Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 56

After leaving the children’s clothes with Jocko in the library, Erika went to the master suite, where she quickly packed a single suitcase for herself.

She didn’t clean up the blood in the vestibule. She should have wrapped Christine’s body in a blanket and called the New Race trash collectors who conveyed corpses to Crosswoods, but she did not.

After all, if she went to a window and looked northwest, the sky would be on fire. And worse was coming. Maybe it would still matter if authorities found a murdered housekeeper in the mansion, or maybe not.

Anyway, even if the discovery of Christine’s body turned out to be a problem for Victor, it wasn’t an issue for Erika. She suspected that she would never again see this house or New Orleans, and that she would not much longer be Victor’s wife.

Only hours ago, she handled with aplomb — if not indifference — such macabre episodes as a butler chewing off his fingers. But now the mere presence of a dead Beta in the bedroom disturbed her both for reasons she understood and for reasons she was not yet able to define.

She put her suitcase at the foot of the bed, and she chose a smaller piece of luggage in which to pack everything that Victor wanted from the safe.

The existence of the walk-in vault had not been disclosed to Erika during her in-tank education. She learned about it only minutes earlier, when Victor told her how to find it.

In one corner of his immense closet, which was as large as the formal dining room downstairs, an alcove featured three floor-to-ceiling mirrors. After Victor dressed, he stepped into this space to consider the clothes he wore and to assess the degree to which his outfit achieved the effect he desired.

Standing in this alcove, Erika spoke to her reflection: “Twelve twenty-five is four one.”

A voice-recognition program in the house computer accepted those five words as the first part of a two-sentence combination to the vault. The center mirror slid into the ceiling, revealing a plain steel door without hinges or handle, or keyhole.

When she said, “Two fourteen is ten thirty-one,” she heard lock bolts disengage, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

In addition to tall upper cabinets, the vault contained lower drawers, all measuring the same: one foot deep, two feet wide. Each of three walls held twelve drawers, numbered I through 36.

From Drawer 5, she withdrew sixteen bricks of hundred-dollar bills and put them in the small suitcase. Each banded block contained fifty thousand dollars, for a total of eight hundred thousand.

Drawer 12 offered a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of euros, and she emptied it.

From Drawer 16, she withdrew one million worth of bearer bonds, each valued at fifty thousand.

Drawer 24 revealed numerous small gray-velvet bags featuring drawstring closures tied in neat bows. In these were precious gems, mostly diamonds of the highest quality. She scooped up all of the bags and dropped them in the suitcase.

No doubt Victor maintained offshore bank accounts containing significant sums, held by such an intricate chain of shell companies and false names that no tax collector could link them to him. There he kept the larger part of his wealth.

What Erika collected here, according to Victor’s instructions, was his on-the-run money, which he might need if the current crisis could not be contained. Listening to him on the phone, she’d thought he should use the word would instead of might, and when instead of if, but she’d said nothing.

With the suitcase, she returned to the mirrored alcove, faced the open vault door, and said, “Close and lock.”

The pneumatic door hissed shut. The bolts engaged. The mirror descended into place, bringing with it her reflection, as if it had previously taken her image into the ceiling.

In the garage, Erika stowed both pieces of luggage in the cargo space of the GL550.

With a large cloth tote bag in which to carry their books, she returned to the library. In his new attire, Jocko looked less like Huckleberry Finn than like a mutant turtle from another planet, out of its shell and likely to pass for human only if everyone on Earth were struck blind.

Although the faded blue jeans looked all right from the front, they sagged in the seat because the troll didn’t have much of a butt. His thin pale arms were longer than those of a real boy, so the long-sleeved T-shirt fell three inches short of his wrists.

For the first time, Erika considered that Jocko had six fingers on each hand.

He had adjusted the expansion strap on the back of the baseball cap to its full extension, making it big enough to fit him, and in fact making it too big. The cap came over the tops of his gnarled ears, and he kept tipping it back to see out from under the bill.

“It’s not a funny hat,” he said.

“No. I couldn’t find one here, and the funny-hat store doesn’t open until nine o’clock.”

“Maybe they deliver earlier.”

Stuffing Jocko’s selection of books in the tote bag, she said, “They don’t deliver like a pizza shop.”

“A pizza would be a funnier hat than this. Let’s get a pizza.”

“Don’t you think wearing a pizza on your head would attract more attention than we want?”

“No. And the shoes don’t work.”

Even after taking the laces out, he had not been able to fit his wide feet comfortably in the sneakers.

He said, “Anyway, Jocko walks way better barefoot, has a better grip, and if he wants to suck his toes, he doesn’t have to undress them first.”

His toes were nearly as long as fingers and had three knuckles each. Erika thought he must be able to climb like a monkey.

“You’re probably well enough disguised if you stay in the car,” she said. “And if you slump in your seat. And if you don’t look out the window when another car’s passing us. And if you don’t wave at anyone.”

“Can Jocko give them the finger?”

She frowned. “Why would you want to make obscene gestures at anyone?”

“You never know. Like, say it’s a pretty night, big moon, stars all over, and say suddenly a woman’s smacking you with a broom and a guy’s beating your head with an empty bucket, shouting ‘What is it, what is it, what is it?’ You run away faster than they can run, and you want to shout something really smart at them, but you can’t think of anything smart, so there’s always the finger. Can Jocko give them the okay sign?”

“I think it’s better if you keep your hands down and just enjoy the ride.”

“Can Jocko give them a thumbs-up sign? Attaboy! Way to go! You done good!”

“Maybe the next time we go for a ride. Not tonight.”

“Can Jocko give them a power-to-the-people fist?”

“I didn’t know you were political.” The tote bag bulged with books. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Oh. Wait. Jocko forgot. In his room.”

“There’s nothing in your room that you’ll need.”

“Be back in half a jiffy.”

He snatched up one of the laces from the sneakers and, holding it between his teeth, somersaulted out of the library.

When the troll returned a few minutes later, he was carrying a sack made from a pillowcase, tied shut with the shoelace.

“What’s that?” Erika asked.

“Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Jocko’s stuff.”

“All right. All right. Let’s go.”

In the garage, at the GL550, Jocko said, “You want me to drive?”