The Hidden Man (4 page)

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON

P
EOPLE FREQUENTLY DISCOVERED THAT
it took more than they were prepared to offer to put a scare into Vignette Nightingale. She insisted on choosing her own causes, fighting her own battles, and, most importantly, choosing the time and place for the conflicts herself.
Allowing the opposition to call the field is stupid.
She and Shane had discussed that very idea a few times over the years, and she was reasonably certain that they were united on that.

At the age of nineteen, Vignette’s full adult strength was finally with her. She felt it all the time. Even in dreams, she understood that if she could make it to clear ground, she could outrun anything that a nightmare threw at her. Her legs always had more energy than they needed: walking, running, even leaping over tall bushes along the sidewalk on blasts of pure exhilaration—sometimes with the frequent added bonus of irritating grouchy pedestrians. And while her arms were not all that strong compared to those of a young man her age, they were just as fast as her legs. Meaning that Vignette could slap a face six ways from Sunday before the recipient got a clear impression of having been struck the first time. A few men knew that already.

But even a spirit as strong as hers could be snagged and held captive by a strong enough adversary. On this unfortunate day, she was stranded in the manipulative grip of Randall’s brand-new fiancée, better known in Vignette’s private thoughts as “the Eastern Whore.” And at the moment, she was trapped in a little maneuver that Vignette called the Snap Bean Ritual.

The rules of the Snap Bean Ritual were simple: She got captured by the Eastern Whore and sent into forced labor. They toiled over a giant bowl of snap beans together, and this part mattered:
moving at a pace controlled entirely by the Eastern Whore,
they set about plucking ends off each string bean before tossing them one by one into the big receiving bowl.

The task could take half an hour. During that time Vignette remained nailed to the floor by the task and helpless against the real point of the exercise, which was an onslaught of polite verbal dissection that would gradually pull her intestines out, yard by yard, while the Eastern Whore disdainfully commented upon each and every inch, until—

“Ahem,” Miss Janine Freshell politely cleared her throat. “You won’t leave all the plucking to me, will you, dear?”

Vignette forced herself to meet Miss Freshell’s probing gaze. The world might look at the woman standing before her and see a famous author from New York City, but Vignette saw only the face of the Eastern Whore who was out to steal Randall.

“Sorry.”

“They don’t pluck themselves,” Miss Freshell said with a mockpouty face.

“It’s just a lot to take in. And he could be home for supper anytime.”

“Oh, if I know our Randall—”

Vignette ground her teeth.

“—he won’t bring Shane home until after the performance tonight. If that telephone works like it’s supposed to, he’s going to be able to call and tell us if he’s coming home late. Think of that!” She plucked two beans together for emphasis, and tossed them into the receiving bowl in a single no-nonsense motion. “They’re likely to be hungry once we all get back late tonight, though.”

“I just can’t believe that the unit commander isn’t saying anything to me about it.”

“Embarrassment, dear. We all try to avoid it. You know how Randall always—”

“Oh God in heaven, yes, I know
this
about Randall, and I know
that
about Randall, because I’ve lived here for the last nine years! So really, I should be the one telling
you
Randall this and Randall that!”

Vignette picked up a fistful of snap beans, forgot what she was supposed to do with them, and threw them back into the pot.

“That’s just your nerves, dear, taking in the blow. I know it’s hard for you to receive this sort of news. The men were here early, and I was only able to let them in because I came over early myself, just to make sure someone was at the door. I knew you’d be here alone. Randall told me how they’re making him get this new telephone for his work, and I know how soundly you sleep. We wouldn’t have wanted the men to be forced to return later, would we, dear?”

“Miz Freshell, I really wish you would stop calling me ‘dear.’ I like my name just fine.”

“Fair enough. I know about the orphanage and about you changing your name, and all.”

“That’s
not
what I meant,” Vignette snapped.

“Your loud tone of voice tells us that you need to put together a plan and not act out of panic. If you have things you need to confess to Randall about yourself, about needing a change in your living situation, now is the perfect—”

“I’m not
panicking.
I just don’t understand why the police use their telephone men for messengers, instead of just grabbing me when I show up!”

Miss Freshell already realized that this part of her story was tricky, the lie of how the policemen had told her about Vignette. She quickly moved past it.

“I told you: avoiding embarrassment. Besides, the messengers were policemen themselves. They just happened to know now how to install the thing.”

She lowered her voice and spoke as if this were a delightful secret: “It’s for police work, but they say you can call anywhere at all with it! Anybody else who has a telephone. I don’t know anyone who does, right off, but some people must. The best ones, actually. Think of it—a private little circle of influential people who are among the privileged few to have such a device of their own! We can speak back and forth to each other!”

When Vignette failed to ignite over that, Miss Freshell shrugged and added, “So I think the captain just used them as messenger boys. Now, listen—I asked them if anybody had informed Detective Blackburn yet, but the men were just regular cops, you know. Doing what they were told.”

“I just—” Vignette stopped and forcefully exhaled.

“Can you work the beans while we talk, Vignette? If we have dinner ready for everybody when we’re all here, it might make it easier for you to tell him, you know, your reason. Or your excuse. Or whatever you have to say.”

“Oh, damn it to hell!” Vignette slapped the table in frustration.

“Certainly, you can use that language if you have no other way to express yourself, dear.”

“You really think he might not know already? God! You think I might have to tell him myself tonight?”

“Men are so sensitive about having their territory invaded by a female.” She pinched just the tiniest bit off the end of a bean, and flicked it away. “And from their point of view, it’s much worse that you fooled them for so long.”

“Do you…Do you think that maybe this is so embarrassing for the department that they’ll keep it a secret even inside the department? In that case, Randall would never hear about it!”

Miss Freshell did not scoff at the idea. She just gave Vignette one of her porcelain smiles, the same smile that had snagged Randall like a deep-sea fishhook. She did, however, pick up one of the longer beans and wiggle it at Vignette to remind her to get back to the Ritual.

This time Vignette let her hands do the repetitive work on their own while she worked at convincing herself that all of this could simply go away. Pinch one end, pinch the other end, toss the bean. Pinch one end, pinch the other end, toss the bean.

It would be so wonderful if she never had to search for an explanation to offer to Randall—the “real reason” why she had elected to endure the police department’s all-male training regimen. She would not have minded knowing, herself. Pinch one end, pinch the other end, toss the bean.

It just had to be done. Like the tall shrubs along a sidewalk that dared her to leap them, regardless of what kind of clothing she had on. Like the endless long walks that went late into the night and sent her through neighborhoods that no unaccompanied female ought to dare enter. It had to be done. Pinch one end, pinch the other end, toss the bean.

Plenty of times in recent years she had plainly seen that if she put her hair up under a hat and wore overalls and boots with a long-sleeved shirt, everybody treated her like a young man. All she had to do was walk and move in a very plain fashion, and try not to talk too much. Keep the voice low, never yell.

Back when Shane had to quit police training, her heart broke for him, but she never had any thoughts about personally “righting the wrong” on his behalf. It would be so convenient to offer that to Randall, but the lie would stick in her throat.

The whole truth? Randall, being a man, had taken no notice when she cut off her hair two weeks earlier, because she covered herself with a wig that he must have written off as a new hairstyle. Miss Freshell noticed the wig, of course, but only made a few remarks indicating that she assumed Vignette was just playing with her appearance.

None of it explained what compelled her to invade police training. Such a thing was not only forbidden, it was dangerous. She had been doomed by Nature to fail there, since someone had to catch on sooner or later. The thought of being caught later, however, had always been much less daunting to her than getting caught early on. At least later in the program she would have already proved the point.

She had also counted on the fact that she was legally an adult, at nineteen, and also had a different last name than Randall did. It seemed clear to her that her actions should be regarded apart from his. It was only fair. And it had seemed so apparent to her that if she did well enough in the program before something tripped her up, then whatever “embarrassment” might go around would hardly have any reason to fall onto him.

But she still needed something to tell him.
This is why I did it, this is what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to beat them at their own game because I hate it when they open doors for me. Where in Hell do men get the idea that just because you are female, they have to open a door for you? The man saves you from the awful fate of opening a door for yourself exactly as you do when nobody’s around to make an issue of it in the first place.

On the rare occasion that one stares at me in a disrespectful way, I want to stab my fingertips into his eyes.

I’ll settle for showing the tough guys at the police training school whether or not I’m too dainty to open the damned door for myself.

But that was more than she could ever expect Randall to understand. No matter how much you love someone, no matter what gratitude you feel, people’s reactions can be unpredictable. You think you know them, then they prove you wrong.

So what
would
Randall do? Perhaps he would show her tolerance, but then maybe not. There was no way to know until it was too late to back away from it.

He was consistently kind to her, but she had never told him things like this about herself. It always seemed that he somehow understood and accepted her true nature. But she had also deliberately avoided testing him on it and dreaded being wrong. Dark anticipations rolled through her on waves of nausea.

She knew that certain things cannot be put back once they get out, such as any public knowledge of Vignette’s true nature, where an inexplicable bonfire forever roared inside her chest. The power of it forced her to dance away the excess energy, all across the walls of her life. To her it was stillness and routine that tasted of danger. The exercises, the rituals of conventional tradition made her feel as if she were being force-walked toward her own open grave. The sensation of it hit her the same way that a tight space hits someone with claustrophobia.

Maybe that’s what I can tell him. Make him see that it’s just my nature, and that’s all. It’s nothing against anybody else. It’s just something I need, like those miners up in Alaska who go crazy if they don’t get enough sunshine.

Vignette had come to see her ongoing dilemma as simply this: She was born with a warrior’s heart packed inside a beanpole female body. She could run in blazing sprints for two or three blocks, or drop into a dog trot that she could keep up for miles. But in a world overrun by large male strangers who were occasionally crazy and hostile, her physical speed and mental skills were all she had to protect her.

So her battles had to be carried out in the safer, invisible arena of deception and trickery. The particular area of personal expertise that she had developed over much of her life was a refined set of manipulative skills that Vignette simply thought of as
moving things around.

Things, people, lives. She engaged in battle only at moments of her own choosing, and danced circles around attackers with her speedy legs, a quick mind, and lightning-fast reactions. It was there, in the art and craft of moving things around, that Vignette’s considerable skills served her.

At least, that had been her plan at the all-male police training school, where her ruse of passing herself off as a young male recruit worked perfectly for that first week.

Pinch one end, pinch the other end, toss the bean.

BACK ONSTAGE

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

J.D.
HAD LONG SINCE
lost control of the performance. The extreme dose of elixir bit random holes in his ability to sustain his stage technique. Now, as the hour-long show was nearing time to end, the evening’s Golden Moment was distant history. His uncontrolled babbling had only worked to buy time. That time, too, was now expended.

If he was going to brass his way out of this, he needed to bring some kind of big finish to the proceedings.
Make ’em think they’ve seen a goddamned
show!

He was stalling the crowd by placing verbal implants under the cover of physical distraction. It was a basic skill. He could sustain it even in this distorted hour. Habit was protecting him, up to a point.

At least the audience members were having a good time guffawing at the test subjects, whom J.D. had lined up at center stage, all facing forward, separated by an arm’s length.

He had taken them through the entire setup, using a mix of praise drawn from the audience on the volunteers’ behalf. He boosted the technique by raising the individual stakes for each one, asking them each a few personal interview questions. That fastened the experience to their sense of manhood as well as to their ideas of social propriety, creating an effective leash that they did not even realize was there.

As always, the young men were willing to serve as guinea pigs, but determined not to let anyone get the best of them. Everyone in the audience could see that in them. The implied credibility that these boys represented was actually his ace in the hole.

But that much only took care of the setup. For the twist, he had each one demonstrate a few basic bends or stretches “to prove they were fit for the task,” but which actually served to reduce their physical inhibition. While each one did the moves he asked of them, J.D. still remembered what he was doing well enough to praise their movements as if they each showed real talent.

As always, while each subject bent and twisted his way through the requested physical movements, J.D. whispered their priming instructions to them under the guise of giving individual encouragements.

Tonight, at that very moment, he assumed that he had done so. But to save his life, he could not actually recall doing it.

He guessed, from the young men’s demeanor, that he had done his job as expected and that all were successfully primed. More than anything, it was his sense of balance that told him he still had a few seconds to bring this disaster to some sort of a closing. If only he could remember tonight’s trigger phrase while the audience still laughed at the young men, who were dutifully holding the poses that J.D. had molded each one into while he spoke to them.

The man on the audience’s left side, downstage right, had been bent into a capital
C.

The next man was bent straight over, arm out touching the floor with the other arm bent to connect the two lines, to make a capital
A.
The others were all bent into the letters to form C-A-L-I-F-O-RN-I-A out of their ten bodies.

The men would hold it for as long as J.D. wanted them to, with little or no sense of pain from the exertion. Not one of them realized what he was doing. Each one’s mind was relaxed and filled with pleasant images of what a fine fellow he was, cued up by J.D.’s combination of physical touch, public instruction, audience pressure, and whispered indoctrination.

But the trigger—what was the damned
trigger
? He had milked this elementary bit for all the juice it had; now it was time to send these quietly prepared young men back into the audience. They were primed to end his show for him, living proof of his abilities, surefire in assuring that the folks would come back to see another performance, and another after that, always trying to figure out how ol’ J.D. made things happen.

He stalled by letting them go back to their seats and by whipping everyone up to applaud the boys off the stage. It only bought him a few moments. Soon they were in the process of sitting back down and everything was all stacked up to set off, upon his command.

Of course he had given each man a trigger. You always give them a trigger. He did it in the same way he tied his shoes, without having to think about it. Habit had protected him, but memory was failing him, one tiny piece at a time. The loss of the trigger phrase was about to leave him with one fat turkey egg, broken and running down his face.

Now he was flailing away, stealing time by loudly praising the cooperative young rubes while he goaded the house into a few more rounds of applause for them. He noted the young men’s dizzy smiles of embarrassed gratification. He could see that each one of them felt as if he had really taken part in something. The young men threw grins to one another across the audience rows, now bonded like a wolf pack.

So the prime was set and everything was ready.

But already he could see the first traces of confusion rising up on the folks’ faces. Some of them—the damned quick ones—sensed that this thing was running out of steam. He could feel the floor beginning to tilt.

A flash of prickly frustration and hot anger rushed through him. He wanted to scream, tear open the top of his skull, pull out his brain, and shake it like wet laundry until the trigger phrase fell out. The magic of the elixir lay in its ability to keep his head clearer and his memory sharper, to prevent his spirits from falling into that awful abyss that always waited for him. But in the wrong dosage, it was like riding a wild beast.

Now there was nothing left but to say a few words of thanks, blah-blah-blah, and
pull the trigger.
Then while they’re still laughing and applauding, gesture to the mayor and his wife, wave to all, exit stage right. No curtain call. Nothing.

Never was there a better night to leave ’em wanting more.

But the trigger. Maybe the name of a local bigwig? No, not with all the other bigwigs there, to feel left out. Save that one for the small rooms.

And with that, as if by magic, the topic for the trigger phrase hit him: promotion.
Promotion!
He took a deep breath.

“And in closing,” he called out in a well-projected voice that was instantly stronger, steadier, “I thank you all for sharing in the secrets I have revealed tonight. Of course, there is much more to come. Please return again and again, to join me while
I appear throughout the fairground, at…

And with that, all ten of the young men simultaneously popped up to attention and bellowed in unison at the absolute tops of their voices, “
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition!
”

In the audience there was the initial reaction of surprise and confusion. Meanwhile, there stood the ten young men, sheepish at their own unexpected outburst…and still there was the audience, slowly realizing that the men did not
know
that they were going to do that…followed by the collective realization that their entire group had just witnessed a successful demonstration of group hypnosis…and then the big payoff—when they broke into the thunder-rolling applause of mass surprise and delight.

J.D. was already off the stage before the applause even peaked. He snatched up his makeup kit in one hand and headed back toward the commode. Passing a water pitcher near the stage manager’s booth, he picked it up with his free hand and carried it along without slowing down, quaffing it down while he strode through the backstage area.

Even back there in the wings, applause continued to wash over him.
And so they bought it,
he thought in gratitude,
every one of them.
The old magic had actually worked once again, tonight. Thousands of hours of practice served to lock him inside a protective cocoon of habit, at a time when his conscious mind could do little more than misfire and shoot off sparks of fear.

For so many years, he had been the servant of his own discipline. Tonight it had saved him.

Everything around him still had that odd, shiny gloss. But at least that awful sensation was fading, that of his head being a lantern with the gas turned up so high that his skull could burst into flames. It was impossible to look anyone in the eye and believe that they did not see it.

He gratefully made it to the commode. It felt good to allow himself to fall silent, deep in thought. Now all he needed was to get away from the public eye and to be safely alone. His fogged brain told him that he needed to sleep this off, more than anything else, even though sleep was unlikely for hours to come.

His legs felt as though they were packed with millions of tiny stars, and that the stars were twinkling, twinkling, twinkling, as hard as they could, poking away at the inside of his skin.
What is the word?…
Asleep.
You say
“
my leg is asleep.
”
Why do you say that?

The leg hurt like hell and there was nothing sleepy about it.

He felt it then, the slippage. The damned brain slippage became more pronounced once he was off the stage. On the heels of the energy he expended in bluffing his way through an entire performance—possibly the most important performance he would give that year—fatigue quickly enveloped him.

That always happened after a show these days, but tonight the effect was worse.
The dose. Where did it come from? Nobody in San Francisco knows I have the elixir…The backstage door. Something about…

If only he could sleep. Clear his head. He would be better once he got some decent rest. His body felt like an empty tank. The sustained level of near panic that gripped him throughout the show seemed to have burned off the strongest effects of the elixir.

Even though his heart still raced, the fog of his fatigue was already thickening. It was welcome, at this point. Anything for the chance to rest and think things through. With a little luck, J.D. decided, he might even be able to close his eyes sometime before the sun came up.

On his way back out of the commode, he absently stepped on the long crack in the floor. In the back of his mind, where the remnants of his photographic memory resided, he noticed that the crack appeared to have grown a bit during this single performance. But he was so powerfully distracted that the detail escaped his conscious attention, and there was nobody else around to take notice.

Except for the two tall men standing next to the backstage entrance. It took J.D. a frozen moment to figure out why there were suddenly strangers in the backstage area. Then it hit him: this man was that Blackburn fellow, the police detective he had requested for the duration of the exposition. A stage hand had pointed out the big cop while he was waiting around before the show.

Duncan’s mouth went dry in an instant of panic. His mind was racing too fast for the molasses drip of conversation, but he realized that the detective had no other reason to be backstage except to talk to him. There was no way to avoid it. Blackburn appeared to have brought along another one, some young fellow, and God what a night—the pair had just started in his direction.