Dantes' Inferno

by Sarah Lovett

  The previous ninety minutes had taken their toll, and the tension she’d managed to dance with all morning had broken through her defenses to step hard on her toes. She felt weary, inadequate, frightened—and that was the good news.

  M was watching. He had to be. He’d arranged a spectacular show—and bought himself a front row seat.

  Snatching a cigarette from her pocket, she looked out at the expanse of concrete, focusing on City Hall, her gaze drawn up the twenty-eight-story tower. LA’s ziggurat.

  HE THAT VIOLATES HIS OATH PROFANES THE DIVINITY OF FAITH ITSELF.

  The oversized letters were carved over the south entrance to City Hall.

  Sylvia felt a hollow space open up behind her solar plexus.

  “Don’t feel bad, Doc. Dantes lobbed it way over your head and straight into my mitt.” The rust-and-gravel voice belonged to Detective Church. He saw her expression; his own eyes held a cold, hard glint. “Shit, I must’ve walked under that quote a thousand times. I used to do liaison work with the mayor’s office. Dantes knows that.”

  “You got it right away?” Sylvia asked, stung, and feeling angry—with herself, with Church, especially with Dantes.

  “Marcus Tullius Cicero,” Church said. “Rome’s greatest orator. I’m one of those guys who reads the writing on the wall. History repeats itself: Dantes left a bomb here in nineteen eighty-eight.”

  “A hoax bomb,” Sylvia said, remembering the file she’d examined hours earlier.

  “Turned out to be a hoax, yeah.”

  “So you’ve got a bomb inside City Hall,” she whispered. She was staring at countless tons of concrete and marble and steel, and she was remembering Oklahoma City. Her stomach fluttered uneasily. Reflexively, she took a step backward. “Or you’ve got another hoax.”

  “Never bet on a hoax,” Church said, his voice a soft rumble. He was sweating, red blotches appearing on his skin. “There’s a bomb until we prove otherwise. And never—as me dear old ma told me more than once—never try to outsmart a smart guy.”

  “Your ma was right.” With shaky hands, Sylvia lit up her cigarette, inhaling, perversely grateful for hot smoke in her lungs.

  As cigarette smoke wafted past his freckled nose, Church said, “I could arrest you for that.”

  Sylvia held out one wrist. “Go for it. I keep trying to quit.”

  Church snorted. “You weren’t around for the triple play last week,” he drawled. Once again, his voice held a note of commiseration. “MDC came this close to evacuating three times in twenty-four—assholes screwed my code seven.”

  “Missed that one.” Code 7 was cop talk for mealtime; she’d learned to translate ten code. “Too bad about your doughnuts.”

  Detective Church shot her a sideways look, one eyebrow trying to jump over the moon. “C’mon, I’ll fill you in,” he said, already headed back toward the command post. As he walked, he pulled out his cell phone, responding to its inaudible vibration. “This is Church.”

  Sylvia glanced back at City Hall as the detective updated the caller: “Last of the civilians are out. Our guys already checked parking and street levels. They’re on two and three. We get the news floor by floor.”

  Church went silent, then he grunted several times. Holding the phone in hand, he considered Sylvia. “Back there at Roybal, we skipped a step.”

  “The debriefing.”

  “Right.” He tugged on the brim of his fedora. “When you were with Dantes, you saw what we only heard. You think we’re on the right track with this? Gut feeling.”

  Eye level with Church, Sylvia found herself staring into two black holes, the opaque lenses of his sunglasses; the freckles on his middle-aged nose stood out in relief against pink skin. In the back of her mind she heard the low drone of a jet, but her thoughts centered on Dantes’ Inferno: City of Angels in the 21st Century.

  A week ago, she’d lost the damn book—she would never have admitted it, she was enough of a Freudian. But she’d replaced it with a second copy.

  Dantes had omitted the revelations of his secret life as a bomber, instead focusing on the city’s history, physical form, ecology, sociology. With an intimacy, a yearning, he’d written about a lover: City of Angels as mythical mate, LA as anima.

  It was fitting that Dantes was being held in the geographic center of his obsession, where physical and mental boundaries merged. Where the world was turned upside down by the threat of explosive destruction.

  Fitting that he would use the language of architecture—the syntactical structure of his city—to speak to the forces of authority he despised.

  Sylvia’s eyes widened as she refocused. She ran her tongue across dry lips. “When I was in there, when I called him a liar, his rage broke through, he went into meltdown. Disintegration.” She nodded. “Gut feeling—he sent us to find a bomb. But whether he’s working with the extortion-ist—or just taking advantage of an opportunity—I don’t know.”

  Church spoke into the cell phone, “You hear that, Sweetheart?”

  Sweetheart . . .

  Now the click: by reputation Sylvia knew of a Professor Edmond Sweetheart, a psycholinguist—an antiterrorist analyst—who was a minor legend in intelligence circles. He’d played a role in the Ben Black-Abu Mohammed investigation in the Middle East. Ultimately, the FBI’s number one fugitive explosives specialist, Black, was killed when an American Tomahawk took a nosedive into a North African terrorist training camp—

  Wasn’t Edmond Sweetheart related to one of the victims of the Getty bombing?

  “I’m sorry?” she said, abruptly aware of Church.

  “I said, don’t take this wrong. Back there, with Dantes, you missed the message. You missed it because he pulled you in. If he gets to you—innocent people die.”

  His voice faded as he caught sight of a black armored truck—LAPD bomb squad—pulling up beside the blue-and-whites. He started to walk away. But instead, he turned toward the growing crowd of spectators. “I don’t want LA to pay for Dantes’ bullshit. Got that?” He kept his voice low. “Don’t go anywhere yet, Doc—we’re gonna need you.”

  Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette on the metal trunk of a street lamp and trailed the detective to the command post.

  9:47 A.M. Sylvia stayed out of everybody’s way—investigators, emergency personnel, and city officials. Their squabbles, their tension, their efforts registered subliminally; her attention was constantly drawn to isolated energetic moments—a loud voice in the crowd, a siren, a flash of light, the smell of smoke, sweat, and exhaust.

  She could feel M’s presence. The agents and investigators around her felt it, too.

  Suddenly, the city seemed to close in around the ziggurat—the modern high-rises known as City Hall East, City Hall West, the LAPD Center, the Times building one block to the south, Spring Street, Main Street, the Harbor and the Hollywood Freeways.

  Here, this one square mile contained five levels of government, from federal and state down to county, city, and even utility districts. Thousands of people came and went each day.

  Walking toward the perimeter and the spectators, she reached for the slender gold chain around her neck. Her fingers closed round something small and solid—a gift from Serena. She gripped the tiny icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, picturing her foster daughter’s angelic face, those rich umber eyes, skin the color of toffee.

  The sound of sharp metal jarred her back to the moment. She saw a shape emerge from the armored truck. An LAPD bomb tech in full protective gear. He moon-walked a small circle, testing his mobility. She held her breath until he disappeared ponderously back inside the air-conditioned truck.

  Sylvia scanned faces—fire chief, cops, maintenance people, city safety engineers—each marked by fear and hypervigilance.

  Waiting for the green light on code 10.

  M was waiting, too.

  10:33 A.M. Less than an hour had passed before they all knew they weren’t going to find a bomb.

  By then the temperature had risen to the low nineti
es, and every temper was short fused. The barricaded streets were eerily deserted except for emergency vehicles—beyond the barricades, the lingering spectators were too quiet. A hush had fallen.

  A few blocks away on Broadway, the sidewalks would be overflowing with pedestrians, the air filled with city music: the noise of hawkers, amplified songs, voices, traffic. The sound would echo up the steep sides of the urban canyons—fissures made of concrete and steel—where raptors shared rooftops with pigeons, rats, and cockroaches. Evolutionary winners . . . unaware that death was only a block or two away.

  Sylvia pressed her palm against the back of her neck; her skin felt hot. The sky was an angular scrim, bruised a bluish yellow, suspended between bleached white buildings. The late-morning sun beat down on the concrete desert, creating an opiate shimmer.

  A shrill ring sounded, and from the corner of her eye, she barely noticed Church answer the phone. She caught the edge of her thumbnail between slightly crooked front teeth. M—who the hell was he? And how did his life intersect with the bizarre tale of John Freeman Dantes?

  “Bombers fit no definitive profile; like other criminals, like other human beings, they are motivated by greed, faith, politics, envy, pathology, need, fear, anger, revenge. Perhaps what makes them exceptional is their resistance to classification.

  “And their willingness to kill indiscriminately.”

  She felt the tight ball of fear in her belly—the inevitable tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “He that violates his oath profanes the divinity of faith itself.”

  A quote about betrayal . . .

  Abruptly she sought the self-medication of another cigarette to keep her hands busy and her chemistry sedated. Seen through the tinted lenses of her sunglasses, the golden head of City Hall reflected light, shimmering like a gaudy jewel. From this distance, there was no apparent danger; the building appeared normal. But in her imagination it shattered suddenly, collapsing in on itself, showering deadly debris in all directions.

  Dantes’ words raced through her mind: Last ride, ten o’clock . . . Bunker Hill in all its glory . . . go see my city of fallen angels.

  Dantes isn’t finished with us yet.

  She turned, moving restlessly across concrete.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  For the second time that day, Sylvia collided with Special Agent Purcell. The woman held a palm-sized tape recorder. “This call just came in.”

  Sylvia set the speaker to her ear.

  She heard an oddly artificial voice, a man enjoying his own joke. “I see that John shared our little secret of Babel. His bombs were meant to punish infidels and gluttons. But your greedy city fathers didn’t listen. Now it’s my turn. No bombs today—but we’ll be back tomorrow.”

  And then he laughed. “Welcome to the third circle of hell.”

  The man in the Mousehole, I am gazing up at the world from a warm, dark nest lined with twigs and fur. All I see is an empty sky where God should live. I am a 21st Century Man. Or am I a mouse?

  Mole’s Manifesto

  10:38 A.M. M presses end on the cellular phone.

  Good-bye. Ciao. Sayonara.

  The call cannot be traced—child’s play—unless the Feds look up. In which case he will wave.

  He is beginning to know the players. The FBI and ATF agents, LAPD, and others. He is beginning to feel a kinship. He makes a move, they make a move. What a perfect synergy. This is a true symbiotic relationship.

  Now, with his binoculars, he can see them clearly from his eagle nest atop the Los Angeles Times building. His vantage point was chosen in honor of Dantes’ LA Times bomb. What a fiasco that had been—as if John’s bourgeois anarchy would actually affect the course of history.

  It is M who will affect history.

  The Feds are in such a tizzy, buzzing like insects, disappointed their plans have come to naught.

  He understands. He feels let down, too. Always his metabolism drops—a chemical shift—after he has made a delivery. It’s as if he’s physically lighter inside. A hole gapes. Some part of him has been left behind.

  He is in limbo. Floating until detonation, explosion.

  At which point, he recharges.

  After decades, he believes this is an integral part of his being. He lives inside the space of tension between action and reaction.

  His actions: Choosing a target. Constructing a bomb. Hearing it come to life. Watching it die as it lives.

  For a moment the LA sun is eclipsed by a very recent memory, and he is transported by neurons to his underground workshop, his own private bunker, where he creates his weapons of destruction.

  “My old flame, I can’t even think of his name,” his parrot, Nietzsche (an African gray), joins in, hitting the last note of the song, his voice wavering like a nightclub crooner with a megaphone. The bird fluffs both wings and dips his head, taking the customary bow for an audience of one. A single blue tail feather drifts past his perch, glancing off one of a dozen bags of Kitty Litter, to land on an otherwise bare basement floor.

  “I can’t applaud you now.” At the moment, the cook’s gloved hands are busy funneling sulfuric acid into a small glass bottle.

  Gently. With care, he supervises the birth of a capillary fuse.

  Slowly, the clear and corrosive oil of vitriol nears midpoint.

  Some of these materials date back more than fifteen years; he and Dantes bought this off an old man in Pomona. Such good friends, they even shared their chips, their circuits, their clips . . .

  Smiling beneath his hood, the cook raises the bottle for Nietzsche’s benefit. “Is the glass half full, or half empty, my friend?”

  The parrot flexes and contracts one claw. “Empty, my friend,” he echoes harshly.

  “Nietzsche the pessimist,” the cook whispers, capping the bottle with a single-holed wax-coated rubber stopper. He is not a large man—without the modified welder’s hood and the heavy sleeved apron, he barely breaks 165 pounds—but he always feels oversized in the close room. It is furnished as sparely as possible to his specifications: two worktables, industrial quantities of highly absorbent Kitty Litter and baking soda, his simple glass and plastic mixing tools—and only those chemicals essential for a particular operation. He installed the fume hood and flue because both are absolutely necessary to draw off the fumes he creates on certain days. But not this particular night. Nietzsche never keeps him company when he is working with noxious chemical exhaust.

  M sets the bottle of acid on the smaller table and takes four steps across the room to reach the larger work area. His supplies are neatly arranged. Plastic bag. Brand new jar of Vaseline. Sugar. Potassium chlorate. Mixing bowl and spatula. The jointed pipe. Caps.

  The beauty of the pipe bomb is containment. The pipe functions as a metal womb where superheated gases (created from explosive powder, in this case a low explosive) expand until they generate enough pressure to go boom.

  The cook is using one of his favorite recipes as filler: sodium chlorate and sugar, which—like ammonium nitrate and charcoal—is highly hygroscopic, attracting moisture like a sponge.

  All in all, it is simpler than baking cookies.

  As long as no trace of filler carelessly contaminates the space between threads and cap. Vaseline helps grease the turn of the screw.

  Others besides M admire the utilitarian efficiency of pipe bombs. George Metesky—the Mad Bomber of New York—included them in his repertoire now and again. Tom Mooney and Warren Billings spent more than two decades in prison for the 1916 Market Street pipe bombing that left ten San Franciscans dead and forty injured. The Unabomber added nails to fill his PVC.

  M snaps a Polaroid of the bomb—a gift for his special friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Nietzsche sings louder, with more heart, when the recipe du jour is pipe bomb. This bomb—like any other of his creations—has a destination: downtown Los Angeles. A special hiding place—

  A voice breaks M from h
is reverie.

  “How come they’re going?” somebody whines.

  Someone else whispers a novena.

  The usual letdown after the show.

  Relief and disappointment: we were going to see some frigging fireworks, weren’t we?

  They move as a herd.

  M finds himself on street level, lost in the throng of spectators, in the midst of anticlimax. The bomb squad is packing up: body armor, dogs, remote devices, collective intelligence, and fear—all gathered in this square block to combat his evil.

  He knows what it will be like when they finally face his device.

  The sweating hands, the tremors, the racing heartbeat. The macabre jokes, false bravado, gallows humor. The personification of a killing machine.

  Like him, they work with bare hands because gloves are clumsy. The fused plastic shields covering their faces will fog up; most bomb squad survivors dance on the edge of death every time they’re invited to a party. It’s easy to nurture a death wish. After a while, the proximity of death brings comfort. Every man needs to hold hands with death from time to time. And bomb squad men are no different. Too bad, he thinks. After all those chemicals, all that fear, the adrenaline kick . . . and now they’re acting like children at a birthday party with no gift.

  Ah, but he and Nietzsche, the parrot, have left the Feds a gift: a temple snake protecting the sacred.

  Under his careful fingers, the trip wire lay down and rolled over.

  Seven feet long, the color of wood, it did not resist the master’s touch. It did not bite or sting, did not release its poison as he trained it to follow the flooring seam.

  Using bare fingers, he anchored the tail; the mouth feeds on a metal spring, extended and expanded under pressure. Between these two stations, the wire remains taut. Until resistance is applied. The lightest footfall, for instance. Enough to free the safety insulator—the end of a paper match inserted between spring and nail—enough to complete the circuit when the wire is rereleased.