Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Mallory said, ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

  Mallory opened a bottle of Absolut and poured a shot and slugged it back and shut his eyes.

  Pagan said, ‘You were just a little careless, Mallory. You used one name in London when you opened Pasco’s bank account, then another in Virginia in the articles of incorporation. Not very smart – unless, of course, you happen to have some deep-rooted desire to be found out. Do you, Mallory?’

  Mallory poured another drink. He couldn’t keep his god-damn hand steady. A deep-rooted desire to be found out. He had to wonder about that, he had to give that one a lot of thought; but it meant exploring the hidden channels of his motives and the crypts of his conscience, and he wasn’t in the mood for deep self-analysis. He’d come to a place where all he wanted was a general numbing of his doubts.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Pagan said.

  ‘What is there to talk about?’ Mallory said.

  ‘I have a few questions.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t have the answers you want.’ Mallory heard a curious little throaty quality in his own voice, a thickness.

  Pagan wandered the room. He was looking at a photograph Mallory had of the kids, snapped when they’d been very small.

  ‘Yours?’ Pagan asked.

  Mallory nodded and gazed down into the surface of his drink. A deep-rooted desire to be found out, he thought. Maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was an urge to liberate himself from the deadly trappings of his membership of The Artichoke Club. Maybe it was something as simple and as complicated as freedom. He didn’t know. He’d become detached from the essence of himself. He was smudged round the edges, like a bad charcoal drawing.

  ‘Nice-looking kids,’ Pagan said. ‘They live with you?’

  ‘California, with their mother.’

  ‘Too bad. A marital breakdown,’ Pagan said.

  ‘You could say.’ Mallory felt emotional all at once. He didn’t think about the kids any more. They’d vanished in the void of divorce only to be beamed back down in faraway California with a new daddy, and that made him sad. Some things you didn’t think about because they only choked your heart. ‘You’re not here to talk about my marriage, Pagan.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Mallory looked at the Englishman. He was an inch or so over six feet, and lean, and gave the impression of a man who hadn’t totally surrendered his humanity in the course of his work. If you looked closely, you might see a quality of sympathy around the eyes. Mallory wondered if he was simply imagining this, if it was something he’d constructed around the genuine way Pagan had said the words too bad when he’d been looking at the photograph of the kids.

  ‘Tell me about Pasco,’ Pagan said.

  Mallory didn’t reply. He could play this silently, acting dumb and innocent. He thought about Max and wondered how far he was prepared to go to protect him and his secrets. He wondered what Max would do if he was the one in this situation.

  Pagan said, ‘I don’t want to get brutal, Mallory. I have a good side, and I have a bad side, and I genuinely prefer the former, because the latter is ugly and consumes too much energy. Talk to me about Pasco.’

  ‘What is it you don’t know, Pagan?’

  Pagan shrugged. ‘You put him in touch with Carlotta, didn’t you?’

  Mallory said, ‘Boy, you’re guessing. You’re dickering around, Pagan. This is a fishing expedition.’

  Pagan passed the gun from one hand to the other, making a little arc of silver. Mallory wondered if he was meant to construe this gesture as a threat, a reminder of where the balance of power lay.

  Pagan took a step across the room and said, ‘I don’t mind fishing, Mallory. Let’s just say Carlotta comes on the scene and we’ll forget the mechanics of it for now. OK, she’s on stage, and her role is that of helping Pasco. Carlotta doesn’t object to this in principle. After all, there’s some destruction involved, and that’s what she does best, and besides she doesn’t feel a great deal of affection for any kind of law-enforcement agency, Special Branch, the FBI, the Agency, whatever. The trouble is, Pasco’s an encumbrance she doesn’t need.’

  Mallory poured himself another measure of vodka. His hand was steady now. He looked at Pagan and said nothing.

  Pagan sat on the arm of the sofa, the gun dangling from his fingers. ‘But she likes Pasco’s agenda in general. The idea of coming back to America after all these years and making loud noises, this really gets her motor ticking over. But now I run into a problem, Mallory. There are loud noises, sure, but some of them don’t originate with her. And this baffles me. Capsicum, North Carolina. The shrink, Lannigan. Big noises, granted – except they’re not Carlotta’s. So who’s making them?’

  Mallory thought of the kid in Lannigan’s house. The painted nymph. She was going to wander again and again into his dreams, he knew that. He was going to carry her around for God knows how long. She was going to haunt him. He felt the vodka create a warm funnel in his stomach, but that warmth didn’t take the chill off his memory. He’d need part of his brain removed to achieve the kind of amnesia he needed. He raised his face from his drink and looked back at Pagan and he felt the urge to explain – but then Skidelsky rose in his mind, a demon in a fashionable linen suit, and a vast disturbing shadow fell across him.

  ‘Pagan,’ he said. ‘Take my advice. Drop it. Just drop it.’

  ‘And what? Go back to London? Forget everything?’

  ‘Go anywhere you like—’

  ‘I can’t do that, Mallory.’

  Mallory drew the cuff of his jacket across his lips. ‘There are guys out there looking for you, Pagan. And they’re not hunting you because they want to give you the good news that your rich uncle in Honolulu just died and left you his entire estate. They don’t want you getting near the woman.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Pagan, leave it,’ Mallory said. ‘Leave it alone.’

  ‘They want the woman for themselves,’ Pagan said.

  Mallory nodded almost imperceptibly. He had the feeling that in this one tiny gesture he’d given away more than he ever intended.

  ‘Who are these people, Mallory?’

  Mallory said nothing. He was conscious of how treachery was formed in layers, strata. He’d betrayed the Agency by aligning himself with Max Skidelsky. And now he was approaching another level, where he had the choice of betraying Skidelsky too. The trouble with betrayal was what it did to you, the bruises it inflicted on you, the way it blew a shifting unpredictable tempest through your own values. What values, Jimmy? he wondered. Do you have any left? His thoughts cluttered his head. He had collapses going on inside him. He felt dizzy. He listened to the rain fall in the shrubbery outside. The cleansing rain.

  He glanced at Pagan. ‘In your shoes, Pagan, I’d walk away.’

  ‘You’re not wearing my shoes,’ Pagan said.

  ‘I’m thankful for any small mercy that comes my way.’

  Pagan rose, stepped across the room, and for a second Mallory had the feeling he was about to be struck. Nothing too savage, a quick punch in the gut, a flick of the pistol across his mouth, but Pagan didn’t touch him. ‘My patience isn’t endless, Mallory. It has limits, and I’m approaching them, and I don’t honestly like the idea of losing it entirely, believe me.’

  Mallory wandered to the sofa, out of Pagan’s range, and sat down, looked inside his glass. What did it matter to him if this stubborn Englishman went out and got himself killed by Skidelsky’s people? What was one more death anyway? She stands in the doorway, that young face painted, the ridiculous prophylactic in her fingers, and she looks so damned innocent, so disturbingly innocent, and young enough to be your own fucking daughter, and now she’s a nightmare you have to carry around.

  He gazed at the photograph of his lost kids. Carrie would be thirteen now, Cindy eleven. He imagined what it would be like to sit down with them one day and tell them about his life and the things he’d done and see their expressions. How would the
y look at him? With understanding or condemnation? He doubted if he’d ever see them again anyhow, so the conjecture was purely a dry academic exercise.

  He drew a hand across his face in a weary manner. He said quietly, ‘My wife complained I gave too much of myself to my work. And she was right, Pagan. I was always going overseas, I was gone too long too often, and everything just evaporated in my absences. I’d come home to a house of strangers, and I’d feel … I guess the word is alienated. It’s a sad story, and it’s banal. Happens all the time.’

  Pagan was silent, tapping the barrel of his gun against the palm of his hand. Mallory couldn’t read his expression. The grey eyes were unresponsive.

  ‘They’d send me to Paris. Rome. Athens. Istanbul. Anywhere you’d find old operatives from the former Soviet bloc. Guys with hot secrets to sell. Documents they wanted to trade in exchange for US residency. All these guys with pathetic expressions. Trouble is, while I was away strange things were going on behind my back, and I wasn’t paying close attention. My wife found a replacement, my marriage collapsed, and my country was falling to pieces. And one day I came home to an empty house and a sick nation.’

  ‘The abandoned husband, the disillusioned patriot,’ Pagan remarked.

  ‘That sums it up, Pagan.’ Mallory turned his face to Pagan, a quick little movement of the neck. He felt a small burst of hostility toward Pagan suddenly. Why should he tell this stranger anything? The guy was intruding on his life. ‘Christ, Pagan. Why don’t you just do yourself a favour and walk straight out of here? Forget you ever saw me.’

  ‘I think I’ll linger,’ Pagan said. He moved a little closer to the sofa. He gave Mallory the impression now of a man who was holding himself in check, energies only just repressed, coils about to unwind.

  Pagan said, ‘Besides, I’m interested in disillusioned patriots. How do they compensate?’

  How do they compensate? Mallory forced a weak smile. His feeling of animosity dispersed as if it were a vapour. He heard voices inside his head, a clamour of them, Skidelsky’s, his ex-wife’s, a kid crying out in a bedroom doorway – there was displacement going on inside his skull, discordant voices echoing in an empty auditorium. He got up and walked back to the liquor cabinet and filled his glass. ‘There’s no real compensation, Pagan. I thought there might be. I guess I figured it all the wrong way. I’m not sure. Even now, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Tell me how you figured it, Mallory.’

  Mallory ran a hand through his hair. Vodka was getting in the way of his thinking. Unfinished sentences floated in and out of his mind, explanations, justifications, things beyond the reach of his language. ‘I’m not a bad man, Pagan. That’s how I assess myself. I’m not what you’d call a bad man. I just happen to be involved in …’

  ‘In what?’

  Mallory paused. The precipice, he thought. The place where, without benefit of either parachute or safety-net, he could jump. Skidelsky’s face formed in his imagination. A warning frown behind the glasses, those clear eyes penetrating. What did he owe Max Skidelsky anyway? Put it into words, what did he owe? Skidelsky had filled certain gaps in his life. Skidelsky had given him a fragile sense of belonging to something. Max’s dreams were infectious, but none of them were real. He created illusions. He was setting the country right, and you wanted to believe him, god damn it, but he was a quack revivalist in a big tent making cripples think they could walk without crutches, except they could only ever manage a few halting steps before they collapsed, but that was enough for some people to believe in miracles. It was all deception, and Mallory was just another gullible cripple fooled and fuelled by a huckster’s enthusiasm.

  ‘See, my trouble is I could never really see how the means justified the end. The others could. They managed the moral arithmetic of it all. Me, I always had problems with the numbers. Right from the start.’

  ‘Tell me about the numbers,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Some people had a good look round, Pagan. And they just didn’t like what they saw. They didn’t like the general drift of the country. They didn’t like the lack of focus. They didn’t like the way pessimism had replaced belief, the inability of cops to control the streets, the wholesale spread of guns, the cheapness of human life – the whole uphill struggle, the grind of keeping law and order, the breakdown in domestic security and intelligence that is supposed to be the reponsibility of the FBI.’

  Pagan said, ‘These people – colleagues of yours?’

  Mallory sipped his drink. He imagined himself sitting in a confessional, unloading all the trash in his system. But the price of atonement was higher than a few god-damn Hail Marys and a bunch of rosaries. He’d done wrong, he’d been carried along in the rush of Skidelsky’s raw intensity, but a stronger man would never have allowed that to happen in the first place. Another kind of man would have challenged Skidelsky’s strategies. Another kind of man would have tried to wrestle the gun out of Ralph Donovan’s hand. And another kind of man would have drawn a line and said I don’t go beyond this point.

  ‘I’m weak, Pagan,’ he said. ‘Not wicked. Just weak.’

  ‘We’re all a little weak,’ Pagan remarked.

  ‘Yeah, we’re all weak. We’re only human, right? Yourself included. They say you have a thing about this woman. Is that your weakness, Pagan? Or is that just gossip?’

  Pagan didn’t answer the question. But Mallory didn’t need it answered. He stared into Pagan’s face and sensed some form of inner flinching, as if he’d touched an open sore in the man. Mallory heard himself laugh, an abrupt little hawk of a sound, a vodka sound. There was no mirth in it. He felt himself sliding down a slope of shale into a place of solitude and inexpressible bitterness – and, what was worse, he had the feeling that this was the place where he really belonged. The bottom of a chute. A locked coal cellar.

  ‘This is hard for me, Pagan. Damn hard. You don’t know.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Pagan said.

  Mallory paused. This was betrayal, he thought. But he was moving into a realm where it frankly didn’t matter to him. He couldn’t differentiate one kind of treachery from another. They all smelled bad. He had the vague feeling that if he spoke to Pagan he’d be throwing off his guilt and could somehow go back to that point in the roadway of his life where he’d taken a wrong turning.

  ‘We decided we could do a better job,’ he said slowly. ‘I know how fucking arrogant that assumption is, but that’s what we decided. The Agency has a sophisticated system in place, we have highly-trained individuals who are underemployed, and the Agency is being pushed out into the cold and left to rot.’

  ‘Because you have no role to play these days,’ Pagan said. It wasn’t a suggestion, more a statement of fact.

  ‘Exactly. No role to play, because we’re pretty much limited to external matters, and all the while the nation is turning inwards. Who gives a shit about what happens in Bosnia or Rwanda anyway? Your average American wants a world where he doesn’t have to lock his car at night and turn his god-damn house into a fortress, he doesn’t care about a few Serbs and Croats and a bunch of starving Africans. Not exactly praiseworthy, maybe … But the domestic scene was off limits to the Agency. OK, we had a foothold in it, but it wasn’t much, because the Feds guard their home territory like pit-bulls. And the Agency, instead of turning its attention to the concerns of the nation, which we’re well-equipped to do … we just play old-fashioned games at Langley, Pagan. That’s all we do.’

  Pagan was all attention. ‘You needed to undermine the FBI.’

  ‘Yeah, we needed that for starters.’

  ‘To make them look incompetent.’

  ‘Yeah. Incapable. Utterly incapable.’

  ‘And you felt the woman could do that for you.’

  ‘Can you think of a better candidate? She’s evaded them for years.’

  ‘So your people blew up Capsicum. You arranged the murder of the shrink. All to get Carlotta firmly back in the national focus. She’s out there doing her thing, and the Fed
s are clumsily panting after her. And they’re seen to be panting, which is even better.’

  ‘That was part of the scheme.’

  Pagan was silent a moment, absorbing this information. From Mallory’s angle of perception, the Englishman looked imposingly cool. You couldn’t imagine him being flustered. You couldn’t see his feathers ruffled. And yet the scuttlebutt had it that the woman was under his skin and had infiltrated his system like a rogue cell. We’re all weak, Mallory thought. Amen to that. He rose and went back in the direction of the Absolut and noticed he was weaving just slightly as he moved.

  ‘There’s more,’ Pagan said.

  Mallory poured another drink. ‘Yeah, there’s a twist or two,’ he said. ‘If the Feds couldn’t capture the woman, we could. Capture or kill, it doesn’t matter. The Agency lives. The Agency is capable of bagging big game, even on the domestic front. The Agency can outsmart the FBI.’

  ‘Presumptuous,’ Pagan said.

  ‘We lived on presumptions, Pagan. We dined out on them. Don’t you understand that?’

  ‘How do you intend to capture her?’

  Mallory, by now half drunk and enjoying the sensation, winked. Vodka was a great provider of bravado. Fuck Skidelsky. Fuck Pagan. Mallory wanted only peace and quiet. ‘Sorry, buddy. I’ve gone as far as I can go,’ he said.

  Suddenly Pagan moved. He moved quicker than Mallory’s retarded eye could follow. The glass was swept out of his hand and Pagan clutched the lapels of his jacket and forced him down on the sofa. Pagan was above him, looking down, his face grim.

  ‘Go a little further for me, Mallory,’ he said. ‘You’ve got my attention.’

  Mallory struggled to rise, but Pagan had him pinned to the sofa. He was stronger than he looked. His hands were locked tight around Mallory’s wrists. Mallory struggled briefly, tried to turn this way and that, then subsided with a grunt of exasperation.

  ‘Go on,’ Pagan said.

  Mallory stared up past Pagan’s face, seeing where the overhead light threw a pale ring against the ceiling. ‘The rough stuff,’ he said. ‘I thought you were a civilized guy.’