Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  Loeb had a tiny cassette player in his hand. He said, ‘Listen some more.’

  Amanda’s voice: ‘I’m calling about a patient. John Rhees.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘His fiancée, Amanda Scholes.’

  ‘He’s stable, Miss Scholes.’

  ‘When’s the earliest I can see him?’

  ‘Visiting hours are from ten a.m. until noon.’

  Loeb shut off the machine. ‘And that’s what you ordered, Anthony? You had the shit kicked out of her boyfriend?’

  ‘It was a simple diversion,’ Dansk said.

  ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘You had absolutely no goddam right, Loeb,’ he said.

  ‘No right to run an eye over your operation?’

  Dansk said, ‘The deal was you don’t interfere, you don’t question my decisions.’

  ‘I question this one. Rhees is one half of a couple. You’ve trespassed into some very dicey emotional territory.’

  Dansk said, ‘Emotional territory? Where did you get your psychology degree? Some school in Guatemala that advertises on the back of matchbooks?’

  Loeb looked morose. ‘You didn’t take into account the obvious thing, Anthony. You’ve only tossed more kerosene on the woman’s bonfire.’

  Dansk said nothing. He was seething at the idea of Loeb criticizing him.

  ‘You never used to put a foot wrong, Anthony, but what you didn’t take into account is the fact that other people have strong feelings, and sometimes those feelings lead to unpredictable responses. Am I coming through to you on any known frequency?’

  Dansk was silent. Let Loeb drone on.

  ‘The question is, what’s your next step, Anthony?’

  ‘I go up to my room and I take a shower.’

  ‘About the woman,’ Loeb said.

  Dansk said, ‘I can take care of her.’

  Loeb looked infinitely weary and sad. ‘God knows why, but I’m your friend, Anthony. Maybe the only one you’ve got.’

  ‘I don’t need friends that go behind my back,’ Dansk said. He listened to Loeb’s ruined breathing. ‘You know what I think? The drugs have addled you. You’re stoned morning to night. You can’t make judgements.’

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the world more clearly in all my life,’ Loeb said.

  ‘Drugs’ll make you believe anything,’ Dansk said.

  Loeb folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Under his eyes were dark sooty rings. ‘This work we’re doing, we’re pushing boulders up mountains, and there’s always more boulders. There’s a job in Seattle should have been taken care of yesterday. Another in LA.’

  Open-mouthed, Loeb was sucking on shallow pockets of air. ‘What I’m saying is we need to get the business done here because we’re falling behind. I need to know you can finalize things in a straightforward way. I need to believe that this business you engineered with Rhees was just some brainstorm along the way.’

  ‘I can cope,’ Dansk said. Brainstorm, he thought. Loeb didn’t appreciate intricacy. He didn’t like filigree. Angles baffled him, curved surfaces bewildered him. His was the geometry of a wasted old pen-pusher. X belongs in this box, Y belongs in that. There’s only one road from A to B, and that’s the straight and narrow. Maybe for you, Loeb.

  Loeb looked bleak. ‘I don’t want an extravaganza, Anthony. I don’t want to hear about diversions. Give me quiet, and don’t leave any mess. Bury your litter.’ Loeb turned and moved in his slow-footed manner down the alley. He stopped and called back, ‘I’m trusting you, Anthony. Just don’t go off at tangents.’

  Tangents. You brain-dead fuck. Dansk chewed on the small finger where no nail grew, a nervous mannerism he’d acquired in fifth grade. A brutally dumb kid called Skipper Klintz had smashed his pinky with a clawhammer. It was all on account of Skipper’s need to assert his tribal superiority over Dansk, whose birthmark rendered him odd and imperfect, and consequently a victim. The nail had never grown back again. Two weeks later, on a bleak sub-zero night, Dansk had waited in an alley for Skipper and battered his head with a baseball bat. He could still feel the whap of the bat in his hands and the crack of Skipper’s skull. A home run and the crowd going crazy in the bleachers and the electronic scoreboard popping.

  Now he watched Loeb go, a sick shambles of a guy shuffling away, dying with every step he took. I’m trusting you. Bugging phones behind my back, you call that trust?

  Dansk walked to the end of the alley, reached the street where the hotel sign created a soft yellow glare and a uniformed doorman stood motionless on the steps, misted by the light falling all around him.

  46

  Amanda found stacked on Dansk’s bedside table the following: a map of Arizona, a paperback entitled Guide to Restaurants in the Valley of the Sun, and an inky copy of something called Phoenix After Dark, which was a list of swingers and spouse-swappers, strip joints and gay bars and escort agencies. Dansk had circled some of these agencies in red ball-point. Romantic Liaisons. Sweet Dreams. Phantasy Chix. Some had come-on lines, like, ‘Meet Miss Foxxy Foxx and get out of that rut.’ ‘See Petal, ripe for plucking.’

  In the drawer of the table she found a packet of condoms, a set of old rosary beads and a plastic wallet-insert that contained a series of photographs.

  She glanced at these snapshots. Dansk was unmistakable in each of them. Some depicted him as a kid, others as a teenager. A woman figured in every shot. In some of them she had an arm round Dansk’s waist or a hand on his arm. Amanda guessed Dansk’s mother because there was some slight resemblance. Touching, she thought. He carries pictures of Mom. And the beads. She tried to imagine him smoothing them with his fingertips but she couldn’t.

  She opened the drawers of the dressing-table. The potent aroma of sandalwood emerged from a sachet that had been placed over a neat stack of boxer shorts. She dug around the polka dots and the paisleys, noticing how fastidiously they’d been ironed and arranged. The next drawer down contained a couple of shirts, still in their Cellophane packages, and a half dozen pairs of socks, coupled and folded. The third drawer was empty.

  She walked to the closet and checked the clothes that hung meticulously on hangers: two suits, both designer labels, two sports coats, a couple of pairs of shorts. The pockets were all empty. They yielded nothing, not a coin, a scrap of paper, not even lint. What did he do? Vacuum them?

  On the closet floor was a combination-locked aluminium case. She picked it up, shook it and heard what sounded like papers sliding around inside. She longed to open the case, but it was useless. She set the case back.

  She entered the bathroom. Toilet items were lined up just so inside the cabinet. Aftershave, hair lotion, a mouthwash she’d never heard of and a toothbrush designed to reach the deepest recesses of the gums and God knows where else. A nail-file with a genuine ivory handle, a heavy-duty nail-clipper, a container of floss, a tortoiseshell hairbrush in whose bristles a matching comb had been inserted, and a wooden spatula-like device whose purpose she couldn’t begin to guess. On the sink was a bottle of Italian mineral water and a razor and shaving cream in a tube.

  And a salt-shaker. Did he gargle with brine?

  This is what Dansk came down to. Expensive toiletries and empty pockets and a locked case and the fact that he used escort services.

  Who the hell are you, Dansk?

  She went back inside the bedroom. A printed card on top of the TV provided the information that guests could access a computer that would provide them with a detailed account of their bill. She aimed the remote at the screen, turned the TV on, selected Channel 22 as the card instructed. The name popped up: ANTHONY DANSK

  Then:

  ROOM RATE $175 TAX INC.

  TOTAL $875.00

  ROOM SERVICE

  TOTAL $63.00

  PHONE CALLS

  TOTAL $4.25

  LAUNDRY

  TOTAL $48.50

  She studied the room rate figure a moment, calculating. He’d been here five night
s. He hadn’t just come to Phoenix to meet her some twenty-four hours ago. I flew all the way down here to set your mind at rest, he’d told her. But you were already here, Anthony, already in place. Why the lie? Why go through that rigmarole?

  You lie when you have something to gain.

  Or something to hide.

  She stared at the menu along the bottom of the screen and pressed sixty-seven on the remote, which gave her access to an itemized account of telephone calls.

  PLEASE WAIT. TRY OUR YUCCA ROOM ON THE MEZZANINE FOR FINE WESTERN CUISINE!

  Then:

  DANSK, ANTHONY 7320

  What followed was a list of calls he’d made. He’d placed four, all local, three to the same number. She wrote the numbers down on a scratch pad that lay on top of the dressing-table, then she folded the sheet and stuck it in her pocket. She switched off the TV.

  It was time to get out of here, and yet she had the feeling she was overlooking something, she hadn’t explored deeply enough. But what was left to explore? Hotel rooms like this one didn’t have a surplus of hiding-places. There was an air-conditioning duct, but she didn’t have either the time or the tool to unscrew the grille. There was also the chance of something concealed under the carpet, but the task of searching would take too long. Down on her knees, hauling at the rug, popping tacks.

  The mini-bar was the last place left. It was stuffed with miniatures, a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay, a jar of macadamia nuts and a tube of Toblerone. She rummaged, found nothing unusual and shut the door. Leave, she told herself. Leave now. You’ve already pressed your luck to its limits and then some.

  She took a last quick look round the room and then stepped towards the door, and halfway there the mercurial bird of good fortune abandoned her, and she heard click as the coded key card was inserted into the lock and the door opened.

  ‘Interesting,’ Dansk said.

  47

  She raised one hand to her hair in a flustered manner, her nerve-ends jumping. The atmosphere around her had a tense zing to it, like the vibration left by a tuning-fork. She moved, standing with her back to the window, crossing her arms in a defensive way. She was aware of the peripheral blackness of night behind her, and she imagined Dansk strolling towards her and casually pushing her through glass, and then she was falling, storey after storey, to the sidewalk.

  She walked away from the window and thought, Nobody knows I’m here.

  Dansk said, ‘I guess there’s a good explanation for this.’ The letter from the señorita. That’s what brings her here. She’s shovelling and she doesn’t know what lies underneath the soil. And if she knew, she wouldn’t be here. ‘You looking for anything in particular? Or was it just a general sniff around, see what you could find?’

  She could still hear the air vibrate as if a huge menacing bird had just passed close to her face. When she spoke her voice sounded cracked. ‘You’ve been following me.’

  ‘I didn’t hear that. Louder.’

  She cleared her throat and said it again.

  Dansk looked annoyed. ‘Following you? Is this because I bump into you by chance on the street and you construct a whole weird scenario around that encounter? Why would I follow you, Amanda?’

  He undid his necktie and it dangled from his hand.

  ‘You know why,’ she said. She noticed how the silver tie caught the light and resembled a loose metal chain.

  ‘You’re speaking a foreign language. Translate for me.’

  ‘You’re running surveillance on me because you know I’m not buying into your deal.’

  ‘Where is all this coming from, Amanda?’

  ‘Rhees is in hospital with broken bones.’

  ‘Rhees?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know any Rhees. You can’t just toss out a name at me, Amanda.’

  She saw from the window the lights of radio masts perched on mountains in those black distances where the city faded. The anger and adrenalin that had driven her appeared to be slipping, and an edge of dread had replaced it. She felt very alone all at once. She looked at Dansk’s reflection in the pane. He seemed to exist simultaneously in different dimensions, behind her in solid form, floating in front of her in a fuzzy spectral framework.

  Why hadn’t she told Willie she was coming here? Anything could happen to her and nobody would know. She turned, bringing Dansk back into focus. ‘Rhees wasn’t any part of this –’

  ‘I’m hearing foreign still.’

  ‘You didn’t do it personally. You paid for it to be done.’

  ‘Paid who to do what?’

  ‘It was meant to look like robbery with serious violence thrown in. But it was badly stage-managed. Thieves steal things, Anthony. You should teach your thugs that.’

  ‘I don’t even know Rhees, so let me hear one good reason why I’d want him harmed.’

  ‘As a warning to me.’

  A warning, he thought. If she wanted to think it was something that crude, let her. People often misconstrued his intentions. Even the smart ones, like Amanda. They didn’t set themselves demanding standards.

  ‘You’re off in the twilight zone, Amanda. I’m hearing that dooda-dooda tune. You just break in here and lay this shit on my doorstep and you don’t have one solid thing to back it up. This is unlawyerly.’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer these days,’ she said. She stared at him. He gazed back, nonchalant, running the necktie through his fingers.

  ‘You break in here and make a wild accusation. Is that normal behaviour?’

  ‘You’re familiar with normal, I suppose.’

  He didn’t like this remark. It rubbed him in all the wrong ways. He walked towards her and looked at her bright lipstick and polished nails. She wasn’t cut out for these gaudy adornments, they cheapened her. ‘What the hell is your problem? You break into my room, presumably you rummage through my belongings. What did you expect to find here? Spell it out for me. Tell me what’s really on your mind.’

  ‘Your Program. The way it leaks.’

  ‘And that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I think it’s more. You’re unhinged on account of Isabel Sanchez and whatever it was happened to this guy Rhees,’ he said. ‘And now you’re imagining funny things.’

  There was an alteration in his mood. He leaned forward, placed his palms against the wall on either side of her face. She was imprisoned between his outstretched arms. She felt she was seeing him through a microscope. The fuzz on his cheeks, the ginger eyebrows, his pores, the birthmark, everything was blown-up in unnerving detail. She anticipated violence. She imagined Dansk striking her. She felt an inward flinch.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have anything else to say.’

  He looked into her eyes and it occurred to him that he could strangle her with his necktie. The idea strobed through him in black and white flashes: the lethal laying on of hands, the deadly intimacy of it all, her eyes darkening as she died. Killing somebody, the way McTell did, or Pasquale. How it would feel. He imagined numbness, the heart anaesthetized, a plunge into a bewildering madness. He didn’t want McTell or Pasquale involved when it came to this woman, he didn’t want them getting within a mile of her. He wanted her for himself. But not here in this room, because even if she died without a sound there was still the daunting prospect of dragging a corpse into an elevator and out through reception, past clerks and porters and guests and security people. Unrealistic.

  And then there was Rhees. Any final solution had to involve him too, because he and Amanda had probably discussed the letter together. They were lovers, and lovers should die together.

  He noticed the room-service food on the table. The hamburger smelled cold and the fries were limp.

  ‘You haven’t eaten your food,’ he said. ‘Lost your appetite?’

  ‘I’m not that hungry.’

  He gazed down at her feet. ‘Lost your shoes as well?’

  ‘I like not wearing shoes,’ she said.

  She looked at
the sweat on his forehead and wondered where he’d been for the last twenty seconds or so, because he’d misted over like a window under a layer of condensation, and his jaw had set in a purposeful way and the muscles in his cheeks had been working as if he were chewing gum. He’d vanished in front of her eyes.

  ‘Eat. You ordered the stuff.’ He caught her wrist and tugged her towards the table. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit,’ she said.

  He pulled back a chair and forced her into it. ‘Now eat.’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Eat,’ he said.

  He whipped the top off the bun and she found herself looking at a dollop of ketchup on the browned meat.

  ‘Try the burger,’ he said. His voice was chilly and brittle and angry.

  She lifted the burger reluctantly. It fell apart between her fingers and she watched it drop on the plate, a soggy bun disintegrating and a crumbling disc of meat smeared with sauce. Dansk was hovering just behind her.

  ‘Clumsy, clumsy. You need some help.’

  He scooped up a handful of meat in his palm and held it to her mouth and she turned her head to one side and said, ‘I’m not fucking hungry.’

  ‘Kids are starving all over the world,’ he said. ‘And I hate waste, I hate the way people don’t think about others less fortunate.’ He pushed the meat forcefully into her mouth, and she shoved his hand aside.

  ‘I don’t want the goddam food,’ she said.

  ‘You ordered it,’ he said.

  Dansk could smell her perfume. He could smell fear on her too, and he had a sense of power flowing through him. He was wired to this woman in some fashion and he was draining energy out of her battery and it made him giddy. He reached down to the table and picked up a fork, speared an onion and raised it close to her face and let it dangle just in front of her.

  She gazed at the hanging strand of onion and tried to shove her chair away from the table but Dansk obstructed her. He let the fork fall, placed his hands back on her shoulders and felt her shiver.