The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (24 page)

    Lancaster excused himself to visit the restroom. He pissed in the fancy urinal and washed his hands and dried them on a fancy scented towel. He checked his watch in the lobby, decided to risk a few moments away from the party, and ducked into the stairwell and lighted a cigarette. Moments later Mr. Blaylock and Dr. Christou barged through the door, drinks in hand, Dedrick hot on their heels, a pained expression replacing his customary stoicism. Dr. Christou and Mr. Rawat immediately lighted cigarettes. Both smoked Prima Lux. "Ah, great minds!" the doctor said, grinning at Lancaster, who covered his annoyance with a friendly mock salute.

    A few minutes later, cigarettes smoked and drinks drunk, everyone headed back to the table. Lancaster did the gentlemanly deed of holding the door. Dr. Christou hesitated until the others had gone ahead. He said in a low voice, "I confess an abiding fondness for Boris Karloff and Val Lewton. Anyone who holds them dear is first class by my lights." The doctor leaned slightly closer to Lancaster, scorching him with whiskey breath. "In recent years I've become convinced the priest of Aphra was duped by the shepherd. Those cemetery photographs were surely a hoax. Which is a damned shame because I think there truly was an extraordinary event occurring in that village." He laid his very large hand upon Lancaster's shoulder. This drunken earnestness would've been comical except for the glimmer of a tear in the corner of the aged scholar's eye. "Please extend my apologies to our fair company. That last drink was a bridge too far. I'm off to my quarters."

    Lancaster wondered if the evening could possibly become more surreal. He watched in bemusement as the big man trundled away and boarded an elevator.

    He returned to the ballroom where Ms. Diamond sat alone at the table. She watched the others dance, her mouth sullen. He sat next to her and, feeling expansive from the booze, said, "I have a bottle of twelve yearold scotch back at the Chateau." His blue eyes usually had an effect on women. He was also decently-muscled from a regimen of racquetball and swimming. He assiduously colored the gray from his expensively-styled hair, and all of this combined to smooth the rough edges of advancing age, to create the illusion of a man in his late forties, the urbane, chisel-jawed protagonist of sex-pill commercials rather than a paunchy playboy with stretch marks and pattern baldness sliding into the sunset years. But Ms. Diamond was having none of it.

    "I think you also probably have a dozen STDs," she said. "Half of them exotic and likely incurable by fire."

    "Well, I don't like to brag," he said.

    The group dispersed, shuffling off to their respective rooms, and Lancaster shook the hands of the men and kissed the hands of the ladies- Kara's skin tasted of liquor, and Mrs. Cook's was clammy and scaly and bitter. He glanced at her face, and her eyes were heavy-lidded, her thick mouth upturned with matronly satisfaction at his discomfort.

***

    Lancaster hailed a cab and made it to his townhouse a few minutes after 2 a.m. Nothing spectacular-two bedrooms, a bathroom with a deep whirlpool tub and granite everything, and a kitchen with wood cabinets and digital appliances. In the living room, lush track lighting, thick carpet and a selection of authentic-looking Monet and Van Gogh knockoffs, a half dozen small marble sculptures imported from Mediterranean antique shops, a gas fireplace and modest entertainment center, and of course, a wet bar tucked opposite bay windows with a view of the river.

    He wasn't in a steady relationship. His previous girlfriend, a Danish stewardess twenty-five years his junior, had recently married a pilot and retired to, 'make babies', as she put it in the Dear John email. He dialed the escort service and asked for one of the girls he knew. The receptionist informed him that person was unavailable, so he requested Trina, a moderately attractive brunette who'd stayed over a few months back, and this time he was in luck, his Girl Friday would be along in forty-five minutes. He dropped his coat into an oversized leather chair, hit the remote to dim the lights, a second time to ignite a romantic blaze in the hearth, and once more to summon the ghost of Jeff Healey through speakers concealed behind a pair of African elephant statuettes.

    The drink and Ms. Diamond's dragon lady glare had worked him over. That and the bizarre dinner chatter and the raw emotion flowing from ponderous Dr. Christou. Lancaster brought forth the special box, cur rently hidden upon a shelf inside a teak cabinet that housed his cigars and collection of foreign coins. Tonight he needed to gaze within the box, to drink it with his eyes, to satiate the nameless desire that welled from his deepest primordial self.

    He sat for a while in the thrall of conflicting emotions. The ritual calmed him less than usual. He shut the box and returned it to its cubby. His breath was labored.

    Cigarette in one hand, a fresh glass of scotch sweating in the other, he sank into the couch and closed his eyes. The doorbell went
ding-dong
! and his eyes popped open. The glass was dry and the cigarette had burned perilously near his knuckle. He set the glass on the coffee table and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. At the door it occurred to him the bell had only rung once, and it bothered him somehow. He peered through the spy-hole and saw nothing but the empty walk, yellow and hazy under the streetlamp light. The doorknob throbbed with a low voltage current that tingled momentarily and vanished.

    He opened the door and Trina-the-escort popped up like a jack-in-the-box, still fumbling with a compact that had slipped from her stylish red-lacquer handbag. She wore a slick black dress and had dyed her hair blonde since their last encounter. "Hiya," she said and caught his tie in the crook of her finger as she stepped past him from the dark into the light. As the door swung closed, a breeze ruffled his hair and he shivered, experiencing the unpleasant sensation that he'd forgotten something important, perhaps years and years ago. His brain was fairly pickled and the girl already slid out of her dress and the strange unease receded.

    When they'd finished, Trina kissed his cheek, dragged on their shared cigarette, then briskly toweled herself and ducked into the bathroom. He dialed her a taxi and lay in the shadows listening to the shower, the edge off his drunkenness and succumbing to exhaustion as he recalled the faces of his dinner guests-Dr. Christou's haunted eyes, Mr. Blaylock's predatory smile, and Mr. Rawat cool and bland even as he dissected and debated. The others ran together, and uneasiness crept back in as his damp flesh cooled, as the red numerals of the alarm clock flickered in a warning. The girl reappeared, dressed, perfumed, and coifed with a polka dot kerchief. She said she'd let herself out, call her again any time. He drifted away, and-

    
Ding-dong
! He sat up fast, skull heavy. Only three or four minutes had passed, yet he was mostly anesthetized from the alcohol and overwhelming drowsiness. He waited for the next ring, and as he waited a chill seeped into his guts and he thought strange, disjointed thoughts. Why was he so nervous? The vein in his neck pulsed. Trina must've forgotten something. He rose and went to the door. As he turned the deadbolt, he experienced the inexplicable urge to flee. It was a feeling as powerful and visceral as a bout of vertigo, the irrational sense that he would be snatched into the darkness, that he would meet one of Dr. Christou's unknowable marvels lurking in the cracks of the Earth.

    Trina stepped back with a small cry when he flung the door open and stood before her, sweat dripping from his torso. A taxi idled on the curb. She regained her composure, although she didn't come closer. "Forgot my cell," she said. Dazed, he fetched her phone. She extended her hand as far as possible to snatch the phone. She hustled to the taxi without a goodbye or backward glance.

    The canopy of the trees across the street shushed in the breeze, and fields littered with pockets of light swept into the deeper gloom like the crown of a moonlit sea. The starry night was vast and chill, and Lancaster imagined entities concealed within its folds gazing hungrily upon the lights of the city, the warmth of its inhabitants.

    Lancaster was not an introspective man, preferring to live an inch beneath his own skin, to run hot and cold as circumstances required. Fear had awakened in him, stirred by God knew what. Imminent mortality? Cancer cells spreading like fire? The Devil staring at him from the pit? Momentarily he had the preposterous fantasy that this primitive terror wasn't a random bubble surfacing from the nascent tar of his primordial self, but an intrusion, a virus he'd contracted that now worked to unnerve and unman him.

    Whatever the source, he was afraid to stand in the tiny rectangle of light that faced the outer darkness. That darkness followed him into sleep. The gnawing fear was with him too. The dark. The hum of the stars.

***

    Lancaster arranged for a limousine driver named Ms. Valens to pick the party up in front of the hotel after lunch the next day. He suggested a helicopter for speed, but Dr. Christou had an aversion to flying in light aircraft-a train and bus man, was the good doctor. Mr. Rawat and the Cooks were traveling to the airport that evening immediately following the tour of the corporate property, so the chauffeur loaded their luggage, which included Mr. Cook's pair of golf bags and no less than five suitcases for Mrs. Cook. Lancaster chuckled behind his hand at Ms. Valens' barely concealed expression of loathing as she struggled to heft everything into the trunk while Ms. Cook tutted and tisked and the muscular Dedrick stood impassively, watching nothing and everything at once.

    The two hour drive was along a sparsely-traveled stretch of secondary highway that lanced through mile upon mile of wheat fields and sunflower plantations. The sky spread black and blue with rolling storm clouds, and crows floated like gnats beneath the belly of a dog. Light distorted as it passed through the tinted windows and filled the passenger compartment with an unearthly haze.

    Lancaster and Ms. Diamond poured champagne from the limousine bar:
A glass to celebrate surviving their hangovers
, Lancaster said. Dr. Christou took his with a couple of antacid tablets, and Kara refused, covering her mouth with exaggerated revulsion. The others finished the magnum of
Grand Brut
with the diffidence of draining a bottle of spring water. Lancaster had seldom witnessed such a tolerance for booze except when playing blackjack with the alkie barflies in Vegas backwaters during his wild and wooly college days. He checked the stock to estimate whether it would last until he got his charges onto the plane. It was going to be close. Ms. Diamond's eyes widened when she met his and he felt a smidgen of uncharacteristic pity for her distress.

    Mr. Rawat took a sheaf of blueprints and maps from his gold-clasped leather briefcase and spread them across his knees. Mr. Cook and Ms. Diamond sat on either side of him. Their faces shone with the hazy light reflected from the paper. Lancaster's eyeballs ached. The scenery slid past like a ragged stream of photographic frames. He pondered the previous evening's gathering at the hotel. Mrs. Cook winked and knocked his knee under the table. Mr. Blaylock grinned, minus an eyetooth, and Christine, the voluptuous vamp, stroked Blaylock's shoulder, her nails denting the exquisite fabric of his dinner jacket. Luther and Rayburn were a blur, unimportant. Mr. Cook drank with the methodical efficiency of a man who'd rather face the scaffold than another day with his wife, and he smiled with the same, superficial cheer as Ms. Diamond did-probably a reflexive counter to deeper, darker impulses. Mr. Rawat debated Dr. Christou with a passion reserved for a lover, while fox-sharp Kara looked on with jaded boredom, and Lancaster wondered how close the men might actually be and perhaps, perhaps the NSA thought to use them against one another, to leverage a clandestine affair, and damn, this trip might actually prove interesting. Lancaster snapped out of it. His sunglasses disguised the fact he'd dozed for a few moments, or so he hoped.

    They arrived at the property, several acres of single-story, hi-tech buildings fronted by immaculately trimmed lawns and plum trees. The office sectors were divided by access lanes, the whole complex erected in the middle of nowhere, an island on an ocean of grain. A grounds keeping truck inched along about a quarter of a mile down the frontage road. Workers in orange jackets paced it on the sidewalk, blasting away with leaf blowers.

    No sooner had her feet touched the pavement, Ms. Diamond launched into a rehearsed spiel, subtly leading Mr. Rawat, Dedrick, and the Cooks by the collective nose toward the nearest wall of glass. She unlocked a set of doors with a key card and they walked inside. Meanwhile, Kara squinted at the changeable sky and fussed with the brim of her hat while Dr. Christou stood in the shadow of the car, rubbing his skull and muttering. Lancaster called the catering company, gained assurances the team would arrive on schedule. Ms. Diamond had reserved tables at a restaurant in a town several miles away. He knew she'd underestimated the softness of this particular group-such people couldn't go five or six hours without food and booze, couldn't go without being waited upon hand and foot; so he'd hired one of the finer outfits in the city to prepare dinner and truck it to the site at approximately the time he figured the tour would be wrapping up.

    "Had enough, have you?" Dr. Christou said. "Of our chums, I mean."

    "Ms. Diamond has them in hand. I couldn't very well abandon you or the lovely Kara, could I?" Lancaster lighted a cigarette. The 'lovely' Kara had retreated into the limousine. He suspected she was raiding the olives. Poor dear was emaciated.

    "I'd say you are more preoccupied keeping tabs on me than helping your colleague net that big fish pal of mine."

    "You're happy, Mr. Rawat is happy. Or am I wrong? " Lancaster said, thinking fast, wondering if the doctor was cagier than he appeared. "I'm here to make certain everyone has as nice a trip as possible." He gestured at the surrounding plains. "Got my work cut out for me. This is the kind of land only a farmer or Bible salesman could love."