Grist 04 - Incinerator (23 page)

“Blinkins,” Edna Vercini said, making a face. “There’s a guy with rubber whips in his room if I ever saw one. But let’s not get confused. Tiltin’ got into illuminateds because the boy had a Byronic bent—no pun intended, but Byron loved the
Song of Roland
and so forth, the what-do-you-callems, the troubadours or chanticleers. Dated from the same time as most of the great French illuminateds. Or, I don’t know, maybe it didn’t, although that was what he said. Maybe he’d made a list of great clubfoots through history. He was certainly off enough.”

“Off how?”

“You don’t remember him?”

“I met him twice, I think. He helped me research one section of a paper. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall him at all.”

“I always had the feeling,” Edna said, looking for something to put into her mouth, “that he went to the men’s room whenever he had something to say to me and rehearsed it for ten minutes. It always came out perfect. If I had a question, he thought for so long before he answered it that at first I figured he was hard of hearing and raised my voice and repeated it. Felt like an ass, too. He had a way of lifting a hand to shut you up while he formulated a reply. See?” she said, picking a cup at random and drinking from it. “ ‘Formulated a reply.’ Just thinking about him has me talking that way. It was like he was translating his answer from a different language. And he had no temper.”

“Everyone has a temper.”

“Not old Tiltin’. Take a day when everything went wrong, and I was mad enough to spit, and everybody was yelling at everybody else, and there was Festus, calm as a cucumber. He shut a file drawer on his finger once, and the whole place went quiet, waiting to see what would happen. What happened was that he opened the file drawer very slowly with his other hand and looked down at the finger he’d slammed, which was bleeding in a fashion to capture a lot of attention, and he said, ‘Darn.’ Then he went into the bathroom and bandaged it, and when he came out he said, ‘Clumsy me.’ I mean, it was enough to give you the creeps.” She glanced down at my own bandaged finger.

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

“No. He thought the only thing anyone saw was that foot. Girls literally made him cringe. I’m hungry. Why are you asking about him?”

“He’s been trying to get in touch with me,” I said, not entirely untruthfully.

“He sure has,” she said.

I sat up. “Edna,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

“He phoned here, just two days ago, and left a message for you.” She smiled at me and pulled open a drawer. From it she took a tiny pink origami swan.

As she painstakingly unfolded it into a telephone-message slip, I silently recited the days of the week twice, and then asked, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I wanted lunch,” she said simply. “Anyway, I was curious. Want to know what it says?”

“If you don’t tell me,” I said, treating her to a view of my teeth, “I’ll rip your throat out.”

“He said to tell you ‘Congratulations, Sherlock.’ And then he asked me to say ‘I’m in the book.’ ”

“In the book,” I said stupidly.

“The phone book,” Edna said, with discreet pity. “Can we eat now?”

Hoxley, Festus 3921 Normal St., #7 L.A. 555-2403

It was two-thirty.
Edna, content on a Big Mac and three orders of fries, was back at her desk. I was in an oven of a phone booth, staring at the directory, feeling exhausted and excited at the same time. Since, as usual, I had nothing to write with, I tore out the page and headed for the underground garage where Alice was waiting for me.

Normal Street, another of Hoxley’s little jokes, was a lower-middle class, or upper-lower class, enclave that stretched for two densely populated blocks just east of Virgil. Number 3921 was a stucco apartment building, two stories high. I drove the street at least a dozen times, making long spirals around the neighboring blocks, looking for a gray Mazda. I wasn’t expecting to see it, and I didn’t, although 3921 had no garages. He’d handed me the address on a platter, so he wasn’t there anymore, and he had a reason for wanting his hidey-hole discovered. Something to do, perhaps, with his rules.

Of course, it could have been a booby trap. As I’d learned, he liked tricks.

The tiny, narrow yards on the block were littered with bicycles and tricycles, and brown children rocketed up and down the cracked sidewalk, playing Indianapolis 500 and Indiana Jones in loud, musical Spanish. Dotted among them, like raisins in a pudding, were kids who might have been Vietnamese or Cambodians. They seemed to get along fine. Very little kids usually do.

Unless one of them has a defect, such as a clubfoot.

As I walked the street, I tried to remember whether I’d ever seen Wilton Hoxley standing up. It took me two passes to be sure I hadn’t. He’d always sat behind his desk, directing me politely to the volumes I’d need for my asinine paper. “Faces of God,” indeed. Now that I’d identified the context, now that I had his
name,
for Christ’s sake, I remembered him. What I remembered, mostly, was how polite he was.

Then I stopped cold, dead center in front of 3921, something I hadn’t planned to do at all, frozen in my tracks by the unlocking of a memory. I’d seen him not twice but three times, and the second time I’d seen him, Eleanor had been with me. We’d been dating only a few weeks, and we were almost literally inseparable. And I remembered that he’d stood when she came in and given her something that looked like a stiff little German bow, and that he’d asked me, the third and last time, about her, and said something about how beautiful she was.

And I’d replied with some asinine remark, offhand and falsely modest, to the effect that she was my girlfriend. Then he’d told me that I was a lucky man, and I’d said, and I remembered my exact words, “Well, that’s what UCLA is for. There are thousands of them.”

Standing there, in the middle of Normal Street, with Hoxley’s apartment ten feet from me, I felt myself blush. What an asshole I had been. And then I saw myself on the preceding evening, being an asshole again in Eleanor’s house.

So booby-trap me, I thought, and went up the paved walkway.

The manager, a sign informed me, resided in Apartment 1. I lifted my hand to knock on the screen door, but a woman was already standing behind it, a stolid Mexican woman with a baby on one hip and the clearest, whitest eyes I’d seen in weeks.

“Mr. Hoxley,” I said, feeling my own eyes scratch as I blinked, “is he in?”

“No,” she said, “not here.”

“He’s an old friend,” I said, thinking maybe I should just call the cops.

“You name?” the woman said unexpectedly.

“Um, Grist,” I said, actually having to think about it. “Simeon Grist.”

“Moment,” she said, going away. A moment later, as promised, she opened the screen door and handed me a key. “Give back when you finish,” she said.

I assured her that I would and climbed the stairs to the Incinerator’s apartment, inserted the key, took a deep breath, and stepped into the Empire of the Sun.

As I pushed the door open, the lights came on. Enough pinspots to light a small musical hung from the ceiling, hooked up to some kind of rheostat that was activated, to use Schultz’s word, by the movement of the door. When I opened it further, the lights brightened, and when I pulled it toward me, they dimmed. The spots picked out various items of interest on the walls, but the first thing I saw was the throne.

It stood on a platform with two steps leading up to it, making the whole assemblage more than seven feet high. What had once been a high-backed wooded armchair had been completely covered in gold and silver foil, with big red and yellow plastic jewels, ironic in their complete falsity, studded everywhere.

I was staring, openmouthed, when I realized that the light hadn’t died when the door closed behind me. Another control somewhere, then, one that took charge when he surveyed his domain and opened the door all the way. With the door shut, no daylight whatsoever entered the apartment; the aluminum foil taped over the windows locked out the sun and ensured that the only light came from the system of tightly focused pinspots. The spots glowed on objects and pictures and bounced off the walls. The walls had been covered entirely in ruby-red metallic giftwrap foil. Pasted to the foil wherever the brightest spots fell were terrible things.

The Polaroids were the worst of all. Swaddled in rags and sprawled on pavements, the Incinerator’s victims burned. Most of them had managed to sit up before the flash went off, and many of them had a flaming hand out and stretched toward the camera, a reflexive appeal for help that had been greeted by the laugh Mrs. Gottfried had described to me. There were thirteen of them. One of them, his mouth open so far that the flash had bounced off his uvula, was clearly Abraham Winston. Another was the lady who’d wanted the bath.

The awful Polaroids provided the only color in the collage, and they were arranged symmetrically, like the blacked-out squares in a crossword puzzle of agony. Everything else was reproduced in black-and-white, but the black-and-white was enough. A little Vietnamese girl, arms aflame, raced toward the camera of an Associated Press photographer. A burning monk tilted sideways, putting a hand—already largely bone—against the surface of the road on which he’d immolated himself. Photos of burn victims, clipped from medical texts, puffed at me like beached blowfish, their eyes receding from the world into pillows of swelling flesh. The men, women, and children who had fed the human bonfires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obediently displayed their melted backs and arms with exquisite Japanese politeness.

It was a lot more than I could take, but it was almost harder to turn my back on it. When I did, I found myself looking at a bed and a desk. Well, okay, there was no bedroom. The bed was narrow and monastically uncomfortable, an iron frame and a thin mattress, and the desk was made from materials that reminded me of my own student days: a door over two sawhorses. This door, however, was made of metal. Stenciled onto it were the words fire door. Over the makeshift desk sagged a shelf, bowed downward in the middle, crammed every which way with books.

All the books dealt with fire in one way or another.
Gods of the Sun
nestled between Franz Cumont’s
The Mysteries ofMitbra
and a popular history called
The Fire-Bombing of Dresden.
Next to that was a scientific text economically titled
Combustion,
and beside that was a biography of Lavoisier. Three books on Zoroaster comprised a subsection in themselves. There were at least fifty volumes in all, and they were all stolen library books.

Pasted to the wall between the books and the desk was the Incinerator’s classical annex.

Paintings, etchings, and engravings of all periods detailed the unhappy career of Hephaestus. A historiated initial or a fragment from a miniature cut from UCLA’s stock of illuminated manuscripts glowed here and there like a little jewel among images depicting the key moments—his being thrown from Olympus by his angry mother, Hera, revolted at her deformed offspring, the gathering of the gods to witness Hephaestus’ cuckoldry as his perfect wife, Aphrodite, writhed with Apollo on her marriage bed, the two of them trapped by a net of Hephaestus’ devising. An oddly masochistic reaction, I thought, making your cuckoldry public. Further along was Prometheus, fennel stalk in hand, creeping toward the forge as Hephaestus, wizened and tilting to one side, absently hammered at a piece of glowing iron.

There were others. Together they comprised an altar to an off-mix of self-loathing and pride. History presents us with a large and sometimes tragic gallery of clubfoots, just as it gives us a surprising number of overachieving epileptics. Wilton Hoxley had chosen to identify himself with the clubfoots, but he’d chosen the only one I knew of who had been a god.

Not looking for much of anything but not wanting to turn back to the collage on the opposite wall, I studied the little classical gallery again. Leading the pack were four images of Hephaestus’ expulsion from heaven, all of them featuring the glowering face of Hera. Hera alone figured in three others.

“Mother trouble,” Edna Vercini had said. Edna had never been a dope.

It wasn’t until I had turned my attention to the desk that I registered that the images above it were of different sizes. I backed off and surveyed it again. The pictures had been clipped from whatever sources he had found them in and pasted to the wall in any which way, big against small, with the tiny scraps from the illuminated manuscripts employed as fillers to block the glow of the red metallic paper beneath the images. If there had been an organizational principle, it seemed to be that the pictures followed the chronology of the Hephaestus myth, but they’d been assembled with no regard to size.

I wondered why that troubled me, and then I turned around and answered my own question.

The first thing I’d thought of when I looked at the other collage, the collage of fire, had been a crossword puzzle. At the time, I’d dismissed it as my mind’s way of distancing me from the content of the pictures, but from across the room I could see that the pictures were all the same size, exactly the same size. They formed a perfect square, about three feet by three feet. A square three feet by three feet covers nine square feet, and that’s a lot of area to cover when your squares are approximately three inches by three inches, which is the size of a Polaroid that’s had its bottom strip, the white strip that you grasp when you pull it from the camera, trimmed off.

Not wanting to do it, hating every step, I pulled myself back across the apartment to take a closer look at the other collage. I hadn ‘t seen police photographs of all the victims, but I’d forced myself to look at enough of them. In some cases, as with poor Helena Troy, I’d also seen photos of them before they were burned.

As nearly as I could tell, the Polaroids were in chronological order.

That meant one of two things. Either he’d glued down the other images first, leaving the careful pattern of empty squares for the Polaroids and filling them in as he took them, or he’d created the whole thing before he vacated the apartment as part of the statement he was trying to make. One way or the other, though, the square was full. No three-inch-squares of ruby gift-wrap paper gleamed at me from anywhere within it. There were no odd images pasted beyond the perimeter of the square. The square, as ghastly as it was, was a finished work.