There was no place to hide in the Rose Chapel, but the other rooms were worse. Lucas finally decided he could drive a nail through the top panel of one of the double doors, then pull the nail and have a hole large enough to peep through. The manager wouldn't let him use a nail, but did loan him a power drill with a sixteenth-inch bit. When Lucas, standing in the dark behind the doors, pressed his eye to the hole, he could see the entire coffin area.
'Go up there, bend over him,' he told Sloan. Del was leaning against the wall, faintly amused. Sloan stood over the coffin and looked back at the doors. The hole was invisible.
'Put your hand on his head, or over it, or something,' Lucas called from behind the doors. Sloan put his hand over Druze's head. A moment later, the doors opened.
'Can't see your hand,' Lucas said. He looked around the room. 'But I think any other arrangement would look wrong.'
'Yeah, with the alcove like that,' Sloan said, nodding toward the coffin.
Del grinned. 'We could, like, put, you know, a spring with a clown under his eyelids, and when Bekker pulls it open, see, it pops up…'
'I like it,' Sloan said. 'Motherfucker'd have a heart attack…'
'Jesus,' Lucas said, glancing toward the body. 'I think we'll settle for the hole in the door.'
'He's moving,' said the voice on the handset.
Sloan looked at Lucas. 'You cool?'
'I'm cool,' Lucas said.
'So'm I,' Del said. He unconsciously dropped his hand back to his hip, where he kept a small piece clipped to his belt. 'I'm cool, too.'
The receptionist came from Intelligence and spent his nights working undercover. 'No problem,' he said. 'I could win a fuckin' Oscar, the work I do.' There were two squads immediately available, and the surveillance team coming in with Bekker.
'He's here,' the radio burped ten minutes later. 'He's going past.'
Bekker rambled through the neighborhood, looking it over, and made another pass at the front of the funeral home before he stopped.
'He's out of the car, looking at the door,' the radio said.
'Everybody…' Lucas said.
A finger of joy touched his soul. In five minutes…
Bekker wore a trench coat and a crushable hat, with leather driving gloves. The scalpel, a plastic tube protecting the point, was clipped in his shirt pocket. The funeral home door, he thought, looked like the door on a bad ski chalet…
The funeral home was overly warm. An antique mirror, like those collected by Stephanie, surprised him just inside the door. He flinched, jerked his eyes away, but found them drawn back…
Druze was gone. Beauty looked back at him. Beauty looked fine, he thought, but tired. Unusual lines crossed his wide brow, gathered at the corners of his eyes. A different look, he thought, but not unattractive. French, perhaps, a world-weariness… like the actor with the home-rolled cigarette. What was his name? He couldn't concentrate, his own image floating in front of him like a dream. And then a gathering darkness behind his image, and…
He pulled his eyes away. Druze was there, still waiting.
'Buchanan?'
'What?' Bekker jumped. He'd been so engrossed in the mirror that he hadn't heard the funeral home receptionist until the man was virtually on top of him.
'Are you here for Mr. Buchanan?' The receptionist seemed ordinary, a thin man in a conservative coat and flannel slacks, a man with no particular relationship to death, although he worked in the middle of it. No imagination…
'No…' Bekker said, 'ah, Mr. Druze?'
'Oh, yes. That would be the Rose Chapel. Down to your right…' The receptionist pointed like a real estate man giving directions to the third bedroom, the one that was a little too small.
'Thank you.'
The funeral home was quiet, all sounds smothered by plush drapes and heavy carpets. To quiet the weeping, Bekker guessed. As he stepped into the Rose Chapel, he glanced back at the receptionist. The man had turned away and seemed about to go down to the next room, when a phone rang in the entry. The receptionist stopped, picked up the receiver and launched into a conversation. Good. Bekker stepped into the chapel.
Lucas stood out of sight, heard the Intelligence guy ask the question, heard Bekker say, 'No… ah, Mr. Druze?' A moment later the phone rang. Worried that Bekker might arrive and yet develop cold feet, they'd worked out the diversion of the telephone, with Sloan calling from a back room. If Bekker could hear the receptionist talking, he'd be encouraged to act.
The Rose Chapel was small, with fifteen dark wooden chairs facing the coffin. The plaster walls were a pale shade of rose; the woodwork an antique cream. A closed pair of double doors was straight ahead of Bekker, apparently leading to the depths of the funeral home; they were sized to take a coffin on a gurney.
The coffin itself was to Bekker's right, on a dais within a plaster alcove. Roses were molded into the plaster, and individually hand-painted. The dais was covered with a rose-colored drape, a deeper shade than the walls. Bekker could see the side of Druze's head and his heavy shoulders under a dark suit.
Beauty was pushing through now, anxious for the celebration, moving him. He could hear the receptionist talking, faintly, far away, and he moved to the front. His hand went to his pocket, found the scalpel. He pulled the tube off the end and moved next to the coffin.
Druze's head was large, he thought. Not just a pumpkin, but a big pumpkin. His face had been liberally worked with makeup, so the patchwork of skin grafts was barely visible. The nose, of course… not much you could do about that. He frowned. Too bad. Druze actually had been something of a friend. A man you could talk to. But he had to go; Bekker had known that from the beginning. Murder was something you didn't share, except with the dead.
Lucas pressed his eye to the hole in the double doors. He couldn't see Bekker as he came in, couldn't see his beautiful face as he went by. Bekker paused, just for a moment, in front of the coffin, looking down. Lucas could hear the receptionist muttering in the hall, and then, suddenly, Bekker was on Druze, bending over, the hand out of sight, but working over him…
Bekker glanced back over his shoulder, then reached across Druze's face with his left hand and lifted his eyelid. The eye beneath was intact, but dull, dry, a piece of leather, staring sightlessly and unflinchingly at the ceiling. His heart pounding, the pressure in his veins, the murmur of the receptionist's conversation providing him with the necessary security, Bekker plunged the point of the scalpel into Druze's eyeball, and then turned the handle, like a corkscrew. He felt some of the weight leave him, a pressure gone from his shoulders.
Quickly, quickly, his mouth open, panting, he did the second eye, looking over his shoulder, twisting the knife…
And he was free. He felt it, almost as if he were being lifted from the floor. He did a little step, Beauty coming on, and looked back at Druze.
The eyelids were open, wrinkled and pulled up, like fragments of dead leaves. His heart beating hard and with joy, Beauty reached out to smooth them down, round them carefully, the scalpel still in his hand. He stepped back.
'Cut his eyes, Mike?'
The voice broke on him like a bucket of ice water, crashing down, snatching his breath away, each word hurting, a sharp stone: CUT HIS EYES, MIKE?
Bekker whirled, the scalpel still in his right hand.
Davenport was there, leaning in the double doors, wearing a dark leather jacket, a pistol in his hands, pointed not at Bekker but to one side. He looked wired, his eyes wide, his hair dirty, his face unshaven. A thug. Another man came in from the left, and then a third, Stephanie's dope-addict cousin, Del. The receptionist was behind them.
'… 'Cause if you cut his eyes, Mike, we got you for the kids, too. We just dug them up today and the medical examiner says they were done with a knife just like that one, a scalpel. Is that a scalpel, Mike?'
