Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Nobody gets up that early in the day, Pagan.’ She raised the gun suddenly and levelled it at him, squinting the length of the barrel. ‘Boom,’ she whispered.

  ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Because I haven’t got what I want yet.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  She didn’t reply. She gave him an enigmatic little smile that was almost one of shyness – but he wasn’t going to be sucked into that. He watched her as she moved toward the door.

  ‘So you go to Naderson or you go to Poole,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you don’t have the complete list, Pagan. You ever think about that?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’

  She reached the door, turned to look at him. ‘Did Roxanne ever masturbate for you, Pagan? Did you ever watch her get herself off in front of your face? Did you ever suck her fingers after?’

  Roxanne. Sex with Roxanne had been gentle, an act of mutual consideration, tenderness.

  ‘You’re not answering me, Pagan. Why? Too personal for you? Maybe she wasn’t into that kind of thing. Was she coy, Pagan? Was there some sweet shy retiring thing about her that turned you on? Maybe you’ve never been properly fucked.’

  She smiled and went out, leaving Pagan alone with the taste of her in his mouth and the dying echo of Roxanne’s name in his head.

  35

  DELAWARE

  She drove the freeway, windows down, warm air streaming against her face and hair. She was thinking of Pagan, the concentration on his features, the way he’d closed his eyes when she’d placed a finger between his lips. I had him, she thought. I had him where I wanted him.

  She drove for miles and miles. Suburbs faded out in scattered tract houses, then mobile-home parks where laundry hung motionless on lines and barebacked kids played a makeshift game of basketball in the fretful heat.

  She saw a bar alongside the freeway and she turned the car toward it. She parked and went inside, passing a collection of motorcycles and pickup trucks. It was a redneck joint, sawdust on the floors, half a dozen or so bikers, a few good old boys on bar stools. Heads turned in her direction, she was assessed and appreciated.

  She went up to the bar and asked for a Bacardi and Coke – Carly Phoenix would drink something like that, but never to excess because she liked to keep a clear head. She saw herself in the mirror on the wall – Carly Phoenix, a walking temptation, her whole being a come-on. She sipped her drink, set the glass down, thought about the hotel room, about Pagan. His world was eggshell thin. And cracked, badly cracked. And that was the way she wanted it. Power was the buzz, the mainline high that made you feel nothing could ever touch you, nothing could ever harm you: as close to immortality as you were going to get in this lifetime.

  One of the bikers came toward her with a pool cue in his hand. He was sweaty in his sleeveless T-shirt. Tattoos covered his arms. ‘You play?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends on the game.’

  ‘Eight-ball,’ he said. He was about thirty and his hair was greasy. In his right ear lobe was a small silver crucifix.

  ‘Eight-ball,’ she said. ‘Not my game.’

  ‘Yeah? Name your game, lady,’ he said.

  ‘You guess.’

  ‘Guess?’ The biker had yellow teeth. ‘Maybe something more lively?’

  She was thinking of Pagan again. She’d excited him and then she’d let him go because she thought it was enough, but now – now she wasn’t so sure. She pictured his grey eyes, the small lines etched at the corners of the mouth, the lean face that was at times almost haunted. Intimacy and destruction. She wondered if Galkin had been right, if what she felt toward Pagan was a form of affection so badly bent out of shape it couldn’t be categorized. No. No. I want him dead. There’s no affection. Nothing like that. Not even remotely. And yet – there had been something contagious in Pagan’s physical agitation, something that had moved her.

  The biker set the pool cue on the bar and said, ‘Folks call me Ronnie Bear.’

  ‘Bear, huh.’

  ‘That’s what they call me. Real close friends call me something else.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She stared at him through her shades. He bored her. He was trespassing on her privacy.

  ‘My real close friends, and I’m talking real intimate now, they call me Kingsize.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Three guesses.’

  ‘I wouldn’t need three,’ she said.

  He winked at her. ‘Yeah. You sure as hell wouldn’t need three, lady.’

  I let Pagan off the hook, she thought. She was disturbed by a sense of unfulfilled desire, of discontent. Her thoughts drifted to the attack on Capsicum, the murder of her parents, the explosion at Lannigan’s house; she circled these happenings, as if they were flames she didn’t want to approach. Maybe somebody’s setting you up, Pagan had said. She remembered her final encounter with Galkin, the idea of a set-up that had crossed her mind then. The game Mallory was playing, one faction of the Agency at war with another, the idea that she could somehow be drawn into this game and used and finally captured … Was Mallory the one behind the acts of violence for which she was being blamed? She wasn’t sure how to react, whether to be outraged by the way her name had been used, or amused by the arrogance of the perpetrator. Games – she was beyond all that.

  She thought of her parents dead inside the plantation house – but she felt nothing, they weren’t her parents, they had nothing to do with Carly Phoenix. Carly Phoenix didn’t have parents, Carly would have been orphaned at an early age and forced to make her own way in the world. She would never have been sent to a clinic and fondled by the seriously sick Patrick Lannigan.

  ‘Whadda you do?’ Bear asked. ‘For work, I mean.’

  She turned her face slowly to the man. ‘I take off my clothes.’

  ‘A stripper, you mean?’

  She covered a pretend yawn.

  One old toothless geezer in a black leather vest said, ‘Take em off, lady. Shows yer knockers. Shows all you got.’

  She said, ‘I don’t want to be responsible for bringing on a heart attack, pops.’

  The bikers laughed and banged their Bud bottles on the table. Bear edged a little closer to her. ‘I never met no stripper before.’

  She faced the mirror, looked at her reflection, saw the smoothed black hair, the leather jacket, the dark lipstick, the shades – a catalogue of impressions, a list of the components that constituted Carly Phoenix, stripper. All the others that had existed inside her were dead. She didn’t have room for memories and resurrections.

  Bear was watching her. He licked his sun-cracked lips. ‘Say. Any chance of a private performance, lady? Like you and me go someplace, and you show me your routine? Hows about it.’

  ‘Why don’t you just evaporate,’ she said.

  Bear laughed in a broken way. ‘You’re funny.’

  ‘I’m funny all right,’ she said.

  ‘Seriously now,’ he said.

  She sipped her drink. She had a sense of danger emanating from this character Bear, the feeling that violence lay very close to the surface of the man. The notion didn’t trouble her remotely. She could handle anything he started.

  ‘You refusing me?’ he asked.

  ‘You got it in one.’

  He turned his head and looked at his biker associates. ‘You all hear that? I been turned down, guys! I been rejected by a stripper! Well, roll me on my hip and fuck me sideways.’

  The bikers, like apes taught to behave by a maladjusted trainer, banged their beer bottles on the tables and screeched. Bear looked back at her and said, ‘They don’t approve, see. They think I should get a private show. They think I deserve one. So – you gonna oblige?’

  She looked directly into his eyes. He was nothing, scum blown in on a Harley-Davison. She set her glass down on the bar. He met her eyes without flinching and she thought: He doesn’t understand what Carly Phoenix can do to him. She’d been raised on rough streets, she’d graduated
the school of hard knocks with a first-class diploma. Carly Phoenix knew her way around morons like Bear. She had them for breakfast and didn’t even notice.

  She said, ‘You’re not man enough, Bear. Come back when you’re all grown up.’

  The bikers hooted. Bear reached out and caught her right wrist. He was strong. His fingers closed around her like metal hinges. She removed her sunglasses with her free hand and stared at him because it was important to maintain eye contact. She wanted him to see into her, she wanted him to sense her potential if he could, if his antenna was receptive, but she had the feeling he was too stupid to have any fine instincts. He grunted and drank and belched his way through the world.

  ‘Let go,’ she said.

  ‘Ooo, let go, she says. You hear her, guys?’

  The bikers were working up quite a rhythm now with their beer bottles, like a drum section on strong reefer.

  ‘I only ask once,’ she said.

  ‘Wow, I’m all shivery, lady,’ he said. He tightened the grip, a muscle strained in his arm, a blue tattoo of a naked girl was stretched out of shape on his skin.

  ‘You’ve been warned,’ she said.

  Bear threw back his head and howled like a wolf under a mad moon on an empty prairie.

  This is nothing, she thought. This is too easy. He wasn’t worthy of her. She moved deftly, pushing herself away from the bar, reaching with her left hand under her jacket to the belt of her jeans, and she took out the gun and shoved it into his throat – everything was too quick for him to follow.

  ‘The safety’s off, hotshot,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, hold on,’ he said.

  ‘Get the fucking hand off my wrist,’ she said.

  ‘Easy now,’ and he took his hand away;

  She raised her arm and pointed the gun at his head, forcing the barrel into his skullbone. She caught the silver crucifix and ripped it out of his ear lobe. He groaned with pain and immediately raised a hand to his wounded ear, which was bleeding.

  She said, ‘Say after me. My name’s Bear and I’m a total asshole.’

  ‘You didn’t have to yank my fucking ear halfway off—’

  ‘You’ve got another one,’ she said.

  ‘Holy shit, it hurts—’

  ‘Now say it. Say what I told you to say.’

  ‘My name’s Bear and I’m a total asshole. Jesus Christ …’

  ‘Good. Now unzip your pants.’

  ‘Unzip my pants …’

  ‘Do it!’

  ‘Wait a minute, lady—’

  ‘The safety’s off and I’ve got a nervous tic in my finger, Kingsize. The zipper.’

  He undid the buckle of his belt, pulled down the zip of his jeans. They slithered to his ankles. He had thin white legs and orange boxer shorts.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now show me.’

  ‘Show what?’

  ‘Show me how you got your nickname,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, lady—’

  ‘Come on, Kingsize. Show me.’

  The other bikers were silent now.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘The world’s waiting, Bear.’

  ‘This is … this is …’ He lowered his hand to his groin, reaching for the flap in his shorts.

  ‘I’m holding my breath,’ she said.

  ‘Lady,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s see the pecker, let’s all see this whopper,’ she said.

  He opened the boxer shorts and fumbled inside and produced his limp white penis, clutched between thumb and forefinger like a slug shrivelling in salt.

  ‘Kingsize?’ she asked. ‘I guess it deflates when it’s scared, huh? Wrinkled little thing. Turn around. Show your friends what you got there, Kingsize.’

  She prodded him with the gun, forced him to turn to the gallery of bikers. He did so quickly, then swung back round to stare at her and she said, ‘I guess your new nickname’s Peanut, or Walnut Dick, or something like that.’

  He reached down and drew up his jeans and, flushed with anger, buckled his belt. ‘You fucking bitch,’ he said.

  She picked up her drink and emptied the glass. ‘Which bike is yours?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  ‘Just answer the question, Kingsize.’ She aimed the gun at him with a gesture of certitude.

  He said, ‘The one that got the red gas-tank.’

  She put her glass down on the bar, picked up her shades, stuck them on her face and walked toward the door. She was still holding the gun on Ronnie Bear. ‘Don’t follow me,’ she said.

  ‘You bitch,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you.’

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ she said. ‘Sure you will.’

  She walked outside. She moved across the parking-lot to the cluster of bikes and she fired a single shot directly into the gas tank of Bear’s Harley, which caught flame. Then she went to the rented Honda and got inside and drove to the exit of the lot, seeing in the rearview mirror bikers scurrying out of the bar into palls of thick black smoke. She backed up the Honda, reached out of the window, fired a second shot into the group of men, watched them throw themselves to the ground for protection. She wheeled around them, gun dangling from the open window. She saw Bear rise and lunge at the Honda in his rage and she accelerated a little, blowing dust up at him. He lost his balance and went down on his face and she circled him one last time, laughing, and then she headed back to the freeway at speed.

  She drove fast for miles, drove until her sense of amusement had passed, until the exhilaration had gone out of her system. Fun, but fun always went away, even for Carly Phoenix, who needed new highs, new horizons. She needed challenges, not some half-assed encounter with an asshole in a roadside tavern, for God’s sake. That wasn’t enough. That wasn’t even close to enough. No way. It was Pagan who kept coming back to her, her finger inside his mouth, the mounds of his closed eyelids, the wet surface of his tongue. It was Pagan who crowded her mind mile after mile.

  She played the radio loud all the way to the outskirts of Dover. Sometimes when the sun glinted off the highway she had flashes of Capsicum, smoke drifting down Main Street, the gas station exploding. Dead, dreary Capsicum, arid and intolerable, the place where Carlotta’s childhood lay trapped under the weight of tinder-dry fir trees and fallen cones that cracked when you stood on them during the long festering summers and the big fans that creaked round and round in the plantation house, where every shadowy room led to one in ever deeper shadow, a series of darkening boxes, the unoiled hub of a wheelchair squeaking, the flutter of her mother’s gauzy dress against a wall, the dank webby smell of the black cellar where the old man sometimes sent her when she’d done something wrong – these details burst open in her head like fireworks on a night with no stars.

  Sweating, she got out of the car at a gas station and used the pay phone. She dialled Chico’s number in Virginia. He was a long time answering.

  When he picked up, she said, ‘Where were you? Watering your plants?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Got anything for me?’

  ‘Could be,’ he answered.

  36

  WASHINGTON

  When the telephone rang in Pagan’s room he answered it at once. A man said, ‘I’m downstairs in reception. I’ve come from Langley.’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Pagan said, and hung up. He went inside the bathroom and dipped his face in what was supposed to be cold water, but was actually lukewarm. He looked at himself in the mirror. He had a sense of appearing different, although he wasn’t sure in what way exactly. It was his own face that stared back at him, and if changes had occurred in him they hadn’t taken place on the visible level. The same Frank Pagan, but altered.

  He drank a glass of water and remembered Foxie’s expression: Basic biology. But that didn’t cut it. Biology didn’t begin to scratch the surface. There was no true science of the heart. He thought: If I move and keep moving, I won’t have time to dwell on her. Focus. Concentration. What had she said? Don’t stop to sift through details. He could sti
ll feel her, that was the problem. She still adhered to him. He carried her around like a photograph inside a locket that was a little too heavy.

  He retrieved his gun from under the bed, reloaded the clip, inserted it. He stuck the Bernardelli in a holster he wore at the base of his spine, then he put on a pale blue linen jacket that concealed the gun. He left the room, rode an elevator down into the reception area. A tall young man stepped forward to greet him.

  ‘Frank Pagan? I’m Ralph Donovan.’ He showed Pagan an identification card issued by the Central Intelligence Agency. ‘Bob Naderson asked me to pick you up and deliver you to Langley.’

  ‘Naderson said he’d call me himself,’ Pagan said.

  Donovan smiled. ‘If you want to verify all this, why don’t you ring him?’

  Pagan looked at the young man. He was muscular and bland and his face suggested healthy pursuits – camping, fresh air, sixteen laps in a swimming-pool before breakfast, a couple of hours a week in the gym. It was a face without shadows. Pagan said, ‘I’ll take your word for it, Donovan.’

  ‘Good. Car’s just out front, Mr Pagan.’

  Pagan followed Donovan outside. The car was a dark blue Buick. Donovan politely held the passenger door open for him. Pagan settled down inside the air-conditioned vehicle. Donovan got behind the wheel.

  ‘So,’ said Donovan. ‘What do you make of our weather?’

  ‘Hot,’ Pagan replied.

  Donovan smiled. ‘There’s a rumour of rain.’

  Weather-chat. Pagan was comfortable with that. It was ordinary and manageable. He stared ahead through a congregation of tourist buses. People swarmed here from every corner of the Republic to pay their respects at an assortment of shrines. They came from all over the world, from countries where democracy was sometimes a deceptive concept manipulated by dictators and tribal chiefs, to peer at the great statues and pay tribute. He pondered the fact that while these good people looked in awe at the Washington Monument or Capitol Hill, he was riding in a car driven by an employee of a clandestine agency, an organization the Founding Fathers could never have predicted. Public monuments, secret monoliths, the dichotomy at the core of these United States. Irony, if you were in the mood for it – but he wasn’t, because he had a dichotomy in his own heart, and he couldn’t deal with that one.