Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  Headlines formed in his brain. FORMER PROSECUTOR KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT. You couldn’t just bribe a crane-operator to drop a 6-ton slab of concrete on somebody’s car. Here’s a suggestion for you, lady: why don’t you just drive across this construction site and under the crane with the big slab on the hook?

  Then he thought, EX-PROSECUTOR DISAPPEARS LEAVING MYSTERIOUS NOTE. I’m going away, I can’t take it any more, forgive me. But Amanda Scholes wasn’t the kind who disappeared.

  She was heading towards central Phoenix, high-rises in the distance, craggy brown peaks beyond. Please be doing something perfectly normal: going to the bank, the supermarket, picking up your dry-cleaning. Your everyday activities.

  He was still pondering the fact that she’d called his hotel late last night, ostensibly to give him a phone number, but in reality checking up on him, which told you something about the way her mind worked. And he was still thinking about her trip to see Sanchez. She picked at fabrics just to see if they’d unravel. Pick, pick, pick.

  Oh, lady. Let it be.

  Downtown, clouds had lifted, traffic was snarled, drivers hung their shirtsleeved arms out of windows. Cigarettes were smoked, fingers tapped on side-panels. He could see her VW half a block away, stuck like he was. He took off the baseball cap. It was making his scalp itch.

  Traffic moved again. The VW made a right turn. Dansk, six cars behind, followed. He wished he had a mask to filter out the fumes that hung in the air.

  Amanda had found a parking space and was backing into it. Dansk drove past, reached a busy intersection, made an illegal U-turn and drove back past the VW.

  Now Amanda was moving along the sidewalk. She ran a hand through her hair and Dansk thought, Rhees ought to give her a fine brush and comb for Christmas. Silver hair-clasps and a partridge in a pear tree.

  He had to find a place to leave the Buick. He entered an alley clogged with cars, then he turned left and slipped the car into a metered space between a U-Haul truck and a busted-up old AMC Pacer with Nevada plates. He locked the Buick. Amanda was about 50 or 60 yards away. She wasn’t looking his way. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She was focussed inward. She was dressed in jeans, white shirt and bleached-out sneakers.

  In the French restaurant she’d looked smart and alive and attractive. She had the kind of sexiness that comes with maturity. A woman who knew all the points of the compass on her lover’s body. Dansk wondered what she’d been like at seventeen and if he might have lusted after her. Probably.

  No, definitely. Fucking the younger Amanda. Burying your face between her breasts and her hard darkened nipples in your mouth. Your cock inside her, and yeah, she’s coming, she’s coming in a noisy way, and you’re beginning to feel your own derrick crank, and the geyser is rushing from deep inside you, and she’s digging her fingernails into your spine and you can’t get your tongue deep enough inside her mouth. You want it all, you want to consume her, your tongue all the way down inside her womb, and she’s saying, oh oh oh, Anthony, oh, Anthony, and her whole body starts trembling and it’s oh ah, God, oh, Anthony, Anthoneee, do me, do me, do, don’t stop, fuck my brains out.

  He could see all this. Smell it.

  Slow down, Anthony. The key is detachment.

  She paused on the sidewalk, reached inside her hip pocket and removed a couple of sheets of paper. Something in the way she held them struck him as interesting. Tight, possessive, as if they were important to her. From this distance, they looked like nothing more than some sheets ripped from a notebook. Maybe they were insignificant, a shopping list, say, reminders she’d written for herself. Things to do. But why clutch them like they were the secret key to a dead language?

  Then one of the sheets slid suddenly from her fingers and a very faint breeze fluttered it along the sidewalk. She reached down quickly to pick it up, but the breeze tugged it beyond her and she went after it with a slight panicky movement, pushing her way forcefully past pedestrians, then trapping it beneath the sole of her foot. When she lifted the foot the paper blew away again, this time coming to rest under a parked car. She went on her knees, groped around, retrieved it, and in a crouching position smoothed the sheet against her thigh. She had an expression of relief on her face, a little half smile.

  She remained motionless for a few seconds, as if she were trying to reach a decision. Which she apparently did, because she folded the sheets and stuck them back in her hip pocket and then continued to walk.

  The way she’d gone down on her knees to pick up the fallen sheet intrigued him. Whatever the papers were, you could dismiss the idea of shopping lists. Something else, something important to her.

  She reached the Federal Building and went inside.

  The Federal Building. Well, well. He loitered among pedestrians.

  A mime approached, white-faced, a yellow helium balloon attached to a string in his gloved hand. He eyed Dansk a second, then changed direction abruptly and wandered away. Dansk had a serious contempt for these pests. Their plastic flowers that squirted water, the way they pretended they were walking against a storm. There ought to be a law against these assholes, and while you’re at it another against former prosecutors who couldn’t mind their own goddam business.

  34

  Lew Bascombe was crossing the lobby towards the elevators. Amanda called out his name and he turned.

  ‘The bad penny again,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for arranging the meeting,’ she said.

  ‘I trust it was fruitful,’ Bascombe said.

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘Does that mean I can look forward to some peace?’

  She laid a hand on his arm. ‘One last question, Lew.’

  She looked across the lobby. Federal workers went back and forth carrying files and briefcases. An armed guard at the metal detector was quietly whistling ‘Danny Boy’.

  She said, ‘You told me before that you’d passed Isabel Sanchez and Reuben Galindez along to agents from the Program. Right?’

  Bascombe nodded his head in a tired way.

  ‘US Marshals, right?’

  ‘No,’ Bascombe said. ‘SS storm troopers.’

  She wasn’t in the mood. ‘How many Marshals?’

  ‘That’s three questions, Amanda. I’m counting. You said you had one.’

  ‘Please, Lew.’

  Bascombe said, ‘How many Marshals. I can’t answer that.’

  ‘But they showed you ID?’

  ‘Amanda, what the hell is your problem? You blackmail me into fixing you up with a meeting with a Program official, which I do. Why didn’t you ask him any questions you had?’

  ‘I’m asking you, Lew.’

  Bascombe drew her to one side, away from the elevator doors. ‘This has got to stop, Amanda.’

  ‘What did they show you, Lew?’

  ‘They have a docket, stamped and authorized. I check the docket against a duplicate supplied to me by Arlington. If it matches, that’s good enough.’

  ‘They could be fake papers,’ she said.

  ‘I wish I had some kind of stuff in a canister I could spray on you. Send you into a temporary coma. As it is, I have half a mind to get the security people to toss you out on the street.’ Bascombe pressed the call button.

  Amanda said, ‘The whole system sounds porous to me.’

  Bascombe shook his head. ‘The dockets have to match exactly. There’s also a one-off code-number for each case, which is highly confidential. These are the safeguards.’

  ‘OK. They show you papers. Do you accompany the Marshals when they pick up the witnesses, Lew? Make sure it all goes smoothly?’

  ‘The logistics change from case to case, for security reasons. I’m not getting into that area, Amanda.’

  She stared at Bascombe. The rug on his skull looked a little maladjusted today.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Lew. Are you straight?’

  ‘Straight?’

  ‘Or are you crooked?’

  ‘I don’t think I follow,’ Bas
combe said.

  You don’t have the face and your hair’s wrong too, she thought. You are what you are, a pencil-pusher with a house in the suburbs and two point something kids.

  ‘Forget I ever asked, Lew,’ she said.

  Bascombe said, ‘Now watch, Amanda. See me step inside this elevator. Imagine me rising to my tiny chamber upstairs where I like to be left alone. Got the picture?’ He entered the elevator and the doors slid shut.

  She turned and walked out of the building and back into the sunny street. She strolled through the crowds. She had a sense of being a cork afloat on an unpredictable tide. She felt the sun on her face and cold in her bones and indecision in her heart.

  She moved across the street. She walked to the next intersection where she paused outside a drugstore. She patted her hip pocket, as if to reassure herself that Isabel’s letter was still there.

  Give it to Dansk. Take it to him now. You’re wasting your time, burning up energy. She removed the two sheets, thinking how flimsy they were, feeling the cheapness of the paper, then she stuck them back inside the pocket and walked to a pay phone. She called the Phoenix PD and asked for Willie Drumm. She’d discuss the letter with Willie. He’d know what to do. He’d advise her.

  She was informed that he was out of the office. Call back again in an hour or so. She hung up.

  She stepped out of the phone booth and the glass door swung and trapped in reflection the face of a man several yards along the sidewalk, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if she should turn and walk away. Then she thought, What the hell.

  35

  Dansk, stunned when he saw her step out of the phone booth and move towards him, squeezed out a smile.

  ‘Amanda,’ he said, ‘this is a surprise.’

  He was furious with the way he’d allowed himself to be bushwhacked. Your concentration slips a second and suddenly you’re on the defensive, only you can’t show it, you have to work to keep it out of your expression and your tone of voice, and this effort grinds inside your head.

  ‘I had some business downtown,’ he said. ‘You too?’

  ‘Nothing serious,’ she answered. ‘A chore, that’s all.’

  Nothing serious, he thought, just a trip to the Federal Building. ‘You got time for a coffee?’

  ‘Too busy with this and that. Sorry.’

  ‘You were meant to be smelling the flowers, Amanda.’

  ‘I’m getting round to it.’

  Dansk took off his shades. ‘You have to catch them at the right time. Summer goes and before you know it, it’s Fall.’

  ‘Then it’s dark old winter,’ she said.

  Dark old winter. You got it, lady. ‘I had the impression you were going off to that cabin you mentioned.’

  ‘Are you in some kind of hurry to see me leave by any chance, Anthony?’ she asked.

  ‘Hurry?’ Don’t push this, he thought. She’s smart enough to sense any urgency in you. ‘I just thought you were heading out of town, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll go tonight probably,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow morning at the latest. Have you been to see Sanchez yet?’

  ‘I’m expecting a report any moment.’

  ‘You’re not interviewing him yourself?’

  ‘Somebody else does that.’

  ‘You don’t do interviews,’ she said. ‘You don’t have the knack for knowing when somebody’s bullshitting you.’

  ‘No, I’m not saying I don’t have the knack. It’s just the way it works. Division of labour.’

  She moved a few yards down the sidewalk and Dansk went along with her. ‘How did you get into this line of work anyway, Anthony?’ she asked.

  ‘Through various channels,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a load of information.’

  ‘It’s a habit.’

  ‘Secrecy, you mean.’

  ‘It’s a lifestyle you get used to.’

  ‘Some might say it’s a strange lifestyle, Anthony.’

  Dansk said, ‘It’s not what you’d call a sociable occupation. It’s not the kind of thing where you have office Christmas parties and company barbecues.’

  ‘Sounds quite lonely,’ she said.

  He hadn’t meant to give an impression of loneliness. He hadn’t meant to reveal anything of himself.

  ‘The work has compensations,’ he said. ‘I’m doing some good.’

  ‘Something for society.’

  ‘We provide a service. We work in the shadows so people like yourself can put criminals where they belong. I believe in my work.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Anthony. You have a purposeful air about you.’

  She looked directly at him. He understood he was being assessed somehow. He didn’t like the frankness in her gaze. For a second he had the impression years had been stripped from her face and he was seeing her as she might have been in her early twenties, cheek-bones less well-fleshed, an absence of those tiny lines around the corners of her grey-blue eyes, the eyes themselves bright with the future.

  He glanced away, then looked back at her, but she’d shifted the angle of her head and the impression of youthfulness had left her and he experienced a certain relief. She flicked a lock of hair from her forehead and he realized he wanted to do this for her and clenched his hand and held it against his leg. Touching the lady prosecutor. Fixing her hair. Don’t start liking the woman. Don’t get drawn in. OK, you had one of those wayward sexual fantasies before, which meant zero, just random discharges of the imagination. Don’t even think in terms of her being a woman, she’s the subject of your scrutiny, that’s it. She’s what you’re working on. This is your job. This is what you do with your fucking life, Anthony.

  She slipped her hand inside her hip pocket. He thought about the papers she’d treated so preciously. He needed a pickpocket, a deft hand in Amanda’s jeans. He needed to see these papers.

  She asked, ‘Do you ever lose people?’

  ‘Lose people?’ Dansk weighed the question. He had the feeling she was asking something completely different. ‘You mean, do they ever stray?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  ‘A few. They miss their old hang-outs. They wander off. Not often.’

  ‘Are there stats available? How many people have walked away, for instance. What percentage stays with the Program. It would be interesting to look at the figures.’

  Dansk said, ‘Information like that would be confidential, Amanda.’

  ‘Confidential. Of course.’

  He looked at her. Do you ever lose people? It was more than simple fishing. Her question was a radar scan of deep waters, a probe for undersea life-forms. She was somehow different today than she’d been during the meeting at the Biltmore, only he couldn’t quite figure it. She seemed more confident, self-assured. He wondered why. Maybe she’d stumbled on something by chance. She knows something. No way. What could she have found out anyway? There was nothing to find out. This whole thing was watertight, chained and padlocked.

  Still.

  His attention was drawn to a woman with a small rodent-like dog on a leash. The dog squatted, deposited excrement on the sidewalk, then shook its ass and strutted on.

  Dansk stared at the little pile of shit and said, ‘Goddam, I detest that. People let their dogs mess the sidewalks and just walk away. Morons throw beer cans from cars and pickup trucks. The freeways are filthy. You find furniture just lying around outside houses. Mattresses, old refrigerators, beds, clothes, abandoned shopping carts. You have to wonder what kind of mentality is at work and why people can’t keep the environment clean –’

  Stop here, Anthony. Don’t take this any further. Quit at this stage.

  ‘This really gets to you,’ she said. She looked at him with a little element of surprise.

  ‘Goddam right it gets to me. Doesn’t it bother you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t honestly say I’ve given it as much thought as I should, Anthony.’

  Dansk took a deep breath. Calm was the important factor here. He was supposed to be d
etached, not the kind of guy who’d get worked up over dog poop. Not that kind of guy at all.

  In more measured speech, he said, ‘That’s just it: nobody thinks any more. They dispose of stuff but they don’t do it properly, and somebody else has to come along and clean it up. The seas are filled with chemicals, rivers are poisoned. The air. Everywhere you look there’s graffiti.’ He ran the back of his hand across his lips.

  ‘You’re a tidy freak,’ she said. ‘You dispose of your own garbage in an orderly way, do you?’

  ‘I try,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about being a tidy freak.’ Freak was a word he didn’t like. Freak rubbed him all the wrong ways.

  ‘Is this some kind of parable, Anthony?’ she asked. ‘You complain about litter and pollution, but really you’re talking about something else.’

  ‘I was talking strictly about trash.’ He laughed. He heard a weird strain in the sound.

  She glanced at him. ‘Frankly, I’m more interested in other kinds of disposal: Galindez. Isabel.’

  The way she said disposal – she gave it sly layers of meaning. She looked in a store window. A thousand kinds of old-fashioned candies in jars, stripes and swirls and a sense of rainbows trapped in bottles. She said, ‘Fudge, look, butterscotch fudge.’

  She entered the store and Dansk followed. The air was heavy with vanilla and cinnamon. Dansk studied an array of lollipops and liquorice laces and jaw-breakers. He was brutalized by scarlets and greens and screaming yellows. He’d never had a sweet tooth, and this kind of place made him feel as if silver foil had been placed directly against a metal filling.

  Amanda bought a bag of butterscotch fudge. She popped a piece in her mouth before they were even back on the street.

  ‘Want one?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Butterscotch fudge is my secret weakness,’ she said. There was a bulge in her cheek. ‘Do you have one, Anthony?’

  ‘You mean a secret weakness? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Your secret weakness is so secret you don’t even know what it is.’

  Dansk smiled. She’s playing with me. She’s going too far. He thought, My finger’s on the button.