A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Miller interjected. ‘Would it be alright if I called you? I don’t know when we’re going to see the light of day on this thing. I’ve got my precinct captain, he’s got the chief, the chief has got the mayor—’

  ‘I understand, Detective Miller. You know where I am. You call me when you get some breathing space and we’ll have this conversation then, okay?’

  Miller felt no less awkward.

  ‘One thing on this,’ Hemmings said. ‘The thing about looking for someone who has to do this, not who wants to, right?’

  ‘I got it,’ Miller said.

  Outside, walking down the steps and back toward the car, Roth said, ‘What was the deal there? Looked like she was hitting on you.’

  ‘She was.’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay . . . so now we have something here.’

  ‘Jesus, man, will you leave it out. I spoke to the woman. I might call her. What the fuck is it with you?’

  ‘I have an idea,’ Roth said. ‘Maybe we could go to a game together, you know? Like me and Amanda, you and Marilyn Hemmings. Hey, that’s a good idea. I’m gonna call Amanda and tell her—’

  ‘Tell her nothing,’ Miller said. ‘You’re not gonna call her and you’re not gonna tell her anything. Nothing at all is going on here. This is not the way my life works. Right now the only thing going on in my life is a visit to the Police Department Administrations Unit. We’re gonna go talk to someone in pensions and they’re gonna tell us where to find Michael McCullough. That’s my life right now, Al, and I really haven’t got time for anything else, okay?’

  Roth said nothing.

  ‘Okay?’ Miller repeated.

  ‘Okay, okay . . . Jesus, what the fuck shit is this? What the fuck—’

  ‘What the fuck nothing, Al. Get in the fucking car.’

  I stood at Catherine Sheridan’s apartment door for a long time before I knocked. It was late, a little after ten. Sunday, April 5th, 1981, a day I would remember for the rest of my life. Such days as this ordinarily became important only after the fact. This was different. This was a day I knew would be important from the moment I woke up.

  I raised my hand, and then I lowered it. I paced the hallway - back and forth, back and forth - and then I returned to the door and raised my hand again.

  She opened it suddenly, unexpectedly.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she said, and started laughing. ‘You’ve been out there walking up and down for a good fifteen minutes. Either you’re going to knock on the damn door or you’re not.’

  I stood speechless for a moment, my eyes wide, my heart missing beats.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m going to knock on the door.’

  ‘Okay, right . . . so knock on the damn door will you?’

  Catherine paused for a split second. I took a step forward to enter the apartment, but she shut the door hard and firm in my face. I heard her laughing on the other side.

  I knocked on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called.

  ‘Jesus, Catherine, who the hell do you think it is? Let me in for God’s sake.’

  She was still laughing when she opened the door. I followed her, closed the door behind me, and once inside the front room I stood there feeling a sense of sympathy for what me and Don Carvalho were putting her through.

  ‘I saw the films,’ I said.

  Catherine’s smile disappeared. ‘So you understand why I want to do something about this?’

  ‘I understand.’

  She stood there, waiting for me to tell her what I’d decided.

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘I just don’t get what the hell is going on with you, John Robey.’

  ‘Maybe there isn’t anything to get.’

  Catherine shook her head like a disapproving parent. ‘There’s always something to get with everyone. You know who Lawrence Matthews is, and Don Carvalho, right? You know who Dennis Powers works for . . .’

  ‘I know who they are,’ I replied. ‘I know about Langley, about the CIA, about the recruitment program they’re running in the campuses . . . I know what they want, Catherine . . . I just don’t know whether I can do it.’

  ‘Whether you can do it, or whether you’re willing to do it? They’re not the same thing.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘So which one is it?’

  ‘I’ve seen the films. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to do something about what’s going on out there?’

  She smiled. ‘People who aren’t in their right mind, that’s who.’

  I walked to the right of the room and sat down. ‘Believe me, Catherine, it’s not a question of whether I want to do something, it’s simply a question of whether I have what it takes—’

  ‘You have what it takes,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘You sound very certain.’

  ‘Believe me, John, if you didn’t have what it takes to do this thing you wouldn’t be here. There must have been at least twenty-five or thirty people that came in with you. And how many of them are still here? This whole thing . . . it’s an Intelligence community. These people are actually very fucking good at what they do. This is a proving ground. This is like college for the CIA. People like Carvalho and Powers know more about you than you know about yourself.’

  ‘You don’t think I realize this?’ I asked.

  ‘Suspecting and knowing are not the same thing, John. These people see something in you that makes them certain you will do exactly what they want—’

  ‘And that would be what exactly?’

  ‘God, I don’t know, John. They want you to gather intelligence. They want you to listen to what people say. Watch people. They want you to evaluate possibilities and report back to Langley.’ Catherine looked away for a moment, and when she looked back there was something intense and disquieting in her expression.

  ‘We’re all on our own here,’ she said quietly. ‘None of us has parents. None of us has connections to the world that mean anything at all. We are the invisible ones, the ones who can vanish in a heartbeat. We appear, and then we disappear. We can go anywhere they want to send us. We can be the eyes and ears of the Intelligence community any place in the world, and if we are suddenly lost it doesn’t matter. There’s no-one to raise a question or file a missing persons report with the police. People like us don’t matter at all in the small details of life, but in the grand scheme of things we can actually count for something.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ I asked. ‘Because you want to count for something?’

  ‘Isn’t that what everyone wants . . . to feel that their life had some kind of meaning?’

  I left her question unanswered.

  ‘Christ, John . . . sometimes you sound so definite, so emphatic, passionate even. That’s what they see in you. That’s why you’ve made it this far. They recognize that it’s people like us who can make some sort of impact on what’s happening.’

  ‘And you don’t question the way these things are done?’

  ‘Of course I question it. But there’s so much more right in this than there is wrong. This is no different from Vietnam, from Korea, Afghanistan . . . a thousand other places where some sort of injustice is being perpetrated on a daily basis. These people don’t have the organization to handle it themselves. They have been beaten down so many times they don’t have the strength to get back up again. There’s an awful lot of history here, John, and you can either be part of it, or you can make it.’

  ‘And the real truth of why we’re going out there?’

  She looked towards the window - pensive, intense.

  ‘The fact that people have to die . . . ?’ I prompted.

  ‘Everyone has to die, John.’

  ‘Sure they do, but they die of cancer and car accidents and strokes and shit like that. It isn’t your average citizen who walks down the street and gets shot in the head by a sniper.’

  ‘The greater good,’ she said.

 
‘The greater good,’ I echoed.

  ‘It’s not something that has to be questioned by people like us. We do what we do for the greater good.’

  ‘Hitler in a bar in 1929.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So I agree with you.’

  Catherine frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I agree with everything you say. I came over here to tell you exactly what you’ve just told me—’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘I like to hear you preach,’ I said. ‘I like to hear you get all wound up and indignant.’

  ‘Oh fuck off will you.’

  ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘It’s actually refreshing to listen to someone take a position on something. Out there . . .’ I waved my hand toward the window, the street, the world beyond. ‘Out there people are so fucking half-minded. They don’t know what they want or need. I see what’s happening, and in all honesty I couldn’t give a damn, at least not specifically.’

  ‘What? I thought you just said—’

  ‘Sit down,’ I told her.

  ‘I don’t want to sit down.’

  ‘Sit down. You’re going to need to sit down.’

  ‘I don’t need—’

  ‘Catherine, for once in your life will you shut the fuck up and sit down?’

  Her eyes wide, her mouth open, she stepped to the left and sat down on the sofa.

  ‘I didn’t come here at the same time as you,’ I said. ‘You thought you were here before me. You were here and then I arrived, right?’

  ‘Yes, you came after me.’

  ‘I’d been here for three months before you even arrived. I went through the entire routine with Don Carvalho. Dennis Powers came later. He’d been away somewhere. He was told that I knew nothing, that I should be indoctrinated like everyone else, and he was to tell you how I reacted, what I thought, everything I said.’

  ‘You set me up?’ Catherine said. ’For God’s sake—’

  ‘No-one set you up, Catherine. I needed to know how certain you were about what was going on. I decided a long time back that I was going. We needed someone to go with me, preferably a girl. They figured you were the best, but they needed to know that you would go regardless of what you thought of me.’

  ‘And Dennis Powers didn’t know that you were already working?’

  ‘Only person who knew was Don Carvalho. He’s my coach, if you like. He figured you were the right one, but he had to be sure.’

  ‘So you had already made arrangements?’

  ‘Arrangements were made weeks ago.’

  ‘But you just said that you didn’t care what was happening out there.’

  ‘Specifically,’ I replied. ‘I said I didn’t give a damn about what was happening specifically.’

  Catherine looked so intense, and yet so confused. I remembered the first time I’d seen her in the damned turquoise beret, how I’d wished that she could be the one.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I could see her assumptions falling apart. She had believed me indecisive and uncertain. Believed it had been her job to convince me of something, and now she saw that it had merely been her own proving ground.

  ‘I mean that there are too many places we could go,’ I said. ‘Ethiopia, Uganda, Palestine, Israel. There’s the attempted Portuguese coup, the Lebanese civil war, the Cuban invasion of Angola. All of this shit and more happening in the last handful of years. This is the tip of the iceberg. This is just the stuff we read about in the newspapers, but it’s out there, it’s happening and it never fucking stops. So no, I don’t care for this any more than I care for any other place, but this is where they want me to go, and they want someone to go with me, and it looks like you’re it.’

  ‘And you’re an assassin? Is that what you are?’

  ‘Jesus no, I’m not a fucking assassin. Who told you I was an assassin?’

  ‘The conversation we had before . . .’

  ‘The conversations weren’t for me, Catherine, they were for you. Everything we discussed, everything you concluded, what you said to Dennis . . . all of it was part of finding out how much you wanted to do this thing, how far you were prepared to go.’

  ‘And you know how far I’m prepared to go?’

  ‘We know enough.’

  ‘So this was all prearranged? Everything that’s happened between us was part of my indoctrination into this . . . this . . .’

  ‘Company of wolves?’ I suggested.

  ‘So what now? I have to fuck you or what?’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  She shrugged. ‘No, I’m not kidding. Jesus, is this what you thought of me? That I could just be led along day after day, that you could just—’

  ‘Just what?’ I said. ‘Test you? Test your resolve on these things? What the fuck kind of game do you think this is, Catherine? What the hell kind of thing do you think is going on here? There’s a war out there . . . Jesus Christ, even that is one almighty understatement. The movies you saw, they weren’t even the rated versions. We’re gathering intelligence, that’s what we’re doing. We’re going out into the middle of fucking nowhere to find out what the middle of nowhere actually looks like. There’s millions of dollars being spent on trying to defend that scratched-up piece of shit from a complete communist takeover, and the CIA . . . Jesus, I don’t even know if this is the CIA. It could be NSA, it could be naval intelligence, it could be some splinter group that answers only to the president himself, but whatever the fuck it is I want to do something about it, and yes I am the same as you. I don’t have any parents or anyone else who might be concerned if I don’t come home on time. This is not the kind of life . . . hell, I don’t even know what kind of life I was planning . . . I only know that this appears to serve a great deal more purpose than anything else I’ve thought of.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘You want me to go with you?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ I said.

  ‘And I’ve passed your tests?’

  ‘They were never my tests, Catherine—’

  ‘I’m not talking about Dennis. I’m not talking about late night discussions with Don Carvalho. I’m talking about whatever tests you figured out for me. The things I’ve said, how I’ve dealt with everything here . . . you must have had a viewpoint about what you wanted.’

  ‘I’ve always known what I’ve wanted.’

  ‘So you want me to come with you?’

  ‘Yes I do . . . I want you to come with me.’

  ‘And you think you can trust me?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can trust you.’

  ‘And to work together you think that maybe the trust should be mutual?’

  ‘Of course it should.’

  ‘So tell me something about yourself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This whole time you’ve been pretending to be someone else, pretending to be the new kid on the block, the guy with all the uncertainties and questions. Well, now you tell me that you were here first, that you’d already made up your mind, and you just needed to get me straight enough to go with you—’

  ‘I never said that—’

  ‘But that’s what was going on, John. I can see that much.’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘So the trust should be reciprocated, and you can only trust someone if you know something about them, and with that something you open the door to something else, and soon you know everything there is to know about them and they have nothing to hide. That’s trust - the idea that there isn’t anything they can hide from you.’

  ‘I haven’t hidden anything from you.’

  ‘You’ve told me nothing about yourself.’

  ‘Telling you nothing and hiding things from you are not the same thing.’

  ‘That’s pedantic.’

  ‘It’s not pedantic, it’s true.’

  ‘But nevertheless you agree that we should be on the same terms for a relationship to work?’

&
nbsp; ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it can’t hurt to tell me something.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to tell you, Catherine.’

  ‘Your parents.’

  My thoughts stopped dead. ‘My parents?’

  ‘Sure . . . tell me what happened to your parents. Tell me why you’re all alone in the big, bad world with no-one to call the police if you don’t show up for work.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you about my parents.’

  ‘Then you can go fuck yourself.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re such a tough cookie,’ I said. ‘You’re so full of shit. There’s no way after all of this that you would turn this down.’

  ‘Try me.’

  There it was again, the intensity in her eyes - the hardness. The thing that had convinced Don Carvalho that Catherine Sheridan was the one. ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘As can be. You want me to trust you, then you have to trust me. You want me to go two thousand miles into the middle of fucking nowhere with you, then there has to be some kind of give and take—’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said.

  ‘The fuck you will. I want to know the truth about your parents, not the bullshit you told me before.’

  ‘Why? Why on earth do you want to know about my parents?’

  ‘Because it’s the one thing you’ve never mentioned, and when I’ve mentioned it you close up so fucking tight. Mention your parents and you become someone else entirely. So fucking impregnable. Be different if you were my trainer, if you were my coach, my reader. Be different then. Wouldn’t be such a big deal. But you’re not those things, John. You’re the guy I’m s’posed to trust with my life. You’re younger than me, for God’s sake. You’ve probably never had a steady girl. Sometimes you act like you never fucked someone. I wanna know whether this big man on fucking campus is really the CIA hotshot, the golden boy, the whiz-kid prodigy that you probably are, or whether you’re just some dumbass wet-behind-the-ears farmhand out of Bohunk, East Jesus, that the CIA thinks they can send over there as cannon fodder.’

  ‘Are you done already?’

  She laughed unsympathetically. ‘No, as a matter of fact I am not done. What I’m saying means something.’