The Hidden Man (19 page)

On the rare occasion that she could restrict her thoughts about men to just those two examples, then in that limited frame she perceived so much more of the beauty of maleness that ordinarily escaped her. When the usual presences were removed—lust-licking stares or grotesque words whispered or shouted, the potential for violence and the violence itself—then a vacuum of silence remained that allowed subtler male energies to take their place and quietly speak to her.

These two men—her fake brother who became a real one by doing nothing more than living that way, and the adoptive father whose little family she joined with a lie—they lived out the truth of the male capacity to latch on and hold fast to the role of protector, day after day, season after season, year after year. They lived out the truth of calmly but strongly standing up for anything that you know to be true and right. They lived out the truth of always seeking and preferring a civilized response to the world, but of also being willing and able to protect one’s own safety, even if violence is required. And although that capacity for violence is real, in such men it is never employed against the innocent, and it freely takes on lethal risk to protect another.

It was only because of those two examples that she had any hope of finding a life that would not require her to be a liar simply to survive. If there were two, there had to be more somewhere. She had so many little memories, over the last nine years, of both Shane and Randall refusing to have anything to do with a situation that would involve being deceitful in some way. Neither of them preached about it; they both just seemed to have an instinctive aversion to falsehood: Randall, because he saw the worst of it every day, and Shane for whatever reasons he carried.

Even if Shane could do nothing more than work in a restaurant, with his condition, she had to acknowledge that he was still out there in the world, living his life. And Randall had fought off attackers so many times in his work that she was certain nobody could ever make him do something wrong, just by threatening him.

It was because of Randall that she knew it was all right to believe in heroes, even in a world that is in large part a giant ash pit. But in spite of all that, she had gone ahead with her mad inspiration to get around the manly police structure’s assumption that women could not do the damned job. The sheer challenge of it had pulled at her the same way that she imagined the sky will pull at a grounded bird.

Her ultimate betrayal of Randall left her unforgiven in her own eyes because she still could not, absolutely
could not
look back on any of it without feeling that burst of pride. The fact that she actually put the plan into motion instead of simply fantasizing about it, as she had a million others, why, that alone was remarkable. Not only did she do it even though it was utterly insane, the sheer audacity of it all somehow became her greatest asset in pulling it off.

She knew that the more she stepped outside the boundaries of social convention, the easier it was for her to move things around. Miss Freshell had prattled on to her about a woman’s power of illusion with corsets and a makeup brush, but she did so without having the slightest grasp of the power to be had in successfully shattering a false taboo, proving it wrong. It made Vignette want to crow like a sunrise rooster…when, she reminded herself, she deserved to feel nothing but shame, of course.

SIMULTANEOUSLY

THE FAIRMONT HOTEL—HIGH ATOP NOB HILL

I
NSTEAD OF SUGAR,
J.D. stirred a fraction of a teaspoon of the elixir powder into his piping hot room service coffee. This was his favorite way to consume it, when he was free to give in to its power. A long Monday night off in the isolation of this lovely suite was an ideal time and place to amplify his dosage further than usual, safe from prying eyes. He had, after all, recently been forced to learn that he could indeed maintain his self-control under the effect of much larger amounts.

He sensed a freedom of some kind that was to be found by hovering near the loss of control. Perhaps it was that place of mental release that his audience marks always went to, but that he had never been able to enter himself.

There was no doctor in the United States to monitor his condition. American doctors. Bonesetters. And he would check into an American hospital for an examination on the same day that he swam in an open sewer for exercise.

He knew what to look for, anyway. All a doctor could do was help him to face it. Dr. Alzheimer had taken care of that by introducing him to just the right chemist. He had a bagful of self-diagnosis open on the table in front of him.

The ornately colored tiles lining J.D.’s main balcony framed his view of the ocean far below. The balcony carried a familiar feel in the handiwork of the mosaic. If he looked closely at the single tiles, they seemed to be randomly placed. But if he pulled away a few steps, an entire panorama came into focus. By the same token, he was certain that if he pulled back from his jumbled thoughts and viewed them from a distance, the whole picture would finally reveal itself.

The question was simple enough, after all:
How bad is it?

How bad is it compared to when it started? Say three years ago. Be more honest, say five. Five years, then. Five years of what he had never allowed himself to define as a slow disintegration, but what he had always recognized as precisely that. Relentless disintegration, a sandy beach eaten away by the tides.

How bad is it?
He didn’t even know what “it” was until he had the evil curse or the good fortune, depending on the time of day that he thought about it, to meet Dr. Alzheimer and receive his diagnosis. His condition was an example of the doctor’s discovery: a new distance—not distance,
disease
—a new disease that slowly empties your brain of its contents and turns you into a godforsaken child.

How gentle the doctor was. “Every man has another inside of himself that he must keep hidden, if he wants the world’s respect. This illness strips away one’s ability to conceal the hidden man.” The doctor did not mention females, in the fashion of his Germanic culture, but J.D. supposed that he referred to them as well. He was about to ask about that when Dr. Alzheimer smiled and added one last thing.

“Mother Nature is kind. As this illness steals your abilities, it also steals your ability to notice the process. Eventually, the problem is not yours at all. The problem, really, is for the ones who must take care of you.”

It was enough to end the conversation. The doctor had smiled again, although his words could not have been more damning if they were uttered by Satan. Their cruel message was clear:
Whatever you have left to do, do it now. Get it done. Then, as soon as you possibly can, scuff away a little indentation in the dirt and line it with pine needles, so you’ll have someplace soft to land when you fall over.

The great James “J.D.” Duncan had never been successful enough to earn real wealth. He was an aging man, married twice, abandoned both times by his wives because of his devotion to his work. Of course, he reminded himself, the love of card games had not been helpful. Various other women picked him clean, time and again, seemingly without effort.

Now this. This erosion.

His fingers began to shake a bit while the first of the elixir took hold of him. He used the remaining seconds while he still had enough fine motor control to peel scrapes of warm wax off the fat candle burning in front of him. He salted a bit of the elixir onto each scrape of wax and rolled it up into itself, burying the elixir inside.

It was a little trick that he came up with during his first year with the elixir, strictly for use on days off. The little wax balls were easy to swallow, and they could keep the elixir from getting into his system for as much as an hour.

Ever since the forced overdose at his introductory show, the idea of pushing his tolerance for the elixir gripped him. He felt compelled to experience every scrap of memory that he had left. He planned to swallow one or two of the wax balls and save the others for later, then go for a long walk and let the effects surprise him.

But at that moment an abrupt knock on his suite’s double doors gave him a jolt. He bolted up from his chair and felt his heart jump.

Room service again? He had not ordered anything else. Besides, room service people always immediately announced themselves. No one had spoken.

He took a deep breath and turned toward the door. “Yes?”

“Mr. Duncan,” came a muffled male voice. “It’s Shane Nightingale. I’m here by myself, sir, and I’m sorry about the late hour, but can you come to the door? The hotel has been trying to get a message to you, and I was asked to bring it over in person.”

Shane Nightingale?

Shane…Nightingale…A bolt of fear shot through him. It was obvious that he was supposed to know that name. Instead there was a blank spot precisely where the information about someone called Shane Nightingale ought to be.

“The hotel refused to come and knock, because you left word not to be disturbed, but they’ve been tucking notes under your door all evening.”

J.D. saw several slips of paper on the floor within a few inches of the doorsill. He sighed.
This is the worst part,
he thought,
losing a whole person.

It was not the loss of words, or the struggle to keep the trance triggers in his mind, or even the challenge of bluffing his way out of failed bits. The absolute worst part was finding out that somebody he was supposed to know had popped like a soap bubble and vanished in his brain.

His greatest threat was a situation just like this: one-on-one, where he had no escape. And it might just be more than he could do, to lie his way out of it. It required a dexterous level of fakery far beyond his means, to handle such an encounter without giving away his deficit.

But with his next deep breath, a fresh wave of clarity sparkled through him. Riding its effect, he reminded himself that he was James “J.D.” Duncan, renowned mesmerist. If anyone could bluff his way through such an encounter in spite of the distance, not distance,
dizziness.
But no, it wasn’t dizziness, it was disease. Disease. He lost the train of thought.

Forty years of almost continuous work in the public arena had earned him enough to take him through his marriages, even if they failed. He accumulated nothing. And what about children? Any children?

Any children? Any children?

The echo of the phrase was loud, swirling inside him with such force that he felt a rush of seasickness from the motion. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the wall.

What was he thinking about?

At that moment, he realized that the chemically fueled memory had completely reversed his mood, placing an entirely new and different lens over his eyes. He now saw that there was a lot to be said for the “die trying” attitude. So why not answer the door? Throw down the challenge.

Plus, J.D. could rely on maintaining as much clarity as possible for several more hours, since he had himself a bellyful of methylenedioxymethamphetamine—the next best thing to fairy powder sprinkled over the brain by elves. He felt it: rapidly dissolving, boosted by caffeine. It would light a bonfire inside his skull.
Good thing the folks aren’t out there tonight.

He decided that maybe he could entertain this Nightingale fellow for a minute or two, after all. Convince the man that he remembered him, then send him on his way and get right back to more amusing things. Surely he had mastered this elixir well enough to maintain the control necessary to accomplish that much.

He forgot for a moment that impulsiveness was a much bigger problem for him when he was under the effects of the elixir, and willingly acted upon the impulse to swallow all six of the little wax balls at once. He took a quick swig from the water pitcher, swallowing the wad with effort and dabbing at the sides of his mouth while he hurried over to the suite’s double doors. That would keep him motivated to get Mr. Nightingale going on his way before the little wax balls melted, released their treasure, and the real trouble started.

At the doorway, he placed his hands on both doorknobs and took a deep breath. Then he pulled on both doors and opened them wide, adding a bit of dramatic flair, a matter of individual style. He was the Renowned Mesmerist, after all.

Out of all of her readers, Janine Freshell would have been the biggest fan of the way she died. She might have even stolen the death for her next book, the one that she did not get to finish, despite her resourcefulness in finding a way to revive her publisher’s interest in her and insert herself into Duncan’s need for a professional boost. The renowned mesmerist was a perfect antagonist for her next book: not the killer, but the cause.

As a woman who had never found any enjoyable use for her femininity except for the effect it created in men, she had adopted the persona of a ravenous whore by night and perfect lady by day. As such, she could hardly fail to secure the romantic interest of a certain bachelor who just happened to be the police detective whose name came up in newspaper articles more than any other over the past few years.

Her inspiration had come from a single piece of information that started it all, for her—received on the day that a distraught woman sought her out in hopes that the author of women’s romance stories would be a sympathetic ear. The woman was older, never married, but had a fatherless son. The son was now a grown man, and his crazy and sometimes shameful behavior was steadily escalating toward violence.

The woman sought Freshell’s help in appealing to the father of her crazy bastard child, whom she could no longer protect or control. But the father was a famous showman. He ignored the letters from the mother of his child, and refused to see her after his shows.

And so the woman begged Freshell to use her celebrity to make contact with the great mesmerist, James “J.D.” Duncan. The older woman did not want anything from him, did not even care to see him, for herself. She only appealed for him to find a way of keeping their mutual creation from causing some sort of terrible harm to himself or someone else.

“Please,” she had begged, “make sure Mr. Duncan understands. It’s gone beyond anything that one woman can handle. Something terrible is wrong with our boy. God forgive me, but sometimes I look at him and I see the Devil.”

In the brief time that it took Miss Freshell to die, there was a moment when a thought flashed through her, not in words, but as a series of mental images and fleeting physical sensations. Their sum total was simple: She was the one who set off the long and complex chain of events that eventually led to the fatal pressure that was now constricting her windpipe.

It began at the moment, months before, when she decided to accept the woman’s appeal. She then lied to her and claimed that Duncan had refused to see her. In truth, she never contacted him at all. Instead, she arranged to meet him for her own purposes, using the opportunity to allow the woman to sit in a café across the street from her meeting place with Duncan, so that she could see for herself that Freshell was actually visiting with him, as promised. For that privilege, the woman paid Miss Freshell a wad of cash that she claimed represented every dollar she had, and which Janine Freshell gladly accepted.

With that, she only needed to convince Duncan that she could save his career, without mentioning her own. She persuaded him to press the San Francisco authorities to assign Detective Randall Blackburn as his personal body guard. It had taken her three anonymous threatening letters, left for Duncan at his stage door, to convince him that he needed a body guard at all. When she sweetened the pot by explaining that she had just gotten the fabulous idea to tail Duncan for the duration of the ten-month exposition, writing a book with him as a main character, his commitment was sealed.

And if none of those things guaranteed her doom, Miss Freshell instantly understood that the cause of her own demise had been launched the moment she contacted Duncan’s criminal bastard with another note. This one was her masterpiece, written as if Duncan himself was the author, and delivered to the mental institution where the son was incarcerated.

The note’s contents berated the son to the point of never even using his name. It scorned him for frightening his mother and it mocked him for thinking that Duncan would ever have anything to do with a god-cursed wastrel like him. It did everything short of openly daring him to escape and come after his father. By the time she finished writing it, she could not think of anybody who would receive such a letter without wanting to kill the author.