The Watchmen

by John Altman

“How would we go about that?”

  Again, Finney hesitated.

  “If coercive techniques fail,” he said slowly, “we might consider the implementation of a depatterning strategy. The subject is reduced to an essentially vegetable state, using electroconvulsive shock, sleep deprivation, sensory isolation. Once fully depatterned, he is unable to feed himself; he becomes incontinent; he is unable to state his name or the date. Then we begin to rebuild. The process is called psychic driving. But it’s hardly an exact science. Far better to secure the man’s cooperation, if possible. To work with him, instead of against him.”

  Warren’s frown remained. He did not want to hear that there was no easy solution, of course. He wanted Finney to wave a magic wand of psychoanalysis and deliver Zattout’s full cooperation on a plate. But that was not the way things worked; and torture could lead them only so far.

  For the moment, the case officer didn’t argue. He looked at his notebook and wrote something down. “Well,” he said. “Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for tomorrow. Let’s call it a day.”

  Finney closed his own pad with some relief. He had been up late the night before, parsing the results of Zattout’s Wechsler test. His cold was not only lurking but gaining ground. If he pushed too hard, he would be of no use to anyone.

  Yet once in his bedroom, he wasted five minutes looking absently out the window. At last something brought him back to reality: the mournful hoot of a train whistle, from far down in the valley. The loneliest sound in the world, his father had called it.

  He glanced at the photograph of Lila, her sparkling green eyes competing with—and defeating—the water over her shoulder.

  He yawned. Then stood, and went to the bathroom to conduct his nightly ablutions.

  As the train whistle receded, the assassin emerged from the forest behind the Sleepy Hollow motel.

  He was careful to give the front office a wide berth. Through the window he could see the girl’s mother talking on the phone, her voice loud enough to penetrate the glass. “The last straw,” she said archly. “It’s that Batter-berry boy, Tina, I just know it …”

  In the room he washed his hands and face. He changed his clothes and packed his bag. Then he sat on the floor, cross-legged, and meditated.

  Three hours later, he stood. He cracked his spine, neck, and shoulders. His forearms were beginning to burn. He had dug the grave by hand, using a flat rock as a shovel.

  At a few minutes past midnight he left the room for the last time. Soon he was on the highway, heading east. Then he turned south, in the direction of New York City.

  His return to the city was slightly ahead of schedule. But circumstance had forced his hand. The shallow grave might keep the girl hidden for a day or two—but by the time she was found, he needed to be gone.

  It was acceptable. He’d accomplished enough reconnaissance to put his mind at ease. And his presence in the city would afford him an opportunity to visit the mechanic, encouraging the man to deliver on his promises.

  At 3:05 on the morning of April 18, the blue coupe pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket. The assassin gathered his belongings and made a quick pass at the car under the sodium lights, removing fingerprints. Then he began to walk.

  By the time he reached the Arlington Motel, it was nearly four A.M. The motel was similar to a half dozen others lining the block: dingy and unassuming, with two letters in the neon VACANCY sign winking on and off. The main office was dark. He approached the night window, rang a bell, and waited. Presently a man shuffled to the window, bleary-eyed and bed-headed, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants.

  When the assassin stepped into his new room, the sun was on the verge of rising.

  He showered, then set up his laptop on a desk that seemed last to have been cleaned at the turn of the century. He composed a brief letter and addressed an envelope to Miriam Lane, at number sixty-two Sycamore Drive.

  He shut down the computer and went to lie on the bed. He closed his eyes, and for ten hours slept a deep, dreamless sleep.

  6

  When he woke, every joint and tendon throbbed from the exertion of digging the grave.

  He showered again—more conscious of his surroundings now than he had been the night before. The bathroom was coated with gray scum and black mildew. Despite the grime he stayed in the shower for nearly twenty minutes, letting the water pound the ache out of his muscles.

  By the time he had dressed, his watch read six o’clock: too late to visit the garage. He ventured out anyway, dropping the letter in a mailbox and then taking a walk. The neighborhood featured bodegas, fried chicken outfits with hand-lettered signs in their windows, diners specializing in Spanish cuisine. He was tempted to sit down in one of these diners and buy a meal. Even a few pleasant words exchanged with a waitress might make him feel less dark inside. But lingering in public seemed unwise. He ordered his dinner to go, then brought it back to the room and ate alone, flicking from one weather report to another.

  Following the meal, he surprised himself by crawling immediately back into bed.

  For a time he stared at the ceiling. A traffic light outside the motel played a light show: red and green, yellow and black.

  The girl had reminded him of Rana.

  It was true; there was no denying it. Sonya had been fair, where Rana had been dark—Sonya of average height, Rana tall and slender. Yet beneath the surface, something in the girls had struck the same chord inside him. Both had been spirited and rebellious; neither had accepted the rules foisted on her by her parents.

  By now Rana Shaykh would be a woman, not a girl. He tried to picture what she might look like. No longer coltish; she would have grown into her legs. But her hair still would be long, still so black that a man felt himself falling into an abyss whenever he looked at it.

  Had she married? The last time he’d seen her, she had been engaged. The engagement had happened during her thirteenth year. She’d gone dabke dancing with friends, and caught the eye of the derbake player—a village elder with a traditional drum of clay and goat skin. After the dance, the old man had approached her mother and asked for Rana’s hand. Her mother had agreed, thinking the engagement offered a chance to remove her daughter from the cinderblock camp in which she’d grown up. But to Rana it simply had offered a different kind of dead end.

  I won’t marry him, she said firmly.

  They were sitting in a lot behind her school, among the stench of garbage and sewage. From a nearby playground came the singsong chant of playing children: Sukkar, mukkar, la la la, delivered without tangible enthusiasm.

  At that point, the assassin’s parents had been dead for only two years. He had been on his own for only half that time. He had not learned to harden his heart, to be skeptical. He had believed Rana when she continued: I’m going to run away. In the West, children play all day. They do nothing but play.

  Now he was older, and wiser. Now he knew that Rana must have married the man, despite her protests. It was her only way out, although she hadn’t wanted to accept that fact at the time. Why did he even think of it? It had been so long ago … she wouldn’t even remember him.

  The traffic lights played: ladybugs and yellow jackets.

  Someone was in the bed beside him.

  Are you cold?

  A little.

  Sonya Jacobs, he thought. Not the girl herself, but her revenant.

  She was cold as ice. She had been in the ground for hardly twenty-four hours, but already maggots had grown in her softest spots: eyes, ears, beneath her arms, in her genitalia. Her breath smelled of worms and rot. He could hear the insects that had nested inside her body, preening.

  She giggled.

  I’m sorry, she said. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

  He closed his eyes. He breathed. When he looked over again, the girl was gone.

  In the morning he would go to the garage. He concentrated on that—on work still to be done.

  In the morning.

  Let it be morni
ng

  Another scalding-hot shower. Then he headed east, into a neighborhood even more marginal than that of his new motel.

  He passed an off-track betting parlor, a vacant lot, a pizzeria with the windows blacked out. Farther on was a weed-choked schoolyard; then an industrial laundry, a warehouse, a store advertising adult novelties and magazines. Fossilized hulks of cars were parked up and down the avenue, balanced on wheel rims and axles.

  As he approached the garage, broken glass crunched underfoot. On one side of the building was a storefront reading CHECKS CASHED. On the other, ACE STORAGE. On the garage itself: GOLDEN STAR MOTORS. Parked out front was a lovingly restored 1965 Ford Mustang, incongruously pristine against the ashy surroundings.

  Behind the desk in the front office stood an obese man looking over a clipboard. When the bell on the door chimed, he glanced up. “Help you?”

  “Is Sal here?”

  “Sal!” the man thundered, and returned his eyes to the clipboard.

  A few moments passed. Through an open door behind the desk, a radio played tinny Spanish pop music.

  The assassin sank into a plastic chair. Stacks of magazines and newspapers rested on a low table to his left. He looked at them, then looked away. He looked back, pulled the Times free, and scanned the front page. In the bottom right corner was a headline that caught his eye: “Search Effort Upstate Fails to Find Missing Teenager.”

  He wet his lips, and bent closer to the page.

  An ongoing search has turned up no trace of the teenaged girl who vanished Tuesday night from the small Catskills motel owned by her parents. Officials insist they have not given up hope that Sonya Jacobs, 16, will be found, even as they acknowledged disappointment at the lack of results.

  As helicopters, search parties, and bloodhounds combed the woods behind this sleepy mountain retreat, police today released a description of—

  “You rang?” a voice said.

  The voice belonged to Sal Santiori—a few inches over six feet, a few dozen pounds over two hundred. His clear blue eyes betrayed no sign of recognition.

  The assassin set down the newspaper. “I was here a few weeks ago,” he said. “The Honda?”

  Sal snapped his fingers. “Right. Come into my office.”

  His office was a corner of the garage visible through the open door behind the desk. A centerfold hung on the wall, above a cup filled with tobacco-browned saliva. Sal flipped through some papers stacked on an engine block. “Honda,” he said. “Honda, Honda. Right. The custom job. I sent it out to a friend of mine on the island.… Here it is. He says my estimate was a little low.”

  The assassin waited.

  “What did we say—seven hundred? I was three hundred short, he says. So we’re talking about a thousand.”

  “When can I expect it?”

  “If I get half the three hundred in cash today—middle of next week?”

  He nodded.

  “Come into my office,” Sal said again.

  This time his office was the front office. The obese man had vanished. Sal moved behind the cash register and punched a button. The drawer shot out. “One-fifty.”

  He accepted three fifty-dollar bills, held them to the light, then marked them with a felt-tip pen and deposited them beneath the tray in the register drawer. “Try me on Wednesday,” he said, “and we’ll see where we’re at.”

  One week from today. Delays, he thought. But would he gain anything by arguing? Doubtful.

  “Long as you’re here …” Sal reached beneath the desk and produced a small spray can. The label read, “Photo Fog: Anti-Flash Photo-Radar Spray.”

  “Twenty-nine ninety-five. Only takes thirty seconds to spray onto your plates. Invisible to the naked eye. But any camera using a flash can’t get your digits; it reflects the light right back. Now here’s the beauty part. It’s one hundred percent legal.”

  “I don’t need it. But thank you.”

  “Whatever you say.” The spray can disappeared. “So, Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday.”

  Sal grinned, showing small uneven teeth like a piranha’s. “Pleasure doing business,” he said.

  On the way back to the Arlington Motel, he stopped at a bodega and bought a newspaper. When he reached the room, he locked the door, moved to the bed, and spread it open.

  Police today released a description of a man who was seen with Miss Jacobs shortly before her disappearance. The man they seek is between twenty-five and forty years of age, light-complexioned, with a slight build and no visible scars. A police spokesman said that further details might be released as the investigation progresses.

  “If anybody knows where our little girl is,” Dorothy Jacobs, Sonya’s mother, pleaded this morning, “we ask that they come forward. She never hurt anybody. All we want is to see her again.”

  Scores of local residents volunteered to join the search, but as this edition went to press the police—

  He folded the paper.

  The coupe had been abandoned and wiped clean. The identity he had been using no longer existed. The description of him—if it was all they had—was generic and vague. They could not trace him.

  But what if the men in the safe house somehow made a connection, between him and the dead girl and Zattout?

  The thought was vexing. His breed were silent, unknown, unexpected. If the enemy knew his face, perhaps he needed to reconsider moving ahead at all.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor. He exhaled, emptying his lungs, then deliberately refilled them. He repeated this exercise seventy-nine times. On the eighty-first exhalation, he left his lungs empty.

  He lowered his chin until it touched his chest, and diagnosed the balance of energy within his body. The path was open: from palate to pulmonary artery, from diaphragm to solar plexus to navel to genitals. Satisfied, he began to breathe again.

  He adjusted his position on the carpet, straightening his legs, and leaned forward until his forehead touched his knees. He counted, nine nines. Now the best path to pursue would show itself to him, if only he made himself receptive.

  The answer rose from his subconscious like a dreamy spark rising from a crackling fire:

  The man on the inside. Quinlan.

  If a problem had developed—if they had connected him with the girl, and become aware of him within the safe house—then Quinlan would make a report of it.

  He lifted his forehead from his knees, considering. The post office box to which Quinlan sent his intelligence was known to him. The knowledge had come from the first man he had killed, who had spoken at some length before the assassin gave him the mercy of death. That man, Talamous Wahab, had provided information regarding the others associated with the Zattout endeavor: the names, the roles played by each, the methods of communication. Wahab had spoken eagerly, seeming to believe that enough cooperation might somehow save his life. He had not been able to fathom that the assassin—whom he first had met weeks before under polite circumstances—would turn on him so ruthlessly.

  Wahab had made a fatal error in judgment. The assassin had no allegiance to these men, nor to their cause. All were tracks that needed to be covered. All except Ajami, who needed to be left alive to arrange the transfer of funds once it was done.

  If the death of the girl had compromised the operation, the mole would report it. He would wait a few days and then check the box himself, availing himself of its contents before Ajami ever picked up the letter.

  He cracked his neck, his shoulders, his wrists, his knees, his ankles. Now that he had a plan of action, he felt calmer. He found his tunic and donned it, then slipped one of the tools sewn into the right sleeve out into his hand. The concealed tools served a dual purpose. Together, still in the sleeve, they could block a blow, frustrating an attack made by hand or knife. Alone, they fulfilled different needs.

  He raised the lock pick he had withdrawn, inspected the soft curve of metal, then returned it to the sleeve with a flick of his wrist.

  They had not made the conne
ction, he thought. The men in the safe house would have no reason to pay attention to the disappearance of a girl from a town thirty miles farther down the highway.

  But it always was best to err on the side of caution.

  Muhammad Nassif leaned back in the doorway of the coffee shop, trying to suppress a murmur of paranoia.

  For five minutes he watched the entrance of the post office with bloodshot eyes. He saw nothing out of the ordinary—and yet the apprehension remained. This would teach him to give in to peer pressure, he thought. This would teach him to act like a child.

  Earlier that afternoon he had let himself be convinced to share a joint with two friends from the Queens Bridge Locals. Had he refused to partake, they would have wondered why; so he had taken three hits, being careful not to inhale too deeply. The weed had left him with a dull headache and a fuzzy, insistent sense of unease. Now he found himself here, hunched into the doorway and watching the post office, for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. Just to be sure, he thought. But sure of what, exactly?

  After five minutes he pushed out of the doorway and crossed the street, trying not to look like a fugitive as he stepped into the post office.

  The place was nearly empty. It felt like a fishbowl, or—more accurately—like a giant empty swimming pool. As he approached the row of P.O. boxes, he felt as if he were walking down a diving board. He slipped the key into the lock, turned it, and saw that the box was empty.

  The key went back into his pocket. He spun on his heel and headed for the door. How were the fluorescents so damned bright? The phenomenon was absorbing, uncanny; he walked with his head tilted back, drinking in the light.

  When he collided with the woman, his paranoia rose again in a rush.

  “Whoa there,” she said. “Watch it.”

  He looked into her face and saw kindly crinkles around the eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties, wearing a postal worker’s uniform. A name tag pinned above her left breast identified her as Rose.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, and tried to step around her; but she was stepping in the same direction. For a few seconds they bumbled back and forth like characters from a vaudeville sketch. Then he darted to the right, slipping past her. As he left the building, left the fish-bowl, he could feel her eyes on his back. Watching him.