only when he was talking about old movies or watching them.”
Roy sensed that what he had just learned was of great importance — but he didn’t understand why. He stood on the brink of a revelation yet could not quite see the shape of it.
He held his breath, afraid that even exhaling would blow him away from the understanding that seemed within reach.
A warm breeze soughed through the temple.
On the limestone floor near Roy’s left foot, a slow black beetle crawled laboriously toward its own strange destiny.
Then, almost eerily, Roy heard himself asking a question that he had not first consciously considered. “You’re sure his mother named him after Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Donner replied.
“Is it?”
“It is to me.”
“He actually told you that’s why she named him what she did?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember. But he must have.”
The soft breeze soughed, the beetle crawled, and a chill of enlightenment shivered through Roy.
Bosley Donner said, “You haven’t seen the waterfall yet. It’s terrific. It’s really, really neat. Come on, you’ve got to see it.”
The wheelchair purred out of the temple.
Roy turned to watch between the limestone columns as Donner sped recklessly along another down-sloping pathway into the cool shadows of a green glen. His brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt seemed to flare with fire when he flashed through shafts of red-gold sunshine, and then he vanished past a stand of Australian tree ferns.
By now Roy understood the primary thing about Bosley Donner that so annoyed him: The cartoonist was just too damned self-confident and independent. Even disabled, he was utterly self-possessed and self-sufficient.
Such people were a grave danger to the system. Civil order was not sustainable in a society populated by rugged individualists. The dependency of the people was the source of the state’s power, and if the state didn’t have enormous power, progress could not be achieved or peace sustained in the streets.
He might have followed Donner and terminated him in the name of social stability, lest others be inspired by the cartoonist’s example, but the risk of being observed by witnesses was too great. A couple of gardeners were at work on the grounds, and Mrs. Donner or a member of the household staff might be looking out a window at the most inconvenient of all moments.
Besides, chilled and excited by what he believed he’d discovered about Spencer Grant, Roy was eager to confirm his suspicion.
He left the temple, being careful not to crush the slow black beetle, and turned in the opposite direction from that in which Donner had vanished. He swiftly ascended to higher levels of the backyard, hurried past the side of the enormous house, and got in his car, which was parked in the circular driveway.
From the manila envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him, he withdrew one of the pictures of Grant and put it on the seat. But for the terrible scar, that face initially had seemed quite ordinary. Now he knew that it was the face of a monster.
From the same envelope, he took a printout of the report that he’d requested from Mama the previous night and that he’d read off the computer screen in his hotel a few hours ago. He paged to the false names under which Grant had acquired and paid for utilities.
Stewart Peck
Henry Holden
James Gable
John Humphrey
William Clark
Wayne Gregory
Robert Tracy
Roy withdrew a pen from his inside jacket pocket and rearranged first and last names into a new list of his own:
Gregory Peck
William Holden
Clark Gable
James Stewart
John Wayne
That left Roy with four names from the original list: Henry, Humphrey, Robert, and Tracy.
Tracy, of course, matched the bastard’s first name — Spencer. And for a purpose that neither Mama nor Roy had yet discovered, the tricky, scarfaced son of a bitch was probably using another false identity that incorporated the name Cary, which was missing from the first list but was the logical match for his last name — Grant.
That left Henry, Humphrey, and Robert.
Henry. No doubt Grant sometimes operated under the name Fonda, perhaps with a first name lifted from Burt Lancaster or Gary Cooper.
Humphrey. In some circle, somewhere, Grant was known as Mr. Bogart — first name courtesy of yet another movie star of yesteryear.
Robert. Eventually they were certain to find that Grant also employed the surname Mitchum or Montgomery.
As casually as other men changed shirts, Spencer Grant changed identities.
They were searching for a phantom.
Although he couldn’t yet prove it, Roy was now convinced that the name Spencer Grant was as phony as all the others. Grant was not the surname that this man had inherited from his father, nor was Spencer the Christian name that his mother had given him. He had named himself after favorite actors who had played old-fashioned heroes.
His real name was cipher. His real name was mystery, shadow, ghost, smoke.
Roy picked up the computer-enhanced portrait and studied the scarred face.
This dark-eyed cipher had joined the army under the name Spencer Grant, when he was just eighteen. What teenager knew how to establish a false identity, with convincing credentials, and get away with it? What had this enigmatic man been running from at even that young age?
How in the
On the sofa, Rocky lay on his back, all four legs in the air, paws limp, his head in Theda Davidowitz’s ample lap, gazing up in rapture at the plump, gray-haired woman. Theda stroked his tummy, scratched under his chin, and called him “sweetums” and “cutie” and “pretty eyes” and “snookums.” She told him that he was God’s own little furry angel, the handsomest canine in all creation, wonderful, marvelous, cuddly, adorable, perfect. She fed him thin little slices of ham, and he took each morsel from her fingertips with a delicacy more characteristic of a duchess than of a dog.
Ensconced in an overstuffed armchair with antimacassars on the back and arms, Spencer sipped from a cup of rich coffee that Theda had improved with a pinch of cinnamon. On the table beside his chair, a china pot held additional coffee. A plate was heaped with homemade chocolate-chip cookies. He had politely declined imported English tea biscuits, Italian anisette biscotti, a slice of lemon-coconut cake, a blueberry muffin, gingersnaps, shortbread, and a raisin scone; exhausted by Theda’s hospitable perseverance, he had at last agreed to a cookie, only to be presented with twelve of them, each the size of a saucer.
Between cooing at the dog and urging Spencer to eat another cookie, Theda revealed that she was seventy-six and that her husband — Bernie — had died eleven years ago. She and Bernie had brought two children into the world: Rachel and Robert. Robert — the finest boy who ever lived, thoughtful and kind — served in
