Huon held Derek’s eyes, as if daring him to look away. “That was at the border, among friends.” His hand traveled slowly to the left side of his face; he laid the finger along his blackened jaw. “This I lost in Tuol Sleng.”
Derek’s coffee tasted cold and bitter. He realized he had been holding it in his mouth without swallowing; he almost gagged as he forced it down.
“One man I knew there, just before the end, lost more than this. You could say he lost almost everything he had, before they found they could keep him alive no longer. This man, I think you know a great deal about him.”
Derek groped clumsily for the face he’d put on a few moments ago, but it seemed inappropriate now. The best he could manage was to look stupid and horrified.
“Maybe you did not know him. How could you, after all, being a young… what, copywriter? But what he had, everything he had to give, came to you, I feel. I am not sure how that could be. but I will not question too much. Is it not strange how things come together, as if with a will of their own? Look how far I have come, Mr. Crowe—all the way from Cambodia to Long Beach, and now to you. I think there is a reason for this. I think it is because you are meant to give me what you have. It never truly belonged to you, and you have done enough damage with it already. I am begging you to give it to me, so that I may destroy this awful thing.”
Derek realized he had to get a better grip on the situation, or Huon would surely drag him into an endless circle of accusations.
“Could you possibly be any vaguer?” he said. “If I had the slightest idea what you were talking about, or getting at, I might have broken off this conversation before now. As it is, the only reason I’m still sitting here is to marvel at how one man can say so much without making a shred of sense. It’s all very touching, I assure you; I feel for the refugees, and I’m sorry your people are in their present plight. But the rest of it—you haven’t said a single word that means a thing to me.”
“Mr. Crowe—”
“No, wait a minute, please, Huon. Have you read my book?”
“I have seen the mandalas, as you call—”
“That’s not what I asked. Have you read it?”
Huon shook his head reluctantly, as if it pained him to concede any ground. Oh, he is a politician, Derek thought.
“If you’d read my book, you would know how the mandalas came to me. They were channeled, by forces I was unaware of until the moment they announced themselves, through a woman I was seeing for spiritual counseling.”
“I thought you were in advertising.”
“That was in the seventies. In the eighties I turned to spiritual pursuits. My point is, if you think you recognize these symbols, maybe it’s because they have revealed themselves to both of us from the same source.”
Huon’s face darkened. “That is… scarcely possible.”
“I would have said so myself, a few months ago.” And here he had it: the inspiration that would draw Huon off his scent and send him on an even more insane and complicated trail. It was exactly what he needed! “But then I began to see the mandalas around town. On posters, billboards, flyers. The mandalas from my book—but having nothing to do with me.”
Huon’s fingers tightened around his water glass, still full of coffee he had not touched. The bone scars, mine scars, stood out like white kernels beneath the flesh.
“My book had yet to be published, you see? No one else knew of the designs. Until that moment I still might have half-believed they were a delusion of my patient—‘Ms. A’ I call her—but these came from an independent source. There is, even now, a nightclub preparing for its grand opening, with no other purpose than to dazzle the city with a huge display of mandalas. And they are not my mandalas, as you call them. They belong to everyone. They’ve revealed themselves everywhere.”
Huon’s mouth gaped. “This cannot be.”
“Club Mandala,” Derek said, smug and confident now. Oh, it had worked well and truly. “I suggest, if you’re going to stay in the city another day or two, you check them out. Perhaps they know your friend from Poison Hill.” He fumbled in his pocket and found the Post-it. “Here you go. You can call them right up.”
He laid the yellow square on the table between them. Huon stared at it in disbelief. Derek had never felt quite such a feeling of triumph; it was a small battle, but who knew where it might have led had he lost it?
“A nightclub… ?”
“Horrible, isn’t it? If you ask me, that would be far more disturbing to your people than anything in my book, which has only noble intentions behind it.”
He watched as Huon picked up the scrap, which clung stickily to his fingers.
“The fellow you want to talk to is called Etienne,” Derek said.
Huon rose abruptly, upsetting his glass. Derek grabbed a handful of napkins from the steel canister and slapped them down in the pool, but not before some of it had leaked over into his lap. He slid out of the booth, cursing, but there was no one left to blame. Huon’s form was vanishing out the front door, and now the waiter was coming toward him with a towel, looking faintly suspicious at the other man’s sudden departure.
Derek grimaced and dug in his pocket for his wallet. So Huon had stiffed him for the tab. It was a small enough price for getting the politician off his back, but it still rankled.
The aftermath of his victory was equally hollow. As he climbed the stairs to his apartment, he realized how many pitfalls surrounded him, gaping like sudden sinkholes in what had seemed the solid surface of his life. He had to reduce his risks somehow. It was time, perhaps, to remove the tangible evidence that would tie him to Elias Mooney. He didn’t know why he’d clung to it so long, except that the notebooks might still contain enough unused material to yield a second book—maybe enough to turn into a nice fat Mandala Tarot. Well, the notebooks were one thing; they were only words on paper. But there was no reason at all to hang onto the worst part of Elias’s legacy, the part at which he was quite sure Huon had been hinting.
The box was still sitting where he had left it, next to his couch, partially open. He had avoided looking at it, dealing with it, but now was the time. He wondered at the best way. Fire? Burial? The garbage disposal?
He went into the kitchen for rubber gloves. When he got back into the room, the box was opening slowly of its own accord, the flaps creaking up. Well, he’d disturbed them, they were unfolding under pressure. It was creepy but explicable. He stood watching the flaps, waiting for the thing inside to emerge, his hands hanging at his sides in bright yellow gloves.
Come on, he thought. Show yourself, you ugly thing.
Then he chuckled, disgusted with himself. He was clearly insane!
How had it come to this? How?
“You know very well,” he muttered. “Don’t pretend you don’t.”
PART 4
We are the corruptors among you, the instillers of deceit and futility.
We are the angels among you, the instillers of wisdom and tranquility.
16
Wizards, seers, and sorcerers traditionally inhabit dark caves, drafty castles, decrepit mansions with crumbling spires… the sort of places that even when new seem haunted. In the back of his mind, Derek was expecting something along these lines on the day he first drove to meet Elias Mooney. He knew quite well that California offered little in the way of castles—outside of Hollywood, that is. But he pictured finding Mooney ensconced in a ruinous old Victorian or at least a weathered farmhouse.