Lost Signals (40 page)

I was in a new line of work these days.

My contact showed brown teeth when I asked about a phone and gestured around the side of the building. Salt and ice held the glass door of the booth shut and I had to hit it with my shoulder to get inside. More ringing. I dry-swallowed a couple of painkillers while I waited for the voice that didn’t come.

The saloon was dark and windowless, smoke from a fireplace hanging below the ceiling and a woman’s voice crooning in French from hidden speakers. The only live female in the place was running drinks to the scattered tables of hard men, her eyes marked by fatigue and fists. I shucked off my parka and drew stares in my wrinkled gray suit, so I slipped the coat back on. Mutters. Sidelong glances. The men here were of a piece, those who remained behind when humanity fled.

My broken fingers were still screaming so I said, “Bourbon, neat,” and slit the envelope with a thumbnail. Some scrawled details on my meet-up in Kuik and then a chilling sign off.
With your shield or on it
. Goombah prick liked to play the scholar, quote Socrates while your bones snapped.

“No one does it like Edith Piaf,” a man’s voice crackled from the speakers and I heard my own Chicago streets in his accent. “According to the almanac, we have about three minutes of daylight left. It’s gonna be a long night, people,” and here the DJ paused for an uncomfortable laugh. “A real long night. Funny things happen. We start to forget about daytime, about brotherhood. The wolves will howl and we will huddle. And when you get down to the bottom and you’re choosing between the taste of a bottle or a gun barrel, think about this song and make it through one more minute, all right
 
?” He cackled again, the least reassuring radio voice I’d ever heard. “This is radio KZXX, music at the edge of the world with, ‘Here Comes the Sun’.”

“That fucker,” the bartender said as the song filtered through the smoke and heads dropped a little lower.

“Why do you have him on
 
?”

“All there is,” the bartender said, smearing the bar with a greasy rag.

I pulled a pack of Marlboros from an inside pocket and lipped a cigarette free, lighting it with my Zippo and then putting flame to paper. The bartender glared but gave me my drink without a word.

The door bumped open and a man entered, stamping snow off his fur-topped boots. “It’s here,” he said quietly and conversation stopped. In ones and twos people rose and went outside. I followed the bargirl through the door.

It was dark.

“Everdark,” someone whispered and a ripple of agreement passed through the men, these dangerous men, who huddled closer together beneath the cloud of their breath. Some wit aimed a bright arc of urine at the building in a gesture of defiance and drew empty chuckles.

“With your shield or on it,” I said.

“Huh
 
?” the bargirl said, but I ignored her.

Sodium lights around the building kicked in with a snap and pushed the darkness back. Big lights, humming yellow bulbs beneath metal half domes, but they weren’t nearly enough. The night was enormous overhead and all around us, far larger than the great expanse of land we stood on. Alaska is said to make a man small. It reduced me to a speck.

I held up my hands, studying the details of knuckles and fingernails, the tape and splint. Making sure I was still here.

Back inside a fight erupted and no one tried to stop it. I left without finishing my drink and was a half hour north before I realized I hadn’t tried to call Vera again.

There wouldn’t be another chance until I killed the man on the radio.

***

The Jeep’s heater produced more noise than warmth and my knuckles were numb on the wheel. I thought about that guinea fuck laughing while his boys broke three fingers on my left hand, nice and slow so Vera could watch me beg.

A Square John in a long coat had studied me like a bug on a slide. With his matching Fedora and briefcase he looked like a centerfold from the London fog catalogue, whatever G-Men were jerking off to these days. I knew a Fed when I saw one.

“You don’t mix business and pleasure, Mick, and you don’t eat another man’s pie,” he said as an Italian the size of a bank vault took hold of my ring finger. Vera was trying not to watch but the boss grabbed her jaw and made her witness my humiliation. “You done both.”

To see her was to fall for her up on that stage under those lights. Backstage in her dressing room she said she was married and I didn’t care. She told me which monster she was married to and I told her, “I can set you free.”

All the times I worked divorce cases, tailed cheating wives, philandering husbands, you’d think I would have become jaded. Maybe I was until Vera cut through my defenses like a searchlight through fog.

You should have seen her.

“Why you choose this lowlife
 
?” he asked Vera and laughed when she shook her head, disowning me. “I mean, what did you think you were gonna find listenin’ in on my business, somethin’ gonna make me give up my wife
 
?”

The big man worked on my ribs until I puked in my lap. Vera was gone when the boss threw the water in my face.

“You wanna live
 
?”

“Yes, yes.”

“You gonna eat my pie any more
 
?”

“No more, Sally,” I said, hiccupping for air. “I won’t eat nothin’ ever again.”

He leaned back and pulled a gold cigarette case from inside his jacket. That slick guinea suit cost more than six months rent on my apartment. “You gotta understand your station in life, Mick.” He flicked his Bic and inhaled a lungful. “You’re shit under my shoe. Girl like Vera
 
? Maybe she wanted to walk in the wild side for a moment but she needs someone who can keep her in style.” He snapped his gold cigarette case closed to make the point, the subtle fuck.

“I understand, Sally,” I said, hating myself but groveling for all I was worth. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Well, you’re lucky because I might be in the mood to do a favor. You deserve a favor
 
?”

“No I don’t but you’re a generous guy, everyone says so.”

“That’s right, I’m so generous I agreed to do this thing for this guy, but I got no one wants to go.” He blew a smoke ring and screwed it up. “It’s cold and outta town. Way outta town.”

“I don’t mind the cold.”

He leaned over and sniffed me. “You didn’t piss yourself, mostly guys piss themselves when Baby Vincenzo goes to work. You stupid but maybe not a complete
vigliacco
. Maybe you can do this thing.” Sally glanced at the Square John who gave a barely perceptible nod.

I took my chance. “Anything, Sally, anything you say—”

He rocked my head with a slap.

“Gonna send you to the asshole of the world, Micky.”

The Square John approached Sally and handed over the briefcase. He left without ever saying a word.

“Who was that—” I started to say when Baby Vincenzo hit me with a ham sized fist.

I woke up on a plane to Alaska.

***

I crossed a bridge over the great void with nothing on either side.

Night. You don’t know what the word means when you live in a city. Even in the suburbs there are streetlights, the distant glow of town. But once the sun goes down in the nowhere, your world is reduced to the cone of light from your headlights. It’s insignificant, that light. As inadequate as all of your preparations.

“That was ‘Ode to Joy’ by,” the DJ sucked in a lungful of smoke, voice strained, “by Beethoven man, dig it. Nothin’ to do in the dark except listen, that’s what I’m doing and I’m glad you are, too.”

He took shape in my mind as I drove, growing long and lizard like in his studio, attached at the mouth to the serpentine hose of a Moroccan hookah. He’d be filthy. Uncombed hair the color of ashes and bad skin that never saw a bar of soap.

“And now we’re gonna let our hair down with m’man Clapton and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.”

“Are you kidding me
 
?” I said to the radio and he cackled back as if he’d heard.

Rock, classical and then some tribal stuff with drums. In between he rambled and ranted about anything that came to mind. Religion. Communism. A marriage, presumably his, failing. This guy was higher than a kite and the only radio station on the air. How did he get such range
 
?

“They don’t know, they don’t know, man, lemme tell you,
they know
. Your new HD-TV with voice control
 
? It’s always listening, even when you turn it off. Think about that, man. You like to jerk off to Internet porn
 
? Man I hope you cover that camera with some tape because they can see you. Yeah, yeah. They say they don’t know how many people cops kill every year
 
? Of course they know, they don’t want you to know but they know. They know everything and they like it.” He took a breath to cough and I could hear the static-laden suck of a pipe. “Know what they don’t like
 
? I know what they know. I can hear them in their little bunkers and they hate it.”

He was crazier than a shit-house rat.

“This is gonna be a humanitarian gesture,” I said and Johnny Cash answered by singing he once shot a guy in Reno. I was getting squirrelly. Popping too many painkillers and doing everything I could not to think about the phone ringing with no one to answer. After two years of playing postman with Vera, I had enough dough stuffed in my mattress to get us down to Mexico where the dollar went far and the tequila flowed like liquid gold. I wanted dirt on Sally so he’d leave us alone but he found the bug I installed on his phone. Then he found me backstage with Vera.

I was picturing her in the dressing room when the fire blazed up on my right and I flashed right past it, unaware until I hit the brakes that I was doing eighty miles an hour. I fishtailed to a screeching stop and threw the Jeep into reverse, backing up with a high whine of the engine into the crimson glow of taillights. I jerked to a stop in front of a collection of low structures surrounding a bonfire.

The domelight came on when I shoved open the door, the loneliest nightlight on the planet. Squinting helped me make out shapes moving around the fire, wide and lumbering things leaking a high-pitched chant. Dogs were howling.

“Hello,” I called out, reluctant to abandon the delicate spill of illumination.

“Shit.” I headed in amongst the buildings—low slung things, wooden frames with hide walls that shimmered and flapped in a weird approximation of life. Some kind of Indian shit. I stepped close to one and touched it, wincing at the grease and stink. I thought I heard a rhythmic grunting from within when a hand slapped against the hide from the inside and I stumbled away, panting.

“The fuck
 
?” I wiped slick fingers against my coat.

The smell of charred meat was strong on the air and the chant continued as I moved past the outer ring and into the central circle where the strange silhouettes sang and swayed. A carved post rose out of the fire, the faces of unrecognizable animals bellowing silently all the way up to a winged shape at the top. Why it wasn’t consumed by the blaze I couldn’t tell but a bundle wrapped in chains was attached to it, shapeless and blackened, dripping fat visible as it trickled into the fire.

“Qui etes-vous
 
?”

A bundled figure emerged from the nearest building, the hide entrance slapping closed before I could see anything but a faint glow inside. She was short and wide in a seal skin coat trimmed with fur. Her cheeks glistened with bear-fat, framed by pendulous black braids.

“What
 
?” I said and the chanting stopped as if I’d tripped a switch. Long-haired women gathered in between me and the fire. Squat in their native winter gear, a museum display come to life. They held spears tipped with white bone.

“English
 
? Do you speak English
 
?” I asked, looking back and forth between the crowd and my questioner. A woman detached herself from the group and said something full of liquid clicks before approaching me.

“Why are you here
 
?” Her words strangely accented. She was a full head shorter than me, eyes narrow in a round face.

“I’m Shaw,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet my guide, take me to KZXX. The radio station.”

That eerie liquid tongue spilled from a dozen mouths and the English speaker turned to them, shouting and slashing the air with her hand. She turned back as the group quieted and said, “Not good there, not good for men.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Dark.” She waved overhead to encompass the starry sky. “Sound.” She opened her mouth to keen in that disconcerting way. The women behind her took up the chant and spread out to circle the fire again. “Sick.” She stepped close enough for me to smell the onions on her breath as she tapped my temple with a blunt finger.

I thought of the people who had stayed behind to the south of me, almost all men. The sense of despair. The fight at the bar.

“Go home,” the woman said.

“Can’t.”

She snorted and shook her head, the beads at the end of her braids clacking. She held out her hand and I pulled the thick bundle of money from my pocket, placing it in her palm. She jerked her head in a “follow me” gesture and set off around the dancers.

The chanting took on a grating quality as I drew closer, the sound of an invisible ant scratching and probing inside my ears until I chanced to look up at the cooking bundle on the pole.

Christ.

“Come,” my guide barked and I shook myself into motion. I crunched through the snow after her, slip-sliding in my smooth-soled shoes as we hurried past a row of tied-up dogs that snarled and snapped at my passage.

“Dog sled
 
?” I said and she snorted in disdain before pulling the tarp from a snow mobile with an incongruously yellow fuselage. She straddled the long seat and waved impatiently for me to climb on behind her, forced to press myself into the feral stink of her clothing. She gunned the machine to roaring life and twisted the throttle several times, blotting out the awful chanting with the mechanical roar.