Relentless

her eyes had not been open and so watchful, I would have thought she was a mummified corpse, preserved with painstaking care.
    “What have you done with my Shearman?” she asked, and her voice was strong, commanding, her diction clipped.
    “He’s sedated, chained in a Hummer in the garage,” I told her.
    Looking from pistol to pistol, she said, “And have you come here to kill me?”
    “We’ve come here for answers,” Penny said. “You’re Mrs. Waxx?”
    “Waxx is a name I chose and made my own. It was not imposed on me. I never married. I didn’t need a husband to have a son.”
    She began to walk toward us, and the nearer she came, the more that she unnerved me. She seemed to glide rather than take steps, as if she were a motorized automaton, not a real woman.
    “When a thing wanes, it diminishes. When a thing waxes, it grows more intense, more powerful. Waxx is my work name, and I fulfill it.”
    “You are one weird lady,” Milo said with childlike directness.
    “What is that filthy animal doing in my house?”
    Milo took offense: “Lassie isn’t filthy. She’s as clean as you are. And she can do things you could never do.”
    Lassie did not lower herself to growl at this scarecrow, but regarded her with canine contempt.
    “Bite your tongue, boy. You should know to whom you’re speaking.My maiden name is Zazu Wane. In
Who’s Who
, my long and enviable entry is rich with details of my compassion and my charity. But what I have done that truly matters, I have done as Zazu Waxx, and it’s more than a nation full of your kind could ever hope to achieve.”
    “And what achievement would that be?” Penny asked.
    “For fifty years, I have pioneered the new science of designing culture. I have
shaped
American and hence world culture through many billions of dollars of sub-rosa propaganda campaigns but also—and more effectively—through the application of techniques more often employed in espionage and warfare.”
    “Sounds like it keeps you busy,” Penny said.
    “Oh, terribly busy, my dear.”
    “Better stop there,” I said as Zazu came within ten feet of us.
    She halted but looked so full of tightly coiled energy that she might have been able to strike as quick as a snake and cross ten feet in an instant.
    “Billions of dollars,” Milo said. “Are you that rich?”
    Staring down her long straight nose at the boy, as a bird might study a bug before eating it, Zazu Waxx said, “I have the unlimited resources of the federal treasury.”
    “Sounds better than my allowance.”
    “And unlike our foolish and inept intelligence agencies, I have kept us on an entirely black budget all these years.”
    She was clearly proud of her achievements, not to say arrogant, not to say megalomaniacal. But I didn’t think she would tell us about all of this if she expected us to leave the house alive.
    Light bloomed in the space beyond this meditation chamber, and a moment later, through a door on the far side of the room came the Maserati monster, unaware of us, mumbling to himself, his big hands worrying at each other. He was Shearman Waxx’s size and physical type, but he shambled more than walked, and he was a hunchback.
    Here, without the intervening rain of our first encounter, he struck me as less monstrous than tragic. His mumbling became audible, and revealed a tortured spirit: “Don’t touch, don’t touch the pretty things, you’ll break them, you stupid boy, you clumsy boy, don’t touch the pretty things.”
    “You,”
Zazu said sharply.
    The man halted and looked up, his fearsome face now fearful, his eyes deep pools of dread.
    “What have you broken now?” she asked.
    His mouth worked, but no words came out. Then he escaped the black-hole gravity with which Zazu commanded his attention, and he noticed us. “Zazu, they don’t belong here, they don’t, they don’t.” He began to wring his hands. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
    The rough voice was that of the brutal murderer who slit John Clitherow’s throat and who, on the phone with me, called himself the brother of all humanity.
    He was a creature of two moods: a miscreation with a rotten purpose and a taste for violence; but apparently also an outsider, alone in the world, whose singularity sometimes made him insecure, uncertain, and fainthearted.
    “They don’t belong here, we have trouble, we have trouble.”
    Clearly perturbed, Zazu said, “Shut up or I will shut you up.”
    Her perturbation might mean