Odd Apocalypse (33 page)

“You knew her?”

“Her and Glenda—who calls herself Valerie Tameed these days. They were his mistresses. They enjoyed threesomes—you know, going at each other in the same bed.”

His understanding of sexual matters unsettled me, though I knew he wasn’t the nine-year-old boy that he appeared to be. According to the plaque in the mausoleum, he had been born in September 1916. He was now ninety-five years old. He had the knowledge of a well-read man of those years, though none of the experience.

As on my previous visit, I was again struck by his ginger-brown eyes, by a quality that might have been loneliness so profound as to be despair, suggesting an interior landscape that was cheerless and
dismal though perhaps not yet desolate. I had never met another pair of eyes that by their stare alone could fill me with such sadness.

Considering how long he had lived like this, it was a triumph for him not to have gone mad. Perhaps it was whatever part of his mind remained that of a child, with a child’s wonder and stubborn hope, that kept him going.

Removing the towel from the pillowcase sack, unwrapping the hacksaw, I hesitated to ask about Madra, but I reminded myself that Timothy was not a fragile child—or at least not only a child.

“Your father shot your mother. Why?”

“She was supposed to stay with me on the Malibu estate, where he spent half his time. The other half, he was here. It was supposed to be
his
getaway, strictly for him and his buddies. My mother was sweet … and too submissive. Maybe she suspected he kept women, but she let him have his retreat. She never came here … until he took her favorite horse from the stables in the Malibu estate and brought it to Roseland.”

I said, “A great black stallion. A Friesian.”

“Its name was Black Magic, but they called it only Magic. He bought Magic for her. When it became her favorite horse, he decided it was his favorite, too. He was always giving her things and then taking them away.”

Holding Timothy’s right hand, I pushed back the sleeve of his sweater, and exposed the GPS transponder.

“She drove all the way up to Roseland unannounced, to get her horse back. She brought me because she thought he might refuse her, but not both of us.”

I placed his arm on the arm of the chair and explained how he needed to grip the upholstery to keep the monitoring bracelet from sliding around under the hacksaw.

“It was a long trip in those days, four hours in a Model T, an amazing adventure, especially for a woman alone with a young boy. I still remember it, how thrilling it was.”

The bracelet was just loose enough that I was able to press a corner of the towel between it and Timothy’s wrist. When the hacksaw cut through the last of the steel, the barrier of cloth would prevent it from drawing his blood.

He said, “She wasn’t surprised to find Paulie Sempiterno at the gatehouse. He was my father’s bodyguard for a long time. Paulie warned my father by phone before sending the two of us up to the main house.”

Undoubtedly I had at least fifteen minutes, probably twenty or more, before Cloyce and his crew would locate Victoria Mors—once Sondra.

“Mother couldn’t believe the grandness of Roseland. She knew he meant to make a first-rate retreat, but she didn’t know it was this spectacular. He had kept the plans from her. He was domineering. And as I said, she was submissive … to a point.”

After testing the tension on the blade, I adjusted the wing nut.

“Sondra and Glenda were living in the guest wing. My father told Mother that it was the servants’ wing, and they dutifully played the part of maids for the short while she would be at Roseland. Of course it was neither the guest wing nor the servants’ wing. It was really the whores’ wing.”

I might never grow accustomed to things like that coming from an apparent nine-year-old. I got up from the ottoman and leaned toward the boy to begin the job of freeing him.

“Mother saw the grooms and the trainer who came in daily to care for the horses but didn’t live on the grounds. Yet she wondered how just two maids, a chef, and a few security men could care for
such a large place. And where were the gardeners for all those lawns and flowers?”

The bracelet had three parallel rows of links, like the band of a wristwatch. If the rows had been aligned, I could have sawn through the weaker recessed connection between them. The center row, however, was offset from those bracketing it. I would need to cut through somewhat more than a quarter-inch thickness.

“Father told her that it was the gardeners’ day off, the whole crew on the same day, though it was Tuesday. He said a large team of housekeepers came in three days a week, but that Sondra and Glenda were the only full-time maids.”

Bearing down on the hacksaw to let the teeth get a bite of steel, not so hard as to snap the blade, I made a long easy stroke.

“I don’t know what all he told Mother, but I think she must have known they were lies.”

I sawed only with forward strokes at first, until a score line could be cut deep enough to hold the blade as it slid thereafter in both directions.

“That afternoon, he agreed to let her have Magic. But she insisted on traveling with the horse when it was taken back to Malibu, and it was too late to arrange transport. We stayed for dinner and the night.”

The necessity to make a single score line and then to keep the blade within it required me to focus, and when I did not so much as glance at Timothy, his voice inspired images in my mind, so that I felt as if I were watching unfold the tale he told.

That fateful night, he was provided with blankets and pillows for a sofa in the parlor of his father’s west-wing quarters. His parents retired to the bedroom in the same suite.

Although tired, Timothy was also excited about being in a new place—and uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He slept
only lightly and was awakened during the night when his father, wearing slippers and a bathrobe, passed through the parlor to the door and went out into the hall.

A fan of mystery shows on the radio, the boy suspected some plot must be afoot, and he determined that he would fill the role of detective. He got off the sofa, hurried to the door, quietly opened it, and slipped into the hallway.

With excitement but also with stealth, he followed his father down through the house, keeping at such a distance that he twice almost lost track of his quarry, and then he
did
lose him. Timothy wandered the mazelike mansion, making his way mostly by the full moon that pressed its ghost light through the big windows.

After a while, he came without knowing it to the guest wing on the ground floor, where hallway lights were aglow. He heard people in one of the rooms, a woman’s soft laughter and another woman whimpering.

Listening at the door, occasionally catching a muffled word along with urgent cries and groans, both male and female, that might have been sounds either of pleasure or of pain, young Timothy grew convinced that something terribly strange and of enormous importance was taking place in there.

The radio-serial heroes whom he admired were clever, bold, and intrepid. They never feared for themselves and never retreated. And because they always seized the moment, they always triumphed.

He dared to ease open the door.

Beyond lay a shadowy sitting room brightened only by what light came through the open door to the adjoining bedroom.

As by a magnet drawn, the boy found himself moving across the outer room, toward the glow of two bedside lamps with pleated-silk shades that cast a peach-colored light.

Near the threshold of the inner room, he was halted by the sight
of his father in there, on the bed with Sondra and Glenda. He was too young, in that more innocent era, to know quite what he was seeing, but he might have understood if the scene had not been made more mysterious by the bondage game that featured Sondra in a dog collar, bound to bedposts with black silken cords.

Equally as weird as all that was the presence of Chiang Pu-yi, who was known these days as Jam Diu. Timothy had seen him in Cloyce’s company several times over the previous couple of years.

Later he would learn that Chiang Pu-yi was a very wealthy man with interests in Hong Kong and England. Chiang and Constantine had met in London, where both spent some days with Aleister Crowley, the practitioner of magic and the cult leader who called himself the Beast from Revelations. Each found in the other a reflection of himself, a will to power that would not be thwarted.

That night in 1925, Chiang Pu-yi sat on a chair, on the farther side of the bed from the open door, watching the threesome. He was dressed oddly. Timothy could not remember what Chiang wore because he was most struck by the fact that the man, who was much older than Constantine, looked like himself but many years younger than he had been the last time the boy encountered him.

Bewildered, Timothy stood in the thinner shadows just before the threshold for no longer than a minute, simultaneously repelled and attracted, fear growing by the moment, though fear of what, he did not know.

And then it seemed to him that Chiang’s stare had shifted from the people on the bed to Timothy. When Chiang smiled, the boy was certain he had been seen, and he fled at once.

By the time he got back to the second-floor bedroom where his mother lay sleeping, the eerie allure of the scene in the guest wing had given way to terror. Although Sondra had not seemed to be afraid, the boy thought maybe they had been killing her.

He had some difficulty waking his mother, which he would later learn was because his father had slipped her a sedative after dinner. These hours later, it still had some effect. But he did wake her and convey to her, in his childish way, much of what he had seen.

Realizing that her clouded thinking must be the consequence of a drug, Madra determined that they must leave quickly. If her husband could do such a thing to her—and be part of what the boy had seen—there might be no offense that he was incapable of committing. In the years since their wedding, she had glimpsed a disturbing fierceness in him, which he tried to conceal. Without delay, she grabbed only the boy’s coat and hurried with him downstairs.

When they left the house by the front door and did not find her Model T in the driveway, Madra didn’t know where to look for it, as there was no obvious garage. And then she realized that even if she found the car, the key might not be with it.

She knew where the stables were, however, and where to find her beloved Friesian, Magic. And the stallion didn’t require a key.

Although young Timothy was by now shaking and weak with fear and though his mother was struggling to clarify her thoughts, they were aware enough to know that Constantine should have by that time come looking for them. Later, the boy would learn that Chiang Pu-yi had been stoned and, though having seen the young snoop, had not for a while realized the implications; his mind had instead wandered into a sick fantasy about what role the nine-year-old might want to play in this debauchery.

Through the night to the stables, under the full moon, mother and son had fled on foot. An accomplished rider with or without a saddle, Madra took no time with tack but stood upon a mounting block, swung astride the horse, and pulled her boy up in front of her, instructing him to cling to the mane. She clung to it with her right hand, her left arm around her son, and they set off for the front gate
at a canter, not risking a gallop that might unseat the boy, staying well clear of the main house.

The gatehouse wasn’t manned at night, when no visitors or stable hands needed to be screened for admittance. Madra meant to open the gates herself, ride into town, and perhaps call someone she knew and trusted—or even the authorities—to report that her husband drugged her and that he was engaged in contemptible activities to which their young child had been exposed.

When my hacksaw blade broke, I was snapped out of the mind movie that the boy’s words painted for me.

As I fished a spare blade from the packet that I had brought with the saw, Timothy said, “He was standing naked in the driveway, as pale as a ghost in the moonlight. We saw him with his rifle just a moment too late. I never saw him kill my mother that time, because he shot and killed me first.”

PREVIOUSLY I MENTIONED MY HIGH-SCHOOL YEARBOOK photo in which I looked foolish and clueless. With Timothy’s revelation, I felt my features settling into that too-familiar expression.

Earlier in the day, in the boy’s suite, when Mrs. Tameed didn’t know that I was hiding in the next room, she reminded him that he was different from the rest of them, and she called him “dead boy.” I had thought those words were a threat. I didn’t realize she meant them literally.

“His first round shot me off the horse, killed me instantly. The second took down Magic but didn’t kill him. I’m told my mother rode the horse to its knees as he lined up his third shot, with which he killed her. Then he walked to the stallion and finished it. He shot her twice again, too, though she was dead.”

I didn’t dare allow myself to be distracted by any revelation, no matter how stunning, even if it struck me as an impossible claim. The searchers would soon be descending to the basement, if they were not there already, just a few minutes away from discovering Victoria Mors.