The Horses of the Night (31 page)

The sunlight was bright, spilling across the stairway. I looked back and asked, leaning against the railing, “What was it you saw, when you were dying, Valfort? How little you had done with your life?”

The streets outside were sunny. The wind was cold. The gutters were filled with running water, the flow directed into drains by rolls of toweling.

I wandered, fretful, even feverish.

The traffic was the usual hectic Paris rush, but at the same time it was without the malice of the traffic in other cities. I watched my reflection glide across the shop windows.

To not know, I told myself. To not know. That is to be free.

I stood outside the Cluny Museum, the ruins of the Roman bath before me. Wind shivered my trouser legs, but I did not mind. Valfort did not know me. I had strengths against more than one sort of riptide.

I turned into the wind and stepped into the street, alert for a cab. I have always weighed the consequence of what I did, and sometimes I have mourned. But, in the end, I have always returned to life.

How little Valfort knew, that man who had seen himself die.

A cab squealed to a stop. I seized the door handle.

But then I realized what I was doing. I understood that I was about to return home more lost than before.

I hurried through the streets, and at last found myself on rue San Mames once again. I pushed the door, and it would not open. I pounded on the heavy glass, shook it, but it made only a metallic rattle.

“Please!” I called. “Not for me! For Nona!”

A man in a uniform was at my side, asking me what I was doing there, banging on a door. Where was my key? Who did I want to visit?

Rapid French words wrapped around me briefly, and escaped, losing me.

48

A woman's voice called my name as I paid the cabdriver at de Gaulle Airport. Despite the decorative spin her accent gave my shouted first name—
Stray-tone
—I recognized it at once.

It was Marie, dressed in an overcoat of the same dark blue as her dress, looking both out-of-time and contemporary. She handed me an envelope, and when I began to speak she put a finger to her lips.

She left me without speaking. I did not open the envelope until I was on the plane. That was because I knew from the feel of the pleasant, auburn-gold paper what was inside.

When I had buckled the seatbelt, and declined yet another glass of champagne, I could not delay any further. I slipped a thumb under the flap of the envelope, which was still slightly moist from the tongue of either Valfort or Marie, and it opened without tearing.

The money I had left was there, folded up within a sheet of paper. But there was a surprise, too. On the paper was a strong, almost illegible bit of handwriting:
I will do what I can, but it's nearly too late
.

There was a signature, too, a
V
like the sketch of a flying thing, a hawk rendered too quickly to allow for a head, feathers, the outstretched talons. I wanted to feel hope. But I recognized the truth.

I got off the plane in San Francisco while the other passengers were still stretching and fumbling for their coats. I threw my black leather overnight bag over my shoulder, and walked fast.

Even so, the lounge was crowded. I was eager to escape the tangle of people, but as I walked the long corridor away from Gate 67 someone fell into stride with me, and on the other side was someone else, another man in a suit, another man in dark glasses.

I stopped, and they all stopped with me. “Mr. Fields?” said one of them, a man with a white scar on his lip.

I was surrounded by a wedge of men. One or two carried small black transmitters. My first thought was that Childress had changed his mind or had been demoted. The men were blank-faced and wore gray suits. They did not, however, recite my rights, nor did any of them touch me.

Instead they walked as quickly as I was walking, and the airport security men nodded to us as we passed.

Beautiful, I thought. A top-of-the-line kidnapping.

That was perfect. It was what I deserved, and it was exactly appropriate: I step off the plane and fall into the sort of trap I had spent years avoiding.

“How was your flight?” asked Lip Scar.

“Fine,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my passport. So, I thought, we're all going to pretend to be normal. That should be fun. “The flight was wonderful. I didn't watch the movie. There was, at one point, a little bit of turbulence.”

We were waved through customs, and as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, I took a breath of cool night and diesel fumes and wondered when they would shove me into the trunk of an Eldorado and head toward the landfill near Foster City. I would kick the one nearest me, the one with the radio with the wiggling black antenna. I would kick him hard in the knee, and skip around the Skycap struggling with a mountain of suitcases.

Then Lip Scar said, “Miss Wick wants to see you.”

There was a brisk walk through the chilly dark. There was a smell of jet fuel and that ordered sense of power that an airport often gives. A chain-link gate was unfastened, and I was hustled up the steps into an executive jet.

Anna Wick handed me a martini glass and waited for me to settle myself in the seat.

“It can be so pretty there this time of year,” she said. “How was the weather?”

“I didn't get what I wanted,” I said.

“How unusual.”

I did not touch my martini. The stuff looked viscous, poisonous, the olive distorted by refraction. She observed my reluctance to drink, and made no move to taste her own.

“I used to think you were one of those people who were too good to get anything done,” Anna was saying, running a finger around the edge of her glass. “Too nice. Too well manicured to fight.”

“You aren't disappointed,” I said.

“Renman wants to meet with you,” she said.

My pulse tripped. “I want to meet him.”

“He insists that we fly down tonight. He says it can't wait. He has news for you.”

She picked up her drink but still did not taste it. “Renman probably wants you dead. He and DeVere understood each other. If I share all of the DeVere empire with you—he won't like it.”

“I want everything. Where it says ‘DeVere' I want it to say ‘Fields.' I want everything that DeVere had. And then I'm going to make everyone forget all about DeVere.”

“You expect me to help you accomplish all that.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes were smiling, but her voice was serious. “Why should I?”

“You don't have any choice.”

“I can't tell if you're threatening me, or offering me something amazing.”

“Medford, Oregon,” I said.

“I beg your pardon,” she coughed, but she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Lumber town,” I said. “Mountains of sawdust, and everywhere you look you see truck ruts and dusty houses. It should be a pretty place, but it isn't. In the middle of forests and all you can see is barren lots and piles of sawed-off trees. And you can smell the lumber fermenting. Starting to rot. That's how it all begins, the houses and the towns, even the books. Piles of sawdust. Your hometown.”

“Just when I was starting to think you were so much fun.”

“You're gambling, too.”

“Am I?”

“You think I'm the future.”

She took a sip of her drink and some of it splashed. She said, “Renman's going to be very surprised.”

We were taxiing. The small jet jounced with the unevenness of the runway. In the distance, beyond the curtained window, was the Bayshore freeway, billboards, glittering traffic. “He thinks he can scare you. Don't laugh. He should be able to frighten any normal man.”

I did not have to speak.

Far away, beside the freeway, I could see the billboard displaying DeVere's rugged, handsome face. Its expression seemed to have brightened since DeVere's death, as though the image of the man knew what had happened and needed to hide the truth from itself.

“You want that taken down,” said Anna in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Replaced,” I said.

But I knew that I was playing out the last act, milking the applause, staying on for just the last, lingering sensation of triumph. I was getting what I wanted.

But it was too late.

49

The executive jet had been outfitted with Mojave-yellow leather seats and sage-gray seatbelts. The impression the color scheme gave was that this aircraft had grown out of an outcropping in New Mexico, from the side of sandstone mesa, a miracle of geology equipped with landing gear.

Anna kept looking over at me, looking up from the contents of yet another red plastic folder. When our eyes met she always gave me a DeVere-quality smile. She returned to her work, whisking various words and figures with yellow highlighter.

She looked over at me so often I began to wonder if she thought I would vanish, or turn into some other sort of creature altogether. And what was that hint in her eyes? Something about me pleased her.

At night the desert is pure abyss. A human settlement is a sharp concentration of pinpricks. Freeways cast a mange of light, and cars pushed light ahead, bulldozing the dark.

The jet glided onto the runway at Palm Springs. There was the flavor of desert night in the air, and a flavor of lawns, too, of sprinklers raining over bermuda hybrid.

A limousine met us, yet another armored vehicle intended for both comfort, easy ostentation, and the sort of shaded glass window that could, with any luck, stop a bullet. A white-and-blue Palm Springs squad car slipped into the traffic behind us.

“The police take care of Renman,” said Anna.

“Good friends of his,” I said.

“He makes them nervous.”

The truth of this made me smile. Renman's name was linked with assassinations and vanished labor union leaders. The story was that what DeVere had known Renman had taught him, if only by example. Renman bought television stations, closed movie studios, and dictated what VCR technology would sit on shelves in homes around the world.

My family viewed Palm Springs as a place for the newly moneyed, the refuge of entertainers and their politician cronies. I had flown down occasionally for tennis, and once or twice a wedding or party had called me here. But it had been a few years since I had visited these streets of tall palms and walled gardens.

When we stepped from the car, I looked up and caught the faint pallor of starlit snow high up in the San Jacinto peaks. There was a glimpse, in the artfully lit garden, of pink raked sand and the spikes of an ocotillo cactus. Then we were within the walls, and in a separate world.

The villa was a masterpiece of security. Cameras tracked us. Polite, tailored men greeted both of us, opening doors for us, and then, noiselessly closing them, and, I sensed, locking them behind us.

The dry air was chilly. Fish, large, scarlet creatures, slowly worked their way through an immense pond, a design I recognized: one of my Japanese friends, a man well known for his ponds of philosophical fish and tastefully arranged, nearly unnaturally pristine, reeds and rushes. The pond was lit from within, and there was a musical trickle of water.

“I keep forgetting how cold it can be here,” said Anna.

She was nervous. I was surprised, before I reminded myself that she had no idea what Renman had in mind.

“This is all going to be free entertainment for you, isn't it?” I said.

“I have feelings,” she responded. “Don't you?”

Perhaps they would try to drown me among the fish. Perhaps they would slit my intestines, in the style of Japanese assassins, and let me bleed to death among the dwarf apple trees. I had the feeling that if there would be an attempt on my life it would be something classical, a beheading with a ceremonial sword.

He was making us wait.

And watching us? I did not think so. Renman would have his Swiss Guard tracking us from distant television screens. The man himself was bathing, or reading, not giving us a thought.

“He's coming,” said Anna.

There was at that moment a sound—a click, a door opening.

In the dark, far across the Japanese garden, there was a whisper. There was a movement. There was a silhouette in a doorway.

I had seen him last at my father's funeral. He had put on weight. He was stocky, short, and wore some sort of flowing gown. His figure was composed not of color but darkness, his head and shoulders blocking the light.

Even now the man was not watching us, I sensed. He was simply taking the air, ignoring us, perhaps barely aware that we were here. But he must have had enough sense of theater to know that his entrance was perfect.

My father had always spoken of Renman as a “field marshall of the real world.” The man was a legend, and like many legends he did not have to appear in public to be a public figure. Even more than DeVere, Renman was a man who had created the age we inhabited. If Petrarch had embodied
his
age, then Renman embodied ours, and the legends of his influence over both the underworld and politics were the stuff of what journalists called the “subtext of our culture.”

When he stepped from the doorway he was invisible. Then, not so invisible. He drifted toward us, stopping to finger the ornamental oranges, pausing to watch the pool and the scarlet and orange-splashed behemoths drowsing there.

He looked older than I had expected. White haired, with white eyebrows, he looked smaller than I had recalled, too, and more weary. We shook hands.

He turned his back to us and watched the pool for awhile. There was a quality about him that was unmistakable: he existed, and the two of us did not.

He shook his head, as though disputing some argument only he could hear. He waved us into chairs, but I preferred to remain standing, as he seemed to. He stepped into one of the beams of light from a hidden lamp. He let me study him, but did not bother looking at me, examining the stunted pine beside the pool.