The Crooked Staircase, Page 21

  The high school had been the site of a Saturday night rally for peace, even though the nation wasn’t at war with anyone other than stateless bands of terrorists. In the eight months since the event, how and why a peace protest could have turned violent hadn’t been explained to anyone’s satisfaction. There might have been a speaker who, while supportive of the crowd’s antiwar sentiment, did not a hundred percent agree with their assessment of those groups and individuals most despised as warmongers. In these days of desperate and unreasoned passions, even a well-meaning speaker might inadvertently enrage a crowd with a few ill-chosen words. Some said the flashpoint had something to do with Israel. Others said it was about the dissing of a champion of some South American revolution. Still others insisted that it hadn’t been political at all, that a contingent of racists had infiltrated the gathering and seized the sound system to spew their hate, though some survivors had no such memories. As yet no definitive answer had been provided regarding the identity of those who’d brought Molotov cocktails and quantities of jellied gasoline to a peace rally or why so many attendees were carrying guns at an event intended to promote brotherhood and understanding. If a gymnasium that seated twelve hundred hadn’t been two hundred people over that capacity, if some of the doors serving it had not been blockaded, the death toll might not have reached three hundred. If the fire alarms had worked, first responders might have arrived in time to save most of the building. In spite of state and federal investigations, the many mysteries of the Independence Day Rally for Peace had grown deeper and more complex with time.

  Jane knew nothing of the truth of this place, but she suspected that several adjusted people, brains webbed with control mechanisms, perhaps among those named on the Hamlet list, had been sent here to commit suicide and to take with them as many others as they could. The Techno Arcadians’ strategy involved disguising their operations as the work of terrorists and madmen, seeding social chaos so the public would cry out for order. This would allow a steady ratcheting up of security measures and rights restrictions until such a day that even those who had not been adjusted with brain implants would celebrate the firm but enlightened rule of their betters.

  Construction fencing surrounded the school and its immediate grounds, but the fabric privacy panels attached to the chain-link had in many places been slashed away by the curious. Signs that warned of toxic chemicals and of the unstable nature of the ruins had been defaced with obscene suggestions.

  The building should have been demolished. But although the ruins had been combed repeatedly for clues, the ongoing federal investigations required that the site be preserved to avoid the destruction of possible evidence.

  The school backed up to a football field flanked by stadium seating beyond the view of the street. Gilberto drove the GL 550 across that weedy, untended expanse of ground, gaining speed until he rammed the gate in the fence, broke the cheap hinges, and slammed through the rickety barrier. With shattered headlights and a buckled hood, the Mercedes came to a stop on the former faculty parking lot, where the undulant blacktop had been deformed and imprinted with fernlike patterns by the heat pouring off the burning building.

  They were about half a mile from the residential street on which Gilberto had parked his Suburban earlier that morning.

  “There’s a shortcut,” he said. “I won’t be as much as ten minutes, maybe a couple minutes less.”

  Together, he and Jane propped the damaged gate in place. It looked reasonably intact in the unlikely event someone chanced by.

  She returned to the Mercedes and opened the tailgate and took Hendrickson’s pulse, which was steady if somewhat slow. She lifted the red neckerchief and watched his eyes moving under their lids. He muttered wordlessly and yawned. She replaced the cloth and sprayed it lightly with chloroform.

  The sun was still forty minutes below the summit of the sky, but the shadow cast by the school seemed longer than it should have been this close to noon. She heard traffic noise in the distance but nothing nearby, no trilling bird, no settling noises in the ruins. Even the damaged Mercedes and its cooling engine failed to make a sound, as if three hundred casualties in one blazing hour had left this area forever a dead zone.

  In Newport Coast, they would have found and freed Simon by now. They would know that two vehicles were missing from his collection. They would have determined that Jane Hawk and a male accomplice had departed the scene in Simon’s Mercedes. Thereafter, it would take only a few minutes to get the registration number of the vehicle from the DMV and cross-check with the manufacturer’s records to obtain the unique signal of the GPS.

  It was too much to hope that the minor damage caused by the impact with the gate in the construction fencing had disabled the GPS to the extent of silencing the transponder by which the Mercedes could be tracked. The wolves would soon be coming.

  20

  Tanuja Shukla woke, opened her eyes without lifting her head from the pillow, and saw it was 11:19 A.M. on Saturday. The clock must be wrong. She never slept so late. Besides, she remained tired to the bone, as though, after an exhausting day, she had been asleep only two or three hours.

  She was wearing her wristwatch. She never wore it to bed, but there it was, on her wrist. The watch and clock concurred.

  She threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the mattress. Her pajamas were damp with sweat and clung to her body.

  A soreness at one corner of her mouth. She put a hand to her lips. Dried blood crumbled against her fingertips.

  For a moment she was mystified, but then she remembered the fall.

  Last night. Standing in the wet dark. Soaked and chilled and lonely and wildly happy. Cataloguing the details of the foul weather as well as her physical and emotional responses to it, the better to write about the journey of the lead character in her novelette. The storm spoke through the medium of the nearby ancient oak, each leaf a tongue empowered by raindrops, the tree telling the storm’s story in a chorus of soft clicks and hisses.

  When she had returned to the house, she’d slipped on the rain-puddled glossy paint of the back-porch floor. Slipped and fell face-first into…into one of the rocking chairs. The arm of one of the chairs. Stupid of her. Clumsy. She would need to eat and drink with care for the next couple days.

  Now, as she got up from the bed, she felt sticky, dirty, and sore in places that the fall did not fully explain. An odor clung to her separate from the stale smell of her night sweat, a malodor that was familiar, disturbingly familiar…but her past experience of it—where, when?—eluded her.

  As she went into her bathroom, step by step, the odor became a stink, became a stench, and incipient nausea slid around the walls of her stomach. She had felt dirty a moment earlier; but she felt filthy now. She was overcome by an urgent desire for a shower, an almost frantic need to be clean.

  The compulsion was peculiar. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.

  Standing in a forceful spray of water as hot as she could tolerate, scrubbing herself with a soapy washcloth, she winced at the pain in her breasts and discovered they were bruised. She must have fallen more fully into the chair than she remembered.

  When she felt clean at last and the threat of nausea had passed, she continued to linger there, eyes closed, turning slowly, letting the hot shower melt some of the soreness out of her. The sound of the rushing water returned to her a memory of the previous evening’s storm: the sky black; the rain like an inkfall where there was no light to color it; the old oak an elaborate black figuration against the deeper black of the night; and sudden movement that was also black on black, three robed and hooded figures hurrying through the downpour, like a scene from some film concerning medieval monks engaged in an urgent mission during apocalyptic times.

  Tanuja’s breath caught in her chest, and she opened her eyes, half expecting to see those monks gathered around the shower stall, three walls of which were glass. Of course,
no hooded figures stood watching her.

  Such an odd moment. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.

  After she’d blown dry her hair and dressed, she went in search of Sanjay. She found him in his study, where the door stood open to the hall. He sat at the computer, his back to her, hunched over the keyboard, typing faster than she had ever before seen him type, as though a scene from his current novel in progress flowed from him on a tide of inspiration.

  To write fiction well, long periods of intense concentration were nearly as important as talent. She and her brother so respected the creative process that neither would interrupt the other during working hours except for matters significant and urgent.

  She went to the kitchen. As she fitted the paper filter in the coffeemaker, she detected an astringent chemical odor, the source of which was not at once evident. By the time she put the coffee and a half teaspoon of cinnamon in the filter, the smell so bothered her that she prowled the room in search of its origin.

  The kitchen was sparkling, in fact cleaner than she recalled leaving it the previous night. The offensive odor was not strong, but waned and waxed and waned again. Indeed, it wasn’t entirely a bad smell. There was in general a lemony fragrance, like that of the antibacterial spray she used to wipe down the counters, but under it lingered a persistent acridness.

  She was drawn to the quartz-topped table, where red roses—the stems cut short in a low arrangement—filled a crystal bowl. Neither of the odors came from the flowers, and yet the blooms fascinated her.

  She stared at the coagulum of blood-red petals for a long moment…until her gaze was drawn to an unlikely object lying on the table beside the bowl. A hypodermic needle. The barrel of the syringe was filled with a cloudy amber fluid.

  It was an exotic item, but at the same time curiously familiar. A sense of déjà vu overcame her, and the feeling that some moment of a forgotten dream had here manifested in real life.

  When she reached for the syringe, it ceased to be there on the table, and her fingers closed only on each other.

  In that instant, she recognized the chemical odor as that of insecticide, specifically Spectracide hornet spray.

  Mystery solved. Except that hornets were not in season. Well, yes, but she and Sanjay did sometimes use the spray for ants.

  As for the syringe…how strange. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.

  Tanuja returned to the coffeemaker. She filled the Pyrex pot with water to the ten-cup level, because when Sanjay smelled the coffee brewing, he would want some, too.

  In a few minutes, the kitchen grew redolent of the fine Jamaica blend, and Tanuja breathed deeply of the wonderful aroma while she cracked eggs for an omelet. She wanted some potatoes as well, and bacon, and toast. She was ravenous.

  21

  At one time there had been security cameras, because in recent decades too many schools were not merely centers of education, but also dens of drug dealing and violence. In the aftermath of the fire, however, there were no cameras intact and no electricity to power them.

  Nevertheless, Jane felt watched, and she studied one broken-out window after another, searching for a faint human form in the charry darkness beyond. Her intuition, which she trusted implicitly, told her that no one lurked in the building, but she scanned the windows anyway. Months of being on the run, with enemies who commanded a panoply of surveillance platforms ranging from simple traffic cams to satellites in orbit, had brought her to that point at which healthy stage-one paranoia could metastasize into a cancerous stage four, which might paralyze her or lead her into fatal misjudgments.

  When Gilberto returned in eight minutes, Jane dragged open the damaged gate in the construction fencing to admit him. He backed the Suburban up to the Mercedes GL 550. Together they moved Hendrickson from one vehicle to the other. She also transferred her tote, the attaché case packed with money, and the Medexpress carrier that she had for a while stowed in one of Simon Yegg’s refrigerators.

  As Jane closed the tailgate, a sudden siren coiled through the morning, close and spiraling louder, surely within a block of the school, much too close for them to escape without being seen. Once spotted, the Suburban would inevitably later be identified, because it would be tracked from the school by Arcadian operatives able to review archived video from traffic cameras, its ultimate destination uncovered. When the vehicle was associated with Booth Hendrickson’s abduction, with Jane, it would incriminate Gilberto and bring hellfire upon him and his entire family.

  Their eyes locked, and they froze in anticipation, as though they stood on a hangman’s platform with rope around their necks, waiting for trapdoors to fall open beneath their feet. The siren Doppler-shifted to lower frequencies as the cops or paramedics, or whoever they were, passed the school and raced away to whatever crime or car wreck they had been summoned.

  Gilberto drove and Jane sat in the backseat, the better to monitor the unconscious captive lying in the cargo area.

  “I called Carmella,” Gilberto said. “She’s taken the kids to visit her sister in Dana Point. They’ll stay the weekend.”

  “I’m so sorry. This is exactly what I didn’t want—bringing all this right into your home.”

  “Not your fault. What happened happened. There’s no other option that makes sense.”

  “I’m still trying to think of one.”

  They crossed the rutted and weedy football field, circled the farther stack of bleachers, turned left into an alley, and slipped away into the suburban sprawl. For the moment, they had eluded the agents of Utopia who would, without hesitation or remorse, kill them in the name of social progress.

  She could think of no viable option other than the one Gilberto offered her. How strangely apt it was to find herself harried to a mortuary, to seek refuge with the dead, while in her hands she held the life of this man Hendrickson, who had ordered and/or assisted in uncounted murders.

  22

  Sanjay Shukla sat at his computer, in a condition he’d never known before, not merely inspired to write but impelled to write, as though he’d been bitten by some exotic mosquito that carried not any wasting disease, but instead a communicable need to create. No, not just a need. The word need implied a lack of something, a deficiency that he might or might not fill. The extreme urgency with which he was motivated to string together words into sentences allowed no choice between might or might not, but incited him to write as if his very existence depended on the quality of what he created. He was gripped not by the need to write but by the necessity, for there was no alternative to writing. He pounded the keyboard as if fever-driven, raining a tropical storm of words onto the screen, with none of his usual careful crafting.

  He had awakened from a half-remembered dream seething with kaleidoscopic images of menace and horror. He had at once been obsessed with writing a story about a man who’d been obliged to protect an innocent child and failed to do so, by his failure allowing the child to perish. He had no complete story in mind. He knew only that when the child perished, so did all innocence in the world, whereupon civilization fell into a darkness that would never know a dawn.

  The narrative flowed from him without a conventional structure, a stream-of-consciousness rant in the voice of the father who had failed the child. Although Sanjay strove to bring coherence to the story, the English language became a wallow of vexatious snakes that he could not wrangle into a satisfying story. Nevertheless, he wrote at a blistering pace for an hour, two hours, three, until the tips of his fingers were tender from the force with which he’d struck the keys. His neck ached, and a heaviness gathered in his chest as if his heart had swollen with retained blood.

  He stopped typing and sat in bewilderment, for how long he did not know, until he smelled coffee brewing, bacon frying. The aromas stirred him as if from a dream, as if he had never fully awakened when he had gone from his bed to his office chair. He saved what he had writt
en and got up and went into the kitchen.

  At the cooktop, using tongs, Tanuja turned bacon in a frying pan. She looked at him and smiled. “Omelet in the warming drawer. I’ve made enough for two. The toast is about to pop up. Butter it, will you? Plenty of butter on mine.”

  Sanjay meant to say that he was starving, but instead he said, “I’m so empty.”

  If she thought his statement strange, she didn’t remark on it, but said, “We need to eat, that’s all, just eat and get on with it,” which seemed to him nearly as peculiar as the words that he had spoken.

  The toast popped up.

  He buttered it.

  23

  The mortuary cosmetician was at work in the basement. The assistant mortician and his intern had driven the decedent from the previous night’s viewing to the cemetery, where a graveside service would soon be under way. No other viewing had been scheduled until six o’clock this evening. The place was as quiet as a funeral home.

  After stripping off Hendrickson’s suit coat and shoulder rig, they strapped him to a gurney on which cadavers were transported, and they wheeled him through the back entrance, into the vestibule. With Gilberto at the head of the gurney and Jane at the foot, they bumped it up the stairs to the family apartment on the top floor.

  The sleek and airy modern décor was in stark contrast to the ornate moldings, heavy velvet draperies, and neo-Gothic furniture on the ground floor.

  As they wheeled Hendrickson through the living room and along a hallway, Jane said, “What’s it like to live with the dead?”

  “Same as it is for everyone else,” Gilberto replied. “Except we realize we live with them—all of us are the dead in waiting, but most people put it out of their mind.”