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In time, the premonition eventually proved true, and nothing I did was able to alter the trajectory of the bullet.
10
Still smiling, still twinkly-eyed, with his charm in full gear and none of the insane-guy edge to his voice, he nevertheless said, “Snow Village is an evil place.”
I wanted to talk to Lorrie about more things we liked, attitudes we might have in common, and I was pretty sure she wanted to have that conversation, too, but we felt we had to listen to the smiley guy because he had the gun.
As though he were a vintner plucking a grape from a vine, the maniac pinched the fat spider between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, crushed it, and brought the mangled remains to his nose to savor the scent.
Un fortunately, he brought the morsel to his mouth and delicately licked the arachnid paste. He savored this strange fruit, decided it was not sufficiently ripe, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket.
Here was a graduate of Hannibal Lecter University, ready for a career in hospitality services as the new manager of the Bates Motel.
“I’m having my period,” she declared impatiently. The furrows in his brow were smoothed away by understanding. “Ah. A female emergency.” “Yes. That’s right. Hallelujah. Now may I have my purse?”
The maniac brightened at the sound. “That’ll be Honker and Crinkles. You’ll like them. They have the explosives.”
11
Hand in hand but only because of the steel cuffs, quickly but only because of the gun prodding us in the back, Lorrie and I went to the end of the room where the maniac had brutally shot the old newspaper.
Lorrie’s cuffed hand sought my cuffed hand and held it tight. I wished that we had met under different circumstances. Like at a town picnic or even at a tea dance.
A dour man came through, out of the alcove, past the pivoted section of bookcase, into the library’s subcellar. A similar specimen followed him, pulling a handcart.
“Excellent, excellent. You’re right on time, Honker,” said the maniac.
“It’d be a shame to off the bitch without using it,” said the choirboy.
The maniac said, “Put her out of your mind, Crinkles. That isn’t going to happen.”
I hadn’t made pastry chef yet, but in my mind I had always been a hero—or could be in a crisis. As a kid, I often fantasized about whipping up soufflés au chocolat fit for kings while at the same time battling the evil minions of Darth Vader. Now reality set in. These violent lunatics would eat Darth Vader in a pita pocket and pick their teeth with his light saber.
“You can whack her when we won’t need hostages anymore,” the maniac promised Crinkles. “I don’t have a problem with that.” “Hell, you can whack both of them,” Honker said. “Means nothing to me.” “Thanks,” Crinkles said. “I appreciate that.”
The two newcomers began to unload the cargo on the handcart. There were at least a hundred one-kilo bricks of a gray substance wrapped in what appeared to be greasy, translucent paper. I’m not a demolitions expert, not even a demolitions dabbler, but I figured these were the explosives of which the maniac had spoken.
“We’ll get an opportunity,” I told her, “and when it comes, we’ll take it. But it’s got to be something a lot better than the female-emergency gimmick.”
She had lobbed the scorn back at me so fast that my face was flushed and burning with it before I fully realized I’d taken the hit.
12
“Crinkles is the weak link,” she said softly.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Something’s happening.”
On our way to the alcove that waited behind the secret door in the bookshelves, we walked by the table on which stood Lorrie’s purse. She boldly picked it up as we passed.
13
“Some place, huh? The institution’s historical records are stored on this level.” “What institution?” I asked. “We’re under the bank.” Lorrie said, “I’ll be damned. You’re going to rob it, aren’t you?”
The Beagle Boys were already planting explosive charges at two of the columns.
14
“So you’ve disabled the bank’s emergency generator,” I said. My statement harried him out of his time-travel fantasy. “How did you know?” I pointed. “The parts scattered there on the floor were a clue.”
“The bank closed an hour ago,” he said, clearly proud of his elaborate plan and gratified to have an opportunity to share it. “The tellers’ drawers have been reconciled, and they’ve gone home. The vault will have been closed ten minutes ago. By routine, the manager and the two security guards were the last to leave.”
“Somewhere,” Lorrie guessed, “you’ve rigged a power-company transformer to blow, cutting electrical service to the town square.” “When the power goes,” I said, “the generator won’t cut in, and the vault will be vulnerable.”
He indicated the farther staircase. “That leads to the half of the bank’s upper basement where they fill coin rolls, bundle cash, verify incoming money shipments, and prepare outgoing transfers. The front door to the vault is also in that area.”
He grinned, nodded, and pointed to the nearer staircase. “The door at the top goes directly into the vault.”
“Cornelius Snow was the sole stockholder in the bank when he built it. He arranged things for his convenience.”
“After Cornelius died, when the bulk of his estate was left to a charitable trust, the section of tunnel leading to the bank’s subterranean entrance was walled shut.”
“The steel door at the head of those stairs to the vault isn’t actually operable,” the nameless maniac continued. “The old oak door was replaced with steel in the 1930s, then welded shut. And on the other side is a reinforced concrete-block wall. But we can get through all of that in maybe two hours, once we’ve dealt with the alarm.”
“Nobody saw the need. To all appearances, it’s not a major bank, not worth knocking over. Besides, after 1902, when they sealed off the underground approach, there wasn’t a back entrance anymore. And in respect of the bank’s security, the charitable trust that owns the Snow Mansion agreed not to disclose Cornelius’s tunnels. A few people in the historical society have seen them, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement with teeth.”
Earlier he had mentioned torturing a member of the historical society, who was no doubt now as dead as the librarian. No matter how tightly a lawyer constructs a nondisclosure clause, there are ways around it.
“You can’t deeply, fully know a town,” he said, “if you love it. Loving it, you’re charmed by surfaces. To deeply, fully know a town, you’ve got to hate it, loathe it, loathe it with an unquenchable fiery passion. You’ve got to be consumed by a need to learn all its rotten shameful secrets and use them against it, find its hidden cancers and feed them until they metastasize into apocalyptic tumors. You’ve got to live for the day when its every stone and stick will be wiped forever from the face of the earth.”
“This is about vengeance. Well-deserved, long-overdue vengeance. And that’s close enough to justice for me.”
“I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I could hardly…force myself through them.” His voice thickened with emotion. “But then I got so angry.” “Understandable,” Honker commiserated. “Each of us only gets one mother.” “It wasn’t just her being murdered. It was the lies, Honker. Almost everything in the newspaper was a lie.” Glancing at his wristwatch, Honker shrugged and said, “Well, what do you expect from newspapers?” “Capitalist lapdogs is all they are,” Crinkles observed. “They said my mother died in childbirth and Dad shot the doctor in a mad rage, as if that makes any sense.” The
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The shooter of newspapers took a step back, startled that I knew his name. I said, “Punchinello Beezo?”
15
Until that moment, I had never suffered from harlequinaphobia, which is a fear of clowns. Too often to count, I had heard the story of the night I was born, the tale of the murderous chain-smoking fugitive from a circus, but never had Konrad Beezo’s homicidal acts instilled in me an uneasiness about all clowns.
Insanity is not evil, but all evil is insane. Evil itself is never funny, but insanity sometimes can be. We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil’s power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.
“I never met Konrad Beezo. I was like five minutes old when our paths crossed.” “I count it as a meet. So regarding clowns and anger, that’s four for four. I’m bummed. It’s like you meet the real Santa Claus and he turns out to have a drinking problem. You do still have the shiv?” “The what?” I asked. “The shiv.” “You mean the nail file?” “If that’s what you want to call it,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
Elsewhere in town, the transformer blew up. It must have been housed in an underground vault, for the rumble of the muffled blast seemed to translate laterally through the walls of the bank’s subcellar.
16
With the acetylene torch, Honker cut open the sealed perimeter of the steel door.
