Quick then, up the Deco stairs to the first subterranean level that housed, among other things, the kitchen and the Egyptian-themed theater and the room where we left twelve Asian slaves in a drugged slumber.
Still no Nihilim. But for the sounds we made, quiet prevailed.
We brought our charges to the elevators we’d been reluctant to use earlier. The first cab connected this level to lower realms; the second went only up to the garage.
Sparky, Panthea, and Winston urged the nine Specials to join them in the second elevator cab, which was a squeeze. Bridget and I decided to resort to the spiral stairs in the blue-neon-lined shaft while the others ascended to the garage and boarded two Mercedes Sprinter Cruisers in the fleet of four, where the keys were waiting in the cup holders.
The getaway had gotten underway with admirable alacrity, and nothing could go wrong now except what always did in such a scene. Just when there seemed that nothing remained to this adventure other than roaring engines and spinning tires casting up clouds of dust and escapees cheering and the heroic rescuers being feted at some future function, just then would come the barrage of bullets or the ghost drone armed with Hellfire missiles, or an attack by denizens of the first universe with tentacles for fingers and talons that could gut a rock.
According to my watch, twilight was sifting down on the world above. If we were left with any grace at all, it would be a minute or two in duration.
As the lift doors slid shut, the door across the hall from the theater opened. A man stepped out of the room where the workers had earlier begun to wake from sedation. Bridget slipped her right hand—and gun—into her purse, and I held my Glock down and at my side, shielded from the stranger by my body.
Tall, slab shouldered, hawk faced, with a trimmed but dense black beard, this guy would have looked like serious trouble if he’d been wearing anything other than pale-green hospital scrubs with a stethoscope dangling around his neck. As a physician to Dionysius the Elder, medico at the Bacchanalia, dispenser of ecstasy in pill form, bone setter and abrasion patcher to the Special Selections, pulling down a million a year in addition to whatever orgy action appealed to him, he might have needed the man-of-medicine costume to maintain the authority of his position. Or maybe he was so seduced by what the Oasis had to offer that he required the scrubs and the stethoscope to remind himself who and what he was.
“Hey, Doc,” Bridget called out as she moved boldly toward him. “I have this, like, thing in my hand that I don’t know what it is. Kind of scares me, you know, so can you, like, take a look at it?”
We weren’t dressed in the loungewear that Emmerich required of the soul children. The eminent visitors who came to strip off their sophistication and wallow for a while would be better dressed than we were, diamonded and Rolexed, Louis Vuittoned and Guccied. In our plebian ready-mades, we bewildered him. Like a goat in season, he gaped at Bridget after merely glancing at me. He was so certain that the Oasis remained an impenetrable refuge from all laws and social norms that he didn’t suspect his situation until Bridget pulled the pistol from her purse and I showed him mine.
I didn’t realize what I was going to say until I said it. Then the question seemed inevitable, considering his exalted position in this sinister pocket universe. “The Special Selection called Camilla—how did she die?”
“Oh, shit.”
“Did you treat her?”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Did you try to save her?”
“Listen, I couldn’t.”
“How did she die?” I asked again. It was less a question than a demand this time.
His eyes were the green of patinated copper. With the fingers of his right hand, he worked the shiny instruments at the end of the stethoscope as if they were prayer beads—the bell chest piece, the flat diaphragm chest piece, the corrugated diaphragm chest piece—beseeching the patron saint of corrupt physicians.
“Annie Piper,” I said. “That was her real name. How did she die? Tell me now.”
From his perspective, the corridor must have gotten very dark, because his pupils were open wide. “The guy lost control. He beat her badly. She was . . . a mess.”
“Who? Who did it?”
“I don’t know.”
I raised the Glock, let him look into that black Cyclopean eye.
He was shaking. “I really don’t know. Some visitors are famous, their faces, but many I don’t recognize. You wouldn’t, either.”
“What did you do with her?” I said, by which I meant to ask what had happened to her body.