A Dark Matter (28 page)

“I can’t believe what’s happening with Hootie,” I said.

“Neither can Dr. Greengrass and that steamy little Pargeeta.”

“You think Pargeeta’s ‘steamy’? She strikes me as cold and haughty.”

“Don’t know much about women, do you? Pargeeta’s a
freak
. She’s so freaky, Hootie turns her on!”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I remembered seeing an odd conflict of emotions surfacing in the young woman’s face when Howard lay on the floor. After Greengrass asked him to speak in his own words, Pargeeta almost smiled. Whatever her feelings had been, they looked nothing like arousal.

“The girls always loved Hootie, man.”

“When he looked like the blond kid in
Shane
.”

“It’s a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.”

“Face it, Don, you couldn’t tell a story straight if somebody put a gun to your head. Mallon was the same way.”

“Aww,” Don said. “We’re having our first argument.”

I realized that I was more irritated than I had thought. These Mallon people made up the rules everywhere they went, arrogant, conceited, grasshoppers who depended on everyone else to feed them and clothe them and given them drugs and alcohol and listen to their ridiculous lies and open their legs whenever the Mallons and Mallon-ites wanted …

I had a sudden visual flash of the silver-haired man in the airport, and with it occurred a certain dread possibility. Instantly, I thrust it away.

“Calm down,” Don said. “I see by your face that you’re getting all cranked up. Remember that I’m doing you a favor here. And looky looky looky, I believe our question has been answered.”

I followed the direction of his gaze and saw, just now flowing down the lobby steps and earning a smile from the Cavalier, a cluster of people of every age, all of them stuffed into blue jeans that strained over their swollen bellies and ample hams. At their center moved a round-faced young woman encumbered with what appeared to be a loose gauze bandage floating about the top of her head. They were a family, mother and father, uncles and aunts, sons, daughters, cousins, wives and husbands, and even a couple of roly-poly children who darted in and out of the general confusion.

“Is that a melee, or what?” asked Olson. “God, look at her. She’s the Queen Bee, all right.”

The lively familial scuffle bustled toward the front desk, where it broke apart into singles and couples, allowing Don’s Queen Bee to throw out her arms and move at a slow, stately trot toward the desk. Two beefy males of approximately her age moved into position to receive extravagant hugs. The gauze on the young woman’s sturdy head was a wedding veil, swept back over an elaborate and lacquered hairdo. Apart from the veil, she wore a gray Eau Claire sweatshirt, the same kind of jeans as the rest of her family, and—a wonderful touch, I thought—well-worn, nearly knee-high cowboy boots with stacked heels and much ridging and stitching. She had come down with her family to greet the arrival of the groom and the best man, his brother.

“Going to be noisy in here tonight,” I said.

For a moment, I switched my gaze to a group of four men in crisp dark suits and gleaming shirtfronts who emerged from the nearer, non-Tower elevators and strode past the wedding party, moving toward the Jefferson Street exit at the back of the lobby. These men moved with the quick, gliding pace of dogs intent on their goal, entirely indifferent to the spectacle around them. The curls of white wire running from the ears of the two tall, athletic-looking men in the rear disappeared beneath the smooth collars of their jackets. Pacing just ahead of a thin, watchful-looking man with black-framed glasses who had tucked a black leather folder beneath his elbow, the obvious leader of this pack had perfect CEO hair graying at the temples and a broad, suntanned face with deep smile lines around the eyes. He looked as if he had just purchased the hotel and was heading out to buy two or three more.

Open-mouthed, Don Olson tracked the progress of these men toward the exit. They swept out in a fluid unit, flowing through the self-opened glass door like sharks prowling the sea.

Olson turned to me and tapped my bicep. “Time for the big surprise, bud.”

He stood up. I did the same. “So that’s who we were waiting to leave.”

“Gee, d’ya think?” Olson wove through the lobby furniture, going to the same elevator the four men had just left. I followed a few steps behind.

“The man who owns the world, his lawyer, and his security team.”

“You didn’t recognize him.”

“I don’t read the business section,” I said.

“That’s not the one he’s usually in.” Olson came up to the single lobby elevator and punched the button with a knuckle. Immediately, the door retracted.

“Okay, I give up,” I said. I went into the elevator and watched Olson use his knuckle to punch the button for the fifth floor.

“What’s the business with the knuckle? A sanitation issue?”

“You really didn’t recognize that guy? He might be our president one day, if our luck runs really bad.”

I snapped my fingers. “You don’t want to leave fingerprints. It’s a trick you learned from Boats.”

“Why leave your prints all over everywhere? Use your elbow, not your hand. Use your knuckle, not your finger. Wear gloves. A world like this, privacy disappearing in a hundred little ways, you might as well do what you can to cover yourself. Just ask the senator what
he
thinks about individual privacy. Fine for him, is what he thinks. That guy, him and those like him need so much privacy they want to take most of what we got.”

“He’s a senator?”

“First term, but give him time. They’ve got big plans,
huge
plans.”

“They? Him and that skinny lawyer guy next to him?”

“Him and his wife.”

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. I followed Olson out as I had followed him in, and when we turned to go down the corridor, something awakened in my memory.

“Is this senator’s name Walsh?”

“Senator Rinehart Walker Walsh, of Walker Farms, Walker Ridge, Tennessee.”

“Currently the husband of …”

“The former Meredith Bright. The one remaining survivor of Spencer Mallon’s ceremony-slash-experiment-slash-breakthrough in the agronomy meadow that you still haven’t met.”

“Apart from Hayward’s roommate, Brett Milstrap.”

“Well, good luck with that. And you forgot Mallon.”

“You mean he isn’t dead?” This information shocked me: it was like hearing that the Minotaur still lived at the heart of his labyrinth. A sudden foul taste and a scalding sensation rose from the back of my throat into my mouth.

“Of course he’s not dead. He lives on the Upper West Side of New York and he makes his living as a psychic. He’s
a
great
psychic. Want to meet him? I’ll give you his address.”

I tried to picture myself ringing Mallon’s doorbell, and a shiver of revulsion ran through me. “All this time, that bastard has been alive.” I still could only barely believe it. “Jesus. You know, back in the airport, this terrible idea came to me, and I …”

Don said, “Pull yourself together, Lee. This isn’t exactly going to be a day at the beach, either.”

At the end of the hallway he knocked on a door marked “The Marquette Suite.”

The door swung open. A tall, cadaverous, black-clad man in his mid-thirties stood before us, already backing away. He had a pronounced stoop, dark hair that dripped over his pale forehead, dark, shiny eyes, and a long, slippery mouth.

“Yes,” he said, making a sketchy bow of his slouch. “Donald, of course, here you are, yes.” Briefly, he offered Don his limp hand, which Don took, briefly, and dropped without shaking. The man turned his entire upper body to me, and swung his hand with it. His eyes glittered. It was like meeting an undertaker from an old black-and-white movie. “And this must be Mr. Harwell, our famous aut’or. What a pleasure this iz.”

I met the man’s dangling fingers with his own. They felt cold and lifeless. After a moment of contact, I pulled back my hand.

“I am Vardis Fleck, Mr. Harwell, Mrs. Walsh’s assistant. Please come with me into the drawing room.”

We were in an entry or anteroom where a large oval mirror in a gilt frame faced a high table with a huge flower arrangement that widened out in a fan of stalks and twigs. Behind Fleck, two doors slanted toward each other in a triangular corner. He glided to the door on the right and swung it open.

“Please,” he said again, smiling with his mouth only.

“I hope you’re still cooking on all burners, Vardis,” said Don. “And that there is peace in the kingdom.”

“Never a boring moment when
you’re
around, Donald.”

He followed us into a wide, functional space with groupings of couches and upholstered chairs around dark wooden tables. A bare fireplace stood in the wall to our right; on the wall to the left, a tall black console displayed a large blank television and an array of drawers around the minibar. Cut-glass vases on two tables held huge, thrusting flower arrangements doubled by mirrors identical to the one in the foyer.

“But I can assure you that I am cooking on every one of the burners that I possess,” Fleck added. “Such is the nature of my employment. I wish to add that you are my dear lady’s most truly
unconventional
acquaintance. She knows no others who request a monetary contribution upon releasse from priss-on.”

With a languid flap of a hand that resembled a broken bird’s wing, he waved us to the furniture in front of the fireplace.

“A contribution she was as happy to offer as I was grateful to receive.”

“Mr. Fleck,” I asked, parking myself on the sofa’s rigid and unyielding cushion, “might I ask where you are from? Your accent is very musical, but I’m afraid I can’t place it.”

“You may, you might,” said Fleck. He was bowing slightly and backing toward a baronial door with a cornice and a grand entablature on the left side of the room. An identical door stood in the wall to our right. Behind these would be many others, leading to interlocking rooms. All of the rooms would be as anonymous and impersonal as this one.

“It is an un-usual story, if I may permit myself. I was born in Alsace-Lorraine, but my childhood was spent in Veszprém, Transdanubia, in the Bakony Mountains.”

“Fleck is a Hungarian name, is it not?”

The man’s smile became almost alarmingly toothy, while his wet-looking eyes remained cold. “Mine is
a
Hungarian name, as you remark.” His upper body inclined toward the floor at an even greater angle, and he reached behind him for the knob, swung the door open, and disappeared through it backwards.

For a couple of seconds we heard his shoes pattering away. Then the footsteps ceased, as if Fleck had taken flight.

“You see him often?”

“Without you see Vardis, you don’t see Meredith. I think even the senator has to make playdates and dinner arrangements through that guy.”

“Does the senator know about your visits?”

“Of course not. Why do you think we had to wait for him to leave?”

“She’s a pretty brave woman, whatever you say.”

“Because of what she’s risking? Meredith Walsh doesn’t give a shit about risk, she has the guts of a burglar. Hold on, she’s coming.”

Audible through the vast door to their left, light footsteps ticked across a wooden floor.

“I thought she’d come from the other side, didn’t you?” I asked. Olson put a finger to his lips, staring at the great door as if in expectation of something wondrous or appalling.

When the door opened, the first thought that came to me was,
Well, now I can say that I have seen at least two extraordinarily beautiful older women
.

Coming toward me was a lush, slender woman in a short black dress cut low in front, a handsome jacket of a subtle blue, and black toe-cleavage pumps with three-inch heels. She was taller than I had expected, and her silken, well-shaped legs made her seem almost obscenely young. Her abundant hair seemed to shimmer between light blond and silver-white, first one, then the other, then back again. All of this had an impact, of course, but what made my heart pick up speed and my vision lose focus was her face.

Abandon and control, warmth and teasing distance, deep humor and deep gravity informed her face, along with a hundred other promises and possibilities. Meredith Walsh looked like a woman who could understand everything, and explain it all to you in words of one syllable, patiently. She also seemed to be of no particular age whatsoever, apart from possessing an undeniably attractive maturity that made youth seem like a mere chrysalis. Her stunning looks, her obvious intelligence, her warmth, her sexuality, her humor, these things flummoxed and upended me, and by the time the gorgeous, sexy, witty, grown-up blur that was Meredith Walsh had somehow magically appeared beside my chair, I wanted, in no particular order, to take her home with me, spend hours in bed making love, and marry her. Standing to greet her came more from reflex than a conscious decision. Once I was on my feet, I was grateful she extended a hand instead of leaning forward for a kiss on the cheek: being that close would have been too intoxicating.

“Lee Harwell, this is such a treat,” she said. “I’m so pleased that Don made it possible for me to meet you. Please, sit down. We have only about an hour, actually less, but we should be as comfortable as possible during our time together, don’t you think?”

She sat where no chair had been, but instantly one appeared beneath her.

“Yes, of course,” I heard myself say. “I certainly want
you
to be comfortable.”

I found myself taking in the top of her head before it came to me that I was supposed to sit, too. How could Donald Olson ever have come to such absurd conclusions about this woman?

When I sat, her gaze surrounded me.

“What a gentleman you are. No wonder you charmed Vardis so completely. Of course Vardis is one of your most ardent admirers. I wish I could say that I have read your books, too, but a politician’s wife leads an absurdly busy life. However, I will get to one of your books as soon as is possible. I will make time for it.”