Then: light streaming in. Iris shock. The first thing he saw was Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the middle of the Encrucijada, his raised palms extending away from his body, his black eyes elevated, looking up. The great worldshatterer towered above him. Except he wasn’t all there. You could see through him, like an X-ray.
“Ah, there you are,” Victor Stiller said, his not unkindly face coming between Komodo and Leona Brooks’s portrait. Wearing a casual white pinstriped jacket over a forest-green turtleneck, Stiller’s eyes looked moist behind his metal-rimmed bifocals. “I’ve been watching you sleep. I hope you don’t mind. It recalls so many memories for me.”
He was sitting on a sandcolored Danish modern couch in a large, sun-filled room. “Of course, you would not recall, a young child in your condition, but I often visited you back in those days. Usually this was for propaganda purposes, to illustrate concern for your plight in the scientific and military communities. However, many times I came on my own. This surprised me. I am not a sentimental man by nature. Also, I despised that hospital, so shabby, with those officious little doctors. But I came anyway. It was your look that attracted me. Dead, but not dead—somehow beyond death. I think you made me feel hopeful.”
Komodo couldn’t move. Gagged, his hands and feet bound, he lay at the base of the wall where the painting hung. It all came back now, standing on that pier as Zeber rode away, then the picture window going dark, empty. And running—up the switchback stairs behind the beach house. To her. Except there were shouts, men screaming in the night. Gunshots. A dull slap against the side of the head.
“I see you are admiring Leona’s portrait of Joseph,” Stiller remarked. “A great work, don’t you think, Mr. Komodo? A legend. It has been in my collection for some time. The longer I keep it here, under lock and key, the more the legend—and value, of course—grows. Such a shame Leona did not create more works of this nature. The Brooks family has always been so good to me.”
Stiller watched Komodo struggle a moment, then let out a long sigh. “Yes, hopeful, that’s what it was. You made me feel hopeful. It’s remarkable how little you’ve changed. There’s something that’s still very much the same.” Then he called across the room. “Mr. Henderson, please untie Mr. Komodo.”
Henderson, the large blond man who’d beaten Komodo on the freeway median, was now swathed in navy blue Gore-Tex. He got up from the bottom step of the spiral staircase, came over, undid the ropes. “But you got to be good,” he said, displaying much perfect dentition.
Unbound, Komodo coughed and fell into an Eames chair. His throat burned, he thought his collarbone might be broken. He was in what appeared to be the living room of a mountain chalet, the sort of sleekly appointed A-frame corporate raiders might rent for ski season.
“The Sierra foothills. A pleasant environment, don’t you think?” Stiller indicated the luxurious view from the soaring triangular windows that made up the impressive west wall of the house. It was already afternoon, Komodo noted. But which day? He’d been drugged, shot up with something, he could feel it in his knees.
“Upon occasion I bring friends here and tell them I enjoy the air, that it reminds me of my boyhood in the Carpathians. But that is a lie. My father was a tailor. We lived in a disgusting hovel in the ghetto. I never saw a mountain until I was sent away to school. Still, it is a comfortable lie. People seem to enjoy hearing it.”
Stiller handed Komodo a glass of carrot juice. “Mr. Komodo, I sense you are a deeply subversive spirit, a revolutionist of the most radical bent. Now, of course, I myself was once a revolutionist. Turn the world upside down, that’s what we longed to do, back in Göttingen. And didn’t we succeed? We achieved a catharsis greater than a billion Bolsheviks could ever have dreamed. Did it make things better? Who’s to say? Change was the mandate, and change we made.
“I am no longer a revolutionist. As dreary as it is, there’s no escaping: In my old age I’ve come to like things more settled. So indulge an elderly gentleman with a late-ripening passion for Order, Mr. Komodo. Explain something to me. That night on Okinawa? Tell me how a boy who hadn’t moved or spoken in more than nine years suddenly got out of bed and managed to escape dozens of MPs and navy cutters. Please. It’s been on my mind.”
Komodo swilled the thick juice down his parched gullet, tried to get his voice back.
“I’m sure you can imagine the difficulties your disappearance caused. The embarrassment. As acting head of the Project, you fell under my jurisdiction. Mine and General Grives’, of course. I personally questioned that man, that black nurse.”
Komodo’s tongue finally loosed. “Walter.”
“Walter? You remember his name? How curious. A most disagreeable individual, very uncooperative. He wouldn’t volunteer a thing, resisted all reasonable attempts to establish the course of events.”
“Walter Crenshaw.”
“Yes, of course. Perhaps we were a bit zealous in our questioning. The man became delirious. He seemed to be under the impression you would contact him on some kind of a radio. We never found any such device. Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. The man was obviously mentally unstable. Completely mad.”
“Poor, sweet Walter.”
“What’s that, Mr. Komodo?”
“You made him sleep in bus stations, walk down mean streets, hurl insults at the sky. You hounded him, tortured him . . .”
Stiller’s cheek twitched. “They found the wreckage of that Korean fishing scow. All the men were dead, drowned, half-eaten by sharks. The seas were quite heavy, if you recall. A typhoon arose, out of nowhere, a most unusual occurrence. There was no chance of survival. Yet here you are. How is that possible?”
Komodo stared back at Stiller. “Are you certain it’s me? I saw you on television, saying I gently slipped away in my sleep, died as peacefully as I lived.”
“Don’t be flippant with me! How did you get away? Where did you go? Where have you been all these years?”
“I’ve been behind the Cloudcover. In the contours of Corvair Bay Beach.”
“What?”
“In the dense forests of Asbestos Wood.”
“Talk sense!”
“Standing in the stiff wind of Past Due Point. In the grottos of Dead Letter Hill.”
“Shut up!”
“I won’t say what Walter wouldn’t.”
Stiller’s face was red now. He stood up in front of the portrait of Joseph Prometheus Brooks, reached into his jacket, produced a creased photograph, and slammed it onto the coffee table. “You are a filmmaker, you know the camera does not lie, so why does it show you here, talking to Joseph Brooks? Two dead men—alive! What do you want, why have you come here?”
Komodo stood up, leveled his gaze at Stiller. Anger gripped him, but a great sorrow as well. “It wounds my soul to say this, inasmuch as I have long admired your achievements in particle acceleration and the development of heavy isotopes, but I can no longer respect you, Mr. Stiller. You speak exquisitely of the dichotomy between science and magic, but your words are hollow. You have forfeited all moral authority, violated a most solemn trust. Men capable of sublime thoughts must possess a sense of honor that is incorruptible. You do not. You are no man of science. Your Order is a false Order. In its way lies only cruel self-interest. Nevertheless, the crimes you have committed against me, I can forgive. But what you have done to Ms. Brooks can never be condoned!”
Stiller’s hand lashed out, slapping Komodo across the cheek. “Ms. Brooks is no affair of yours! She is a sick woman. She cannot be told the truth. It will kill her!”
“A child should know her parents.”
Stiller stopped yelling now. He looked tired, weary. He sat down on the couch, breathing hard.
“You signing off on this, Doc S.?” Henderson inquired, hovering close. Stiller said nothing, turned away.
Thus cued, Henderson jammed a pistol butt into the back of Komodo’s neck, smashing him face-first to the floor. Then the large man picked Komodo up again, flung him into a chair. There were several other men in the room now, all clad in brand-name athletic garb. Komodo recognized them as the straitjacket-wielding ambulance drivers.
“Let me introduce the team, Mr. Komodo,” Henderson said with affable menace. “Bill. Frank. Sammy. Sergio. Over there, we got Mohammad K-Paul, he’s the Pakistani of the group. I’ll explain the problem, Mr. Komodo. I just got off the phone with my brother agents in L.A. They tell me the local police are engaged in a pitched battle with about five hundred people attempting to converge on your house there. These people—they’re dressed as lizards. They keep screaming about something called the 90 Series. Would you have any pertinent information about this, Mr. Komodo?”
Komodo felt stunned. “The 90 Series . . . but how could that be? The supplication has been disconnected from the Quadcameral.”
Henderson squinted. “Whoa! Back up here a minute. The suppli-what?”
“What’s he talking about?” one of the others said. “A quadriphonic? I had one of those. Wound up throwing it out with the eight-track.”
“That’s enough,” Henderson interrupted with a withering glance. “Let’s get basic, Mr. Komodo. Why were you in the Encrucijada? What do you want from Joseph Brooks?”
Komodo did not answer. Henderson slapped him.
“Are you and Brooks involved in some kind of nuclear project?”
Again, no answer and a slam.
“Look, we know something is going on out there. The facts and figures are on the table. If you’re smart, you’ll help us. What’s between you and Brooks?”
Komodo shook his head, felt a cracking as Henderson’s foot landed in his ribs.
“Why did you come to America?”
“What’s this supplication? What do you want?”
“Talk, you fucking Jap bastard!”
Then they knocked him to the ground, ripped his black pajamas, exposed his chest. “What’s these circles here? What do they mean?”
“That goddamn monster in the movies got the same circles!”
“What do they mean, asshole?”
Again they kicked and punched him. Komodo felt a bubble of blood precede his words. “I fell down on a waffle iron.”
“What?”
“Someone seared me with a car cigarette lighter.”
How happy Komodo felt right then, even as Henderson smashed him with karate blows. For he remembered that day, so many years ago, when Gojiro first emblazoned the Triple Rings on his massive chest and their great Promise was sworn. “We’ll never tell how we got ’em, or what they mean,” the monster declared, his fists clenched, emotion rising in his voice. “Don’t matter what nobody does to us, we won’t say. We’ll tell them something like . . . I dunno . . . like we tripped on a hot manhole cover or something.” What a joy to be able to follow his great friend’s suggestion now, Komodo thought as another foot crashed into his side. There could be no greater honor than to be true to his friend and their Vow.
Henderson was getting ready to hit Komodo again when Stiller waved him off, pointing to a manila envelope lying on the couch.
“Right,” Henderson said, taking out a gray file. “Mr. Komodo, we’ll return to the previous line of questioning in a moment. We like to pursue several avenues of discovery at once. Media management, as you can well imagine, is a major concern. In that vein, I thought you might be interested in the story we’re currently seeding in certain newspapers. To summarize, you are no longer the Coma Boy. In fact, your entire story is a hoax. You weren’t found in any pit after the Bomb blast. You’ve never even been to Hiroshima. You were brought up in Tokyo, a fair student in several schools. Your father, now deceased, was a bank clerk convicted of embezzlement. Your mother is a sometime travel agent in Kobe whose virtue, I’m sorry to report, is somewhat questionable. You had a brother, but he was killed in a drug deal about two years ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about
you
, Mr. Komodo, who you are.” Henderson took out a picture of a grade-school graduating class. One head in the middle row was circled. “That’s you, at ten. You can’t see it that well, but we’ll have better pictures by tomorrow. I got one of your mom, though. You want to see it? She’s kind of hot.”
No.
“Hey, don’t be so ungrateful! We’re giving you a whole different identity here and you don’t even have to apply for a new Social Security card.”
“This is horrible! Unspeakable!”
Henderson turned to the other men. “I hit a nerve here or what?” Then, to Komodo, “Yeah, this new you is going to be front page, along with how you dreamed up the whole story to save your sagging movie career. Your operation is in deep financial trouble, has been for some time, if you don’t know. That’s why you lied to Sheila Brooks about being the Coma Boy. You wanted to play on her guilt about what her poor, dead dad did to you back at Ground Zero. A cunning Jap plot, inscrutable as shit.”
Komodo tried to get up, but Henderson knocked him down. “Mr. Stiller! How can you allow this?” Stiller had turned away to rearrange his outfit.
“That’s not the end of it, Mr. Komodo. Oh, no. There’s more. Much more. You’re a child abuser. A mutilator, too. We’re running checks on all those kids you had up there at that house. It looks bad. Real bad. Grieved parents from Somalia and whatever other third-world hellholes will be coming forth in droves to tearfully testify how you stole their kids and threw them into your freakshow movies. But the worst of it is probably the murders. How you kill them when they get too old to be in the pictures. We found that grave, you know.”
“What?”
“Hey, Joe! We get a name on that kid in the grave yet?”
Joe, blow-dried and heavyset, looked up from the
Penthouse
magazine he was reading. “Yeah. Ebi. Little girl. Horrible, just horrible. Tears your heart right out.”
“You’re a ghoul, Mr. Komodo. The American public needs to know that. We got a disinterment order on that grave. We’ll dig her up, find some very graphic things in the autopsy, I’m sure.”
“Ahhhhh!” Komodo’s shriek came from the bottom of his soul, welled up, sprang him forward. He flew across the room, knocked Henderson aside, and went for Stiller. He got his hands around the old man’s withery neck, began choking.