“You’re both there?”
“I’m here,” Schultz said serenely.
“Al?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I dumped Willick’s walkie-talkie into the John. Write it off as a loss, but don’t charge him with it.” Willick sat upright on the bed, looking ridiculously grateful.
“That it?” Hammond asked.
“No,” I said. “Your thread to the Incinerator, to use Dr. Schultz’s memorable phrase, is hanging by a thread. You do this to me once more, and you’ve lost me. I’m in the Des Moines Holiday Inn, Al.”
“He’ll follow you,” Hammond said.
“Interesting time to bring that up,” I said.
“Simeon,” Al said.
“Your cars, your walkers,” I said, cutting him off. “They’ve done two circles?”
“Like you said.”
“Tell them to do another two. Then phone.” I hung up.
Willick was watching me as though he expected me to sprout razors from the ends of my fingers and go for his fat throat.
“Alone at last,” I said to him, settling back onto my bed. Willick didn’t look reassured. He just mopped at his walkie-talkie.
When I finally left, about twenty minutes later, it took me more than three hours to get home. I’d refused to speak to either Hammond or Dr. Schultz. I got partway up the coast and then turned around and headed back to Santa Monica, twice. I bought a pair of running shoes I didn’t need, watching the street so closely that I got the wrong size. I took every switchback and cul-de-sac I could find. It was after eleven when, reassured at last, I pulled into the turnaround at the foot of my driveway and climbed out of Alice.
There was a full moon. It was bright enough to show me that the flag on my mailbox was upright.
There was a sprig of some kind of plant in the mailbox. It smelled sweet. I don’t know anything much about plants, but it smelled a familiar kind of sweet. I tossed the sprig onto Alice’s front seat and trudged up the driveway to the house. Halfway up, wearing my too-large new shoes, I stumbled over the tripwire that I’d set up myself. I got a nice mouthful of loose dirt.
I had a rotten night, full of dreams that were all fire.
With the burn hospital receding into the rearview mirror, I headed over the Sepulveda Pass toward Bel Air. The only times I felt I could drive safely without one eye epoxied to the rearview mirror was when I went to the Bel Air Hotel to talk to Annabelle Winston. After all, as far as the Incinerator was concerned, that was something I was supposed to be doing. I almost wanted him to be watching.
The meeting was the kind that you have just to have a meeting. Its highlight came when I realized that Bobby Grant now had two earrings. In the same ear.
“Maybe he’s given up on you,” Bobby Grant said for the second or third time. He’d been agitating to hold his million-dollar press conference. He looked clean enough to wrap around a wound.
“Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said, smoking the same kind of cigarette that she’d forbidden Dr. Schultz. She was seated at the table, wearing a russet silk suit and a pair of jade earrings, moving some papers around. She’d had two more phones put into the room. They squatted at the corners of the desk. “Use your head. He hasn’t done anything. He’s not activated, as that little cockroach of a doctor might say.”
“Activated,” Bobby Grant pouted. “You sound like an acting teacher I had once, except that he’d have said ‘motivated.’ ”
“I knew you’d been an actor,” I said.
“You did?” Bobby asked in his deepest tenor. “How?”
“Just the way you carry yourself,” I said. Grant gave me a suspicious look.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked sarcastically. “Just sit here and wait for him to set fire to someone?”
“Yes,” I said, sitting down. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. I’ll keep doing what he expects me to do and trying to avoid what the cops want me to do, and maybe he’ll communicate with me. If he doesn’t, we wait until he burns someone. Then, if he doesn’t contact me, you can hold your press conference.”
Bobby gave the suggestion 25 percent of his lower lip. It made him look like a fountain. “Maybe we could just do a release,” he said. “Something about progress. Picture of the two of you.”
“No,” Annabelle Winston said without looking up from her papers. Her father had been flown home for his funeral, and she’d accompanied the body, been photographed in a veil at the cemetery, chaired an emergency stockholders’ meeting, and flown back to Los Angeles, and she looked as if it had been a week since she’d walked around the block. In her spare time, she’d been running the business.
“What’s this?” I asked her, holding up the sprig that I’d found in my mailbox the night before.
Annabelle turned the page she’d been reading facedown before she reached up and took the small piece of greenery, which was in mid-wilt. She sniffed it, then shrugged her disinterest. “It’s some kind of herb.”
“What is this?” Bobby Grant asked the heavens. “A segment of The French Chef?”
“Shut up, Bobby,” Annabelle Winston said absently. She rubbed the leaves between her fingers, bruising but not crushing them, and then moved her fingers back and forth beneath her nose. “Fennel,” she said. “So?”
“So maybe nothing,” I said, retrieving the sprig.
Annabelle Winston inhaled the fragrance on her fingers again and then wiped them on her skirt. The woman was hell on expensive clothes. “Have you talked to anyone at your college yet?” Annabelle Winston said.
“In twenty minutes,” I said. “Not that I expect anything.”
“Please,” Dr. Nathan Blinkins said, rolling his eyes around the room as though he were looking for his headache. “Fire? There’s not a religion in the world that doesn’t involve fire in one way or another.”
Dr. Blinkins was a professionally slim man with too much hair in some places and not enough elsewhere. He grew his silvery sideburns long and curly and combed them back to cover his ears, perhaps hoping to strike an average with the expanse of gleaming dome he called his forehead. He affected suede jackets, black turtleneck sweaters, and pre-faded jeans. If asked to describe himself in a single word, he probably would have suggested “imperial.” It was hot in his office, and he wiped his face with a Kleenex, leaving a film of white lint trapped in the postfashionable stubble he was cultivating. Blinkins had been my graduate adviser in comparative religions. Given how profoundly useless the degree had proved to be, I felt he owed me one.
“I’m looking for someone who was here when I was,” I said.
“Well, that’s fine,” Dr. Blinkins said with ponderous irony. “If you want to know about students who specialized in fire religions, I can probably help you narrow it to three or four thousand. As I recall,” he said, settling himself back in his chair, “you were here for quite a while.” He smiled to demonstrate the impossibility of the task. “In fact,” he added, “when you called, I wasn’t sure I recalled the name.”
I gave him the nicest, which is to say the only, smile I could manage. I’d been at UCLA, in fact, longer than he had. “Let’s start with Zoroastrianism,” I said.
“Zoroastrianism,” Dr. Blinkins said comfortably. He probably had a Parsi temple in his backyard. “Who are we looking for?”
“A male. Tall, blond hair. Walked with a limp.” I felt the frailty of the description as I spoke it.
“No blonds,” Dr. Blinkins said. “Zoroastrianism is almost exclusively the purview of Iranians now. Has been for some time.” He spread his hands. He had very clean hands. “Historical interest, you know. In fact, the stock, so to speak, for Zoroastrianism is down just now. Aboriginal religions, that’s the thing. Lots of room for a good paper. Zoroastrianism’s pretty much worked out. Unless you want to do a bibliography, of course. Always room for a first- rate bibliography.”
“And I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” I said. “But I’m looking for a man, not a degree, and the man I’m looking for is familiar with Ahriman and Ahura Mazda.”
“Who isn’t?” Dr. Blinkins said with the very large and very selective blind spot of the scholar.
“Doctor,” I said, just to puncture the envelope of his self-esteem, “this guy is setting fire to people.”
Dr. Blinkins blinked. Then he passed long musician’s fingers over his chin and looked down at them. They had little threads of Kleenex on them. “Holy moly,” he said.
“Excusez-moi” he said, opening a desk drawer. “I’ve heard something about that.” He peered into the
