Except for the years that he’d been in the Marines and two years after, Gilberto had lived above the funeral home ever since his mother had brought him home from the hospital as an infant in a bassinet. He had slept most nights knowing there was at least one dead person downstairs—often two, sometimes three—and some of his earliest memories were of venturing into a viewing room when no one was there, to stand on tiptoe by the casket and look at the deceased fresh from the embalming room in the basement. By the time he was eleven, he was observing his father at work, assisting in what small ways he could. He had seen people who’d died of natural causes at ninety, who had been eaten away by cancer at fifty, who had been killed in a bar fight at thirty, who had died in a car crash at sixteen, who had been beaten to death by an abusive parent at six, all those and many more. He had seen them, and later he had prepared their poor bodies with the respect and tenderness that his father had taught him. In all the years of his life with the dead, Gilberto had never been frightened of being in the company of a corpse or of a corpse itself. He had only fond memories of these rooms above a mortuary, memories of love and conviviality.
For the first time, this Saturday in March, fear had come upon him here, and more than once. The previous evening, when Jane had told him about the nanomachines and the Arcadian conspiracy, he had believed her and had felt an existential dread unlike any that he’d known since being away at war. But now observing her interrogation of Booth Hendrickson, both prior to the injection and after, as they anticipated the man’s coming conversion, Gilberto had been chilled to the core.
Jane’s techniques, persistence, and self-control made the interrogation a riveting experience for Gilberto, but in spite of her unrelenting—even merciless—pursuit of the truth, he had not been shaken by anything she did. In fact, he was grateful she was on the right side of this business, because if she’d been one of them, she would have been a damn formidable enemy.
Hendrickson was another matter. The arrogance of the man from the DOJ, his contempt for the rights of others, for the lives of others, his utopia that would be the darkest dystopia for most of humanity…More than once, the guy sent shivers through Gilberto.
And now, as his personality seemed to deteriorate, either under the extreme stress brought on by his inevitable conversion into one of his adjusted people or because something was going wrong with the control mechanism implantation, Hendrickson’s voice and his manner and his revelations about his mother stiffened the fine hairs on the back of Gilberto’s neck. Since the control mechanism had not yet woven itself fully across and into the man’s brain, there was a possibility that his breakdown was a performance, that he had some trick in mind, though it was difficult to see what he could hope to achieve by such a deception. Besides, there was a creepy reality to his emotional devolution.
Jane wanted to know a great deal about the estate in La Jolla, where Anabel Claridge currently resided, and then about the estate in Lake Tahoe, to which the woman would move on May first and remain until October.
“She likes Tahoe not for its winter sports, but for its summer beauty,” Hendrickson said, and he emitted a mutterance of laughter, bitter and restrained, which he refused to explain. In fact, he denied having laughed at all, and he seemed to be sincere in his denial.
Hendrickson spoke of the La Jolla property readily enough, but his mood changed when answering questions about the place in Tahoe, which he called “the forge.” When closed in Anabel’s absence, the forge was overseen by the live-in groundskeeper, Loyal Garvin, and his wife, Lilith, who was the housekeeper. In her younger days, Anabel had spent nine months of the year at the forge, and the boys had sometimes lived the entire year there.
“Why do you call it ‘the forge’?” Jane asked.
“Because she called it that.” Hendrickson stared into his glass of cola as if the shapes of melting ice cubes were the equivalent of a Gypsy’s tea leaves.
“Was it a forge at one time?”
“It was her forge.”
“What do you mean by ‘forge’?”
He looked up from his drink and met her eyes but quickly looked away as he said, “What do you mean by it?”
“Blacksmiths. A furnace for heating metal and hammering it into shape. Forging horseshoes and swords and whatnot.”
That bitter, ironic laugh quickened from him and away. “In this case—whatnot.”
“By which you mean?”
After a hesitation, he said, “Mostly boys. She forged sons there.”
“You and Simon?”
“Didn’t I just say?”
“Forged you into what?”
“The kind of men she wanted.” His nostrils flared and he turned this way and that, sniffing. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” Jane asked.
“Rancid meat.”
“I don’t smell anything.”
Hendrickson had no trouble looking at Gilberto; it was only Jane’s stare that intimidated him. “Do you smell spoiled meat, Charles?”
“No,” Gilberto said.
“Sometimes,” Hendrickson said, “bad smells no one else can detect…that’s a symptom caused by a control mechanism threading itself through the brain.”
After a silence, Jane said, “How did your mother forge you? Just what do you mean?”
“She had her ways. She had her very effective ways. We aren’t permitted to talk about that.”
“I’m giving you permission.”
“It’s not yours to give. We can’t talk about that. Never. Not ever. We can’t ever talk about that.”
15
If it was known that Gavin and Jessie were harboring Travis, they had to assume that their landline phones and their smartphones had been accessed remotely and were acting as infinity transmitters. Every word spoken in the house would now be monitored in real time by Jane’s enemies.
When they stepped into the kitchen from the back porch, Travis was sweeping the floors with a Swiffer. Duke and Queenie considered the fluffy Swiffer pad to be a toy. For a minute, there was a chaos of dogs panting and whimpering with excitement, of tails whacking cabinets and chair legs, and of a boy giggling as he struggled to preserve the pad from teeth and claws, managing at last to stow it in the broom closet.
When Travis turned to them, Gavin made a V of two fingers, pointed them at his eyes and then at the boy’s eyes, which was a prearranged signal that meant Big trouble, so focus on me.
Travis became instantly alert.
“Hey, kiddo, you want to play cards, Old Maid?” Jessie asked.
“Yeah, I like those funny old games. They’re cool.”
Gavin pointed with a forefinger, drew a circle in the air to include the entire room, and tugged at his right earlobe, which the boy would know meant, They’re all around us, listening.
“I’ll get some drinks,” Jessie said.
“I’d like a beer,” Gavin said.
“Beer for me, too,” said Travis.
“You wish,” Jessie told the boy as she moved to the iPod that stood on the counter with a pair of Bose speakers. “Heineken for the big guy, root beer for the wise guy.”
“I gotta use the bathroom,” Travis said.
“Me, too,” Jessie said, “but I gotta have music, too.”
Gavin said, “Pure tragedy that I was born too late for doo-wop. Give me some Hank Ballard, some Platters, some Del Vikings.”
As he and Travis moved away into the house, music rose loud in the kitchen.