The Face (39 page)

CHAPTER 66

M
ICK SACHATONE, THE ANARCHIST MULTIMILLIONAIRE, didn’t live in a glitzy neighborhood of multimillionaires because he never wanted to have to explain the origins of his wealth to the tax authorities. When you make it in cash, you live without flash.

He laundered enough income to justify a spacious four-bedroom, two-story house of no architectural distinction in a clean and pleasant upper-middle-class neighborhood in Sherman Oaks.

Only a handful of Mick’s most trusted customers of long standing knew his address. Mostly he transacted business on public beaches and in public parks, coffee shops, and churches.

Without stopping at the garage in Santa Monica to change from his Robin Goodfellow costume into his regular-guy clothes and yellow slicker, Corky went directly from Jack Trotter’s funky digs in Malibu to Sherman Oaks. Thanks to Queeg von Hindenburg, collector of broken porcelains, Corky’s schedule was screwed up. He had much yet to do on this most important but fast-vanishing day of his life.

He parked in the driveway and ran a few quick steps through the rain to the cover of the front porch.

Mick’s voice came from an intercom speaker beside the bell push, “Be right there,” and Mick Sachatone himself came to the door with unusual alacrity. Sometimes, you had to wait here on the porch two or three minutes, or longer, between when Mick spoke to you via the intercom and when he greeted you in person, so routinely preoccupied was he with work or with other interests.

As usual when at home, Mick was barefoot and dressed in pajamas. Today the jammies were red, decorated with images of the cartoon character Bart Simpson. Mick bought some peejays off the rack but had others custom tailored.

Even before Mick had achieved puberty, he had been enchanted by the story of Hugh Hefner, founder of
Playboy
. Hef had discovered a way to grow up, be a success, and yet remain a big child, indulging any whim or desire to whatever degree he wished, making of his life one long party, living more days than not in pajamas.

Mick, who worked mostly at home, owned more than 150 pairs of peejays. He slept in the nude but sported pajamas during the day.

He considered himself an acolyte of Hef. A mini-Hef. Mick was forty-two going on thirteen.

“Hey, Cork, super-hip threads,” Mick declared when he opened the door and saw Corky dressed as Robin Goodfellow.

This might have sounded like mockery to a stranger; but Mick’s friends knew that he had long ago stopped picking up new slang in an effort to be more in the Hef groove.

“Sorry I’m late,” Corky said, stepping inside.

“No sweat, my man. I’d run this pad clockless if I could.”

The living room contained as little furniture as necessary. The plush sofa, plump armchairs, footstools, coffee table, end tables, and lamps had been bought as a set at a warehouse outlet. The quality was good; but everything had been chosen for comfort, not for looks.

Mick had no pretensions. In spite of his wealth, he remained a man of simple if sometimes obsessive needs.

The primary decor statement in Casa Sachatone had nothing to do with furniture or art. Except for a suite of work rooms that Mick had added to the original structure, all but two walls in the house were lined with shelves on which were stored a collection of thousands of pornographic videotapes and DVDs. Shelves had even been added to the stairwell and hallway walls.

Mick preferred videotapes to DVDs because the cassettes came in boxes with wide, colorful spines that blazed with obscene titles and sometimes with hard-core photographs. The effect was of one continuous erotic mosaic that flowed from end to end and top to bottom of the residence, achieving almost psychedelic impact.

Only the work wing, this living room, and the master bedroom contained any furniture. Other chambers, including the dining room, were not merely lined with videocassettes but were filled with aisles of shelves, as in a library.

Mick ate all his meals either at his computer or in bed: lots of microwave dinners, as well as home-delivery pizza and Chinese.

Of the two walls not fitted with floor-to-ceiling shelves, one was here in the living room. This space had been reserved for four big top-of-the-line plasma-screen TVs and associated equipment. The other such wall was in the bedroom.

A pair of plasma screens hung side by side, and a second pair hung side by side above the first. A DVD player and a videocassette machine served each screen; that equipment, plus eight speakers and associated amplifiers were racked in low cabinets under the screens.

Mick could run four movies simultaneously and switch, as whim struck him, from one soundtrack to the other. Or he could—and often did—play all four soundtracks simultaneously.

Usually when you stepped into the Sachatone living room, you were greeted by a rude symphony of sighs, grunts, groans, squeals, squeaks, hisses, and cries of pleasure, by whispered and growled obscenities, and by a rhythmic rush of heavy breathing in one degree of urgency or another. With eyes closed, you could almost believe that you were in a riotously inhabited jungle, albeit a jungle in which all the tropical species were simultaneously copulating.

This afternoon, sound accompanied none of the four porn films. Mick had muted all of them.

“Janelle was so special,” Mick said tenderly, nodding toward the video wall, referring to his lost girlfriend. “One cool swingin’ chick.”

Although his Bart Simpson pajamas might seem frivolous, Mick dwelt in a somber memorial mood. All four screens featured classics from Janelle’s extensive filmog-raphy.

Pointing to the upper-right-hand screen in the four-screen stack, Mick said, “That thing she’s doing right there, no one—
no one
—ever did that in film before or since.”

“I doubt anyone else could,” Corky said, because the eye-popping trick in which Janelle was vigorously engaged involved her legendary flexibility, for which perhaps she alone among all humanity carried the necessary gene.

Referring to his gal’s costars in the upper-right-hand video, Mick said, “Those four guys
love
her. See that? Every one of those guys just loves her. Men
loved
Janelle. She was truly groovy.”

Mick’s voice swelled with wistful longing. In spite of all his Hefnerian hipness, he had a sentimental streak.

“I just got back from Trotter’s in Malibu,” Corky revealed.

“You kill the son of a bitch yet?”

“Not yet. You know I need him for a while.”

“Oh, look at that.”

“She’s really something.”

“You’d think that would hurt.”

“Maybe it did,” Corky said.

“Janelle said no, it was fun.”

“She do a lot of stretching exercises?”

“Her
work
was stretching exercises. You will kill him?”

“Promised you, didn’t I?”

“I expected to grow old with her,” Mick said.

“Really?”

“Well,
older,
anyway.”

“I shot up his current collection of porcelains.”

“Expensive?”

“Lladro.”

“Will you torture him before you kill him?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a good friend, Cork. You’re a pal.”

“Well, we go back a long way.”

“More than twenty years,” Mick said.

“The world was a worse place then,” Corky said, meaning from an anarchist’s point of view.

“A lot has fallen apart in our time,” Mick agreed. “But not as fast as we dreamed it would when we were crazy kids.”

They smiled at each other.

Had they been different men, they might have hugged.

Instead, Mick said, “I’m ready to execute the Manheim package,” and led Corky to the back of the house, into his work rooms.

Instead of video porn, the walls here were lined with computers, a compact printing press, lamination machines, a laser holography imprinter, and other high-tech equipment necessary for the production of the finest quality forged documents.

At his central work station, Mick had already positioned two chairs before the computer screen. He settled in the one directly in front of the keyboard.

Corky took off his leather jacket, hung it on the back of the second chair, and sat down.

Eyeing the holstered Glock, Mick said, “Is that the rod you’ll use to waste Trotter?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I have it after?”

“The gun?”

“I’ll be discreet,” Mick promised. “I’ll never use it. And I’ll drill out the barrel so it can’t be matched to any of the rounds you kill him with. I don’t want it for a gun, see, it’ll just be like a sacred object to me. Part of my private memorial wall to Janelle, on the shelves where I keep all her films.”

“All right,” Corky said. “It’s yours when I’ve done him.”

“You’re a champ, Cork.” Indicating the computer and the data on it, the keeper of Janelle’s flame said, “This was a nut-buster job.”

As a hacker of exceptional achievement, Mick customarily implied or boldly stated that for him, self-named Ultimate Master of Digital Data and Ruler of the Virtual Universe, all came as easily as bees to a flower; therefore, this admission that the Manheim job had taxed his talents must mean that it had been a formidable task, indeed.

“At precisely eight-thirty this evening,” Mick continued, “the telephone company’s computer will shut down all twenty-four of the lines serving the Manheim estate.”

“Won’t that alert Paladin Patrol, the off-site security company? One dedicated line maintains a twenty-four-hour link between Paladin and the estate, for alarm transmissions.”

“Yeah. If the line goes dead, Paladin treats the interruption in service the same as an alarm signal. But they won’t know a thing.”

“It’s an armed-response company,” Corky worried. “Their guards aren’t Barney Fifes with pepper spray. They respond fast, with guns.”

“Part of the package I’ve worked up for you is a breach of the Paladin computer immediately before the Manheim phones go down. It pulls the plug on their whole system.”

“They’ll have redundancy.”

“I know their redundancy like I know my own crotch,” Mick said with impatience. “I’m pulling the plug on the redundancy, too.”

“Impressive.”

“You won’t have to worry about the off-site security company. But what about the private guards on the estate, Manheim’s own boys?”

“Two on the evening shift,” Corky said. “I know their routine. I’ve got that covered. What about cell phones?”

“That’s part of the package you’re buying from me. I checked out the information you got from Ned Hokenberry, and Manheim still uses the same cell-service provider as before Hokenberry was fired.”

Corky said, “Two cellular units are used by the on-duty guards. A third goes everywhere with the security chief, Ethan Truman.”

Mick nodded. “They’ll be shut down at eight-thirty along with the hard-wired phones. The couple that runs the estate also receive cell phones as part of their job—”

“The McBees.”

“Yeah,” Mick said. “And Hachette, the chef, and also William Yorn…”

“The groundskeeper. None of them will be there tonight,” Corky noted. “It’s just Truman and the kid.”

“You don’t want to take any chances, do you, that somebody might decide to work late or maybe come back early from vacation? If I shut them all down, there’s no chance anyone on that estate can dial nine-one-one. At the same time, service will be discontinued to those members of the staff who carry personal pagers.”

Previously they had talked about the Internet and ways in which it could be used to issue a call for help.

Anticipating Corky, Mick said, “Cable-direct Internet access from the Manheim estate will also be terminated at eight-thirty.”

“And the on-duty guards won’t know any of this has happened?”

“Not unless they try to use a phone or go on the Internet.”

“There won’t be a system-interrupt warning on their computers?”

“Got that covered. But like I warned you, I can’t shut down the cameras, the perimeter heat sensors, or the motion detectors in the house itself. If I did any of that, they’d see their system going blind, and they’d know something was up.”

Corky shrugged. “When I get in the house, I want the motion detectors operative, anyway. I might need them. As for the cameras and the perimeter heat sensors, Trotter will get me past all that.”

“And then you’ll kill him,” Mick said.

“Not right then. Later. So what do you have left to do?”

Raising his right hand high in ceremonial fashion, Mick said, “Just this.” Slowly, with a goofy sense of drama, he brought his index finger straight down to the keyboard and tapped
ENTER
.

The data on the computer vanished. The screen clicked to a soft, unblemished field of blue.

Corky clenched. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing. I’ve initiated the delivery of the package.”

“How long’s it take?”

Mick pointed at three words that had appeared in the center of the screen: G
ETTING
I
T
O
N
. “When that changes, the job is done. You want a Coke or something?”

“No thanks,” Corky said.

He never ate or drank anything in the Sachatone house, and he tried not to touch anything, either. You had to figure that Mick had touched everything in the place, at one time or another, and you never knew where Mick’s hands had recently been. Actually, you pretty much
did
know where Mick’s hands had recently been, which was the problem.

Most of Mick’s friends would have avoided shaking his hand if he had offered it; but he seemed to understand their concern, if only subconsciously, and never suggested hand-to-hand contact.

Bart Simpson ran across a field of wrinkles, jumped in and out of folds of fabric, and made numerous faces as Mick got a Coke from an office refrigerator and returned to his chair at the computer.

They talked about a rare adult video, supposedly produced in Japan, which was legendary among aficionados of sleaze; the film involved two men, two women, and one hermaphrodite, all costumed as Hitler. Mick had been chasing after this item for twelve years.

The video didn’t sound all that interesting to Corky, but he didn’t have a chance to be bored by the conversation because in less than four minutes, the words on the computer screen changed from G
ETTING
I
T
O
N
to the succinct S
ATISFACTION.