by Tim Powers
He had to grip the thumb between his teeth to bend over and lift the plaster hands out of the compartment under the bed, and he was gagging as he hopped forward and slid back into the driver’s seat. He laid one plaster hand on the dashboard and grotesquely stuck the other upright between his legs as he put the van back into gear and carefully pulled out away from the curb.
The Honda had looped back, and now was passing him on the left. The riders hadn’t had time to have talked to Buddy, but the old woman swung her head around to blindly face Sullivan, and peripherally he could see the frown creasing her forehead.
She’s sensing a psychic blur, he thought; a mix of Houdini’s birth and life, and my own. She won’t be catching any echoes of Houdini’s death, because the old magician was masked for that event, and got away clean even though he died on perilous Halloween. She’ll be wondering if I’m a schizophrenic, or on acid—what it is that makes the driver of this vehicle such a psychic sackful of broken mirror. (He even felt a little different—his jacket seemed looser and lighter, though he didn’t dare look down at himself right now.)
He groped through his mind for any remembered prayer—Our Father …? Hail Mary …?—but came up with nothing but a stanza of verse from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books, a bit Sukie had liked to recite:
“The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly.”
The motorcycle drifted past outside his window and pulled in ahead of him; through the close glass of the windshield he could hear the bass drumbeat of the motorcycle’s exhaust pipes, and through the fluttering gray hair he could see the old woman’s jaw twisted back toward him; but he kept a steady, moderate pressure on the gas pedal, though his legs felt like electrified bags of water. Was the driver of one of these cars around him seeing some signal from the old woman? Was he about to be cut off? They wanted him alive, but only so that deLarava could use him as lure for his father’s ghost.
In a hoarse voice he quoted more of the Alice scripture, thinking of Sukie and mentally hearing her remembered recitation of it:
“Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.”
The brake lights flashed on the transom of the gold motorcycle—but its rider leaned the heavy bike around in a U-turn and then accelerated back toward Cherokee, the diminishing roar of its engine rising and falling as the rider clicked rapidly up through the gears. Sullivan’s jacket was heavy and tight again.
He spat the old brown thumb out onto the dashboard and gagged hoarsely, squinting to be able to see ahead through tears of nausea.
He turned left on Wilcox, and then right onto the crowded lanes of eastbound Hollywood Boulevard. Don’t puke on yourself, he thought as he squinted at the cars glinting in the sunlight ahead of him. It looks like you got away this time. Now stay away. Hide. Buddy will have described the van, and might even have got the license number.
The thought of Buddy reminded him of the missile his old friend had thrown at the van as Sullivan had committed hit-and-run. Stopped at a red light, Sullivan now rolled down the driver’s-side window and craned his neck to look at the outside of the door.
A branching pattern of viscous wetness was splattered from the door handle to the front headlight. It was clear stuff mottled with yellow and dotted with angular bits of white, and half a dozen vertical trickles had already run down the fender from the initial horizontal streaking.
Buddy’s missile had been a raw egg.
The schoolboy-prankishness of the gesture was disarming. He egged my van, Sullivan thought; after I smashed the front end of his car! How could he have been colluding with deLarava at one moment and doing something as goofy as this in the next? I must have been wrong—poor Buddy wasn’t guilty of anything but beery tactlessness back there in the restaurant, and then he must really have been calling some business associate when he went to the phone. I should go back, and apologize, and agree to pay for getting his car fixed. This was pure paranoia. Even the people on the motorcycle had probably just been—
No. Sullivan remembered the old woman sitting high up against the sissy bar, blindfolded against visual distractions and sniffing the breeze, and he couldn’t make himself believe that the pair on the Honda had been random passersby.
He kept driving straight ahead.
East of Vine, the street stopped seeming to be Hollywood Boulevard, and was just another Los Angeles street, with office buildings and CD stores and boarded-up theaters, and red-and-yellow-blooming wild lantana bushes crouched in the squares of curbside dirt; but when he glanced out of his open window he saw, a smoky mile to the north against the green Griffith Park hills, the old white HOLLYWOOD sign—and for just a moment, to his still-watering eyes, it had seemed to read HALLOWEEN.
Not for two days yet, he thought, and he spat again to get rid of the taste of Houdini’s thumb. I’ve got about thirty-six hours.
Just past Van Ness he turned right onto the 101 southbound. The freeway was wide open and cars were moving along rapidly for once, and he gunned down the ramp with the gas pedal to the floor so as to be up to speed when he merged into the right lane.
A. O. fucking P., he thought as he took his first deep breath in at least five minutes. On the freeways, there you feel free.
He remembered now, now that he was at long last experiencing it again, the always-downstream rush of driving along open fast-moving freeway lanes. Up here above the surface streets, above them even if the freeway was sluicing through a valley, the real world off to the sides was reduced to a two-dimensional projection of sketchy hills and skyscraper silhouettes, and you dealt with the names of places, spelled out in reflector-studded white on the big green signs that swept past overhead, rather than with the grimy stop-and-go places themselves; even the spidery calligraphy of gang graffiti markers, looping across the signs in defiance of barbed wire and precarious perches and rushing traffic below, were formal symbols of senseless-killing neighborhoods, rather than the neighborhoods themselves.
Other drivers were just glimpsed heads in the gleaming solidity of rushing cars in this world of lanes and connectors; space and time were abridged, and a moment’s inattention could have you blinking at unfamiliar street names in Orange County or Pomona.
Sullivan had to find a place to stay, a place with a garage. After this, he couldn’t keep living in the van out on the streets. And he wanted to be close to deLarava, without putting himself in the way of her possibly stumbling across him.
Just short of the towers of downtown he turned south on the Harbor Freeway, toward Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor … and the Queen Mary.
CHAPTER 27
“If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
FRANCIS STRUBE’S BLACK LEATHER electric office chair was acting up. It was made by the McKie Company, which was supposed to manufacture the best race-car seats, and he had punched the button on the “comfort console” to pump up the lower-back region, but it had inflated out grossly, to the size of a watermelon, and in order to sit back with his shoulders against the top of the chair he had to push out his chest and belly like a pouter pigeon.
Ludicrous. He leaned forward instead, dividing his attention between the flimsy sheets of fax paper in his hand and the man in the seat across the desk. The Goudie Snuff people—after extorting a thousand dollars out of him!—had printed out their mailing list in some kind of minimalist dot-matrix, and Strube was afraid he’d have to get Charlotte to puzzle it out for him.
“But,” said the client uncertainly, “would that be best for them?”
Strube looked up at him. What dreary
aspect of the man’s divorce case had they been discussing? Damn the chair. He pushed the “deflate” button several times, but the leather-covered swelling behind his kidneys didn’t diminish; if anything, it swelled more. But he put patient concern in his voice as he asked, “Best for whom?”
“Whom we’re talking about, Mr. Strube! Heather and Krystle!”
These, Strube recalled, were the man’s daughters. He remembered now that custody of the children had been the topic at hand.
“Well, of course it would be best for them,” Strube said, indicating by his tone that he was way ahead of the man, and had not lost track of the conversation at all. “Our primary concern is the well-being of Heather and Krystle.” Strube had made a bad impression early on, when, having only read the girls’ names on the information form, he had pronounced the second one to rhyme with gristle rather than Bristol.
“But,” went on the father of the girls, waving his hands bewilderedly, “you want me to demand alternating custody of the girls, a week with me and then a week with Debi, and then a week with me again? How would that work? They’d have to pack their clothes and … and toothbrushes and schoolbooks and … I don’t even know what all. Every weekend! Would Debi be supposed to feed their goldfish, every other week? They wouldn’t even know what was in the refrigerator half the time. The girls, I mean.”
Rather than the goldfish, thought Strube. I follow you. “It’s your right—and it’s to their benefit,” he said soothingly. “For two weeks out of every month they’d be living with you, in a normal, nurturing environment, away from that woman’s influences.”
He let his gaze fall back to where the fax sheets lay in a patch of slanting sunlight on the desk. Most of the customers for Goudie snuff were shops, but there were a couple that seemed to be residential addresses. He noticed one on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana, and drew a checkmark beside it. Santa Ana was just an hour away, down in Orange County—that could easily be where Nicky Bradshaw was hiding out these days. Strube reminded himself that he would have to scout all the likely addresses, and actually see Bradshaw at one of them; he wouldn’t get the credit for having found Spooky if he just sent in half a dozen likely addresses.
And here was one in Long Beach. Why did so many people need to have snuff mailed right to their houses?
“ ‘That woman’ is my wife,” protested the client.
“For a while,” Strube answered absently. Here was another address, in Southgate. How did somebody in Southgate afford a luxury item like Scottish snuff? “You did come in here for a divorce, you’ll recall.”
“Only because she filed! I didn’t want a divorce! The girls staying a week with me, and then a week with her—this is fantastic!”
Strube looked up. “Well, you won’t be paying child support for half the time. Besides, the arrangement won’t last for very long. Your girls will hate it, and it’ll wear Debi down, and then you can press for total custody.” To hell with your girls, he thought; it’ll protract the proceedings, and I’m paid by the hour.
The thought was suddenly depressing, and he remembered yesterday’s riddle about the lawyer and the sperm cell. He realized that he was hunched over the desk like some kind of centipede.
He spread his Nautilus-broadened shoulders inside the Armani jacket, and leaned back, lifting his chin.
And from the back of the McKie chair burst a sharp, yiping fart-sound. A wordless cry escaped his astonished client.
Still sitting up straight, though he could feel the sudden heat in his face, Strube said, “That will be all for today.”
“But—about the division of property—”
“That will be all for today,” Strube repeated. He would press for a Substitution of Attorney tomorrow.
One chance in two million of becoming a human being. He could work with the studios, handle prestige cases for famous clients. Swimming pools—movie stars. He could start by representing Bradshaw.
The client had stood up. “What time …?”
“Miss Meredith will schedule an appointment.” I knew him in ’74 and ’75, which was more than ten years after he quit showbiz, Strube thought. I’m likelier to recognize him than any of his old Hollywood crowd is.
He maintained his stiff pose until the man had left the office. Then he let himself slump. He could check the Santa Ana address today.
Maybe even the Long Beach one too.
Loretta deLarava was crying again, and it was taking her forever to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich. She was in a window-side booth in the Promenade Cafe; out through the glass, across the blue water of the Pacific Terrace Harbor she could see the low skyline of Long Beach, with the boat-filled Downtown Long Beach Marina spread like a bristly carpet of confetti around the foot of it.
She preferred to eat in the employees’ cafeteria on C Deck, four decks down, back by the stern; but she couldn’t make herself go there anymore.
When the Queen Mary had been an oceangoing ship, that C Deck auxiliary room had been the men’s crew’s bar, called the Pig and Whistle, and she liked the airy brightness of the present-day cafeteria, with the young men and ladies in the tour-guide uniforms chatting and carrying trays to the white tables, and the absence of obnoxious tourists. But yesterday, and the day before too, when deLarava had gone there, she had found herself in a low dark hall, with dartboards on the walls and long wooden tables and benches crowded with men, some in aprons and some in black ties and formal jackets. The men at the nearest table had looked up from their pint glasses of dark beer and stared at her in wonderment. She hadn’t been able to hear anything over the throbbing, droning vibration that seemed to come up through the floor, and she’d realized that it was the sound of the ship’s propellers three decks directly below her.
It had been the old Pig and Whistle that she’d seen, as it had been in … the sixties? Hell, the thirties?
And late last night she had left her stateroom and followed uncarpeted stairs all the way down to D Deck, and stood by the closed-up crew’s galley by the bow and looked aft down the long, dim service alley, known to the crew in the old days as the Burma Road, that was said to stretch all the way back to the old bedroom service pantry and the hulking machinery of the lift motors by the stern. From far away in that dimness she had heard a lonely clashing and rattling, and when she had nerved herself up to walk some distance along the red-painted metal floor, between widely separated walls that were green up to belt height and beige above, hurrying from one bare bulb hung among the pipes and valves overhead to the next, she had seen tiny figures moving rapidly in one of the far distant patches of yellow light; children in red uniforms with caps—she had peered at them around the edge of a massive steel sliding door, and eventually she had realized that they were the ghosts of bellboys on roller skates, still skating up and down the old Burma Road on long-ago-urgent errands.
She had hurried away, and climbed the stairs back to her stateroom on B Deck, and locked the door and shivered in her bed under the dogged-shut porthole for hours before getting to sleep.
The sandwich was actually very good, with tomato and basil in among the ham and cheese, and she made herself take another bite.
The man sitting across the table from her was holding a pencil poised over the wide white cardboard storyboards. “You okay, Loretta?”
“Sure, Gene,” she mumbled around the food in her mouth. She waved her free hand vaguely. “Stress. Listen, we’ve also got to get a lot of footage of the belowdecks areas—the crew’s quarters, the section up by the bow where the service men were bunked during the war—it’d be a good contrast, you know? To all the glamour of the top decks.”
“Well,” he said, sipping nervously at a Coors Light, “I guess you can edit to a balance in postproduction—but we cleared it with the Disney people for just the engine-room tour and the pool and the staterooms and the salons. There might not be accessible power sources down in the catacombs, and God knows what their routines are—they might tell us it’s too late to set it all
up. It’d only be giving them two days’ warning, if you want to get everything in the can Saturday.”
“Well, we can at least do stills down there. A still photographer, and me, and my assistant carrying a portable stereo—that shouldn’t disrupt any employees.”
“You don’t need music to shoot stills, Loretta. And how are you going to use stills?”
deLarava had looked past him and seen Ayres standing by the cash register. She waved, and said, “I’ve got to talk to this guy, Gene. Do what you can, okay?”
The man stood up, taking the storyboards with him. “Okay. If the PR guy’s in his office I’ll talk to him now, on my way out. I’ll call you and let you know what he says. Tomorrow I’ll be at the studio all day, and I’ll be back here Saturday, early, to make sure they rope off the areas from the tourists. I still don’t see why we had to film on Halloween. A weekday would have been less crowded.”
“Will you not be questioning my decisions, Gene? You gentlemen all work for me.”
Gene left as Ayres walked up, shrugging as they passed each other, and deLarava was crying again; she wanted to scratch her scalp, but didn’t dare, because she had stretched three rubber bands over it this morning. She had felt she had to, after the dream that had somehow left her to wake up crouched over the toilet in the stateroom’s bathroom, whispering to the water in the bowl.
Ayres sat down and promptly drank off the last inch of the Coors Light. “Your old boy Joey Webb is crazy,” he said. “He’s out at all hours on the beach with a metal detector and a jar of orange marmalade, singing that ‘Ed Sullivan’ song from Bye Bye Birdie.”
“Ed Sullivan? The moron. He’s not supposed to be looking for Ed Sullivan.”
“Could I have another of these, please?” said Ayres to a passing waitress. To deLarava he said, quietly, “I found out some things about the Parganas couple.”
“Okay…?”
