by Ian Rankin
“Arms dealers?” the man guessed. When Hoffer didn’t say anything, his smile widened. “We know all about them, we had that information days ago.”
“Ooh, I’m impressed.”
“We even know what you told Chief Inspector Broome yesterday.”
“If you know everything, what do you want with me?”
“We want to warn you. You’ve managed to get close to the Demolition Man, but you need to be aware that we’re close to him too. If there should come a confrontation . . . well, we need to know about you, and you need to know about us. It wouldn’t help if we ended up shooting at one another while the assassin escaped.”
“If you’re after him, why not just let me tag along?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Hoffer.”
“You don’t, huh? Know what I don’t think? I don’t think you’re from the Company. I’ve met Company guys before, they’re not a bit like you. You smell of something worse.”
“I can produce ID, given time.”
“Yeah, somebody can run you up a fake. There used to be this nifty operator in Tottenham, only he’s not at home.”
“All I’m trying to do here is be courteous.”
“Leave courtesy to the Brits. Since when have we ever been courteous?” Hoffer thought he’d placed the man. “You’re armed forces, right?”
“I was in the armed forces for a while.”
Hoffer didn’t want to think what he was thinking. He was thinking special operations executive. He was thinking National Security Council. The CIA was a law unto itself, but the NSC had political clout, friends in the highest and lowest places, which made it infinitely more dangerous.
“Maybe we’re beginning to see eye to eye,” the man said at last.
“Give me a name, doesn’t matter if it’s made up.”
“My name’s Don Kline, Mr. Hoffer.”
“Want to hear something funny, Don Kline? When I first saw you I thought, Gestapo-style glasses. Which is strange, because normally I’d think John Lennon. Just shows how prescient you can be sometimes, huh?”
“This doesn’t get us very far, Mr. Hoffer.” Kline stood up.
“Maybe you should lay off the narcotics, they seem to be affect-ing your judgment.”
“They couldn’t affect my judgment of you. Ciao, baby.”
For something to do, Hoffer lit a cigarette. He didn’t watch Kline leave. He couldn’t even hear him make a noise on the tiled floor. Hoffer didn’t know who Kline was exactly, but he knew the species. He’d never had any dealings with the species before; it was alien to him. So how come that species was suddenly interested in the D-Man? Kline hadn’t answered Hoffer’s question about that. Did it have to do with the journalist? What was it she’d been investigating again? Cults? Yes, religious cults. Maybe he better find out what that was all about. Wouldn’t that be what the D-Man was doing? Of course it would.
He foresaw a triangular shoot-out with the D-Man and Kline. Just for a moment, he didn’t know which one of them he’d be aiming at first.
His waitress was back.
“No smoking in this section.”
“You’re an angel straight from heaven, do you know that?” he told her, stubbing out his cigarette underfoot. She stared at him blankly. “I mean it, I didn’t think they made them like you anymore. You’re gorgeous.” These words were obviously new to the waitress, who softened her pose a little. The brittle beginning of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth.
“So what are you doing this evening?” Hoffer went on, rising to his feet. “I mean, apart from scaring small children?”
It was a low blow, but no lower than the one she gave him.
part two
FOURTEEN
We took a train from Euston to Glasgow.
I’d decided against renting a car in London. Rentals could always be checked or traced. By now, I reckoned there was a chance the police—or even Hoffer—would be finding out about DI West and DC Harris. Plus they had the evidence of my phone call to the radio station. They knew I was still around. They’d be checking things like hotels and car hire.
So I paid cash for our train fares, and paid cash to our hotel when we checked out. I even slipped the receptionist £20, and asked if she could keep a secret. I then told her that Ms. Harrison and I weren’t supposed to be together, so if anyone should come asking . . . She nodded acceptance in the conspiracy. I added that even if she mentioned my name to anyone, I’d appreciate it if she left Bel’s name out.
Bel had phoned Max and told him of her plan to go north with me. He hadn’t been too thrilled, especially when she said we’d be passing him without stopping. She handed the phone to me eventually.
“Max,” I said, “if you tell me not to take her, you know I’ll accept that.”
“If she knows where you’re headed and she’s got it in her head to go, she’d probably only follow you anyway.”
I smiled at that. “You know her so well.”
“I should do, she gets it all from me. No trouble so far?”
“No, but we’re not a great deal further forward either.”
“You think this trip north will do the trick?”
“I don’t know. There should be less danger though.”
“Well, bring her back without a scratch.”
“That’s a promise. Good-bye, Max.”
I put Bel back on and went to my room to pack.
On the train, I reread all the notes on the Disciples of Love.
“You must know it by heart by now,” Bel said, between trips to the buffet. We were in first class, which was nearly empty, but she liked to go walking down the train, then return with reports of how packed the second-class carriages were.
“That’s why we’re in here,” I said. It’s a slow haul to Glasgow, and I had plenty of time for reading. What I read didn’t give me any sudden inspiration.
The Disciples of Love had been set up by an ex–college professor called Jeremiah Provost. Provost had taught at Berkeley in the ’70s. Maybe he was disgruntled at not having caught the ’60s, when the town and college had been renamed Berserkeley. By the time he arrived at Berkeley, things were a lot tamer, despite the odd nudist parade. The town still boasted a lot of strung-out hippies and fresher-faced kids trying to rediscover a “lost California spirit,” but all these incomers did was clog the main shopping streets trying to beg or sell beads and hair-braiding.
I was getting all this from newspaper and magazine pieces.
They treated Provost as a bit of a joke. While still a junior professor, he’d invited chosen students to his home on weekends.
He’d managed to polarize his classes into those who adored him and those who were bored by his mix of blather and mysticism.
One journalist said he looked like “Beat poet Allen Ginsberg before the hair went white.” In photos, Provost had long frizzy dark hair, kept parted at the front, a longish black beard, and thick-lensed glasses. It’s hard to get kicked out of college, especially if you’re a professor, but Provost managed it. His employers didn’t cite aberrant behavior, but rather managed to dig up some dirt from his past, showing he’d lied in his initial application form and at a later interview.
Provost stuck around. He was busted for peddling drugs, but it turned out he’d only given them away, never sold them. He was fast turning into a local underground hero. His shack-style house in a quiet residential street in Berkeley became a haven for travelers, writers, musicians, and artists. The outside of the house boasted a huge paste-and-wire King Kong climbing up it until the authorities dismantled it. The house itself was painted to resemble a spaceship, albeit a low-built cuboid one. Inside the house, Jeremiah Provost was slowly but surely leaving the planet Earth.
Out of this home for strays emerged the Disciples of Love.
It was a small enterprise at first, paid for, as investigative journalism revealed, by a legacy on which Provost had been living.
His family was old southern money, and as the e
lders passed away their money and property kept passing to Provost. He sold a couple of plantation houses, one of them to a museum.
And he had cash too, as aunts and uncles found he was their sole surviving heir.
An article in a California magazine had gone farther than most in tracing Provost back to his childhood home in Georgia.
He’d always been pampered as a child, and soundly beaten too, due to a doting mother and a disciplinarian father (whose own father had financed the local Ku Klux Klan). At school he’d been brilliant but erratic, ditto at college. He’d landed a job at a small college in Oklahoma before moving to Nebraska and then California.
He found his vocation at last with the Disciples of Love. He was destined to become leader of a worldwide religious founda-tion, built on vague ideals which seemed to include sex, drugs, and organic vegetables. The American tabloid papers concentrated on the first two of these, talking of “bizarre initiation rites” and “mandatory sexual relations with Provost.” There were large photos of him seated on some sort of throne, with long-haired beauties draped all around him, swooning at his feet and gazing longingly into his eyes, wondering if he’d choose them next for the mandatory sexual relations. These acolytes were always young women, always long-haired, and they all looked much the same. They wore long loose-fitting dresses and had middle-class American faces, strong-jawed and thick-eyebrowed and pampered. They were like the same batch of dolls off a production line.
None of which was my concern, except insofar as I envied Provost his chosen career. My purpose, I had to keep reminding myself, was to ask whether this man’s organization could have hired a hit man. It seemed more likely that they’d use some suicide soldier from their own ranks. But then that would have pointed the finger of the law straight at them. The Disciples of Love were probably cleverer than that.
The Disciples really took off in 1985. Trained emissaries were sent to other states and even abroad, where they set up missions and started touting for volunteers. They offered free shelter and food, plus the usual spiritual sustenance. It was quite an undertaking. One magazine article had priced it and was asking where the money came from. Apparently no new elderly relations had gone to their graves, and it couldn’t just be a windfall from investments or suddenly accrued interest.
There had to be something more, and the press didn’t like that it couldn’t find out what. Reporters staked out the Disciples’
HQ, still the old Spaceship Berkeley, until Provost decided it was time to move. He pulled up sticks and took his caravan north, first into Oregon, and then Washington State, where they found themselves in the Olympic Peninsula, right on the edge of Olympic National Park. By promising not to develop it, Provost managed to buy a lot of land on the shores of a lake. New cabins were built to look like old ones, grassland became vegetable plots, and the Disciples got back to work, this time separated from the world by guards and dogs.
Provost was not apocalyptic. There was no sign in any of his writings or public declarations that he thought the end of the world was coming. For this reason, he didn’t get into trouble with the authorities, who were kept busy enough with cults stor-ing weaponry like squirrels burying nuts for the winter. (These reports were mostly written before the Branch Davidian ex-ploded.) The Revenue people were always interested though.
They were curious as to how the cult’s level of funding was being maintained, and wanted to know if the whole thing was just an excuse for tax avoidance. But they did not find any anomalies, which might only mean Provost had employed the services of a good accountant.
Lately, everything had gone quiet on the Disciples news front. A couple of journalists, attempting to breach the HQ compound, had been intercepted and beaten, but in American eyes this was almost no offense at all. (The same eyes, remember, who were only too keen to read new revelations of the sex ’n’ drug sect and its “screwball” leader.)
All of which left me where, precisely? The answer was, on a train heading north, where maybe I’d learn more from the cult’s UK branch. Bel was sitting across from me, and our knees, legs, and feet kept touching. She’d slipped off her shoes, and I kept touching her, apologizing, then having to explain why I was apologizing.
We ate in the dining ear. Bel took a while to decide, then chose the cheapest main dish on the menu.
“You can have anything you like,” I told her.
“I know that,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze. We stuck to nonalcoholic drinks. She took a sip of her tonic water, then smiled again.
“What are we going to tell Dad?”
“What about?”
“About us.”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Well, it rather depends, doesn’t it? I mean, if this is just a . . .
sort of a holiday romance, we’re best off saying nothing.”
“Some holiday,” I joked. “He’d work it out for himself, no matter what we said.”
“But if it’s something more, then we really should tell him, don’t you think?”
I nodded agreement, saying nothing.
“Well?” she persisted. “Which is it?”
“Which do you think?”
“You’re infuriating.”
“Look, Bel, we’ve not known each other . . . I mean, not like this . . . for very long. It hasn’t been what you’d call a courtship, has it?”
She grinned at the memories: producing the gun in Chuck’s Gym, fleeing his men in Upper Norwood, making false documents in Tottenham, pretending to be police officers . . .
“Besides,” I said, “the sort of work I’m in doesn’t exactly make for a home life. I’ve no real friends, I’m not sure I’d even know how to begin the sort of relationship you’re suggesting.”
Now she looked hurt. “Well, that’s very honest of you, Michael. Only it sounds a bit feeble, a bit like self-pity.”
My first course arrived. I ate a few mouthfuls before saying anything. Bel was looking out of the window. Either that or she was studying my reflection. It struck me that she knew so little about me. The person she’d seen so far wasn’t exactly typical. It was like she’d been seeing a reflection all along.
“Once you get to know me,” I confided, “I’m a really boring guy. I don’t do much, I don’t say much.”
“What are you trying to tell me? You think I’m looking for Action Man, and I’m not.” She unfolded her napkin. “Look, forget I said anything, all right?”
“All right,” I said.
I thought about our relationship so far. There’d been some kissing and hugging, and we’d spent two nights together. We hadn’t done anything though, we’d just lain together in the near dark, comfortable and semiclad. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make love with her. I don’t know what it was.
Part of me wished I’d left her behind in London, or insisted on dropping her off in Yorkshire. It was hard to concentrate with her around. I knew it was harder to take risks, too. I’d taken them in London, then regretted them afterward. In Scotland, I wouldn’t take any, not with her around. I’d be like one of those Harley-Davidson riders, forced by circumstance to wear a crash helmet. But when I looked across the table at her, I was glad she was there looking back at me, no matter how sulkily. She kept my mind off Hoffer. He was in danger of becoming an obsession.
He’d come close to me once before, last year, after a hit in Atlanta, not far from the World of Coca-Cola. I’d visited the museum before the hit, since my target would visit there during his stay in the city. But in the end I hit him getting out of his limo outside a block of offices. He was being feted in the penthouse suite while he was in Atlanta. The bastard was so tough, he lived a few hours after my bullet hit home. That doesn’t normally happen with a heart shot. It’s the reason I don’t shoot to the head: you can blast away a good portion of skull and brain and the victim can survive. Not so with a heart shot. They took him to some hospital and I waited for news of his demise. If he’d lived, that would have been two fai
ls from three attempts and my career would not have been in good shape.
After the news of his death, I moved out of my hotel. I’d been there for days, just waiting. Across the street was an ugly windowless edifice, some kind of clothing market. “A garment district in a box” was how a fellow drinker in the hotel bar described it. It was so gray and featureless, it made me book a ticket to Las Vegas, where I didn’t spend much money but enjoyed seeing people winning it. The few winners were always easy to spot; the countless losers were more like wallpaper.
Hoffer looked like a loser, which was why despite his bulk he was hard to notice. But then he made a mistake. He had himself paged in the hotel casino. I’m sure he did it so people might recognize him. I recognized his name, and watched him go to the desk. Then I went to my room and packed. I could have taken him out, except no one was paying me to. Plus I’d already disposed of my armory.
I still don’t know how he tracked me. He has a bloodhound’s nose, as well as a large pocket. So long as Walkins is paying him, I’ll have to keep moving. Either that or kill the sonofabitch.
What sort of a life was that to share with someone?
I found out in Vegas that my victim had been a prominent businessman from Chicago, down in Atlanta for the baseball. In Chicago he’d been campaigning to clean up the city, to bring crooked businesses to light and reveal money laundering and bribery of public officials. In Vegas the saloon consensus was that the guy had to be crazy to take that lot on.
“You see a sign saying ‘Beware—Rattlesnakes,’ you don’t go sticking your head under the rock. Am I right or am I right?”
The drinker was right, of course, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I felt bad for a whole two hours and five cognacs, after which I didn’t feel much of anything at all.
And then Hoffer had come to town, as welcome as a Bible salesman, sending me traveling again.
No, mine was definitely not a life for sharing, not even with someone like Bel.
We stuck around Glasgow long enough to rent a car. Now I was clear of London and the immediate investigation, I didn’t mind.
