Internecine Page 5

  Real operatives in real crises don’t stand around waiting for ordinary citizens to appreciate how cool they are.

  “I trashed the guns, swept the phone—it’s bug-free—and kept the envelopes. No tracking shit on the paper. So the leash is slipped and now it’s your turn to make yourself useful.”

  “I really don’t know any more about these political guys than—

  “Yeah, yeah.” He seemed annoyed, aware of my obvious smoke screen. “Consider yourself my fucking captive if you want. You could have ended this evening strewn all over your living room. Or you could shut the hell up and let me ask my questions, and maybe you might learn something.”

  I had to remind myself that this man was armed all the time.

  His personality seemed to speed-shift again, so it was a surprise when he asked, “You hungry?”

  He was batting my brain around like a paddleball. The bus station lockers brought memories that made my gut lunge. The tape on the Nam guy’s shoes reminded me of the duct tape with which Celeste had trapped me. The newspaper made me think of the big lie, the stage role we were both performing. Ordinary objects, unnerving new associations.

  “Don’t glaze out on me, Conrad,” he said. “I need to ask you some questions about those politician buddies of yours, strictly for my own intel. If I’m going to quiz you, such good pals that we are, I should also offer you some disposable information in return that might make you see things differently. You know—value received. It’s an ad concept.”

  The way I was looking around, any cop would ask to scrutinize my pupils.

  “Conrad, look,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I am going to use you. Now, once again: Are you hungry?”

  He next conducted me to Café 101, a glorified coffee shop near the Franklin onramp to the Hollywood Freeway. We commandeered a dark booth. The joint was fairly packed with people shouting over medium-loud music. The noise made me feel safer; we were hiding in plain sight. A caffeinated waitress with hair dyed a virulent magenta brought her cheery manner to our table. Her pants were low-slung and her starched white blouse, tied high, exposing a bare midriff of pale skin. I bet a lot of customers tipped her abdomen.

  “What happened to your head?” she asked me.

  “Birthmark,” I said.

  Her face narrowed into a sidelong glance. She had brightly indicated cursory interest in her customers, then I had set off her bullshit alarm. Fine, then—just serve ’em and forget ’em. When she bounded away I saw she had some sort of elaborate tattoo on the small of her back. Tramp stamp, Katy would have said.

  “Now what?” I said to Dandine.

  “Now we make like real Americans and do the burger and fries thing,” he said. “And if you’ll shut up a minute, I’ll try to answer your question.”

  I ordered a milkshake to calm my stomach. Better than eating a pound of antacids and washing them down with Alka-Seltzer, and maybe some strychnine.

  Dandine doodled on a napkin. “Ever hear of these organizations?”

  He spun the napkin so I could read it. He had written: CRASH. I/KON. MORG.

  “Nope.”

  “Most of them were deep cover phalanxes. The usual freak show—sociopaths supervising psychopaths. They’ll always have a high burn-out rate. The whole protocol of espionage changed after the 1960s and Kennedy. It hasn’t been James Bond land for decades, but most people don’t know, or give a shit. At one point in the early seventies there were a hundred and thirty-seven subgroups in the basement of America’s power structure, and like rats infesting a tenement, they spent more time devouring each other than they did accomplishing anything useful. Mostly they headed off assorted scandals while causing others, and purged the odd foreign leader who might be getting too feisty.”

  “Maximally demoted” them, he meant. Killed them. In my business, when you were beheaded or chopped off at the knees, it was called “administrative leave.”

  “The hundred and thirty-seven ratpacks got winnowed down to a hundred and two, after which the umbrella designation for all of them was CII—not an abbreviation, but a Roman numeral.” He wrote it on the napkin under the others. “One operative quite rightly called it a ‘bureaucratic malignancy.’ There was a similar mirror organization in Great Britain about the same time.”

  “Another hundred and two . . . spy groups?”

  “And just multiply by country, as needed. To shut them all down meant the excision of hundreds of chains of command. Thousands of jobs, evaporated. It was like the French Revolution. Heads rolled.”

  It was an industry unto itself, I thought. And when industries become top-heavy and wasteful, they cave in or self-destruct. I’ve read Marx. Rather, Lenin.

  He dunked the napkin in his water glass and the ink blotted away to a Rorschach abstract. He balled it up, wrung it out, and pushed it aside.

  “Like a whole bunch of businesses competing for a tiny market.”

  “You’ve got it. Today there’s only a few cells left with any power or leverage—the meanest, the cutthroats, the survivors. After I/KON and MORG became ‘subpotent,’ as they say, this week’s winner was something called NORCO.”

  “Like the Impossible Missions Force?” I said.

  Dandine wrinkled his brow.

  “You know—” I said, flustered. “Your mission, should you decide to accept it . . .?”

  “Oh. TV.” I suppose it was irrational to expect someone like Dandine to be fluent in what is oxymoronically termed “television culture.” More reminders of other worlds, coexisting invisibly with what he called the walking dead. Parallel planes, like the gaps in a venetian blind. Head-on, it looks solid, but there are all kinds of slats to slip through.

  Our meal materialized with admirable speed. It really was an impossible mission not to look at our waitress’s navel, and she knew it. A sterling silver stud lived there, to catch the light and prompt the show. I cursed my male coding while she slid Dandine’s plate into place, casually touching him on the shoulder and calling him doll. I thought about alpha wolves and swirling clouds of pheromones.

  “Think of it this way,” he said. “Most ordinary citizens’ concept of enforcement goes like this: Cops, detectives, undercover cops, FBI, then CIA . . . and after that, it gets hazy. Maybe they’ve heard of the Division.”

  “What does it divide?” I tried, but he didn’t laugh.

  “Sits between the FBI and CIA. Now, think of all the subterranean cells as being in the same order, but starting with the CIA at the bottom. It helps to remember all the clubs essentially mistrust and despise each other, and that’s a chink that can be exploited.”

  “What about the National Security Agency?” I hazarded a bite of club sandwich, and I don’t know why it bothered me that it tasted pretty damned good.

  “Not players. Remember, the NSA started out as ‘codebreakers and codemakers,’ ever since the end of World War Two. They umbrella SIGINT and INFOSEC. Did you know the NSA employs more mathematicians than anyone else? People got the NSA confused with subterranean ops back at the turn of the century—all that so-called ‘terrorist’ shit.”

  “It’s sexier now,” I said. “Now that we live in a world of red, white, blue, and yellow alerts.”

  “Bottom line: The more agencies there are, the more time they have to spend spying on each other instead of doing any sort of sociopolitical work. Then they have to police themselves for suborganizations within their own clubs. So you stand a decent chance of getting misfiled, or slipping through some loophole, I know not what.”

  It sounded as though he was trying to soften some blow, or set me up for worse things coming. “So . . . where is NORCO on the food chain?”

  Dandine filled his glass with Rolling Rock and drank half in one swallow. “Ever wonder what happened to the jobs the Impossible Missions Force turned down?” He chuckled at his own gag. “That’s NORCO.”

  “What does that stand for?”

  “I have no idea.” He destroyed most of his turkey burger with
the relish of good hunger. (My mom used to tell people that hunger is the best seasoning; at least, that’s what I tell people. Amusing personal maxims build client trust.) “Rather, you might say that whatever they say it stands for; it probably stands for something else entirely.”

  I sipped my milkshake. It was pretty good. I watched our server gallivant from customer to customer. Her whole manner was probably a front, too. It worked, what can I say?

  “So . . .” I tried to gather thoughts in air, like invisible sand. “Somebody, somewhere, needs to erase somebody else named Alicia Brandenberg. Somebody, somewhere else, pays you to do it on a kind of work-for-hire basis. A whole bunch of other somebodies fuck up the plan, and I’m stuck with a dead body in my apartment, and . . . crap, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Because we’re not on the same page yet,” said Dandine, finishing off his beer and refusing a second. “Here’s how I see it: Miss Alicia and I are supposed to dance, one quickie, done deal. But the plan leaks, and moves are made to counteract it. Now the shooter is supposed to blow up, sparing Miss Alicia in the process, and making the whole setup look like an abortion—a failed attempt on Miss Alicia. I was supposed to be the patsy, the fall guy. Then you came along. You’re the most valuable thing I could ask for in a situation like this: A totally random factor with no knowledge and no experience.”

  “Gee, thanks, now I really feel insignificant.”

  “No, thanks to you I have a better chance of doping this out.”

  The dregs of my shake tasted dead and flat; tacky, too sweet. “Couldn’t I have just handed the case over to some TopGuy, or the Chief or something? Apologize and forget about it?”

  Dandine was nailing me with that look of pity, again.

  “Sure, you could have—that’s why I removed the option. Then you could have wound up with a gang of mystery doctors, who could have jabbed a syringe full of Freon into your brain, selectively erasing your memory centers until you forgot what they wished. Along the way, you could have forgotten how to stand up, or not shit yourself, or keep from drooling.” He worked his incisors with a toothpick and I saw a thin line of blood from his gums. “You don’t grasp how this inevitability works in the world. Your comparative guilt or innocence is no longer a factor. After all, you chose to open the box. Past that, you’re a wart, and it’s easier to just X you out.”

  You think your entire existence can’t evaporate in an instant? Think again. At the very least, I had to acknowledge my low status in the food chain.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “One thing; if ever you do find yourself explaining this to an important looking functionary in an overpriced suit, and he smiles and tells you it’s all just a ‘misunderstanding’ . . . brace yourself for a bullet to the head.”

  Our waitress caught the tail of Dandine’s last line and arched an eyebrow. She scooped up the check and the money Dandine had laid out, a total pro, still too cute to live. I automatically reached for my billfold and Dandine made a face.

  “Nah, I got it. This is rough enough on you, I bet.”

  I had to say it, “Your treat?”

  “We might as well spread around some of this currency before we have to toss or burn the rest of it. Before they nail the serial numbers or tip to the tracking ink.”

  (This was just after the Treasury had changed the look of the $20 bill . . . again. First it had become what I called “big head money,” with amplified, hydrocephalic presidential profiles spilling past the borders. Now it was a riot of hidden watermarks and foil strips, sprinkled in a snow of golden numbers as if for a remedial child—now look, honey, this is a twenty, see? Twenty-twenty-twenty—with a deranged inking scheme that appeared to me to have been run through the wash cycle in a pocket alongside a leaky blue pen. Our money had changed so much in the past few years, my thoughts were: [1] indecisive government, [2] field day for counterfeiters, and [3] we win the goofiest currency on the planet award. You could have three different forms of this one bill in your wallet at the same time. Yeah, that makes everything easier.)

  I stared at the spot where two twenties had been a moment before. “That was from the briefcase?”

  He dipped his head once; affirmative. “All they’ll know is some landed at the bus station, and forty bucks more landed here, a couple of blocks away. They’re waiting for us to try swapping out the whole bang for clean cash.”

  “And . . . we’re not going to do that?”

  Another dip of the head, like a teacher approving of a satisfactory test answer. “And we’re going to be best pals, until I can amass some more data. Remember not to whip out your credit cards for anything, either.”

  “You have a charming way of diverting the question of what’s going to happen to me.”

  He rose and returned the waitress’s passing appraisal, with just a hint of heat. She would remember he was handsome; she would remember her substantial tip, but she probably would not be able to describe his face. I had been staring at it for hours, now, and I knew it would turn to fog if I tried to describe it to a sketch artist. His face was . . . “uninhabited.”

  “Conrad—as for what’s going to happen to you, I don’t fucking know. But you’re stuck. We can get there easy, or hard. Pick one.”

  Introspection has never been one of my bullet points.

  My head was still swimming with an alphabet soup of sinister organizations, as reeled off by Dandine. If it was a smoke screen of noise to hide a larger lie, it sure worked. Looking at this man whom I still can’t describe in terms of facts and figures, I saw a man looking at me the same way. He was wondering who the hell I really was. Which meant I was now wondering who the hell I really was. In pro wrestling, this is called a “reversal.” Who was Conrad Maddox, this skin I wore?

  Hunger is the best seasoning. Thanks, Mom.

  The person I presented to the world had no parents, no relatives, no ties that could not be clipped if they got messy or personal. This person, this version of me, was notably different from the person he once was. Blame was always assumed by others—oh, he had a bad marriage, another failed career, a rebuilding year, a crappy childhood, a personal tragedy. You take all those possibilities and toss them off in a no-big-deal way, and no one will ever press you for details. They will simply assume you have the same retinue of damage that everybody else pretends to carry around as a life burden. It’s sleight of hand at its best, and we all do it. . . . Why?

  To make ourselves appear more interesting than we really are. To be the spy at the airport, like in that old George Carlin routine. In the airport, surrounded by total strangers, you get to pretend to be mysterious. There’s a spy at the airport! Your job: FIND HIM!

  To pretend to be characters like Dandine. . . . Why?

  Have you ever seen one of those action flicks where ordinary people more or less just like you are suddenly plunged into a whirlwind of conspiracy and have to spend the next hour running away from helicopters and black SUVs? The thrills, if they work, are vicarious. Try taking it on the lam for twenty-four hours with no food and no rest and tell me it’s something your inner hero craves.

  No, people want to entertain the fantasy that anyone’s life can become exciting and dangerous in the blink of an eye. The sticking point is that nobody wants to actually risk anything. Not the paycheck, not the family, not life as we know it in these United States.

  However, a vast majority of those lives do not constitute “living.”

  Hence, the world of the walking dead.

  Guilty.

  You mate suitably, pay the bills, and wait around to die. The rest is just buying stuff. You buy the stuff you’ve always wanted, then you upgrade to more expensive stuff. Until you die.

  You consume movies and books and art, because those can dream for you, when you’ve lost the fashion of dreaming.

  And I haven’t dreamed of anything for a long time.

  What I do instead is target the next conquest—the next job, the next lover, the next mark. It’s an atavi
stic hunter-gatherer gene that still fires because it’s got nothing left to aspire to.

  Now, walking with Dandine is dreamlike, unreal. But I can taste the air, smell the city pulsating all around me, and see my reflection in the windows of the coffee shop. It’s me. My blood is alive. I literally have no idea what I might be doing five minutes from now.

  So, who am I?

  Try this question on yourself, sometime.

  Outside the coffee shop, he lit a cigarette from a burnished ebony case in his jacket pocket. It was whisper-thin, about the size of a business card case. Two cigarettes leaned against each other inside like sad sentries. Having nothing more intelligent to offer, I said, “You need more smokes?”

  “No. I allot myself five of these a day. They’re best right after a meal.”

  “Smoking less and enjoying it more?”

  He was taking his time strolling back to the car, practically sauntering. “Something like that.”

  We were about the same height, I noticed. Part of my mind was busily indulging a paranoid whim involving Dandine’s substitution of my own dead body for his, in some elaborate bait-and-switch scenario, which would explain why he was keeping me close. It was tough to think about this and force idle, personal chat—the kind I normally use to massage a client—while not barfing up the white-hot ball of worry that sizzled between my lungs.

  “Is Dandine really your name?”

  He chuckled, to himself. I wasn’t included. “No comment.”

  “Mr. Dandine . . . are you going to kill me?”

  He stopped, turned, and faced me, his smile clicking off as though on a motion sensor. “Don’t try to tell by looking in my eyes,” he said. “Get in the car.”

  This was a negotiation, a contract conference, and it was time for me to haggle. To strengthen my position via objection and contraindication. “The world’s nicest hit man,” I said. “Why is he so pleasant and forthcoming? In my business, people use honesty and familiarity to hide the bigger lie. So I’m thinking, what’s the lie, here? Could it be that you’re going to cancel my ticket? I’ve been beaten up, home-invaded, bound and gagged, shot at and practically kidnapped. But you say it’s all smooth, don’t worry. When people insist on telling me not to worry, that’s when I start to worry.”