A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  Miller opened his mouth to speak but Natasha kept on talking.

  ‘His mother had to go down there and identify his body. She didn’t last more than six months. That old woman died of fucking shame about what her son had become. If they’d told her the truth I guarantee you that old woman would still be alive today.’

  Roth raised his head. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Could I just ask you where your daughter is now?’

  ‘She’s down the hall. Old lady named Esme. She likes to go see her every once in a while, keep her company for a coupla hours. They just watch TV together, make some hot chocolate and marshmallows, whatever they like.’

  ‘She’s a good kid, isn’t she?’ Miller said.

  Natasha Joyce smiled, and for a moment it seemed as though she was unable to speak.

  Miller reached out his hand and closed it over hers. She did not flinch. She did not withdraw.

  ‘Gonna ask you something,’ Miller said, knowing now that he had to tread carefully. ‘Gonna ask you to look at some pictures for me, and if you do, I’ll find Michael McCullough for you. It’s gonna be an awful lot easier for me to find him than it is for you. They’ll have his forwarding details somewhere within the system and I can locate him.’

  ‘Pictures?’ Natasha asked. ‘What pictures?’

  ‘We just want you to look at some pictures of a guy and tell us if you recognize him, okay?’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘We don’t know. Could be no-one, and if we tell you who we think it is before we show them to you it could be construed as influencing your judgement. We just need you to look at them with a completely unbiased viewpoint, alright?’

  ‘Bring it on, whatever . . . sure. But I ain’t gonna let up on this McCullough. I do this, then you gotta help me find him like you say.’

  Roth took the photographs from his inside jacket pocket and passed them to Miller, who turned them face down on the table. He then slid the first one towards Natasha.

  Miller felt his heart skip a beat when she turned it over. She looked at it for no more than a split second and said, ‘It’s him.’

  ‘Who?’ Roth asked. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The guy who came down here with the dead woman.’

  ‘You’re absolutely certain?’

  Natasha took the other photos, rapidly scanned each one. ‘Same guy. Same guy in the photos as came down here with her and asked after Darryl. He’s younger here, but no question about it.’

  Miller looked at Roth. Roth smiled warily. They had something now, but what exactly . . .

  ‘So now you gotta find this dude. That what you gon’ do?’

  ‘That’s what we’re gonna do,’ Miller said. He rose from the chair and gathered up the pictures. He handed them back to Roth and started towards the door. ‘We’ll speak soon, okay?’

  Natasha Joyce looked at him directly. There was something cold and determined in her expression.

  ‘I’ll do what I promised,’ Miller said. ‘I’ll track McCullough down and find out where he went to. I understand you want closure on this thing. You’ve helped us out here, Natasha, and I will come back to you on this guy, alright?’

  Natasha looked at Roth.

  ‘He does what he says,’ Roth told her.

  ‘You go find whoever you gotta find,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget you promised me on this thing.’

  Miller smiled, reached out and took Natasha’s hand. ‘You take care, okay?’

  ‘We do what we can,’ she replied, and then she opened the front door and let them out.

  ‘Fucking thing comes together like jigsaw pieces,’ Roth said when they reached the car.

  ‘You see any of the picture yet?’ Miller asked.

  Roth shook his head. ‘You?’

  ‘Something . . . hell, I don’t know, maybe something, maybe not. Don’t like it though.’ He paused for a moment, looked back towards Natasha Joyce’s apartment. ‘Whatever the fuck is going on here, I don’t like it at all.’

  Late afternoon. Class dismissed. Sitting in my room, heels on the desk. Feel something like a sense of nothing, a hollowness, a vacuum inside. Thinking back to when I was a student and they talked to me - Lawrence Matthews and Don Carvalho.

  Thinking about the hat. The damned hat she wore. Stupid damned turquoise beret she wore that day in December when I saw her in a coffee shop in Richmond.

  December of 1980, the 10th, a Wednesday. Cold day. Remember that much. That and the damned hat.

  It was five weeks after Reagan and Bush stormed into office with a better than ten million-vote lead over Carter and Mondale. Carter had suffered with the energy crisis, the gas station lines, most of the Tehran hostage nightmare. The Republicans were in the House, they were going to clean up everything the Democrats had aborted and bastardized, and I listened to Don Carvalho as he explained that it made no great difference who was in office, that the company he worked for served as a non-biased and unprejudiced force for order and stability regardless of which political persuasion was flavor of the month.

  ‘It’s not a matter of politics anymore,’ he said. We were seated in an Italian-styled delicatessen on the corner of Klein and Fourth, the two of us in a window seat, Don with his knee raised, his foot on the edge of the seat, the ever-present unfiltered cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Not a matter of politics?’ I asked, more rhetoric than anything else. ‘Of course it’s a matter of politics.’

  Don lowered his foot to the ground, leaned forward smiling. ‘See, that’s where you’re wrong, my friend. Politics is an apparency here.’ He waved his hand in the direction of Langley. We never mentioned Langley by name. It was always ‘There’ or ‘Our place’ or ‘The Hotel’. He went on talking. ‘Over there they don’t give a fuck about who’s in the House. They want to know that the basic and fundamental necessities of democracy and international stability are being maintained. It’s a matter of control, that’s all, not politics. They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about who’s in power where, which tinpot dictator might have ousted which other tinpot dictator. Coup d’états, all this kind of shit ...’ Don shook his head and laughed. ‘Global ownership is not the issue, John, never has been. We’re not trying to own the world. We’re just trying to maintain the status quo sufficiently to enable decent people to get what they want and keep it once they have it.’

  ‘You can’t expect me to believe that, Don,’ I said, and Don just smiled, same way he always did, and then he changed the subject.

  I could see right through him, him and so many others like him. I had been to Langley numerous times. I was being indoctrinated into the ‘think’. Already I was turning towards the beliefs and attitudes that were prevalent in our introductory meetings. ‘Up there it’s like Control Freaks Anonymous,’ Don had said. ‘Don’t listen to the ones that propound and pontificate. Listen to the ones that state an opinion and label it as such. Some guy says he knows the way things work, you can pretty much guarantee he doesn’t. Some other guy thinks he has an idea, he’s not sure, he’s willing to look at it different ways, that’s the guy who we’re interested in . . . that’s the guy who can think on his feet, you know? That’s why you’re here, my friend, because the management of this country . . . hell, what am I saying? It’s no longer anything to do with the management of this country, it’s everything to do with the management of the whole fucking world . . . anyway, that job is going to be carried on the backs of a few men who can think for themselves, not a herd of fucking sheep, and certainly not a handful of pretentious assholes who can’t see beyond their own ingrained dogmas.’

  That was how Don worked. He told me I was good. He told me I was independent. He told me that every thought that ever walked from one side of my head to the other could never be anything other than a perfectly self-reliant and autonomous thought, otherwise why would I have thought it?

  Looking back I can see how insidious it all was. The initial meetings, the sense of openness in the discussion forums. We
would meet two, sometimes three times a day. Coffee, cigarettes, comfortable chairs, eight or ten or twelve of us in a room, Don usually present, another guy named Paul Travers who I guessed was also a shepherd. And they would shoot the shit, talk around in circles, and all the while there were people watching us, people looking at us through one-way windows on the right-hand side of the room. Next meeting another subject, next meeting yet another. Through December, talking about the murder of John Lennon, the American nuns killed in Salvador, the return of Jose Napoleon Duarte and the four-man junta. We talked about Reagan, Carter, Bush Snr., the hunger strikes in Ulster, the assassination of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, his Mercedes ambushed in Asuncion in Paraguay by a small group of men with automatic weapons and a bazooka. Asuncion police reported the arrest of several men whose rebuttal of the accusation was backed up by the ruling junta who merely expressed ‘joy at the death of an evil man’. The debate lasted several days. I began to think that this was the direction Carvalho and Travers had been steering us in. Don always had more to say than anyone else. He always knew more of the history and background of the issues we discussed. The days went on. New people arrived. Others seemed to disappear quietly.

  ‘Not the best material for what we need,’ Don explained to me when I asked about those people.

  ‘Not the best material?’ I asked, surprised at the expression.

  ‘Not free thinkers. Open-minded. What we like to refer to as simultaneous perspective. Able to look at a situation from both sides, from all three or four sides if it’s a more complex situation, you know? That’s the kind of people we need, my friend . . . more people like you,’ and he smiled, reached out his hand and gripped my shoulder, and once again made me feel as though I had been chosen because of some inherent ability I possessed that was a little more of something than everyone else.

  And she was the same. Saw her that day - December 10th - walking right by the window of the delicatessen where Don and I were seated, and then she came through the door, a floor-length camel-colored overcoat and the turquoise beret, and she went to the counter and ordered coffee to go, and stood there patiently without turning around until they brought her order.

  As she left she glanced in my direction. Don said it was like someone had switched a light bulb on inside my head. Saw a caricature of myself, something out of Hanna Barbera, tongue rolled out and touching the floor, hair standing on end, smoke out of my ears. You know the routine. That was the first time I saw Catherine Sheridan, though at the time that was not her name. That was when I saw her, and that was when I decided I had to know who she was: know her name, her job, her ideas and thoughts and beliefs and ideology.

  Don Carvalho watched me watching her, and he smiled to himself.

  I stared at her as she made her way out of the deli and started down the street. I think he perceived my intention to get up and follow her. He reached out and gripped my arm. He made it easy, as he had so many times, as he would so many times again.

  ‘Don’t sweat it, John,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ’She’s in the discussion group tomorrow.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘We check out this Isabella Cordillera now,’ Roth said, as Miller started the car and pulled away from the edge of the curb.

  ‘And speak to Lassiter,’ Miller said. ‘We need to keep him in the loop.’

  Roth glanced at his watch. ‘It’s a little after four . . . Lassiter will be there until five, five-thirty maybe.’

  Miller smiled.

  ‘What?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘Think our schedule is gonna stretch at both ends until we’re done.’

  ‘I told Amanda it’d be this way for a while.’

  ‘She’s okay?’

  ‘Sure she’s okay,’ Roth said. ‘You know Amanda, she’s always okay.’

  ‘Figure she’s the best thing about you, you know?’

  Roth laughed. ‘Join the fucking club Miller, join the fucking club.’

  Desk sergeant was still there when they arrived back at the Second. ‘We don’t have a Michael,’ he said. ‘Not one within the correct age range. Found you a seven-year-old and a sixty-one-year-old. Those are the only Michael McCulloughs in the city.’

  Miller shrugged. ‘So he moved out after he retired.’

  ‘Go wider,’ Roth said. ‘See what you can find.’

  ‘We’re on it already,’ the desk sergeant said.

  ‘Can you call Lassiter for me?’ Roth asked. ‘Tell him we’re back, on our way up.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  The sergeant lifted the receiver and dialled Lassiter’s office as Miller and Roth crossed to the stairs.

  Natasha looked out of the kitchen window and down into the encroaching wilderness, out across the trash and debris that spilled from alleyways and doorways and gantries. She stood quietly and breathed deeply and wondered why Darryl never spoke with her. Not to her, not at her, but with her. Why he didn’t take her aside and sit her down, and put his arm around her shoulders, pull her close for just a moment, say what he must have wanted to say for so very long. This is the way it is. This is who I am and what I am doing. This is the way I am trying to rectify the damage that’s been done.

  Natasha closed her eyes, a tight fist of something invading her chest, and she thought of Chloe down the hallway, of Esme, of the two of them watching TV together, misunderstanding one another, and how it didn’t matter because they were more than happy to do nothing but share one another’s company . . . and Natasha wished so hard that Darryl King could have been there. That he could have seen the kind of girl his daughter had become. That he could have been some part of the thing he had created. But he was dead. Shot by someone unnamed for reasons unknown. And Michael McCullough, retired and disappeared, and this man Robert Miller and his partner, and the promise made to find McCullough and ask him what in God’s name he thought he was doing taking Darryl on a police raid . . .

  This is the life I have now, she thought. Make the most of it, or get the fuck out.

  She smiled to herself, turned away from the window, and her breath stopped dead in her chest.

  Miller switched on his computer, waited for the thing to load up and then typed Isabella Cordillera into the search window. Waited a heartbeat, and then looked up at Roth.

  ‘Take a look,’ he said, and he smiled, shook his head, sort of half-frowned and then watched Roth’s expression change as he read the first entry on the search page.

  ‘Cordillera Isabella,’ Roth said. ‘Predominant land mass and mountain range extending approximately three hundred and sixty kilometers from Chinandega on the western coastline to the Honduran border at Montañas de Colon, Cordillera Isabella rivals Costa Rica’s Cordillera de Talamanca as one of the most extensive mountain ranges on the South American peninsula . . . et cetera et cetera . . .’ Roth looked at Miller and shook his head. ‘A newspaper clipping about the election and now this?’

  ‘Think someone is trying to tell us—’ Miller began, but was cut short by the telephone ringing on his desk.

  Eyes. Eyes dark enough to be barely visible.

  That’s the first thing she saw, perhaps the only thing she saw, because there was something about the way he looked at her that made her cold and awkward and silent. The way he looked right through her that made her feel as if she was really nothing at all.

  She started to breathe, and then he shook his head and raised his finger to his lips, and there was something about the way he looked that told her she should say and do nothing, that something was going on here that was an awful lot bigger than her, and if she challenged it it might just swallow her whole, so the best thing to do was just to stand there silently, and breathe as shallowly as possible, and wait and see what the man had to say for himself.

  And what he said was, ‘Natasha.’

  And when he said her name she sort of unravelled inside and felt weak at the knees, and she had to put her hand out behind her to find the edge of the counter-top, to balance herself, to
steady herself, to give herself some kind of support and ensure that she didn’t faint right then and there . . .

  ‘Natasha Joyce,’ the man said matter-of-factly.

  And Natasha - despite her best judgement, despite some inner voice screaming at her that this was something she wanted no part of - nodded, and then kind of half-smiled awkwardly, and she said, ‘Yes . . . I’m Natasha . . .’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s very good.’

  And then he took a single step forward, and even though she wanted to ask him who he was and what he was doing, why he was in her apartment, and before that how he’d gotten into her apartment in the first place, it didn’t matter, didn’t matter at all, because she kind of knew in her gut that whatever he said would be pretty much the last thing she heard, pretty much the last thing that happened in her life, because that single step he took, just a simple matter of eight or ten inches, possessed such a sense of finality, and there was nothing in the world that had ever felt like that . . . even when she was screaming blue murder through labor pains, even when they sent down a woman police officer to tell her that Darryl King was dead from a gunshot to the chest . . . even then . . . even then . . .

  Sound of something escaped her lips, and she felt the weight of her own body resisting gravity, but gravity was like heavy water, and the tension that usually supported her, tension she never gave a second thought to, seemed to ease out from beneath her, and though she gripped the edge of the counter-top as hard as she could, though she held on for dear life . . . though she closed her eyes and said some kind of prayer to a God she had long since stopped believing in, she knew that all of it didn’t matter any more . . .

  She felt her knees like elastic, like something pliable, something with plenty of give . . .

  And they gave.