Although the act of walking was obviously painful for
him, Sonnenberg would insist on taking the curious on a
tour of his house. Even veteran guests usually followed with
equal interest. There was always something new.
The tour presented a portrait of the man. Inside the hall
closet, where furs and topcoats would be hung, Sonnenberg
first had to push aside a tangle of fishing rods and other gear
that had an oft-used look about it. An old wicker creel and a
dented tackle box sat conspicuously on the shelf. Polite
questions about how they were biting resulted in an imme
diate visit to Sonnenberg's den, where he would point to a
mounted bluefish or sea bass of awesome dimension. Un
derneath and on top of the mantel, which framed an antique
Franklin stove, were two mounted photographs. In one, Son
nenberg posed proudly beside a seven-foot Mako shark on a
Montauk weighing dock. In the other, he stood beside a boy
of perhaps thirteen whom he identified as his favorite grand
son and sometime fishing companion who was now attend
ing school in Switzerland. In truth, Sonnenberg had no
notion of the boy's identity.
Passing the mantelpiece, the guests would confront a
floor-to-ceiling collection of Sonnenberg's books. They
were arranged in groups, the largest being two dozen or
more volumes dealing with pre-Columbian art. A single vol
ume lay open on the same shelf, a tasseled bookmark hold
ing flat a color plate that showed an ancient Mayan bird carved in gleaming obsidian. Its beak and the tips of its
feathers were of hammered gold so finely blended that they
seemed to grow from the stone itself. Photograph courtesy
of Dr. Marcus Sonnenberg, read the acknowledgment below the text. The priceless artifact itself sat unpretentiously on a
lower shelf, as if it claimed no greater worth than the half-
dozen other carvings displayed above and below it.
Another cluster of books dealt with fishing, including a
first edition of Walton in a presentation case. A third con
tained a considerable collection dealing with antique furni
ture and reproductions. More color plates. The designs of
Thomas Chippendale, Duncan Phyfe, George Hepplewhite,
and Thomas Sheraton. Inevitably, a guest would show inter
est in the subject, and Sonnenberg would call attention to the
Hepplewhite bookstand that supported the massive Sonnen
berg family Bible. He would delight in confessing that the
bookstand was not a Hepplewhite at all but the product,
time-worn dents and wormholes included, of his basement
workshop. A marvelous hobby, he would say. Superb ther
apy when the mind wearies of circuits and transistors and when the fingers itch to create form rather than function. There is profit enough in alarm systems but precious little humanity. His visitors would answer with rueful smiles and
then follow him from the room, usually pausing before a
large sepia photograph of several dozen smiling men in
combat uniform posing on a brace of Sherman tanks. Some
one always stopped and asked about it.
“It was taken just after my outfit entered Aachen,” he
would say, and a mist of nostalgia would cloud his eyes. “I'd
buried that photograph in my attic for years. There was a time when it saddened me because I neither looked nor felt
like that adventurous young man anymore. But, remember
ing all the other grand young men whose bodies were bro
ken or who died in that conflict, I came to look upon it rather
as a celebration of life. As that, and as a reminder that
chance survivors such as myself ought to see an obligation to justify that survival. . . Goodness, that was pompous of
me, wasn't it?”
All would rush to disagree.
“Which one are you, Doctor?” one would ask, his or her
fingertips tracing lightly over the montage of faces.
“The one with the beret.” He'd point. “The tank com
mander's arm is around my shoulder. I joined the Third
Army as a scout after I was liberated from a camp near
Neufchateau.”
All would nod. “Can't mistake those eyes.” It was usually
a woman who said that. That and, “You've become much more handsome. Distinguished. The beard makes you look
like one of those 1914 archdukes of the Hohenzollerns.”
This last was once pronounced by Audrey Thronhill, a pre
tentious boob whose sum knowledge of significant events was drawn from the pages of
Town & Country.
Nevertheless, Sonnenberg would blush and wave off all compliments. “Come,” he'd say abruptly. “Perhaps you'd
like to see where the mad inventor works. Or would that be
boring of me?”
More disagreement.
So Sonnenberg would lead the small group through his
expensively understated living room, past an obviously orig
inal Duncan Phyfe sofa, under a probably original Winslow Homer, and by a possibly original Henderson butler's table.
They could no longer be sure, having seen evidence of his
skill at reproduction. They would line up behind him as he
stiffly negotiated the narrow basement steps. As he de
scended, he'd explain that among the reasons he looked for
ward to this little entertainment was that it forced upon him
the incentive of cleaning up his workshop once a year. Then
he would wait while someone complimented him on its tidi
ness.
It was actually two distinct workshops. His lathe and bandsaw and router table were at one end. A canister vac
uum stood at attention, as did a rank of wood chisels that
hung from a pegboard. At the other end was a well-lit work area whose centerpiece was a large, flat drafting table. Sev
eral pages of dog-eared specification sheets were tacked to
one corner and a thick file of catalogues lay close at hand.
No tools were in evidence, save several spools of insulated
wire and a single transformer. Against one wall stood a high
oak cabinet painted white, with separate glass doors enclos
ing each shelf. Behind the glass was a random jumble of
electrical parts, printed circuits, testers, and exotic-looking
modules, all in some stage of construction or disassembly.
Sonnenberg had memorized their names and functions.
Here the tour would end. Sonnenberg would answer per
functory questions about his most current project, being un
derstandably vague, or he would commiserate with that inevitable guest who thought to remark ruefully on the un
happy need for such devices of protection. But Sonnen
berg's mind, by then, was on the white cabinet and on the
unsuspected door behind it. The door, which led to a tiny
room where Sonnenberg's real work was done, opened onto
a world without props or facades or false trails, a room in
which Sonnenberg's world was real and thrilling. Of all the
living, only Mrs. Kreskie had seen it.
Sonnenberg would force himself back to his entertain
ment. Go, Marcus. Go complete your work with these peo
ple. Disarm them. Enlist them. They are your insulation. If
you are real to them, it follows that you must be real in fact.
Study and record them as they sip your wine and munch
Mrs. Kreskie's rumaki. Bottle them against the day when
their behavioral clones will spring into existence in some
distant city. Let them, meanwhile, wander about, discover
ing Marcus Sonnenberg, as long as one of them doesn't take
it into his head to wander out among the rhododendrons with
a spade in his hand. The result would certainly be high
drama but hardly worth the consequent inconvenience.
Someday, though. Someday the house would change hands,
and the new owner would decide that the manicured fair
ways of the Westchester Country Club were too much of an
environmental asset to be blocked from view, and he'd tear
down the fence and rip up the bug-ridden old rhododendrons
by their roots. “Hey, Marge, look at this. There's some kind
of animal under here. Maybe two or three animals. Wait a
minute . . . these aren't. . . Holy Christ. . . these are skele
tons here . . . No, damn it, I mean people skeletons. Holy
Christ.. .”
Then it would be only a matter of a day or so before they
found the room downstairs. They'd bring in a trencher that would break its teeth against the reinforced concrete of the
room's ceiling. Or else it would slice through the vent that
led to the inside wall of the well. Sonnenberg winced at the
probable fate of the marigolds and geraniums in the
trencher's path and hoped that the event would occur in win
ter, when only sleeping tubers would be disturbed. On the other hand, marigolds mean contempt in the language of
flowers and geraniums mean deceit. How very apt. There
was a certain poetry to the vision of these two flowers hurl
ing a last, defiant insult at their murderer.
As for the room downstairs, Sonnenberg knew that how
he'd managed to excavate it would become one of the en
during mysteries of the case. Actually, he didn't build it. Luther Dowling the elder built it and he's dead, so he isn't
telling. Luther Dowling the younger is alive enough except
that he isn't Luther Dowling anymore, so he won't tell ei
ther. The room, in fact, was the feature of the house that had
most attracted him when he bought it from young Luther
nine years earlier. A century before that, it had been
a root
cellar, then a coal bin until the house was converted to oil,
and finally a bomb shelter built by batty old Mr. Dowling in
1954 without benefit of a building permit. Contractors of the
time, who competed to construct these Eisenhower Specials,
often disguised what they were doing at the request of the
client, who frequently preferred that the shelter's existence remain a secret. If the Russian bombers ever actually came,
it wouldn't do to have fear-maddened and less provident neighbors hammering at the door, begging to share the
measured rations of food and water as nearby New York City
boiled into the stratosphere.
The room measured eight feet wide and nearly ten feet deep. At one end was a louvered metal door resembling the
grate of a furnace. An air conditioner jutted from the wall
beneath it. The door led to a concrete tube, twenty-eight
inches in diameter, that was both an air shaft and an escape
tunnel leading to the inside wall of the well. The well had
long been filled to a level six feet below its lip, which was
covered with a latticed grating that served as a base for pot
ted plants.
The room itself offered only the barest amenities. A stu
dio couch, a small kneehole desk, and a Morris chair. It
didn't seem that old Luther had made provision for his son.
The built-ins included a large water tank, hermetically
sealed, and an attached washstand that folded into the wall. Farther along the wall was a group of horizontal steel cabi
nets, each with its own combination lock. The lowest one
contained a month's supply of assorted dehydrated dinners.
The middle one, which was lined with asbestos, held a Cole
man gas stove with a reserve supply of Sterno, and a rain
slicker, clothing, a fire extinguisher, and miscellaneous
hardware. The third was all Sonnenberg. It held his files, his
notebooks, and his journals. A separate case held dozens of tape cassettes labeled with coded names and dates plus a
battery-powered player. Sonnenberg had added only two
significant refinements to the room. The first was an air con
ditioner that, like the electric lights, tapped into the power
line outside and ran unmetered. The second was a thermite
charge that would explode among his files if the air condi
tioner was not first turned on or if it was set at any combi
nation other than Low Cool-Exhaust.
On the opposite wall, he'd replaced Luther Dowling's
gun rack with a large map of North America. More than
forty colored pins dotted its surface from Saskatoon in the
north to Cuernavaca in the south and to the island of St.
Croix in the east. Each pin was a person—or an identity, to
be precise—that had not existed before Sonnenberg.