Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

twenty-five: the smart set

WHEN I got back to the apartment, everybody hurried out to the garage to see (and make fun of) my new ride.

“That is so cool!” shouted Halyna. Oxana was laughing. “You are very funny, Bobby!”

“What are you supposed to be now?” Clarence asked me. “The Beatles?”

“Listen, you young whippersnapper, that Yellow was a Submarine. What you mean is, ‘Who are you supposed to be, Joni Mitchell?’ because her old man was taken away by a Big Yellow Taxi. Your grasp of culture is appalling, Junior.”

“Every time you open your mouth,” Clarence said, “you just seem older and weirder.”

Inside, the Amazons returned to lazy alternations of sparring and making dinner. (I’d told them I was tired of doing all the food prep.) I didn’t like what I was hearing of their meal plans, something about barley soup, so I sat down with Clarence. He’d brought his own computer and was scrolling through the images Oxana had taken at Schloss Sepanta.

“I’ve labeled as many of these as I can, Bobby. I never wanted to know this much about rich San Judaeans.” He paused on one. “See, that’s the governor. Do you think he’s in on this, too?”

I gave the kid a look to make sure he was kidding. “I’m not worried about politicians, although you’d be surprised how many have connections with both sides.”

“Well, that’s too bad, because there’s a ton of them here. Look, there’s the mayor of San Judas. And a here’s a bunch of congresspeople at this event, whatever it was. But most of the people in the pictures aren’t that well-known, or at least not that easy to identify. It’s going to take forever to put names on all of them.”

“You can skip most of the really famous ones, because why would Anaita hand the horn to one of them? She wouldn’t trust any mere mortal to keep it from the Grand Duke of Hell, least of all a politician.” I frowned at the images of Donya Sepanta going past; formal, ceremonial ones mostly. She, or Anaita rather, was still beautiful in the pictures, but not in the astounding way she’d been at our meeting, more like her own slightly more ordinary-looking sister. The angelic glamour didn’t come through in any of the photographs. In fact, she might have just trotted it out for yours truly. “All I really want to know is where that damned horn is. I’m just hoping . . .” Something occurred to me. “Hey, aren’t you on call? This place blocks cellphones. They could be calling you and calling you and you wouldn’t—”

Clarence rolled his eyes. “Yes, Bobby, I know. You told me. That’s why I go out into the yard every little while to check.” He flicked to the next image.

“Hold on, go back. No, that one. I saw something. What is this?” The photo was Donya Sepanta and another woman standing with two men.

“Some charity thing, that’s all I know, and I only know it because she’s wearing the same dress in another picture where she’s giving someone a giant fake check. And Ms. Sepanta, whatever she really is, never wears the same dress twice. Why? Do you know those people?”

“No.” The men were both Silicon Valley executive-types, badly shaven and slightly long-haired in an “I’m not really an evil plutocrat” kind of way, and the unknown woman was the female version of that, which meant she dressed a little better than the men (because she had to). The four of them were standing with champagne glasses in the kind of awkward group photo you get when you interrupt people having a conversation and ask them all to smile. But it wasn’t Anaita or the main figures that had caught my attention, but something in the crowd of a couple of dozen people, out of focus but visible behind them—something that I couldn’t see now. “Can you make it clearer?”

“No. I can make it bigger, but this is a picture that Oxana took with her phone of a photograph behind glass in less than ideal lighting. The best government photo labs in the world might make it better, but I can’t.” He frowned. “Believe it or not, Bobby, sometimes even angels can’t do miracles.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Junior.”

“I thought you were going to call me by my name.”

“No, I said I’d call you Harrison instead of Clarence, Clarence—I mean, Harrison. I never said I wouldn’t call you kid, or Junior, or Mr. Smarty-Pants.”

“The irony is that the one who acts like an eight-year-old is calling me ‘kid.’”

“No, the irony is that you, the one who dresses like a sixty-year-old, aren’t grateful for it. Get a better copy.”

He stared at me. “I just explained . . .”

“Get a better copy. If this wasn’t taken by Sepanta’s own personal photographer or something, then maybe it was on some website or in some magazine. Come on, you’re Captain Records Hall, right? So find a better copy. I’m going back to looking up her other properties.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Remember, God loves you.”

I couldn’t quite hear his reply as I walked away, but I don’t think he said the same thing back to me.

• • •

The Amazons’ barley soup smelled a lot better than I thought it would, especially once they started to put in the mushrooms and onions and little bits of bacon. In fact, I was beginning to look forward to dinner when Clarence stepped out to check his messages. He was out there for quite a while, and when he came back he said, “No rest for the weary. I’ve got a client over in Friendly Acres. But I think I found a better version of the picture.”

I looked at the screen. “It’s not the same picture.”

“No, but it’s the same event and the same people from a slightly different angle.” He slapped at my fingers as I tried to enlarge it. “If you’re going to look at my computer while I’m gone, don’t ruin anything. Old people get really cranky with technology sometimes, and they break things.”

“Cute. Hurry back.” But I was already examining the new image. It had been taken at a very similar angle, but whatever had caught my attention in the first one didn’t even raise a flicker now. I scrolled back through Clarence’s recent history and found the rest of those pictures on a photographer’s web page under the heading, “Charity event, San Judas, 6/17/03.” It named the other high-rollers posing with Anaita, but I didn’t care about the main figures. It was something in the background that had snagged me in the first place.

I went back to the first picture and stared at it, then got up and looked at it again from a few feet away, then from so closely that my nose almost touched the screen. Back to the far wall before moving in slowly. Sideways. Upside down. Then I printed out a copy and walked around with that in my hand for a while, turning it and turning it, letting my eye drift over the blur of shadows and faces and shapes in the background until they became almost meaningless, looking for the pattern that had first caught me. And then suddenly, for no reason I could name, I saw it again. It was a shoulder and the back of a head, a man in the crowd who had turned away just as the photo was taken. Whoever it was, I still didn’t recognize him, but now I knew what I was looking for. Something about the guy made my Dollar Sense tingle.

• • •

Clarence showed up just as the Amazons were serving soup. I had cracked a bottle of Caz’s best wine, a really old-looking Burgundy (that’s good, right? Because I might have told you, I’m more of a vodka man myself) and I was pouring it.

“Smells good,” he said. “May I have some? Wine, too? I’ve just had the most horrible, nasty old woman to deal with. Even worse, I got her off with only a century of Purgatory. I would have sent her to Hell, personally.”

“Don’t joke ’til you’ve been there,” I said. “But I have something that may make you feel a bit better. We have a lead.”

I handed him a glass, then led him over to his computer. “See that guy? Right there? He was in the back of the crowd. I finally found one of your other pictures where you can see his face.”

Clarence shook his head. “Not the most pleasant-looking person I’ve ever seen, but I don’t know him.”

“You wouldn’t, but Sam and I would, because the last time I saw him he was about to have Sam blown to bits and me dragged to Hell.”

“But that’s not Eligor . . . what’s his Earth name? Kenneth Vald? That’s not Vald.”

“No, but it’s Vald’s ex-security chief, an ugly piece of work named Howlingfell, who I’m pleased to say wound up being swallowed by that monster you met later, at the old sea baths at Shoreline Park. You remember the ghallu, right? You remember how it . . . kicked you?”

He gave me a really unpleasant look. “Not exactly. I remember how you coldcocked me with a gun and told me the monster did it.”

“I was improvising. Look, you want an apology, I’m sorry. You were trying to arrest Sam.”

He didn’t look happy, but he turned back to the screen. “But what’s so interesting about this Howlingfell guy? I mean, he’d go everywhere that Eligor would go, right? That’s what security guys do.”

“Right. And I’m trying to find anything that might link Anaita with Eligor, so that’s point of interest number one. But you haven’t heard the rest.” I took a swig of my Burgundy. I’m not sure I’ll ever be a serious wine drinker, but I have to say, right then, that shit tasted good. “See, I tracked down the fundraiser, too. Yes, your old Grampa Bobby’s got some gosh-durned computer skills. The party was held at the Elizabeth Atell Stanford Museum of the Arts, that big old thing out on the campus. They were celebrating breaking ground on a new wing for the museum. And Donya Sepanta was one of the main fundraisers.”

Clarence was perking up. “And Eligor was there?”

“No. I’ve found a bunch of articles, society page stuff, some PR crap in the magazines that cater to rich dicks who love to hear about their own good works, things like that. And Kenneth Vald wasn’t there. Or at least, nobody made any mention of one of the most newsworthy billionaires in the world—and certainly in San Judas—being at the museum gala.”

“But then what’s the big deal?”

“Because, Junior, why would Howlingfell show up if it had nothing to do with Eligor? He was either there because Eligor was there, or he was there because he was casing the place for a proposed meeting. Either way, it’s the first real lead we’ve had. Now we need to research this museum, especially the new wing. We need to get deep, deep into it and find out everything we can. In fact, you’re going to do just that. You can have dinner first, though.”

“What do you mean me? What are you going to do?”

“Have another glass of wine. And think about what I’m going to need to break in there.”

“Break in?” Clarence almost dropped his glass. “Why on earth do you want to do that?”

“I like to get the feel of a place, and that includes smelling and listening and poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. And let’s not forget, our friend Ms. Sepanta was celebrating having plunged ten million dollars, reportedly half her own money and the rest from her personal fundraising, into a new Asian wing for the museum where she and Eligor were probably going to have their meeting. So she’s invested a lot in that place, and I want to know why.”

“But why break in? You said we’re going to research—”

“Yes, research first, and maybe it will turn out to be a blind alley. But in case it isn’t, I’m going to be ready to get in there and have a look around. Because that’s the way I roll.”

Clarence gave me another disapproving look. “That’s how you roll? Like a teenage meth addict looking for stuff he can fence for drugs?”

I poured myself some more red vino and sat down in front of my soup bowl. The steam was very pleasantly scented. “It smells lovely.”

Halyna and Oxana were already finishing their first bowls, so I hurried to catch up. Clarence finally sat.

“But, Bobby, when you do things like that, crazy, bad stuff happens. And it almost always goes wrong. Remember you and Five Page Mill?”

“Yeah, crazy, bad stuff happens. And that’s exactly why I do things like that. Because it’s when things get out of control that other people’s plans collapse.”

“Including your own.”

“Including my own, sometimes. But I’m used to living that way. The others aren’t. And it’s been a long time since Anaita’s had anyone stand up to her.”

“That’s because the rest are all dead,” said Clarence.

“Or raped,” said Halyna.

“Or make into slaves,” said Oxana.

“My, you’re a cheery bunch. Shut up so I can celebrate.” And I did, damn it.