The Face (36 page)

CHAPTER 59

F
ROM THE MORE REMOTE ROOMS IN PALAZZO Rospo, Fric gathered earthquake lights in a picnic hamper.

The mansion and the outlying buildings had been reengineered for seismic security and retrofitted with structural reinforcements that were supposed to ensure little or no damage even from a two-minute shaker peaking at 8.0 on the Richter scale.

Generally, 8.0 was considered to be the kiss-your-ass-good-bye number. Earthquakes that big struck only in movies.

If a humongous killer quake knocked out the city’s power supply, Palazzo Rospo would be able to rely on gasoline-fueled generators in a subterranean vault that had two-foot-thick, poured-in-place, steel-reinforced walls and ceiling. Following a regional catastrophe, the mansion should remain fully lighted, the computers should continue to run, the elevators should still be operating, the refrigerators should remain cold.

In the rose garden, the carved-granite fountain of urinating cherubs should continue to sprinkle eternally.

This backup would be less useful if heretofore unknown volcanoes erupted under Los Angeles and disgorged rivers of molten lava that turned hundreds of square miles into a smoldering wasteland or if an asteroid smashed into Bel Air. But even a star as famous and rich as Ghost Dad could not protect himself from cataclysm on a planetary scale.

If the Swiss-made generators in the bunker were disabled, then Frankenstein-castle banks of twenty-year batteries, each as big as a casket standing on end, instantly came into service. These supported limited emergency lighting, all computers, the security system, and other essential equipment for as long as ninety-six hours.

Should the city’s electric power fail, should the generators be wrecked, should the giant twenty-year batteries prove useless, there were many earthquake lights distributed throughout the house. Personally, Fric figured such a series of failures was likely only in the event of an invasion of extraterrestrials with magnetic-pulse weapons.

Anyway, according to Mrs. McBee, there were 214 quake lights, which meant you could safely bet your life that there were not 213 or 215.

These small but potentially bright, battery-powered flashlights were at all times plugged into electrical outlets in the baseboard, continuously charging. If the power failed, the quake lights at once switched on, providing enough pathway illumination to allow everyone to exit safely from the mansion in the darkest hours of the deepest night. Furthermore, they could be unplugged and carried as though they were ordinary flashlights.

Like the cover plate on the electrical outlet in which it was seated, the plastic casing of each flashlight matched the color of the baseboard on which it rested: beige against limestone baseboard, dark brown against mahogany, black against black marble…. During ordinary times, they were meant to be inconspicuous. When you lived with them day after day, you soon ceased to notice them.

No one but Mrs. McBee would be likely to realize that a dozen of those 214 were missing. Mrs. McBee wouldn’t return from Santa Barbara until Thursday morning.

Nevertheless, Fric filched quake lights only from remote and little-used rooms where their disappearance was less likely to cause inquiry. He needed them for his deep and special secret hiding place.

He stowed the lights in the picnic hamper because it had a hinged lid. As long as he kept the lid closed, the contents could not be seen if he unexpectedly encountered a member of the staff.

If anyone asked what was in the hamper, he would lie and say “Sandwiches.” He would tell them that he was going to camp out under a blanket tent in the billiards room, where he would pretend that he was a Blackfoot Indian living back in maybe 1880.

The whole concept of playing Blackfoot in the billiards room was monumentally stupid, of course. But most grownups believed that geeky ten-year-old boys did stupid, geeky things like that, so he would be believed, and probably pitied.

Having people pity you was better than having them think that you were as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.

That was one of Ghost Dad’s expressions. When he thought someone didn’t have both oars in the water, he said, “The guy’s as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.”

Years ago, Ghost Dad had signed a deal to make a movie directed by Barbra Streisand. Something had gone terribly wrong. Eventually, he backed out of the project.

He had never said a negative word about Ms. Streisand. But that didn’t mean they were as friendly and as eager for mutual adventures as all the little animals in
The Wind in the Willows
.

In the entertainment business, everyone pretended to be friends even if maybe they hated each other’s guts. They were kissy-faced, gushy-lovey, always hugging and backslapping, praising one another so convincingly that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have figured out which of them really wanted to kill which others.

According to Ghost Dad, no one in the business dared tell the truth about anyone else in the business because each of them knew that any of the others was capable of conducting a bloody vendetta of such viciousness that it would have scared the shit out of the meanest Mafioso.

Barbra Streisand didn’t actually have a two-headed cat. This was just a “metaphor,” as Fric’s father called it, for some story element or character that she had wanted to add to her movie after Ghost Dad signed up based on a script
without
the two-headed cat.

He thought the two-headed cat was a totally crazy idea, and Ms. Streisand thought that it would win the picture a shitload of Oscars. So they agreed to disagree, kissed, hugged, swapped praise, and backed away from each other unbloodied.

This morning, in the hallway outside the kitchen, when Fric had almost told Mr. Truman about the mirror man and Moloch and all of it, he had come perilously close to being considered as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

His mother had once been committed to a booby hatch.

They would think,
Like mother, like son
.

His mother had been released after ten days.

If Fric started talking about mirror men, they would
never
let him out. Not in ten days, not in ten years.

Worse, if he were in the booby hatch, Moloch would know
exactly
where to find him. There was no place to hide in a padded cell.

Carrying the picnic hamper as if he were on an Easter-egg hunt, stealthily collecting quake lights in a back staircase, in a back hall, in the tea room, in the meditation room, Fric kept reminding himself, “Sandwiches, sandwiches,” because he worried that when he finally encountered a maid or porter, he would become tongue-tied and forget what lie he had meant to tell.

By nature, he was not a good liar. In a time and place where you needed to lie merely to pass for normal, in a place and time when
he
needed to lie to survive, being a lousy liar could get him killed.

“Sandwiches, sandwiches.”

He was a moronically bad liar.

And he was alone. Even with some kind of half-assed guardian angel, he was really
alone.

Every time he passed a window, he was reminded also that the stormy day was melting away rapidly and that Moloch would most likely come in the night.

Short for his age, thin for his age, a bad liar, alone,
tick-tick-tick
: He had nothing going for him.

“Pandwiches,” he muttered to himself. “Just some jellybutter-and-seanut pandwiches.”

He was doomed.

CHAPTER 60

Q
UEEN PALMS, KING PALMS, ROYAL PALMS, phoenix palms shook their feathery fronds like the storm-tossed trees in
Key Largo
. Buses and cars and trucks and SUVs clogged the streets, their wipers not quite as persistent as the beating rain, side windows half fogged, horns bleating, brakes barking, jockeying for position, idling and spurting forward and idling again, the drivers exuding a palpable frustration reminiscent of the opening scene of
Falling Down
, minus the summer heat of that movie, minus Michael Douglas, although Ethan supposed that Michael Douglas might be in this mess, too, quietly going as mad as had his character. In front of a bookstore, under an awning, stood a group of spike-haired, eyebrow-pierced, nose-pierced, tongue-pierced, painted punk rockers or just plain punks, dressed in black, one of them wearing a bowler hat, which made him think of the droogs in
A Clockwork Orange
. And here came a group of teenage schoolgirls, all beautiful, enjoying their seasonal freedom, walking without umbrellas, their hair plastered to their heads, all laughing, each of them playing the part of a fey party girl, all trying to be Holly Golightly in a remake of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
shot this time three thousand miles from the original location, this time on the nation’s wild coast. The storm gloom transformed midday to dusk, as if some director were shooting day-for-night. The shop lights, the neon, the cold-cathode tubes, the bright festoons of colorful and vaguely Asian lanterns that decorated streets in a politically correct nonreligious holiday spirit, the headlights and taillights—all rippled and flared off the storefront windows, off the walls of the glass buildings that rose in lunatic defiance of the earthquakes to come, across the wet pavement, sparkled like sequins in scintillant quicksilver plumes of vehicle exhaust, reminding Ethan of atmospheric shots in
Blade Runner
.

The day was simultaneously too real and a fantasy, the dreams of Hollywood having brightened the city in a few places, darkened it in many more, changed it in every corner, until nothing seemed as solid as it ought to be.

They were in Ethan’s Expedition, having left Hazard’s plain-wrap department sedan at Our Lady of Angels. Since Ethan had no police authority, he couldn’t arm-twist information out of anyone, but his partner couldn’t both arm-twist and drive.

To check out their six leads, they would enter jurisdictions other than those strictly within the authority of the LAPD. Without preparing the way through proper channels, even Hazard would not have entirely legitimate authority. They didn’t have time for protocol.

Hazard rode shotgun, making phone calls. His voice rose from a polite and almost romantic murmur to a demanding thunder, but most often settled into an easy folksiness, while relentlessly he used his status as homicide detective to coax-pinch-push-pull-wrench cooperation from a series of higher-education bureaucrats.

Every college and university in the greater Los Angeles area had closed for the last two or three weeks of the year. Something less than a skeleton staff remained on duty to serve those students who had not gone home for the holidays.

At each institution that he phoned, he employed charm, appeals to good citizenship, threats, and persistence to get from one know-nothing to another, but always eventually to a know-something who could further their investigation.

Already they had learned that the drama professor—Dr. Jonathan Spetz-Mogg—had organized both of the weekend conferences on acting for which Rolf Reynerd had written checks. They had been granted an appointment with Spetz-Mogg at his home in Westwood, to which they were en route without benefit of emergency flashers or siren.

In the process of tracking down Dr. Gerald Fitzmartin, who had organized the three-day weekend conference on screenwriting, Hazard became so infuriated with the runaround at which all academic types excelled that he paused in the chase before frustration drove him to smash his department-issued phone to pieces against his own forehead.

“All these university cheese-eaters hate cops.”

“Until they need you,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, then they love us.”

“They never love you, but if they need you to save their ass, then they’ll
tolerate
you.”

“You know that Shakespeare quote?” Hazard asked.

“There’s more than one.”

“About how to make the world a better place—”

“Kill all the lawyers.”

“Yeah, that one,” Hazard said. “Shakespeare didn’t stop to think who
trains
all the lawyers.”

“University cheese-eaters.”

“Yeah. You want to make a better world, go to the source.”

The traffic remained relentless and tight. The Expedition kissed paint with a black Mercedes SUV, spared from a bruise to the factory finish by nothing more than the lubricating lip gloss of rain.

With a start, Ethan thought that he saw Fric on the sidewalk, wandering alone among strangers. A closer look proved that the boy was younger than the Manheim heir, trailing behind his parents.

This had not been the first false Fric that he had seen and reacted to since leaving the hospital. His nerves had been rubbed raw by too much weird experience.

“What about Blonde in the Pond?” Ethan asked. “Did you get your lab report this morning?”

“Didn’t check. If I’ve got the true goods on my city councilman, it’ll just make me squirmy, having to leave him walking around full of himself, the way he is, like he’s the Lord by election, which is even more infuriating when you think how many ballot boxes his thugs stuffed for him. I’ll call the lab tomorrow, the day after, whenever it is we settle the situation we’re in.”

“Sorry about this,” Ethan said.

“If you’re sorry for that nose of yours, get it fixed. Anything else you’re sorry for, you shouldn’t be.”

“Lunch and a few mamouls didn’t pay you for this much trouble.”

“It wasn’t
you
turned my world upside down. Some guy gives me a set of dream bells out of a nightmare, then disappears into a mirror, I tend to get shook up without your help.”

Hazard reached under his jacket with both hands, tugging on his cotton sweater, and Ethan said, “You bulked up since yesterday?”

“Yeah. Had me a breakfast of Kevlar.”

“Never knew you to wear protection.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe I’ve dodged more bullets than any man has a right to. Doesn’t mean I’m not still fearless.”

“Didn’t say you weren’t.”

“I’m scared shitless, but I’m still fearless.”

“That’s the right psychology.”

“Survivor’s psychology,” Hazard said.

“Anyway, what’s wrong with my nose?”

“What isn’t?”

The hard rain abruptly began to fall harder, and Ethan cranked the windshield-wiper speed to the highest setting.

Hazard said, “Feels like the end of the world.”