Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  “So what’s your point?” she asked, deadpan.

  I laughed in spite of myself. “Definitely too smart for your own good.”

  “I know it. Horace says I’m one of a kind.”

  “He won’t get any argument from me.” Horace was her “hardman,” which I presumed meant boyfriend, lover, soulmate. I hadn’t discussed the term with her because I was afraid she’d provide me with a too-precise definition. He stood about six two, weighed around 240, and had the general demeanor of Mean Joe Greene on game day. He was an honor student at S.F. State, majoring in music appreciation, and was also studying to be a concert cellist at the Conservatory of Music. “How is Horace these days?”

  “He’s cool. Picking me up at five-fifteen.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, man, it’s that now. He’ll be downstairs and you know he doesn’t like to wait.”

  I poked my chin in the direction of her computer. “Go ahead and log off or shut down or whatever it is you do with that thing.”

  “Nothing else you need?”

  “Not today.”

  She did whatever it is she does to darken and disconnect the PowerBook, folded it up into its self-contained carrying case. “When you leaving for Creekside?” she asked then.

  “Tomorrow morning, early.”

  “Well, I’ll be in Wednesday and Thursday, same as usual. Got a couple of hours free on Friday morning, too, if you want me to come in then.”

  “Fine. I’ll check in when I can.”

  At the door she said, “You find Allison, okay? Or at least what happened to her.”

  “If I can.”

  “Not just for her mama’s sake. If she’s alive, she’s somebody deserves to have a life. Design buildings, work for causes, marry a plumber or her mystery man if he’s cool—whatever. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Loud and clear. You wouldn’t be making a point after all, would you?”

  The half-smile again. “I guess maybe I am at that. Be smart now,” she said, which meant that I should take care of myself, and out she went to brighten the evening of her budding concert cellist.

  Home, for Kerry and me, is a two-sided proposition. Before we’d tied the knot we had made the decision that each of us maintain our separate residences. She had bought her apartment when her building on Diamond Heights went condo a few years ago, and I’d had my Pacific Heights flat—low rent, thanks to a benevolent landlord—for so long I could barely remember the other places in the city that I’d lived prior to it. So neither of us cared to give up one in favor of the other. Besides which, we were both set in our ways, both independent to a fault, both in need of a certain amount of privacy. The privacy factor was particularly important when one or the other of us was caught up in a difficult work schedule.

  The arrangement, as unconventional as it was, probably would have caused trouble in most marriages; for us, it served as a bond of trust that made our relationship even more solid. Most weeks we spent five or six nights and the entire weekend together, more often at Kerry’s condo than at my flat because she has a bigger bed (you can make of that what you like) and more space for her wardrobe and personal effects, and because it’s easier for her to do the work that she regularly brings home from her office. She’s a creative director at one of the city’s larger ad agencies, Bates and Carpenter—the kind of job where the image you project, how you look and dress, is almost as important as how skillful you are at creating a selling ad layout. Kerry claims the bathroom in my flat is too dark and has what she calls “fun-house mirrors” so that she can never get her makeup on properly. I’m sure she’s right. My craggy old phiz looks a hell of a lot less tolerable to my critical eye in her brightly lit bathroom mirror than it does in my shadowy one.

  Tonight was one of our nights at the condo, so I drove straight up to Diamond Heights after I closed the office. Her building is on a steep street called Gold Mine Drive. On the plus side it offers one of the best views of the city; on the minus side, underground parking is limited to one car per unit and street parking, also limited, can be a pain in the ass. I got lucky this evening, though the lone free space half a block downhill was narrow and I had to do some jockeying back and forth to squeeze my car into it. It wasn’t until I was done squeezing that I noticed the car parked behind mine, a butterscotch-hued Mercedes 560SL.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  You don’t see many Mercedes sport jobs painted that color; the only one I’d ever seen belonged to Paula Hanley, a friend of Kerry’s who owned an interior design company and was a client of Bates and Carpenter’s. Paula was all right, and we got on well enough most of the time, but she made me uncomfortable. What little sense of humor she had was bizarre, she was overly analytical, and she thought she knew what was best for everybody and consequently kept trying to manipulate and change other people’s lives. These less-than-endearing traits were part of the reason she’d gone through three husbands and was working on a fourth, a poor tubby little chiropractor named Andrew. The other part had to do with a magnetic attraction to every screwball new fad, fancy, and ism that came along. She was always trying to talk Kerry into joining one of her harebrained new pursuits. So far Kerry, who was more practical than adventurous, had resisted. But it worried me that one of these days Paula would wear down her resistance and then poor tubby Andrew and I would finally have something significant in common.

  So was Paula here tonight on business or on a fresh mission? On a mission, like as not; she usually reserved business matters for her office or Kerry’s, and she’d been between fads, fancies, and isms longer than usual. Hooked into a new one, sure as hell, I thought fatalistically.

  I steeled myself and went in to find out more than I would ever want to know about Paula Hanley’s latest dementia du jour.

  Chapter Three

  Sex.

  And didn’t that just figure?

  I could hear Paula gabbling as soon as I opened the door. She and Kerry were in the living room, at the opposite end of the apartment, but she might have been standing next to me yelling in my ear. She had one of those rare voices that indiscriminately ranges up and down the register from a deep-throated low to a piercing high, depending on her subject matter, mood, level of excitement, and intake of wine. The more animated she got, the more her voice took on a kind of breathless, fire-whistle shrillness. It hadn’t reached that level yet tonight, but it was edging in that direction. She must’ve been a squealing bundle of fun in bed—one of the reasons, no doubt, that she’d gone through so many husbands, all of whom were now surely hearing-impaired. And if that’s a sexist remark, Kerry gets the blame: She was its originator, not me.

  “. . . not exaggerating, Kerry, The Holy Sexual Communion is absolutely the most wonderful book I’ve ever read. It’s so enlightening, so stimulating . . . so profound. It changed my entire outlook on love and marriage and human relationships, and if you read it and absorb its message, it will change yours too. Take the concept of ‘high sex,’ for instance. I mean, Andrew and I, well, we thought we had a perfectly satisfactory sex life right from the first, but after we read The Holy Sexual Communion and began attending Alida’s workshops, we realized that all we’d been doing was going through the motions, so to speak. What we have now, with our energy bodies in total harmony, is so much more intense and spiritual. . . .”

  There was more, no doubt a lot more, but I didn’t hear it except as background noise. I had one arm out of my coat, when a streak of black and tan fur shot around the corner from the kitchen and launched itself at me from about five feet away. I tried to catch it one-handed, missed, and it slammed into my right leg thigh-high with enough force to pitch me backward a step. Razor-sharp claws sank into my flesh; it was like being stabbed with a dozen needles all at once. Manfully I managed not to scream. The fur ball hung there, firmly anchored, looking up at me out of huge amber-colored eyes and making a sound like an electric grinder.

  How can you get upset with something that weighs less than three pounds and gazes at you
with such soulful adoration? I reached down and disengaged him gently from my bleeding leg. He snuggled in against my chest, making even louder rumbling noises, as if I were a blood relative instead of a primary provider of 9 Lives and Kitty Litter. “Cat,” I said, “you really are well named,” which he took as a cue to raise his head and adore me some more.

  Right, I thought. When Kerry first came up with the name for him, I considered it silly. Not as silly as Fufu or Precious or some of the other saccharine things people call their felines, but silly enough for me to try to talk her out of it. She remained adamant. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s what he is, isn’t it?”

  I couldn’t argue with that, then or now. There really wasn’t a better or more appropriate handle for the furry little bunco artist than Shameless.

  I set him on the floor. He wound himself around my legs while I finished shedding my coat; then he went charging ahead of me as I limped down the hall into the living room.

  Paula was still holding court, perched cross-legged on the couch, talking with her long-fingered hands as well as her crimsoned mouth. She wore black velour slacks and a chartreuse blouse that clashed violently with her lipstick and her lemon-yellow perm. She had a reputation as one of the city’s most stylish home designers, and an annual income to back it up, but she couldn’t decorate herself worth a hoot. Kerry, on the other hand, not only knows how to dress but always manages to look fresh and unrumpled at any hour of the day. Cream-colored suit and a blouse the shade of old port wine today, her long legs encased in a pair of sheer nylons. She was in her chair with her shoes off and her feet pulled up, which suited me fine; she has the sexiest feet of any human being on this planet. Sexy greenish chameleon eyes and a pretty hot neck too, especially where it curves up into the short auburn hair at the nape.

  When Paula saw me she paused long enough in her monologue to draw a breath. This gave Kerry time to smile at me and say, “Hi, guy. You look tired.”

  “I am tired. And I can’t stay long—my wife’s expecting me. Hello, Paula.”

  “Hello yourself. What happened to your leg?”

  “What? Oh. Shameless. He keeps using me as a scratching post.” I went over to give Kerry a kiss. “We’ve got to have him declawed.”

  “That’s not good for a cat,” Paula said. “Cats need their claws, even housebound cats. It’s not natural to have them removed.”

  “It’s also not natural for me to walk around with blood dripping down my leg.”

  “Did he really scratch you that bad?” Kerry asked. “There’s iodine in the bathroom. . . .”

  “Later. I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

  I resisted an urge to nibble the hair on her neck, avoided any more eye contact with her bare feet, and lowered my hams into my chair. Immediately Shameless jumped onto my lap and conned me into massaging his ears.

  Paula’s face, I noticed while I massaged, was flushed—partly from the excitement generated by her latest mania and partly from the effects of the wine she and Kerry had been drinking. A nearly empty glass stood on the end table beside her, and if I knew Paula, it wasn’t her first. Next to the glass lay a small, slender hardcover book with a silver dust jacket that had The Holy Sexual Communion and the single author’s name Alida splashed across it in dark purple.

  The Hanley eyes, a little glazed from wine and fervor, were on me and had been ever since I’d walked in. They were a kind of off-amber color similar to Shameless’s, just as round and also slightly ophthalmic, and whenever she watched me like that I got the uncomfortable sensation that I was being analyzed. The same sort of analysis a scientist might give a mildly interesting bug.

  “You seem tense,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Tense. Your body language—it’s sending messages of tension.”

  “Sort of like Western Union, you mean?”

  She stared at me in a puzzled way: the bug had made sounds the scientist didn’t understand. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “He was making a joke,” Kerry said.

  “Oh. A joke. Well, it must be the tension. What you should do after I leave is to give him a massage. You know, the kind I was telling you about—his back and arms with warm oil.”

  “Warm oil,” I said. “What kind? Pennzoil, or will WD-40 do?” Paula brings out the worst in me.

  “Very tense,” she said.

  Kerry said, “We’re not much for massages. . . .”

  “But that’s just the point.” Paula waved an arm and almost knocked over her wineglass. This made her aware of the glass; she drained it before she went on. “The whole idea of the tantric experience, the holy tantric communion, is for couples to expand their horizons. Learn new shared pleasures, teach other joys greater and more lasting than the fleeting orgasm. It’s the one true path to enlightenment and bliss, to spiritual oneness.”

  I made the mistake of asking, “What’re you talking about, Paula?”

  “New Age tantra, of course.”

  “What’s New Age tantra?”

  “You’ve never heard of it? Really?”

  “Really. What is it, besides some kind of new sex thing?”

  She looked appalled. “New? Thing? The techniques of New Age tantra are derived from a meditative tradition founded in India fifteen hundred years ago.”

  “Yeah, huh?”

  “Absolutely. In those days the rituals were held in secret because they went against established Buddhist and Hindu dogma. Devotees consumed taboo foods such as meat, drank alcohol, chanted sacred syllables, visualized gods and goddesses in symbolic sexual union during meditation, and copulated with one partner after another.”

  “Pretty kinky.”

  “Kinky? No, it was spiritual. The main difference between the old form and New Age tantra is that we’re taught how to achieve ultimate intimacy with just one other person. A domestic and less religious version of the old teachings, although spirituality is still the core. New Age tantra is the antithesis of the free-love, noncommitment seventies, the autoerotic experimentation of the eighties. It’s not only the perfect form of lovemaking for the monogamous, AIDS-aware nineties, it’s what all human sexuality should evolve into—a holy communion, a rite of passage through the multifaceted changes of life and togetherness.”

  She was on a roll again. With each new sentence—quoted more or less verbatim, I’d have been willing to bet, from The Holy Sexual Communion—her voice rose another octave. The zealot’s glaze made her eyes shine. She ran both hands through her hair, yanking at it as if she might be getting ready to snatch out handfuls by the roots; she didn’t go that far, but she did succeed in creating an unintentional new ’do, a sort of New Age fright-wig style.

  “It’s not just sex,” she said, “it goes far beyond simple physical connection. Closeness, intimacy, spirituality—that’s what tantra teaches us. Pure love in which orgasm is truly nonessential. What you and your mate create together is a sacrament that brings you closer to God as well as to each other. You see?”

  I saw, all right. I said, “How do you do it?”

  “Do it? Do what?”

  “Create this sacrament. Reach tantric Nirvana with your mate.”

  “By deemphasizing sex. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Deemphasizing sex. Uh-huh. You have sex by deemphasizing it.” I glanced at Kerry. “Make sense to you?”

  She said, “Well, in principle. The physical act isn’t what’s important. The emphasis is in finding ways to please your mate spiritually and emotionally as well as physically, which allows you to feel greater pleasure and closeness. Isn’t that right, Paula?”

  “Absolutely,” Paula said. Somehow the second syllable came out a few decibels higher than the others, as if she were trying to imitate the whistle of a teakettle. Came pretty close too. “And in order for the ultimate connection to be made, you have to create the proper atmosphere. Preparations are vital.”

  “What sort of preparations?” I asked.

  “Oh
, there are many different techniques. We learn to use variations of all in sequence and harmony, in order to awaken the god and goddess in ourselves.”

  “Sort of a tantric version of foreplay.”

  “Yes! The last time Andrew and I had our morning prayer—that’s what our lovemaking has become for us now, what Alida calls a morning prayer, even though we usually do it in the evening—the last time, he began by making an altar on the bureau of our chamber, surrounding a photograph of me with flowers. Roses and camellias, my favorites. Then he massaged my back and arms with warm scented oil. Then we sat facing each other on pillows before our statue of Buddha, and practiced full-body cuddling for a time, breathing slowly and gazing deep into each other’s eyes. When we were both totally relaxed, totally connected, we sipped wine and fed each other dates and nuts—”

  “Nuts,” I said, and Kerry reached over to poke my arm. Paula didn’t seem to notice.

  “—in order to appease our physical hunger while our spiritual need sharpened and expanded. Then I chanted softly to him as he beat on his elkskin drum—”

  “His what?”

  “—chanted the words ‘My body is the body of the Goddess,’ and at that point my own goddess awakened both physically and spiritually. I was the Goddess. We drank wine while he stroked the plastic wand in my glass and I fondled my yoni puppet. Soon we were ready for—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Yoni puppet?”

  Kerry laid a warning hand on my arm. She said to Paula, “Um, maybe you’d better not get too explicit,” but by then Paula had dragged her purse onto her lap and was hauling something out of it.

  “This,” she said, and held it up in all its bizarre splendor.

  It was long and round and hollow and sort of furry at one end. It was made out of black velvet and pink silk. It looked like nothing so much as a giant, anatomically correct—

  “My God!” I said.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”