Internecine (48 page)

Except I knew my time had come. The single test of every ability I had ever developed. I knew it, the way Dandine seemed to magically know things. I just
knew
it. And I was ready.

“Okay, Mr. . . . Rainstone, is it? Good enough. See these files? Files, everywhere. Bits and pieces of you, and me, and us. It’s just paper. Facts
and figures. See, that’s the speed bump. It’s a
paper
speed bump. Surely, together, we’re strong and secure enough to negotiate a paper speed bump.”

“You’re saying that none of this, ah, matters to you?”

“Oh, it’s all important stuff, I’ll give you that. It certainly makes me nervous to consider all the contents. But look at us, here, now—that’s the difference between dealing with people as files, and dealing with them as people.”

“That’s very cute,” said Rainstone. “Demoting the end of your life to no big issue in order to curry favor. You’ve been trained very well.”

“All I know is what works best in my field. You guys are all trying pressure, leverage, threats, and I’ve always found the best way to reach an accord is to let the client sell himself. So—” I turned to Dandine.

He picked up the football. “So, what Mr. Maddox is saying is we want to clear our credit history with
NORCO
.”

“Right.”

Dandine went on, “Total unilateral expungement from the database. No red flag items. No black-stripe card alerts. No associational ladders of contact with friends, co-workers, acquaintances.
NORCO
ignores the fact we even exist. That’s what I had until Gerardis superceded your orders. He didn’t want me walking around in the world. He wanted to play dog in the manger, and kill anything he could not own. So . . .” He opened his hands—still constricted by his injuries—to give the floor back to me.

“So, simply put,” I ventured, “I—we—leave
NORCO
alone to do its business.
NORCO
leaves us alone, to do ours.”

Rainstone blinked rapidly, several times. “That’s all?”

“You have your own problems,” I said. “You need to concentrate on the decay curve of an organization you allowed yourself to lose control over.” Not grammatical, but certainly pointed. “If you and I and Mr. Dandine and all the worker bees at
NORCO
merely retreat to our safety positions, we spend a lot of time and resources trying to disrupt each other’s lives until one of us finally dies. You don’t want that. You want your machine to run without glitches.”

“I thought you said this was a, ah, deal,” said Rainstone. “You’re not offering me anything.”

“Go to Ripkin,” I said. “Tell him you’re responsible for foiling the plot on his life. Think ‘spin.’ I’ll go back to Kroeger—” I swallowed, hard “—and I’ll walk that nitwit right into the governorship with a strength-versus-sympathy plan that’ll be irresistible. I can solve more promotional problems in advance than you can even think of. You come up with a better substitute candidate, and I’ll do you the same deal.”

“What about, ah, Katy Burgess?” Rainstone mispronounced her name.

First I gambled, “Katy will help me accomplish the things I say.” Then I negotiated, “She has to stay alive and unharmed in order to do this.” Then I lied, “I control what
she
does.”

“I’m listening, Mr. Maddox.”

In that moment, I knew I had him sold. The worst part was that the feeling wasn’t new. But he was acting as though he wanted to stall, or win an additional concession.

Dandine sighed. He was pharmacologically better, but medically in severe distress. He brought the heavy Beretta out and rested it on one knee, a chitchat stopper. “It would be crass of me,” he said, “to suggest that one day you will receive a Federal Express Courier-Pak containing Zetts’s eyeballs.”

“Say
what?
” Zetts had been so quiet I had almost forgotten he was in the car with us.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Dandine. “I would never make a threat to anyone as powerful as you. I would merely state a fact. I know what you can do to me. But I also know that you have unusually strong views on the sanctity of family. You’re an archetypal American, Mr. Rainstone. You believe in family, even if your family doesn’t believe in you, and Zetts is the only blood relative you have left. It is that very belief that made Gerardis consider you an antique, and try to end-run around you. When I left
NORCO
, you asked me to keep an eye on your son. I kept him pretty close, and never put him in direct jeopardy.”

Unlike me, or Zetts under his own power.

“Gerardis obliterated that consideration,” Dandine said. “All I would ask is that you reinstate it.”

“Fuck
you,
” said Zetts. “I can take care of myself.” I caught his eye, sidelong, and shook my head.
Not now.

But the worm of doubt had already begun to squirm in Rainstone’s
mind. He put down his brief and trued up the ironed seams of his trousers.

“Did our mysterious Mr. . . . ah—”

“Dandine,” I said. It wasn’t that Rainstone didn’t want to say the stage name, or was prevented by some professional code of conduct. He simply could not remember it; one pseudonym among thousands.

“Yes,” Rainstone continued. “Did he ever relate the circumstances of his leavetaking from
NORCO
?” asked Rainstone.

“He never asked,” said Dandine.

Sure, like
that
would have gotten me anywhere.

“It’s everything you’ve just experienced, Conrad, over the last couple of days,” Dandine told me. “The corporatization, even of
NORCO
. The top-heaviness. The useless bureaucracy. Its waste, its pointlessness.”

The aim of all big business, foremost, is to stay in business. If a cure is discovered tomorrow, you don’t think the American Cancer Society is going to voluntarily dis-employ itself, do you?

“Rainstone knew that the new order Gerardis had in mind for
NORCO
didn’t allow for retirement,” said Dandine. “They would erase me.”

“So while I had supreme executive authority,” said Rainstone, “I chartered this man as the steward for my son, in the remote possibility that some pirate force might try to strike at me through Declan.” His tone was almost historic—the kind of history written by victors. “With the agreement that Mr., ah, Dandine here would agree not to interfere in
NORCO
’s operation.”

“Sort of an emeritus position,” Dandine managed weakly.

“A setup,” I said. “If he messed with a
NORCO
program, he would be fair game again. If so, Gerardis could eliminate his headache from the prior administration, with the excuse that he was looking out for
NORCO
’s interests, and you went rogue, thereby proving Gerardis right about you all along.”

“Like I said,” noted Dandine. “It was a pleasure to shoot him.”

“If he broke cover and interfered,” said Rainstone, “even I would not be able to deny that he had to be scotched, for the good of the company. That’s what Gerardis wanted me to think.”

“But that means you’re still running this show,” I said. “Gerardis called you his superior.”

Rainstone laced his fingers around one knee. We were all conversational and buddy-buddy, now. “True, five years ago. Less true today. Increasingly, the position is titular and honorary—only because I’m still breathing. Inevitably, Gerardis would have pulled his coup. Soon, I think. But I am insulated. In addition to which, Gerardis would have known that if he disempowered me . . .”

“Then Dandine would have showed up to lop off his head,” I realized. “Hence—eliminate Dandine first, using a subcontract designed to implicate him in the assassination of Alicia Brandenberg, who was operating clearly within the
NORCO
sphere of influence.”

Rainstone seemed to puzzle this in his mind. Slowly, he said, “Yes . . . that is the situation as I . . . understand it.”

“So what about the deal?” I asked. “Will you accept this deal?” I photo-recalled what Dandine had laid out; it has always been one of my more dramatic meeting skills. “Unilateral expungement, no flags, no hassle, no surveillance, no leverage, no fallout on us or people we know.
NORCO
ignores our existence. No files. Period.”

Rainstone said, “With the exception of your help in the political campaign, which you’ve already offered without condition?”

“I can do that without even having to acknowlege
NORCO
exists. Let me do it on my own.”

“Gentlemen, I believe, ah, we may be very close to an accord.”

Zetts gave Rainstone an odd look. He thought his father was talking about a car.

Great, I thought—now we were all stuck in unholy wedlock with
NORCO
(or whatever it metamorphosed into) until the next election was old news. Everybody had been assigned brooms and buckets, and now we had a titanic mess to clean up. Everybody was free. Everybody was obligated. We were stuck in the world of the walking dead, whether this pleased us or not.

“You may keep that.” Rainstone indicated the file I held. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in, ah, taking over the position of the late Mr. Gerardis? You’ve demonstrated quite a range of the skills that are required.”

“No, thank you.” I was thinking,
that would entail a separate negotiation.
The subdeals were always where the client got nailed, and I was used to holding the hammer.

“A pity. Then I think you both could use some medical attention,” Rainstone now ignored his son entirely. “Permit me to, ah, expedite that, shall I?” He punched a couple of buttons on the car’s control console.

If he offered us refreshments next, I’d grab Dandine’s gun and shoot him myself. Don’t doubt it. Not now.

Mugged by gangbangers
: That turned out to be my story. Ripping out my IVs had produced subdermal bleeding which resulted in more horrendous bruising. There was some debate over where to reinsert the leads and hoses, until Nurse Vanessa Strock came along and suggested shoving them up my anus, with a smile.

At least the ringing in my ear had subsided.

Perhaps I should have seized Rainstone’s offer. The problem with resuming a mundane life is that once a door opens, and you see new things, it’s impossible to revert to some program of normalcy without killing part of yourself. Your old life becomes hollow, a walk-through. You feel disconnected and unimportant. Normal, ordinary; bored and marking time. The only other way out was to grab a pen and write it down . . . or use the same pen to perform a lobotomy on myself.

I scrawled down a few notes for Katy Burgess to make pretty, so we could use them to win an election for the honorable (if cowardly) Theodore Ripkin, or whomever the secret masters chose to run against him. The battle plan just bummed me. I finally learned what Poe meant when he wrote about being filled with despair—I mean filled to the rim, slopping over, drowning in it.

I put on an insincere happy face for Katy and Zetts. Apart from them, I had one other visitor. He stumped into my room on a single crutch, ribs taped, hands bandaged, antibiotic gel glistening from the burn patches on his head.

“You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?” I asked.

“I quit.” Dandine inspected my bureau. Three bouquets, just as before—one from Kroeger, one from Katy, one from Zetts. That depressed me, too. It was as though I had time-jumped back to the same hospital room I’d had before. Dandine, on the other hand, found them
cheery. He touched a rose with the crude paddle of his left hand, the fingernail-free one. He closed his eyes and inhaled the fragrance. I won’t go so far as to say
he stopped to smell the flowers,
but it was an odd thing to witness, especially considering his tirade against floral offerings. He checked the card on a thin, tall vase of purple irises. “Zetts brought these?” he asked, slightly astounded. “Kind of . . .
regal,
for Zetts.”

“You want to sit?” I asked.

“No. Too complicated. I have to turn, and put one foot over
here,
and grunt, and go slow, and gasp, and try not to burst any major hoses standing up or sitting down.”

“You’re in the hospital?”