Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Something wrong?’ McTell asked.

  Dansk tossed the newspaper down on the table. ‘I take it you can read.’

  McTell looked at the front page for a time without expression. Dansk snatched the paper back out of his hands and said, ‘Let’s take a stroll. Get some air.’

  ‘I hate the air around here,’ McTell said.

  Dansk said, ‘Move, Eddie. Don’t give me any friction, I’m not in the mood.’

  Outside in the heat Dansk sweated: the back of his neck and armpits. His perspiration displeased him. Liquid oozing through pores, impurities leaking from the system. He walked, followed by McTell, until he came to a small square on the edge of downtown where office workers, sprawled here and there on the sunny grass, ate health-conscious lunches. Men in white shirts, women in crisp blouses. They had the look of minor civil servants. They were clocking down their time until it was retirement day. Here’s your pension. Enjoy.

  A guy in wire-framed glasses laughed at something. The girl who kneeled beside him, a half moon of pitta bread in her skinny hand, spluttered. There was a sense of things in their rightful place and lunches that lasted a regulation thirty minutes and amusing office gossip. Let’s kill the supervisor. Let’s poison his pastrami sandwich.

  Dansk drew a hand across his wet forehead and sat under a shady tree. McTell hunkered down on his heels and let his arms dangle between his legs. Dansk had a feeling of anger so intense it seemed a thing apart from himself, a seething doppelgänger, another Anthony in another dimension.

  He thrust the newspaper under McTell’s nose with such vigour he might have intended to shove it up the man’s nostrils. ‘Quote unquote. “The body of Reuben Galindez, forty-seven, was found in the Little Colorado River on the Navaho Indian reservation by Sergeant Charles House. Police reports blah, blah, blah, gunshot wound blah, blah, blah. Galindez turned State’s evidence against Victor Sanchez et cetera et cetera. Homicide detective Lieutenant William Drumm of the Phoenix Police Department attended the forensic examination in Flagstaff rhubarb, rhubarb. With him was Amanda Scholes, the prosecutor in the sensational trial of Sanchez, now on death row. Neither Lieutenant Drumm nor Miss Scholes were available for comment.”’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I read it, Anthony.’

  Dansk said, ‘I’m seeing Galindez float down a river like driftwood, and I don’t like the image. I don’t like it from any angle. I don’t like any of this. You didn’t tell me this was the way it happened.’

  McTell said, ‘Pasquale shot him, but the current was too fucking fast, and it wasn’t like there was a full moon or nothing. We figured maybe he’d –’

  ‘Maybe he’d what? Dissolve in the water like goddam Alka-Seltzer? Or were you under the illusion there were piranha in the river and they’d eat him?’

  ‘Piranha?’ McTell smiled his dull brute smile. ‘More like decompose someplace, the river bottom, like that.’

  ‘Dead people float, McTell. Unless you weigh them down, they have this unfortunate tendency to surface.’

  Dansk sighed and looked up at the sky. How high and blue it was. Up, up and away. McTell acted on his thoughts the way a chunk of Kryptonite affected Superman.

  ‘He drifts down the river, and then who enters the picture? Look, look. Black and fucking white.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So what? He’s only a homicide cop and she’s only the goddam prosecutor whose last case was Victor Sanchez. I’m trying to run a discreet little disposal business here. Some business. Galindez floats out of sight down a fucking river and a woman the size of Minnie Mouse has you running your asses off.’

  McTell shuffled his feet in the grass. ‘Yeah, but we got her, Anthony.’

  ‘Sure you got her. That’s what you’re paid for, McTell: getting people. Only now we have a goddam homicide cop and this former prosecutor bitch, and they’re rolling around inside my head like very loud fucking marbles and I’m thinking, Maybe they’re not just gonna drop this matter. Maybe they’re gonna be intrigued, McTell.’

  ‘Hey, they’re a problem, no sweat, no big deal, we can fix them,’ McTell said.

  ‘A homicide cop and a former prosecutor and you can fix them, huh?’

  ‘Listen. Anybody can be fixed.’

  ‘All your solutions come down to the same thing: blow somebody away. Here’s a problem, let’s blast it into oblivion.’

  ‘Saves time and trouble in the long haul.’

  Dansk tried to imagine how Einstein felt in a bus station, say, surrounded by morons. How he felt standing in a cafeteria line for a hot dog and fries and listening to empty drones chatter about last night’s soaps.

  He looked across the grassy square. He admired how the freshly laundered office workers gathered up their trash before they left. House-trained. Picky-picky. They worked in smoke-free zones and drank bottled water and belonged to health clubs and had mortgages and good credit ratings. They were respectable, central to the way the country worked. The machinery couldn’t turn without them. Politicians drooled for their votes.

  He found himself imagining what would happen if a passing gunman opened fire on this bunch just for the sport of it. He saw blood spilling across grass, white shirts red, people screaming and diving for cover, total chaos. He thought of snipers in towers and fertilizer bombs in vans parked outside government buildings and deranged sorts in the badlands who were at odds with revenue officials. This is America, bulletproof vest country, where you don’t sit with your back to the door. The nation was bent out of shape.

  He rose, brushed blades of grass from his slacks and looked at McTell. What was it about killers, why were they so well-endowed in the vicious department and so challenged when it came to brains? You took what you could find, he thought. It wasn’t like you could go down to an employment bureau and ask for assassins. McTell and Pasquale came out of sewers. All they knew was death. It was a limited kind of understanding. They enjoyed killing, it thrilled them. It was their own crazed theatre.

  He pondered this, what it would be like to buy a ticket and go inside. Snuff scenes at the Blood Bijou. People blown away. Carnage galore. And maybe when you slept you dreamed of human slaughterhouses and corpses hanging upside down from hooks, skinned and de-veined and raw.

  He watched McTell yank a daisy out of the ground and destroy it one petal at a time, and he wondered if flowers felt pain and anguish, if this daisy was screaming at some level beyond the range of human hearing. The thought intrigued him. Noises you couldn’t hear, a place beyond the net of the senses.

  He said, ‘We’ll wait, keep an eye on the situation, see what comes up. Then I’ll decide. It’s not like there’s any bonus money in it for giving them the ultimate good-night kiss, McTell.’

  ‘No bonus money?’ McTell asked.

  ‘None. And if you don’t like that, take it up with your union.’

  19

  The first thing Amanda heard when she returned to the house was a female voice. Rhees had a student with him in the living-room, a willowy girl with straight, long blond hair. She looked as if she’d strolled out of a shampoo commercial. A yellow nimbus hung about her.

  ‘Amanda,’ Rhees said, ‘this is Polly Svensen. Polly’s doing post-grad work next semester.’

  The student smiled. Amanda smiled back. Polly Svensen was, well, simply stunning. She had the kind of astonishing beauty that quickened men’s hearts and sent thrilled whispers running through crowded rooms. Her neck’s just a little too long, Amanda thought.

  ‘I didn’t expect Professor Rhees to be at home. I was just dropping off my paper,’ Polly said. ‘I heard he was out of town.’

  ‘Lo and behold,’ Amanda said, frost in her voice. ‘Here he is. The man himself.’

  Polly was all false modesty. She knew she was a knockout. Slender, five-eleven, faded skin-tight blue jeans and a white halter, and her cute little navel showing. She knew she changed the weather wherever she went.

  Rhees frowned at Amanda and said, ‘We were just discussing the
role of nature in Dylan Thomas.’

  ‘Mmm, interesting,’ Amanda said. Rhees had access to a surfeit of girls. He met them one on one in his office, tutorial fashion. She wasn’t normally threatened by these academic tête-à-têtes, but today things were just coming at her and she felt defenceless.

  She said, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, et cetera.’

  Polly said, ‘Right. You’re familiar with Dylan.’

  Dylan. Polly was just the type to be on first-name terms with dead poets.

  Amanda said, ‘A few lines, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s worth getting into,’ Polly said. ‘There’s this really marvellous deep underlying green thing. “About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green”, you know?’

  ‘And all this time I thought he wrote about jerking off. Goes to show.’

  Polly had a distinctive giggle. Somebody had probably told her once it was real neat, so she reproduced it whenever she could.

  Rhees got up from the table and cleared his throat. He indicated with a gesture of his head that he wanted a moment of privacy with Amanda. He went into the kitchen and Amanda followed. He shut the door and crossed his arms.

  ‘You’re being rude,’ he said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You know you are.’ Rhees reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘This isn’t like you, Amanda.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, and shrugged.

  ‘You sneaked off at dawn without saying where you were going. I can guess anyway.’

  Amanda opened a closet door, rummaged around and said, ‘I thought we had some Grahams here. Polly might want a cracker.’

  ‘Unworthy scold,’ Rhees said.

  Amanda slammed the closet door shut. ‘She’s young and she’s like some goddess. Her hair goes all the way down to her ass, for Christ’s sake. What planet’s she from?’

  ‘Come here.’ Rhees spread his arms and Amanda fell into them and shut her eyes. Rhees, her harbour. ‘Polly’s mostly bubbles, you’re more my ideal.’

  ‘How can I be anybody’s ideal? Look at me.’

  ‘You get better all the time, Amanda. I have you up on a pedestal.’

  ‘I’m too heavy for your pedestal. I feel overweight and sluggish. And this.’ She tugged at her brown hair, letting it slide through her fingers. ‘They didn’t find Isabel, John. They looked and they looked.’

  ‘Maybe …’ he said.

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘She’s still out there somewhere.’

  Amanda remembered the grains of dirt damp with blood. Rhees was trying to force open a little window of optimism in the face of evidence to the contrary. He was good at finding silver linings in the gloom. Please God let this be one of those silver linings. Let her be alive.

  Rhees kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll give Polly the benefit of my wisdom, which should take all of seven or eight minutes, then we’re out of here and heading north. How does that sound?’ He moved towards the kitchen door. ‘Before I forget, some reporter from the Phoenix Gazette phoned. Wanted to know if you had anything to add to the story of the Galindez discovery.’

  ‘I hope you told him I was incommunicado.’

  ‘My lips were sealed.’

  Rhees left the kitchen.

  Amanda’s head hurt and she had an acid sensation in her stomach and a general sense of malaise, a weakening inside, as if her immune system was flagging. She looked out into the backyard. Neglected grass grew long in ragged brown stalks and butterflies flapped here and there, settling where the mood took them.

  She watched for a time. She thought about Isabel. She couldn’t cancel the thought out. She couldn’t flutter away from it like one of those mercurial butterflies.

  She walked into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, ransacked through a collection of bottles. Say hello to the old gang: ginseng, zinc capsules, iron, the whole spectrum of B-vitamins, garlic tabs, fortified C, some kind of painkiller. It was a regular health arsenal. She scooped out pills and downed them with water.

  Then she put her hand in the hip pocket of her jeans and took out Isabel Sanchez’s plastic hair-clasp and studied it. It caught the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window. There were people in the world reputed to be able to locate buried corpses by caressing their possessions, but she wasn’t one of them.

  She had a mechanic’s eye, not a mystic’s.

  She walked up and down the kitchen for a time before she dialled Directory Assistance, and wrote down the number she was given by the operator. Then she dialled it.

  A man answered and introduced himself as Donald Scarfe.

  She said, ‘Don, this is Amanda Scholes.’

  ‘We-ell, Amanda,’ Scarfe said, ‘it’s been an age. What can I do you for?’

  ‘I need to come see you.’

  Scarfe said, ‘You know the way.’

  Amanda hung up. She left the kitchen by the back door, so that Rhees wouldn’t see her. He wasn’t going to be overjoyed about this stunt.

  20

  The window of Donald Scarfe’s office in the Florence facility looked out over a hazy view of desert mountains in the distance. There was another vista directly below: the compound, watch-towers, barbed wire, high walls.

  The compound was empty. Amanda glanced down, seeing shadows pressed against concrete. The watch-towers made her uneasy. Guards in shadows with guns. The penitentiary was a volatile place, heavy with violent potential.

  ‘So you think he contracted out a killing,’ Scarfe said.

  ‘Everything points that way, Don.’

  Donald Scarfe was tall and gaunt and his face had been hammered and dried by too much sunlight. He’d always reminded Amanda of a weathered fence post at the edge of a dry prairie. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a turquoise bola necktie, and looked more like somebody’s idea of a middle-aged rodeo rider than an associate warden of a prison.

  Amanda walked to the water-cooler in the corner of Scarfe’s office and filled a dixie cup. She drank hastily. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  Scarfe pointed to a no-smoking sign. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. More and more I feel like a leper anyway.’ She crushed the dixie cup and dropped it inside a waste-basket. She looked at Scarfe for a time. She’d met him at various seminars on penal policy and law-enforcement strategies several times during the last few years, and she’d liked his attitude, which was liberal, compared to the prevailing hard-assed positions concerning the treatment of prisoners. Stick them in goddam tents and let them sweat and feed them pig slop.

  ‘I don’t have any objection to this visit,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you expect to come of it, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not anticipating a confession,’ she said.

  ‘So what are you expecting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘You think you can tune into him, is that it?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Don. Has anybody been to see him recently? Any visitors?’

  ‘He doesn’t get visitors, Amanda.’

  Amanda looked at her watch. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. She remembered what Willie Drumm had said. We’re gonna have US marshals from the Program coming in droves. Probably guys from Justice. So why hadn’t anyone arrived yet? Bascombe’s first message to Arlington, concerning Galindez, had gone out twenty-four hours ago. His second must have been received around noon today Eastern Time. And what had Bascombe himself said? Of course they’d act fast.

  Bureaucrats. They doodled while cities caught fire. They shuffled papers as volcanoes erupted. Perhaps they were still studying Bascombe’s messages. Or perhaps somebody was in transit even now. She had no way of knowing.

  ‘Are you up for this?’ Scarfe asked. ‘You look a little out of sorts.’

  ‘It was a hot drive down here,’ she said.

  Scarfe shrugged and picked up one of the two telephones on his desk. He pressed a button and spoke to somebody. ‘Chuck. Escort Prisoner eight eight sixty around to the int
erview room, would you? I’m bringing along a visitor. I want an armed guard in the room for the duration.’

  Scarfe put down the telephone. He opened a drawer and took out a small laminated badge with the word ‘Visitor’ on it. She pinned it to her shirt.

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ Scarfe said. ‘I ought to warn you though. He’s been trouble from the start. He attacked another inmate with a screwdriver, which of course can’t be proved because nobody saw anything. Punctured one of the guy’s lungs.’

  ‘He’s a charmer,’ she said.

  ‘And last week he torched another guy’s cell. He thought it was funny.’

  ‘Offbeat sense of humour.’

  ‘Black, anyway. I guess if you’re living where he’s living, nothing matters a damn in the end.’

  They left the office and stepped into a long chilled corridor. Halfway down, she stopped. She was approaching a transition here, a crossroads, choices. She had only to change her mind, turn round, walk back to the car, drive away and leave things be.

  She moved forward.

  The bridge was crossed and burning behind her and the fumes had a bitter-sweet smell, and she thought she detected in the smoke the strange scent of her apprehension at the idea of being in the company of Prisoner 8860.

  21

  The interview room, a table and a few chairs and a one-way observation window, smelled of floorwax. Overhead was a solitary fluorescent strip. Amanda, glad to see an ashtray on the table, lit a cigarette at once.

  The door opened and Victor Sanchez, accompanied by an armed guard, a bullet-headed man with a long jaw, was led inside. The guard took up a position in the corner. Sanchez, with a slow motion imposed upon him by his ankle-shackles, shuffled to a chair and sat facing Amanda.

  ‘The lady prosecutor,’ he said. ‘Life’s all surprises.’

  He was dressed in loose prison garb. He was sleek, muscular, handsome, more than 6 feet tall. He had long eyelashes that curled, and eyes the colour of a midnight with no moon. Girls would swoon and drown in those eyes. Isabel had.