Dantes' Inferno (21 page)

Abruptly Sweetheart seemed to realize he wasn't alone; he gripped Sylvia's arm, and the strength of his fingers worked as a ground.

“I'm okay,” Sylvia breathed. She was aware of water, dripping steadily, like a heartbeat in the earth. “How far did these pipes go?” she whispered, brushing cobwebs from her face. “Where does it come out?”

“It used to connect to a water shed, but the system's long dead. What you're hearing is just surface runoff—sprinklers, gutters, seeping down.”

As Sweetheart aimed the beam of light, searching for the gleam of water, the source of the sound—a space opened up, high in the pipe. The remnants of an old ceramic neck—a way to the surface.

Cautiously, Sweetheart moved closer; as the light found a clear trajectory, he grunted. “That's how he got out.”

“Can we get up—and follow?”

“He's long gone. And it would be a dangerous climb; it's ready to collapse.”

They focused again on the subterranean cul-de-sac. On the ground at their feet a filthy pile of rags resembled a dead body. Where a candle had burned down, dirty wax covered a crate. Junk was scattered everywhere—old appliances, trash, scavenged food. The stench was thick and ripe.

“Mole people. This is their trash. They live down here.”

“In a burrow,” Sylvia whispered. “What an awful home.”

“‘
Ma quando tu sarai nel dolce mondo, priego ti ch'a la mente altrui mi rechi
.'”

“Translate.”

“‘Pray . . . when you return to earth's sweet light,
remember me to humanity.'” He took a breath. “We'll get forensics down here. Our bomber's a very bright boy, doing his homework: establishing our routines, our schematics for emergency response.”

She turned toward Sweetheart just as he gripped her arm. His fingers dug into her flesh; pain shot along her nerves.

“Are you working with Dantes?” he demanded.

“No.”

“He asked for you—you led us to the bomb.”

“I could've been killed.”

“But you weren't.” The professor's dark eyes trapped the light; it flickered like a dangerous flame in both pupils.

“What about you?” she asked. “You're obsessed with Dantes. This isn't just an investigation, it's a vendetta.” He was standing so close, Sylvia could feel his breath on her skin.

“You're right,” he said softly. Abruptly, he pushed past her, thrusting the flashlight like a knife—

He stopped in his tracks.

Sylvia stared up at the message painted on the wall.

4
TH CIRCLE

Sweetheart said, “It seems we've just entered the next level of hell.”

For Sylvia, the rest of Tuesday passed in a blur . . .

An interminable debriefing session at FBI offices before she was finally released.

Leo driving her back to the bungalow—the exits rolling by while vivid pictures in her mind evaporated and reformed much like the freeway landscape.

The realization that there was only one connection between John Dantes, Sylvia Strange, and the bombings: LA, City of Id, where the shadow thrives.

Leo doctoring her: with chicken soup, with a hot bath, with an offer to sleep on the couch; a vague recollection of the alarm system arming itself for battle, and exhaustion winning out over fear.

Serena's e-mail:

Dear Sylvie: Matt told me you're helping the FBI catch a bad man. He said I might see some bombs on the news, but I should know you are safe. I'm saying special prayers to St. Christopher and St. Michael. Te amo mucho!!! Come home soon. xoxox, Starfish

Falling into bed with her lover in New Mexico—thanks to AT&T. Finally drifting out of consciousness while Matt was still on the phone, promising he would take the next flight to Los Angeles.

Sleep was no refuge.

Nightmarish images formed, dissolved—twisting reality or diverging from it completely.

Stepping on the trip wire—the bomb exploding beneath her feet.

Detective Church covered with blood, mangled, smiling ghoulishly, repeating, “Tick-tock, dickity-doc.”

M laughing, chasing Serena in circles.

Matt introducing Mona Carpenter's parents—“They want to know why you killed their daughter.”

Special Agent Purcell looming close, cackling like a witch: “He used Betty Crocker to intensify the blast—he used
flour
. Think of a silo accident when grain explodes.”

And deep in the tunnel, Sweetheart pulling off his face to become John Dantes.

As Dantes' arms tightened around her body, she pulled away, trying to scream. But his mouth found her lips, covering her mouth.

And he sucked poison from her body so that she felt hard pieces of something pulled from belly to throat.

Little stones, she thought. I'm filled with toxic stones.

But when Dantes broke away to spit the poison, tiny plastic bits of a toy city—people and buildings—spewed from his mouth.

Call me nihilistic, but I enthusiastically embrace the annihilation that has come part and parcel with urban pathology since the first gatherings known as civilization. Be they tent cities in the barren deserts or steel and concrete bastions, eventually they must fall to ruin.

Mole's Manifesto

11:53
P.M.
His mind goes in circles like a dog lying down.

M knows he's dreaming, but still the images blur with disturbingly fluid realism. A few minutes before midnight. He lies on a double bed next to a woman—at the same time he watches the house on Beaudry Street explode.

In his dream he watches as they—
his old friends, his new friends
—are thrown or drop to the ground, then pick themselves up, dazed. Some begin to run, some are yelling, others crying.

He has exposed himself to sunlight with reluctance. He hates the heat, which brings the red scars of old burns to welt on the surface of his skin.

But as always he must witness the punishment. To be a voyeur is the only way of sharing that he has left.

M watches with deference. This explosion—
any
explosion—is the prodigy of Byzantine alchemists and their
two-thousand-year-old invention, Greek fire. He has never lost his appreciation for the beauty of the holy triad: initiation, oxygen, fuel. In this regard he is a satisfied voyeur. But something is definitely absent—his sense of awe. Certainly the knowledge of his power, his omnipotence, remains. But it is an empty awareness. A dead place. Devoid of desire, devoid of love or hunger or even suffering.

He's not dreaming; he's a lost man wandering the dark empty tunnels of his waking nightmare. What fills the space? Nothingness. Is there anything more awful in the universe? In contrast, suffering must be divine and death a pleasure.

After all, he deals in death. By inference, he is a pleasure broker.

Gunpowder, nitroglycerin, trinitrotoluene, ammonium nitrate, C-4, PETN and RDX, Tovex, Semtex—these labels represent his personal history and the tools of his trade, his particular science of destruction.

He has the knack for choosing what will hurt most. He understands the pain of others. There was even a time he felt pain himself. He misses that pain the way most men miss love. He knows how to create the perfect hell for others because he's been there so many times.

The earthen walls, the fetid water, the stinking gruel; oh yes, he knows about hell, where men are chained like beasts, left to sleep in their own excrement, to beg for the scraps of rotting meat, the slop that comes spiced with maggots.

We'll shit in your food. We'll piss in your drink. Soon you'll be grateful we give you shit and piss. Learn quickly
.

In the empty space of his soul, there is a single need that keeps him alive—a man, as he is, clinging to his last breath. That need is revenge.

Only then will this waking nightmare truly end.

His eyes fly open—this time he's
awake
—and he is stretched next to the woman on the bed. She is snoring
softly, evenly. Sleep releases her from the agony of her daily existence. Moonlight paints her skin milky white. Her lips are parted, tiny breaths warm his arm. Each inhalation is to choose life, each exhalation a flirtation with death. Every breath a human takes is a decision to go on living.

He stretches, elbows back, yawns, then runs his fingers through his light brown bristle. His scalp feels tight, itchy, with scars rising to his touch like topographic landmarks of past misery.

He doesn't find refuge anywhere—not even in dreams. To him, sleep is simply practice for death; he needs few hours, two or three. Insomnia is a habit he learned in the long winter's night known as prison.

He turns toward the red gleaming numbers on the digital clock: three minutes to midnight.

The fourth circle promises new levels of commitment. Theirs. His.

Dantes is acting his part to perfection. Yes, this partnership has survived the years, the distance, the agony of betrayal.

M slides his naked body from between cotton sheets that are the color of fresh limes. Rise and shine, there's work to be done. Shower in the tiny tiled bathroom. Select clothes for the new day—khakis, short-sleeved blue-and-white cotton shirt, work boots. Make coffee.

Say good morning to Nietzsche, who offers love bites from a yellowed beak.

Before he leaves, he always fills Einstein's bowl with kibble. The cat switches her tail. She is ridiculous with her crazy-quilt fur, a cacophony of dark and light spots and stripes. Why is a female cat named Einstein? Ah, yes, the boy named her—children do things like that, he reminds himself.

Once more he sits quietly on the edge of the double bed,
sipping coffee, watching the woman's body sprawled between tangled sheets. Her skin glows with a soft sheen.

She tells him daily that he is bringing her back to life. He is teaching her to touch and be touched again. Each time she cries out in love, tears streaking her face, she is bewildered by the fact he can bring her to climax even in the midst of her grief.

She would kill him if she knew the truth.

Perversely, the fact he represents both death and life to her excites him sexually. He has never had problems servicing women, but this time there is a special ease created by the give-and-take of survival.

In turn, she stirs the faintest longing inside him, a longing for passion, for love, but most of all for the capacity to feel remorse. He believes these twinges are like the pains of a phantom limb—or perhaps more accurately, the vestiges of a primitive tail, because a phantom limb implies that he was once capable of loving.

M strokes the back of her neck, lifts the tawny hair from her nape.

Ah, but that much is true, he reminds himself. John Dantes robbed him of his capacity for pain and love. Paradoxically, it was also Dantes who made him strong.

He whispers the boy's name to himself, as if he's testing the shape of the word on his tongue. But thoughts of the dead child leave him as empty as everything else in his world. He has practiced the pretense of what it means to live with a heart behind his ribs. He can recite a small list of those who have died for him—women and children who became his
family
, at least for a matter of months.

I touch others through death, he thinks. It is a fact, not good or bad. At all times, he is alone, even when he's surrounded by a hundred, a thousand of his species, even when he's lying next to one.

Solitude is the only state he can tolerate. Solitude is killing him.

But he cannot falter. Not from this precise moment . . . not until he and Dantes have played their parts to the hilt.

Again, he whispers, “Jason.” Although the ghost of the child wakes nothing inside M, it pulls Molly from sleep. She reaches out her arms to him, soft gold hairs shiny against skin.

“Hold me,” she whispers; her cheeks are wet with fresh tears.

He wraps his arms around her. “You dreamed again?”