Chase and Alexis Longrin, with their three daughters—Laurie, Daphne, and Artemis—are being temporarily detained in the living room.
When Chris Roberts and Janis Dern attempt to interrogate the family, all five detainees act as though they are gathered here by their own choice. They pretend to be unaware of any intruders, and speak only to one another, mostly about television shows they have seen recently. They are certain that Gottfrey and his crew aren’t legitimate authorities—or at least that they aren’t loyal to either the Bureau or the country. Clearly, through her in-laws, Jane Hawk has poisoned the minds of these people.
Egon Gottfrey observes this impudence until it bores him. Then he goes to the fenced exercise yard at Stable 5, where Pedro and Alejandro have corralled all the employees, eight men and two women. Nine of those ten are day workers and can claim not to have been on the property at 2:00 A.M., when Ancel and Clare Hawk arrived on horseback—and perhaps soon thereafter left by a more comfortable form of transportation.
Only one of them, Bodie Houston, a lean-muscled sun-seared thirtysomething guy with jet-black hair, has been here all night, in a small ranch-manager’s house. He claims to so admire the FBI, its history and its high standards and its incorruptible agents, that he bitterly regrets having slept too soundly to have seen anything. Bitterly regrets it. “As a kid, see, all I ever did want to be was FBI. What an honor if I could help you fellas. Damn, but don’t I feel as useless as a fifth leg on a horse.”
Gottfrey regards him in silence after that speech, trying to decide whether the Unknown Playwright wants him to handcuff Bodie Houston, drive him to a remote location, and throw him off a cliff—or walk away.
He chooses to walk away.
38
CORNELL’S LIBRARY FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. Windowless. Quiet. A fortress of books. In one of the reading areas, four mismatched—but beautiful—armchairs faced one another in a circle. Between the chairs were antique tables, each of a different period. Stained-glass lamps on the tables. The colored light so soft and pretty. Chairs and everything standing on a late-nineteenth-century Tabriz carpet in shades of red and gold.
Cornell had tried to make the library match his idea of what Heaven would be like, except he hoped that he wouldn’t be alone in Heaven and that he wouldn’t look scary to people there and that he would know what to say to the other people he met.
Now he had company, and it seemed like this was a test to see if he might be ready for an afterlife in which he wouldn’t be alone.
The two big dogs were lying on the carpet, each with its tail tucked between its legs, one of them snoring. Cornell had quickly grown more comfortable with the dogs than he’d thought possible on first encountering them. For one thing, there was no need to carry on a conversation with the dogs.
Cornell sat in a wingback chair. The boy was lost in a big club chair. By contrast with the child, Cornell felt like a pterodactyl folded onto a perch meant for a sparrow. Feet on footstools, they faced each other from the north and south points of the reading circle. The dining trays were hooked over their chair arms.
“Sandwiches are real good,” the boy said.
Cornell wasn’t sure what to say, though it seemed safe just to describe the sandwich. “Buttered bread, two slices of baloney, two slices of cheese, one Velveeta and one provolone, sliced tomatoes, a little mayonnaise, put in a sandwich press and toasted.” That seemed to go over well, so he added, “Two sweet pickles on the side and a little bag of potato chips for each of us.”
“The cola is good with the sandwiches,” the boy said.
Having read everything on the soda can, having an eidetic memory, Cornell decided not to list the contents of the beverage, but he did quote a fact he found interesting: “ ‘Canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313, by a member of the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 30327.’ ”
The boy said, “I’ve never been to Atlanta.”
“Neither have I,” said Cornell.
“We should go someday.”
“No, that’s a scaryidea.”
“Scary why?”
“Too far. Too big,” Cornell said.
“I guess it is if you say so.”
This conversation thing with a new person was easier for Cornell than it had often been before.
After a silence, the boy said, “You’re Uncle Gavin’s cousin.”
“My mother, Shamira, was his mother’s sister. But the family disowned her and she disowned them when she was sixteen, before I was born. The family never knew about me.”
“How do you … disown somebody?”
“You push them out, close the door, and never see them again.”
“Wow. That’s mean. Why’d they do that?”
“My mother was a terrible angry drug addict and a prostitute.”
“What’s a prositoot?”
“She sold sex. Oh. You didn’t hear that. You didn’t hear it. You didn’t hear. She … she … she made love for money.”
This conversation thing had broken Cornell into a sweat.
The boy said, “Making love is making babies. She made babies?”
“Just me. I was a baby once.”
“So who’s your dad?”
“Nobody knows. It’s a big mystery.”
“Doesn’t your mom remember? You should ask her.”
“My mother died when I was eighteen.”
The boy put down his sandwich. “That’s really sad.”
“It was a long time ago. Go ahead and eat. See, I’m eating. She died of a drug overdose, she couldn’t help herself. We have to eat, we can’t help ourselves.”
The boy sat looking at his sandwich. Then he said, “It isn’t right, people having to die.”
“No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t right. It isn’t right. But that’s the way it is. And we have to eat.”
“So if the family never knew about you, how does Uncle Gavin know?”
“When I got rich, I hired a detective to find my family and tell me about them. Gavin was the one I thought I might like. And I do. I like him … or liked him. He’s the only one I let know about me. Which is why maybe you’re still safe here. You’re still safe here. You’re safe here.”
“I sort of feel safe.”
“That’s good. That’s nice. Now eat your sandwich, please and thank you.”
The boy took a bite of the sandwich and chewed thoughtfully and swallowed and said, “How rich are you?”
“About three hundred million.”
“Wow. I can’t count that high.”
“It’s scary,” Cornell said. Thinking about all that money was so frightening that he almost put down his sandwich. But he needed to be a positive role model for the boy, so he continued eating.
“How’d you make all that money?”
“I invented several very popular apps.”
“I heard of apps, but I don’t know any.”
“You will one day. Anyway, by the time I was twenty-four, I made so much money it scared the bejesus out of me.”
“Why would money scare you?”
“I started out with ten dollars. Four years later, after taxes, I had three hundred million. That can’t happen unless a civilization—unless all of this, the way we live—is a mouse of cards.”
“A what?”
“I apologize, please and thank you. Sometimes the wrong word comes out of me. House. Our civilization must be a house of cards. So I decided to get ready for Apocageddon.”
“And so you built this secret library.”
“And the even more secret bunker. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, you aren’t crazy. You’re real smart.”
Pleased by the boy’s praise, Cornell said, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it and keep it secret without all the Filipino workers who couldn’t speak a word of English.”
39
BEGINNING TO WONDER IF THE SCRIPT calls for him to be stymied by a bunch of muleheaded Texas horse traders, Egon Gottfrey checks in with Rupert Baldwin, who is busy in Chase Longrin’s office in Stable 3.