‘We were talking about your investigation,’ she said.
‘Right, we were.’
‘This anticipated report concerning Sanchez may tell you nothing.’
‘You never know.’
‘And then what? Back to HQ?’
Dansk nodded. ‘Right.’
‘Back to your internal investigation. And when you learn something, I get to hear about it.’
‘That’s still the deal, Amanda. We shook hands on it.’
‘Right, we did.’
‘Call me old-fashioned, but a handshake means something to me,’ he said.
‘And to me, Anthony.’ She rattled the paper bag containing the fudge. ‘My secret weakness is really pretty tame when you think of what I could get up to.’
‘What could you get up to, Amanda?’ he asked.
‘Oh, mischief, I guess.’
He looked at the slender little chain she wore round her neck and visualized twisting it until her eyes popped and her tongue hung out and that was the end of her. Then he imagined burying her alive. Soil falling on her face and darkness coming down on her, her hands upraised against the relentless rain of dirt. How she’d scream until her mouth filled up with earth and sand, and nothing to mark the grave, nothing to say, ‘Here Lies The Lady Prosecutor’. Then he thought of her catching fire, burning. He imagined the air filled with cinders. I have power over you, lady. I can fuck with your life like you wouldn’t believe.
They strolled until they came to an intersection. Dansk had a feeling of ropes tightly knotted inside his skull. You’re keeping me stuck in this burg when I have other places to go, other business elsewhere. I can’t spread myself thin like this, lady.
She said, ‘My car’s over there. This is where we part company.’
‘I guess so.’
She shook the bag of fudge again. ‘Sure you won’t try one? Last offer.’
‘You’re persistent.’
‘Oh very,’ she said.
She opened the bag and he dipped a hand inside and came out with a crumbling brown cube, which he placed on his tongue as if it were nuclear waste. She smiled and walked to her car, and as soon as her back was turned he spat the candy from his mouth.
She drove past him and honked the horn twice and waved. He waved back. The sickly flavour of the fudge adhered to the back of his throat like sweetened chalk. He watched the VW disappear round a corner.
He went back to his car and sat behind the wheel. There were tracer bullets screaming in his head. His brain was a war zone. Trenches, casualties, men rushing with stretchers, the rumble of cannon, the dead littering the field of battle.
Mischief, he thought. I’ll show you some genuine fucking mischief, toots. You have Anthony Dansk’s personal guarantee. He had an image of his hand hovering over a control panel, lights blinking, his index finger poised, the pull of Amanda’s gravity drawing his fingertip down and down to its destination.
One touch. Smithereens.
He phoned McTell.
36
She dialled Drumm’s number from a pay phone at a filling-station. He was still unavailable. She left a message to say she’d called, then decided to phone Rhees. She watched traffic slide past and wondered if Anthony Dansk was nearby, if he’d really followed her downtown and seen her going inside the Federal Building, if he was following her still. Watching her moves. You were meant to be smelling the flowers, Amanda.
She’d surprised him when she’d popped out of the phone booth. He’d made a big effort to seem unflustered, but he’d reacted like a man caught in an act of voyeurism, an eavesdropper surprised behind a door, a whole flurry of give-aways: scratching his birthmark, nibbling the tip of his pinky. And then out of the blue the whammy, the bizarre diatribe against litter, white flecks at the corners of his lips.
A dog craps on a sidewalk and Dansk reacts badly. A neatness freak. Captain Hygiene. The thing that bothered her was the voltage in his eyes as he spoke. It was a zealot’s intense stare, unblinking and focussed on some remote place only he could see. The eyes had become hard bright emerald stones, and spooky. He meant what he said. He was a man who’d gone up the mountain and come down with a big-time revelation. Keep America clean.
No, it was more than that, more than litter and graffiti and shopping carts left all over the place. She had a low allegory threshold in general, but it seemed to her that he was saying, in his own roundabout way, something about the condition of the country. What? The heart of the nation was trashed? As a people, Americans had drifted too far towards a disregard of law and order, as evidenced by their tendency to litter the streets and let their pets shit anywhere they liked?
She wasn’t sure, but his sudden outburst had made her uneasy, more than uneasy. There was clearly a very strange and worrisome compartment in Dansk’s head, and for a moment she felt an odd sense of vulnerability, as if inside the phone booth she presented a clear target for a sniper nearby, her skull in somebody’s scope, a nicotined finger on a delicate trigger. She looked across the street. The stucco building opposite was an office block, four storeys, blinds in windows, a solitary date palm outside. She gazed up at the roof, thinking, This is absurd. Dansk might be more than a little weird and scary, but he is an agent from the Justice Department, he is supposedly on your side …
And yet. She felt pressured by menace.
Rhees answered the phone.
She said, ‘It’s me.’
Rhees was quiet for a time. ‘Where are you?’
‘Glendale Avenue,’ she answered.
‘You’re on your way back, I hope.’ He sounded sullen.
‘I didn’t mean to rush out like that, John.’
Rhees said, ‘You never mean to rush, Amanda.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Now I’m hearing the contrite bit,’ he said.
‘OK, I’m contrite.’
‘And furtive. I hate furtive.’
She felt a tense band across her forehead. ‘Truce?’
‘You can’t just say that word and think it makes everything peachy. Have you contacted Dansk?’
‘I saw him.’
‘Tell me you gave him the goddam letter, Amanda. That’s all I want to hear.’
‘I think he’s been following me, John.’
‘Following you?’
‘Watching me.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘He wants to make sure I leave town. He doesn’t want me hanging round. I also get the strong feeling he’s a carrot short of a coleslaw.’
‘So he’s following you. He’s watching you.’
‘That’s a gut instinct, I can’t be sure –’
‘But you’re saying you don’t trust him.’
She answered quickly. ‘Yeah. I don’t trust him.’
‘You don’t trust him to be honest with you? Or you don’t trust him period?’
‘Period,’ she said.
‘Why don’t you just come home and we’ll discuss all this face to face. Meantime, I’m still waiting to hear about the letter, which you managed to sidestep quite neatly.’
She was quiet a moment. ‘It’s in my pocket,’ she said. ‘I’d like to discuss it with Willie before I do anything else.’
‘Drumm, Dansk, I really don’t give a shit who you give it to just as long as you get it out of our lives.’
He hung up. He’d never done that before. He’d never once just hung up on her in all six years of their relationship. She stuck the handset back. She felt slightly fragmented, as if some mild explosion had occurred inside the phone booth.
She stepped out and the hot sun zapped her and she suddenly remembered she was supposed to return Bernadette Vialli’s call. She went back to the pay phone, searched through the tattered directory and called the number. There was no answer.
She walked to her car, drove a little way, checking her rear-view mirror, wondering how she could tell if she was being tracked through the stream of traffic. She steered into the parking-lo
t of a shopping plaza, killed the engine and then she sat for a time, staring through the windshield and watching traffic come and go. So many cars, so many people, all movement eventually fusing together in one unbroken sunlit glow that after a time became surreal.
Her thoughts drifted to Sanchez, to the threat she could hear echo and roll inside her. She thought of shadows and stalkers, the possibility of harm lurking behind the glare of light.
Dansk.
Or somebody else, somebody hired by Sanchez.
How could you possibly know if anyone was following you through this crazy bright urban nightmare? And by the same token, how could you know the plastic Dansk had flashed at you was genuine issue? What evidence did you really have that he was who he claimed to be?
None.
37
Rhees was killing time fishing detritus from the pool – dead butterflies, limp insects, leaves – when the telephone rang inside the house. He laid the net on the ground and walked into the kitchen. He half-expected to hear Amanda again, but it was Morgan Scholes on the line.
‘Is she around?’
‘Not at the moment,’ Rhees said. He looked across the backyard at the cedar fence. Water reflected by sunlight rippled against the wood, a dappled effect. A few yards down the alley beyond the fence a telephone lineman in a white hard hat was climbing down from a ladder propped against a pole. He vanished out of sight and Rhees heard doors slam and the sound of a van start up.
‘You there, John?’ Scholes asked.
‘I’m here.’
‘I call her, she says she’ll get back to me, I don’t hear a goddam thing.’
Rhees said, ‘She’s running an errand, Morgan.’
‘Don’t tell me. It’s this stiff in the river business she’s got herself into, right?’
‘You know what she’s like,’ Rhees said.
‘The back of my hand,’ Morgan Scholes said. ‘You’re too soft on her, John. Who’s in charge there anyway? You or her?’
Rhees said, ‘We’re equal partners,’ and wondered how true that was. Sometimes he thought of Amanda in terms of a storm, a river suddenly flooding. His role was to stack sandbags along the banks and wait for the waters to recede.
‘Equal, I don’t think. She has you by the short and curlies.’
‘That’s not true, Morgan.’
‘I blame myself. I gave her too much freedom when she was a kid and what good has that done? I should have laid down the law more.’
Rhees glanced at the kitchen clock. Half an hour had passed since he’d hung up on her. Maybe she was sulking somewhere, taking her time coming home, trying his patience.
‘I don’t think this has to do with you giving her too much freedom, Morgan,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘One minute she wants the cabin and peace,’ Rhees said, ‘the next she’s not sure it’s inactivity she’s really after. She’s always had goals in the past. Now … I guess it’s a question of redefining herself, which isn’t easy for her.’
Morgan Scholes said, ‘She’s old enough to make up her mind, John, and you ought to tell her that.’
Rhees said, ‘I’m trying.’
‘Get her to phone me when she comes in.’
Rhees said he’d pass along the message.
He hung up, wandered through the house, room to room, restless. In the bathroom he looked inside the medicine cabinet. He had an urge to gather together Amanda’s vitamin supplements and immune-system boosters and just dump all that quackery in the trash. He studied the labels: dried seaweed, powder derived from a green-lipped mussel, whatever the hell that was. He imagined plants and creatures fished out of the deep sea, ground down and then stuffed into capsules.
There were a couple of prescription medications: Diazepam, Dalmane. Downers she’d used during the Sanchez trial when she’d needed to sleep, when she was fraught and wound too tight, and it was three a.m. and she was collating material or studying Isabel Sanchez’s testimony, or poring over transcripts of her interviews with Galindez. When she was fraying at the edges.
And now, now she’d said Dansk was following her. Her gut feeling, she’d said. She usually had good instincts, but this time he had to wonder if she was interpreting the signals accurately, or if she was creating her own little melodrama because of Isabel.
A touch of paranoia? Possibly.
He shut the cabinet. He listened to the silences of the house. He wished she’d come through the front door and he could hold her and say something like, I’m sorry I hung up on you, let’s talk. Let’s clear the air about everything.
He walked into the kitchen. The door to the backyard was open. He thought he’d closed it. No, he remembered closing it to keep the cold air from the air-conditioning escaping –
He saw the tyre-iron but couldn’t move out the way before it smashed into his ribs with an impact that forced all air out of his lungs, and he staggered, clutching the area of pain, aware of light being sucked out of the room, and he had the sensation of plummeting down a greased cylinder. The second blow struck the side of his head and the sense of slipping inside a darkening tube was even stronger now, and he gave up trying to keep his balance and went down on his hands and knees.
He raised his face. He made an effort to get up by clutching the edge of the table, and that was when the third blow was launched, sharp and dreadful, metal coming down so hard on his left hand that he could hear the sound of his finger-bones breaking. He slumped and the room was like one of those deranged rides at a carnival when you went spinning round and round in the air and the spectators far below you were just a sea of faces in white light. He rolled over on his back and dimly saw two guys wearing ski masks. He launched a foot, the best effort he could make, and struck one of the guys in the groin.
‘You motherfucker,’ the guy said.
The tyre-iron cracked against the back of his knee and he was dragged across the kitchen floor and out into the yard towards the swimming-pool where his head was forced underwater and held there, and all he could see were pale red bubbles rising from his mouth. Drowned, he was being drowned. He wanted to scream, but then his head was yanked up from the water and the sunlight was blistering against his eyes and he was whacked again, this time across the shoulders. And then his face was forced underwater a second time, or maybe a third, he couldn’t count, he was beyond making elementary measurements. Now the pain came roaring through him, gathering strength, but that was only the first stage, because after that he found himself entering a place of pain beyond pain, where a deep burgundy tide hurried into his brain.
38
Amanda drove into the cul-de-sac. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was no sight of Dansk or anyone else, no car behind her. She parked in the driveway.
OK. Time to get practical. Go inside the house and call the Justice Department in Washington, and ask through the central switchboard to be connected to Anthony Dansk. The private number he’d given her could be anything. If she found herself connected to his extension, then at least she’d know he worked for Justice. If the operator told her there was no listing for anyone called Dansk – but she wasn’t ready to think this through to a conclusion.
She got out of the car. She turned and looked the length of the cul-de-sac. It was calm and somehow completely unsettling. It was as if a cortège had recently passed, leaving behind a somber pall of silence. No kids, no pedestrians, no lawnmowers roaring, nothing. It was wrong, only she couldn’t think why. Some form of charged static hung in the still air, like the atmosphere before a storm.
She opened the car door, glanced at the house, saw the sunstruck windows. Fiery glass blinded her. She walked to the house, unlocked the door and entered the hallway, where the shattered mirror on the wall reflected her face in a series of jagged slivers.
She didn’t move. She understood at some level of memory activity that there was a procedure to follow in situations like this, you were supposed to back out of the house at once and call the police, you were
advised not to run the risk of confronting the intruder if he was still on the premises, there were rules to follow if you wanted to survive. Rules didn’t enter her head.
She took a step forward. Broken bits of mirror crunched under her sneakers. She glanced through the open doorway of the living-room. A typewriter lay upturned on the floor. The drawers of Rhees’s desk hung open. Papers were strewn all around.
Terror comes in variations on the ordinary. Papers where they shouldn’t be, a typewriter lying upside down, a broken mirror. She edged closer to the door, conscious of the way a deep silence was clinging to the house, all noise vacuumed out of the place, dead space, just this void. She was numb, circuits down.
She entered the room.
‘John,’ she called.
His books were scattered. His files lay in utter disarray. A chair was overturned, a lampshade trampled and bent. No sign of Rhees.
‘John!’
She moved to the kitchen doorway. No Rhees. On the kitchen table a jar of beets had been toppled and dark purple liquid dripped to the floor like a strange wine.
She was finding it hard to breathe. The space through which she moved was viscous. Go back, turn, get out of here. She walked to the half-open kitchen door and gripped the handle.
‘JOHN!’
The yard was silent. Butterflies flapped over the long grass and her own voice returned to her as an echo she couldn’t identify. Blue sky, frail bright wings, an echo dying. She went through the grass, drawn for some reason towards the pool, then stopped dead. The sun darkened.
He was seated motionless on the steps in the shallow end. His head was inclined forwards against his chest. His eyes were shut. The water, which rose as far as his waist, was ribboned with spirals of red.
This happens, this kind of thing, you read it every day in the papers – home invasions, suburban terrorists, dopers looking for quick cash, fix-money. This is the way it happens, only it’s supposed to happen next door to somebody else, not to you.
No way. Never to you.
She rushed to where Rhees sat and, bending at the knees, gripped him under the shoulders, and then she pulled until she was breathless and her head was burning with a kind of fever and she’d hauled him out of the water and the air smelled of chemicals and damp clothing.
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