Internecine (26 page)

I could drown in my own life, right here on this monitor. I turned Zetts’s attention back to it. “Is Dandine in here?”

“Nahh, I tried that. Total dead end.
Nada
.”

“Can I look at this stuff some more?”

“Sure,” said Zetts, standing. “Go nuts. I’m gonna go, y’know, smoke a fatty and kick back. Unless you’d care for a taste.”

He didn’t wait for me to say no.

By now, you’re wondering where all this pathetic wallow leads. You check for files on Dandine and Zetts, knowing that Zetts knows you’ll try. There is nothing to read. All queries find no such files. You have no idea what alter egos to request. Reckless idiot that you are, you’ve used your real name your whole life.

You wanted to smack Zetts in the chops, when he jumped ahead, read your mind, and outlined the “freak-out scenario.” You feel lame and obvious, your every thought already broadcast on some subnormal frequency that alerts the players of the world to marks and suckers.

But wouldn’t Zetts have been instructed to say all that, as a means of allaying your natural suspicion and fear?

Wouldn’t Zetts need to act calm and noncommittal, and offer you the option of exit, so you could protest and refuse it?

Wouldn’t you like to head off this poisonous, lousy feeling about yourself at the pass, just one time?

You rise from the monitor with a reckless, risky plan already congealing in your slowpoke brain. Zetts sits in the middle of a cloud bank of dope smoke, nursing his version of the five o’clock martini and watching the news.

“Man called it, brah,” he says, indicating the TV.

The sound is turned down but you can imagine the hyperbolic play-by-play that accompanies the on-screen image of Linda Grimes, also known as “Choral Anne.” You remember the photo from her driver’s license. Now some studio munchkin has spent half an hour Photoshopping it to fit an appropriately hysterical logo within the video frame, titled
Southland Woman Missing
. No suspects or persons-of-interest attached to the developing story. Yet.

Leverage, as Zetts had pointed out.

You affect Zetts’s own attitude—loose, easy, uncaring—as you ask to read one of his
Doc Savage
paperbacks. Why not, what the hey, we’ve got time to kill, right? Zetts rises with a that’s-the-spirit camaraderie and fetches a title down from his shelf, jabbering about which ones are good to start with, if you haven’t read the entire series of 181 books in order. As he stands on a kitchen chair and reaches for a likely volume, you kick the chair out from under him, feeling like a shit but doing it anyway. Zetts cracks the obverse of his skull on the lip of the kitchen sink, during his fall to meet the floor. The chair skitters away and thin paperbacks go flying. You straddle Zetts as he flails about and put him down exactly the way
you
were incapacitated by the so-called Celeste, the mystery ninja who faked you out long enough for you to open your apartment door. You cock your arm back, flat-handed (as though you
know what you’re doing; as though you’re some kind of fucking martial artist), and give Zetts everything you could throw behind the heel of your hand, just as he sits up. It sounds like a slap. Zetts’s eyes roll to white and he goes back down hard, legs spasming.

And you do all this thinking,
I’m sorry—really.

Zetts’s pockets yield keys. You grab the cellphone off the kitchen table. There’s already a gun in the car. Queer, to think that if there is no backup key ring, you will be locking Zetts into his own house.

You go.

You leave the television on, for company, and ease back out into the world of the walking dead, thinking,
seriously, I really am sorry, man. Really.

The cellphone was a bust. I tried back-calling Dandine from the memory menu, but only saw a splash of gobbledygook on the screen, like a high-kicking dance line of swear words from some old comic strip. Whatever piece of spy hardware Dandine had used to call Zetts, the damned thing was encrypted, secure, untraceable, and probably patched through landline exchanges in ten different states.

It occurred to me to wonder who I thought I was kidding, trying for slick, pretending I knew what I was doing, trying to outfox foxes.

Then, just like that (imagine the finger snap) . . . I suddenly knew where I was going.

I thought of wrestling alligators every time I cranked the wheel of Zetts’s GTO into a turn. Manual steering. The car grumbled and vibrated in an ominous and unfamiliar way, causing my pampered, automatic-everything reflex to howl and bitch. Working the five-speed shift seemed harder than calculus. I was doing an incredibly stupid thing, according to my rational mind, which warred with my inner cliff dweller, who was hollering about the damned car, barely under human control, and so on.

My navigational head fared slightly better. I remembered enough landmarks to get me back to the Sisters. Between 20th Century–Fox and MGM; right. I abandoned the metal objects on my person and approached the rear gate, carrying only the slim, handled paper bag I’d picked up at a wine shoppe en route. The wizened Mexican I had
mistaken for a gardener faced me through the grillwork, his sawed-off, twelve-gauge pump casually resting on his shoulder, his index finger aligned alongside the trigger guard. He smiled.

“
Nombre, por favor.
”

“Mr. Lamb,” I said. “They should remember—”

He had already nodded and turned away.

1984/October 13: I lose my virginity to Carla Johnson at age eighteen.

You’re a late starter. At eighteen you have technically never dated, not in the sense “dating” is understood by your fellow seniors, regardless of the rules about male-female coupling that have been trashed and inverted by the slide of the late 1960s into the early-to mid-1970s. Nobody provided a handbook, because if they had, you would have understood that Carla Johnson was after a bit of nasty from line one. She simply wants to get drunk and fuck you. You insist on slopping it up with a lot of garbage from books, movies, fantasies, and your own ignorance. Ever since your cross-country wander at age ten, you have been shuffled from one public school to another as your father struggled to cope with his sudden divorce and changeling finances; hence, you have attended a different institution, with a different class of peers, each year from junior high onward. No continuity of friends or neighbors. You lead an unsettled life that prompts you to internalize and not form attachments, since the whole structure will morph, sure enough, before your next semester begins.

Childhood warps of this sort, it is theorized, make for good spies. Operatives to whom emotional discorporation is second nature. It is a survival skill, and a learned behavior.

Carla’s recreation is your turning point, despite all the messed up and misfired signals. She sets it up as a movie date, VCR-style, disguised as a homework appointment. While her parents are away golfing or sunburning or whatever it is they do in Palm Springs, several times a year. You both gobble pizza—her order, your treat.

The area between her legs is alien, speculative territory. It does not resemble the flayed, face-hugger lunchmeat of men’s magazines. It looks more like one of those very smooth French pastries, with a crease
in the center. It feels, to your virgin fingers, basically like the roof of your own mouth, only slightly more yielding. If you attempt to inject your penis there by dead reckoning, it will wilt faster than a candle in a toaster oven at the first bump of resistance.

She fondles your equipment while you check out hers. After a hurried and hungry make-out session, she jumps directly to pants-off, the point of no return. She interprets your lack of experience as the leisure of someone who has done this before and is in no hurry. She makes you extra-slick with her mouth and pulls you aboard while some videotape plays in the background, a movie you can’t even recall.

Abruptly, just like that, you realize you are
inside
her. Rather, that she has
surrounded
you, and she has a helluva grip down there.

The process is all het up and distorted by two bottles of extremely cheap, fruit-flavored vino. You made the mistake of trying to match her swig for swig, and now your vision is plunging and dotting, your head light, your guts broiling. Spicy pepperoni plus fiery alcohol plus over-stress equals . . . emissions. The horrific thought of venting unseemly gas during your first real sexual encounter distracts you so that you don’t climax right away, like you feared you would. Below you, Carla is really getting zoned, grabbing your ass and ramming away with her pelvis, digging in with her heels and bucking to the rhythm of her own breathy gasps. She comes quickly and easily, grinding into the next sequence as soon as she achieves the first spike. No downtime. She seems to be an expert at this. Compared to you, at least.

You’re busy clenching your ass to keep from farting.

C’mon c’mon baby come in me come in me baby c’mon . . .

It’s like she’s trying to demonstrate power, to prove she can make you let go, but hearing her hiss this gentle mantra is more than you can bear, and abruptly your groin goes soft and rubbery as your semen glurts into her. You stop thrusting and can feel your heart slamming against your chest, echoing her own beat, which is making one of her adorable breasts wiggle.

Then your stomach clenches into a greasy fist, and you shit all over yourself. Hydrochloric diarrhea shoots from your ass, sideswipes her thigh, stains the floral-patterned sofa. The air goes pungent with the reek of your embarrassment.

You stumble to the kitchen sink in time to throw up still-recognizable pizza into the disposal. It stinks like strawberries, bile, and apples from the wine. Carla is hollering about the sofa, not vulnerable at all despite the fact that she’s nude. Her eyes accuse you. It’s the fall of 1984, the year Orwell warned everyone about.

Most of your future sexual encounters will reflect the inaugurational paradigm. Without the cleanup phase.

Such catastrophes need only occur a single time to make a lasting impression. You think of this incident every time you and a woman begin the dance that leads to intromission. Even now, your favorite part is the moment at which they accede. The “yes” part. The sex is almost secondary—deft, now; certainly knowledgeable, technically proficient. But the real achievement, for you, has always been selling woman on the
idea
that they want to fuck you. Everything else is leading up to, or going away from, that fleeting moment. This peculiar mind-set was part of your redraft of your own character, after you got to college with a clean slate and no friends, no hangers-on from your past, and no reputation.

Fucking clients—that came later—when you were a pro.

“
Por favor, señor,
please to enter.” The gate buzzed and the man smiled at me with tobacco-edged teeth. This time, I knew I was walking through a metal detector.

I saw a rake leaning against an elm tree. I thought of Buster from Texas, relegated to the fogbanks of childhood, his head split open and bleeding, my fault. If he’d died, I would have heard . . . something, surely.

As I waited in the parlor, I tried to recollect the way Dandine had greeted the Sisters, like a long-lost son, and decided to try and assess their mood before I ventured anything so bold. My ebbing battery of charm, I hoped, had enough juice left to curry a pair of little old men who displayed themselves as little old women. In deference to their delicate sensibilities, I had turned my
GAY MAFIA MEMBER
T-shirt inside out, and redonned my jacket from the car.

“Ah, my dear Mr. Lamb!” It was the Sister with the clubfoot. “What a pleasant surprise to see you again so soon. I trust our friend Mr. D. is well?”

“Probably in better shape than I am,” I said, trying for an honest face.

She shielded a tiny smile behind her equally tiny, beringed hand. “I shouldn’t say anything, but . . . you did observe the proper precautions?”

“Nobody knows I’m here,” I said. “And nobody followed me.”

“Courtesy is often lost, these days. Perhaps our business would better be discussed in chambers. Or perhaps you would prefer to avail yourself of our confessional?”

I immediately pictured restraints and handcuffs. Certainly the talents of the Sisters extended to the science of information extraction. Ball gags and cattleprods. I assumed the second Sister was engaged in the abuse of some policeman or priest, for money to cover operating overhead, or perhaps to maintain this place’s excellent soundproofing and charmingly Old World concept of security.

“Oh, and I brought you a little something I hope you might enjoy.” I handed over the bottle of Groth Reserve California Cabernet that had taken me fifteen minutes to select, nervous as a sophomore on prom night.

“Oh. Oh! The nineteen ninety-two. There were only fourteen hundred cases of this made, you know. How very, very kind of you. Please come this way.”

I knew the Groth had been a sly choice, not a name brand, a truly awesome vintage to gainsay the idea of snob appeal.

“Chambers” turned out to be an office I had not seen on my first trip. It had a parquet floor and was slightly crowded with Italian antiques. The Sister took her place at the helm of a Queen Anne desk and directed me toward a chair with gnurled arms and dark velvet upholstery.

I had no idea how to start. “Sister, I don’t wish to seem tactless, but—”