The Face (20 page)

CHAPTER 32

U
PON RECEIVING THE CALL, DUNNY WHISTLER at once responds to it, driving directly to Beverly Hills.

He doesn’t need the car anymore. Nevertheless, he enjoys being behind the wheel of a well-engineered automobile, and even the simple pleasure of driving has a new poignancy in light of recent events.

En route, traffic lights turn green just when needed, gaps in traffic repeatedly open for him, and he makes such speed that dark wings of water plume from his tires most of the way. He should feel exhilarated, but many concerns weigh on his mind.

At the hotel, where the arriving and departing vehicles seem to be those makes that retail for six figures, he leaves his car with valet parking. He tips the attendant twenty bucks, going in, because he’s not likely to be around long enough to spend all his cash on pleasures for himself.

The sumptuous luxury of the lobby embraces him with such warmth of color, texture, and form that Dunny could easily forget that the night outside is cold and rainy.

Richly paneled, expensively appointed, lighted for romance, a textbook on glamorous decor, the hotel bar is huge, but crowded in spite of its size.

Every woman in sight, regardless of age, is beautiful, by either the grace of God or the knife of a good surgeon. Half the men are as handsome as movie stars, and the other half
think
they are.

Most of these people work in the entertainment industry. No actors, but agents and studio executives, publicists and producers.

In another hotel, elsewhere in the city, you might hear several foreign tongues, but in this place only English is spoken, and only that narrow but colorful version of English known as the dialect of the deal. Connections are being secured here; money is being made; sexual excesses are being plotted.

These people are energetic, optimistic, flirtatious, loud, and convinced of their immortality.

In the manner that Cary Grant once navigated crowded parties in the movies, as though skating while everyone around him walked with leg weights, Dunny glides past the bar, among the crowded tables, directly to a prized corner table for four where only one man sits.

This man’s name is Typhon, or so he would have you believe. He pronounces it
tie-fon,
and tells you on first meeting that he bears the name of a monster from Greek mythology, a beast that traveled in storms and spread terror wherever the rain took it. Then he laughs, perhaps in recognition that his name is dramatically at odds with his appearance, his genteel business style, and his polished manners.

Nothing about Typhon appears the least monstrous or stormy. He is plump, white-haired, with a sweet androgynous face that would serve well in a movie as either that of a beatific nun or that of a saintly friar. His smile comes easily and often, and seems sincere. Soft-spoken, a good listener, irresistibly likable, the man can make a friend in a minute.

He is impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit, white silk shirt, blue-and-red club tie, and red display handkerchief. His thick white hair has been cut by a stylist to stars and royalty. Unblemished skin smoothed by expensive emollients, bleached teeth, and manicured nails suggest that he takes pride in his appearance.

Typhon sits facing the room, pleasantly regal in demeanor, as might be a kindly monarch holding court. Although he must be known to this crowd, no one bothers him, as though it is understood that he prefers to see and be seen rather than to talk with anyone.

Of the four chairs at the table, two face the room. Dunny takes the second.

Typhon is eating oysters and drinking a superb Pinot Grigio. He says, “Dine with me, please, dear boy. Have anything you wish.”

As if conjured by a sorcerer, a waiter instantly appears. Dunny orders double oysters and a bottle of Pinot Grigio for himself. He has always been a man of large appetites.

“You have always been a man of large appetites,” Typhon notes, and smiles impishly.

“There’ll be an end to that soon enough,” Dunny says. “While there’s still a banquet in front of me, I intend to gorge.”

“That’s the spirit!” Typhon declares. “You’re a man after my own heart, Dunny. By the way, that’s a handsome suit.”

“You’ve got an excellent tailor yourself.”

“It’s a bother having to do business,” says Typhon, “so let’s get it out of the way first thing.”

Dunny says nothing, but steels himself for a reprimand.

Typhon sips his wine, sighs with pleasure. “Am I to understand that you hired a hit man to remove Mr. Reynerd?”

“Yes. I did. A guy called himself Hector X.”

“A hit man,” Typhon repeats with audible astonishment.

“He was a gangbanger I knew in the old days, a ranking cuzz with the Crips. We manufactured and distributed sherm together back then.”

“Sherm?”

“PCP, an animal tranquilizer. Had a Jim Jones production line going. Marijuana joints laced with cocaine and dipped in PCP.”

“Do all your associates have such charming resumes?”

Dunny shrugs. “He was who he was.”

“Yes,
was
. Both men are dead now.”

“Here’s the way I see it. Hector had killed before, and Reynerd conspired to have his own mother murdered. I wasn’t corrupting an innocent or targeting one, either.”

“I’m not concerned about corruption, Dunny. I’m concerned that you seem not to understand the limits of your authority.”

“I know ringing in one killer to take out another is somewhat unconventional—”

“Unconventional!” Typhon shakes his head. “No, lad, it’s utterly
unacceptable
.”

Dunny’s oysters and wine arrive. The waiter uncorks the Pinot Grigio, pours a taste, and Dunny approves.

Relying on the pleasant boozy rumble of the glamorous crowd to screen their sensitive conversation, Typhon returns to business. “Dunny, you must conduct yourself with discretion. All right, you’ve been a rogue much of your life, that’s true, but you gave that up in recent years, didn’t you?”

“Tried. Mostly succeeded. Listen, Mr. Typhon, I didn’t pull the trigger on Reynerd myself. I worked by indirection, like we agreed.”

“Hiring a hit man is
not
indirection.”

Dunny swallows an oyster. “Then I misunderstood.”

“I doubt that,” Typhon says. “I believe you knowingly stretched your authority to see if it would snap.”

Pretending gluttonous fascination with the oysters, Dunny dares not ask the obvious question.

The most powerful studio chief in the film industry enters the farther end of the room with all the poise and self-assurance of a Caesar. He travels in the company of an entourage of young male and female employees who are as sleek and cool as vampires yet, on closer inspection, appear simultaneously as nervous as Chihuahuas.

At once spotting Typhon, this king of Hollywood waves with a measured but revealing eagerness.

Typhon returns the greeting with a markedly more restrained wave, thus instantly establishing himself as the higher of the two on the pecking order, to the Caesar’s controlled but still visible embarrassment.

Typhon now asks the question that Dunny has been reluctant to voice: “In hiring Hector X, did you stretch your authority past the snapping point?” Then he answers it: “Yes. But I’m inclined to give you one more chance.”

Dunny swallows another oyster, which slides down his throat more easily than the one before it.

“Many of the men and women in this bar,” says Typhon, “daily negotiate contracts with the intention of breaching them. The people with whom they negotiate fully expect to be victimized or to breach certain terms themselves. Eventually angry accusations are exchanged, attorneys are brandished, legal actions are served if not filed, and amidst bitter charges and vehement countercharges, a settlement is arranged out of court. After all this, and sometimes even during it, the same parties are engaged in negotiating other contracts with each other, contracts which they also intend to breach.”

“The film business is an asylum,” Dunny observes.

“Yes, it is. But, dear boy, that’s not my point.”

“Sorry.”

“My point is that breach of contract—betrayal in general—is an accepted part of their personal and business culture, just as human sacrifice was an accepted practice in the Aztec world. But betrayal isn’t something
I
accept. I’m not that cynical. Words, promises, and integrity matter to me. They matter deeply. I can’t do business—I simply won’t—with people who give their word insincerely.”

“I understand,” Dunny says. “I’m properly chastised.”

Typhon appears to be genuinely pained by Dunny’s reaction. His plump face puckers with dismay. His eyes, usually characterized as much by a sparkle of merriment as by their singular blue color, now cloud with sadness.

This man is remarkably easy to read, open with his emotions, not in the least enigmatic, which is one reason that he’s so likable.

“Dunny, I’m truly sorry if you feel chastised. That wasn’t my intention. I just needed to clear the air. The thing is, I want you to succeed, I really do, lad. But if you’re to succeed, you’ve got to operate according to the high standards we originally discussed.”

“All right. You’re more than fair. And I’m grateful to have another chance.”

“Ah, now, there’s no need for gratitude, Dunny.” Typhon smiles broadly, his merriment regained. “If you succeed, then
I
succeed. Your interests are my own.”

To reassure his benefactor that they are in full understanding of each other, Dunny says, “I’ll do everything I possibly can for Ethan Truman—always keeping a low profile, of course. But I won’t make any move against Corky Laputa.”

“What an appalling piece of work
he
is.” Typhon clucks his tongue, but his eyes twinkle. “The world desperately needs God’s mercy as long as there are men like Corky in it.”

“Amen.”

“You know that Corky would most likely have killed Reynerd anyway if you hadn’t interfered.”

“I know,” Dunny says.

“Then why show up with Hector X?”

“Laputa wouldn’t have killed him with witnesses, certainly not with Hazard Yancy present. When Reynerd died in front of Yancy, then Yancy was
involved,
and more deeply than he’d have been otherwise. For Ethan’s sake, I want him involved.”

“Your friend
does
need all the help he can get,” Typhon acknowledges.

For a minute or two, they enjoy the oysters and the fine wine in a mutual, comfortable silence.

Then Dunny says, “The incident with the PT Cruiser came as a surprise.”

Raising his eyebrows, Typhon says, “You don’t think our people were involved with that, do you?”

“No,” Dunny says. “I understand how these things work. It came as a surprise, that’s all. But I was able to use it to my advantage.”

“Leaving him with the three little bells was a clever move,” Typhon agrees. “Though you’ve driven him to drink.”

Smiling, nodding, Dunny agrees: “I probably have.”

“No ‘probably’ about it,” says Typhon. Pointing, he adds: “Poor Ethan is at the bar right now.”

Although Dunny’s chair faces most of the room, about a third of the long bar is to his back. He turns to look where Typhon points.

Past intervening tables where breachers of contracts socialize like friends, Ethan Truman sits on a stool at the bar, in profile to Dunny, staring into a glass that might contain high-quality Scotch.

“He’ll see me,” Dunny worries.

“Most likely not. He’s too distracted. In a sense, he doesn’t see anyone right now. He might as well be here alone.”

“But if he does—”

“If he does,” Typhon says reassuringly, “then you’ll manage the situation one way or another. I’m here for guidance if you need it.”

Dunny stares at Ethan for a moment, then turns his back to him. “You chose this place knowing he was here?”

The only response from Typhon is a winning smile with a sly twist, which seems to say that he knows he’s been naughty but simply couldn’t resist.

“You chose this place
because
he was here.”

Typhon says, “Did you know that Saint Duncan, for whom you were named, is the patron saint of guardians and protectors of many kinds, and that he will help you be steadfast and resourceful in your work if you petition him?”

Smiling thinly, Dunny says, “Is that so? Ironic, huh?”

Patting Dunny on the arm, Typhon reassures him: “From everything I’ve seen, you’re an amazingly resourceful man to begin with.”

Dunny communes with the Pinot Grigio for a while, but then says, “Do you think he’s going to come through this alive?”

After finishing his last oyster, Typhon says, “Ethan? To some extent, that’s up to you.”

“But only to some extent.”

“Well, you know how these things work, Dunny. More likely than not, he’ll be dead before Christmas. But his situation isn’t entirely hopeless. No one’s ever is.”

“And the people at Palazzo Rospo?”

With his white hair, plump features, and sparkling blue eyes, Typhon is but a beard away from being Santa Claus. His sweet face isn’t made for grim expressions. He appears disconcertingly merry when he says, “I don’t think any experienced oddsmaker would give them much of a chance, do you? Not against the likes of Mr. Laputa. He has the violent temperament and the reckless determination to get what he wants.”

“Even the boy?”

“Especially the boy,” says Typhon. “Especially him.”

CHAPTER 33

F
ED, FRIGHTENED, AND FRUSTRATED, FRIC WENT directly from the wine cellar to the library, proceeding by an indirect route least likely to result in an encounter with a member of the house staff.

Like a spirit, like a phantom, like a boy wearing a cloak of invisibility, he passed room to hall to stair to room, and no one in the great house registered his passage, in part because he carried a rare gene for catlike stealth, but in part because no one, with the possible exception of Mrs. McBee, cared where the hell he was or ever wondered what the hell he was up to.

Being small, thin, and ignored was not always a curse. When the forces of evil were rising up against you in vast dark battalions, having a low profile improved your chances of avoiding evisceration, decapitation, induction into the soulless legions of the living dead, or whatever other hideous fate they might have planned for you.

The last time that Nominal Mom had visited, which wasn’t quite as far back in the mists of time as mastodons and sabertooths, she had told Fric that he was a mouse: “A sweet little mouse that no one ever realizes is there because he’s so quiet, so quick, so quick and so gray, as quick as the gray shadow of a darting bird. You’re a little mouse, Aelfric, an almost invisible perfect little mouse.”

Freddie Nielander said a lot of stupid things.

Fric didn’t hold any of them against her.

She’d been so beautiful for so long that nobody really listened to her. They were overwhelmed by the visuals.

When no one ever listened to you, really listened, you could begin to lose the ability to tell whether or not you were making sense when you talked.

Fric understood this danger because no one really listened to him, either. In his case, they weren’t overwhelmed by the visuals. They were underwhelmed.

Without exception, people loved Freddie Nielander on sight, and they wanted her to love them in return. Even if they
had
listened to her, therefore, they wouldn’t have disagreed with her, and even when she made no sense whatsoever, people praised her wit.

Poor Freddie didn’t get any truthful feedback from anything but a mirror. No explanation short of a miracle explained why she hadn’t gone as crazy as a nuclear-waste-dump rat a long time ago.

Arriving in the library, Fric discovered that the furniture in the reading area nearest the entrance had been slightly rearranged to accommodate a twelve-foot Christmas tree. The fresh forestal smell of evergreens was so strong that he expected to see squirrels sitting in the armchairs and busily storing acorns in the antique Chinese vases.

This was one of nine massive spruces erected this very evening in key rooms throughout the mansion. Flawlessly shaped, perfectly symmetrical, greener-than-green clone trees.

Each of the nine evergreens would be decorated with a different theme. Here the subject was angels.

Every ornament on the tree was an angel or featured an angel in its design. Baby angels, child angels, adult angels, blond angels with blue eyes, African-American angels, Asian angels, noble-looking American Indian angels with feathered headdresses as well as halos. Angels smiling, angels laughing, angels using their halos as Hula-Hoops, angels flying, dancing, caroling, praying, and skipping rope. Cute dogs with angel wings. Angel cats, angel toads, an angel pig.

Fric resisted the urge to puke.

Leaving all the angels to glitter and glimmer and dangle and grin, he went into the book stacks, directly to the shelf that held the dictionaries. He sat on the floor with the biggest volume—
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
—and paged to R
OBIN
G
OODFELLOW,
because Mysterious Caller had said that the man from whom Fric would soon need to hide “styles himself as Robin Goodfellow.”

The definition was a single word:
Puck
.

To Fric, this appeared to be an obscenity, although he didn’t know what it meant.

Dictionaries were full of obscenities. This didn’t bother Fric. He assumed that the people who compiled dictionaries weren’t just a bunch of foul-mouthed gutter scum, that they had scholarly reasons for including trash talk.

When they started providing one-word obscene definitions that made no sense, however, maybe the time had come for the publisher to start smelling their coffee to see if it was loaded with booze.

Many of his father’s associates used so many obscenities per sentence that they probably owned dictionaries that contained nothing but foul language. Yet
Puck
was so obscure none of them had ever spoken it in Fric’s presence.

Fric paged forward through the volume, pretty sure he would discover that
Puck
meant “Screw you, we’re tired of defining words, make up your own meaning.”

Instead, he learned that Puck was a “mischievous sprite” in English folklore and a character in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

Most words had more than one meaning, and that was true of
Puck
. The second definition proved to be less cheerful-sounding than the first: “a malicious or mischievous demon or spirit; a goblin.”

Mysterious Caller had said that the guy Fric needed to worry about had a darker side than Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck. A darker side than a malicious demon or goblin.

Ugly clouds were gathering over Friclandia.

Fric paged farther forward in the dictionary, looking for a guy named M-o-e L-o-c-k. Instead, after some searching, he found M
OLOCH
. He read the definition twice.

Not good.

Moloch had been a deity, mentioned in two books of the Bible, whose worshipers were required to sacrifice children. Obviously, he had not been a Bible-approved deity.

The last four words of the definition particularly disturbed Fric: “…the sacrifice of children
by their own parents
.”

This seemed to be carrying child sacrifice one step too far.

He didn’t for a moment believe that Ghost Dad and Nominal Mom would strap him down on an altar and chop him to pieces for Moloch.

For one thing, with their superstar schedules, they’d probably never again be together in the same place at the same time.

Besides, while they might not be the kind of parents who tucked you in bed at night and taught you how to throw a baseball, they were not monsters, either. They were just people. Confused. Trying to do the best they knew how.

Fric had no doubt they cared about him. They had to care. They’d made him.

They just didn’t express their feelings well. Images, not words, were your average supermodel’s strength. Naturally, the biggest movie star in the world, being an actor, was better with words than Freddie was, but only when someone wrote them for him.

For a while, just to have something to do that didn’t require thinking about being brutally murdered, Fric looked up obscene words in the dictionary. It was an amazingly dirty book.

Eventually he began to feel ashamed of himself for reading all these filthy definitions in the same room with a tree full of angels.

After returning the dictionary to its shelf, he went to the nearest telephone. Because the library was a humongous space, three phones were distributed among its armchair-furnished reading areas.

On those rare occasions when Ghost Dad invited a magazine journalist to interview him at home rather than on a set or some other neutral ground, he usually noted that the library contained more than twice as many books as there were bottles of wine in the wine cellar. Then he said, “When I’m a has-been, at least I’ll be a pleasantly wasted, well-educated has-been.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Fric sat on the edge of a chair, picked up the phone beside it, pressed the access button for his private line, and keyed in *69. He had forgotten to do this in the wine-tasting room, after Mysterious Caller had hung up on him.

Previously, when he’d tried this trick, the call-back number had rung and rung, and no one had ever answered it.

This time, someone answered. Someone picked up on the fourth ring, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s me,” said Fric.

Though he didn’t receive a reply, Fric knew he wasn’t listening to a dead line. He could sense a presence at the other end.

“Are you surprised?” Fric asked.

He could hear breathing.

“I used star sixty-nine.”

The breathing grew strange, a little ragged, as though the idea of being tracked down with *69 excited the guy.

“I’m calling you from the crapper in my father’s bathroom,” he lied, and waited to see if his weird phone buddy would warn him about the misery with which lying was rewarded.

Instead, he just got breathed at some more.

The guy was obviously trying to spook him. Fric refused to give the pervert the satisfaction of knowing that he had succeeded.

“What I forgot to ask you is how long I’ll need to hide from this Puck when he shows up.”

The longer he listened to the breathing, the more Fric realized that this had peculiar and disturbing qualities far different from the standard pervert-on-the-phone panting that he’d heard in movies.

“I looked up Moloch, too.”

This name seemed to excite the freak. The breathing grew rougher and more urgent.

Abruptly Fric became convinced that the heavy breather was not a man, but an animal. Like a bear, maybe, but worse than a bear. Like a bull, but nothing as ordinary as a bull.

Up the coiled cord, into the handset, into the ear piece, into Fric’s right ear, the breathing squirmed, a serpent of sound, seeking to coil inside his skull and set its fangs into his brain.

This didn’t seem at all like Mysterious Caller. He hung up.

Instantly, his line rang:
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo
.

He didn’t answer it.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

Fric got up from the armchair. He walked away.

He passed quickly along aisles of bookshelves to the front of the library.

His personal call tone continued to mock him. He paused to stare at the phone in this main reading area, watching as the signal light burned bright with each ring.

Like all the members of the household and the staff who enjoyed dedicated phone lines, Fric had voice mail. If he didn’t pick up by the fifth ring, the call would be recorded for him.

Although his voice mail was currently activated, the phone had rung fourteen times, maybe more.

He circled the Christmas tree, opened one of the two tall doors, and stepped out of the library, into the hall.

At last the phone stopped taunting him.

Fric glanced to his left, then to his right. He stood alone in the hall, yet the feeling of being watched had once more settled over him.

In the library, among the hundreds of tiny white lights strung like stars across the dark boughs of the evergreen, the angels sang silently, laughed silently, silently blew heralds’ horns, glimmered, glittered, hung from their halos or harps, dangled from their pierced wings, from their hands raised in blessing, from their necks, as if they had broken all the laws of Heaven and, executed in one great throng, had been condemned forever to this hangman’s tree.