Internecine

by David J. Schow

  “Thank you, Marion.”

  I must have looked pretty submissive, one hand hoisting me into doggie position, the other clamped on my macerated ear. It was absurd, but I could almost see up Alicia Brandenberg’s brief skirt from my vantage.

  The bald behemoth “helped” me into the chair with a complete lack of grace. I tried to will my head not to loll.

  Alicia Brandenberg was wearing black today. Black turtleneck, black leather skirt of triple-dyed lambhide. Black belt. Minimal ornamentation that looked like black pearls. “That was for scaring the shit out of me last night,” she said, “and for embarrassing me in front of underlings. A no-no.”

  There were dots of blood on my hand. Blood was leaking out of my ear. If my ear was still on the side of my head, which felt anesthetized—that scary numbness that engulfs your skull if you stay horizontal too long at the dentist, and the xylocaine starts gravitating.

  She stood before me, arms folded beneath her breasts. She blew out a nasal breath of disgust. “Now, as for what you did to little Choral . . .”

  My hackles scared up. I could feel the thick presence of my chaperone moving in on me for another disciplinary wallop. “Wait!” I ducked instinctively. There he was, all right, fist cocked and everything. “Wait! I need my other ear, lady, unless you’re going to teach me hand signals!”

  “Marion.” She waved him off. He solidified into an at-ease stance about two feet behind me, a golem of retribution short-stopped by a magical command.

  I was still watching him. “Marion?”

  “Mr. Maddox,” said Alicia, keeping her distance, as though I smelled bad. She fired up a dark Sobranie; the smoke that unreeled from it seemed thin and toxic. “Since you’re acting idiotic, I’ll presume you need things explained to you. But no one owes you any such explanation. I am doing you a favor, since you did me the courtesy of delivering yourself. That’s quite strategic, really—you knew you could not get past my security, so you made yourself visible and let them bring you to me.”

  I wanted to say something by way of comeback. You know, Your gratitude knows no bounds. Oh, I guess I owe you a favor now. But my mouth wouldn’t work right, and my ear was roaring. Yes, to other eyes it might appear that I had gotten to Alicia Brandenberg quite easily . . . except now I had special status, and I was just beginning to realize that counted for something incalculable, in the same way a nightclub goon knows to let you past the rope, cutting you ahead of the riffraff.

  “Do you want an aspirin or something? I don’t have all day. Marion, get him a goddamned aspirin.”

  “What happened to Choral?” I said.

  She almost laughed. “Why, Mr. Maddox—you raped and murdered her.”

  There was literally no comeback in the universe I could summon for that one. I swallowed about six times; I could feel my throat swelling up.

  She sucked strength from her imported ciggie. “You fucked up my Plan A, Mr. Maddox. So I went to Plan B. God, I almost feel sorry for you; you’re so out of the loop. But pity is wasted on the walking dead, isn’t it? Listen closely, the thing you think you’re part of? Over. Done. Terminated. Finished.”

  “And now we’re in . . . Plan B?”

  “Good boy.” No doggie treat was forthcoming.

  “What does Plan B have happening to me?”

  “It’s your headache now, or will be shortly. Consider it payback for the bad taste you demonstrated by involving yourself.”

  Marion the bodyguard returned with a bottle of aspirin and left it on the service cart, next to the coffee.

  “Can I have some water?”

  Alicia glanced at her watch. Marion poured from a carafe of sparkling water and I squeezed down five bitter pills. “Hard to believe,” I said, pitched so Alicia could “overhear” my doubt.

  She opened her hands like an impatient teacher. “Well?”

  “I can’t believe this all started with you, that you set this all up. A fake hit on yourself to massage the sympathy poll on whichever of your bed-buddies proves more viable.”

  “I’ll take it that’s the version of the story you got,” she said, unruffled. “Don’t tell me I have to explain politics to you, now. You are naive, my dear. Listen carefully: Any professional politician with an ounce of competence always looks like he’s losing his hair and has skin cancer. Zero charisma, and charisma equals sex, and sex is a no-no. That’s why they have platoons of geeks to invent images for them, to fabricate personalities, because they have no personalities. It’s all manufactured. It’s all sell.” She paused. “You with me, so far?”

  “I figure you’ll come to a point eventually,” I said, still hurting.

  “Did Choral Anne Grimes spin you the sex-tape fantasy?” she asked, narrowing her gaze and not liking what she perceived. “Yeah, she did, didn’t she? It’s a great shorthand for getting the attention; but you know what? It has zero barter value. Nobody cares who fucks whom anymore. It is the expected indiscretion, you see? Predictable. These days the public needs unpredictable sins to curry their outrage. Sex tapes only have power if you can scare or control the people in the tapes, not the public at large. Joe Sixpack and Joanne BabyFactory need larger transgressions to justify their reactionary no-vote because now they just assume there’s always some kind of hanky-panky, which follows from the assumption that their elected representatives are all corrupt—sort of the same way citizens view the police, if they have any sense left.”

  Her disdainful superiority was making my ass hurt. “Still with you,” I said, not caring.

  She shook her head. “Vice president of advertising, huh? Impossible. It’s a great cover, though. I’ve seen your travel records. Four or five hops to Europe, two dozen cross-country jumps, frequent flyer miles up the waz, couple of days at each stop? I’ve even spoken to Burt Kroeger about you. About your attempts to sabotage Katy Burgess’s campaign when she wouldn’t sleep with you? You’re going to have to find a new cover identity, Mr. . . . uh, Maddox?”

  The rancid fabrication she was building toward could certainly hold enough water to occupy me for the next twenty years, before a chance of parole. “You mean the way Jenks pulled a shape-change and zap, he’s a politician?”

  “That was done perfectly legally,” she said, all cool. “Unlike attempted blackmail. Which reminds me—there is a tape you’d be more interested in. A recording of your threats, hissed at me in that dreary mall. Just so you know.”

  “Inadmissible evidence.” I knew that much without homework.

  “Kidnapping. You took her hostage. In a minute you’ll be a wanted man, and I’ve got all the bodyguards.” She sure did act like someone who always got her way.

  “Don’t believe everything you see on the news.”

  She actually smiled, for the first time, I think. “Why, Mr. Maddox—they couldn’t put it on TV if it wasn’t real. And now, you’ve arrived to harm me. Stalking. Premeditation. You were bound to show your face to me, eventually.”

  She was spot-on. But if she was just waiting around to score points off me, why had I been escorted up here . . . and not to the nearest hanging judge, the handiest electric chair?

  Because she was in the dark, too.

  “You know the quickest way to get rid of you?” she said.

  My gaze followed hers to the balcony. The street was so far down it was out of focus. I could count Die Hard floors all the way until I splattered like a 170-pound cannelloni dropped twenty stories.

  She shook her head again, with a sinister glint in her eyes. “Let you go. I’d be surprised if you last another day out in the real world.”

  “Are those my NORCO odds?”

  “Oh.” She chuckled. “That fictional, all-powerful shadow organization that you believe secretly runs everything? If I were you, I’d jump out that window voluntarily, or remember where you got that little story from.”

  Listen to yourself, I told myself. Victimized by sooper-secret clandestine ops, wrongfully pilloried, a deer in the headlights of media. Poor ba
by.

  “You don’t have a chance, either,” I said, trying to follow her tactic of switching tracks. “There’s no stronger election pitch money can buy than saying, ‘my governor can kick your governor’s ass.’ ”

  “Almost true,” she said. “And if we’d had things in place when our last governor became a pariah . . . well, who knew, right? And we couldn’t scare up enough petty cash to buy his replacement. But those people out there—that network share, that lowest common denominator, that majority vote—they love the idea of empowerment. Up by the bootstraps. So we go for that other great American pitch, the underdog. We put Rocky up against the Terminator. But, for myself, I am in love with the American idea of overkill, and we don’t know yet which candidate will accrue the most public favor.”

  “So you’re just serving the country.”

  “In my modest way, yes.”

  “But none of this was your idea.”

  “That’s inappropriate.” She scowled.

  I ran Andrew Collier’s grocery list of alternatives through my memory. Alicia wasn’t running anything except her own mission, here, with NORCO’s help. She had her eye on the top of the ladder, though. Her profession was seduction followed by sacrifice.

  She would never admit that to the likes of me, though, which made her unreachable, a glacier. I turned back to the expressionless bodyguard. “Is your name really Marion?” I said.

  His features thunderclouded for a moment, then he hardened up and said, “Yeah. Just like John muthafuckin’ Wayne.”

  I gave him my lame impersonation of the Duke: “Truly this waz da Son ’a Godd.”

  I could see him fighting to stifle a grin, and that’s when I knew I had a gnat’s chance. Nearby on the bar service tray was a gas cork-popper—one of those cartridge-fed deals with a shaft like an icepick. Inside the cartridge was enough ozone-depleting refrigerant to open about seventy bottles . . . or kill maybe ten people if your aim was true. If I could get a grab on it . . .

  But I saw Marion see me seeing it, and he picked it up himself with a strange glint in his gaze, as though he’d just had an inspiration.

  Then he sacked my head in a plastic bag until I blacked out on my own carbon dioxide. Through the bag I heard Alica say, “Take him to Room 2250.”

  The pain brought me back.

  My pants were down and one of my testicles was bleeding.

  Then I saw Marion holding the hypodermic needle.

  It held about 30 cc’s of cloudy fluid.

  Then I realized how they planned to make the whole “rape” aspect of Choral Anne Grimes’s death pass forensic muster.

  I was about to wonder how they were going to hide the needle puncture in my left ball when I saw Marion holding that goddamned tetrafluoroethane cork-popper.

  “It’ll be a defensive stab wound,” he said with a grin. “Y’know, as she was fighting you off.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said like an idiot.

  “Oh yeah.” He smiled entirely too much. “It’s the gig. Nothing personal. But today it sure sucks to be you.”

  “Hurry up,” came Alicia’s voice from the anonymous hotel bedroom. “She’s getting cold.”

  The room was a half-suite, and not more than ten feet away laid the mortal remains of Linda Grimes, a.k.a. Choral Anne. Not beaten to death by me, although I was positive the blood on my newly abraded knuckles would match up, thanks to Marion’s catalogue of talents. This man was going to use a turkey baster or something on her corpse, then finish me off with “defensive stab wounds.”

  What a riot.

  I was frozen and sweating, trying to will myself to move, take some action, do some damned thing, guts plummeting, vomit rising. So much for hope.

  That’s when Marion fell across me like a clumsy lover, emitting a precious little oral fart of a woofing sound as his last gasp on earth.

  To her credit, Alicia was already halfway out of the bedroom, aiming a compact, nickel-plated pistol, but a single shot kissed her forehead dead center, and she dropped without a noise. One of her shoes cocked askew and I could finally see her underwear.

  Dandine was standing there wearing an ill-fitting bellboy’s getup.

  Dandine sucked air through his teeth. “Dammit, I wish I hadn’t had to do that so quick.” He was already disrobing, trying to wrestle his arm sling around the bellboy’s outfit. “Pull your pants the rest of the way off,” he told me. “Put this on or we don’t have a hope in hell of getting out of here.”

  1994/July 13: I score a big hit on the up-and-coming roster, and/or: I sacrifice a friend to climb the ladder.

  Chet Favreaux has become the kind of buddy you should have had in high school, but time and geoposition had other plans, so when you meet at a trade show for tech toys, it’s like reconnecting with a long-lost brother, the kind you meet for the first time, unexpectedly. Long story short: You’re both attracted to the same woman, a busty Irish lass named Kendra. You use your resentment of this vague betrayal to swipe a few ideas Chet has brainstormed with you on his drafting table. He wants to break ice as an architect, you want to get a leg up in advertising, and you submit the ideas you have purloined from him to Burt Kroeger, at the agency. Chet’s somewhat wounded phone call comes a year later, when he actually sees the ads in magazines. Kendra is history; she slept with both of you, Chet first. Now she’s vanished to obscurity and child-rearing in some unmemorable Midwestern state. Chet says he doesn’t care about the goddamned ads, the stupid drawings; he just wants to know what happened to make you stop calling. He is willing to forgive harsh words spoken in anger. You give him smoothly architectured placation talk, short-stop his pain . . . and never call him again, as you get on with your new, improved life.

  Sometimes, modest sacrifices are justified.

  Scratch “modest” and just make that “sacrifices.” I don’t know what made me flash on Chet Favreaux as I was scrambling to disrobe. I haven’t thought about that guy for, well, over a decade. No idea whatever became of him. He had left the ad business and gone back East somewhere; something to do with his father’s business, leaving the shark tank behind, yadda-yadda. I didn’t miss him or anything. He’d served his purpose for me. The world is an arena, and the one sight you don’t want to see is a thumb pointing toward the ground.

  None of this dunning personal history was spelled out in exact language on paper. But if somebody had access to my hidden dossier, they might be able to draw conclusions about my character from it. Somebody like Dandine, for instance, might conclude that I would act a certain way when cornered, either personally or professionally.

  Nobody had had enough downtime for that sort of pat solution to apply, though. It was tempting but highly unlikely.

  The cork-popper was sticking out of the base of Marion’s neck, little fizzy red bubbles accreting around the penetration point. He was deader than God. Ditto his teammate, in the outside room. Dandine had put them down without a noise; the whole bellboy ruse was probably just window dressing. Or maybe he needed a way to carry the outfit up here for me, while keeping his gun hand free. My waistline battled the trousers that Dandine had just shucked. We now shared the suite with four dead bodies, one of which we would shortly be tossing out the window from above the twentieth floor.

  “Move it, lardass,” Dandine said, after a thorough and professional once-over of the premises. “Jeezum-pete; I can’t leave you alone for a fucking minute.”

  He ignored the corpses. I couldn’t not notice them. Sixty seconds ago, three of them had been breathing. He registered my expression, or perhaps, my hesitation.

  “Don’t go all moral on me,” he warned.

  I couldn’t help blurting it out: “Have you seen my file? The secret one? The one Zetts knows how to access?”

  “Conrad, I haven’t had time for homework. Sure, I know about the system. If we’re alive half an hour from now, maybe you can walk me through the transgressions of your life, but not now.”

  He withdrew the cork-popper fr
om Marion’s spine. It made a little fsssss noise of retreat.

  I got dressed in an ill-fitting hurry. Welcome to the service industry. Dandine peeled Marion, the neater of the two male kills. The clothes were twice his size but he somehow made the fit pass muster. Plenty of room to hide . . . guns and things. Like the weapon he’d used, an automatic with a lot of weight on the front end; boxy, vented and baffled. He broke it down and proceeded to stash parts in pockets.

  I watched him snatch up Alicia’s pistol and check the magazine, then swap out the barrels. He had killed the bodyguards with the same make and caliber, only now it was Alicia’s gun that would tell the ballistic lie.

  “Is Zetts okay?” I said.

  “Later. Help me lift this sonovabitch.” Hoisting Marion’s clonelike partner, by the arms, to a standing position was obviously less easy than teaching a sofa to waltz. Together, we got him vertical—your standard crucifixion pose. He remained dead. Blood had trickled from both ears to ruin his shirt sufficiently against Dandine’s use. His eyes were open, sightless, their sclera crimsoned.

  “Police are supposed to be coming,” I said, grunting. The dead guy tipped a gym scale at 300, easy, and most of it was above the waist at about 10 percent body fat.

  “That’s not who we need to worry about.” Dandine bumped his chin against air, indicating we should haul our load toward the balcony—the one from which I thought I was going to swan-dive under duress, lifetimes earlier, this same day.

  “They had me in another room . . .”

  “I know. That made me almost too late.”

  “We have to go back there.”

  “For god’s sake, why? Haven’t you gone rogue enough? Making shit up yourself and, uhh . . . !” He had to rehoist our silent partner. “. . . floundering around in the deep end of the pool, when you can’t fucking swim?”

  I thought of all the movie trailers I’d ever seen: He’s a cop on the edge who plays by his own rules. There’s just one problem . . .

  Problem was, that guy wasn’t me. But some advertising dude had thought up all that hard sell, and it sure went down smooth as warm molasses. People never pay any real attention to that stuff, right?