The day after the day after tomorrow would be her seventy-seventh birthday. She had been born on Halloween in Grace Hospital in Detroit at 1:26 in the afternoon, in, apparently, the very instant that the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini was expiring in the same hospital.
And she had been robbed of her birth-ghosts, the psychic shells of herself that had been thrown off in the stress and fright of being born. Those shells should have been instantly reabsorbed, like the virtual photons that electrons are always throwing off and then recapturing…but they had been caught by someone else, and so she had been tumbled out into this busy world with only a fraction of her proper self. The loss had to be connected with Houdini’s death.
DeLarava hit the brake pedal again as taillights flashed red in front of her, and she thought about what Sukie Sullivan had said to her brother Pete on the telephone on Friday night, just before she’d shot her own drunken head off: Go to the place where we hid—a thing, some things, okay? In a garage? It’s what you’re gonna need…And Pete had said, Where you can’t hardly walk for all the palm fronds on the pavement, right? And you’ve got to crawl under low branches? Is it still there? And Sukie had replied, I’ve never moved it.
DeLarava was sure that they’d been talking about Houdini’s mask—the severed thumb and the plaster hands. The loss of them at Kennedy Airport in ‘75 had not been a random, tragic luggage theft after all—the twins had snatched the package, and hidden it from her. That, and the theft of her birth-ghosts, had been the only robberies that had ever hurt her.
A garage, she thought as she signaled for a lane change to the left, with palm fronds on the pavement and low branches around it. That could be nearly any where—and if Pete has recovered the thumb and the hands, there’s no use in me finding the garage now anyway. And if he’s carrying them with him, then he’s masked and I can’t track him.
At least not by psychic means.
But the old man is apparently out of the sea now, or at least emerging. Maybe I can catch him and eat him even without Pete being present as a lure. And though my twin set is broken, I ought to be able to get by, just with the help of Joey Webb. A real bag-full-of-broken-mirror schizophrenic is nearly as good a mask as a pair of twins.
And maybe this…this lobster quadrille will even draw Nicky Bradshaw out of hiding, him being the old man’s godson and all, and the old man having got him his start in show business. Maybe I could have Bradshaw gassed or knocked unconscious. Do people dream, when they’re unconscious? If so, I could probably be on hand to get live footage of one godalmighty fireball in Venice. It’d certainly be a more valuable bit of film to peddle to the networks than this feature on the lobsters and the dead fish.
It might even be possible for me to catch Nicky’s ghost. I wonder how that one would taste, it having been in effect carried in a locket around his neck for seventeen years.
NEAL OBSTADT’S offices were on the roof of the Hopkins Building on the corner of Beverly Glen and Wilshire, ten stories above the Westwood sidewalks and overlooking the tan blocks of the UCLA buildings to the west and the green lawns of the Los Angeles Country Club to the east. The walls of his consulting room were sectional cement slabs paneled with Burmese teak, but there was no roof, just a collapsible vinyl awning that was rolled back this morning to let the chilly breeze flutter the papers on the desk. Obstadt was slouched sideways in his thronelike chair, squinting up at an airliner slanting west across the blue sky.
“Loretta’s a clown,” he said without looking away from the plane. “Trying to eat the ghost of Jonah or somebody out of those fishes she hooks up from that puddle around the Queen Mary.”
The black-bearded man across the desk from him opened his mouth, but Obstadt held up a hand.
“Got to think,” Obstadt said. “I need…what I need is a fresh viewpoint.”
He pulled open a drawer and lifted out of it a thing that looked like a small black fire extinguisher. From his pocket he fished a thumb-sized glass cartridge, and he looked at the label hand-Dremled onto the side: HENRIETTA HEWITT—9-5-92.
“Was last month a good vintage?” he asked absently as he laid the cartridge into a slot in the nozzle at the top of the black cylinder and then twisted a screw at the base of the slot until he heard a muffled hiss inside the cylinder. A plastic tube like a straw stuck out from the top of the nozzle, and he leaned forward over the desk to get his lips around it.
He exhaled through his nose for several seconds, then pressed a button on the side of the nozzle and inhaled deeply.
All at once:
Yellowed curtains flapping in an old wood framed window with peeling white paint, hip and wrist lanced with flaring hot pain against the dusty carpet and the weight of the whole noisy planet crushing her sunken chest; only newspapers for years now on the big leather recliner by the TV, no one will find me, who’ll feed Mee-mow and Moozh; Edna and Sam both moved away, back East, having had weddings of their own, but a string of Christmases before that with smells of pine and roasting turkey, and bright-painted metal toys; and their births, wailing little creatures wet and red-faced after the hours of anxious, joyful, expanding pain—(nothing like this constricting agony that was smashing her out of existence now like a locomotive rolling a fragmenting car in front of it)—and breath-catching nakedness under sweaty sheets in a palm-shaded Pasadena bungalow, a wedding in 1922, drunk, and driving the boxy new Ford around and around the little graveled traffic circle at Wilshire and Western; long hair easier to brush when the air carried the sulfur smell of smudge pots burning in the orange groves in the winter, and a schoolhouse and pet ducks in the fiat farmlands out home in the San Fernando Valley, dolls made of wood and cloth, and smells of cabbage and talcum powder and sour milk; pain and being squeezed and choking and bright light—ejected out into the cold!—and now there was nothing but a little girl falling and falling down a deep black hole, forever.
Obstadt exhaled slowly, aware again of the sun on his bare forearms, the breeze tickling between the coarse gray hairs. He uncrossed his legs and sat up straight, his man’s body still feeling strange to him for a moment or two. And, he thought, I now weigh one three-thousandth of an ounce more than I did a minute ago.
He took a deep breath of the chilly morning air. The memories were fading—an old woman dying of a heart attack, after kids and a long life. He knew that the details would filter into his dreams…along with the details of all the others. Nice not to have a wino or a crackhead for once.
“Loretta’s a clown,” he repeated hoarsely, dragging his attention back across the vicarious decades. “She wins chips in this low-level game, but never cashes ‘em in to move up to a bigger table; though she’d obviously like to, with her Velcro and her vegetarianism.”
He rubbed his fists over his gray crew cut, knuckling his scalp. “Still,” he went on, “some big chips do sometimes slide across her table, and she’s all excited about one now.” He stood up and stretched, flexing his broad shoulders. “I’m going to take it away from her.” He thought of brightly painted toys under Christmas trees. “Children,” he said thoughtfully. “Does Loretta have any, biological or adopted? Find out, and find them if she does. Keep monitoring her calls.” He looked at Canov. “What have you got on Topper?”
“Spooky,” Canov corrected him. “Nicholas Bradshaw. I think the courts still have warrants out on him. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”