The Face (19 page)

CHAPTER 29

F
RIC FELT THAT BY SOME MAGICAL INFLUENCE of the brick floor under his feet and the brick walls around him and the low brick vaults overhead, he had been transformed into brick himself as he listened to the soft voice of this stranger.

“The secret room concealed behind your closet isn’t as secret as you think, Aelfric. You won’t be safe there when Robin Goodfellow pays a visit.”

“Who?”

“Previously I called him the Beast in Yellow. He styles himself Robin Goodfellow, but he’s darker than that. In truth, he’s Moloch, with the splintered bones of babies stuck between his teeth.”

“That’ll take some heavy-duty dental floss,” said Fric, though a tremor in his voice belied the flippancy of his words. He hurried on, hoping that Mysterious Caller had failed to detect his fear. “Robin Goodfellow, Moloch, baby bones—you aren’t making any sense.”

“You have a great library in your house, don’t you, Aelfric?”

“Yeah.”

“And you must have a good dictionary in that library.”

“We have a whole shelf of dictionaries,” said Fric, “just to prove how scholarly we are.”

“Then look it all up. Know your enemy, prepare yourself for what is coming, Aelfric.”

“Why don’t you
tell
me what’s coming? I mean just plain, simple, easy to understand.”

“That’s not within my power. I’m not licensed to take any direct action.”

“So you aren’t James Bond.”

“I’m authorized to work only by indirection. Encourage, inspire, terrify, cajole, advise. I influence events by every means that is sly, slippery, and seductive.”

“What’re you—an attorney or something?”

“You’re an interesting young man, Aelfric. I’ll genuinely be sorry if you’re disemboweled and nailed to the front door of Palazzo Rospo.”

Fric almost hung up.

Wrapped around the handset of the phone, his palm became greasy with perspiration.

He would not have been surprised if the man on the far end of the line had smelled this sweat and had commented on the salty scent.

Returning to the subject of a deep and special secret place, Fric mustered a steady voice. “We have a panic room in the house,” he said, referring to a hidden high-security haven armored to keep out even the most determined kidnappers or terrorists.

“Because the house is so large, you actually have two panic rooms,” Mysterious Caller said, which was true. “Both are known, and neither will keep you safe on the night.”

“And when is the night?”

Enigmatically, the man said, “It’s a fur vault, you know.”

“A what?”

“Long ago, your nice suite of rooms was occupied by the original owner’s mother.”

“How do you know which rooms are mine?”

“She had a collection of expensive fur coats. Several minks, sable, white fox, black fox, chinchilla.”

“Did you know her?”

“That steel-lined room was meant to keep the fur coats safe from burglars, moths, and rodents.”

“Have you been in our house?”

“The fur vault is a bad place to have an asthma attack—”

Stunned, Fric said, “How could you know about that?”

“—but it’ll be an even worse place to be trapped by Moloch when he comes. Time is running out, Aelfric.”

The line went dead, and Fric stood alone in the wine room, surely alone, but feeling watched.

CHAPTER 30

I
F THE SKY OPENED TO DISGORGE A DELUGE OF fanged and poisonous toads, if the wind blew hard enough to flay the skin to bloody ruin and to blind the unprotected eye, even such cataclysmic weather would fail to dissuade ghouls and gossips from gathering at the scenes of spectacular accidents and shocking crimes. By comparison, a steady drizzle on a cool December night was picnic weather to this crowd that followed misery as others might follow baseball.

On the front lawn of an apartment house, catercorner across the intersection from the police barricade, twenty to thirty neighborhood residents gathered to share misinformation and gory details. The majority were adults, but half a dozen energized children capered among them.

Most of these sociable vultures were outfitted in rain gear or carried umbrellas. Two bare-chested and barefoot young men, however, wore only blue jeans and appeared to be so steeped in a marinade of illegal substances that the night could not chill them, as though they were being cooked flamelessly like fish fillets in lime juice.

An air of carnival had settled upon this gathering, expectations of fireworks and freaks.

In all his glistening yellowness, Corky Laputa moved among the onlookers, like a buzzless bumblebee patiently gathering a morsel of nectar here, a morsel there. From time to time, to blend better with the swarm and to win friends, he offered a taste of ersatz honey, inventing florid details of the vicious crime that he claimed to have heard from cops manning the second barricade at the farther end of the block.

He quickly learned that Rolf Reynerd had been killed.

The gossips and the ghouls weren’t sure if the victim’s first name was Ralph or Rafe, Dolph or Randolph. Or Bob.

They were pretty sure that the luckless fellow’s last name was either Reinhardt or Kleinhard, or Reiner like the film director, or maybe Spielberg like another famous director, or Nerdoff, or possibly Nordoff.

One of the bare-chested young men insisted that everyone had confused the victim’s first name, surname, and nickname. According to this wizard of deductive reasoning, the dead man’s true identity was Ray “the Nerd” Rolf.

All agreed that the murdered man had been an actor whose career had recently rocketed toward stardom. He had just completed a film in which he played Tom Cruise’s best buddy or younger brother. Paramount or DreamWorks had hired him to costar with Reese Witherspoon. Warner Brothers offered him the title role in a new series of Batman movies, Miramax wanted him to play a transvestite sheriff in a sensitive drama about anti-gay bigotry in Texas circa 1890, and Universal hoped he would sign a ten-million-dollar deal for two films that he would also write and direct.

Evidently, in this new millennium and in the popular imagination of those who dwelt on the glamorous west side of L.A., no failure ever died young, and Death came early only to the famous, the rich, the adored. Call it the Princess Di Principle.

Whether the man who had killed Ray “the Nerd” Rolf had also been an actor on the brink of superstardom, no one knew for certain. The murderer’s name remained unknown, unmangled.

Indisputably, the killer himself had been gunned down. His body lay on the lawn in front of Rolf’s apartment house.

Two pairs of binoculars circulated among the onlookers. Corky borrowed one pair to study Rolf’s apparent executioner.

In the darkness and the rain, even with magnification, he was unable to discern any identifying details of the corpse sprawled on the grass.

Crime-scene investigators, busy with scientific instruments and cameras, crouched alongside the cadaver. In black raincoats draped like folded wings, they had the posture and the intensity of crows pecking at carrion.

In every version of the story viewed with credibility among the gossips, the killer himself had been killed by a police officer. The cop had been passing by in the street at the right moment, by sheer happenstance, or he had lived in Rolf’s building, or he’d come there to visit his girlfriend or his mother.

Whatever had occurred here this evening, Corky was reasonably confident that it would not compromise his plans or cause the police to turn a gimlet eye on him. He had kept his association with Reynerd secret from everyone he knew.

He believed that Reynerd had been likewise discreet. They had committed crimes together and had conspired to commit others. Neither of them had anything to gain—and much to lose—by revealing their relationship to anyone.

Stupid in uncounted ways, Rolf had not been entirely reckless. To impress a woman or his witless friends, he might wish to reveal that he’d had his mother killed by proxy or that he was partner to a murderous conspiracy involving the biggest movie star in the world, but he would never go that far. He would just invent a colorful lie.

Although Ethan Truman, incognito, had visited earlier this very day, the possibility that Reynerd’s death was connected in any way to Charming Manheim and the six gifts in black boxes remained unlikely.

Being an apostle of anarchy, Corky understood that chaos ruled the world and that in the rough and disorderly jumble-tumble of daily events, meaningless coincidences like this frequently occurred. Such apparent synchronisms encouraged lesser men than he to see patterns, design, and meaning in life.

He had wagered his future and, in fact, his existence, on the belief that life was meaningless. He owned a lot of stock in chaos, and at this late date, he wasn’t going to second-guess his investment by selling chaos short.

Reynerd had fancied himself not only a potential movie star of historic proportions, but also something of a bad boy, and bad boys made enemies. For one thing, more in search of thrills than profits, he had dealt drugs to a refined list of entertainment-industry clients, mostly cocaine and meth and Ecstasy.

More likely than not, tougher men than pretty-boy Reynerd had decided that he was poaching in their fields. With a bullet in the head, he’d been discouraged from further competition.

Corky had needed Reynerd dead.

Chaos had obliged.

No more, no less.

Time to move on.

Time, in fact, for dinner. Aside from a candy bar in the car and a double latte at the mall, he had eaten nothing since breakfast.

On good days filled with worthwhile endeavors, his work provided nourishment enough, and he often skipped lunch. Now, after busy hours of useful enterprise, he was famished.

Nevertheless, he tarried long enough to serve chaos. The six children were a temptation that he could not resist.

All were six to eight years old. Some were better dressed for the rain and the cold than others were, but all remained unflaggingly exuberant, dancing-playing-chasing in the nasty night, as though they were storm petrels born to wet wind and turbulent skies.

Focused on the hubbub of cops and ambulances, the adults stood oblivious of their offspring. The kids were wise enough to understand that as long as they played on the lawn behind their elders and kept their chatter below a certain volume, they could prolong their night adventure indefinitely.

In this paranoid age, a stranger dared not offer candy to any child. Even the most gullible among them would shriek for the cops at the offer of a lollipop.

Corky had no lollipops, but he traveled with a bag of luscious, chewy caramels.

He waited until the kids’ attention turned elsewhere, whereupon he extracted the bag from a deep inner pocket of his slicker. He dropped it on the grass where the children were sure to find it when their games brought them in this direction again.

He hadn’t laced the candy with poison, but only with a potent hallucinogenic. Terror and disorder could be spread through society by means more subtle than extreme violence.

The amount of drug infused in each sweet morsel was small enough that even a child who greedily stuffed his face with six or eight of them would not risk toxic overdose. By the third piece, the waking nightmares would begin.

Corky mingled a while longer with the adults, surreptitiously observing the children, until two girls found the bag. Being girls, they at once generously shared the contents with the four boys.

This particular drug, unless taken in concert with a mellowing antidepressant like Prozac, was known to cause hallucinations so horrific that they tested the user’s sanity. Soon, the kids would believe that mouths, bristling with sharp teeth and serpent tongues, had opened in the earth to swallow them, that alien parasites were bursting from their chests, and that everyone they knew and loved now intended to rend them limb from limb. Even after they recovered, flashbacks would trouble them for months, possibly for years.

Having sown these seeds of chaos, he returned to his car through the refreshingly cool night and cleansing rain.

If he had been born in an earlier century, Corky Laputa would have followed the original trail of Johnny Appleseed, killing one by one all the trees that the fabled orchardist had planted on this continent.

CHAPTER 31

I
F FRIC HAD SUSPECTED THAT THE WINE CELLAR was haunted or that something less than human prowled its channels and chambers, he would have eaten dinner in his bedroom.

He proceeded without caution.

Likening the separation noise of the rubber seal to the sucking sound made by popping the lid off a vacuum-packed can of peanuts, Fric opened the thick glass door in the insulated-glass wall.

He stepped out of the wine-tasting room into the wine cellar proper. Here the temperature was maintained at a constant fifty-five degrees.

Fourteen thousand bottles required a lot of racks—a
maze
of racks. These weren’t simply arranged like aisles in a supermarket. Instead, they lined a cozy brick labyrinth of vaulted passageways that intersected at circular grottoes ringed by more racks.

Four times each year, every bottle in the collection was gently rotated a quarter turn—ninety degrees—in its niche. This ensured that no edge of any cork would dry out and that the sediment would settle properly to the bottom of each punt.

The two porters, Mr. Worthy and Mr. Phan, were able to attend to the turning of the wine bottles for only four hours a day due to the tediousness of the work, the measured care that it required, and the havoc that it caused with neck and shoulder muscles. Each man could properly rotate between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred bottles per four-hour session.

Through a flow of cool dry air that pumped ceaselessly from ceiling vents, Fric followed a narrow dome-vaulted passageway of Pinot Noir to a wider groin-vaulted corridor of Cabernet, circled a curiously coved grotto of Lafitte Rothschild stocked with various vintages, continued through a tunnel of Merlot, in search of a place where he would be able to hide without fear of discovery.

Arriving in an elongated-oval gallery stocked with French Burgundy, he thought he heard footsteps other than his own, elsewhere in the maze. He froze, listened.

Nothing. Just the whispery voice of the perpetual wine-cooling draft lazily entering the gallery by one passageway, leaving by a second.

The fluttering false flames of the fake gas lamps, which were wall-mounted in some places but also hung from grotto ceilings where height allowed, caused shimmers of light to chase twists of shadow along the racks and brickwork. This meaningless but spooky movement teased the mind into hearing footsteps that probably weren’t there.

Probably.

Proceeding less boldly than before, occasionally glancing over his shoulder, he moved on with the gentle draft.

Other wine cellars might be musty dens in which time shed skin after skin of dust, leaving a record of its unending progress. In fact a dusty film on the bottles was often considered good ambience.

Fric’s father had an almost obsessive aversion to dust, however, and none could be found in this place. Taking special care not to disturb the bottles, the staff vacuumed the racks once a month, as well as the ceiling, walls, and floor.

Here and there in the corners of the passageways and more often in the shadowed curves of the masonry ceiling vaults were delicate spider webs. Some were simple, others elaborate.

No eight-legged architects could be glimpsed at home in these constructions. Spiders were not tolerated.

When at work, the housekeepers kept the vacuum cleaner away from these gossamer architectures, which had been made not by spiders but by a specialist in set decoration from Ghost Dad’s favorite film studio. Nevertheless, the webs deteriorated. Twice a year, Mr. Knute, the set decorator, swabbed them off the bricks and then rebuilt them as good as new.

The wine itself was real.

Turn by turn through the labyrinth, Fric calculated how long his father could stay blind drunk on wine before exhausting the contents of this cellar.

Certain assumptions had to be made, the first being that Ghost Dad would sleep eight hours a night. Perpetually soused, he might sleep longer; however, in the interest of keeping these calculations simple, an arbitrary number must be selected. Eight.

Also assume that a grown man could stay seriously drunk by consuming one bottle of wine every three hours. To establish a state of inebriation, the first bottle might have to be slugged down in an hour or two, but after that, one every three hours.

This was actually not an assumption but hard knowledge. Fric had on numerous occasions been in a position to observe actors, writers, rock stars, directors, and other famous drunks with a taste for fine wine, and while some could pour it down faster than one bottle every three hours, those aggressive drinkers always passed out.

Okay. Five bottles spread over each sixteen-hour day. Divide fourteen thousand by five. Twenty-eight hundred.

The contents of this cellar ought to keep Ghost Dad shitfaced for twenty-eight hundred days. So then divide 2, 800 by 365…

Over seven and a half years. The old man could stay blind drunk until Fric had graduated from high school and had run away to join the United States Marine Corps.

Of course, the biggest movie star in the world never drank more than one glass of wine with dinner. He didn’t use drugs at all—not even pot, which everyone else in Hollywood seemed to think was just a health food. “I’m far from perfect,” he’d once told a reporter for
Premiere
magazine, “but all my faults and failures and foibles tend to be spiritual in nature.”

Fric had no idea what
that
meant, even though he’d spent more than a little time trying to figure it out.

Maybe Ming du Lac, his father’s full-time spiritual adviser, could have explained the quote. Fric never dared to ask him for a translation because he found Ming nearly as scary as Mr. Hachette, the extraterrestrial predator disguised as their household chef.

Arriving in the last grotto, the point farthest from the wine-cellar entrance, he heard footsteps again. As before, when he cocked his head and listened intently, he detected nothing suspicious.

Sometimes his imagination went into overdrive.

Three years ago, when he’d been seven, he’d been convinced that something strange and green and scaly crawled out of the toilet bowl in his bathroom every night and waited to devour him if ever he went for a postmidnight pee. For months, when Fric woke in the middle of the night with a bloated bladder, he left his suite and used safe bathrooms elsewhere in the house.

In his own monster-occupied bath, he’d left a cookie on a plate. Night after night, the cookie remained untouched. Eventually he had substituted a chunk of cheese for the cookie, and then a package of lunch meat in place of the cheese. A monster might have no interest in cookies, might even turn its nose up at cheese, but surely no carnivorous beast could resist pimento-loaf bologna.

When the bologna went unmolested for a week, Fric used his own bathroom again. Nothing ate him.

Now nothing followed him into the final grotto. Nothing but the cool draft and the flicker of light and shadow from fake gas lamps.

The entrance and exit passages more or less divided the grotto in half. To Fric’s right were yet more racks of wine bottles. To his left, stacked floor to ceiling along the wall, were sealed wooden cases of wine.

According to the stenciled names, the cases contained a fine French Bordeaux. In fact they were filled with cheap vino that only gutter-living bums would drink, and the contents had no doubt turned to vinegar decades before Fric had been born.

The wooden cases had been stacked here partly for decoration and partly to conceal the entrance to the port-wine closet.

Fric pressed a hidden latch-release button. One stack of wooden cases swung inward.

Beyond lay a room the size of a walk-in closet. At the back was a rack of port wines fifty, sixty, and seventy years old.

Ports were dessert wines. Fric preferred chocolate cake.

He assumed that even in the late 1930s, when this house had been built, the nation had not been plagued by gangs of port-wine thieves. The closet had most likely been concealed just for the fun of it.

This secret chamber, smaller than the fur vault, might make an adequate hiding place—depending on how long he would need to remain hidden. The space would be comfortable enough for a few hours.

If he had to stay in here for two or three days, however, he would start to feel that he’d been buried alive. He’d collapse into a screaming fit of claustrophobia and eventually, descending into madness, he would probably eat himself alive, beginning with his toes and working upward.

Unnerved by the direction their second conversation had taken, he’d forgotten to ask Mysterious Caller how long he could expect to be under siege.

He retreated from the port closet and pulled shut the clever wine-case door.

Turning, Fric saw movement in the passageway by which he had entered this last grotto. Not just the throb of fake gas flames.

A large, strange, spiral silhouette wheeled across the racks and vaulted brick ceiling, layering itself over the familiar flicker of small pennants of light and small flags of shadow. It was approaching the grotto.

Quite unlike his father in a big-screen pinch, Fric seized up with fear and could neither attack nor flee.

Eerily shapeless, shifting, gently tumbling, the shadow billowed closer, closer, and then the fearsome source appeared at the mouth of the passageway: a spirit, a ghost, an apparition, ragged and milky, semitransparent and vaguely luminous, drifting slowly toward him by supernatural locomotion.

Fric frantically stepped backward, stumbled, fell hard enough to remind himself that his butt was as scrawny as his biceps.

Out of the passageway and into the grotto came the apparition, gliding like a stingray in ocean depths. Lambent light and pulsing shadow played upon the phantom form, lending it a greater mystery, an aura of veiled or bearded evil.

Fric raised his hands protectively before his face and peered up between his spread fingers as the spirit arrived above him. For a moment, weightless and slowly revolving, the apparition reminded him of the Milky Way galaxy, with its gossamer spiral arms—and then he recognized it for what it was.

Lazily drifting on the cool draft, a fake web, fabricated by Mr. Knute, had come unanchored. Floating with all the ghostly grace of a jellyfish, it followed the air currents across the grotto toward the next passageway.

Mortified, Fric scrambled to his feet.

Passing out of the grotto, the airborne web snared on one of the wall-mounted lamps, tangled upon itself, and hung there, flimsy and aflutter, like something from Tinkerbell’s lingerie drawer.

Angry with himself, Fric fled the wine cellar.

He was in the tasting room, closing the heavy glass door behind himself, before he realized that the spider web could not have come loose all by itself. A draft alone would not have spun it free, up, and away.

Someone would have had to brush against it, at the least, and Fric didn’t believe that he himself had done so.

He suspected that someone close behind him in the wine maze had patiently worked the web loose from its corner, careful not to shred or wad it, and had set it afloat upon the draft, to taunt him.

On the other hand, he remembered too well the toilet-spawned, scaly, green monster that had not even been real enough to nibble on a slice of bologna.

He stood for a moment, frowning at the refectory table. While he had been wandering the wine cellar, his dinner dishes had been taken away.

One of the maids might have cleaned up after him. Or Mrs. McBee, though as busy as she was this evening, she would probably send the mister.

Why any of them would have followed him into the wine cellar without calling out to him, why they would have set the Knute-spun cobweb afloat, he couldn’t begin to understand.

Fric felt that he was at the center of a web not manufactured by Mr. Knute, an invisible web of conspiracy.