Ashley Bell: A Novel (56 page)

The electronic key fit the oval hole, the wasp in the Lucite glowed like a lamp filament, and the pneumatic steel door whisked open. Because the chamber beyond the threshold had a high positive pressure, a gust of sanitized air blew across Bibi and chased the fog off her shoulders and back. As she stepped inside, none of the wolfish, shadowy stalkers lunged at her, which made her wonder if their purpose was to guard this building or rather to herd her into it if she failed to enter of her own will. Behind her, the door slid shut with a
whoosh.

She stood in what might have been a reception hall, one designed to intimidate or inspire awe. It was about eighty feet wide, sixty deep, forty high, illuminated by adjustable pot lights recessed in the ceiling, most of which were directed straight down. Every surface was finished in panels of white quartz, which lacked the veining of marble and therefore presented a gleaming and uniform surface with depth. The only decoration appeared in the wall opposite the door: an inlaid twenty-foot-diameter disc of some blood-red stone, perhaps carnelian, which itself was inlaid with two parallel, highly stylized lightning bolts in black granite.

Bibi recognized the lightning as being a version of the double-
S
logo that had appeared on the front-page of
Das Schwarze Korps—The Black Guard
—the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s chief instrument of terror. The colors of the Nazi flag were boldly represented in this enormous room, although reversed. Instead of red for the field, there was white; instead of a white circle, red; instead of a black swastika, the black double-
S
motif. Whatever use might be intended for this building, Terezin had made only a minimal effort to disguise his inspiration. Perhaps that was because, here in the tumultuous second decade of the new century, frightening numbers of people were either easy to deceive or wished ardently to submit to any belief system, no matter how delusional, that reassured them and justified their hatreds.

Bibi had fallen into a peculiar state of mind. She was afraid but not of this building or anything in it. Not of Terezin, if he were waiting for her in some other room. She was afraid of herself, of some potential in herself that she had long denied but that she might be unable to deny any longer.

She did not fear the bottled and stoppered anger that popped and spilled when she bludgeoned her former teacher with the pistol. Her rage and capacity for violent action were righteous rather than savage. Envy of others and hatred of others because of their race or creed or class were the source of the storms that sometimes destroyed entire civilizations, but they were not the source of her anger. If she raged, it was against barbarism and cruelty, against willful ignorance and arrogance, against the demonizing of one’s opposition and the brutalizing of the innocent. She could control even that potent anger born from seventeen years of repressing fundamental knowledge of herself, which had left her with the fear of some act she had committed—and might still commit—but with no knowledge of what the act had been.

Besides rage, however, there was some other potential that she possessed, forgotten but not lost. It was coming back to her. In some way, the quest that she’d been on for two days was as much a search for that repressed truth as it was for Ashley Bell.

The immense white-red-black chamber was unfurnished except for what might have been a reception desk, a great block of midnight-black granite, so high that anyone manning it during an event would have to remain standing. As this object held the greatest interest, she moved toward it. When Bibi had closed to within a few yards of the desk, Chubb Coy rose to his feet behind it. He held a Taser.

She had researched Tasers for her novel. There was the thrust-and-click stun gun with no more range than the length of your arm, and there was the kind that fired two small probes trailing fifteen-foot wires. Coy was armed with the latter. He said, “Damn it all, woman, I don’t belong here.” Propelled by nitrogen gas, the wire whispered toward Bibi and the probes pierced her T-shirt. The shock mapped her peripheral nervous system and disrupted its messaging along both sensory and motor nerves. Racked by pain, without control of her limbs, she crumpled to the white-quartz floor, stuttering a curse that her tongue could not complete.

Bibi couldn’t sharply focus on Chubb Coy. She twitched in her private world of pain and motor-nerve confusion, like some broken-back beetle in denial of its fractured shell. But she realized what he must be doing, understood him well enough to know that he was coming around from behind the desk, not done with the Taser, tossing aside the used cartridge, clicking another one into place. She had known him only a short while, but she knew his capacity for malice. She knew him well. Her expectation was at once fulfilled as indigo light bloomed behind her eyes and an alien current razored along radiant neural pathways, chattering her teeth, making her hands flop like the hands of a marionette operated by a drunk puppeteer.

Coy circled as Bibi crabbed on the quartz, leaning toward her and raising his voice. “Do you understand that I don’t belong here? Do you get what I’m telling you? Are you going to stubbornly persist with this thread, the Chubb Coy thread? Is the hard way the only way you can fumble yourself to enlightenment?”

Her eyes were full of tears, squeezed out of her by pain. Before her, the white quartz shimmered as if melting, as if it might have been composed of condensed and petrified fog that was about to return to vapor. Aside from Coy’s shoes as he paced around and around her, the only dark object in view, approximately ten feet away, must be her pistol.

If she could get to the gun, she could use it. Pax had taught her how to use it. She was ready to use it now. No more hesitations. Use it not merely to intimidate. Not as a bludgeon. Pull the trigger. Empty the magazine. Kill the bastard.

“So I’m a retired police detective enjoying a second career as head of hospital security. That’s logical. Sets me up as being maybe more skilled, more dangerous than your average rent-a-cop. Not bad. Not terribly clever, but credible.”

He continued to circle her as she painstakingly dragged herself, shuddering and uncoordinated, inch by inch across a floor shimmering like a frozen sea under the pot lights. At times, the plain of quartz seemed to tilt precariously, so that she feared sliding at increasing velocity until she pitched across some brink, into a melt-smoothed vent flume that would spin her down—she was already dizzy—down into deep and deeper ice caverns.

“From the get-go,” Coy said, “my job was to establish the air of conspiracy and paranoia that would thicken and become complicated event by event. But that’s about all I was given to do. Except, of course, to be a distraction, to pop up when perhaps your thinking leads you toward the thing you find unthinkable.”

The Sig Sauer lay inches away, frozen to the tilted ice field and thus resistant to the gravity that would have sent it spinning away from her. She reached for it with her right hand, which was coming under her control again.

Coy had clicked a third cartridge into the Taser, and he fired it into her back. The probes, which could bite through an inch of clothing, pierced her blazer and T-shirt with no difficulty, serpent fangs injecting a current similar to that of the human body. Techno mavens called it neuromuscular incapacitation, a solemn laboratory term for a total physical freak-out, the baffled brain no longer able to discern the difference between the body’s natural signals and the storm of meaningless static, but the effect was more visceral and more emotional than the dry term suggested. With each shock, Bibi was thrown into a cold rushing river of sensation at the same time that she was robbed of any ability to control her reaction to it, and she wondered if with the fourth cartridge or the fifth, she would soil her pants and have the last shreds of dignity stripped from her.

Coy kicked the pistol away from Bibi’s spasming fingers. The weapon spun beyond her blurred and salt-stung vision.

“Are you listening to me, woman?” Coy asked, booming at her as if he were a lowercase god of the elements, speaking in the language of thunder, and she were a groveling penitent. “Think about my name. Chubb is as frivolous as Bibi, don’t you think? Yeah, sure, I’m being used to distract you, but part of me, just like part of you, wants you to find the truth, to be freed by the truth.”

There was a metallic taste in Bibi’s mouth, not the familiar coppery flavor of blood—she hadn’t bitten her tongue—but more like sucking on rusted iron, and a bitter lump rose in her throat, either vomit or self-pity. Her flesh stiffened even as her bones seemed to have been reduced to jelly, quivering like aspic on a plate.

“I am restricted—
you
have restricted me—to only indirect means of breaking through the stubborn and resistant Bibi, to reach the other Bibi that wants to remember the full truth. And so I try to make you understand what I really am by speaking out of character.
Are you listening to me, Gidget?
”

She thought that she said yes.

“What did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I’m listening, yes.” She heard the susurrant syllables hissing from her lips and across the quartz. “Yes.”

He said, “I tried to make you understand by speaking out of character. Chubb Coy, former homicide detective, not known to have significant interest in the classics of American literature. Jack London, Thornton Wilder, Flannery O’Connor—they all just happen to be among
your
admired pantheon.
Are you listening, Gidget?
”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Listening isn’t the same as
hearing,
” he declared, and with the cruel authority of a stone-temple god armed with modern technology, he slammed her with a fourth Taser cartridge.

She didn’t black out. She didn’t soil her pants, either. But she didn’t feel like searching for the lost gun or like doing anything other than lying on the bright griddle of quartz, melting like a pat of butter.

His voice remained stern, but softer than before. “I try to alert you to what I am. You sabotage me, sabotage yourself with the memory trick.”

She was looking at his shoes inches from her face. They were Gucci loafers. They should not be Gucci loafers. Too expensive for him. Too effete.

He walked a few circuits around her, saying nothing.

His socks were right. Not fancy designer socks with elaborate patterns. Plain black. A blend of man-made fabrics with just a little cotton. He could have bought them at Walmart, good working-cop socks.

He said, “Would you really rather die than learn the truth of what you are?”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“No. I don’t want to die.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I. Don’t. Want. To. Die.”

After a silence, with pity that had an edge of contempt, he said, “Then prove it by dealing with me.”

She was lying prostrate, head turned to the right. The injured left side of her face pressed against the stone floor. Her bleeding ear began to burn and throb again as the chaotic effect of the latest Tasering wore off and coherent messaging returned to her nervous system.

“Proving yourself to yourself doesn’t mean you’ll survive,” Coy said. “You could still easily end up dead. Or insane. But dealing with me is a start. Deal with me.”

Lying in the reception hall of a building in which a new world of fascist fury was being designed, she thought about what needed to be done. Editing. Revision.

From behind her came a rustle, a couple of soft thumps. As if some length of drapery had slipped off a rod, though the room had no draperies.

She waited. She listened. She heard nothing more.

When with an effort Bibi sat up and turned her head, she saw Chubb Coy’s discarded shoes and clothing, a puddle of fabric in the jumble of which his shoulder holster and pistol and Taser could be seen. He seemed to have disrobed and disarmed and walked off naked, though she had heard no door open or close.

Earlier, in the motel, studying the London, O’Connor, and Wilder quotations, she had begun to realize not only that Chubb Coy had spoken out of character, but also that he
was
a character. One of her creation. The quest for Ashley Bell would have collapsed right there if she had not cut the words from the books and burned them in the bathroom sink, using the memory trick to preserve this world, which was now too fully formed to easily dissolve.

To an observer, she might have appeared defeated as she crawled on her hands and knees to the tall black-granite desk and sat on the floor with her back against its polished-slab front. She had lost her baseball cap. Her hair tumbled in disarray. If her battered face was as pale as her hands, pale almost to ash-gray, she must have looked at once weak and wild.

She was not weak, however, and wild only to the extent that she did not know what jungles waited within her or what powers, native to them, she would soon discover. She was not defeated. But she was in the cold grip of fright.