Internecine

by David J. Schow

  Slow hiss of air; Dandine sighing into the phone, or perhaps exhaling smoke from one of his five-per-day. “Yeah, well, you could have done worse, for a tyro. Tell me the part about Alica Brandenberg.”

  “First-class monster hellbeast who is currently sleeping with both candidates for the California governorship. She knows about NORCO.”

  “Hell, NORCO probably groomed her.”

  “How’s your shoulder?”

  “Hurts like a sonofabitch,” he said.

  “How’s Collier?”

  “Clear,” said Dandine. “Vaguely amused at the drama. I thanked him and relocated. You really owe that guy a huge favor, someday.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Didn’t want to attract any flies by staying put.”

  I found I was pacing, tiger-walking the cage of Zetts’s living room, gradually and restlessly expanding my arc. Hyped-up, the way a politician must feel as district vote totals trickle in on election night.

  “Why didn’t little Choral just turn you back over to Alicia Brandenberg’s bodyguards? She must’ve had four or five, dogging her.”

  I tried to put events in order. “I guess that when she Maced me, the cops were right there on the street. Coincidence.”

  “Never discount a random factor,” said Dandine. “It makes sense. If she lost face with her boss, and delivered you as leverage toward her job and her trustworthiness, NORCO would have you by now. I wonder why she didn’t.”

  “This is kind of hard to explain, but I think she wasn’t all that keen on working for Alicia Brandenberg.” From my own view, she had begun to see just how deep the sewage was, and had begun to rethink her goals about the time she had told her boss to get fucked. “Which gives her points as a human being.”

  “Too bad she’ll never get a chance to enjoy her moral state of grace. She’s off the grid, Conrad. Disappeared. Watch the news and you’ll probably see her turn up dead, and if you’re very, very unlucky, you will be the fall guy. Prepare for that—murder suspect, dragnet, a crappy snapshot of you on TV. I know what I’m talking about. So don’t mourn her for kicking you in the balls and making you infamous.”

  My voice dried up in my throat. He could have mentioned that up-front. He had not—proving who was still in charge. “How do you know?” I said, dreading the answer.

  “Most obvious course of direct action,” he said. “You’re tailor-made to take the fall. If Choral knew about this little gubernatorial conspiracy, then she clearly knew too much, so purging her would be in the game plan already. That way, no severance, no unemployment. Economy counts. Not your fault—but you pick up the check, see?”

  My vision started to swim and I felt like puking.

  That meant that Alicia Brandenberg had been a total NORCO puppet, trained well enough to never reference her true puppeteers. They had aimed her at both candidates, Jenks and Ripkin, like a deadly Tomahawk smart missile of sexuality with no fuse. When in doubt, cover both targets, accumulate intel, then choose who you can best advantage. Her machinations had been so complicated that she required a staff, hence Choral Anne Grimes. There was a distinct possibility that Alicia had been jockeying for position, ready to take over for either Ripkin or Jenks, whoever fell first. Alicia could seduce nearly anybody, and had even succeeded in making a confidant out of Choral Anne Grimes . . . until Choral Anne broke character and got uppity as a result of being threatened by guys with guns. Me and Dandine. There was a second distinct possibility that Alicia was grooming Choral Anne as her own manipulative replacement, once she moved more visibly into the sphere of political double-dealing. God, it was an endless downward spiral, a rabbit hole filled with antipersonnel mines that never, ever got to the bottom.

  Third possibility, even weirder: Alicia had managed to spin this spiderweb all on her own, and NORCO had found out about it, and a deal had been cut with extra percentage points for initiative.

  So, in the official story version, who was supposed to be the architect of Alicia Brandenberg’s failed assassination? Answer: Jenks or Ripkin—whomever NORCO chose to discredit. It was hermetically brilliant, in its way.

  Which made Alicia Brandenberg herself the person who had hired Dandine, using enough stalking horses to cover her culpability. Hired Dandine for a murder attempt that was supposed to fail, thus nourishing her credibility.

  But why had Dandine taken the gig, if he had already bailed out of NORCO? That was one I didn’t have an answer for, and now was the wrong time to ask. He was running his own playbook, and so far I hadn’t been killed.

  But others had.

  I felt bad. I felt responsible. I wanted to take it all back. I felt like a dry dog turd in a dirt yard. I sat down, heavily, all the starch gone from my legs.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “I’ll make contact soon. I have to figure some things out, myself. You sit tight at Zetts’s. Don’t even look out the window.”

  Click; he was gone, just like that.

  Which meant Zetts’s assignment was to make sure I did nothing. Which meant that I was still a prisoner. The exterior doors of his home, I now noted, were deadbolted by keyed locks from the inside. The windows were barred. And Zetts probably had an equalizer or two in reserve, just in case I got rowdy.

  Zetts was in the kitchen. “What’s the word, Thunderbird?”

  “We wait,” I said.

  “I got frozen pizza. Lots of stuff on the tube.”

  “Yeah.” I felt hopelessly out of the loop—superceded, extracted, impotent, and pointless. This was what normal people called despair.

  In the cramped corridor leading to Zetts’s bathroom, a hallway composed mostly of doorways, I saw one-by-six pine planks had been laid across the tops of the door moldings to form quick and dirty shelves that held wall-to-wall paperbacks. Zetts had every single Doc Savage book in print. The newest reprint was fifteen years old; the oldest, older than Zetts by a decade. Doc Savage, Promethean superhero of the thirties and forties. The Man of Bronze. By Lester Dent, and his cronies, writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson.

  Nobody was who they said they were.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, holding up a thin copy of one of the adventures (fans in the know called them “supersagas”) titled Death in Silver. “How do you even know about these?”

  Zetts was pulling on another beer. “Got the whole set off eBay,” he said, rather pleased with himself. “I like ’em. They’re fun to read. They’re easy to read. And Doc always wins.”

  Blackmail is such a vital industry in Mexico that they have hostage hotels. For five hundred dollars per night, faceless men will keep your kidnap victim in a locked room with no escape options, no weak links in the chain. Fed and watered, provisioned with a bed, bathroom, and TV set, bottled up beyond the reach of the world.

  The hostage hotel is hermetically secure. Some are in remote locations, others, right in the middle of Mexico City. The police have been bribed into ignorance. El Cañonazo is an enormous part of the Mexican economy, so much so that without all the corruption, the state itself would collapse. Every week or so, some minor celebrity’s kid or politician’s grandpa is abducted; about half the time it is somebody vaguely newsworthy, which feeds the fever-pitch hysteria of tabloid reporters. Usually the victims (Dandine would call them clients) of such an exercise only lose two or three fingers before the targets stop fucking around and pony up the cash everyone knows they possess. A sense of general public resentment underlies the drama; sympathy for the plight, yet resentment toward the haves from the have-nots. How dare you have more money than me? See what it gets you? Regional TV news treats it all like a lurid game show, showcasing the returned victims, who invariably smile at the camera and display their mutilated hands, often still bloody or mummified in soaked bandages.

  You think: If Mexico has business-planned it so well on the entry-level, what would the whole enterprise be like with ready cash and resources? Americans still preferred to live in a fairyland where g
raft was publicly condemned as a backroom aberration, not an open, inevitable, necessary evil for doing business.

  (Remember that country? The one whose flag flew every night when TV stations ended their broadcast day, back when freedom of speech was more vital than political correctitude? When the Berlin Wall was still standing, and there was no such word as downsizing? Yeah, that country . . . before it became East Berlin West.)

  Dandine could have stashed you under the stewardship of Zetts two days ago, but did not. Why? You conclude that Dandine had: (1) been honest in his urge to unload secret stuff on some outsider, or, more likely (2) wanted to expose you to danger in order to convince you that his rattle about NORCO was real, so that (3) you’d buy his direction with less question, feeling unmoored and out of your element. The paradigm of the babe in the woods is supposed to engender sympathy and warn against naivete. The poor dupe in the hostage hotel is a depletable resource that can be quickly bartered for cash. So what is the lesson, here—what is the goal?

  Your golden rule is make the customer sell himself, always advantaging their basic greed, weakness, or self-interest. You’re just there to help them get whatever they already want. You just make them more honest, and you are almost never disappointed. Greed, weakness, and self-interest are the baseline for all human behavior.

  You let the hot water in Zetts’s adequate shower pound your scalp. It feels good to wash off the experience of jail and send it down to meet the sewer . . . even if you’re still somebody’s inmate, agenda unknown. You consider your fingers, and what it might take to keep them.

  Dandine has not surfaced. He has not raced down to hold your hand because it was not necessary. Zetts has gotten you out, and that was all the news Dandine was interested in at this moment. You’ll see Dandine again when it is time to do something new, something further, either to compound an elaborate network of lies, or to bring the drama, real or not, closer to its conclusion. Even though, right now, all you want to do is sleep for a week.

  “Let me show you something.” Zetts beckoned from the dim recess of what I presumed was his bedroom. Toweled off and temporarily installed in one of my host’s black T-shirts (silkscreened with a pink pussycat and the logo GAY MAFIA MEMBER), barefoot, and wearing my jail trousers, I entered the aquarium glow of Zetts’s computer kingdom. The bed, shoved into a corner and perpetually unmade, was an afterthought. The real deal, here, was the monitors, keyboards, and hard drives. It figured.

  He peered at my face. “You shave?”

  “Yeah.” It had been another way to scrape off the past day. My chin was smooth again. “So?”

  “You, uh, didn’t, like use the beard trimmer, I hope.”

  “No.”

  “I’m just saying . . . um, ’cos I tried using that thing to trim my pubes, and I, uh, kinda shredded my scrotum a little bit.” He opened up a metal folding chair for me. It had FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH written on the back in Magic Marker.

  I closed my eyes, trying to picture his grooming regimen. “Why did you do that?”

  His main monitor was opened up to an Internet browser. After a couple of load seconds, an adult homepage displayed itself, all facial come shots and glistening genitalia. “Because that’s what she likes,” Zetts said. He pointed.

  A woman appeared on-screen. A naked hooter queen with that beach movie expression of sizzling intellect. She moaned in a repeat cycle as she jammed a gigantic cucumber in and out of her photo-real vagina, cadenced as a windup toy.

  “That’s Rebecca,” said Zetts. “My virtual girlfriend.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Pause. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Hey, it’s not like I get much of a chance to lounge at the coffee boutique and scope chicks with laptops, fuckin poetry books, brah. Look at the shit I do. Not much window there for work-related love affairs. No MOAS.”

  “Mo’ ass?”

  “No—M-O-A-S. Minimized Option Attraction Syndrome. Some chicks look better to you if they’re the only chicks you’re ever around, like, in a work environment.”

  Like Katy Burgess, at Kroeger, for example. Moonstruck romantic that I am, I wondered if I would ever see her again.

  “But compare them to the outside world product, and whoooo let the dogs out, ya hear that? Now, Beckah here, she can do things. She comes with a hardline voice person to, y’know, get your juices flowing, live, one-on-one.”

  “On the phone, you mean.”

  “Fuckin-A on the phone. Safe sex, dude. But anyway, that ain’t what I wanted to show you.”

  “You tried to shave your pubic hair with a clipper because an animated Internet girl with a real, live phone voice told you to?”

  He bounced a surly look off me. “This is the twenty-first century, blood. Never mind. You wanted to know about NORCO, right?”

  “Oh, geez, I should have thought of that right away,” I said. “Just go to the NORCO Web site.”

  “Even people who don’t advertise need a database,” said Zetts. “Now, check this out; you can’t do this on ordinary wireless or even a cable modem or DSL. Has to be a strong-ass digital signal, uplinked to a satellite.” He devoted his full attention to entering a URL, which popped up in the proper window:

  http//:www.domainhost@neupixel.com/index/html

  When he hit RETURN, the www part disappeared from the URL.

  “That’s when it happened,” he said. “When they modified the uniform resource locator because people got tired of manually typing superlong addresses. Now you can just enter the domain name and it routes automatically. Systems always compress; it’s like an abbreviation of what’s already an abbreviation that sends the same information. One, two, three—protocol, domain name, and hierarchical file name.”

  “That’s when what happened?”

  “Clone system, based on mirrored signals.”

  “Please,” I said. “My headache wants to come back and I don’t have time to run out and get a fucking nerd degree.”

  “Just watch.” He blanked the URL from the window and typed:

  h/t/t/p/:::access

  The drive noodled for a bit—that “searching” sound which, for me, usually indicated the thing was about to crash. What displayed next was no surprise:

  ERROR = 404 DOES NOT EXIST/NOT ON SERVER

  Zetts checked his watch (a no-frills Seiko), counted off thirty seconds, then typed:

  Route2access:::portal753690

  The computer did not crash. It did not say The Finder Needs Your Attention or that anything had “unexpectedly quit.” Instead, there came a barber-pole roll bar and the legend:

  . . . connecting . . .

  The new URL that appeared was a complex string of characters, symbols, and numerals that ran right off the menu window. Zetts keyed to starboard to show it to me. “See? It’s like two feet long.”

  “What is it?”

  “Internets within the Internet,” he said. “Webs inside the Web, like a subterranean data network. The Internet is like a venetian blind—you twirl the thingie, and it looks like a solid barrier. Look at it at an angle, and all you see is cracks, provided by the illusion of solidity.”

  I had thought of the venetian blind metaphor myself, a day earlier. It was disorienting, as though Zetts had been briefed on my inner musings.

  “Ever get cable TV?” he said.

  “Once.” Way back during the Bronze Age.

  “Yeah, right, well, that co-ax they strung into your house is capable of carrying like a hundred times the signal needed for mere TV. The Internet is like that, too, but it would be like trying to see individual molecules in a solid object. A whole big gang of like untapped potential.” He pointed at the screen, which now showed a simple white box with a subwindow headed SUBMIT INQUIRY and blinked with the persistence of a tapping foot.

  “So . . .” He scooted back from his berth, offering the keyboard to me.

  I typed NORCO. The screen shot back AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED/LOGIN. “Strike One,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Just wait, dude. Jesus.” Zetts leaned in and typed NAKEDAPE21, all caps. “Dandine got this from some guy on the inside.”

  NORCO (NORTH AMERICAN CONSULTANCY, 1990– 98) WELCOME, NAKEDAPE21

  A long homepage menu flowered beneath this. Corporate overview. Business plan. Profit history by quarter. Awards and commendations. Resources.

  “All bullshit,” said Zetts. “Designed to bore you to death if you actually poke in and read it.”

  I thought of the labyrinthine language of contracts the thickness of a phone book and weight of a dead Rottweiler. Of clauses and codicils, riders and warranties. I thought of people whose tax returns ran to 670 bound pages per year (not me, but I did know a few), none of it good subway reading. After the first few lines, you just naturally glaze over. On our planet, Earth, everyone is usually so busy talking that no one actually pays real attention to anyone else. Each talker merely awaits the next lull in the tirade, so he or she can interpose with what they were talking about already, anyway. This catacomb of the Internet was like that—capable of being ignored in plain sight.

  “People are dumb and lazy,” said Zetts. “They scream about their privacy being invaded, about Big Brother watching them, and the Internet comes along, and whaddaya know—those same people give up all their vital stats voluntarily. Which is the only way true surveillance could ever work, since there will never be enough warm bodies, or man-hours, to keep track of everybody else in a meaningful way. Like, now the government can flag anybody they want by just using a keyword. People put their fucking diaries online, for god’s sake.”

  “People who feel invisible want attention,” I said. I found that I wanted less, as my life wore on.

  “Anywhoo, that’s the smoke,” he said. “Here’s the fire.” He hit the FUNCTION/ESCAPE keys together and I almost stopped him. All home computers need a key that reads take it back. Think of all the times you’ve hit the wrong thing at the right time and lost an hour of unsaved work, or all the times your machine took you someplace you did not wish to go, due to a mis-stroke. Take it back.