The Crooked Staircase, Page 34

  “That’s sad,” the boy said.

  “Not as far as Cornell’s concerned. This is exactly the way he wants things.”

  Although Cornell had no one after his mother died, he’d made no effort to be taken into the fold of his family. Instead, years later, when he was wealthy, he quietly researched his relatives and chose one of them, Gavin, to whom he felt comfortable reaching out.

  Even though the two of them lived but a couple hours from each other, and though Cornell had once suggested that he’d settled here for just that reason, Gavin was welcome to visit no more than once a month.

  He didn’t know why Cornell favored him and no other. If he bluntly asked why, he wouldn’t get an answer. He might even be put on the not-welcome list for his temerity. The only way that Cornell talked about personal matters was at his election and indirectly.

  Gavin put down the windows and switched off the engine and said, “I’ll go in alone and have a little chat with him, see if he wants to say hello.”

  “Does he have cows?” Jessie asked.

  From the backseat, Travis said, “Cows would be cool.”

  Gavin sighed. “The depth of my patience amazes me.”

  He got out of the Land Rover and went to the man-size door in the barn, which was adjacent to the larger double doors that would have admitted a tractor pulling a hay wagon if they had still functioned. He didn’t bother trying the door or knocking. Cornell was alerted electronically the moment any vehicle drove onto his property. And concealed in the knotholes of the weather-grayed siding were cameras by which he was even now studying his visitor, assuming he was here rather than in his bunker.

  Although the door appeared flimsy, with corroded hinges and a simple gravity latch, it was solid and equipped with an electronic lock that Cornell could engage or release from a control panel in the main room. A buzz, a clunk, and the door swung open.

  Gavin stepped into a five-foot-square unfurnished vestibule with white walls. Directly ahead, a metal door. Above the door, a camera.

  The outer door closed. The inner one opened. He stepped into the main room, and the second door swung shut behind him.

  The truth of the building was not the dilapidated barn that enclosed it like a shell. The one and only room, other than the vestibule and a small water closet, was this forty-foot-square space with a twelve-foot ceiling. The barn was anchored to this solidly constructed building that stood within it.

  Here, Cornell passed most days, retreating at night to the bunker, which Gavin had never seen, and to which this place was connected by a hidden underground passageway.

  Bookshelves entirely lined three walls and part of the fourth, almost thirteen hundred linear feet of shelving. There didn’t appear to be room left for a single new volume.

  Along the portion of the fourth wall not devoted to books, there were the door through which Gavin had entered and the door to the water closet, as well as a kitchenette with cupboard, counter space, a double sink, two big refrigerators, two microwaves, and an oven.

  On the concrete floor were four area carpets on which stood an amazing variety of chairs and recliners, no two pieces of the same style or period, in configurations that made sense only to Cornell. Each seating option was served by a matching footstool and a side table with either a lamp or a floor lamp. The light filtered through either stained glass or blown glass, or colored-and-cut crystal, or pleated silk, or treated parchment. Every lamp glowed, so Cornell was able to move, at any moment, from one chair to another and continue reading without interruption. The many lamps cast mostly soft pools of amber or rose light, but also two blue pools and two green, in a large room that remained shadowed in many places.

  Although there was nothing in this windowless space that Gavin had not seen elsewhere and often, the effect was otherworldly, as if this were not a building, but instead a capsule untethered from the known world, adrift in time, where the readers of these books were hobbits or creatures equally quaint. For all its strangeness, the big room was cozy, welcoming, even as it was magical and richly bejeweled by the lamps.

  The one and only reader who ever placed a bookmark between any two of these millions of pages looked entirely human, although his appearance had changed since Gavin’s most recent visit. Cornell Jasperson—six foot nine, more than half a foot taller than his cousin—stood beside a wingback armchair in a circle of four mismatched armchairs that faced one another.

  Milk-chocolate brown rather than black, he was a long-boned knob-jointed scarecrow with enormous hands, whose body suggested menace and a knowledge of violence that qualified him for a role in movies that featured lonely places where the silence of the night was broken by the roar of a chainsaw. His face seemed misplaced on that body: round and smooth and sweet, with dark eyes that radiated intelligence and kindness, a countenance that might have gotten him cast to play Jesus. All of that was Cornell as Gavin had long known him; but never before had the man’s head been as smooth and hairless as an egg.

  Gavin stopped three feet from his kin and neither attempted to hug him nor offered to shake hands. Cornell could tolerate being touched, but the experience always took a toll on him.

  Years earlier, to avoid a lifelong need to see a dentist and be touched by one, Cornell had gone through two lengthy appointments with an understanding periodontist, in the first of which, under anesthesia, he had all his teeth pulled and titanium posts embedded in his jawbones. After a few months of healing, during a subsequent appointment, his new teeth were installed permanently over the titanium posts. Good-bye decay, good-bye gum disease, good-bye regular teeth cleaning.

  “What happened to the dreadlocks?” Gavin asked now.

  Cornell’s voice matched his face, not his body. “In a book I was reading, there was a mention of Mr. Bob Marley being dead.”

  “He’s been dead a long time.”

  “I didn’t know. Convey my condolences to the family, please and thank you. So I would wake up in the middle of the night and think of Mr. Bob Marley lying in a coffin, and it felt like I was wearing a dead man’s hair. So I shaved it off. Does that sound odd to you?”

  “Yes, it does,” Gavin said.

  Cornell nodded. “I thought it would.”

  “You didn’t grow the dreadlocks because of Bob Marley.”

  “No, that’s right, I didn’t.”

  “So you could have kept them.”

  “No, not once I knew he was dead.”

  Cornell had heard only one Bob Marley song and had been badly affected by it. Reggae made him feel as if ants were crawling over every square inch of his body. He listened to orchestral pieces, preferably with a lot of strings, but mostly to “Mr. Paul Simon, whose voice sounds like it belongs to a friend I’ve always known.”

  “Remember I told you the day might come when Jessie and I needed to stay for some time in the little blue house out there?”

  “And I said okay, sure, no skin off my rose.”

  “You did, and I’m grateful for that.”

  Gavin never knew if his cousin’s occasional malapropisms were unintentional or for some reason amused him. Maybe he meant to say nose and it just came out rose. Though there was a twinkle in his eye that suggested he was playing some sly game. Whatever the case, Gavin never corrected him.

  “Well, it’s that time, Cornell, and I need to explain a little, so you’ll have some idea what you’re getting into.”

  “Can we sit down to talk, please and thank you?”

  “Of course.”

  Patting the back of the chair beside which he stood, Cornell said, “This is my chair right now.” He indicated the other three armchairs in the circle. “You can sit in any of those, and if you can’t decide, I can pick one for you.”

  “I’ll take the leather club chair.”

  “That’s a good one. That’s a fine chair.”

 
As he folded into the wingback, Cornell seemed to have extra knee and elbow joints. He interlaced his fingers and propped his hands on his stomach and smiled. “So is it the end of all things come ’round at last, like I told you it would?”

  “Not quite,” Gavin said.

  14

  Because they are busy on one assignment after another in California, Nevada, and Arizona, Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose live for the most part in hotels. They are highly valued by their Arcadian superiors. They are technically if not actually agents of the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and the Environmental Protection Agency, collecting five salaries and accumulating five pensions, with SPECIAL STATUS emblazoned across the top of their various photo IDs. Because of that special status and the fact that their expenses are divided among five agencies—considering also that a cleverly jiggled accounting program channels 30 percent of their combined expenditures onto the books of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, under the heading OFFICE SUPPLIES—they can be confident that the government will pay for transportation, accommodations, dining, and incidentals of the highest quality.

  During the Shukla operation and one that came before it, and now that the Washington matter has been assigned to them, they have two ocean-view rooms at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, which isn’t in Laguna Niguel, as its name would imply, but in Dana Point. Laguna Niguel just sounds classier.

  After the fiasco in the desert, Jergen and Dubose had been airlifted out to Capistrano Beach and driven from there to the hotel. They had gone to bed at 3:30 A.M.

  Exhausted, Jergen intends to sleep at least until noon. His room phone rings at a quarter past seven. When he doesn’t answer it, the smartphone in the charger on the nightstand rings. When he fails to answer that, his room phone rings again—and he ignores it.

  He has almost drifted back into a dream when the room’s ceiling light comes on and Radley Dubose says, “I know you Boston Brahmins need your beauty sleep, but you’re already pretty-boy enough. Get your ass in gear.”

  Jergen sits up in bed. “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “Are you serious? Have you forgotten who we are and what we do? Come on, partner. Every hour we delay, the colder the trail gets.”

  “There is no trail.”

  “There’s always one. We get the Washingtons and the kid, or we have a black mark by our names in the big book of the revolution.”

  “I haven’t showered yet.”

  “You have five minutes.”

  “I can’t shower in five minutes.”

  “Then I’ll carry you into the bathroom, turn on the water, and soap you down myself.”

  Throwing back the covers, getting out of bed, Jergen says, “You’re just asshole enough to do it.”

  “I’m more than asshole enough. Hey, fancy pajamas.”

  “Stuff a sock in it.”

  “Four minutes,” says Dubose.

  15

  In the club chair, enveloped by rose-colored light, Gavin noticed a hardcover copy of Black Orchids, a Nero Wolfe mystery by Rex Stout. There seemed to be a different Nero Wolfe novel on each table in the circle of armchairs, each with a bookmark inserted one place or another.

  Seeing his cousin’s interest, Cornell said, “I recently read the works of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. I needed relief. Have you read the Nero Wolfe mysteries?”

  “I’ve not had the chance, I’m afraid,” Gavin said.

  “I’ve read all the Nero Wolfes before,” said Cornell, “but they bear rereading. Immanuel Kant—not so much.”

  Having made his fortune and been terrified by the size of it and the ease with which it had been earned, being himself disengaged from life as most people knew it, Cornell had decided to spend his remaining years—whether or not the world ended—reading about life as others had written of it.

  “Do you still avoid the news?” Gavin asked.

  “No newspaper, no magazines, no radio. The one TV, and I only turn it on for a minute every day, just to see if transmissions are still occurring. If they are, the end times have not arrived—though what little glimpses I get of the current programs assure me that my prediction of societal collapse is correct. I’m prepared to wait out thirty months of barbarism between civilizations.”

  Like the small blue house at the front of the property, the big room inside the barn and the underground bunker were connected to the public power supply. If society collapsed as Cornell anticipated, he could switch to a generator housed in a subterranean vault and powered by propane drawn from an immense tank buried nearby. According to his calculations, there was enough propane to operate the bunker and the barn for fourteen months, because both were so well insulated that they needed little heating or cooling; if he retreated to the bunker and didn’t use the barn room, he could ride out a crisis lasting thirty months.

  “I estimate,” he said, as he’d said before, “there’s a forty-six percent chance a new society will arise from the disintegration of the current one. But if after thirty months the public utilities aren’t operative, they won’t be restored in my lifetime, if ever.”

  “Then what?” Gavin asked, as he had asked before.

  “Then the inevitable,” said Cornell, as he always said. He smiled. “So you’re coming to stay in my little blue house.”

  “You need to understand the risk of taking us in.”

  “The coming collapse is the ultimate risk.”

  “Nevertheless, you need to know a few things. Jessie and I did a favor for a friend who’s wanted by the FBI.”

  “A criminal?”

  “A righteous fugitive. She—”

  Cornell raised one hand to stop Gavin. “Give me a thumbsnail version, please and thank you. After the Nero Wolfe stories, I want to read everything written by Mr. Henry James. I liked The Turn of the Screw—very turny, very screwy—and he was a busy, busy author. He published more than a hundred twenty books in his lifetime, far more than you.”

  “Thumbsnail, then, it is,” Gavin said. “Our friend is wanted by the FBI and some really bad people. She’s a widow—”

  “Convey my condolences, please and thank you.”

  “I will,” Gavin promised. “Anyway, she’s afraid the people who want to kill her would also kill her son. So she hid him with us.”

  “I would feel safe to be hidden with you,” Cornell said, “but I feel even safer in my bunker, no offense intended.”

  “None taken. Anyway, the worst happened, and some people came after us, and last night we got out of the house just in time, went overland, and lost them. Now we’ve got to lie low.”

  “I know about lying low. Sometimes people have to lie low in the Nero Wolfe stories, also in those of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and even in those of Mr. Charles Dickens. I think in particular of the escaped prisoner, Magwitch, at the beginning of Great Expectations.”

  Gavin leaned forward in his chair. “This is real life now, Cornell. Real bad people, a real threat, not a story by Dickens or Dashiell Hammett.”

  “There’s no meaningful difference, cousin. I think Plato might agree. Except he’s dead. My condolences. When I return to reading fiction, which I hope to do in just a minute or two—please and thank you—it is my real life. Now you stay in my little blue house and lie low and don’t worry about me.”

  He accordioned up from his chair, all the pleats of his long legs and arms opening out, drawing in a deep breath in the rising, as if he might issue a squeeze-box sound. But he only sighed and said, “You already have the key to the house.”

  “Yes. Thank you, Cornell.”

  “Say no more. Say no more.” He put his large hands over his ears. “Say no more.”

  16

  They take breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, which is bright and airy and elegantly appointed. The U-shaped booth is large enou
gh for six, and Dubose sits at the deepest point of it, his back to the wall, so that no one—not even the waitress—can see the screen of his laptop.

  The computer on the table offends Carter Jergen, but he doesn’t complain. If he speaks up every time Dubose does something uncouth or vulgar, he will have laryngitis by noon.

  As he enjoys a bowl of mixed berries in clotted cream with brown sugar, Jergen considers the mystery, not for the first time, of why his and Dubose’s partnership is so successful. They rarely experience a debacle like that of the previous night. Regardless of the intensity or duration of his deliberations on this issue, Jergen arrives always at the same conclusion, as he does now again: The very fact that he and Dubose have little in common is a considerable advantage. Just as opposites attract each other into marriage, so opposites when paired as agents, with a license to kill and worse, can each bring a unique perspective to any case.

  The problem with this explanation is that from it one must infer that, separately, each of them is in some sense an incomplete or at least unfinished person. Carter Jergen believes himself to be complete, finished, as well rounded as a droplet of water floating in a zero-gravity environment. In fact, he knows that he is both complete and complex. Yet no other explanation occurs to him….

  Using the rootkits that the NSA has secretly installed in the computer networks of the major banks with which Gavin and Jessica Washington have credit cards, Dubose checks to see if they have charged anything since the unfortunate episode the previous night. They’re probably too smart to make such an error, but sometimes bright and savvy people do dumb things.

  While he works on the laptop, Radley Dubose eats bacon with his fingers. He smacks his lips as if the fullest enjoyment of the meat requires loud gustatory noises. Occasionally, he pauses between one slice of bacon and the next to suck on the thumb and forefinger with which he held the meat to ensure that no dab of grease will escape his consumption.