False Memory

hard tick in his bones. Time was running out for him and for Martie. Indeed, with the weight of his fear now grown so great, he was concerned that the cops would detect his anxiety, misunderstand it, and grow suspicious.

Susan’s mother, who lived in Arizona with a new husband, was notified by telephone, as was her father, who lived in Santa Barbara with a new wife. Both were on their way. After the case detective, Lieutenant Bizmet, had quizzed Martie as to the seriousness of the estrangement between Susan and her husband, he called Eric, too, got an answering machine, and left his name, rank, and number, but not any news.

Bizmet, a formidable bulk with buzz-cut blond hair and a stare as direct as a drill bit, was telling Dusty that they were no longer needed here, when Martie was hit by a spasm of autophobia.

Dusty recognized the signs of the seizure. The sudden alarm in her eyes. The pinched expression. Her face a whiter shade of pale.

She dropped to the sofa from which she had just risen, bent forward, hugging herself and rocking, as she had done in the car earlier, shuddering and gasping for breath.

This time, in the company of cops, he wasn’t able to talk her down with reminiscences of their dating days. He could only stand by helplessly, praying that this would not escalate into an all-out panic attack.

To Dusty’s surprise, Lieutenant Bizmet mistook Martie’s autophobic misery for another seizure of grief. He stood looking down at her with evident dismay, awkwardly spoke a few consoling words, and cast a sympathetic expression at Dusty.

Some of the other cops glanced at Martie and then returned to their various tasks and conversations, their bloodhound instinct failing to catch the scent.

“Does she drink?” Bizmet asked Dusty.

“Does she what?” he replied, so tense that he was at first unable to puzzle out the meaning of the word drink, as though it were Swahili. “Oh, drink, yes, a little. Why?”

“Take her to a nice bar, pour a few into her, blur the edge off her nerves.”

“Good advice,” Dusty agreed.

“But not you,” Bizmet amended with a scowl.

Heart leaping, Dusty said, “What?”

“A few drinks for her but just one for you if you’re driving.”

“Sure, of course. Never had a citation. Don’t ever want one.”

Martie rocked, shook, gasped, and had the presence of mind to throw in a few stifled sobs of grief. She shook off the seizure in a minute or two, as she’d done in the car on the way here.

With Bizmet’s thanks and sympathies, after only one hour in the apartment, they were on their way into a day grown dark.

The afternoon’s bluster had not faded with the early winter twilight. Its cool breath scented with Pacific brine and with the iodine in snarls of seaweed that lay withering on the nearby shore, the wind harried Dusty and Martie, huffing and squealing as though with accusations of cover-up and guilt.

In the chaotic rattle and click of clashing palm fronds, Dusty heard the half-masked, rhythmic ticking of a clock. He heard it, too, in their footsteps on the promenade, in the action of a three-foot-high decorative windmill that stood on the patio of one of the ocean-facing houses that they passed, and between each half of his two-part heartbeat. Time running out.

55

Davy Crockett was bravely defending the Alamo, but not solely with the support of his usual compatriots. This time Davy had the help of Eliot Ness and a considerable force of G-men.

One might expect that submachine guns, had they been available to the stalwart men at the Alamo, would have altered the historical outcome of that battle in 1836. After all, the Gatling gun, which was the first crude version of the machine gun, wouldn’t be invented for another twenty-six years. Indeed, automatic rifles weren’t in use at that time, and the most-advanced weapons in the hands of the combatants were muzzle-loaders.

Unfortunately for the defenders of the Alamo, this time they were under siege by both Mexican soldiers and a bunch of ruthless Prohibition-era gangsters with submachine guns of their own. The combination of Al Capone’s vicious cunning and General Santa Anna’s talent for military strategy might be more than Crockett and Ness could handle.

The doctor briefly considered complicating this epic battle by introducing spacemen and futuristic weapons from his Galaxy Command collection. He resisted this childish temptation, because experience had taught him that the greater number of anachronistic elements he combined on a board, the less satisfying the game. To be engrossing, a play session required him to control his flamboyant imagination and stick strictly to a scenario with one clever but believable concept. Frontiersmen, Mexican soldiers, G-men, gangsters, and spacemen would be just too silly.

Dressed comfortably in black ninja-style pajamas with a scarlet silk belt, barefoot, the doctor slowly circled the board, craftily analyzing the positions of the opposing armies. As he reconnoitered, he rattled a pair of dice in a casting cup.

His immense game board was actually an eight-foot-square table that stood in the center of the room. These sixty-four square feet of terrain could be redesigned for each new game, using his large collection of custom-crafted topographical elements.

The big room, thirty feet square, otherwise contained only an armchair and a small table to hold a telephone and snacks.

Currently, the only illumination came from the down-lights in the ceiling directly over the game board. The rest of the room lay in shadows.

All four walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling display shelves on which were stored hundreds of plastic playsets in their original boxes. Most of the boxes were in mint or near-mint condition, and none could be rated less than excellent. Each set contained all its original complement of figures, buildings, and accessories.

Ahriman acquired only Marx playsets, those produced by Louis Marx during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The miniature figures in these sets were wonderfully detailed, beautifully produced, and sold for hundreds — even thousands — of dollars on the rare-toy market. In addition to the Alamo and Untouchables sets, his collection included Adventures of Robin Hood, American Patrol, Armored Attack, Ben Hur, Battleground, Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, Fort Apache, Roy Rogers Rodeo Ranch, Tom Corbett Space Academy, and scores of others, many in duplicate and triplicate, which allowed him to populate the tabletop with a large cast of characters.

This evening, the doctor was in an exceptionally fine mood. The game on the board before him promised to be tremendous fun. Better yet, his other and far bigger game, being played in the world beyond this room, was getting more interesting by the hour.

Mr. Rhodes was reading The Manchurian Candidate. Most likely, Dustin would lack the imagination and the intellect to absorb all the clues in that novel and wouldn’t be able to build upon them enough to understand the web in which he was caught. His prospects of saving himself and his wife were still dismal, though better than they had been before he’d cracked open the book.

Only a hopeless narcissist, megalomaniac, or other psychotic would engage in any sport year after year, if he knew in advance that he would win every time. For the true — and well-balanced — gamesman, an element of doubt, at least a soupcon of suspense, was required to make the game worth playing. He must test his skills and challenge chance, not to be fair to the other players — fairness was for fools — but to keep himself sharp and to ensure amusement.

Always, the doctor salted his scenarios with traps for himself. Often, the traps were not triggered, but the possibility of disaster, when it loomed, was invigorating and kept him nimble. He loved this impish aspect of himself, and he indulged it.

He had, for instance, permitted Susan Jagger to be aware of the semen that he left in her. He could have instructed her to remain oblivious of this distasteful evidence, and she would have blocked it from her mind. By allowing her awareness and by suggesting that she direct her suspicion at her estranged husband, the doctor had established powerful character dynamics, the consequences of which he could not predict. Indeed, this had led to the near thing with the videotape, which was the last development that he could have