Chapter 1
Marco and Michael sat spent, enervated, and drained, breathing out in disbelieving exhaustion as if they had survived the barbarian sack of an antique mall, while the happy tableaux of the montage movie behind them went on flickering, like the spirits of the slain fluttering over the place of battle. Marco’s lime-colored shirt, glimmering and virginal with the orange sunrise that morning, now felt on its wearer like an oozy green gelatin dessert at the end of a protracted family reunion; poor Michael, on the other hand, after nine hours of repetitive tapping on his vintage 1978 adding machine and swipe after swipe of debit card after debit card, now felt as if he was sunk in a brackish fen and his glasses were like the eyes of a Grendel staring up from the foul skin of a fetid algal backwater.
But over this silence Marco half-cheered, “We did it. We’re pretty much cleaned out. No more runcible spoons. We don’t need to come back tomorrow." He pressed himself up and after a glance at Michael, who was opening an unsold volume of Horizon, trudged over to the community room fireplace, and took in the photograph of the dearly departed Mrs. Paglia.
“We’re doing her sale next,” he mumbled limply to Michael, who peeked over his reading and weakly waved at the lady in the photo.
Suddenly at the door sounded out a staccato banging like mortar fire and Marco and Michael started and cringed.
The banging ceased.
Silence.
Marco and Michael stared at the doors.
Suddenly, the banging started once more and Marco crept to the portals and cautiously took hold of the handles. Just then, he saw something through the windows of the doors, immediately released the deadbolt—more from shock than hospitality—and fell back.
The doors opened choreographically (like the opening number in Visigoths: The Rock Opera) and through them charged Andreas Stackenwalter, clad in only his pink jelly sandals and an old-fashioned posing strap, and his whole body was smeared with a silvery, twinkling body paint, so that he appeared like a glitter-dipped Oscar statue. Heaving and panting, his aging pectorals losing the fight against gravity, he demanded in a Thuringian brogue (or burr or bark), “Wo ist Geoffi? Wo ist Geoffi?”
Marco and Michael, transfixed, mortified, and/or struck mute, said nothing and did not move, until Andreas commanded, “Come,” and Marco and Michael found themselves following him outside—this gave them a chance to make some sense of their client’s bizarre maquillage: across his posing-strap-enclosed backside were printed the words “Silver Jock Muscle Show.”)
Once in the balmy evening air—it had been a hot, hot day—Andreas slid by aid of his very greased back and thighs into his tiny Lombardi and barked at his dragooned companions again to “Come!" They automatonically climbed into their own pinkmobile (at this point in the day a mobile oven) and managed to keep up with him, he was driving so fast.
Now, for the sake of the rest of us, let us fall back in time an hour or so to find out what had happened in the cottage of Chez Cockaigne crocheted with kiwi vines at the end of the usually-placid Vera Lynn Lane.
At the intersection of Vera Lynn Lane and Carnegie Dale Drive (where old Nancy and Beulla had it out every so often on the front porch about whether to use organic millet in the birdfeeder), as the driveway lights of the bungalows were beginning to glow to life in the twilight heat, a black BMW 230i convertible with its top folded down came to a silent stop, to squat in the heat like a demon toad. Within the car, Marjorie Mayfield began her vigil, sitting with the consolation that once this bit of subcontracting for Milosh was done, she would be free of the old steel-toothed troll and could resume her workaday rounds of business promotion (as well as an occasional fling at pharmaceutical smuggling to break the monotony).
Marjorie gave an initial glance through her tinted windscreen to gauge whether the field was clear: the last brilliant light of a stifling mango-orange sunset was finger-painting with brazen hues the tops of the tallest poplar trees that grew along the border fence of Summerfield, but No, she thought, not yet.
In time, though, the darkness did deepened and the bats started keeking about, so Marjorie lifted her night-vision lorgnette and trained it toward the end of Vera Lynn Lane for any SOA (Signs of Activity).
But the cottage of That Old Man still sat quiet.
So, to while away a bit more of her tedium, she returned to her iThing, tapped on the app for Van Cauwenberghe Ice Cream—a daily ritual, like praying the Hours, although minus those silky ribbons—and flicked her fingertip over the tab for “What’s New.”
The screen shifted and Marjorie found herself staring entranced at Hubblesque images of ices, glaces, gelatos, tortoni, and chilled Rote Grütze. And what was this? All-new, it promised, all new! Lingonberry Rocky Road with Pink Divinity and Crystallized Angelica?Rapture...!
And during that little span of time as she fantasized over her next purchases from Van Cauwenberghe, Marjorie forgot the reason that she was melting in the heat in her black stretch stealth suit. No, as she stared at this parade of parfaits, Weinschaum, apricot whip, and bombes passing across the screen, she suddenly and vividly remembered: Her First Ice Cream Cone.(At one time, Marjorie had thought of giving this confection a name, but wisely shied away from the idea, since if it had a name it would have been a friend and, well, she did eat it.)
Like a hippie quilt patchwork of polyester, calico, and black denim, recollections and remembrances sewed themselves together in her mind’s eye: a blue summer sky, a picnic, a picnic on a sunny day. Then a tall man in a plaid shirt and plaid pants. Then her father. Then a mistake. Then shame hotter than the sun of the picnic afternoon. Then a tolerant laugh. But before she could cry, she had said, “Mr. Jeff,” yes, “Mr. Jeff,” to right her lispy mistake. Then the tall man in plaid along with her father happily laughed. Then the tall man held the cone down to her.
A girl’s first cone…
Then, as if a marlin had jumped on to her mental boat deck, from the end of the cul-de-sac a pair of bright lights and the noise of a car summoned her back to business. Dropping her iThing in her lap, Marjorie collected her wits and raised the night-vision lorgnette once more to her eager eye.
At the kiwi-covered cottage at the end of Vera Lynn Lane, the garage door had slid open and the compact Lombardi, its headlights on, rolled forth down the drive before coming to a stop. The taller of the two men, with a near-empty tumbler in one hand, was speaking down to the one in the little sports car: the shortish fellow with the athletic ensemble, since the porch lights of the house behind him showed up his white stubble of hair. Then said roadster zoomed away from the house, down Vera Lynn Lane towards her car, but he engaged a sapphire-blue turn signal and raced away up Carnegie Dale Drive, unknowingly leaving the field clear for Marjorie Mayfield. Back at the jasmine-embowered bungalow, the tallish man, keeping his grog at the ready in one hand, was closing the garage door with the other and clicking secure the cyclopean padlock. Hmm, thought Marjorie. Were they keeping something in or keeping someone out? Maybe there was some good junk there, just collecting dust—a little booty, she mused, along with a live catch would not be out of order, if she could swing it.
With the little sportscar gone and the tallish man with his drink creeping back inside through the front door, Marjorie started her own car. Leaving its headlights off, she reversed it, brought it to a graveled easement half-way down the street behind her, and crunchily drove it down the alley for the length of one lot between warping cedar-board fences (“And they jabber that Old Man Sam ’built to last,” she sighed.)At the end of this alley, she found her way barred—as she knew it would be—by a cyclone-fence gate. But with a masterful press upon the appropriate button on a pirated security remote, the gate ground on stiff rollers to one side, revealing a service road beyond. Marjorie drove through, turned to the right, and as the gate closed itself behind her, she drove on along another stretch of cedar-board fence, where she stopped. On the other side of this fence lay the backyard of the house of That Old Man.
Having arrayed herself for her mission in a stretch suit, the stretchable gloves, night-vision goggles on a strap about her black-capped head, and over her shoulder a half-empty bag, Marjorie tiptoed from her car, while leaving it unlocked and pointed towards an escape route. Thus, to the sound of insects and crickets improvising continuous bars of supper-club jazz, she gracelessly made her way for the back fence. Now to get over it.
But reminding herself that for many a month now she had been a practitioner of Taffy-Pull Yoga and recalling how her yoga teacher, “Hatha Mama” Rabinowitz, would dulcetly chant, “We are getting in touch with our chewy center, your prana is flowing like high-fructose corn syrup,” and similar otherworldly nostrums like cotton-candy-colored lotuses, Marjorie delivered one muttony thigh upward, set a balancing hand on the top rail of the splintery cedar-board fence, and with a hippopotamine balleticism succeeded over the back fence with one leap, to landed with a noiselessness that would have been surprising had anybody heard it.
After adjusting her night-vision goggles, as if she was trying for better reception, Marjorie set off toward the house. To her eyes the backyard before her was a lurid, garish nightscape, truly bizarre, what with phantasmal mud flats, ghastly Rose-of-Sharon bushes, and gymnastics equipment like gibbets and gallows arranged for anyone to bump into in the dark.
But she reached the back porch without incident. She found herself at a pair of French doors and without much ado she tried a faux brass nob and it turned for her with continental courtesy. At least she did not have to break out the skeleton key or pull the fire alarm (crude but effective, since the inhabitant rushes out, while Marjorie, garbed in her fire marshalette uniform, rushes in.)
Marjorie could guess, based upon the porch-and-driveway configuration out front, the layout of the rooms. (Old Sam Summerfield hocked about one of three floorplans to the well-heeled retirees who answered his summons and Marjorie Mayfield knew each variation.) So, with stealth and a somewhat elevated pulse rate, she pressed on over the threshold.
She was in a dimly-lit dining room where a single spacious table served as a dumping ground for a miscellany of junk mail, shopping bags, and a single, tome of a cookbook spread open on a little stand.(For some reason she peered down at its pages, only discovered stern columns in German and—Ugh—the metric system).To her left, in the kitchen a single recessed light over the sink glowed gently, while on the stove steamed away a vat-like pot from the props department of the Grimm Bros. Productions Co., Ltd., with something leathery rolling slightly in an aggressively percolating froth. In front of her, beyond the dining room, opened on to an unlit main room and to the right of this the small square windows of the front door. If she made a hard right, she would be lurking down a hallway into deep, deep, overheated darkness.(This house did not apparently believe in air conditioning, but she did hear a few fans pushing the hot air around.)
Marjorie cocked her ear like a twilight predator.(Her imagination favored something sleek and feline, like an ocelot in the bird-filled jungles of Belize, with Mayan ziggurats silhouetted against the horizon.)The French doors, unclosed behind her, were letting in a few nighttime noises; from the kitchen she heard the bubbling of the pot on the stove; and from the unlit main room before her some kind of gurgling and snorting, rhythmic and somnolent. Unless the thing in the pot slurped out and seized her in its tentacles, her way was clear.
She made the hard right down the hallway to see what she could make out in the infrared spectrum—or was it the ultraviolet? Oh, well, it was all an off-green glow. What should have been a banal corridor quickly showed itself as a startling gauntlet, for she found herself in the middle of a stiff and orderly crowd. On the walls all to her left and right, hung tier after tier of photographs of silvery frames of people in tiaras and epaulets, uniforms and gowns shingled in medals, banded in sashes, and starry with diamond sprays. Each of these old figures had a complexion like porcelain and marble, and neither smiling in performance nor scowling in despair, all seemed to hold their eyes towards a pearly horizon. Marjorie squinted at one or two messages or names scrawled in the corners, like black thread trapped under the glass. All first names and Roman numerals.
“Very classy…” she whispered, ignorant that no one with class says classy. “Well, the frames will keep the bidding hot on eBay,” and humming away, she sequestered a few of the larger specimens into her satchel.
She oozed on down the hall.
A door, half-open door, semi-revealed a masculine washroom, redolent of bay rum and tooth powder, but spying neither her prey nor anything of value (no one was in the market for an over-stretched truss), Marjorie moved on.
At the end of the corridor, she came to another door, gingerly gave it a push, and stepped within. This was probably a bedroom, having against one wall a narrow, plain cot, along another a row of athletic shoes in perfect, almost militaristic order, and a dresser whose dustless top served as a general surface for personal sundries, mostly bottles and tubes with foreign labels. One object, a piece of masonry or rock, sitting on a chipped china plate, caught her attention. Dismissing any suspicion that it might be alarmed, she cautiously lifted it, thought she should sniff or taste it, thought better of those animal options, and automatically added it also to the hoard in her purse. Maybe she could hold it for ransom.
Her gaze travelled to the wall above the dresser where hung any number of images, most of them framed: The 1960 Norwegian national men’s gymnastics team; the 1959 Danish national men’s gymnastics team, the 1958 West German Olympic men’s gymnastics team; an undated Dutch national men’s gymnastics team; a postcard some decades old with the message Willkommen bei Zeuthener See below a bland body in fresh water; in antique frames: a sepia photo of a woman in an aristocratic dress with a blonde boy on her lap, who in turn held a small teddy bear on his knee; and a seated quorum of unsmiling aristocratic elders, with a pack of youngsters (even the girls) in sailor suits kneeling on an Oriental rug, and all bookended by bristling wolf-like dogs of uncertain parentage—although Marjorie suspected that the people in the photo knew exactly who their ancestors were; a photo of a thick-haired young man in a white sailing digs straddling—without surprise—a sailing boat, like someone in the supporting cast on Jacques Cousteau; and in a stolid wooden frame, three lines of weary, but upright persons who looked most decidedly as if they had not been having much in the way of fun for a long, long time, sitting under a camp sign that read “Paulinenhof,” in Art Nouveau letters. In the front row of these cheerless drudges sat one axial woman with glasses and wavy silver hair (the tide had gone out on her marcel waves some time before); at her feet huddled a clutch of very grim, very blonde children. Marjorie guessed that this was some kind of mountain spa and they were all tired of the cold baths and wildflower walks.
On the dresser itself stood, rising like a monument amid the bottles of creams, colognes, and witch hazel, stood a weighty silver frame fencing a photo of a square-headed, agate-eyed black dog of glossy coat and far-seeing expression, like a canine model for high-end chow. (If it were a man he would be selling toothpaste.) A pewter blazon shaped like a curling horizontal scroll fixed to the bottom of the frame read “Kronprinz Axel.”
Marjorie grabbed these last three of the pictures on the wall, as well as the Ken Doll of the dog world. The bag was now heavy. What she would do with the bit of rubble, well, if they would not pay her price, then after a couple of stick-on eyes, a paperweight could be born. She was done in this room.
After slowly inserting her head back into the dark hallway to ensure that no foes were afoot, Marjorie went on to look behind other doors.
A few feet down the hall, she set her hand on a new knob and squeezing it with a surgeon’s acumen turned it and pushed on the door.
Creak.
Marjorie became as stiff and prickly as a half-eaten tub of cheap Neapolitan lost in the back of the freezer.
She cocked her ear. A small canine cough came from the Stygian portions of the quiet house, but since no beast little materialized, she waited until sure tide of Plutonian silence settled around her, then with a quiet step moved into the chamber.
This room was busy, even by night-vision goggle. Under the window a lumpy double bed, unmade, claimed the goodliest portion of acreage and near it a half-opened closet hinted at many, many shirts and jackets. But immediately before her was a wooden wheeled office chair and a desk crowned around with shelves of volumes in brick-red and tomes in cherry-red.(This would have been, admittedly, under natural light, but even by night-vision goggle, Marjorie made out that they were law books.)
Above these shelves hung a gallery of photographs. If the walls in the previous room spoke of athleticism and history, in this crowded covey the framed matter tended towards the cosmopolitan, professional, and pious, a few exemplars of note being: Diplomas stating that Mr. Geoffrey L. Durant-Dupont had graduated from someplace called Faculté de Droit de Paris and the Georgetown University Law Center; a photograph of a tallish young man and a short blonde fellow (all muscles) on a beach with acacias, palms, and a Roman ruin bringing up the rear; a photo of two rows of nuns, not only in black and white habits but of brown and pink skin (the former predominating.)Clustered in front of them sat small sub-Saharan children, one of whom clutched some vermin like a prehistoric gerbil and almost the size of the little darling that held it so close.
All very nice, fretted Marjorie, but no old man was here and she was running out of places where a geezer might be lurking. But with rejuvenated desire to be done with this farce—Why couldn’t Milosh order Dmitri and his personal mountain range to blot out this pest?—she turned about to move on, at the same time hefting her weighty, goody-laden shoulder bag to keep it close.
But, in this neat parallelism, as she turned and hefted, she also beheld and brushed into. Let us place the last two events on to the dissection table.
In beholding, Marjorie rotated towards the open door of the bedroom, intent of stepping back into the hallway. But, smack above the light switch next to the door, a fascinating new picture (and a darn big one, too) came to her notice: a picture of old Sam Summerfield. Marjorie swallowed with surprise, either squelching what was coming up or because, like a sea monster gulping down an unlucky sailor, she was taking in some eerie truth whole. She saw Sam Summerfield, shovel in hand, standing beside a fresh hole which, based upon the hills in the horizon behind him, must be the initial excavation of this magical slaughter yard called Summerfield Estates. Beside Sam Summerfield, to the left, stood a much-younger version of the tallish man in a ghastly 1970’s lounge suit, and to Sam Summerfield’s right a small, small girl with a pageboy haircut.
But, as Marjorie felt a strange horror on seeing this bit of Summerfield history, her trinket-laden shoulder bag, being both unwieldy and projecting a few inches from her generous frame brushed into a bowl of marbles on a low shelf above the desk (no doubt an endearing souvenir from the old boy’s childhood.)The force of the adipose knapsack versus the dainty dish sends the playful spheres dropping, like jocund glassy meteors, down, down to land upon the desktop, not merely knock-knocking against the flat wood and rolling amongst the stapler, the ten-key, the knock-off Tiffany lamp, and into a few half-empty whiskey tumblers scattered about like bachelors at a wedding reception, but also with fatal precision upon the Play button of the remote control device for the stereo, which is sitting across the room camouflaged by the darkness.
A blast of vintage European pop shook the room—and unless room-by-room soundproofing had been a choice from the Options Package for this model, then the rest of the house was hearing it, too.
With frantic fingers Marjorie found the recalcitrant remote and thumbed button after button to shut it up or shut it off, either of them, she did not care.
The music stopped.
Then, like a black hole taking all matter into itself, Marjorie inhaled anxiously and listened.
Silence.
Then, into the cosmic quiet that followed her gas giant of a blunder, from the maw end of the hallway came a loose scattered tinkling sound, like ice in a glass and the recessed lights in the hallway ceiling glowed to life.
At once, Marjorie pulled off her night-vision goggles to avoid a sudden bout of blindness, but they popped off of her head and dragged her black skullcap with them. Dropping down to get out of the normal line of sight, Marjorie poked her head out of the room to see what was advancing upon her.
Down the now-illumined corridor swayed the living picture of staggering bibulousness, the tallish Old Man himself, in a V-necked muumuu, the tick-tick-tick of the swaying beads of its hem symphonizing with the small noises of the ice in his glass. He called out, “Andi, are you home already? Did you win? And who put on that atrocious Michel Sardou?”
Meanwhile, Marjorie, still in an uncomfortable crouch, found herself face-to-muzzle with a Pekingese arf-arfing at her like an old wig with emphysema. She ignored the poster puppy for canine COPD and looked back at the tallish Old Man coming towards her.
By now, practically at the door to the bedroom, he noticed (a) his little Chinese dog (always worthy of top billing), (b) a humanoid head peeking out from his bedroom (he did not like the turn this show was taking), and (c) the same head reappearing at human height and attached to a darkly-clad, all-consuming entity of death (and given her size, she just might be said to consume all.)
He stopped staggering and stared at her without a word.
This might have been a pleasant end to Marjorie’s unpleasant day, since the quarry had drugged itself and ambled right up to her—no trip wires, no fuel lines to be cut, no space heaters sparking in the garage, no blow-dryers tumbling into a relaxing bath. Instead, her prey dropped his glass, its shards scattering about with crystalline noise, and he cried out, “The genius loci! The goddess of death is in my house! The fat, fat pig goddess of death!”
But as he stumbled back, Marjorie stepped over the Pekingese, still squatting like a eunuch dwarf watching a palace coup, and advanced upon her prey.
On the couch in the living room, Elsa the Black Dog, loopy from her arthritis medication, opened one squid-like eye at the noise, cries, and human hubbub coming from the hallway. But, she closed her glaring eye with the sudden coming of silence.
