by James, Mark
“Another masterpiece of political art, Mr. President.”
The president noted the subtle sarcasm, “Well, we all have to be good at something. My relative skill just happens to be pulling my backside out of nosedives. The best part is that I won’t have to do one of those for a while.”
Mac smiled, “You might want to give a few knocks to that wood desk over there.”
Strangely though, even as he said it, Mac knew that Walker had never needed to ward off bad luck. Basically, he was one of the luckiest people he’d ever known, obstacles and enemies seeming to evaporate before him. It was uncanny, and even commented on by some of the reporters. Perhaps, Mac mused, one actually needed that kind of luck, that rare karma, to even become a president at any time, in any age. We watch our presidents claw to reach the highest office, as if it were Mount Olympus, and marvel at their perseverance. But, he wondered, was it actually the opposite: before they even started, had destiny already decided where they would go? Osborne wondered if Walker, or any of our past presidents, had ever wondered about this themselves? He would have to ask Bob about it later.
“What’s that there?” Mac said, motioning to the papers spread out on Walker’s desk.
“The grand jury documents I was telling you about. Jackson over at DOJ says they only need my signature. You said that Brett Shore was sworn in this morning as special prosecutor?”
“Yeah, and he’s a little skittish. He’s risen up the ladder without a hiccup. Now he’s looking at this like it might be a problem, if he doesn’t get it right.”
“You mean, if it doesn’t turn out right,” the president laughed. “Well, no time like the present to become introduced to the deep end of the ocean. He’ll be fine.”
“What else?” the president asked, signing the grand jury authorization and handing the order to Margaret Spencer.
“Well, Jack and Keno are holed up tight in Scotland. I’m working out a plan to move them to Germany. Talked to Merkel’s liaison last night and they’ll have a place set up by Friday. We’re using a NATO transport to move them, safer that way. In return, Merkel asked for a kind word on the EU negotiations vis-a-vis the Russians and I said, sure. Especially given that we’ve already planned that out. Only a word here and there. The bottom line is we’re not committed in any way. Hell, she’s so old she probably won’t remember.”
“Don’t bet on it,” the president said, looking over the remaining papers on his desk.
“I’m looking to move Jack and Lani this next week and have told Jack to stay put. No breaks on the Croatian accounts yet. I’m not excessively worried, as of today, but ask me next week and that answer may have changed. Usually Josh gets these things right away.”
“On the Surveillance-Net, the installation is moving ahead, as planned. The French are still balking, but, as we discussed last week, dangling the Indonesian oil fields in front of them should get the movement we want.”
“Or, maybe a shove?” the president said, smiling. He turned in his chair and looked out the back window, the lawn stretching out into a bright day. “You know,” he said, a solemn feeling coming over him, “I feel, sometimes, that we should’ve tried harder to stop this thing, this Surveillance-Web, when maybe we had a chance. After the bombings, everything went so crazy…”
“You mean, Surveillance-Net, not Web, right?” Mac smiled, “Now, there’s a Freudian slip.”
Mac was less happy about the Surveillance-Net than even the president. Yet he also knew that the time to kill it had passed. What’s more, they had tried to stop it, or at least slow it down – what they’d tried simply hadn’t worked. Sometimes, Mac’s job was to remind the president of those things; remind him that he wasn’t responsible for everything that happened in the world.
“Unfortunately,” Mac said, “it’s now the proverbial spilled milk. And, Mr. President, recall, you did try. Voters are screaming for every theater, every school, every last hallway to be watched – to make them safe. The best we can do is to stay close to the rollout and control it to the extent we’re able. Here, you really want to be spooked, look at this. A gift from Josh.”
Mac reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, grey ball. It thudded when he released it on the president’s desk. It began to roll forward and Walker reached out.
“Is that what I think it is?” Walker asked, holding it up on the tips of his fingers.
“That’s it. Flies too. They have all different sizes. This is the extra petite model.”
The president stared at the orb’s featureless skin, so dull it seemed to swallow light. “So, tell me, why do I get this feeling that this thing is, well, alive? Strange, eh?”
“Well, it flies at night and silently launches from a perch. And it’s completely unfeeling, and it only wants to…to suck my blood!” Mac laughed. “Like a vampire bat, right? Now, there’s an image!”
It was Mac’s way to feel through the dark with humor, it always had been. He would rather laugh into the Medusa’s eyes than clamor in fear.
The president came from another place. He continued to look at the orb, as if at its center there was an answer, an answer to all of this fear.
Walker looked over to Mac, who was still laughing and moving over to his attaché on the couch, beginning to gather his papers. Walker could sense that old feeling; of his friend’s courageous laughter in the face of every crisis, trying to pull him up from the darkness once more, if only a little. Today was different, though. As he stared at the orb – its nano-mirrors pulling the light from all around it – he could feel something else, something that was reaching out to him, like a whisper past hearing.
Mac saw the look, “You okay? Everything alright in there?”
Walker broke his gaze, returning to the room, feeling as if he’d been somewhere else.
He remembered himself again, his place in all of this. Remembering that the troops, the citizens, the world, even his dear friend Mac, needed to see him stay strong, to always stay strong.
Stern again, he returned Mac’s smile and tossed him the orb.
“Take it,” he said.
†
“Metaphorically, it’s a leitmotif,” the killer said.
“A what?” the Norwegian girl cooed.
“A leitmotif. Or, as the Germans would say, a leitmotiv,” letting the accent fall from his tongue.
“In music, it’s a recurring theme that a composer might use – Wagner, for instance – tying an orchestration together. It’s a melody behind the other notes, building. It derives from the German word, leitmotiv, meaning, ‘guiding motif.’ The red in the glass and the ceiling were placed there purposely. I instructed the architect myself.”
She looked back up at the enormous translucent orb projected on the wall, humming like the Red Giant star, Betelgeuse. She looked above it, to the bolt of rose in the frosted ceiling.
They were lying in a king size bed on their backs, the sun rising over the jungle and catching the house in places it wouldn’t feel for the rest of the day.
“Alright, so you designed it this way – the red in the glass, here and there, in hidden places. But I can only see the red splashes at certain times of the day, when the light hits it just so. I wonder, why any color at all? You have the frosting, it offers privacy, so why the color?”
She was always much smarter than she looked. It amused him, her small surprises.
“Because the world, in and of itself, is not clear. A reflective house reflects the world.”
This was not his true reason; he merely said it because, in that moment, it sounded good.
She rolled over against him, her hand moving beneath the covers, tracing his stomach and finding him rising like a horn.
“But why red?”
He paused. He’d never thought of it before. Sometimes he would think of things, do things, without knowing why.
He looked up again at the glass – his rose moon, his red spear, each beginning their fade as the sun moved higher. He waited for the a
nswer, as if to be given.
She turned over on her stomach and he moved his hand down beneath her silk panties, finding the line.
“Because…”
He waited for the answer.
“...I couldn’t use black.”
He didn’t know what this meant. He didn’t care.
Forgetting it, he moved on top of her, past-life memories of Bathsheba surging across his mind, the ancient musk like a river through him.
23
Florence, Italy
Carabinieri Giovanni Biaggi, Chief Investigator for the provincial division of the Polizia di Stato, was having one of those days. He retrieved a linen handkerchief from his suit pocket, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and flicked a hand-rolled butt onto the ancient brick road, grinding it out.
An annoying jangle rang out from his pocket.
Biaggi hated his Neo-pager. What an atrocious contraption! His superiors had nearly tackled him to strap it to his belt. Since then, he’d summarily banished it to his pocket, where he dearly hoped it would slip out one day and plop straight into the River Arno. Until then, ignoring it was his modus operandi.
He stood outside the fifteenth century building converted into one more of those confounded B&Bs, squinting up at the Tuscan sun just rising over the Duomo.
Yes, of course, it was certainly true – Firenze needed her tourism. Still, he missed the quieter days; when shop owners would stand on street corners carrying on with people they’d never met – over family, politics, the state of the weather, it didn’t matter. Here, there was no time. The sedate life was gone and the ringing of the gadgets had begun. Italy had been pulled into a world foreign to her soul.
Thank God it was too early for the tourists. He wiped his forehead and tossed the wax paper from the biscotti into a street bin. He began climbing the narrow stairs, the wood creaking in time with his knees. He was already regretting that final, sublime glass of Brunello from the night before.
An enthusiastic, unintelligible voice bellowed down from above.
Ilario Santini was a brawn of a man hulking about in an old suit. Five years before, when Biaggi made chief investigator and inherited Ilario as his partner, it was impossible not to hear the fee-fi-fo-fum jokes and the Of Mice and Men catcalls from some of the other officers. He told more than a few to keep it to themselves, but one look at Ilario made one wonder. And yet, still, over time, he’d found that Ilario’s appearance could deceive and where other men thought too fast, told jokes too fast, Ilario plodded along, missing almost nothing.
What’s more, they’d become best friends. Yesterday, he drove Ilario’s children to the zoo when his mother caught a last-minute cold. The weekend before, Ilario helped him drive a car back from an auction in Rome. That said, they cackled like an old married couple. It was their sport.
“Are we having a problem down there?” Ilario chuckled.
“Si, si,” Biaggi muttered back, “Coming, coming. You old hen…”
At the top of the stairs, Biaggi rounded the corner and turned into the first room. The victim had already been transported to the morgue and Biaggi wanted to start at the beginning, as one always should. “So, do we have the coroner’s preliminary report yet?”
Ilario handed him the manila folder.
Biaggi leafed straight to the first photograph. It showed a middle-aged, Caucasian male slumped in a bathtub, head slung back and mouth gaped open. The arms were tanned, the skin below the water whitened with lines. The photo bore the name, Dr. Gregory Anderson.
“So, who is our unfortunate American physician?” Biaggi asked.
“Not a medical doctor – a scientist. His residence is listed as Arlington, Virginia. He worked as a research scientist, Aero-Con Corp. No wife, no kids. We’re waiting on the rest.”
“Interpol?”
“Clean.”
“And, our ever-friendly coroner?”
“You mean, Dr. ‘M’?” Ilario laughed, the joke getting him every time.
They called the coroner, ‘M’, a play on the character in the spy movie – their ‘M,’ however, standing for Medusa. Last year, she’d taken a sabbatical and some at the station had rumored it was a forced sabbatical. It clearly hadn’t helped her personality. She was from Rome, explaining everything.
“Yes, our own resident Gorgon,” Biaggi chuckled, finally beginning to wake up, “Turns men to stone…”
“Just preliminary,” Ilario said, “but she can’t find an external mark anywhere. No points of entry. And yet…”
Biaggi held the folder back out to Ilario. “Then what, old friend, are we possibly doing here at this wretched hour?”
Biaggi was infamous for not having enough coffee in the morning. Ilario pushed ahead.
“M’s initial report concludes that it was no drowning. And, of course, he’s a VIP American. And, of course, both the Russian and American delegations are coming into town after the summit ends in Brussels later this morning.”
Biaggi grunted, “Nothing that we should care about – only more people milling about, an excuse for more traffic.”
Ilario leaned forward, “Then, there’s this.”
He reached deeper into the folder and handed Biaggi a photo showing the victim’s head captured in five different black-and-white photos, each from a different angle. Biaggi stared at the photographs and finally saw it on the aerial view. The coroner had shaved a two inch diameter circle on the crown. Within the circle was a suture.
He pointed.
“That’s where the coroner stitched it back together,” Ilario said. “It’s a small slice.”
Biaggi smiled. “And why?”
Ilario handed him a clear envelope containing a small, black sliver.
“It looks like a computer chip,” Biaggi observed.
“Well, it’s something...”
Biaggi looked up impatiently.
“Whatever you want to call it, it’s scorched. Burned.”
“Is that all the report says?”
Ilario’s eyes narrowed. He stared harder at the report, trying to pronounce the words that the ever-difficult coroner had purposely placed into English, “Mulsi…mulsi…”
Biaggi held out his hand and Ilario handed him the report.
He scanned down the page, the last word stopping him.
The interior of the cranial cavity
has been wholly effected…the
effect extending through the
hemispheres, their related lobes,
and encompassing the cerebral
cortex. Cause: unknown. Effect
type: emulsification.
In the golden half-light of a Florence evening, a mind had been turned dark.
†
Aisha can hear Osborne asking his questions, sometimes in a frustrated yell, as if a vague voice outside of her, of this world.
She is still in her perfect ball in the dream and staring at the star, its perfect light washing over her.
She cannot touch it, even as she tries.
She hears the same ethereal sound, a thousand sounds, forming into words. The sounds have been visiting her. The words are ancient and were told to her when she was a child, by an old man, then forgotten. The old man told her they were written a thousand years before:
The geese do not intend to cast
their reflections,
The water has no mind to
receive their images
She doesn’t know why she hears these words, or what they mean, over and over in an infinite chorus.
What does it mean?
The star is growing, washing through and healing her.
It is a mother’s hand, a whisper.
†
Jenny Huff felt propelled. She was coming out of her dream lying on the couch, half-covered in a blanket and still in her clothes.
Last night, after putting the children to bed, she’d stayed up late and watched an old movie, one she’d not seen in a long while – about a visit, UFOs, by that direct
or, what was his name, yes, Spielberg, about an actor building a mountain in his kitchen. No, the Devil’s Tower it had been, Richard Dreyfus, driven by a force he couldn’t understand, that he couldn’t explain to others. Jenny had tried to explain it too, to her best friend, Calinda, from down the street. But Calinda had only stared and reached for her hand, saying nothing more. When she’d seen the film long ago she’d thought that this Tower-part of the movie was unrealistic – wouldn’t everyone simply think that the Dreyfus character was insane, in real life wouldn’t they have stopped him?
In real life…
This time as she watched the movie she had leaned forward, as if entranced, entranced by her…empathy with it. She realized that she was the same as that character – pulled or driven, who knew by what, towards something, someone, someplace.
She must do something. She can’t stay in this dead house any longer. She could take her children to her in-laws for the weekend. What would she say? What would she say when, not understanding, they asked again?
She moves into the bedroom, looking around. Before moving to the bedroom, she’d turned on the TV for company, for some sound in this house. From the bedroom she hears the voice of Paddie Popoff Jr., the son of the recently deceased televangelist, carrying on like a late-century tonic salesman, bemoaning to the faithful, shilling to the desperate – Buy the prayer cloth! She runs into the front room and turns the channel.
There is a CNN News Alert falling away and behind as she moves back into the bedroom.
She pulls the suitcase from the top of the closet and throws it on the bed.
She is traveling. She does not know where.
†
Jack and Lani had been at the manor for two days. She’d convinced Jack not to leave, at least for now. “We have nowhere to go.” They needed to trust Mac, trust your friend, she’d said. Jack had listened carefully, finally saying, “A week, no more.” He then went out the door, “I’ll get more firewood…”
