Fear itself: a novel (30 page)

“S’matter, he knock you up or something?”

“No, I—”

“Listen, Bootsie honey, I haven’t seen my children since nineteen fifty-one. That’s, uh—That’s almost—That’s a helluva long time. He don’t know where I am, and if he ain’t home, I don’t know where he is. So unless you get some kind of weird kick out of making old ladies cry, why don’t you let me get back to my shows and I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.”

“Rosie, there’s something you should—”

Click. Linda redialed, but the phone was now off the hook. Fuck it, she thought, putting down the phone and picking up the fax from the medical examiner in Berkeley again. Let somebody else tell Rosie her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster—there must be people who get paid for that.

Simon hid in a utility closet off the snake exhibit area until the last employee had left the reptilarium a little after seven-thirty. When he emerged with his pencil flashlight (the Volvo, having belonged to Nelson, was well-stocked with flashlights, flares, and even a first-aid kit), the snake room was pitch-dark save for the red glow of the exit lights over the doors.

The glass fronts of the snake cages were set flush into a curved wall ringed by a sloping carpeted ramp from which the public could view the snakes in safety. Simon circled the ramp all the way around to the back, until he reached the door marked
Staff Only—No Public Access,
which led, he had learned that afternoon, to the workroom in the center of the circle of cages. It was locked, but a hard kick sprang it; a moment later Simon found himself inside the workroom, surrounded by cages containing a veritable who’s who of the world’s most venomous snakes.

The flashlight beam darted around the circular walls. Here a black mamba (which was actually kind of gray), there a spitting viper, a hooded cobra, an eight-foot python, a Florida cottonmouth, a Texas diamondback rattler. He hadn’t come for any of these, though. The mambas were too fast and agile, the rattlers too noisy, the cobras, cottonmouths, and vipers too venomous, and the constrictors not venomous at all.

No, what Simon had come for was the humble eastern coral snake,
Micrurus fulvius fulvius,
a red-, yellow-, and black-banded member of the Elapidae family, which, with its small mouth, short fangs, and delayed-action, borderline-lethal neurotoxic venom, was perfect for his purposes. Even better, for educational reasons, the three coral snakes were housed with members of various mimic species—nonvenomous, look-alike milk snakes, scarlet snakes, and scarlet king snakes. Surely the reptilarium staff wouldn’t miss just one coral and one scarlet king out of that whole tangle.

Simon grabbed a leather gauntlet and a snake hook, which was basically a golf club with a hook on the business end instead of a club head, and dragged a plastic garbage can over to the cage. Carefully he opened the trapdoor in the back, and holding the flashlight in his mouth, the garbage can lid in his bare hand, and the snake hook in the gloved hand, he gingerly extended the hook into the pen and positioned it under the neck of one of the corals, which accommodatingly wrapped itself around the shaft.

This was the most dangerous part of the transfer—for a few seconds, as he lifted the snake-on-a-stick out of the cage, there were only two feet of haft between his gloved hand and the deadly reptile curled around the base of the hook, with nothing at all to prevent it from slithering up the shaft and past the gauntlet, and sinking its stubby fangs into his upper arm. But the coral knew the drill—lazily it unwound itself and dropped into the garbage can. Simon quickly clapped the lid on—
fait accompli.

Half
accompli,
anyway. The nearest scarlet king snake to the hatch proved equally cooperative; the only danger in this second transfer would have come if the coral had made a break for it when Simon raised the lid to drop the king in. But luckily the coral, having recently been fed, was already fast asleep again, curled peacefully in the bottom of the can, dreaming, no doubt, of fat rats and juicy, slow-moving mice.

“We should have called first,” Dorie had said repeatedly, from behind the wheel of Pender’s rented Toyota—the winding, cliff-hugging, two-lane stretch of Highway 1 between Carmel and Big Sur was definitely not a drive for a one-armed man.

“You should have called first,” announced the young neohippie who greeted them at the door of the Lethe Institute Retreat Center of Hot Springs. Behind her, a great empty cathedral of a room—vaulted ceiling, redwood beams, and through a picture-window western wall of rose-tinted glass, nothing but ocean and sky. The smell of incense hung in the air; New Age space Muzak filled the room, where half a dozen figures in white meditation pajamas were either performing yoga exercises or training for jobs as circus contortionists.

“So I’ve been told.” But Pender, who was wearing one of his new hula shirts and his glorious new wide-brimmed white Panama, had learned over the years that it was more difficult for somebody to turn him away from their door than it was for them to refuse him an interview over the phone. And having parked the Toyota at the top of what seemed like a sheer cliff and descended a flagstone path so steep it would have given a Grand Canyon donkey second thoughts, he was not going to be dismissed by some flunky quite so easily. “Why is that, exactly?”

“Because Dr. Luka won’t see anybody without an appointment,” said the young woman.

“I see. And what’s your name?”

“I’m Lakshmi.”

“Lakshmi, I need you to do something for me.” Linda Abruzzi wasn’t the only one who knew psycholinguistics. “I need you to tell Dr. Luka that Special Agent E. L. Pender of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to speak with him briefly about a former patient of his, by the name of Simon Childs. We’ll wait here,” he added—it was all about seizing the initiative.

“Hell of a view,” Pender whispered to Dorie, as Lakshmi left the room via a side door.

“Dramatic, anyway,” she replied. “But you could paint it with a roller.”

Lakshmi reappeared, beckoned from the side door, and led Pender and Dorie down another fearfully steep path to the famous Lethe baths, a series of recessed natural hot tubs carved into the side of the cliff over eons by a mineral spring, and canopied by a great granitic overhang that gave the baths the feel and echo of a shallow cavern or grotto. Alone in the hottest and deepest tub, the one nearest the mouth of the spring, sat the hairiest old man Dorie had ever seen naked, or wanted to—white hair to his shoulders, bushy Santa beard, and the matted white pelt covering his chest and arms would have made a yeti reach for the Nair.

“Come on in, the water’s fine.” His accent was a strange hybrid of hip and cultured, of Berkeley and Budapest.

Pender shrugged, pointed to his cast, and sat down on a backless marble bench, facing the tub, with his back to the ocean. He could hear the surf crashing below; silvery reflections from the light playing off the steaming surface of the baths danced on the shiny granite walls of the cliff like hundreds of manic Tinkerbells.

“And you, dear?”

Dorie shuddered as she sat down beside Pender. “I may never take another bath again.”

“Ablutophobia?”

“Simon Childs–ophobia.”

“Oh?”

Dorie looked over at Pender, who nodded. He suspected her story would make a more eloquent argument for Luka’s cooperation than anything he could say. As she spoke, the damp walls of the shallow cavern gradually took on a pinkish glow from the western sky. When she’d finished, Luka asked Pender to give them a moment alone. Pender walked a few dozen paces up the flagstone path and watched the sun hovering twice its width above the curved horizon—he’d never seen anything as vast as that horizon.

Dorie appeared around a bend in the path. “He wants to talk to you now.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He just wanted to make sure I had a good therapist. Said he could give me a couple of names if I needed.”

She told Pender she’d wait for him up at the house. Pender retraced his steps. The light back at the baths was now a refulgent primrose pink—it was like being inside a Tiffany lamp.

“Tell me, Agent Pender,” said Dr. Luka, “is it FBI policy now to schlep victims around on interviews?”

“No, I—”

“Your relationship with Miss Bell is more of a personal nature then, I take it.”

“Yes, we—”

“In that case, let me give you a little professional advice, free of charge: Either Miss Bell has one of the best-integrated psyches in the western world—which her history of severe phobias would tend to argue against—or she’s heading for a psychological blowup of Hindenburgian proportions.”

“But isn’t it possible that it could be kind of, what’s the word,
empowering
for her—helping put Childs behind bars?”

“I suppose so—but if she were my patient, and I were thirty years younger, I’d kick your ass down that cliff there. Now, what is it you think I can do for you, Agent Pender?”

“Tell me everything you can about Simon Childs—the more we know, the more likely we’ll be able to catch him before anybody else has to go through what Dorie went through. And worse.”

“Oh, my, I have been out of touch, haven’t I? And when was it, precisely, that the privilege of doctor-patient confidentiality was revoked?”

“Come off it, Doc—you know perfectly well that a physician is not only permitted, but
required
to breach confidentiality when lives are endangered. You can’t testify in court without a waiver from Childs, but neither can you withhold information that may help us capture him.”

“It’s been thirty-five years, Agent Pender, and my memory isn’t what it once was.”

“Mine either,” said Pender. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. But I can give you chapter and verse of every case I ever worked, and I’m willing to bet you can, too.”

Luka sank down until he was chin deep in the steaming water, with his long white hair fanning out around his head. “Agent Pender, are you familiar with the old joke about the gay man who tells his friend that his mother made him a homosexual?”

“‘If I buy her the yarn, will she make me one, too?’”

“Precisely. And Simon Childs’s mother and grandfather couldn’t have done a better job of making a counterphobic phobic if they’d knitted one from a pattern. The way Simon tells it—or at least the way he told me, back in 1963 (I remember the year, because it was right around the time my friend Jack Kennedy was assassinated)—he was already suffering from multiple specific phobias by the time he and his sister were abandoned by their mother at their paternal grandfather’s proverbial doorstep after their father died—drowned drunk after driving his car into the bay, if I remember correctly.

“First and foremost, understandably enough, little Simon was afraid of drowning. So his grandfather took it upon himself to cure him of his weakness by beating him, holding his head under water, then alternating beatings and dunkings, until Simon had learned to master his terror. Next came fear of the dark, which the grandfather cured by beating him, then locking him in the basement, then beating him some more. After nyctophobia, however, came cynophobia, the fear of dogs (specifically, his grandfather’s two attack-trained Dobermans, as I recall), which the grandfather cured by making him sleep in the kennel—and beating him, of course.

“Subsequent phobias, including the fear of heights, spiders, and mirrors, were cured along similar homeopathic principles, until by the time he reached puberty, Simon told me, he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was equally in denial about his feelings toward his sister, whom his grandfather obviously adored—or indulged, at any rate. But Simon had so internalized his sibling rivalry that he had, in a sense, internalized his sister. It’s a syndrome that’s seen more often with identical twins—not at all healthy, needless to say.”

“Is that why he was in therapy?”

“No—apparently he and a neighbor boy had been caught in flagrante, so to speak, by the grandfather. According to Simon, the two boys had formed something they called the Horror Club. Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon’s polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television, then masturbate together. Of all the reasons for Simon Childs to go into treatment, this adolescent experimentation with homosexuality was about the least important. Except of course to the grandfather. Who killed himself a few weeks after Simon began therapy—I never saw young Childs again after that.”

“Do you happen to remember the other boy’s name? From the Horror Club?”

“I’m afraid not—why?”

“Childs has probably gone to ground somewhere in the Bay Area. We want to cover all the bases.”

“All I can tell you is that his family lived next door to the Childs house in the autumn of 1963, and…No, wait—it’s coming to me. Simon called him—there’s an expression for a timid soul…nervous something? Nervous Norman?”

“Nervous Nellie.”

“Yes, that’s it—Nervous Nellie. Short for Nelson, if memory serves.”

“I don’t suppose you have a last name for me?”

The old psychiatrist sighed. “Now I know how Jesus felt. The more miracles you perform, the more they want.”

For the first Tuesday evening in nearly a month, Jim and Gloria Gee had their house, and equally important, their computer, to themselves.

Inviting her old college roommate to stay with them had been a mistake—Gloria admitted that freely. (Gloria and Linda had roomed together as undergraduates at Stony Brook, before going on to different law schools, Linda to Fordham, Gloria to Georgetown.) But by the time the Gees realized how much the sessions of the Swingin’ Tuesdays Club had come to mean to them, Linda was already installed in the spare room. Although they considered themselves quite the liberated couple—flat-out wild, by Chinese-American standards—neither of them felt liberated enough to participate in a cyber-orgy with Linda just down the hall.