68 THE MEN WHO EVAPORATED

68

THE MEN WHO EVAPORATED

Regis Duroc-Jersey is confused, the poor dear, having taken the path of virtue out of his wretched life. He is fearful because when a close associate of Terrence Boschvark engages in free thinking and disagrees with his boss, that independence of mind is said to be disloyalty, which can lead to the destruction of one's reputation and financial ruination. Regis fears for his life as well because he's been a liaison between Boschvark and the Bead crime family, and the latter perhaps will think he knows too much to be allowed to go straight. Having never made it to bed the previous night, the sweet man—always a better soul than he believed he was—is exhausted. He needs to relax with a hot shower and sleep away the long afternoon.

Wendy prepares the bed in the guest room, provides towels in the adjacent bath, and sets out a decorative basket containing a variety of soaps and small bottles of emollient lotions. She draws the drapes shut not just in the guest room but also in strategic places throughout the house, ensuring that no snoopy neighbors or passing minions of Terrence Boschvark might catch a glimpse of Regis.

Not many years earlier, minions was a serious word; now, like a lot of other words, it's cartoonish. Wendy has thought a great deal about what is happening to her world. She believes the evolution of minions —and the degradation of language in general—is less because it is associated with characters in an animated-film franchise and more because most of the people in the leadership roles of every profession in this society are simpleminded and sound like cartoon characters every time they use the language—or as though they have stepped out of a bizarre world in a dystopian graphic novel. As a consequence, these cartoonish people are busy shaping a future world as unreal as Batman's Gotham or Mickey Mouse's hometown, a world that is therefore sure to fail.

With the windows draped against the prying eyes of minions, Wendy settles in the kitchen to plan and prepare a five-course dinner. She looks forward to a candlelit meal at a table set with beautiful linens and fine china and an array of silverware ranging from butter knives to coffee spoons. Although she appears to be as informal as a character in a TV sitcom about young moderns, she is at heart more suited to life at Downton Abbey , a traditionalist who places great value on order.

She expects visitors no later than three o'clock. At twenty minutes past two o'clock, a soft bing-bong issues from the through-house speakers of the music system, indicating that the gate to the backyard has opened. She is not surprised that they have entered her property from the alleyway rather than the street, because of course they will wish to be discreet.

She opens the door and steps onto the porch as they approach along the walkway that's flanked on both sides by red begonias. The one in the lead wears a gray suit, white shirt, and black tie; he's about five feet eight, so fresh-faced that he might be a Mormon youth come to share the promise of his church, except for a smile that curls into a smirk at the right corner of his mouth. Whatever knife he carries, it's sure to be sharp enough to gut a crocodile. The second guy is very tall, as solid as a vault door, with a broad face as blank as that of a golem whose skull is full of mud.

Before the smaller of the two can announce himself or state his purpose, Wendy says, "You look like Galen Vector sent you," as if she is unaware that Vector is most likely dead along with the others in the hunting party that went after Vida.

"Who sent me doesn't matter," the suit replies. "What matters is the message I've been instructed to convey and the seriousness with which you receive it."

"So you're an attorney. Come in, and bring your notary public."

"He's not a notary," says the lawyer.

Wendy smiles. "I didn't think he was."

She decides not to offer them either a beverage or cookies.

They sit at the kitchen table. Wendy doesn't expect to need a firearm, but she occupies the chair that has a pistol fitted in a spring clamp under the seat.

"I know that you love your half brothers," the attorney says. "You want the best for them, as do the people for whom they work."

"The Bead family," she says.

The smirk, which has seemed like a permanent feature of his face, vanishes in a solemn downturn of the lips. "I don't know who that is," he lies.

"If you say so. Now what have you been sent to tell me?"

"For their own good, your brothers need to evaporate."

"Evaporate?"

"Not just vanish but cease to exist, live under new names, in a place far from here, never to return, never to have contact with you or anyone they knew here."

Unspilled, tears fill Wendy's eyes, wrung from her less by the fate of her brothers than by her failure to guide them out of their degenerate existence. Life passes like a shadow, and it's necessary to do something useful with your years. "What have those boys done now? What on earth have they done that makes it necessary for them to evaporate?"

"If I revealed that, I'd be putting them at risk. And you're better off not knowing."

Whether the golem has the power to speak remains unrevealed when he only belches as if to confirm what the attorney says.

"If you want to be sure your brothers remain safe in their new lives," the lawyer continues, "you must cover for them when anyone asks where they've gone."

"What am I to say?"

"You say they went to start new lives in South America."

"Where in South America?"

"Peru, Brazil, Argentina, wherever. It doesn't matter. They aren't in South America. You have to sell it. Can you sell it?"

"Well, I don't know. I guess I can try."

"You have to do better than try. If by your behavior you create suspicion about what's happened to your brothers or if, God forbid, you report them missing ..."

Wendy looks puzzled, as if she is not quick-minded enough to read the mortal truth that underlies the story he's telling. "What if?"

The lawyer looks sad, and the golem leans over the table to deliver a far different expression from that of his associate. The latter belches again, and the former says, "Then for your safety, you'll have to be given a new identity and moved to South America with your brothers."

"But you said they're not in South America."

"Exactly."

She holds her expression of puzzlement for a moment, while they sit in silence, and then pretends slow-dawning enlightenment. "Oh."

"Two associates of your brothers, Galen Vector and Frank Trott, have also gone to South America," the attorney says. "It's a chore having to relocate all these people. Please don't burden us with the need to move you into a new life."

"I won't," she says. "I like it here."

"You have two beauty shops, a lovely home, a nice life."

"I don't want to evaporate."

Satisfied, the two men get up from the table. The golem opens the back door.

As he's about to depart, the attorney turns to Wendy. "One more thing."

"I know," she says. "You were never here."

"How could we have been? We don't even exist."

Smirking, he closes the door softly behind him.

Wendy opens a cabinet drawer near the cooktop and removes a colorful apron and uses it to blot the tears from her eyes before tying it on.

She wishes she might have had one more chance to convert her brothers, but she can no longer deny that she would have failed again because, frankly, they were psychopaths.

She prides herself on her fierce determination, which arises from having a meaningful purpose and bottomless energy, two of many qualities in which her slatternly mother was deficient. Wendy had failed to save her mother from a long fall toward early death, and now she had failed her brothers. After waiting eighteen years for Regis, the fulfillment of the seer's prediction, she must not fail him. In the pursuit of his reformation, she will be decided, firm, inflexible, resolute. There are things about him worth loving, not least of all his inability to lie to her. She is putting it all on the line this time, and if she fails, she will be devastated. If she fails him, she does not know what she will do, does not know how she will cope, how she will find a reason to go on—except perhaps by opening a third beauty shop.