'I was in the limo after a show,' Clive said with uncommon nasal resonance. His adenoids must have been bigger than Univac. 'You know, everybody thinks that rock stars must feel great after a show, but for me that was always the lowest time. It was like my whole life was over, like I didn't have any more reason for being alive. The better the show was, the lower I felt. You know what I mean?'
'Of course,' Mary Claire said, rapt. There was really something very unattractive in the looseness of her mouth. 'With a triumph in the past, what can the present hold?'
'Yeah,' Clive said. 'That's it. I was low. So I told the driver to turn on the radio.'
'This was in New York,' Mary Claire said, 'so that meant you were listening to our affiliate there, WHOP-FM. Good gain, WHOP.' She pronounced it 'W-HOPE' rather than 'WHOP' She clasped her hands over her head in praise of WHOP.
'I guess so,' Clive said a bit impatiently. He was a lot more interested in himself than he was in the good folks at WHOP. 'And I heard this little angel's voice.'
'Our little Angel,' Mary Claire said. She stroked her daughter's hair, and Angel pulled away slightly. Her eyes wandered away beyond the cameras. I found myself wondering again about the two little girls who had Spoken before her. Had they gotten bored? Had they suddenly become problems?
Then I heard voices in the hall, a man and a woman.
I stood up and waited. The voices became louder, and I opted for discretion and went quickly into the bathroom. Leaving the door open, I stepped into the bathtub and drew the shower curtain.
The man and the woman came into the other room.
'… should be closed,' the man said.
'He probably went over to the studio to watch the broadcast,' the woman said. 'You know how the new ones are.'
'That doesn't make it right. Put him down for discipline. Doors are supposed to be closed when the rooms aren't in use.'
'He just wanted to see Angel in person.'
'Well, it'll be a while before he sees her again,' the man said. 'Basement him.'
The man's voice grew nearer.
'You can't basement him,' the woman said. 'He hasn't been here long enough. You'll lose him.'
'Then we lose him,' the man said. He was at the bathroom door. 'We can handle him if he gets smart. There's no room for carelessness.' He flicked on the bathroom light.
On the TV, Clive droned on. I bent my knees into a half-crouch and brought my hands up, ready to go for the eyes if the man opened the curtain.
'Let's go,' the woman said. 'I want to see the show.'
'See it on tape. We've got the rest of the floor to check.'
'Only because you were late,' the woman said. 'We should be done by now. Sometimes I wonder about you. Sometimes I wonder why you're in the Church.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'None of it seems to mean anything to you. Not even Angel.'
'Don't be silly,' he said, but there was an edge of wariness in his tone. 'Of course she means something to me.'
'Well, it doesn't seem like she does,' the woman said calmly.
'What do I have to do, drop to my knees?'
'Then let's go watch her. Come on, it's the only show of the day.'
The man drew his breath in and let it out. Then he snapped off the light. 'Okay,' he said, 'but if they ask you, we checked the whole floor, right?'
'Sure, sure,' she said. 'Come on.' After a moment the outer door closed behind them.
I stayed in the bathtub for a full three minutes, watching the second hand on my wristwatch. Only when the third minute was up did I step out and cross the room. I shut the door silently behind me and headed for the elevator.
There was no one in sight. It seemed likely that most of the faithful were glued to the tube, watching the testimonies of the rich and famous. Even the lad at the desk had deserted his post, although the rock star could be seen on the screen of a set hung above the elevators.
I reached the elevator and pushed the Down button before I saw the fire stairs. There they were, right where they were supposed to be, with the customary warning that they, rather than the elevator, were to be used in case of fire.
Everything had been labeled but the basement. The man and woman had used the word 'basement' as a verb and had argued about it. The elevator wouldn't take you to the basement if you didn't have a key. On the whole, it seemed to me, I rather wanted to have a look at the basement.
So I took the stairs.
They were grimy, even for the Borzoi, and ill-lit. More important, though, they didn't stop at the lobby. There was a rickety waist-high grate closing them off, the kind of thing people in two-story houses buy when they have a baby, with a sign across it that said no access. I accessed by stepping over it and continued down.
The stairs ended in a heavy metal fire door. I turned the knob slowly and inched it open just far enough to peek through. Nothing that I could see. I opened it quickly and stepped through.
The smell of damp was stronger down here than it had been in the lobby: the place smelled like it hadn't been dry in years. A forty-watt economy bulb hung from a wire above my head. The wire, an electrician's nightmare, was actually stripped bare in places. The Church obviously saved the high-wattage light bulbs for Revealings.
I was at the end of a concrete-walled corridor. By the time I'd realized I was in a cul-de-sac, the door had closed behind me with a soft, steely sound. Experimentally I tried the knob. From this side, the door was locked. I was going to need another exit.
Something dripped, and I looked down. The floor was covered evenly with a quarter of an inch of black water. Another drop plopped into it, sending out dull concentric ripples that pushed bits of suspect debris before them. Water had seeped through, or condensed on, the ceiling, and it dripped more or less continuously into the fluid on the floor. This was not the kind of place tourists bought maps to find.
Well, I couldn't just stand there. Sooner or later someone was going to come through the door behind me or round the corner at the other end to check out my little hallway, and I didn't think they'd be happy to see me. If they didn't want to see me, I certainly didn't want to see them.
So I sloshed through the water toward the open end of the corridor. Something entirely too large for my liking scuttled past me in the other direction: a rat. It was wet and black and sleek and it looked mean enough to eat snakes. I accelerated away from it and found myself standing in a wider corridor that crossed mine like the longer stroke of a T. My heart was going like a bass drum.
Neither left nor right was particularly appealing, but I had to go one way or the other, and the right seemed to be more brightly lighted. Figuring that the people were likely to be where the light was, I headed left.
I'd covered more than twenty yards before I found a door. It opened into a small service closet, even wetter and darker than the hallway, with nothing in it but a couple of buckets and some old rags. I closed it and went on, feeling like Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris. At least he'd known that his enemies were behind him. I had no idea where mine were.
A second cul-de-sac, this one jutting off to the left, led to an enormous and apparently new air-conditioning system, probably installed right where the old gravity furnace had been. It roared along at full output, making me doubt my senses. Who could want air conditioning on a day like this one, fifty-five degrees and raining? And then I remembered the television studio and all those bright lights. Couldn't have beads of sweat on little Angel's upper lip.
Big ducts, almost three feet square, branched off from the business end of the air conditioner like the legs of a spider, except that most of them seemed to lead in one direction: toward what would have been the left side of the hotel if I'd been outside and facing it from the street, which I very much wished I were.
A square opening had been cut into one of the ducts with a blowtorch, and then the piece of metal had been removed, hinged, and replaced, perhaps for maintenance access. I thought about the man who would willingly crawl through those ducts in this rat's nest and asked myself whether even Dexter Smif would do it. Probably not the
