False Memory (38 page)

“She didn’t commit suicide,” Dusty repeated, speaking softly, leaning forward conspiratorially in the booth, even though the roar of voices from the bar prevented anyone from eavesdropping.

The certainty in his voice left Martie speechless. Slashed wrists. No indications of a struggle. A suicide note in Susan’s handwriting. The determination of self-destruction was irrefutable.

Dusty held up his right hand, and with each point he made, he let a finger spring from his clenched fist. “One—yesterday at New Life, Skeet was activated by the name
Dr. Yen Lo
and then together we stumbled to the haiku that allowed me to access his subconscious for programming.”

“Programming,” she said doubtfully. “This is still so hard to believe.”

“Programming is how I see it. He was waiting for instructions.
Missions,
he called them. Two—when I became frustrated with him and told him he should give me a break and just go to sleep, he went out instantly. He
obeyed
what seemed like an impossible order. I mean, how can you drop off to sleep in a blink, at will? Three—earlier yesterday, when he was going to jump off the roof, he said someone had
told
him to jump.”

“Yeah, the angel of death.”

“Granted, he was whacked on something. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some truth in what he said. Four—in
The Manchurian Candidate,
the brainwashed soldier is capable of committing murder on the direction of his controller, then forgetting every detail of what he’s done, but, get this, he’ll also follow instructions to kill himself if necessary.”

“It’s just a thriller.”

“Yeah, I know. The writing’s good. The plot is entertaining, and the characters are colorful. You’re enjoying it.”

Because she had no answer to that, Martie drank more beer.

General Santa Anna was dead, and history was being rewritten. Al Capone must now assume command of the combined forces of Mexico and the Chicago underworld.

The goody-two-shoes bunch defending the Alamo had better not start celebrating just yet. Santa Anna was a formidable strategist; but Capone had him beat for sheer ruthlessness.

Once, the real Capone, not this plastic figure, had tortured a snitch with a hand drill. He locked the guy’s head in a machine-shop vice, and with henchmen holding the turn-coat’s arms and legs, old Al had personally cranked the drill handle, driving a diamond-tipped bit through the terrified man’s forehead.

Once, the doctor had killed a woman with a drill, but it had been a Black Decker power model.

Dusty said, “Condon’s book is fiction, sure, but you get a sense that the psychological-control techniques described in it are based on sound research, that what he proposes as fiction was pretty much possible even at that time. And Martie, the book is set
almost fifty years in the past.
Before we had jet airliners.”

“Before we went to the moon.”

“Yeah. Before we had cell phones, microwave ovens, and fat-free potato chips with a diarrhea warning on the bag. Just imagine what specialists in mind control might be able to do now, with unlimited resources and no conscience.” He paused for Heineken. Then: “Five—Dr. Ahriman said it was
incredible
that both you and Susan should be stricken with such extreme phobias. He—”

“You know, he’s probably right that mine is related to Susan’s, that it comes from my sense of failure to help her, from my—”

Dusty shook his head and folded his fingers into a fist again. “Or your phobia and hers were implanted, programmed into you as part of an experiment or for some other reason that makes no damn sense.”

“But Dr. Ahriman never even suggested—”

Impatiently, Dusty said, “He’s a great psychiatrist, okay, and he’s committed to his patients. But he’s conditioned by education and experience to look for psychological cause and effect, for some
trauma
in your past that caused your condition. Maybe that’s why Susan didn’t seem to be making much progress, because there isn’t any trauma to blame. And, Martie, if they can program you to fear yourself, to have all these violent visions, to do the things you did at the house yesterday…what else could they make you do?”

Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the Valium. Maybe it was even Dusty’s logic. Whatever the reason, Martie found his argument increasingly compelling.

Her name was Viveca Scofield. She was a starlet slut, twenty-five years younger than the doctor’s father, even three years younger than the doctor himself, who at that time was twenty-eight. While playing the second lead in the old man’s latest film, she had used all her considerable wiles to set him up for marriage.

Even if the doctor hadn’t yearned to escape his dad’s shadow and make a name for himself, he would have had to deal with Viveca before she became Mrs. Josh Ahriman and either schemed to control the family fortune or squandered it.

As savvy as Dad was in the ways of Hollywood, as talented as he was at screwing associates and browbeating even the most vicious and psychotic studio bosses, he was also a widower of fifteen years and the champion crier of his time, as vulnerable in some ways as he was imperviously armored in others. Viveca would have married him, found a way to drive him to an early death, eaten his liver with chopped onions the night before the funeral, and then cast his son out of the mansion with nothing but a used Mercedes and a token monthly stipend.

In the interest of justice, therefore, the doctor was prepared to eliminate Viveca on the same night that he killed his father. He prepared a second syringe of the ultrashort-acting thiobarbital and paraldehyde, intending to inject it into something she might eat or directly into the starlet herself.

When the great director lay dead in the library, felled by the poisoned petits fours, but before surgery had been performed on his lacrimal apparatus, the doctor had gone in search of Viveca and had found her in his father’s bed. A bobinga-wood crack pipe and other drug paraphernalia littered the nightstand, and a book of poetry was on the rumpled sheets beside her. The starlet was snoring like a bear that had gorged on late-season berries half fermented on the vine, spit bubbles swelling and popping on her lips.

She was as naked as nature had made her, and because nature had obviously been in a lascivious mood at the time, the young doctor got all sorts of hot ideas. A lot of money was at stake here, however, and money was power, and power was better than sex.

Earlier in the day, during a private moment, he and Viveca had gotten into an ugly little argument that ended when she coyly noted that she had never seen him well up with emotion the way his father did so routinely. “We’re alike, you and me,” she said. “Your father got his share of tears
and
yours, while I used up all of mine by the time I was eight. We’re both bone-dry. Now, the problem for you, boy doctor, is that you’ve still got some little withered lump of a heart, but I don’t have any heart at all. So if you try to turn your old man against me, I’ll castrate you and have you singing show tunes, soprano, for my dinner entertainment every night.”

The memory of this threat gave the doctor an idea better than sex.

He went to the far end of the three-acre estate, to the lavishly equipped tool room and woodworking shop housed in the building that also contained, upstairs, the apartments of the couple that managed the estate, Mr. and Mrs. Haufbrock, and the handyman-groundskeeper, Earl Ventnor. The Haufbrocks were away on a one-week vacation, and Earl was no doubt passed out after his nightly patriotic effort to ensure that the American brewing industry would not be driven into bankruptcy by competition from foreign beers.

Without the need to skulk, therefore, the doctor selected a Black Decker power drill from the collection of tools. He had the presence of mind also to take a twenty-foot, orange extension cord.

In his father’s bedroom once more, he plugged the extension cord into a wall outlet, plugged the drill into the extension cord, and thus equipped, climbed onto the bed with Viveca, straddling her but remaining on his knees. She was so doped that she snored through all his preparations, and he had to shout her name repeatedly to wake her. When she finally came around, blinking stupidly, she smiled up at him, as if she believed he was someone other than who he was, as if she thought the power drill was an elaborate new Swedish vibrator.

Thanks to the superb instruction provided by the Harvard Medical School, the doctor was able to position the half-inch steel bit with pinpoint accuracy. To the confused and smiling Viveca, he said, “If you don’t have a heart, something else must be in there, and the best way to identify it is take a core sample.”

The shriek of the powerful little Black Decker motor brought her out of her drug stupor. By then, however, the drilling operation was under way and in fact nearly completed.

After taking time just to appreciate the loveliness of Viveca being dead, the doctor noticed the book of poetry that lay open on the sheets. A whorl of blood soiled both exposed pages, but in a pristine circle of white paper in the middle of the crimson stain were three lines of verse.

This phantasm of falling petals vanishes into moon and flowers…

He did not know then that the poem was a haiku, that it had been written by Okyo in 1890, that it was about the poet’s own impending death, and that, like many haiku, it didn’t translate into English with the ideal five-seven-five syllable pattern in which it was composed in the original Japanese.

What he
did
know was that this tiny poem moved him unexpectedly, profoundly, as he’d never been moved before. The verse expressed, as Ahriman himself could never express it, his heretofore half-repressed and formless sense of his mortality. Okyo’s three lines brought him instantly and poignantly in touch with the terrible sad truth that he, too, was destined eventually to die. He, too, was a phantasm, as fragile as any flower, one day to drop like wilting petals.

As he knelt on the bed and held the book of haiku in both hands, reading those three lines over and over again, having forgotten the drill-pierced starlet whom he still straddled, the doctor felt his chest tighten and his throat thicken with emotion at the prospect of his eventual demise. How short life is! How unjust is death! How insignificant are we all! How cruel the universe.