by Alan Glynn
‘A place in the West Thirties, on Twelfth Avenue.’
He kicked another box.
‘When are you moving?’
‘Early next week.’
The new place wasn’t ready in terms of décor and furnishings, but since it had a shower and phonelines and cable, and since I didn’t mind eating delivery food for a while – and since I really wanted to get out of Tenth Street – I was prepared to just move into it straightaway, as it was.
Gennady was now breathing through his nose.
‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve got my social security number and my credit-card details. It’s not like you’ll be losing track of where I am. Besides it’s only across town and up a bit.’
‘You think I’m worried about losing track of you?’ He threw a hand up in the air dismissively. ‘I’m tired of this…’ – he pointed to the floor – ‘… coming here. What I want is to meet your dealer. I want to buy this shit in bulk.’
I shook my head and clicked my tongue.
‘Sorry, Gennady, that’s just not going to be possible.’
He stood still for a second, but then lunged forward and punched me in the chest. I fell backwards, over a full box of books, arms outstretched, and whacked my head on the floor.
It took me a few moments to sit up, and a few more to rub my head and look around in bewilderment, and then to get up on my feet again. I thought of a hundred things to say to him, but didn’t bother with any of them.
He had his hand out.
‘Come on, where are they?’
I stumbled over to the desk and got the pills from a drawer. I went back and handed them to him. He swallowed one of the pills and then spent the next couple of minutes carefully transferring the rest of them from the little plastic container I’d given him to his silver pillbox. When he’d finished doing this, he discarded the plastic container and put the pillbox into the breast pocket of his jacket.
‘You shouldn’t take more than one of those a day,’ I said.
‘I don’t.’ Then he looked at his watch, and sighed impatiently. ‘I’m in a hurry. Write down the address of this new place.’
I went over to the desk again, still rubbing the back of my head. When I found a piece of paper and a pen, I considered giving him a false address, but then thought what would the point be – he did have all my details.
‘Let’s go. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.’
I wrote down the address and handed him the piece of paper.
‘A meeting?’ I said, with a hint of sarcasm in my voice.
‘Yeah,’ he smirked, obviously missing the sarcasm, ‘I’m setting up an import-export company. Or trying to. But there’s so many fucking laws and regulations in this country. You know how much shit you have to go through just to get a licence?’
I shook my head, and then asked him, ‘What are you going to be importing? Or exporting?’
He paused, leant forward a little and whispered, ‘I don’t know, you know… stuff.’
‘Stuff?’
‘Hey, what do you want, this is a complicated scam I’m working on – you think I’m going to tell a cocksucker like you about it?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘OK, Eddie,’ he said, ‘so listen. I’m giving you until next week. Set up a time with this person and we’ll meet. I’ll cut you in for a commission. But fuck with me, and I’ll rip your heart out with these two hands and fry it up in a skillet. Do you understand me?’
I stared at him. ‘Yes.’
His fist came from out of nowhere, like a torpedo, and landed in my solar plexus. I doubled up in pain and staggered backwards again, just avoiding the box of books.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, did you say yes? My mistake.’
As he was walking down the stairs, I could still hear him laughing.
*
When I was able to breathe normally again, I went over to the couch and lowered myself on to it. I stretched out and stared up at the ceiling. For some time now, Gennady’s personality had been threatening to spiral out of control. I was going to have to do something about it, and soon – because once he saw the apartment in the Celestial Building there’d be nothing I could do. Not any more. It’d be too late. He’d want in. He’d want everything.
He’d ruin everything.
However, a bit later – when I thought matters through more fully – I came to the conclusion that the real crisis wasn’t with Gennady at all. The real crisis had to do with the fact that my supply of MDT was haemorrhaging – and at an alarming rate. Over the past month or so, I’d been dipping into it several times a week, indiscriminately, without ever bothering to count how many pills were left – thinking each time that I’d count them the next time. But I never did. I never got around to it. I was too caught up in things, too caught up in the relentless drumbeat inside my own head – the MCL-Abraxas deal, the Celestial Building, Ginny Van Loon…
I went into the bedroom. I opened the closet, took out the big brown envelope and emptied its contents on to the bed. I counted the pills. There were only about two hundred and fifty of them left. At the current rate of consumption – plus Gennady’s regular supply – they’d all be gone in a couple of months. Even if I eliminated Gennady from the equation, that would still only add a few more weeks to the total. So ultimately… a few weeks, a few months – what difference did it make?
This was the real crisis I was facing, and in the end, it came back – again – to Vernon’s little black notebook. Somewhere in that list of names and telephone numbers there had to be someone who knew about MDT, about its origins, and about how dosage levels worked, and maybe even about how to get a new supply line up and running. Because if I was to have any chance of fulfilling this great, unlooked-for destiny that was stretching out before me, I had to address these issues – either or both of them, dosage and supply, and I had to do it now.
*
I took out the notebook and went through it again. Using a red pen, I crossed out the numbers I’d already tried. On a separate piece of paper, I made a fresh list of selected numbers I hadn’t tried. The first number on this new list was Deke Tauber’s. I’d been reluctant to call him before, because I hadn’t imagined there’d be much chance I’d get through to him. In the 1980s he’d been a bond-salesman, a Wall Street jock, but now he’d recreated himself and was the reclusive leader of an eponymous self-improvement cult – Dekedelia.
The more I thought about it, however, the more sense it made for me to call him. Regardless of how weird or reclusive he’d become, he would still know who I was. He’d known Melissa. I could invoke the old days.
I dialled the number and waited.
‘Mr Tauber’s office.’
‘Hello, could I speak to Mr Tauber please.’
Suspicious pause.
Shit.
‘Who may I ask is calling?’
‘Erm… tell him it’s an old friend, Eddie Spinola.’
Another pause.
‘How did you get hold of this number?’
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business. Now, may I speak to Mr Tauber, please?’
Click.
I really didn’t like people hanging up on me – but I knew it was probably going to keep happening.
I looked at the list of numbers again.
Who is this?
What do you want?
How did you get hold of this number?
The thought of going through the list and crossing each number out, one after the other, was too demoralizing, so I decided to persist with Tauber for a while. I visited the Dekedelia website and read about the courses they offered and about the selection of books and videos they sold. It all seemed very commercial and had clearly been designed to attract new recruits.
I surfed around for a bit, and found links to a wide range of other sites. There was a directory of fringe religions, an awareness network called CultWatch, various ‘concerned parents’ organizations and other sites dealing with issues
such as mind control and ‘recovery facilitation’. I ended up at the homepage of a qualified exit counsellor in Seattle, someone who had lost his son fifteen years previously to a group called the Shining Venusians. Since this person had mentioned Dekedelia on his homepage, I decided to find his number and give him a call. We spoke for a few minutes and although he wasn’t much help he did give me the number of a concerned parents group in New York. I then spoke to the secretary of this group – a concerned and clearly deranged parent – and got the name, in turn, of a private investigation agency which was conducting surveillance of Dekedelia on behalf of some members of the group. After several attempts and a lot of dissembling, I got to speak to one of the agency’s operatives, Kenny Sanchez.
I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but eventually agreed to meet me – at the skating rink in Rockerfeller Plaza.
Two hours later we were pacing up and down Forty-seventh Street. Then we drifted on to Sixth Avenue, past Radio City Music Hall and up towards Central Park South.
Kenny Sanchez was short and paunchy and wore a brown suit. Although he was serious and obviously very circumspect when it came to his work, he started to relax after about ten minutes and even became quite chatty. Exaggerating slightly, I told him I’d been a friend of Deke Tauber’s for a while in the 1980s, but that we’d lost touch. This seemed to fascinate him, and he asked me a few questions about it. By answering these freely, I created the impression that I was willing to share any information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
‘The basic tenet of this cult, Eddie,’ he told me, in confidential tones, ‘is that each individual needs to escape the inherent dysfunction of the family matrix, and – get this – to re-create themselves independently in an alternative environment.’
He stopped for a moment and shrugged his shoulders, as if to distance himself from what he’d just said. Then he continued walking.
‘When it started up, Dekedelia was no more, or less, flaky than any of a dozen other of these outfits – you know, with lectures and meditation sessions and newsletters. Like all the others, too, it had an aura of cheap, second-hand mysticism about it – but things changed pretty quickly, and before you knew it the leader of this quote-unquote spiritual movement was producing best-selling books and videos.’
I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to let me know that he was on top of his brief.
‘The problems started soon after that. A succession of people – always young, usually stuck in dead-end jobs – seemed to just disappear into the cult. But there was nothing illegal about it, because the members were always careful to write “goodbye” letters to their families, thus…’ – he held up the index finger of his right hand – ‘… cleverly pre-empting any missing-person investigations by the police.’
He was focusing on three individual cases, he said, young people who had disappeared within the past year, and he gave me a few details about each of them – stuff I didn’t particularly need to hear.
‘So, how are your investigations going now?’ I asked.
‘Erm… not so well, I’m afraid.’ He clearly hadn’t wanted to say it, but it didn’t look as if there’d been much choice. Then, as though to compensate, he added, ‘But there seems to be something strange going on at the moment. Within the past week or two, rumours have been circulating that Deke Tauber has taken ill. He hasn’t been seen, hasn’t given any lectures, hasn’t done any book-signings. He can’t be reached. He’s effectively incommunicado.’
‘Hhmm.’
I felt the time had now come for me to show my hand.
I said I had reason to believe that Deke Tauber was taking a strange, physically addictive designer drug and that if he was ill it might be because the only known supplier of the drug had… disappeared recently, leaving all of his clients high and dry – as it were. Kenny Sanchez was naturally very interested in this, though I did keep it quite vague and told him almost immediately what I needed – which was information on an associate of Tauber’s, a Todd-something. I told him that if he helped me out with this, I’d pass on any further information I managed to uncover about the drug thing.
In trying to impress me, Kenny Sanchez had lost his professional bearings somewhat, but he still managed to balk convincingly at the notion of revealing, to a third party, information he had learned during the course of an investigation.
‘Information on an associate of Tauber’s? I don’t know, Eddie – that’s not going to be easy. I mean, we’re bound by rules of confidentiality…’ – he paused – ‘… and ethics… and stuff…’
I stopped on the corner of Sixth and Central Park South and turned to face him. He stopped as well. I looked directly into his eyes.
‘How do you get information in the first place, Kenny? It’s a commodity, like anything else, no? A currency? This would simply be an exchange…’
‘… I suppose…’
‘I mean, what are sources anyway?’
‘Yeah, but…’
‘There has to be some give and take, surely.’
I kept on at him like this until he eventually agreed to help me out. He said he’d see what he could do, and added – sheepishly – that if he tried he could probably get access to Tauber’s phone records.
*
I spent the weekend packing up the remainder of my stuff and having most of it moved into the Celestial. I got to know the main guy, Richie, at the desk in the lobby. I checked out a few more furniture showrooms, as well as having a look at the latest in kitchen appliances and home entertainment systems. I bought a complete set of Dickens, something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I also learned Spanish – something else I’d been meaning to do for ages – and read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original.
Kenny Sanchez called me on Monday morning. He asked if we could meet, and suggested a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue in the Eighties. I was going to object, and suggest somewhere a little closer to midtown, but then I didn’t. If this was to be one of his little private investigator things – meeting in public places, like skating rinks and coffee shops – then so be it. I made a few calls before going out. I set up an appointment for later with my Tenth Street landlord to hand over the keys. I made an unsuccessful attempt to set another one up with the guy who was going to be tiling my bathroom. I also spoke to Van Loon’s secretary and scheduled a couple of meetings for the middle part of the afternoon.
Then I went down to First Avenue and hopped in a cab.
*
That was last Monday morning.
As I sit now in the eerie quiet of this room in the Northview Motor Lodge, it seems incredible to me that that was only five days ago. Equally incredible, given all that’s happened since, is what I was doing – setting up business meetings, worrying about bathroom tiles, taking what I imagined were sensible steps to address the MDT situation…
Outside there has been a subtle shift in the light. The darkness has lost its edge, and it won’t be long now before a blue tinge starts seeping up from the horizon. I am tempted to put the laptop down, to go outside and look at the sky, and feel the vast stillness that surrounds this small clearing on the edge of a Vermont highway.
But I stay where I am – inside, in the wicker armchair – and continue writing. Because the truth is, I don’t have that much time left.
*
In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the place as we sped by. It was closed and looked strangely flat and unreal, like an abandoned movie set. I allowed my head to replay what I could remember of the dinner there and of the reception in Rodolfo Alvarez’s studio afterwards – but soon those pai
nted figures, lurid, bulging, multiplying, were all I could see, and I had to stop. I blocked it out by reading the charter of passenger’s rights on the back of the seat in front of me.
When I got to the coffee shop, Kenny Sanchez was sitting in a booth, eating a plate of ham and eggs. There was a large brown envelope on the table beside his coffee cup. I sat down opposite him and nodded a suitably discreet hello.
He wiped his mouth with his napkin and said, ‘Eddie, how are you? You want something to eat?’
‘No, I’ll just have a coffee.’
He nabbed a passing waitress and ordered the coffee.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said and tapped the envelope.
I felt my heart beat a little faster.
‘That’s great. What is it?’
He took a sip from his coffee.
‘We’ll come to that, Eddie – but first, you’ve got to be straight with me. This designer drug thing – how real is it? I mean, how do you even know about it?’
Obviously – having gone off and had himself a little think – he’d concluded that I was trying to put one over on him, to finagle the information out of him without giving anything substantial in return.
‘It’s real all right,’ I said, and paused. Then the waitress arrived with the coffee, which gave me a moment to think. But there was nothing to think. I needed the information.
When the waitress had gone, I said, ‘You know all these performance-enhancing drugs you read about in the papers, and that are tainting sport – swimming, track-and-field, weight-lifting? Well, this is like one of those, except it’s for the brain – a kind of steroid for the intellect.’
He stared at me, unsure of how to react, waiting for more.
‘Someone I knew was dealing them to Tauber.’ I nodded at the envelope. ‘If those are Tauber’s phone records, then this guy’s name is probably on there, too. Vernon Gant.’
Kenny Sanchez hesitated. But then he picked up the envelope, opened it and pulled out a sheaf of papers. I could see straightaway that it was a print-out of telephone numbers, along with names, times and dates. He riffled through them, looking for something specific.
