The Face

Rudy are going to share with you some techniques for keeping your mind at peace through all this.”
        Dr. Rudy was Rudolph Kroog, a psychiatrist famous in Hollywood circles for his unconventional past-life therapy. He talked to Fric for a little while, trying to determine if in a previous incarnation he might have been a boy king in Egypt during the centuries it was ruled by [427] pharaohs, and provided a bottle of capsules with directions to take one at lunch and one at bedtime.
        Remembering that boy kings had sometimes been poisoned by their advisers, which he’d learned on Saturday-morning cartoon shows, Fric had carried the capsules directly to his third-floor suite, where he flushed them down the drain. If a green, scaly monster had lived in his toilet, he killed it with an overdose that day.
        As easy as Dr. Rudy had been to endure, Ming was hard. After two days of “sharing,” Fric preferred to be consigned to the mercy of Mr. Hachette, the brain-diseased chef, even if he would be roasted with apples and fed to unsuspecting Bowery bums on Thanksgiving.
        Eventually, everyone had left him alone.
        He still didn’t know whether it had been a hospital, sanitarium, or booby hatch.
        His mother had been to Palazzo Rospo only once since then, but she hadn’t mentioned the incident. That was the visit in which she told Fric that he was an almost perfect invisible little mouse.
        Then they had gone riding on a pair of great black stallions, and Fric had been exuberant, self-assured, athletic like his father, and a superb rider.
        Ha, ha, ha.
        Sitting here in the rose room, gazing through the windows, he had gotten so lost in the past that he hadn’t noticed when Mr. Yorn, the groundskeeper, had entered the picture. Wearing green rain togs and black wading boots, Mr. Yorn must have been checking the lawn drains or investigating a clogged downspout. Now he stared through the rose-room windows at Fric, from a distance of six feet, looking puzzled, perhaps worried.
        Maybe Mr. Yorn had waved and Fric, lost in the past, had not waved back, and so Mr. Yorn had waved again, and still Fric had not waved back; and now maybe Mr. Yorn thought Fric was in a trance.
        To prove that he was neither a rude little snot nor hypnotized, Fric [428] waved, which seemed to be the right thing to do, whether Mr. Yorn had been standing there unacknowledged for ten seconds or five minutes.
        Fric waved a little too vigorously, which might have been what caused the groundskeeper to step closer to the windows and say, “Are you all right, Fric?”
        “Yes, sir. I’m fine. I’m just having some ham sandwiches.”
        Apparently the leaded glass panes and the roar of the rain filtered some of the sense out of Fric’s voice, for Mr. Yorn edged closer still and spoke again: “What did you say?”
        “Ham sandwiches!” Fric explained, raising his voice almost to a shout.
        For a moment Mr. Yorn continued to peer in at him, as though studying a curious bug trapped in a specimen jar. Then he shook his head, causing the brim of his rain hat to flap comically, and he turned away.
        Fric watched the groundskeeper walk past the bronze bowel movement. Mr. Yorn receded into the storm, dwindling across the immense lawn until he appeared to be no bigger than a garden gnome, until he was finally gone like a ghost.
        Fric figured he knew exactly what Mr. Yorn was thinking: Like mother, like son .
        Rising from the chair, stretching, shaking stiffness out of his legs, Fric accidentally kicked the picnic hamper, knocking it over.
        The lid fell open, revealing something inside: a whiteness.
        The hamper had been empty. No quake lights, no ham sandwiches, no anything.
        Fric scoped the parlor. He saw no place in which an unsuspected companion might be hiding. The door to the hall remained closed, as he had left it.
        Hesitantly, he stooped. Cautiously, he reached into the hamper.
        He withdrew a folded newspaper and shakily opened it. The Los Angeles Times.
        [429] The headline was too bold, too black, too incredible to miss:
FBI ENTERS MANHEIM KIDNAPPING
.
        A chill shuttled and wove in Fric.
        A sudden brine moistened his palms, as if he had dipped his hands into a supernatural sea, and his fingers stuck to the paper.
        He checked the date of the issue. December 24. The day