each bite delivered a jolt of steam to his drivetrain, and he put down three big plates—which was a miracle for a man who considered coffee to be all the major food groups. When he left, Bobby’s mom stuffed a Ziploc of gulab jamun into his pocket.
Nadeel was one of the brightest kids who had come through Lucas’s office. Last year, during the Christmas sniper case, Lucas had put Nadeel in the computer lab with two of his other graduate students to collate some data—to find some patterns. The exercise demonstrated that Nadeel was able to think in the abstract, which was an indispensable muscle in the field of astrophysics. The kid had that rare combination of technical genius married to scientific insight that he topped off with curiosity—all necessary components in a good scientist’s outlook. Unfortunately, as was true with Lucas, Bobby’s people skills needed a little polish.
Tonight, Lucas had given the kid the hard drives that Calvin-Wade Curtis had clandestinely delivered. Handing out restricted data to non-bureau personnel was strictly verboten, but after Nadeel’s and the other students’ unofficial stint with the bureau last year, Kehoe’s people had done a retroactive deep background check, and they still had clearance—technically.
The bureau’s people were fettered by both protocol and lack of vision; not so Nadeel. So Lucas had tasked him with sifting through the hard drives Curtis had dropped off—with the very unspecific goal of finding anything that shouldn’t be there.
It was night now, and the cab cut through Central Park on the journey to the West Side. They had come up the FDR to 63rd, then over to Madison, where they headed north to 66th, then across the park. The rain didn’t look like it had any intention of easing up and the clouds overhead were blocking out all atmospheric light. Halloween was still a day off, and if this held up, the city of the dead would be the best place in the world for all the spooks and witches and goblins—which these days meant gluten-free robots and princesses and vegan superheroes.
The tunnel of trees opened up and they hit Central Park West, reminding Lucas of the old Ian Hunter song. He wondered if old Ian would still think, “it’s the best!” or if he would look around and shake his head at the Starbucks and spatula stores.
The cab turned right, making the eight blocks north on a stream of green lights, while Lucas tried to erase the song from the iPod in his head.
It was a twenty-six-story nod to New York’s golden age of architecture, but instead of the belle époque swag of Renaissance Revival, it was classical gothic. Every opening in the building, from the doors to the windows to the passages, peaked in hand-milled lancet arches. There was a round drive out front, and the news parasites were on the sidewalk just beyond it, held at bay by a platoon of private security guards.
Lucas rapped on the bulletproof partition. “Drop me off at the next corner.”
“You sure? I can drop you right out front.” The cabbie eyed him with an expression that Lucas was getting used to. “Because you don’t look so good.”
He was starting to wonder if everyone used the same writer for their dialogue. “Here is fine.”
After the cab drove off, he crossed the street, slipping by a gaggle of reporters on the corner who were on their phones under a canopy of umbrellas. He walked down half a block until he found the service alley and cut in.
He was about twenty paces beyond the glow of the streetlights when a voice in the dark said, “Sorry, sir, but you’ll have to use the front door.”
Lucas tilted his umbrella back and squinted into the void. A man in a security guard uniform emerged. He had the prerequisite dark clothes, epaulets, and badge of his kind—but he was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a small carbine. He had the shoulders and biceps of a cop, but his head looked transplanted from an orc—it was in the general shape of a turnip, with pointy gargoyle ears. The guy gave the impression that he could chew through a tire. But his voice was relaxed and disconnected; evidently he didn’t think Lucas looked like much of a threat.
Lucas nodded up at the building. “I’m here to see the man on the top floor. I can’t go through the front.”
A second orc emerged from the shadows, this one virtually indistinguishable from the first, only larger. Their type tended to work in packs—probably something to do with making it easier to hunt the smaller animals.
The first orc nodded knowingly. “The TV assholes?”
“Yeah.”
The orc gave him a slow up and down. “He expecting you?”
“Nope.”
“I’m not a doorman. I’m here to keep people out, not let them in.” He was being nice, but Lucas could tell that would stop very soon.
Lucas slowly reached into his coat pocket and took out his badge. “You know Benjamin Frosst?”
The orc nodded. “He was my boss.”
“I’m the guy who killed him.” Lucas realized that those words might be the wrong ones, but he was going for impact.
The smaller orc said, “And that will make the man upstairs want to see you?”
“I guarantee it.” Lucas handed his ID over.
Orc One stared at him. Then down at the ID. Then he keyed the mic velcroed to his vest. “Yeah, Zimmy? Call up to the penthouse. I got a guy here wants me to let him up. Name’s Lucas Page.”
A squawk of static that could have originated in Orc Mountain came back, and Lucas could discern no human words in the warbled message. But evidently the orc’s ears were more finely tuned and he keyed the mic again. “I know we’re not doormen, but I can’t help it if people keep showing up. Just make it fast. It’s pissing rain out here and I got four more hours on the clock.”
The orc gave the ID back and they passed the next few moments without conversation. The only sounds in the alley were the various drips, drops, and streams of water cascading down from elevation offset by the occasional honking horn or revved engine beyond the mouth of the passage. Finally, the orc’s radio made another indecipherable noise that evidently contained meaning because he keyed his mic and said, “Thanks, Zimmy.”
His body language opened up and he nodded at some unidentifiable point in the darkness at the end of the alley. “Take the red door, then cut left. Take the red service elevator—not the blue one. Get in, press the button. The doors will close, and they’ll check you out over the CCTV before they bring the car up.”
Lucas thanked him and he disappeared back into whatever dark alcove he had been nesting in.
Two hundred feet later, Lucas took the red door—a well-lit portal around a corner and hidden from street view. The building was warm and he shook off his umbrella, then took a left. The service elevators were at the end of a can’t-miss-it corridor—a red one for the penthouse, a blue one for the rest of the floors. It was a typical service car, painted a pale red that had gone out of style some time in the 1930s. Lucas pressed the only button—a broad brass panel with the letters PH on it—and the doors closed.
As the car shot up through the spine of the building, he felt himself become heavier, and he concentrated on the floor, his focus on a single paw print in the corner. He managed to make the entire trip without toppling over, and when the car slowed, Lucas put a hand out against the wall to keep his footing.
The doors slid open to a white-tiled service area that was larger than the footprint of most New York City studio apartments. There was a single door in the far end, and as Lucas walked toward it, the various locks clinked and clanked. It swung out and William Hockney nodded at him. “Dr. Page.”
“Mr. Hockney.”
As Lucas got closer, the old man took a step back and gave him a theatrical once-over. The old man said the only thing he could. “You don’t look so good, young man.” He was in moccasins, gray wool slacks, a high-collared white shirt, a
nd a very nice smoking jacket—evidently he was up to speed on billionaire loungewear. “Why don’t you come in and sit down.”
The old man walked Lucas through the kitchen—a white-tiled mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings, five ovens, and enough tin-lined copper pots hanging over the bowling-alley-sized island to recast the Statue of Liberty. A copper and brass espresso machine sat on the island, polished to a mirror finish. The contraption was bedecked with a dozen valves and thirty yards of piping and could easily be mistaken for a submersible diving bell.
The butler’s pantry was next—a glass-cabinet-lined room that displayed at least thirty different sets of formal china—followed by a serving room, then the dining room proper. The table was big enough to land a small aircraft on and sat forty people with plenty of elbow room. You didn’t need a history lesson to know that everyone from heads of state to movie stars had rubbed elbows around it.
Whoever said that money could not buy taste had never seen William Hockney’s living room. Like Hearst’s Xanadu, it was filled with the finest antiques to come out of the major European movements of the past two centuries—it had none of the look-at-me-ism that new-money New Yorkers tended to gravitate toward, eschewing the faux opulence of gold leaf, cherubs, and Louis XVI–inspired crown moldings. Every piece in the room was elegant, tasteful, and very expensive. It was old time, old school, old money.
The doors to the patio were open, four large floor-to-ceiling bronze affairs inset with beveled panes. Out on the patio, there was enough vegetation to launch a well-heeled safari. Beyond the stone banister, the park reached east.
The big surprise in the living room were the bonsai, a shared interest with Saarinen. He knew that the old man had a hobby—his kind always did. But they usually collected classic Rolls-Royce, Old Masters, or pre-Columbian art—objects that had cost associated with them. Diminutive horticulture seemed to be too much of a hands-on pastime for a man like Hockney—he seemed more of a sit-back-and-pay-people-to-do-things kind of guy. It was hard to picture him sitting in here on the weekends, listening to Def Leppard in his slippers, clipping miniature branches, sipping obscure whiskey, and letting the stress of counting the zeros in his bank account all day long bleed away.
