The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  All around her, the airplane thrums like a gigantic insect that’s eaten her alive. It’s not a pleasant thought, and she pushes it away.

  “I need something to drink,” she mutters, her voice hardly more than a raw, hoarse whisper, and then she sees the bottle of National Bohemian waiting obligingly in her cup holder.

  “Well, will you look at that,” says the Signalman. “Sleeping Beauty awakes. And here I figured you’d be sawing logs all the way to Omaha.” He’s sitting across the narrow aisle from Ellison and two rows forward, his back to the cockpit doors, facing the female agent who watched on while Ellison endured a rushed medical evaluation and a round of inoculations, Mackenzie something or another Irish—Rourke. O’Riordan, Reilly . . .

  Mackenzie Regan, she remembers.

  Yeah, that’s right.

  She’s too pretty, that one, too young and fresh-faced, entirely too sober and unscarred, someone who would look more at home teaching elementary school than running with the likes of the Signalman. Then again, Ellison Nicodemo learned a long time ago just exactly how deceiving looks can truly be. Best to withhold judgment. Always best to wait and see. For all Ellison knows, Mackenzie Regan might be the meanest motherfucker alive, a regular intergalactic samurai badass, facing the death sentence in twelve star systems, yada, yada, yada.

  Ellison twists the cap off the bottle of beer and takes a long swallow, clears her throat, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, and belches. Mackenzie Regan turns her head, looking over her shoulder and sparing half a forced, distasteful smile before focusing her attention once more on the documents and photographs and maps spread out on the little table between herself and the Signalman.

  “We just crossed the Arizona-Utah border,” he says to Ellison and nods at his window. “Look down there, kiddo, and you’ll see the patch of buttes and dust and rattlesnakes that John Ford made famous. If the Duke has a ghost, I’d wager green folding money that’s where you’d find it.” And then he winks at her and lights a cigarette, which saves Ellison the trouble of having to ask if she can smoke on the flight.

  “I thought you fucking hated planes,” she says, then clears her throat again. “I thought with you it was railways and highways or no ways at all. I thought you’d rather eat the peanuts out of a pile of pig shit than get on an airplane.”

  The Signalman watches her and rubs his salt-and-pepper stubbled chin. It doesn’t look as if he’s shaved since the day before. Or maybe the day before that.

  “And I thought I’d find you healthy and clean, living it up on the banks of the Vltava,” he replies. “You wanna tell me again why it is I didn’t?” And then to Mackenzie Regan, he says, “That’s in Prague, the River Vltava,” and she sighs and tells him she knew that already.

  Ellison frowns and lets the matter drop. She finds a shiny new Zippo and a half-empty pack of Chesterfields in the breast pocket of the blazer. She lights one and stares at the sky for almost a whole minute before asking, “How long was I out?”

  “Not too long,” the Signalman replies. “Since just before takeoff. An hour and a half, more or less. I warned you that was some potent shit, not like that nickel-and-dime skag you’ve been shooting.”

  “Yeah,” she mutters around the filter of her cigarette. “You warned me.”

  Kitty Wells is replaced by Connie Francis, “Who’s Sorry Now.” The plane might belong to Albany, but it’s sure as shit the Signalman’s mixtape.

  Ellison finishes the beer and sets the empty bottle back into the cup holder. She wants to ask if she can get another and is debating whether or not that’s a bad idea, trying to guess just how deep the Signalman’s indulgence runs, when he holds up a manila folder so she can see, then taps it with an index finger. There’s an identical folder lying on the otherwise empty seat next to her, and she nods at him, picks up the folder, and opens it. Inside, there’s a thin sheaf of typed pages held together with a red plastic paper clip. Typed, she notes (and on onionskin), not a computer printout, because Albany has never trusted computers for these sorts of things and likely never will. The cover sheet is stamped with green ink, COSMIC TOP SECRET and EYES ONLY and so on and so forth. Ellison takes a drag on her Chesterfield, then turns to the second page. And here, assembled in a terse, itemized list, are all the many reasons that the agency has sent the Signalman to yank her back into the fold, all the horrors and unlikelihoods that add up to this moment, to her sitting in this seat on this plane, racing through the sky above a cowboy-movie landscape of towering sandstone buttes and cowboy-movie phantoms.

  “I’m going to need another beer for this,” Ellison says, because, really, the worst he can do is say no. She shuts her eyes, trying to scrape together a few stingy shreds of courage and summon some measure of backbone from the heroin’s deceitful, warm embrace. When she opens her eyes again, the empty bottle’s gone and there’s a fresh Natty Boh in the cup holder. Its already been opened for her. The Signalman is standing now, stooped slightly so he can gaze out one of the circular windows.

  “You don’t have to read it all at once,” he says. “You’ve got some time. But I do need you to read all of it, kiddo. And then we’ll talk.”

  Ellison takes a swallow of the cold malt liquor, wipes her mouth, then looks back down at the folder in her lap, the bloody-red paper clip, the crisp typed pages, the bizarre catalog of atrocities lined up all neat and tidy for her careful consideration. The life and times and not quite unspeakable sins of a Welsh woman named Jehosheba Talog, the only assignment Ellison Nicodemo never finished, the only one who ever got away.

  “To tell you the truth,” says the Signalman, “after what happened in Atlanta, I thought maybe she’d crawled off somewhere to lick her wounds and . . . whatever. Swum away home like a good pollywog to King Neptune’s stately pleasure palace or just fucking died. What the fuck ever it is people like her do when they’ve finally done the world all the mischief they can manage. I honestly thought we’d heard the last of her.”

  After what happened in Atlanta . . .

  Ellison glances down at the scars on her hands, then shuts her eyes again.

  “No, you didn’t,” she says, so softly that the words are almost lost in the low, rumbling purr of the King Air’s twin turbine engines. “You didn’t think that for a minute. So why bother lying to me about it?”

  When he doesn’t answer the question, Ellison opens her eyes and goes back to staring at (but not reading) the contents of the manila folder. It’s not like she really expects an answer.

  “Anyway,” the Signalman says finally, “read it. Maybe you’ll see some kinda pattern there we’re missing. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you. We’re refueling at Offutt, then flying on to Quonset Point.”

  “And there’s nothing the least bit portentous about making a pit stop at the birthplace of the Enola Gay.”

  “I stopped thinking like that a long, long time ago,” says the Signalman. “You have to, or you wind up seeing the face of Jesus in every bowl of breakfast cereal.”

  “But that’s pretty much what you want me to do, isn’t it?” she asks him and points at the dossier.

  “No, it’s not. All I want you to do . . .” But he trails off and sighs and quietly massages his temples and eyelids a moment before continuing. “No one ever got as close to her as you did. At least no one who’s still walking around and breathing.”

  “Well, I’m not a profiler, either,” Ellison reminds him.

  “Look, I’m not saying I believe you can read that file and tell me what the bitch is going to do next. Just that maybe you’ll see something the rest of us have missed. Something. Anything. And the sooner we find her, the sooner we can put this one to bed for good. Before more people die. Before she wakes up something we don’t know how to put back to sleep or blow to smithereens or banish to whatever shithole banana republic dimension she’s called it forth from.”

  “And, after all, if I hadn’t fucked this up seven years ago . . .”

  “That’s not what I sa
id, kiddo. That’s not at all what I just said. Listen, as long as the hound still comes when it’s called, that’s mostly all they care about.”

  “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  The Signalman sighs and looks away from the window.

  “Just do what you can,” he says, and she can hear his exasperation as clearly as she can see the sheen of sweat on his face. She wonders if he’ll make it to Offutt without having to use one of the airsickness bags. “Just do your best, given the circumstances.”

  “When has Albany ever been happy with that?” she asks him, and the Signalman scowls and goes back to his seat. Mackenzie Regan mutters something Ellison can’t quite make out, and the Signalman tells her to play nice and mind her own damn business. Ellison starts to ask if times have really gotten so hard that TPTB have started hitting up the steno pool for new talent, but then she thinks better of it. It might bring a smile to her face, poking the bear and all, but then again, it might not, and the folder would still be right there in her lap, lying in wait, ready to snap shut like a steel-jaw trap.

  The plane bumps and shudders for a moment, passing through some invisible wrinkle in the sky, some harmless pocket of clear-air turbulence, and Ellison glances over at the Signalman. His teeth are clenched and he’s holding on to the armrests for dear life. She imagines she can hear his molars grinding and his stomach rolling. She looks back down at the dossier. She doesn’t like seeing him like this.

  She takes another swallow of beer.

  Fine, she thinks. I will read these things. Hell, I’ll read them twice, three times, but I won’t see shit, and pretty soon they’ll figure out I’m useless and send me packing. So read the file, get it over with, go the fuck home.

  The second page of the dossier begins with a brief account of a thirty-two car pileup on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, just outside of Harrisburg. A sixty-five foot sperm whale had appeared, ex nihilo, in the westbound lane. The whale had still been alive when first responders arrived on the scene.

  The plane hits another pocket of rough air, worse than the last, and she glances up at the Signalman again. He’s doing a piss-poor job of pretending that he’s neither ill nor terrified. Ellison finishes her second beer, takes a last drag on her Chesterfield, smoked almost down to the filter, then drops the butt into the empty bottle. She imagines a faint, brief sizzle, even if she doesn’t actually hear one. She sets the bottle back in the cup holder before turning her attention once more to the typescript—the unfortunate, impossible sperm whale on I-76, twelve people dead, and so on and so forth.

  And then a single drop of water falls onto the paper in her lap. More annoyed than surprised, Ellison Nicodemo sits staring at it for four or five seconds, as the ink begins to run, before she looks up to see where it could have come from.

  8.: In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated

  (Ynys Llanddwyn, Wales, November 27, 1972)

  Almost every evening now, the dark man comes to see the girl named Abishag Talog. Almost every evening since her mother died, he comes strolling up the narrow, stony path that leads from the mainland out onto the craggy jut of ancient pillow lava and red chert, limestone and shifting sand that is only an island at high tide. He comes in fair weather and he comes even if the sky is spitting sleet or snow or rain that stings like needles fired from faerie bows. The girl has never learned his name. He’s never volunteered it, and she’s never asked. His name has never seemed especially important. He comes all the way out to her mother’s whitewashed cottage near the lighthouse, and he brings Abishag food so that she never goes hungry. He sees that she has warm clothes and coal and kerosene for the lanterns. He sees that she has shoes. Once, when she caught a bad chest cold, he brought her medicine and nursed her back to health. Two months ago, on her tenth birthday, he brought her sweets and a small music box made from cherry wood and inlaid with abalone shell. When her mother died, the girl was afraid that there would be well-meaning, prying men and women from Newborough who’d come and take her away from the cottage, who’d see that she was shipped off to an orphanage. After all, she had become an orphan, hadn’t she? But the dark man told her she’d need never again worry about being forced to leave the cottage where she was born, the house her grandfather had built for her grandmother, before they’d both gone down to the sea, and the only home the girl has ever known. The dark man told her that he’d taken care of everything, every last detail, so she was free to remain on the island as long as she wished.

  “Are you my father?” she asked him, that first night he came to her. After all, the girl had never known her father, so, for all she knew, perhaps the dark man was him.

  He laughed, but not unkindly, and told her no, that he wasn’t her father, but that he had met her father years before, in Korea, during the war. “He asked me to look after you, once your mother was gone,” the dark man said.

  “He knew that she would die?” asked the girl.

  “Everyone dies,” the dark man had replied.

  On his second visit to the cottage, he brought her a brand-new transistor radio, so there was news and soap operas and music, if the weather wasn’t too bad. The first song she heard on the radio was “American Pie” by Don McLean, and she has never heard a song that she’s liked better.

  Sometimes the dark man brings her books.

  And sometimes he reads to her, and other nights he tells her stories that are all his own and no one else’s. The dark man knows many stories.

  Some nights, like tonight, they sit together at the fire and listen to the sea shattering itself against the rocky shore, the ravenous Atlantic patiently eating away at the island, one grain at a time. To the girl, it has always seemed that the breakers are interwoven with murmuring voices, if only one knows how to hear them.

  “What are the waves whispering tonight?” the dark man asks her, because (as he’s told the girl) he does not himself know the language of the sea. He was born in the Egyptian desert, hundreds of miles from the ocean, and he only knows the languages of sand dunes and scorpions, of serpents and of men.

  “‘Come away,’” she says. “They are saying, ‘Come away. Come away with me.’”

  The dark man has just finished the last of the laverbread and steamed cockles that she cooked for their dinner, and he lights his pipe and sits back in his chair and watches her for a few minutes before he says anything more.

  “Someday,” he tells her, finally, “when you’ve done everything here you were born to do. Just take care not to let the sirens have their way with you before then. Take care not to end up like your poor mother.”

  The first night he came to the cottage near Tŵr Mawr lighthouse, the dark man already knew everything about how her mother had died, how late one morning she’d gone alone to the beach below the cottage, taken off all her clothes, and swum out as far as she could before the cold and exhaustion had claimed her. Before the sea had claimed her. He knew that the girl had watched it all from the doorway of the cottage. He knew that the she’d seen her mother drown. He also knew that the body had never been recovered, and he knew that the girl had gone to the beach and waited for her mother to return, that she’d waited until sunset, and then she’d gathered up her mother’s clothing and gone back to the whitewashed cottage. He knew that the clothes were kept locked away inside a cedar chest at the foot of the girl’s bed. And he knew that, from time to time, the drowned woman rose to whisper terrible secrets to her daughter and to tell her about the cities that sprawled in the deep places and about the beings who’d built them, aeons before the coming of man. Some nights, the girl could be persuaded to share those secrets, but not always, even though her mother had assured her time and again that the dark man was a friend and could be trusted and would never betray her.

  “I don’t intend to drown myself,” says the girl.

  “I know,” the dark man replies. “But few ever do. Usually, it’s the last thing on a person’s mind, drowning.”

  “It wasn’t the last thing on my
mother’s mind,” she says.

  And he replies, “No, but your mother was weak, and she despaired. It wasn’t her time, and she knew it. She wasn’t finished here. She hadn’t taught you all the things your father had trusted her to teach you.”

  “Which is why you’re here?” she asks.

  “Which is why I’m here,” he replies. “That, and also because I wouldn’t see you starved or worse.”

  She asks him, “What would be worse than starving?”

  And he answers, “Many things, child. More things than I could ever count. But worst of all for you, that you might be stolen away to some place far from the sea, where neither your mother nor your grandparents could ever find you again.”

  “My grandparents have never visited me,” she reminds him. “Because of what my mother did.”

  “All the same,” he says. “It would be worse than starving.” And then he blows grey smoke rings towards the low rafters of the whitewashed cottage. He’s stopped watching her and is staring instead into the small, fragrant peat fire crackling in the hearth. There are nights when the dark man sees visions in the flames, and the girl suspects this is because he was born in a desert, where the sun burns everything dry and brittle and black. Her mother—who’d been born by the ocean—saw visions in water, so to the girl it seems a reasonable enough explanation for why the fire in her hearth talks to the dark man.

  “I suppose that it would be,” she tells him. “Worse than starving, I mean.”

  “You can count on that,” he says.

  The girl is quiet for a while then, watching the dark man watching the fire and smoking his pipe. Tonight his smoke smells of oranges and cinnamon. She’s only ever tasted an orange once, when he brought her one as a gift on the night of the summer solstice, wrapped up in a swatch of gingham and tied with a red-and-green silk bow. She kept the bow and sometimes she uses it to tie back her long hair.