Relentless (40 page)

Quite reasonably, I explained my position to her: “To avoid any unpleasant surprises, I’d just like to know if the saltshakers will send me to Mars or turn me into a wolf, or throw me into a parallel dimension
where dinosaurs still rule the earth. I’m not asking the hour of my death or whether I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a people-of-the-red-arms prison, I don’t want information that would make living unbearable. I just want to know what the saltshakers will do.”

Penny Boom said, “Let it go.”

“It’s defensive knowledge. It’s like, what if you were walking around with a butane lighter in your pocket, and you didn’t know what it was, you thought maybe it was a breath freshener, so you stuck it in your mouth to get a squirt of mint, and you clicked it, and you set your tongue on fire.”

“Let it go.”

“Milo,” I said.

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Will the saltshaker send me to Mars?”

“It’s not a saltshaker anymore.”

“Whatever it is, will it send me to Mars?”

“No, that’s not possible.”

“Will it turn me into a wolf?”

“That’s kind of a silly question.”

“But will it turn me into a wolf?”

“Of course not.”

“Will it throw me into a parallel dimension where dinosaurs still rule the earth?”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Dad, but that’s stupid. Won’t happen even with the pepper shakers.”

“You’ve got pepper shakers, too?”

“Let it go,” said Penny.

“Let’s stay with the saltshakers, Spooky.”

“That’s all we’ve got,” he said, “except they aren’t saltshakers anymore, like I keep saying.”

“What are they supposed to do?”

“You mean when they were saltshakers or now?”

“Now. What will they do now?”

“This thing that’s like nothing anyone would think could happen. You have to experience it to understand.”

Penny said, “Cubby, if you don’t let it go, I’m going to start screaming.”

“You won’t start screaming,” I said.

“Yes, I will, and I’ll want to stop, I really will want to stop, but I won’t be able to stop, I’ll scream insane things like ‘butane breath freshener,’ all day, all night, and then what are you going to do with me, are you going to take me back to Titus Springs and ask Frank the hardware guy’s geeky nephew to lock me in his basement?”

Suddenly it seemed to me that I had been hectoring Milo and Penny much as Hud Jacklight often hectored me.

Mortified, I said, “You’re right.”

She regarded me with suspicion.

“No,” I said, “you are, you’re right. Sometimes it’s best to just let it go. We’ve been through a lot today, and it’s not over yet. We still have to deal with Waxx, and that’s enough. Dealing with Waxx is all by itself too much.”

In the backseat, Lassie yawned loudly, and Milo said, “Dad, it’s just that if I tried to explain the science, it would sound like gobbledygook to you.”

“I’ve let it go, Milo.”

“If it makes you feel better, Dad, I can guarantee you the saltshaker won’t set your tongue on fire.”

“That’s good to know, son.”

“It won’t freshen your breath, either.”

As we were entering the Los Angeles area, the day wanted to move on toward Japan, and I let it go.

A short while later, the twilight wanted to follow the day, and I let it go.

Letting go of things greatly relaxed me. I felt that at last I was making progress and that one day I would be the same Cubby that I had always been, would hold fast to my best qualities, but would have become a Cubby who could let things go.

We were now drawing very close to the moment when one of the three of us would be shot dead, whereafter life would never be the same.

   The Shearman Waxx house looked exactly like it did on Google Earth: cream-colored walls, terra-cotta window surrounds, a handsome Spanish Mediterranean residence set behind forty-foot magnolias that canopied the front yard. At night, romantic landscape lighting made the place magical.

Larger than expected, set on a markedly more expansive property than was customary in crowded Laguna Beach, the Waxx residence suggested an owner who possessed wealth and power. Neither Penny nor I had the stomach to torture information out of Waxx. Here, more than anywhere else, we might find files and other records regarding his mission and the group symbolized by the triskelion.

At some point during the day, Waxx would surely have been missed and a search for him undertaken by his colleagues. But they would be expecting to find him somewhere in that northern county and would not imagine that he’d been kidnapped and taken home in a marathon twelve-hour drive.

Nevertheless, we cruised by the house a few times, looking for the trouble that might be looking for us. All seemed calm.

No lights shone at any of the windows.

Using the fob on his key ring, I opened one of the doors at the pair of double garages, and Penny drove the Hummer inside. I put the door down.

Having expected a security alarm to be triggered when we drove into the garage, I was ready to let myself quickly into the house with Waxx’s keys and enter the disarming code that we had found in his wallet. But no alarm sounded.

The three of us, with dog, stood in the garage for a minute, very still, listening, waiting for someone to appear. No one came.

Waxx remained unconscious in his chains, and we decided to leave him in the Hummer while we completed a tour of the house. Once we had found his files or evidence of a safe, we might need to scare a few answers out of him.

I unlocked the door between garage and house. Penny and I, guns drawn, shepherded Milo along a hallway into a kitchen. We turned on lights as we went.

Evidently designed for frequent use by caterers, the enormous kitchen was not just industrial but also off-putting. The appliances were all stainless steel, as were the counters and the backsplashes and the cabinets. The autopsy theater in a morgue was not as cold-looking as this kitchen.

In room after room, the furniture was stark, the upholstery all in shades of black and silver, the carpets gray, and the artwork so modern that it appeared to have been painted by machines.

We entered a large room that lacked furniture and art. The black-granite floor, gray walls, and indirect cove lighting most likely had been intended to convey a serene mood, but instead the decor made me feel empty. If you were disposed to despair, this place would induce it in but a minute.

As if meditating or in communion with the darkness until we turned on the lights, the woman in Shearman Waxx’s wallet photos stood in the center of the room.

She was older than in the latest photo, at least in her mid-seventies. She remained a handsome woman, although thinner than I had imagined, tall and storklike.

Wearing a well-tailored suit—long black skirt, gray jacket, gray blouse—and a simple but stunning diamond necklace, she took pride in her appearance.

If her eyes had not been open and so watchful, I would have thought she was a mummified corpse, preserved with painstaking care.

“What have you done with my Shearman?” she asked, and her voice was strong, commanding, her diction clipped.

“He’s sedated, chained in a Hummer in the garage,” I told her.

Looking from pistol to pistol, she said, “And have you come here to kill me?”

“We’ve come here for answers,” Penny said. “You’re Mrs. Waxx?”

“Waxx is a name I chose and made my own. It was not imposed on me. I never married. I didn’t need a husband to have a son.”

She began to walk toward us, and the nearer she came, the more that she unnerved me. She seemed to glide rather than take steps, as if she were a motorized automaton, not a real woman.

“When a thing wanes, it diminishes. When a thing waxes, it grows more intense, more powerful. Waxx is my work name, and I fulfill it.”

“You are one weird lady,” Milo said with childlike directness.

“What is that filthy animal doing in my house?”

Milo took offense: “Lassie isn’t filthy. She’s as clean as you are. And she can do things you could never do.”

Lassie did not lower herself to growl at this scarecrow, but regarded her with canine contempt.

“Bite your tongue, boy. You should know to whom you’re speaking.
My maiden name is Zazu Wane. In
Who’s Who
, my long and enviable entry is rich with details of my compassion and my charity. But what I have done that truly matters, I have done as Zazu Waxx, and it’s more than a nation full of your kind could ever hope to achieve.”

“And what achievement would that be?” Penny asked.

“For fifty years, I have pioneered the new science of designing culture. I have
shaped
American and hence world culture through many billions of dollars of sub-rosa propaganda campaigns but also—and more effectively—through the application of techniques more often employed in espionage and warfare.”

“Sounds like it keeps you busy,” Penny said.

“Oh, terribly busy, my dear.”

“Better stop there,” I said as Zazu came within ten feet of us.

She halted but looked so full of tightly coiled energy that she might have been able to strike as quick as a snake and cross ten feet in an instant.

“Billions of dollars,” Milo said. “Are you that rich?”

Staring down her long straight nose at the boy, as a bird might study a bug before eating it, Zazu Waxx said, “I have the unlimited resources of the federal treasury.”

“Sounds better than my allowance.”

“And unlike our foolish and inept intelligence agencies, I have kept us on an entirely black budget all these years.”

She was clearly proud of her achievements, not to say arrogant, not to say megalomaniacal. But I didn’t think she would tell us about all of this if she expected us to leave the house alive.

Light bloomed in the space beyond this meditation chamber, and a moment later, through a door on the far side of the room came the Maserati monster, unaware of us, mumbling to himself, his big hands worrying at each other. He was Shearman Waxx’s size and physical type, but he shambled more than walked, and he was a hunchback.

Here, without the intervening rain of our first encounter, he struck me as less monstrous than tragic. His mumbling became audible, and revealed a tortured spirit: “Don’t touch, don’t touch the pretty things, you’ll break them, you stupid boy, you clumsy boy, don’t touch the pretty things.”

“You,”
Zazu said sharply.

The man halted and looked up, his fearsome face now fearful, his eyes deep pools of dread.

“What have you broken now?” she asked.

His mouth worked, but no words came out. Then he escaped the black-hole gravity with which Zazu commanded his attention, and he noticed us. “Zazu, they don’t belong here, they don’t, they don’t.” He began to wring his hands. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

The rough voice was that of the brutal murderer who slit John Clitherow’s throat and who, on the phone with me, called himself the brother of all humanity.

He was a creature of two moods: a miscreation with a rotten purpose and a taste for violence; but apparently also an outsider, alone in the world, whose singularity sometimes made him insecure, uncertain, and fainthearted.

“They don’t belong here, we have trouble, we have trouble.”

Clearly perturbed, Zazu said, “Shut up or I will shut you up.”

Her perturbation might mean that the hunchback’s surprise matched her own, which she had striven to conceal. If indeed we surprised her, she was not as in control of the situation as she pretended to be.

She said, “They claim your father is chained in the Hummer in the garage.”

Penny and I exchanged a glance. We both said, “Father?”

“They say,” Zazu continued, “that he’s alive. They may be lying about both issues.” To us, she said, “You have the guns. So I must ask—may
he go confirm what you have said before we discuss whatever it is you want?”

Without the key to all the padlocks, freeing Shearman Waxx might easily take half an hour with the proper tools.

“I want him back here in two minutes,” I said, “or I’ll have to shoot you dead.”

Zazu did not like the ticking clock, perhaps because she thought the hunchback unreliable, but she knew there could be no better terms than this.

The stare she turned upon the hunchback made him cringe. His shoulders slumped further, and he hung his head, regarding her meekly from beneath the shelf of his heavy brow.

She said to him, “If you want to be allowed to do those things you so much like to do, be back here in two minutes.”

“Yes, Zazu. I will, I will, Zazu. I understand. Don’t I always do what you say?”

The hunchback hurried from the room, by way of the door through which we had entered.

Suddenly I remembered John Clitherow’s curious last words to me:
And now I am in the tower
de Paris
with—

John had been trying to warn me, without giving away his game, that should a horribly deformed man cross my path, I must not pity him or let him get too close. Victor Hugo’s famous novel
Notre-Dame de Paris
was in English titled
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, and the tower of course was the bell tower of that cathedral.