Talk Talk

by T. C. Boyle

  “She is out there,” Radko said, his voice deep and bell-like.

  Bridger looked to the screen, not certain exactly what he meant—was she off the scale as far as looks were concerned or was she grazing the limits of histrionic expression? “Yeah,” he said, nodding, because it was always a good idea to agree with the boss, “yeah, she is.”

  Radko waved both his hands vigorously, like an umpire declaring a man safe at third. “No, no,” he said, “Dana, she is out there.”

  It took him a moment to understand—Dana was in the front office, beyond the uniform line of cubicles and the pouchy droop-shouldered figure of Radko, who was pointing now, his face heavy and oppressed. Bridger pushed back his chair and got to his feet. If Dana was here, then she was in trouble. Something had gone wrong. The first thing he thought of was the man in the picture, the voice on the phone, the thief. “Where?” he demanded, just to say something.

  He found her in the outer office, slumped forward in one of the cheap plastic chairs against the far wall. She was wearing the T-shirt and jeans she’d had on when he left the apartment and she hadn’t combed her hair or bothered with makeup and there was something clutched in her right hand, papers, letters. Was it her manuscript? Was that it? He crossed the room to her, but she didn’t lift her head, just sat slumped there, her shins splayed away from the juncture of her knees, one heel tapping rhythmically against the leg of the chair. “Dana,” he said, lifting her chin so that her eyes rose to his, “what is it? What’s the matter?”

  There was a noise behind him—Radko at the security door motioning to Courtney, the receptionist, a nineteen-year-old blonde who two weeks earlier had dyed her hair shoe-polish black and banished all color from her wardrobe in sympathy with whatever style statement Deet-Deet was trying to make. She gave Bridger a tragic look and excused herself—“I’m just going to the ladies’,” she murmured—and then the door pulled shut and they were alone.

  Dana didn’t get up from the chair. She didn’t speak. After a moment she took hold of his wrist and handed him an envelope addressed to herself from the San Roque School for the Deaf. As soon as he saw it, he knew what it meant, but he extracted the letter and unfolded it all the same, her eyes locked on his every motion. The letter was from Dr. Koch and it said that after consulting with the board he had the regretful duty of informing her that her position had been terminated for the fall session and that this was in no part due to any dissatisfaction that either he or the board might have had with her performance but strictly a result of budgetary constraints. He concluded by saying he would be happy to provide her with references and that he wished her success in whatever new endeavor she might embark upon.

  “You know it’s bullshit,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “They’re firing me. Koch is firing me. And you know why?”

  “Maybe not. He says they’re eliminating the position—that’s what he says…”

  Her eyes narrowed, her jaw clenched. “Bullshit. I e-mailed Nancy Potter in Social Studies and she said they’re already advertising for a vacancy in high school English. Can you believe it? Can you believe the gall of Koch? And these lies,” she shouted, snatching the letter out of his hand. “Just lies.”

  Beyond the windows, two rectangular slits cut horizontally in the wall to let the employees of the inner sanctum know there was another world out there despite all evidence to the contrary, a woman with six dogs of various sizes on a congeries of leashes was pausing beneath the massive blistered fig that dominated the block. A kid in a too-big helmet went by on a motor scooter, closely tailed by another, the asthmatic wheeze of the engines burning into the silence of the room. He felt miserable suddenly, thinking only of himself, selfish thoughts, the what-about-me? of every contretemps and human tragedy. This would mean that Dana was going to have to relocate, no choice in the matter, and where would that leave him?

  She was on her feet now, angry, impatient, thrusting out her arms and jerking her shoulders back in agitation. “It’s because I was in jail. He blamed me. He all but accused me of dereliction of duty.”

  He tried to put his arms around her, to hold her, comfort her, but she pushed him away. “Here,” she said, thrusting a second letter at him as if it were a knife, “here, here’s the capper.”

  The letter was from the Department of Motor Vehicles. A month earlier she’d sent in her license renewal, just as he’d done himself two years ago. As long as there were no outstanding convictions or special considerations, the DMV had instituted a policy of renewal by mail without the necessity of being re-photographed. Dana had taken that option—who wouldn’t? The price of a thirty-nine-cent stamp saved you a trip to the DMV office and an interminable wait in one line or another. All right. Fine. So what was the problem? “It’s your license?” he asked.

  Her eyes were hard, burning. “Go ahead, open it.”

  He heard the door crack open behind him and turned to see Courtney’s pale orb of a face hanging there for an instant before the door pulled shut again. He bent to fish the new license out of the envelope, hard plastic, laminated, California Driver License emblazoned across the top of it. They had her name right, had her address too, but the sex was wrong and the height and the weight and the signature at the bottom. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The two photos, the larger on the left and the smaller on the right, were of a man they’d both seen before, and he was staring right at them.

  There was no question of going back to work. Dana was in a state. Every day, it seemed, the mail brought some fresh piece of bad news, bill collectors dunning her for past-due accounts she’d never opened, a recall notice for a defect in a BMW Z-4 she’d never seen, notification of credit denied when she hadn’t sought credit in the first place. And now she’d lost her job, now she’d be driving on an expired license. “What next?” she demanded, her voice strangled and unbalanced, riding up the walls like the cry of some animal caught in a snare, and she took hold of his arms in a grip so fierce she might have been trying to stop the bleeding, only he wasn’t bleeding. Not yet. “Back to jail again? Tell me. What do I have to do?”

  He wanted to hold her but she wouldn’t let him because he was the villain all of a sudden, the stand-in for the bad guy, the nearest warm-blooded thing she could fight against. A man. Hairy legs and a dangle of flesh. A man like the one who’d done this to her. He said, “I don’t know, I really don’t,” and she still held to her grip, her nails biting into the flesh, both of them fighting for balance. All at once he felt the irritation rising in him—she was crazy, that was what she was. Fucking crazy. “Goddamnit, let go of me,” he shouted, and he shoved her away from him. “Shit, Dana. Shit, it wasn’t me, I’m not the one to blame.”

  At that moment the door pushed open behind them and there was Radko, with his heavy face and his cheap shoes and his cheap watch. “I dun’t like this,” he said carefully, slowly. “Not in my office.”

  Dana glared at him. Here was another man to lash out at. “I want to kill him,” she said.

  Radko studied the gray abraded paint of the floor. “Who? Bridger?”

  Bridger understood that he was at a crossroads here, that there was a choice he would have to make, and soon, very soon, between Digital Dynasty and this wound-up woman with the tangled hair and raging eyes. A mad notion of stalking out the door flitted in and out of his head, but he caught himself. Conflict was inimical to him, a condition he’d always—or nearly always—managed to avoid. “I’m sorry,” he said, ducking his head in deference. “It’s just that thing—you know, with Dana and what she’s been through? It just won’t go away.”

  Radko lifted both hands to smooth back the long talons of his hair, then he lifted one haunch and settled himself on the edge of the receptionist’s desk and began fumbling for the cigarettes he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket. “This thiff, yes?” he said, his voice softening. “This is it? This is the problem?”

  Bridger acknowledged that it was.

  “So sit,” Radk
o said, gesturing to the plastic chairs along the wall, “and you tell me.” And then, to Dana, as he touched the flame of his Bic to the cigarette, “You mind?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do,” but he ignored her.

  Over the course of the next half hour, while Courtney went out for coffee and Plum twice stuck her head through the door to assess the situation and deliver updates to the crew and the cigarette smoke rose and the sun inflamed the undersized windows, Dana, who barely knew Radko, unburdened herself, and when she was at a loss, Bridger was there to offer amplification. Drawing at his cigarette, smoothing back his hair, sighing and muttering under his breath, Radko listened as though this were the plot of a movie he expected to bid on. “You know,” he said finally, “in my country this thing goes on all the time. This stealing of the documents, of the people too. Kidnap for ransom. You know about this?”

  Bridger nodded vaguely. He wasn’t even sure what country Radko came from.

  “Let me see that,” Radko said, slipping the ersatz license from Dana’s hand. He studied the picture a moment, then offered his opinion that the DMV had screwed up and the computer had sent the license to the address of record rather than the new address the thief had given them. “If you get that address,” he said, glancing up as Courtney came through the street door with their coffees, “then you get this man.”

  Dana had become increasingly animated as they worked through the litany of details—how they’d contacted the credit reporting agencies and put a security hold on all her information, how they’d sent out copies of the police report and affidavit to the creditors of the spurious accounts, how they’d gone to the police and the victims’ assistance people—and now she wondered aloud just how they might go about doing that. “This guy could have a hundred aliases,” she said, removing the plastic cap from the paper cup and pausing to blow at the rising steam. She took a sip. Made a face. “And how do we get the address? They won’t even run a fingerprint trace. Not important enough, they said. It’s a victimless crime. Sure. And look at me: I’m out of a job.”

  “Milos,” he said.

  Courtney had settled back in at her desk, making a pretense of focusing on her computer, and Plum, for the third time, pushed open the security door and let it fall to again. Bridger said, “Who?”

  “Milos. My cousin. Milos he is finding anybody.”

  The next afternoon—a Friday and Radko gone to L.A. for another “meeding”—Bridger left work early to pick up Dana at her apartment. He had to get out of the truck and ring her bell—or rather, flash it—because she wasn’t quite ready, and he stood there on the doormat for five minutes at least till she appeared at the door, but the appearance was brief. Her face hung there a moment, wearing a look of concentrated harassment, the door swung open, and she was gone, clicking down the hallway in her heels, looking for some vital thing without which she couldn’t leave the apartment even if it were on fire. He wanted to remind her—urgently—that they had an appointment with Radko’s cousin at four-thirty and that his office was in Santa Paula, a forty-five-minute drive, but he wasn’t able to do that unless he was facing her and he wasn’t facing her. No, he was following her, from one room to another, her hair flashing, her arms bare and animated as she dug through a dresser drawer, pawed over the things on the night table, tossed one purse aside and snatched up the next. “I’m running a little late,” she flung over her shoulder, and slammed the bathroom door.

  Bridger wasn’t happy—he resented feeling compelled to speed and risk another ticket—but he was resigned. He put his foot to the floor, the tires chirped and the pickup protested, wheezing and spitting as he gunned it up the ramp and onto the freeway, and he glanced over at Dana to see how she was taking it, but she was oblivious. He remembered how she’d told him that when she’d first got her new car—a VW Jetta—it ran so smoothly she couldn’t tell whether the engine was actually going or not and had continually ground the starter without knowing it. Only after she realized that people were staring at her in the parking lot—grimacing, clenching their teeth—did she begin to adjust. It was all about the vibration, and eventually she trained herself to pick up the faintest intimation of those precise valves working in their perfect cylinders and all was well. The pickup was another story. Yet once he got it up to cruising speed and kept it there he was able to make up the time with some creative dodging around the cell-phone zombies and white-haired catatonics whose sole function in life it was to block the fast lane, and they pulled into Santa Paula no more than twenty minutes late for the appointment.

  The town was a surprise. Instead of the usual California farrago of styles and build-to-suit outrages to the public sensibility, it seemed all of a piece, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. In fact, it all looked hauntingly familiar, the broad main drag lined with one-and two-story frame buildings that must have dated from the forties or earlier, the hardware store, the mom-and-pop shoes and clothes shops, Mexican restaurants, coffee shop, liquor store and cantina, and he couldn’t help wondering how many period pieces had been filmed here. Teen movies, no doubt. Greasers in too-perfect ’55 Fords and Chevys, cruising, heading for the hop. Dreary dramas about old people when they were young. World War II weepers where the crippled hero returns to receive a mixed message and the streets run ankle-deep with schmaltz. Of course, all this could be re-created today without ever having to leave Digital Dynasty, but still, it did Bridger good to see the real deal, the actual frame-and-stucco buildings of the actual town. They were rolling down the street, going so slowly they were practically parked, when he pointed to the scrawled sheet of directions in Dana’s lap and asked, “What was that number again?”

  She didn’t respond, didn’t glance down at his finger or up at his face. She seemed as entranced as he, her head lolling against the frame of the open window, legs crossed and one foot dangling as if it was barely attached, and that made him smile—here she was, relaxed for the first time in weeks, a little road trip, the prospect of Milos and an end to her troubles working on her like a massage. He had to point again before her eyes went to his lips. “One-three-three-seven,” she said, squinting through the windshield to track the numbers on the storefronts.

  There was no shortage of parking—the town seemed almost deserted—and they emerged to eighty degrees and sun and a light breeze with a distant taste of the sea riding in on it. The trees bowed and waved. A pure deep chlorophyll-rich square of green crept back from the curb across the street and wrapped itself around some monument to war veterans or a mayor gone down to the exigencies of time. It was all very—what? Very calming. Ordinary. Real.

  Milos’ office was above a Korean grocery that stocked nothing but Mexican specialties and beer, and Milos himself answered their knock. He was younger than Radko, thinner, with sucked-in cheekbones and tight discolored lips, but he wore his hair the same way as his cousin, gel-slicked and glistening like the nose of something emerging from the sea, with an orchestrated dangle of individual strands in front. It took Bridger a minute, and then he understood: Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas.

  “So, yes,” Milos said, in the same dense indefinable accent as Radko, waving them into the office, “you are looking for a thiff, I know, I know.”

  He offered them seats—two straight-backed wooden chairs—and dropped into a swivel chair behind a desk that might once have been a library table, gouged and pitted and with nothing at all on the barren plane of its surface except for a single old-fashioned rotary phone. The rest of the decor ran to patterned wallpaper, a bookcase filled with what seemed to be birdwatchers’ guides and a long unbroken line of phone books, two hundred or more, that climbed up the near wall like some sort of fortification. Dana perched briefly at the edge of her chair, but almost immediately she rose and began pacing, making liberal use of her hands as she spewed out the story, Bridger elucidating and interpreting whenever Milos’ gaze seemed to grow distant. It took five minutes, no more, and then she ran out of words and sat heavily beside him.
They both looked to Milos, whose face revealed nothing.

  “All this I know,” he said, and held out his hands, palms up. “My cousin,” he added, in a long whistling sigh.

  A protracted moment swelled and receded. It was oddly silent, as if the rest of the building were deserted, the grocery notwithstanding, and hot, too hot, the pair of windows behind Milos’ desk painted shut and the fan in the corner switched off—or no longer functioning. Bridger exchanged a look with Dana—she was drained, her shoulders slumped, the drama over—and he wondered what they were even doing here. Milos, as Radko had confided, mainly worked divorces, peering through suburban windows, watching motels from across the street, and his office didn’t exactly inspire confidence. He was definitely low-tech. And this thief, this man in the photo, this voice on the phone, was as high-tech as you could get.

  Milos finally broke the silence. “A man such as this,” he intoned, pulling open the drawer of the desk and removing a smudged file folder, “he is not so smart as you think.” He took a moment, for dramatic emphasis, and slid the folder across the table to Dana.

  Inside was the fax of a police report from the Stateline, Nevada, Police Department and there, leering at them, was the now-familiar face. The man’s name was recorded as Frank Calabrese, born Peterskill, NY, 10/2/70, no address given—“Transient,” the report said, “Sex M, Race W, Age 33, Ht 6-0, Wt 180, Hair BRO, Eyes BRO, SS#?, D/L 820 626 5757, State NY”—and he’d been arrested for forgery at a Good Guys store, where he’d attempted to acquire credit in another person’s name—Justin Delhomme—and purchase a plasma TV worth $5,000. He was carrying a second driver’s license, a California license, that showed him to be a.k.a. Dana Halter, of #31 Pacific View Court, San Roque.

  Bridger could feel the excitement mounting in him—here he was, the son of a bitch, nailed—and he glanced up at Milos in gratitude and elation, and how could he ever have doubted him? “So his real name’s what, Frank Calabrese?”