Internecine

by David J. Schow

  Brilliant. All along I was trying to saddle Dandine with the burden of blame and here he was—exposing me to myself.

  “I told you about NORCO because your reactions were intriguing and useful to me. You paid me back by rising to the challenge at Varga’s—you acted like you’d surprised even yourself.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t fill my pants and run around like a decapitated chicken.”

  “No, see, you’re still trying to do that huckster thing: shrugging off credit and deferring blame. Like you did with Varga; that was a super-sized order of boardroom bullshit. You knew to pretend to kiss his ass because that was what would unlock him. With me and him, it would have been threats and counterthreats.”

  “I also know how to deflect the issue with backhanded compliments,” I said, zeroing in on him. “What about NORCO?”

  “Old news I thought was resolved,” said Dandine. “Apparently, it’s not. Otherwise, neither of us would be here right now. As far as you go . . . well, you decide. I’m willing to let you continue this ride-along because it’s worth it to me to see your perceptions, and I think you’re game because you want to unravel these invisible things that impact your existence. If you don’t like that one, how about this: It’s weirdly fun. I’ve never had a partner before.”

  This was far more revealing than I expected Dandine to be.

  “Partners usually share intel,” I said. “So far this is pretty one-sided. Need-to-know stuff that only you need to know.”

  “Here’s what you need to know right now: Some faction inside of NORCO has decided to sacrifice me to cover some kind of political play distantly connected to a client of your ad agency. In the process, you accidentally blundered into their crosshairs, but I can insulate you from them—for the time being, and only if I keep my eyes on you. I’m willing to bet some answers can be found if we poke into who’s screwing whom in the election snake pit, and you can help with that.”

  “We . . .?” Jesus good goddamn, were we a duo, now?

  “Sorry. Slip of the tongue.”

  He went toward the elevator, walking the room card across his fingers like a magician.

  “Let me put it this way: Tomorrow, I plan to visit the Sisters. That’s exposure, which means escalation. Like the way flak, in World War Two, was always followed by fighter planes. Tomorrow, it gets serious. So if you need to bail, do it now.”

  I sensed he wasn’t just going to hand me a gun, pat me on the head, and send me on my way.

  I mean, what would you do?

  I left the TV on, sound off, for company, and for the calm blue glow of the screen. From a desk, the hotel telephone tempted me a thousand times.

  I imagined the world’s nicest hit man, in his own room on the other side of the suite, stretching out on his queen-sized, smoking his final cigarette of the day, organizing some sort of battle plan, calm, his heart rate steady.

  I conducted a raid on the minibar to force myself to become pleasantly fuzzy. I put away some potent vodka, thinking of it as medicine. My brain was redlining, but my body finally copped to exhaustion. I managed the civilized, proactive move of balancing a plastic bag of hotel ice on my tender noggin, but I never made it out of my clothes.

  I slept better that night than I had for years.

  DAY TWO

  Here’s a scenario:

  I wake up in a strange hotel room, jostled back to the land of the living by strangers in severe business suits. I’ve lost over a week of time. My handlers say nothing as they escort me past the bullet-riddled corpse of Dandine, in the next bedroom. Our headquarters is in the basement of the Federal Building out in Westwood. You have to insert a special key and tap the elevator buttons in a certain pattern for access—the same way you search out “hidden menu features” on a DVD supplement. Back at HQ I am debriefed by some Man in Black, which is funny because the man himself is also black, one of my darker brothers. He is an absence of light in a cold and unforgiving room.

  “The programming technique worked beyond our expectations, Connie,” he says, using the diminutive as though he knows me; but I say nothing, because he is my superior. “We knew Dandine would use the trigger word sooner or later.”

  He fills me in: I have been hypnotized using something called the Deep-Trance Method of Mental Parallels, in which fabricated details serve as memory blocks for the bitter truth, and thus, shield my actual identity like bricks in a wall. To the world of the walking dead, I am an advertising executive named Conrad Maddox . . . until my target cues mission memory by utilizing a certain word or phrase. By then, I am inside his trust, and defenses, and can easily purge the target. Dandine was a tough nut indeed, and this was the only gambit that could possibly breach his defenses. Set up a false playbook to draw him out, then saddle him with an apparent norm to whom he will feel some sense of atavistic responsibility.

  “As your reward,” says the black Man in Black, “we have decided to grant you administrative leave.” Then he shoots me in the face with a wad-cutter, to cover the possibility that someone else might recognize me.

  Some people will lie to themselves, invent anything to make their lives appear more interesting.

  Struggling toward the surface from deep REM sleep is more difficult than waking up on schedule, according to habit. My tendency is to awaken, eye on the clock, usually about thirty seconds before the alarm goes off. Even my body knows how predictable I am. There was a fleeting, dreamlike phase that preceded my memory of recent events. Then my brain reminded me of what had gone on in the real world, and woke me up with a stab of worry.

  In the main room of the suite was a room service tray of coffee, croissant, fruit, yogurt, cereal, and toast. The toast was kept warm, but not dried out, by a special, covered silver tray. Dandine had damaged the repast and left me half, which I ravenously gobbled up in no order.

  I redressed my wrists with gauze and a little packet of antibiotic ointment, the first probably procured for me by Dandine, the second part of the hotel’s thoughtful cache of toiletries. Shampoo, shaving cream, razor, all one-shot and disposable. Lacking identity. No one would ever know I had passed this way.

  Later Dandine told me that he had risen after four hours of what he called meditative sleep. Then an hour of isometric exercises, which he could do practically anywhere there was a fixed and stable vertical surface, like a door molding. Then he used the hotel gym and baked in the sauna for twenty minutes. He was halfway into an overloaded day and I was still trying to figure out how to pour coffee directly into the fissures of my bleary brain. He walked in wearing a hotel robe and slippers, hair damp with condensation, skin reddened from basting in steam.

  “Doc Savage,” I said.

  He gave me what was becoming a familiar look, quizzical.

  “Doc Savage used to do a regimen of two hours of special scientific exercises, mental and physical calisthenics, every day, no matter where he was.”

  His gaze tried to flatten me. “You’re staring at my nipples, aren’t you?”

  Was he saying I was gay? I was staring, all right—Dandine did not have any nipples. His chest was as blank as the molded plastic of a doll, with two smears of shiny scar tissue where nipples would normally be.

  He realized he couldn’t blow it off. “It was sort of a shaving mishap,” he said. “At least, it involved a straight razor. Understand?”

  Someone had removed Dandine’s nipples with a razor, like planing cheese with a girolle. Someone had tortured him, once, and he had survived. I suffered a fast local wince. I wondered if he had cracked—talked—and what he might have said, or not said. I wondered what my own tolerance for pain might be, and whether I’d have to find out, soon. Someone edges a razor against your nipple and asks you a question. Wrong answer, and they move to your eyes. I mean, what would you do?

  He watched me figure it out, then said, “Okay. I shower, then we go. Last chance, Conrad.”

  “Everybody in the hotel has used up all the hot water by now.”

  “I
don’t want hot water.” I knew he’d say something like that.

  We blazed eastward on Washington Boulevard, Dandine piloting the Town Car like a fighter plane during war games. He had good “cop radar” and knew how to get someplace fast, with a minimum of left turns. I’d learned to use a seat belt all over again, to avoid being dumped all over the cabin, since I didn’t have a steering wheel to hang on to. The vanity mirror on the visor revealed my forehead, in daylight, had mellowed to a sick ochre color, mottled with impact spots in darker sienna.

  “I look like I’ve got the plague,” I said.

  “Is your nose still bleeding?”

  “No.”

  “Headache?”

  “You have to ask?” I kept touching my head, as though it belonged to someone else, or feeling up a mystery object in a dark room with cautious dread.

  “I think you’re okay,” Dandine said. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  He was flipping me the bird.

  “Tell me about the Sisters,” I said.

  “They’re what I’d imagine you’d call brokers of information. I obviously can’t work with what I’ve got unless I make direct contact with NORCO, and I’m not ready to do that, yet.”

  “Last resort?” I said. He pursed his lips and jigged his eyebrows briefly; I took that as a “yes,” subcategory: desperation measures.

  After Dandine’s profession (at which I was getting my first good look in—still—fewer than twenty-four hours), information theft is probably the country’s number one subterranean industry. Remember my Kroeger spy, the Mole Man? Nobody knew his real name, either. But he’d sell us the skinny on a competitor’s bid ceiling or reveal which players were about to check into detox, and the Mole Man’s truth record was spotless. He had saved our collective butts more than once by divulging weak links in the chains of large companies, brand names of which you are probably still a loyal customer. That whole “New Coke” thing? The Mole Man kept us from taking a dive on that account by advising that the three-person team who had conceived the idea were one baby step shy of seeing their faces on America’s Most Wanted, and their original plan was to sneak the coke back into Coke, so to speak. New Coke was intended to be a disaster, to cover the chemical changes worked on the original before it was hurriedly reintroduced as “classic.” The only thing classic about it was the sleight of hand, and having bought the illusion, consumers forgot it was ever an issue, and my outfit dodged that bullet. Same deal with the whole Blu-Ray fiasco. Whatever the Mole Man charged Burt Kroeger, it was worth it. I think it was Burt who came up with the moniker, because the Mole Man was, well, talpoid. Soft, round, balding, with downy hair on his cheeks and forearms, like a boiled-egg man with rheumy eyes, bespectacled like a wise woodland critter in an Arthur Rackham painting.

  Dandine took Overland, north. We were lost somewhere between 20th Century Fox and MGM, if that means anything. A few more turns and he parked behind a courtyard apartment group that had been sinking into the ground since the 1950s, a lot of stuccoed archways engirded by overgrown eucalyptus trees, surrounded by a security fence.

  “We have to go through a metal detector, just so you know,” he said. “You could always wait in the car.”

  “Lead on,” I said.

  “Lose your belt first. The buckle.”

  “Right.” I knew that. I still felt like a first-grader, fucking up the simplest things.

  We were buzzed through a locked gate and Dandine led the way through a well-tended garden, almost Japanese in its severity and specificity. There was a modest pond with tuned stones. A sun-browned, skeletal man frowned up at the morphing clouds in the sky. He looked like somebody’s older Mexican uncle. He nodded as we passed, and resumed reading his copy of ¡Alarma! Amid a scatter of gardening tools on the ground, I was sure I spotted the butt of a shotgun.

  A narrow, stoop-shouldered hallway led to a room tricked out like a parlor frozen in time from a century earlier. Lace and antimacassars, wingback chairs and dainty little spool tables. A rolltop writing desk with a cane chair, starkly varnished. Floral draperies.

  “What happened to the metal detector?” I said.

  “We’re already through it.” His gaze cut past me. “Ah, Sister, my heart swells with joy.”

  Our hostess beamed, open-armed, as she emerged from an alcove I had failed to notice, behind me.

  “Oh, Mr. D, how delightful to see you again after all this time.” The woman in the nun’s habit was gnomic and resembled a classic babushka, even down to her unfortunate hair distribution. Her dark eyes glittered. She embraced Dandine warmly, and because she was about four feet tall—including her clunky, thick-soled shoes—Dandine had to stoop. “Welcome, welcome. Please introduce this new face,” she said, her expression rounded with thick, peasant bonhomie. She shot me a genuine, yellow-toothed smile that struck me as overly hungry.

  “This is my friend, Mr. Lamb,” said Dandine. I shook hands with her, working my grasp around a rosary. She wore a plain silver ring on her middle finger and her grip was like a trash compactor. “You are most welcome,” she said. “Oh, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. L. You won’t mind my using the initial, I hope. It’s the way of things, here.”

  “What do you do when you have a roomful of people and all their names begin with the same letter?” I asked after she relinquished my dented hand.

  “Oh, my, that is amusing, isn’t it?” she said, as her hands vanished into capacious sleeves. The matriarchal penguin folds its wings. “May I offer you nice gentlemen some refreshment?”

  “Not today, Sister,” said Dandine. “Although please accept some from me. I saw it and thought instantly of you.” He presented her with a bottle of Haut-Brion, which she examined owlishly.

  I hadn’t even noticed he was carrying it, and didn’t bother to wonder where he’d gotten it. But I knew it was in the three hundred dollars-per-bottle range. I’ve been there, done that.

  “Oh, very, very good. The ’eighty-two, in perfect condition. To decant this properly would require a little time. Perhaps for your next visit?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, as we’re kind of pressed for time, today.”

  “Oh, dear boys, so are we, so are we. As a matter of fact, the Sister and I were right in the midst of something when you were so thoughtful as to call. If you don’t mind—?”

  “Please,” said Dandine, waving away decorum.

  “But first,” she said, “does our new friend, Mr. L, require any sort of . . . ah, medical attention?” She pointed at my forehead.

  “No, Sister,” said Dandine, gracious enough to field what was becoming a recurring gag that wasn’t funny. “He was in a strange place, you know, and he . . . walked into a mirror.”

  “Oh, you poor dear. Are you all right?”

  “I’ll live,” I said, rubbing my head to demonstrate it was no biggie. Lancets of pain shot from my eyebrows to my jaw. Still tender. She had taken note of my gauzed wrists, too, but tastefully refrained from asking if I had recently attempted suicide.

  She waddled off down a hall to the back of the structure, crooking a finger for us to follow. “Attend,” she said, all smiles. “Our Mr. L may find this instructive.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dandine said, sotto voce.

  The Sister levered open a heavy door and indicated that we should enter. I caught an ambient, fishy odor my nose did not enjoy.

  Dandine ushered me through first. “This is probably one of the most bug-proof rooms in Los Angeles,” he said.

  I expected to see—surprise!—a soundproofed, hi-tech chamber where we could shuck the niceties and get down to business. A bunker of safety tucked amid the chintz and religious bric-a-brac. I was half-right.

  A gridded steel staircase led down to an unsuspected subfloor of the house. The main room was at least twenty by twenty feet, tarted up as a medieval torture dungeon. There were two vacant cells in one wall, each about the size of a toilet stall, with barred doors. Another door on the opposite wall led to a
bathroom. Most of the equipment—the stretching rack, the X-shaped inverted cross (with padded wrist and ankle cuffs), a gymnastics horse augmented with restraints, and a Frankensteinian dentist’s chair—were wheeled back out of the center of the room to clear a large, general space of floor, carpeted in thin, but durable, all weather stuff like tweed. It was a harsh, deep crimson color, varying enough to reveal the traffic areas, and wheel impressions from the assorted machines.

  The other Sister, virtually a clone of the first, stood in the center of the room, next to a footstool holding an open can of cat food and a spoon. Slick morsels littered the stool and the floor around it, and I identified the stench as minced mackerel. (My stepmom used to feed it to a bloated, glassy-eyed, catlike thing she called a pet; I’ve always hated that smell.)

  Connected to the ceiling girders by a steel cable was a middle-aged, red-faced man wearing a too-tight Cub Scouts shirt (Troop 183) and nothing else. Smears of cat food had chunked around his mouth and spattered his naked thighs, making him look as though he had vomited excrement (I’m sorry, but that’s really the only way to describe it, and if you’d seen it, you’d agree). He was just struggling to stand as we entered, and the Sister closed the door behind us. Around him the carpet was darkened and wet; sweat was pouring abundantly off of him and as he managed to climb to his feet (freehand, since his wrists were bound behind him by a buckled leather strap), a rope of drool escaped from his mouth. The cable looped from a choke chain around his neck to the ceiling. He stood there, swaying, with his feet planted apart.

  “Please do continue, Sister,” said our Sister. “I believe we were on Number Three.”

  The other Sister nodded, stepped back for swinging room, hiked her habit, and kicked the captive man in the groin as hard as she could with those big, clunky shoes. The man folded up and collapsed with a huffing noise as his leash (the cable) unreeled a predetermined length from its pulley. His genitalia were deep purple, the color of blisters filled with blood. I flinched.