Then he froze—someone was moving around below him, clumsily, through the litter on one of the clogged side terraces. Sullivan couldn’t hope to see the person through the shaggy greenery below, but in the weighty silence he could hear someone mumbling and scuffling around.
One of the bums that live here, he thought. It doesn’t sound like a cop or a caretaker; still, the bum might draw the attention of such people, and I don’t want to get kicked out of here myself before I retrieve the mask. They might fix the fence, or even post guards, before I could get back. This place is a historical landmark, after all, though nobody seems to pay any attention to it.
He tiptoed through the fieldstone arch ahead of him and picked his way up a side stairway, which, being narrower, was relatively clear of debris. His fast breathing sounded loud in the still air.
There was another arch at the top, and he paused under it, for he was at the broad main terrace of the hill now, and he’d be visible crossing the cement pavement that stretched between the jungle below and the odd house in front of him.
The pavement was clear up here, and he let himself light a cigarette. Sukie, he recalled, had brought a flask, on that…March?…day in ‘86. That’s right, March—it had been Good Friday afternoon, which had seemed like a good day for burials.
At first the two of them had thought that this house—this narrow two-story building, brick below and stuccoed above, with castle-like crenellations along the roof as if the owner were ready to hire archers to repel attack from below—must be Houdini’s mansion, and they’d been surprised that the famed magician would live in such a little place. Later they’d learned that this was just the servants’ quarters. Houdini’s mansion had stood a hundred yards off to the south, and had burned down in the thirties. But this was nevertheless a part of the old Houdini estate. It would do fine as a place to hide the mask. “Hide a thumb in a place where there’s already a lot of its thumbprints,” Sukie had said.
SULLIVAN NOW stared uneasily at the house. The doors and windows were all covered with weathered sheets of plywood, but on the tiny upstairs balcony sat a flowerpot with a green plant growing in it. Had there been rain in L.A. recently? The palm fronds he’d climbed over below had been dry as mummies. Was some homeless person living in this place?
He decided to hide here for a little while and see if the noises on the slope had been heard and might draw someone out onto the balcony.
Sullivan recalled that he and Sukie had nearly killed themselves struggling up the slope six years ago, for they’d been “on bar-time big time,” as Sukie had said—they’d been feeling the roughness of a step underfoot before the shoe actually touched it, and the bark of a tree limb a second before the hand grasped it. But Sukie had been full of hectic cheer, chatting graciously with imaginary guests and singing misunderstood snatches from Handel’s Messiah. Sullivan had been constantly whispering at her to shut up.
No one seemed to be home in the little castle. Sullivan relaxed and sucked on his cigarette, and he looked up at the brushy slope beyond the house. The upper slope had advanced visibly since his previous visit—broken dirt was piled up right to the stones of the arch at the south end of the house now, and a section of ornate marble railing stuck up crookedly above and behind the arch like a bleached rib cage exposed by a cemetery landslide.
He jumped suddenly, and as his cigarette hit the pavement he heard a voice from the stairway he’d just climbed: “By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin—”
Sullivan crouched behind the house side of the arch as the voice went on, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll eat you, billy-goat-gruff.”
It’s that bum, he thought nervously. He’s following me, and of course my gun is locked up back in the van.
Then he grinned at his momentary panic. Just a bum, he told himself. Forget him and go get the mask from the garage, which luckily is still standing. Sullivan stretched out his leg and stepped on the smoldering cigarette, but he was trembling, for the billy-goat-gruff remark had reminded him of the troll that had lived under a bridge in that old children’s story. Maybe, he thought as he made himself maintain his grin, I shouldn’t have walked across that board over the broken bridge back there.
He straightened up and stepped out into the sunlight and began walking across the old cement, careful not to kick any stray rocks.
The open-arched garage was a strange structure too, entirely fronted with tiny inset stones and with two broad castle-like merlons on the roof; the inside walls were all stonework as well, and the back wall was concave, as though to provide good acoustics.
After only a few steps he whipped his head back around to the left and saw a skinny old woman come shuffling around the corner of the house. Her white dress looked as if it had been elegant before someone had spent years sleeping, and apparently doing engine work, in it, but all she was wearing on her stained feet was a broken pair of plastic zoris. The soles flapped on the cement as she hunched toward him.
“I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?” she was calling anxiously.
Then Sullivan heard the bum scuffling quickly to the top of the stairs behind him. “Blow your house down!” he was cawing.
Sullivan broke into a run for the garage; he stomped and skidded inside and in an instant was crouched in the shadows against the back wall, digging in the loose dry dirt with his hands. It seemed to him that the dirt was colder than it had any right to be.
“Where the fuck,” he was keening to himself, just as he felt the plywood board he and Sukie had laid over Houdini’s mask. He paused, even though he could hear the bum wheezing his way across the driveway toward the garage. It’s not Houdini buried here, Sullivan reminded himself, it’s not even his ghost. He took a deep breath and lifted the board away in a shower of powdery dirt.
And he saw that the life-size plaster hands and the little cloth Bull Durham sack were still in the hole. If the bum was just a bum, Sullivan could probably chase him away by waving the plaster hands like clubs.
Even in his panic he grimaced with distaste as he tucked the sack into his shirt pocket, and then he made himself snatch up the plaster hands, and he turned toward the light of the entrance.
The bum from the hill slope was standing there, visible at last, and Sullivan saw that he did have hair on his chin; lots of it, white and matted. The man had his hands in the pockets of an enormous ragged overcoat, and he was rocking his head and peering in Sullivan’s direction.
Sullivan’s heart was pounding, for the man was clearly puzzled to see him. “What do you want?” Sullivan ventured. “How did you get in here?”
“I saw a guy—come in here,” mumbled the old man, “couldn’a had a hall pass, aren’t they—I forget. Where’d he go, anyway? I think he’s the guy that stole my…my Buick.” He was scuffling backward in confusion now. “I’m still pissed about that Buick.”
“He came in here,” said Sullivan, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “I ate him. And I’m still hungry.” He could smell the old man now, the well-remembered tang of raw cheap wine oozing out through dead pores.
“Jesus God!” the old man exclaimed shrilly, his brown-mottled eyes wide. “Ate—him! I help out around here, ask anybody, I fold the newspapers—” He was flapping his shaky hands. “—rearrange the rocks and—branches, you know? Make it all neater.” He bared teeth that seemed to be made of the same bad stuff as his eyes. “You can’t eat me, not right on top of him.”