'You'll have to make it this evening, though,' he went on. 'My vife and I are leaving town tomorrow.'
'I can be there in under an hour.'
He nodded, then looked at me silently, as if thinking. Or looking into my head. Disconcerting. 'And bring your vife. Ve have heard of her.'
I glanced at Tuuli. Where she stood, she'd shown in his screen too, though out of focus. She was grinning. 'Fine,' I said. 'We'll both be there.'
* * *
Sigurdsson's place was modest for Bel Air, but the location was something else, on top of a ridge. Sigurdsson himself answered the door, a tall, rawboned old man who still stood straight.
His eyes settled on Tuuli right away. Men generally find her interesting. She's small, dainty actually, but nicely shaped, with a face that's delicate and pretty. She's been described as elfin. Her hair is tan and so is her skin. All over; it's her natural color. Her eyes are green and tilted. She's Lapp on her mother's side, and Finn on her father's.
I introduced us. Sigurdsson's eyes shifted to me while I spoke, then turned back to Tuuli. It wasn't as if he was an old lecher. It was more like a—like a personnel examination. After four or five seconds he nodded, as if he approved of her.
'Laura vill vant to meet you both v'en ve're done vith business,' he said. 'She is in her office, marking up a shooting script. Yust now she's executive producer for a picture that the director is trying to run up the costs on.'
He led us down a hall to a comfortable room like a small living room, that obviously served as his den. Against one wall, a brick stove had been built that could be used for heat in chilly weather. I'd never seen a brick stove before. It had a steel plate in the top that you could cook on, and looked as if it burned wood. There was also a table painted like a couple I'd seen in old Swede farmhouses back in Ojibwa County, with chairs to match. The couch he motioned us to was high enough and firm enough for comfortable sitting.
'Coffee?' he asked.
We both said yes. He put on a red-laquered percolator with something written on the side in a foreign language, Icelandic I suppose.
'So,' he said, looking me over, 'v'at do you vant from me?'
I told him I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. That the Institute of Noetic Technology, or people inside it, were suspect, and I wanted to know more about it. A woman named Molly Cadigan had suggested I talk to him, had said he might be more up to date than she was. That I'd read a
'Vell,' he said, 'I ain't much more up to date than that. But I'd be surprised if the institute vas up to getting Christman killed. If any individual Noetie vas, it vould be Haller himself.'
'And he's dead,' I said.
'Do you know that?'
That stopped me. 'According to his biography,' I answered, 'he died of the Great Flu in December '99, and was buried in a mass grave near Eau Clair, Wisconsin.' I looked at the circumstances that would have prevailed then. I didn't know how big Eau Claire had been, but big enough to be a well-known name throughout the region—forty or fifty thousand maybe. That mass grave would have been one of many for Eau Claire, each with maybe a hundred or even five hundred bodies. There'd have been no autopsies, no embalmings, little if anything more than an identification by whoever discovered the body or brought it in. Even my home town, Hemlock Harbor, had mass graves, and it only had some four thousand people before the Flu—twenty-eight hundred afterward. They bulldozed a trench, lined the bodies out in it, limed them heavily and covered them up.
I changed tack. 'As a psychic, does it seem to you that Haller's alive?'
'I don't get anything vun vay or another on that.'
'Do you get anything on who's responsible for Christman's disappearance?'
He stood silent for a minute, frowning, then grunted and shook his head. 'Nothing on that either. How long has he been missing?'
I gave him a rundown on what Armand Butzburger had told me. Meanwhile the coffeepot had been perking, and when I'd finished, Sigurdsson got up and poured three mugs. I had mine with honey and cream, the cream out of a little oak-veneer fridge built into his oak bookcase. He didn't have anything to say till he'd served all three of us.
'So he has been missing probably since October. More than six months. Then I vould guess he is dead. But that's only a guess. And considering v'at the church is like, I vould guess that somevun or some group inside it killed him.'
'I don't suppose it would do me much good to interview Lon Thomas?'
Again he grunted. 'From v'at I've heard, he vouldn't give you an interview. And if he did, v'at makes you think he'd tell you the truth?'
'I consider myself pretty observant about things like that. I think I'd know if he was lying.'
'Don't be too sure. I vas never in the church, but I have friends that vere, three or four of them that vere pretty high up. Thomas is sharp—maybe not intelliyent, but sharp—kvick, avare. And he came up through their PR division. The people in public relations there do lying drills till they can say anything to anyvun, straight-faced and vithout blinking.'
My first reaction was, it sounded like a myth, the kind that can grow up about a mysterious organization or secret government agency. But even as I thought it, I realized it was possible, and might well be true of an outfit like the Gnosties. I nodded. 'Who are these three or four people you mentioned? I'd like to talk with them.'
'There vas three of them. Two died in the plagues. The other vun you already talked to: Vinny Sproule.'
