“Did I? You’d think that would be the type of thing I’d remember.” It was like a dialogue with Alice, if Alice were high on mushrooms. Curiouser and curiouser Men without faces and tongues removed. “Okinawa. Rwanda. Vatican City. What are you on about?”
“I have a dossier on you, Mr. Rafferty.”
“I’m sure you do. Listen… Agent Rhodes, is it? Can I give you some advice? Maybe eat a sandwich now and again. You look like a fuckin’ stick insect. Your ribs probably rattle when you get fucked.”
She smiled. “I’m afraid only one of us is getting fucked today, and it isn’t going to be me.”
To besmirch a man’s reputation is no small thing—and no easy feat. He pushed his empty glass to one side. “Badge or not, I’d be careful who you repeat those allegations to, Miss Rhodes.”
She was twisting her empty ring finger, and Rafferty watched as her eyes flitted over the room. Christ. She’s checking the exits. And was that a…? It was. Tucked inside her jacket, a holster. A fucking gun. She wasn’t just a lunatic; she was an armed lunatic. How the hell does one manage to bring a handgun into Australia, even if you are—supposedly—employed with Interpol? Must have purchased it when she got here, in Alice Springs probably, black market, or maybe it’s just a replica and she’s just bluffing, or crazy, or a combination of both.
Agent Rhodes’s eyes locked onto his. Any pretense of pleasantness was gone. “‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’ That’s from Gauguin, from his diaries. The clock has run out, Mr. Rafferty. I win.”
You just missed her. Your lady friend.
“Good god. You’ve been tracking me since Napier.” But one doesn’t get old and cynical without learning a thing or two along the way. “Before you haul me in, Miss Rhodes, can I see that badge of yours one more time? You can’t expect me to surrender to the first loopy lady who shows up. I do have my standards. They’re very low, admittedly—a sort of Mariana’s Trench of standards—but still. May I?”
“Of course.”
She handed it over and Rafferty examined it like an Antwerp diamond dealer. “It says ‘administrative supervisor.’ ”
She hesitated, and in her hesitation told him everything.
“You’re not actually law enforcement, are you?”
“I told you. I’m with the ICA, a division of Interpol.”
“You’re with admin. You’re basically a bureaucrat. You can’t arrest me, you can’t even detain me.”
She met his gaze. “I can contact the Australian police easily enough.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure the local billabong constabulary will snap to it if you show up barking orders. ‘Yes, ma’am! Just let us finish rescuing this koala from a kookaburra and we will get right on it.’ You have no more authority than any random nutjob on the streets of Devil’s Spite Creek. Less so, in fact, what with you being a foreigner and all.”
Thomas Rafferty had been pulled off of buses in Ecuador and threatened by armed guards in Bangladesh. This was nothing.
“Here’s what’s going to happen, Agent Rhodes. I’m going to get up and walk out that door over there, probably raising my middle finger as I go—I haven’t decided yet; might be overkill, no? And you are going to shoot me in the back, if you like, that’s honestly fine with me, but think of the paperwork. Plus, your own inevitable arrest and trial and incarceration. You’ll lose that badge of yours as well, the one you seem to think gives you supernatural powers. You might as well go about flashing your library card at people, it would have about the same amount of authority. So, you can shoot me, if you feel so inclined. Or, and this is the more likely scenario, I will walk out of here, finger raised, un-shot, and you will fuck off back to whatever sad little bureaucratic hole you crawled out of.”
He stood, slowly, deliberately, turned his back to her—and she did consider it. Center mass, two to the core, one to the head, as trained. But on what charge, and to what end? And what if she was wrong? When she’d said the name “Billy Moore,” it had meant nothing to him. She could see that. Not a glimmer of recognition. Her doubts grew.
From his table to the exit was only nine steps, but they were a long nine steps. Hand on the door, about to leave—Rafferty could already feel the dog’s breath of heat outside—he stopped, turned around, faced his banshee.
“Rwanda. Why did you say Rwanda?”
She was still at the table, hadn’t drawn her weapon or tried to stop him. She looked, if not defeated, at least deterred. The laser-like focus she’d shown earlier was gone from her eyes, and—was that doubt he saw?
Rafferty came back, stood above her. “Why Rwanda?”
“Because you were there. You left bodies behind when you left.”
“There were bodies aplenty in Rwanda. They didn’t need any help from me. I was just trying to get out.”
“With the Kalinga drum, in tow.”
That stopped him cold.
“The what?”
“The Kalinga drum,” she said. “Royal emblem of the Tutsi kings. Buddy Holly’s glasses. Muhammad Ali’s medal. The egg—the Fabergé egg. The urinals and the chess piece. I can’t connect you to all of those, not yet, but I will. You were there when that drum was taken. You hired mercenaries to do your dirty work.”
Jesus Christ, she really is crazy.
But then—
Memories of Sydney. An art gallery soiree and a fat man with a leering look. “Not men of action, like you or I.” Rafferty sat down. “That’s the weirdest thing. Someone else asked me about that drum, years ago.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, he was rotund, ex-military, Australian, maybe English. You would need someone like that, wouldn’t you? To know how to arrange for mercenaries. Like you, he thought I was involved in the operation. He said as much.”
“When was this?”
“Ten years ago, maybe more.”
“Where?”
“A gallery, in Sydney, you could see the opera house, it was across the harbor from the bridge.”
“So… a man you don’t know, whose name you can’t recall, who may or may not have been Australian, or possibly English, asked you about the Kalinga drum at a cocktail party somewhere in Sydney, ten years ago, or more, you’re not sure.”
When she said it like that…
“Better get crackin’,” he said. “Before the trail gets cold.”
“Know what I think, Mr. Rafferty? I think you are trying to gaslight me. I think this is a clumsy attempt at misdirection, something a second-rate magician might employ at a child’s birthday party. I think you’re trying to cover your tracks.” She leaned closer, eyes burning. “I know you were in Rwanda when the government fell, I know you were in the Congo afterwards. I know about your associate as well, a small man, does your dirty work. We have witnesses that place him in the Congo too, when the drum was taken.”
“A small man?”
She nodded.
“Well dressed? Sort of nondescript?”
Another nod.
Rafferty felt his chest constrict. “I know exactly who you’re talking about.”
With that, the world froze, just for a moment—less than a moment, a heartbeat really. Gaddy could feel the tectonic plates beneath shift and fall into place. “The small man?” she said. “You know him? You admit it?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Does he work for you?”
“What? No.”
“Do you work for him?”
“Fuck no. But our paths have crossed—more than once. I saw him years ago, in Africa, in the camps like you said, and again, just recently, in Christchurch. I saw him in the sudden flash of a camera. Who is he?”
“A collector.”
“Art?”
“Things. Objects.”
“Is that why he was in Christchurch?”
“He saw a window of opportunity, yes. He thrives on chaos. To him, earthquakes and civil wars are simply acts of misdirection played out on a larger scale, allowing one to slip thro
ugh doorways undetected. When he saw the buildings fall in Christchurch, he made his move.”
“Why Christchurch?”
“New Zealand’s South Island is the end of the line. The old black-and-white movies that Hollywood used to ship. Massive film reels, soaked in nitrates. When they reached the end of the circuit they were simply thrown out or shoved into storage and forgotten, often in the basement of the last cinema that played them. A few years ago, a treasure cache of lost Chaplin films was discovered in a cellar in Dawson City, Yukon. When the Christchurch earthquake wiped out the architectural overlay of that city, the same thing happened.”
Rafferty rummaged around in his shirt pocket, produced his passport, slid it across the table. “Check the date. The entry stamp.” New Zealand was in the process of switching over to a wholly automated passport reading system, but not yet, not when he’d arrived on a media visa. “Look,” he urged, but she already knew. When she hesitated, he flipped the pages for her.
“I arrived in New Zealand the day before the earthquake. Do you see? Here, where they stamped it. I would need some finely tuned psychic abilities to predict an earthquake, don’t you think?”
“You could’ve bribed someone, could’ve forged that stamp.” But she didn’t sound convincing, least of all to herself.
Rafferty could see the certainties drain from her face. He almost felt bad for her. “How long have you been looking for him, this man of yours?”
“Since before I was born, it seems.”
A heart desiccated, dry as any page-pressed flower. “Well,” he said. “I have some bad news, or good, depending on your state of mind. This man you’re looking for, he’s dead.”
If he was expecting a reaction, a gasp or a jolt, a clutching of pearls or a fainting couch swan dive, he received none. She’d been down this lane before. “No. He’s not,” she said.
“But—”
“He’s not dead.”
“He is.”
“Let me guess. Overcome with guilt, he killed himself, left a heartfelt confession behind.”
“A wall fell on him.”
“How convenient.”
“I saw the body.” Not the body, not exactly: a hand, clawlike and reaching out. Rafferty felt a faint tremble of doubt in his own chest, but he pushed it back down. “I saw him. He’s dead. He’ll be in the official tally by now. They have records, a list of the deceased. I can give you the exact time and date he died. There will be a coroner’s report, I’m sure.”
“You spoke with him?”
“I did, and I can tell you one thing, he’s not from New England.”
“Is that what he’s claiming now?”
“He’s dead, Ms. Rhodes.”
She felt her doubts flicker and grow. That’s how it begins—faith, science, self-sabotage—with a single flicker of doubt, like a candle in melted wax. The long flight and carefully contained excitement. The noose tightening. An Aussie yob with dry lips, an alleyway in Alice Springs, money changing hands. Semi-automatic, slide load, short recoil. Gaddy Rhodes, armed and ready, all for naught.
She looked at Rafferty, trying not to plead, not with her voice, certainly not with her eyes. “You’re sure about this, about the body?”
Rafferty considered the Saint Whatsit medallion tucked away in the desk drawer of his hotel room. “Yes, I’m sure. Hundred and ten percent, as my coach used to say.”
Growing up in the Midwest, Rafferty had played baseball as a boy. Not well, of course. Most people aren’t very good at most things. But he remembered his coach and he remembered the exhortations. Unfortunately for him, and for Agent Rhodes, 110 percent is not a real number. And the finder was not dead. He was waiting. Was closer than they realized.
TAMSIN VERSUS THE LARRIKINS
IT RAINED DURING THE NIGHT.
Rained, but not in her dreams. She was trapped again on the Afghan steppes, pulled from a vehicle, was crouching behind the rusted shell of a Soviet tank as the shriek of Taliban bullets needled past above her head, an AP stringer by her side, a young man, a boy really, pink-faced and wide of eye, who would die anticlimactically a year later in an auto accident in Delhi, and the two of them, caught in a crossfire and Tamsin laughing—laughing till her heart hurt, laughing at the craziness of it all, the emptiness, the sheer absurdity of what she was doing, laughing until she cried, and then, during a lull in the shooting, her stringer running out, adrenaline the drug of choice, zigzagging across debris fields, returning with a canteen wildly swinging, caked in sand—both the canteen and the boy—and now he was laughing too, and how could you not? You had to laugh, you had to, and then, rising like soft applause in the background, the sound of rain and she woke with a spasm.
She was sleeping in the Land Rover, had pulled off the highway, and had woken to the drumming of a metal roof, restless fingers in the night. She lay awhile, listening to the rain. Uluru would be streaming with water right now. Malya must be smiling. The rain ended and dawn arrived.
She climbed out, cotton-mouthed and groggy, watched the first shimmer of sunlight break above the horizon. Fields of flowers had appeared, a haze of yellow on the grass-covered dunes. It created a halo effect of its own, unrelated to the lingering aftereffects of Tamsin’s eye surgery. She slung her camera bag over her shoulder, climbed a tussock hill. Uluru was gone, lost in the distance, and on the other side a drift of camels was moving across the plains, slowly, almost gliding. These were the descendants of animals brought in from Afghanistan to act as pre-rail freight trains, now feral and unfettered. Beasts of burden, freed of their burden. The camels slipped away, and Tamsin considered pursuit, a telephoto lens maybe, a high depth of field to flatten the distance, but there were miracles closer at hand.
Strewn bouquets, beaded with rain, had appeared while the world was sleeping, softly pink and veined with red, ornamental flowers that had long since escaped from backyard gardens and now grew wild. Everything has a habit of escape.
Drought-evading plants that flowered only after a rainfall had been lying dormant, waiting—waiting for precisely this moment to make their presence known. Burned-leaf cassias and the lilac-tinted teardrops of the mulla, the succulent herbs and ephemeral fan-flowers, desert myrtle in the swales, clinging to the dunes, green and glorious. And daisies! (one always needed to add an exclamation mark to that word, Tamsin felt), bright white with buttery hearts, these romantically denuded she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not flowers in the Mind of God. When children draw flowers, they draw daisies. Even the thornbush acacias had bloomed.
Mad dabs from a highlighter. Pom-poms and poached eggs. And suddenly, Tamsin could see the colors and patterns behind everything. They had been there in the art of Anangu women, in tufted clumps of grass endlessly repeated as dots, in the interlocking circles of spinifex, in the serpentine trails in the sand; it was all there, the songlines and stories sculpted into the earth, a direct glimpse into the Dreamtime that wasn’t a dream. Tamsin felt elated, euphoric, unsteady. Heat and dehydration at play, perhaps, but maybe not and no less real for it.
Flowers exuberant, and birds exultant. Babblers and budgies and many-colored parrots. Cockatoos, uncaged and elegantly crested, gold-flecked and regal, chattering away royally as they rooted about for seeds. Finches flitting in and out of the tussock grass and shrubs, drinking in the dawn. It was the first day of creation, when the world was sung into existence, when that first inhalation had yet to exhale, a breath suspended in amazement and joy. The light behind the darkness.
Tamsin in the magic hour, walking out into an overflowing emptiness.
Animals, hidden, and creatures unseen. Honey ants, swollen with a musty sweetness, burrowing beetles and scorpions incognito, nocturnal hunters dangerous when disturbed. All invisible, revealed in the early morning by the tracks they leave, cyphers crisscrossing the sand, the curlicue trails that were left behind. Legless lizards. False snakes, as they were known, these gentle twisting creatures. Bird track hieroglyphics and the ditto-dash of hopping mice: a frenzy of
footprints pogo-jumping among bushes.
She walked on, farther and farther from her vehicle, discovered the wavy ripples of a surface-swimming sand mole, blind and gold-tinged, out for a romp after the rain. Rafferty was wrong. It wasn’t a redundancy. There are non-subterranean moles. Cryptic mammals—she loved that name—were very good at hiding and seldom seen. Cryptic reptiles as well, creatures that disappeared as quickly as they appeared, slipping under spindly thorns or into the sand itself, wiggling their way into the earth.
And still she walked.
The most poisonous snakes in the world live in Australia, but the average snake can strike only about a third of its body length. Tamsin had heard that somewhere and had decided to take it as the gospel truth, swinging wide when she saw one, a thin-faced whip-snake, loosely coiled in the shade. Her heavy leather, high-ankled boots would (should) thwart any serpent strikes or scorpion stings.
Dragons and lizards. And demons too.
Moloch horridus, as they were more correctly known, named after the Canaanite deity Moloch, chief among Satan’s angels. A “horrid king, besmirched in blood,” according to Paradise Lost. Tamsin had been looking for one such thorny devil, and she found it as it gobbled down a line of ants, toad-like and wart-armored. The gods of ugly things. Weta beetles and thorny devils. Tamsin lay down on her belly, quietly brought the creature into focus, froze it in time. Still on her belly, she spotted a procession of white caterpillars that was snaking across the sand in front, joining end to end to form one extended feathery bullwhip.
The coolness of the morning had provided respite from the flies, but the growing heat brought them out again, maddening and persistent, crawling across her viewfinder, tickling their way into her ears, tracing patterns on exposed skin, congregating at her tear ducts and the wet corners of her mouth. Tamsin had left her fly net back in her vehicle, too far to run back for now, and she swatted uselessly instead, succeeded only in stirring them momentarily as she worked. So fixated was she on these ghostly caterpillars, and so distracted by this annoyance of flies, that she didn’t hear the ATV approach or the footfalls coming nearer. And anyway, the wind was against her and they had approached from her deaf side.
The Finder Page 28
