Small World (34 page)

‘Din-din,’ the Giant Dorothy sang.

Her perfume was very strong. Leyna thought her face seemed elaborately made-up, a garish moon above her shimmering garb. Perhaps she had plans for the evening. It was convenient for Leyna, perhaps too convenient. The Giant left the supper tray, replaced the wall, and went away immediately.

It was a huge, festive supper: breast of turkey, wild-rice piiat . pureed hubbard squash, new green peas like small sweet pearls of jade, cucumbers in vinegar, rye bulkie rolls, and sweet honey butter, and a banana split for dessert. There was a split of rose to drink, and a pot of coffee. Leyna set the wine aside, and savored the rich coffee in its fragile porcelain cup.

Afterward, she brushed her teeth and waited patiently for Dorothy’s return. The light failed and the room grew dark and still, but the Giant did not come for the tray. It was not unusual; she had left the supper tray all night previously. Any of the trays might sit for hours before she bothered with them. The possibility that she was out for the evening cheered Leyna immeasurably.

With the art blade in one hand and the corkscrew in the other, she began the second phase of the War. She began with the pillows, slashing them until their feathered entrails flew around the room. Next, the needlepoint upholstery on the two chairs in the room. When they had been slashed and stabbed, she went to the draperies at the windows. It was tiring but exhilarating, tearing the heavy cloth from the rods and slashing it in long hopeless rents. Tearing the clothes from the bed, she piled the linen in the middle of the room.

Sweating and panting by the pile, she realized that so far she had made little noise.

‘A little night music,’ she whispered, and a frenzy broke in her.

She spilled the tray with its china and silver to the carpet. It clattered and crackled as it fell but the carpet muffled the sounds disappointingly. She kicked the silver pieces, then stooped to pick up china and pitch it against the wall. There was a satisfying crescendo of smashing crockery. She paused again to listen for the sound of approaching Giants.

The room grew still and darkened. She turned on the overhead lights, the better to see by. It was time to do the real work now. Retrieving the lamp, she plugged it in, carefully avoiding the exposed wiring. She shredded an obnoxiously scratchy blouse from her wardrobe and heaped its nylon and Lurex around the base of the lamp and the naked wires.

Tucking her art blade and corkscrew into her waistband, Leyna picked up the split of rose and the half-bottle of Riesling that remained from her recent meals. Pausing before the mirror, she inspected herself, seemed satisfied, and closed the wardrobe door. Without looking back, she turned off the overhead lighting, and left the room, leaving only the lamp on the floor for light, and

the spill from the hall through the partly opened door to disperse

:he dark.

She vandalized randomly as she went through the house,

ashing wallpaper, upholstery, draperies, paintings, and then lining obscenities into the long, shining table in the State Dining Room. She drove the corkscrew savagely into the wood of furniture, doors, moldings, frames, and chipped futilely at the marble surfaces of the Entrance and Cross halls. Tiring of it, she pitched it through a window. The bottle of rose, drunk as she progressed, oiled her rage and boosted her flagging energy. She grew dizzy and fell against things, knocking over pier tables, potted plants, busts, and chairs. The wine slopped from its open carafe onto the carpets when she staggered.

She giggled once or twice but mostly did her damage in a wordless, panting fury. When the carafe was empty, she used it to smash a mirror. With the end of it, she ran out of hysteria.

Calmly, she dragged an elegant little Boston rocker to the Blue Room from its place in the East Room, and stationed it so that she could look out onto the grounds. The lights that illumined it at night had come on automatically. She could make out the Carousel, standing silent in the middle of its circle of black-green grass, and the fantastic shapes of the trees and bushes around it. She wished she knew how to turn it on. It was the Giants who controlled the Carousel. If it were running, by chance or choice, she might have'chosen it over this room, and would have liked to hear its music again. Here, though, she could ruin the carpets. In fact, she had a considerable start on most of them already.

A spasm gripped her bowels and she withstood it. Standing up, she walked to the center of the room, slipped down her shorts, and peed on the Aubusson. That done, she ignored the acrid smell of her own urine, and took her seat again. The art blade was a little dulled by its recent use, and her hands trembled, but she found the proper vein in her left wrist with very little effort. Dropping the blade, she snatched up the bottle of white wine, and chugged a good portion of it. It spilled out of her mouth and ran down her chin. Her head was notably unsteady; it was an effort to keep her balance in the chair. Closing her eyes, she leaned back. She took a deep breath, and thought she could smell, somewhere, a tarry smoke.

‘Some birthday party,’ she whispered. ‘Happy birthday to me,’ she sang softly. ‘Happy birthday, dear Leyna . . . ’ she paused to collect a shaky breath ‘ . . . Happy birthday to me.’

She wanted to clap for herself but her left arm was numb and unresponsive, her right growing very weak. She opened her eyes to stare up at the chandelier that hung like a huge lit birthday cake overhead. She thought it swayed, that the flames of its false candles wavered, and then she realized it was her own vision. From somewhere in her brain, black explosions obtruded into her ?;ght. She heard something that might have been a faucet :ripping, but her nose, curiously acute, told her it was warm, salt, coppery. She could feel it spattering her bare feet. With great relief, she remembered it was not her birthday at all.

In the third-floor bedroom that had been hers, the facsimile Queen’s bedroom, the scraps of cloth around the stripped wire flowed. The smell of ozone was strongin the room. At last, a faint explosion, as the synthetic cloth, heated to the point of combustion by the electrical wiring, burst into flames. There was a lot to burn; it was a well-furnished house. The fire fed itself on fine cloth and wood, glue and paint, varnishes and wood stains. Like a a'.ing thing, it breathed the air that came in through the many tall, - ell-proportioned windows. It burned twenty minutes before the smoke detectors in the dollhouse room went off, thirty before the -rrinkler system automatically flooded the room.

It was an excellent system. The fire was quickly out, and the sensors, detecting no more smoke and heat, turned off the water. If the room was a miasma underfoot, and stank of wet charred -ood and cloth, if the Doll’s White House was a sodden wreck and the rest of Dorothy Hardesty Douglas’s prized collection aamaged, at least the apartment and the rest of the building was ?afe. No one would die as a consequence of this fire, inside or outside the no-longer quite-white dollhouse. Leyna died, as she r.anned, from blood loss.

No one heard the smoke alarms. Maid and mistress were both absent, on similar errands. The sound-proofing between apartments was more than adequate. The morning would have to come round to expose the business of the night.

Dolly came in at ten the following day. The apartment, always -uiet. was preternaturally still. She shivered involuntarily and men shook off the sudden, inexplicable shadow on her good reelings. It was not the shadow of anything real, she decided, r.erely the ghost of cocaine. It was unlike Ruta not to be up and a Tout her work. She had spoken to Dolly about seeing a new -■oyfriend the previous night; undoubtedly, she was hungover.

Not knowing that Dolly had eaten breakfast out, Ruta would be contrite about not being on hand to serve Dolly her morning coffee.

Dolly, bored with life without Roger, had gone to a dinner party and encountered an old boyfriend, a French record producer. Armand had a pretty boy in tow, and one thing had led to another. It all made her feel like a world-beater, her father’s old expression for postcoital self-esteem. How could she have imagined she was getting old? She was just beginning.

Consulting a mirror, she thought she did look a touch dissipated. Roger would be home in the evening but there was nothing much to do today. She could sleep the day away and greet him fresh-faced and innocent. But first she had to feed their dolly-mouse. Roger would notice any signs of neglect. He might punish her by withholding the use of the minimizer, by refusing to supply any more little things to her.

There was no warning. The hermetically sealed dollhouse room had kept its secrets from the rest of the world, from Ruta, never really welcome in the sanctum sanctorum anyway, and from Dolly herself, until she unlocked and opened the door. She looked right at the Doll’s White House. For an instant, nothing registered. Then the odor of wet char reached her nose, and after that, the pit of her stomach.

Approaching the house as if a sleepwalker, she slipped in a puddle of water and slid heavily into the dollhouse and its base. The Carousel shuddered; its mechanical music-maker was jarred and issued a distorted, rasping note in protest. Gaining her feet, again, Dolly saw both the charred East Wall and the South Portico, where a rusty stain seeped from under the doors and across the floor of the Portico to the steps. In a daze of disbelief, she reached out to the fire-blackened wall. Her fingers came away smudged with soot; she wiped them distastefully on her cocktail dress.

Dipping a finger into the stain of the Portico, she stared at it. The water from the sprinklers had not diluted it because the roof of the Portico had covered it. But it had not dried; the room was now too humid. It was darker then when it flowed from Leyna’s veins, to be sure, and the smell of death was strong in it.

Dolly had only to bend a little and look in. Leyna had chosen the obvious place, center stage. She was slumped in the rocker like a doll, abandoned by a child called away to supper. The chair, squarely under the chandelier and facing the windows, was painfully out of place. Under it, a hideous rug of brick-red puddled around it, and the rockers were spattered with the same substance. There was so much of it, Dolly thought, for such a tiny

being.

Her first instinct was to smash the little dolly-mouse, to grind the teeny tiny corpse into the floor, but she could not bear to touch

her.

‘Good riddance,’ she whispered, ‘good riddance. I’m glad I broke you.’

Leyna’s unseeing eyes stared up at her; she made no reply. The little body, limp and white, seemed to waver, as if it were becoming a ghost that very instant. But it was only the tears in Dolly’s eyes, blurring her vision. They were not tears of grief, but tears of rage.

What happened?’ he said, when she showed him the small body in the coffin-shaped cigarette box. His voice was as dead as the teeny tiny woman.

Dolly’s hands shook as she put the coffin-box in his hands. She rumbled frantically for the cigarette she had put down a few seconds before.

‘I don’t know. She seemed all right. She ate her meals.’'

He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes traveled feverishly over the Doll’s White House. He fingered the slashed curtains, the scars on the furniture, the char marks, as if he were a pathologist performing an autopsy. When at last he spared a look for Dolly, his eyes accused her.

She said nothing in her own defense, thinking it was the best defense to simply act shocked and innocent.

His hand found her face in a haze of unreality. She was astonished that it hurt. She fell backward, against the sofa. His voice struck at her with as much violence.

'What the fuck happened?’

I don’t know,’ she choked out. ‘She went crazy, I guess.’

He turned his back on her, to stare at the corpse.

I had to put her in the box myself,’ she told him, aggrieved.

He stared at her and didn’t seem to see her.

When I gave her the car, she tried to kill herself. I couldn’t stop her. When someone wants to die, that’s it.’

Roger sat down abruptly in the nearest chair and covered his eyes.

It’s your fault,’ Dolly burst out. ‘You did it to her. You did 203

something wrong!’

The slump of his shoulders and his hidden face voiced his own secret conviction. Now Dolly could be nice to him. She moved close to him, brushed the nape of his neck with her fingertips. ‘We’ll make a nice funeral for her,’ she murmured.

He sighed raggedly.

‘Listen, darling,’ DQlly pushed on, ‘we’ve learned a lot. Next time will be better.’

There would be no next time, Roger promised himself, staring at his late teeny tiny woman in her silver coffin.

Dolly sensed his withdrawal from her. It made her a little sick. She must have new tenants for her White House. Somehow, she would have them, when the house was repaired. Roger had to give them to her. She’d see to it. Only for now it was necessary to smooth things over, easeliis evident pain. Just like a kid with a pet mouse, she assured herself, he’ll forget it quickly enough. She knew how to make him forget his own name, let alone his teeny tiny woman. She knew how.

Investigators admit privately that they are baffled by the strange disappearance of TV journalist Leyna Shaw. After weeks of intensive cooperative effort by law enforcement agencies, there was no visible progress in the case. With no authenticated ransom demands to support the theory that Shaw was kidnapped, for money or by political terrorists, the focus of the investigation shifted to Shaw’s private life. There too, there was a painful scarcity of clues. Childless and separated from her husband, architect Jeffrey Fairbourne, but on verifiably good terms with him, the journalist apparently had few close friends, and no serious relationships in her life, though she dated a wide spectrum of media colleagues, upper-level government bureaucrats, and politicos, including his Elegance the President, Matt Johnson. Inevitably, her disappearance sparked wild rumors, which were dismissed by no less an insider than the president’s mom, dowager Harriet Caithness Johnson, as ‘poppycock. The girl and Matthew were never more than acquaintances.’ Almost-ex-husband Fairbourne has his own information in the matter: He claims Leyna told him that His Eligibility had paid more than one midnight visit to her plush Potomac co-op. Fairbourne plans on revealing his suspicions in a roman a clef, now being shopped to major publishers.