Strangers (55 page)

“Anything?” Ernie asked again.

“No,” Dom said. “No memories…but bad vibrations. If I give it time, I think the room might break down the barriers. I’ll sleep here tonight, give it a chance to work on me…if that’s all right.”

“No problem,” Faye said. “The room’s yours.”

Dom said, “I have a hunch the nightmare will be worse here than it’s ever been before.”

Laguna Beach, California

Although Parker Faine was one of the most respected of living American artists, although his canvases were assiduously collected by major museums, although he had been commissioned to create works for the President of the United States and other luminaries, he was not too old and certainly not too dignified to get a thrill from the intrigue upon which he was engaged in Dominick Corvaisis’ behalf. To be a successful artist, one needed maturity, an adult’s perception and sensitivity and dedication to craftsmanship, but one also had to hold on to a child’s curiosity, wonder, innocence, and sense of fun. Parker held tighter to those things than most artists did; therefore, he fulfilled his role in Dom’s plans with a spirit of adventure.

Each day, when he picked up Dom’s mail, Parker pretended to go about his business without the slightest suspicion that he might be under surveillance, but in fact he searched surreptitiously, diligently for the watchers—spies, cops, or whatever they might be. He never saw anyone observing him, and he never detected a tail.

And each night, when he left his house and went to a different pay phone to await Dom’s prearranged call, he drove miles out of his way, turned back on his own route, made sudden turns calculated to throw off a tail, until he was sure that he was not being followed.

A few minutes before nine o’clock, Saturday night, he arrived by his usual devious means at a telephone booth beside a Union 76 station. A hard rain fell, sluicing down the Plexiglas walls, distorting the world beyond and screening Parker from prying eyes.

He was wearing a trenchcoat and a rainproof khaki hat with the rim turned down all the way around to let the rain run off. He felt as if he belonged in a John le Carré tale. He loved it.

Promptly at nine o’clock, the phone rang. It was Dom. “I’m on schedule, at the Tranquility Motel. This is the place, Parker.”

Dom had a lot to tell: a disturbing experience in the Tranquility Grille, Ernie Block’s nyctophobia.…And by indirection, he managed to convey that the Blocks had received strange Polaroid snapshots, too.

Discretion was essential; if the Tranquility Motel was, indeed, the center of the unremembered events of the summer before last, the Blocks’ phones might be tapped. If the listeners heard about the photographs, they would know they had a traitor in their midst, and they would surely find him, and there would be no more notes or photos forthcoming.

“I’ve got news, too,” Parker said. “Ms. Wycombe, your editor, left a message on your answering machine.
Twilight in Babylon
had another printing, and there are now a hundred thousand copies in the stores.”

“Good God, I’d forgotten the book! Since Lomack’s house four days ago, I haven’t thought about anything but this crazy situation.”

“Ms. Wycombe has more good news she wants to share, so you’re to call her as soon as you get a chance.”

“I’ll do that. Meanwhile…seen any interesting pictures?” Dom asked, indirectly inquiring if any more Polaroids had been received.

“Nope. No amusing notes, either.” When the headlights of passing cars swept across the booth, the thin skin of flowing water on the transparent walls flared briefly with a rippling-shimmering brilliance. Parker said, “But something came in the mail that’ll knock your socks off, buddy. You’ve identified three of the names on those moon posters at Lomack’s. So how’d you like to hear who the fourth one is?”

“Ginger? I forgot to tell you. I think her name’s on the motel registry. Dr. Ginger Weiss of Boston. I intend to call her tomorrow.”

“You’ve stolen some of my thunder. But you’ll be surprised to hear you got a letter today from Dr. Weiss. She sent it to Random House on December twenty-sixth, but it got caught in their bureaucracy. Anyway, she’s at the end of her rope, see, and then she gets hold of a copy of your book, gloms your photo, and she gets this feeling she’s met you before, and that
you
are a part of what’s been happening to her.”

“Do you have the letter with you?” Dom asked excitedly.

Parker had it in his hand, waiting. He read it, glancing now and then at the night beyond the booth.

“I’ve got to call her right away,” Dom said when Parker finished the letter. “Can’t wait till morning now. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow night. Nine o’clock.”

“If you’ll be calling from the motel, where the phones are likely to be tapped, there’s no point in my running out to a phone booth.”

“You’re right. I’ll call you at home. Take care,” Dom said.

“You, too.” With mixed feelings, Parker put the receiver on the hook, relieved that these inconvenient nightly journeys to a pay phone were at an end, but also certain that he would miss the intrigue.

He stepped out of the phone booth, into the rain, and he was almost disappointed when no one took a shot at him.

Boston, Massachusetts

Pablo Jackson had been buried that morning, but he was with Ginger Weiss throughout the afternoon and evening. Like a ghost, his memory haunted her, a smiling revenant in the chambers of her mind.

Keeping to herself in the guestroom at Baywatch, she tried to read, could not concentrate. When not preoccupied with memories of the old magician, she was eaten up by worry, wondering what would become of her.

She got into bed at a quarter past midnight and was reaching for the switch to turn off the lamp when Rita Hannaby came to tell her that Dominick Corvaisis was on the phone and that she could take the call in George’s study, down the hall, adjacent to the master bedroom. Excited and trepidatious, Ginger put on a robe over her pajamas.

The study was warm and shadowy with dark oak paneling. The Chinese carpet was beige and forest-green, and the stained-glass lamp on the desk was either a genuine Tiffany or a superb reproduction.

George’s puffy eyes made it clear that the call woke him. He began surgery early most mornings and was usually in bed by nine-thirty.

“I’m sorry,” Ginger told him.

“No need,” George said. “Isn’t this what we’ve been hoping for?”

“Maybe,” she said, unwilling to raise her hopes.

Rita said, “We’ll give you privacy.”

“No,” Ginger said. “Stay. Please.” She went to the desk, sat down, picked up the uncradled handset. “Hello? Mr. Corvaisis?”

“Dr. Weiss?” His voice was strong yet melodic. “Writing to me was the best thing you could’ve done. I don’t think you’re nuts. Because you’re not alone, Doctor. There are more of us with strange problems.”

Ginger tried to respond, but her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “I…I’m sorry…I’m not…I don’t…don’t usually cry.”

Corvaisis said, “Don’t try to talk until you’re ready. I’ll tell you about
my
problem: sleepwalking. And my dreams…about the moon.”

A thrill, half cold fear and half exultation, throbbed through her. “The moon,” she agreed. “I never remember the dreams, but they must involve the moon because that’s what I wake up screaming about.”

He told her about a man named Lomack in Reno, dead by his own hand, driven to suicide by an obsession with the moon.

Ginger sensed some vast gulf beneath her, a fearful unknown.

“We’ve been brainwashed,” she blurted. “All these problems we’re having are the result of repressed memories trying to surface.”

For a moment there was a stunned silence on the line. Then the writer said, “That’s been my theory, but you sound sure of it.”

“I am. I underwent hypnotic regression therapy after I wrote to you, and we turned up evidence of systematic memory repression.”

“Something happened to us the summer before last,” he said.

“Yes! The summer before last. The Tranquility Motel in Nevada.”

“That’s where I’m calling from.”

Startled, she said, “You’re there
now
?”

“Yes. And if possible, you ought to come. A lot has happened that I can’t risk talking about on the phone.”

“Who
are
they?” she asked in frustration. “What are they hiding?”

“We’ll have a better chance finding out if we all work together.”

“I’ll come. Tomorrow, if I can book a flight that quickly.”

Rita started to protest that Ginger was in no condition to travel. In the many-colored light of the Tiffany lamp, George’s scowl deepened.

To Corvaisis, Ginger said, “I’ll let you know how and when I’ll arrive.”

When Ginger hung up, George said, “You can’t possibly go all that way in your condition.”

Rita said, “What if you black out on the airplane, become violent?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Dear, you had
three
seizures last Monday, one after the other.”

Ginger sighed and slumped back in the green leather chair. “Rita, George, you’ve been wonderful to me, and I can never adequately repay you. I love you, I really do. But I’ve been living with you for five weeks, five helpless weeks during which I’ve been more like a dependent child than an adult, and I’m just not capable of going on that way. I’ve got to go to Nevada. I’ve no other option. I’ve got to.”

New York, New York

A couple of blocks farther down Fifth Avenue from the Presbyterian Church, Jack stopped again, in front of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. In the nave, he stared in fascination at the huge reredos of Dunville stone behind the altar. He met the strangely portentous gazes of the statues in the shadowy niches along the walls—Saints, Apostles, the Blessed Virgin, Christ—and he realized that the primary purpose of religion was the expiation of guilt, to provide people with forgiveness for being less than they were meant to be. The human species seemed incapable of living up to its potential, and some would be driven mad by guilt if they did not believe that a god—be it Jesus, Yahweh, Mohammed, Marx, or some other—looked on them with favor in spite of themselves. But Jack found
no comfort in St. Thomas’s, no expiation of his sins, not even when he left twenty thousand dollars in the charity box.

In the Camaro again, he set out to dispose of the rest of the cash from the Guardmaster heist, not because giving it away would salve his guilt; it would not, for redistribution of the funds was not the moral equivalent of repayment. He had too much to atone for to expect to shrive himself of all his transgressions in one night. But he did not need or want the money anymore, could not simply throw it in the trash, so giving the damn stuff away was his only possible course of action.

He stopped at more churches and temples. Some were open, some locked. Where he could gain entrance, he left money.

He drove down to the Bowery and left forty thousand dollars with the startled night attendant at the Salvation Army Mission.

On Bayard Street in nearby Chinatown, Jack saw a sign in a second-floor window that proclaimed, in both Chinese characters and in English:
THE ALLIANCE AGAINST OPPRESSION OF CHINESE MINORITIES.
The place was above a quaint apothecary that specialized in the herbs and powdered roots of traditional Chinese medicines. The apothecary was closed, but a light shone in a window of the Alliance offices. Jack rang the bell at the street-level door, rang it and rang it until an elderly and wizened Chinese man came down the stairs and spoke to him through a small grille. When Jack ascertained that the Alliance’s current major project was the rescue of brutalized Chinese families from Vietnam (and resettlement in the States), he passed twenty thousand in cash through the grille. The Chinese gentleman reverted to his native language in surprise and came out into the cold winter wind, insistent upon shaking hands. “Friend,” the elderly mandarin said. “You can’t know what suffering this gift will relieve.” Jack echoed the old man, “Friend.” In that single word, and in the warm grasp of the venerable Oriental’s callused hand, Jack found something he thought he had lost forever: a sense of belonging, a feeling of community, fellowship.

In his car again, he drove up Bayard to Mott Street, turned right, and had to pull to the curb. A flood of tears blurred his vision.

He could not remember ever having been more confused than he was now. He wept in part because the stain of guilt, for the moment at least, seemed an ineradicable mark upon his soul. Yet some of the tears were tears of joy, for he was abruptly brimming over with brotherhood. For the better part of a decade, he had been outside society, distanced in mind and spirit if not in body. But now, for the first time since Central America, Jack Twist had the need, desire,
and
ability to reach out to the society around him, to make friends.

Bitterness was a dead-end. Hatred hurt no one more than he who harbored it. The wine of alienation was loneliness.

During the past eight years, he had often wept for Jenny, and he had sometimes wept in fits of self-pity. But
these
tears were different from all others he had let previously, for they were cleansing tears, purging tears, washing all the rage and resentment out of him.

He still did not understand the cause of these radical and rapid changes taking place in him. However, he sensed that his evolution—from outcast and criminal to law-abiding citizen—was not finished and would generate several more surprises before it reached a conclusion. He wondered where he was bound and by what route he would arrive there.

That night in Chinatown, hope swept back into his world like a summer breeze stirring music from a cluster of wind chimes.

Elko County, Nevada

Ned and Sandy Sarver were able to run the diner by themselves because they were hard workers by nature, but also because their menu was simple and because Ned had learned efficient food service as a cook in the U.S. Army. A hundred tricks were employed to make the Tranquility Grille function smoothly with as little effort as possible.