Springer closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his pupils were a very pale agate color, and luminous. ‘Ashapola is the greatest power in the universe, John. Ashapola can turn the night into day. Ashapola can heal the sick and make the dead dance.’
‘OK,’ said John. ‘I’ll take your word for it. But what we need to do now is set up some kind of surveillance, right? One of us needs to keep an eye on the hotel lobby in case Gordon Veitch tries to register, and the rest of us should patrol the corridors. Whatever happens, we mustn’t let him slip into the hotel unnoticed. Otherwise we’re screwed.’
NINETEEN
Hunt The Clown
Detective Wisocky was studying the menu outside the entrance to the Boa Vinda restaurant when Detective Hudson came toward him across the hotel lobby, accompanied by a white-haired old man in a brown three-piece suit.
He checked his wristwatch and said, ‘It’s five after six, Charlie. You’re twenty minutes late. I was just about to go in and order the tilapia with peanuts. I never ate tilapia with peanuts before. Come to that, I never ate peanuts with tilapia.’
‘Sorry, Walter. We had to stop off on the way and buy a new battery for Henry’s hearing aid. By the way, this is Henry Marriott. Henry — this is Detective Wisocky.’
The old man held out his hand. He was small and frail, with a bulbous nose and large hairy ears, and he put Walter in mind of a miniature version of Jimmy Durante. He wore a crisp white shirt with a red silk necktie and a matching red carnation in his buttonhole. His hand felt like a turkey’s claw.
‘Good to meet you, Henry,’ said Walter. ‘My partner tells me you used to run the Clown Museum down on Pearl Road. When was that?’
‘What’s that?’ asked Henry, cupping his hand to his left ear. The background music in the hotel lobby didn’t help, and neither did a business executive standing right next to them, yelling into his cellphone.
Walter leaned forward and shouted, ‘When — did — you — run — the — Clown Museum?’
‘Oh! Got you! I was there for almost forty-eight years, from August nineteen hundred and thirty-five through June nineteen hundred and seventy-nine. I was only eighteen years old when I started. I took over the running of it when I was twenty-seven, which was in nineteen forty-four, because Mr Cascarelli was called up to join the Marines. He was killed at Okinawa, poor fellow. Stepped on a mine and got blown to smithereens. Good way for a clown to go, though.’
Charlie said, ‘Henry knew Gordon Veitch. In fact he knew him better than most — didn’t you, Henry?’
Walter laid a hand on Henry’s angular shoulder. ‘Let’s go through to the bar, shall we, Henry? It’s a whole lot quieter in there, and you’ll be able to hear me better. What would you like to drink?’
‘A long slow comfortable screw up against a cold hard wall, if that’s OK.’
Walter looked across at Charlie and raised one eyebrow, but Charlie simply shrugged. ‘That’s kind of a circus drink, I guess.’
They walked across the lobby toward the Lantern Bar, passing beneath the portrait of the stern-faced man with the reddish hair and the formal black suit. As they did so, Henry stopped and pointed up at him and said, ‘Now there’s your guilty party. Gilbert T. Griffin.’
‘Gilbert Griffin? Gilbert Griffin built this hotel and it’s the best hotel in Cleveland. What’s he guilty of?’
‘Meddling with things that shouldn’t be meddled with. That’s what he’s guilty of.’
‘OK…’
‘That’s Gilbert Griffin and the girl next to him, that’s his child-bride Emily Griffin, God rest her soul, wherever her soul might be.’
‘I see. You’ll have to tell us about it.’
They found a dark corner booth in the Lantern Bar, with squeaky black leather seats. Walter would have given anything for an ice-cold Coors, but he had to settle for a Diet Coke. Sometimes he wished he had picked a career in which drinking was not only acceptable but obligatory, like politics, or acting, or writing fiction. Charlie ordered a glass of water, with a twist.
‘So you knew Gordon Veitch,’ said Walter, when Henry’s cocktail arrived.
‘You bet. We all knew him, all of us clowns. Gordon Veitch was Mago Verde, the Green Magician. His father before him, Daniel Veitch, he was Mago Verde, too, and he handed it down to Gordon — the make-up, the tricks, but most of all that mean malicious attitude. If there was ever a son-of-a-bitch on this planet it was Daniel Veitch and if there was ever a son-of-a-son-of-a-bitch it was Gordon Veitch. But let me tell you one thing. Gordon Veitch may have been mean and malicious to everybody else, but he was never once mean and malicious to me. I guess you could say that he took me under his wing.’
‘How did you come to meet him?’ asked Walter.
‘I met him at Corey’s Circus. I used to work there after school, making myself some money by mucking out the animals. You ever smell lion shit? There is no worse smell on this planet than lion shit. Well, tiger shit maybe.
‘I got to know some of the clowns and most of them were good to me, considering I was nothing more than a part-time shit-shoveler. Bongo especially. He was Portuguese, believe it or not, and his real name was Remi. He helped me to design my own make-up and he lent me some of his outfits and he showed me how to juggle with knives and how to walk on the low wire and how to fall on my ass without hurting myself.
‘But it was Mago Verde who took a real shine to me, especially if I ran errands for him, like placing bets on the horses and bringing him cigarettes and bottles of hooch. All of the other circus folk, though, they stayed well clear of him. He would trip people up when they were carrying boxes of light bulbs; or he would do this trick when he threw an egg up into the air and catch it in a velvet bag, but when he asked some sucker to dip his hand into the bag and pick the egg out for him, the bag was cram-full of razor blades. Like I say, he was a regular son-of-a-bitch. He had the power, though, no mistake about that.’
‘The power?’ asked Walter. ‘What power was that, exactly?’
Henry sucked noisily at his cocktail. Then he held it up to the light and said, ‘Not bad. But too much sloe gin.’
‘What power, Henry?’ Walter pressed him.
Henry blinked at him as if he had never seen him before in his life. But then he lifted one finger and tapped it against the side of his bulbous nose. ‘Daniel Veitch had given Gordon a whole lot more than his make-up and his magic tricks and his mean and malicious attitude. He had passed on the family knack of stepping into other people’s dreams. That’s what he told me, anyhow, and he proved it to me.’
‘Excuse me? Stepping into other people’s dreams? How exactly did he do that?’
‘Search me. But he always insisted that he could do it, and once he told me that he had stepped into one of my dreams when I was sleeping — a dream I was having about fishing out on Lake Erie and my boat was sinking — and he described that dream to me in every detail — just like he had actually been there, too, standing right behind me.’
‘OK,’ said Walter, trying not to sound too skeptical. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, the dream thing, that’s where Gilbert Griffin came into it, and Gilbert Griffin was the real instigator of what happened next, although I never told nobody about it because nobody would never have believed me.’
‘So what makes you think that we’re going to believe you?’
‘You can believe me if you want to, or not if you don’t. I’m ninety-three years old now and I don’t give a rat’s ass. But I might as well tell somebody before I cash in my chips and it might as well be you. Especially young Charlie here. He understands about clowns, don’t you, Charlie?’