Relentless

that the hunchback’s surprise matched her own, which she had striven to conceal. If indeed we surprised her, she was not as in control of the situation as she pretended to be.
    She said, “They claim your father is chained in the Hummer in the garage.”
    Penny and I exchanged a glance. We both said, “Father?”
    “They say,” Zazu continued, “that he’s alive. They may be lying about both issues.” To us, she said, “You have the guns. So I must ask—mayhe go confirm what you have said before we discuss whatever it is you want?”
    Without the key to all the padlocks, freeing Shearman Waxx might easily take half an hour with the proper tools.
    “I want him back here in two minutes,” I said, “or I’ll have to shoot you dead.”
    Zazu did not like the ticking clock, perhaps because she thought the hunchback unreliable, but she knew there could be no better terms than this.
    The stare she turned upon the hunchback made him cringe. His shoulders slumped further, and he hung his head, regarding her meekly from beneath the shelf of his heavy brow.
    She said to him, “If you want to be allowed to do those things you so much like to do, be back here in two minutes.”
    “Yes, Zazu. I will, I will, Zazu. I understand. Don’t I always do what you say?”
    The hunchback hurried from the room, by way of the door through which we had entered.
    Suddenly I remembered John Clitherow’s curious last words to me:
And now I am in the tower
de Paris
with—
    John had been trying to warn me, without giving away his game, that should a horribly deformed man cross my path, I must not pity him or let him get too close. Victor Hugo’s famous novel
Notre-Dame de Paris
was in English titled
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, and the tower of course was the bell tower of that cathedral.
    I directed Zazu to move between us and the door by which the hunchback had departed.
    The creature’s big-knuckled, thick-fingered hands would be so clumsy with a gun that he probably always chose a knife, as with Clitherow, but using Zazu as cover seemed right to me.
    Returning to the subject of her vaunted achievements, Zazu said,“The problem with culture is that it swings like a pendulum, driven by one theory for a while and then by a countertheory.”
    “That’s the same way it is when you’re working on the time-travel problem,” Milo said.
    For a moment, Zazu looked as if she might spit a stream of blinding venom at the boy.
    But she was too eager to talk about herself to be sidetracked from her favorite subject: “My life’s work is to stop the pendulum from swinging ever again and to maintain it along the arc on which the genius Rousseau set it moving more than two hundred years ago.”
    “They say I’m a kind of genius,” Milo told her.
    “You are the wrong kind of genius,” Zazu informed him.
    “Watch it, bitch,” Penny warned.
    “Rousseau was a madman,” I said, “and an absolute monster to people in his personal life.”
    “Yes,” said Zazu,
“you
would think so. Shelley, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Sartre—they were all monsters to the people in their personal lives, but that was of no importance when you consider their contributions to the world.”
    “All madmen to one degree or another,” I said. “Geniuses, yes, and some of them fine artists. But madmen. And their contributions to the world were … irrationality, chaos, excuses for mass murder, despair.”
    “Not madmen,” she said.
“Intellectuals
. They form the opinions of the elite ruling classes. Then artists and writers must, with their work, carry the message of their superiors to the masses. Which you have not done, Mr. Greenwich.”
    She went on in this vein for another minute, and I began to think she was vamping, stalling for time to think of a way to deal with us. We had indeed surprised her.
    When he could get a word in, sweet Milo said, “Don’t put down my dad. He’s the best dad in the world—and
soooo
patient.”
    Ignoring Milo, Zazu Waxx said to me, “With your books, you are pushing the pendulum in the wrong direction, which is why you must be broken, made to renounce your heresy, and purged.”
    Gasping as if from exertion and also weeping, the hunchback returned to the room. In his right hand he clutched a butcher knife that dripped bright blood.
    As flamboyant melodrama goes, it didn’t get any better than this. But remember, truth is always paradoxical, and always much stranger than