Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘What is it with you? You got an aversion to peace and quiet? If I was Rhees, I’d stick you in the trunk of the car and drive you back to the cabin immediately and lock you there until you’re thinking halfway straight. What’s wrong with him anyway? You wrap him round your little finger like –’

  ‘I’m hanging up, I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Don’t you dare hang up on me, Amanda.’

  She set the receiver down. She swept a lock of hair from her forehead. In a way, she liked the feeling of hanging up on Morgan, who longed to think she needed him and his money. The telephone rang again. This time it was Bascombe.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ he said, ‘this is the deal.’

  25

  By early afternoon Dansk had almost finished going through the microfiche material in the newspaper morgue. He zoomed in on a photograph of Amanda taken outside a courtroom. Dressed in a dark suit with a double-breasted jacket, she was smiling into the camera. He gazed into her face. Was that fatigue he saw there? Or relief? He couldn’t decipher the expression.

  The caption read, SANCHEZ PROSECUTOR RESIGNS.

  He skimmed over the story. ‘Ms Scholes said she needed time for her personal life … looking forward to a vacation but gave no indication of where she plans to spend it … delighted the prolonged Sanchez case is finally over and that justice has been served.’

  Justice served, and amen.

  Behind Amanda in the photograph was a man identified as Lieutenant William Drumm. He had small slitted eyes and a benign smile. He was quoted as saying that the resignation of Special Prosecutor Scholes was a blow to the law-enforcement community. Amanda and the plump cop, a mutual admiration society.

  The article also mentioned that Amanda’s successor was a guy called Dominic Concannon, a graduate of Columbia. Concannon said that Amanda Scholes had set very high standards, she was a hard act to follow.

  She’d had a fair amount of press in her time, Dansk thought. Magazine profiles, newspapers, mainly in-State publications, but also a couple of nationals. She had views on big matters. Capital punishment (against in some instances, for in others – cop-killers, child-murderers). Abortion (pro-choice). She was critical of the legal profession, the usual gripes: too many frivolous lawsuits, too many ambulance-chasers, too many deals cut in back rooms.

  He left the building, stepped out into the rain, sat in his car, took out his little notebook and leafed through it. This Amanda was one determined woman. She sailed into battle with cannons blazing. In court she harried defence witnesses, squabbled with opposing attorneys, took flak from the bench. Gutsy, and brainy, give her that.

  Then out of the blue she’d had enough. Abracadabra, gone. He wondered what lay behind this decision. Maybe she realized she’d chosen a career that didn’t fulfil her, which wasn’t a decision she’d make lightly. He had the feeling she didn’t go into things in a superficial way, she’d figure the angles first, which was maybe too bad – superficial he could deal with.

  He flicked the pages of his notebook to the biographical stuff. Father named Morgan Scholes, widower, rich business shark. Amanda had gone to law school in Los Angeles. She’d never married. Probably too busy being Ms Prosecutor, building the career, climbing the glory ladder. The fucking problem with microfiching your way into somebody’s life was how you didn’t get the full story, only the margins, and they were never satisfying.

  For instance, did she have close friends? Old pals from college? People she’d confide in? People she’d turn to in an emergency? A support group? He wrote, ‘friends?’ in his notebook.

  He gazed out at the rain streaming across the parking-lot. No sun, the city grim, passing cars making spray. Typical, you’re in the desert and it rains. He drove back to his hotel, left his car in the underground parking. McTell was waiting in reception. They went inside the empty bar and Dansk ordered a 7-Up. McTell asked for a Coors.

  He hunched across the table. ‘The guy’s called John Rhees,’ he said. ‘He’s a professor. Teaches college here. Poetry or something.’

  She’d want somebody smart, Dansk thought. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘According to this busybody neighbour I talked with, they’ve been living in a cabin up near Flagstaff past few weeks. Seems she was sick or something.’

  Sick. Dansk wondered about that. Sick didn’t tell you much. He settled back in his chair. ‘You’ve been busy, Eddie.’

  ‘Nice guy Rhees,’ McTell said.

  ‘Don’t tell me. You talked to him.’

  ‘A few minutes.’

  Dansk asked, ‘What did you say, you were from the electric company and had to read his meter?’

  ‘Trade secret, Anthony.’

  ‘Did you see the woman?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ McTell stared inside his drink. ‘Whaddya think, Anthony? We gonna have to do surgery or what?’

  Dansk said nothing. Surgery, he thought. Arteries ruptured, blood pumping.

  ‘We can’t like hang out here for ever,’ McTell said.

  ‘We like hang out until I say otherwise, McTell.’

  McTell blew out his cheeks and looked sullen, resembling a puffer-fish in a bad humour.

  Dansk pushed his chair back from the table. He thought about the French restaurant last night, the way Amanda and Rhees had held hands across the table. He was aware of a bleak little blue-yellow gas flame of loneliness inside his head. He recalled how she’d leaned across the table and dabbed Rhees’s lips with her napkin, the concern that was maternal and sexy at the same time. Concealed behind a vase of carnations, Dansk had picked at his salade niçoise without any enjoyment.

  He’d followed Rhees inside the men’s room at one point and stood at the urinal next to him. In the strained manner of conversations conducted between strangers pissing side by side, Dansk had said, ‘It’s always a good sign when a restaurant has a spotless toilet.’

  Rhees, zipping up, had agreed. Out of casual interest, Dansk had glanced very quickly at Rhees’s flaccid penis – circumcized, mid-sized number, nothing to write home about – then he’d washed his hands and held them under the hot-air dryer.

  Dansk said, ‘Sanitary. Better than towels.’

  Rhees said, ‘Those gadgets don’t dry as well as towels.’

  ‘Towels carry germs,’ Dansk had remarked.

  Rhees had said, ‘I guess it’s down to personal preference,’ and smiled affably, the smile of a man who knows his love is waiting for his return. Dansk had pictured this lean man with the easy smile fucking Amanda. He’d imagined Amanda’s spread thighs and pubic shadows and moonlight on a window and Rhees saying he loved her, and he wondered what that was like, living your life as if you belonged inside it.

  Dansk stood up now. Remembering Rhees depressed him. ‘I think I’ll rack out for a while.’

  McTell said, ‘Later.’

  Dansk took the elevator up to his room. He hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the handle and closed the door. He started to take off his jacket, then realized he wasn’t alone. The man who sat on the bed wore a long black overcoat and a black cashmere beret. His breathing was shallow and laboured.

  Dansk didn’t move, didn’t say anything. He was surprised by the guy’s appearance, conscious of turbulence in his head. He had his jacket halfway off, an empty arm dangled at his side.

  The man covered his mouth with a black-gloved hand and coughed a couple of times. His eyes were bloodshot and runny and, Dansk thought, disgusting.

  The man opened his briefcase. He produced a thick wad of crisp banknotes, set it on the bedside table and said, ‘Payroll time for your guys, Anthony.’

  26

  She entered the Biltmore at 10 p.m. It’s cloak and dagger, Bascombe had said on the phone. It’s the only way they’ll agree. Be punctual.

  The only way, she thought. What was wrong with a little openness now and again? They were infatuated with secrecy. They liked nocturnal meetings and whispered conversations in secure rooms.

  She surveyed th
e reception area. This place, all the rage in the years after Frank Lloyd Wright had designed it, was past its shelf-date. Women with bad face-lifts dined here, balancing awkwardly on high heels and hanging on to the arms of silver-haired men who looked like traumatized bankers or golfers from the age of knickerbockers. There was the perfume of old money and the musty smell of quiet power. It was the kind of place where her father occasionally dined.

  Amanda approached the desk. She asked a clerk for the key to room 247, as she’d been instructed. Do it exactly the way you’re told, Bascombe had said. The clerk was supercilious. He pushed the key towards Amanda as if he thought she was here for the purpose of an illicit assignation. She wondered if her clothes were suspect. The knee-length black skirt and matching jacket didn’t strike her as the garb of a working-girl. You couldn’t tell, she supposed.

  She took the key and walked towards the stairs. On her way up she encountered a party of old dowagers chattering among themselves like so many fluttery birds descending in a wave of chiffon and the choking smell of Chanel No. 5. Amanda sidestepped, let them creak past her on their way down, then continued up.

  She clutched the key in her warm hand. Go into the room. Somebody will meet you there. For an uneasy moment she suspected some kind of trick or trap. It was groundless, a case of nerves. She was going to have a quiet word with a grey-faced bureaucrat, that was all, somebody who’d allay her fears with a few appropriate phrases and maybe a lie or two thrown in for good measure. Somebody who’d tell her that the situation had been investigated and the repairs made, the holes sealed, it couldn’t happen again. Sorry about Isabel Sanchez, by the way.

  But still.

  She walked down the corridor, searching for the room number. She reached it, paused, then kept walking. This affliction of nerves was downright stupid, so why didn’t she just turn around, slip the key in the door and enter the goddam room? This is what you wanted, she thought. This is what you asked for.

  She walked back. She looked at the key a moment, then she opened the door. She stepped inside the room. It was empty. She checked the bathroom, also empty. She went to the window and gazed out, seeing falling rain caught in the lamplight on the lawn. Somewhere a band had begun to play, a tinny sound heavy on drums, music for people who wanted to shuffle through a geriatric foxtrot.

  OK, so the Program representative was late, flight delayed, traffic jam, all kinds of reasons. She sat down in front of the dressing-table and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. A little make-up, a touch around the eyes, the lashes, the lightest of lipstick, hair sensibly brushed and in place. She’d wanted to look down-to-business serious, the kind of person who wouldn’t be swayed by platitudes and excuses.

  She heard a key turn in the lock and the door opened. The man who entered the room came across the floor towards her. ‘Amanda Scholes?’ he asked.

  She noticed tiny spots of rain in his hair. He reached inside his raincoat and said, ‘Let me show you some ID.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  He handed her a laminated badge. She saw the words ‘Department of Justice’ and the guy’s photograph and a thumb-print and a name typed just beneath it: ‘Anthony Dansk.’

  27

  Her first impression was of a mauve birthmark, suggestive of a truncated map of Italy, situated between Dansk’s jawline and ear. And then his eyes: greens were often restful, but not the green of Dansk’s eyes, which had the sharp, just-too-bright quality of a traffic signal located on a lonesome road in the deep heart of nowhere. His hair was thick and red and healthy, brushed back and straight, and a faint gingery down fuzzed his cheeks. He wore a neat single-breasted grey suit and grey shirt and a black and grey necktie. His body was trim: clearly he worked out. He looked way too young, she thought, but so did a whole lot of people these days – physicians, cops, lawyers. They were like kids dressing up. You go over forty, and suddenly the world’s filled with children running the show.

  She lit a cigarette. She was still a little tense.

  ‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘Flight schedules don’t mean a thing these days. I wonder why they even announce them.’ He sat, frowning at the smoke drifting from her cigarette.

  ‘Yeah, I know. The health warning’s on the pack,’ she said.

  Dansk said, ‘What people inflict on their bodies is their own business. They want to take risks, it’s up to them.’ He leaned back in his chair. He smiled very briefly, which in that split second softened the starkness of his eyes and dimpled his cheeks unexpectedly. She could imagine him as a boy, apple-cheeked and freckled. He had perfect teeth. He puts a lot of effort into dental maintenance, she thought.

  She looked for an ashtray. A length of ash dropped in her lap and she brushed it off, leaving a grey smudge on her skirt. Clumsy. Dansk watched her without expression.

  ‘Do I call you Amanda or are we doing this on a formal basis?’

  ‘Amanda’s fine,’ she said. ‘So where do we begin?’

  Dansk clasped his hands together. Well-manicured, except there was no nail on the pinky of his left hand, just puckered skin. ‘Your concerns about the Program,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a start,’ she said.

  He wandered over to the mini-bar, removed a can of Diet Dr Pepper and popped it. ‘Under one name or another – Silencer, WITSEC – the Program’s been around for thirty years, give or take. And you can’t run something this sensitive for that length of time without the occasional mistake, a lapse here or there.’

  ‘I don’t call the fact that Galindez is dead a lapse,’ she said, ‘and I certainly don’t call the likelihood that Isabel Sanchez is dead a lapse either. Euphemisms give me heartburn.’

  He leaned forward in his chair. ‘What I’m saying is, people are fallible, they get greedy. An official takes a bribe in return for somebody’s address, then a witness you thought was well-protected turns up in the trunk of an abandoned car. I expect we’ll find a bribe was involved in the situation with Galindez and Isabel Sanchez. We need some time to work on it.’

  ‘How much time?’

  ‘Impossible to estimate. These things have to be done very carefully. You don’t want to alert the culpable party that he or she is under scrutiny.’

  ‘How many people have access to the kind of information we’re talking about?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to divulge that.’

  ‘What exactly are you allowed?’

  ‘Try to understand, Amanda, the heart of this Program is secrecy.’

  She said, ‘Look. The glaringly obvious place to start is with Victor Sanchez. I already went down to Florence and gave it a shot, not that I achieved anything.’

  ‘What impression did you get?’

  ‘He’s involved up to his neck, I just can’t figure out how he penetrated your security. Also he threatened me.’

  ‘Threatened you?’

  ‘He said I was next on his hit list.’ She made a slashing motion with her index finger across her throat. ‘Which wasn’t pleasant.’

  ‘You think he was serious?’

  ‘It’s something I don’t take lightly,’ she said. ‘He scared me.’

  Dansk was quiet for a moment. ‘We’ve arranged to interview him.’

  My heart beats easier, she thought. ‘You’re finally getting around to that, are you?’

  Dansk seemed impervious to her sarcasm. He said, ‘My advice to you would be take a vacation and don’t tell anyone where you’re going. You’d be safer far away from here. Let me get on with my business, it’s in good hands.’

  ‘Funnily enough, I told Isabel Sanchez the very same thing,’ she said. ‘You’re in good hands, sweetie. But I keep hearing the goddam dogs in my head.’

  ‘The dogs, right,’ he said. ‘How close were you to them?’

  ‘Hard to say. A mile, two, maybe more.’

  Dansk looked pensive. ‘You responded to a phone call from Mrs Sanchez, I understand.’

  Amanda nodded. ‘I was too late to help her.’

 
‘What did she say exactly?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the report?’

  ‘Sometimes the reports I get leave things to be desired.’

  ‘She was scared. Men were coming after her.’

  ‘Did she know these men?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘She mention how many men?’

  ‘Two she said.’

  ‘Descriptions, anything like that?’

  ‘No, no descriptions.’

  Dansk shook his head. ‘It’s a bad business.’

  A bad business was an understated way of putting it, she thought. ‘I’m curious. She was in Farmington, New Mexico, then Tuba City. Finally she comes back here to Phoenix. Where did you relocate her?’

  ‘I can’t answer that, sorry.’

  ‘What the hell can you answer? Galindez is dead, Isabel’s missing and you come waltzing down from God knows what cubby-hole in Arlington or Washington or wherever, and you’re condescending. Oh, we’re taking over, Amanda, why don’t you go on vacation.’ She checked herself, the way her voice was rising. She didn’t want to alienate Dansk, because he had the power to close doors on her.

  ‘Condescending?’ he asked. ‘I flew all the way down here to set your mind at rest.’

  ‘And what if my mind isn’t at rest? What if it’s like a jumping bean?’

  Dansk strolled across the room and sipped his drink. He switched the subject suddenly. ‘You talked about going to the newspapers, I believe. I don’t think that would be smart.’

  ‘Is this some kind of warning?’

  He sat down again and drew his chair close to her. Their knees were almost touching. ‘All I’m telling you is this: if you decide to have a word in the ear of some inquisitive journalist – cases collapse because witnesses are too scared to talk.’

  ‘But would you gag the journalist?’

  ‘You think we have that kind of power?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what powers you do have. I’m supposed to mosey off into the sunset while you people get on with your business.’

  ‘You agree to stay out of this business entirely, and in return I’ll let you know the outcome.’