Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (18 page)

“Hello?” Bernal shouted in through the open front door of the big vinyl-sided house that Spak sometimes identified as home.

“Back here,” a voice called. “Back in the kitchen.”

Arnie turned out to be the boss of the place. He wore a too-tight pink oxford shirt with a couple of missing buttons and had long, lank hair. He stirred stew in a huge pot on the stove. Two men at the kitchen table paused, white Chinese-restaurant spoons held at identical angles above their bowls, then dabbed their lips with napkins and left.

“Hey, bowls in . . . oh. Okay. Feed the bunnies, can you, Nourse?” He called after them. “I’ll put these in the ’wave when it’s safe for you to come back in.” He shook his head. “Don’t get many visitors. Not used to it.” Arnie himself seemed nervous, throwing glances at him when he thought Bernal wasn’t looking, the rest of the time focusing intently on the spicing of his stew.

“Spak gives this as his address,” Bernal said.

“It’s . .. well, it’s not an official center, if you know what I mean. You know, all that licensing and stuff. I used to run real residential facilities, oh, years ago. I ... yeah, well, we do get money. Grant money. It’s kind of experimental, what we’re after here. We got all sorts of sustainable gear in back, you want to see. Rabbit hutches, pigeon coops, an aquaculture pond. Tilapia. It’s a converted hot tub, works pretty good. That’s funded by some folks in New Hampshire.”

“I’m not concerned about your licensing,” Bernal said. “I’m looking for Spak. I hear he lives here.”

“Yeah.” Arnie was reluctant. “Most of the time. He in trouble?”

“No trouble. Just a few questions. He saw something I want to learn more about.”

“All of a sudden people are interested in Spak.” 

“Really?”

“Well, someone gave him a hat. Schiaparelli. Red velvet, feather, veil. Big old jewel on the front.” 

“Schiaparelli? You recognize things like that?”

Arnie chuckled. “You know Spak, you know old clothes. He digs around, makes some real finds. Loves every decade, every style. His only hobby.”

“So who gave him the hat? And in return for what?” 

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

The living room was stuffed with armchairs and sofas. Crumpled baby wipes made a dune behind a big camel-back couch. Someone must have swiped a case or two from the back of a truck at a drugstore, and now the inhabitants fastidiously used them to clean their hands and wipe surfaces, and then tossed them in the corner. A loud snoring came from under the heap of old jackets on the couch. It reeked of unwashed skin.

Arnie looked around the living room and sighed, seeing it through someone else’s eyes. “Please be kind to him. These guys seem like they’ve been hit with everything there is to be hit with, but sometimes it’s surprising how much there is left to break. Now, excuse me, I got people to feed.”

_______

Spak was wearing
 even more clothes than he had been the last time Bernal had seen him, having thrown a silk dressing gown on over his flowered surgical scrubs. He was bent over, fiddling with a black garbage bag filled to bursting. He then swung around and squatted behind it. He still wore the sunglasses with one lens.

“Hi, Spak. Remember me?” Bernal squatted down next to him.

Spak glanced up at Bernal, then huddled in on himself and looked away.

“You saw me when I was talking to Jord.”

“Nah. Maybe. Don’t remember.”

“Come on. You were peddling ... scrubs. Surgical scrubs.”

“Got some. Got some, you want. Don’t remember then, though. Too long ago.”

“How long ago?” Bernal was eager to trap him, as if that would make any difference.

“Whenever it was.”

Bernal realized that he should have planned a fallback position before even coming in here. If Spak continued to pretend to never have seen Bernal before, what was he supposed to do? Hit him?

“You said you saw something, in a car down by the Black River.”

“Ain’t never been there.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere! ” Spak’s anguished shout was loud enough for a few heads to poke in through the doorway, to vanish again quickly.

“Spak.” Bernal was earnest. “This is important. People’s . . . lives are at stake. It’s about finding a killer. Someone took something from that car. You told someone about what you saw, and they took it.”

“I didn’t tell nobody nothing about nothing.”

Bernal caught a glimpse of dark-red velvet inside the bag.  

“So,” he said. “I hear you got a new hat. A beautiful hat. Who gave it to you?”

Spak looked betrayed. “Who tell you that?”

“Never mind who told me. It’s all over. Everyone knows. Where did you get it?”

“Found it. I find everything.”

“Sure. And where is it now?”

“Lost it.”

“Now, Spak. I’ve heard all about you. You take care of your clothes. Lose a classic like that? Not you, Spak.” 

“Some kids. Beat me up. Took it.” Spak moaned. “Back still hurts. Got to keep sitting here until it doesn’t.” 

“Come on. Kids beat you up to steal classic 1930s evening wear? This is important. Tell me the truth.” He reached into the bag, trying not to think about what else was in there, and pulled out a turban-like red felt hat with a costume-jewelry medallion and a battered peacock feather dangling from it.

“Mine!” Spak grabbed for it.

Bernal held it away. “What, Spak, those punks feel all guilty and give it back?”

“It was something else they took. Made a mistake.” 

“The only mistake you’re making is not coming clean. You talked to somebody else about what you saw. And they told you to shut up about it. Tell me, Spak. Who was it? Who did you tell?”

Spak hunched his head into his chest. “Can’t. Promised.”

“A promise sealed with a hat?”

“Nice hat.”

“Fabulous hat, Spak. Much too nice to shove into a bag because you want to avoid telling me the truth.” 

Spak sat with his face in his hands. He wore at least a dozen rings on his pudgy fingers. Most were battered costume jewelry, but a couple had the gleam of true quality. A cracked fire opal was held in its setting by a wad of pink chewing gum.

“Prelate and Vervain,” another voice said. “Why don’t you want to tell this nice man about your dealings with those babes?”

Spak whimpered.

The pile of jackets on the couch shook and cascaded to the floor. A bearded face appeared, and Bernal realized it had been a few minutes since he had heard the snore.

“Let me introduce myself. Name’s Walligan. And the Walligans, sure as shooting, have ears.” He grinned, revealing gaps in his teeth. “That’s my main source of entertainment, these days.”

“Who are Prelate and Vervain?” Bernal asked. Walligan narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You gotta know who they are. Big time operators, both of them. Run this part of the state. What line of business you in, anyway?”

“I’m an . .. investigator,” Bernal said.

“Really? A PI? Too much 
truth
 out there already, without you digging up more. You ever think about leaving some things the hell alone?”

“I have things I want to find out. Do you know anything about them?”

“A dark being wanders the streets and fields, but that’s like a theological issue to you, you don’t care about Death and its manifestations. You care only about those poor schlubs who are persuaded to act in its name.” Walligan paused. “I was talking about something. .. .”

“Prelate and Vervain.”

“No . . . no, that wasn’t it.”

“Yes it was.” Bernal reined in his impatience.

“Maybe it was, now you mention it.” Walligan bared his teeth. “They’re real babes, eh, Spak? Prelate and Vervain. I think in a news story it would say ‘not their real names,’ like you’d ever think they were. Recycling’s what they’re into. Big industrial equipment, mostly, but they do anything. Got a nice eBay slot, trade across the country. And Spak’s, like, a spotter for them. Once they got him a nice set of men’s formal shoes, what do you call them, opera pumps. Nice, soft leather, he’s probably got them in one of those bags, if you want to look.”

“Spak,” Bernal said softly. “Do you remember now?” 

“They curious,” Spak sobbed, broken by Walligan’s revelation. “Heard, right when I got back from finding it.” 

“Why were they so interested?” Bernal said.

“Those girls.” Walligan shook his head. His bare feet were decorated with toenails of impressive size. “They’re into everything. Someone’s always on the lookout for something, and they cash in.”

“And what were they looking for?” Bernal said.

“A machine,” Spak wailed. “Hidden in a car, somewhere deep. A cold machine for keeping heads.” 

“Heads?” Bernal said.

“They don’t want the heads. They want the machine. Just a clue. Who wants another head?”

“I could use one,” Walligan confided. “Just as a spare.”

_______

Bernal found Arnie
 out back, where he was probing a sore on the side of a flopping fish from the hot-tub aquaculture tank.

The back of the house was a nightmare of poorly maintained sustainable experiments. A solarium with loose panes held racks of sprouting plants. They looked vigorous, but they were surrounded by the decayed remnants of previous attempts. Besides .. . Bernal looked up at the sky. It looked like the solarium had been built on the north side of the house, never a good idea in the Massachusetts climate. An old gray-water recovery unit with dangling filters made of nylon stockings stood next to a high-end rotating composter that smelled of rotting meat.

Arnie dropped the fish into one of a row of fish tanks. Then, squinting at the instructions on a large plastic bottle, he added a teaspoon of some kind of medication to the murky water.

He shook his head. “Some of the money comes from some kind of a commune in New Hampshire. They used to bike down here sometimes to check on the results of their funding. Nice guys. Older. Round glasses, big calves. All their land is worth huge amounts of money now, and people seem to love their ... hammocks, whatever it is they’ve been making for the past thirty years, and they’re all rich and kind of guilty about it. But they don’t come around anymore. I think they’ve gotten more interested in a cohousing thing for young families up in Portsmouth. But we still get the checks, and I do my best.” He looked mournfully at the fish, which was still alive, but seemed to be gasping for oxygen in the small tank. “You ever try to scale and gut a tilapia for dinner?” He sighed. “You know what? It’s not even, like, a useful skill, fish gutting. These guys need to sustain their lives, not the environment. Couple of them now know how to make tofu. That might still go somewhere.”

“Does Spak have anywhere else to go?” Bernal said. 

“If he did, do you suppose he’d flop here?”

“I’m just... he helped me out just now. I don’t think it’s likely to come back on him. But I don’t want anything to happen to him because of me.”

Arnie stared at him. At first Bernal thought he’d just gone blank, but then realized he was thinking. “I got a friend over in Leominster who could take him for a couple of days, if . .”

Bernal shoved some money in Arnie’s hand. “You’re doing good work. Now . . . two women,” Bernal said. “Walligan called them Vervain and Prelate. They been in here?”

“They help out here. Last year they brought me a new blower for the furnace and installed it. We couldn’t have made it through the winter without it.”

“Where do they get their stuff?”

Arnie looked at him bleakly. “We do what we need to get by. For some people that’s really easy. For some of us, it isn’t.”

“Look, stuff fell off the back of the truck, that’s fine with me. I just need to talk to them.”

“Do they want to talk to you?”

“I doubt that very much.”

Arnie looked at him with surprise. “Well. It’s important?”

Bernal nodded.

“Okay. Just don’t tell them the lead came from here.” 

“I won’t.”

“I mean, the refrigerator compressor’s started to make a clicking noise... .” Arnie paused. “They work out of an appliance repair place over in Greenwich.”

“They have real names?”

“You bring hunger, despair, and a desire to survive here. You don’t need a real name.”

It was ridiculous. “Prelate.” “Vervain.” There had been a time when you had to earn your underground moniker. Now people who replaced the heating elements in toaster ovens had them.

The Ziggy Sigma dispatcher had told Bernal that the two women were working a job out on Scobee Road. It was an older house, big, with a gigantic addition that turned the original house into a hand puppet. Someone had parked the white Ziggy Sigma repair van at an insolent angle in the wide driveway. Bernal was about to pass it on the way to the front door, and then stopped. He glanced up and down the street. Nothing like the midmorning quiet of a bedroom community with high employment.

He grabbed a handle and opened the van’s rear.

Racks held boxed parts. Transparent drawers were packed with O-rings, clamps, hoses, and mesh filters. Electronic testing equipment trailed alligator clips and power cords. Silvery quilted pads were folded and stacked on the foot of a handcart. And something lay on the floor under a grease-streaked tarp secured by straps. Wet leaves covered the floor.

Bernal thumbed the tension clamps, slid the straps off, and started to pull back the tarp.

The back door banged open, sending in a blinding flare of light.

It was a black woman with her hair under a sanitary cap with the Ziggy Sigma logo on it.

“Who the hell are you?”

_______

Inside the house,
 a white woman with a turban sat at the kitchen table, watching a tiny TV and fiddling with the innards of a leaf blower. Someone on the show won something, and tinny gongs and munchkin cheers came from the speakers.

“My name’s Bernal Haydon-Rumi. Which of you is Prelate?”

“I am Prelate.” She had some kind of Eastern European accent. “This is private home. Get out.”

“Worse than it sounds.” Vervain put her foot on the massive compressor she’d pulled out of the multidoored refrigerator that made up a wall of the kitchen and rocked it back and forth. “He was in the truck.” 

“Bullshit!” Prelate yelled. “Total bullshit.”

“I just need some information about that item you salvaged,” Bernal said.

“Got wrong chicks,” Prelate sneered. “We do repairs. All new replacement parts, guaranteed. Skip your Better Business Bureau bullshit, please.”

“That thing you got out of that abandoned car down by the Black River? Murder evidence.”

“What you mean, ‘murder evidence’?” Prelate said. 

“Don’t listen to him, honey,” Vervain said. “He’s just blowing smoke.” 

“The Bowler,” Bernal said. “Ever hear of him?”

“Bullshit!” Prelate said.

“Like my friend here said, we don’t handle salvage.” Vervain sounded calm, almost friendly. “So you got yourself some serious misinformation. I’d talk to that person. Tell him to get more accurate.”

“Heads,” Bernal said. “You find any heads in that thing?”

He struck a nerve. “No bullshit heads! You watch too much TV! No Bowler heads.” Prelate set her long screwdriver down.

“Muriel Inglis was murdered at the location where you got that thing.” He was guessing, but he suspected that that was what Charis’s follow-up investigation would show. Every line of activity seemed to knot up there, on the muddy bank of the Black, two nights ago.

“Bull . . .” Prelate couldn’t get it out this time. The two women looked at each other. “Freezing asshole! Frickin’—”

“Shut up,” Vervain said. “Just. . . shut up.”

“Can’t afford more trouble, you know that!” Prelate was suddenly close to hysteria. “This .. . did you know? What it was?”

Vervain turned back to Bernal. “Look, mister, what you after?”

“If he tell you and not tell me, what can I do?”

Bernal and Vervain both ignored the increasingly hysterical Prelate. “Me? I’m trying to find something out. But this . . . whatever it is. That’s right in the middle of it. That car, the one you took it out of, there was a murder there.”

Vervain shook her head. “Look, let me show you something.”

She turned back to her refrigerator. She squatted down and slung the massive compressor easily. Bernal had to step back to avoid getting hit. She gave him a slight smile, radar-dish earrings swinging, and rested it on a red hand truck. She pulled out a bandanna and mopped her sweat-free face with it.

“I’ll have to call,” Bernal said. “I don’t think you understand the ramifications of this.”

But there was no signal on his cell phone.

“They got some shielding,” Vervain said. “Like their privacy. Funny folks, the people who live in this house. They’re not back for five weeks. They’re in Africa, doing a safari. Asked me where they should go. Like I got some kind of native knowledge. In my blood, right? The homeland. I told them, stick to the Roger Williams Zoo, down in Providence. Nice place. Ever been there? I take my nieces. But it had to be Africa.”

She was being informative, telling him exactly what he needed to know, but he wasn’t really listening, trying to figure out how he could call Charis and still keep an eye on these two . . . where was Prelate? She was no longer at the kitchen table. Had she managed to— 

As Prelate grabbed his arms from behind, Vervain gagged him with the bandanna.

_______

It took a
 matter of seconds for them to haul him down a set of stairs and past a basement laundry area. They threw him down. Prelate clinked something that sounded like metal and glass. Vervain knelt on the small of his back and removed the gag. Then she stepped back, and a heavy door clicked shut.

For a moment, he lay stunned in the darkness.

Then he rolled and threw himself at the door. It was padded, so he didn’t hurt himself much, but it didn’t even make a sound.

He stopped, held his breath, listened. The silence was absolute. He couldn’t imagine that Prelate and Vervain were still working upstairs, but if they had been, he wouldn’t have heard them.

The darkness was just as absolute. He couldn’t even get a sense of how large the space was. The air was definitely cold, but not meat-locker cold.

Bernal put out his arms and stepped forward, slowly, slowly. The floor was level concrete, so he could slide his feet. There. A wall, concrete as well. And the door was . .. this way? Yes. The padding was leather, or some close synthetic, with what he presumed were ornamental nail heads, diamond-shaped.

He could think of one reason to have a sealed cool room in your basement. He reached to his right and was rewarded with the rattle of glass against wood. Bottles, ranks and ranks of them. This was a wine cellar.

He thought quickly. Even with a locked and secure door, the place probably had an emergency exit lever as an elementary safety precaution. Starting in the center of the door, he searched to the left, up and down, and back the other way.

And here it was, a simple rod with a textured rubber handle. Bernal let out a sigh of relief and pulled. He felt the latch lift up.

Then something snapped, and the lever dangled loose.

For a moment, Bernal couldn’t believe it, and worked the lever up and down. It still swung on its pivot, but was no longer connected to anything.

So he lay down on the floor. It was cool and smooth, a high-quality pour. Its hardness was the only thing that kept the place from being a sensory deprivation chamber. Did people still use those? There used to be quite a fashion for them, people floating in body-warm buoyancy-neutral pools, cut off from every sensory input. It was a kind of test of existence: if the universe disappeared, did you go too? If you didn’t, what did you do for entertainment?

He found his thoughts running on their hamster wheels. The way Monique had laughed at him in fifth grade, when he decided that a 
Star Wars
 vest with pictures of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker on it would be elegant wear for the first day of school. Those damn cardiac action potentials. A package with a book about Minoan statuary that blew up in his face. All the ridiculous pieces of this puzzle of Muriel, Madeline Ungaro, and Hesketh.

There had be something he could do. They’d screwed with the safety release, but they hadn’t had much time to do it. Maybe he could figure out how to get it to work.

Something clinked and rolled against his foot as he stood. He knelt, picked it up.

A wine bottle, open. About half of it had spilled out on the floor. Damn it. This was perfect. Not only had they locked him in down here, but now they’d made him look like a snooty drunk, only satisfied by a Grand Cru. He put the bottle against the wall and stepped around the puddle.

He had to see if there was something, anything, in this dark space that could help him. Starting at the top of the rack to the right of the door, he felt carefully, bottle by bottle, building a map in his mind. That was something he could do: carefully delineate the limits of his prison.

Each wall was covered, six feet up, maybe a thousand bottles per wall. That seemed excessive, somehow. But, hell, Bernal had plenty of frequent buyer cards from bookstores, and he never actually used them, waiting for that one big score, that 
Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture 
that would get him the heftiest discount. So people waited to enjoy themselves at the perfect time. There was a lot of potential pleasure down here, energy like a boulder balanced on a cliff. Happiness research indicated that people overestimated pleasure both in prospect and in retrospect, but that in the single moving bead of the present moment, joy was always at a moderate level. Perhaps the cumulative anticipation in this cellar would, in aggregate, bring more pleasure than drinking it ever would.

He found useful things. A corkscrew dangling from a string meant that he could enjoy a bottle without smashing the neck against something and potentially slicing up his cheeks in the dark. A dust cloth, probably used to clean off the most valuable labels, could serve as a pillow, if he stayed here until the owners got back from Africa. And there, at the end of the last row, his hand encountered the rubbery grip of a flashlight.

As happens even in the best of households, someone had neglected to update the batteries, so its light was a dim yellow and wouldn’t last long. He brought it over to the door and squinted at what he could now see of the handle mechanism. He pulled the handle. He could see that it didn’t engage anything, but nothing seemed to be broken. He relaxed, trying to understand purpose, function, and the current mismatch between the two. And, ah . . . there. A linkage was missing. A cotter pin, or something, between the arm and the rest of the mechanism. They’d yanked it out or broken it.

He turned the flashlight off to spare the battery. There was only one way for this thing to work. The lever arm went down, the short end went up, yanking up a latch with a hook. Simple, something that had been around for centuries, no matter whether there was a keypad on the other side, with a code that engaged an electromagnetic lock. Lifting the latch overrode it. An emergency override had to work under all circumstances. But the lever now slid past the hook without engaging it. The impossible-to-anticipate situation: sabotage.

Without even turning on the flashlight, he walked over and grabbed the corkscrew. Yes. It was a hollow spiral of metal, the kind that minimized the risk of splitting the cork. It took him a couple of minutes to untie the length of twine it was hanging from.

He had the theory. The corkscrew would certainly slide into the hole left by the vanished cotter pin. If he could just get it in there. . ..

There was a sound on the other side of the door. They’d returned to finish the job. Of course. They’d just been holding him here, out of the way, while they finished up whatever else they were doing, and they had now returned to tie up their one remaining loose end.

He stepped back. His only weapon was the corkscrew. Knowing he looked like a feeble idiot, he stuck its point out between his knuckles.

The door swung open.

“Jesus, Bernal.” Yolanda’s blond head was silhouetted by a single dim hall light. She sniffed the air. “I hope you saved some for me.”