False Memory (53 page)

Martie’s eyes met Dusty’s. “Haiku.”

“Or something like.”

Chase said, “Anyway, I thought you ought to see this. Because somehow, I don’t know, but somehow it explains Ahriman. And it gives you a better idea what you’re up against.”

In spite of its Wrightian influence, the institute nevertheless looked as though it would be better suited to its environment if it were situated high in the Carpathians, just down the road from the castle of Baron von Frankenstein, wreathed ever in mists and struck with regularity by great bolts of lightning that sustained rather than damaged it.

Following a fine lunch, Dr. Ahriman had intended to swing by the Rhodeses’ residence and have a look at what the fire had wrought. Now that Skeet and the reincarnation of Inspector Clouseau were on his tail, taking that scenic route seemed unwise.

Anyway, his day was not entirely given to leisure, and he did have a patient scheduled this afternoon. He drove directly, though sedately, to his offices in Fashion Island.

He pretended to be unaware of the pickup as it parked in the same lot, two rows back from his Mercedes.

His suite on the fourteenth floor was ocean-facing, but he went first to the offices of an ear-nose-and-throat specialist on the east side of the building. The waiting room featured windows that looked down on the parking lot.

The receptionist, busy with typing, never looked up as Ahriman went to the window, no doubt assuming he was just another patient who would have to wait with the rest of the runny-nosed, red-eyed, raspy-throated, forlorn bunch sitting in uncomfortable chairs and reading ancient, bacteria-infested magazines.

He spotted his Mercedes and quickly located the beige pickup with the white camper shell. The intrepid duo had gotten out of the truck. They were stretching their legs, rolling their shoulders, getting a breath of fresh air, obviously prepared to wait until their quarry reappeared.

Good.

Arriving at his suite, the doctor asked his secretary, Jennifer, if she had enjoyed her sandwich of tofu cheese and bean sprouts on rye crackers, which was her Thursday lunch. When he was assured that it had been delicious—she was a health-food nut, no doubt born with less than half the usual number of taste buds—he spent a few minutes pretending to be interested in the nutritional imperative of taking huge regular supplements of ginko biloba, and then closeted himself in his office.

He phoned Cedric Hawthorne, his house manager, and requested that the least conspicuous car in his street-rod collection—a 1959 Chevrolet El Camino—be left in the parking lot of the building next door to the one in which the doctor had his offices. The keys were to be placed in a magnetic box under the right rear fender. Cedric’s wife could follow in another car and return him to the house.

“Oh, and bring a ski mask,” the doctor added. “Leave it under the driver’s seat.”

Cedric did not ask why a ski mask was wanted. It was not his job to pose questions. He was too well trained for that. Very well trained. “Yes, certainly, sir, one ski mask.”

The doctor already had a handgun.

He had arrived at a strategy.

The game pieces were now all in place.

Soon, playtime.

66

The ranch house featured time-worn Mexican-paver floors and ceilings of exposed
vigas
separating inlays of aspen
latillas.
In the main rooms, aromatic fires—subtly scented by pine cones and by a few cedar splits—crackled in sensuously sculpted adobe fireplaces. Except for the upholstered armchairs and sofas, the tables and chairs and cabinets were mostly WPA-era pieces, reminiscent of Stickley furniture, and everywhere underfoot were fine Navajo rugs—except in the room where the deaths had occurred.

No fire burned here. All but one piece of the furniture had been removed and sold. The floor was bare.

Thin gray light pierced the curtainless window, and a chill radiated from the walls. Now and then, in her peripheral vision, Martie thought she saw the gray light bend around something, as if strangely deflected by the soundless passage of a nearly transparent figure, but when she looked directly, nothing was there; the light was hard and unbent. And yet, here, it was easy to believe in unseen presences.

In the center of the room stood a wooden chair with a spindle back, no padding on the flat seat. Perhaps it had been selected for the degree of discomfort that it ensured. Some monks believed that the ability to focus for meditation and prayer was diminished by comfort.

“I sit here a few times each week,” said Bernardo Pastore, “for ten or fifteen minutes usually…but sometimes for hours.”

His voice was thick and slightly slurred. Words were marbles in his mouth, but he patiently polished them and got them out.

Dusty held the tape recorder with the built-in microphone turned toward the rancher, to be sure that his awkward speech was clearly captured.

The right half of Bernardo Pastore’s rebuilt face was incapable of expression, the nerves irreparably damaged. His right jaw and part of his chin had been put back together with metal plates, wire, surgical screws, silicone parts, and bone grafts. The result was reasonably functional but not an aesthetic triumph.

“For the first year,” Bernardo said, “I spent a lot of time in that chair just trying to understand how such a thing could be, how it could happen.”

When he had hurried into this room in response to the gunfire that had killed his sleeping son, Bernardo had been hit by two rounds fired at close range by his wife, Fiona. The first had torn through his right shoulder, and the second had shattered his jaw.

“After a while there seemed to be no sense trying to understand. If it wasn’t black magic, it was as good as. These days, I sit here just thinking about them, letting them know I love them, letting her know I don’t blame her, that I know what she did was as big a mystery to her as it is to me. ’Cause I think that’s true. It must be true.”

His survival, surgeons claimed, was against all odds. The high-powered round that shattered his jaw had been miraculously deflected upward and back by the mandible, had traveled along the mastoid, and had exited his face above the zygomatic arch, without damaging the external carotid artery in the temple, which would have led to death long before medical assistance arrived.

“She loved Dion as much as I did, and all those accusations she made in her note, the things she said I’d done to her and Dion, they were untrue. And even if I’d done those things, and even if she had been suicidal, she wasn’t the kind of woman to kill a child, her own child or any other.”

Hit twice, Pastore had staggered to a tall chest of drawers near the window, which had been open to the summer night.

“And there he was, standing just outside, looking in at us, and the most godawful expression on his face. Grinning, he was, and his face all sweaty with excitement. His eyes shining.”

“You’re talking about Ahriman,” Dusty clarified for the tape.

“Dr. Mark Ahriman,” Pastore confirmed. “Standing there like he knew what was coming, like he had tickets to the killings, a front-row seat. He looked at me. What I saw in those eyes, I can’t put into words. But if I’ve done more bad than good in my life, and if there’s a place where we have to account for all we’ve done in this world, then I’ve no doubt I’ll see eyes like that again.” He was silent awhile, staring at the window that was now empty of everything but the austere light. “Then I fell.”

Down, lying with the undamaged half of his face to the floor, vision swimming in and out, he had seen his wife kill herself and fall inches beyond his reach.

“Calm, so strangely calm. As if she didn’t know what she was doing. No hesitation, no tears.”

Bleeding, nauseous with pain, Bernardo Pastore had washed in and out of consciousness, minute by minute, but during each spell of awareness, he had dragged himself toward the telephone on the nightstand.

“I could hear coyotes outside, far away in the night at first, but then closer and closer. I didn’t know if Ahriman was still at the window, but I suspected he was gone, and I was afraid that the coyotes, drawn by the scent of blood, might come through the window screen. They’re shy creatures alone…but not in a pack.”

He reached the phone, pulled it down onto the floor, and called for help, barely able to torture half-comprehensible words out of his swollen throat and shattered face.

“And then I waited, figuring I’d be dead before anyone got here. And that would have been all right. Maybe that would have been best. With Fiona and Dion gone, I didn’t care much about living. Only two things made me want to hang on. Dr. Ahriman’s involvement had to be uncovered, understood. I wanted justice. And second…though I was ready to die, I didn’t want coyotes feeding on me and my family as if we were no different from chased-down rabbits.”

Judging by how loud their cries became, the pack of coyotes had gathered under the window. Forepaws clawing at the sill. Snarling muzzles pressed against the screen.

As Pastore had grown weaker and his mind had become increasingly muddled, he had begun to believe that these were not coyotes seeking entrance, but creatures previously unknown to New Mexico, having come out of Elsewhere, through a door in the night itself. Brethren to Ahriman, with even stranger eyes than the doctor’s. Pressing at the screen not because they were eager to feed on warm flesh, but drawn instead by a hunger for three fading souls.

The doctor’s sole patient of the day was the thirty-two-year-old wife of a man who had made half a billion dollars in Internet-stock IPOs in just four years.

Although she was an attractive woman, he had not accepted her as a patient because of her looks. He had no sexual interest in her, because by the time she came to him, she was already as neurotic as a lab rat tortured for months by continuous changes in its maze and by randomly administered electric shocks. Ahriman was aroused only by women who came to him whole and healthy, with everything to lose.

The vast wealth of the patient was not a consideration, either. Because he had never experienced a shortage of wealth himself, the doctor harbored nothing but contempt for those who were motivated by money. The finest work was always done for the sheer pleasure of it.

The husband had harried the wife into Ahriman’s care not so much because her condition concerned him as because he intended to run for the United States Senate. He believed that his political career would be jeopardized by a spouse given to eccentric outbursts bordering on lunacy, which was probably an unrealistic concern, considering that such outbursts had been for many years a staple of both politicians and their spouses, across the entire political spectrum, resulting in little negative consequences at the polls. Besides, the husband was as boring as a dead toad and unelectable in his own right.

The doctor had accepted her as a patient strictly because her condition interested him. This woman was steadily working herself into a unique phobia that might supply him with interesting material for future games. He was also likely to use her case in his next book, which would concern obsessions and phobias, and which he had tentatively titled
Fear Not for I Am with You,
though of course he would change her name to protect her privacy.

The would-be senator’s wife had for some time been increasingly obsessed with an actor, Keanu Reeves. She assembled dozens of thick scrapbooks devoted to photographs of Keanu, articles about Keanu, and reviews of Keanu’s films. No critic was half as familiar with this actor’s filmography as she was, for in the comfort of her forty-seat home theater, on a full-size screen, she had watched each of his movies a minimum of twenty times and had once spent forty-eight hours watching
Speed
over and over, until she had at last passed out from a lack of sleep and a surfeit of Dennis Hopper. Not long ago she had purchased a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Cartier heart-shaped pendant, gold and diamonds, on the back of which she ordered engraved the words
I Krave Keanu.

This lovefest had suddenly turned sour, for reasons the patient herself didn’t understand. She began to suspect that Keanu had a dark side. That he had become aware of her interest in him and was not pleased. That he was hiring people to watch her. Then that he was watching her himself. When the telephone rang and the caller hung up without speaking, or when the caller said,
Sorry, wrong number,
she was convinced that it was Keanu. Once she had adored his face; now she became terrified of it. She destroyed all the scrapbooks and burned all the photographs of him in her bedroom, because she grew convinced that he could view her remotely through any picture of himself. Indeed, at the sight of his face, she was now stricken by a panic attack. She could no longer watch television, for fear of seeing an advertisement for his latest film. She dared not read most magazines, because she might turn a page and find Keanu watching her; even the sight of his name in print alarmed her, and her list of safe periodicals now included little more than
Foreign Policy Journal
and such medical publications as
Advancements in Kidney Dialysis.

Dr. Ahriman knew that soon, as was the pattern in these cases, his patient would become convinced that Keanu Reeves was stalking her, following her everywhere she went, whereupon her phobia would be fully established. Thereafter, she would either stabilize and learn to live as restricted a life as Susan Jagger had lived under the influence of her agoraphobia, or she would descend into complete psychosis and perhaps require at least short-term care in a good institution.

Drug therapy offered hope to such patients, but the doctor did not intend to treat this one conventionally. Eventually, he would put her through three sessions of programming, not for the purpose of controlling her but simply to instruct her to be not afraid of Keanu. Thus, for his next book, he would have a great chapter about a miraculous cure, which he would attribute to his analytic skills and his therapeutic genius, concocting an elaborate story of therapy that he had, in fact, never performed.

He hadn’t yet begun to brainwash her, because her phobia needed more time to ripen. She needed to suffer more in order that her cure would make a better story and to ensure that her gratitude, after she was made whole again, would be boundless. Properly played, she might even consent to appear on
Oprah
with him when his book was published.

Now, sitting in the armchair across the low table from her, he listened to her fevered speculations about the Machiavellian scheming of Mr. Reeves, not bothering to take notes because a hidden recorder was capturing her monologue and his occasional prodding question.

Impish as ever, the doctor suddenly thought how fun it would have been if the actor now waiting to assault the president’s nose could have been Keanu himself. Imagine this patient’s terror when learning of the news, which would absolutely convince her that hers would have been the savaged nose had not fate put the nation’s chief executive in Keanu’s path before her.

Ah, well. If there was a sense of humor behind the workings of the universe, it wasn’t as acute as the doctor’s.

“Doctor, you’re not listening to me.”

“But I am,” he assured her.

“No, you were woolgathering, and I’m not paying these outrageous hourly rates so you can daydream,” she said sharply.

Although just five short years ago, this woman and her boring husband had been barely able to afford fries with their Big Macs, they had become as imperious and demanding as if they had been born into vast wealth.

Indeed, her Keanu madness and her pan-faced husband’s crazy need to seek validation at the ballot box resulted from the suddenness of their financial success, from a nagging guilt about having gained so much with so little effort, and from the unspoken fear that what had come so quickly could be quickly gone.

“You don’t have a patient conflict here, do you?” she asked with sudden worry.

“Excuse me?”

“An unrevealed patient conflict? You don’t
know
K-K-Keanu, do you, Doctor?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Not to reveal a connection with
him
would be highly unethical. Highly. And how do I know you’re not capable of unethical conduct? What do I really know about you at all?”

Rather than draw the Taurus PT-111 Millennium from his shoulder holster and teach this nouveau-riche ditz a lesson in manners, the doctor switched on his considerable charm and sweet-talked her into continuing with her delusional ramblings.