The Face

contained more than twice as many books as there were bottles of wine in the wine cellar. Then he said, “When I’m a has-been, at least I’ll be a pleasantly wasted, well-educated has-been.”
        Ha, ha, ha.
        Fric sat on the edge of a chair, picked up the phone beside it, pressed the access button for his private line, and keyed in *69. He had forgotten to do this in the wine-tasting room, after Mysterious Caller had hung up on him.
        Previously, when he’d tried this trick, the call-back number had rung and rung, and no one had ever answered it.
        This time, someone answered. Someone picked up on the fourth ring, but didn’t say anything.
        “It’s me, “said Fric.
        Though he didn’t receive a reply, Fric knew he wasn’t listening to a dead line. He could sense a presence at the other end.
        “Are you surprised?” Fric asked.
        He could hear breathing.
        “I used star sixty-nine.”
        The breathing grew strange, a little ragged, as though the idea of being tracked down with *69 excited the guy.
        “I’m calling you from the crapper in my father’s bathroom,” he [225] lied, and waited to see if his weird phone buddy would warn him about the misery with which lying was rewarded.
        Instead, he just got breathed at some more.
        The guy was obviously trying to spook him. Fric refused to give the pervert the satisfaction of knowing that he had succeeded.
        “What I forgot to ask you is how long I’ll need to hide from this Puck when he shows up.”
        The longer he listened to the breathing, the more Fric realized that this had peculiar and disturbing qualities far different from the standard pervert-on-the-phone panting that he’d heard in movies.
        “I looked up Moloch, too.”
        This name seemed to excite the freak. The breathing grew rougher and more urgent.
        Abruptly Fric became convinced that the heavy breather was not a man, but an animal. Like a bear, maybe, but worse than a bear. Like a bull, but nothing as ordinary as a bull.
        Up the coiled cord, into the handset, into the ear piece, into Fric’s right ear, the breathing squirmed, a serpent of sound, seeking to coil inside his skull and set its fangs into his brain.
        This didn’t seem at all like Mysterious Caller. He hung up.
        Instantly, his line rang: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
        He didn’t answer it.
         Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
        Fric got up from the armchair. He walked away.
        He passed quickly along aisles of bookshelves to the front of the library.
        His personal call tone continued to mock him. He paused to stare at the phone in this main reading area, watching as the signal light burned bright with each ring.
        Like all the members of the household and the staff who enjoyed dedicated phone lines, Fric had voice mail. If he didn’t pick up by the fifth ring, the call would be recorded for him.
        [226] Although his voice mail was currently activated, the phone had rung fourteen times, maybe more.
        He circled the Christmas tree, opened one of the two tall doors, and stepped out of the library, into the hall.
        At last the phone stopped taunting him.
        Fric glanced to his left, then to his right. He stood alone in the hall, yet the feeling of being watched had once more settled over him.
        In the library, among the hundreds of tiny white lights strung like stars across the dark boughs of the evergreen, the angels sang silently, laughed silently, silently blew heralds’ horns, glimmered, glittered, hung from their halos or harps, dangled from their pierced wings, from their hands raised in blessing, from their necks, as if they had broken all the laws of Heaven and, executed in one great throng, had been condemned forever to this hangman’s tree.

CHAPTER 34
        
        ETHAN DRANK SCOTCH WITHOUT EFFECT, FOR his metabolism seemed to have been dramatically accelerated by the experience of his own death twice in one day.
        This hotel bar, with its crowd of self-polished glitterati, was a favorite of Charming Manheim’s, a haunt from the early days of his career. In ordinary circumstances, however, Ethan would have chosen a joint without this flash, and with a comforting soaked-in-beer smell.
        The few other bars familiar to him were frequented by off-duty cops. The prospect of running into an old friend from the force, on