The Face

wheel of the Land Rover, he clicked the remote to roll up the garage door. He backed into the rain-swept alley.
        He had arrived in Santa Monica as Corky Laputa. He was leaving as Robin Goodfellow, agent of the NSA.
        After waiting to be sure that the garage door went all the way down, he pressed a second button on the remote, engaging an electric lock that doubly secured the premises.
        The CD player in the Land Rover was loaded with the symphonies and operas of Richard Wagner, which was his preferred music when he was being Robin Goodfellow. He fired up Götterdämmerung and set out through the storm for Malibu, to have a serious face-to-face talk with the man who this evening would get him onto the Manheim estate undetected.
        Corky loved his life.

CHAPTER 62
        
        “SANDWICHES,” SAID FRIG.
         Stupid, stupid, stupid.
        After conveying the dozen quake lights to his deep and special secret place, Fric had decided to return the empty picnic hamper to the lawn-and-patio-storage room, where he had originally gotten it. He had undertaken this task for some reason that had seemed logical at the time, though he could not now recall what it had been.
        Mr. Devonshire, one of the porters-the one with the English accent, the bushy eyebrows, and the weak left eye that tended to drift toward his temple-had encountered Fric in the ground-floor west hall, at the end of which lay the lawn-and-patio-storage room. By way of friendly small talk, Mr. Devonshire had said, “What’ve you got there, Fric?”
         Sandwiches, Fric had said. Now he said again, “Sandwiches.”
        This was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to say, let alone to repeat, because when Mr. Devonshire had first seen him, Fric had been swinging the hamper as he walked along the hall, swinging it in such a way that its light weight-and therefore its emptiness-must have been instantly apparent.
        “What kind of sandwiches?” Mr. Devonshire asked.
        [415] “Ham,” said Fric, for this was a simple response that he could not screw up in the nine thousand ways that he could probably mangle the words peanut butter and jelly.
        “So you’re having a picnic, are you?” Mr. Devonshire asked, his left eye slowly drifting out of alignment as though he expected to be able to look behind himself while simultaneously studying Fric.
        When the porter had first come to work at Palazzo Rospo, Fric had thought that he possessed an evil eye and could cast curses with a glance. Mrs. McBee had corrected this childish misapprehension and had suggested that he do some research.
        Fric now knew that Mr. Devonshire suffered from amblyopia. This was a little-known word. Fric liked knowing things that most people didn’t.
        Long ago Fric had learned to look at Mr. Devonshire’s good eye when talking to him. Right now, however, he wasn’t able to meet the porter’s good eye because he felt so guilty for lying; consequently, he found himself gazing stupidly at the amblyopic eye.
        To avoid embarrassing Mr. Devonshire and himself, he stared instead at the floor and said, “Yes, a picnic, just me, something different to do, you know, ummm, not the old routine.”
        “Where will you have your picnic?” Mr. Devonshire asked.
        “The rose garden.”
        Sounding surprised, Mr. Devonshire said, “In this rain?”
         Stupid, stupid, stupid.
        Fric had forgotten the rain. He said, “Ummm, I mean the rose room .”
        The rose room, as members of the staff continued to refer to it, was a small ground-floor reception parlor. Its windows presented a view of the former site of the rose garden.
        A few years ago, at the urging of their feng-shui consultant, the rose garden had been moved farther from the house. Where the old rose garden had been, grass grew, and from the grass soared a massive piece of contemporary sculpture that Nominal Mom had given to [416] Ghost Dad on the ninth anniversary of their wedding, at which time they had been divorced for eight years.
        Nominal Mom described the sculpture as “futuristic organic Zen” in style. To Fric it looked like a giant heap of road apples produced by a herd of Clydesdales.
        “The rose room seems like an odd place for a picnic,” said Mr. Devonshire, no doubt thinking about the Zen turd pile beyond the windows.
        “Ummm, well, I feel close to my mom there,” Fric said,