“Not mine!” she giggled. “Come.”
The next constricted hallway we arrived in was lit by fluorescent tubes. She steered me to a steel door which had a design stenciled in day-glo pink on it. It was that optical illusion thing. Looked at one way, it showed an urn or vase. Seen another way, the handles of the vase were profiles of human faces.
“Welcome to the Situation Room.”
When she’d said the words “puppet show,” I’d conjured up either a curtained theater from a Swiss chateau or some wonky kid’s cardboard box creation. Instead we entered what looked like a Las Vegas hotel security command center, with a computer console situated beneath a wall of monitors. She pressed a button on the control panel and all the screens came to life. There were several rows and one large monitor, onto which I gathered any of the smaller images could be projected at full size. This proved to be correct, and the first image she enlarged was a man sitting on a toilet.
“Christ,” I groaned. This was obviously a closed circuit system. There were other people in the house and this was her way of spying on them. A wave of disappointment and embarrassment washed over me. So this was the big mystery.
“What’s the matter, Sunny,” she purred.
Stranded … stranded on the toilet bowl …
“The guy’s taking a dump. I’m not into potty training!”
Her face assumed a hard, uncompromising expression.
“First of all, Sunny. He is an extremely senior executive of the Ford Motor Company. He has an annual salary that would take your breath away. He is at this minute in a mansion in Grosse Point, Michigan. He’s astride one of ten toilets in that house—the one I told him to be on—which is actually the one reserved for his gardener, who speaks poor English and commutes 45 grueling, expensive miles one way to trim his hedges. But he’s not ‘taking a dump’ as you put it. He would never consider even breaking wind in my presence unless commanded. He is simply in position, just like Mr. Dover. I told him to be where he is between certain times and he’s there.
“Secondly …” she flared. “What you are into is insignificant! You’re here because I invited you. Don’t forget that again.”
Suddenly she was all smiles again. “These individuals you’ll observe are in a totally different category to you. You might think of them as clients, because that’s how you think of things. But that would imply I work for them. I think of them as devotees, subjects—or as mere objects. They’re all involved in some form of training and discipline that I have tailored to their particular psychology. I’m a philosophical erotic consultant. I smooth creases in libido—or add new ones. I realign values. Our involvement is on another level. An extremely special level, Sunny. This is why I am sharing so much of my privacy with you. I want you to appreciate that.”
I swallowed hard and glanced back up at the screens. “So … these people …?”
“Mr. Tanaka is in Kyoto,” she informed me casually, indicating a Japanese fellow who was standing upright in a narrow cylinder, immersed to his chin in some yellow fluid. “And doing well with his program.”
I couldn’t imagine what Mr. Tanaka’s “program” entailed, but all the other faces and figures that appeared on the wall were seemingly involved in equally dire situations. One screen was filled with what appeared to be a giant ball of twine, which I had the niggling feeling actually contained someone. There were many others, men and women both, confined in vats or boxes. Some were naked, others restricted more completely in suits made of netting or wire. Gas masks. Animal mascot uniforms. One tall man I noticed was imprisoned (if that’s the right word) in a Plexiglas rectangle packed with insect larvae.
“These images are coming to us live. From Taiwan to Toronto, Brussels to Bloomington, Indiana,” Genevieve said.
So, the walls of 4 Eyrie Street were every bit as permeable as I’d imagined—I just hadn’t considered the technological angle. Maybe she was richer and smarter than I thought. I felt windows in my mind opening, as she began to toggle the scroll mechanism and new subjects fluttered up onto the screens.
Then I was startled to see a face I recognized. He was perspiring heavily. He had on his General’s uniform with the rows of medals, but below the waist he was stripped and wired as I’d been with the rats and Sophia—but with a large tube inserted …
He was standing before a wall of artificial hands that emerged and then retreated within holes. He kept grabbing at them impulsively, as if it was some arcade game.
“That’s—but it can’t be! I’ve seen him on television!”
“He’s on television now,” Genevieve answered. “Just a more select channel. He’s in The Hague—having his thinking revised about a remark he made recently that ‘International politics is a matter of shaking the right hands at the right time and lighting fires under the right butts.’ He’s receiving radical colonic irrigation via an apparatus I’ve affectionately dubbed ‘The Bazooka,’ while what passes for his genitals are wired to receive an awakening burn at regular intervals. His only means of preventing this is to shake the right hands at the right time. Every time he guesses wrong, he experiences a blistering pain in his groin and more high pressure colonic cleansing. This serves to remind him that the responsibilities and privileges of political leadership, diplomacy and sensible foreign policy are not matters of guesswork, canapé receptioneering or Viagra sword waving.”
“And … he’s doing that by choice? You’ve haven’t—?”
“Oh, what is choice, Sunny? It’s the deepest human mystery of all. Light a cigarette—are you choosing to kill yourself? Aren’t we all prisoners to some inner command? It’s their own reflected faces the majority are ruled by. Some of these windows do indeed look into jail cells, as you may have imagined. But I’m not the jailer. I’m helping to organize a mass escape.”
My eyes were drawn to a group scene—four men in blackout hoods stalking stealthily around with horse needle syringes raised like javelins. “What are those guys doing there?”
“They’re remembering the importance of play,” Genevieve answered. “They’re commodity brokers in Chicago. They developed some imaginative ideas about playing with other people’s money, including mine. The syringes contain a deadly neurotoxin. They’re trying to Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”
“But there’s no donkey,” I pointed out.
“No,” Genevieve agreed with a malicious grin. “That’s my play!”
I felt my mind cloud further. Cringe. Blur. Shear.
“This c-could all be … be rigged,” I stuttered at last. “They’re just shadows!”
“Shadow puppetry is my favorite form of theater,” she answered coolly. “And shadows are my business. Nothing exists in the light without casting a shadow. And in the darkness, there is only shadow. Perhaps you need an example from closer to home to refresh your respect. Why don’t you open that door across the hallway?”
“What is it? Another bathroom. Or a vomitorium?”
“One of my many mottos is ‘See for yourself,’” she replied casually.
I didn’t see any point in not doing it. Besides, I was still too curious about where all this was leading—what she had in mind for me. Before I lost my mind altogether. I opened the door expecting to find a guy’s head poking out of an iron lung full of fire ants. Instead I gazed at an indoor swimming pool.
It was left over from the saltwater bath-house days of Cliffhaven. A grand faded frieze on the back wall showed a group of muscled naked athletes. Rusted art deco sconces in the shape of buxom winged ladies washed the other walls. Beside the water was a kid’s toy pedal car—a black Cadillac convertible with dents in the side. The water was as murky as squid ink and many of the mosaic tiles were cracked. Two men were in the pool—I wouldn’t say they were swimming. More like staying afloat. One had no legs and the other no arms. Both were dressed in women’s one-piece bathing suits, one lemonade pink, the other aqua.
“That—can’t be!” I squawked. “It’s Falco Zagame and …”
<
br /> “And Ernie ‘The Ram’ Brucato,” Genevieve completed, easing into the room behind me.
The images, the people on the screens in the other room—that could’ve all been explained. She could’ve been sampling other web cams from around the world—she could’ve staged the scenes and then replayed them in an endless loop. The big shot I thought I recognized, he could’ve been a look-alike—an actor playing a part. But this … this was something else entirely.
I knew what Falco Zagame and The Ram looked like. I’d personally investigated no less than six gang killings they’d been implicated in over the years, not to mention witness tampering, from pay-offs to full traction hospitalizations. I’d had a hot putanesca thrown in my face by Falco’s daughter and a rather frank chat with three of his knee breakers over some off-track betting. I’d pawed through the steel scrap in Ernie’s wrecking yard looking for bloodstains and I’d sat across the table from him at his bistro, Dago Red (which many people thought should be renamed China White), his breath heavy with the smell of pork, garlic and fennel, when he made me a proposition I wasn’t likely to forget.
These were made men with strong family connections to Kansas City, New Orleans and Brooklyn. They ran restaurants and owned city councilors—lived in big red houses with white lions out the front and had never once paid personal income tax. Men who’d spent their lives trying to rig juries, ballot boxes and trifectas, only to watch their empires eaten away by up-and-comers like Freddy Valdez. I knew these men. And I knew they were dead.
I’d been on the fringe of the crowds at both their boutonnière funerals. The backroom word at the Italian Social Club was that Falco’s people took credit for Brucato’s murder and vice versa. Their mutual assassinations had set the local families at each other’s throats and ushered in a new era of underworld expansion and consolidation that rippled out from Wetworld to affect the whole city—if you traveled in my vicious circles. There was no way they could both be here.
“Zagame’s lost his arms—and Ernie—his legs!” was all I could sputter. This couldn’t be happening. This was an ace she’d played—and I couldn’t beat it. Never once had I imagined I’d find in the basement of 4 Eyrie Street the two rival syndicate bosses of my generation—both of whom were supposedly dead and had been given Catholic burials—still alive but mutilated, floundering in the remains of a dark old spa pool. They’d lived lives of continuous excess. Banquets, box seats and bulletproof windows. Now they were hacked and wallowing in ridiculous women’s bathing suits.
“They’ve formed an alliance,” Genevieve informed me. “Falco needs Ernie’s help to wipe his bottom and feed himself. Ernie needs Falco’s legs to help him get around. See their toy car? A black Cadillac. Falco pedals, Ernie tries to steer. And they have a nice bedroom with posters of Italian sporting heroes on the wall. Ladies, do you recognize my guest?”
“A crooked cop!” Zagame blubbered, trying to find the cement edge.
“If you’re here, it’s too late,” Ernie bubbled. He’d lost a lot of weight, even without losing his legs.
“Don’t pay them any mind, Sunny! They’re persnickety because they have to share the pool.”
She knew just how much mind I’d pay them. I was one step away from head failure.
“You got a big alligator in there or something?” I managed finally.
“You know …” she chirped. “When I was living in Australia, I witnessed a rare confrontation between an estuarine crocodile and a shark.”
I was still gaping at the pitiful spectacle of the maimed mob bosses, feeling like I was standing beside a more threatening predator than either a croc or a shark. “Who won?”
“There’s been a lot of theoretical speculation about such a contest. The odds typically run 2 to 1 in favor of the shark. The problem is that it’s rare to see a saltwater crocodile fighting in open water. In the actual contest I enjoyed, both creatures were mortally wounded.”
“Hear that boys?” I said, and listened to my voice echo back off the walls. Then I said, “I don’t think this pool is big enough.” When in doubt with women, get logical, eh? And when you feel yourself drowning …
“You’re quite right,” Genevieve snapped, and snapped a switch on the wall.
The dark ink pit lit up instantly, turning into a luminous rectangle of water that made the shapes of the two gangsters seem even more grotesque.
“What concerns them, and why they don’t appreciate the therapeutic benefits their swimming privileges afford, isn’t a creature that’s vicious or aggressive, but which is nonetheless the most venomous in the world.”
I peered into the pool, at first thinking nothing was there. Then I saw it. It was like a discarded plastic bag full of fishing line—and then it seemed to breathe and the membranous bell inflated … the tendrils undulating … vaguely astral against the mosaic tiles.
“It’s a sea wasp,” Genevieve said. “Chironex fleckeri. A marine stinger. The most deadly jellyfish in the world. Look at the gelatin blossom of its body—its means of propulsion. And see the tentacles? How long they are? Wilhelm Reich believed the expressive movements of the orgasm reflex are functionally identical with those of a jellyfish.”
The stricken gangsters had become more agitated since the light had come on. Perhaps the sight of their pool mate increased their anxiety—or they worried the light made them easier to see. The stinger’s tendrils rippled out searchingly. Then again, I thought, their own nervousness could be stirring the water. The so-called creature might well have been made of polyethylene. That thought renewed a hint of confidence. I stepped over to the child’s pedal car and booted it into the drink. The thing at the bottom billowed across the mosaic tiles. Shit, maybe it was alive after all.
“Well, Sunny,” Genevieve sighed. “I understand you may feel you have a score to settle with these old dissociates. But you are never to act without my permission. That’s what Falco and Ernie have learned so well. I forgive you, because all this is still new to you—and because the vision of a miniature Cadillac at the bottom of a lighted swimming pool is so lovely.”
She entwined one of her arms with mine in an unwholesome yet deeply arousing way.
“Now, ladies,” she called. “Retrieve your vehicle any way you can. Come, Sunny. The next stop on the tour has even more to do with your life. Oh, yes. From now on tonight, it’s all about you, you big hunk of man.”
E LEFT THE GANGSTERS AND PROCEEDED DOWN the hall to another forking passage, toward a large mirror. Our reflections seemed to blur. We must’ve crossed the path of an electric eye for the looking glass was another door, and as it opened, there came a cool breath from the cliff face.
Yet another unexpected facet of this false-bottomed house. A junior sized railroad track, as in the depths of a mine. Only, I recognized the weathered cars. They were from the Scenic Railway in Funland. The horizontal shaft we entered was lit by some battery-powered emergency system, a faint light every hundred feet or so—the tunnel thick with the odors of damp rock, old metal and aging timbers.
“Yes,” Genevieve acknowledged. “The Funland tracks used to run much farther than you may have thought. Old Leopold Mandel, the designer of the park, built this house and treated the grounds as his private fiefdom. Until he lost control of the property in a wager—with the Madame who established the house as a brothel.”
“You seem to know a lot about local history for someone new to the city,” I said, checking my pulse.
“Get in the front car,” she instructed. “Why do you think I’m new to the city?”
“I would’ve heard of you otherwise,” I answered and climbed into the rusted lead car, all of them painted a scraped yellow, the color of fun.
“You have heard of me, Sunny,” she said, sliding in beside me. “Only you weren’t listening well.”
How she activated the controls I don’t know, but the cars chugged off down the tracks and jerked around a corner. It was a very trippy sensation to be riding so close to her, feeling the hea
t of her body—and it was heat not warmth I felt—the scent of her all the stronger in the stale still cave air.
“I was once the Madame who won this house all those years ago,” she said. “I’ve been many things in my long life, however impossible it is for you to comprehend. Legal technicalities have had to be juggled in time, and my plans and aspirations have changed as well. What has renewed my interest of late is a desire to reintegrate the property as it was once. For that I needed the cooperation of señors Zagame and Brucato. The one had title to the restaurant block, as you know. The other has deeded to me the land that includes the Funland parking lot. Funland itself passed back into the City’s hands when the company that owned it went bankrupt. With the land I now own, I’m confident of being able to negotiate with the City for the development of the entire site.”
The cars eked around another bend and down, a switchback route I surmised was a way of coping with the incline leading to the water’s edge. The idea that all the times I’d looked at the Scenic Railway there’d been a covert route entering the cliff flipped me. Almost as much as her claim of being a brothel Madame from more than half a century ago. The damn thing was—that kind of mumbo-jumbo would’ve explained a lot. All the madness would start to make some sense. But that didn’t make any sense at all.
“So, the land deal is how you came into contact with Stoakes and Whitney,” I tried. I had to stay on track too, winding though it may have been.
“They came into contact with me,” she corrected. “They were searching for something. Just as you are.”
The cars wormed through the excavated rock, the emergency light reflecting the way I felt.
“They didn’t come to very happy ends,” I noted.
“Are you saying that as a police officer or as an ordinary citizen?”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like an ordinary citizen again,” I confessed openly. “The police cases are closed. My investigation’s still on-going.”
Private Midnight Page 15
