Pandemonium (20 page)

An hour in, I realized my project required more space, and I moved from my bedroom to the library. Under the gaze of the Black Well painting I laid out the piles of plastic-wrapped pictures into clusters and series, setting out trails of stepping stones that ran in and out of the niches, around the furniture, turning the room into a giant game board. The chronology of the pictures’ creation had nothing to do with my organizational scheme, and neither did geography. Or style and material, for that matter: the same subject could be tackled in sculptures, chalk drawings, paintings, collages. The demon’s name was the Painter, but that was a misnomer.
I crouched over the smallest series, only three pictures. The first was the sketch of my mother—Del’s mother. The label on the back of its cover sheet said it had been created in Moab, Utah, on September 8, 1991. Next to it, from two years earlier and several states away, a sculpture made out of wood and bits of tin and barbed wire that somehow looked like a young, chubby Lew. Last, a smear of yellow and green paint created in Hammond, Indiana, 2001 that I recognized as my father’s 1966 Mustang gleaming in the driveway. None of them created anywhere near the times they depicted—Lew was a high schooler by ’89, my mother sold my father’s Mustang when he died in ’95—but that seemed to be the point. These weren’t snapshots from a moment in time. None of them were
photorealistic.
These were interpretations, images fished from my memory, distorted and glossed by emotion.
“Are you finding what you need?” a soft voice said behind me. Meg had appeared in the room, silent as a cat.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at my watch—already past 1 a.m. I should probably be in bed, but I wasn’t tired. This body was just a vehicle. I could drive it as fast as I wanted until the gas ran out. “I feel like there’s gotta be some kind of message here.”
“You aren’t the first to be fascinated by the Painter’s work,” Meg said. “Most of the originals are in the hands of private collectors, though Red Book has tried to acquire as many as possible. Everyone is searching for clues in them—the government, academics, hundreds of hobbyists on the Internet. A theory for everyone, and everyone with a theory.”
I had suspected as much at IPOC—all those academics were the tip of the iceberg.
“The Boy on the Rock, for example.” She stooped, picked up a picture from one of the trails I’d laid, and showed it to me.
I’d found a dozen pictures of a kid maybe eleven or twelve, at a stream. Sometimes he sat with his arms around his knees, sometimes standing, about to dive, sometimes climbing up onto a boulder, a towel draped across his back. I’d first seen one of the pictures in the ICOP slideshow.
The kid wasn’t me, wasn’t Lew, didn’t seem to be any of the Hellion victims. I didn’t know what to make of him, but he seemed important to the Painter.
“He’s got the most regular features of any of the subjects,” Meg said. “Everyone’s tried to identify him, match him to a photo of somebody real. The government interviewed thousands of people back in the seventies. Lots of near misses—you can find plenty of fresh-faced boys, and even plenty in bathing suits—but no hundred-percent matches. Still, there are theories. It’s a self-portrait of the original Painter. Or he’s the Painter’s son. Or he’s the archetype of innocence, a cherub. Or he’s not even been born yet; he’s the one the Painter is waiting for.”
“To do what?”
She shrugged, smiled. “You know how it is with messiah stories.” She set the picture down again and grunted as she stood up.
“So I’m wasting my time here,” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh no. None of us have ever had your resources. No one’s been able to ask a demon what they mean. The Painter is always silent.”
Meg came to the source pile, the clump of pictures I couldn’t sort. I kept returning to the pictures, sifting through them, waiting for the moment that something resonated, some synapse fired—and then I’d carry the picture to another part of the room. She frowned at the pile—perhaps thinking of all the work of putting these back in their binders—and moved on, her eyes following the horizontal exhibition on the floor.
“How is the boy?” Meg said casually. She didn’t mean the boy on the rock. “Do you still feel him straining to get out?” They couldn’t call him the Hellion anymore, and they wouldn’t stop calling me Del. So the person in my head was like an unnamed fetus:
the boy,
or just
he, him.
“Quiet,” I said. He’d been silent and unmoving since the hypnosis session. I didn’t think time passed in there. He wasn’t conscious, stalking his cage and scheming his escape. He was like a fitful sleeper, and sometimes when his nightmares came on strong, or there was light coming into the cage from some hole I’d opened up, that’s when he got agitated. Since my car accident I’d been leaving the cage door open at night, and I hadn’t even known it.
After the session with the Waldheims, though, I had slammed the doors and tripled the locks. I clamped down on him as tightly as I had in those years when I thought he’d vanished—the years between Dr. Aaron’s “cure” and my plunge through the guardrail in Colorado. Now that I knew what I was doing, maybe I could hold him down for years. Maybe I could throw him so deep in the dungeon that he’d never come back up.
All I’d have to do then was live with
myself.
“What’s the theory on the farmhouses?” I asked. I stood and led her to the twenty or so pictures. I picked up the most recent one. “This one I saw the Painter do at O’Hare Airport a couple weeks ago.” No, less than that—today was Tuesday. I’d arrived in Chicago ten days ago.
The police or maybe a reporter had gotten an overhead picture of the popcorn–and-litter collage: the quaint clapboard house, the red silo and barn, the tree-edged fields. I was struck by the same sense of familiarity that I’d felt at the airport, but it wasn’t as strong as the pictures of Lew or Mom. It wasn’t anyplace I’d lived.
“Have you wondered about the smudge?” she said. She pointed to the dark blur in the sky above the house. At O’Hare the Painter had created it by scraping the heel of his shoe across the tile. “It’s in all the pictures.”
“It is?” I picked up another one of the series, then another. Each picture showed the same farm, but in winter, in summer, at night. And she was right—the smudge was always there. In the nighttime pictures it was a faint glow.
“We could call in our experts to help you,” Meg said. “We didn’t want to bring anyone in until you were comfortable, but perhaps—”
“No. No more people.”
Meg frowned slightly. Of course they wanted to call in their experts. The entire secret society would be in a lather to meet me.
“Promise me,” I said.
She touched my shoulder. “No one else. I promise.”
I moved away from her, my neck hot, and bent to pick up another picture. “About this smudge,” I said without looking at her. “What are the theories on that one?”
“It’s never distinct enough to be a signature,” Meg said, easing gracefully back into scholar mode. “But it’s always there. It could be a bird, but because it also shows up at night, most people think it’s a plane…”
“Holy shit,” I said.
I stared at her. “I know where I’ve seen this,” I said. I scooped up several of the plastic-coated pictures and started for the library door.
“What is it?” Meg asked.
“There’s something I need from my mom’s—from her basement.” I had to wake O’Connell. If she wouldn’t go with me I’d just take the keys to her truck. “I’ve got to get to Chicago.”

DEMONOLOGY
THE KAMIKAZE

OUTSIDE DENVER, COLORADO, 1955
A plane roared up from behind them, so low it blew off the president’s ball cap. Eisenhower was in midswing. He sliced badly, sending the ball into the trees, and jerked his head up to stare at the underbelly of the aircraft. He could make out rivets.
The plane zoomed away, disappeared over the next hill. The president cursed, something he rarely did. He turned to his golfing partner that day, George E. Allen, and said, “What the hell do those boys think they’re doing?”
“Those boys” referred to the pilots of nearby Lowry Air Force Base, where Eisenhower kept his summer White House. Planes were frequently overhead, but they’d never buzzed the golf course.
Allen laughed. “You ought to say something to their commander-in-chief.” Even though Allen was a former secretary of the Democratic National Committee and an advisor to Truman, the two men rarely talked politics. Eisenhower valued their friendship, as well as the fact that Allen’s handicap was larger than Eisenhower’s fourteen.
The president placed another ball on the tee, and grunted as he stood up. The eighth tee box was on a slight rise, and he had a clear view of the green. He leaned on his club and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was unusually hot for late September, almost tropical. In a few days they’d have to go back to Washington, back to the political swamp. The Republicans had taken a beating in the off-year elections a year ago, and his own reelection campaign was about to begin. He’d have to figure out what to do with Nixon. His staff wanted the man off the ticket.
The drone of the plane grew louder again. Allen and Eisenhower looked around, saw the plane circling back, banking around to their left. They could see its glass canopy, the tops of its wings. The plane was just a Beechcraft trainer, but the air force seals had been overpainted with large red circles. Eisenhower squinted, said, “George, is there a man on that thing?”
A figure in red clung to the outside of the plane’s canopy. A white cape, perhaps a shredded parachute, rippled behind him. One hand seemed to be flailing at the glass that covered the pilot.
The two secret service agents who’d been trailing the president ran up the hill toward them. One of them said, “Mr. President—,” and grabbed Eisenhower’s arm.
The plane came out of its turn. It wobbled, then straightened, the nose aiming down at them. Eisenhower could see the pilot’s face—he wore a white scarf around his forehead—and the face of the daredevil riding the plane’s back. The glass canopy had shattered, and the red-clad man was reaching down into the cockpit.
The agents hauled Eisenhower and Allen backward and pushed them down the hill. Eisenhower ran several steps and suddenly fell to his knees. One of the agents pulled the president to his feet. The plane struck a moment later.

The next morning, Vice President Richard Nixon came across a short item in the paper noting that the president had suffered an attack of indigestion. Nixon turned the page without thinking much about it; Eisenhower was prone to that sort of thing. It wasn’t until Sherman Adams, the assistant to the president and White House chief of staff, called an hour later that Nixon realized the seriousness of the situation.
“There’s been an accident,” Adams said. “The president’s had a coronary.”
Five minutes later Nixon entered a basement room of the White House already crowded with staff: Jim Hagerty, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, the Dulles brothers, and several men he didn’t recognize. It was clear that they’d been talking for some time, perhaps hours.
Adams pulled Nixon aside and said, “Dick, you may be president within the hour.”
The chief of staff told Nixon what they knew: a plane crash, a dead secret service agent, another badly burned. Eisenhower had been struck by shrapnel and suffered a heart attack sometime after the crash. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness soon after reaching the hospital. George Allen was wounded but in good condition. Allen confirmed that the plane had dived for them, and that they’d been saved by a “daredevil” clinging to the plane. “If he hadn’t made that kamikaze hit that hill we’d be dead,” he said.
Nixon scowled. “What daredevil? What do you mean, ‘kamikaze’?”
The men in the room turned to the Dulles brothers. Allen, director of the recently created Central Intelligence Agency, handed a folder to his brother, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. “The plane was one of ours, stolen from Lowry Air Force Base,” Foster said. “But it was painted like a Japanese Zero.”
Nixon frowned but said nothing.
“The pilot was Lawrence Hideki, an Air Force helicopter mechanic of Japanese descent. The ‘daredevil’ is unknown at the moment—perhaps he was another airman on base. We’re checking to see if Hideki was troubled by psychological problems, or if he had any links to Japanese extremist groups. But frankly, we don’t expect to find anything along those lines.”
Again Nixon said nothing.
“This is not the first such attack on American soil,” Foster said. “Yesterday Allen ordered a search for similar cases.” He laid out several folders, and briefly described three previous attacks: May 1947, a Japanese man dressed as a kamikaze pilot stole a crop-duster plane in Kansas and crashed it an hour later, killing eight people attending a farm auction. July, 1949, a plane painted like a Zero crashed into the side of the USS
Cunningham
in San Diego, killing eighteen sailors. And in 1953, a second-generation Japanese sailor working on the aircraft carrier
Antietam
tried to hijack a fighter plane but was stopped before he could take off.
“There may be more,” Foster said, almost apologetically. “We’re pulling records of all plane crashes and hijackings right now.”
The room was quiet for a long moment. Finally Nixon spoke: “Did the president know about these attacks?”
Allen Dulles stepped forward. “You have to understand, Mr. Vice President, nobody thought these events were related. In each of these cases, the pilots were men with no criminal record, no history of mental illness, and no obvious links to Japanese nationals. We had a handful of coincidences, nothing that rose to a level worth the president’s attention.”
“Let me see the folders,” Nixon said.
Word came of Eisenhower’s death at 8:00 p.m. A short time later, Nixon was brought into an adjacent room where several people waited: his wife, Pat; his secretary, Rose Mary Woods; Nelson Pym, a staff photographer; and Justice Hugo Black. Pat had brought the Milhous family Bible from their apartment. In the official photo, Nixon is listening to the justice, his expression tight-lipped and grim.
After taking the oath of office, Nixon hugged his wife and returned to the briefing room. He didn’t have to call for attention; the atmosphere had already changed.
President Nixon stood silently for a long time, arms folded tightly across his chest, staring at the table. When he spoke, he didn’t look up.
“I’m no general,” he said quietly. “I can’t be the kind of leader President Eisenhower was.”
Sherman Adams looked at Jim Hagerty with a worried expression. No one needed to tell them that Nixon was no Ike.
“But I know conspiracies,” Nixon said. “I understand how the Japanese, a defeated people, may turn desperate. How even the most innocent-seeming of men can be secretly plotting the destruction of the nation.” He didn’t have to explain: Nixon was the man who had brought down Alger Hiss, the man who’d held the reins of the Un-American Activities Committee. “This is a new kind of war, a new enemy, whose weapon is fear.”
Nixon looked up, into the faces of men who’d been plotting his political death a day before. He showed his teeth, a twitch of a smile. Some of the men looked away uncomfortably.
“I promise you,” Nixon said. “We will root out this new enemy, wherever he is among us.”