Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  “Those fit me?” he asked, of the suits on the bed. She appraised him openly this time, and shook her head—full no. He offered the vodka—again, no. “Suit yourself.” He in-filled the juice till it troubled the brim. “If all God’s children knew full and virtuous splendor by sight, there’d be bugger-all left to me. To fallen comrades,” he said with a gesture, and drained off the top. He chased it with coffee and she watched him motionlessly. Gamlin drew a pair of enlargements from an envelope on the coffee table and toss them down before her. “Know him?” he asked. He smoothed his sparse, damp blond hair and reclined into the sofa with his juice and his ethanol warmth.

  Soong separated the images with index fingers. “What is this?” she asked.

  “Two weeks fruit-meat,” answered Gamlin. “Frame captures. Closed circuit.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You ever seen him?”

  “Skinhead in a bomber? He deliver pizza?”

  “You know it lovey—I can never tell when you’re joking: something ‘bout your demeanor.”

  “Next time I’ll tap my foot.”

  “Light a flare,” said Gamlin.

  “I don’t know him,” she said, and pushed the pictures back toward Gamlin. “Who is it?”

  “Some fixer. Name of August Reams.”

  She shook her head again.

  “I wouldn’t think it,” said Gamlin. “Our moon-face mandarin friends were all out of ideas, too. I’d to ring up old mates to work it out.”

  “Is that a risk?”

  “When we’re all scribing Hanzi with a fucking brush, you and your people can have it all your own way. Until such time, I’ll draw my own plays.”

  Soong lay a long, heavy look at him he took for doubt. But he couldn’t be sure. She drew a rumpled pack of Marlborough Lights from her bag, and he nodded toward the balcony. She stepped out through a French door, lit one on a grape convenience store lighter, and exhaled gamely back into the room. Gamlin skimmed from his glass and settled further into the sofa. “Any other shocking habits to confess?” Gamlin called over the sofa back and smiled.

  “The stills are from where?” she asked.

  “Kashkin’s hotel in Mexico City, and the departure lounge.”

  “Kashkin was yours?”

  “Pavel Kashkin. I ran him, yes. He was mine.”

  “How’d you get them?”

  “Do you know what?” Gamlin laughed, “they were all snugged away till the police took them. Rounded the closed circuit footage, and from there it was light reading. Cost me a return trip, four packs of draught Guinness—they’ve a Sergeant who likes it: says the widget’s always wrong—and a clean 1911. He should have that by now. But, maybe that’s bloody expensive for Mexico!” said Gamlin, who rose to share his expression over the sofa.

  “For frame captures?”

  “No. The tapes.”

  “Copies?”

  “Nah, original tapes. Hard to say how, but I imagine their files must have got damaged. Corrupted…somehow. Call it intuition. It’s a pitiable loss.”

  “Are you the only one who knows who you’re looking for, then?”

  “We are,” said Gamlin.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “We do. No good him getting rolled up somewhere we can’t reach him. Competition’s for chumps and republics, right Kim Soong.”

  “What is a ‘widget’?” she asked, as a bee struck against one of the door mullions with an audible tap, and clung to it in lethargy. Soong observed it with a shiver.

  “He’s bloody out of season.”

  “It’s been unusually warm most of the week,” she said.

  She exhaled vaguely, pressed out the butt with the tow of her sneaker, fastened the door behind her, and knitted herself quietly back beneath the bag in the chair. Soong was young and featureless and porcelain-fine, and resumed her unstructured collapse of slouch as before. Gamlin wondered if she’d evaporate in self-dispraise. And if she did, what would become of her enormous, scrotinous droop of tote?

  “Widget’s a nitrogen capsule in a draught Guinness can. Ever had a Guinness?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t think it. You live a fevered, unbridled life, Kim Soong: low tar fags and dry-clean laundry. At this pace you’re liable to blow.”

  “I don’t think you know me so well as to dislike me,” she said, and blinked, and blinked. Gamlin thought she was straining against touching her face, thought if she didn’t master the urge soon she’d leave rope burns.

  “You’d be right to think it; but you’d be wrong to imagine it’s true. But listen: your English is perfection. So, good on ya.”

  “I’ve got it you’re some speckled Anglo from danglesey: mineral rights to empire and all. But I guess I don’t understand why you called in for me. I’m fed: I’m not hungry for your shit.”

  Gamlin laughed. “Ah, fuck it Kimberly! Let’s be friends. I’ve lost the urge, and you’ve stole my wee heart away.”

  “That’s the screwdriver, Hoyt. Have another and we can do lab trials: see if your kingdom expands or contracts.”

  “It is love!”

  “What…do…you…want, Gamlin? Before I call Hubei—tell them you’re wasting my time, and to have you mounted on your own shaft. I’ve got my own work,” she said, and brushed her cheek with her hand, just once, and then smothered it beneath the bag.

  “Mouth on a lamp string,” Gamlin said with mock astonishment. “Fags and blowjobs made you tough after all. Well, Kimberly . . . you know Howard Foster?”

  “Dr. Foster? I had his class three years ago: senior year. Yes, I know him.”

  “Kashkin was working him when he set off for Mexico. Followed him back from a conference in Beijing. He was working him here in St. Louis. Left for Washington. Something got hotted up and he split for Mexico City—thought he had something, and called me down for a rolling handoff. When he doesn’t turn up I find him stuffed in his hotel bath.”

  “Dr. Foster?”

  “That’s who he was covering. I told him it was fallow, but he persisted. Hubei thought Foster was recruiting from Chinese trade shows—tech and security conferences. They wanted somebody on him. Kashkin was in Bejing at the time. I put him on. I thought it was a loser. Then Foster hired Kashkin—for his divorce, I presume. I thought it might be a ruse. Kashkin thought it might be gold—no clue as why. And then he said he had something: something good. Then our August Reams turns up for a very brief tour in Mexico. And now Kashkin doesn’t drink anymore.” Gamlin sat up to dribble what vodka was left into the glass, and stirred it with his finger.

  “You liked him.”

  “Kashkin? If it matters. I like a man, you know what he’s about.”

  “Is this Reams serious?”

  “People in D.C. think he’s capable, but say snuffing’s not his main thing. Does drug logistics, mainly. Some enforcement. High-power problem solving. Runs some players through Kansas City, St. Louis, Atlanta; and loose teams in Chicago, D.C., New York, and Boston. Guess he got boxed out of Philadelphia. Mainly Atlantic corridor sort of thing.”

  “So, what’s the connection?”

  “Well that’s to work out, isn’t it. But Foster’s here and so is Reams. Or he was. Left from here for Mexico—so I’m told. And returned here after.”

  “That’s a close loop for a busy man.”

  “So said I.”

  Soong rose and left the bag in her place. She fetched a cup from the credenza at the door and returned to have coffee from Gamlin’s carafe. She took cream and sweetener from fiddly packets, and Gamlin’s unused spoon.

  “Add more and they charge for dessert,” said Gamlin.

  “What about do-it-yourself cocktails?”

  Soong wore jeans, a quilt coat she’d put over the chair, and what to Gamlin was an odd brocade blouse. It w
as close at the shoulder and wide at the hem and swung unsteadily as she moved, and Gamlin thought she looked the tongue of a ringing bell.

  She took the time from a slender watch that might’ve been inert costume jewelry: “Half-past eleven, Hoyt. You could be drunk by one.”

  “With a little effort, sooner,” said Gamlin. “And see there, I’d just thought we were getting on.

  “You say you know Foster. How well?” he asked.

  “Not well. When I had his class I was on light watch. But Hubei’s got their internship now—so I’ve been concentrating on that. I know for a while he was palling with this student—we were in Dr. Foster’s class together: Jeffrey Sachs.”

  “He is?”

  “Grad student at the university. Supposed to be a slick programmer: big talent. Some mutual friends—pretty reliable parties—said he might be working on a side project with Dr. Foster, or maybe for him. But nobody’s seen him since New Year’s—and what is it?” She looked again at her costume jewelry watch. “The twenty-seventh? He’s got family in the east, I understand—so people think maybe he ditched out and went back home for a semester. Family illness or something, I don’t know.”

  “What might he be doing with Foster?”

  “Recruiting him, maybe?”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Here. The U.S.”

  “Not likely then.”

  “Well, if it was side work, and you’d brought Sachs on to code, you’d have brought the right guy.”

  Gamlin tugged deeply from the glass and cleared its dewy sides with his thumb. “You know Foster by sight?”

  “He’ll be the one ducking power lines.”

  “Tall, is he?”

  “Hard to miss.”

  “He look alright to you?”

  “He’s tall for me—anyone but Greek heroes really.”

  “He look alright otherwise?”

  “He’s fine, I suppose.”

  “Maybe you should know him better.”

  2.

  Hoyt Gamlin had been on the road some two weeks—his trips to and from Mexico, his phone calls and favors and promises: his beer and a gun. He’d wheeled out by car from his L.A. condo to Pavel Kashkin’s attorneys’ offices in Washington, D.C. He’d pecked around Kashkin’s offices as a client forlorn with questions, and elsewhere, working to untangle Kashkin’s steps through D.C. to the point he’d slipped off for Mexico City. Gamlin had forwarded the digital bank of files to Hubei from Los Angeles: between the hotel and the airport, forty-eight hours across thirty-two cameras to be run through recognition software, and played for what Gamlin imagined to be a roomful of fifty Chinese all the bespectacled look of Mr. Moto, and raising a tobacco smoke like Beijing industrial fog. He floated this image receiving Soong’s armchair quiz on sources—an ageless prepubescent mid-twenties waif tuning static on his methods.

  His footwork in D.C. had remained largely fruitless until he’d heard back from Hubei on the footage. Whether by rock-crushing mainframe or legion of nicotine inspired Chins—the turn was ‘stonishing fast. As he’d suggested, they crossed traffic near Kashkin’s room with the footage from the international terminals, and swiftly provided a match. But as with Soong, this sort of thing was a categorical weakness—a blind spot the size of all Caucasia. The Chinese had become expert at smuggling corporate data systems and siphoning off anything not bolted to the floor. Pinching files, decades of tax declarations, accounting and staff ledgers—public, private, privileged or otherwise: they were scanned and collated and cross-referenced—rooted and foraged with a truffle pig’s flair. Mailing list or security permission: if you were on an inventory, you could be found. Otherwise, you were in the boundless reaches beyond data. In near Asia, their HUMINT—their human intelligence—was quite good: a body could be dug out of hiding in Taiwan; Hong Kong—plucked up and spirited off. In the bucolic swathes of alabaster pallor: the chasm yawned off into imagination. Operating in North America, if you weren’t coded into a lift-able database of assets, you were as well as unknowable to the hand-wringers back east. And it was in large part to this point that Gamlin had been attractive to the Chin. Castoff parts and pension back in the U.K.; security consultant like a corporate Pilates coach to baby tech titans in California; a bit of trigger muscle off in the camel-sands; but the whole of a full-functioning machine to Hubei—or so he was paid. But just as he with Soong there at the balcony door; her playground lighter and diet cigarettes: they did not trust him. But they did not trust him for the same reason that he did not like them: the isolation of tribes—mountainous impasses; deserts gravid with emptiness; and language which grows to cleave beyond common meaning. They wanted him, they needed him, but they would not trust to use him as they might; and it had become a recurring and perceptible omission.

  The cross-referenced stills had come back to Gamlin in D.C. with shrugs and blank expressions, and he’d been left to work out what his minders, in the zenith of their inabilities, could not. He was unfamiliar with the figure in the stills as well, but it took little imagination to appreciate he possessed physical power to manhandle Kashkin, technique, and some measure of skill. He was no pizza boy. He’d traipsed the images round Washington a few days to a collective bemusement, until finally he’d traded them to an old friend in the U.K. for a future reciprocation: a friend who’d long ago swapped his SAS face paints for an MI6 redacting pen. It was he who first put face to name. He recognized him as a fairly competent doer and finder and mover of things. They’d used him on occasions when they’d required vendors in the U.S. eastern corridor but weren’t coordinating with the CIA—or moreover, sharing.

  Now, with this, a caption for his photos; when Gamlin tried around again, memories began to clear; recollections began to jog. And once he’d put this August Reams into and out of St. Louis—a line circling back toward Foster—the third figure in the geometry, he reached out to Hubei about Soong.

  Hoyt Gamlin had crossed paths with Soong a few years prior on business through St. Louis: he’d taken reflexive disliking to her then, and he took viscerally to that reflex now. Kim Soong was a graduate student at Washington University; she was a native to the mainland: she was skin and kin and well liked. Moreover, she’d gained an internship at Boeing and in one stroke greatly elevated her station. For Hubei, she’d become the gilded swan or the jade duck, or the whatever- the-fuck, in her section: word was she was feeding back a steady stream of tasty morsels, and the Directorate had sincerest hopes for more and better. So, when Gamlin put in for some of her bandwidth, suddenly there was slack in the line. There was shuffling—a pandering reluctance—but in the end if someone was putting down footmen, he’d get a download from her, and some time. Nevertheless, Gamlin found her disagreeable as a taped chair leg: flawed, not by intent, but natural condition. If Kashkin were a concert in reassuring faults, Soong was a fugue in atonal virtues: for Gamlin, a disconcerting strength of composition in all the wrong good. It was a condition of her nature that lay against him with the bristling mortification of haircloth, but with none of the mollifying pleasure of contrition. He felt it when she crossed his running toast of Kashkin quoting time from her costume watch; and days later, parked opposite the Cheshire Inn, he would feel it whenever she rummaged through her split sow of purse, its clatter of lipstick tubes and mysterious daubs and balms, its breath of old gum, and the grim silence, which Gamlin took as the welcome sound of retributive intention, levied against him by Soong as they sat watch on the hotel.

  The Cheshire Inn was a brown and tan Tudor with a heavy porte cochère shading the door: a seventeenth century half-timber coaching inn, plucked from history and screwed to the curb of a frantic intersection beneath a waxing shout of Amoco ellipse. It was a location they’d covered through the thronging traffic from the opposite curb, and it was the location, with some doing, that Gamlin had put August Reams to. Soong was annoyed at the fieldwork, and restless, and oddly no
isy for all her labors of silence. They’d been there four hours with coffee and a telephoto camera, and the interminable contents of Soong’s bag when a large white dually drew up to fill the porte cochère, and a figure the convincing likeness of August Reams stepped from the hotel to the truck, and Gamlin started the car.

  3.

  Kim Soong sat on a brick step puzzling over something on the sole of her shoe when Hoyt Gamlin pulled in to fetch her. He pictured her hiking up Forsyth along the school and the quarter block off campus along Maryland: a rangy stoop of girl with a freight of backpack and a click of stone in her tread. The day was mid February dishwater and salivary mist of rain as he’d swept down Maryland to collect her; a quiet length of roof gable and pin oak which stared dead into the university’s gluteal terminus—an athletic complex which rose along Big Bend as a blush battlement of mercantile apparatus. She’d sat glistening between two beds of rattling ivy—Gamlin could hear their parchment tremor when he’d put down the window—and with her slim jacket perishing warmth, Gamlin took her demeanor for a thing like relief. She was glad for the car, if not also for him.

  Kim Soong hoist her pack into the back seat and joined him up front with a sigh and scent of damp fur. It had been several weeks since they’d camped the Cheshire and tailed August Reams and his ride—a local associate whose truck registration said he was Edmund LeFrance of Zephyr Lane. And what the work of between days said, was that Reams liked drive-through coffee and Mexican carryout, and LeFrance liked diesel fuel and green produce and cards; and between the two they’d recently taken unaccountable interest in abandoned Dutchtown real estate. But as to matters of whyfor—nothing more had emerged.