White Apples (25 page)

"And it was all right? You had no problems or anything at home?" "No. Why are you asking?"

Mann ignored the question. "And you had no other problems with anyone else since we were at the hospital? None with other people?"

There was the incident at the zoo but he didn't want to talk about that. The safety of his children took precedence over every•thing else. "Nothing, Bruno. What's going on? Did something hap•pen to you?"

"Yeah, Vincent, something happened— Suddenly everyone knows now that I died. When I got home my wife freaked out. She screamed when she saw me walk in the door—literally screamed. 'But you're dead, you're dead!' She

kept chanting it. What could I say to her—yes darling, you're right?" "What did you do?"

"I tried to calm her down. But good luck doing that—try calming someone down after they've seen a ghost. And that ghost is you."

"So where are you now?"

"In my house—downstairs, trying to think of something con•vincing to say to her. But Vincent, you know what this means? If it's true then we're shut out of everything—no job, no friends or family, no bank account—nothing. We can't see anyone we know anymore. We can't even risk
being
seen because it's too damned dangerous. To the world we're dead, which means—

Ettrich's voice took on a hard edge. "I get the point, Bruno. I've got to think about this. Let me get back to you in a while."

"Don't you think we should meet and talk about it?"

"No, not till I've thought it through. I'll call you later." Ettrich disconnected before Bruno could say anything else. The only thing on his mind was that if it were true, he would never be able to see his children again. His contact with them would be lost forever. The thought was crushing. He squeezed the phone in his hand until the plastic squeaked. When he heard the sound he released it and the phone fell to the floor between his feet.

Isabelle waited for Vincent's face to relax before asking what happened. In a defeated monotone he told her.

She wasn't having it. Reaching down, she picked up the tele•phone and dialed his home number. Ignoring her, he stared through the windshield at the restaurant and thought about his kids.

"Hello? I'm calling from the alumni office at Rhodes College. I'd like to speak with Vincent Ettrich, please. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, I do." She tapped Ettrich's shoulder. When he looked she shook her head and smiled. "Yes, I'm ready. Yes, I've got it. Thank you so much." She clicked off and dropped the phone in his lap. "Your wife was very nice and said you don't live there anymore. Then she gave me the telephone number of your apartment. So I guess you're still alive in the eyes of the world."

His face relaxed but his eyes remained skeptical. "What does that mean? Why would Bruno say that if it's not true?"

"It can be one of two things—they only did it to him. Or he's lying to you." "Why would he lie? That makes no sense."

She waited to let the realization come to him but he said nothing more. "Do you trust him? Do you believe what he tells you?"

"Well, yeah, I guess. I don't know. I work with the guy. I've known him a long time." "That doesn't mean anything, Vincent, especially now. You should know that."

"But his name was tattooed on the back of Coco's neck! That's how this whole thing started for me. Why would she have his name there?"

"Did Coco ever tell you?" She put her hand on his knee and gave it a gentle squeeze.

He looked at it. His thoughts were whizzing around so fast now that it felt like his brain was a centrifuge. "No, but I assumed..." His voice died, and then rose again. "And what about the hospital? What about that whole thing there with him and Tillman Reeves?"

"I don't know, but I would be very careful about who you trust these days."

He sucked in his lower lip and put his hand on top of hers. Eventually he slid it up and over to her stomach where their son was hiding out. "I was just thinking of something someone said to me years ago: The way to get out of a labyrinth is to walk across the top of it."

"That sounds good but what does it really mean?"

"Kitty's grandfather said it and, according to the way he'd lived his life, it was sound advice. He was almost a hundred years old when he died. The biggest scoundrel I ever met. He'd had three wives and treated them all like shit. In the meantime he slept with any woman who said yes to him. He borrowed money from every•one but never paid it back. He declared bankruptcy I don't know how many times but managed to walk away from all the wreck•age... The guy was a bad character in a Teflon suit. He lived to be ninety-seven years old. But he was charming; I gotta say that for him. On the last day of his life that guy was more charming than Clark Gable."

Isabelle loved the way Ettrich perceived and talked about life. It was one of the things she had missed most in these long months away from him. Even today with all that was going on, she was so happy to hear him talk about nothing special. "You were with him when he died?"

"No, but just before. He loved Kitty so we used to go visit him in the hospital. Listen to this—that last time I saw him, we walked into his room. Naturally he had finagled a single although he had no money for it. We went in and he was wearing a black get shorty baseball cap, a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a bright red jogging suit. This was seven o'clock at night in January. On a boom box in the corner
Abba's Greatest Hits
was playing. He said he liked them because they had a good beat. A hundred fucking years old. Walk across the top of the labyrinth. That's pretty good advice, you know?"

"But what do you think it means?"

Ettrich smiled, remembering. "He told me where he got the idea. He was once walking through Piccadilly in London. Someone had put a labyrinth in the middle of the sidewalk. It looked like a giant black-and-white plastic tablecloth. It was maybe ten feet by ten feet; really big. Maybe it was some kind of conceptual art. He said the most interesting thing about it was pedestrians were making a wide circle around it. They'd go way out of their way to avoid walking on the thing although it was clear it had been put there for people to use. The only ones walking on the thing were kids

having fun trying to figure out the way to the center. A crowd had stopped to watch.

"After a while an old woman came along. You know the kind who is carrying too many plastic bags and mumbling to herself? Now
she
wasn't having any of it—she needed to get from point A to point B and B was on the other side of this labyrinth. So she just walked straight across it. He said the greatest part of it was all the people who'd stopped to watch were clearly angry that she did it—that she'd ignored the labyrinth. You could see it in their faces. But then they all looked around at each other and began smiling. As if they understood that they were the fools and she was the clever one. Why not walk across it when you're in a hurry to get some•place?

"I've got to figure out how to do that here. So far we've been saying if we can't go left, let's try right. But this ain't your everyday labyrinth. It's not just made up of lefts and rights, but also ups and downs, a mosaic, the Pemmagast and I don't know what else. It's like one of those games of three-dimensional chess where you have to play on many levels at once if you're going to win."

"But how do we do that? How do you get above this so you can look down and figure out the right path to take?" Ettrich touched her stomach again. "Maybe Anjo can help."

Bruno Mann was annoyed, but that was nothing new. He hated being human and he hated human beings. Hated the heaviness of the body, the slowness of how everything moved and functioned, how it smelled, the
needs
it constantly had. It needed air and food and warmth and cold. The list was never-ending. A body was continually hungry for something, always unsatisfied or uncomfortable, com•plaining, unhappy with whatever situation it was in.

He had been human so long that some days he almost forgot what it was like to be anything else. It was a disease that moved into your system and infected every part of you until finally you were terminally human and there was no way back. He knew others of his kind who thought that it was okay. He knew some who had come to like it quite a lot and didn't mind being here one bit. Not him. Not Bruno Mann. The longer he was marooned on this desert island called the Human Race the deeper his antipathy toward it grew.

And the latest insult was this: Vincent Ettrich had said he didn't want to meet. Bruno had been around Ettrich a long time and had played him like a fish on a line, reeling him in and then letting him go out just far enough so that Vincent thought he was free. Then Bruno would yank him back. Not that Ettrich ever knew what was going on. When he was dying in the hospital, Bruno had been one of the only people who'd visited him and Ettrich wept at the kind•ness of the gesture.

But now the resurrected Ettrich didn't want to meet until he'd figured things out. What a laugh. Vincent couldn't even figure out how to keep his dick in his pants.

Perhaps Bruno was upset only because he'd been so pleased with his "They know we're dead!" plan. It was such a smart and appropriate way to begin the endgame with Ettrich. Further isolate and confuse him, cut him off at every pass, close off all his options until it was just him and his flaky girlfriend. Then go in and finish it.

Originally Bruno Mann had been sent to do five other things. It was just coincidence that he came in contact with Ettrich. But as he got to know Vincent and observed his impressive rabbitlike prom•iscuity, he realized this man and his obsession with women could be useful in a small way.

Certainly chaos encourages broken hearts and promises. Pathetic as it is, love is the great leveler and nothing other than imminent death causes greater confusion in the human soul. Because he was often bored, Bruno took Ettrich on as a kind of pet project and enjoyed watching him blow through women's lives like a hurricane, leaving little standing in the way of pride or self-esteem. The high point came when Vincent actually left his wife and children for another woman, only to see that new woman reject him and dis•appear from his life altogether. Then as a kind of afterthought, Et•trich contracted a particularly enthusiastic cancer that metastasized immediately, ravaging his body and killing him in months. Bruno had played no part in any of it but he sure got a big kick out of the scenario as it played out.

So it came as a genuine shock the morning he walked into the office months later and saw Ettrich there flirting with a secretary as if nothing had changed in the months since he had died. What the hell was this? What the hell was going on here?

At first no one could tell him anything because they had all been taken completely off guard. How had it happened?

Who were the ones responsible for bringing Mr. Hot Pants back? There were meet•ings and recriminations. No one had seen this coming—they had all been blindsided. No one was willing to take responsibility either. Someone had snuck Ettrich back into life under their radar. As a result, they all looked like incompetent fools. Sound the alarm!

Groups were mobilized. Plans never before conceived of were whipped up and put hurriedly into place. They were winging this one and, boy, was it obvious.

Bruno picked up a magazine, looked at the cover, and dropped it back on the coffee table. What was he supposed to do while he waited for Mr. Ettrich to "think it through"? If it had been anyone else, he would have gone over to their house, fucked them up, and forgotten about it. But since doing a Lazarus on them, Vincent had to be handled very carefully now because no one knew what else he was capable of. Add to that what Isabelle Neukor's special, dan•gerous child was capable of and you had yourself an unwieldy sit•uation.

He picked up the magazine again and let it fall open in his hands. Before he could focus on a page the telephone rang. Thinking it was Ettrich, he said, "Good boy," as if addressing a dog that had brought him a stick. Then he picked up the receiver.

It was not Ettrich. It was not human. It was Bruno Mann's boss. Speaking in the same mysterious language Coco had used earlier to scold the lipsticked rat, it explained what had happened at the zoo. While it yammered on, Bruno looked at his fingernails and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He wondered again why his boss insisted on using a telephone to communicate. Did he think it was quaint or cute? Worse, had he become one of the complacent fools who liked life as a human and was satisfied with this ridiculous method of being heard? Had he really

sunk so low?

One thing Bruno knew was not to interrupt. He emptied his mind and let the voice in his ear have its long-winded say. None of the details surprised him, although they were absorbing. Despite loathing humanity, he believed it was a lot smarter than they gave it credit for. Again and again he had seen instances of how quick•witted and capable people were when it came to recognizing and solving problems. He had said this more than once in planning ses•sions but was invariably dismissed as being unduly pessimistic or just plain wrong.

Now
who was wrong? Dumb old Ettrich had outsmarted them and escaped. Worse, they didn't know where either he or his girl•friend was because of the Pemmagast, who had never had the im•pudence to show their ugly little faces here—until today.

Bruno's eyebrows rose way up when he heard they had done the rescue. The
Pemmagast?
He wished this conversation was on tape so that he could play it back later and listen again to his boss sple•netically splutter about how those shitty little miserable ectoplasmic
nothings
had triumphed. It was unthinkable, hilarious, and right in line with what Bruno had been telling his superiors all along. But he was cynical enough to know that his insight would only make them angrier at him now for being so prescient. None of us likes being wrong, especially when we're offered a chance to be right but ignore it.

The description of the debacle at the zoo finally, finally wound down and the boss stopped talking. Bruno chewed on a thumbnail, waiting to hear if another flood of words would be forthcoming but none was.