Internecine Read online

  He pitched his smoke and spread his fingers across the roof of the car. “You give up and go home. Aim for a good night’s sleep. You won’t get it. You’ll have an ass-full of NORCO agents in your way. Try to walk back into your life with your head high. Just make sure you have your estate in order, because there won’t be a funeral, because they’ll never find your corpse. See ya.” He shook his head again and got into the Sebring.

  “Wait a minute!”

  He started the car.

  “Unlock the fucking door, goddammit!”

  He idled just long enough to rile me, then buzzed the passenger window down. “Can I help you?”

  “Just wait a minute, will you? God!” My heart was racing and I had broken a new sweat.

  “I don’t need you anymore, Conrad. The briefcase can’t do anything except lead back to you, and you’re a dead end. The rest, I can do myself. You can blab all about me, all you want—it’s just the usual mess of conspiracy theories any paranoid schizophrenic could have made up. Secret agencies with funny names. A laugh riot. Best of luck with your career.”

  He started to roll up the window and I hit it with the palms of both hands.

  Understand something: I did it impulsively, already angry that I was spending so much time beating myself up. I had the sudden, taboo urge to hit something, and I just did it—practically a first.

  The safety glass bowed and shattered into a crescent shape, a shark-mouth, and suddenly my wrists were gouged and bleeding. When I looked toward him, it was down the muzzle of a pistol.

  “Think first,” he said.

  It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t sweating. I doubt if his heart rate had even changed from when he was calmly smoking.

  Again, the smile, but this time, it was actually connected to his eyes, which glinted with mischief. “Conrad Maddox, Man of Action,” he said.

  Then the son of a bitch started laughing. It started as a stuttering exhalation that turned into a chortling cough. Then the dam broke. He laughed out loud. He smacked the steering wheel. He clutched at himself. He had to mop his eyes with his gun hand. “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, and this propelled him into another paroxysm of mirth, at my expense. He put a hand into the air to steady himself, like an actor trying to wipe his expression clean for a new take. No good. That busted him up again. This paragon of control was out of control.

  “I’ll just stand here and bleed,” I said, brushing glass cubes from my arms.

  “No, no . . . it’s not you, it’s . . . ohh, hoohoo . . . !”

  Terrific. If I had been hit with a cream pie, Dandine couldn’t be more hysterical.

  “It’s . . . ahhh . . . you broke the window ohhaaaahahaha!” He stuffed the pistol into his crotch and tried to compose himself. “You looked so fucking serious, man!”

  “Shut up.”

  “I . . . can’t. Look, Conrad, what do you want?”

  “That shit you were running about guys in JCPenney’s suits swarming over my apartment? Prove it.”

  He really was just going to drive away and leave me; exit my life, fast as a finger snap. But something in his eyes told me he might consider indulging this stranger, this member of the walking dead, for a few moments more just because it seemed exotic to him. And look at me: begging my captor to hang onto me, in a sort of ultimate perversion of the Stockholm syndrome.

  Good god, maybe he felt sorry for me.

  “You opened the door,” I said. “I don’t want to just stand on the threshold. If some of the things you said are even remotely true I can’t ease back into whatever I was before tonight. I know you understand that much. I need to understand more. Please.”

  It was a sales routine, and we both knew it.

  He huffed out a sigh hinting at some of the things I suspected inside him. He could keep me for a few more minutes or take me to the pound.

  Or euthanize me, if I pestered him enough.

  Finally he said, “All right, climb aboard, but mind the . . . glass . . .”

  That shoved him down the fun-chute again, and I willingly got into a high-powered vehicular deathtrap with an armed man who was apparently a gibbering lunatic. What the hell, it wasn’t even 2 A.M., yet.

  He handed me a fairly expensive looking pair of Zeiss binoculars. “Four down, three over from the west face of the structure,” he said. “See it? That’s your apartment.”

  The magnification screwed up my ability to count, and I had to resist trying to squint and see the display through one eye. “How’d you get onto my balcony?”

  “Trade secret.”

  I craned up to the top, then down, then over. Windows, mostly dark, rushed past in my amplified view until I found my balcony. Funny; I’d never bothered to place it before, from the outside of the building. Now it seemed as obvious as a billboard—more so because my lights were on, and I knew I had turned them off when we first left Celeste’s body there, cooling off.

  Somebody (just a black cutout shape against the light) came out onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and was joined by another black shape.

  “NORCO,” said Dandine.

  “Shit,” said me.

  “You don’t have any, like, nasty Polaroids of yourself hidden up there? Incriminating evidence about your secret, gay double life? The infamous ‘second set of books’?”

  “No.” I felt weirdly embarrassed that my home life offered no evidence whatsoever that I was cutting edge. The knives from my De Vries butcher block barely ever got food on them. The most provocative thing in the kitchen was a few bottles of pretentiously priced Cabernet, alongside some higher-class gift wine. There were five or six photos of my ex-wife shoved away in a drawer, in exile, and she had her clothes on in all of them. We had never been huge snapshot hounds. Most of the stuff in the kitchen had been bought out of catalogs. There were one or two framed prints on the walls, practically screaming my lack of personal character. My home looked like an upscale hotel room, anonymous and functional. They’re weren’t even any intriguing stains on the 300-thread count sheets.

  The ultra-dull catalogue of my previous existence. Like, from birth until . . . yesterday.

  “They’re turning the place over,” said Dandine, “trying to get a handle on where you’d run away to. It’s important for you to avoid anything familiar. If you’ve thought of it, they’ll know it. Including people. You want to get closer, or you want to take a side trip to your office so I can show you that’s open for business, too, right now?”

  Strobes of flash starkened the balcony shell at regular intervals. Pictures of things being captured for analysis and discussion. Maybe some of them would be suitable for framing, as urban studies. Still lifes.

  “See the van?”

  “Where?” I lowered the binoculars.

  “Double-parked over there, no running lights, no trim. That’s where our friend Celeste will be dumped, like baggage nobody will claim. They’ll have a hand-to-hand team watchdogging this place for a while, hoping you’ll think the heat is off, and come back for something valuable. They go to training seminars to learn how to be inconspicuous. It’s a growth industry.”

  Dandine eased back in his seat, like someone used to long stakeouts. “The best smugglers look like accountants. No sharp edges on their personae that would stick in your mind. That’s been going on for so long that the bland outward face has itself become a template for a potential smuggler, for all those VICAP and profiling obsessives. Back and forth, like a seesaw, and you always have to know which end you’re on today.”

  “Civilians,” I said. These ghosts had to rehearse, to look like the walking dead. “What media define as ordinary people.”

  “Exactly; now you’ve got it.”

  Pause now, for my insanity defense.

  It had been hectoring me ever since I noticed Dandine and I were the same height: the notion that he might not exist, that he was a projection, my doppelganger, an idealized, spy movie alter ego. An invisible man in the “real” world. Dandine’s commentary emphasize
d how un-special I was, then he trumped the game by noting how un-special he had to be, in order to succeed. I quit smoking five years ago, but when Dandine whipped out his little case (augmenting it just enough with the history hinted at by his nicotine diet), I felt the old jones for a butt slam in harder than ever. I knew without asking that he would not smoke another until the next stage of our nighttime mission had been accomplished. He used the cigarettes, as I would have, as punctuation in his workday. I would mention that maybe I was losing my mind and that he was me, like that guy in that Brad Pitt movie . . . and Dandine would say he’d read the book, but not seen the film. Stuff like that. He avoided talking about himself (always make the client sell himself), but much of what he did offer made him sound like an alien observing Earth culture from afar, or a visiting animus from some parallel spirit plane. He seemed to know the score and had all the answers, the way I would expect him, as a fictional character, to just know things not apparent to the rest of us.

  Or maybe I was just exhausted, free-associating myself into a padded room.

  “It’s time to go visit Mr. Varga,” he said, wrapping the topic of my apartment, is-it-is-or-is-it-ain’t.

  “Maybe I should just curl up in the backseat, you know,” I said, “and cry myself to sleep.”

  “No. I need another set of hands and eyes, and right now is ideal for a social call. You hit them at night, when they’re tuckered out or perhaps have had a couple of cocktails. It hampers their menu of reactions.”

  “What you meant when you said you were going to use me?” I said. “Does that mean you’re using me now instead of Celeste, back there?”

  “No. It means I want you to pay attention, and alert me if something smells funny. Something I wouldn’t notice. I’m serious.”

  “How?” How was I supposed to become sensitized to a world I barely understood?

  “I can’t explain it, Conrad—it’s the sort of thing you’ll know when you see it. Why you? Because you’re here. Besides, you have yet to tell me what I want to know about those politician fellows, remember them?”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “That’s right,” he said knowingly. “Celeste is academic.”

  Fair enough. “What about the window?” I said. “There’s glass all over your car.” I still felt sheepish about it.

  He said exactly what I thought he would say. “Don’t worry—it’s a rental.”

  We took the freeway downtown and wound up near the top edge of Compton, a confusion of railroad switch-tracks and warehouses lit by harsh, sodium vapor lamps, in the middle of Ramparts Division, locally notorious with the LAPD as gang central.

  On the way I explained what I knew or could cobble together about the cryptic G. Johnson Jenks, as referenced in the hit-kit folder on Alicia Brandenberg—the same bullet points I had uselessly amassed while tied up. I slammed into the brick wall of how little I actually knew about Kroeger’s political client, and Dandine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow, as though I had just made it all up. My big hole card of presumed information was useless.

  “This is why you never get involved with a contract client beyond their dossier,” he said. “The water just gets muddier. Kind of the opposite of your line, come to think of it.”

  He had a point. One of my job skills, borne of necessity, was the cultivation of bogus intimacy, the ability to read between the lines of a dry printout and extract the one personality quirk that would make your target believe you were on the same frequency, that you were simpatico.

  It hit me like a bolt of heat lightning in the desert: I needed something I could sell Dandine. And he was allowing me a bit of latitude to find out just what that might be. In a way, I had reinforced his latent need to give me that latitude . . . or so I deluded myself.

  I used to think I was a lot smarter than I was proving to be now. And Dandine was a world-class expert at teasing a fish, this capacity exacerbated by what I was coming to see as a weird disposition toward the oblique. He was definitely one of those adverse to authority or stated rank, a condition common to thinkers. He enjoyed bumping the rule-book out of true. He was doing it now, by allowing my ride-along, and leaking more of his psychology to my inner salesman. I could not go passive; he’d smell it.

  “So you missed the case,” I said, “and found me. How does that work?”

  “I had to access the car rental records,” he said. “Which delayed me. Almost too long.”

  “Kroeger rented the car, not me.”

  “Kroeger’s records led to yours. You know that dossier on Alicia Brandenberg? You should see the piles of data that was condensed from. In fact, you should take a look at your life-file, one of these days, if you ever get the chance.”

  The secret records that sum up your whole life, that big imaginary file folder with the stamps and seals? You’ve always suspected its existence while shrugging it off—naahh, there’s nothing interesting about me anybody would want to know. But that’s two different things: the facts, in excruciating detail, versus someone’s desire to know them, justified or not. The facts, the file, remains . . . and Dandine had just said that one of those mystery folders, in some secret place, had my name on it.

  Privacy is another illusion, like national security.

  Dandine took a few labyrinthine turns inside a huge lot populated with equal numbers of big-box trucks, vacant slots containing parts trailers or other on-hold junk, and automobiles that appeared to be bombed-out, forsaken, or at least had been sitting there long enough to get dusty.

  “Do I sit in the car again?”

  “Negative,” he said. “They already know there’s two of us.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “We’ve been dogged since six blocks back. Varga uses spotters.” I saw his eyes check the periphery and mirrors with metronome relentlessness. “But something’s cooking. I’m sensing a lot more spotters than he needs for simple security.”

  “What?” I said. “You’re telepathic, now?”

  He snorted. “No, just observant. You learn to see how controlled spaces are monitored. Shadow profiles. Negative movement. Maybe the watchers are being watched, and maybe they don’t know it, but I know it. Rather, I sense it. Unconfirmed. You ever hear that expression about growing eyes in the back of your head? Now would be a good time to start.”

  Every time Dandine answered a question I felt more in the dark than ever.

  He made sure to park with adequate cover from multiple angles; I did notice that.

  “Now,” he said. “Do you want to continue to play?”

  Flashbacks of game shows crowded my head. Door Number One, Two, or Three? Dandine would know that, then wait for me to ask what he was talking about, then tell me that I couldn’t afford the luxury of dissipate fantasy. I could impress him by skipping the obvious. I nodded, feeling my own reluctance.

  He sketched it out for me, “You’re my associate. You don’t have to say anything unless somebody addresses you directly. Just stand behind me about two paces, with your hands folded in front of you, and try to avoid direct eye contact, like it’s all beneath you. Think you can manage that?”

  “Hell,” I said. “It’s exactly the same as a bid conference.”

  “A what?” Dandine paused in midexit.

  “Your company’s got a bid on an account, but so does another company. They’re the enemy, and you have to out-macho them by pretending it don’t mean nothin’.”

  He rolled that around in his brain for a moment. “I think you’ll do fine.” What he did not say was I want to toss you onto the firing line and see who flinches, because that might have made me bolt outright.

  He led the way up a roll-off ramp to a metal staircase. There were lights on in the office, about three stories from ground level. The shutters were cocked halfway, and they looked very sturdy; probably bulletproof. He rapped exactly three times on an all-metal door, and we were quickly sized up through a view slot even though there was a surveillance camera mounted behind us, up
high, painted black. Dandine’s knock was businesslike. I hate it when people try to knock “cute,” or do shave-and-a-haircut. I hate it when people try to compose creatively adorable and individual outgoing messages on their answering machines. Grow the fuck up. Most people are un-special and untalented, and always will be. Otherwise, I’d never be able to sell them anything at all.

  The door unbolted and we were admitted by a gigantic guy who looked: (1) Samoan, and (2) born without a sense of humor. Oh, and (3) He was holding an automatic pistol that dwarfed his big hand. He nodded with recognition at Dandine.

  “How’s the music biz, Thule?”

  “Sucks, man. Who’s the bread sandwich?”

  “My associate.” I tried to duplicate Dandine’s deferential nod, and look anywhere but into Thule’s deep-set, unblinking, judgmental eyes.

  “We gotta do the thing,” said Thule.

  “Absolutely,” said Dandine, raising his arms for a poke-and-pat. It was no different than going to the airport, these days. When Thule was done with me I was sure he could name the brand on my underwear.

  (American Male, full briefs, gray. As good as Calvins but less expensive. I’m glad I don’t usually have to go into this much detail. Now, I thought, I could get wiped out by a speeding bus, and the only way paramedics could identify me was by checking my underwear, and they’d write American Male in the box for my name. In the last few hours, I had thought about death more than I ever had before. Personality Modification Checklist Item #1: I really needed to shunt more effort into not being ridiculous.)

  Dandine had made a point of wearing a single gun for the benefit of Thule’s search, leaving the rest of his personal hardware in the trunk after shuffling some of the payoff currency into separate envelopes. I had neglected to ask why. I was learning to save my tyro-sounding questions for, you know, the good stuff.