Page 48

When Spike’s questions had been answered, he said, “Ollie, old boy, being a forgiving soul, I’m inclined to let you live, even to limit your pain to humiliation. Take off your clothes.” When the suspended man expressed dismay and reluctance, the hand that held him grew larger; thick fingers spread up his face, like the petals of a blooming flower. No words were necessary to convey the message that sealing his mouth and nose shut would be neither difficult nor an act that would cause his executioner to lie awake at night in the grip of regret.

His legs dangling like those of a boy hanging from a tree limb, Lambert struggled out of his tuxedo coat. It fluttered to the floor. He freed himself from his cummerbund, untied his tie, tore open his ruffled shirt, fumbled with his cuff links, and those items fell away from him. His trousers slid down surprisingly thin and bowed legs, but they hung up on his shoes.

When Spike abruptly released him, Lambert fell to the floor with a sound like—but with less grace than—a sack of potatoes.

As his swollen hand and elongated arm shrank to their previous size, the giant said, “Little lady, you might want to avert your eyes.”

Harper’s smile suggested she foresaw much that might amuse her and nothing likely to offend her.

Benny knew it was unworthy of him to take pleasure in watching the vain and arrogant Lambert humiliated. Although he was nice, even if some thought he was too nice, he never claimed to be saintly. He didn’t look away.

After Lambert slipped out of his shoes and threw aside the tangled pants and stripped out of his undershirt, he stood in his red-and-black harlequin-patterned briefs, trembling and bewildered. His cultivated suntan now overlaid a ghastly complexion, rendering him a dull grayish bronze. “No more,” he said, faking defiance.

Looming over Lambert, Spike pulled the here’s-looking-at-you-kid trick, this time with both eyes.

Letting out a thin shriek, as if he had shed forty-five of his fifty years and changed genders in an instant, the attorney stumbled backward two steps and came up against a wall.

With his eyes glaring on the ends of fibrous stalks and swaying like cobras an inch from Lambert’s face, Spike said, “If I have to take those fancy underpants from you, I’m sure to grab more than the fabric, and I’ll tear off whatever I close my hand around. Presto, esquire becomes eunuch.”

On second thought, their host shucked out of his shorts.

The eyes reeled back into their sockets. Heavy lids closed halfway over them. Spike lowered his face to Lambert’s.

Breath wheezed in and out of the attorney in ragged gasps as his tormentor grabbed his head in both hands and turned it sideways and murmured something other than endearments in his ear. When the naked man stopped shaking and began to breathe normally, Spike released him and stepped away.

“Benjamin, he will remember that you and Harper were here, but he will recall nothing of me. He will not understand how youcould have bespelled him into doing what he’s about to do, but he will now forever live in fear of you.”

A bead of sweat depending from his nose, his face glistening like a glazed doughnut but not as appealing, Lambert looked around as if not sure where he was. After a moment, in a voice eerily normal, he said, “Well, I better get back to the party.”

Wearing nothing but black socks, like a performer in a sleazy 1950s stag film time-warped into a new century, he crossed the room and opened the door and stepped into the upstairs hallway.

Spike, Harper, and Benny followed Lambert down the back stairs to the kitchen.

The attorney paused at one of the islands, where a chef was hovering over a silver tray, arranging sticks of zucchini that had been breaded in sweet-potato starch and Parmesan before being deep-fried. He picked up one, bit off a piece, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Superb.” He headed toward the nearer of two swinging doors, the one that would take him not into the butler’s pantry and then the dining room, but into a hallway that served the several chambers where his guests partied.

Lambert hadn’t yet finished chewing the zucchini before Chaz Champlain and his staff had fallen silent and still, like mannequins in a diorama. All eyes followed the attorney as he sauntered out of the kitchen, and no one seemed to notice Benny and his companions when they passed through the other swinging door.

In the dining room, on the right, a wide archway led to the hall. They proceeded instead to the far end of the room, to a door that opened to the immense foyer where the showgirls waited on the staircase. Benny was aware of the roar of conversation diminishing in stages as elsewhere the bare-assed barrister made his way among the celebrants with zucchini stick in hand.

When Benny followed Spike and Harper Harper out of the house, the Rolls-Royce that had occupied the place of honor in the street had been replaced by his Ford Explorer. A valet, serving as spotter, called out to his fellows. A squad of attendants sprang into action, opening the doors and starting the engine. If they had possessed whisk brooms, they might have hurriedly swept the path.

As before, the two energetic mimes flanked the destiny buddies. The silent pair no longer struggled against a nonexistent wind, but instead moved sideways, polishing nonexistent walls of glass that supposedly enclosed the walkway.

Nearing the Ford, as the ten-piece band faltered to a sudden unmelodic conclusion, Benny glanced back and saw a colorful flock of women in glamorous dresses and stilt heels wobbling out of the house in great haste, clinging to tuxedoed men for support.

Harper scrambled into the back seat, and Benny climbed into the shotgun position, and Spike the craggle crammed himself behind the steering wheel, and the grateful valets slammed the doors one-two-three, and somewhere Oliver Lambert was coming to the realization that he was naked except for black socks, with no memory of taking off his clothes and no slightest idea why he’d done so.

LEAVING THE PARTY OF THE CENTURY, BENNY REMEMBERS THE HORROR IN THE HEADMASTER’S HANGING GROUND

So after an intense evening of Coca-Colas with aspirin and the crafting of dollar bills into origami animals, having arrived at an understanding that they had a moral obligation to put an end to the suffering of Prescott Galsbury, now also known as “Bugboy,” Benny and Jurgen—and Mengistu Gidada in his private room—were awakened the following night by excited but distant voices and two muffled sounds that might have been shotgun blasts. After hardly more than an hour of sleep, they erupted from their beds and flew to their windows, from which they glimpsed several flashlight beams sweeping the night in the vicinity of Catherine Baneberry-Smith’s laboratory.

With uncanny synchronization, they threw on dark clothes and unlatched their windows and arrived simultaneously at the massive, spreading pine that stood fifty yards from Felthammer House. The sky was ornamented with a crescent moon, as on the previous night, but this time it seemed, to Benny, less like the sneer of the Cheshire cat and more like a harvesting blade. The four or five searchers had receded beyond the laboratory and now their lights carved the darkness across the last of the meadow, moving toward the grove of silver firs known as the Headmaster’s Hanging Ground.

Mengistu said, “I do not delude myself that we are in no real danger. We are in mortal danger. One of us might die this night.”

“One or all,” said Jurgen Speer.

“Or none,” Benny said. “We might all live long and prosper.”