Puppets (33 page)

Mr. Smith stopped, glared at Three. Through the wall he heard whimpering, which would be Number Four, hearing the rising passion in his voice and feeling the conditioned-in fear mount. That was nice. But Three had been quiet for too long.

"Time for a normative verbal response," Mr. Smith said sweetly.

His tone scared Three, who barked quickly, "So you decided something had to be done! A form of protest that nobody could ignore!" A voice hoarse with fear.

Right answer. Mr. Smith resumed pacing, his shadow briefly eclipsing the huge face of Morgan Ford projected on the wall.

"Correct. Very good," he said. "So I deliberately skewed my new subject's targeting. He was sent off to do his job, fucked up, had to be cleaned up later. And then the Pentagon Papers thing blew up, all the secret bad news of the war came out, there were congressional probes and armed services reviews and news reporters up the wazoo. It got too hot for comfort, our labs were disappeared and the program got vanished. We were all reassigned or sent home. And the war ended about a year later."

Significant pause.

Taking the cue, Number Three said, "But that wasn't the end of the story. That wasn't the end of their manipulation of you."

The right response again. But it was too easy, Three was being facile again and it enraged Mr. Smith. "No, it was not," he said, acting mollified. "No, it was not. There's no happy ending here." He let a benignly paternal expression come over his face, and then without warning, he lunged at Three, whipping the Asp toward his face.

Three dodged with surprising quickness and scrabbled backward across the floor. Mr. Smith swung the Asp again, so fast it whistled in the air. It hit the lawn chair and sent it flying, the tube aluminum crimped at the point of impact. In another instant Three was on his feet, legs wide, ready, chest pumping.

Another whistling swing of the Asp made contact, but only on the forearm, Three had defended himself well. A feint, another hit, partially deflected. Three was wincing from pain, but did a feint himself and then attacked. Mr. Smith anticipated it, sidestepped, clipped the back of his head with the Asp, sending Three sprawling. That must have hurt, too, but Three was up again in no time, face flushed with rage.

This was good. Three was in good form. You always had to keep their reflexes sharp.

"Excellent! Very good," Mr. Smith said. He frowned at Morgan Ford's impassive face on the wall and turned back to Three. "So now let's get back to some serious work."

42

M
O PICKED UP THE women and they drove into the lowering sun over to Fort Lee. Rebecca arranged it so Rachel sat in front next to Mo, presumably to let them bond or fight it out or whatever. It was fairly strained.

"So—where'd you guys go yesterday?" he asked casually.

"Movie."

Just out of politeness you could answer with more details, Mo thought. Like even the name of the movie, to give a guy something to go on here. He tried again, "That one friend of yours, she looks kind of Goth—"

"See, Mom? I told you, everybody has this prejudice!" Rachel whirled to face Rebecca accusingly, as if this were part of a continuing discussion. "Cindy wears black and leather, and we all know what that means, don't we? Columbine High School! Kinky sex and murder!"

"Wait a minute," Mo said. "Now you're being prejudiced about me—you know what I'm going to say. How? Because I'm a law-enforcement type?"

Rachel faced him confrontationally. "So what
were
you going to say?"

He actually hadn't been planning to say
anything,
he'd just been randomly tossing off possible starting places. But he improvised, "That she's pretty. That her Goth things one of my cousins, in Pittsburgh, is into that. She just graduated high school with honors and got a full scholarship to Smith. Majoring in ecology."

Actually, Mo hardly knew his mother's sister's kids, and the girl wasn't as Goth-identified as Rachel's Cindy looked. He only knew any of this from his aunt's annual family newsletters.

But Rachel took it at face value. She cranked herself around in the seat to say to Rebecca, "See? It's like I was telling you! I mean, the Goths are totally like the smartest, most nonviolent kids I know!"

So now Mo was on her side. In the mirror, Mo saw Rebecca shrug, bemused by this turn of events, keeping her distance.

Then something happened that he would never have expected. Rachel flicked her gaze at him and then frowned critically at her own hands. "You're right. I was being prejudiced. I'm sorry. It's very hard to catch."

So she did take after her mother that way. The honest self-appraisal. Maybe there was hope for the kid.

They got to the bowling alley at six o'clock, parking in the mostly deserted shopping-center parking lot. The fading facade of Star Bowl was lit with watermelon light from the westering sun, bright against the dirty sky of Manhattan beyond. Mo hit the men's room as the women checked in. When he came out and went to the desk to get his shoes, he looked over the lanes and spotted them immediately: two yellow-haired heads above the vinyl back of the booth at their lane. Rebecca's hair was bundled carelessly back, so that strands of it fell onto her face. Rachel seemed to be gabbing away, more kidlike than Mo had ever seen her. So probably there were parts of her she didn't reveal around him. That was instructive.

The old guy at the counter sprayed some Desenex into a pair of shoes that looked like roadkill and handed them over.

Rachel was okay, they had a pretty good time. Mo felt like he was getting the hang of it, handling the ball better. There were only two other lanes in use. It was a beat-up sort of place, the vinyl benches burned by cigarette butts, the wallpaper on the end wall coming loose, tacked at the top but starting to balloon inward. But he could see where you'd like the old-fashioned feel: the long,-low room, the waxy smell of the varnished lanes, the out-of-date high tech of the overhead scoring lights and ball returns, all in this rounded, passe futuristic style.

They bowled a game and then took a break and went back into the dimly lit bar and grill. An older woman, maybe the wife of the guy at the front counter, got them Cokes and bags of chips, and they sat in a vinyl booth that smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Rachel tried to teach him how to talk with a Midwestern accent. His attempts were found very amusing. He reminded her they were being ironic here.

Rebecca wasn't saying much, but she looked good even in a place like this, lit only by beer signs. When Rachel went to the bathroom, he reached across the table, took her hands, asked her how she was doing.

"I'm okay. I like seeing you, Mo. Even if our dates are chaperoned. God, you have won Rachel over! It's hard to explain how happy that makes me."

Won over
seemed like maybe wishful thinking. The kid was loosening up a little but was still hanging pretty tough.

"But something's on your mind," he said.

"I don't really want to talk business tonight. But, yes, there's something about our basic thesis that's been troubling me. From a psychological perspective."

"Okay—"

Rebecca glanced back toward the bathrooms to make sure Rachel wasn't coming. "Geppetto. Whether it's Flannery or whoever, we believe the puppet-maker got his training during some secret mind-control project in the Vietnam era. Right? And he has some agenda, some statement to make, that has no doubt been conflated seamlessly with a trauma he experienced in his past. But, Mo—the Vietnam War ended, what, twenty-seven years ago!"

"So the problem is—?"

"If the first of Geppetto's subjects was Ronald Parker, or even the one in San Diego that Erik worked on before he was assigned here, in 1995—what took him so long? What was Geppetto doing with his agenda and his bottled-up trauma for twenty-two years? Or, conversely, what happened in 1995 that triggered Geppetto to start up?"

Good question. And good questions were windows into solutions. Mo was holding both her hands in both of his as he thought about it. And then Rachel was there, sliding into the seat next to her mother. "Am I interrupting something?" she said caustically. "Excuse
me."

Still, they bowled another couple of games, had a pretty good time. They headed out at nine o'clock, the last customers to leave, and the old man locked the door behind them.

They weren't yet at the stage where it was confortable enough for everybody for Mo to drop Rachel at her dad's house. So he drove back across the bridge into Manhattan, not saying anything, feeling the pressure mount again. Rebecca's question had brought it all back.
The dump,
he was thinking. Tomorrow was Monday, he and St. Pierre would begin looking into junkyards, and they'd start digging into Dennis Radcliffs past to see how Geppetto had acquired him. Maybe they'd find a line to Geppetto. But it felt weak. And he wanted to get to work right away, now, tonight.

When they got to Rebecca's building, he said, "Rachel, I'm going to kiss your mother good-night, and I don't care if you like it or not. If it makes you feel better, I'll give you a kiss, too." Rachel looked affronted for only an instant, then said, "Maybe some other time, big boy." A vamping voice that still dripped with disgust, but so well done they all three laughed. When they got out, he waited until they were safely in the lobby before he pulled away.

Into Brooklyn. The thousand strands of the old bridge, the scintillating lights in the looming dark of the cities on either side of the river, then off at Flushing Avenue, down into the dark maze. Brooklyn streets at night. It was 9:48 on Sunday night, not the best time to barge in, but he'd been wanting to do this for almost two weeks. Not that he exactly believed in Mudda Raymon's prophecy ability and all that. But he couldn't deny she had gotten certain things right: the puppet-puppet, the dump. Could have meant nothing or anything—except that both ended up being relevant. Maybe he was being superstitious, but he found it easier to believe in intuition, even magic, than that much coincidence.

And there was another thing he'd realized he needed to do, it seemed like it had to happen soon.

Without Ty there to navigate, it took him a while to find the place again. The streetlight in front was out, leaving the green and yellow door and the blank eyes of plywood-covered windows in shadow. This time there was no bodyguard at the door, but he spotted Carla's red Honda just down the street. A few kids on the sidewalk down the block, otherwise a quiet night in this part of Brooklyn.

He parked, went to the stoop, knocked at the door, waited. For a long time, nothing, just the giant, complicated white noise of the city night. Then a thump and a rattle, and the door opened a crack. He recognized the young woman who had led him upstairs the first time.

"I'd like to talk to Carla Salerno. And Mudda Raymon, if she'll see me. Tell her it's Morgan Ford—she'll know who I am."

The door shut and he heard it locked again. But after another minute it rattled again and then opened wide. Carla came out onto the stoop.

"What are you doing here, Mo?" she asked suspiciously. She was barefoot, wearing a big white shirt open over a gray tank top and skirt. He thought she looked thinner, older, but it could have been the bad light.

"I wanted to see Mudda Raymon again. And you."

"Oh, now you're a big believer?" She shook her head. "Come on, Mo. What—you think that's somehow going to get me back?"

She was so far wrong that it touched him. "You still doing okay? You feel like your life's on track?" Suddenly that mattered a lot to him.

She snorted disdainfully. "This is pretty juvenile, Mo. I mean, I thought you'd be handling this better. I really did."

"No, Carla, listen. I really do want to see Mudda Raymon. She's . . . last time, she said some interesting things, they've kind of come back as significant. I've got this case, I don't know where to go with it, and—"

"And a ninety-year-old Jamaican grandmother is going to help you."

"I'll take any help I can get."

A jet angled slowly overhead, eclipsing the vague stars, drowning them in noise as it slid down toward La Guardia. Carla turned away, wrapping her shirt tighter around her even though it was hot and muggy on the stoop. She looked down the block at the kids. "Well, she can't help you, Mo," she said bitterly. "She died on Thursday. She'd been terminal for years. So your sudden conversion is a little late. I'm just here helping out the family for a few days." Before he could say he was sorry, she whirled around to face him again. "So does that allow you to get real about why you're here? Because I'd really like you to get real about us and stop trying to hang on to something that wasn't working!"

Mo stood there, half pissed at her for the attitude, half wanting to hold her one more time as they straightened this out. Yes, this was partly about her and him. But not how she thought.

"You've got it wrong, Carla. I've been seeing somebody else, it came up really fast and it's really good. It's . . . serious. It's a lot of things I've wanted for a long time."

"And, what, you felt you just had to let me know?" she asked skeptically.

He thought about that. "Yeah, basically. I . . . yeah, I just thought you should know." He shrugged. It sounded lame.

"What do you want—my
permission?"

"No. Look, I don't know. Closure, maybe." Or some old-fashioned thing, wanting it to be clean and aboveboard and honorable. Like love was a thing that once given was supposed to be willingly relinquished if it was no longer wanted. Like letting it go was important, even when you both were moving on, even when there was someone else. Like it deserved some minimal ceremony.

Now she saw he was serious. "Mo, you give yourself closure on these things."

He nodded reluctantly. "Yeah. You're probably right."

She held her shirt tight around her, arms crossed. That wonderful shape. After another minute she sighed. "Whatever. Okay. You have my permission. You have closure. Okay? And now I'm going back upstairs." She turned, went inside, and shut the door.

Mo drove out of Brooklyn, thinking it was too bad about Mudda Raymon. He'd gotten his hopes up, he'd been serious when he'd said he'd take help from any quarter. Also thinking about how it had gone with Carla, wondering what he'd expected that was any different, and why he didn't feel happier now that it was done.

He didn't get back to the mausoleum until eleven. Carla's mom's big dark house, the oak-shadowed lawns, the echoing front rooms, his semisqualid bachelor domicile in back. He checked the answering machine. No messages. He'd kind of hoped Rebecca might've called in. He sat on the bed, feeling emotionally wrung out. Then the telephone rang and made him jump.

"Who's your new guy?" The flat voice of Gus Grisbach.

"Gus—thanks for calling! Flannery, Richard K. Flannery."

"As in Westchester district attorney Flannery."

"As in, yeah." For an instant Mo thought of adding Tyndale Boggs to the list, but his instincts rebelled. He chided himself for losing objectivity but then gave himself the excuse that Gus wouldn't approve of prying into a fellow PD investigator. Sleazy legal officials and arrogant Feds were more his cup of tea.

Gus didn't say anything for a few seconds. But at last he said, "Yeah, okay. I'll call you." Another pause, Mo thought he'd hung up. But then Gus spoke one more time: "So tell me, Ford—you some kind of a masochist? Because from where I sit, between this and the last one, you look like a guy who's asking for pain."