Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Eat, Jimmy,’ he said.

  Mallory wasn’t hungry. He’d been dragging nausea around with him all day and he’d been chewing on Swiss Crème Maalox, and his stomach felt like a vessel in which inchoate substances churned. He declined the chopsticks and picked up a fork and tasted the food, because he was too polite to turn it down.

  ‘You look miserable,’ Max said.

  ‘No appetite, Max.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Mallory asked. He set down his fork and placed his fingertips to his face. ‘Maybe I’m coming down with something.’

  ‘The bug of conscience?’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  ‘The trouble with conscience is you get sweet fuck all in return for your investment. It’s like worry. It never solves anything.’

  ‘It happens, though.’

  Max held his chopsticks poised to his lips. ‘When it comes to conscience, you fight it. You have a conscience attack, you ask yourself why. Why am I feeling this bad over – OK, the deaths of a certain psychiatrist and his under-age concubine, for example. So you ask yourself: was the act just one of meaningless destruction? Or did it have significance?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you weigh the question. If it wasn’t meaningless, then why are you having qualms about it? The shrink had to go. That was agreed. He was part of a meaningful design. And you made a decision to go along with that design, Jimmy, because you thought it was a good thing. The kid, well, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and you’re sorry about it, but you don’t raise the dead by being sorry.’

  ‘What if you think it’s all unjustified? The shrink, the kid, the business in Capsicum, the whole agenda?’

  Max put down his chopsticks. ‘Is that what you think, Jimmy?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  Max Skidelsky got up from the table and went out of the kitchen and returned a few moments later with a stack of newspapers he tossed down in front of Mallory. ‘Check them out, Jimmy. The Washington Post. The New York Times. The Chicago Tribune. On the front page of every one. Headlines. Carlotta everywhere. She’s like a virus in the bloodstream of the whole country. People are panicked. Turn on your TV. Check Larry King. Check Dan Rather. Check Nightline. And it’s her name you’re going to hear. And by tonight they’ll be busy dissecting the mind of a terrorist, and they’ll be talking crap about how there might be some god-damn Oedipal element in the fact she killed her shrink and shot her own father. And that ought to make you feel good, Jimmy. Because you played a role in all that. You helped create those headlines. Believe it, Jimmy. Believe.’

  Mallory didn’t look at the papers. He heard an urgency in Max’s voice, a fervour. How easy it was for Max to sway him. How simple. The voice insinuated itself into his head and it felt soothing. He wished he had Skidelsky’s superb confidence.

  Max rubbed Mallory’s shoulder and said, ‘It’s not pleasant, Jimmy. I sympathize with that. Death leaves a bad taste. OK, so you have a conscience. And you haven’t learned how to train it because there’s some vestigial Christian guilt matrix inside you. But conscience is only a god-damn dog, Jimmy, and you control the leash. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget that. The dog doesn’t wag your tail, pal.’

  Mallory speared a shrimp on his fork and carried it to his mouth. He wondered about the black mongrel of conscience, a wilful creature. ‘What about your conscience, Max?’ he asked.

  ‘I house-trained mine some years back. Now it doesn’t shit in my head.’

  Mallory chewed on the shrimp. It had a delicate ginger flavour.

  ‘Eat,’ said Skidelsky. ‘Let’s see enthusiasm. Never do anything half-hearted. Food, sex, work. Always give it everything you’ve got.’

  Mallory was thinking about the girl who’d appeared in the doorway of Lannigan’s bedroom. The image rose up like a bubble of trapped gas from the floor of a dank pond. The shrimp lodged at the back of his throat. He choked it down. Enthusiasm, he thought.

  Once upon a time in his life he’d been enthusiastic about a lot of things – his work, his country, his marriage to Rosemary, the two kids. Rosemary, converted in middle age to weirdness, was long gone, taking the kids to San Francisco where she’d set up some kind of New Age art gallery and fallen in love with a spiritual guru who called himself Apis, after the sacred bull of Egypt, for Christ’s sake. As for his work and his country – well, he was supposed to be working in a subterranean way toward the nation’s betterment, but he had doubts about that. Serious ones. And they all distilled themselves in the memory of a kid’s face in a doorway. He wanted Skidelsky to wave a magic wand and make his worries vanish.

  Skidelsky finished eating, pushed his plate aside. He dabbed his lips with a napkin and said, ‘Things of value take time to build, Jimmy. We Americans have been raised in a world of instant gratification. Want a burger? OK, you get one in a twinkling at a Burger King. No waiting. Life insurance? No sweat. A paramedic will call at your home within the hour and run some health tests. Car loan? Pick up the phone. This high-speed concept is a dangerous thing, because the quicker we do things the less quality they have. And after a while we don’t notice any more. What we think is high-speed efficiency is actually the slipway to mediocrity, Jimmy.’

  ‘The sleigh-ride,’ Mallory said.

  ‘The sleigh-ride, right.’

  ‘And we’re making things better,’ Mallory said.

  ‘Sure. But it takes time. Time, Jimmy. It’s not a matter of minutes. It’s not a matter of hours. Even months. You signed on for the long haul.’

  Mallory pushed his chair back from the table. He had the feeling that Skidelsky was about to go through the hand-bonding business and he wasn’t in the mood to give Max his hand. He walked around the kitchen, which was all black and white tiles and blond butcher-block surfaces.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ Skidelsky said. ‘I should never have asked you to go along with Donovan. I took you out of your environment and you couldn’t cope. My fault.’

  ‘If it was a test, I failed it,’ Mallory said. ‘Give me little jobs that require an eye for detail. Let me open bank accounts in foreign countries, Max. Let me copy documents or set up funny corporations. I’m a deskman, face it. I don’t belong out there …’

  Skidelsky put plates in the sink. He turned and looked across the room at Mallory and frowned.

  ‘I promise. No more fieldwork,’ he said.

  Mallory turned from the window. ‘I can help in any other way you like. Just ask.’

  ‘I know that, Jimmy.’

  ‘Anything, anything except …’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Max said.

  ‘I understand – once you’re in the Club, you don’t get out again. You can’t just resign your membership.’

  ‘It would be problematic, sure.’

  ‘I accept that. Just don’t send me out again.’

  ‘You have my word,’ Max said. ‘Give me your hand, Jimmy.’

  Mallory stretched out his hand and sighed inwardly. Bonding-time again, he thought. He’d barely touched Max Skidelsky’s fingers when there was the sound of the doorbell ringing. Skidelsky walked out of the kitchen to answer it and Mallory felt a small relief that he wasn’t going to be put through the strenuous business of the handgrip. Through the open doorway he saw Larry Quinn come inside the apartment.

  Quinn entered the kitchen, followed by Skidelsky, and went directly to the refrigerator where he removed a bottle of Grolsch, which he opened at once and slugged from in a feverish manner.

  ‘Hot out there,’ Quinn said. He ran a hand across his forehead and moved to the table. He sat down, picking at the label on the big Grolsch bottle.

  ‘So,’ Skidelsky said. ‘Cough it up, Larry.’

  ‘I didn’t think it showed,’ said Quinn.

  ‘It shows. Believe me.’

  ‘I got two bits of news. Pasco’s dead, one.’

  Mallory said, ‘Pasco’s dead?’

  Skidelsky shrugged. ‘He’s not imp
ortant, Jimmy. He served a purpose.’

  Served a purpose, Mallory thought. He remembered Pasco in the London hotel, the guy’s scarred hands, the manic determination in his eyes. He remembered Pasco’s head tilted to the side in concentration as he’d listened to his instructions. He’d come to like Pasco in a way. Certainly he’d pitied him. How could you be human and not pity somebody who’d been mistreated and abused like Pasco? Served a purpose, for God’s sake. Sometimes he had to ask himself what Max had for a heart – a chamber of stainless steel, a vacuum bag? Or maybe nothing, nothing at all.

  ‘The woman shot him, it seems,’ Quinn said.

  ‘Why am I not surprised? What about the money?’ Skidelsky asked.

  ‘I checked. It’s still in the bank. Hardly touched. Pasco only took out five grand sterling.’

  Skidelsky looked at Mallory. ‘Jimmy, you better make arrangements to transfer the funds back to Zurich. It’s too much money to be lying around in an English bank.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mallory said. Transferring funds. Paperwork. His element. What he did best. Pasco’s dead. He doesn’t need the cash. The dead don’t spend anything. The dead just lie around without expectations.

  ‘Two,’ Quinn said, and took another long pull from the lager.

  ‘It’s Donovan, isn’t it?’ Skidelsky asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s Ralph,’ said Quinn.

  ‘You’re going to tell me he fucked up.’

  Quinn said, ‘I don’t know exactly how it happened, Max. But he got himself involved in a shoot-out.’

  ‘A shoot-out?’

  ‘The DC police report states that Donovan and three dead black guys were found on a building site.’

  ‘Three dead black guys?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t ask me what happened. The cops can’t reconstruct it, and people in that neighbourhood don’t confide in the law. Four corpses and no story. Beats me.’

  ‘And Pagan?’

  Larry Quinn shook his head. ‘No sign, Max.’

  ‘You checked his hotel?’

  ‘He’s not there.’

  Skidelsky smiled unexpectedly. ‘Interesting turn of events,’ he said. He walked to the side of the kitchen where he studied a wall calendar.

  ‘Interesting wouldn’t be my first choice of word,’ Quinn said.

  Skidelsky stared at the calendar and said, ‘Poole’s asinine seminars begin tomorrow morning and they’re scheduled to go on for three days.’

  ‘And?’ Quinn asked.

  ‘If Pagan doesn’t find and catch the woman in that time, we’re home and dry.’

  ‘If,’ said Quinn.

  ‘I don’t like ifs. Conditionals don’t belong in my kind of equation.’ He turned from the calendar and said, ‘We just find some other way to disable the Englishman, that’s all.’

  38

  DOVER, DELAWARE

  ‘Does he retrieve?’ she asked.

  The man in the stained blue dungarees said, ‘Like there’s no tomorrow.’

  The woman watched the big fawn dog jump up and paw her cotton skirt. The animal’s pink tongue hung out and vibrated. It was the kind of dog forever anxious to please, and the woman hated it at once.

  She stroked the dog’s neck, then looked at the man. ‘How much?’

  ‘Well, you saw I was asking fifty in the newspaper ad. That too much?’

  The woman gave the impression of pondering this. She adjusted her glasses and looked around the yard at the back of the man’s tumbledown house. There was a whole menagerie visible behind a maze of chicken-wire. Turkeys, a goose, a huddle of rabbits, a gaggle of parakeets, a fat gerbil labouring mindlessly inside a plastic wheel.

  ‘You like animals,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, but they multiply,’ he said. ‘The reason I gotta get rid of the dog is because I got half a dozen others back there and it’s getting a mite overcrowded,’ and he gestured with his head in the direction of kennels constructed out of wood and tar-paper. She noticed that he hadn’t once taken his hands from his pockets since she’d arrived. He jiggled something in one of the pockets, perhaps a set of keys.

  ‘I might come down to forty,’ he said. ‘I just want to think he’s going to a good home, miss.’

  ‘He’s going to be well looked after,’ she said. ‘Guaranteed.’

  ‘I had him four years now. It’s a wrench.’

  She searched the grass and found a stick and tossed it high in the air across the yard and the dog went after it with the kind of eagerness that can only be genetic.

  ‘See,’ said the man. ‘Retrieves.’

  The dog came back, stick in jaws. He dropped the stick and the woman patted his head. ‘Forty, then,’ she said.

  ‘Okeydoke.’

  She counted the money from her purse and the man asked, ‘You live in Dover?’

  ‘Up country a little way,’ she said. She handed him four ten-dollar bills and he brought one plump hand out of his dungarees. She thought it resembled a small plucked pigeon ready for the oven. He stuffed the notes in his pocket.

  ‘Dog’s name is Roy,’ he said. ‘You might want to change that.’

  ‘Roy’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have a leash for him. If you like, I’ll get some string.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He pulled a length of twine out of another pocket and made a noose, which he slipped round the dog’s neck.

  ‘Well, he’s all yours, miss.’

  She took the end of the string and tugged, and the dog cast a melancholy glance at the man, as if this transaction were a form of personal treachery.

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ the man said.

  She tugged the string and the dog followed her out of the yard to where she’d parked the Honda in a side-street. The man came after, jiggling metal, whistling airily. She opened the back door of the car and the dog jumped in.

  ‘You wouldn’t know anyone in the market for a goose, would you?’ the man asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, and she slid in behind the wheel.

  ‘You hear anyone that does, you know where to send them.’

  ‘Will do,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

  The man nodded. He didn’t look at the dog.

  She drove away, reached the Dover city limits, parked outside a shopping-mall. She went inside, where the world was one of permanent fluorescence, and looked for a hardware store. She searched among the tools and instruments until she found what she wanted. She paid at the desk, left the mall, walked back to her car. The dog was standing with its paws pressed to the driver’s window. She shooed the creature into the back of the car.

  She drove a few miles, turned off the main highway and headed for a small inexpensive motel built from cinderblock. She parked outside room twenty-six and the dog followed her out of the car and into the room where it immediately went sniffing around, checking the territory, the rush of alien scents. Then, satisfied, it collapsed in a corner.

  She opened a bag of dog food and poured some of it into a saucer and set it down in front of the dog and said, ‘Chowtime, Roy.’ The animal chewed at the substance with some slight suspicion.

  The woman regarded herself in the mirror of the dressing-table. Cotton skirt, plain sleeveless blouse, hair pinned up and held back tightly. It was the face of a woman who would religiously walk her dog, a fussy kind of face, a little pinched perhaps, a solitary woman. Not exactly Kristen Hawkins, but a kindred spirit, an American edition. She strolled to the dog and kneeled beside it. She stroked the animal’s keen big head for a time. She thought: Carlotta never had a pet as a kid, never a dog, cat, bird, anything. Nothing really lived in that big house. Nothing truly survived there.

  She stood up, smoothed her skirt, picked up the telephone and dialled the number of The Madison in Washington, then asked to be put through to Frank Pagan’s room, but there was no answer. Where was he? She’d expected him to be in his room waiting to hear from her, and the idea that he’d gone out annoyed her – as if he had no right to a l
ife that wasn’t connected to her in some way. She wondered where he’d gone, what he was doing at that precise moment. Looking for me, she thought – what else would he be doing?

  She hung up, walked to the window, stared for a time at the forecourt of the motel. A yellow Ryder rental truck, a beat-up station-wagon, a VW bug. Stylish clientele. She raised her face and saw the sun declining in tracks of red and gold. Thirty minutes, she thought, then she’d get out of here. The dog padded across the floor and sat at her feet, turning its snout up, nudging the palm of her hand for attention. She stroked it, disliking the feel of fur against her skin. But she didn’t intend to keep the animal long. Roy had a job to do, and that was it. That was the end of the story.

  Where was Pagan?

  She dialled the number again, and again there was no reply from his room. She took a slip of paper from her purse, looked at it, dialled another number in DC. This time she got an answering-machine. A man’s voice said: This is James Mallory. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message. She hung up. She gazed toward the dog and thought: Come on, Pagan, how good are you? Just how goddam good are you? She walked back to the window and stared impatiently into the sun which was sliding downward. Time to go. She couldn’t hang around. Quickly, she packed her belongings, stuffed them inside a canvas bag, and then she left.

  She drove with the dog in the back seat. A jet screamed above Dover Air Force Base, leaving a stream of grey vapour. She came off the main highway beyond the town of Lynch Heights. The sky was beginning to turn in slow stages from red to navy blue, and here and there an early star could be seen, pale intruders in the twilight.

  The road narrowed the further she drove. She stopped in an isolated place, a shallow incline between two small hills, and took a map from the glove compartment, switched on the reading-light and studied the map a second, then when she’d memorized the turnings, she replaced it.

  Although twilight was deepening, she didn’t want to turn on her headlamps just yet. A sign ghosted in front of her, a wooden post to which was attached a board that bore the legend: Property of the United States. She ignored it and kept driving. She swung left. In the far distance a ship was visible on Delaware Bay, a sprinkling of lights.