“Help you?”
“You know the guy in number two-ten, down the hall? Sequoia Solutions.”
He wags his head. “No. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen anybody in that office,” he tells me.
“Guy named Mertz?”
He shakes his head again. “Lot of these offices, people aren’t here on a daily basis, you know? I’m the exception. Sorry.”
I ask him for the number of the rental agency, which he gives me. They’ll have a lease, more information about Mertz. I’ll get in touch with them tomorrow.
In the meantime, I need a room.
This turns out to be a problem. It’s August, there are not that many places to stay, and they’re all booked solid. I strike out in Anchor Bay. I head north toward Point Arena, and I strike out there, too. Everywhere I go, I ask about Mertz, and Sequoia Solutions. I strike out there, too. No one’s heard of him.
The clerk at the Buena Vista Cottages in Point Arena takes pity on me and makes a few phone calls.
“Bingo,” he says. “The Breakers Inn, in Gualala. They had a cancellation.”
“Where’s that?”
“Just go south on 101. It’s the next town down from Anchor Bay.”
“Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.”
“Hey, my turn will come.”
It’s almost eleven by the time I pull into the Breakers Inn parking lot. Mine is a big room, with a balcony facing the sea, the kid at the desk tells me.
The motel’s landscaping is heavy with flowers and rose-covered arches. Beyond a placid estuary, the surf crashes and ebbs. Everything about the place, including the happy couple behind me in line, suggests that it’s popular for romantic getaways. Not exactly the way I’d describe my visit.
The clerk takes my card and runs it through his machine. I decide to get right to it. “You know a local guy named Mertz?” I ask him. “Short guy, bald, lots of money. But he’s not really local. Has a place around here, but he’s actually from Belgium.”
“Sorry, man. I’m just here for the surf.”
“You know anyone who might know?” I ask, taking the key from him.
He thinks about it. “The little grocery store – right next door. That’s open till midnight. Local people work there. You might try real estate agents – there’s a flock of them. They stay pretty up on things. And there’s a couple of restaurants in town that don’t just cater to tourists. Try the Cliff House.”
I thank him and look at the key, which has no number. “So where’s my room?”
“You’re in Canada,” he tells me. “Down the walk, third on the left.”
“Canada?”
“They’re all named after places,” he says. “Decorated that way, too. Thinking out of the box, you know. Someone thought numbers were boring. Too hierarchical.”
“That is sooo California,” the woman behind me says. “Don’t you just love it?”
At the grocery store, I let an elderly lady in line behind me go ahead, and she does, with a little genuflection of thanks. She buys Salem Lights, a can of Pringles, and a half gallon of skim milk.
The woman working the register is young and huge, at least six-feet-two, two hundred fifty. With her round, cherubic face, she looks like a giant baby.
I put my bottle of Zephyrhills water on the conveyor belt. “I’m looking for somebody,” I tell her. “Maybe you know him?”
She flips her wrist with a practiced motion and scans the water. “Dollar twelve,” she says.
“Guy named Luc Mertz. He’s-”
“-a fucking frog is what he is,” the cashier snarls. “Tells me no, he ain’t a frog, he’s Belgian.” She shakes her head. “Same difference. They hate our guts, too. Some kind of allies, huh?”
“So you do know him,” I say.
Babyface doesn’t miss the stupidity of this remark. “Duh,” she says. “Yeah, I guess so.”
I’m stunned. For a moment I feel the surprising and unfamiliar radiance of luck. I was prepared to grind it out.
“He live around here?”
“Hell, yes. I worked a party down there one time, bartending. Big place, down by Sea Ranch. Got some frogoid name.” She concentrates like a toddler, her face contorted by concentration. “Mystère!” she says like a quiz-show contestant. “You know, it’s like frog for mystery.”
She puts my water in a plastic bag, places the receipt in it, hands it to me.
“Where’s Sea Ranch?” I ask her.
“You don’t know where Sea Ranch is?” Now I’m testing her patience. She rolls her eyes. “It’s probably the biggest development between here and… San Francisco is all. You go south on 101. You could be legally blind and you couldn’t miss the place. It’s a million acres or something. You’ll see these big old ram’s horns – that’s like the Sea Ranch” – she searches for the word on the ceiling – “logo. Got a rental office and all. Lodge, restaurant. Okay, maybe a few miles past the end of Sea Ranch, there’s a little road on the right called Estate Road. You go down that and at the very end, you get to Mystère. Iron gates with a big old M in the middle. Guardhouse and all.”
Before I head out, I throw my suitcase on the bed and dig the gun out of its foil cocoon. As long as I have the gun, I might as well take it along. I slide it under the passenger seat of the car.
I cross the county line, leaving Mendocino County and entering Sonoma County. So, a trip to the courthouse in Ukiah would have been useless.
Ten minutes later, I’m past the Sea Ranch, and I’m on Estate Road. It’s almost dark now, and as I drive past Mertz’s estate, all I can really see is the brightly lit cubicle of the guardhouse and the general lay of the land. A series of rolling hills fall away toward the sea, which is far enough away that I can’t really hear the surf. And then I do – a dull and distant thud, like a faint heartbeat. The moon slides out from underneath a cloud and illuminates, for a few moments, a boulder-strewn patch of ocean. In the moonlight, the knobby pinnacles of rock look like a crowd of alien giants striding toward shore. The waves fracture against them, sending up spumes of white. And then the moon slips under the cloud again, and I can’t see much but the rough contours of the land.
The estate – it’s down there somewhere – is huge, its borders protected by the sea and by a towering iron fence whose vertical pikes end in sharp points. Every twenty yards or so, red diodes mark the location of surveillance cameras.
Somewhere down there is a house.
And somewhere in that house are my boys.
My heart seems to be outside my body.
What are they doing – Sean and Kevin? Is one of them rehearsing his lines for the performance? Is the other practicing his emergence at the end of the trick, with a big smile for the audience?
I can picture them together, Sean making fun of Kevin as he bursts out of the basket, arms thrust up in victory like a gymnast at the end of a winning routine. I can see them giggling, delighted by their part in the deception, the twin trick. What would Boudreaux tell the boy who’d been chosen to rise in triumphant life? How would he explain the bloody limbs and body parts tossed into the basket atop the one crouched there, waiting for the signal to come forth. It occurs to me that certainly the basket is specially built – like the dovepan described by Karl Kavanaugh – so that the waiting boy is spared contact with the hacked limbs and severed head of his brother.
I roll along at a crawl beside the iron fence, tempted to climb it right now, but deterred by the cameras. Then the road comes to an end in a gravel cul-de-sac on the edge of a cliff. I can see the property line clearly. The metal fence turns the corner and extends a hundred feet or so along the flat area at the top of the cliff. Then, as the land abruptly falls away into a rocky crevasse, the border of Mystère is demarcated by a multiple-strand fence of barbed wire that stretches as far as I can see, down into the sea. Its topmost run, at about nine feet in height, glitters in the moonlight: it’s strung with razor wire. Even here, in terrain that would challenge a rock climber, surveillance cameras sit atop the metal stanchions supporting the barbed wire, every twenty yards or so as far as I can see down toward the ocean. It’s eerie to see them whir and turn, robotic eyes restlessly scanning the misty night. I hope I’ve managed to stay beyond their reach.