Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Chico,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, like the style,’ he said. His voice was unusually deep, a frog’s croak. He had small bad yellow teeth. ‘I always had this thing about leather.’ He lit a cigarette and fingered his beard.

  She picked up a salt-shaker and rattled it in her hand. She observed Chico for a time. He was uneasy in her presence. He was anxious to get the business over and be gone, back to his beloved Appalachian hollows where in isolated places he grew reefer and sometimes ran guns to Brownsville, Texas. She enjoyed his discomfiture; it was as if she had a hook in his flesh and liked to see the barb bring blood. She liked the way she could bring pressures to bear on other people without really trying.

  The waitress came to the table. She ordered coffee. Chico dropped his cigarette on the floor, ground it underfoot, lit another.

  ‘You’re crazy to come here,’ he said. ‘And I’m crazy to be with you.’

  She laid a hand over his knuckles. ‘So we’re both a little crazy.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, you always did like taking chances. But not me, not me.’ He ran a hand across his forehead, smoked fiendishly.

  ‘Relax,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have relax in my vocabulary. I am deeply concerned by the Feds, who take a very dim view of my kinda private enterprise. Right, so I sell a few guns to some rebellious individualists in a land directly to the south of these United States and I grow a little weed – big fucking deal. Relax, you say?’

  ‘It was your choice to meet me, Chico.’

  ‘My ass my choice. You got me by the goolies.’

  She leaned her head back against the wall. ‘I’m not forcing you into anything, Chico.’

  ‘Right. Tell me I’m here of my own free will. Make me a believer.’

  ‘You could have refused. You could have hung up the phone any time you liked.’

  He looked directly into her eyes. ‘Bullshit. All I had to say was I wasn’t gonna show and you drop a dime and I got Feds going down my windpipe and, zip, before I know it they’re coming outta my anus.’

  ‘You really think I’d turn you in, Chico?’

  ‘You’d smile when you was doing it.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  ‘Yeah well, I ain’t taking the chance. I don’t trust you. I never trusted you. You’re one dangerous bitch, and I ain’t gambling with you.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘The worst thing I ever did was business with you,’ he said.

  ‘It was profitable, Chico.’

  ‘Sometimes money turns out to be irrelevant. Sometimes peace of mind is the preferred choice.’

  ‘Certain Iranian parties needed your assistance. I don’t remember you refusing them.’

  ‘I was naive back then.’

  ‘You’ve grown up in four years.’

  ‘I like to think so.’ He turned to the door and frowned. ‘For instance, I’d never use a go-between again. And if I did, I’d make god-damn sure he or she knew sweet fuck all about my operations.’

  ‘A go-between,’ she said. ‘I always considered myself more like a temporary partner.’

  ‘Partnership with you’s a damn one-way street. You learned everything about the way I worked. My customers. My bases. Every god-damn thing. And what did I learn about you in return? One thing. One useless thing.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘You’re a fucking chameleon, that’s what.’ He lit yet another cigarette.

  She brushed smoke aside. She wondered if Pagan still smoked. Ten years ago he had, and she’d teasingly criticized him for it. She thought about him at The Madison. She remembered how he’d looked as he’d approached the registration desk. His face was somewhat hollowed by weariness, but he had an air about him of concentration, perhaps even determination. He didn’t slump; straight-backed, a man ready for the fray, ready for destiny. She’d watched him talk to a hotel official – a manager, somebody like that; he’d probably been asking questions about her. You’ll have your answers soon, Pagan, she thought. A time is coming when there will be no more questions.

  Chico pointed the burning cigarette at her. ‘OK. This is the score. I’m gonna do you the favour you asked. And that’s it. End of the line. You don’t call me. You don’t visit. No more favours. Deal.’

  ‘Deal,’ she said.

  He shook his head in a bewildered manner. ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here going through the motions of making a deal with you, for Chrissakes. You wouldn’t know a deal from a kazoo.’

  ‘You could always turn things around, Chico. You could always drop a dime on me. That’s an option.’

  He laughed, coughing out uninhaled smoke. ‘An option? Hey, you come and you go like the fucking wind, you turn up here, you turn up there, you vanish inside cracks. How could I drop a dime on you? By the time anyone showed up, you’d be gone.’

  ‘I take precautions,’ she said.

  ‘Precautions. You give a whole new meaning to the word.’

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘First off, I got the piece you asked for. It’s in the trunk of my car. Second, this guy you mentioned.’

  She was all attention. She brought her face close to Chico’s.

  ‘This guy’s a Company man,’ he said. ‘Research, what I hear. Connections with all the old networks that have broken down in Europe.’

  The old networks, she thought. That explained how Mallory had entered Vladimir Galkin’s orbit. Galkin had KGB scraps to sell, information as useful as wood-shavings. ‘What else do you know, Chico?’

  Chico adjusted the brim of his beret. ‘You know I had to work my balls off to get that much.’

  ‘I need more, Chico. Like, if you were looking for him, where would you look?’

  ‘Try his place of employment. Try Langley.’

  ‘Langley. Sure. That’s a great help.’

  He smiled at her for the first time since she’d arrived. There was a slight hint of admiration in the smile; despite the fact he didn’t trust her, he liked her in a contrary manner. Maybe it was the dangerous way she lived. Maybe it was her sheer balls. The Feds would have coughed up a fortune for information about her and here she was in the US, right under their noses. She lived beyond all reasonable margins. She was wild. An American original.

  ‘Get serious, Chico. If you were planning to visit his home, where would you start?’

  ‘I need a little more time on that one.’

  ‘How much more time?’

  ‘A day, maybe less. I got a guy working on it. I’ll call you.’

  ‘No, Chico. You know better than that. I don’t go round giving out my phone number. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Trust nobody. Trust nothing.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It’s a sorry old world,’ Chico said, and stood up. ‘You wanna walk with me to my car? I need to get the hell outta this city before I totally crack up. You can’t breathe the fucking air here. And there’s too many cops. Too many Federal offices.’ Chico shuddered. His little beard shivered.

  She left some coins on the table and followed Chico out of the restaurant. His car was an old Ford Fairlane parked at the side of the truckstop. He unlocked the trunk. Concealed beneath a spare tyre and a tool-box was a grease-stained towel.

  ‘Open your purse,’ he said. ‘What you’re getting is an FEG GKK-45. Hungarian. I added three extra clips. You never know. I put in a silencer. What you also got there are two miniaturized high-tech doodahs of Czech origin. They don’t come with instructions, but I figure you’ve seen them before.’

  She opened her purse and he dumped the towel inside it, then shut the lid of the trunk.

  ‘I’ll hear from you,’ he said and got inside the Fairlane.

  ‘You’ll hear.’

  She returned to her car, drove away from the truckstop. When she reached her motel, which was close to Washington International Airport, she parked and entered the building, pausing in the lobby because her attention was drawn to the
newspaper display, and in particular to a headline in the Washington Post. She pushed coins in the slot, opened the glass lid, removed a copy of the paper and walked slowly toward the stairs as she read the front page.

  30

  VIRGINIA

  James Mallory thought: THIS IS WRONG.

  The white-hot early morning sun spread light across the country-side, rendering meadows and trees strange and hallucinatory. Mallory wore only lightweight cotton pants and a short-sleeved white shirt and yet his clothing might have been welded to his flesh. Sweat accumulated on the ridges of his eyebrows and slid down across the lids and slithered in broken lines the length of his nose to his lips. He tasted the salt of himself. When he emerged from the car and touched the door handle it burned his skin. The air was purgatorial, the kind of heat you might imagine in the antechamber to hell. He longed for rain. He ached for rain. But the sky was cloudless to infinity, an infuriating blue.

  Donovan stepped out of the passenger seat. Blond Ralph, looking like a lifeguard, a Boy Scout. But there was a darkness at the heart of Donovan’s sunny appearance, a quality Mallory had glimpsed from the first day he’d met him. Skidelsky had once described Donovan as a surfer from hell. And Mallory was uneasy just being around the guy; but he was a member of the Club, and he operated directly under Skidelsky’s command – so Mallory was obliged to set his discomfort aside. It wasn’t easy. What Mallory couldn’t get his mind around was Donovan’s capacity for violence. Capsicum, North Carolina, too much blood, too many killings – why did Skidelsky’s master-plan involve such bloodletting? Max had once said It’s the one thing people really react to, Jimmy. The sight of blood. Think of yourself as a leech, OK, but there was a point where even a leech became gorged and bloated. Metaphors didn’t erase moral considerations, not for Mallory. You couldn’t find a hiding-place behind figures of speech.

  He moved toward the shade of some dried-out fir trees. Donovan followed him. Wasps buzzed in the dusty air. A butterfly, a bright red beauty, flapped kamikaze fashion against Mallory’s face.

  Donovan said, ‘I could have done this on my own.’

  ‘You keep reminding me.’

  ‘Why did Max saddle me with you?’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m a burden, Donovan. But it’s the way Max wanted it. And Max always gets what he wants.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were a burden, Jimmy.’ Donovan stared across the meadow. The farmhouse was white and still. The barn behind the house was painted deep red and glowing in the sunshine.

  Mallory said, ‘Maybe he thinks it’s time for me to get some real experience. The nitty-gritty.’

  ‘This is a stroll,’ Donovan said. ‘This isn’t your line of work.’

  A stroll, Mallory thought. No, it wasn’t that exactly. He felt nervy. The heat zapped energy out of him. He looked in the direction of the farmhouse, the shadowed porch, blinds drawn down on windows. Picturesque rural Virginia, white fences enclosing meadows, a herd of horses grazing a field in somnambulist fashion. The essence of tranquillity. Mallory took his eyes away from the house.

  He asked, ‘You ever feel anything, Ralph?’

  ‘Feel? Like what? Remorse? Guilt? That kind of thing?’

  ‘Yeah. That kind of thing.’

  ‘It’s business, Jimmy. It isn’t personal. It’s as if I’m not really involved. I can’t explain … I see somebody else going through the motions.’ Donovan licked his lips, across which he’d smeared some kind of sun-protection cream that tasted of apricot. ‘If I have a bad moment, I just shake it off. Maybe I jog. Or go down to the gym.’

  ‘And that does it?’ Pumping iron as a prophylactic against ethical qualms. Against guilt attacks. How simple Donovan’s world had to be.

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Usually. And if that fails, I try to see my actions from a different perspective. Long-term, if you like. The general interests of the country.’

  Mallory heard an echo of Max in Donovan’s words. Long-term. The general interests of the country. You could take that view, he supposed, if you were formed like Skidelsky. You could stand at that questionable junction where ends and means intersected and feel perfectly comfortable. He was queasy. He wondered if Max’s insistence that he accompany Donovan was a test, an initiation ritual. Skidelsky the Examiner. The Controller of Rites. The High Mason of the Lodge. Let’s see if you’ve got the stuff, Jimmy. Let’s see what you’re made of. This is the real version of bonding.

  Donovan opened a small black leather bag he’d brought with him. The clasp made a clicking sound like that of a cricket. Inside was a gun and a clip of ammunition and a small plastic cylinder which Mallory figured was similar to the device Donovan must have used in Capsicum. He tried to distance himself from these objects but it was difficult. They had a lethal potential you couldn’t just step back from. On the barrel of the gun were the words Accu-Tek, Chino, Ca. Donovan slipped the clip in place with a deft movement.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Mallory wanted to linger for ever in the fragile scented shade of the firs. He followed Donovan into a meadow filled with long dehydrated flowers that crackled against his arms. Moths flew out of the rustling stalks. A couple of distressed bluejays screamed. The house was a mere fifty yards away, the only dwelling-place in sight. The horizon was lost in trees and thickets and long grass.

  Outside the house a Range-Rover was parked, silver and shimmering.

  ‘I hope this Lannigan doesn’t have a guard dog,’ Mallory said quietly.

  ‘No dog. No burglar alarm. We do our homework.’ Donovan brushed a sprinkle of small purple petals from his shirt. ‘Lives alone. Retired.’

  Mallory wondered about the isolation of this place. Maybe if you’d spent your life as a shrink you’d want to retreat from the sad babble of the human race at the end of the day. You’d want the loveliness of silence away from an ocean of troubled voices.

  Donovan quietly opened the gate in the white wood fence. Mallory went after him. On the porch was a motionless rocking-chair. The path was paved, the lawn on either side sparse and brown. A hose lay in a tidy black coil, like an inert mamba. Donovan moved toward the porch and Mallory, glancing quickly at the daffodil-coloured blinds on the windows, followed him.

  ‘See,’ said Donovan. ‘Trusting kind of guy. Doesn’t even lock his front door.’

  Mallory watched Ralph Donovan turn the handle and push open the door. Inside a ceiling-fan turned lazily. The rooms were shadowy, almost cool. The blinds imparted a lemon tint to the interior. Apart from the slight whirring of the fan’s motor, the house was silent. Donovan walked to the foot of the stairs with the gun in his hand. Mallory felt a troublesome lump of tension in his chest. This is wrong, he thought. This isn’t what I want to be doing. He had an urge to turn, to go back outside into the merciless sunlight, which would be immeasurably preferable to this.

  Donovan was already moving up the stairs. For a big man, he moved gracefully and quietly. Mallory took a deep breath and put his foot on the first step. Donovan had turned and was looking down at him and making a gesture of impatience. Come on, let’s get this done. The step creaked under Mallory’s foot and he cursed his own clumsiness, his lack of stealth. He was an organizer, a detail man – not an accessory to murder. Above him, Donovan continued to climb. Mallory grasped the handrail and went up after him. Donovan was at the top now, on the landing, where sunshine came fractured and discoloured through a window of stained glass. Mallory made it to the landing.

  What now? Did Donovan know which room to enter? Had he done all his homework?

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing, the sudden whish of water being sucked out of a bowl, the gurgle of a cistern refilling. A man appeared in a doorway. He was tall and tanned and lean, and his short hair was white. He was sixty, maybe more, maybe just less. Mallory couldn’t tell. He was dressed only in a green robe that was unbelted and hung open. Mallory had a flash of the man’s pubic hair, his long penis, the circumcised head. Surprised, the man opened his mouth and steppe
d back and Donovan shot him once in the centre of the chest and he fell against the bathroom door and continued to stagger back, losing his balance with each tiny retreating step until his body struck the glass surround of the shower and he crashed through it, creating an ugly cacophony of shattered glass. And then he dropped back, bleeding, into the porcelain shower-stall, and Mallory looked away, even as Donovan walked inside the bathroom and fired a second shot.

  Donovan came back from the bathroom and said, ‘Done.’

  But it wasn’t done, because another door along the landing opened and a girl stood there; she had to be twelve, thirteen, a narrow-hipped nymph, naked, pubescent little breasts, long stalk of neck.

  She said, ‘Hey—’

  And Mallory looked at her, seeing her stunned expression, and in her eyes a look of fear he’d never seen before, something he never wanted to see again. Beyond her, he was vaguely conscious of a double bed, a tangle of bed sheets, pants and a discarded shirt lying on the floor, flimsy underwear on the carpet, pillows heaped at the top of the bed. And other details, the child’s make-up, the streaked mascara surrounding her eyes, faded lipstick. And this, the one he’d remember most later, the one that would keep coming back to him: in her right hand she held a used condom, a ridiculous length of limp, wrinkled latex.

  Donovan raised the gun and levelled it at the child.

  ‘No,’ Mallory said.

  Donovan fired. He fired directly into her young heart. Mallory turned away. He half-stumbled down the stairs, clutching the handrail. His stomach was a see-saw. His mouth flooded with acidic saliva. He had the sense of teetering on the edge of collapse. Donovan came down after him and grabbed his shoulder and pushed him against the wall.

  ‘Can’t take it?’

  Mallory said nothing.

  ‘Can’t take it, Jimmy?’ Donovan slapped Mallory across the cheek.

  ‘I,’ Mallory said. Words coagulated in his head.

  ‘Guy was a scumbag,’ Donovan said. ‘You saw it, Jimmy.’

  Mallory wasn’t sure what he’d seen. He was fighting to regroup, but bits and pieces of himself went zooming off in odd directions.