49

The executive jet had been outfitted with Mojave-yellow leather seats and sage-gray seatbelts. The impression the color scheme gave was that this aircraft had grown out of an outcropping in New Mexico, from the side of sandstone mesa, a miracle of geology equipped with landing gear.

Anna kept looking over at me, looking up from the contents of yet another red plastic folder. When our eyes met she always gave me a DeVere-quality smile. She returned to her work, whisking various words and figures with yellow highlighter.

She looked over at me so often I began to wonder if she thought I would vanish, or turn into some other sort of creature altogether. And what was that hint in her eyes? Something about me pleased her.

At night the desert is pure abyss. A human settlement is a sharp concentration of pinpricks. Freeways cast a mange of light, and cars pushed light ahead, bulldozing the dark.

The jet glided onto the runway at Palm Springs. There was the flavor of desert night in the air, and a flavor of lawns, too, of sprinklers raining over bermuda hybrid.

A limousine met us, yet another armored vehicle intended for both comfort, easy ostentation, and the sort of shaded glass window that could, with any luck, stop a bullet. A white-and-blue Palm Springs squad car slipped into the traffic behind us.

“The police take care of Renman,” said Anna.

“Good friends of his,” I said.

“He makes them nervous.”

The truth of this made me smile. Renman’s name was linked with assassinations and vanished labor union leaders. The story was that what DeVere had known Renman had taught him, if only by example. Renman bought television stations, closed movie studios, and dictated what VCR technology would sit on shelves in homes around the world.

My family viewed Palm Springs as a place for the newly moneyed, the refuge of entertainers and their politician cronies. I had flown down occasionally for tennis, and once or twice a wedding or party had called me here. But it had been a few years since I had visited these streets of tall palms and walled gardens.

When we stepped from the car, I looked up and caught the faint pallor of starlit snow high up in the San Jacinto peaks. There was a glimpse, in the artfully lit garden, of pink raked sand and the spikes of an ocotillo cactus. Then we were within the walls, and in a separate world.

The villa was a masterpiece of security. Cameras tracked us. Polite, tailored men greeted both of us, opening doors for us, and then, noiselessly closing them, and, I sensed, locking them behind us.

The dry air was chilly. Fish, large, scarlet creatures, slowly worked their way through an immense pond, a design I recognized: one of my Japanese friends, a man well known for his ponds of philosophical fish and tastefully arranged, nearly unnaturally pristine, reeds and rushes. The pond was lit from within, and there was a musical trickle of water.

“I keep forgetting how cold it can be here,” said Anna.

She was nervous. I was surprised, before I reminded myself that she had no idea what Renman had in mind.

“This is all going to be free entertainment for you, isn’t it?” I said.

“I have feelings,” she responded. “Don’t you?”

Perhaps they would try to drown me among the fish. Perhaps they would slit my intestines, in the style of Japanese assassins, and let me bleed to death among the dwarf apple trees. I had the feeling that if there would be an attempt on my life it would be something classical, a beheading with a ceremonial sword.

He was making us wait.

And watching us? I did not think so. Renman would have his Swiss Guard tracking us from distant television screens. The man himself was bathing, or reading, not giving us a thought.

“He’s coming,” said Anna.

There was at that moment a sound—a click, a door opening.

In the dark, far across the Japanese garden, there was a whisper. There was a movement. There was a silhouette in a doorway.

I had seen him last at my father’s funeral. He had put on weight. He was stocky, short, and wore some sort of flowing gown. His figure was composed not of color but darkness, his head and shoulders blocking the light.

Even now the man was not watching us, I sensed. He was simply taking the air, ignoring us, perhaps barely aware that we were here. But he must have had enough sense of theater to know that his entrance was perfect.

My father had always spoken of Renman as a “field marshall of the real world.” The man was a legend, and like many legends he did not have to appear in public to be a public figure. Even more than DeVere, Renman was a man who had created the age we inhabited. If Petrarch had embodied his age, then Renman embodied ours, and the legends of his influence over both the underworld and politics were the stuff of what journalists called the “subtext of our culture.”

When he stepped from the doorway he was invisible. Then, not so invisible. He drifted toward us, stopping to finger the ornamental oranges, pausing to watch the pool and the scarlet and orange-splashed behemoths drowsing there.

He looked older than I had expected. White haired, with white eyebrows, he looked smaller than I had recalled, too, and more weary. We shook hands.

He turned his back to us and watched the pool for awhile. There was a quality about him that was unmistakable: he existed, and the two of us did not.

He shook his head, as though disputing some argument only he could hear. He waved us into chairs, but I preferred to remain standing, as he seemed to. He stepped into one of the beams of light from a hidden lamp. He let me study him, but did not bother looking at me, examining the stunted pine beside the pool.

“You do look like her,” he said.

I made no sound.

“Like your mother,” he said.

Anna sat, arranging herself like someone getting comfortable for a play. I could not keep myself from experiencing an unpleasant thought: That is where she will be sitting when my bowels spill onto the gravel.

“When you were younger the resemblance wasn’t so strong,” he said. “But sometimes that is what maturing is all about: becoming what you already are.”

I don’t know why I sounded so carefree. “Anna thinks I won’t leave here alive.”

He did not look her way. “And what do you think?”

“I sold my soul to get here.”

I could not read his reaction to this words. Perhaps he was assuming that I was speaking metaphorically. He did, however, consider my statement for awhile. “Was that a wise thing to do?” he said.

We both knew he was not joking.

“First of all,” he said at last, “I owe you an apology. I did a bad thing, and I’ll make it up to you.”

I prepared a quick response to this, about to say that I certainly saw no need for an apology, but he flicked my unspoken words aside with a finger.

He did not continue for awhile, regarding me briefly with dark eyes. “I thought you had killed Ty. Now they tell me otherwise.”

“Who?”

“My people.”

The water made its gentle music.

He sighed, as though I had made a remark, but he was responding to thoughts of his own. “The man who attacked you in Anna’s office was named Palmer. Mark Palmer. A well-known man in certain circles. He’s still alive.”

I closed my eyes with relief.

“I am the person who’s done harm. I killed someone recently,” he said.

I didn’t understand.

He went on, “I was rash when I heard about Ty’s death.” He used DeVere’s first name with affection, like the name of a brother. “And Blake. He was like family. He’d fallen on hard times in recent months. But he was on his way back. Ty was going to help him. Ty was like that. Good friend, hard enemy. I’m a man with a certain feeling for people. I had been drinking a little. I said someone ought to teach you a lesson. Some hotheads got the wrong idea. Some baseball bats were used, and harm was done.”

He patted the pockets of his dressing gown, like a smoker who has forgotten his lighter. “I’m responsible. Nona Lyle was a good woman. Fern was an admired man, a good man the way some cops can be. I financed a special on Nona Lyle once. The Japanese loved it. It played there on television with a title like ‘Warrior Children,’ or ‘Little Sunset Heroes.’ Something like that. I used a pound of Kleenex when I saw it. You ever see it? She did good work with those sick kids. I know how you must feel.”

What a fool this man was. I nearly said this aloud. And I nearly said these words: A power greater than yours was responsible for that attack.

I said nothing, however, surprised at something that was only obliquely related to his words. He had spoken Nona’s name, and for an instant I did not know who he was talking about.

I had forgotten her. I had forgotten the woman I loved. And then I reminded myself of that empty gully in me, that still-fresh void.

I told myself this, and yet I was cold, far colder than the chilly evening warranted. I was queasy. The man’s words made no sense.

Renman was quiet, as though speaking used up some power in him. “I’m disgusted with myself,” he said. “You do a bad thing and you can’t undo it. It stays.”

“Why did you ask me here?”

He lifted a shoulder, looking at me with surprise or curiosity. “I’m going to let you in.”

He saw that I did not quite follow him, and added, “As a way of making it up to you. It’s very simple. I feel sorry for you. I do. I feel a very real kind of pity for you.”

“Pity,” I echoed.

“That’s right.”

“You fool,” I said softly, but quite distinctly.

The words were like a slap. Nothing was said in response. Renman did not flinch, or turn away, but I sensed his reaction.

“You have no choice,” I heard myself say. “You are forced to give me what I want.”

Renman surprised me with his calm as he said, “What will happen if I don’t?”

“They’ll destroy you.”

He nodded as though in complete agreement with me. Then his eyes flicked to Anna.

“I told you he was crazy,” she said.

“Did you?” said Renman thoughtfully, sadly.

“He’s great fun to be around,” said Anna with a laugh. Her voice was bright, unkind.

“Go inside,” snapped Renman.

The sky was empty, except for the pinpoint lights of the stars. The stars, and the empty black. My chest was heaving.

He waited for her to leave, enter a sliding door, and vanish into the house.

A fish splashed.

“She knows a lot,” he said. “And she works hard. I’ve never thought knowledge was that important. And work …” He made a silent, thoughtful chuckle. “Anyone can work hard. Work’s not that important.”

I was distracted by the wriggling lights of the fish pond. “What is important?” I asked, my voice rough.

“I know what you want,” said Renman. “I know what kind of emptiness eats at a person who feels that his life doesn’t add up to anything.” He knelt, perhaps to get a better look at the fish.

“I may be more disturbed than you realize.”

“You mean I might be too late?”

I could not tell him how right he was.

He straightened. “You can’t live to punish people. You can’t breathe hate, or eat it. You can despise me because I want to help, and all I can say, Stratton, is that I am not a good man. I’ve done some bad things. But maybe I’ll do something right where you’re concerned. I’m going to try to help you. Call it a gamble.”

My words flowed without any awareness on my part. My tone was one of wonder. “You don’t have any choice. I see how it’s working. Perhaps you sold your soul, too, a long time ago. I’ve won. I have what I want.”

He took my arm, kind, gentle. “I think maybe you came here thinking you would kill me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I know your family.”