The top sheet showed the site plan for the whole development: the footprints of the residences, road, streetlamps, guardhouse, and school bus shelter.
Crystal Waters had been built around one elongated oval street, Chanticleer Circle. Ten homes were inside the oval, on wedgeshaped lots that sloped gradually down to a center pond. The remaining seventeen houses were strung around the outside, backed by the brick perimeter wall. The whole plan resembled a doughnut, squeezed at the sides.
The Farraday house had been the first residence on the outer circle to the right of the guardhouse, driving in. On the blueprint, the inside of the Farraday house outline was slightly lighter than the bluish tint of the rest of the sheet. I bent down closer to the drawing. Someone had penciled, and then almost completely erased, a light X on the Farraday house.
The small rectangle of the school bus shelter, outside the wall, across from the Farraday house, had also had an X drawn on it and then erased. I studied the two little rectangles for a minute but could see no relationship between the two other than proximity.
I flipped slowly through the rest of the blueprints. They contained the detailed construction specifications-the material lists, cross-sections, and dimensions that had been needed to build Gateville. There were nine sheets for the road alone, a dozen just for thelandscaping. Electrical, plumbing, concrete, sewerage, they all looked normal enough.
I went back to the site plan on top, and this time I noticed a little triangle of torn paper hanging from the binding. A previous sheet, perhaps a cover, more likely a contents index, had been torn off.
I went through the prints again. This time I counted pages. It didn’t take long, because the sheets were numbered. Blueprint numbers fourteen, nineteen, twenty-seven, forty-one, and fifty-eight were missing.
I checked the little list by the conference room phone and called the Bohemian’s extension. Griselda answered on the first ring. She told me he had left. Her hurried tone suggested she’d left her broom idling by the outside door and was anxious to leave, too. Outside, rain was coming down heavy, obscuring the lights from the surrounding buildings. I checked my Timex. It was past nine o’clock. I told her I was finished.
She was there in a minute and walked me out to the foyer. Once she had me safely blocked inside the elevator, she handed me a thick cream-colored business card, almost the same shade as some of the paint splats on my jeans. ANTON CHERNEK, the card read, in raised dark green letters, along with his office telephone number. There was no address. Another phone number had been handwritten in green fountain-pen ink below the printed number.
“Mr. Chernek requested you call him when you finished. That’s his private cellular number.” She made no move to step aside to let me back in to use the reception phone.
I ran through the rain to the Jeep. I tried the Bohemian’s cell phone before starting off, but it forwarded me to voice mail. I left a message saying that I would try back in a few minutes.
I started the Jeep and put it on the Eisenhower, not wanting to use the cell phone again until I was sure traffic would keep moving. Steering and shifting a Jeep in traffic, especially in the rain, is, at minimum, a two-handed sport, but three hands are needed if a cellphone is being used, and four if it’s all to be done in the proper Chicago style, with one arm waving an upraised finger at the other oblivious morons talking on their own cell phones.
It’s bumper cars, played with obscene gestures, but I have hope for the future. Evolution ultimately corrects physical limitations, and I have no doubt that in a thousand years, humans will have sprouted cellular antennae and the necessary two extra hands.
Two miles west of the Bohemian’s office, traffic opened up enough to call. This time he answered right away. In the background, I could hear the clink of heavy glasses and the loud laughter of scotch drinkers.
“Do you have more blueprints?”
The clinking and the laughter got softer. He’d moved away from the noise so he could talk. “You have everything I have. What are you looking for?”
“Some pages are missing.” I didn’t say anything about seeing the X’s drawn on the two bomb targets.
For a minute the only thing that came through the phone was people talking in the background, and then he said, “Can you tell which pages?”
“No, just the page numbers. Was there an index page, a cover sheet?”
“I don’t recall,” he said. “I just keep them in safe storage.”
“Who has had access to them?”
“Over the years?” He paused. “All kinds of people. Contractors hired by the Members come over to reference them all the time.”
“Do they take them with?”
“Absolutely not.”
“So those prints have never left your offices?”
For a minute, the only sounds coming through the phone were background voices at his party. “Except for the Board,” he said finally.
“Board members have taken them out?”
“Why is this important, Vlodek?”
“I don’t know.” I went on. “Does anyone think the D.X.12 was buried outside the house, or could it have been inside?”
“Nobody has established that.”
“Nor will they, given that you bulldozed the site. Our best shot now is the lamppost. Because of the depth of the hole, I’m thinking the bomb must have been buried two or three feet down, under the base.”
“You told Stanley it could have been left by a guy faking a flat tire. Would he have had time to dig that deep without being noticed?”
“I don’t see him taking the risk, but it’s still my best guess. You’re sure there are no other sets of blueprints?”
“They don’t exist, not anymore. The developers numbered each set and then made sure those drawings were seen only by the contractors who really needed them. When the project was done, I got them all back. I destroyed them myself, except for my own set.”
“You covered every base, didn’t you?”
“Good security comes from absolute attention to detail. Electrical, plumbing, and sewer pipes are all ways into Crystal Waters, even if some of the pipes are less than a half inch thick. We tried to think of everything.”
“The Farraday bomb might have been planted by someone posing as a landscaper, squatting behind a bush,” I said, “but the lamppost, lit up, out in the open, bothers me. Someone planting a bomb there, even with the car jacked up and a spare tire on the ground, took a big risk of being seen digging, and that doesn’t fit with the caution our man has been using.”
“Unless the explosive was pushed through a pipe or something, from inside Crystal Waters?”
“It’s a speculation,” I said.
“Surely not that electrical conduit pipe beneath the lamppost? It was too small to push anything through.”
“As I said, it’s just a speculation.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
In the rain, in the traffic, I couldn’t make out the inflection in the Bohemian’s voice.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, exactly,” I said.
The snakes came again that night. All colors of them, backlit by the orange flames of the burning houses, writhing and contorting as first one house, then another and another, blew up like monstrous firecrackers on a long string, sending sparks and flaming roof rafters high into the night sky. Until, at last, all the houses were gone, and the ground was flat, scorched black, and nobody was left alive.
Eleven
I shifted so I could see Leo’s reaction to what I was going to say. It was eight thirty Tuesday morning. We were drinking coffee from Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, sitting on his front steps. The rain had stopped in the middle of the night. After emptying the buckets and wastebaskets out the windows on the fifth floor, I’d spent the rest of the night on top of the turret, riding my lawn chair, spinning fancies, and I wanted Leo to tell me I was crazy.