An image of myself if I didn’t take it suddenly unfurled before me. Me as a prematurely old buffoon, reduced to nothing more than—at best—a colorful anachronism, like one of the war-bonneted Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Me propping up the bar somewhere, bending the ear of anyone who’d listen about the glory days of my career—oh, yes, a marvelous little place in the Indian Ocean—then lurching home and passing out in an alcoholic stupor on the bed.
No.
I pushed Reply and wrote:
Thanks. OK. See you then.
Only after I’d pressed Send did it occur to me that I hadn’t given him my phone number. So how on earth had he got it?
I was careful—or at least as careful as I could be, without knowing exactly what I was up against. In the morning, I went to the airline desk in person to change my ticket. Instead of extending the rental on the Charger, I returned it and skipped round the corner to a rival company to hire its replacement: a silver Toyota, which I thought was probably about as inconspicuous as you could get in this part of California. No GPS: too easy to trace. So my first stop was at a drugstore, where I bought a large-scale road map and a cheap Pay As You Go mobile. I asked for them in my best American accent. It was a bit shaky in places—but if the assistant who served me noticed, he gave no sign of it.
After transferring Corinne’s, Ginny Voss’s and Stewart Crothers’s numbers to the new phone, I removed the battery and SIM card from the old one and stowed it at the bottom of a suitcase. Then I opened the atlas and plotted my route.
Latham, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the most exclusive of a string of exclusive communities on the coast north of San Francisco. And Ocean View—also unsurprisingly—was its most exclusive address. It wasn’t hard to see why: the road rose and dipped and twisted its way along the top of a line of wooded cliffs, passing—at a respectful distance—a select handful of magnificently-sited houses. Most of them were visible enough to attest to the owners’ wealth and taste, but too far away—or too well screened—to offer a glimpse of their fairy-tale lives. It was hard to make out where the grounds of one ended and the next began, but they must all have been enormous. When, after almost a mile, I reached 8761, it was only the tenth property I’d come to.
It was strikingly different from its neighbors. There were no tantalizing views of mock-Tudor splendor or faux-Spanish elegance; no sweeping vistas of the Pacific; no fancy wrought iron. The functional gate looked more like the entrance to a prison than to a palace. Beyond it all you could see was a narrow strip of drive plunging at a sharp angle into a dense wall of foliage, as if it couldn’t wait to scuttle out of the public eye into anonymity.
On one of the gateposts was a button, with a large metal panel above it. When I pressed the button the panel slid open to reveal a loudspeaker grille and what appeared to be a lens. An automated female voice said,
“What is your name?”
“Robert Lovelace. I’m here to see Stewart Crothers.”
There was a tiny pause while she/it processed what I’d said.
“Please show your ID.”
I opened my passport. As I held it up, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something slightly above me coming in my direction. I instinctively turned towards it. Not, as I was expecting, a bird, but a drone—splay-footed, boggle-eyed, like some obscene imp that had broken free from a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. It dropped almost to ground level and made a quick tour of the car. Then the voice said,
“Open the trunk, please.”
I opened the boot. The drone hovered over my shoulder, relaying an image of the contents. It was difficult not to imagine its being disappointed. I had to remind myself that—for all its apparent autonomy—it was just a flying camera and had no means of distinguishing between a pair of matching bags and a dismembered corpse or a nuclear device.
“Please close the trunk,” said the voice. “The gate will open in five seconds.”
I got back into the car. I was barely through the gate when, glancing in the rear-view mirror, I saw it closing behind me. If this was a trap, there was no getting out of it now.
The drive seemed designed to disorientate, weaving through dense blue-green ranks of oak and fir, then—for no obvious reason—looping back on itself, so that it was impossible to keep a consistent sense of direction. But after a few minutes it abruptly emerged into a completely different world: an expanse of open parkland, artfully dotted with redwoods and little clusters of shrubs. After the gloom of the woods, the brilliance of the unfiltered sun was so dazzling that for a few seconds that was as much as I could see. But as my eyes adjusted, I made out a strip of foam-flecked blue along the horizon, and then—jutting out from the hillside—what appeared to be a gigantic rock-fall, that someone had for some reason painted white. Only when I was a couple of hundred yards away did it finally resolve itself into a collage of squares and rectangles and triangles, and I realized I was looking at Stewart Crothers’s house.
From the way it was set into the landscape—half-dominating, half-accommodating—it seemed to owe something to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. But this was a building that refused to acknowledge any antecedents. It was the incarnation of the modernist creed: make everything new. It had, undeniably, a kind of lunar beauty. But its disregard for convention made me uneasy. How do you approach someone who lives in a place like that? Do the normal social rules apply, or do you have to start again from scratch?
The drive curved round and widened into a sort of carriage sweep in front of the house. The main entrance was slightly off-center—twice the size of a normal front door, but still dwarfed by the enormous slab of granite that stuck out above it, like some Neolithic henge-builders’ idea of a porch. I got out of the car and started towards it. I was looking for a bell to push when a voice behind me called,
“Hi!”
I turned. A man: mid-forties, with sparse, tightly-curled gingery hair, coming towards me across the gravel. His movements seemed uncoordinated, arms jerking, one foot turned as if it wanted to go in a different direction from the rest of him. He was wearing shorts and a decrepit-looking Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned down to the navel. A mobile phone swung on a lanyard from his belt.
“You Bob?” he said.
“I’m beginning to think I must be.”
He stared at me, as if I’d replied in a foreign language. Then he smiled and said,
“Oh, I get it. Robert.” Up close, he smelt strongly of turpentine, and I could see spatters of paint on his clothes and bare skin.
“Bob’s fine,” I said. “I’m just not used to it.”
He shook his head. “Let’s do Robert.” He held his hand out. “I’m Stew.” We both caught it at the same moment and laughed. “Uh, Stewart.”
“Thank you so much for agreeing to see me,” I said.
“Sure.” His gaze strayed off towards the ocean, then scanned the grounds before looking back to me. “You like inside or out?”
“I’m in your hands. It’s all beautiful.”
“I prefer out.” He nodded at the house. “You want to wash up or anything first?”
“I’m fine.”
He retrieved his phone. I saw now that it actually wasn’t a phone at all, but a walkie-talkie. “Hi, honey,” he said. “We’re going down to the fire pit.”
He touched my elbow, then set off with his odd limbo-dance shuffle past the end of the house and across a rough triangle of lawn. As I caught up with