Internecine Page 3

  The curtains were still wafting around, from the blowback. And Celeste, whatever her name, was sprawled on the floor, writhing feebly. Her right hand was gone and her face was a voodoo mask of blood, still steaming from the heat flash. Some of her hair had cooked into vapor and her eyebrows were gone. When I saw her track and grope around, I knew she was blind. When she grimaced and tried to roll herself to a crouch, I saw gaps where two of her front teeth had vacated. Her top was shredded and her blood-streaked breasts were exposed. Not implants. Pierced nipples; single posts. She made it halfway to standing, then collapsed and went still. I thought she was dead but after an instant I could see her still breathing—shallow, autonomic respiration. Not dead, not yet.

  I could do exactly nothing. Duct tape is tenacious. What could I do? Manfully rip myself free at the cost of my own flesh, not to mention ruining a lot of Danish leather? Call the cops? And say . . . what? Help her? Why? Fifteen seconds ago she was getting ready to blow me away with a sharklike smile.

  My skull was really pounding, now. What a riot on old Conrad.

  Well, my deft verbal skills had sure gone on unpaid leave. Talking people into or out of things is one of my big guns, and I had just completely blown it.

  This so-called Celeste person, by contrast, had come in like a total pro, even telling me I did not have to open the door—so I would open it, you see, to prove what a swell, okay guy I was at heart. A guy competent and self-assured enough to see poor little Celeste as no threat at all. She sold me a persona I was eager to buy.

  And like a coward, I found myself wishing for the calm pool of how things had been just a tiny while ago, before the locker key.

  Now it was gruesomely apparent that there were entire universes from which I had managed to insulate myself. We’ve all done it: Go for the pay hike, stay in the moribund job, seek and acquire the material things guys like me instruct you to value. Ever since my divorce, I realized, I had willingly given myself over to life in a bomb shelter. Touch nothing, and make damned sure nothing touches you. When you get very good at it, nothing will move you, either, and pretty soon, you’re checking your own wrist to see if there is still a pulse. Then you contemplate opening a vein to ascertain whether your own blood is still in there.

  I mentioned movies before; I watch a lot of movies and would deny the accusation that I experience anything vicariously through them. Los Angeles is an industry town in the way Pittsburgh is a steel town (or was) or Detroit is an auto town (or was). LA’s product is visual media—movies, TV, Webisodes, dancing billboards. The raw material, the local “ore,” if you will, is stuff of the imagination, which means that this industry, unlike all the others, is based on making shit up. That’s too mysterious for most ordinary people to handle, and they disqualify the notion that Hollywood’s “industry” is different or special in a variety of down-home, salt-of-the-earth ways . . . because to keep the world at large un-special is a great way to deny your own lack of individualism or status.

  The point is this: In order to sell people things, you have to be movie-literate, because movies provide pocket homilies that roll smoothly off the tongue instead of any sort of cogent philosophy. Movies tell Blue State folks to beware of the Red States, and vice versa. Hell, movies even tell people what clothing to wear; what’s hot and what’s not. The reason we don’t have royalty in America is because we have celebrities.

  Which includes our politicians. Which was why it was so critical that Kroeger Concepts was chosen to paint the correct portrait of G. Johnson Jenks, so the electorate would buy it the way we told them to.

  Katy Burgess always called them the “electo-rat.”

  So everybody logs their time, pays their tributes, keeps their heads down, locks their doors, and worries about pedophiles or what commercials will be on during the Super Bowl. It all works, after a fashion, providing a simulacrum of life . . . until you unlock your door of your own volition.

  It had been nagging at me ever since I regained a soupy sort of consciousness. It was almost as though I had willed that goddamned key into existence to stir up the turbid compost of my life, which had become buffed, shined, rigorously arranged, and allergen-free, festooned with the correct car, the proper tank watch, the desirable living quarters, and an utter lack of oxygen. Friends? I had conditionalized them according to their usefulness. Lovers? I had used and disposed of them according to contractual double-talk.

  Some sainted wiseass once said that you recognize the turning points in your life only in retrospect.

  I had done my job and done it well—so well that I had pulled a kind of cell door shut behind me and saved everybody else the trouble of locking it. Did I want to shove someone like Katy Burgess into that grinder, where all the product emerges the same? I didn’t think so; I kind of liked her. Talking with her, I was aware of being entertaining instead of forthright. My rule was never to discuss my past. There was only the now.

  Was this just standard-issue, middle-aged cynicism and boredom? The kind of joy two decades of white-collar skills can bring?

  Some other sainted wiseass once said that dramatic events accelerate your thinking. I’ll say . . . especially when your life is thrown into jeopardy.

  Like in the movies: The jeopardy is the turning point.

  Here was the jeopardy: gunfire and bloodshed. Suspense, too—I was tied up firmer than a tree engirded by killing vines.

  Like the weekend gambler, I had indulged a tempting little risk and lost my bucket of quarters. Would I moan about my superficial damage and retreat, having learned my lesson? Or would I take a bigger risk and chance learning something that could bust me out of the cage my life had become?

  There’s this guy I know—Katy had mentioned him back at the bar—who calls himself the Mole Man. He’s an information conduit for Kroeger and a total eccentric. Nobody knows anything about him, not really. Sometimes he tries to talk me into coaching him on fine wines. It is his sheer lack of background that makes him fascinating; he just is, in all his weirdness. He doesn’t care what’s hot and what’s not. He only cares about what’s interesting. He knows things; all kinds of obscure linkages and arcana. I imagine you could sit down with him, no preamble or conditions, and within five minutes be swept away into some place you never thought you’d find worthy of note.

  Once, when he brought up the topic of wine yet again, I thought: He’s inviting me in.

  But I didn’t pursue it. I had work to do.

  The Mole Man is a short bald guy—nobody would ever want to look like him. But to get inside the finely machined clockwork of his mind and live there awhile, that might be the key to making sense out of life. If not adventure, then at least answers, the kind that could liberate you from the dictates of mass manipulation.

  All we ever need is a key.

  An hour later, by the stereo clock, and I was still in my seat, needing more than anything to go to the bathroom, when I enjoyed another nighttime visitor. Another un-invitee. Celeste had not moved and was still breathing.

  To yell for help from some Samaritan from another of my unknown neighbors would have been in vain. One of the selling points of the building in which I live is the soundproof walls. I was nowhere near a telephone, and in no position to manipulate one. Given help of any sort, I would have to wrestle the challenge of explaining the bloody, maimed woman currently spoiling the resale value of my Stahls carpeting. The duct tape held me, powerless, viselike at all points.

  I wished I could backpedal; maybe ask Katy what was so goddamned interesting about this Alica Brandenberg person. I had plenty of time to wonder that myself. Ridiculously, the briefcase that might be hiding an answer, or five, was on the other side of the room, beyond the grab of some schmuck tied up in a chair.

  Some admen call them bullet points. Some call them action items. Others call them flags (a term which, interestingly enough, comes from the pharmaceutical industry). In the movie biz they’re called loglines. Their purpose is to boil away flowery filigree and get right to
the steak. What did I know, right now, without the garni du jour?

  Somebody wants Alicia Brandenberg dead.

  Subterraneans are involved.

  Alicia Brandenberg may or may not be lying about her past, according to Katy. She might have more than one name, history, dossier.

  Best guess: Alicia Brandenberg was straddling the political fence, playing both candidates, Jenks and Ripkin. Or, she was a mole for Ripkin.

  The rest was conjecture, and I was still firmly immobilized.

  That’s how it remained until a new intruder came in via the sixth-floor balcony. Like I said, I live in a security building.

  He was just there, filling air that had been tenantless a moment before, a black silhouette through the sheers of my Odelay drapes. He appeared like a ghost, ninja-quiet, unmoving. I thought I was freaking out or hallucinating until he tickled the sliding door (silently defeating the Sentry lock there, too) and stepped inside.

  Oh christ, this one was wearing a black ski mask. Black everything else, and what looked like dancing shoes. He stepped over the inert form of Celeste like it was no big deal. When he spotted the open case on the table, he muttered goddammit to hell and immediately slammed it shut.

  Then he saw me, across the room, as if for the first time, as if I was the least of his worries.

  “Lucky you,” he said.

  I can spin-doctor verbal pitches like a fighter pilot doing Immelman turns. I can go silver-tongued with zero prep and talk nearly anyone into nearly anything; it’s part of my job. I can commiserate with clients and give voice to their inarticulate objections with the psychiatrist’s trick of prompting trust. I am extremely skilled, verbally. And right now I couldn’t dredge up a thing to say. At least half of my body was still convinced I was dead, and seeing all this from the ceiling, or a tunnel of light. I was mute with fear, and it was embarrassing.

  The intruder stooped to pick up something behind my Donatelle quilted pillowback sofa. Celeste’s hand. He held it gingerly between two fingers, like dead vermin from a trap, turning it this way and that. He, too, wore surgical gloves, snugged into the wristlets of a black, military-style brigade sweater. He emitted a tiny humph and walked to the kitchen to drop the hand into my vegetable-washing sink, the smaller one that was part of the marble butcherblock centerpiece. He rinsed off blood and something that smeared like lampblack, and dried his still-gloved hands on a paper towel from a chrome spindle I’d bought at Smarter Image.

  He stood looking at the case again, and shaking his head. “What a classic,” he said. Then he turned to me. “Are you shot?”

  I shook my head no, rattling my forebrain.

  “Are you sure?”

  I shook my head yes.

  “Are you mute, or something?”

  Getting my voice to work was like trying to crack ice with a banana. I forced out a dry croak. “No.” I swallowed. It hurt. “I’m not.”

  “Fucking amateurs.” I didn’t know whether he meant me or the still-motionless Celeste, or both of us. “Bet this was all a big surprise for you, am I right?”

  I nodded again. “You could say that.”

  “Oh, I could? That’s priceless. You’re all tied up in a chair with a soon-to-be corpse in your lap, and do you really want to play stupid games? Maybe you should just go back to nodding, ace.”

  “She’s not dead,” I said.

  He nodded, now. Better answer; no drama. He stepped toward her and pulled his own silenced automatic from a spine holster. The gun was black, the rig was black; I didn’t even register it. He gave her two shots to the head, point-blank. The gun made a coughing sound like someone punching a cardboard box, one-two. The body on the floor jigged with the hits, expelled its final breath in a watery gasp, then settled, as though deflating.

  “She’s dead now,” he said. “For sure.” He moved closer, gun in hand, hands on knees, leaning down to inspect me. “She hit you in the head?”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  “Because your forehead is the color of a pluot.”

  “A what?”

  “Pluot. You know—plum and apricot, a hybrid. Fruit. Look it up.”

  No, I didn’t know that.

  “You got anything to drink around here? I’m as dry as sand. Sure you do.” He rummaged around inside my refrigerator (a KitchenAid double-wide in stainless steel that cost over four thousand bucks, new, and was mostly for show) until he found a bottle of sparkling apple juice. “You?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said, as though deferring another drink at a cocktail reception. Glib. Terrific. I needed to purchase a spare hour somewhere just to wrap my brain around the concept of this ninja-looking sonofabitch now standing in my very own living room, and until I found my voice I was going to sound like a complete tool.

  He leaned against the counter. “Suppose I cut you loose? You going to cause any trouble, you think?”

  He was making it my responsibility, and the implied threat was already lying dead on the floor. Smart.

  “I really have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Don’t want to leak all over on your Danish cowhide? The reason I ask is because I have to decide what to do with you, and we have to reach an accord rather quickly, and—what’s your name?”

  “Conrad.”

  “And, Conrad, time is of the essence, and I need you to promise me that you don’t have a hogleg hidden in the bathroom, or something equally laughable. I’ll know if you lie, and I’m faster than you, and a better shot, too.” A lockback knife appeared in his grasp as magically as the gun had. He snicked it open by thumb, without looking. It was narrow and mean, probably of German manufacture, with a clip-point blade.

  “Try not to cut the chair.” My follicles, from the back of my head to the cleft of my ass, were standing sharply to attention. Cold, sickly sweat had popped from my pores. I couldn’t play cool, even faking it. My whole body would betray me, and I knew this man would see it, smell it, just know.

  “Don’t worry about the chair.”

  I saw him use a fingertip as a depth guide and he slit the tape around my wrists, again without really looking. I peeled loose and he handed me the knife.

  “Well, go ahead, Conrad.”

  He had given me the knife and I clumsily freed my neck, then legs. It was a test, to establish fake trust. Dammit, that was one of my tricks.

  “Does this have something to do with Ripkin? With Jenks? With the election?” I’m afraid I babbled.

  “Don’t know any of them,” my intruder replied.

  I closed the blade and handed the knife back to him, leery, as though feeding a treat to a surly alligator.

  “Go. You’ve got two minutes.”

  I always try to default to levity. “Sure, I can have a nervous breakdown in two minutes.”

  “I mean it. Hurry.” He was really loving that apple juice.

  I walked like a zombie to the bathroom on numb, unresponsive legs. Closed the door. Didn’t lock it. Made the mistake of staring at myself in the mirror. A huge crimson-violet cloudbank of bruise joined my eyebrows and the moisture on my upper lip was not perspiration, but thin drops of blood. My lying bladder mustered a dribble that would barely top off a shot glass. I flushed anyway. Rinsed my face. It hurt to touch my head. I leaned on the counter and tried to remember how to breathe. Hurry.

  When I came out, the intruder was still in the same spot.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, Conrad, listen carefully because I don’t have the time to explain things in detail or repeat myself. If you came out of that bathroom with anything in your pants besides your dick, tell me now.”

  “I’m not armed,” I said. He patted me down regardless.

  “Okay. Do you have any guns in the house I should know about?”

  “Just what’s in that thing.” I indicated the Halliburton. “Can I please get some water?”

  I saw his eyes and mouth compose a frown, through the holes in his mask. “Fuck, Conrad, it’s your house; you don’t have to ask. I thought
you said you didn’t need a beverage. And don’t play that phony courtesy shit just because I have a gun. That gets on my nerves.”

  I poured and drained a crystal tumbler of seltzer, imagining I could feel his gaze boring into my shoulder blades, or maybe the horripilation of a gunsight, trained there. But when I turned around, he wasn’t even facing me.

  “Conrad,” he said peevishly. “You’re not my fucking hostage, okay? I ran a fast meditation unit while you were in the can and I’ve decided I can’t neutralize you the way I did the kindergartener over there. You have inadvertently stuck your weenie into a fan, but you may also have saved my life tonight. For that, I have to break tradition and discuss a couple of things with you. Hot button items. Like these fellows Jenks and Ripkin—who they might be, I mean beneath and behind all the schmooze and persona, and how that involves you, because according to the crap in the briefcase you’re part of their mix, in some mysterious switchback way. But in order to explore this like civilized human beings, we have to leave, like, five minutes ago. Unless you want to wait around for Celeste’s pals, who will probably be storming your lobby by the time the news comes on.”

  It was three minutes till 11 P.M.

  “You can stay here and try your luck with the, ahem, authorities, if you want. But I guarantee you won’t see any real police for days, during which time you’ll be detained by grim people who aren’t very giving. Like her.”

  “She gave me a hell of a headache,” I said.

  He snorted. “Hmm. I guess she did. So let’s you and me make like a tree and get the flock outta here. We have to dispose of that.”

  He meant the briefcase, not the corpse.

  And he had not mentioned Alica Brandenberg at all, not once.

  “Expect not to come back here for a while. Take some aspirin and we go.”

  I gulped some leftover Vicodin and killed another whole glass of bubble water. So much for my Katy fantasy. A brief vision of her, at home and safely asleep (alone, I hoped), made my sinuses throb. When I looked back, the gun was gone, the knife was gone, and my living visitor was holding the Halliburton.