Janis is a dedicated revolutionary and an effective agent, but she seems too tightly wound, as if one of these days an escalating series of dire sounds—gears stripped, springs sprung, flywheels fractured—will arise within her, culminating in a glittering, smoking ejectamenta of clockwork fragments bursting from her ears, nostrils, mouth, and other orifices.
She stands too close to Egon, as though she has no concept of personal space, and she makes insistent eye contact, as she always does. “You’ve got to leave me the ampules and a hypodermic needle and everything else I need to inject a control mechanism.”
“Inject who?”
“Laurie Longrin.”
“One of the children?”
“See, then we’ll have someone in the family to report to us.”
“The brain has to reach a certain stage of development before the implant can assemble and function properly. Sixteen. You know we only inject after the sixteenth birthday.”
“Oh, please, that’s such a steaming pile of horseshit. Just theory.”
“It’s fact,” Egon says, though in truth, like so much else, this is only what the Unknown Playwright wants them to believe.
As Paloma Sutherland moves the customized Cadillac Escalade that blocks the driveway and as Sally Jones waves them through, Rupert and Vince leave in the Jeep Wrangler.
“Only after their sixteenth birthday,” Gottfrey repeats.
Janis Dern draws a deep breath, blows it out in exasperation. “They didn’t try enough kids to be sure the problem is universal.”
“Nine,” Egon says. “Every one had a psychological crack-up within three months. Physical collapse, too. Had to be terminated.”
“Nine is too damn small a sample to prove anything. It’s worth a try with Laurie. This family can lead us to Jane Hawk. If the brat goes bat-shit crazy and bleeds from the eyes, so what? Why do you care?”
“I don’t. I’m along for the ride. I just do what he wants.”
She frowns. “He who?”
“The Unknown …” Egon looks away from her yellowish-brown flypaper eyes, but they remain stuck to him as he reconsiders his reply. “My Arcadian operator. You answer to me. I answer to him.”
“So ask him for permission to inject Laurie Longrin. The worst he can do is say no.”
He meets her stare again. “We’re wasting time here. I need to get to Killeen.”
Janis Dern is quite attractive if you don’t look into her eyes for too long. They are eyes less suited to a woman of her physical charms than to a miscreant come forth from a toxic womb, malformed and insane at birth, to whom value and pleasure are to be found only in hatred.
“Janis, I can’t give you a control mechanism for the girl. It’s not what the script calls for.”
Tears well in those eyes that previously have been as dry as cinders. She doesn’t shed them, but the tears shimmer and glimmer.
She puts one hand to his face, tenderly pressing it against his right cheek. Leaning even closer, she whispers, “If you can’t do this for me … then could you instead think of Laurie the next time you need to let off some steam?”
Genuinely bewildered, he says, “Let off some steam?”
“You’ve never shown an interest in me, but I’ve always been so intensely drawn to you. My desire is unrequited, and I’ve resigned myself to that. But next time things go so wrong you need to relieve the tension, instead of wasting some drunken cowboy with a TEXAS TRUE bumper sticker, think of that snarky little bitch Laurie.”
This twist in the script leaves him speechless. The Unknown Playwright’s wicked imagination has at last thwarted Egon’s usually reliable intuition. He never saw this coming.
Assuming that his silence means he fears her disapproval, Janis slides her fingers along his cheek to his mouth and presses them to his lips. “No need to explain yourself. And please don’t think that I’ve declared my feelings in the hope that we might have something together. I’m resigned to your disinterest. But I’ve loved you from afar, and I’ll continue to love you. You’re so strong. You do what you want, take what you want, always with such certainty that you’ll triumph. The cowboy could’ve had a gun. And the others … the ones I know about, anyway … in each case something could’ve gone very wrong, but you were fearless. I watched. I saw.”
When she takes her fingers from his lips, he remains so amazed that he can’t help saying, “No reason to fear them. None of them was real. Nothing is real.”
“They’re all just plebs, plodders, rabble, two-legged cattle,” she says, under the misconception that they are both talking about the unwashed masses who will eventually come under the rule of the Arcadians, unaware that he is expressing his philosophy of life, his radical nihilism. “Do you have siblings, Egon?”
“No. There’s no one but me. No one real.”
“How fortunate. I had three older sisters. You hate children?”
“I don’t allow myself such strong emotions. What’s the point if nothing’s real?”
“Well, I have enough hate for both of us. Think about it, Egon. You don’t have to love me in return. But maybe someday, when you’re stressed out and you need relief, maybe you can come back here and do this one thing for me, just out of the goodness of your heart.”
She walks away from him and returns to the Longrins’ house.
Egon gets behind the wheel of the Rhino GX. He drives out to the end of the private lane that serves Longrin Stables, where Rupert and Vince are waiting for him in the Jeep Wrangler.
They turn right onto the highway, east toward distant Austin.
The afternoon sky is vast and empty. The fields dwindle to every horizon, as if they have become the sole feature of a world that has been shorn of its mountains and drained of its seas.
Egon Gottfrey wonders what the script requires of him aside from this trip to Killeen. His usually reliable intuition regarding the author’s intent fails him for the moment. He has no feeling for whether he’s supposed to kill Laurie Longrin or Janis Dern—or both. Mile by mile, indecision plagues him, and his tension grows.
42
THE GREEN PLAQUE on the gate announced GRANDPA AND GRANDMA’S PLACE. Behind the white picket fence, on the manicured lawn, three gnomes sat on tree stumps, two smoking pipes and one playing what might have been a lute. Three other gnomes danced in delight. The blades on the four-foot-high windmill turned in the mild breeze. There was an ornate birdbath, too, but no feathered bathers; perhaps some avian instinct warned them not to dare it.
The sign above the front door read BLESS THIS HOUSE.
Jane rang the bell.
Judy White and Lois Jones, one and the same, yet neither, opened the door. Fifty-something. Buxom, well-rounded. Jet-black hair. Egg-yolk-yellow fingernail polish. Blue toenails. She wore flip-flops, a too-tight leopard-pattern sweat suit, seven diamond rings, numerous gold-and-diamond bracelets, and a necklace of matched sapphires.
She took the cigarette from between her lips and let smoke drift out of her mouth rather than blow it, and then she said, “So you look like something happen.”
“Something did. But I’m here.”
“You have three times usual money?”
Jane held up the paper bag that had contained her truck-stop sandwiches.
“Come in, darling. Sit. I see if Pete have everything ready.”
The house reeked of cigarette smoke that would have dropped little grandchildren like malathion felled mosquitoes, had there been any grandchildren, which there weren’t. The interior—darkish, with far too much heavy antique furniture and brocade draperies and Persian carpets—offered none of the kitsch that fancified the front yard and served as a disguise.
The woman went to her husband’s large workroom at the back of the house, leaving Jane alone with the two white cats as big as bobcats. One was lying on a sofa, the other on a La-Z-Boy recliner. They watched her as if she were prey.
Jane moved toward a leather armchair, but the yellow-eyed cat leaped off the sofa and sprang onto that seat before she could occupy it.
As she turned toward the now-empty sofa, the green-eyed cat abandoned the recliner and took the first cat’s original perch.
When Jane looked at the La-Z-Boy, both cats hissed.