answer is, a face. Nothing
“What about the innocence?” Marciano asked. “She had that too.”
“Yes, it’s a given. But innocence isn’t what drives our pair of Ghosts to abduct these particular girls. The face does. If a girl doesn’t have the face, all the innocence in the world won’t interest the Ghosts in her.” He paused, frowning.
“Go on, Carmine,” Silvestri prompted.
“The Ghosts – or maybe one Ghost – knew someone with the face. Someone they hate more than the rest of humanity put together.”
He dropped his head in his hands, clutched at his hair. “One of them, or both of them? The dominant one, for sure, whereas the submissive one might just be along for the ride on one fantastic roller-coaster – he’s the servant, he hates whomever the dominant one hates. When you said to me that the Ghosts aren’t interested in breasts, Patsy, you filled in another chunk of sky. The flat chest, the plucked pubes. They should suggest that the owner of the face was pre-pubescent, and yet – if so, why don’t they abduct pre-pubescent girls? They don’t lack the balls or the brains to do it. So is the owner of the face someone that at least one of the Ghosts knew from childhood to young womanhood? Hated more as woman than as child? That’s the riddle I have no answer for.”
Silvestri spat out his cigar in excitement. “But they have gone further with the child aspect on this second dozen, Carmine. A little girl’s party dress.”
“If we knew who owned the face, we’d know who the Ghosts are. I spent the whole drive back from White Plains mentally searching through every Hugger’s house looking for that face on someone’s walls, but it isn’t on any Hugger’s walls.”
“You still believe it’s the Hug?” Marciano asked.
“One of the Ghosts is definitely a Hugger. The other one is not. He’s the half who does the staking out, maybe some of the abductions unaided. It has always had to be a Hugger, Danny. Yes, you can argue that bodies might have been put in any of the medical school dead animal refrigerators, but where else than the Hug is it possible to get two to ten bulky bags from a vehicle to the refrigerator unobserved? The fewer in one trip, the more trips. People come and go in the parking lots twenty-four hours a day, whereas the Hug’s parking lot is key-card gated and utterly deserted at, say, five in the morning. I noticed that there’s a big shopping cart chained to the Hug’s back wall to help a researcher take his books and papers inside. I am
“Simple and easy is better,” said Silvestri. “The Hug it is.”
“You’d best hope it isn’t Desdemona, Carmine,” said Patrick.
“Oh, I’m positive it isn’t Desdemona.”
“Ah!” Patrick cried, tensing. “You suspect someone!”
Carmine drew in a deep breath. “I don’t suspect anyone, and that’s my worst worry. I
“Talk to Eliza Smith,” said Desdemona, her head on Carmine’s shoulder; he had moved her into his apartment the day after her visitor. “I know you don’t really tell me anything significant, but I am convinced that you believe the Ghost is a Hugger. Eliza has been a part of the Hug since its inception, and while she has never stuck her nose into what she shouldn’t, she does know an awful lot other people don’t. The Prof talks to her sometimes, such as when he’s in hot water over the staff – Tamara is quite a strain, Walt Polonowski has his moments, and so does Kurt Schiller. Eliza took a psych major at Smith and went on to take a Ph.D. in psych from Chubb. I’m not a fan of psychologists, but the Prof has a lot of respect for Eliza’s opinions. Go and talk to her.”
“Does the Prof ever need to talk about you to Eliza?”
“Certainly not! To some extent I travel on an outer orbit that’s out of step with all the other orbits – a bit like four-five music. I’m seen as an accountant, not as a scientist, and that makes me of no importance to the Prof.” She snuggled. “I’m serious, Carmine. Talk to Eliza Smith. You know perfectly well that it’s talk will solve this case.”
Chapter 24
The aftermath of the thaw kept Carmine too busy to see Mrs. Eliza Smith until almost a week later than Desdemona’s urging him to. Besides, he couldn’t see for the life of him what Mrs. Smith might be able to bring to his investigation. Especially now that the word was out that the Prof would not be returning to the Hug.
Temperatures soared and the wind decided to die; from a freeze it turned into ideal demonstration weather, cool enough for warm clothes but not unpleasant. The icy lid on statewide racial unrest melted; violence broke out everywhere.
In Holloman, Mohammed el Nesr sternly forbade rioting, as it was no part of his plans at this stage in his genesis to court arrest and search warrants. Alone among the discontented clots of black people raising hell, the Black Brigade and its leaders were sitting on a formidable arsenal of weapons rather than whatever firearms could be looted from gun shops or private houses. And now was not the time to reveal the presence of that arsenal. Despite which, Mohammed demonstrated relentlessly. If he had hoped for bigger crowds, the numbers who congregated were sufficiently large to put shouting, fist-waving groups outside City Hall, the County Services building, Chubb Administration, the railroad station, the bus station, M.M.’s official residence, and, of course, the Hug. All the placards dwelt upon the Connecticut Monster’s whiteness, inviolability and racially selective murder victims.
“After all,” said Wesley/Ali eagerly to Mohammed, “what we want is to highlight racial
Mohammed el Nesr looked like the eagle he was named for, a magnificently proud, hawk-nosed man of imposing height and build, his cropped hair hidden beneath a hat he had designed himself, with some of the look of a turban, yet flatter on top. At first he had worn a beard, then decided that a beard obscured too much of a face no camera could make seem bestial, or cruel, or ugly. His leather Black Brigade jacket’s white fist was embroidered rather than stamped, he wore it on top of combat fatigues, and he moved like the ex-military man he was. As Peter Scheinberg, he had risen to the rank of full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, so he was indeed an eagle. An eagle with two law degrees.
Inside their lining of mattresses his headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street were stuffed with books, for he read insatiably on the law, politics and history, studied his Koran fervently, and knew himself a leader of men. Yet he was still groping for the right way to accomplish his revolution; industrial cities might enjoy big black majorities, but Whitey owned the entire nation, which by and large wasn’t hugely urban. His first inspiration had been to recruit Black Brigaders among the armed services’ plethora of black men, only to find that very few black soldiers, no matter how they privately felt about Whitey, were inclined to enlist. So upon discharge – an honorable one – he had migrated to Holloman, thinking that a small city was the best place to start wooing the restless ghetto masses. That the stone he threw into the Holloman pond would spread its ripples ever outward to embrace other and far bigger places. A superlative orator, he did get invitations to speak at rallies in New York City, Chicago, L.A. But the local leaders in each place were jealous of their sway, didn’t regard Mohammed el Nesr as important. At fifty-two years of age, he knew that he lacked the money and the nationwide organization to weld his people as they needed to be welded. As was equally true for other autocrats, the people were pointing out to him that they refused to be led whither he would take them. Infinitely more wanted to follow Martin Luther King, a pacifist and a Christian.
Now here was this skinny little sansculotte from Louisiana giving him advice – how had he let that happen?
“I’ve been thinking too,” Wesley/Ali burbled on, “about what you said a couple of months ago – do you
