Authors: Tim Powers
“Up Laurel Canyon?” she asked.
“That's what he said.”
“I wonder what would happen if I was to knock on a door, at that place we just passed.”
Scott was nervously puffing on his cigarette again, trying to
think of what to say to this Ostriker person, but he mentally replayed what his sister had just said. “You think Natacha would open it? Or Kosloff?”
“Neither of them would know me by sight. I'd ask for sanctuary.” She glanced sideways at him. “In her last-person novel, Aunt Amity wrote âwhen is a door not adore,' spelled likeâ”
“I remember.” Whatever I say to Ostriker, Scott thought, I have to frame it as a message from our aunt.
“And when Aunt Amity used to knock on it and ask us that, the answer wasn't âwhen it's ajar.' It wasâ”
“âWhen it's a wainscot.' Paneling.”
“Maybe we misunderstood her. Maybe she was saying, âwhen it's a way in, Scott.'”
I've got to
somehow
ask him about Mom and Dad, he thought. “Hm? Well, it's not a way in to anything. There's a solid wall behind it.”
At Laurel Canyon Boulevard Madeline followed the slanting lanes north, and now a brush-covered slope was on their left, and Scott glimpsed an occasional house fronting the road or half hidden behind trees to their right. Through his open window he caught the smells of sage and wild anise on the chilly breeze.
After half a mile, Scott tapped the windshield. “Left there.”
Madeline swung the little car left, by a dozen blue and green plastic recycling bins at the foot of a grassy slope, and the four-cylinder engine was roaring as she drove up a steep narrow road between stone walls and the trunks of tall oaks and chain-link gates barring private driveways.
After several sharp curves and a tight turn onto a narrower road, Scott said, “I think this must be it on our right. Watch for a driveway or something.”
A low stone wall, stepped down every dozen feet because of the incline, partially blocked dense greenery on that side; and then there was a gap, a stone arch with a tall cypress on either side, the one on
the left sporting a green branch stuck out sideways like a cowlick.
Madeline steered the Datsun through the arch and then up a curling driveway that was a tunnel through vine-hung tree branches. The pavement leveled out as soon as the road below could no longer be seen, and she braked to a halt on a wide cement apron and clicked the gearshift into park.
They were in front of a two-story adobe house tucked back into the trees. A wooden verandah ran along the entire front, matched by a long balcony hung below the red-tiled roof. A new neon-green Ford pickup truck and a gleamingly maintained black 1970 convertible Camaro stood on the far side of the house.
Madeline switched off the engine, and the depth of the trees and the expanse of the clearing seemed to become bigger in the ensuing silence; Scott could hear birds calling, and the breeze fluttering through high branches.
He clearly heard Madeline whisper, “We don't belong here.”
“Tell him he needs a solar water heater,” Scott whispered back as he levered open the passenger-side door and stepped out onto the pavement.
Together they walked across the damp cement to the steps and clumped up onto the boards of the verandah, and Scott knocked on the iron-banded door. He heard floorboards creak inside, and he was sure someone was looking out through the iron-ringed peephole.
“You should have shaved,” said Madeline, still whispering.
A bolt clunked back, and then the door swung inward, and a burly man with long dark hair and a short gray beard assessed Scott and Madeline with narrowed eyes. He was wearing a baggy olive-green flight suit that seemed to zip from ankle to neck, and his right hand was held out of sight behind him. His unlined face reminded Scott of Claimayne, and even with the beard he looked no older than fifty.
He didn't step back. “You're the kid that called,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Do you remember me telling you to come alone?”
“I didn't have a car,” said Scott. “This is my sister.”
Ostriker stared at Madeline for several moments and then nodded, and Scott briefly wondered if the man somehow recognized her. Then his gaze swept back to Scott. “You're here. What's the message?”
Scott had considered several things he might say. “It was,” he said now, “âI want to protect my son, Claimayne. Let Scott'âthat's meââsee you burn the originals of the birth certificates and the marriage license and the photographs.'”
Scott was hoping this might get a useful responseâas the “finder,” Ostriker must at least have known of the items at one time, whether or not he had actually possessed them.
Madeline clearly remembered their mother's note too, for now she piped up, wide-eyed at her own temerity, “She said there was the risk of wheelbugs getting involved.”
Ostriker was smiling and frowning. “Birth certificates, marriage license? Photographs? What is this, genealogy?”
Scott shrugged. “She seemed to think you'd know what she meant.”
“And that's a threat, isn't it,” the man went on, “about wheelbugs? What have you got, somebody holding a letter that they'll open if you don't report back that I . . . gave you what you want? You little shit.” Scott could smell brandy on the man's breath.
Ostriker stared out over their heads for a while, as a drop of sweat ran slowly down over Scott's ribs and Madeline shifted her old Reeboks on the porch boards.
Finally Ostriker looked directly at Madeline again and bared his very white teeth in what might have been a grin. “Come into my parlor, my dear.” He pulled the door open wider and stepped well back, and beyond him Scott could see a broad, polished expanse of pale hardwood floor and a standing lamp with three round chrome reflectors.
Scott stepped past Ostriker over the threshold and heard Made
line shuffle in behind him. The door closed with a boom that echoed in big empty volumes of air.
“Walk ahead,” said Ostriker, “to the kitchen on the left.”
Scott took Madeline's elbow and started across the broad living room, the floor creaking under their shoes. A long couch on a zigzag frame of blond wood stood against the wall on the right, below bookshelves on which the books had been arranged by the colors of their spines in a rainbow pattern. Several issues of
GQ
were fanned out on a coffee table that was a sheet of glass supported by arcs of polished wood.
The open kitchen area was all chrome and glass and white enamelâthe only spots of color were the deep amber of a pear-shaped bottle of Hennessy cognac on the marble counter and the interrupted red and green rings on a dartboard on the wall beside the refrigerator.
“You two stand over there by the window,” Ostriker said, and when Scott and Madeline had shuffled back to the far side of the kitchen, he shook his head and stared at them.
Finally he swung his right hand out from behind his back and carefully laid a stainless-steel semiautomatic pistol on the counter.
“
Amity,
” he pronounced, shaking his head as he twisted the cap out of the brandy bottle. “I'd offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.” He lifted the bottle and took a sip right from the neck of it, then exhaled sharply and leaned sideways to brace himself against the wall with his free palm against the dartboard. Scott noticed that the twisted-wire numbers on the dartboard were the twelve numbers of a clock face, not the nonsequential twenty numbers of a standard dartboard.
Ostriker inhaled noisily. He had regained his balance and now laughed heartily. “Was she crazy in her old age? She named a kid Claymation? For one thing, there's no such thing as âthe originals' of birth certificates. They issue certified copies.”
It occurred to Scott that a forged one would be an original.
“I can only tell you what she told me,” Scott said, wishing now that he'd thought of a better opening line. “You
did
know her?”
“What would it matter? She preferred women.”
“She got married,” said Madeline. “She had a son.”
“That settles that, then, doesn't it?” Ostriker picked up the gun again. “What do you two really want? Did she leave some kind of suicide note, mentioning me?”
“No,” said Scott, “there was noâ”
“How did she kill herself? The paper didn't say.”
“She climbed onto the roof,” said Madeline, “with a grenade, and blew herself to pieces.”
“That doesn't sound like a suicide.”
Scott blinked at him. It certainly didn't sound like a murder.
Ostriker went on, “Did her
foot
ever heal?”
“She always limped,” said Scott. He shifted his own feet on the tiles, and Ostriker quickly pointed the gun straight at him, with his finger inside the trigger guard.
“Okay,” Ostriker said, “you've used up your bullshit allotment.”
“Wait,” Scott said hastily, “we did come here about birth certificates and the rest of it, but not because Aunt Amity asked us to.”
Ostriker kept the gun pointed at him. “Amateurs!” he said, almost spitting. “Is this some kind of dipshit blackmail?”
“No.” Scott licked his lips, aching for the man to point the gun somewhere else. “You knew our parents,” he said carefully, “Arthur and Irina Madden.”
“They talked to you in 1991,” spoke up Madeline. “
They
wanted to blackmail
Aunt Amity
. They left notes, and copies of her birth certificate and her mother's, and her mother's marriage license, and some . . . pictures. Your name was in the notes, in quotation marks. Put the gun down, mister, we just want to know what happened to our parents!”
And find a way to force Aunt Amity to rest in peace, thought Scott.
Ostriker exaggeratedly raised his eyebrows. “Art and Irina,” he said. “Fat little bald charlie, and a ratty-haired beanpole, right? That them?”
Scott kept his voice level. “They disappeared on New Year's Eve of 1991. They wrote that they spoke to you.”
“Yeah, I remember 'em. Couple of fools. Quotation marks is cute.” With his free hand Ostriker hoisted the bottle and took another swallow of the brandy. “They, yeah, they wanted some dirt on your
Amity,
and they figured I'd know something because she and I had a . . . history. So she
knew
about me, even knew my phone number! But all these years she never bothered with me. That would have to be because”âhe laughed and swayed, and Scott exhaled silently in relief when the gun's muzzle wobbled awayâ“afterward she found something else, something better.”
Scott wondered if he meant a woman or his uncle Edward.
“Did you ever hear from our parents after 1991?” asked Madeline plaintively.
Ostriker stared at her, shaking his head, and Scott wondered again if the man somehow recognized her. “I got no time for losersâor their idiot kids rummaging around.
You,
Little Miss Muffet,” he said directly to Madeline, “are a kid poking your hand through the bars at a zoo.”
Madeline looked bewildered. “Me?” she asked. “Particularly?”
Ostriker obviously considered saying something and then thought better of it; finally he just muttered, “Both of you, probably.”
The interview, such as it was, seemed to be ending. Scott asked quickly, “Do you know what information they were blackmailing her with?”
Ostriker clanked the bottle down. “I don't think you two know anything at all.”
“We know about Natacha!” burst out Madeline.
Ostriker cocked his head. “I really don't think you do. I think
you found some old notes and stuff in that crazy house, and my name, and figured you could try to stick somebody up for money. How did that work out for your folks?”
“You tell us,” said Scott.
“How about I tell you this insteadâif you come around here again, I'll kill you both for trespassers.” He was grinning broadly. “That sound equitable? That work for you? Nowâankle your sorry little asses out of my house.”
Scott started toward the living room, then paused. This had accomplished nothing. Desperately, he asked, “Do you know where William Desmond Taylor's exorcism film went, after Paul and Charlene took it from Natacha Rambova?”
Ostriker stood perfectly still for several heartbeats, staring at the spot by the window where Scott and Madeline had been standing. Then he said, quietly, “Maybe you're the ones who should be worrying about wheelbugs.”
He appeared to have nothing more to say. Scott took Madeline's elbow again and led her through the cavernous white living room to the front door. Ostriker was still standing in the kitchen, facing the window, so Scott unlatched the door and pulled it open.
They hurried across the pavement to the car, and when they had slammed the doors and Madeline had started the engine, she said, “What did we learn there?”
“Everybody knows more than we do, that's what.” Scott rubbed his face and exhaled shakily as Madeline reversed on the broad expanse of cement, and he whispered, “I hate people pointing guns at me!”
Madeline shook her head. “He had something Aunt Amity wanted, and he hid from her under this fake Ostriker nameâMom had the name in quotes, right?âbut after a while it didn't matter anymore because she found something better.”
“I thought he meant she found something better like a boyfriend . . . or a girlfriend.”
“No. Some thing.”
He turned to look at his sister. “Have you
met
him before? Like, was he ever an astrological client of yours? It sure looked like he recognized you.”
“It did look like that,” she agreed, “and what was that business about me and a zoo? But no, I don't think I've ever seen him before. He didn't look as old as we thought he would, did he?”
Her purse was in the backseat, and Scott hiked around to get his hand in it. Madeline had got the car in drive and begun guiding it down the long driveway when he sat back down in his seat, holding their aunt's old phone book.