We stand there, waiting. “There’s supposed to be a stone,” she tells me. “But sometimes that takes a while.”
I can’t say a word. To her credit, she gives my arm a squeeze and lets it go at that. We wait. She seems to be studying the cloud patterns. I can’t take my eyes off the plastic knights, the Fisher-Price figures, the raw earth.
Her phone rings, a discreet chirp. She turns away from me as she talks.
“No?” she says in a hushed voice. “You’re kidding. Oh, God, people are something, huh?”
She puts the phone back in the holster on her hip and looks at me, a tiny frown marring her serene expression. “This is somebody’s idea of a bad joke,” she tells me, bending down to scoop up the toys from the dirt. “There’s no one buried here. This is one of six plots that we’ve taken off the market. We’re putting in a fountain here, for the little folks’ area.” She cocks her head, looks at me, puts her hand on my arm. “Look, it’s a big place, it’s easy to get confused. This isn’t the only location where children are buried. If there’s someone in particular you’re looking for, you should go to the graves registration office. It’s in administration, where you found me. Okay? I’ll give you a ride.”
She starts to walk off toward the car and I fall in step next to her. We both hear it at the same time: the crystalline notes of a flute. It’s a haunting and beautiful sound.
“Isn’t that pretty,” she says as we turn in unison to look for the source of the music. “I didn’t know there were any ceremonies this morning.”
And then I see him – leaning casually against a gravestone not thirty feet from me. He’s wearing khakis, a white shirt. He holds the flute to his lips.
“Hey!” the woman protests as I take off after him, but I’m gone, running between gravestones, crashing past startled cemetery visitors. I ran the four hundred in high school and although I’m out of shape, I’m still fast – and I’m gaining on him. He’s heading toward a small lake, the grounds around it beautifully landscaped with trees and shrubs, interspersed with family mausoleums. The area provides so many places to hide that I lose him a couple of times – but each time he pipes a tune and then emerges from behind a tree or gravestone.
My lungs are burning, my quadriceps screaming by the time I see him run onto a little causeway that leads to an island in the middle of the lake. I accelerate: it’s a dead end for him. I can practically feel it, his body under me when I launch myself and take him down.
We’re running alongside the large mausoleum on the island and I’m so close that I can see what brand of shoe he’s wearing – Nikes. He reaches the end of the structure and turns the corner. I’m seconds behind him, and yet when I turn… impossibly, he’s not there. He’s vanished.
CHAPTER 44
I can’t believe my eyes and yet… he’s gone. I spend the next forty-five minutes searching – for him at first, and then for how he did it. Initially, I scan the landscape, thinking I’ll catch sight of him again, that he’s toying with me, like before. It doesn’t happen. Then I explore the mausoleum and all the surroundings – the trees, the shrubs, the gravestones. I even stand at the lakeside and look into the water. I search for any place he could have hidden himself, even for a moment, trying to figure out how he could have pulled off his vanishing act. But I find nothing.
I approach other visitors to the island and its surroundings. Many of them saw The Piper, heard his flute, even saw me chasing him – but no one saw where he went. No one saw him disappear.
I don’t believe that, of course. I know he didn’t disappear. It was a trick, an illusion. He left the Hollywood Forever brochure in my car; he knew I’d be coming to the cemetery. He had plenty of time to make any kind of arrangements he wanted to in advance. He set up the display with the knights and the toys, waited for me to look at it, then led me on a chase. He knew where I’d go, because he was leading. But still – how did he do it? I can’t find anything – anything – that would have enabled him to vanish like that. But he’s a magician, after all.
Given a day or a week, maybe I could figure out how he did it, but I don’t have time. I’m still shaking my head when I drive out of the cemetery and head for LAX.
Mike Aguilar is a laid-back Chicano who doesn’t hold it against me that I’m fifteen minutes late.
“The traffic here, man?” He shakes his head. “You try to keep too locked on to a schedule, you make yourself crazy.”
The bartender brings us a couple of Bohemias, chips, and salsa.
“So you’re interested in this guy Mertz,” Aguilar says. “Matter of fact, he’s an innarestin’ guy. I’m not surprised somebody wants to take a look at the man.”
“I understand you confiscated some videos from him and he sued to get them back.”
Aguilar shakes his head. “He sued all right, but we didn’t take them off him. We took the videos off an employee of his, a Japanese photographer who was coming to the U.S. from Croatia or some damn place. The videos are tucked into bogus slipcases, y’know? I think one of them was The Lion King. That’s what made me take a look. I thought it was probably pornography, right? Because this guy didn’t look like he was into kiddie stuff.”
“So what happened?”
“We screened a couple of minutes of each video, and then we seized them.”
“So it was pornography.”
“No. It was worse than that. By community standards – and I don’t care if we’re talking about L.A. or Fargo – those videos should have been burned.”
“But-”
“What it was… Mertz paid this guy to go around, making videos in places like Bosnia, Albania, Sierra Leone. So what you had were people being tortured and killed – on camera, real time! It was like a snuff flick, but without the sex. No politics, no context. Just ninety minutes of people dying in close-up. The impression I got: this guy went from detention camps to makeshift prisons, paying bribes and directing the action.”
“And the judge let him keep that?”
Aguilar nods. “Yeah. Said it was art.”
“And that was it? No investigation?”
The customs agent gives a hopeless shrug. “Nothing we could do. Mertz’s lawyers were all over the case as soon as we grabbed the videos. We had the initial intake interview with the photographer, and that was it.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“Not much. The only thing I got out of it was that it wasn’t just Mertz. It was like there was a club or something.”
“What kind of club?” I ask.
The customs agent shakes his head. “I don’t know. The photographer was going nuts when I grabbed the videos. So he started throwing out names, yelling – the people he works for are going to have my job. Mertz was one of the names he threw out. But there were others. A sheikh. Some Russian oil guy. People like that.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together. “Big bucks,” he says. “Fingers in a lot of pies.”
I press Aguilar for the names.
“Sorry, man, I just don’t remember.”
“What about that interview – you have a tape?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, we lost the case, right? Those tapes get purged.”
“One more thing. What nationality is Mertz? French?”
Aguilar shakes his head. “Belgian.”
I get an idea, stuck in traffic on Sepulveda. Maybe I can make Mertz come to me.
I catch John DeLand as he’s leaving the Castle for lunch. “Just a quick question.”