Once home, Artie checked in with the police. There was nothing new on Mark—no runaways or young victims of violence who fit his description. Connie Lee was working late at KXAM and sounded a little plaintive when she asked Artie if he’d be in for work the following day. Artie assured her that he would; the rest of the conversation was devoted to Connie’s growing belief that the world was going to hell.
Mitch’s answering machine was on; he apparently wasn’t home. For a few minutes Artie’s mind was filled with possible scenarios of what might have happened to Mitch, then he forced himself to stop thinking about them. Things were scary enough without his imagination adding fuel to the flames.
He called Susan but there was no answer. She was at the hospital, he thought, and debated calling her there, then decided against it. He had nothing more he could tell her about Mark.
He slept fitfully and awoke the next morning with a splitting headache. He sat on the edge of his bed for a good five minutes, massaging his temples and trying not to think about what he was going to do that morning. He’d have to call Connie’s voice mail and tell her he was going to be in late; there was no helping it.
He read the paper starting with the comics and ending with the front page, then dialed Mary Robards after nine. She was usually at her law office early—if she answered at home, he’d simply hang up.
Again, an answering machine.
He ate a quick breakfast of orange juice and oatmeal, then pocketed the automatic and drove over to the Potrero Hill section of town. Mary lived on Connecticut Street in a white clapboard house that seemed small from the front but extended back almost the full length of the lot. It was a large enough house for her and Jenny to have separate offices—neither one of them would feel cramped. The only drawback was that there was no garage tucked underneath. The house itself was on a hill that sloped away toward the back and Artie guessed that the first floor was set back into the hill. The floor that fronted on the street was actually the top floor.
Artie parked and watched for a few minutes. There was no movement behind the curtains and there were no cars parked on the street that he recognized as belonging to either Mary or Jenny. He glanced at his watch, then quietly got out of the car. Mary had cats, that much he knew, but she didn’t care for dogs—“Dirty animals, always humping your leg and fouling the sidewalks.” Mary had said the house had been painted that fall and it looked it. Certainly pretty enough from the front, the landscaping carefully groomed. That was Mary’s one hobby that he knew of: gardening.
Artie spent a moment rehearsing a story to tell Mary in case he had miscalculated and she was home, then rang the bell. A minute of panic before he relaxed. Nobody had answered the door. He tried the knob—locked—and guessed there was a dead bolt on the inside. He stood there a moment, shivering in the cold, thinking about Mary. Serious, almost grim—and forgetful. She wouldn’t rely on her memory when it came
to taking along her keys when she left the house. She’d even joked about the time she’d locked herself out.
Artie lifted the mat—nothing—and glanced around the small front porch. The usual leaves that had blown into the corners, plus a half-empty bag of potting soil almost hidden in the shadows. He felt underneath it, found the key, and a moment later was inside the house. Heavy curtains and drapes kept out most of the sun and Artie stood for a moment in the gloom, listening. Nothing.
He took a breath and started exploring. The street floor was laid out like a railroad flat, with all the rooms opening off a long hallway that ran along one side of the house. A large living room in front with windows looking out on the street, then a dining room, and finally the bedroom with a kitchen opposite and a sunporch in back. The bathroom was across from the dining room just after a few steps that led down to a landing. Then more steps from the landing to … what? Probably offices and a family room downstairs, cut into the slope of the hill.
It was a turn-of-the-century atmosphere inside the house. Mary and Jenny had restored the interior, letting the outside of the house blend with the others on the block. Thick, heavy drapes and lacework curtains, dark oak furniture—probably all antiques. Area rugs carpeted the light oak flooring. The walls of the living room were covered with prints of famous paintings, all of them realistic, almost illustrative. Winslow Homer, Sargent, Gainsborough, Wyeth, Alma-Tadema, Eakins, Pyle, and a St. John of a cave girl being threatened by a saber-toothed cat. A lot of it kitsch, all of it romantic realism.
In the dining room, the table had a linen cloth spread over it and was set for two with antique dinnerware, obviously for show. The dining table and the setting went with the framed 1906 copy of the Oakland Tribune, the headlines about the San Francisco earthquake,
that hung among the print gallery on one of the dining room walls. It was a room reserved for small dinner parties, Artie decided—Mary and Jenny probably ate most of their meals in the kitchen.
There was only one bedroom. Against the far wall was a king-sized four-poster with goose down pillows and a comforter that had probably won a prize in a county fair a century before. Large closets and two oak chests of drawers, one for each of them. Artie opened the bathroom door, then quickly closed it. The cat box by the toilet was overdue for changing.
He almost expected to find a woodstove in the kitchen, but when it came to cooking, Mary had the same taste for the modern as Cathy Shea, salted with a few antiques. Heavy cast-iron frying pans hung from wall hooks and an ancient butcher block squatted next to the sink. The surface was concave from usage but Artie guessed that Mary kept it mostly—again—for show.
Show for whom? He didn’t know anybody in the Club who had ever been there with the exception of Lyle, and he had hardly been a guest.
Artie walked quietly to the head of the stairs. There were no windows downstairs and the stairwell was pitch black. He couldn’t find the light switch and fished around in his pocket for his cigarette lighter and flicked it on. He felt his way down the stairs, catching glimpses of more paintings in the faint glow from the lighter. Opening off the stairwell at the bottom were two offices—one somewhat spartan with a large poster of San Francisco on the wall, a plain, uncluttered desk, a single filing cabinet, and a computer table. Jenny’s.
The other office was larger, with a bank of four filing cabinets and several large bookcases filled with law books. Mary’s hideaway from her office downtown. A more ornate desk with two telephones on it, a fax machine, and another computer workstation. And on one corner of the desk, a large color photograph of Jenny,
which must have been taken when they had first met. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman now; she had been drop-dead gorgeous back then.
The room that lay beyond was the one Artie was most interested in. It was a huge recreation room with a conversation pit lined with black leather pillows around the rim. One wall was covered with more paintings, most of them prints of the Impressionists. The only exceptions were some Maxfield Parrish prints in thin black frames—covers from some old magazines. The far end of the room was taken up with an elaborate surround sound system.
The left wall held Mary’s CD collection, one that made Lyle’s seem tiny. Thousands of jewel boxes lined shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling and extended from one end of the room to the other. Artie walked over and waved his lighter along the shelving. There were no instrumentals—all the CDs were voice. Popular, classical, operatic, jazz …
The opposite wall was taken up with bookcases, and Artie guessed they were filled with first editions. Mary probably hadn’t been selective; he suspected she had everybody from Hemingway to Eliot to Ginsberg.
Such little things as art and music and poetry to give her away.
Artie never heard the creaking of the stairs, never heard anybody walking down them. The first he knew he was no longer alone was when the overhead track lights flashed on, blinding him. He dropped the lighter and the gun was in his hand without his even thinking. Then he had sense enough to freeze.
“You’re a clever species,” a voice behind him said. ‘Too clever by half.”
Artie stood still another few seconds, then said, “I’d like to turn around.”
“Please do,” Mary Robards said. “I don’t want to talk to your back all day.” Her voice was heavy, gravelly. She
was dressed in black with a looping strand of pearls. Your stereotypical, old-fashioned matron, the perfect image of the motherly lawyer for the defense. To complete the picture she was holding a huge black cat with a splash of stiff white fur around its muzzle. A tom that Mary must have had for years.
“Congratulations, Artie—you’ve discovered the real me.” She nodded toward the conversation pit. “We’ll be more comfortable over there if you want to talk, and I assume you do.” She turned her back on him and walked over to the pit. “And put away the cannon; you’re the only one who’s armed.”
Artie sat gingerly on one of the leather cushions, hunching forward with his elbows on his knees. He was face-to-face with the enemy—and the enemy turned out to be a plump, middle-aged woman whom he considered his friend and whom he had once slept with when they both were younger. An enemy who wore reading glasses and held a basketful of knitting in her lap,.her cat curled up next to her.
“You were waiting for me?”
“You paid a visit to Lyle last night; I guessed I would be next on your list.”
Artie felt the first prickle of sweat.
“You’re good—I never knew I was being followed.”
She shook her head and pulled out a row of stitches, frowning. “Nothing so time-consuming. Lyle called Jenny after you left; they’re still friends, he’s closer to her than other members of the Club. I’ll give him one thing—he’s a game loser once he knows he’s really lost.”
To Artie, it sounded like a confirmation of what he’d suspected.
“Lyle’s one of you?”
“Perhaps. But that’s for you to find out, Artie. For your own protection, I’d certainly try to find out soon if I were you.”
Artie could guess but asked anyway. “Why so important?”
She took a sip from a water glass on the coffee table in front of her. Vodka, Artie thought, or more likely gin. She’d been a drinker all her life but he’d never suspected she hit the bottle that early in the day; she was probably smart enough to limit herself to a glass in the morning and a martini in the evening. Who was it who said that as you grew older you didn’t give up your vices, they gave you up?
“He could be a Hound, you know.”
“Hound?” Artie felt lost.
“One of our soldiers, if you like. Or think of the children’s game, Hare-and-Hounds, with the hounds out to catch the hare. Or the hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Better yet, the poem by Thompson. ‘I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years … .’ It’s one of my favorites—‘The Hound of Heaven’—but I think ‘Hound from Hell’ is more appropriate in this case.” She smiled slightly. “I never knew, Artie—Do you like poetry? Your species has a way with words, I’ll grant that.” And then, deadly serious: “You’re the hare, Artie. I think you’ve already met the Hound.”
It was hard for Artie to think of her as one of the Old People. His mind kept slipping back to when he’d first met her. She’d had a peasant’s stocky body and there had been occasions when he’d delighted in it. But there had also been a remoteness about her that he never understood until she and Jenny became a couple. He hadn’t accepted that until much later.
“You’re toying with me, aren’t you, Mary?”
“Of course. I’m hardly going to point the finger at anybody; you wouldn’t respect me if I did.” Her voice was sarcastic.
“Did Lyle murder Larry Shea?”
She shrugged. Artie had always thought Mary and Larry Shea had been close friends. It didn’t seem to
matter to her now and it was obvious it never had.
“I don’t know who our Hounds are, Artie. What we don’t know, we can’t tell. If I suspected, I would never ask and they would never say. Some Hound, maybe Lyie—if he is one. For all I know, he’s Homo sap, just like you.”
She chucked her cat under the chin one more time, then set it on the floor. It ran for the shadows in a far corner of the room and disappeared.
The house was made for entertaining, but nobody Artie knew had ever been there—or had admitted to it. She obviously had a different circle of friends from those in the Club, friends with whom she could let her hair down, friends with whom she could dispense with the act. Friends just like her.
“Who are you people, Mary?”
She didn’t look at him but concentrated on her knitting, holding up a length of scarf that seemed a bizarre collection of colors—she had no sense of the artistic at all, Artie thought. But she wasn’t fat, she didn’t have a dowager’s hump, and when she held up the scarf the flesh didn’t hang in loose folds from her upper arms. Like Lyle, she was probably in damned good shape but kept it hidden under flowing dresses.
“Come on, Artie, you already know—we’re the meek who were supposed to inherit the earth. Until your species came along. And that’s not quite accurate, either. Did you know we managed to coexist for thousands of years?” She grimaced. “Then thirty-five thousand years ago nature gave you too many talents all at once. It was like giving an ape an arsenal of assault rifles and teaching him how to use them. Maybe it was a mutation, maybe it was a gene for violence—that’s something your scientists ought to look into. But the problem isn’t who we are, the problem is who you are.” She shook her head in mock dismay. “You always want to know how other species differ from you, not how you
might differ from them, unless all the differences are on the plus side.”
“One of you killed Dr. Hall,” Artie accused.
She took another sip from the glass and studied him, her eyes a crystalline blue in a remarkably unlined face.
“All I know about it is what I read in the papers, Artie. You apparently went to Hall and showed him Shea’s research. Not very kind of you in the long run. You’re as responsible for what happened to him as the Hound, whoever he is.”
“And Pascheike?”
“Same thing.”
She seemed friendly enough on the surface, but beneath it Mary struck him as being as alien as somebody from another planet. Artie kept trying to think of common ground, of points of rapport. She was willing to talk but he didn’t know where to start asking questions. In ’Nam he’d sat in on interrogations with Mitch where the languages differed, but here it was the mind-set itself—and something more. Different species, he thought uneasily. How the hell would they talk to each other?
“You said that we’re different from you.”
She looked disapproving.
“Oh, you’re different all right, in a way you don’t suspect. Most of your anthropologists know it but they’ll never tell you. You’re a fluke of nature, a flawed species, Artie. Only a part of you is rational. The other part is mad as a hatter—as a species, you’re committable.”
Artie felt uncomfortable.
“That’s a pretty harsh judgment.”
“Is it? For starters, you breed uncontrollably, you war constantly, and you’ve made the world into a pigpen. Worst of all, you take no responsibility—you excuse yourselves by saying that somehow it’s all part of God’s grand design. I’ve got news for you, Artie. God sometimes
makes mistakes, and you’re one of them.” Artie remembered balancing on the railing of his balcony and the subtle urgings that had bubbled up in his head. He hadn’t known what to call it then; he didn’t now.
“You can read minds?”
She cocked her head, frowning.
“Don’t be silly—nobody can read minds. We can’t press a button on your mental computer and watch the words scroll up on a screen. We can see images in each other’s minds and we can project them if you’re receptive, that’s all. It’s like the Rhine experiments: The subjects weren’t asked to identify words, they were asked to identify images. Many of your own children can do it when they’re two years old. They mostly lose the ability as they grow older.” She pointed to her glass. “You want something to drink?”
He might think about getting roaring drunk later on. But if Mitch was right, he knew he could never afford to lose control of his mind again.
“I’m fine. I didn’t know that about kids.”
“You should. When you’re growing up, what’s the one ability you always wished you had? To know what somebody else is thinking, right? When you’re a teenager, it’s ‘will she or won’t she’ and how much you’d give if only you knew. To be able to glimpse an image of you and her together, to know that that’s what she’s thinking about. Wouldn’t you have liked to be able to do that, Artie? You lose that ability early, but you never get over wishing you had it back.”
“That must have given you a big advantage over your enemies.”
For a fleeting moment she looked sad. “We could see pictures in other people’s minds. It was useful on the hunt. And racial memories were our history books. A simple talent, but you more than made up for your lack of it.”
Artie couldn’t understand why she was telling him
as much as she was. She had to be doing it for a reason, but he didn’t have a clue what it might be.
“How?”
She put down the knitting and took another sip from her glass.
“Didn’t your professor Hall explain the possibilities? Your species could make a far wider variety of sounds than we could, and eventually it led to language. We didn’t need to describe what we saw in words. For much the same reason, we didn’t need art. You needed both and you ran with them. And then you were clever enough to substitute paintings for mental images, the one talent we had that you envied.”
She twisted her head to glance at the wall of CDs and books behind her.
“Nature not only made you handsome, it gave you language and music and art and you did wonders with all of them. From a personal viewpoint, I’m very glad that you did. I can’t carry a tune—few of us can—and I couldn’t draw a recognizable stick figure if you paid me. But it was a Faustian bargain, Banks. Nature also made you the most homicidal species the planet has ever seen.”
She suddenly turned accusing.
“Your species learned to lie with language, Artie. Lying was a concept that was foreign to us; you can’t lie very well with images. We believed you during truces, in battles, in negotiations—and by the time we understood you were lying, we were almost gone.”
Artie tried in vain to see in her face the Mary Robards he’d once known, but that Mary had vanished for good. They had been lovers briefly and then friends for how long? Twenty years? Now she’d taken off the mask she had worn for so long and beneath it was the face of a stranger. It was like a death in the family.
“Language—that was your key to winning the world, Artie. Then you trumped it and organized the sounds
you made into words you could carve in stone or print on paper. Remarkable! You could do with print the same things you could do with your voice. You didn’t need racial memories; you could leave printed books behind. And you could lie with them just as easily as you could with the spoken word.”
“You’re afraid of us,” Artie accused.
She looked surprised. “If you were us, wouldn’t you be? What do you think would happen if everybody knew about us? How soon would it take your governments to launch the greatest pogrom the world has ever seen?”
He already knew the answer to that one; once again the memory of the Tribe was fresh in his mind.
“You’re experts at genocide,” she continued, her voice now heavy with anger. “It’s in your blood. The genocides of the Second World War—”
“Committed by the Nazis—”
“Oh? And since then it’s been the Hutus trying to exterminate the Tutsis, all those loser tribes in the Sudan killing each other off, the Serbs slaughtering the Muslims—That was another genocide where the murderers did their jobs with enthusiasm, an evening’s entertainment! And remember ’Nam, remember My Lai?”
“Thousands died on both sides,” Artie said angrily.
Mary’s smile was sardonic.
“So what’s your point, Artie? You want to go back to Tasmania a hundred and fifty years ago when the early settlers shot the natives for sport and exterminated an entire race?”
She resumed knitting, the needles flashing savagely.
“Or try your eden of Tahiti where warring tribes nailed children to their captive mothers with spears and drilled holes in the heads of other prisoners so they could be strung together like beads on a string. Consider the Turks and the Armenians or the Mayans, whose population dropped ninety-five percent in fifty
years because of wars of extermination. Better yet, read your own Bible—”
“That’s the dark side,” Artie interrupted, desperate.
She sounded exasperated.
“My God, Artie, you think there’s a bright side? Look at your history books. They’re nothing but a recital of battles won and battles lost with the victors sitting atop a mound of skulls at the end! And the generals who engineered the slaughters become your heroes! What was it your General Grant said? That he could walk across the battlefield at Shiloh stepping on the bodies of the dead without his feet ever touching the ground?”
She drained what was left in her glass, hesitated, then refilled it from a bottle beneath the table.
“You should read your morning paper more often, Artie. Your species is monstrous when it comes to hypocrisy: you keep telling yourselves how much you prize human life when it’s obvious there’s nothing you value less. You love violence, you adore it. Three hundred years ago you even treated guns like works of art, decorating them with intricate carvings and inlaying them with mother-of-pearl. It’s a wonder you’re not doing the same thing with the stocks of AK-47s today. For all I know, maybe you are.”
Mary turned colder now, her face masking her emotions. “History is a two-way street, Artie. You want to know what you were like in the distant past, look at what you are today. You’re the same murderous species now that you were thirty-five thousand years ago. You exterminated the Neanderthals and then you went after us. You wanted our hunting grounds and our foraging areas, and the simplest way to get them was to kill us—men, women, children, babes in arms. And it was so easy! We looked different from you, so you could identify and kill us on sight. We were the ‘other’ and because we were, you didn’t need an excuse.”
Artie remembered the slaughter on the riverbank
and turned away, sick. “You’re still here, Mary,” he said in a low voice.
“There were two groups of us. Those of us who lived in northern Europe were big nosed, heavy browed, stumpy people who had adapted to the cold. We were tribal, we tended to stay in the same areas, so we didn’t get any images about what was happening until it was too late. We became the ogres of fairy tales, the hairy, ugly people who lived in the woods. It was open season on us and within a few thousand years we were gone.”
Artie could see no trace of the primitive in her.
“You look no different from us.”
Mary turned back to her knitting, her voice sad.
“I said there were two groups of us. The tribes who lived in southern Europe, around the Mediterranean, looked more like Homo sapiens. It was survival of the fittest, Artie, and the fittest were those of us who looked and spoke the most like you. Children who were throwbacks were killed by their parents for fear they would cast suspicion on their families. We were selected out by our environment and you were that environment, as selective as the glaciers or the veldt. We ended up breeding according to your specifications. We adapted to you; we had to.”
“You interbred—”
“God, yes, we interbred, Artie—there was mating and there were offspring. But we were a different species, it was like donkeys mating with horses, where the offspring are mules, sterile. Since lives were short, there were few grandparents around to become suspicious. As a species, we survived through arranged marriages. It’s an honorable practice; it just goes back much farther than you think.”
Artie remembered the few times he had watched her in court. She was as passionate then as she was now. Except then it was a calculated passion and now it was spontaneous.
“Why are you telling me all this, Mary?”
This time her smile made his skin crawl.
“We were the species in a direct line of succession from ancient man. You came out of nowhere, a quantum leap in potential, and you looked like nothing that had gone before. You were flat-faced, relatively lightly built, comparatively hairless with well-shaped heads … an elegant species. And thirty-five thousand years ago you stole our world.” She held the scarf up to check her stitches, the mismatched colors jittering in the light. “We want it back, Artie.”
Once again, Artie wasn’t sure what to say.
“What are you going to do?”
“That’s the second question. The first is what are you going to do.”
She wasn’t making sense. “I don’t understand.”
Her voice was very calm, deliberate.
“You’re going to exterminate yourselves, Artie. You don’t stand a prayer of lasting another hundred years. For a while we thought all we had to do was wait.”
Artie stood up. The feel of the small gun in his pocket was comforting.
“Larry and Dr. Paschelke and Richard Hall aren’t examples of waiting.”
Her expression was somber.
“Our original plan was simple: Stay hidden until all of you died in wars or starved to death in a habitat you had ruined beyond saving. Unfortunately, it’s our habitat as well. In the meantime our chances of being discovered have grown immeasurably. Medicine has become more. sophisticated, there are physicals for work and for the military—you’re only a few years away from having DNA data included on everybody’s birth certificate. You’d be shocked when you came to us. And we can’t foresee accidents and autopsies like Talbot’s. Shea was a curious doctor. There’ll be others. We can’t afford to wait any longer, Artie—we want you gone. Now.”
“And you’re going to use the Hounds as weapons.”
She shrugged, as if somehow they didn’t involve her. “They’re a loose cannon, a wild card. I don’t know what they plan or who they are, but even if I knew, I wouldn’t try to stop them.” She paused. “We breed them like you breed pit bulls. They’re dangerous, Artie. But you know that.”
He would give a lot for the old Mary, Artie thought. The former lover whom he could talk to about his problems at work, his problems with raising Mark. How did a Muslim and a Serb, who might have been lifelong friends, talk to each other now?
“Why did you join the Club, Mary?”
She took another small sip from her glass.
“You sweated testosterone, you and the others. And you were courageous, adventurous. More than any military academy, the Club was a natural breeding ground for your own Hounds. You proved it when all of you went to ’Nam and came back decorated. You were brave, you were resourceful—we knew you would be and we were curious about you, about what made you tick. So several of us joined to find out.”
“I didn’t enjoy ’Nam,” Artie said somberly. “I didn’t enjoy war.”
She shook her head. “I don’t say you enjoyed killing people. But you enjoyed war, you enjoyed the hunt. You’re ashamed of that now.”
She sounded like Mitch, Artie thought with sudden anger. He knew what he was ashamed of and he knew what he was proud of.
“You could have talked me out of what I suspected when I came here, Mary. I thought it was going to be a wild goose chase.”
She looked surprised.
“Does it really make any difference what I say? You have no proof of anything; all you have are fantasies. We claimed Talbot’s body, your printout of Shea’s diskette is gone, so is the diskette itself. And everybody who’s read Shea’s research is dead.”
He remembered Shea and Paschelke and Hall, and for the first time he accepted Mary as a complete stranger—one who would probably consider it a victory when he was dead as well.
“Except me.”
“Except you.” She shook her head. “But nobody in authority is going to believe you. For everything that’s happened, there’s a reasonable answer.”
“You’ve told me too much, Mary. You’ve played the traitor. Your own Hounds will be after you now.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Traitor? Hardly. Call it a favor for a friend. Someday you might have to make a judgment based on what I’ve told you. And that’s … important. But in any event, we don’t kill each other like your species does. Incidentally, don’t bother coming over here again. Jenny and I will be away on vacation.”
Artie paused by the stairwell. It would probably be his last chance to ask a question that had bothered him for years. “Why you and Jenny, Mary?”
There was a flicker of tenderness on her face. “I mated outside of gender and outside of species, Artie. Jenny needed somebody to take care of her and I needed somebody to take care of. She was beautiful and I was lucky. It worked out.”
Mark had been in the back of his mind ever since coming over. He had nothing to lose by asking about him now.
“Mark disappeared three days ago. You know he’s handicapped, he has to use a wheelchair to get around. He couldn’t have gone anyplace without help. I’m worried your people might have taken him.”
He was pleading with her, gambling on any feelings that might still exist between them, and for a moment he thought she looked concerned.
“I’m sure none of us have him but I don’t really know.”
Artie heard a car drive up outside and started up the
steps. It was time to leave; more than time.
Behind him, Mary said softly, “Artie?”
He turned.
“I’d like to help you but I can’t.” She hesitated. “I probably wouldn’t, even if I could.”
What surprised him was the sorrow in her voice when she said it.