Thomas ate their food, and listened to the earnestness behind their brutish sound during three sets. He hovered at the edge of the stage when they closed. “Great sets tonight, guys. I just wanted to thank you. I’ll see you around.”
“Wait, man, want to eat Chinese? We know an all-night place up two blocks that stays open for the restaurant people. You can buy since you’re a fat-cat lawyer.”
“Sure. Why not? Even if my clients are out-of-work actors.”
He followed people who had nowhere else to be into a red painted restaurant and ate MSG-infused food for two hours. After, he wrapped himself around the singer and followed her home. She rented an apartment across town, above Tribeca and way north of Canal. He coughed up for the cab.
“This is it,” she said, as she led the way into an efficiency. She dropped her music bag and her keys on the floor by the couch. “Lock the deadbolt behind you. My neighbors are no better than they ought’a be, but at least they only try to break in a couple of times a year.”
“Nice place.”
“Frickin’ liar. It’s a dump. I haven’t had time to clean since Christmas, and anyway, I’m not here much.” She stepped in close and fingered his lapel. “Want to crank up? I got some LA Turnarounds left that we could powder.”
He thought of all the elegant evenings he had manufactured on the way to seduction, all the good wines and esoteric food. He thought about his previous women with their finishing-school accents and preppie clothes, in the end revealed in their white underwear… giving just enough to honor the conventions.
Zlata would have understood this woman, poised on the edge of something in an apartment like this. Stage dust in the hair, the strong smell of performance sweat, tattered and ripped black clothes that revealed flashes of white, blue-veined skin—Robko Zlata would have been at home. “Sure. I can’t reciprocate with anything, but if you have enough for two?”
“Straight. You popped for the cab. Fair warning, this isn’t meth, just some jumpers.” She found a mortar and pestle and ground up six powder-coated pills. “I don’t do meth anymore. I like it too much, and it gets in the way of the music.” Placing a pinch of the dust on a piece of foil at the end of a glass tube, she held a match over the assemblage and drew deep. His suck on the pipe imitated her hit with some competence. The smoke seared his sinuses and dissolved his throat into a burning mass of flesh. Clenching down hard, he kept himself from exploding into a cough.
The hit had an all-enveloping, soul-shivering effect. He had never had such a feeling of well-being in all his life. She worked with his belt and opened his pants. He fumbled within the rips and tears of her clothes, desperate to discover the woman inside.
***
At eleven the next day, Thomas made it back to his apartment. For all the high, there had to be the low. He felt as bad as anything he could ever remember. Twice he stopped on the subway to retch into a trash can, but the dry heaving did nothing. He knew his Chinese feast from the night before lay congealed in his belly, but his throat closed like a vise. By the time he reached his door, he shook like a train platform with an express roaring by. He dropped his keys. When he bent down to pick them up, a black-out swarmed up through his head. He dropped to his knees. His nose, his whole sinus passage sucked in a whiff of something that made him gag. It cleared his head, this smell. Some chemical, some cleaning compound. Shining in the hall light a small puddle, there in front of his kneecaps. Nasty stuff… it bled out from under his door. Dipping a finger into the liquid, he raised it to his nose. It was awful.
He lurched to his feet and wiggled his key into the lock. Opening the door a crack, he surveyed the gap. Near the floor, a thumbtack had been stuck in the doorframe with a thread that led away to the left. He pulled the tack with a gentle dig of his fingernails, dropped the thread, and eased the door open. A crude paper fabrication crouched against the baseboard with some innocuous firework taped to it. Thomas stared down at something he recognized as a firebomb. An igniter waiting for him, and a foyer full of accelerant. If this goes off, what will be left for them to find?
Down in the Bars
Chapter Sixteen: Send a Message, Send a Message
In the tallest hotel in the Mile-High City, Robko got high and sought the low. The old night died, and a new day, welcome or not, crowded into his life. They had taken the suite Sibyl wanted. He thought it the opulence of a faked life, the irony of trash delivered upon a silver platter. He lay upon a leather couch as white as Sibyl’s rounded belly, wearing the hotel’s maximally-plush black robe. On the wall to his left, a fake Mark Rothko hung in splendor, the size of his ciotka’s dining-room table. In his haze, he daydreamed of that aunt; she knew all the tales of the old land and all the stories of God’s paradise. Always dressed in widow black, always with a pile of childhood’s books and strange little wooden toys from Europe.
He found this bone-whitened place the flip of home—none of the children, the cats, and the dark massive furniture that towered up to the ceiling. Here it was stripped to the bone, all line-on-line, white-on-white. He could hide here, hide from them. Hide from Mirko.
The drug ratcheted up another notch, and he had the illusion the room rotated. The window wall across from him transformed into a floor beneath him; luxuriant air and glass suspended him over the horizon of the city. His body leaned out from the couch, ready to launch into the depths of a sunrise. The glass waited below, a thin skin between him and the sun.
“Robert, I’m back.” Sibyl entered from the foyer where the piano hung, sauntered across the white-carpeted wall. She strolled round to the end of the couch between him and the sun and paused to watch him from below. His inner ear wobbled, disoriented as she cantilevered out from the wall. He pushed that rush of vertigo around in his mind like the party favor it was. “Sibyl, glad you got here before I fell off. Try one of these robes; they’re so comfortable it’s nearly like sex.”
“You gozo, you’ve picked up another fetish… the black terrycloth fetish.” She stepped around the arm of the couch and brushed him on the forehead with her lips. She peeled her clothes away, and he watched as they fell up against the wall beside the suspended couch. She revealed herself, metamorphosed into a sleek shape that crawled up into the leather cocoon and held him tight. “You’re right; this robe feels great, feels like sable. Let me in.” She tugged at the tie.
“We may drop off the face of the earth any second. I’m glad you’re going with me.”
“I see you scored. Well, I did, too. I shucked a desk tablet out of the hotel office. After all, the door was unlocked. The silly bitch even has pictures of her naked. Stored on a pad without a password! You remember how we first met—shoplifting makes me so hot.”
“I should tell you I have a new drug. It’s called Painted Desert. It lights up the world. Would you like one? It’s a dream wrapped in a down.”
“Halluso, is it? I always liked you on hallusos; they make you so mystic and full of holy universal shit.”
“It’s the curse of lapsed Catholics. We’re all searching for God’s grace and finding it in the Swiss cheese of our brains.”
“See, that’s what I mean.”
“Don’t fall off into the dawn, not yet. I’m ready for wild love, I think. Of course it could be a delusion, so I need you to check for me.”
She felt down between them with a soft, wriggling hand. “No hallucination here. Do you feel like it, right now?”
“Give me five hundred dollars.”
***
Still home at noon, Thomas lay in the chaise in the shade of the rooftop air conditioning equipment. He had nothing important to do, and he contemplated his death at LeFarge’s hands with great idleness and melancholy. His iMob chimed. “Steward here.”
“It’s Angie.” And so it was, in a white linen suit and a navy silk shirt. “We’ve got a lead on an Italian bike, an exotic one painted red, brought in for ‘tires and tune.’ The shop says a couple brought it in, and they had been running it hard—wear pat
terns on the tires show they’d used up the sidewall as well as the tread.”
He tried the smallest of smiles. Still, it was a chance. They had to take it. “Where is the bike?”
“San Francisco.”
“Want to go?”
Her laugh burbled through the cell towers. “Sure. I’ll get us tickets and two rooms near Union Square.”
***
San Francisco turned out cold and drizzling, grayed to summer’s end sooner than the East Coast. Thomas’s mood matched the autumnal rain; he slumped on the couch. He gazed at the gilded cornice and the slate-colored window below it. She swayed in from her adjoining room. “The private detective texted me.”
He flicked the fingers of one hand. “Dick.”
“Of course. The slang is ‘dick.’ You guys enjoy that word. Our Dick is on location, but the couple hasn’t come in to pick up their motorcycle.”
“What arrangement did you make?”
“When they do show up, he’ll use his vidi to send a picture. We can decide right then if he tails them.”
“They’ll be on a hot bike.”
“And so will he. He can play the part. It’s not like he’s wearing a black suit and a brown, big-brimmed hat.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up. “Carrying a snub nose and driving a 1941 coupe. So we wait….”
“Thomas, is something wrong? You seem down in the dumps.” She leaned up against the back of an easy chair.
“I’ve got a new problem. LeFarge may be removing witnesses of Father Mirko’s killing.”
“You mean his four muscle men? Has he killed them?”
“I don’t know about them. I was referring to yours truly.”
She shook her head. “If he was going to shoot you, you’d be dead.”
“Accident—he wants a plausible accident. Either O’Brien agrees with LeFarge, or LeFarge wants to hand the Governor a way to rationalize away my death… after the fact.”
“What makes you think LeFarge is after you?”
“I found a booby trap in my apartment when I got home Wednesday.” He made a fountaining gesture with both hands.
Her mouth dropped and she stepped towards him. “You’re sure it was a booby trap?”
“What do you think?” He heard his own voice, too abrupt.
“We’ll have to take precautions.”
“We means you too. LeFarge wouldn’t mind collateral damage, taking you out at the same time.”
Her mouth drew down and her eyes narrowed. “None of this makes sense. He needs you to find Robko Zlata.”
“Well, he needs the team. He may not hold me in high regard.”
“Teams need leaders,” she said with a faint smile.
He returned a grin. “Our team may have a leak. He may have someone on the team, and we don’t know it.”
She shook her head—her dark hair bobbed. “We chose our people carefully.”
“And it worked, seeing we got good people, but it only takes one.”
“Do you have someone you suspect?”
“No, but this trip makes a pretty good test. If LeFarge’s people show up, there’s a hole in our security.”
She ambled over to the bar and made a drink: scotch neat, he thought. She leaned up against the bar’s sideboard. “So what did you mean… precautions?”
“I haven’t been home for a couple of days—I’ve hoteled it. I’m digging around for an old friend I can visit for a while. My problem is that most of the guys I know are competitors, not friends.”
“How about women?”
“Hmm. They’ve moved on, or I have. There is one, but she’s more dangerous than LeFarge. Lives on Chinese food laced with MSG. How about you, do you have a place to go?”
“Well,” she paused, “I think I’ll call my cousin down on Staten Island.”
“They’ll know to search for family.”
“Yes, but it’s hard for a stranger to pass unnoticed in our little version of Italy. It’s a tight community.”
He levered himself out of the luxurious sofa and joined her at the bar. He found a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé in the fridge and opened it. Taking a stemmed-glass-full over to the window, he gazed out at the lights of Union Square. “Want to do major room service tonight?”
“Sure. It’s all paid for by the Governor.”
“You can tell me about your girlfriends; I’ll tell you about mine.”
Her laugh ran like a waterfall through the room. “I have something in common with the boss.”
***
In Denver, the desktab lay on the couch between Robko and Sibyl. The couch had restored itself to its normal position within gravity, with no physical manifestation of its recent metamorphosis. She said, “Find Sibyl Boxwood.”
The desk tablet gave her three files to choose from. She opened one after the other, and said each time, “Read file.” The tablet duly read each file in an Asian singsong voice. None of these files taught them anything except how well Sibyl had been profiled. When the Asian voice read her medical records, she peeked sideways at Robko and grinned, but didn’t blush. Then she searched for Robko’s aliases. Steward’s master summary showed him unaware of the fourth and fifth identities. Or rather, he hadn’t known at the time they stole the information in Ithaca.
Most of Steward’s tablet was dedicated to financial crap. It took time to find the right part of the tree. As Sibyl searched down the promising branches for information on O’Brien’s organization, the memdevice unfolded like a flower, a deadly nightshade. She and Robko listened to several cross-linked files gathered under “OBrienFriends&Enemies.” They found notes on the head of Corporate Security, Don Garland, and on Egan LeFarge. Steward’s voice, mid-American and without color, read his memos back into the room.
She snorted, “I know the type. Two-hundred-dollar Oxford shirts, weekends in the Hamptons, some kinky sex he would never reveal to his preppie wife.”
But Robko listened for the hunter’s voice, the man who had found him in the City and then in Ithaca. A shudder ran through his shoulders as Steward read out the Zlata data crisp, judgmental, hard. He asked her, “Don’t you notice something weird about his voice?”
She said to the tablet, “Pause.” Turning to him, she said, “What do you mean?”
“It’s…, I don’t know, as if I’m hearing myself talk. Doesn’t he sound a lot like me?”
“Yeah, right, beyond the fact you’re both tenors? Like he has your street punk accent, and you talk in his nasal business-school twang? Naah, his vocabulary is way better than yours. He’s a Regular Joe; you’re a Booster.”
“No… there’s something.”
“I think you’re still junked from those Painted Deserts. After-flash.”
He frowned, but it was true. He could feel a little bit of trip kick in.
She turned back to the tablet. “Play.”
***
The tablecloth was so starched Thomas could push drops of water around on it with a spoon. They had pulled out all stops, and the table held the most pretentious food he had seen in months. Wonderful presentation, but his mind roamed elsewhere. “It’s no good trying to dodge LeFarge indefinitely. It could be a while before this is all done.”
Angie said, “We’re at a whole new level of corporate infighting, aren’t we?”
“Yes, with firebombs and knives and guns.”
He teased a bit of polenta with his fork. “O’Brien’s the key. I haven’t been able to convince O’Brien he doesn’t need the Foreign Legion and Captain LeFarge. He doesn’t see them as a liability. And if he thinks my luck has deserted me, I’ll be the liability.”
“Don’t kid yourself about the military crap. O’Brien enjoys it. Think about it… O’Brien knows business and politics. Now he’s got his own army. He’s having a great time commanding killers—it’s a new form of power for him.”
He spread a big glob of paté on a crostini and handed it to her. “So O’Brien won’t fire or eliminate LeFarge?”
&
nbsp; “Not until Zlata is captured and probably killed. Could O’Brien give you some protective coverage even though LeFarge is the favorite?”
He scowled. “I’d first have to convince O’Brien that LeFarge had tried to kill me. If he doesn’t believe me, I’ll have destroyed the trust.”
She shook her head. “How much trust do you think he has now?”
“Just enough to get what he wants.”
She pursed her lips, a charming pout. “Can we get LeFarge arrested for killing the priest?”
“Dangerous. First, I was there, so I’m implicated. Second, LeFarge could bring us all down to save his own skin.” He sipped delicately at the wine.
“Can we blackmail LeFarge into backing off?”
“I could threaten him—tell him I’ll turn myself in to the police and testify against him. But I think he’d just come straight for me. No more fake accidents—he’d go for the sure thing.”
“Gunshot to the back of the head. Mob style.” She cleared her throat. “Could we eliminate LeFarge before he kills you? And me?”
“Eliminate? You mean murder? Maybe, if it comes to that. Risky. Killing is LeFarge’s specialty, not ours. And how squeamish are we?”
“Can you hire your own bodyguards?”
“Maybe, or I could maybe work the Zlata pursuit on the road, from outside NYC. I chase Zlata, and LeFarge chases me.”
She flared those beautiful dark eyes, a moment of fright. “Leaves me hanging out there.”
“Say no more.”
***
188 Lincoln Avenue, Denver’s hottest new restaurant could do takeout—that is, if the hotel manager calls ahead, and the doorman goes over in a taxi to get it, and if Sibyl speaks directly with the chef. Robko loved the plum soup, and his next Painted Desert—just one to help with the coasting—gave him the tiniest little flashes of connection. He leaned over the glass slab of the coffee table covered with plates and the serving dishes, but he also lay in an orchard outside of Warsaw, fat, purple fruit splayed around him, plums on the ground spoiling in great-grandmother’s sunshine as it drooped hot out of the sky. The hotel room smelled like fruit sugar, like dust from the orchard road, like grass.
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