Hymn Read online

  They left the Science Museum and were walking across heat-dried grass of Balboa Park. Joe said, ‘There was something else . . . something that’s been bugging me.’

  They reached Lloyd’s car. Lloyd unlocked it, but waited until Joe had told him what was on his mind before opening the door.

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s relevant or not,’ said Joe. ‘But about two or three weeks before Otto appeared on the scene, we were spending the weekend together at the Dream Inn at Santa Cruz. Marianna had never seen the boardwalk before. Anyway, she was checking her breasts in the bathroom and she suddenly said that she could feel some kind of a lump.’

  ‘It wasn’t cancer, was it?’

  ‘I never found out. I told her to go to the doctor, and she went to the doctor. But then she didn’t say anything more about it. I kept asking her what she was going to do about it, and all she said was she’d been talking to Celia and Celia was going to sort it out.’

  Lloyd wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Celia was always talking about Marianna, but she certainly didn’t mention anything about Marianna having a lump in her breast.’

  ‘Well . . . no particular reason why she should, I guess,’ said Joe. “’Girls’ talk”, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Come on, Joe. Celia and I talked about everything. And one of your best friends finding a lump on her breast isn’t exactly unimportant, is it? Especially since she was supposed to be sorting it out. And in any case—how the hell could she sort it out?’

  ‘Search me, pal,’ Joe replied. ‘But after Otto appeared on the scene she never mentioned it again, and when I asked her about it, she said, “it’s fine, it’s all fixed.’”

  He paused, and then he added, ‘And with all due respect, Lloyd, Celia couldn’t have told you everything, could she? There was a whole lot she was keeping to herself.’

  Lloyd nodded, and opened the car door. ‘You want a ride back to the theatre?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘I want to walk for a while.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lloyd told him. ‘I understand. I’ve been doing a lot of walking myself. Walking, and thinking.’

  He drove away from the Science Museum and headed north. Joe watched him go, and then made his way slowly across the grass toward the shade of the trees.

  Across the street, a woman was standing watching him. In spite of the heat, she wore a long white raincoat, and her head was tightly tied with a white silk scarf. Her eyes were concealed behind circular sunglasses with dead black lenses.

  Joe glanced at her once, but her image was rippling in the heat from the concrete sidewalk, and he didn’t recognize her. But after awhile, she began to follow him, keeping at least a hundred and fifty feet behind him, but never allowing him out of her sight.

  Eleven

  Lloyd reached the house on Paseo Delicias a few minutes after twelve. His mouth was dry, and he would have done anything for a glass of cold beer, but finding Otto was more important than quenching his thirst.

  Joe had told him that the house was on the second-to-last curve before the road entered the town of Rancho Santa Fe itself. It hadn’t been difficult to find. He had driven up the winding road through lemon groves and bursts of flowering bushes and located the house on a steep left-hand bend, behind a dusty-looking thicket of prickly pear. He had driven right past it, and then parked about three hundred feet further up the road, under the shade of some sadly-trailing eucalyptus trees.

  He climbed out of the car and put on his sunglasses. It was very hot and quiet, up here in the hills. He had driven up here for lunch on days when the coast had been thick with fog, and it had always been clear. A lizard scuttered out of sight into the undergrowth. There was a strong aroma of evaporating eucalyptus in the air.

  His shoes crunched on the dusty tarmac.

  Now, how am I going to play this? What if I ring the bell at the front door, and he’s actually there, and he answers it? What the hell am I going to say to him? Supposing he really did have something to do with Celia’s death? And Marianna’s, too? And Sylvia’s? And poor Bob Tuggey’s?

  He reached the driveway. It sloped at a sharp angle in front of the house, with three large Mercedes-Benzes parked in it: an old-fashioned open-topped tourer, in a dull shade of German field grey; a large bulbous black 1950s’ limousine; and a 1960s’ 380SL sports car, in white. All three cars were grimy with dust and tree-pollen and spattered with fruit-coloured bird-droppings.

  The house itself was equally neglected. It had once been a very elegant adobe, painted white, with a long front verandah and a curved Mexican-style porch. Now its single-storey roof was heaped with a thick toupee of dried-up creepers, the paint was flaking, and two of the steps leading up to the porch had rotted and collapsed.

  Lloyd could see the garage that had been converted into a ‘study centre’. It was a flat-roofed side-building built out of whitewashed cinder-blocks, with sun-bleached wooden doors. He found it difficult to imagine that Celia had willingly come to a place like this. She had always been so fastidious about everything. Her clothes, her hair, the slightest mark on the living-room rug.

  What he found even harder to believe was that she could have fallen for Otto and his bullshit about master races and immortality. She had been nervy, yes, like a good many brilliant musicians. But she had never been gullible, nor superstitious, and she had certainly never been racist.

  He stood in the entrance to the driveway for nearly five minutes, trying to make up his mind whether he ought to go in or not.

  In the end, his mind was made up for him by a security patrol car cruising past. The driver slowed down on the bend and stared at him suspiciously through orange-lensed sunglasses. He gave the driver a nod and a smile, and tried to march into the driveway as if he belonged there. Behind the prickly pear, he heard the security car hesitate, and then drive on.

  Lloyd climbed over the broken steps and approached the front door. It looked as if it hadn’t been painted in twenty years. It had probably once been bottle-green, but now it was blistered and faded. The only fixture that looked new was a large brass doorknocker in the shape of a fat, snarling lizard, and even that was discoloured by the sun, and had never been cleaned.

  He listened for a few moments, then he picked up the knocker and tapped it twice. It sounded flat, no echo at all, like striking a coffin with a walking-stick. He waited and waited but there was no reply, no sound at all. He knocked again, much louder this time. Again that curious flatness, as if the knocker could only be heard outside the house.

  He stepped back a little way, and called out, ‘Anybody home? Mr Otto? Anybody else?’ The sweat was running down the back of his prune-coloured Bijan polo-shirt. He tried the knocker a third time, and shouted some more, but it was pretty damned obvious that there was nobody home or, if there was anybody home, they were quite determined not to come to the door.

  He took off his sunglasses and peered in at one of the dusty windows. Now that it was early afternoon, the sun was sloping into the back of the house, and he could just make out the silhouette of a bulky rounded armchair, a side-table, and a 1930s-style sunray mirror gleaming on the wall. There was something about the decor of the room which disturbed him. It was obviously decorated in 1930s’ style. But he couldn’t believe that anybody would have gone to such trouble and expense to recreate a 1930s’ room that looked so formidably dull.

  It was almost as if the room had been left this way, untouched, for over fifty years.

  Treading quietly on the boarded verandah, Lloyd crept along the next window. Another sitting-room, rather smaller, with a dark-oak desk facing the back wall. Again the furniture was all pure 1930s . . . a bent plywood chair, a bent plywood table, and a plastic Volksempfanger radio, of the type cheaply produced by the German government in the 1930s to spread their propaganda message as widely as possible. On the wall above the desk was a large framed drawing of the s
ame symbol that featured on the charm that Bob Tuggey had given him—a lizard with its head crooked to one side, and its tail bent the opposite way.

  Lloyd rubbed the grimy glass with the side of his hand, but he couldn’t distinguish very much more. The rooms were furnished very oppressively, but in an age when fifteen-year-old kids were roaming the streets of Watts with loaded Uzis, it was hardly a Federal offence to have oppressive rooms.

  He walked around the end of the house, tugging aside a mass of creeper that had partially collapsed from the roof, bringing down two or three dozen shingles along with it. The only window he could reach was a small sash window next to the chimney-breast, and he could only just manage to peek into it if he stood up on tiptoe.

  He saw a third room, much larger than the other two, and filled with sunlight. Against the left-hand wall stood a black Bechstein upright piano, its top covered in a dark red velour piano-drape. The top of the piano was clustered with black-and-white framed photographs, although Lloyd couldn’t make out who they were. In this room, there were several large bulbous armchairs, covered in anchovy-brown cotton, with ‘modern’ patterns of red art-deco rectangles. Beside one of the chairs stood a tall chrome ashtray, on which a dead half-burned cigar butt was perched.

  When Lloyd craned his neck around to have a look at the other side of the room, however, he felt a thrill of surprise and alarm. Kneeling on the carpet, with his head bowed, was a young blond man. Very muscular, deep-chested and narrow-hipped, and—from what Lloyd could see of him—very good-looking, if you went for slab-sided profiles and straight noses and deep-set eyes. A jock. More than a jock, a body-builder. The type that Celia would have half-mockingly called an ODYS—an over-developed young Siegfried.

  Lloyd stared at the man in fascination, trying to keep as still as possible, so that he wouldn’t attract his attention. The man was completely naked, and his wrists and ankles were manacled behind him with shiny steel bands, at least an inch and a half wide, and those manacles in turn were chained to a ring in the floor.

  Lloyd had been concerned at first that the man would look up and see him, but the man kept his head unremittingly bowed, as if he were staring at the fireplace and trying to make the hours pass by sheer force of will.

  What the hell is this guy doing, chained up to the floor? Maybe he’s been kidnapped. Maybe Otto’s holding him hostage. Or maybe he has chained himself up. You get to hear of stranger perversions than that.

  He was certainly in peak physical shape, so he couldn’t spend all of his time chained up here. His hair was cropped as flat as a flight-deck, too, so he must have been to a hairdresser recently. His pubic hair was as blond as the hair on his head, and he had a huge heavy penis that hung halfway down his thighs, not circumcised, but with the foreskin rolled back to expose the glans.

  Lloyd stood on tiptoe staring at him for as long as he could, until his calf muscles began to judder with the effort. Then he carefully left the window, and retraced his steps along the verandah. He considered knocking at the door again, and even raised the lizard in his hand, but he let it down again, with nothing but the faintest tap. What was the use, when the only occupant that he had seen was incapable of moving more than a couple of inches?

  He left the driveway, and walked back to his car. He was strongly tempted now to call Sergeant Houk. After all, Otto must be committing some kind of offence, just by having that young man chained up. If he was guilty of that, then surely he could be guilty of almost anything. Didn’t the Lindbergh law say that kidnappers were liable to be sent to the gas chamber? Or was that something he had read in that Joseph Wambaugh book about The Onion Field, and now half remembered?

  He drove back home, playing La Bohème on his car stereo. He decided, on balance, not to get in touch with Sergeant Houk, not yet. First of all he wanted to talk to Otto in person, face-to-face, and ask him some searching questions about Celia. If he contacted Sergeant Houk he would never get the chance. He wanted to ask Otto how the hell a beautiful intelligent girl like Celia could have been bewitched by all the squalid claptrap of racial purity and dominant human species and immortality.

  Then he wanted to ask him what had given him the right to intrude on their love and their happiness—whether he was directly responsible for Celia’s death or not.

  And then he wanted to ask him what kind of a creature he really was.

  He called Waldo on his carphone. It took Waldo a while to answer. It was the middle of lunch, and the Original Fish Depot was hectically busy. When he came to the phone, he sounded flustered but cheerful.

  ‘It’s going good, Mr Denman, believe me. Already this lunchtime fifteen lobsters and ten specials.’

  ‘That’s great. I’ll look in later. Meanwhile I’m off to the desert.’

  ‘You’re going to the desert? Why for?’

  ‘A little research, that’s all. Any messages? Any calls?’

  Waldo coughed. ‘Two people called by to see you. They said you were expecting them.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody.’

  ‘Well . . . you didn’t say that you would come to the restaurant today, so I guessed that you weren’t.’

  ‘Who were they? Did they leave their names?’

  ‘An old man and a woman. Some kind of a woman, too. Too big for me.’

  An old man, and a woman. Lloyd felt a cold pain of anxiety and suspicion that was almost like neuralgia. ‘They didn’t leave their names?’ he asked.

  ‘They said not to worry. They said they’d find you, whatever.’

  Lloyd said. ‘This old guy . . . was he wearing a hat, and a suit?’

  ‘That’s right, hat and a suit. And the woman was wearing all black leather. Looked like a biker, you know? Or maybe a hooker. Biker or hooker, one of the two. Or maybe she was a restaurant critic.’ Waldo thought that this was funny, and laughed until he coughed.

  Lloyd laid down the phone. This was a new and distinctly disturbing development. He was looking for Otto, but at the same time it seemed as if Otto was looking for him. The only reason that Otto had been out when he called at the house on Paseo Delicias was because Otto had been calling at the Original Fish Depot.

  So what did Otto want?

  There was only one possibility. The charm with the lizard on it. The same lizard that Lloyd had seen on the wall of Otto’s house. Unca Tug had called him to say that the charm hadn’t belonged to Celia, and the only way that Unca Tug could have found that out is if somebody had come looking for it. Somebody had come looking for the lizard charm and Unca Tug had died by fire. Somebody had come looking for the Wagner libretto, too, and Sylvia had died by fire.

  Lloyd was beginning to feel sure that all this burning was down to Otto, and that Otto was not simply some religious and racialist wacko, but gravely dangerous. A homicidal madman with a taste for random violence was frightening enough: but a homicidal madman with his own rationale for changing the world was even more terrifying.

  He stopped at a gas station at Escondido, and a little tubby lady in a back-to-front baseball cap filled up his BMW.

  ‘Nice car,’ she commented.

  ‘I like it,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘My old man, he wouldn’t have a German car for all the world,’ she remarked.

  ‘Oh?’

  She wiped a dab of grease from the end of her nose. ‘He was in the 4th Armoured Division during the war. Liberated some of the concentration camps.’

  Lloyd gave her his credit card. ‘In that case, I guess he’s got a reason.’

  ‘Won’t even drink Milwaukee-brewed beer, for fear that it’s made by Germans.’

  It was a long and pleasant, calming drive, out to the Anza Borrego Desert. The road wound up through trees and mountains, and the quiet communities of Ramona and Santa Ysabel. Lloyd stopped at Julian for a cheeseburger and a beer, and then drove onward, into the dusty scrubby outskirts of the desert itself
.

  On the car stereo, he played a tape that he had found of plangent rock’n’roll from the Woodstock days: Country Joe and the Fish, the Doors, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. It brought back memories of business college; furry sideburns and flared jeans; girlfriends with miniskirts and chains around their hips and long shining hair; his first car (a Beetle, with a Peace symbol painted on the door); his first joint (pukish); sitting crosslegged all night in a friend’s poster-plastered apartment, drinking Thunderbird Red and talking about Meaning and Being Yourself, Man, and how they were all going to go to London and find out Where It Was At.

  He had stopped looking for meaning a long time ago. Once he had started work, he hadn’t had the time. As for being yourself, he had discovered how incredibly easy that was, once he had stopped trying to be like somebody else (Paul Newman, for example, in Cool Hand Luke, or George Peppard in The Carpetbaggers). He had never made it to London, but he guessed that since the Swinging Era had long since passed away, London probably wouldn’t be much different from anyplace else, all Burger Kings and bumper-to-bumper traffic—no more Where It Was At than Indianapolis or Pittsburgh or San Francisco.

  He thought of the first time he had seen Celia, at that charity dinner at the Rancho Bernardo Inn. She had stepped out of the doorway of El Bizcocho restaurant, and the sun had dropped into her hair like a sign from the angels above. This is the girl for you, Lloyd, here she is, we’ll even light her up for you, so there won’t be any mistake.

  His throat tightened, and he sniffed. He missed her, by God how much he missed her. He found a tissue in the glove-box and loudly blew his nose.

  He had been worried that it would be difficult to find the place where the bus had burned, but he came to the crest of a rise in the road, and there it was, about a couple of hundred feet off to his left, a blackened skeleton, more like a charcoal sketch of a bus than a real bus.