Fury and the Power (43 page)

"People tell me that. I do some modeling."

"That may be where I saw you! Swimsuits?"

"Yeah,
Sports Illustrated
. I got the cover this year."

"Oh, you're famous!
Célèbre
. I remember now. My old boyfriend, before Lewis, he never missed an issue of
Sports Illustrated
."

They walked into the villa. "Is this a honeymoon trip for you, Charmaine?" Bertie asked, looking casually around.

"Oh, no, we're not that far along. Can you believe this place? Lewis isn't exactly a high-roller, but he doesn't think
anything
about dropping fifty thousand in a high-stakes poker game." Charmaine shrugged and sighed and led Bertie to the kitchen. "Which is mostly what he's been doing since we got here. I don't mean
losing
. Just playing poker, all night, every night." Sigh. "Does make a girl feel, you know, second-best? And I don't know a soul here in Las Vegas." She opened one of the restaurant-type refrigerators and began handing bottles of wine coolers to Bertie. "We'll find us somethin' to carry those in. Six enough?"

"I should think."

"I feel like I know your friend Eve from somewhere too," Charmaine said, but Bertie just smiled inscrutably. "It's nice of you guys to let me hang out. I get lonesome for somebody to talk to, you know?"

"Glad to have you, Charmaine."

Charmaine looked in some kitchen cabinets and came up with a picnic hamper. They loaded it with the chilled bottles and went back outside.

"Is Eve a model too?"

"No, just a good friend."

"Are you all spending much time in Vegas?"

"Depends."

Bertie went to the top of the wall first. Charmaine handed up the basket and seemed not to notice Bertie's helping hand as she climbed over herself. The two young women settled down in the semi-shade of a beautifully furnished orangerie. Nearby the surface of the pool flashed in the sun whenever a breeze passed over it. Charmaine tried to remove a stubborn twist-off cap from a bottle of wine cooler and grimaced at Bertie.

"You'll ruin a nail," Bertie advised her. "I'll get an opener. Right back."

Inside the duplex villa she met Eden coming down a free-standing spiral staircase. She'd had a fast shower and changed clothes. Crisp white resort wear with a sleeveless cashmere sweater.

"Tom should have called by now" Eden fretted. She rubbed the mastoid bone behind her left ear.

"Too soon. He's only been gone a couple of hours. What's the matter?"

"I don't know; it hurts here. Like I'm raising a boil." She tilted her head to one side. "See anything?"

Eden stopped rubbing the spot where Gwen had had a small magnetic device implanted, behind her right ear.

"Well, I wish Tom would keep us up-to-date, at least. What if he doesn't find you-know-who."

"You'll have to think of something. She's your dpg."

Eden shrugged. "It is my fault for thinking she could be helpful. But she's like a jinx. Maybe I just ought to say, you know, the 'G' word; then she won't be my responsibility anymore."

"She would still be your mirror image. How desirable is that? Give Tom some time and try not to worry."

Eden offered a deliberately goofy smile. "Me, worry?"

"If we're not playing any more tennis, I'll take a shower too. If you don't mind entertaining Charmaine."

"She seems easy to amuse. What do you make of her?"

"For one thing, she has less of an aura than a pilot light gas flame. Sometimes none at all."

"What do you think that means?"

"Either she's walking dead, or she's suppressing her aura."

"I didn't know anyone could do that."

"Lincoln Grayle for one. Also the guy from Santa Rosa, California, who bit off the monsignor's face in the papal library."

Eden looked out at the orangerie, where Charmaine patiently waited with an unopened bottle of wine cooler in her hand.

"Do you think—"

"I'm not sure yet, but it's suspicious. Also she hasn't wanted me to touch her. As if she knows I could get a reading. And there are crosscurrents of extremely bad vibes in that villa where she's staying. I felt like I was wading through a tide of stinging jellyfish. Of course vibes hang on in places like this, where there could've been a couple of hundred people in and out during the past month, very few of them perfect in their love for Jesus."

"Then we don't want her hanging around with us."

Bertie thought about it.

"I'd rather know where she is than not know where she is."

"So we'll do lunch?"

"Let's find out what we can. About Charmaine, and those vibes I mentioned."

"You're not planning to—"

"Bad vibes or not, before I clean up I'd like to do a walk-through next door. Just keep Charmaine occupied while I'm snooping. Oh, you'll need a church key for those wine bottles. There's one on the bar over there. And Eden?" Bertie waited for Eden's full attention. "On this of all days we need to keep our wits about us."

"Remember that yourself. And I'll just have a Coke."

11:24 A.M.

B
runch had been served to Lincoln Grayle and Eden Waring's doppelganger on the terrace of the second of three traylike levels of the magician's mountain home, designed, apparently, by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed of native sandstone with a plentiful use of bronze-toned glass. While Tom Sherard and Courtney Shyla watched from the high-country hide that Courtney had selected on her first foray, Gwen previously had gone inside to put on clothes. And returned of her own volition. Tom noted this with interest and apprehension. After returning she had listened, saying little or nothing, to a pitch from Lincoln Grayle that went on for nearly a quarter of an hour, Grayle pacing around the terrace while Gwen remained seated, motionless, her head bowed, hands knotted in her lap. She looked tensely servile, Tom thought, sharing with Courtney binoculars that would not reflect sunlight. They were about three hundred yards from the house, in a jumble of sheared boulders below a southwest face of the mountain, scrub spruce that clung to deep cracks between the rocks providing good cover for their surveillance.

"What do you think he wants from her?" Courtney commented when Gwen and the magician devoted themselves to their meal. Gwen ate tentatively at first, but after a few bites of beef Wellington her appetite perked up. Food seemed also to loosen her tongue. Her end of the conversation was accompanied by mostly negative gestures. Sherard was glad to see that; he had thought she might have been mesmerized by the Trickster. The only other way to account for Gwen's continued presence on the terrace would have been black light; but obviously she wasn't a prisoner of high-quantum energies. So Grayle had come up with another means of keeping Gwen close to him. And he wanted her cooperation.
Leoncaro
, Tom thought,
might have been right when he theorized Grayle needed the dpg to retrieve the missing half of his black soul.

"Maybe I can answer that," he said to Courtney. "But first you should know that Gwen is not exactly what she appears to be."

"Here we go again," Courtney said, rolling her eyes in mock resignation.

11:27 A.M.

W
hile Bertie supposedly was dawdling in an upstairs shower, Eden toured Charmaine around the first floor of the six-thousand-square-foot villa, this one with all of the Technicolor panache of a 1940s Carmen Miranda musical. Bertie slipped over the garden wall again and reentered the villa next door, not without a heavy baggage of misgivings.

Just inside the glass doors she stood very still for half a minute, eyes closing, hands levitating from her sides, fingertips beginning to tingle. She sensed, as if her outstretched fingers were divining rods, black arts, a household of evil, murder.

Also, thankfully, a benign presence.

"I'll watch your back," the entity said in her mind. "Have a look around."

"Thanks. What am I supposed to see here?"

"You know I can't answer that."

Bertie heard colorful, infectious music:
 
hectic drummings, guitars, tambourines.
Samba
. Her hips began to move involuntarily.
Gotta dance
. When she opened her eyes one of the cariocas on the mural in the grand salon was moving also. Bare to below his slim brown waist, glistening with perspiration. He wore tight-fitting awning-striped bell-bottom pants and an old-fashioned straw boater. As Bertie looked at him with a twitch of a smile and the music became louder, throbbing with good feeling and diminishing some of the nastier vibrations inside the villa, the carioca doffed his boater, rolled it on its stiff brim the length of an outstretched arm, winked, and returned the hat to his head at a cocky angle. His feet were moving all the time to the frenzied beat or Brazilian conga drums.

"Do I know you?" Bertie said subvocally.

"Let us say we have a mutual acquaintance in Rome."

"Okay, let us say. What do I call you?"

"How about 'Bing'? I have always taken a shine to that name."

"Bing it is. What tripped your trigger, Bing? Do I really need to know what went down here?"

"Yes. But be cautious."

"The magician?"

"And his many surrogates. Thousands of them infest Las Vegas. This place is long overdue for a good dose of plague and fire."

"You sound like the late Pledger Lee Skeldon."

"I had the duty and pleasure of assisting him in his long career."

"So what are you doing in Vegas, Bing?"

"Unfortunately I was unable to prevent another terrible murder. The magician was a stronger presence. And I have no license to interfere in human events. Otherwise what need do souls have for human beings?"

"I thought it was the other way around."

"Of course not."

"Could you tone the music down a little, Bing? I can handle whatever is left here to deal with."

"A great deal, I'm afraid. And there's so little time. But you're a resourceful girl."

"Where do I start?"

"May I suggest the master suite? And I wouldn't leave Eden Waring alone for too long with your new friend."

"Way ahead of you there, Bing."

11:38 A.M.

G
wen dabbed her lips with a linen napkin and asked one of the Hispanic girls who had waited on them at breakfast to adjust the tilt of the sunshade above her head. The other girl poured more fresh orange juice into her glass from a pitcher, looked inquiringly at Lincoln Grayle. He waved both of them away and off the terrace.

"The point is," Gwen said, "I've never time-traveled. I know how it's done, but—"

"What do you need," the magician said genially, "a time machine?" He had begun to enjoy her company, now that she was thawing out and accepting the fact that her hostility was misplaced. He really did want to help her achieve her full potential as an ex-doppelganger.

"Time
is
a machine."

"Oh."

"With an infinite number of entrances and exits. How complex do I let this get before I lose you completely?"

"That's enough of an explanation. My question was—"

Gwen had been staring into blue space, running her tongue thoughtfully over the edges of her front teeth, trying to ignore a relentlessly up tempo version of "Ding Dong Merrily on High" pouring out of multiple speakers on the terrace.

"What do I need? To start with, photographs of the period. Summer of 1926."

"Original photos? That would take time."

"No. I think good copies from an Internet archive might do. I'm not all that sure. But all images, even those, let's say, in a faded old Raphael tapestry from the early sixteenth century, can be used to gauge the exact position and velocity of the particles that resulted in the creation of the image, and once I'm logged into that flow of the machine, I know at just what point I 'get off.' It's like riding on a subway the thickness of a human hair, where all the tunnels are wormholes and I'm the only passenger."

"What if you want to travel to the future?"

"The past, obviously, is predictable; the future is not, according to chaos theory, so that's another story. But I'm not going to the future."

"Could I tag along with you? To Georgia in 1926?"

"No. Nothing personal, it's just that your string section doesn't play the same tune as my string section. Sub-atomically you'd wind up scattered in an infinity of universes, crying for your mommy."

"Like yourself, I never had a mommy. So explain to me how you'll know, out of several thousand prisoners on a hundred or more chain gangs, which one is—"