Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

“Heads,” Bernal said. “You find any heads in that thing?”

  He struck a nerve. “No bullshit heads! You watch too much TV! No Bowler heads.” Prelate set her long screwdriver down.

  “Muriel Inglis was murdered at the location where you got that thing.” He was guessing, but he suspected that that was what Charis’s follow-up investigation would show. Every line of activity seemed to knot up there, on the muddy bank of the Black, two nights ago.

  “Bull . . .” Prelate couldn’t get it out this time. The two women looked at each other. “Freezing asshole! Frickin’—”

  “Shut up,” Vervain said. “Just. . . shut up.”

  “Can’t afford more trouble, you know that!” Prelate was suddenly close to hysteria. “This .. . did you know? What it was?”

  Vervain turned back to Bernal. “Look, mister, what you after?”

  “If he tell you and not tell me, what can I do?”

  Bernal and Vervain both ignored the increasingly hysterical Prelate. “Me? I’m trying to find something out. But this . . . whatever it is. That’s right in the middle of it. That car, the one you took it out of, there was a murder there.”

  Vervain shook her head. “Look, let me show you something.”

  She turned back to her refrigerator. She squatted down and slung the massive compressor easily. Bernal had to step back to avoid getting hit. She gave him a slight smile, radar-dish earrings swinging, and rested it on a red hand truck. She pulled out a bandanna and mopped her sweat-free face with it.

  “I’ll have to call,” Bernal said. “I don’t think you understand the ramifications of this.”

  But there was no signal on his cell phone.

  “They got some shielding,” Vervain said. “Like their privacy. Funny folks, the people who live in this house. They’re not back for five weeks. They’re in Africa, doing a safari. Asked me where they should go. Like I got some kind of native knowledge. In my blood, right? The homeland. I told them, stick to the Roger Williams Zoo, down in Providence. Nice place. Ever been there? I take my nieces. But it had to be Africa.”

  She was being informative, telling him exactly what he needed to know, but he wasn’t really listening, trying to figure out how he could call Charis and still keep an eye on these two . . . where was Prelate? She was no longer at the kitchen table. Had she managed to—

  As Prelate grabbed his arms from behind, Vervain gagged him with the bandanna.

  _______

  It took a matter of seconds for them to haul him down a set of stairs and past a basement laundry area. They threw him down. Prelate clinked something that sounded like metal and glass. Vervain knelt on the small of his back and removed the gag. Then she stepped back, and a heavy door clicked shut.

  For a moment, he lay stunned in the darkness.

  Then he rolled and threw himself at the door. It was padded, so he didn’t hurt himself much, but it didn’t even make a sound.

  He stopped, held his breath, listened. The silence was absolute. He couldn’t imagine that Prelate and Vervain were still working upstairs, but if they had been, he wouldn’t have heard them.

  The darkness was just as absolute. He couldn’t even get a sense of how large the space was. The air was definitely cold, but not meat-locker cold.

  Bernal put out his arms and stepped forward, slowly, slowly. The floor was level concrete, so he could slide his feet. There. A wall, concrete as well. And the door was . .. this way? Yes. The padding was leather, or some close synthetic, with what he presumed were ornamental nail heads, diamond-shaped.

  He could think of one reason to have a sealed cool room in your basement. He reached to his right and was rewarded with the rattle of glass against wood. Bottles, ranks and ranks of them. This was a wine cellar.

  He thought quickly. Even with a locked and secure door, the place probably had an emergency exit lever as an elementary safety precaution. Starting in the center of the door, he searched to the left, up and down, and back the other way.

  And here it was, a simple rod with a textured rubber handle. Bernal let out a sigh of relief and pulled. He felt the latch lift up.

  Then something snapped, and the lever dangled loose.

  For a moment, Bernal couldn’t believe it, and worked the lever up and down. It still swung on its pivot, but was no longer connected to anything.

  So he lay down on the floor. It was cool and smooth, a high-quality pour. Its hardness was the only thing that kept the place from being a sensory deprivation chamber. Did people still use those? There used to be quite a fashion for them, people floating in body-warm buoyancy-neutral pools, cut off from every sensory input. It was a kind of test of existence: if the universe disappeared, did you go too? If you didn’t, what did you do for entertainment?

  He found his thoughts running on their hamster wheels. The way Monique had laughed at him in fifth grade, when he decided that a Star Wars vest with pictures of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker on it would be elegant wear for the first day of school. Those damn cardiac action potentials. A package with a book about Minoan statuary that blew up in his face. All the ridiculous pieces of this puzzle of Muriel, Madeline Ungaro, and Hesketh.

  There had be something he could do. They’d screwed with the safety release, but they hadn’t had much time to do it. Maybe he could figure out how to get it to work.

  Something clinked and rolled against his foot as he stood. He knelt, picked it up.

  A wine bottle, open. About half of it had spilled out on the floor. Damn it. This was perfect. Not only had they locked him in down here, but now they’d made him look like a snooty drunk, only satisfied by a Grand Cru. He put the bottle against the wall and stepped around the puddle.

  He had to see if there was something, anything, in this dark space that could help him. Starting at the top of the rack to the right of the door, he felt carefully, bottle by bottle, building a map in his mind. That was something he could do: carefully delineate the limits of his prison.

  Each wall was covered, six feet up, maybe a thousand bottles per wall. That seemed excessive, somehow. But, hell, Bernal had plenty of frequent buyer cards from bookstores, and he never actually used them, waiting for that one big score, that Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture that would get him the heftiest discount. So people waited to enjoy themselves at the perfect time. There was a lot of potential pleasure down here, energy like a boulder balanced on a cliff. Happiness research indicated that people overestimated pleasure both in prospect and in retrospect, but that in the single moving bead of the present moment, joy was always at a moderate level. Perhaps the cumulative anticipation in this cellar would, in aggregate, bring more pleasure than drinking it ever would.

  He found useful things. A corkscrew dangling from a string meant that he could enjoy a bottle without smashing the neck against something and potentially slicing up his cheeks in the dark. A dust cloth, probably used to clean off the most valuable labels, could serve as a pillow, if he stayed here until the owners got back from Africa. And there, at the end of the last row, his hand encountered the rubbery grip of a flashlight.

  As happens even in the best of households, someone had neglected to update the batteries, so its light was a dim yellow and wouldn’t last long. He brought it over to the door and squinted at what he could now see of the handle mechanism. He pulled the handle. He could see that it didn’t engage anything, but nothing seemed to be broken. He relaxed, trying to understand purpose, function, and the current mismatch between the two. And, ah . . . there. A linkage was missing. A cotter pin, or something, between the arm and the rest of the mechanism. They’d yanked it out or broken it.

  He turned the flashlight off to spare the battery. There was only one way for this thing to work. The lever arm went down, the short end went up, yanking up a latch with a hook. Simple, something that had been around for centuries, no matter whether there was a keypad on the other side, with a code that engaged an electromagnetic lock. Lifting the latch overrode it. An emergency override h
ad to work under all circumstances. But the lever now slid past the hook without engaging it. The impossible-to-anticipate situation: sabotage.

  Without even turning on the flashlight, he walked over and grabbed the corkscrew. Yes. It was a hollow spiral of metal, the kind that minimized the risk of splitting the cork. It took him a couple of minutes to untie the length of twine it was hanging from.

  He had the theory. The corkscrew would certainly slide into the hole left by the vanished cotter pin. If he could just get it in there. . ..

  There was a sound on the other side of the door. They’d returned to finish the job. Of course. They’d just been holding him here, out of the way, while they finished up whatever else they were doing, and they had now returned to tie up their one remaining loose end.

  He stepped back. His only weapon was the corkscrew. Knowing he looked like a feeble idiot, he stuck its point out between his knuckles.

  The door swung open.

  “Jesus, Bernal.” Yolanda’s blond head was silhouetted by a single dim hall light. She sniffed the air. “I hope you saved some for me.”

  27

  Yolanda knelt and dabbed at the puddle of spilled wine with a paper towel. She wore a toreador jacket and tight pants. Her pale blond hair was heavily processed into a lion’s mane.

  “This isn’t going to do it.” She took a long pull on the open bottle, which proved to be a Saint-Estephe, though neither Yolanda nor Bernal proved able to determine whether it was a good year. “Go upstairs, will you, hon? Grab a couple of rolls from under the sink. And get me some ... let me think. Cheese crackers, something like that. I need something to go with these jammy notes here.”

  “Cheese crackers?” He thought a moment. “How did you get in?”

  “The security door has a code. Not a fancy one, but not one you’re likely to guess quick. But they didn’t think they’d remember it, so they wrote it on a piece of paper and put it under the cake of scented soap in the basement, over there past the Neptune washer and dryer. No one ever comes down here, so they figured that was safe enough. They got seven bathrooms in this place. I counted.”

  “No, I meant the house.”

  “I know this ’hood, Bernal. Used to have friends here, before I had all my unfortunate financial reverses, all that stuff that Uncle Solly could make good, if those idiots at Long Voyage would just see they were beaten. I do still come down here sometimes, drive around, see my old haunts. That beat-up red van of yours sticks out like a sore thumb. Around here, they have a big truck with a magnet to go along the curb and pick up crap like that. Must not be running today. So I stopped to see what you were up to. You know, Bernal, you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Nothing personal. I’m just saying.”

  “Bad luck. It was just plain bad luck. Could happen to anyone.”

  “Oh, sure. Any of us could end up getting locked in the basement by the appliance people. Get me those paper towels. And don’t forget the cheese crackers or whatever else you can scare up.” Yolanda winked and took another swig of wine.

  “Um, are they—”

  “Those scary women? They’re long gone. Go on up, say hi to the folks. Nice crowd.”

  A handful of people sat around the giant coffee table in the living room. They nodded at Bernal, as if they knew him, but not well, and returned their attention to the TV. A woman on a talk show had just revealed that she’d been a cocaine mule on her honeymoon, while her husband sobbed and yanked at his long hair next to her and the audience hooted. Most of the people at the table looked like recent Hispanic immigrants, with a few other ethnicities thrown in. Four men, three women. Food littered the coffee table: chalupas, samosas, tomatillo salsa.

  No cheese crackers.

  It looked like most of the cleaning crews in this part of town took their break in the same place, the house of people known to be on an extended African vacation.

  Bernal saw a row of plastic buckets with rubber gloves neatly hanging on their rims, a giant vacuum cleaner one step away from being a rider just beyond. Someone had vacuumed the thick pile carpeting into mathematically precise rows. The dishes on the coffee table were all disposable, and the table itself had been wrapped in a plastic sheet. When they were done with lunch, they would just pull up the sheet and throw the whole thing away, with not a sign being left.

  Bernal went into the kitchen. The refrigerator was back in its place, humming gently. Two gardeners sat at the counter playing cards and drinking coffee out of delicate china cups. A plasma screen TV above the counter showed a jai alai game. The one with the do-rag yelled at someone on his phone—probably his bookie. The other one shook his head at the excessive enthusiasm and cut the cards. Bernal noted how he palmed a card and slid it onto the top of the deck. Bernal tried to smile at him in a conspiratorial way, but received a stony look in reply.

  He opened a couple of cabinets, found a roll of paper towels and a box of Cheez-Its, and went back into the basement.

  28

  They crept past the corner of a garage. Bernal almost knocked over a garbage can but grabbed it just in time.

  “Careful!” Yolanda slipped easily through a gap between two chain-link fences: neighbors who had not managed to cooperate. “Those people over there have some kind of vicious dog. It leaves gigantic turds. Though I hear some people get fake ones to throw around, to scare anyone who might want to break in. Come on, step on one, see if it’s real. Put my mind at rest.”

  “Don’t be so grumpy with me, Yolanda. I had no idea those crackers would be stale.”

  “Grumpy? I’ll show you grumpy. I’ll sic a vacuum cleaner salesman on you.”

  “Harsh.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  She sashayed ahead of him. She shook the Saint-Estephe bottle over her tongue, getting whatever drops remained, then pitched it over a fence into a neighboring yard. They both listened, but it hit nothing but soft grass and was absorbed into the spring night.

  “Where the hell are we going?” They were somewhere near Spillvagen’s house, but she’d approached the neighborhood from an unfamiliar direction, and he wasn’t sure how close they were.

  “Surveillance. It’s a hell of a job, but somebody’s got to do it. Somebody who wants to make her dear uncle’s death in some way meaningful, anyway.”

  They stopped by a large oak tree.

  “These things look dangerous, but it’s a fake.” Yolanda climbed the tree’s trunk. “Safety regulations, don’t you know.”

  And, in fact, as he followed, Bernal saw that she was right. The steps looked like small boards nailed into the trunk in the traditional build-your-own-treehouse style, but were really a complete set in some weather-resistant composite, held up by two rubber-coated support bars sunk into the bark.

  At the top was a treehouse, also composite made to look like mismatched plywood sections. All it lacked was a deliberately casual sign that said no girlz.

  Yolanda collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. “That’s it for my nightly workout. Should stick to yoga, like the rest of the girls. Or maybe just acupuncture.” Bernal peeped through the window and found himself looking at Spillvagen’s house. He caught sight of Honor stalking off to submit a formal complaint to her mother, while Clay danced apelike behind her, pirouetting and waving his arms.

  “Here.” Yolanda handed him a pair of binoculars. “This makes it way easier. You can pretty much read the shopping lists on the refrigerator with these babies. The Spillvagens buy a lot of crap. Not good for the kids.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bernal said. “Where are we?”

  “Surveillance, sweet thing. Surveillance. Don’t get no evidence without surveillance. And this is the hideout of the younger Ash Willingham. He’s getting a bit old for this place. Even easy girls don’t necessarily want to have sex in a kid’s treehouse; you have to be a bit older to find that kind of thing interesting. But he still comes up here. And thank God, ’cause I don’t have to haul my own molecules u
p here.” She pried up a section of flooring. “Clever boy, our Ash. Take a look.”

  Bernal did. There was nothing under the flooring, just the bottom layer of the treehouse.

  “Loose floorboards are one of those things parents do check. Think they’re real secret squirrels if they do. They were bad in high school, think they know the score. But Ash . . . Ash is my man.” She reached way underneath, feeling with her fingers. “The frame’s metal. Steel. I mean, this poor tree. .. . Ash got himself a few of those really strong magnets ... like strong. I like ’em.”

  “Neodymium-iron-boron,” Bernal said. “You can get them online.”

  Magnets. When Ignacio had been yelling at Patricia behind Near Earth Orbit the night Bernal helped her lug the Freon up to the diner roof, Ignacio had asked her why she hadn’t attached the tanks under her truck with electromagnets. Why had that popped into his mind now? He jiggled the moment, shook it, turned it upside down, but nothing came out of it.

  “Oh, what can’t you get online?” She grunted and tugged. Something finally came loose, and she pulled out a plastic box. The magnets were tiny dots on either end, glued onto the box. “Satisfaction. That’s what you can’t get online. He clicks this thing up under the support. Real smart. To find it you’d really have to look for it.”

  “How’d you find it?”

  “I really looked for it. Believe me, I know my teens. Still inside their heads. So I knew it was there. Great time of life, you gotta hang on to it.” Inside the box was a bag of marijuana, a small pipe smelling of burnt resin, and a few packs of rolling papers. “Hey, wow, this really takes me back. . . .”

  “I can’t believe you steal this poor kid’s dope,” Bernal said.

  “Yeah, poor frickin’ kid. Drives a new Mustang Shelby GT that takes a Saudi oil field to power and probably gets blow jobs in the hot tub from members of the school gymnastics team and from his dad’s accountant.” She already had the papers out and was nimbly rolling a joint. She crimped the ends between sharp red fingernails.