Fury and the Power (22 page)

She had shed her clothes and was astride the husky shoulders of Triton, calling to him. When he didn't respond Pinky stuck out her tongue, licking the moonlit air, the droplet moisture around the pagan sea-god and his winged horses, a come-on that gave Frank an immediate erection, which he hoped God wouldn't see beneath the gold bowling ball. His trophy of a lifetime. Not counting Pinky.

The ball had become slippery. He lost his grip and it rumbled away down the street, pursued by a snarling pack of wild black dogs. Frank experienced the sort of gloom that can come over a man who finds himself inexplicably in a strange place among strangers, bereft of his God, devoid of Grace.

He awakened with a hand on his hard penis. The other side of the king-size bed was rumpled but empty. The door to the sitting room was nearly closed; a vertical slash of lamplight glowed in the darkened bedroom. Frank sat up, straightened his twisted pajama top over his convex belly, glanced at the digital clock on an antique commode—it was past two in the morning—and went silently to the sitting-room door. He hesitated there, didn't open it. Instead he looked through the half-inch space at his wife, who was seated in profile to him twenty feet away.

Pinky had ordered room service again. She was eating voraciously. It was what she ate and how she handled her late-night snack that disturbed him so.

On the plate she was hunched over was a large serving of ground beefsteak tartare. And Pinky was eating with her fingers, shoving the raw meat into her mouth as fast as she could gobble and swallow. There was blood on her fingers and blood on her chin; because steak tartare was served raw but not bloody Frank reckoned she must have bit her lip or tongue. A strand of blood mixed with saliva hung almost to the free-swinging crucifix on the chain around her neck, which she took off only to bathe. Twice while he watched in amazement and—yes——disgust, she lifted her head to gulp air. Then she bent to the task of cleaning her plate, a fierce gleam in her eyes.

The Tubners had been married twenty-four years. In all the time Frank had known Pinky she hadn't been much of a meat-eater. Preferred seafood. A broiled lamb chop on occasion, if they were dining out. But steak tartare?
Never
. And of all places to suddenly develop an appetite for it. Three nights in a row.

Pinky had almost finished. She picked up noisettes left on the plate, then licked her fingers. He heard a low groan, or growl, of pleasure. Then she turned her head quickly, as if she had detected him spying on her from behind the door. But she couldn't make him out in the dark of the bedroom, Frank was sure of that. Anyway, her eyes were unfocused, drowsy, now that her hunger was satisfied.

Frank retreated to the bed and pulled up the covers. A little later Pinky came quietly into the room and entered the bath. Frank heard her pissing, then the handles squeaking as she turned on the bidet and "watered her flower." As she liked to say.

Twenty years since their second and last child had been born. But Pinky was only forty-seven, not yet menopausal. It was possible that she was pregnant, and just hadn't wanted to say anything yet. Still getting used to the idea herself.

Yes, pregnancy could account for Pinky's otherwise unexplainable craving, her lack of caution in spite of recent outbreaks of mad cow disease on the Continent.

Frank breathed easier, although the idea of raising another child at their age wasn't entirely welcome. They already were grandparents. Frank recalled dietary mismatches she'd blithely concocted during her first two pregnancies. Peanut butter with sweet potatoes. Ketchup on her pancakes—dear Lord, it gave him heartburn to think about it.

Pinky got into bed like a little mouse so as not to disturb him. When he felt her cold but clean hand momentarily on the back of his neck, he was all nerve ends, flinching beneath the covers.

"Oh, I just wanted to touch you. I'm sorry. Good night, Fuzzinuts."

"Good night, baby duck."

"Love you, Frank."

"Love you too."

SAN FRANCISCO

OCTOBER 16

11:00 A.M. P
DT

M
egan Pardo's uncle and aunt lived on Russian Hill, half a block from that famous part of Lombard Street that made its brick-paved, serpentine way downhill between Hyde and Leavenworth. Eden Waring and Chauncey McLain left the house where they had spent the night and caught the Powell-Hyde cable car for the precipitous drop down the bay side of Russian Hill to the end of the line.

It had been gray-blue skies and pale sun atop Russian Hill; halfway down there was fog and the sun disappeared.

When they left the car at the Hyde turntable, visibility was fifty feet. Car and truck fog lights tinted the gloom a hellish saffron shade; fuming neon faded away along the street. The temperature here on Frisco Bay was ten degrees cooler—in the high fifties—than it had been a few minutes ago.

Eden was wearing the red sweater and Masai headband, articles of identification for Mr. Edmund Ruddy, Betts's former flame, about whom Danny Cheng, the Information Man, had provided Eden the basics of his life. Ruddy had attended USF when Betts was a student there, later worked for a Bay Area corporation. Twenty-three years and out the door, early retirement and his pension. For the past two years he had lived in a duplex condo in an East Bay community but was seldom around, according to the neighbors. A lifelong bachelor, he spent a great deal of time traveling in his Winnebago and indulging a passion for fly-fishing. According to the photo on his driver's license, he looked like ten other men you could expect to run into during any week of the year. On the nerdy side, with gray bangs and a shaggy gray mustache (nerdy men never seemed to realize that the mustaches they grew only emphasized their nerdiness). He wore glasses with heavy black rims. Those, at least, were making a comeback within the literary/intellectual set. He was fifty-six, a year older than Betts. There seemed to be nothing about Edmund Ruddy that would have sustained Betts's (secret) interest in him all these years. But you just never could tell, Eden thought, looking around in the soup. Her teeth chattered; her face felt clammy. She hadn't been able to manage breakfast, and ice seemed to be forming inside the hollow of her stomach.

"I c-could have done without this," she said, tucking Tom Sherard's lion's-head walking stick under her right arm.

"Which way to Ghirardelli Square?" Chauncey asked with a canary-like tilt of her pert blond head.

"Opposite direction from the Cannery, which is over there," Eden said, pointing. "I think Ghirardelli's only a block or two."

Traffic was moderately heavy, mostly delivery trucks and vans. There were not many tourists about on this Wednesday morning. Only half a dozen people had left the cable car with them: a young Chinese couple who had been waiting at their stop on Russian Hill, and a family of four. All of them, including a girl who looked to be about eight years old, had New York accents and that aggressive chumminess of family groups who communicate largely through bickering.

The New Yorkers headed for the Cannery, large old buildings converted in the sixties to a mall and a museum. The Chinese couple looked around as if they were lost. She was wearing a purple breakfast orchid pinned to the lapel of her pinstriped suit jacket. They talked in low voices—their language—sorting out a mild disagreement with the politesse of newlyweds on a new and still precarious level of intimacy. Eden and Chauncey walked ahead of them to Ghirardelli Square.

There was something invigorating about a good fog. Waterside chill, droplets of moisture on Eden's hair, the tips of her eyelashes. Pigeons materializing in glum nearly motionless groups as the Square opened up to them. Seagulls glided at the upper limits of visibility. There were more people now, congregated around the welcoming burnished lights of shops and cafés across Fountain Plaza in the old red-brick buildings of a former chocolate factory. Bronze mermaids sat back-to-back with the modest fountain plume between them. There were, on a fogbound morning, fountain-sitters, most of them solitary and as still as the mermaids, others eating from paper bags as pigeons waddled close to check for handouts.

Eden looked around at bodies half realized in the fuming grayness, faces dim as saintly frescoes in a medieval church. She felt like a wildfire in her red turtleneck sweater. Against her better judgment she was about to trust someone she'd never seen before.

"I smell coffee," Chauncey said.

"Good a place as any to wait," Eden agreed, shuddering.

They were crossing the plaza when one of the fountain-sitters, wearing a hooded cape and holding a shopping bag, raised her head to look at them.

"Eden," she said, in a frail but recognizable voice, "I'm here."

Eden stopped as if she'd come within an inch of walking off a cliff.

"
Betts?
"

"Yes, dear one."

They were about thirty feet apart. Betts made an attempt to rise as Eden sprinted across the bricks toward her, scattering pigeons in a brisk flurry. One of the pigeons flew close to Betts's head and she tottered, the shopping bag falling from her hand. The loose hood fell back from her face. Betts's short gray haircut was unfamiliar, but not her hazel eyes nor the rest of her features, such as the tiny mole high on her upper lip.

Eden lunged to help her, but Betts recovered her balance rather easily and faced Eden with a peculiar slanted smile, right hand coming out from under the short cape.

"Hel
lo
, lovey." This time the voice was not at all recognizable. Eden only knew that it wasn't Betts talking.

Eden! Knife!

Eden reacted to the telepathic warning with the reflexes of a gifted athlete, jerking her head aside a fraction of a second before she saw the blade in the Assassin's hand slicing in a short arc toward her throat. Instead of slitting the carotid artery, the sharp blade glanced off the gold lion's head of the walking stick in Eden's left hand. Before the Assassin, exceptionally quick himself, could reverse his initial thrust with the knife, Eden hit him in the padded breast with her lowered right shoulder, sending him sprawling over the fountain's ledge into the water.

She looked down in a moment of horrified incomprehension at Betts's cunningly duplicated face underwater, at a contact lens that had popped out of one eye and clung to mascara'd lower lashes like a worn penny, at the gray wig now askew from the collision of the Assassin's head with the coin-strewn bottom of the fountain. Then he scrambled up and was coming for her again.

"
Simba!
" Eden said.

The plenipotent walking stick leaped from her hand, the lion's head coming to life. It met the knife thrust in midair as Eden stood her ground and snapped the blade in its jaws. The stout stick flashed like a propeller and struck the Assassin under the chin, snapping his head back. The soggy wig flew off, leaving strips of tape fluttering, a line of glued-down latex visible across his scarred head. He would have been in the fountain again, but the lion's head had grasped him and was holding him erect, feet dangling several inches above the fountain's ledge. Dazed, he stared down at Eden with mismatched eyes.

Six seconds had elapsed since Eden had heard the telepathic warning. They had attracted some attention from the fountain-sitters, but devoutly minding your own business in a city like San Francisco was always the wisest course.

"Wow," Chauncey said behind Eden. "Where can I get one of
those
?"

A sixteen-passenger van crossed the plaza and stopped close to them. Eden turned and looked past Chauncey at the young Chinese couple who had followed them to Ghirardelli Square. He had a gun in his hand. The girl was smiling.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Lu Ping. This is Ted; he's a private detective." She looked up at the suspended Assassin leaking blood from a corner of the mouth he had redrawn to more closely resemble Betts Waring's. "Guess you got my message okay" the Psi-active Lu Ping said to Eden, no longer smiling. She regarded the hung-up Assassin, who was half conscious and had a broken jaw, with martial sternness. "I never expected to run into this sack of pig offal again. Our ride is here. Do you need help getting him into the van?"

"Why should I go anywhere with you?" Eden said.

"I forgot to mention, Danny Cheng is my uncle? He thought there was something, you know, fishy about all this, so that's why—"

"I have to find Betts! Do you know this bastard?" Eden's shakes had returned. "What's going on? Why is he made-up to look like Betts? Why did he try to kill me?"

"We'll find out. Don't worry. Right now we had better get the lead out, Eden."

MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER 1

3:40 P.M. P
D
T

U
naware as a daydreaming child of time passing, Eden silently watched thoroughbred horses and colts, ten of them in shades of ebony, chestnut, or bay, in a fenced pasture of an astonishing green that brimmed and flowed with glossy light when the sun returned, powerfully, from behind clouds piled like a gilt-edged snow-bank above the Mann Peninsula. The horse farm belonged to Danny Cheng and his elderly father Chien-Chi; it was, Danny's niece Lu Ping had confided to Eden, one of his several enterprises, like antiques, that were visible on the surface of Danny's complex business affairs.