Foundation (2 page)
With the feral moan of a struggling yet unseen hydraulic piston and a harsh, scraping noise, the door-like section was dislodged from the wall. It crashed to the floor with a dull thud, sending up a cloud of debris, letting the brightest beam of sunlight flood the interior of the bunker.
It was a bright morning, echoing with crashing waves and the foolhardy cries of the seagulls. A now peaceful ocean washed ashore the booty of a night of rage: weeds and twigs and shells.
An army of hungry shorebirds—herons, plovers, stilts, a couple of pelicans, a squad of ruffled sparrows as well as a solitary robin—patrolled the beach, rummaging through the jetsam in search for the unexpected treat to pick at: a crablet in hiding, a beached pilchard, if they were lucky.
Occasional vacation houses and bungalows closed up for the cold season dotted the seaside, resembling ghosts looking out at sea. Most of them were concrete-plastic prefab buildings fitted with standard components.
Each one had its own built-in solar-cell circuitry. Its bare front porch with its withered plastic floorboards. Its pathway eternally buried in sand. Its collection of overgrown and then dried-out weeds that kept bowing according to the breeze on blowing duty. Its bleached-out picket fence equally torn and eaten away by the salt. Its neat, shriveled white post box mounted on a stick.
The houses and bungalows looked cheap and they were. But they would do fine for a pair of vacation weeks in April, a couple of months in summer and a bunch of weekends throughout the year.
Kayaks, rigid-sail windsurfs and small, sleek sailboats that had been pulled aground sat next to the houses, looking like oversized cuttlebones in disarray.
A lonely vehicle sped along the coastal road overlooking the deserted beach and the bungalows, whirring softly.
It was a white, streamlined champion of ergonomics, long time friends with what was left of the environment.
Its fenders were no more than a darting outline in the elegant case of metal-plastic. Its polished windshield had evolved into a big, encasing dome that connected the front and the rear hood in one continuous, graceful arc. It still had wheels, of course; they were withdrawn under the bodywork like the curled paws of a well-fed cat out for a nap.
A bow-like protrusion at the end of the front hood culminated in a big halogen headlight, so that the most modern vehicle technology could create looked very much like a car built at the beginning of two centuries before, in the roaring 1940s.
The car sped on in a comfortable buzz, whipping up the grit in its wake as it went. It drove onward, shrinking in the distance, turning into a long spit of land, headed for a lonely house at the end of it.
As if a switch had been thrown, the purr went off all of a sudden and the car glided into a decrepit yard engulfed in the sand pushed over by the wind and overrun with scrubwood.
It parked in silence next to a beaten up pickup truck and three other vehicles, all electrical: a nondescript sienna sedan car—one of the millions one could find in every street in every city at every time of day and night; a compact van the color of cream—from the back of which the dimple-cheeked face of a red-haired boy licked his fingers and grinned in a big ad picture; last was a white police squad car whose black front and rear were so tapered down it resembled a vacuum cleaner.
The door of the just parked car swung open and a man climbed down from it.
He wore spotless white shoes and a Syntex suit that wrapped around his body with ease, fitting like a tailored cloth, feeling warmer than real wool and looking as expensive as silk.
But the man was neither a bank teller, nor a salesman.
Christian Trumaine was thirty-six, about one inch short of six feet, built strong without being hulky. He was fit and tanned, with thick jet-black hair that had just begun to fade to gray above the jawbone.
He peered around with iron, piercing eyes that missed nothing. He glanced at the parked cars. At the sand. At the house. His eyes finally sat on the ever-churning ocean seen beyond it.
Like an old sailor, he took a lungful of brackish air and held it inside him ... and, for the briefest moment, the ocean looked back at him; it reflected itself in his irises, washing away.
Trumaine came to and moved along the walkway lined with dusty rosemary and sage bushes that brought him to the entrance of the building.
The house sat half-hidden behind a tall hedge, pushed far back in the lot, looking as solitary and withdrawn as it could be. It was round like a cylinder and squat like a stump, topped with a slanted roof covered with old-fashioned clay tiles. The plaster looked fresh and pristine around the walls. That meant that the house had been built recently; salt could be nasty on finishing around here.
The house resembled a solitary bunker and partly it was. From the outside, only one opening could be seen, and that was the entrance door. It was designed to keep off intruders.
If it was true that homes were a bit like their owners, thought Trumaine, the people who lived here were difficult, extremely reserved and must value privacy above anything else, including relations. Even close friends, if any at all, were welcomed half-heartedly in there.
Trumaine stepped to the entrance door. He looked down at the doorbell, where a small brass plaque read a lonely name:
JARVA
.
Below the plaque, four self-sealing milk cartons were aligned like soldiers against the wall. From every single one of them, the dimple-cheeked boy seen on the back of the compact van sneered cheerfully.
Trumaine rang the bell and immediately a young cop he had never seen before opened the door.
“Firrell?” asked Trumaine.
“He’s down in the bunker,” said the rookie, excitedly. “You better hurry, he’s already questioning the witnesses.”
The cop stared, a dumb frozen smile spread across his face. That told Trumaine the boy must’ve been in the force no more than a couple of months. He was exhilarated and thrilled like a pup, willing to do his best, happy to serve and all. It was a warm, easygoing smile that came from the heart and Trumaine appreciated it as any decent human being in the world would, but he knew it wouldn’t last.
Soon enough, the boy would learn all about the shadowy recesses of the mind, about the foul things people happen to do to each other. The smile wouldn’t like that in the least. Soon, it would fade and sink back into the well of good wishes from where it had risen.
The zealous eagerness was going to turn into coldness and disenchantment. In the end, the boy would become a man who would hate his job, the people who worked with him and the infesting moss that was the human race.
But he was still young, thought Trumaine. In youth lay hope, the tiniest hope of all: That in the flutter of time it takes to turn a boy into a man, the world would also change into something better.
Trumaine nodded his head to the rookie and stepped past him into the bunker.
Despite the fact that there were no windows, the lighting was excellent and perfectly tuned. Warm-light fluorescent lights as well as halogen lamps and LED spotlights had been arranged in such a masterful way that one never had the feeling of being closed in.
The light cascaded down in such a proper way, that even the too small entrance hall looked adequately large.
A couple of antique chairs and a matching table leaned against the far wall. There wasn’t anything else in the room, except for an elevator door—included with a polished-brass control panel—and a corridor to the left that led down in a wide spiral to the next level.
Trumaine studied the elevator door and its brass panel, then spun on his heels and went down the spiral corridor.
Trumaine’s polished shoes hit the shiny resin of the sloping spiral, resounding like the measured, inexorable beats of a pendulum clock. He walked not with haste, but with a purpose.
He had been summoned for something he knew was going to turn into long, tedious hours of speculation and endless headaches and he had no intention of hurrying the process. Each case was unique and he needed to be detached, fresh-minded and alert.
Only when the mind was in that peculiar state would it be able to string the most insignificant details into a meaningful, often unexpected and hopefully decisive clue.
Trumaine took a deep breath, the same way cliff divers do before they plunge into the roiling waters below. He didn’t know then, but it was exactly what he was about to do: dive into an obscure world that would change him forever.
The spiral walkway ended in a second hall exactly one level below the entrance hall. The metal shutter that would eventually open and lead to the inside of the bunker’s keep looked like a big safe door and was still shut. Bright metal shone from a couple of sharp and deep dents just above the lock, where the sappers’ hardened tools had bitten, in a first fruitless attempt to pry the door open.
Three men stood in the hall. Captain Grant Firrell was a burly, big chunk of a man of about forty-five. Slightly overweight, not ever completely at ease in his uniform suit, he had a blue police badge pinned on his jacket lapel that kept flashing every time he breathed.
He squinted hard as he scribbled away in the electronic pad in his hands, then he peered up from below his thick eyebrows and studied the man standing in front of him.
“You absolutely sure?” asked Firrell.
“I’ve been working at Security Systems for ten years now, sir. I know these toys like the back of my hand,” said the technician.
He looked just shy of his forties, wore a boring, faded-blue shirt and pants and clung to a metal suitcase the same way a shipwreck survivor would do with a safety belt. He kept throwing nervous glances around him, as if he was eager to leave quickly.
“I already told you, sir. The bunker’s been shut for ninety-six hours straight. I’m sure,” he added with a tone of finality.
Firrell stroked his chin. He reread the statement recorded in the pad, then shook his head and grunted in disappointment.
He wasn’t the brightest person on the planet and he knew it, but he was stubborn and he had learned it was the perfect skill for the job. Solving a murder case was a complicated enough thing. But if you had the patience to keep looking at things, soon or later something conclusive was bound to turn up. When it did, Firrell would be there to pick up that bit.
Firrell’s trust had always proven right—well, at least until that morning. Because all the information he had collected up to that point led to a big zero. As if the clues being scarce, queer and making little sense weren’t difficult enough, the last words of the technician had wrapped it all in a big gift box that had the word “impossible” for a tag. If there were any hidden threads or clues, he couldn’t see them. If someone was trying to be smart with him, he couldn’t say who it was. But there was one thing he was damn sure of. That case was going to be a hell of a nut to crack.
Firrell rolled his eyes and bounced them off to a lonely chair where a plump guy of about twenty-five sat, wearing a cream uniform and a white overall from which the same carefree dimple-cheeked redhead boy seen on the van and on the milk cartons sitting outside the entrance door smirked.
It was the milkman who had summoned the police in the first place, after he had discovered that nobody had picked up his Saturday delivery.
Firrell reread the technician’s statement for the third time, as if it could change or make more sense—it didn’t. It was going to be a very very long day, thought Firrell. A day good for ramming one’s head into the wall and seeing if anything good came out of it. He exhaled disconsolately ...
Then, at hearing approaching footsteps, he perked his ears and turned his head to see a man in a white suit. Firrell seemed quite relieved at seeing the detective emerge from the spiral corridor.
“Trumaine!” he blurted out with a grin. “About time you arrived!”
He motioned for the technician and the milkman to wait, then preceded Trumaine into the hole that had been dug in the wall.
It was about seven feet away from the bunker plate shutter where the sappers had found a good spot to break in. The edges of the door-like breach were rough and jagged. The tips of the iron bars drowned in the concrete glistened like silver buttons where the drill had cut them to level. In the breach, beyond a snowfall of dancing particles of dust, a blue living room could be glimpsed.
