Odd Apocalypse

“Due diligence. I’m going to apply for a job.”

She met my eyes directly again, and said dismissively, “There aren’t any openings.”

“Seems like there aren’t enough security guards.”

“Two of them are on vacation.”

“Ah. Henry Lolam says he gets eight weeks off. That’s a generous vacation.”

“But there aren’t any openings.”

“Henry only took three of his eight weeks. He says the world is changing too much out there. He only feels safe here.”

“Of course he feels safe here. Who wouldn’t feel safe here?”

I suspected that the thirty-four dead women in the subcellar of the mausoleum had at some point not felt safe in Roseland; however, I didn’t bring up the subject because I didn’t want to be boorish.

If I had ever fantasized about being a CIA interrogator, I’d lost interest in the job when the law limited them to extracting information from terrorists only with the offer of candy. But I was pleased with myself for getting some interesting responses from the maid even without a Three Musketeers bar.

Now that I’d switched techniques and had begun to needle her a little, our chat might turn hostile, in which case I would have to solve the problem she presented before she could report my presence in the house to anyone.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to deal with her, because I was not inclined to shoot her as a first option.

She was nearly finished sorting the laundry.

I said, “Henry Lolam told me Roseland is an unhealthy place, but I think he must have been joking, considering that he can’t bear to be away from it.”

“Henry reads too damn much poetry, he thinks too damn much, and he talks too damn much,” Victoria Mors said, sounding not at all like a schoolgirl.

“Wow,” I said, “you really are like a family.”

For just an instant, the hatred in her eyes told me that she wanted to bite off my nose and turn me over to Paulie Sempiterno so that he could put a bullet in my face.

But Victoria Mors was a quick-change artist. As I set down the pillowcase sack, she retracted her fangs, blinked the venom out of her eyes, washed the vinegar out of her voice with honey, and spoke with the quivering emotion of a winsome child defending the honor of her beloved father.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Odd.”

“De nada.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Forgiven.”

“It’s just, well, I can’t stand it when someone’s unfair to Mr. Wolflaw, because he’s really so … he’s so incredible.”

“I understand. It really steams me when people say bad things about Vladimir Putin.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Victoria had finished with the laundry, so she wrung her hands as if she’d spent a lot of time recently learning dramatic skills from silent-movie melodramas.

“It’s just that poor Henry, he’s a nice man, he is rather like a brother to me, but he’s one of those people — you could give him the world, and he would be unhappy because you didn’t give him the moon, too.”

“He wishes aliens would come and make him immortal.”

“What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he be happy with everything he has?”

As if Henry exasperated me, too, I said, “Why indeed?”

“Noah is a brilliant man, one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

“I thought he ran a hedge fund.”

As I finished speaking, the laundry-room door opened, and the tall, gaunt, mustachioed man in the dark suit entered the room, the one who had told me that he had seen me where I had not yet been and that he depended on me. His deep-set eyes were dark, too, and bright with fevered emotion, arguably the most intense eyes I’d ever seen, his stare so penetrating that I might not have been too surprised if it had actually boiled my brain in my skull.

He came toward me, reaching out imploringly with one bony hand. “I intended none of this.”

Instead of grasping the hand that I reflexively held out toward him, the man passed through me, as if he were a ghost. For the brief moment that we occupied the same space, an electrical current seemed to surge from the core of my body to every extremity, neither painful nor thrilling, but making me acutely aware of the neural pathways by which I felt pain and pleasure, hot and cold, smooth and rough, sound and sight and smell and taste. The routes taken by every nerve in my flesh were as clear in my mind’s eye as were the highways on any map I’d ever read. No ghost could ever have such an effect.

Once through me, he kept going, fading away two steps farther into the laundry room. Although he vanished, four words rang out in his accented voice after he was gone: “Throw the master switch.”

Victoria Mors turned her head to watch the apparition vanish. Then she met my eyes.

Neither of us spoke, but she didn’t have to say anything for me to know that she had encountered the tall gaunt man before, and I didn’t have to say anything for her to realize that I knew enough about Roseland to be unfazed by this bizarre event, enough to be a mortal danger to them all.

I caught her under the chin with a right uppercut and followed with a left that nailed her above and slightly to the side of the right eye, and she dropped like a sack of laundry down a chute.

Twenty-eight

I wasn’t proud of myself. I wasn’t exactly ashamed of myself, either, but I admit to being grateful that the laundry room didn’t have a mirror.

Never before had I punched a woman. Not only was she a woman, but she was also smaller than I was. Not only was she a woman and smaller than I was, but she was also pretty in a cute, elfin way, and I felt as if I’d just beaten up Tinker Bell. Yes, I know, Tink was a fairy, not an elf, but I can’t help how I felt.

I took solace in the belief that she knew the darkest secrets of Roseland and therefore must be a bad girl. She couldn’t work here and be unaware of the grim collection of dead women in the mausoleum subcellar, which was easily accessible from the basement of the main house.

Worse, she seemed to be in love with Noah Wolflaw or at least admiring of him. What kind of person, laundress or not, could have tender feelings for a torturer and murderer of women?

I opened her mouth to be sure she hadn’t severely bitten her tongue when I delivered the uppercut, but there wasn’t any blood in there. She was going to have nasty bruising and a mean headache. I felt sorry about that, although probably not as sorry as I should have been.

In one corner of the laundry room was a seamstress station. I found a pair of scissors in a drawer.

Fishing among the clothes in one of the washing machines, which as yet contained no water, I found some garments — none of them unmentionables — that I could cut and rip to use as binding material.

Working quickly, worried that she would regain consciousness and berate me in a most unpleasant fashion, I securely tied her wrists in front of her and then bound her ankles. I connected those bindings with a hobble, which would prevent her from getting to her feet.

After opening the door and scoping the hallway, I cradled the maid in my arms and hurried with her to the furnace room next door. She was slender but she weighed substantially more than Tinker Bell.

I put her down in a corner, where she could not be seen from the door because of an intervening boiler as big as a space-shuttle booster rocket. She began to mutter like a sleeper in the midst of a disturbing dream as I hurried out of the room.

Once more in the laundry, I put away the scissors. Snatched up a few lengths of cut fabric that I still needed. Threw the mutilated garments in the trash. Retrieved the pillowcase sack with hacksaw.