"So… through tradition the steps became objects of veneration to the popes of Rome. In the sixteenth century the staircase was moved to where it stands today, a ceremonial approach to the papal chapel on the second floor of the building, the
sanctum sanctorum
. Holy of holies. It's one of the major attractions for pilgrims to Rome, who follow the example of generations of popes by ascending the steps on their knees, stopping to meditate or pray. In the photos I saw the building looks kind of dark inside, so you had that part right. But the steps are covered in wood."
"Easier on the kneecaps of the devout. Doesn't change anything. Underneath the staircase is still marble. And I saw it desecrated. Dripping blood."
"Whose blood?"
"Well—it must be—the Vicar of Christ. Pope John the Twenty-fourth. He's going to be murdered, like that evangelist in Tennessee."
"Unless you're reading way too much into some bloody paw prints."
"I'm not! But that's just what Bertie would say. She may be hard to convince. And Tom."
Eden stood up in the tub. Her doppelganger handed her a towel, glanced at the inside of a tanned thigh where blood mixed with bathwater ran thinly. Eden looked down and grimaced.
"You never have an easy one, do you?" the dpg said sympathetically.
"No, and I'm getting another cramp. I'm gonna lie down for a while."
"When are you going to introduce me to Bertie and Tom?" the dpg asked. "After all, it's been four months. I feel like a poor relation."
Eden paused in toweling off and looked at her. "Well—I don't think they're quite ready for you yet."
"Ready as they'll ever be," the dpg said with a pout.
"But you're still the boss."
COLDSTREAM BRIDGE, CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 13-14
2:45 A.M.-6:15 P.M. PDT
T
he Assassin left shortly before three A.M. with the ten-year-old girl named Saffron Pike still unconscious but breathing normally in the back of his dusty blue pickup truck, under the locked tonneau bedcover.
Betts had made sure that little Saffron was okay before allowing the Assassin to leave with her. Pulse was a few beats fast, but her pupils were equal and reactive to the beam of light from a pencil flashlight. Unfortunately she had urinated, reverting, perhaps in deep slumber, to an old bed-wetting habit. Betts insisted on removing the soiled clothing, washing and drying panties and shorts while the Assassin waited in the cottage, engrossed in an old Judy Garland movie, only occasionally complaining that he had a couple of hours' drive ahead. But he commended Betts for her motherly instincts.
"No surprise Eden turned out so well" he said.
Betts didn't want to talk about Eden. "Your makeup looks a little saggy," she told him.
While he freshened the face of Rance Jool, Betts hung around the garage demanding to know exactly where he planned to drop the girl off.
"Not on her doorstep, if that's what you mean. There's a KOA campground about ten miles from Hum—from the down-at-the-heels town I plucked her out of. I'll leave Saffie there, only a few yards from all the ma-and-pa retirement RVs, just as the birds are beginning to twitter. By then she should be waking up herself."
"In time to make the seven o'clock news?"
"Well—we must allow a little more time than that. Noon, for sure."
"When I see that sweet face on TV, when I hear that she's all right—"
"You will f'fihl y'r end a' the bargain," the Assassin said, inserting fresh pads of silicone into his mouth, enhancing Jool's chipmunky, half-bright, good-ol'-boy expression. He turned away from his triptych of mirrors in the garage dressing room. "And deliver our message to Eden. Or else—" He leaned a hip against the truck and spoke Cowboy. "Reckon the next tasty pullet I bring you'll have its feathers off and its neck already wrung."
Betts responded with a nod, dumb in the face of his sulky antagonism, just one layer (and that close to the surface) of his impenetrable lunacy. She was thinking only of the safety of Saffron Pike. Later she would work out a method of killing the Assassin before Eden ever crossed his path again.
No sleep the rest of the night.
At seven she was eagerly scanning the television news on San Francisco and Sacramento channels, but there was nothing yet. She kept the radio in the kitchen tuned to an AM all-news station in Frisco. Maybe both she and the Assassin had made a mistake, assuming that a ten-year-old girl who turned up fuzzy-minded but physically unharmed after having been missing for less than twenty-four hours would be breaking-news material. But the Assassin had assured Betts, without elaboration, that Saffron Pike would indeed be news.
But by the noon hour she wasn't; and the Assassin hadn't returned.
When he showed up at two-thirty he was driving a Volkswagen Jetta with Nevada license plates, and he wasn't in a good mood. He had exchanged the rancher's straw for an Oakland A's baseball cap and was wearing a red NASCAR windbreaker. Sunglasses hid a third of his face. He sat down immediately in his dressing room and began to remove all traces of Rance Jool, peeling latex. No up-tempo ballroom music accompanied this stripping and discarding process down to the deadpan of his grim past.
"Where's your truck?" Betts asked.
"It wasn't mine in the first place."
"How about this one?" she said with a wave of her hand at the orange Jetta.
"What do you think?"
"Are you hot?"
"I'm never hot. Rance Jool assuredly is. But in ten minutes he will no longer exist."
"Is Saffron with the police?"
"I would assume as much. Or with her devoted parents. He happens to be one of the state legislature's prime movers and shakers. They will be making public the note I pinned to Saffron's clothing when I dropped her off 'midst the redwoods. The vid journalists are beginning to swarm. We'll watch the show on one of the Sacramento channels at six. Now don't bother me. I'm dead for sleep. Wake me at five-thirty. At which time a few of those little lamb chops broiled medium-well with some of the delectable porcini mushrooms and of course a chilled, mint-scented bell pepper salad would be most welcome. That is, if you're not still sulking and refusing to prepare either of us a memorable meal. No? Splendid. Use the good china."
S
affron Pike led off the local evening news in Sacramento. She was seen, briefly, getting into a sedan with her mom, responding with a bemused smile to the usual frenzied show put on by the media types hustling to get their tidbits, shouting questions at her. But Daddy did all the talking for the family. He looked like a man on his way up:
magnetic eyes and he knew which side of his regal face the camera liked best.
"Of course we're outraged that this group calling itself 'Geo Puritas' would resort to the kidnapping of a child in an attempt to intimidate and coerce not only myself but other members of the California legislature. I can assure you that in spite of the psychological damage visited upon our daughter in the past twenty-four hours, my vote will not be changed and the Stony Fork dam will be built to the ultimate benefit of the citizens of our great state."
"'Geo Puritas'?" Betts said to the Assassin. The face of Rance Jool, a decent likeness as drawn by a police artist from Saffie Pike's description of him, was now on the TV screen.
The Assassin yawned, dancing a carpet slipper at the end of a pale bony foot. "Best I could come up with on short notice." He looked at Betts. The TV news scene shifted to a particularly nasty-looking accident on Interstate 80. With the remote he turned the set off. And there he was, fixed like a vampire from a bad movie in the depths of the blank tube, juxtaposed with Betts's desperate, petrified face above the confining neck brace.
"Shall I get out my laptop now, Betts? Or do you need a few moments more? Call on God, if you like. What is the old Army saying, 'There are no atheists in foxholes'? You are in a foxhole, honey chile. I'm the fox. But you know that. And you know that I am resolute. God is nowhere to be found, as usual. My will be done. There is no way out."
"Yes, I know," Betts said. "Just shut the fuck up."
"SHUNGWAYA"
LAKE NAIVASHA, KENYA
OCTOBER 14-15
1640-0745 HOURS ZULU
A
fter an evening meal of grilled tilapia fillets from the lake,
Makate Mayai
, which were Kenyan crepes stuffed with fried eggs and chopped meat, and fresh mango, Etan Culver said over coffee that he had something interesting to show them.
Pegeen Culver, irritable from prickly heat and bitchy to her husband, excused herself, to everyone's silent relief. They moved from the candlelit veranda to the spacious parlor of the house. The furnishings were largely leftovers from the days of Tom Sherard's grandfather Albert, an early settler in the Naivasha bottomland and safari guide to royalty, as well as a one-eyed U.S. President with more zeal than skill as a marksman. There was a faint but everlasting musk of cigars in the parlor. Tom's mother Deborah had contributed feminine touches during her unfortunately brief marriage:
batik drapes and slipcovers, graceful Moroccan vases, two paintings by the French Impressionists Jean Beraud and Jean-Louis Forain. And an eighteenth-century French backgammon table. Deborah had been passionate about the game, and spent many hours during her husband's absences subsidizing her acquisitions of fine art with winnings from houseguests who lacked her touch with the dice.
The most recent addition was a digital projection TV with a sixty-inch screen. There were two large satellite dishes in the vegetable garden; all of it was surrounded by electrified fencing to discourage the herbivore night feeders, particularly hippopotamuses.
While Etan connected his digital camcorder to an i.LINK port in a Sony VAIO Notebook, which would enable them to see footage stored in his camera he had shot in Amboseli that morning, Eden wandered around the parlor with its cabinets full of museum-quality artifacts from prehistoric Kenya, the brute heads and curlicue horns mounted along walls paneled in termite-resistant
mopane
wood, and an arsenal of well-used weapons, some quite rare and all carefully maintained, from the days of legendary safaris.
There also were oil paintings: a male lion ready to charge, his tail standing straight up from his body; portraits of Albert Sherard wearing a squared-off red beard, with the naturalist and hunter Frederick Selous and two brawny lion dogs. A spacious landscape of an area Eden was familiar with, the unstable mirage-filled geography of plains and hills, evanescent in the barely tolerable scorch of noonday light. Horned animals by the thousands in a cratered place, shimmering miraculously into being from the ground up.
The last painting was a family portrait over the fireplace, Donal and Deborah Sherard with Tom, buck-naked, age about a year and a half. Slender Deb held her son serenely on crossed forearms, the crown of his head beneath her chin. She had a straightforward gaze and a large bowie knife on her belt.
Eden had come across Tom on more than one occasion, sitting alone in a favorite leather chair facing the hearth, his walking stick with the gold lion's head across his knees, gazing profoundly at the painting. His mother had died in an accident on the Longonot road when Tom was two. His father's health failed not long after. Bertie's father, Joseph Nkambe, already forty and with grown children, had seen to most of Tom's raising. Joseph was a self-educated man who had elevated his status from gun bearer to a full partnership in Shungwaya Safaris, Ltd., eventually becoming a landholder in the Central Highlands. At fifty-eight and a rich man, he took a fourth wife. Alberta was his last and youngest child, named for the old safari hand who established Shungwaya.
Joseph had a severe, proud face; bewhiskered to hide the out-of-kilter jaw he'd received from an elephant-tossing, as he modestly described one of his many near-death experiences in thornbush and grassy savanna. A cardiologist had limited his use of tobacco to a single pipeful after dinner. He packed his old white pipe, carved from warthog ivory, and settled down on a small sofa next to Bertie, who was wolfing a dish of huckleberry pie, to watch Etan's picture show.
Eden stood behind Tom, who also was sitting to take the strain off a knee shredded by the gun of the assassin who had killed Tom's wife. And Eden's natural mother, the two of them permanently separated soon after Eden's birth.
What a strange, haunted pair we are
, Eden thought, looking down at Tom. Wanting to touch him, but she'd never known how.
They were looking at Czarina's elephant family now. Then Eden saw her own rapt, perspiring face, and Pert Kincaid, wearing headphones, listening with half-closed eyes. A mature female elephant came close enough to the Land Rover to shade it with the flapping canopy of one ear. The picture on the TV set blurred momentarily, as if the Rover was moving to the footsteps of the elephants on baked ground.
"Here it comes:" Etan murmured, turning up the sound. His camera panned quickly to pick up the arrival of Karloff as he charged the combi. A cyclone of dust, enraged bellowing. Karloff 's immense head swung side to side, tusks slashing the air above the roofless combi. More faces, frightened, as Tom, Bertie, and the Research Associate ducked below the heavy roll bars away from this potentially lethal saber play. Only Lincoln Grayle had the nerve to look at Karloff, but his face was a blur.