Hmmmm.
In 1997, Life magazine placed Nikola Tesla among the one hundred most famous and world-changing people of the past thousand years.
Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.
Tapping. Scratching. Knock-knock.
“Who’s there?” I asked softly. “Juno,” I replied in a quiet but authentic piggy voice. “Juno who?” I asked with sincere puzzlement. And I answered: “Juno how much I’d like to get in there and ham it up with you?”
I learned also that Tesla had his peculiar side. Sometime between 1899 and 1900, in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he believed that he had received signals from another planet. Serious people examined his evidence and agreed. He once said that with the right application of an electric current, he could easily split the Earth in two. Fortunately, Tesla didn’t leave notes as to how this might be done, for otherwise those guys in the Jackass movies would already have done it.
In short, he not only could think outside the box, but he could think outside the bigger box in which the first box had come. Such a man might be able to meet the challenge of harnessing time and using it as he wished.
Before I was tempted to surf over to YouTube to look at that dancing cat, I backed out of the Internet and shut down the computer.
As the tapping and scratching came again at the shutter, I heard Chef Shilshom in the kitchen, cursing profusely, as though he thought he might be Victoria Mors. He seemed to be coming this way.
I sprang off the Jabba the Hutt office chair, snatched up the pillowcase sack, and darted through the door between the chef’s office and the walk-in pantry, which also had an entrance from the kitchen.
In the pantry, I left the door to the office a half-inch ajar and waited to see if the quiche king would appear.
The chef breached the room in great white billows, more than agitated but less than panicked, as though he had just seen Captain Ahab stumping toward him on one good leg and one of polished whalebone. He didn’t appear to be in a mood either to bake or to broil.
From a cabinet that might have contained a trove of exotic spices or his personal collection of antique egg cups, he took what appeared to be a 12-gauge semiauto combat shotgun.
Thirty-seven
A FRIGHTENED, ANGRY, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND, ANTISOCIAL chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.
I slipped away from the door between Chef Rambo’s office and the pantry. Eased through the dark. Found the other door by the thin line of light that glowed at the bottom of it. Entered the kitchen. Left the kitchen. I crept along a hallway where one door or another might suddenly be flung open by a Roselander, whereupon I’d be discovered and sternly reprimanded for not remaining behind locked doors in the guest tower—or shot.
When I reached a side hall and then a discreet service door to the main drawing room, I ducked into that vast space, which felt like a stately common room on some exceedingly formal luxury liner from a distant era, which in the movies are peopled by beautiful women in glamorous gowns and men in tuxedos and platoons of waiters in white jackets serving drinks on silver trays. Islands of Persian carpets offered several arrangements of furniture, armchairs and side chairs and sofas and chaises enough to seat a quarter of high society’s top four hundred.
The windows were shuttered. None of the Tiffany lamps glowed. Of the five chandeliers, only the one in the center of the room provided light.
Directly under that glitteration of candle-shaped lamp bulbs and pendant crystals stood a circular banquette that surrounded a twice-life-size statue of the Greek god Pan. Pan had the head and chest and arms of a man, the ears and horns and legs of a goat, and he was badly in need of a fig leaf.
The periphery of the room was curtained with shadow. The corners folded away in the dark.
My intention was to slip around the darker part of the chamber, staying well away from horny Pan, until I came to another service door, hidden in the wall paneling, catercorner from the one through which I had entered. That would take me to a short hallway that also served the library, where I hoped to climb the circular bronze stairs to the second floor.
I was still about six acres away from my destination when I heard hurried footsteps on marble. Through the deep, columned archway that separated the drawing room from the better-lighted foyer, I saw Noah Wolflaw—alias Cloyce—and Paulie Sempiterno, both with shotguns, coming this way.
Allergic as I am to buckshot, I dropped to my hands and knees and hid behind a sofa.
Even as the madman and his chief lieutenant arrived in the drawing room, a door opened toward the farther end of the chamber, perhaps the one I had used. Others joined Cloyce and Sempiterno at the center of the big room, under the lit chandelier, beside the shameless Pan.
Peering warily around the end of the sofa and over a forest of furniture, I discovered that Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed had arrived. The gardener carried a shotgun. Mrs. Tameed, almost a foot taller than Mr. Diu, wore a gun belt with a holster on each hip, and in her right hand she held one of a pair of door-buster handguns, aimed at the ceiling.
The pistol-packing Swede could have kicked a lion in the butt and made it mewl like a frightened kitten. Jam Diu looked like Buddha gone bad.
The room had excellent acoustics, and I could hear everything they said. Victoria Mors had gone missing. She wasn’t in her private rooms, and she didn’t answer when called on her Talkabout, which was evidently a walkie-talkie that they all carried to keep in touch in the immense house. They were certain she’d been in the main residence when the shutters went down.
Not in the least embarrassed to declare the obvious, Paulie Sempiterno said, “Something’s wrong.”
That something was me.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Where’s that phony [expletive deleted] little [expletive deleted] bastard?”
Again, that would be me.
“Henry called from the gatehouse earlier,” Cloyce said, “after the shutters fell here. Thomas was pounding on the door down there, trying to get in. The freaks were after him.”
“Then he’s dead,” Jam Diu said.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Probably he’s dead. But don’t underestimate the [expletive deleted], [expletive deleted], [hyphenated expletive deleted] creep.”
Considering that Mrs. Tameed was far older than she appeared, I wondered if, under another name, she had worked in the Nixon White House.
“If he was out of the house when the shutters went down,” said Jam Diu, “then he can’t have gotten in again. Let’s not waste time worrying about him. He’s just an ignorant clocker.”
Clocker. Not cocker.
“Even a clocker can catch a lucky break now and then,” Paulie Sempiterno said.
“I’m more concerned there might have been a shutter breach,” Jam Diu said.
“There’s no shutter breach,” Cloyce assured him. “Whatever has happened to her, it’s not a freak that’s gotten her.”
They agreed to search the house for Victoria Mors, working in teams of two, always staying on the same floor, starting at the top of the house.
“She’s not in my suite,” Cloyce said. “But there’s a lot of other territory to search. Every damn closet, every corner. Let’s move.”