Heat

by Campbell Armstrong

  Donovan drove with a certain nonchalant competence. ‘I don’t take the regular route, in case you’re wondering,’ he remarked. ‘It’s usually clogged. More so this time of the year. It gets a little shabby from here on. But we contrive to hide all this from the merry tourists.’

  The car was travelling grubby side-streets where topless bars were located. Girls Girls Girls!!! The Pussy Pit. The Peekaboo Lounge. Palace of Fuzz. The taverns were uninviting, darkened windows, unlit neon signs. Pagan always found something mildly depressing about unlit neon.

  ‘You work directly for Bob Naderson?’ he asked.

  ‘You might say I’m a general gofer, Mr Pagan.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Donovan shrugged and turned to glance at Pagan. ‘I’m a floater, really.’

  ‘You get moved around.’

  ‘Shunted, more like. Department to department, one office to another, no regular abode. When a chauffeur’s needed, I get the job. When a message has to be delivered, I’m usually the man. Unattached, you might say. It’s OK. It gives me certain freedoms I might not have if I was tied down.’

  ‘So you don’t know why you’re delivering me to Langley?’

  ‘Mr Naderson’s orders. I never ask questions, Mr Pagan. I do what I’m told to do. I like it that way. I’m not an ambitious sort of guy. I’m not what you’d call driven.’

  Along a street of decrepit houses where porches sometimes stood at slanting angles, there were burned-out cars and boarded windows and For Sale signs. Dark faces brooded in the shadows of houses. On street corners dope deals were being transacted with an absence of subterfuge. Store windows were barred or sometimes totally hidden behind steel shutters. Here and there a figure could be seen lying on a sidewalk. Dead or doped or drunk, Pagan had no way of knowing. A city of memorials and crack dealers, monuments and vagrants.

  ‘I don’t know where we are,’ Donovan said. ‘But it sure ain’t America. Sorry sight. All this hopelessness. Despair. It makes you think.’

  ‘Every city has neighbourhoods like this,’ Pagan remarked, as if to alleviate the apparent dismay in Donovan.

  ‘Somehow it’s worse when it’s Washington. I mean, you don’t expect the nation’s capital to have this kind of shit going on. People come here because the city stands for an ideal. And as soon as you get off the beaten track – well, look around. Just look around.’

  ‘Am I being chauffeured by an idealist?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘I believe in certain things, Mr Pagan. Trouble is, some of the things I happen to believe in are under fire. Guys selling dope openly on the streets – but where are the cops? And then you think of that dope coming across the country’s borders, and you wonder what the DEA is doing. Whatever it is, it’s not enough, otherwise you wouldn’t have places like this, and you wouldn’t see crack changing hands on street corners.’

  Pagan noticed a small speck of saliva on the corner of Donovan’s lips. The trouble with idealists was their naivety. They expected the world to be one way, and when it wasn’t, they bruised too easily. And when they were hurt, they frothed at the mouth. Like Donovan.

  ‘You can’t stop the flow of drugs,’ Pagan said.

  ‘You can try, though,’ Donovan responded.

  ‘What do you suggest? Seal off the borders?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And after the borders, what next? The airports. The seaports. Wrap an electronic fence round the whole country?’

  ‘Impractical,’ Donovan said.

  Impractical. It was clear to Pagan, whose suggestion of an electronic fence was meant to be interpreted as an impossible whimsy, that Donovan wasn’t blessed with a sense of humour, at least not when it came to his idealism, his patriotism.

  ‘We give too many visas to people who come here on shady business,’ Donovan said. ‘We get the dregs of the world washing up on our shores and we welcome them with open arms. Cubans. Haitians. You name it, we take them in.’

  ‘The melting-pot,’ said Pagan.

  ‘The shitcan, you mean,’ Donovan said. He banged the horn as a skinny kid materialized in front of the car with a glazed look on his face. The kid leaned away from the vehicle and Donovan braked.

  ‘God-damn moron,’ Donovan said, and stopped the car.

  To Pagan’s surprise, Donovan got out and grabbed the kid by the collar of his T-shirt and shook him vigorously. The kid was elsewhere, transported aloft on the narcotic of his choice, and for him the confrontation was probably just the bad-dream part of his trip. A big white guy shaking him, jarring his bones, unreal. Pagan watched as Donovan dragged the kid to the sidewalk and dumped him in front of a stoop where a bunch of old men passed a bottle back and forth in a brown paper bag. Donovan launched a foot hard into the kid’s ribs, then returned to the car.

  ‘The rough approach,’ Pagan said. ‘Dangerous in a neighbourhood like this.’

  ‘Dangerous,’ Donovan said, as if the concept were alien to him. He looked at Pagan and smiled. ‘Sometimes I get to the point where I have to … make a small gesture?’

  A small gesture, Pagan thought. There was clearly a tiny screw not quite connected in Donovan’s system. The way he’d grabbed the kid and shaken him as if he meant to force his eyes from their sockets, and that final needless crunching kick to the ribs. Random violence unsettled Pagan, who was beginning to wonder if Donovan’s Aryan plausibility and bright demeanour didn’t contain more than just a seed of darkness. Maybe they bred them like Donovan at Langley these days – unhappy patriots, malcontented idealists, candidates for some future American Reich to which nobody was permitted access unless they held certain untainted beliefs and could swear to them on old mildewed family Bibles hauled over on the Mayflower.

  Donovan drove a little way before he said, ‘I get pissed off, Mr Pagan.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  Donovan shook his head and sighed. ‘It’s not just dope. Dope’s only a symptom.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘A far greater sickness,’ Donovan said solemnly.

  Pagan said nothing. He was losing touch with Ralph Donovan. He stared through the windshield. The neighbourhood had deteriorated further, if that was possible, and now there was a series of unpaved streets and flattened houses and some kind of abandoned building project. A crane with shattered windows stood in the centre of a big empty lot, surrounded by bricks and tumbledown scaffolding. Shells of new houses had been erected but somewhere in the process of creation an abandonment had taken place – perhaps because somebody had run out of Federal funds or faith, or even both.

  ‘This is typical,’ said Donovan. ‘A builder gets Federal money to slam up some new houses that are going to become slums as soon as they’re occupied. But what happens is that the foundations get laid and a few walls go up and the contractor abandons the whole god-damn thing because it’s too dangerous for his crew to work here – they get attacked, mugged, shot, name it. So the builder pulls out, claiming a lack of security, and his wallet’s stuffed anyway, and the whole damn thing becomes a slum before anybody’s even moved in – Ah, Christ.’

  The car stalled, stopped. Donovan turned the key in the ignition a couple of times but the engine didn’t fire.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t know what the particular problem is with this car, but I can tell you the general problem – inadequate maintenance, incompetent mechanics, a lack of professionalism. Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  Donovan got out of the car and opened the hood. Pagan sat for a time, the litany of Donovan’s complaints ringing in his ears, and then when it became too hot and stuffy to stay in the car he opened the door and stepped out. He scanned the building site. Deserted, forlorn, strangely still in the afternoon heat. He didn’t like this place. He was sweating. This was the kind of weather that microwaved human brains. Maybe that was what had happened to Donovan – too many hours in clogged traffic, sucking too many fumes, working up a general despair at the condition of th
ings. Drugs, bad mechanics, corrupt contractors, the waste of Government money, the incompetence of cops. The inside of Donovan’s head had to be filled with all kinds of bad bagpipe music, laments.

  Pagan walked to the front of the car. Donovan was concealed by the upraised hood, which resembled the big wing of a metal bird.

  ‘Anything happening?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Donovan. ‘Look what I found.’

  He raised his face from the shadow of the hood and he was smiling. The sight of the gun in the young man’s hand surprised Pagan, whose first inclination was to pass it off as a bad joke, or some irrational behaviour inspired by the weather, but Donovan’s smile was lethally serious. There was nothing ambiguous in that expression.

  ‘Why?’ Pagan asked.

  ‘I do what I’m told,’ said Donovan.

  ‘The gofer.’

  ‘Right on the nail, Mr Pagan.’

  ‘And you don’t stop to ask, Ralph.’

  ‘No, I never ask. I just get on with it.’

  Pagan wondered about dying in a place like this. Shot, his body dragged and dumped behind a pile of bricks. Maybe not even that. Murders were commonplace around here. Maybe he’d just lie out in the open where he’d be seen and somebody might come by eventually and a call would be made to the cops. That could take days, by which time he’d be fly-fodder. He’d be crawling, infested. He didn’t care for the notion. He didn’t have time to waste dying. He’d been careless, taking Donovan at face value.

  ‘Walk over here with me, Mr Pagan,’ Donovan said. ‘Let’s take a look at where some of our Federal taxes have gone.’

  They crossed the rutted dry lot, Donovan a pace or so behind, and moved toward the shadow of the crane. The ground sparkled with broken glass. Pagan stepped over planks of cut timber that had been vandalized, set alight and charred round the edges. The shells of the small houses suggested a theatrical set, and the sun was nothing more than a big bleak spotlight. The place was isolated. Pagan felt sweat gather around the loose collar of his shirt. A way out, he was thinking. A way out.

  He stared at Donovan, who said, ‘This is nothing personal, you understand.’

  ‘That makes it OK, I suppose. I’d hate to think I’d offended you directly, Ralph.’

  Donovan thought this funny and laughed a moment.

  ‘Killing me is going to accomplish something, is that it, Ralph? I forgot, sorry, you can’t answer. You just do what you’re told. Who tells you, Ralph? Who is this somebody that dishes out the orders?’

  Donovan stood directly under the giant yellow arm of the crane. A huge hook hung from the arm, like a claw. A bird rose out of the control cabin and flapped off wearily into the sun.

  Donovan said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t ask questions, Mr Pagan. Anyway, what’s the point in me answering them? It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to you now.’

  Pagan looked beyond Donovan but saw no escape routes. Everything became distilled in the glimmer of Donovan’s gun: his whole life dwindled miserably to a dark hole the size of a human eyeball. ‘I’m just curious, Ralph. That’s all.’ He tried to keep panic from his voice. But the deadpan manner, the artificial cool, was difficult to maintain in the circumstances.

  ‘Step back about four feet,’ Donovan said.

  ‘You don’t want my blood on you,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Dry-cleaning’s a pain in the ass.’

  Pagan took a few steps back and was seized by the sensation that he was posing for a photograph, moving himself into the correct angle for a camera.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Donovan. ‘Stop where you are.’

  Pagan looked up at the sun. The world seemed to him just then a place of dislocations. None of the parts fitted. Everything was out of joint. A dreaminess descended on him for a moment, as if he’d just swallowed morphine. He looked at Donovan, whose white shirt was a blur, a blaze.

  Donovan raised the gun and pointed it. Pagan wasn’t sure if he was meant to close his eyes or keep them open or whether somebody should step forward and blindfold him right now and perhaps stick a smoking cigarette between his lips. He held his breath and stared at the gun and considered his options, none of them viable. To rush Donovan was useless. To turn and run was futile. But to stand still and wait for death and just go out like a snuffed match – there had to be more to it than that. His mouth was a bone-dry cavity in his head. His eyes smarted from sweat.

  He heard a crunching sound, something that didn’t quite belong at an execution. He wasn’t altogether sure where it came from, but it sounded like movement over broken stones. Donovan heard it too, and he half turned from Pagan, but he kept the gun in the firing position because he wasn’t going to let his attention wander. The sound came again, and this time there were voices attached to it.

  ‘Fucker come this way.’

  ‘Car’s back there.’

  ‘He ain’t far.’

  ‘He gonna be one sorry sonofabitch.’

  Pagan gazed at a high pile of gravel. Donovan, he noticed, looked slightly bewildered, his attention split between Pagan and the voices coming from the other side of the gravel mound.

  ‘Gonna be one sorry mother,’ a voice said.

  ‘Gonna be, man.’

  ‘Gonna wisht he don’t come roun here, yeah.’

  ‘Stompin on folks, what the fuck.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  The kid Donovan had assaulted appeared at the top of the pile. He held in his hand a length of lead pipe. Behind him, two others came in view – older, heavier, one carrying what looked like a Wildey automatic with a fourteen-inch barrel, the other a blunt little Uzi. Pagan experienced a distinct chill in the air, a pocket of cold gather in the shadow of the crane’s arm. There was a curious imbalance about things all at once, Donovan unsure of his next move, the armed kids on the gravel summit staring down at him, and Pagan himself, a prisoner of shadow, spared his own execution – at least for the moment.

  ‘That’s the fucker,’ said the small kid.

  Donovan stepped back a few feet. He formed the apex of a murderous triangle, Pagan on one side, the gravel mound and the kids on the other. Pagan felt it coming, it was gathering in the air around him, the build-up of violence; it was like the dry claustrophobic heft of the atmosphere just before a thunderstorm.

  Donovan said, ‘You boys want to take your chances, huh? You want to get hurt? I sure as hell know how to use this gun, but if you think you can take me, you’re welcome to try.’

  ‘Fuck white asshole!’ The Uzi went off, a stuttering, manic sound, strangely flattened and impassionate. There was never any music in the weapons of death. Never a melody.

  Dust was dug out of the ground around Donovan’s feet and he danced a little to avoid the spray of gunfire. He shot the young kid dead with expert judgement, his arm extended and relaxed. Pagan edged out from under the shadow and Donovan, whose field of vision must have been extraordinary, caught a glimpse of him and, barely turning his head, fired off a shot that struck the steel base of the crane.

  Pagan went down on the ground, rolling as he did so, tugging his gun from his holster. He fired at Donovan, missed, but at least he felt he’d declared his intentions sufficiently that the two kids left on the gravel mound would understand he wasn’t on Donovan’s side – if it came to anything as fine as that, that kind of hair-splitting, because once violence started it gathered its own senseless momentum.

  He heard the Uzi stammer again and saw Donovan, still backing off, fire at the figures on the gravel, and they returned like with like, the Uzi rattling, the Wildey blasting. Donovan was struck in the shoulder and went down on one knee and continued to shoot and clipped the kid with the Wildey, who fell into the gravel and slithered a few feet, moaning. Pagan thought: you had to admire Donovan’s mindless courage, the way he faced his assailants. But Donovan was bleeding from the shoulder, and it was bothering him that he had Pagan to one side and the kid with the Uzi to the other. He was effectively trapped, but he still kept
shooting; he’d shoot until there was nothing left in the chamber because he wasn’t the kind of guy who understood there were limits to everything, including mortality.

  Pagan saw the Uzi kick back into life. Donovan took a bullet in his shin and dropped face forward and fired at the one remaining kid on the gravel, and this time, with an accuracy that was uncanny, struck the kid in the neck. The kid didn’t fall, didn’t drop, instead he roared and charged down the gravel slope, rattling away with the automatic, energized by – by what? Encroaching darkness? A sense of his own life ebbing out of him?

  Donovan was out of ammunition. His gun clicked uselessly. The Uzi went off in the kid’s hand and Donovan’s body shuddered with the impact of the bullets and then the kid was on top of him in a peculiar bloody embrace, and then there was silence, as if somebody had drawn a heavy curtain around the scene.

  Pagan walked to the place where Donovan lay with the kid on his chest. He stood motionless for a while. Donovan’s eyes were open, and his lips touched the dead kid’s hair. The other figures on the gravel mound were silent, still. The scene transfixed Pagan; the aftermath of violence had an hypnotic effect. He stepped back and holstered his pistol; there was no need for it now. He raised his face when he heard a faint fluttering overhead and he saw the bird that had flown earlier out of the crane return to the broken window of the control cabin and, folding its wings, vanish inside.

  He blinked as the sun hammered mercilessly down against him.

  37

  WASHINGTON

  Max Skidelsky chopped stalks of celery with a quick cutting motion, then spread them to one side and started slicing bok-choi. The wok was beginning to heat up, so he dumped the vegetables in the oil. ‘What’s important here is timing, Jimmy. You fry the veggies in the oil too long and they lose all their goodness.’

  Mallory watched the deft way Max handled the wok. He shook it with one hand and stirred the vegetables with a wooden spatula in the other. He sprinkled a touch of peanut oil over the concoction, tossed in a handful of pre-cooked shrimps at the last minute, gave everything one final stir, then spooned the food onto plates.