Relentless (23 page)

Their official address was the small combination office and apartment in Anaheim, where a secretary who resembled the actress Judi Dench screened job offers to be sure the people who wanted a building blown up had both the authority and a legitimate reason to contract for the demolition.

Here in the canyon, they never spoke to their neighbors, which was no loss, considering that the nearest were at a distance and were an uncommunicative couple who, believing they had been twice taken against their will into spacecraft from a distant star, were hiding out from evil extraterrestrials.

Although they lived largely above ground, Grimbald and Clotilda went subterranean two or three days every month—what they called “in lockdown”—to stay in practice for the End of Days.

Because they seemed always to be finding excuses to go into emergency lockdowns in addition to the regularly scheduled ones—a scary declaration by the insane leader of Iran, a scary declaration by the benighted leader of the United States, and in this instance the destruction of our house—I suspected they preferred the bunker to the sunlit world but would feel
too
eccentric if they admitted it.

The main chamber, a combination living room and kitchen, offered armchairs, a sofa, wonderful stained-glass lamps, fantasy art that Penny—a homeschooled girl herself—had drawn as a teenager, and a sturdy knotty-pine dining table.

Their stronghold enjoyed an effective exhaust system that could separate a single source of smoke into seven wispy streams, dispersing
them to different corners of the woods above, to avoid detection by roving bands of post-catastrophe barbarians or genetic-plague zombies, or whatever hellish beings might one day stalk the ruins of the world.

Consequently, Clotilda had the convenience of a wood-burning stove, on which she was cooking when we arrived. The fragrant air smelled of home fries, onions, and pot roast.

“Cupcake!” Grim called to her. “I didn’t have to kill anyone, it was really the kids ringing the bell.”

Clotilda Boom—born Nancy, maiden name Farnham—was an Amazon: six feet three, broad shoulders, full bosom, strong arms, a spine as straight as a plumb line. Her thick mane of midnight hair, without a touch of gray, usually lay in intricate braids down her back, but now hung loose, great black curtains billowing around a striking face surprisingly beautiful considering that her features were bold enough for an Eskimo totem pole or the prow of a Viking longboat.

She wore laced boots that probably went to her knees, a long skirt of coarse gray material, a belt with a fang-bared serpent’s head for a buckle, a man’s blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a silver pendant, an amulet in which she kept a lock of hair from the mane of a horse that had trampled to death a man who had tried but failed to rape her when she was fourteen.

Turning away from the stove, her face bright with sweat and with happiness at the sight of us, Clotilda said, “I
knew
you would come tonight when I saw the strange vein patterns in one of the basil leaves I put in the soup this afternoon.”

I’ve known Clotilda for a decade, yet I can’t say with certitude if her claim to the perceptions of a Gypsy seer is serious or tongue-in-cheek. Penny, who has known her mother longer than she has known
anyone
, is likewise unsure, which argues that Clo is playing a sly game, testing our gullibility, tolerance, and commitment to reason.

The name Clotilda comes from the Old German word that means “renowned in battle.”

Clo threw her arms around Penny, lifted her off the floor, and kissed her two, three, four times. “Punkin’, you’re a slip of a thing, you aren’t eating, you’re going to wither away.”

“I eat well, Mom,” Penny assured her, waiting to be put down.

“You’ve gone off meat!” Clo declared. “Oh, girl, you’ve become a grazer!”

“No, Mom. I could never do that.”

“Vegetarianism kills,” Clo warned. “Your vital organs shrivel, your brain dims. Look in a mirror at your teeth. You have central incisors, lateral incisors, canines—all for the purpose of chewing meat. Vegetarianism is unnatural, it’s not right, it’s
creepy
.”

“I eat plenty of meat,” Penny assured her. “I eat it every chance I get. I
live
for meat.”

“Eating it often isn’t enough if you’re eating small portions,” Clo said, finally returning my wife to her feet.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Grimbald and Clotilda produced a daughter as petite, lithe, and comparatively demure as Penny. Two of the three proofs that she is their offspring—her hair as black as Clotilda’s, her blue eyes the same shade as Grimbald’s—do not convince. For me, the case is made by the fact that, in spite of her size, Penny is as tough and just as indomitable as the Booms.

Clotilda came to me as if she were a Valkyrie swooping down on a dying warrior to take possession of his soul, and I half feared she would sweep me off the floor and hold me in the crook of her arm.

She kissed my cheek. “Seeing you lifts my heart, Hildebrand.”

“Likewise, Nancy.”

“Ah, yes, yes, I forgot—you prefer Cubby.”

“Since it’s my name. You look wonderful, Clotilda.”

“Every night before going to bed, I put a small silk bag full of thyme leaves under my pillow. You look very fit yourself.”

To please her and forestall a lecture, I said, “I ate the better part of a cow last month.”

“There is no
lesser
part of a cow. They are entirely delicious.”

Turning from me, she descended upon Milo and clasped his head with both hands. Speaking in Gaelic between kisses, she smooched his brow, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks, each corner of his mouth, his chin. I believe it was some kind of blessing.

Next she plucked Lassie from the boy’s embrace. Holding the dog at arm’s length, laughing with delight, she turned rapidly in circles, her skirt flaring.

Were I to do anything of that kind, Lassie would either whimper with fear or bare her teeth and growl me to a stop. In Clotilda’s hands, she grinned not with anxiety but with obvious pleasure, and her tail wagged, wagged, wagged.

Put on the floor, the dog tottered dizzily, but Clo remained in full control of herself and rushed back to the woodstove to tend to her cooking before anything burned.

“You’ll stay for dinner,” Grimbald declared.

Before we could reply, Clo said, “They already had dinner. I saw it in the basil leaf.”

“Then while we’re having dinner,” Grimbald said, “you’ll tell us more about the house blowing up, what you know of the method, how it looked as it fell, the debris pattern.”

“They came for guns,” Clo told him.

“Did you see that in the basil leaf?” I asked.

Pointing to the stone floor, Penny said, “I think she’ll tell you that she read the pattern of the water drops that fell from Milo’s raincoat.”

“Exactly right, dear,” said Clotilda, pointing a wooden spatula at
her for emphasis.
“So
—you finally admit I have at least a little of the soothsayer’s gift.”

“What you have, Mom, is a gift for drama, for being enigmatical, and for caring.”

“My daughter the skeptic. But I love you, too, dear.”

At last putting down Milo, dropping to one knee, and helping the boy out of his raincoat, Grim said, “Guns? But I thought, Cub, you were against guns.”

“I’m not against them for other people, Grim. But for me … I’ve just always had an aversion to them.”

“And now?”

“I’m getting over it.”

   From the main room of the stronghold, on your way to the armory, you pass through Penny’s old bedroom. For fifteen years, since she moved out, her folks have left it exactly as it was throughout her childhood and most of her teen years, when she spent the monthly lockdowns underground with them.

Partly for sentimental reasons, they have not expanded the armory into her old quarters. They also hope that Penny and I will recognize the signs of impending Armageddon and will join them in this citadel of survivalism before a politician or a mad mullah, or a crazed dictator, or a group of angry utopians, or just the grinding work of the federal bureaucracy destroys civilization.

I don’t rule out the possibility of one day taking shelter with them. Before I move in, however, I will
insist
that they remove from Penny’s room the poster of Jon Bon Jovi naked to the waist, as I do not want to remind her that she has settled for much less than her teenage dreams.

The armory is next to the last major room in their subterranean complex. It contains a breathtaking array of weapons, as well as a supply of ammunition that would have lasted the defenders of the Alamo at least five years.

Of course, back when Penny was Brunhild, she was raised with guns. Although she had thus far deferred to my disinclination to own one, since our marriage she accompanied her parents twice a year to a shooting range, where they kept their marksmanship sharp.

I would have preferred to stay in the kitchen with Clotilda and Milo. But in defense of my family, if I truly did intend to overcome my aversion to firearms, I would have to look at one and even touch one sooner or later.

Penny and her father engaged in such technical discussions of the choices of weaponry available to us that although I tried hard to listen to them and to learn, I finally could make no more sense of their conversation than I could of the Gaelic with which Clotilda had blessed my son. Soon they managed to do what I would have thought impossible: They made guns seem less scary than boring.

I wandered out of the armory, into the final and largest chamber in the stronghold. Here lay the proof, if I had needed it, that Grim and Clo were not insane, that they were no worse than eccentric to the max.

Their survivalism was not just about the preservation of their lives in the event of universal destruction. They hoped as well to preserve the fundamental works of Western thought and art that had given the world—for a while—the only societies that believed every individual was born with a dignity and a God-given right to freedom that no one had the authority to deny or to abridge.

Books.

The classic works of Greek philosophy: Aristophanes … Aristotle, Plato …

The plays of Euripides. Plutarch on the lives of legendary and real Grecians and Romans. Herodotus on ancient history. Hippocrates on medicine. Euclid and Archimedes on geometry and math.

The masterpieces of the Middle Ages: Dante … Chaucer … Saint Thomas Aquinas …

From Shakespeare to Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
, from Dickens to Dostoyevsky …

Of works published in the twentieth century, which produced more books than any other, they preserved fewer than a hundred titles. Conrad, bridging centuries with
Heart of Darkness
. Bellow … Churchill … Orwell … O’Connor … Pasternak … Waugh …

They kept three copies of each book. Two were carefully vacuum-sealed in plastic, using a kitchen appliance designed to package leftovers for the freezer, but the third copy remained accessible for their use.

I am led to believe that the rumored other family strongholds have libraries of their own, that perhaps some have collections of reproductions of the great art produced before the decline of the West, when the purposes of art were celebration and reflection instead of transgression and negation.

There are times when even extreme eccentricity is not abnormal but merely irregular, and there are even times when it is wisdom. All that seemed obsessive about the Booms’ stronghold might on reconsideration be seen as prudent, and all that appeared selfish might be noble.

When I returned to the armory, Penny and Grimbald were closing a pair of metal attaché cases that contained the weapons and the ammunition that they had chosen for us.

Handing one of the cases to me, Grim said, “Penny can teach you gun safety and how to shoot. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say she was Annie Oakley in a previous life.”

My wife, the adorable gun nut.

Grim snapped thumb and middle finger. “Oh, right! And I’ve got those items Milo called me about.”

For a disconcerting moment, I thought he meant that our boy had requested weapons of his own.

“No, no,” said Grimbald. “A month ago he called me with a list of electronic items and highly specialized microchips.”

“But I always get him what he wants.”

Turning from us and lumbering deeper into the armory, like Thor trying to remember where he stored his latest batch of thunderbolts, Grim said, “Oh, you could never have gotten these things. They’re embargoed.”

“Embargoed by whom?”

“Government.” He withdrew a small suitcase from a cabinet. “You have to have contacts in the black market.”

“Why?”

Returning with the suitcase, Grimbald grinned and winked. “Well, let’s just say these items have … military applications.”

Penny and I exchanged ten thousand words of concern in just a glance.

Grimbald wondered, “What’s the nipper up to, anyway?”

“Something very different from an interstellar communications device,” I said. “That’s all we know.”

“He’s going to do something spectacular one day,” Grimbald declared.