Garden of Evil (33 page)

‘Oh, yeah? Who's that, then? What did they give you?'

Jim thought of the face that he had seen on Ricky's canvas, in that nanosecond after the image of Father Michael had melted away. He could never know for sure. Maybe it had been nothing more than an optical illusion, a trick of the light, or wishful thinking. But he laid his hand on Ricky's shoulder and Ricky was real and solid and alive and smelled of turpentine and Peruvian grass and he had never felt such gratitude in his life.

He made his way back into his apartment, high-stepping over the rubble. As he did so, Rebecca Teitelbaum held up her cell and waved it and said, ‘The signal's back! I'm just calling my grandparents!'

‘Hey, mine's back, too!' said DaJon Johnson. ‘I can call Na shortly, make sure she's still in one pee-ass!'

All of Special Class Two took out their cells and started furiously prodding at them. Jim stood and watched them, partly in fond amusement but mostly in pain. Bethany wasn't among them, and neither was his father, nor Santana.

As he stood there, though, his own cell started playing the opening notes of Beethoven's
Piano Concerto Number Five
–
da-da-da DAH
!

He tugged it out of his pants pocket and said, ‘Jim Rook here.'

‘Jim? It's Jane – Jane Seabrook.'

‘Jane! Are you OK?'

‘I'm fine, Jim. We saw some of the riots in the distance but they didn't reach up as far as Stone Canyon.'

‘Jane—'

‘I don't know how to tell you this, Jim. But somebody's granted us a miracle.'

Jim couldn't speak, because he could guess what Jane was about to tell him.
Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you.

‘It's Bethany. She's alive. About ten minutes ago there was a knock at the door and there she was, just standing there.'

Jane took a few moments to recover herself, and then she said, ‘She's alive, Jim. I saw her dead, lying in the morgue, but she's alive again and it's really her. I don't know how it happened and I'm not going to question it.'

‘Jane—'

‘Before you say anything, Jim, one of the first things Bethany said was that she doesn't want to see you.'

‘She doesn't want to see me? I thought that was why she enrolled in Special Class Two.'

‘She hasn't told me why, Jim. But she's adamant. She doesn't want to see you or hear from you or have anything to do with you.'

There was nothing that Jim could say to that. He had been prepared to sacrifice Bethany's second life so that the white-robed children of Lilith would be sent back to their graves, and no matter how many thousands of lives he might have been trying to save, she obviously and understandably resented it.

‘All right, Jane. Tell her that I love her, would you? Tell her that I hope she can find it in her heart one day to forgive me.'

‘Forgive you for
what
, Jim? You've never met her.'

‘Take care, Jane.'

He snapped his cell shut and pushed it back into his pocket. All around him, his students were either talking to their parents or their friends, or desperately trying to get through to people who weren't picking up.

‘I think I need some air,' he said.

Summer said, ‘I'll come with you. All this dust is getting up my hooter.'

Together, they went down the steps to the road, Summer teetering on her high wedge sandals and Jim holding her hand tightly so that she wouldn't fall.

As they reached the parking area in front of the apartments, Santana appeared, trudging up Briarcliff Road in his short-legged dungarees.

‘Santana!'

‘
Hola, Señor
Rook!
Olvidé mi coche
!
Cómo podría olvidar mi coche
?'

‘You forgot your car?'

Jim went up to him and shook his hand and clapped him on the back. ‘Good to see you, Santana. I mean it.
Una larga vida y feliz.
A long life and a happy one.'

Summer turned her head and frowned at him as he went to unlock his car.

‘I coulda
sworn
he was upstairs with us, before. How'd he get all the way down here? I think I'm going screwy.'

‘Don't worry, sweetheart. It's been one of those nights.'

‘
One of these nights . . . one of these crazy old nights
,' sang Summer, as they walked hand in hand down the steeply sloping curve to Foothill Drive. ‘
We're going to find out, pretty mama, what turns on your lights . . .
'

They reached Foothill Drive and ahead of them was North Van Ness, long and straight and utterly deserted, except for six or seven parked cars, all of them burned out. The evening air was pungent with the smell of smoke, and the wailing of sirens was growing louder and louder.

‘
You got your demons, you got desires
,' sang Summer, softly. ‘
Well, I got a
few of my own
.'

For no reason at all, going nowhere, they started to walk down the middle of North Van Ness, still hand in hand. Jim looked up at the smoke drifting south-westward across the sky. A quarter moon was shining, but occasionally the smoke blotted it out.

They hadn't walked far before Jim thought he saw a darker twist of smoke. It drifted much more slowly across the moon than the rest of the smoke, and for a long moment he and Summer found themselves walking in total darkness.

Jim thought:
I can't see you any more, Ba'al. Neither you nor any other demons. I can't see you and I can't hear you if you speak to me. Your days are over, and you're never coming back, because you have no one to help you any more.

The twist of smoke cleared away, and the moonlight shone down on them again.

Summer put her arm around Jim's waist and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It's just like we're the only people in the whole world, isn't it, Jimmy? Just you and me. We're like Adam and Eve, don't you think? Adam and Eve, in Paradise.'

T
he one person who never reappeared was Jim's father, William ‘Billy' Rook.

Over the coming weeks, the bodies of the dead were gathered together and buried, and the burned-out houses were either demolished or repaired and redecorated. Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles echoed and re-echoed to the sound of piledrivers and construction trucks.

On several occasions, Jim thought he saw his father in the street, or in Ralph's supermarket, but each time, when he approached him, the man would turn around and look completely different, as if his father's spirit were repeatedly playing a trick on him, to upset him for what he had done.

One day, three weeks later, he drove to Santa Monica Beach with Summer and walked on the sand with her. Summer saw a red spaniel running around and went running after it, round and round in circles, laughing.

Jim stood with one hand shading his eyes, looking at the ocean. The wind whistled a soft, persistent tune in his ear, the way his father used to whistle when he was mending something, like gluing together a broken coffee-pot handle.

A small boy in a pale-blue T-shirt was sitting on a plaid blanket not far away. He was holding a pack of Oreos, and his blond hair was sticking up at the back. He was squinting at the ocean in the same way that Jim was.

‘Are you OK, son?' Jim asked him.

The boy looked up at him, with one eye closed against the sun. ‘I'm waiting for my daddy,' he said.

Jim turned back to the ocean. He stared at the surf for a long time, and then he said, ‘So am I, son. So am I.'