Chapter Twenty-One

AT THE TOP OF A GENTLE RISE that begins at a rambling country highway-a highway that might be in New England-Mansard Penders had built himself a two-million-dollar arts-and-crafts house. The porch looks over a sweeping lawn, a stone fence, the highway, and his forest. He owns the forest, twenty thousand acres of plantation pine, with some mixed hardwoods, in the Rufus Chamblee Bend of the Mississippi River above Mansardville, Louisiana.

A messy, English-style cottage garden twists along gravel paths on the back and sides of the house. The garden was created by Florence Penders, and has all the color of Monet’s garden at Giverny. But while Monet’s garden is confined in beds, Flo’s garden sprawls and scampers and climbs, flaring up in the spring, muting a bit in June and July, roaring back in the summer: red, white, and yellow roses, pink hollyhocks and chrysanthemums, flaming gladioli, deep blue irises, scarlet poppies, cornflowers and larkspur, orange cockscomb, red and purple dahlias.

From anywhere among the flowers, you can see the river twisting below like a blue-steel snake. Sometimes, when the wind is right, you can smell the dead fish and mud of it, and on stormy days, you’ll see the weather rolling in from the west.

Inside the house, in the west wing, is a study with walnut walls and bookcases. Walnut is a dark wood with a touch of gray; the room is brightened by clerestory windows, arts-and-crafts lamps, and several thousand hardcover books with bright, variegated dustcovers.

Five oil paintings will hang in a band on one wall, on the theme of The River, with books both above and below. Mansard Penders is paying me three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to do the paintings.

As part of the deal, Manny had insisted on the right to specify the sites of the paintings, although not the details of them. After looking at the sites, I accepted. My dealer, who thinks I’m an asshole, and who was sure I’d turn the offer down, went out for a large whiskey and soda, or maybe two, and, I suspect, to a snug little whorehouse down by the river in New Orleans.

God bless him. He puts up with a lot.

I WORKED on the preliminary oil sketches for most of September, trying to get it all just right. I was dreaming about them every night; I wanted them to glow from the walls, to hold the colors of the river, and to stand up to the house.

But some nights, I’d wake up in the motel, in the middle of a painting dream, and when I couldn’t get back to sleep-I can never get back to sleep anymore-I’d wander over to my laptop, load the Bobby files, read and think and work.

One thing I worked out: Bobby had penetrated the DDC. Some of the files on the laptop certainly came from there. It’s also possible that he was directly in touch with Carp-maybe that’s why Carp was so confident about flicking that little fly out there, about dragging Rachel in front of Bobby’s computer eyes.

AS FOR Jimmy James Carp, he was gone and he wouldn’t be back.

John and his friends had split up, going their own ways, after we got Rachel back. When John arrived at the house, he was grim as the reaper himself. He said, “Hi,” in a quiet voice, when he came through the living room, and I nodded toward the bathroom. Marvel and Rachel had been inside for the best part of an hour. I could hear them talking and sometimes, crying.

John knocked on the door, talked with them for a minute, then came back into the living room. “That jerk,” he said. He was calm enough. He went to the refrigerator and got out a beer and popped the top. “You want one of these?”

“Yeah, I’ll take one,” I said. The beer tasted pretty good, cold and spiky against the heat. “She’ll be okay,” I said. “Marvel will fix her.”

“She might grow up to be okay, but she’s not okay right now,” he said, tipping the bottle up.

“How did you get Carp to tell you where she was?”

“He made the mistake of thinking death was the worst thing that could happen to him,” John said. I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he tipped the bottle toward me and said, “Don’t ask, okay? Those guys you saw…”

“What guys?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

He took another calm pull on the bottle, looked at it, and then screamed, “That motherfucker,” and he pitched the bottle right through one of the plate-glass windows on the front of the house, which blew out as though it had been hit by a bomb.

Marvel came wide-eyed out of the bathroom: “What was that?”

“Window broke,” John said.

All right.

THAT evening, as the sun was going down-and after we’d gone to the hardware store for glass and putty and I showed John how easy it is to replace a window-John, Marvel, Rachel, and I headed for Memphis, all jammed into John’s car. They dropped me at the airport, where I caught a plane back to Cleveland, to retrieve my car. They went on to see a doctor, not George, but a lady friend of George’s, who’d give Rachel a complete exam. Nobody said anything about it, but if Rachel had been made pregnant…

That’d be just about the final little chip of horror in the story. The doctor would make sure that wouldn’t happen.

On the way, Rachel confirmed what I thought but hadn’t mentioned, about how Carp had found her. She’d been going to the Longstreet library with her laptop, and from there, she logged into her regular baby-hacker chat rooms with her baby-hacker name. If you knew what you were doing-and with most programs, it’s really easy-you could track that back to her location.

LuELLEN was at my apartment when I got back to St. Paul from Cleveland. I walked in the door and she called, “Kidd? In the kitchen.” I dropped my bag in the hallway and found her eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese. The red cat was sitting on the kitchen counter, next to her, licking his chops. Cream cheese was one of his favorites.

“So what happened?” she asked.

I told her. All of it.

“Fuck him,” she said about Carp.

TWO days later-this is while the DDC was still operating-I found her file in a DDC computer under the tag Betty 47. “Betty,” as it turned out, was intelligence-speak for an unidentified female. The file contained partial fingerprints from her car and a dozen photographs taken by a concealed camera in the room where she’d been detained.

“They did a good job hiding the camera,” LuEllen said. “I never saw a thing. And I looked.”

“Some of the lenses are the size of pinheads,” I said.

I downloaded the photographs, went out to the FBI files and picked up another dozen surveillance photos of a dark-haired woman named Harriet. With a few hours of tedious work in Photoshop, I replaced LuEllen’s face with Harriet’s, while leaving LuEllen’s body and the room backgrounds. The fingerprints were replaced with a set picked at random from the FBI files.

Is she safe? I don’t know. There may be hard copies, or optical-disk copies, of all the stuff on LuEllen. You can’t get into somebody’s desk drawer from a computer.

Am I safe? I don’t know that, either. I do have reason to believe that they don’t know who I am. Not yet, anyway-because if they did, they’d come through the door with an Abrams tank.

Before we went to sleep that night, LuEllen said, into the dark, “My real name is Lauren. My mother named me after Lauren Bacall.”

She still hasn’t told me her real last name; maybe we’re getting to that.

CONGRESSMAN Bob had been busy with the CD I gave him, though not exactly saving the Republic. When the Bobby attacks suddenly stopped, most of the air went out of the other charges, too. The political counterattack started with a lot of media bullshit about responsibility and McCarthyism and anonymous smears, despite the black-and-white evidence for many of the charges.