And then Benner was approached by them and offered a high-paying, though unspecified, position. Over a pitcher of beer one night Benner had told Doyle about all the tests he was taking in order to qualify: tests for alertness under fatigue and distraction, physical endurance and agility, quick comprehension of complicated logic problems… and even a few tests which struck Doyle as distasteful, the purpose of which seemed to be to measure Benner’s capacity for ruthlessness. Benner had passed them all, and though he did tell Doyle afterward that he’d been accepted for the position, he completely, though amiably as ever, evaded all questions about the job itself.
Well, Doyle thought as, sounding distant through the insulation, the wheels yelped against the runway, maybe I’m about to learn what Benner wouldn’t tell me.
The guard unlocked the gate and took Doyle’s suitcase from the driver, who nodded politely and walked back toward the purring BMW. Doyle took a deep breath and stepped through, and the guard locked the gate behind him.
“Good to have you with us, sir,” the man recited, his voice raised to be heard over the roaring of diesel engines. “If you’ll follow me, please.”
The lot was more expansive than it had looked from the street, and the guard led him on a looping course to stay out of the way of intimidating obstacles. Big yellow earth-moving tractors lurched and shifted from place to place, popping head-sized stones to dust under their mill wheel tires and sending up an unholy clattering roar as they pushed quantities of rubble into big heaps and then pushed these away somewhere out in the darkness; the rubble, Doyle noted, was fresh, the broken edges of stone still white and sharp-smelling. And there were busy people hurrying about on foot, too, laying out thick power cables and peering through surveying instruments and calling numbers to each other over walkie-talkies. The ring of bright spotlights cast a half-dozen shadows from every object.
The guard was six feet tall and taking long strides, and the shorter Doyle, having to jog occasionally to keep up, was soon puffing and wheezing. What’s the goddamn hurry, he wondered angrily; though at the same time he promised himself that he’d start doing sit-ups and push-ups in the mornings again. A battered old aluminum trailer stood at the periphery of the glare, moored to the activity by cables and telephone lines, and this proved to be their destination. The guard hopped up the three steps to the door and knocked, and when someone inside shouted, “Come in!” he stepped down and waved Doyle ahead. “Mr. Darrow will speak to you inside.”
Doyle walked up the steps, opened the door and went in. The inside of the trailer was littered with books and charts, some looking old enough to belong in a museum and others obviously brand new; all were clearly in use, the charts covered with penciled notes and colored pins, and the books, even the oldest and most fragile, propped carelessly open and marked up with felt-pen ink. An old man stood up from behind one of the taller book stacks, and Doyle was impressed in spite of himself to recognize, from a hundred pictures in magazines and newspapers over the years, J. Cochran Darrow. Doyle had been prepared to humor a wealthy but sick and almost certainly senile old man, but all such thoughts evaporated before the man’s piercing and frostily humorous gaze.
Though the hair was whiter and scantier than recent photographs had shown, the cheeks a little hollower, Doyle had no difficulty in believing that this was the man who had pioneered more fields of scientific research than Doyle could probably even spell, and, out of a small-town sheet-metal factory, built a financial empire that made J. Pierpont Morgan look merely successful.
“You’re Doyle, I hope,” he said, and the famous deep voice had not deteriorated at all.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Darrow stretched and yawned. “‘Scuse me, long hours. Sit down, any space you can find. Brandy?”
“Sounds fine to me.” Doyle sat down on the floor beside a knee-high stack of books on which Darrow a moment later set two paper cups and a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessey. The old man sat down cross-legged on the other side of the stack, and Doyle was mortified to note that Darrow didn’t have to suppress a grunt in lowering himself to the floor. Lots of push-ups and sit-ups, he vowed.
“I imagine you’ve speculated on the nature of this job,” Darrow said, pouring the cognac, “and I want you to ditch whatever conclusions you’ve come up with. It’s got nothing to do with any of them. Here.” He handed Doyle a cup. “You know about Coleridge, do you?”
“Yes,” Doyle answered cautiously.
“And you know about his times? What was going on in London, in England, in the world?”
“Reasonably well, I think.”
“And by know, son, I don’t mean do you have books at home on these things or would you know where to look ‘em up in the UCLA library. I mean know ‘em in your head, which is more portable. Answers still yes?”
Doyle nodded.
“Tell me about Mary Wollstonecraft. The mother, not the one who wrote Frankenstein.”
“Well, she was an early feminist, wrote a book called, let’s see, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, I think, and—”
“Who’d she marry?”
“Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law. She died in childb—”
“Did Coleridge really plagiarize Schlegel?”
Doyle blinked. “Uh, yes. Obviously. But I think Walter Jackson Bate is right in blaming it more on—”
“When did he start up on the opium?”
“When he was at Cambridge, I think, early 1790s.”
“Who was the—” Darrow began, but was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. The old man swore, got up and went over to the phone and, lifting the receiver, resumed what was obviously an argument in progress about particles and lead sheathing.
Both from politeness and lack of interest, Doyle made a show of being curious about a nearby book stack—and a moment later his interest became wide-eyed genuine, and very carefully he lifted the top volume.
He opened it, and his half-incredulous suspicion was confirmed—it was the Journal of Lord Robb, which Doyle had been vainly begging the British Museum for a xerox copy of for a year. How Darrow could have got actual possession of it was unguessable. Though Doyle had never seen the volume, he’d read descriptions of it and knew what it was. Lord Robb had been an amateur criminologist, and his journal was the only source of some of the most colorful, and in many cases implausible, crime stories of the 1810s and 20s; among its tales of kill-trained rats, revenges from beyond the grave, and secret thief and beggar brotherhoods, it contained the only detailed account of the capture and execution of the semi-legendary London murderer known as Dog-Face Joe, popularly believed to have been a werewolf, who reputedly could exchange bodies with anyone he chose but was unable to leave behind the curse of lycanthropy. Doyle had wanted to link this story somehow with the Dancing Ape Madness, at least to the extent of the kind of speculative footnote that’s mainly meant to show how thoroughly the author has done his homework. When Darrow hung up the phone Doyle closed the book and laid it back on the stack, making a mental note to ask the old man later for a copy of the thing. Darrow sat down again beside the book stack with the cups and bottle on it, and picked up right where he’d left off. For the next twenty minutes he fired questions at Doyle, hopping from subject to subject and rarely allowing him time to amplify—though occasionally he would demand every detail Doyle knew about some point; questions on the causes and effects of the French Revolution, the love life of the British Prince Regent, fine points of dress and architecture, differences in regional dialects. And what with Doyle’s good memory and his recent Ashbless researches, he managed to answer nearly all of them. Finally Darrow leaned back and fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes out of his pocket. “Now,” he said as he lit one and drew deeply on it, “I want you to fake an answer.”