'It broke,' she said.
'Of course it broke. I should have known it would break. Gold wire wheels. Of course it broke.'
'So what are we going to do?'
'We're going to wait for them to come for us,' I said, sitting back down next to her. 'Then we're going to rip them to pieces. What else can we do?'
'That was your plan?' she said. 'The knife?'
'That was the beginning.'
She leaned against me with a long sigh. 'I wish I hadn't asked,' she said.
About two hours later she said, 'There must be a light.'
I'd been dozing in a sort of fitful free-association, and when she spoke I started. 'What?' I said.
'A light,' she repeated. 'People worked in here with the door closed to keep it cold. There was a handle on this side originally. Why wouldn't there be a light switch?'
'Why would there be a bulb?' I asked a little nastily. 'So we can see our breath?'
'How do you know there isn't?'
'Because these people don't work that way. They want us to be in the dark. They didn't bother to give us blankets, did they?'
'Don't be insufferable. Have you got anything better to do with your time than look for the light switch?'
'No,' I admitted.
'Well,' she said, 'if it's here, it must be near the door.'
I let out an exasperated sigh, just to be doing something, and got up. I found the door and ran my hands around its perimeter. Then I put my palms flat against the tile wall and slid them upward along the right side of the door. Then I tried the left. There it was.
'Well, what do you know?' I said, and flipped it up.
Dim, chalky light filled the room. Eleanor, looking beyond me, squinted once and then screamed.
I turned around and screamed myself.
Standing in the corner, looking me straight in the eye, big as life and twice as dead, was Ellis Fauntleroy. He had a sign hung around his neck.
The sign said surprise!
Chapter 29
'Relax,' I said to Eleanor.
'He's dead.'
'That's very reassuring,' she said, chewing on the side of her hand.
I went over to poor old Ellis. His shirt had turned a dreadful brown color and it was full of sharp creases where the blood had stiffened it. His jaw hung slackly, making me think of the scene in Dickens in which Marley's ghost unbinds the wrappings beneath his chin and his jaw drops to his chest. It had convinced Scrooge.
'Who is he?' she said.
'He was one of them,' I said. 'He was on Brooks's side. I guess it was the wrong side.'
'How can he be standing?' She'd gotten the better of her fright, which put her half a move in front of me, and she was determined to be analytical.
'Good question,' I said, making the supreme effort to put my hand on his shoulder. He turned quite easily. 'Meat hook,' I said. 'They stuck it through his jacket.' The entire wall was lined with meat hooks. Fauntleroy dangled there like a parody of the carcasses, the slit pigs and sides of beef, that had hung from them for the delectation of the gourmets upstairs in the dining room of the Borzoi.
I backed away and looked at my watch. After twelve. The Revealing was due to start in less than twenty minutes. And where, I wondered, was Dexter?
'This is a horrible place,' Eleanor observed with an attempt at objectivity.
I looked at dead old Ambrose, or rather Ellis, and suddenly I remembered Nickodell's. 'Holy shit,' I said. 'His fingernails.'
'They don't keep growing,' Eleanor said. 'That's a myth.'
'This was a man who was crazy for clean fingernails.' I started to rifle his pockets.
'Yeah, and look where it got him.'
'Swiss precision,' I said. 'It's got to be here. Why would you take a dead man's knife? Bingo.' It hung, red and heavy and shiny, from my fingers. 'Nine million blades,' I said. 'More blades than an army of ninjas. Even a screwdriver. It's got everything we need except a bazooka.'
'Let's go, then. He gives me the creeps.'
'He wasn't much better when he was alive,' I said. 'Let's give it ten minutes. You sit there and read your palms or something and I'll make sure I've got this door figured out.'
'The hell with that,' she said. 'I'm going to do some breathing. We both need to be calm and centered.' She closed her eyes, folded her hands in her lap, and breathed rhythmically.
'Anyone in the world, transported magically through time and space into the center of this refrigerator,' I said, fooling with the cylinders, 'would know immediately that he was in Los Angeles. I should be forcing this lock with a crystal. Then we could make a slow, slushy escape while New Age music shimmers on the soundtrack.' Eleanor just breathed.
The screwdriver was the thing that did it. It was short, so there wasn't much leverage, but it was very thick. I knew in a minute and a half that I'd be able to force the lock. Leaving the screwdriver wedged in the cylinders, I sat down next to Eleanor and breathed for eight minutes.
I tapped her wrist. She was up and ready instantly, her eyes clear. Feeling intent and slightly light-headed, I went to the door and worked the knife back and forth.
'Turn off the light,' I said. I was using both hands.
She reached past my shoulder and snapped it off, and I pushed the cylinder all the way to the right and put my shoulder to the door. It opened slowly, and the two of us stumbled out into the kitchen.
'Oh, my God,' Eleanor said, paling. 'What in the world could that be?'
'Hold your breath for a minute,' I said. 'It's called Eau de Fluffy, and it's on our side. That means Dexter's here.' I pulled out the two handkerchiefs and poured the after-shave over them. I gave one to Eleanor, who promptly clamped it over her nose and mouth, and I breathed through the other. The smell of dead animal was so intense that it cut through the cheap scent. Dexter must have dumped half of the contents of the truck into the intake for the air conditioning.
We moved quickly across the kitchen and out into the corridor. I paused for a moment to check my orientation and then headed for the air-conditioning unit, my first landmark. Two or three people passed us, people who had been basemented apparently, but no one gave us a second glance; they had their own problems. Each of them had something wadded up and clutched over his face. We looked just like everybody else.
The big air-conditioning unit was pumping its evil-smelling lungs out. It was set at medium. I unscrewed the face plate of the control panel with the screwdriver on the Swiss Army knife and then turned the selector to high. Then I slipped the flimsiest of the blades under the rotor switch and angled it so it touched all the contacts, forging a permanent connection between the selector and the high contact. I snapped the blade off and left it there and then replaced the face plate. Short of crawling under it and disconnecting it, that thing was going to be murder to turn off.
'Someone's coming,' Eleanor said.
Another person fled down the hallway, coming from the direction we'd come in, and made a beeline for the TV studio. I recognized Listener Simpson, she of the Nordic blue eyes, pinching her nose closed and walking very fast. I wondered whether she'd been basemented, and if not, what she was doing down there. I debated backtracking her to see what I'd missed, and then looked at my watch again.
It was time for the Revealing.
We navigated the corridors, me checking my mental map at every turn and Eleanor holding her handkerchief screwed up to her face. We moved deliberately; now was not the time to get lost. Another person blundered past
