The City

by Dean Koontz

  He brushed his teeth and then brushed them again. He took a long shower, as hot as he could tolerate. With a styling brush, he shaped his hair as he blew it dry, until it was a prematurely white, leonine mane. That hair made some women think of their fathers and fantasize transgressive sex, whereupon they became insatiable. He looked in the mirror again and saw a demigod.

  After putting on clean underwear and fresh clothes, he went into his study, sat in the studded-leather chair behind the teak desk with the black granite top, swiveled toward the phone, and was gratified to see that his hand didn’t tremble. He’d had touch-tone phones for three years, but he still found them odd. Somehow they didn’t seem as authentic as rotary-dial phones, and Dr. Mace-Maskil was all about authenticity.

  He placed the call to the number that he’d most recently been given, wondering if perhaps Lucas might be unavailable—wondering, not hoping—but the familiar voice answered: “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Robert Donat,” the professor said, referring to the actor who had played the heartwarming title role in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Set in an English boys’ school, the movie had been about a Latin teacher who starts out a bumbler but over the decades becomes a beloved school institution.

  “Say hello to Greer Garson for me,” Lucas said dutifully, for she had played the female lead.

  If their phones were tapped, nothing was gained by using names other than their own, and they never spoke in code, but Dr. MaceMaskil liked making contact this way. It made him feel safer than he might otherwise have felt.

  He launched straight into his story about how he’d been in the Alumni Affairs Office when Setsuko Nozawa barged through the door, obviously with some kind of buzz on, drugs or liquor, hard to tell which, and demanded to know the address of one Lucas Drackman. She might have been upset about something, but she might also have been nothing more than nervous; her behavior was so peculiar that it was difficult to tell which. The secretary behind the counter, a busty redhead named Teresa Marie Hallahan, who for some time had been hot for the professor, of course informed the distressed visitor that the university guarded the privacy of alumni, whereupon this Nozawa person became belligerent. When Dr. Mace-Maskil spoke up for Miss Hallahan and university policy, the Nozawa creature turned her fury on him, became incoherent, and left in a huff.

  “Who the hell is Setsuko Nozawa?” Lucas asked.

  “I gather she owns a dry-cleaning shop. I thought you must know her somehow.”

  “I never heard of the crazy bitch.”

  Dr. Mace-Maskil believed him, and that was a relief. If Lucas had neither done Nozawa a great kindness nor killed someone for her, then he was far more likely to believe his mentor than a weird woman who’d thrown a fit in the Alumni Affairs Office.

  “When did this happen?” Lucas asked.

  “Fifteen minutes ago. I came straight from there to my office phone here at the school.”

  “Why does the bitch want my address?”

  “She wouldn’t say. But it was so strange, so very strange, I thought you should know.”

  “Yeah, all right. I’ll think about it, look into it. My plate’s kind of full right now, but I’ll get to it. It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”

  After they disconnected, the professor went into the bathroom, got on his knees in front of the toilet, and threw up.

  74

  According to the eventual testimony of Aurora Delvane, after she returned from her run in the park that day, she showered, washed and dried her hair, and painted her toenails before she came downstairs and found Lucas with Reggie “Gorilla” Smaller, Tilton, and Fiona in the kitchen, where for one last time they’d been reviewing details of the impending operation. Aurora hadn’t needed to be there, for she wasn’t an active participant in the scheme; she was an observer, their chronicler, who would one day write about their exploits and the deep philosophy that motivated them.

  As Aurora entered the kitchen, Lucas racked the wall phone, turned to the group, and said, “What the hell was that about?” He recounted his conversation with the professor, whom he referred to as “a total butthead I should have offed years ago.”

  No one knew what if anything to make of the story about the erratic dry-cleaning entrepreneur, and Aurora Delvane asked, “What is this, Jap Day or something?”

  Lucas frowned. “What’d you say?”

  Fiona came around the table, eyes narrowing with each step. “Yeah, what’d you say?”

  Aurora told them about the gay guy from New Year’s Eve, who was at that moment ensconced on the bench in the park, directly across the street. “But he’s a big old nobody swish. He’s reading that Capote book, the one everybody’s reading, been a bestseller forever, so you know it’s for dunces.”

  Intrigued, Lucas retrieved a pair of binoculars from the study, and they all went to the front room. After Lucas watched the bench-sitter for a minute, Fiona took the binoculars and studied the man.

  She hissed, “Yoshioka.”

  “You mean the tailor?” Aurora asked. “The nice little guy across the hall, you never see him in anything but a suit?”

  “He’s a sneaky, treacherous sonofabitch,” said Fiona Cassidy. “Nozawa in Illinois, this guy in the park and on that bench of all benches, Yoshioka sniffing around on the sixth floor, him and his security chains. It’s Jap Day, sure enough.”

  A conversation ensued, during which they argued heatedly about whether Fiona might be excessively paranoid. They all properly and wisely embraced paranoia as being essential to their survival and success; but though paranoia could be a good thing, it could also be too much of a good thing. If one of them, for instance, began to suspect that among them lurked a Bilderberger, the other four had to conduct a friendly intervention and get him back on a rational track. In this case, the five reached a relatively quick consensus: Fiona wasn’t off the rails; there must be some connection between Yoshioka, Nozawa, and this big guy in the chokeberry shadows.

  Tilton said they never should have used Apartment 6-C for bomb-making, that Fiona should have cooked the pudding and packed the pots right here in the house. That ticked off Lucas, who reminded Tilton that the house was a two-million-dollar asset, not a place where you made bombs or tested flamethrowers. If Fiona blew herself to bits, that would be sad, even a tragedy, but blowing up the mansion would be something else altogether; blowing up the mansion would be a serious loss of capital. Besides, if the house was damaged by a bomb blast, the FBI would be all over the Drackman Family Trust and all over Lucas himself; even dumb bears knew not to crap in their dens.

  Basically, they had two options. One, cancel the operation planned for that morning and hope to reschedule it, snatch Yoshioka instead, and torture the truth out of him. Two, proceed as planned, rather than running for the tall grass like a bunch of cowards, and then extract the facts from Yoshioka afterward.

  Even if the guy in the park was conducting surveillance, they could leave the house by the back, walk a couple of blocks along the alleyway before coming out to a main street, flag down a taxi, and take that to the rented Quonset, once an auto-repair garage in an industrial district, from which they were staging the operation.

  “Look,” Lucas said, “it’s weird, all these Japanese, but who are these people really? I mean, we have a tailor, a dry cleaner, and some squish, we don’t know what he does, if anything. We’re not dealing with Elliot Ness here. I say we go forward as planned, make this a day to remember, and later we squeeze Yoshioka until we pop the little rotten tomato.”

  Lucas nearly always got what he wanted, certainly not because of metaphors like the rotten tomato and not merely because he knew how to manipulate and motivate people, but also because he was a spooky dude who seemed to be perpetually on the edge of violence. His four compatriots agreed with him: the operation was on.

  75

  A couple of hours later, at 10:10 A.M. that Monday, Amalia and Malcolm and I disembarked from the city bus at the corner of National Avenue a
nd 52nd Street, as we had done the previous Thursday. Across the avenue stood Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, where Europe in the Age of Monarchy had finished its run on Sunday. First National Bank and its thirty-story financial center towered behind us, and for a couple of blocks in every direction stood imposing and richly detailed historic buildings.

  On the ride in from our neighborhood, I’d discovered that Amalia knew almost as much about architecture as she did about art, and she had stories to tell about the buildings and the people who designed them. She never acted like a know-it-all, never made me feel clueless by comparison. Instead, knowledge flowed from that girl like cool air from an electric fan. The longer you listened, the more you wanted to hear, because the things she knew and the words she used to convey them made the world around you clearer, brighter.

  “Where do we start?” I asked.

  Malcolm said, “Right here, the bank, it’s so radical. You’ll love it.”

  I had never been inside a bank before, and I thought they must be kidding me. “But we don’t have any money to put in or take out.”

  “The lobby is a public space,” Amalia explained. “And one of the most beautiful. Anyone can go inside. Anyone. There was a time, not so long ago, when architecture was as much about beauty as function. This place opened in 1931. It’s brilliant Deco. It always gives me goose bumps.”

  The facade of the bank, before the tower began above it, was perhaps forty feet high and at least four times that wide. A vast rectangular frieze spanned the front of the limestone structure, a pattern of geometric shapes—mostly circles and triangles—arranged in an arresting pattern. At the top of the steps were eight pairs of bronze-and-beveled-glass doors, and we entered at the north end.

  I know Amalia had much to say about the immense, spectacular lobby, but I don’t remember any of that. It is lost to me as a consequence of what happened next. The last words of hers I remember that day were spoken as I passed through the heavy door behind her and looked up in wonder at the massive columns supporting the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Perhaps forty feet overhead, suspended from the apex of the vault and racing its length were stylized horses, studies in the liquidity of equine grace, cast from stainless steel.

  “Isn’t it glorious, Jonah?” When I turned my attention from the ceiling to her lovely face, she looked so happy when she said, “Isn’t it glorious what people can do, what wonderful things they can create when they’re free and when they believe everything is important, everything has meaning, when they think even a bank lobby has to please the eye and lift the heart?”

  A few dozen people were doing their banking. There were maybe twenty tellers. Behind a stainless-steel balustrade, bank officers of rank unknown to me were stationed at a fleet of desks, working on documents or manning their phones, or serving customers who sat with them. Considering its grand dimensions and hard surfaces of stone and metal, the lobby should have been noisy, voices ricocheting from vault to floor, to pillar, to post. Due to the amazing finesse of the architects, however, the enormous chamber was hushed, as though everyone must be whispering to one another when in fact they weren’t.

  Although I can’t remember what Amalia said to me and Malcolm, I recall wandering through the lobby almost as if through a joyous, exhilarating fantasy film. Each time that I thought I had seen the best of the layered Deco details, I noticed another more enchanting than anything before.

  Each teller’s window flanked by shimmering stainless-steel fluting and surmounted by a semicircular pediment of steel in which had been cast the head of the Statue of Liberty, the rays of her crown each pointing to a stylized star …

  The pale-gold granite floor inlaid with intricate medallions of black, blue, and green marble, surrounded by a border of the same …

  Four evenly spaced enormous chandeliers of stainless steel, each with many bulbs and six branches, a bronze sculpture of what seemed to be the robed Miss Liberty seated at the end of each branch …

  Spaced along the center of the lobby were tall tables of carved green marble, at which people stood to prepare deposit slips and to endorse checks before going to the tellers’ windows. As I was passing one of these, a small golden feather floated down before my face, in every way identical to the one that had turned from white to gold in the pendant that I wore under my shirt.

  I halted, startled, and the feather floated in a fixed position less than an arm’s length in front of my face, as though the draft that had brought it to me now held it motionless for my inspection.

  If the architecture and exquisite decoration of the bank lobby had drawn me into a state of quiet rapture, the feather added to that the quality of a dream, specifically the singularity of movement in some dreams, when the dreamer and everything he experiences progress in slow motion.

  I reached to my throat and pinched the silver chain and pulled the pendant from beneath my shirt.

  The Lucite heart, transparent in the chandelier light, remained intact, but it contained no feather.

  As the pendant slipped from my fingers and dangled at chain’s end, the airborne feather began to move south through the lobby.

  The voices in the hushed chamber faded to silence, and though people moved in slow motion around me, not one foot struck a sound from the stone floor.

  I could hear only my heart, which beat as slow as a drum in a funeral cortege, surely too slow to sustain me.

  Like a deep-sea diver walking against a resisting mass of water, I followed the feather farther toward the southern end of the lobby.

  Although I didn’t understand what was happening, I knew I moved now toward the moment that I’d been anticipating for so long.

  I seemed to float, to drift, my feet not quite touching the floor.

  A sensation that should have been exhilarating instead became a source of fear, as though I might slip the bonds of gravity and never come down again.

  I passed two of the tall marble tables, and the feather stopped at a third.

  As it had drifted down into my line of sight, so now it settled farther, until I saw beneath the table a brown-leather briefcase.

  Still the only sound, my heartbeat accelerated.

  The feather rose before my eyes, and I almost reached for it, but I intuited that to seize it would be wrong.

  Looking past the feather, I saw her as she’d never presented herself before: in high heels, a businesslike skirt and blouse and jacket, eyeglasses, ink-black hair pinned up in a chignon.

  Fiona Cassidy.

  She moved toward one pair of bronze and beveled-glass doors. As she walked, she looked not back at me, but north.

  Turning my head, following her stare, I saw him as he had never presented himself before: in black wing tips, a dark-gray business suit, white shirt and tie, a hat with a pinched crown and black band and snap brim.

  Tilton.

  My father.

  He moved toward a different exit from the one Fiona approached. He had shaved off his beard.

  He reached the door.

  She opened her door and stepped outside. I looked down at the briefcase.

  Over the thundering of my heart, I heard myself say, “Bomb.”

  76

  In Illinois, Mrs. Nozawa’s Monday had not begun well. After his breakfast and his walk, Toshiro Mifune didn’t want to go back into the house. He was agitated, panting, and as she tried to settle him, he vomited copiously in the grass.

  On occasion, Mr. Nozawa complained that his wife treated the dog better than she did him, to which she replied, with affection, that he wasn’t as dependent or innocent as their sweet Labrador retriever. Now she coaxed Toshiro Mifune into the backseat of her Cadillac, not in the least concerned that he might make a mess there. A car was just a car, but the dog was her fourth child.

  Never previously an imprudent person, Mrs. Nozawa disobeyed all the speed limits, as if the car were an ambulance. She arrived at the veterinarian’s office with a squeal of brakes.

  Dr. Donovan examined the dog and performed an
array of tests while Mrs. Nozawa sat in the waiting area, on the edge of her seat, her hands fisted in her lap, as if she were the mother of a wrongly condemned man, waiting outside of the prison’s execution chamber, waiting either for word of the governor’s stay or for the crackle of the electric chair.

  As it turned out, Toshiro Mifune had a fever and an infection, nothing mortal. He would be all right after a course of antibiotics and rest.

  Mrs. Nozawa drove home at a sedate pace, continuously talking in a soothing tone to the dog in the backseat. She called the drycleaning shop to say that she would be out all day.

  The Labrador’s favorite place in the house was on the padded window seat in the living room, where he could watch activity in the street. Once he was lying on those cushions, nose to the glass, she sat in a nearby armchair with a copy of Julia Child’s cookbook, reading recipes.

  Now that Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had returned from his holiday, Mrs. Nozawa needed to tell him about Dr. Mace-Maskil, the murder of his wife Noreen, and the plausible assumption that Lucas Drackman had killed the woman for the professor. She had meant to call by nine o’clock his time, but already it was after ten o’clock there. As soon as Toshiro Mifune went to sleep, she would reach out to Mr. Tamazaki. No hurry.

  77

  As I said, “Bomb,” I turned toward the north end of the lobby and saw that I had put some distance between myself and Amalia, who stood perhaps forty feet away with Malcolm, both of them studying the ornate ceiling, the procession of stainless-steel horses in perpetual gallop. No one moved in slow motion anymore, and sound returned, and I realized that I had said, “Bomb,” so softly that no one had heard me.