He dropped his head in his hands, clutched at his hair. “One of them, or both of them? The dominant one, for sure, whereas the submissive one might just be along for the ride on one fantastic roller-coaster — he’s the servant, he hates whomever the dominant one hates. When you said to me that the Ghosts aren’t interested in breasts, Patsy, you filled in another chunk of sky. The flat chest, the plucked pubes. They should suggest that the owner of the face was pre-pubescent, and yet — if so, why don’t they abduct pre-pubescent girls? They don’t lack the balls or the brains to do it. So is the owner of the face someone that at least one of the Ghosts knew from childhood to young womanhood? Hated more as woman than as child? That’s the riddle I have no answer for.”
Silvestri spat out his cigar in excitement. “But they have gone further with the child aspect on this second dozen, Carmine. A little girl’s party dress.”
“If we knew who owned the face, we’d know who the Ghosts are. I spent the whole drive back from White Plains mentally searching through every Hugger’s house looking for that face on someone’s walls, but it isn’t on any Hugger’s walls.”
“You still believe it’s the Hug?” Marciano asked.
“One of the Ghosts is definitely a Hugger. The other one is not. He’s the half who does the staking out, maybe some of the abductions unaided. It has always had to be a Hugger, Danny. Yes, you can argue that bodies might have been put in any of the medical school dead animal refrigerators, but where else than the Hug is it possible to get two to ten bulky bags from a vehicle to the refrigerator unobserved? The fewer in one trip, the more trips. People come and go in the parking lots twenty-four hours a day, whereas the Hug’s parking lot is key-card gated and utterly deserted at, say, five in the morning. I noticed that there’s a big shopping cart chained to the Hug’s back wall to help a researcher take his books and papers inside. I am not saying that the Ghosts couldn’t have used other refrigerators, I am simply saying that using the Hug’s is simplest and easiest.”
“Simple and easy is better,” said Silvestri. “The Hug it is.”
“You’d best hope it isn’t Desdemona, Carmine,” said Patrick.
“Oh, I’m positive it isn’t Desdemona.”
“Ah!” Patrick cried, tensing. “You suspect someone!”
Carmine drew in a deep breath. “I don’t suspect anyone, and that’s my worst worry. I should suspect someone, so why don’t I? What I do have is a sense that I’m missing something right under my nose. In my sleep it’s crystal clear, but when I wake it’s gone. All I can do is go on thinking.”
“Talk to Eliza Smith,” said Desdemona, her head on Carmine’s shoulder; he had moved her into his apartment the day after her visitor. “I know you don’t really tell me anything significant, but I am convinced that you believe the Ghost is a Hugger. Eliza has been a part of the Hug since its inception, and while she has never stuck her nose into what she shouldn’t, she does know an awful lot other people don’t. The Prof talks to her sometimes, such as when he’s in hot water over the staff — Tamara is quite a strain, Walt Polonowski has his moments, and so does Kurt Schiller. Eliza took a psych major at Smith and went on to take a Ph.D. in psych from Chubb. I’m not a fan of psychologists, but the Prof has a lot of respect for Eliza’s opinions. Go and talk to her.”
“Does the Prof ever need to talk about you to Eliza?”
“Certainly not! To some extent I travel on an outer orbit that’s out of step with all the other orbits — a bit like four-five music. I’m seen as an accountant, not as a scientist, and that makes me of no importance to the Prof.” She snuggled. “I’m serious, Carmine. Talk to Eliza Smith. You know perfectly well that it’s talk will solve this case.”
Chapter 24
Monday, February 21st, 1966
The aftermath of the thaw kept Carmine too busy to see Mrs. Eliza Smith until almost a week later than Desdemona’s urging him to. Besides, he couldn’t see for the life of him what Mrs. Smith might be able to bring to his investigation. Especially now that the word was out that the Prof would not be returning to the Hug.
Temperatures soared and the wind decided to die; from a freeze it turned into ideal demonstration weather, cool enough for warm clothes but not unpleasant. The icy lid on statewide racial unrest melted; violence broke out everywhere.
In Holloman, Mohammed el Nesr sternly forbade rioting, as it was no part of his plans at this stage in his genesis to court arrest and search warrants. Alone among the discontented clots of black people raising hell, the Black Brigade and its leaders were sitting on a formidable arsenal of weapons rather than whatever firearms could be looted from gun shops or private houses. And now was not the time to reveal the presence of that arsenal. Despite which, Mohammed demonstrated relentlessly. If he had hoped for bigger crowds, the numbers who congregated were sufficiently large to put shouting, fist-waving groups outside City Hall, the County Services building, Chubb Administration, the railroad station, the bus station, M.M.’s official residence, and, of course, the Hug. All the placards dwelt upon the Connecticut Monster’s whiteness, inviolability and racially selective murder victims.
“After all,” said Wesley/Ali eagerly to Mohammed, “what we want is to highlight racial discrimination. Whitey’s teenaged girls are safe but no one else’s are — and that’s a fact not even the Governor’s ivory tower can dispute. Every industrial city in Connecticut is at least eighty percent black, which puts us in the catbird seat.”
Mohammed el Nesr looked like the eagle he was named for, a magnificently proud, hawk-nosed man of imposing height and build, his cropped hair hidden beneath a hat he had designed himself, with some of the look of a turban, yet flatter on top. At first he had worn a beard, then decided that a beard obscured too much of a face no camera could make seem bestial, or cruel, or ugly. His leather Black Brigade jacket’s white fist was embroidered rather than stamped, he wore it on top of combat fatigues, and he moved like the ex-military man he was. As Peter Scheinberg, he had risen to the rank of full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, so he was indeed an eagle. An eagle with two law degrees.
Inside their lining of mattresses his headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street were stuffed with books, for he read insatiably on the law, politics and history, studied his Koran fervently, and knew himself a leader of men. Yet he was still groping for the right way to accomplish his revolution; industrial cities might enjoy big black majorities, but Whitey owned the entire nation, which by and large wasn’t hugely urban. His first inspiration had been to recruit Black Brigaders among the armed services’ plethora of black men, only to find that very few black soldiers, no matter how they privately felt about Whitey, were inclined to enlist. So upon discharge — an honorable one — he had migrated to Holloman, thinking that a small city was the best place to start wooing the restless ghetto masses. That the stone he threw into the Holloman pond would spread its ripples ever outward to embrace other and far bigger places. A superlative orator, he did get invitations to speak at rallies in New York City, Chicago, L.A. But the local leaders in each place were jealous of their sway, didn’t regard Mohammed el Nesr as important. At fifty-two years of age, he knew that he lacked the money and the nationwide organization to weld his people as they needed to be welded. As was equally true for other autocrats, the people were pointing out to him that they refused to be led whither he would take them. Infinitely more wanted to follow Martin Luther King, a pacifist and a Christian.
Now here was this skinny little sansculotte from Louisiana giving him advice — how had he let that happen?
“I’ve been thinking too,” Wesley/Ali burbled on, “about what you said a couple of months ago — do you remember? You said our movement needed a martyr. Well, I’m working on it.”
“Good, Ali, you work on it, man. In the meantime, get back to your brainchild, the Hug. And Eleventh Street.”
“How’s next Sunday’s rally coming on?”
“Great. Looks like we’ll pull in fifty thousand black people on the Green come midday. Now
fuck off, Ali, let me get on with writing my speech.”
As ordered, Wesley/Ali fucked off to Eleventh Street, there to spread the word that Mohammed el Nesr was going to speak next Sunday on Holloman Green. Not only did everyone have to be there, but everyone also had to persuade their neighbors and friends to be there. Mohammed was a brilliant, charismatic orator, raved his disciple, well worth listening to. Come along, find out just how thoroughly Whitey was screwing black people. No black girl child was safe, but Mohammed el Nesr had answers.
What a pity, thought Wesley/Ali in one corner of his perpetually busy mind, that no one white would think to shoot Mohammed el Nesr down. What a martyr he would make! But this was staid old Connecticut, not the South or the West: no neo-Nazis, Klanners or even typical rednecks. One of the original thirteen states, a haven of free speech.
Whatever Wesley/Ali thought, Carmine knew that Connecticut had its share of neo-Nazis, Klanners and rednecks; he also knew that most of it was talk, and talk was cheap. But every rabid black hater was being watched, for Carmine was determined that no one was going to draw a bead on Mohammed el Nesr on Sunday afternoon. While Mohammed planned his rally, Carmine planned how to protect him: where the police snipers would be, how many cops he could put in plain clothes to patrol the outskirts of an anti-white crowd. No way was a bullet going to cut Mohammed el Nesr down and make a martyr out of him.
Then on Saturday night the snow returned, a February blizzard that left eighteen inches on the ground overnight; a shrieking sub-zero wind ensured that no rally would take place on Holloman Green. Saved by the winter bell yet again.
So today Carmine was at liberty to drive out to Route 133 and see if Mrs. Eliza Smith was home. She was.
“The boys went to school, very disappointed. If the snow had only waited until last night, no school today.”
“I’m sorry for them, but very glad for me, Mrs. Smith.”
“The black rally on Holloman Green?”
“Exactly.”
“God loves peace,” she said simply.
“Then why doesn’t He issue more of it?” asked the veteran of military and civilian warfare.
“Because having created us, He moved on to someplace else in a very large universe. Perhaps when He did create us, He put a special cog in our machinery to make us peace loving. Then the cog wore down, and whammo! Too late for God to return.”
“An interesting theory,” he said.
“I’ve been baking butterfly cakes,” Eliza said, leading the way into her mock-antique kitchen. “How about I make a fresh pot of coffee and you try some?”
Butterfly cakes, he discovered, were little yellow cakes Eliza had gouged the hilly tops off, filled the hollows with sweetened whipped cream, then cut the tops in two and put them back the wrong way up; they did look quite like fat little wings. They were, besides, delicious.
“Take them away, please,” he begged after scoffing four. “If you don’t, I’ll just sit here and eat the lot.”
“Okay,” she said, stuck them on the counter and sat down as if she meant to stay. “Now, what brings you here, Lieutenant?”
“Desdemona Dupre. She said you were the one I should talk to about the Hug people because you know them best. Will you fill me in, or tell me to go take a running jump?”
“Three months ago I would have told you to go take that jump, but now things are different.” She toyed with her coffee cup. “Do you know that Bob isn’t returning to the Hug?”
“Yes. Everybody at the Hug seems to know that.”
“It’s a tragedy, Lieutenant. He’s a broken man. There has always been a dark side to him, and since I’ve known him all my life, I’ve known about his dark side too.”
“What do you mean by a dark side, Mrs. Smith?”
“Utter depression — a yawning pit — nothingness. He calls it one of those, depending. His first fully fledged attack happened after the death of our daughter, Nancy. Leukemia.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So were we,” she said, blinking away tears. “Nancy was the eldest, died aged seven. She’d be sixteen now.”
“Have you a picture of her?”
“Hundreds, but I put them away because of Bob’s tendency to depression. Hold on a minute.” Off she went to return with an unframed color photograph of an adorable child, obviously taken before her illness ate her away. Curly blonde hair, big blue eyes, her mother’s rather thin mouth.
“Thank you,” he said, and put the picture face downward on the table. “I take it he recovered from that depression?”
“Yes, thanks to the Hug. Having to mother the Hug held him together. But not this time. He’ll retreat into trains forever.”
“How will you manage financially?” he asked, not realizing how longingly he was looking at the butterfly cakes.
She got up to pour him more coffee and plopped two cakes on his plate. “Here, eat them. That’s an order.” Her lips seemed dry; she licked them. “Financially we have no worries. Both of our families left us with trust funds that mean we don’t have to earn livings for ourselves. What a horrific prospect for a pair of Yankees! The work ethic is ineradicable.”
“What about your sons?”
“Our trusts pass to them. They’re good boys.”
“Why does the Professor beat them?”
She didn’t attempt to deny it. “The dark side. It doesn’t happen often, honestly. Only when they carp at him the way boys do — won’t leave a touchy subject alone, or won’t take no for an answer. They’re typical boys.”
“I guess I was wondering if the boys are going to join their father in playing with the trains.”
“I think,” Eliza said deliberately, “that both my sons would rather die than enter that basement. Bob is — selfish.”
“I had noticed,” he said gently.
“He hates sharing his trains. That’s really why the boys tried to trash them — did he tell you that the damage was disastrous?”
“Yes, that it took four years to rebuild.”
“That’s just not true. A little boy of seven and another of five? Horse feathers, Lieutenant! It was more a business of going around picking things up off the floor than anything else. Then he beat them unmercifully — I had to wrestle the switch off him. And I told him that if he ever hurt the boys that badly again, I’d go to the cops. He knew I meant it. Though he still beat them from time to time. Never in a furor, like he did over the trains. No more sadistic punishments. He likes to criticize them because they don’t measure up to their sainted sister.” She smiled, a twist of the lips that didn’t register amusement. “Though I can assure you, Lieutenant, that Nancy was no more a saint than Bobby or Sam is.”
“You haven’t had it easy, Mrs. Smith.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. So long as I can handle life, I’m okay.”
He ate the cakes. “Superb,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about Walter Polonowski and his wife.”
“They got themselves hopelessly tangled in a religious net,” Eliza said, shaking her head as if at incredible denseness. “She thought he’d disapprove of birth control, he thought she’d never consent to birth control. So they had four kids when neither of them really wanted any, especially before their marriage was old enough to let them get to know each other. Adjusting to life with a stranger is hard, but a lot harder when that stranger changes in front of your eyes within scant months — throws up, swells up, complains, the works. Paola is many years younger than Walt — oh, she was such a pretty girl! Very much like Marian, his new one. When Paola found out about Marian, she should have buttoned her lip and kept Walt on as a meal ticket. Instead, she’ll be raising four kids on alimony peanuts, because she sure can’t work. Walt is not about to give her a cent more than he has to, so he’s going to sell the house. Since it’s encumbered by a mortgage, Paola’s share will be more peanuts. Adding to Walt’s troubles is Marian, who is pregnant. That means Walt will have two families to support. He’ll have
to go into private practice, which is a genuine pity. He does really good research.”
“You’re a pragmatist, Mrs. Smith.”
“Someone in the family has to be.”
“I’ve heard a rumor from several people,” he said slowly, not looking at her, “that the Hug will cease to exist, at least in its present incarnation.”
“I’m sure the rumors are true, which will make the decisions easier for some Huggers. Walt Polonowski, for one. Maurie Finch for another. Between Schiller’s attempted suicide and finding that poor little girl’s body, Maurie Finch is another broken man. Not in the same way as Bob, but broken all the same.” She sighed. “However, the one I feel sorriest for is Chuck Ponsonby.”
“Why?” he asked, startled at this novel view of Ponsonby, the man he had simply assumed would be the Prof’s heir. No matter how the Hug changed, Ponsonby would surely survive the best among them.
“Chuck is not a brilliant researcher,” Eliza Smith said in a carefully neutral voice. “Bob has been carrying him ever since the Hug opened. It’s Bob’s mind directs Chuck’s work, and both of them are aware of it. A conspiracy between them. Apart from me, I don’t think anyone else has the slightest idea.”
“Why should the Professor do that, Mrs. Smith?”
“Old ties, Lieutenant — extremely old ties. We come from the same Yankee stock, the Ponsonbys, the Smiths and the Courtenays — my family. The friendships go back generations, and Bob watched quirks of fate destroy the Ponsonbys — well, so did I.”
“Quirks of fate?”
“Len Ponsonby — Chuck’s and Claire’s father — was enormously rich, just like his forebears. Ida, their mother, came from a moneyed Ohio family. Then Len Ponsonby was murdered. It must have been 1930, and not long after the Wall Street crash. He was beaten to death outside the Holloman railroad station by a gang of itinerants who went on a rampage. They beat two other people to death as well. Oh, it was blamed on the Depression, on bootleg booze, you name it! No one was ever caught. But Len’s money had vanished in the big crash, which left poor Ida virtually penniless. She funded herself by selling the Ponsonby land. A brave woman!”
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