This Present Darkness (40 page)

Bernice could feel something coming across in Marshall’s manner. “What’s bothering you, Marshall?”

Marshall tossed his notes on the desk and leaned back in his chair to ponder. “Bernie, we’d be fools to think we’re immune to any of this.”

Bernice gave a resigned nod. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about it, wondering what they might try.”

“I think they already have my daughter.” It was a blunt statement. Marshall himself was shocked at the sound of it.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“If I don’t know that, I don’t know
anything.
”

“But what kind of real power could they wield except economic and political? I don’t buy all this cosmic, spiritual stuff; it’s nothing but a mind trip.”

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not religious.”

“You’ll find it’s a lot easier.”

“So what if we end up like—like Harmel, no family left, just hiding in the bushes and talking about … spooks?”

“I wouldn’t mind ending up like Strachan. He seems comfortable enough just being out of this whole thing.”

“Well, Bernie, even so, we’d better see it coming before it gets here.” He grabbed her hand in earnest and said to her, “I hope we both know what we’re getting ourselves into. We may be in too deep already. We could quit, I suppose …”

“You know we can’t do that.”

“I know
I
can’t. I’m not putting any expectations on you. You can
get out now, go somewhere else, work for some ladies’ journal or something. I won’t mind.”

She smiled at him and held his hand tightly. “Die all, die merrily.”

Marshall only shook his head and smiled in return.

IN ANOTHER STATE,
in a low-income section of another town, a little panel truck weaved its way down a kid-cluttered street through a housing project. All the little duplexes, except for different color schemes, came from the same mold. As the truck pulled to a stop at the end of an aging asphalt cul-de-sac, “Princess Cleaners” could be seen printed on its side.

The driver, a young lady in blue overalls, her hair in a red scarf, got out. She opened the side door and pulled out a large laundry bundle and some bag-draped dresses on hangers. Rechecking the address, she made her way up one walk to one particular door and rang the bell.

First the curtain of the front window pulled to the side for a moment, and then there were footsteps toward the door. The door opened.

“Hi, got some cleaning here,” said the young lady.

Oh, yes …” said the man who answered the door. “Just bring it in.”

He opened the door wider so she could make her way into the house as three children tried to keep out of her path despite their great curiosity.

The man called to his wife, “Honey, the cleaning lady is here.”

She came in from the small kitchen, looking tense and nervous. “You children go outside and play,” she ordered.

They whined a bit, but she herded them out the door, closed it, then drew shut the one window that still remained open.

“Where’d you get all this laundry?” the man asked.

“It was in the truck. I don’t know who it belongs to.”

The man, a heavyset Italian with graying curly hair, offered his hand. “Joe Carlucci.”

The young lady set down the laundry and shook his hand. “Bernice Krueger from the
Clarion.
”

He showed her to a chair and then said, “They told me I was never to talk to you or Mr. Hogan …”

“For the sake of our children, they said,” Mrs. Carlucci added.

“This is Angelina. It was for her sake, for the children’s sake, that we—we moved away, we left it all, we said nothing.”

“Can you help us?” asked Angelina.

Bernice got her pad ready. “Okay, just take your time. We’ll start at the beginning.”

AT WHAT AL
Lemley called “the halfway point” between Ashton and New York, Marshall pulled the Buick into the parking lot of a little insurance office in Taylor, a small town at the crossing of two major highways with no other real reason for being there. He stepped into the little office and was immediately recognized by the lady at the desk.

“Mr. Hogan?” she asked.

“Yes, good morning.”

“Mr. Lemley is already here. He’s waiting for you.”

She showed him to another door which led to a back office that no one was using at the time. “Now there’s coffee out here on the counter, and the bathroom is right through this door and to the right.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Marshall closed the door, and only then did Al Lemley stand up and give him a warm handshake.

“Marshall,” he said, “it’s great to see you. Just great!”

He was a smaller man, bald, with a hooked nose and sharp blue eyes. He had spunk and sparkle, and Marshall had always known him as a priceless associate, a friend who could come through with almost any much-needed favor.

Al sat behind the desk, and Marshall pulled a chair up beside him
so they could both look over the materials Al had brought. For a little while they talked old times. Al was pretty much filling the vacancy that Marshall had left in the City Room at the
Times
, and he was beginning to have a real appreciation for Marshall’s ability to handle the job.

“But I don’t think I want to trade places with you now, buddy!” he said. “I thought you moved to Ashton to get away from it all!”

“I guess it followed me there,” he said.

“Eh … in a few weeks New York may be a lot safer.”

“What’ve you got?”

Al pulled an 8 x 10 glossy photo from a file folder and let it slide across the desk under Marshall’s nose. “Is this your boy?”

Marshall looked at the picture. He’d never seen Alexander M. Kaseph before, but from all the descriptions he knew. “This has to be him.”

“Oh, it’s him, all right. He’s known and then he’s not known, if you catch my drift. The general public never heard of the guy, but start asking investors on Wall Street, or government people, or foreign diplomats, or anyone else in any way connected with international wheeling and dealing and politics and you’ll get a response. He is the president of Omni Corporation, yes; they are definitely connected.”

“Surprise, surprise. So what do you know about Omni Corporation?”

Al shoved a stack of materials toward Marshall, a stack several inches thick. “Thank goodness for computers. Omni was just a little nontypical in tracking down. They have no central headquarters, no main address; they’re scattered into local offices all over the world and keep a very low profile. From what I understand, Kaseph keeps his own immediate staff with him and likes to be as invisible as possible, running the whole operation from no one knows where. It’s weirdly subterranean. They’re not on the New York or American Stock Exchanges, not by their name, at least. The stocks are all diversified among, oh, maybe a hundred different front corporations. Omni is the owner and controller of retail chain stores, banks, mortgage companies, fast food chains, soft drink bottlers, you name it.”

Al continued talking as he thumbed through the stack of materials. “I had some of my staff digging into this stuff. Omni doesn’t come right out and print anything about itself. First you have to find out what the front corporation is, then you sort of sneak in the back door
and find out what interest the Big Mother Company has in it. Take this one here …” Al produced a stockholder’s annual report from an Idaho mining company. “You don’t know what you’re really reading about until you get down here to the end … see? ‘A subsidiary of Omni International.’”

“International—”

“
Very
international. You wouldn’t believe how influential they are in Arab oil, the Common Market, the World Bank, international terrorism—”

“
What?
”

“Don’t expect to find any stockholder’s reports on the latest car bombing or mass murder, but for every documented aboveboard item here there are a couple hundred pieces of under-the-table scuttlebutt that no one can prove but everyone seems to know.”

“And such is life.”

“And such is your man Kaseph. I want to tell you, Marshall, he knows how to spill blood if he has to and sometimes when he doesn’t have to. I’d say this guy is a perfect cross between the ultimate guru and Adolf Hitler, and he makes Al Capone look like a Boy Scout. Word has it that even the Mafia is afraid of him!”

ANGELINA CARLUCCI TENDED
to spill words more from emotions than from objective recall, which made her story travel in agonizing circles. Bernice had to keep asking questions to get things clear.

“Getting back to your son Carl—”

“They broke his hands!” she wept.

“
Who
broke his hands?”

Joe intervened to help his wife. “It was after we said we would not sell the store. They had asked us … well, they didn’t ask, they told us we’d better … but they talked to us about it a few times and we wouldn’t sell …”

“And that’s when they started threatening you?”

“They
never
threaten!” Angelina said angrily. “They say they
never
threatened us!”

Joe tried to explain. “They—they threaten you without sounding like they are. It’s hard to explain. But they talk the deal over with you,
and they let you know how very wise you will be to go along with the deal, and you know, you just know that you should go along with it if you don’t want anything evil to befall you.”

“So just who was it that you talked to?”

“Two gentlemen who were—well, they said they were friends of the new people who own the store now. I just thought at first that they were realtors or something. I had no idea …”

Bernice looked over her notes again. “All right, so it was after you turned them down the third time that Carl had his hands broken?”

“Yes, at school.”

“Well, who did it?”

Angelina and Joe looked at each other. Angelina answered, “No one saw it. It was during recess at school, and no one saw it!”

“Carl must have seen it.”

Joe only shook his head and waved his hand at Bernice to stop short. “You cannot ask Carl about it. He is still tormented, he has bad dreams.”

Angelina leaned forward and whispered, “Evil spirits, Miss Krueger! Carl thinks it was evil spirits!”

Bernice kept waiting for these two responsible adults to explain the strange perceptions of their young son. She had trouble phrasing a question. “Well, what does—why—what do you … Well, surely you must know what really happened, or at least have some idea.” The two of them only stared at each other blankly, at a loss for words. “There were no teachers on the grounds who assisted him after it happened?”

Joe tried to explain. “He was playing baseball with some other boys. The ball rolled into the woods and he went after it. When he came back, he was—he was crazy, screaming, he’d wet himself … his hands were broken.”

“And he never said who did it?”

Joe Carlucci’s eyes were glazed with terror. He whispered, “Big black things …”

“Men?”

“
Things.
Carl says they were spirits, monsters.”

Don’t knock it, Bernice told herself. It was clear these poor deluded people really believed something of this nature was attacking them. They were very devout Catholics, but also very superstitious.
Perhaps that explained the many crucifixes on every door, the pictures of Jesus and the figurines of the Virgin Mary everywhere, on every table, over every doorway, in every window.