“Where—is—Naz?” Chandler demanded, and in the other room Sidewalk Steve jumped again, whirled around, jumped back one more time, his hands batting at the air.
“The only way you will see Miss Haverman again is if you do as I tell you. Punish Steve, Chandler. Punish him as you deserve to be punished, and I will make arrangements for you to see Miss Haverman again.”
“Please,” Chandler hissed. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt her.”
In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was swatting at the air, squinting and ducking as though a swarm of bees were buzzing out of the sky around him. He smacked at his skin, danced from one leg to the other as though snakes or crocs snapped at his legs.
“It’s your fault we have her,” Keller said implacably. “If you’d done what you were supposed to, you would’ve never ended up here. Never would have dragged Miss Haverman into it with you.”
Keller’s disembodied voice had acquired an echo, and an outline as well. Pink, puffy clouds came out of the speaker like particolored smoke. In the other room, Sidewalk Steve was tossing himself from one wall to another. The shoe boxes stacked in the room added their flimsy shape to whatever imagined terrors attacked him, and he grabbed them and ripped them to pieces, but whatever was attacking him wouldn’t be kept away. His mouth was open, but no sound penetrated the window.
“Please,” Chandler whispered, “don’t hurt her.”
“Oh, but she is hurting,” Keller hissed through the speaker, the pink smoke coiling out like a serpent, “and it’s all your fault. Now the only way for you to save her is to punish Steve. Create a hell for him and drop him in it. Do it, Chandler. Do it!”
“LET HER GO!” Chandler screamed, and from the other room came the faint echo of a reply.
“No.”
But there was no stopping it now. It walked through the door of Sidewalk Steve’s room like a flaming ghost. Chandler remembered it from Millbrook. From the cottage, right before Naz had been taken. The boy made of fire. But who was it, and why did it keep coming back? Was it friend or enemy?
But the apparition had no time for any of these questions. It swept Sidewalk Steve up in blazing arms and engulfed him in a corona of flames. Sidewalk Steve writhed in the inferno for two or three agonized seconds, then fell to the floor, his brain as blank as a freshly washed blackboard. Only his twitching fingers and feet gave any sign that he was alive.
But it wasn’t quite over yet. The flaming boy turned toward Chandler and stared at him through the window. Its eyes were empty, dark sockets, its mouth an open, questioning O, but what it was asking, what it offered, Chandler had no idea.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
But the boy just stared at him for another moment, and then, sputtering like a pilot light, he disappeared.
Washington, DC
November 8, 1963
The linoleum floor of the Salvation Army was coated with a layer of dirt that crunched beneath the soles of BC’s shoes. A mildewy tang floated through the moist air, over which came the faint sound of Christian Muzak and the hum of innumerable fluorescent tubes.
BC had never set foot in a thrift store before and was amazed at how big it was—a gymnasium-sized space filled with clothes that had been worn by other people. Not just worn. Worn in. Worn out. Though the silver-wigged old lady at the counter assured him all the clothes were washed before they were put on the racks, BC saw innumerable sweat-stained armpits and yellowed collars and any number of faint and not-so-faint bloodstains. There was even an entire rack of used underwear: limp boxers and listless jockey shorts, their leg bands stretched and flaccid from being pulled on a thousand times, their flies sadly puckered from who knew what kind of fumbled or fevered gropings. Though BC felt that it was somehow violating the industry standard not to take a disguise all the way down to the skin, there was no way in hell he was putting on another man’s skivvies.
Which still left him with the dilemma of trousers, shirt, jacket, hat. It was reasonable to assume Charles Jarrell’s house was being watched—at any rate, it was not unreasonable to assume. And, too, he wasn’t sure how Jarrell would react to a particularly G-man-looking G-man showing up on his doorstep. He might run, and BC would lose the closest thing to a lead he had to Melchior. BC had to get Jarrell to open the door. After that, he would worry about getting him to talk.
Many of the shirts had names sewn over the left breast—bowling shirts mostly, but also mechanic and gas jockey and repairman’s uniforms, the thick, shiny threads of their embroidered names often in better condition than the threadbare garments onto which they’d been stitched. That was American job security: your name, on a shirt. You knew you were there for a while. The names flashed by like index cards unticlass="underline"
CB
Red letters, green background. But that wasn’t what caught BC’s eye. It was, rather, the words below the name:
Hoover Vacuums
How could he resist?
It took twenty more minutes to find pants that matched the shirt’s green, a belt, a pair of battered shoes (he wasn’t about to destroy another pair of Florsheims). But the real coup was the cap. It wasn’t an actual Hoover cap, but it did bear the motto “Suck It Up.” After waving it around in what was probably a futile effort to dislodge any lice eggs, BC tried it on, glanced in the mirror. But even through the healthy coating of dust on the glass, all he saw was a G-man in a goofy cap.
For some unfathomable reason the cashier had to record each purchase in a notebook.
“Pa-a-ants,” she said, drawing out the word as she scrawled it into her spiral-bound notebook. “Twen-ty-fi-ive cennttssss. Shi-i-irt, twenty-five cents. Sho-o-oes, fifty. Ca-a-ap, fifteen.” BC felt like a barbarian standing in front of a Roman tax assessor tallying up the worthlessness of his life.
The woman held up the belt, which, though not snakeskin, was every bit as wrinkled and cracked.
“I’ll just give you that,” she said. “Will that be all?”
BC was about to nod his head when he stopped.
“Just one thing. Where’d you get your wig?”
San Francisco, CA
November 8, 1963
At 10:36 p.m., Keller made a final note in his log:
“BOTH SUBJECTS SLEEPING.”
Sidewalk Steve had ripped hundreds of shoe boxes into confetti, which he’d burrowed inside of like a hamster or gerbil. There was some interesting theta wave activity on Chandler’s EEG, which Keller suspected was some kind of deep dreaming: a fantasy taking place at a level before cognition, before consciousness even. Tomorrow the doctor would hook Sidewalk Steve up to the EEG to see if, as he suspected, Chandler was somehow able to produce his images in other people’s brains, as opposed to a peripheral stimulation of the optic nerve. If that was indeed the case, they would be irresistible. You wouldn’t be seeing them (or hearing them or feeling them): you would be thinking them, and your mind wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from reality, no matter how fantastical they seemed. Fire would seem to burn you, bullets to pierce your skin. It was quite possible that Chandler could kill you with his thoughts—with your thoughts, rather, manipulated so that your body couldn’t tell the difference between an imaginary knife in the heart and a real one. How Melchior’d come out unscathed was anyone’s guess. “I’m used to living in a fantasy world” was all he’d said before he left, and, well, he was CIA. One was tempted to take him at his word.