The Intruders (45 page)
Blanchard went down in the elevator with me and walked me to the door. Stood looking up the street as I lit a cigarette.
“There’s no call for you to be leaving the country, right? Or the state?”
“No,” I said.
“I guess we’d like it if you kept it that way. Being lucky doesn’t equate to a free pass just yet.”
“Whatever you say.”
He nodded, seemed to hesitate. “Don’t feel bad about what happened,” he said. “It seems to me that everyone put themselves in their own place. Fisher most of all.”
“Okay.” I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Right,” he said. “Well…oh. Here.”
He handed me a slip of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Left at the nurses’ station for you this morning. Now. Tell me you’re not going to try driving anywhere today.”
“I’m not going to try driving anywhere.”
“Good man. See you around, Jack.”
I waited until he’d walked back into the hospital before I unfolded the piece of paper. It took me a moment to recognize the handwriting. Something about it had changed. The note said:
Meet me somewhere.
First I cabbed over to Belltown to retrieve my car. The area around the building was heavily cordoned. Police and firemen were going about their business. Passersby stopped to watch for a while, no idea what they were looking at. Just another thing in the background of their lives. The visible fabric of the building didn’t appear badly damaged, but if fire had been through the foundations, I guessed it was most likely coming down.
To become another parking lot, and then apartments, and get knocked down again, and then be something else in some future world. Things go up and then come down, and the years go by.
I got into the car and drove down to Pioneer Square.
I bought a coffee in the Starbucks and took it outside. The metal tables were all empty. I chose the one with the best view of the square and lowered myself gently into one of the chairs. The process hurt. I told myself I’d give it an hour and then go.
While I waited, I looked across at the trees. There was something about the quality of the light filtering down through them that lent the square an elusive quality. For a place that gave birth to so much, a whole city, it is actually rather small. Just those few trees, the sheltered seat, a drinking fountain, and that totem pole, all dwarfed and in shadow from the stolid stone buildings that stand around, like a defensive barricade.
And yet it doesn’t seem small.
It felt okay to be sitting there, and after a time I shambled inside again and got another coffee. I returned to the table and went back to watching people walking up and down, tourists and locals on their way somewhere, the homeless passing through, stopping in the square for a few moments, then moving on.
I was halfway through the second cup when I heard a chair being pulled out from the other side of the table. I looked around to see that someone had joined me.
“You’re good,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. She levered the top off her cup of tea to help it cool. Lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. Looked at me.
“Are you okay? Physically?”
“I’ll live,” I said.
“Well, that’s good.”
“Glad you think so.”
“You were locked in the top office for a reason. You were intended to stay there for your own safety.”
“Shame you didn’t explain that at the time. Gary Fisher might still be alive.”
She shrugged. Something had changed, more so than when I’d seen her on the pier in Santa Monica and even since last night—though I hadn’t had much chance to observe her closely then. Her hair was brushed differently, or maybe it was the same, but her suit was new in some way, its fabric or the cut, something that hinted at an older fashion. Perhaps it was something less tangible. Body language, the light in her eyes, or lack of it, whatever it is that makes someone altered from the person she was before, that says she stands at a different angle to you now. Whichever, I knew that this person was no more my wife than the girl who used to go to sleep in the bedroom of what was now Natalie’s house.
I started with that. “What did you take?” I asked. “From Natalie’s?”
“Nothing important. A keepsake.”
“Of what?”
“Being a child. I used to stash my little treasures under the floorboard there.”
“Why go back for it now?”
She hesitated, as if deciding how much she wanted to confide in me. Or what I could be trusted with.
“When I was about eight,” she said eventually, “going on nine, one weekend we went to a swap meet over in Venice. Me, my mom, Natalie. We wandered around, looking at the usual crap, you know, and then I saw this one stall and knew I had to go look at it. The woman had all this really old, dusty stuff.”
She reached into her purse, pulled something out. Put it on the table. A small, square glass pot, with a tall Bakelite lid. Whatever was inside had once been brightly colored, a hot pink of a kind now out of fashion, but it had dried and cracked and gone mainly murky and black. There was a faded label, in the kind of lettering you see on old cinemas. It said JAZZBERRY.
“Nail polish,” I said.
“Original 1920s. I didn’t know that then. Just knew I had to have it. My mom thought I’d gone nuts. I used to take it out and look at it once in a while. Didn’t understand why. Until I was eighteen.”
“What happened then?”
“Things changed.”
“You started to believe that you’d been here before.”
“So you think you know some things, huh?”
“I don’t really know what to think.”
“Your friend Gary built quite a castle in the air, by the sound of it. In which he’d have lived alone. Probably just as well things turned out as they did last night. No offense.”
“Was he right? About any of it?”
“I don’t know what he told you. But…people guess things. Sometimes they guess right. The mental institutions of the world are riddled with sane people who just never had the sense to shut up.”
“What’s the Psychomachy Trust?”
“What do you think? What’s your guess?”
“Something to do with the intruders.”
She raised an eyebrow. “The who?”
“That’s what Gary called people who got it into their head that they keep coming back.”
“A name he got from your book, I suppose. I’m sure that, if any such people exist, they’d prefer the term ‘revisitors.’”
“The place under the building in Belltown,” I said. “What was that for?”
She glanced at her watch. “A gathering. One that happens very rarely, and quite soon. It’s why I’ve been spending so much time here.”
“But now it’s burned down.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t have been using that place anyway. It was prepared long in advance. A hundred years ago, that’s how it was done. The world is far less formal now. You have to move with the times.”
“Wasn’t there a risk someone would find it?”
She laughed. “Find what? Some chairs, a table? Big deal. Hiding things is for amateurs.”
“What about the bodies?”
“That was different.”
“Who was Marcus Fox?”
“Someone who used to be important,” she said, as if the subject were distasteful. “He has always been…difficult. He developed worse problems during his most recent time away.”
“Away where?”
“The place where you go. In between. It’s not far. Marcus became very cruel. He hurt people. Little people.”
“I saw. Why keep the bodies?”
“They were as safe from discovery there as if buried in a forest or thrown into the bay. Until you and your friend started digging around.”
“And Fox?”
“He became a security risk. He was dealt with.”
“Killed, you mean. By the man who shot Gary.”
“So you say.”
“Why did Todd Crane say Marcus was in the building yesterday?”
“You do have good ears. And a busy little mind. That could be a problem. But, of course, we know where you live.”
I stared at her. “It’s where you live, too.”
“No. I never lived there, Mr. Whalen.” She stubbed out her cigarette, looked at me with blank indifference. “I assumed you understood. You’re not talking with Amy. You’re talking to Rose.”
Maybe I’d already guessed. I’d certainly realized during the night that Amy could have put a number for ROSE into my phone, at any time in the last few weeks or months, and I wouldn’t have noticed until she called me from that number. Called why? To warn me, maybe. Or to stop me from screwing with something I didn’t understand. Presumably the same reason I’d been approached by the two men in the alleyway with Georj. Men in the pay of the intruders, whoever the hell they were.
“So who is Rose, exactly?”
“Just a label for a state of mind.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either. Why was Shepherd trying to kill that girl? Was Fox supposed to be inside her?”
“He was. But Mr. Fox appears to have left the building.”
“That happens?”
“Very rarely. She was strong. She was also far too young. There’s some concern over how Marcus got through in the first place. One of our helpers may have been involved.” She shrugged. “Sometimes revisitors jump ship. Once in a blue moon, they get kicked out. Someone will keep an eye on the girl. We’ll see.”
She saw how I was looking at her and shook her head. “Not going to happen here. I told you on the pier. This is who I am. How I’ve always been, underneath.”
I noticed a gray limousine parking fifty yards away up Yesler. A man got out, old, African-American, distinguished-looking. The car drove off, and the man walked down toward the square. He sat on a bench by himself. This struck me as odd in some way.
I was distracted by Amy lighting another cigarette. It’s the simple things that seem the most wrong. Even though it was clear to me that I was not there with someone I understood, I didn’t want her to leave. Once this person left, whatever she was now calling herself, I could be left with no one at all. So I started asking questions again.
“What was Anderson’s ghost machine?”
She sighed. “You shouldn’t know about that either.”
“Tough. I do. What was so important that a guy like Bill had to be killed? And his wife and child?”
“He chanced upon something that allowed the eye to glimpse certain things.”
“Christ, Amy—just be straight with me. What things?”
“The clue’s in the title, Mr. Whalen.”
“The machine meant you could see ghosts?”
“Souls. While they’re waiting to come back again. They’re all around us, they live in a…Trust me, it was a bad machine. No good would have come of it. People are better off not knowing certain things.”
“So Cranfield paid Bill to drop his research.”
“Joseph was a kind man, and he had become rich and powerful and gotten used to handling things his own way. Even people with his experience forget the broader picture once in a while. It was a mistake. It should have been discussed among the Nine.”
“Who are they?”
“The people who look after things. Make strategic decisions. First among equals. You know the kind of thing.”
I realized that another man was sitting on the bench in the Square now. He was not communicating with the first man, just sitting at the other end, watching the world go by. And a woman in her late fifties was standing by herself on the other side, near the totem pole.
“Unfortunately, the money made Anderson aware he was onto something,” Rose said. “He started hinting about his work to people on the Internet.”
“That was his big crime? Hinting?”
“There will come a time when the Internet will be our best ally. Sooner or later someone there will have said everything that can be said, proved every cross-eyed piece of lunacy, and then there’ll be no distinction between what’s true and what’s not. We’re not there yet.”
“So your people had Anderson murdered.”
“Nothing should have happened to his family.”
“But now I know some things. So—”
“You think you know, that’s all. And I’m sure you realize how it sounds. How seriously did you take Gary when he told you what he thought he knew?”
“So what happens to me?”
“That’s up for discussion—though not with you.” She hesitated. “I find myself unable to mandate the usual course of action. Amy’s still strong. But that will pass.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said. My voice felt shaky. “She’s pretty tough.”
“We do, however, know about the night when you allegedly chanced upon suspicious activity in Los Angeles. We know that your colleagues and Internal Affairs elected to accept your version of events on the basis of exemplary previous ser vice and on the fact that the four men you shot dead would not be missed by their own mothers. But I also know, because Amy knows, that’s not the way it was. You went out that night looking for two of those men, and you took your gun but not your radio or your badge. What happened was premeditated. Amy could testify to that.”
“She wouldn’t,” I said.
“Maybe. But I would.”
“In which case I’d start talking.”
“And all that gets you is a cell with thicker padding on the walls. Your record is not your friend here. Nor your personality in general.”
There was coldness in her voice now that made me realize I’d spoken with this woman at least once before. The day I’d seen Amy, on the pier, for some of the time I’d been dealing with Rose. And before that? Presumably. Maybe from the day we met, those moments when my wife had seemed just a little different, unaccountable, not quite like herself. As we all do, from time to time.
When had Rose started to take fuller control? When we lost the child that would have kept us together? Could an event like that have made Amy start to withdraw deeper inside herself, leaving the stage empty? Or was it just something that was destined to follow its course, an assumption of power that happened according to schedule?
“So who’s the guy in the pictures on your phone?”
She smiled. It was a warm, private smile, the kind to make a husband sad. “His name’s Peter, since you ask.”
