Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  Wally ended the conversation the way he religiously ended conversations with that man. “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” He disconnected.

  They swiveled to face each other, and simultaneously reached to take each other’s hands, and as their fingers touched they allowed themselves to smile.

  “Hose goo,” she said. “Oh, that is precious.”

  “The man next door has just walked on the Moon,” Wally said, smiling bigger.

  “Every once in a while, maybe a good deed goes unpunished,” Moira said.

  “We are going to explain to Jude that it’s a fool who plays it cool, by making his world a little colder.”

  “Let’s go get under his skin,” she agreed. They put their silicon servants to sleep, and left the office. Like any Vancouverite about to leave home unexpectedly at night, Moira zapped the TV on to access the cable weather channel to find out whether rain-gear was required. It came on with a shriek of sound, tuned to the local news channel; the last time the set had been used, they’d been listening for earthquake warnings while running around the house packing. The screen filled with a long shot of a smoking ruin, and an earsplitting voice bellowed, “OINT GREY COMPUTER PROGRAMMER RALPH METKAVITCH’S HOME WAS DESTROYED BY FIRE FOLLOWING AN UNEXPLAINED EXPLOSION LAST NIGHT, AND THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION REPORT SAYS THAT ARSON QUOTE CANNOT BE RULED OUT UNQUOTE. SO FAR POLICE HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO CONTACT MESKOWITZ, WHOM NEIGHBORS SAID HAD RECENTLY SHAVED HIS HEAD—”

  Moira tried for either the volume down or mute buttons, and missed both; the set went off. She thought about turning it back on, and could not think of a point. She turned to her husband, and at the sight of his face she blanched. “Oh, Wally.”

  “It’s not the despair,” he said, his voice placid, conversational. “I can deal with the despair.”

  She nodded. “It’s the hope.”

  “Yeah. It’s killing me.”

  Sigh. “Me too, Wally.”

  CHIRRRRRRUP, said the phone.

  “Do we answer it?” she asked.

  Wally sighed. “Why not? We haven’t got anything better to do. Maybe it’s a Psychic Friend, calling to tell us where to find Jude. Maybe it’s Dr. Kevorkian letting us know he’s going to be in the neighborhood, that’d be useful—”

  “I’ll go.”

  “No, I’ll get it.”

  She compromised, waiting until he caught up and then putting on the speakerphone. “Is this someone with good news or money?”

  “Both,” said the phone.

  “Steve?”

  “I got a lead on your guy.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  It was Moira who reinvented breathing first. “Say again, Steve.”

  “I got your guy. Got an address and an accomplice, anyway—from the Net.”

  Moira would not have believed, if informed beforehand, that a heart could so simultaneously rise and fall. This might just possibly be good news—but it was probably worthless, and its cost could be dear. Had Steve started a fannish clock ticking on their amateur manhunt? Had he told anyone why he needed the data? “Steve, just how did you get this—”

  Wally overrode her, slapping the record button on the phone machine. “What’s the address you have?”

  The vibrations of his voice had to be translated by the phone into a pattern of electrical signals; these had to cross half a continent, starting at the speed of light but arriving much slower due to switching delays; converting them back into sound waves took more time, then Steve needed at least three times as long to hear, grasp, and respond to them—whereupon the whole weary process began in reverse. All this time, Moira waited, absolutely certain that if she were just patient enough Steve would give them the late address of the former Ralph Metkiewicz, and they could hang up and get back to contemplating suicide. She and hope were quits for the night; maybe for good.

  “Pencils ready? One, zero, six, fi-yuv, niner, Point Grey that’s ee why Road, Vancouver; postal code Varley eight Unicorn, four Rotsler six. Owner of record is a Carla with a sea Bernardo. He got mail there through an account registered to ‘Penforth Naim,’ that’s en-nuh, eh, eye, em-muh, but obviously that’s not gonna do you much good. Still, it’s a start. You want me to repeat any of that?”

  Moira’s operating system was hung, her cursor and her curser both frozen; Wally had to take it. “No, that’s okay, Steve-o, it’s on tape. I’m genuinely impressed. Tell me, though, how exactly did you dig all that up?”

  “Relax: I know what you’re thinking. It’s cool—really. I understand this is…uh…a sensitive matter. What I did, I logged onto the Net and tapped the fannish grapevine—”

  Moira moaned.

  “No, really, wait a minute and listen. I didn’t say anything about…about what happened to you guys, okay? Not a word.”

  When it was clear that Steve would wait until someone reassured him or hell froze over, whichever came first, Wally said. “You have our complete confidence, Steve. What did you say then?”

  “I said I was putting together a Next Generation parody for VanCon, called ‘Data Takes A Dump,’ and I wanted to know if anybody had seen anyone around a con lately that looked like Picard and either was bald or wouldn’t mind shaving his head.”

  The metaphorical lightbulb that appeared in the air over Moira’s and Wally’s heads baked their shadows onto the wall.

  “Bless my soul!” Wally exclaimed. Moira backed up involuntarily until she hit the fridge, and gave thought to sliding down it to a sitting position. But she couldn’t face getting back up again. “Steven,” she said weakly, “would you and Sybil like a couple of sex-slaves for a year or so?”

  “You’ll have to take a number—damn city building-code won’t let me expand the dungeon without a permit. Now, naturally I got about two dozen hits—hell, I got people who were willing to have plastic surgery to play Picard at a Worldcon, and have you noticed? there’s no shortage of bald guys in fandom. But I’m pretty sure if any of ’em is your guy, it’s the one I gave you. Yin the Stomach-Settling talked to him at the Registration Table at Vikingcon, down in Bellingham. You know her thing for Captain Picard: she remembers the dude good, even though he had hair then. She says he came on like a mundane, asked all kinds of general questions about fandom…but then at one point she started a Lazarus Long quote and he finished it. He gave her his e-mail address so she could send some stuff about how to go about starting your own con, how to finance it and stuff. And some promo for VanCon.”

  “As far as I know,” Wally said, “that may be the second sign of sloppy workmanship he’s shown.”

  “Well, actually it wasn’t all that sloppy. He must have thought it was safe: the address he gave her went through anon.data.ru.” This was a Moscow-based free Internet service, created and run by a volunteer and funded entirely by donations, which relayed e-mail after stripping off its identifying header—conferring effective anonymity on its users. “Yin said on the strength of that she included some of her private porn in the stuff she sent him, but she never heard back.”

  “Then how did you get a meat address?” Moira heard herself ask.

  Steve made the vocal equivalent of a suicide’s hesitation marks.

  “Steve?” Wally said.

  “Look, this is completely DNQ, all right? I mean, really. I keep your secret, you keep mine, okay? The guy that runs anon.data.ru is a friend of mine.”

  The metaphorical flashbulb attempted to flare again, but it was shot.

  “You told him the truth,” Wally said.

  “I had to. He wouldn’t have breached security to help me find an amateur actor. He’s only EVER opened his files twice, and nobody knows about either one or he’d be out of business. Both times were to stop criminals in progress—and I mean, he’s got a comfortingly narrow definition of ‘criminal.’ But ‘thief’ fits. He says this guy is too clever to be walking around.”

  “Roger that,” Moira muttered.

  “Did he let you browse ‘Mr. Pen Naim’s traffi
c?” Wally asked.

  “Negatory. He says catching crooks is one thing, reading their mail’s another. I have to agree.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Wally agreed, rubbing his forehead. “I’ll settle for reading his entrails.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what my friend in Moscow said.”

  “Please do.”

  “He said ‘bolshoyeh luck.’”

  “Thank him for us. Discreetly but profusely. No one will ever know where we got the information, I promise him that. As for yourself, I would begin to outline a summary of just the highlights of all the many ways we thank you, but this is your dime. We owe you big-time.”

  “I’ll relay your offer to Sybil. She happens to have an opening…and a position available, too. Good hunting, you guys. Remember, if you lose him, you’re no worse off than you are now—you can’t be—but if you get him, you’ll live forever. Later.”

  The speaker clicked off. There was silence. Wally reached up and shut off the phone machine, hit rewind.

  Moira said quick “Oh​Wally​if​the​fucking​tape​didn’t​—”

  Wally cut her off. “One, zero, six, fi-yuv, niner, Point Grey that’s ee why Road, Vancouver; postal code Varley eight Unicorn, four Rotsler six. Carla with a sea Bernardo: cute. Penforth Naim: too cute. Let’s go see Ms. Bernardo.”

  Moira saw his hand twitch toward his pants pocket, toward the little .22 he had bought from a helplessly giggling Rastafarian on Bathurst Street. She kick-started her brain. “Let’s walk around her and kick the tires, first. And let’s let our fingers do the walking.” She pointed toward the office.

  He hesitated, and his hand twitched again. And then he relaxed. “Never make decisions in haste that don’t call for haste. If she’s there now, she’ll be there in an hour. You take municipal and provincial, I’ll take federal.”

  “The other way round,” she said, already on her way, physically and mentally.

  An hour later, they parked their Toyota across the street from Carla Bernardo’s house, which lay on the water side of Point Grey Road. It was, even more than its companions along this stretch, shamelessly opulent. It did not even have the decency to wear hedges, and its floral display was positively obscene even by streetlight.

  “What’s ‘cute’ about the name Carla Bernardo?” Moira asked.

  “You don’t want to know. Dammit, I don’t see any lights on in there.”

  “Well, it’s late.”

  “Not to a thief. Maybe they’re out working; we can wait here and ram them in their own driveway.”

  “We could look through the garage window and see if there’s a car in there.”

  “Screw it; let’s just go knock on the door and see what happens.” He started to get out of the car, but Moira could be a very effective anchor. “What?”

  She looked him in the eye. She kept her voice very low and calm. “Wally? Do you want to outthink this guy, for once?”

  “More than I want to win a Hugo.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  He opened his mouth…and in spite of himself, he began to smile. “Oh, that is good. That is smart. I smell like fear and testosterone: if he’s there he’ll watch my hands and you can put one through his knee.”

  She was mildly surprised to realize that she was actually prepared to do that. “You remember how good I was with a paint-gun that time in Biloxi.” They had once and only once attended a con that was eighty percent War Gamers, drawn by a special GoH; to her own surprise, Moira had ended up winning the only paint-gun stalk she’d ever been on, nailing the enemy commander square in the groin. (He had earlier made a remark she found offensive.)

  “You hit what you aim at,” he agreed. “Here.” With some difficulty, he extricated the gun from his pants, checked the safety, and passed it across. As he did so, his smile turned wry. “It’s technically a lady’s gun anyway, the Rasta said.”

  She moved her hand from his shoulder to his cheek. “Wally…I promise you I won’t shoot him until you hit him at least once, okay? Unless he runs.”

  He turned his face and kissed her hand. “Thank you. The safety’s on the right.”

  “I saw how it works.” She placed it carefully in her purse, and hung the purse from her right shoulder, unzipped.

  They left and locked the car and, since it was late at night, crossed Point Grey Road on foot without the customary side effect of dying. There was a light drizzle in the air, but both ignored it. “There’s one in the chamber and four more,” he said. “I insisted on firing it before I bought it. He just laughed and turned his boom box all the way up. It put a hole in a dumpster.”

  She stopped on the minuscule sidewalk and looked at him. “In a dumpster?”

  “Well, it didn’t come out the other side. But I think I heard it hit the back.”

  “Did it shoot straight?”

  “I don’t know. Uh…I was aiming at the dumpster.”

  She nodded. “Good enough. Five rounds, got it. Let’s check the garage before we knock.”

  They walked through a florid floral quotation from Butchart Gardens and circled around to where they could squint in the window set into the center door of the three-car garage. “Jesus,” Wally said. “A Porsche. And something else generic on the right, maybe only a lowly Thunderbird or something.”

  “Looks like a Camry to me.” She took her hand from the gun and rummaged in the purse until she found her Swiss Army knife; went over to the edge of the door and examined its track. She found a place to wedge the knife, and opened some of its extensions to tighten it in place, trapping the Porsche in its bay. “There. Now if they get past us and make it to the garage, we only have to catch another Camry. Now we ring the bell.”

  Wally examined her in admiration for a moment—she felt it—before he followed.

  She let him ring the bell. Its melody was like a commercial for a laxative—lovely on first hearing, cloying at the fifth repetition…binding by the tenth.

  She was afraid he might get angry then—his face was dark as he turned away from the door—but his voice was calm. “Okay, we gather information. Let’s try neighbors. Wake ’em up if we have to.”

  “What do we tell them?”

  “Whatever they want to hear.”

  To their surprise, they hit pay dirt on the first try. The neighbor immediately to the west of Casa Bernardo was a find from the point of view of just about any collector.

  Her face alone was worth driving a long way to see: it had started out pretty once, many years ago, and then she had dieted until the bones showed clearly, and then she had had it repeatedly lifted until, on first viewing, one felt the cruel impulse to bounce a quarter off her cheek. Even in the doorway light, the line where the nasal region of her skull gave way to cartilage was clear; in better light, Moira was confident she could have traced the way that cartilage had been rebuilt. The woman looked overall like a concentration-camp survivor onto whom absurd balloon breasts had been grafted by Dr. Mengele, dressed in the Bitch of Buchenwald’s housecoat and given Szell’s cigarette holder. For their purposes she was the ideal menagerie: mean as a snake, nosy as a cat, territorial as a pit bull, shameless as a ferret, loud as a gull, smart as an ox, and drunk as a skunk. They had won the Blotto.

  She opened the door talking; it was a full minute before they were able to fold and insert their names. The moment she grasped that they were interested in any gossip she might have about That Pardon My French But Cunt Next Door and/or Her Stud Gigolo, it ceased being necessary for Wally or Moira to do anything but murmur and nod from time to time, with an occasional cluck or tsk as seemed indicated. She even reeled away into the house—waving them sternly to wait where they were—and returned with several photographs of an astonishing zoo-parade of zombies at a recent Do in her backyard: three shots had Carla Bernardo in frame in the background, and one of those included a clear shot of Jude/Metkiewicz/Naim with a full head of hair. They were in their own yard, at a raised poolside, visibly sneering at the party. Mr
s. Never Mind What My Name Is, I Live Here was unwilling to give Wally and Moira any of the photographs—but was willing to sell them the shot with both targets in it for the approximate cost of an exclusive McKinnon, since it also depicted guests she particularly despised (for reasons they were obliged to hear). She even took one of Wally’s cards—Moira’s she ignored—and swore to call him the instant That What I Said or Her Love Slave came home. She assured them she would know, day or night; they did not doubt this. Then she gave Wally a quick but nonetheless sloppy bourbon kiss he was too shocked to dodge, and closed the door in their faces, but Moira did not shoot her through it.

  “You know,” she said as they walked back to their car, “I hate to say it, but I’m almost starting to enjoy this. Stephen Cannell couldn’t have written her dialogue better.”

  “Monologue,” Wally corrected, wiping his mouth and spitting.

  “We were getting stale, Wally: we gotta start hanging out with mundanes again. You know, if a pygmy shrunk her, she wouldn’t get any smaller.”

  Wally began to giggle. “If you unscrewed the top of her head, her whole skeleton would come squirting out from the pressure—” He chortled. “—and there’d be this little glove left, shaped like Linda Hunt—” He whooped. “Unzip the back of her head, and her face would be in your face—”

  “Keep it down. A sincere laugh in this neighborhood is unusual enough somebody might call the cops—and I’m holding a firearm.”

  He reduced his mirth by increments to a silly grin, and they got in the car. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We know there’s two of them, we have their pictures, we know a lot about their habits, and we have their house staked out for us by a force of nature. All we have to do now is—”

  “Honey, I, uh, I have a bad feeling about that part.”

  His grin flickered.

  “Maybe you’ll think this is hard to buy, with that Porsche sitting there in that garage and all that money blooming all over the place…but I think maybe why I buy it is that Porsche, just sitting there…Wally, honey, I don’t think they’re coming back here. I think something happened, something spooked them, some other con blew up in their faces, probably. Jude’s house got torched last night, and according to Robo-neighbor they left here on foot a few hours later. I think they’re on the run.”