“Again, Andy,” I said. “I don’t know how we can thank you for—
He waved it off. “Feh. Don’t pull gratitude on me, Mad Dog; it’s disgusting.”
Dandine’s eyes swiveled toward me. “Mad Dog?”
I felt myself blushing. “Maddox. Mad Dogs. You know.”
“I don’t get it.”
He held for a beat, or at least until Collier started laughing. Then he smiled—gotcha—and put his nose back into his glass, smug as a fifth-grader who has succeeded in making a dirty pun out of your name.
“Yeah, terrific, everybody have a bigass laugh at the expense of the pathetic advertising guy. You’re not supposed to have a sense of humor, you know.”
“I’d think you’d need a keenly developed one, in your line,” said Collier, to Dandine. “That steely-cold operative jazz if strictly for the movies. Think Miguel Ferrer. Tom Jane.”
This was pleasant, but Dandine could tell I was itching. He said, “Phone calls, to answer your question.”
“What question?” I hate having my mind read.
“The question you were going to ask about what we’re supposed to do next. Stop me when I’m wrong. Phone calls. It’s time to make a little strategic contact. But not from this location.”
“Not on a damned cellphone, that’s for sure,” said Collier. “Elise says you need to convalesce, and you’re in no shape to dance back out into the world for the next action scene. Rest up a bit. I know you probably rail at the idea of doing nothing, but nothing is what you need to do next.”
“Actually,” said Dandine, almost murmuring, “it’s kinda nice.” He was falling asleep, on the precipice of nodding off, right there in the chair.
“Help me get this guy into his bunk,” said Collier.
Five minutes later, I stood there, thinking, nobody ever sees Dandine’s bare feet.
Divestment of shoes made him vulnerable. Snoozing in the guest bed with his feet hanging off one end, Dandine looked like a normal guy, sleeping, not some kind of merciless death machine.
He had once worked for NORCO. He had worked for the people who really ran everything. He had quit them. Wasn’t that a character point in his favor? Was it compensation enough, against the blacker things he had probably done over the course of his career?
I wondered what he had done before. Whether he had ever been a paperboy, or a Boy Scout, or some other frilly, happy-families bullshit.
In the movies, hitmen were iguanas—completely cold-blooded and hindbrain-motivated. Or they listened to opera and quoted fine literature. Or they were Family thugs, lip-deep in all that Sopranos pasta fazoole. Not like this guy, for real. That was how he did what he did, while the walking dead . . . walked on, oblivious, uncaring, cluelessly innocent.
“Jesus, we’ve got us a trigger,” said Collier, freshening up his drink in the living room. He paused to consider his own reflection in vast glass, ghostly against his great, panoramic view of a cutback valley dotted with very few house lights.
“He’s not a pet,” I said. “Howevermuch of his story is true, all I know is the bullets being shot at me seemed real. Real things, blowing up. Real people, acting like people—”
“People in spy movies?” Collier said this with a toasting gesture. “Welcome to the real world of the unreal. It’s not so weird, when you think about it.” He raked his hair, as though tired by deduction. “But, you know what? If I was a producer and this was a movie, I’d be asking one question.”
I had to ask.
“Where’s the girl?” said Collier. “No female lead. Strictly a guy story.”
“What about little Miss Butcher? A.k.a. ‘Choral’? What about the lady ninja that crushed all the nerves in my forehead? What about—” I wiggled Alicia Brandenberg’s dossier at him. Dandine had left it on the coffee table in the office while we had hacked and slashed through a slightly modified version of our thrilling narrative. “What about her?”
“Bit parts,” said Collier. “Supporting characters. Background furniture. Look at the beats you’ve got.” He ticked them off on his fingers, and I had a feeling he was upshifting into pitch mode. “You pick up a hit-kit and become a target. Except the real target is the hitter, and the whole plot seems to be a fake. The fake hit is a subcontracted job, to exonerate some big secret cabal.”
“NORCO.”
“Yeah, right, NORCO. So what does that tell you?”
“I don’t know.”
“NORCO set it all up in the first place, and covered their butts with maximum deniability, in case Dandine lived long enough to come after them for payback. Unless . . .”
“Stop doing that,” I said. “Unless what?”
“Unless Dandine made up NORCO, to cover some larger agenda. He can explain it in ephemeral terms, and you’d buy it.”
“Then, if it’s all about Dandine, are you saying that Alicia Brandenberg is a completely random factor?” I was recycling the jazz Dandine and I had brainstormed on our way here. I wanted Collier’s reaction to it. Needed it, in fact.
“Hence, ancillary to NORCO,” Collier said. “Not top echelon, but connected enough to seek help from NORCO when she gets out of her depth. Or maybe she’s a NORCO contractee not privy to the internal workings of the big clock itself. Or trained by them as a one-shot capable enough to keep the political fellows in hock to the organization. Any of those would do. You don’t have to tell the audience every damned thing in simpleton language; you do have to provide a crumb or two of back-story for the viewers intelligent enough to see layers, yes?”
“So Alicia’s just a symptom,” I said. “Like a dead-end plot thread.”
“Unless she, too, expires in some revelatory way. Collier smiled and spread his hands, palms up. “Hence, where’s the girl? Why don’t you just go and ask this Alicia person?”
Good question. Dandine had kept me so busy ducking and running, over the past day, that it seemed a possibility both remote and unattainable.
“And I’ve got a better question than that one, Connie. Why are you hanging around? This doesn’t even involve you. If it’s all about Dandine, nobody gives a toss about you. The shadow warriors don’t care about you. You’re not a target. You only were a target because they mistook you for Dandine, or you were hanging in Dandine’s orbit. Why don’t you just go home, file a burglary report—that’s what it’ll go down as, trust me—and get some quality sleep time?”
That let the air out my balloon, double-quick. Collier was right. What in hell was I doing here, I mean, really?
“You’re like the guy in the flying saucer movies. The one who sees the alien, or discovers the monster, first. Normally, he would hand his information over to experts, and drop out of the picture. Not in a movie, though. The audience needs to uncover the threat alongside the protagonist. Then they stick with him, or her, because he or she is their entrée to the rest of the subsurface plot. That character is the audience point of view, just like Roger O. Thornhill, in North by Northwest.”
Collier’s words burned me on the inside. It was truth, and it smarted. What the hell was I doing here?
(1) I had been given an opportunity to escape my life, indulge in some risky acrobatics, and pretend none of it was my fault. That meant: (2) I had a life that I needed to escape from, because (3) it was mostly a calcified, rote bore.
Now I was surrounded by colorful eccentrics and bizarre misfits. I was exactly like those losers you glimpse at airports, pretending they’re cooler than they actually are, pretending to be someone else when they’re in the company of strangers, all en route to places other than here. An exotic destination, a titillating rendezvous. When you’re stuck in an airport, it seems that everybody is headed somewhere more interesting than you, and you and I both take this feeling for granted.
We all play spy at the airport.
As Roger O. Thornhill had pointed out, in the person of Cary Grant, his initials stood for rot. My life, as a crock of same.
Collier was right. I had tailed alon
g at Dandine’s behest because I wanted to believe I was essential to his investigation. So far, there was nothing he could not have done, quite ably, solo. I had taken his word for it. For all I knew, his latticework of facts was just more expertly deployed bullshit, for purposes I would never be capable of understanding . . . unless he was merely holding me in reserve as a human shield for some crucial combat.
Dandine had sold me on the whole package, goddammit.
Unless . . .
. . . unless it was all me. Once I had been plucked from the universe of the walking dead, and was on the outside, looking in, I hated what I saw. I wanted to test my own resilience, to prove myself in some obscure way, to acid-test those theoretical qualities to which we all bow, yet are rarely called upon to demonstrate. I wanted to jump into the predator pool and swim, and find out if my own grit was bona fide, or merely another civilized illusion. There were tons of phony risks available for moral chickenshits to jerk off pretend bravery—skydiving, whitewater rafting, driving a Hummer. Reading Soldier of Fortune. Climbing a fence. Crossing against the light.
“My, that’s an introspective look,” said Collier.
“Sorry,” I said. I bolted too much single malt and almost gagged it out the wrong tube. “Andy, I think he’s for real. He’s in trouble and I helped get him there. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”
He shrugged. “If you enjoy gambling with your own arse.”
“It’s not that. It’s necessary.”
“God help us, a romantic idiot. I never would have called you that, before. But what the hell—the worst they can do is kill you, right?”
“Why are you helping us, then?”
Collier grinned. Big, honest, broad. “Because when I do things like this, dear boy, I learn things I never knew before, and sometimes reap unimagined benefits.”
“Then, I rest my case.” I folded my arms.
His grin split even wider. “You’re drunk, lad.”
I smiled back at him. “Not nearly drunk enough. Hit me again.”
“You’re dangerously close to expressing a genuine emotion,” he said. “Feels weird, doesn’t it?”
Yeah, it did. That was the really scary part.
Collier’s eyrie was halfway up Nichols Canyon, from the Hollywood side. The serpentine mountain road crested at Mulholland Drive and from there, dropped down into the San Fernando Valley. From anywhere on his tract of property, you’d think you were vacationing in some sylvan retreat or ashram, not maintaining an illusion of frontier hominess less than a five-minute drive from the heart of the tourist district—Grauman’s, the Kodak Theatre, all that.
Walking down took considerably more than five minutes. It was cooler in the hills than in what are locally called the “flats.” Damp. Morning would bring cushions of fog to compromise all the newly washed cars. I encountered several people in jogging suits or sweats, huffing uphill, or walking their dogs. They all nodded at me in cautious neighborliness, then pressed onward and forgot about me. A private security car on patrol didn’t even slow down for review. I looked more or less like I belonged here, and I wasn’t lugging anyone’s stolen silverware.
Urban noise began to surge toward me from below. Nichols Canyon elbowed onto Franklin Avenue, and suddenly, I was back in the city again. Neat trick. I felt energized from my wandering, legs thrumming, and decided to do my cardio a favor and hike all the way to Sunset Boulevard, where I bought some mints and a pack of smokes at a gas station. The smiling Albanian guy at the counter gave me a free butane lighter, and past the snacks and frozen beverages, I could see a couple of pay phone carrels outside, near the locked, customers-only restrooms.
I returned the counterman’s smile and used the advantage to talk him out of a whole fistful of pocket change. In my jacket, on one folded sheet of the dossier, were more phone numbers for Alicia Brandenberg than I had fingers. I figured her direct cell was the best first bet.
Traffic rushed past in all directions, like platelets through an arterial junction jamming up, switching lanes, suddenly busting loose, careening around each other with inches to spare. It was good cover noise; I could be calling from anywhere in the city. I fired up a cigarette, willing myself to look cool—I was Mr. Lamb, the Man from Ad.
I wished I’d felt this certain whenever I was in Vegas, because the voice that answered my very first call said, “This is Linda Grimes.”
Alias “Choral.” Bingo, blackjack, we’ve got a winner. She had answered in the middle of the third ring, as assistants are instructed to do, all business.
“Hi, Linda. Listen, I need to talk to the boss-lady.”
“Who’s calling, and what is this regarding?”
“Well, Linda, first I should say that I hope our abuse of your credit card doesn’t piss off Citibank.”
I heard her suck in a tiny breath before whispering, oh shit.
“May I call you ‘Choral’? I hope so.”
“What do you want?” There were mufflings and shufflings on her end, as if she was stuck in a crowd, looking nervously around for a sniper, trying to play normal for the company she was in.
“I want Alicia Brandenberg to drop whatever the hell she’s doing and meet with me. Right now. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important, but then, I’m not really asking.”
“I can’t do that. Listen—”
“You listen! I can see you, from where I am, but you can’t see me.” How would she know? “Here’s what I want. You can either put her on the phone right now, and watch her squirm, or you can pull her aside and talk in her ear like a good assistant, bringing up an essential item of business. Your call.”
Big exhalation. “Just a minute.”
“Twenty more seconds and I hang up.”
“Just a minute, dammit. Geez.”
I racked the phone. It felt . . . wonderful. I finished my cigarette—my first in three years—had a mint, and called her back from the drugstore pay phone across the intersection. This time, the call was snapped up on the first ring.
“Hey, Choral.”
“Jesus—why’d you hang up?”
“Yes or no?”
She frittered. “Yes, yes, goddammit, but we can’t just—”
“Yes, you can.” I kept her on the ropes, interposing. “Here we go. You know the movie theatre near what used to be the Virgin on Sunset?”
Everything in Los Angeles used to be something else. The titanic complex at Sunset and Crescent Heights had been erected on the grave of the original location of Schwab’s Drugstore to house a Virgin Megastore, which of course had gone belly-up after the turn of the century. There’s a Trader Joe’s there now. Nothing endured.
She wanted to say a dozen other things, but she said, “Yeah. Across from what used to be the Teazer.”
“Try to make the nine-thirty show of a movie called Spiderweb.”
“But what if—?”
I hung up again. I could walk to the theatre from where I was. Even stop for coffee.
Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant had also died around the time the Virgin store vacated its prime real estate. Outdoor escalators still fed up toward the movie theatre complex on the second level, but the place had a besieged, abandoned air, as though the big players had pulled out amidst conflict and disgrace. It wasn’t as populous as I would have liked; fewer crowds meant less cover. An espresso joint was tucked into one corner like an afterthought, trapped in a bustle of hazard tape. When new businesses moved into old slots, sometimes the tenants even replaced the damned sidewalks. It was cosmetic surgery for the face of the city—nips, smoothing, tightening—and it held the scary plastic sheen of the new and the transitory. Exteriors mattered. Never mind that they’d warp in sunlight or decompose in mere weeks. They were meant to be replaced again, and that obsolescence, that upkeep, had become what passed for evolution on the face of the city.
In a world such as this, how could any sane person expect to do a single job for a number of decades and then enjoy some kind of retirement where their safetie
s and investments were protected? People had to morph, too, or risk being recycled into something more useful.
It was happening to me, right now.
The person I had been was not the man who growled threats into a phone, who assigned meet-ups by force, who pushed pawns around. Who was now checking stairs and escalators for escape routes. Nope, not me.
Of course I had done each of those things before, many times, in the course of my work. But then I had enjoyed ameliorative language and the protection of business-class excuses. I was erasing my old identity. I was becoming something new, a “work in progress.”
Whether it was a skin-deep makeover—fake, false—or a fundamental change in my own DNA, I had no idea . . . but I was about to find out.
At exactly nine-twenty I saw Choral Anne Grimes and Alica Brandenberg exit the south bank of elevators directly connected to the upper level where the movie theatre was located. If there were bodyguards, they were hanging back, out of sight in public. From my view there were plenty of getaways to street level.
I handed my prebought ticket to an usher and scooted inside, ten minutes after the feature had already begun. Slap my hand, I’d even lied about the start time.
I was able to monitor the two of them most of the way. Choral was suited up in efficient evening chic and black heels. Her legs turned heads in the courtyard.
Alicia Brandenberg’s photo did not do much justice to her allure, or maybe she just naturally exuded magnetism, the way the best politicians do. She was wearing a smart suede jacket and calfskin pants; she knew how to stride in heels, almost imperiously. She led; Choral followed, or rather, kept up. They could have been wealthy, attractive mother and daughter. Alicia was wearing glasses, no doubt costly designer items. Auburn hair, restyled since her headshot. Very pale skin, probably Irish-German. Minimalist jewelry. Matte lip gloss. All top-drawer. Choral eyed the milling consumers in the forecourt and acted frustrated. Alicia kept eyes-front all the way.
I stood in the back corner near the curtains, invisible, with a full view of the multiplex auditorium. Spiderweb was a movie about double crosses. The kickoff scene took place in an airport, at night, as twenty or thirty special agents and security watchdogs try to prevent a Chinese fugitive from escaping on an outbound flight. They descend like locusts on their target . . . who turns out to be the wrong man. They reset and realize they’ve been diverted, and hustle to another terminal, where they are just in time to nail another decoy . . . as the real guy boards yet a third flight, in drag. It was one of those movies seemingly shot all at night. No bright scenes to illuminate the auditorium, at least not for half an hour or so.
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