Internecine (8 page)

To pretend to be characters like Dandine. . . . Why?

Have you ever seen one of those action flicks where ordinary people more or less just like you are suddenly plunged into a whirlwind of conspiracy and have to spend the next hour running away from helicopters and black SUVs? The thrills, if they work, are vicarious. Try taking it on the lam for twenty-four hours with no food and no rest and tell me it’s something your inner hero craves.

No, people want to entertain the fantasy that anyone’s life can become exciting and dangerous in the blink of an eye. The sticking point is that nobody wants to actually risk anything. Not the paycheck, not the family, not life as we know it in these United States.

However, a vast majority of
those
lives do not constitute “living.”

Hence, the world of the walking dead.

Guilty.

You mate suitably, pay the bills, and wait around to die. The rest is just buying stuff. You buy the stuff you’ve always wanted, then you upgrade to more expensive stuff. Until you die.

You consume movies and books and art, because those can dream for you, when you’ve lost the fashion of dreaming.

And I haven’t dreamed of anything for a long time.

What I do instead is target the next conquest—the next job, the next lover, the next mark. It’s an atavistic hunter-gatherer gene that still fires because it’s got nothing left to aspire to.

Now, walking with Dandine is dreamlike, unreal. But I can taste the air, smell the city pulsating all around me, and see my reflection in the windows of the coffee shop. It’s me. My blood is alive. I literally have no idea what I might be doing five minutes from now.

So, who am I?

Try this question on yourself, sometime.

Outside the coffee shop, he lit a cigarette from a burnished ebony case in his jacket pocket. It was whisper-thin, about the size of a business card case. Two cigarettes leaned against each other inside like sad
sentries. Having nothing more intelligent to offer, I said, “You need more smokes?”

“No. I allot myself five of these a day. They’re best right after a meal.”

“Smoking less and enjoying it more?”

He was taking his time strolling back to the car, practically sauntering. “Something like that.”

We were about the same height, I noticed. Part of my mind was busily indulging a paranoid whim involving Dandine’s substitution of my own dead body for his, in some elaborate bait-and-switch scenario, which would explain why he was keeping me close. It was tough to think about this and force idle, personal chat—the kind I normally use to massage a client—while not barfing up the white-hot ball of worry that sizzled between my lungs.

“Is Dandine really your name?”

He chuckled, to himself. I wasn’t included. “No comment.”

“Mr. Dandine . . . are you going to kill me?”

He stopped, turned, and faced me, his smile clicking off as though on a motion sensor. “Don’t try to tell by looking in my eyes,” he said. “Get in the car.”

This was a negotiation, a contract conference, and it was time for me to haggle. To strengthen my position via objection and contraindication. “The world’s nicest hit man,” I said. “Why is he so pleasant and forthcoming? In my business, people use honesty and familiarity to hide the bigger lie. So I’m thinking, what’s the lie, here? Could it be that you’re going to cancel my ticket? I’ve been beaten up, home-invaded, bound and gagged, shot at and practically kidnapped. But you say it’s all smooth, don’t worry. When people insist on telling me not to worry,
that’s
when I start to worry.”

He pitched his smoke and spread his fingers across the roof of the car. “You give up and go home. Aim for a good night’s sleep. You won’t get it. You’ll have an ass-full of
NORCO
agents in your way. Try to walk back into your life with your head high. Just make sure you have your estate in order, because there won’t be a funeral, because they’ll never find your corpse. See ya.” He shook his head again and got into the Sebring.

“Wait a minute!”

He started the car.

“Unlock the fucking door, goddammit!”

He idled just long enough to rile me, then buzzed the passenger window down. “Can I help you?”

“Just wait a minute, will you? God!” My heart was racing and I had broken a new sweat.

“I don’t need you anymore, Conrad. The briefcase can’t do anything except lead back to you, and you’re a dead end. The rest, I can do myself. You can blab all about me, all you want—it’s just the usual mess of conspiracy theories any paranoid schizophrenic could have made up. Secret agencies with funny names. A laugh riot. Best of luck with your career.”

He started to roll up the window and I hit it with the palms of both hands.

Understand something: I did it impulsively, already angry that I was spending so much time beating myself up. I had the sudden, taboo urge to hit something, and I just did it—practically a first.

The safety glass bowed and shattered into a crescent shape, a shark-mouth, and suddenly my wrists were gouged and bleeding. When I looked toward him, it was down the muzzle of a pistol.

“Think first,” he said.

It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t sweating. I doubt if his heart rate had even changed from when he was calmly smoking.

Again, the smile, but this time, it was actually connected to his eyes, which glinted with mischief. “Conrad Maddox, Man of Action,” he said.

Then the son of a bitch started laughing. It started as a stuttering exhalation that turned into a chortling cough. Then the dam broke. He laughed out loud. He smacked the steering wheel. He clutched at himself. He had to mop his eyes with his gun hand. “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, and this propelled him into another paroxysm of mirth, at my expense. He put a hand into the air to steady himself, like an actor trying to wipe his expression clean for a new take. No good. That busted him up again. This paragon of control was out of control.

“I’ll just stand here and bleed,” I said, brushing glass cubes from my arms.

“No, no . . . it’s not you, it’s . . . ohh, hoohoo . . . !”

Terrific. If I had been hit with a cream pie, Dandine couldn’t be more hysterical.

“It’s . . . ahhh . . . you
broke the window ohhaaaahahaha!
” He stuffed the pistol into his crotch and tried to compose himself. “You looked so fucking
serious,
man!”

“Shut up.”

“I . . . can’t. Look, Conrad, what do you want?”

“That shit you were running about guys in JCPenney’s suits swarming over my apartment? Prove it.”

He really was just going to drive away and leave me; exit my life, fast as a finger snap. But something in his eyes told me he might consider indulging this stranger, this member of the walking dead, for a few moments more just because it seemed exotic to him. And look at me: begging my captor to hang onto me, in a sort of ultimate perversion of the Stockholm syndrome.

Good god, maybe he felt
sorry
for me.

“You opened the door,” I said. “I don’t want to just stand on the threshold. If some of the things you said are even remotely true I can’t ease back into whatever I was before tonight. I know you understand that much. I need to understand more. Please.”

It was a sales routine, and we both knew it.

He huffed out a sigh hinting at some of the things I suspected inside him. He could keep me for a few more minutes or take me to the pound.

Or euthanize me, if I pestered him enough.

Finally he said, “All right, climb aboard, but mind the . . .
glass
. . .”

That shoved him down the fun-chute again, and I willingly got into a high-powered vehicular deathtrap with an armed man who was apparently a gibbering lunatic. What the hell, it wasn’t even 2
A.M.
, yet.

He handed me a fairly expensive looking pair of Zeiss binoculars. “Four down, three over from the west face of the structure,” he said. “See it? That’s your apartment.”

The magnification screwed up my ability to count, and I had to resist
trying to squint and see the display through one eye. “How’d you get onto my balcony?”

“Trade secret.”

I craned up to the top, then down, then over. Windows, mostly dark, rushed past in my amplified view until I found my balcony. Funny; I’d never bothered to place it before, from the outside of the building. Now it seemed as obvious as a billboard—more so because my lights were on, and I knew I had turned them off when we first left Celeste’s body there, cooling off.

Somebody (just a black cutout shape against the light) came out onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and was joined by another black shape.

“
NORCO
,” said Dandine.

“Shit,” said me.

“You don’t have any, like, nasty Polaroids of yourself hidden up there? Incriminating evidence about your secret, gay double life? The infamous ‘second set of books’?”

“No.” I felt weirdly embarrassed that my home life offered no evidence whatsoever that I was cutting edge. The knives from my De Vries butcher block barely ever got food on them. The most provocative thing in the kitchen was a few bottles of pretentiously priced Cabernet, alongside some higher-class gift wine. There were five or six photos of my ex-wife shoved away in a drawer, in exile, and she had her clothes on in all of them. We had never been huge snapshot hounds. Most of the stuff in the kitchen had been bought out of catalogs. There were one or two framed prints on the walls, practically screaming my lack of personal character. My home looked like an upscale hotel room, anonymous and functional. They’re weren’t even any intriguing stains on the 300-thread count sheets.

The ultra-dull catalogue of my previous existence. Like, from birth until . . . yesterday.

“They’re turning the place over,” said Dandine, “trying to get a handle on where you’d run away to. It’s important for you to avoid anything familiar. If you’ve thought of it, they’ll know it. Including people. You want to get closer, or you want to take a side trip to your office so I can show you
that’s
open for business, too, right now?”

Strobes of flash starkened the balcony shell at regular intervals.
Pictures of things being captured for analysis and discussion. Maybe some of them would be suitable for framing, as urban studies. Still lifes.

“See the van?”

“Where?” I lowered the binoculars.

“Double-parked over there, no running lights, no trim. That’s where our friend Celeste will be dumped, like baggage nobody will claim. They’ll have a hand-to-hand team watchdogging this place for a while, hoping you’ll think the heat is off, and come back for something valuable. They go to training seminars to learn how to be inconspicuous. It’s a growth industry.”

Dandine eased back in his seat, like someone used to long stakeouts. “The best smugglers look like accountants. No sharp edges on their personae that would stick in your mind. That’s been going on for so long that the bland outward face has itself become a template for a potential smuggler, for all those VICAP and profiling obsessives. Back and forth, like a seesaw, and you always have to know which end you’re on today.”

“Civilians,” I said. These ghosts had to
rehearse,
to look like the walking dead. “What media define as ordinary people.”

“Exactly; now you’ve got it.”

Pause now, for my insanity defense.

It had been hectoring me ever since I noticed Dandine and I were the same height: the notion that he might not exist, that he was a projection, my doppelganger, an idealized, spy movie alter ego. An invisible man in the “real” world. Dandine’s commentary emphasized how un-special I was, then he trumped the game by noting how un-special he
had
to be, in order to succeed. I quit smoking five years ago, but when Dandine whipped out his little case (augmenting it just enough with the history hinted at by his nicotine diet), I felt the old jones for a butt slam in harder than ever. I knew without asking that he would not smoke another until the next stage of our nighttime mission had been accomplished. He used the cigarettes, as I would have, as punctuation in his workday. I would mention that maybe I was losing my mind and that he was me, like that guy in that Brad Pitt movie . . . and Dandine would say he’d read the book, but not seen the film. Stuff like that. He avoided talking about himself
(always make the client sell himself),
but
much of what he did offer made him sound like an alien observing Earth culture from afar, or a visiting animus from some parallel spirit plane. He seemed to know the score and had all the answers, the way I would expect him, as a fictional character, to just
know
things not apparent to the rest of us.

Or maybe I was just exhausted, free-associating myself into a padded room.

“It’s time to go visit Mr. Varga,” he said, wrapping the topic of my apartment, is-it-is-or-is-it-ain’t.

“Maybe I should just curl up in the backseat, you know,” I said, “and cry myself to sleep.”

“No. I need another set of hands and eyes, and right now is ideal for a social call. You hit them at night, when they’re tuckered out or perhaps have had a couple of cocktails. It hampers their menu of reactions.”