Satisfied, he logged off, gave Sphinx a brief, unwanted pat on the head, and took his bottle and glass outside to the gazebo.
Beach Court ended on a small bluff above the James River, but the Riggins property sloped all the way down to the water's edge. Easing onto the gazebo's wooden bench, he leaned his back against the railing and allowed what tension Jack Daniels had neglected to drain from his limbs.
The darkness was not complete. Porch lights from distant houses across the river were reflected in tiny broken flecks on the water, while intermittent, tiny beams burst through the trees from his neighbors to either side, one facing the James, the other, Howie's, further up the hill.
Howie had told him the neighboring waterfront property belonged to someone named Mackenzie. Ari had seen their mailbox, at the entrance to a driveway that swept deep into the woods behind Howie's yard before turning towards the river.
A series of splashes was followed by plaintive honks. It sounded too deep-throated for a duck. He'd look into it tomorrow. How much would a book on birds set him back?
The liquor, at least, was inexpensive--and of high quality. As were the cigarettes, he mentally saluted as he lit a Winston. No black market gouging here, no furtive exchanges of too much for too little. And that was for just a bit of extra food. Forget risking your neck for a pack of extra-toxic DJ coffin nails at the Shorgia market or a bottle of stomach reflux brewed in the marshes. America was a good place for the simpler sins, although Ari found all the No Smoking signs problematic. Next thing you knew, they'd be issuing fatāwā against the grand old weed. Perhaps they had already begun.
A not-distant rumble marked the beginning of the rapids Ari had seen from Lee Bridge on his arrival. A sound that would probably recede from conscious awareness after a week or so of living nearby. But Ari found that it somehow punctuated a hollow ache around his heart. He had been too busy acclimating himself to his new country to pay much attention to it. When the busyness stopped, however, and unavoidable memories throbbed to the forefront, all of his crimes and misjudgments came crowding up to shout in his face. If only he had.... If only he had not....
A friend of his with a philosophical bent once told him America's top export was the sense of personal loneliness. They lured people into a corral of self-absorption, a circle of screens and mirrors. It was every man for himself, but with much of the danger removed. The problem with such exports was that they did not always adapt to the new market, reducing it instead to every-man-for-himself, but with the danger still intact.
The friend with the philosophical bent was as good as dead. Perhaps he had not been a friend. For all Ari knew, he might have been his mortal enemy all along. It was hard to say, anymore. So much certainty removed....
And now this old friend was just one more ache in his chest, and the river emphasized the loss with the rushing boom of its passing.
One thing for certain, though, Ari thought as he looked back at the house. The sound was not nearly loud enough to mask a sledgehammer pounding against a back door.
He was distracted by a bright flash above the river. A moment later a loud crack echoed across the water and rippled down the south bank. Howie had said kids stood on the tiny island and lit off firecrackers. He had not said that they did it after dark. From the perspective of his forty-odd years, Howie had transformed young adults into children. Ari looked at his watch and was unpleasantly surprised to find that it was already past 11. By passing the time with Jack Daniels, he had lost an entire evening. He tried to remember if he had fed Sphinx.
Turning to the house again, he followed the hidden trajectory of the killer, or killers. Center left, downstairs picture window. If the window curtains had been open, a kayaker taking a brisk spin on a cold December night might have seen the flash of gunfire in the living room. Ari leaned down so that he could see the second floor beyond the gazebo roof. The master bedroom windows could also be clearly seen from the river.
It was suddenly darker than a moment before. It looked as though the Mackenzie porch light had been switched off. A flash and report announced the launching of another Whistling Jupiter from the island, which was completely invisible at this time of night.
The Mackenzie light came on.
Then went off.
Then came on again.
A kind of smirking sorrow filled Ari. He gave a snort, then poured another snort. Tricks. Everywhere, tricks. You could tabulate the world population by counting all the people who had outsmarted themselves. And he should know. He was a genius at it.
Should he go inside and put a seal on this little plot of innocence? What the Mackenzies were up to in the middle of the night was none of his business. But he did not move. He would add to his knowledge of the foibles of his new land. He was also curious to know if the rocket man out on the water was using night vision goggles. Even here, where the water was calm, a collision with a rock or driftwood could capsize a kayak or canoe.
Besides...perhaps it was his business, after all.
Once he decided to remain outside, he tested the option of creeping up on the Mackenzie house. The trees seemed thick enough to provide cover. But after taking a few strides toward the edge of the yard he about-faced back to the gazebo bench. Three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey had not stifled the cold, inner observer that weighed the odds and enforced decisions. It was too dark, and he had drunk too much, to guarantee a stealthy approach.
He didn't see the two-man kayak until it slid into the faint aura of light from the Mackenzie porch about thirty yards from the shore. It was a little larger than the ones Ari had seen doodling on the river the last couple of days. The two men drew their doubled-edged paddles out of the water.
"Product!" one of the called out.
Someone must have signaled from the Mackenzie yard. The kayakers vanished behind the tree border as they stroked to the beach. There being nothing to see, Ari leaned back and closed his eyes, hoping to catch a few more words. But all he heard were a few indecipherable murmurs. He swore lowly, blaming Jack Daniels for his deafness. He took another sip.
The kayak remained out of sight for nearly ten minutes. Negotiation (if any) and the exchange of money for 'product' should take no more than a moment, especially for the kind of transaction Ari was certain was taking place.
He had not turned on his own porch light, but the kayakers would have seen the faint glow filtering through the thick living room curtains.
Someone’s moved into the Riggins house?
Yes.
Know anything about them?
No.
Obviously, such a conversation would take all of three seconds. What else were they talking about? The weather? No, the kayakers would not linger for banal chitchat.
He tried to interpret the tone of the murmurs. Not much there, either. They were perfectly neutral, containing neither laughter nor argument. It sounded as if only two men were talking. One of the kayakers was not participating in the discussion. Still squatting in the boat, maintaining his position in the water. A portable escape hatch.
And then a woman's voice chimed in, clear as a bell.
"No, there's someone living there. I saw him the other day. A fucking A-rab. He was in a jogging suit. A fucking A-rab jogger!"
Ari smiled. The silly woman was completely smashed, a fact confirmed by her shrill laughter.
Mr. Mackenzie must have told her to tone it down. Her reaction was predictably belligerent.
"Fuck you! It's a free country!"
Ari mentally waggled a finger at the invisible woman, in part for her language and in part for her assertion. Outside of nationalistic propaganda, he had yet to see or hear of a free country, now or ever. Above all, though, he silently admonished her for the way she spoke to her husband.
The voices subsided. Ari found himself urging Mrs. American Freedom to speak up again and assert her right to row drunkenly, even at the price of male embarrassment. She did not let him down.
"You've got to be shitting me! No
way! The first we heard about it was in the papers."
Some harsh skeptical sounds followed, probably from the kayak spokesman.
"You think we'd do something like that?" Mrs. Mackenzie shot back. "You're out of your fucking mind!"
"No, no, no, I didn't say..." The male voice drifted off on a light breeze.
Why were they only talking about this now? If the kayakers thought the Mackenzies had had something to do with the murders, bringing it up nine months later did not serve any purpose. Blackmail made no sense. If the kayakers had seen something, they would have leapt on it immediately, threatening to lead the police to fresh evidence. By waiting so long they would have made themselves accomplices.
"What if you did it, huh?" Mrs. Mackenzie screeched. "You were out here that night! Right? Right?"
Ari hoped the woman would not be smacked into silence. She was providing the only open window on the topic at hand. She had certainly provided him with an interesting morsel. The kayakers had indeed been cruising the James the night of the murders. But this posed the same problem. Why wait so long to make the accusation?
Because no one had lived in the house all this time? Why should that matter? Unless the house itself was what triggered the argument.
Sphinx, you're going to have to start earning your keep. This might be America, land of the coddled cats, but your new master is not American. He expects pets to work for a living.
"Okay, okay! I've had a few drinks, okay? Is that a crime?"
Well, Ari thought, fingering his glass...yes. And no. Hard to say, especially after a few drinks.
"I said I'm fucking sorry, all right?"
She sounded more drunk than convinced. And then, for the first time, Ari obtained a clear take on the voice of Mr. Mackenzie:
"Hey Dude, she's drunk! Okay! We're cool!"
Cool as a razor off the strap, Ari smirked. This was really wonderful. He couldn't wait for fine weather. He needed to talk to Detective Carrington. He needed to talk to the kayakers. And for both discussions, a clear sky and calm waters were necessary.
He watched as the kayak, black as coal and sleek as a reed, vanished out of the halo of the Mackenzie's porch light.
NINE
The unhooded prisoner turned and cringed when he saw the scimitar. He lost control of his bladder. Courage could only carry him so far.
"There's no need for this," Ghaith sighed. "He's not worth your trouble. Besides, where's your video setup? Don't you people usually film these things?"
"Not in this case." Omar looked at him closely. "Why isn't he worth our trouble?"
Well...maybe it will help.
"Aziz Shahristani, a veteran of the first war against the Americans. He fell on hard times during the embargo and was caught pilfering...I don't know what, exactly." Ghaith closed his eyes for a moment, matching the face to the file. "During his stay in Abu Ghraib he met with a little accident during interrogation, losing the small finger..."
"Which one?" Omar asked.
"Both of them."
"I noticed that when I tied him up," one of the guards said.
"And there is no way Ghaith could have seen them," Omar said, meaning the prisoner's bound hands had been out of sight the whole time.
Aziz Shahristani's dread lifted momentarily. He was staring at Ghaith.
"Do I know you?"
Ghaith shook his head.
"But he knows you," Omar said, turning back to Ghaith. "So what they told me is true."
"Now you know. I'm a clerk, I file things away."
"You supervised the Ministry database," Omar added.
"There were many databases...at least, until the fall," Ghaith observed, giving a mocking glance at the scimitar. "Before the Americans got there, the looters took every last computer server and paper clip."
"Everything but this." Omar once again tapped his old friend on the side of the head. "I see now why the Ministry wants you dead. They want to start from a clean slate."
“And these…?” Ari nodded at the bound prisoners.
"They meet the same fate," said Omar harshly. "They were caught helping the Americans."
"Not me," Ghaith shook his head.
"It's only a matter of time." Omar made a swooping motion with his arm. Using both arms, the guard raised the scimitar over his head.
"Don't move," he told the first prisoner. "That would only make it more painful."
The next morning the rain came. Cats and dogs, was the meaningless analogy in English.
Ari scratched Detective Carrington and the kayakers from his To Do List, at least for that day. Which was just as well. He wasn't feeling particularly sharp. Gulping down cup after cup of hot tea, he spent his pre-noon hours squinting at his computer screen.
There was no need to purchase a bird guide. He found what he needed at Wikipedia. Whoever was monitoring his browser would be stumped by his sudden fascination with geese. Particularly interesting was the tidbit about the Capitoline geese, who alerted the ancient Romans when the Gauls were sneaking up on their last citadel in 390 B.C. The Empire might have been snuffed in its cradle, leaving the world to the Persians and fucking A-rabs. The geese outside the master bedroom window (although he couldn't see them with the rain bashing against the panes) were Canadian. Many had abandoned the tribulations of migration and taken up permanent residence in the Chesapeake Bay and on the James River.
Leaving off avian research, Ari checked his email. Nothing. He hadn't expected a reaction from his employer this soon, one way or another.
Sphinx seemed to have nothing better to do than to take up space on his camper mattress. Ari swiveled in his office chair and gave the cat a baleful eye. Sensing it was being observed, Sphinx opened its own eyes to find a menacing scowl directed its way. The cat stretched leisurely and seemed on the verge of going back to sleep when Ari stomped his foot on the wood floor. Sphinx jumped up, pupils wide with alarm. Ari stood. Finally recognizing the threat, Sphinx ran out the studio door, Ari hot behind it.
Sphinx flew straight for the stairs. Bleary-eyed, his temples pounding, Ari nearly went head over heels as he tried to leap several steps at one go, only saving himself by grabbing hold of the handrail.
"Sphinx!" he shouted. "I'll skin you alive!"
He stopped and steadied himself.
"If I don't break my neck, first."
There was no sound. With a grunt, he proceeded with yet another search of the house. On the first floor he double-checked closets, stomped for hollows in the floor, tapped on the trim work to make sure it was secure. A small makeshift door the size of four playing cards laid out in a rectangle opened up on a water valve, which apparently controlled the line to the bibcock out front. Squeezing his arm past the pipe, Ari ran his hand along the floor behind the wall. There was something grainy at the bottom of the frame. Drawing out, he found his fingertips coated with white powder. He sniffed at it gingerly. It was gypsum that had rained off the sheetrock during the construction of the house, plus something else. Some kind of oil. It reminded him of cosmoline.
"Here, Sphinx. Be a good girl. Talk to me. Meow...meow..."
In the basement he tapped at the wall paneling. Here and there he struck a hollow spot. It would be an easy matter to pull out a section and bury something in the insulation. But if the idea had occurred to him, it would have occurred to whoever else had searched the house over the last nine months. He scrutinized the heads of the small brown panel nails, but it was impossible to say if they had been tampered with. Besides, the theoretical searcher could have easily bought new nails to hammer the panels back into place. In any event, the cat had no access to the gaps in the walls--at least, none that Ari could find.
He went into the kitchen and opened a can of cat food. He tapped a spoon on the edge of the can, a signal Sphinx had already learned to recognize. But Ari had thrown too much of a scare into it. With a sigh of resignation that merged effortlessly with the rain hissing on the roof, he doled out a couple of clumps into the cat dish. T
he water had gone down in the second dish. He topped it off.
Squeezed between a Big Lots and a lawyer who specialized in divorces and traffic injuries--two very similar types of accidents--Moria's Notions was a nondescript niche in an anonymous cluster of shops along the mishmash of malls on Broad Street, itself a salute to indiscriminate entrepreneurship. Shoppers were undeterred by the weather, with every car shooting off hip-high water wings, splashing themselves and other cars (there were no pedestrians to spatter, which Ari found enormously odd, even spooky). Shop-hopping was the universal pastime, and few stores were excluded from the itinerary.
Moria's Notions seemed to be one of them. Sitting in his car, working himself up for a dash across the parking lot, Ari saw no one coming out or going in--unlike the Big Lots next door, which attracted throngs of bargain-hunters.
In the time it took him to reach the overhang, a pair of girls had slipped out of the shop door and were scratching cigarettes out of a battered soft pack. Ari thought they had been severely beaten, until a closer look revealed the bruises to be black lipstick and mascara. One of them was evenly plump all over, the other plump in the abdomen. They drew back as he stomped his feet on the pavement and shook his arms, as if he was trying to fling the bad weather in their faces. He nodded at them, smiling. Assuming that he was headed for Big Lots, they made way for him to pass. They were nonplussed when he took out his pack of Winstons, found one that had not gotten soaked, and asked for a light. With what might have been a surly pout, which under all that makeup might have been a bright smile, one of the girls handed him a tiny red lighter.
"Is the shop open?" he asked after starting his cigarette and handing the lighter back. The storm reflected off the plate glass storefront. The interior of Moria's Notions looked dark.
"You have to go in over there," the evenly-plump girl said, folding one arm across and resting her other elbow on top of it, as though her cigarette was so heavy that additional support was necessary.
The 56th Man Page 8
