The Crooked Staircase, Page 23

  She turns to him again. “How much do you pay the coiffeuse to cut your hair?”

  She wishes to define him as a shallow elitist, and he refuses to be that person, for he is not that person, not of that class, not of her class, either, not of any class, above all concepts of class, caste, and echelon. He says nothing.

  In an instant, she goes from ice to fire, her face contorted by rage and flushed with hatred. With sudden fury she snarls, “What do you pay for a haircut, asshole?” As she speaks, her right hand arcs high and then down, driving the scissors into the two-inch-thick vinyl-covered mattress, so close to his face that he startles in spite of himself. Vinyl and dense-foam padding split as flesh might, and the points of the blades rap against the steel substrate as if against bone.

  She wants him to believe that the death of her husband and the peril in which her child lives and these long months on the run have driven her to the edge of sanity, that she might snap, butchering him before she quite realizes what she’s done. But he knows her too well to be conned by this performance. He has reviewed in detail the cases she solved while an agent of the FBI—a record of brilliant deduction, wise strategies, and smart techniques. For months, she has eluded capture even though the combined resources of federal, state, and local law enforcement have been committed to the search for her. Her sanity is a stone that can’t be cracked.

  Nevertheless, as the scissors flash past his face and gouge the mattress, he glances at the iPhone, attempting by an act of sheer willpower to summon the SWAT teams that surely must be en route.

  She leans toward him, her rage gone as abruptly as it came, her unblemished face serene and exquisitely erotic in its serenity. Her lips are eight or ten inches from his when she presses the closed blades of the scissors against the lower lid of his left eye. The steel is cold and the point pricking.

  In almost a whisper, she says, “Do you know why I put the phone on the table, Boo? Hmmm? To give you hope. So that when you hoped, I could take your hope away from you. Like you’ve taken hope from so many people. I hammered a screwdriver blade into the charging port of that phone, Boo. Split the battery. No juice. No locater signal. No one’s tracking it. No one’s coming to save you.”

  Her eyes are at least three shades of blue alternating in the striations of the irises, those thin circular layers of muscle like the folds of Japanese fans, the kitchen fluorescents treating each grade of pigment differently, so that her stare seems radiant not by reflection, but because of some internal light. Her pupils are black holes, their gravity alarming.

  She still speaks softly, but now as tenderly as a lover. “Tell me, Booth, what else must I take away from you in order to make you talk? Your eyes—so you can see no evil? What a terrible, terrible loss, considering the delight you take in seeing the evil you do.”

  She moved the scissors to his lips.

  “Your lying tongue? Then you’d have to answer all my questions in writing while swallowing so much blood.”

  She takes the scissors away from his lips but doesn’t press them to another part of him. Instead, she startles him by reaching back with her left hand and caressing his crotch, fondling his package through his suit pants.

  “Do you go to Aspasia, Booth?”

  The elegant and highly secret houses of pleasure, reserved for the wealthiest supporters of the Techno Arcadian mission, are called Aspasia, named after the mistress of Pericles, the famous statesman and mayor of Athens, circa 400 B.C. Booth is disquieted to learn that she knows about Aspasia, as closely guarded a secret as any the Arcadians keep.

  “There are four of them,” she whispers. “Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington. Have you tried them all, Booth? I’ve spent a little time touring the Aspasia in Los Angeles.”

  The revelation that she has been in one of these highly secure palaces of Eros alarms him, and he tells himself that she is lying.

  “The twin colonnades of magnificent phoenix palms that flank the long driveway,” she says, “the courtyard with its swimming pool as big as a lake. Tens of millions of dollars of art and antiques. So much marble and granite and gilding. It’s all so classy that dirty little perpetual adolescents can go there and feel like big important men.”

  She is not lying. She has been to Aspasia. The truth of her mood is not in the softness with which she speaks and the tenderness with which she teases him through his pants; the truth is in her stare, her eyes now radiant with fury. What she saw at Aspasia has not merely outraged her; she clearly found it an abomination, for she is filled now with loathing, and the light in her eyes is the light of abhorrence.

  “One of the girls in Aspasia is a gorgeous Eurasian, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Her name is LuLing. Well, you know, that’s her whore name, given to her. She doesn’t remember her real name or what she once was, doesn’t remember her family, nothing of her past. She doesn’t even possess the concept of a past or a future. All that and more has been scrubbed from her mind. She lives only in the moment, Boo. Smiling and attentive, without any inhibitions. You might call her a blithe spirit if there was any spirit left in her. She lives only to submit to those who use her, to satisfy their every desire. Cool, huh? Just thinking about it should fill out the pouch in your briefs, Boo.”

  He dares not speak. He believes now that he has misjudged her capacity for…cruelty.

  Her soft voice fades to a breathless whisper. “Do you have extreme desires, Booth? Do you like rough sex? Rougher than rough? Do you like to hear them cry?”

  Bravado and ostentatious assertion of his superiority have in the past always gotten Booth through tight passages. His mind races now as he considers what to say and do.

  Her face six inches from his. Her hand still moving sensuously over the crotch of his pants. Her warm breath on his face. “Mama’s boy is terrified of me, isn’t he? If he wasn’t, there’d be at least some stiffening of his little man, but there’s none at all. Terror is a good thing if it makes you face the truth. Agree to tell me everything I want to know about the Arcadians, because if you don’t, not even your mind is dark enough to imagine what I’ll do to you.”

  If he rats out the Arcadians, they will surely torture and kill him as a turncoat. His fellow conspirators are infinitely more bloody-minded than this bitch, who is still more of a straight arrow than not. In the past few months, she’s given him lots of headaches, some of them as fierce as migraines. Maybe she’s capable of greater cruelty than he thought, but she will not—unlike certain of his associates—cut out his tongue or cut off his balls. She terrifies him, yes, but bravado and reliance on his superiority are, now as always, his best hope.

  Fear has flooded his mouth with saliva, and he puts it to good use, spitting copiously in her face from a distance of six inches.

  He expects her contained fury to erupt, expects to be slapped and clawed, but her face is still serene, and she doesn’t touch him.

  She remains bent over him for a moment and then slowly rises to her full height. She stands in silence, staring down at him without expression.

  Perhaps a minute passes, during which she does not wipe her face. Pearls of spittle glimmer on her cheeks, her chin, and a slimy silvery string depends from the tip of her perfect nose.

  She turns away from him and goes to the sink, but she doesn’t pull a paper towel from the holder and blot herself or turn on the water. She stares out the window.

  Her reaction is so unexpected that Booth’s dread grows with the continued silence. He is reluctant to look away from her, but then he rolls his head to the right on the gurney and regards the thug in the black suit, who stares back with eyes as black as those holes in desert sand from which tarantulas burst forth.

  Jane Hawk turns from the sink and says to her companion, “I’m going to use the bathroom. Quiet him for me while I’m gone.”

  “Chloroform?” he asks.

  “No. Gag him. Tape hi
m.”

  She doesn’t look at Booth again but walks out of the kitchen, his spittle still wet upon her face.

  Her words replay in Booth’s memory. Not even your mind is dark enough to imagine what I’ll do to you.

  26

  In her office, Tanuja Shukla sat at the computer, moving her lonely character, Subhadra, through a night of wind and rain, on a journey ominous and mysterious but ultimately magical. The sentences failed to form with the usual felicity, but there was satisfaction in the struggle.

  Her smartphone ringtone was a few bars of “What a Wonderful World.” She smiled and let the music repeat, as she usually did, while she sang, “I see skies of blue and clouds of white.” Then she answered it.

  A vaguely familiar man’s voice said, “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”

  “Yes, all right,” Tanuja said.

  She listened to what must happen that evening, and she said she understood, that she would act according to instructions.

  After he was finished, the caller said, “Auf Wiedersehen, sweet lips.”

  “Good-bye,” she said and put aside her phone and returned to the novelette in progress.

  After a moment, she sang, “I see trees of green and red roses, too,” as she reached for the phone. But the music did not repeat. No call was incoming. Either the caller had let it ring once before hanging up or Tanuja had imagined the ringtone.

  She stared at the phone in puzzlement for a moment. Then she shrugged and returned to her story about Subhadra in the storm.

  Now and then, she absentmindedly touched the wounded corner of her mouth, but the bleeding had stopped hours ago, and her fingers always came away dry.

  27

  In the half bath, at the sink, Jane washed her face with soap and water and rinsed it and dried with a guest towel.

  She leaned against the vanity, staring into the mirror, into her eyes, which lately seemed alien to her, and she wondered if she could really do what she intended to do.

  Even as a young girl, she had never spent a lot of time gazing into mirrors. She could see too much of her mother in her face, so that her reflection was a reminder of grievous loss. Not least of all, the image in the looking glass reminded her of the confusion and self-doubt and fear and cowardice that had paralyzed her when, as a nine-year-old child, she hadn’t been able to accuse her father of murdering her mother, though she’d had good reason to believe—no, she had known—that he’d killed her and staged it as a suicide. We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.

  The problem this time was not cowardice. No courage was needed to do to Booth Hendrickson what she intended. Instead, ruthlessness was required. She needed a hardened heart, if not hardened to all the world, at least to those who lacked the ability to see their own humanity in others, who preyed on others, who recognized no right to life except their own, for whom power was no less essential than air and water. The world had always been acrawl with their squamous kind in nuisance numbers, but these days they flourished as never before, after centuries of compounding technological advances had put into their hands more power than kings of old had dreamed, power that should be entrusted only to benign gods.

  She could not interrogate Hendrickson using the techniques she had found successful with other subjects. His arrogance was both a suit of armor and a fortress. The deepest roots of his psychology, like those of his brother, were snarled in a Gordian knot first tied in his earliest childhood and elaborated on since then; the man now in his forties might appear to be a mighty oak, but he was rotten at the core, all his limbs and branches deformed—and leafless, if it could be said that leaves were a sign of health. He was maze of deception, a primal forest of deceit, and she could trust the answers he gave her only at considerable peril.

  With such a man, she had no choice but to be extraordinarily cruel. Of course, uncountable psychopaths resorted to that same rationalization.

  She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind her son as she had last seen him: in the ranch-fenced exercise yard adjacent to the stable at Gavin and Jessica Washington’s place, where he was hidden away and safe; dappled by sunlight and oak-leaf shadows; standing on a low stool, grooming the mane of the Exmoor pony named Hannah that Gavin and Jessie had recently bought for him; his hair dark and tousled, like his father’s, and stirring in the light breeze; his eyes the blue of hers, although clear with an innocence that she had lost long ago.

  In the past, at the end of each of her infrequent visits, he had walked with her to her car and watched as she had driven away. But he could no longer bear parting in that manner. On this most recent occasion, soon after Jane’s arrival, he’d made it known, through Jessica, that when the time came for his mother to leave, she should just pretend that she was going out to sit on the porch or into the next room to read, something like that, without saying the word good-bye.

  And so she had stood for a while, watching him groom Hannah, talking about how quickly he was becoming a confident rider under Gavin’s tutelage, about how smart Hannah was and about how much the pony enjoyed the company of the German shepherds, Duke and Queenie. As always, a moment came when the deep-heart sorrow of leaving him seemed to double in weight each minute she delayed, so that if she didn’t go right then, she would never go. But she had learned too many secrets, done too much harm to too many people whose wealth and power were exceeded by their arrogance and by their cherished and implacable malignity. If she walked away from this grim fight, her enemies would never stop hunting for her, and they would eventually find her. Finding her, they would also find him. No foreign country was far enough away, no lifestyle too humble, no false identities too cleverly woven to thwart them in their search, not when they had numerous eyes in the heavens, maybe a hundred million cameras here below, and the growing Internet of Things that would one day give them undetected access to every room on earth. And so…and so she kissed Travis’s cheek as he stood grooming Hannah, and she said that she was going for a walk, and she went into the house by the back door and out the front door and to her car and away, the road before her blurred and darkling as if storm-swept, though the day was blue and bright.

  Now, in the Mendez family’s half bath, she regarded her mirror image and knew that, without doubt, she would be able to commit the horror she had been contemplating. In the defense of the innocent—not just her son, but also the uncounted others whose souls had been or would be harvested by the Arcadians—she would incur no mortal stain requiring that she stand before the judgment of eternity.

  However, she would be a fool if she believed that the act she was about to commit would not haunt her for the rest of her life. And she was no fool.

  28

  In this season, the cooler mornings were for horses, and like other mornings with horses, this last Saturday in March provided idyllic hours of peaceful rhythms, simple nature scenes, and graces abundant, with no jarring note or alarming turn until they stopped for a creekside lunch in the shade of cottonwoods.

  Saturday morning, little more than an hour after first light, Gavin Washington had saddled the stallion, Samson, and young Travis had sat smart upon the pony, Hannah, and together they had ridden into the eastern hills of Orange County, where the chaparral was green from all the recent rain. There were still a few clouds in the wake of the previous night’s storm, but they were unraveling like cocoon silk, as if the sky were some great blue-winged wonder that had emerged from them.

  They didn’t talk much when they rode, because horses were a kind of meditation, which Gavin had long appreciated and which the boy was learning. For a while they proceeded at a slow walk, with just the clop of hooves, the rattle of dislodged gravelstones, the creaking of the leather saddles, and the occasional whispering of a fitful breeze through sage and feather grass
, Avena and long-stemmed buckwheat. Rabbits startled off the trail into the brush, and lizards watched wall-eyed from perches on sun-warmed rock.

  They picked up the pace to a full walk when they turned north to put the morning sun on their right, but Gavin was not yet ready to let the boy ride at a trot except in the fenced exercise yard on their property.

  High overhead, red-tailed hawks were gliding on the rising thermals, hunting mice and like creatures condemned to the rough life of the land-bound. The aerial ballet of those predators could be mesmerizing, and Gavin warned Travis to give equal attention to the trail ahead. Although west-leaning shadows of brush and rock still patterned the ground, the day was now warm enough for rattlesnakes.

  They turned into an eastward-leading canyon, the walls of which sloped gently to a creek too swollen with recent rains to allow Travis to attempt his first fording. But the gentle grade of the ascending canyon floor offered an easy trail, and on their left, the ceaseless slide of surprisingly clear sun-spangled water over smooth stones was pleasing to both the eye and ear.

  Past eleven o’clock, they came to an open grove of cottonwoods and dismounted and walked the horses to the creek and held the reins while Samson and Hannah drank, for the water was clean enough to give Gavin no reason for concern. There had been so much rain this season that the earliest storms had washed the stony creek bed clean of silt and debris.

  They let the horses graze the sweet grass that flourished in the open grove and beyond, perhaps not just because of the seasonal rains but because of some aquifer under the canyon floor. They put down a blanket and sat in the shade to eat chicken sandwiches and drink iced tea from thermos bottles.

  “Aunt Jessie does good sandwiches,” the boy said.

  “The entire reason I married her,” Gavin said, “was her sandwiches, her homemade ravioli, and her peach pie.”