Beyond the open door lay a very long room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling thirty feet high and walls curving to the floor. Olympian. Not human in scale. Reminiscent of designs by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. The ceiling and walls were paneled in light cherrywood finished with multiple coats of lacquer, glossy, with the depth of colored crystal, softly but dramatically lit by gold-leafed wall sconces that cast narrow fans of light both up and down. Here were the windows that Bibi earlier had thought were glowing spheres, mysteriously hovering in the fog, seven-foot-diameter portholes, concave from this side, the panes captured in bronze muntins. Along the center of the wide chamber, the polished black-granite floor did not reflect any of the wall lights, and Bibi felt almost as if deep space lay underfoot, an interplanetary void where she walked without the pull of gravity.
At the farther end of the room, before a wall hung with a tapestry replicating the red circle and black lightning bolts first seen in the reception hall, was an immense stainless-steel-and-black-granite desk unsuited to anyone but a mythic figure. If behind it had waited the Minotaur, with a human body and the head of a bull, or a horned mongrel as much goat as man, or some beast with furled wings and luminous green eyes, the desk and its owner would have been properly matched.
Instead, waiting for her was a tall athletic man in a slim-cut black suit of superb tailoring, a white shirt, and a black necktie, with a red display handkerchief in his breast pocket. Seventeen years later, he was recognizable as the boy of sixteen who murdered his mother and left his disfigured father for dead. He still parted his coal-black hair severely and combed it to the left across his brow, though anyone unaware of his obsession with the Third Reich would not interpret the style as an homage to Hitler.
To an extent, his good looks would insulate him from suspicion, for in this new century, image trumped substance and appearance often mattered more than truth. He had been a handsome boy, and he’d become a man with movie-star features and a glamorous aura. Hitler and most of the Nazi party hierarchy had been unattractive men, doughy and chinless like Himmler or brutish like Hess and Bormann, in some cases even macabre, and yet they had led a great nation into hell on earth and a world into chaos and destruction. Had they looked like this Terezin creature, perhaps they would have enraptured even more true believers and would have triumphed.
As Bibi approached, the elegant murderer came out from behind his desk and stood beside an office chair in which sat a young girl, her back to Bibi. The lustrous, champagne-blond hair was like that of Ashley Bell in the photograph found at Calida’s house.
To Terezin, Bibi said, “Why do totalitarians—communists and fascists alike—favor the colors black and red?”
The timbre of his voice, a masculine resonance halfway between bass and tenor, was a weapon as useful as his good looks. “Black for death, the power of life and death. Red for the blood of those who won’t respect that power. Or maybe it’s because they’re the colors of the roulette wheel, the colors of fate. Our fate is to rule, your fate is to be ruled. We are agents of fate, enforcing its dictates.”
“What a load of horseshit,” Bibi said, stopping ten feet from him.
“Yes, isn’t it? But, lovely Bibi, horseshit is the preferred language of our times.”
He swiveled the office chair, turning his captive into view. Ashley Bell’s right wrist was handcuffed to the arm of the chair.
“The girl you named by divination,” Terezin said, “spelled out with Scrabble tiles.”
“I’ll take her from you now,” Bibi assured him.
The long blade flicked from the knife that she had not been aware he held. He put the razor-sharp cutting edge to Ashley’s throat.
In the creation of this quest, there had been two authors: the Bibi Blair who wrote fiction and thought she understood herself, and another Bibi Blair, the shadow Bibi with paranormal talent, who was cloaked from her twin by the memory trick. For both of them, the one medicine that had always relieved their pain and healed their sorrow had been stories. In the creation of the search for Ashley Bell, Bibi had sought the full truth of herself, because the truth included the power to edit some things in the real world as she could edit them here—the power to edit away her cancer. But Shadow Bibi had been determined to keep the knowledge of that power in the memory hole where Captain had sunk it, because it was the cause of the greatest traumas of her life. To prevent Bibi from realizing that her real adversary was her alter ego, Shadow Bibi had to invent an antagonist, Terezin, who seemed to be her only enemy. But now Bibi and Shadow Bibi were one, united by the collapse of Captain’s trick, by the restoration of memory. An antagonist was no longer needed.
Lightly sawing the flat of the blade, not the cutting edge, back and forth across the child’s throat, Terezin said, “If I kill her, I kill you.”
For a moment, Bibi didn’t fully process that statement, didn’t realize what it meant that Terezin should know such a thing. She was intent upon the need to edit him out of this world of her shaping, applying her metaphorical eraser to him as she had applied it to Chubb Coy.
He smiled and shook his head. “That won’t work, lovely Bibi. And if you think about it, you’ll know why.”