by Ian Rankin
The chocolate-eater was going to be somebody’s bodyguard someday. He probably thought being a bodyguard was all about being big and holding a clean driving license; a sort of chauffeur with clout. He had a lot to learn. Reeve had met a few heavyweight bodyguards, international types, political types. Some of them had been in Special Forces at the same time as him. Chocolate-chops had a long way to go.
He never told clients he’d been in the SAS. He told them he was ex-infantry, and mentioned a few of his campaigns: Northern Ireland, the Falklands… He never went into detail, though he was often pressed. As he said, none of that was important; it was the past. It was just stories—stories he never told.
The living room was warm. Joan was curled up on the sofa, tending to the immediate needs of Bakunin the cat while they both watched TV. She smiled as she took the mug from him. Bakunin gave him a dirty look for daring to interrupt the stroking session. Reeve made a tactical withdrawal and sank into his favorite chair. He looked around the room. Joan had decorated it, doing her usual thorough job. This is what home is all about, he thought. This is fine.
“You slipped up today,” she said, her eyes still on the TV.
“Thanks for making me look good.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know that was my job.”
Did she want an argument? He didn’t need one. He concentrated on the coffee.
“Did you get all their checks?” she asked, still not looking at him.
“They’re in the drawer.”
“In the cashbox?”
“In the drawer,” he repeated. He couldn’t taste the coffee.
“You gave them their receipts?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything after that, and neither did he, but she’d managed to get beneath his skin again. She could do it so easily. He’d been trained for most things, but not for this. Joan would have made a great interrogator.
This is home, he thought.
Then the phone rang.
TWO
THE CO-WORLD CHEMICALS BUILDING was situated on the corner of B Street and Fifth Avenue in downtown San Diego. That put it about sixteen miles north of the Mexican border, which was a lot closer than Alfred Dulwater liked. The place was practically a foreign country as far as he was concerned. He knew, too, that the city’s Gaslamp Quarter started only a couple of blocks south of the CWC building, and though the city had cleaned the place up and now advertised it to tourists as “historic,” it was still as full of panhandlers and bums as it was overpriced restaurants and knickknack shops.
Dulwater came from Denver. As a kid, he’d taken a map of the USA and drawn two diagonals through it, one from Seattle to Miami, the other from Boston to San Diego. In so doing, he’d managed to prove to himself that Denver, Colorado, was just about at the heart of the blessed United States. Okay, Topeka had actually been nearest the cross-sights, but Denver was close, too.
He didn’t live in Denver these days, though. The private investigation company he worked for—indeed, was the newest junior partner in—operated out of Washington, DC. The image a lot of people had of PIs was the usual fictional one: grubby men chain-smoking on motel stakeouts. But Alfred Dulwater’s firm, Alliance Investigative, wasn’t like that. Even its name made it sound more like an insurance company than some two-bit outfit. Alliance was big and prosperous and worked for only select clients, most of them big corporations like Co-World Chemicals. Dulwater didn’t mind at all working for CWC, even on something which seemed so trivial, but he did mind that Kosigin kept bringing him to San Diego. Usually, a report would be delivered by trusted messenger service. It was very unusual for a client to demand that a junior partner deliver the report personally; in the present case it was not just one report, but several, requiring several trips to Southern California—crazy economics, since the subject was living and working locally. It meant Dulwater had to fly out here, rendezvous with his team of investigators, read through their report, and then carry the same to San Diego, like he was a damned postman.
Still, Kosigin was paying. As old man Allerdyce at Alliance said, “He who pays is king.” At least for a day.
Mr. Allerdyce was taking a close interest in this investigation. It seemed Kosigin had approached him personally and asked him to take on the case. This was a simple surveillance, with background biography and clippings. They were to look for the usual—dirt buried beneath the fingernails of the subject’s past—but were also to report on his workday activities.
Which, really, as Dulwater had suggested to Mr. Allerdyce, was a bit beneath them; they were corporate investigators. But Allerdyce had sat behind his huge oak desk and pouted thoughtfully, then waved his fingers in the air, dismissing the complaint. And now he wanted regular reports from Dulwater, too. Dulwater wasn’t stupid; he knew that if he kept in with the old man, did a good job, and kept quiet, then there might be advancement. And he lived for advancement.
No Mexicans seemed to work in the CWC building. Even the doorman, the security guard who checked Dulwater’s identity, and the cleaner polishing the brass rails on the wall between the four elevators were all male, all white. Dulwater liked that. That had class. And the air-conditioning pleased him, too. San Diego was warm-to-hot; it was like that all year, except when it got real hot. But there were sea breezes, you had to admit that. It wasn’t a baking or steamy heat. It would’ve been quite pleasant if Dulwater hadn’t been trussed into a blue woollen three-piece with a tie constricting his neck. Damned suit and shirt used to fit—but then he’d added some weight recently, since the injury to his knee stopped his weekly squash torture.
There was a gym in the CWC building. It was one floor below the lobby, and one floor up from parking. Dulwater had never been that far down, but he’d been right to the top, and he was going there again. The security guard came with him to the elevator and turned his key in the lock, pressing the button for the fourteenth floor. You couldn’t simply press the button, you needed the key as well, like in some of the hotels Dulwater had stayed in, the ones with penthouse and executive levels. The doors closed, and he tried to stop seeming nervous. Kosigin wasn’t the biggest fish within the multinational; he was maybe number five or six in the States, which made him seven or eight in the world. But he was young and arrogant with it, and Dulwater didn’t like his attitude. In another life, he’d have punched him out and then given him a sharp-toed kick in the lumbar region for good measure.
But this was business, and Kosigin was king for the duration of the meeting. The doors opened, bringing Dulwater out onto the thick, silent carpeting of the fourteenth floor. There was a reception area, with only three doors leading off. Each door led to an office, and each office covered several hundred square feet, so that they didn’t feel like offices at all; they felt more like temples. The secretary, who was actually known as a “personal assistant,” smiled at him.
“Good morning, Mr. Dulwater.” She still pronounced it dull-water, even though on his first visit he’d corrected it to doo-latter. In truth, the family back in Denver said dull-water, too, but Alfred didn’t like the sound of that, just as he’d hated all the jibes and nicknames at school and college. When he left for Washington, he’d decided to reject dull-water and become doo-latter. He liked doo-latter. It sounded like it had class.
“Mr. Kosigin will be about five minutes. If you’d like to wait inside…”
Dulwater nodded and approached the door to Kosigin’s office, which the secretary unlocked with a button beneath the lip of her desk. Then he walked in.
That was another thing. He’d looked at Kosigin’s name and thought koss-eegin, like the Soviet guy in the fifties—or was it sixties? But the name was pronounced kossigin, rattled off in a single breath, all the letters short and hard. There was a hardness to Kosigin’s office which matched both his name and personality. Even the works of art looked harsh and brutal: the paintings were full of squared-off objects, geometric shapes in dull colors; the sculptures looked like either disfigured people or thin
gs that had gotten too close to a heat source. And even the view, which should have been fantastic, was somehow harder, crueler than it merited. You couldn’t quite see the waterfront—there were other, taller buildings in the way. He thought he could see the shiny Marriott through a gap in the downtown buildings, but the way it reflected light it could have been anything.
True to his investigator’s skills, Dulwater didn’t spend much time on the view but walked over to Kosigin’s desk, just to see what was there. The answer as usual was disappointingly little. It was an ornate antique desk, maybe French, with bowed legs that looked like they’d snap if you put any weight on them. It was quite long but narrow, and didn’t seem to square with Kosigin’s chosen chair, a workaday swivel model with red covers and black plastic armrests. Dulwater got the feeling Kosigin did his real work elsewhere. On the desk’s surface were a blotter pad, a tray of pens and stuff, and a small Anglepoise. It could’ve been a student’s desk; it could have been anybody’s desk.
He took stock of the rest of the room. There was a lot of bare parquet floor between himself and the living area. This comprised a sofa and two chairs, all done in black crushed leather; a large and well-stocked liquor cabinet, with empty decanter and crystal glasses on top; and a couple of TV sets, one of which seemed to be switched on permanently. It was showing C-Span with the sound on mute.
Some of the wall space was taken up with tall freestanding wooden cabinets, locked, and never opened in Dulwater’s presence. He didn’t know if they were empty or full, if they contained files or Kosigin’s shoe collection. Hell, maybe they were secret doors to other offices. It didn’t much matter. What mattered was that Kosigin was keeping him waiting. He put his briefcase—rigid, mat-black, almost impossible to open without both keys, official Alliance issue—on the low table next to the working TV and sat himself down on the sofa. There was no remote for the TV that he could see, but he found the control panel on the front of the set, eased its cover aside, and changed channels. There was a Rolling Stones tribute on MTV, so he left it at that and sat back to watch, not bothering with the sound.
He wondered again about the surveillance. Surely a corporation like CWC, one of the globe’s chemical giants, could and would afford its own security operatives. Why hadn’t Kosigin handed the pissant job to them? And why was old man Allerdyce taking such a close interest? It wasn’t as though he was afraid Dulwater would screw up; he’d assured him of that. Why then? What was it about this guy James Reeve, this asshole Anglo with the boring personal habits and the peripatetic job? That wasn’t Dulwater’s concern, just like Mr. Allerdyce had said. What was his phrase? “We are the means, not the end.” It sounded great when he said it, but what the fuck did it mean?
He walked over to one of the windows and looked directly down onto the street below. One block south was an orange-and- green trolley-bus on its tourist route, one of the old city trolleys almost colliding with it. He hoped the tourists would have more sense than to get off in Gaslamp.
“Mr. Dulwater.”
He hadn’t even heard the door opening, but when he turned, Kosigin was already halfway to his desk. He wasn’t looking at Dulwater, though; he was looking over towards the TV and the briefcase. The briefcase wasn’t supposed to leave Dulwater’s hands. It made going to the john an interesting outing, but those were the explicit instructions. Dulwater went over to retrieve the case. By the time he got back to the desk, Kosigin had unlocked a drawer and brought out a remote. He pointed it towards the distant TV and flipped back to its original channel. Dulwater almost apologized, but didn’t. Apologies made you weak. Besides, what had he done wrong?
He sat down opposite Kosigin and watched the man put the remote back in the drawer and relock it with a key he tucked into his vest pocket. For a few seconds, all he had was a view of the top of Kosigin’s head, with its thick salt-and-pepper hair, curling and luxuriant. Maybe he had it dyed like that to look older. When he looked up, Kosigin almost seemed like a teenager, with bright healthy cheeks and sparkling eyes with no wrinkles or creases. His burgundy silk tie shimmered with life. Then he slipped on his metal-rimmed glasses and changed again. He didn’t need to harden his face; the glasses did that for him. And the voice—the voice was pure authority.
“Now then, Mr. Dulwater.”
Which was Dulwater’s cue to unlock the briefcase. He took one key from his jacket pocket and slipped off his left shoe to retrieve the second key from where he had taped it to the heel of his sock. The case was fireproof, bombproof, and tamperproof; if anyone attempted to open it without both keys, a small incendiary wiped out the contents. Dulwater opened the case with ease, Kosigin avoiding eye contact as he waited for the investigator to place the file on his desk. The first time they’d met, Dulwater had held out the file and Kosigin had sat like a dummy until Dulwater realized what was wanted of him: Kosigin didn’t want any contact with the investigator, not so much as linkage by a document folder. So now Dulwater placed the file on the desk, and when he’d taken his hand away, Kosigin slid the file a bit closer and opened it, leafing through the sheets of paper.
It was a thick report this time: further background, biographies of friends, colleagues, family. It had taken hundreds of man-hours to compile, including use of investigators overseas. It was utterly thorough.
“Thank you, Mr. Dulwater.”
And that was it—no small talk, no drink, no eye contact, even. Alfred Dulwater was dismissed.
After the investigator had gone, Kosigin took the file over to one of the leather chairs and made himself comfortable. He glanced up at the TV whenever he turned to a new sheet, but otherwise had eyes only for the report. He didn’t like Dulwater—the man was oversized and slow-witted—but he had to concede that Allerdyce ran an impressive operation.
He reread the report, taking his time. He didn’t want to make the wrong decision, after all, not when it might be such a serious decision. James Reeve the journalist was no longer just a thorn in CWC’s side, and the man would not take a warning. Money had been attempted; threats had been attempted; physical threats, too. But the journalist was either very stupid or simply overconfident.
Kosigin read for a third time the updated biography. Several things caught his eye: a failed marriage which ended in acrimony and legal debts; a drinking problem; flirtation with narcotics—some speed and coke, plus grass, but then nearly everyone in California did grass—several unsuccessful relationships since the marital breakup. No children. And now a story that was go-ing nowhere—a state of affairs which might just break Reeve. There was one brother, but no one of importance. And no powerful friends, no real allies.
He buzzed Alexis and asked her to bring him coffee, decaffeinated with one percent milk. Then he took out his leather-bound address book and made a telephone call to Los Angeles.
“It’s me,” he said into the receiver. “How soon can you get down here?”
THREE
JAMES REEVE WOKE UP THAT MORNING feeling the usual apprehension.
He’d really tied one on the previous night, but there was nothing so unusual in that. In the course of his life he’d been kicked out of more bars than he cared to remember. His motel room looked unfamiliar to him, until he caught sight of the large suitcase—his suitcase—its contents spewing out onto the olive-green carpet. Yes, that looked familiar all right. He’d seen that suitcase look the same way all over the USA, Europe, and the Far East. The case had probably done more traveling than most of the world’s population.
It took him a couple of minutes to reach the bathroom, what with getting dizzy and having to sit on the end of the bed for a moment, screwing shut his eyes against the headache and the white flashes. It was the kind of thing Vietnam vets should get: huge phosphor explosions across the glaze of his eyeballs.
“I’m not cut out for drinking,” he told himself, reaching for the first cigarette, knowing it was a mistake even as he did so, even as he placed it between his lips, even as he lit it and inhaled.
H
e almost had to pick himself up off the floor after that. God, it hurt, and it tasted foul. But it was necessity. Sheer addiction, like with the drink. Some men were built for alcohol; they had large frames which soaked up the juice, and brains which rejected all thought of a hangover. On the other hand, he was lean and lanky—and by Christ he got hangovers. He guessed by now his liver must be about the size of a sheep’s head. It was a wonder it hadn’t pushed all his other organs aside, knocked them out of the game. He loved drinking but hated getting drunk. But of course by the time he was getting drunk, the defenses were all down, so he kept on drinking. It was a problem. It surely was a problem.
So why did he drink?
“I drink therefore I am,” he reasoned, rising once more from the bed. He smiled through the pain. Maybe his brother would have appreciated the philosophy. Or maybe it was the wrong kind of philosophy. He’d never been able to figure Gordon out, not for a minute. He suspected—no, hell, he knew—Gordon had been in the SAS or one of those other quasisecret branches of armed service. He knew it just as surely as he knew the bathroom was only another three hundred yards away. Maybe if I crawl, he thought, maybe everything would be easier if I resorted to all fours, returning to nature, communing with my fellow beasts. Hell, this is California, the idea might catch on. Every other idea in the world had. You could get Tai Chi with your chili or send your kids to Satanist preschool. Every loony in the world seemed to have landed here with their One Idea, some life-changing thing that might take off. You’d always find at least one sucker, one easy-to-dupe disciple.
I’m a journalist, he thought. I’m a persuader. I could have half of Beverly Hills crawling on all fours and talking to the dogs and cats in no time. What I can’t do, right now, is find my way to the bathroom.
