The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (9 page)

First few times through the loop, I stopped off at the bar to throw down a scotch, loosen me up some, but as I perfected the mop and bucket bit, I no longer needed loosening up. Once I think someone must have given me a sandwich as I waited in the wings for my turn onstage. Maybe it was more than once. I remember what must have been the can, slick white porcelain, and peeing, but I don't remember how I got there or how I got back to the stage.

I remember the moment I realized the perfection I was reaching for was an illusion. I suddenly knew that no matter how many times I came around, I would never get it right. I'd reached a peak, and now things could only get worse. A lot worse. The dance became not a quest for enlightenment and redemption, but a struggle for survival. The change had a lot to do with a big bad guy.

The big bad guy joins you onstage (and you wonder if you're the only one who can see him) and he's got a six-shooter and he says, “Dance, dude,” and he shoots at your feet and you jump around in a goofy parody of dance in your big boots and he laughs and you can't stop dancing while the devil is shooting at your feet and it simply goes on forever.

Oddly, I still had to get back in line periodically to wait for another turn. I spent the time in line trembling and sweating (we call this jitterbugging—I have no feet and I must dance), and as bad as the time onstage was, the time in line was worse.

I noticed a man named Yuri from my support group lurking in the wings, and I figured someone had sent out a rescue party, but the face faded so quickly I decided I was hallucinating, especially since the woman with him had looked just like Prudence Deerfield. Yuri was a green card Russian guy and Russians had been on my mind lately.

I kept jumping around the stage dodging bullets, until someone threw a bag over my head and dragged me away.

I didn't care who had snatched me; I didn't care why. I went limp with surrender and let myself be led. We walked and walked and walked and then I could tell we were outside. I got folded into a car.

Once we were in motion, someone yanked away the bag (it was a big yellow pillowcase) freeing my arms and head. I looked over and saw that the driver really was Yuri Kost from the twelve-step group. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes.

When we got back downtown, Prudence (I wasn't all that surprised to see that it was her after all) and Yuri helped me up to my office. I stretched out on the couch and they took chairs like friends at a sickbed or maybe mourners over a deathbed. I thought I should talk to them. I closed my eyes instead.

seven

I'd been staring at a spot of sunlight reflected onto the ceiling for some time before I decided it looked like the state of Texas. I wondered how many days I'd lost.

I rolled my head to the left and saw Prudence Deerfield leaning forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees. She widened her eyes at me. She was wearing a pale purple flower-print dress and black grunge boots. Or maybe she'd been time traveling, too, and her feet just hadn't caught up with the rest of her yet.

“Let me guess,” she said. “That's your what-the-cat-coughed-up disguise.”

“What the cat dragged in.” I swung my legs off the couch, sat up, and put my head in my hands. “You're so weird, Prudence. Everything you say is just a little off.”

“But cats are always coughing stuff up, aren't they?”

“Never mind,” I said. I lifted my head up out of my hands. “So where's Yuri?”

“He had to get back to work,” she said. “He said he'd come by later and get you for one of your support group meetings.”

“He's your foreign gentleman who recommended me, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Another Russian in the mix,” I said. “I should have thought of Yuri earlier.”

“Your Russian number theory,” she said.

“You read about it?”

“It's all the rage on alt-dot-dead-dot-nerds,” she said.

I got up off the couch. I hoped it looked easier than it was. I was still swimming through pancake syrup, and I produced a strange echo every time I spoke. I made it across to my desk and sank down in my chair. I logged on, moved over to the newsgroups, and called up alt.dead.nerds. “So what's going on?”

Prudence came around my desk and stood looking over my shoulder at the message list.

“Go down a little,” she said.

I scrolled down the list.

“There,” she said. She put a hand on my shoulder and leaned in to point. I got lost in her touch and her smell. She shook me, and I came a little more awake and followed her arm down to the screen.

The message line she was pointing at said, “Jumbo Dinner Frank.”

Prudence took her hand off my shoulder and backed off a little.

I took a deep breath.

My mind was like a machine in need of oil, moving slowly and painfully with a lot of noise no one else could hear.

I guessed the “Frank” in “Dinner Frank” could refer to Frank Wallace, but that was another case entirely.

“What made you think this would pertain to anything?” I asked. “Did you read everything?”

“Yes, I read everything,” she said.

The subject line became clear when I read the first line of the message itself. “Skylight Howells has all the deductive power of a jumbo dinner frank! Russians! What a weenie!”

The handle for this user was becoming familiar.

SOAPY.

SOAPY went on at some length about how my numerical speculations of the night before were utter nonsense.

“It's perfectly obvious why Gerald Moffitt and Randy Casey had to die,” he said. But then he didn't go on to state what he thought was so obvious. Maybe he was a mathematician. They like to do that—just say something is obvious when it's not and then leave you twisting in the wind. The thing was I couldn't admit that I was twisting in the wind. I was supposed to be some kind of hotshot detective.

“You noticed the from line?” I asked, tapping the 4e4.com address with my fingernail.

“Oh, that,” she said.

“Yes, that,” I said. “Isn't it strange this jerk is so down on my Russian theory when he's using the Russian anonymous remailer? I think he's trying to throw us off the track.”

“You think SOAPY is a Russian?”

“Well, maybe,” I said. “Why not?”

“And you think he's the killer?”

“I think he or she ought to be right up there on our list of suspects,” I said.

“You got anything else?” she asked.

I remembered the threat SOAPY had sent to Gerald Moffitt, and I slapped my hand over my left shirt pocket where Dennis had put the disk. “Well, nothing definite yet,” I said.

I could feel her looking down at the disk in my shirt pocket. I slowly moved my hand back to the keyboard.

“So, how do you plan on finding out who SOAPY really is?” she asked.

“Just good solid down-to-earth detective work,” I said. At that moment I had no idea what I should do next, but I knew I would think of something.

I considered hitting her with the word “DATAPANTS” just to see how she'd react, but then I figured I'd save it for a time I was feeling a little more alert.

“Lots of people think you're blowing smoke up the wrong alley with that Russian business,” Prudence said. “You'd better read some of the other posts if you want to know how many people think you're a weenie.”

I didn't have anything to say to that, so I didn't turn around and look at her, but I was very aware of her standing there just behind me.

“Your ears are red,” she said. She touched my right ear then leaned in close and touched her cheek to mine. I twisted around and pulled her down into my arms.

No, wait a minute, I was making stuff up again. Prudence wasn't even behind me anymore. She'd walked around the desk and was now sitting in the client's chair.

“So what is the connection with Evil Empire Software?” I wanted to see if she'd lie to me about the Russian company.

“If there is a connection,” she said, “it's just that EES hired Gerald and Pablo to translate their manuals into English.”

I was seized by a sudden realization, and I slapped my palm down on my desk. “And Yuri works for Evil Empire Software!”

“I think we may have mentioned that last night,” she said. “That's how I know Yuri. And Yuri knows you from your twelve-step group and you're a detective, so when this whole nasty business came up, he told me about you. He said you were a nice guy.”

“Yuri thinks I'm a nice guy?”

“Yes.”

It was all very neat. “It all seems very neat to me,” I said.

“Way cool,” she said.

“What?”

“Neat. Like you said.”

The bells from the church down the street rang, and while those bells didn't only ring on Sundays, they always reminded me of Sundays, and that reminded me that I still didn't know how many days I'd lost.

“What day is this?”

“Thursday,” Prudence said.

I'd lost all of Wednesday.

Time ticked away at the top of the computer screen. Nearly noon. I could still make visiting hours.

I pushed up and walked over to the cardboard wardrobe behind the screen by the files and grabbed a change of clothes and ducked into the washroom to shave and shower.

After dressing, I took a roll of tape from the disguise cabinet and secured the disk with SOAPY's threat and the DATAPANTS file underneath the cabinet. Dennis would just have to wait to play with the encryption.

Prudence was still sitting in front of my desk when I came out.

“You look a lot better,” she said.

I grabbed my coat.

“Hey, where are you going? You're supposed to wait for Yuri.”

“I always visit my mother on Sundays,” I said. “I'll be back later.” I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and looked back over my shoulder at her. “And, hey, thanks. You guys. For, you know, rescuing me.”

“But it's not Sunday!”

I ducked out before she could fire another question my way. I took the stairs in case she tried to catch up with me at the elevator. I didn't have anything else to say, but I had something to do.

Come hell or high water, I always visit my mother on Sundays. Which means I always visit at least once in any seven day period. No matter when I visit, Mom always thinks it's Sunday. Unless more than seven days have passed since my last visit. In that case, she gently chides me for missing a week. Sometimes my visit is a chore and sometimes it's a joy. Either way, I go. Today I was pretty much in a total fog, but I couldn't let that stop me. If I waited until tomorrow I would have missed a week in her mind.

My mother had once been a leading force in Eugene high society. You couldn't throw a big benefit dinner without her. You wouldn't build a bridge or reopen a street without checking to see if she was on your side or not. If she wasn't, you knew the project would take a lot longer and would cost a lot more. One of the major downtown streets is named after her great grandfather (or maybe his father, I forget which).

She married my father, Richard “Dick” Dobson, in 1954. His great grandfather (or whatever) is the Dobson after whom another major downtown street was named. On one corner of the intersection where the family streets cross is a mediocre Mexican food restaurant (which drives Dieter crazy); there's a convenience store across from the restaurant; a bead and incense shop occupies the third corner, and just recently a fancy coffee place has opened on the fourth corner. My mother spent a lot of time scheming to get that intersection. She wanted to build family houses on all four corners, but she was never able to get the properties.

Both sides of the family go way back. My grandfather, however, was the last Dobson to amount to a hill of beans (as he himself never tired of pointing out). Grandfather died when I was fourteen, seven years after my father was killed in a bar fight in San Francisco. He'd left Mom and me high and dry (as my grandfather liked to say), and I believe his leaving was the first nudge of so many nudges that finally pushed my mother over the edge. I couldn't have thought that at the time. In fact I don't remember thinking anything at the time. I don't remember my father. It's not like we were broke and hungry after he left. Grandfather still controlled the money on the Dobson side, and Mother had her own money. It was Pop who ended up in poverty. Growing up, I often thought we must have really been awful for Pop to choose a life of desperate poverty over us. Later I decided he was just a drunken jerk.

Mom went a little wacky after he left. It's easy to see that now, but it came upon her so slowly over the years that no one really noticed. Now it didn't matter much, because something the doctors said probably wasn't Alzheimers was taking the rest of her just as fast as it could. That's another reason (besides guilt, I guess, and the occasional bright moment when we laughed or I saw some of the old light in her eyes) that I drove up Bailey Hill Road and into the forest every “Sunday” to the Oak Leaves Care Center to spend some time with her.

She's still weird.

I always go as myself, but she always thinks I'm one of my disguises. I don't even know how she knows about my disguises. I don't know how she gets the details right.

Last week she thought I was Lulu and we spent the afternoon talking about flattening our tummies.

Today when I came into the lobby feeling so disconnected and demoralized, Mother sitting in one of the big flowery overstuffed chairs by the fireplace put out her hands for me to take and when I'd taken them, she said, “How nice to see you again, Dieter.”

That meant we'd be talking Mexican food.

I remembered the first time I realized there really was a Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks. Anyone can see there is a marked difference between the Mexican food you can get along our southern border (especially along the Arizona/Mexico and the New Mexico/Mexico borders, where I spent quite a few of my college days tasting, toasting, and learning the ins and outs of the local cuisine) and the Mexican food you find here in town. Most of the restaurants here tried too hard and never got it right. In Eugene you can get crab quesadillas and tofu tacos.