Internecine

by David J. Schow

  “No.”

  “They had their hardware boxed and baffled.”

  “English, please?”

  “They used silencers and cartridge-snaggers, like I used back at the hotel. I doubt if anybody upstairs heard anybody downstairs getting bagged. This ain’t happening; it’s over.” He stowed his piece as the first incoming cruiser rutted the gravel outside in a speed-stop. “Put on your sunglasses,” he said.

  “Like at Varga’s?” I said.

  “Just like at Varga’s.”

  There was almost enough overcast daylight left to get away with it, too; I could always claim my shades were prescription, but if we got into chitchat on that depth . . .

  I hung back while Dandine strolled right into the muzzle view of several riot guns and more than a few drawn police .357s. He had never intended to pull a gun. He was going to pull rank instead. You had to admire the sheer balls on the guy.

  “Thompson, NSA,” he announced, flashing his perfect credentials. I heard somebody shout stand down. The same voice, the shouter, said, “Captain Ramses.”

  By the time I got to the door, they were already shaking hands. Captain Ramses had brought a small army for his armed response, plus a point man in full-bore SWAT Kevlar, and a K9 shepherd. Ramses made a hand sign and the cops stashed their hardware, relieved at not taking fire, irritated at not getting to discharge. An LAPD chopper had settled into a hover pattern overhead, thrumming the air.

  “That’s Lamb,” he said, jerking a thumb toward me. I did my tough-guy single nod and my glasses slid down my nose. Slick. One of the uniformed cops called in a Code 4 from the location; he said “location” instead of “scene,” as though he was talking about a movie shoot.

  “Whatever your call was,” said Dandine, “This was no burglary. Captain, I’m going to have to ask for your discretion on this, and possibly your judgment. Because I believe we’ve really got a terrorist incident on our hands, right here in the middle of where we’re not supposed to worry about stuff like that.”

  “Copy that,” said the captain, playing hardcase, all squint and burly set of jaw. He’d seen worse. He eyed Dandine’s sling. “What happened to you?”

  “Torn rotator cuff,” Dandine said.

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Run a jacket on every one of those dead bodies in there and you’ll find Middle Eastern passports for the lot. You can get an evidence van up here double-quick, but that won’t change the prognosis. We may be looking at a Yellow Alert for Beverly Hills, and I’m not talking about missing toddlers, if you catch my meaning.”

  Captain Ramses knew the ramifications. “Shit,” he whispered, indicating what his workday had become.

  “Every one of your men will have to be debriefed,” Dandine said. “Whoever shot up this place wasn’t making a pit stop after the Beverly Hills Gun Club, am I right?”

  “Oh, thank god, thank god! Oh, god! Oh, no—”

  We heard some antique porcelain tchotchke in the house crash into powder as it was blundered from a pedestal.

  “Oh . . . god, Esteban, god, god, they’re all dead!”

  “Somebody religious?” said Dandine.

  Half the response team realigned their weapons on the front door as a disheveled man plummeted out at a dead stumble. His shirt was untucked, there was an unseemly rip in the shoulder of his tailored suit, his face was bright red, and he walked clop-footed, as though he had forgotten how. His clothing was smudged with dust and dirt, and he only seemed partially aware of us, his rheumy blue eyes saccading across us too many times. His hands were jittering with shock, which was deadly, because one of them held a nickel-plated revolver, a whore’s gun that had probably spent most of its life in a drawer.

  This, then, was the estimable Theodore Ripkin.

  “Stand down!” Ramses shouted toward his men. The presence of the helicopter pretty much necessitated that everyone shout. “Sir—I’m going to ask you to stop right where you’re standing, and place that weapon on the deck. I do mean right now.”

  Ripkin skidded to a halt as though he’d smacked into an invisible barrier. “Oh! Oh! Yes! Of course! I—oh, thank god you men are here, thank god—”

  “He’s back on the God thing again,” Dandine said to me in aside, already disgusted with the specimen before us.

  Ripkin had the kind of big, weathered hands that always appeared strangulated by shirt cuffs. They were red, too, as though he suffered some circulatory problem. He bent butler-style and relinquished his gun, gingerly, as though it was a bomb about to detonate.

  “Did you call us, sir?” said Ramses.

  “What? Yes! Yes! Cellphone! My god, my god . . . they came in these vans, they were all over the grounds before . . . oh my god, they’ve murdered Esteban, they’ve killed them alllll . . .” His voice degenerated into a bray as he sank to his knees. Tears tracked his face.

  “Jesus fucking christ,” said Dandine.

  Ripkin’s glasses were thumbprinty and skewed. He plowed one hand backward through stone-white hair, which he still had most of. His roseate complexion made the fine, ivory hair pop. It was stark, unnatural. He tried to bury his face in his hands in sorrow, as no doubt he had observed people did when genuinely afraid or immolated by grief. Ramses collected the pistol. He tried to help Ripkin to stand, but Ripkin twisted away and swatted the hand, like a surly child.

  “Try to tell us what happened, sir.”

  “No security, none!” Ripkin blubbered. “Bodyguards all dead! They were everywhere, oh, god, they were shooting everyone, oh my god! I ran, I hid, I had to, don’t you see?”

  Dandine stepped in. “Where did you hide?” His expression told me that he was not accustomed to his searches coming up dry, or worse, unprofessional.

  “Room,” Ripkin said, husking air, dicing his words into moist, breathy chunks. “Special room.”

  “Like a panic room?”

  Ripkin gulped more air and tried to find his persona. “More like a goddamned closet. Small. Off the upstairs bathroom. Nobody knows—”

  “I checked the upstairs bathrooms,” said Dandine, with a petulance only I could appreciate. “All four of them.”

  “No, it’s . . . you can’t see it . . . nobody knows it’s there . . . it’s inside the shower stall . . . we never use that one . . . special . . . custom . . .”

  Dandine rolled his eyes. “You ran away to a hide you had in the shower, with a gun?”

  “They didn’t see me . . . I saw ’em through the window . . .”

  “And you ran and hid. With a gun.”

  Obviously, Dandine was going to need this explained to him, at length, and at the risk of huffing away our flimsy cover. I stepped around him and spoke to Captain Ramses. “Captain, if you don’t mind, I need this man for two seconds.”

  Captain Ramses did what I hoped, and cleared a space in deference to my imaginary rank. There was no time so I got right in Rifkin’s face. I wanted to start slapping him, exactly the same way Dandine had wanted to slap me moments before. No time, no time for anything.

  “Mr. Rifkin,” I said, trying to keep my pot from boiling again. “NORCO did this. Tell me if you know NORCO did this.”

  “What?” said the man who had run away and hid with a gun while everyone else in his house was getting exterminated. “Who?”

  His blue eyes had gone bloodshot, and in that very instant I knew I was looking into the eyes of a man who had never heard of some secret cabal called NORCO. My lungs seemed to compress. The guy was a still-living dead end. All he had ever done was get seduced by Alicia Brandenberg.

  Dandine saw the reflex distress in my expression, and quickly stepped in, keeping Captain Ramses’s attention off of me. “I think this gentleman requires protective custody, Captain . . . instead of exposure, out here in the open.”

  That jolted Ramses back to his playbook. “All right!” he yelled at his men, pointing. “You two men, escort! You two—wingmen. Keep him low in the vehicle! Get him out of here, now!”
/>   One officer hustled in and threw a SWAT vest over Ripkin’s head. Cops swarmed him like pod people.

  “Nothing he can tell us here that he can’t tell us at the station,” said Ramses. “Thanks.”

  It was nothing. Really. It really was nothing.

  “How’d you fellas get here ahead of us?” asked Ramses.

  “Dumb luck. I caught your air and was closer.”

  If Ramses checked our car for a radio, we were sunk. But he deferred to the NSA as though he was used to doing it. He and Dandine went ’round and ’round a bit more, then we escaped in a cloud of bullshit. Our work here is done, stout sidekick.

  We couldn’t clear the drive fast enough. We hit Benedict Canyon and Dandine spurred the beige Town Car north. “I know one damned thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That guy back there really is Ripkin, right? I mean, he’s not like a plant, or a double—somebody pretending to be Ripkin?”

  “That’s Ripkin, believe it or don’t. One of our great leadership hopes for the future. And he doesn’t know a damned thing about the shit you and I are in. That guy is innocent of just about . . . everything relevant.”

  “How did you know that?” said Dandine.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I thought of the information sinking into my brain and percolating down through the layers of fissures until it popped a red flag. “I just looked at the guy and it was obvious. Plus, he had no idea in hell who either of us were. If he was in bed with NORCO, he’d know; he would have reacted. If he was in bed with NORCO, then who sent the cleanup crew to his house, and why?”

  “That’s good,” said Dandine. “You’re learning.” Then he glanced past the tint layer on the upper windshield. “Fuck!”

  I shed the sunglasses because they still pinched my not-completely recovered head. Because it was now dark. “What?”

  “Goddamned helicopter. It’s following us.”

  I kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t have to ask who one more time.

  I knew other things without saying, too. I knew that tracker satellites could only look straight down from Earth orbit, but if the guys in the helo were sharp, they might already have made our stolen plates, or gotten them from one of Captain Ramses’s eagle-eyed crew. I knew we were technically in violation of the Benedict Canyon speed limit. I knew Dandine was formulating a plan I probably would not enjoy.

  Nothing I knew seemed useful or applicable, anymore. Right past the tip of my nose, the whole world had changed. I needed to shift the balance, and at least delude myself in thinking I had some sort of control. A grip. Cards to play.

  “Stop looking up,” Dandine said, as he blew the stoplight and careened the car onto Mulholland. We were riding the spine of the snake, now, twisting and turning on the backbone of the Santa Monica ridge, the territory of scenic overlooks in both directions. Make-out spots. The ribbon of road where rich guys came to blow out high-performance driving machines, and park rangers waited in Jeeps to dole out speeding tickets.

  Dandine edged the car up to sixty per. In these hills, sixty felt like ninety-five, and there were abundant cutbacks and hairpins, any one of which could shoot us out into space, where we would prove less than weightless. Up here, chances were good that we might round a turn at high speed and paste a deer, or a family of coyotes. Chances were better and more dangerous at night, and as we flew west on this essentially rural road, Dandine was forced to use our high beams. The pursuit ’copter easily paced us, sporadically nailing the Town Car in a UFO-abductee circle of frozen blue light from above.

  “Seat belt,” said Dandine, unnecessarily.

  “This is stupid! This is a car chase, and we’re the only fucking car!”

  Brief pause to taste the meat of my own heart, as it tried to eject, blocking my throat. Dandine had chosen to fade past an SUV dawdling along ahead of us at the legal limit. To pass it on the right side, because we hit a switchback that made the oncoming turn invisible. Dandine applied the brakes for a controlled skid when we hit the dirt shoulder. I slammed both eyes shut and stupidly braced against the dash, imagining impact, fire, my funeral. The khaki-colored Jeep Liberty spun out after getting a macro view of our left rear bumper. The shoulder was not guardrailed and we missed kissing the edge of the cliff by two, maybe two and a half feet. We whip-cracked back onto the pavement and all I could see aft was a billowing cloud of dust-smoke. The guy in the Liberty sat there, honking impotently. Another guy with an American flag sticker.

  “Warn me if you’re going to do that again?”

  “Do what?” said Dandine. He could have added a little exposition about his plan, but as you’ve seen, he was not the most forthcoming of individuals.

  You know the story about the Mulholland Tunnel, right?

  In the 1970s, long before anyone dreamed of drilling through the mountains to provide subway tunnels fifty years too late, there was this movie star who bought a lot of property not far east of Stone Canyon Road. He had a cluster of houses up there called the Compound, with a gated private drive off Mulholland (his heirs own it now). The driveway, incidentally, was similar to Calle Viuda in that it was not an official street, but had been phonied up by its master with a name and street sign not quite in accordance with municipal statutes. Hence, “Universe Trail.” Most of the Compound was on the hilltop—views in both directions, you see—and when the highway had been carved out of the mountain in the early 1920s to connect Hollywood with what was then called the Malibu Colony, city engineers bisected a minor peak in the range to keep the road level. In 1972, after investigating the LA County land registrar’s office, the movie star discovered that his property actually fell on both sides of the cut in the mountaintop, and instead of raising a ruckus, offered to build over it in order to utilize more real estate for adding additional structures. The courtroom fight with the zoning commission dominated local headlines for months before the problem suddenly vanished, whisked away on the winds of bribery, and geologists pronounced the plan sound in record time. Earth was moved back into the gap and the two-lane Mulholland Tunnel was born. Where the movie star failed was in his bid to get the tunnel named after himself. It is a close, radically arched passage like the ones you can see in Griffith Park, its egresses decoratively limned in granite. It is actually shorter in length than the mountain is tall, vented for drainage, built to last.

  (William Mulholland, the water and power baron for whom Mulholland Drive was named in 1923, committed suicide in 1935 after one of his dams burst, rather spectacularly, in 1928 . . . but that’s another story.)

  Know your city. At least know the lies it’s built on. Print the legend.

  We slip knotted through the turn by Universe Trail at about six bits, and the maw of the Mulholland Tunnel yawned ahead as the pursuit helicopter kept to its watchdog altitude, fading the treetops. The interior of the tunnel was harshly lit by sour yellow sodium lamps pocked into the ceiling about fifty feet above; I wondered how maintenance guys changed the bulbs.

  Sitting in the middle of the tunnel, parking lights aglow in the oncoming lane, was Zetts in his GTO. There was somebody with him—two silhouettes, not one.

  Trap, I thought. Dandine had been right, days, centuries earlier. Zetts had been bought and we were doomed.

  Dandine flashed into the tunnel and stood on the brakes, baking tread and coming in for a landing just past Zetts’s monster.

  “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing the Halliburton, already out of the Town Car, fast-fast-fast. I was right behind him.

  Zetts’s passenger debarked and he and Dandine passed each other like hurried commuters on opposing escalators. A guy with thick glasses and an explosion of dreadlocks, dressed in very colorful, very loose, very big clothing.

  “Leon,” said Dandine, in transit.

  “Yo,” said Leon, not even looking. “This one makes us even.”

  “Copy that,” said Dandine.

  It was all like a really organized Chinese fire drill, with me two moves
late and no instruction manual.

  Leon vaulted into the driver’s seat of the Town Car, buckled up, and glared at me. “You wanna close the door, man? Thank you. Jesus!”

  Slam, vroom, and Leon was off, speeding out the far end of the tunnel while my seat was still warm. I was standing there like a dork when Dandine shouted back, his voice echoing in the tunnel.

  “Connie—sometime today, all right?”

  We could have wasted time debating over who got to ride in front, but I piled in and Zetts, belted and focused, did what he does best. There was no bruise on his forehead, no damage on the back of his skull. He looked fine.

  February 25, 1999: My divorce papers are finalized.

  The divorce has taken longer than the actual marriage—three and a half years versus a scant ten months. Signed, sealed, no-fault, everybody shakes hands and goes away, the final whimper in a bang-less romantic career. A grand total of no incidents, during the years I waited out and delayed the paperwork. I used the excuse of “distance” when I enacted these legalities, because by the time the papers trickled through, I did not want to feel a single emotion: anger, regret, anything. I did not want this event to have enough power to cause me to react in any way, other than dropping the documents into a folder and doing my best never to look at them again. I bore no grudge. There were abundant avenues for soap opera, but I wasn’t interested enough to cultivate extravagant tales of how I had been cheated, how I had been fucked over, all the tabloid details meant to make your personal failings fascinating to greedy outsiders, providing cheap moral lessons to reinforce a status quo of banality. Several friends wanted to get me drunk and hear all the nasty dish, but that wasn’t necessary. Really, it wasn’t. They countered with reviews of me as a human being. I was closed off, they said. I didn’t allow myself to have feelings, they said. It was all bait to lure me into saying things that were not true, or inventing things equally untrue that satiated their need for common drama. Their tactics were transparent and infantile, and I danced around them easily, because when I lie, I do it by choice, and I am much better at lying than they are. You and I both know the difference between the pikers and professionals, when it comes to lying. The amateurs are lame and awkward (and thus reap a surfeit of the drama they crave) while the pros are somehow admirable in their audacity. They don’t lie capriciously. They lie as part of the system of getting things done, or because the waters in which they swim are so corrupt that a lie is the only way to keep from drowning. If you don’t want to swim with the big fish, it’s your choice not to get in the river . . . but don’t expect to ride a tide, or go anywhere interesting in your life. Be honest. Be safe. You might get a merit badge. You’ll definitely get chewed up and shat out by the predators swimming in the river. Guys like me, who sell you things. Who batten off your fear. Who aren’t afraid of the dark. Who live in the real world. Who don’t feel, unless they choose to.