The Face (37 page)

CHAPTER 61

A
FTER RECEIVING A FRANTIC TELEPHONE CALL from Captain Queeg von Hindenburg, Corky Laputa had to undertake an unexpected journey to the farther reaches of Malibu.

The man in Malibu currently called himself Jack Trotter. Trotter owned property, carried a valid driver’s license, and paid as few taxes as possible under the name Felix Greene. Greene, alias Trotter, had once used the names Lewis Motherwell, Jason Barnes, Bobby Domino, and others.

When Jack-Felix-Lewis-Jason-Bobby had been born forty-four years ago, his proud parents had named him Norbert James Creezel. They had no doubt loved him and, being simple Iowa farm folk, could never have imagined that Norbert would grow up to be a wigged-out piece of work like Captain Queeg von Hindenburg.

Corky called him Captain Queeg because the guy exhibited the paranoia and megalomania to be found in the character of the same name in Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny
. Von Hindenburg suited him in part because—like the German zeppelin that had taken thirty-six to their deaths in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937—he was a gasbag and, if left to his own devices, he would one day crash and burn spectacularly.

On his way to Malibu, Corky stopped at a garage that he rented in Santa Monica. This was one of forty double-stall units accessed by an alleyway in an industrial area.

He held the lease on the garage under the name Moriarity and paid the monthly bill in cash.

A black Land Rover occupied the first stall. Corky owned this vehicle under the name Kurtz Ivory International, a nonexistent but well-documented corporation.

He parked the BMW beside the Land Rover, got out, put down the garage door, and switched on the lights.

Redolent of the crisp limy scent of cold concrete, the sweet-and-sour fragrance of old motor-oil stains, and the faint but still lingering astringency of insecticide from a termite fumigation that had been conducted a month ago, this drab space was, to Corky, the essence of magic and adventure. Here, like troubled Bruce Wayne in the Batcave, Corky became a dark knight, though with an agenda that might appeal more to the Joker than to Bruce in cape and tights.

In the war between Heaven and Earth, armies of rain marched across the corrugated-steel roof, raising such a battle roar that he could not have clearly heard himself singing if he’d chosen to break into “Shake Your Groove Thing.”

After switching on an electric space heater, he took off his rain hat and yellow slicker. He hung them on a wall peg.

On the left side of the garage, toward the back, four tall metal lockers were bolted to the wall. Corky opened the first of these.

Two zippered vinyl wardrobe bags hung from a rod. On a shelf above the bags, a large Tupperware container held socks, neckties, a few items of men’s inexpensive jewelry, a wristwatch, and other personal effects of a false identity. On the floor was a selection of shoes.

After pulling off his rain boots and a double layer of socks, after stripping to his underwear, Corky dressed in gray cords, a black turtleneck, black socks, and black Rockports.

The elaborate combination workbench and tool-storage cabinet at the back of the double garage featured a spacious secret drawer that Corky himself had designed. This drawer contained a selection of handguns and packets of false identification in six names.

Over the turtleneck, he strapped on a shoulder holster. He stuffed the holster with a 9-mm Glock.

He swapped his wallet for one that was filled with everything that he needed to hit the road as a different man: driver’s license, social-security card, a couple of credit cards in his new name, and photographs of a wife and family that were entirely invented. The wallet was even preloaded with five hundred dollars in cash.

The packet also included a birth certificate, a passport, and a leather ID fold containing fake FBI credentials. For the task at hand, he required none of those items.

He did, however, take with him a second slim leather fold that contained fake but convincing credentials identifying him as an operative of the National Security Agency. This was who Queeg von Hindenburg believed him to be.

The NSA identification would reduce the average civilian to a swoon of cooperation, but wouldn’t withstand determined verification by any authority. Corky would never dare flash it at a cop.

Because it was real, the driver’s license in this false name could endure close scrutiny by any police officer who might stop Corky. In addition, it credited him with a spotless driving record.

Years ago, the state of California had lost control of many of its bureaucracies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles. Certain corrupted DMV employees sold tens of thousands of valid driver’s licenses every year to men like Mick Sachatone, the multimillionaire anarchist who also regularly supplied Corky with disposable cell phones in fake account names.

Mick—and other middlemen like him—made substantial money by obtaining driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, for convicted felons who had served their time and who earnestly hoped to begin fresh criminal lives uninhibited by their arrest records, for chaos activists like Corky, and for many others.

Sufficiently IDed, with the Glock in a holster under his left arm, Corky shrugged into a stylish black leather coat tailored to conceal the bulge of the weapon. He tucked two spare magazines of ammunition into the coat pockets.

He closed the locker, closed and locked the secret drawer in the workbench, and switched off the space heater.

Behind the wheel of the Land Rover, he clicked the remote to roll up the garage door. He backed into the rain-swept alley.

He had arrived in Santa Monica as Corky Laputa. He was leaving as Robin Goodfellow, agent of the NSA.

After waiting to be sure that the garage door went all the way down, he pressed a second button on the remote, engaging an electric lock that doubly secured the premises.

The CD player in the Land Rover was loaded with the symphonies and operas of Richard Wagner, which was his preferred music when he was being Robin Goodfellow.

He fired up
Götterdämmerung
and set out through the storm for Malibu, to have a serious face-to-face talk with the man who this evening would get him onto the Manheim estate undetected.

Corky loved his life.

CHAPTER 62

S
ANDWICHES,” SAID FRIC.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

After conveying the dozen quake lights to his deep and special secret place, Fric had decided to return the empty picnic hamper to the lawn-and-patio-storage room, where he had originally gotten it. He had undertaken this task for some reason that had seemed logical at the time, though he could not now recall what it had been.

Mr. Devonshire, one of the porters—the one with the English accent, the bushy eyebrows, and the weak left eye that tended to drift toward his temple—had encountered Fric in the ground-floor west hall, at the end of which lay the lawn-and-patio-storage room. By way of friendly small talk, Mr. Devonshire had said, “What’ve you got there, Fric?”

Sandwiches,
Fric had said. Now he said again, “Sandwiches.”

This was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to say, let alone to repeat, because when Mr. Devonshire had first seen him, Fric had been swinging the hamper as he walked along the hall, swinging it in such a way that its light weight—and therefore its emptiness—must have been instantly apparent.

“What kind of sandwiches?” Mr. Devonshire asked.

“Ham,” said Fric, for this was a simple response that he could not screw up in the nine thousand ways that he could probably mangle the words
peanut butter and jelly
.

“So you’re having a picnic, are you?” Mr. Devonshire asked, his left eye slowly drifting out of alignment as though he expected to be able to look behind himself while simultaneously studying Fric.

When the porter had first come to work at Palazzo Rospo, Fric had thought that he possessed an evil eye and could cast curses with a glance. Mrs. McBee had corrected this childish misapprehension and had suggested that he do some research.

Fric now knew that Mr. Devonshire suffered from amblyopia. This was a little-known word. Fric liked knowing things that most people didn’t.

Long ago Fric had learned to look at Mr. Devonshire’s good eye when talking to him. Right now, however, he wasn’t able to meet the porter’s good eye because he felt so guilty for lying; consequently, he found himself gazing stupidly at the amblyopic eye.

To avoid embarrassing Mr. Devonshire and himself, he stared instead at the floor and said, “Yes, a picnic, just me, something different to do, you know, ummm, not the old routine.”

“Where will you have your picnic?” Mr. Devonshire asked.

“The rose garden.”

Sounding surprised, Mr. Devonshire said, “In this rain?”

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Fric had forgotten the rain. He said, “Ummm, I mean the rose
room
.”

The rose room, as members of the staff continued to refer to it, was a small ground-floor reception parlor. Its windows presented a view of the former site of the rose garden.

A few years ago, at the urging of their feng-shui consultant, the rose garden had been moved farther from the house. Where the old rose garden had been, grass grew, and from the grass soared a massive piece of contemporary sculpture that Nominal Mom had given to Ghost Dad on the ninth anniversary of their wedding, at which time they had been divorced for eight years.

Nominal Mom described the sculpture as “futuristic organic Zen” in style. To Fric it looked like a giant heap of road apples produced by a herd of Clydesdales.

“The rose room seems like an odd place for a picnic,” said Mr. Devonshire, no doubt thinking about the Zen turd pile beyond the windows.

“Ummm, well, I feel close to my mom there,” Fric said, which was so lame that it was almost clever.

Mr. Devonshire was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Are you all right, Fric?”

“Ummm, sure, I’m swell, just a little, you know, bummed out by all the rain.”

After another but thankfully shorter silence, the porter said, “Well, enjoy your ham sandwiches.”

“Thank you, sir. I will. I made them myself. From scratch.” He was the world’s worst liar. “With ham.”

Mr. Devonshire walked toward the north hall, and Fric just stood there, stupidly holding the hamper as if it were
heavy
.

After the porter disappeared at the intersection of the west and north halls, Fric continued to stare after him. He was convinced that Mr. Devonshire was hiding just out of sight and that the man’s eerie left eye would turn so far to one side that it would be hanging out of his head when he peeked around the corner.

The lawn-and-patio-storage room, to which Fric had been headed, was not set aside for the storage of lawns and patios. Rather, the cushions for the hundred or more outdoor chairs and sun lounges—and sometimes the furniture as well—were moved there in anticipation of bad weather. The big room also held lawn umbrellas, croquet sets, outdoor games, and such associated paraphernalia as picnic hampers.

Following his conversation with the porter, Fric could no longer simply return the hamper to the storage room. If Mr. Devonshire saw him without it anytime soon, he would be exposed as a devious liar who was actually up to some kind of no good.

Suspicious, the staff might surreptitiously watch him, even as shorthanded as they were at the moment. Without realizing it, he might reveal his deep and special secret place to a keen observer.

Now that he had committed himself to the picnic story, he must follow through. He would have to lug the hamper to the rose room and sit by the windows, gazing out at the rose garden that wasn’t there anymore, pretending to eat ham sandwiches that didn’t exist.

Mysterious Caller had warned him about lying.

If he wasn’t ready to handle nice Mr. Devonshire, Fric wondered how he could expect to deceive and hide out from Moloch.

Finally he decided that the porter and his lazy eye were not lurking just around the corner, after all.

Certain that he appeared too grim for a picnicker, but unable to force a smile, he carried the damn hamper all the way from the southwest corner of the house to the northeast corner, to the rose room.

CHAPTER 63

J
ACK TROTTER, KNOWN TO THE WORLD BY MANY names, known only to Corky as Queeg von Hindenburg, didn’t live in the glamorous part of Malibu. He resided far from those view hills and beaches where actors and rock stars and the fabulously wealthy founders of bankrupt dot-com companies sunned, played, and shared recipes for cannabis brownies.

Instead, he lived inland, behind the hills and beyond the sight of the sea, in one of the rustic canyons that appealed not only to those who kept horses and loved the simple life but also to troubled cranks and crackpots, weedheads with names like Boomer and Moose who farmed marijuana under lamps in barns and bunkers, ecoterrorists scheming to blow up auto dealerships in the name of endangered tree rats, and religious cultists worshiping UFOs.

A ranch fence badly in need of paint surrounded Trotter’s four acres. He usually kept the gate shut to discourage visitors.

Today the gate hung wide open because he feared that Corky—known to him as Robin Goodfellow, kick-ass federal agent—would drive through that barrier, battering it off its hinges, as he’d done once before.

At the end of the graveled driveway stood the hacienda-style house of pale yellow stucco and exposed timbers. Not dilapidated enough to be called ramshackle, not nearly dirty enough to be called squalid, the place suffered instead from a sort of genteel neglect.

Trotter didn’t spend much money maintaining his home because he expected to have to flee at any moment. A man with his head in the lunette of a guillotine lived with no more tension than what Jack Trotter daily endured.

A conspiracy theorist, he believed that a secret cabal ran the nation, that it intended soon to dispense with democracy and impose brutal dictatorial control. He was ever alert for early signs of the coming crackdown.

Currently Trotter believed that post-office employees would be the vanguard of the repression. They were, in his estimation, not the mere bureaucrats they appeared to be, but highly trained shock troops masquerading as innocent letter carriers.

He had prepared a series of bolt-holes, each more remote than the one before it. He hoped to escape civilization by degrees when the bloodbath began.

No doubt he would have fled after Corky’s first visit had he not believed that Corky, as Robin Goodfellow, knew the location of every one of his bolt-holes and would descend on him in his hideaway with a company of cutthroat mailmen who would show no mercy.

Toward the east end of the property, away from the house, stood an ancient unpainted barn and a prefab steel building of more recent construction. Corky knew only some of what Trotter was up to in those structures, but he pretended to have full knowledge.

In the fierce heat of summer, the real threat to Trotter would be fire, not a wicked government cabal. The steep slopes behind his property, as well as half the narrow valley both up-canyon and down-canyon, bristled with wild brush that, by late August, would be as ready for burning as Brittina Dowd’s house had proved to be with the application of a little gasoline.

Now, of course, the steep slopes were so supersaturated with rain that the risk was a mud slide. In this terrain, a canyon wall could descend in a tidal wave of muck with such suddenness that even a wild-eyed paranoid with every nerve fully cocked might not be able to outrun it. If he broke into a sprint at first rumble, Trotter could still wind up buried alive, but alive only briefly, sharing his grave with an ark’s worth of crushed and smothered wildlife.

Corky loved southern California.

Not yet crushed and smothered, Trotter waited for his visitor on the veranda. If at all possible, he hoped to keep Corky out of the house.

On one of his previous visits, deeply into his role as a rogue government agent who used the United States Constitution as toilet paper, Corky had misbehaved. He had shown no respect for Trotter’s property rights. He had been a brute.

On this twenty-second day of December, Corky didn’t find himself to be mellowed out by holiday good will. He was a punk-mean elf.

Although he parked ten steps from the veranda, he didn’t hurry through the downpour because Robin Goodfellow, too cool for jackboots but wearing them in spirit, was not a man who noticed the weather when he was in a foul mood.

He climbed the three steps to the veranda, drew the Glock from his shoulder holster, and pressed the muzzle to Trotter’s forehead.

“Repeat what you told me on the phone.”

“Damn,” Trotter said nervously. “You know it’s true.”

“It’s bullshit,” Corky said.

Trotter’s hair was as orange as that of the Cheshire Cat who had toyed with Alice in Wonderland. He had the pinned-wide, protuberant eyes of the Mad Hatter. His nose twitched nervously, reminiscent of the White Rabbit. His bloated face and his huge mustache recalled the famous Walrus, and he was in general as brillig, slithy, and mimsy as numerous of Lewis Carroll’s characters rolled into one.

“For God’s sake, Goodfellow,” Trotter all but blubbered, “the storm, the
storm
! We can’t do the job in this. It’s impossible in weather like this.”

Still pressing the Glock to Trotter’s forehead, Corky said, “The storm will break by six o’clock. The wind will die completely. We’ll have ideal conditions.”

“Yeah, they’re saying it might break, but what do they know? Do any of their predictions ever turn out right?”

“I’m not relying on the TV weathermen, you cretin. I’m relying on supersecret Defense Department satellites that not only study the planet’s weather patterns but
control
them with microwave energy pulses. We will
make
the storm end when we need it to end.”

This crackpot assertion played well with the paranoid Trotter, whose pinned-wide eyes stretched even wider. “Weather control,” he whispered shakily. “Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts—an untraceable weapon as terrible as nuclear bombs.”

In reality, Corky was counting on nothing more than chaos to be his ally, to bring the storm to an end when he needed calm skies.

Chaos never failed him.

“Rain or no rain, wind or no wind,” he told Trotter, “you will be in Bel Air, at the rendezvous point, at seven o’clock sharp, as originally planned.”

“Weather control,” Trotter muttered darkly.

“Don’t even think about not coming. Do you know how many eyes are on us right now—up in those hills, out in those fields?”

“Lots of eyes,” Trotter guessed.

“My people are everywhere in this canyon, ready to keep you honest or blow your brains out, whichever you want.”

In fact, the only eyes on them were those of the crows, hawks, sparrows, and other members of the feathered community gathered in the ancient California live oaks that sheltered the house.

Jack Trotter had fallen for these lies not because of the phony NSA credentials, not because of Corky’s bravura performance as Agent Robin Goodfellow, but because Corky had known so much about Trotter’s many aliases and at least a few things about his thus far successful career as a bank robber and a distributor of Ecstasy. He believed that Corky had learned about him by means of the ruling cabal’s all but omniscient intelligence-gathering apparatus.

What Corky had learned about Trotter, however, he had heard from Mick Sachatone, the hacker and multimillionaire anarchist who traded in forged documents, untraceable cell phones, and other illegal paperwork, objects, substances, and information. Mick had provided Trotter with the identities that subsequently he revealed to Corky.

Ordinarily, Mick would never disclose to one client the affairs of another. Considering the kind of people he did business with, such a lack of discretion would result, if he were lucky, in his death or, if he were unlucky, in the excision of his eyes, the extraction of his tongue, the severing of his thumbs, and castration with pliers.

Because Mick had reason to hate Trotter with an intensity nearly homicidal, he had risked sharing information with Corky. Jealous rage of operatic proportions had caused him to violate his usual standards of client confidentiality.

For his part, Trotter had earned Mick’s enmity, though he seemed unaware of it. He had stolen Mick’s girlfriend.

Mick’s girlfriend had been a porn-movie star renowned in certain jerky circles for the inhuman flexibility of her body.

Perhaps Trotter didn’t think that anyone could become profoundly emotionally attached, on evenings and weekends, to a woman who did two, six, and even ten men at a time in front of a camera, during her regular business hours.

Since the age of thirteen, however, Mick’s most cherished dream had been to have a porn star for a girlfriend. He felt that Trotter had robbed him of his heart’s one true desire and had thwarted his destiny.

After four months with Trotter, the woman had disappeared. Mick was of the opinion that, having tired of her, Trotter had killed her either because she had learned too much about his illegal activities or merely for sport, and had buried her deep in the canyon.

Now she was of no use to anyone, and this pointless waste of her exceptional flexibility further infuriated Mick.

Lowering the Glock from Trotter’s forehead, Corky said, “Let’s go inside.”

“Please, let’s not,” Trotter pleaded.

“Need I remind you,” Corky said, lying with delightful panache, “that your cooperation with me could earn you erasure from all public records, from all tax records, making you the freest man who ever lived, a man
utterly unknown to the government?
”

“I’ll be there tonight. Seven o’clock sharp. Wind or no wind. I swear I will.”

“I still want to go inside,” Corky said. “I still feel the need to make my point with you.”

A sadness came into Trotter’s Mad Hatter eyes. His walruslike face drooped.

Resigned, he led Corky into the house.

The bullet holes in the walls, from the previous occasion when Corky had needed to teach Trotter a lesson, had not been repaired; however, the living-room display shelves had been filled with a new collection of Lladro porcelains—statuettes of ballerinas, princesses dancing with princes, children capering with a dog, a lovely farm maiden feeding a flock of geese gathered at her feet….

That a paranoid, conspiracy-drunk, bank-robbing, drug-peddling survivalist with bolt-holes leading from here to the Canadian border should have a weak spot for fragile porcelains didn’t surprise Corky. Regardless of how rough we may appear on the exterior, each of us has a human heart.

Corky himself had a weakness for old Shirley Temple movies, in which he indulged once or twice a year. Without embarrassment.

As Trotter watched, Corky emptied the 9-mm magazine, shattering one porcelain with every shot.

In the months since he had unintentionally wounded Mina Reynerd in the foot, he had become remarkably proficient with handguns. Until recently, he’d never much wanted to use a firearm in the service of chaos, for it had seemed too cold, too impersonal. But he was warming to the instrument.

He replaced the first magazine with a second and finished off the Lladro collection. The humid air was full of a chalky dust and the smell of gunfire.

“Seven o’clock,” he said.

“I’ll be there,” said the chastened Trotter.

“Gonna take a magic carpet ride.”

After replacing the second magazine with a third, Corky slipped the Glock into his shoulder holster and walked out to the veranda.

He proceeded slowly through the rain to the Land Rover, boldly turning his back to the house.

He drove down out of the Malibu canyons toward the coast.

The sky was an open beaker, pouring forth not rain but the universal solvent for which medieval alchemists had sought in vain. All around him, the hills were melting. The lowlands were dissolving. The edge of the continent deliquesced into the tumultuous sea.