herself that her lovely eyes were enough physical beauty for him and that what he really prized was her innocence, her chastity, her personality, and her piety
The trick was to divine the brand of Christianity that she had embraced, then convince her that they shared that particular flavor of the faith. If she was a Pentecostal, his approach would have to be far different from that required if she was a Catholic, and
Fortunately, she proved to be an Episcopalian, which Roy found markedly easier to fake than one of the more passionate sects. He might have been lost if she'd been a Seventh Day Adventist.
She proved to be a reader, too, and especially a fan of C. S. Lewis, one of the finest Christian writers of the century just past.
In his quest to be a Renaissance man, Roy had read Lewis: not all of his many books, but enough.
Dear Candace was so enchanted to have a handsome and interested man as a conversationalist that she overcame her shyness when the subject turned to Lewis. She did most of the talking, and Roy needed only to insert a quote here and a reference there to convince her that his knowledge of the great man's work was encyclopedic.
Another fortunate thing about her being an Episcopalian was that her denomination did not forbid drink or the joy of sensuous music. From the cafe, he talked her into a jazz club on Jackson Square.
Roy had a capacity for alcohol, but one potent hurricane erased whatever lingering caution Candace might otherwise have harbored.
After the jazz club, when he suggested they take a walk on the levee, her only concern was that it might be closed at this hour.
'It's still open to pedestrians,' he assured her. 'They just don't keep it lit for the roller skaters and fishermen.'
Perhaps she would have hesitated to stroll the unlighted levee if he hadn't been such a strong man, and so good, and capable of protecting her.
They walked toward the river, away from the shopping district and the crowds. The full moon provided more light than he would have liked but also enough to allay any of Candace's lingering concern about their safety
A brightly decorated riverboat chattered by, its great paddle wheel splashing through warm water. Passengers stood on the decks, sat at tables. This late-night river cruise wouldn't stop at any nearby docks. Roy had checked the schedules, always planning ahead.
They ambled to the end of the pavement atop the breakwater of boulders. Fishermen were more likely to come this far in daylight. As he expected, here in the night, he and Candace were alone.
The lights of the receding riverboat painted serpentine ribbons of oily color on the dark water, and Candace thought this was pretty and in fact so did Roy, and they watched it for a moment before she turned to him, expecting a chaste kiss, or even one not so chaste.
Instead, he squirted her in the face with the squeeze bottle of chloroform that he had withdrawn from a jacket pocket.
He had found this saturation technique to be far quicker, more effective, and less of a struggle than a soaked cloth. The fluid penetrated her nostrils, splashed her tongue.
Choking, gasping for breath and thereby inhaling the anesthetic, Candace dropped as suddenly and as hard as if she had been shot.
She fell on her side. Roy rolled her onto her back and knelt next to her.
Even in the insistent silvery moonlight, they presented a low profile to anyone who might look this way from a craft on the river. Glancing back the way they had come, Roy saw no other late strollers.
From an inside jacket pocket, he produced a stiletto and a compact kit of scalpels and other instruments.
He didn't need larger tools for this one. The eyes would be simple to extract, though he must be careful not to damage the part of them that he considered to be perfectly beautiful.
With the stiletto, he found her heart and conveyed her from sleep to death with only the faintest liquid sound.
Soon the eyes were his, safely in a small plastic bottle full of saline solution.
On his way back to the lights and the jazz, he was surprised when he suddenly had a taste for cotton candy, not a treat that he had ever before craved. But of course the red wagon was closed and might not open for days.
CHAPTER 31
A nineteenth-century stonemason had chiseled HANDS OF MERCY into a limestone block above the hospital entrance. A weathered image of the Virgin Mary overlooked the front steps.
The hospital had closed long ago, and after the building had been sold to a shell corporation controlled by Victor Helios, the windows had been bricked shut. Steel doors had been installed at every entrance, equipped with both mechanical and electronic locks.
A tall wrought-iron fence surrounded the oak-shaded property, like a stockpile of spears from a full Roman legion. To the rolling electric gate was affixed a sign: PRIVATE WAREHOUSE / NO ADMITTANCE.
Hidden cameras surveyed the grounds, the perimeter. No nuclear weapons storage depot had a larger or more dedicated security force, or one more discreet.
The forbidding structure stood silent. No beam of light escaped it, though here the new rulers of the Earth were designed and made.
A staff of eighty lived and worked within these walls, assisting in experiments in a maze of laboratories. In rooms that had once held hospital patients, newly minted men and women were housed and rapidly educated until they could be infiltrated into the population of the city.
The armored doors of certain other rooms were locked. The creations within them needed to be restrained while being studied.
Victor conducted his most important work in the main laboratory This vast space had a techno sensibility with some Art Deco style and a dash of Wagnerian grandeur. Glass, stainless steel, white ceramic: All were easy to sterilize if things got? messy.
Sleek and arcane equipment, much of which he himself designed and built, lined the chamber, rose out of the floor, depended from the ceiling. Some of the machines hummed, some bubbled, some stood silent and menacing.
In this windowless lab, if he put his wristwatch in a drawer, he could labor long hours, days, without a break. Having improved his physiology and metabolism to the point that he needed little or no sleep, he was able to give himself passionately to his work.
Tonight, as he arrived at his desk, his phone rang. The call came on line five. Of eight lines, the last four- rollovers that served a single number-were reserved for messages and inquiries from those creations with which he had been gradually populating the city.
He picked up the handset. 'Yes?'
The caller, a man, was struggling to repress the emotion in his voice, more emotion than Victor ever expected to hear from one of the New Race: 'Something is happening to me, Father. Something strange. Maybe something wonderful.'
Victor's creations understood that they must contact him only in a crisis. 'Which one are you?'
'Help me, Father.'
Victor felt diminished by the word
'I'm confused? and sometimes scared.'
'I asked for your name.'
