“You gave it to me.”
“Hell I did. When? When did I give you that number?”
“I don’t remember. Perhaps Singh...”
“Call the other number, next time.”
“The recording.” A heavily-accented voice would answer, say Conrad had reached Kow’s Mandarin Grill, please wait.
“Uh-huh. That one.” Marsh did something away from the receiver, came close again. He coughed. His voice was raspy; it thickened when he was upset. According to Singh, Marsh suffered from a rare bronchial disease, a souvenir from the Dark Continent. “Y’know we clandestine types wallow in the traditions of argot and subterfuge. It’s genetic.”
“Ah.”
“You know, Conrad, I was kinda worried you weren’t going to call in. Thought maybe you’d forgotten.”
“No worries, Rob. I’ll have your money.”
“Oh, don’t I know that. Where you headed, bud?”
“West.”
“Uh-huh. Where to?”
“There are sites in Washington. I might visit those.” Conrad smiled and his lips split, dribbled blood down his chin into the receiver. Marsh had him pigeonholed as a wannabe naturalist. That was fine, that was convenient, it kept them off his back. The Mima Mounds. The Juniper Dunes. The Horse Cliffs. A dozen others, most of them nameless and unmapped. He’d trod the ground of those places; camped in their primordial circumferences and watched star-fields blaze like iron in a crucible; burned innumerable rolls of film and waited for epiphanies that yet eluded him. Going back to those hallowed sites wasn’t likely to make a difference; the key to the whole mess was surely elsewhere in an exotic region, upon a darksome shore. However, he had to give Marsh something. Otherwise, Marsh would take what he wanted.
“Shouldn’t you be training?”
“I’m always training.”
“And that’s it. Huh.”
“I’m just driving.” Conrad wasn’t an artful liar; bluntness was his weapon of choice. However, when dealing with the likes of Marsh he’d gradually learned to adopt cursory camouflage, to blend in with his current habitat, an ant trundling in the shadow of aardvarks. Huh, I’m becoming proficient. Should’ve gone into law.
“Uh-huh. Say, bud. People came by your house yesterday. The New England house.”
“Who?” Conrad had almost forgotten about that place—monumentally gothic, surrounded by overgrown gardens and fieldstone walls; he hadn’t been there in several years. An industrialist fan had given it to him as a present. Conrad had owned several homes before liquidating them to fuel his search for Imogene. Gifts from patrons and admirers. Cars too; and planes. All of it gone now, except for the New England house, a cabin in Washington State.
“People. We called in an eye in the sky and ran the pics—nada. They weren’t ours and they weren’t Company guys; probably foreign. Got any foreign friends?”
“I don’t know them.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Uh-huh. Stranger things, I guess.”
“I’m just driving.”
“Sure, sure. Could be a coincidence. Maybe whoever owned that house before had some heat. That could be the deal.”
“I don’t know them.” The conversation compounded Conrad’s headache; his brow was slick and feverish. He feared the tension would prompt him to do something ill-advised. Occasionally, nerves caused him to burst into maniacal laughter. He had to get off the phone.
“Uh-huh, could be a coincidence. That’s how a pal of mine got cashiered. I ever tell you that story? No? Sullivan ran an LP in Lima. Boring stuff, I promise you that. Not much of a health risk. Except Sully went into the wrong nightclub to get drunk and came out at exactly the wrong time; somebody thought he looked like somebody else who was also there, it was dark, and blah, blah, blah. Piece of piano wire will fit around anybody’s neck if you cut it long enough.”
“I don’t know them.”
“You’re just driving, right?”
“Right.”
“Uh-huh. Singh can meet you. He’s got business in the area. If you don’t hear from him in a few hours—”
“I’ll call back.”
“At the other number.”
“Okay.”
Marsh disconnected.
Conrad stared into the receiver. The concave oval of miniature black holes radiated waves of soft static like heat shimmering from desert highway.
He made another call, this one to some medical technicians affiliated with the Pageant and told them when and where the ludus would be, then hung up and slouched into a dollar store, bought a bag of aspirin packets and three bottles of generic seltzer water. The clerk at the register was excruciatingly polite. She seemed pleased to inform him that yes, the Happy Raven Hotel was about seventy miles up the highway, Bon voyage, sucker. He thanked her, went outside and chewed a fistful of aspirin, gulped the water.
Packs of urban cowboys trolled in pickups, spat tobacco at the gutters in well-rehearsed arcs. Some gave Conrad the evil eye, muttered to their partners, if they had any, to themselves if they didn’t. Country & Western tunes slithered from tin sheathes, coiled into his eardrum, tweaked the knob of his adrenal drip, caused a surge of testosterone that threatened to wake the prehistoric lizard. Opera for Marsh, Hank Williams for Conrad.
He revisited the photo shop and picked up his film. He sat on the bumper of the Cadillac and reviewed the stack flashcard style. Then he burned the pictures in a sodden pile, kicked the ashes to pieces as an afterthought. The ashes drifted across white and yellow parking stripes and were lost in the boundless fields.
V
The ludus went down at a mostly defunct strip mall just off the highway a few minutes after midnight. There was a film crew, a couple of equipment vans, the assorted handlers and hangers on attendant to these ludi. A small crowd, even for this. He’d placed a call to one of Uncle K’s former liaisons and arranged for a surgeon, a couple of emergency techs, and three security guys. The security guys dressed in suits and carried Uzis slung under their coats. Their leader, a short, mean looking guy with false teeth shook Conrad’s hand and said it was an honor to meet him.
Conrad strapped on a glorious plumed helm, a harness, greaves and boots. He wrapped his left fist in a cestus. The for-show-minimum. Across the lot the Finn was a terror with his oiled body and spiked-everything. The Finn opened his mouth and arched his back, sucking in oxygen. Conrad smiled without emotion and stared at the ground and waited for it to begin.
The Finn had killed his share of men, but they were lesser men, not first class talents. The last victim was a second-tier brute in Gibraltar; a real bloodbath, that one. Nothing for Conrad to scoff at, but nothing to worry about either. He’d watched the tapes, studied the taller man’s movements, his favored techniques. The Finn was a striker, a pugilist enamored of cestus and cleats, knees and elbows. Conrad wasn’t concerned with strikers; he was built to absorb that kind of punishment. A primer, a tune up for the real battles down the line. Easy money.
The Finn had killed many, many men, but lesser men. The Finn was killing Conrad.
The Finn’s fists were too fast, too heavy and they were everywhere. Conrad was strong, but strong couldn’t do much against fast this night and he was on his knees on the sticky asphalt in the crushed glass and gravel and it was all but over.
The grand, stony moon wobbled, lopsided and estranged. Its edges whickered against a whetstone of dark matter and coagulated fire, counterpoint to cosmic symphonies of gamma bombardment and imploding quantum particles. The moon shrieked below the threshold of human perception, reverberated in vast stygian chambers of rock and bone. Its light slopped as from a butcher’s pail overflowed; a lantern bloated on reeking whale fat, the ribs and spleen of every woodsman who had gazed upon it and trembled before the shutter shut and the bar dropped across the cottage door.
Conrad didn’t see the moon or moths as large as silver dollars fluttering their dance in its milky radiation. His head was bowed. He saw worm
holes; he saw his hand, wrapped in iron-studded rawhide, as a dismembered starfish welded to concrete; he saw the dim hulk of a windowless cement façade, the flank of a mall, a forgotten mausoleum commemorated by graffiti and posters bleached to zero resolution.
Then the Finn kicked him in the face with the ball of a reinforced hoplite sandal, hard as horn and laced below the crook of the knee, the boot of legions which had trod ancient slaughter fields black, and the sodium lamps leaned like palm trees in a hurricane, beamed their bright-hot lights into Conrad’s eyes. Angels instantly retreated to wavering pinpricks. Devils made long, sinuous ribbons of themselves and hissed. Conrad’s chin strap came apart and his helmet arced out in a cinematic parabola of gleaming metal and crimson bristles, bounced once into darkness and disappeared.
Cymbals clashed.
Conrad’s blood jumped from him, hurled itself from him, declared him the headwaters of a river, a broken vessel, the Grail smashed upon rocks.
The Picts howled—
The painted devils, the fearful angels—
An x-ray of his skull in the doctor’s hand—
A red infant, yarded from the womb trailing its umbilical cord—
A hog squealing in the stirrups, rising to meet the knife—
And the next dropkick slammed home into Conrad’s ribcage with the weight of a derrick behind it, digging into the meat of him, the bones and the sinews of him bending around the leather and the steel and the Finn’s calf, a granite oblong piston.
Conrad clasped that pillar in a death clinch. Thank you, he thought in that jigsaw moment when all moments converged, when all possibilities revolved upon the point of a tooth. Thank you for that. And he squeezed—
The planet hurtled through dusty space.
—a crocodile with a deer in its maw turning and turning over in the river, whipping the muddy water like a thresher takes wheat and covers the camera lens.
The Finn’s thighbone snapped, then his spine; a sharp, pulpy report as of a pickaxe hacking into moist subject matter and then Conrad had the Finn’s neck levered between elbow and sternum and he twisted with a convulsive scissoring of his hips, making a corkscrew. Paralysis, strangulation, death; quietly desperate as any pincer-to pincer mortal combat waged by arthropods in the soft grass of nature’s killing floor.
After, no applause. The buzzing lamps, cold. A couple of guys in green smocks hustled Conrad into the back of a drywall van and switched on the fluorescents, began stitching him up.
Like Satan appearing in a puff of black smoke, DeKoon squatted in the opening that breached the cab. His sallow features shifted and flowed in the sickly light. “Should’ve gone the whole hoplite route—pila and knives. Rauno had too much faith in his hands. Rubbish with weapons. Bloody awful. At least you put him down. Thank god.”
None of the fighters had names, barring fanciful nom de plumes, or popular crowd attributions. It was always the Finn, the Turk, the Russian. Conrad was the American, and that sufficed. At the moment he was the It boy representing what DeKoon referred to as ‘the Colonies.’
Conrad couldn’t speak because his lungs were deflated sacks of shocked flesh straining to expand and get some oxygen cycling before the lights went out. So he bled. He suspected DeKoon was a figment summoned by head trauma. What a backwater stage this was for a man of DeKoon’s caliber. The man’s presence here in the outpost of pillaged American heartland, the Fair Lady of Liberty and Plenty sans makeup, was supremely incongruous; so far removed from his customary haunts of European pleasure salons and Hong Kong opium dens. Conrad hoped the well-heeled ghoul would dissolve at any moment, sink into the quagmire of his id.
DeKoon grinned as if he tasted the very wish in Conrad’s mind. “I am unhappy with your exhibition. You don’t take unsanctioned fights. That’s a no-no.”
“Maybe we need to renegotiate my contract.” A medic ran a needle into Conrad’s shoulder and laced the heavy sutures in the manner of sealing a pigskin. Conrad’s mouth crimped tighter.
“Don’t be stupid, Conrad.” DeKoon picked lint from the breast pocket of his suit. His long, exquisite fingers would’ve brought tears to the eyes of world class pianists and state-sponsored torturers everywhere. “Do you think you’re the only attraction on Uncle’s string? My string, now. Disabuse yourself of that conceit. Your prior performances were excellent, but… After tonight’s debacle I am extremely nonplussed. Something’s different about you. Are you losing your edge, Conrad? Wine, women and song got you down? You looked slow. Slow and old.”
Conrad raised his head and flashed DeKoon a vicious grin.
“Ahh, good. That’s the temper we love.”
Conrad bled.
DeKoon made steeples of his horribly beautiful fingers. He appraised Conrad through the gaps. “Sweet, sweet, malevolent Conrad. What can I do for you? The answer is, ‘Anything.’ Tell me what you need and I’ll oblige. You’ve been saving your pennies. Do you want a tropical island? A flotilla of harem girls? A new car? Say the word, my boy. Because, something’s amiss. Indeed, you seem melancholy and reckless. Don’t be reckless with Uncle K’s investment.”
Conrad spoke thickly. “You don’t own me.”
“Oh. I was under the impression that I do…”
“Don’t push.”
“Imogene, Imogene, the prettiest girl I ever done seen? We can’t raise the dead, O friend of mine. We won’t take on the entire Mexican army. Bad business.”
“Wasn’t the Mexicans.”
“We know who it was. We don’t care to attract his attention, either. Nothing personal. Uncle tried to tell you this before.”
Conrad grunted and hung his head.
“Ah, well.” DeKoon made a sad face. “Goodbye for now, Conrad. We’ll be in touch. The main stage next, hmm?”
Conrad bled.
“Yes, I think so. I beg of you, keep your eye on the prize. No more shenanigans. Kay?”
“Conrad!” A woman called from outside the panel truck. Her voice was breathless and Midwest-nasal, tentative and unutterably drunk; the exact pitch to raise one’s hackles.
That was…what was her name? Yvonne, Luann? Wanda. Wanda, right. They had begun to run together, to become interchangeable, these Wanda’s.
“Your woman beckons,” DeKoon said. “I shan’t keep you apart. We’ll be in touch.”
VI
Conrad?” Wanda came into focus again.
The motel room was a swamp.
They’d been drinking vodka, because Conrad happened to have a half case stashed in the trunk of his Cadillac, and chain-smoking cloves as that’s what the girl carried in her transparent plastic purse with the Wonder Woman decal. She’d grown fond of cloves in college when she prowled coffee houses, dating the musicians, the painters, and the nihilistic poetry majors, whatever cliché with a pulse was handy. Clove was the watchword of cool people.
The girl attached herself to him like a barnacle to the hull of a ship. There were two kinds of women in his universe—the kind who screamed when he peeled off his shirt and revealed the scar-tissue narrative of his life; and the kind who wanted to fuck on the spot. Wanda was firmly in the second camp. After motoring through miles of white alkaline and rusted lake bottoms, they left their fingerprints and smudges on the drapes, the savaged sheets, each other. Here was morning—overcast, stark and cold as stars.
But now the sea change was in effect.
What had she said to him during the night? What had she whispered in the voice of the Other? Something guttural and foreign. Germanic, Gallic…Imogene spoke German, I mean she did before she died; she could’ve been a translator instead of… Must be the burnt carpet, the chemicals in the epoxy confusing my dreams.
What was it Wanda said?
(they want in)
He didn’t want to remember, so stopped poking the dead animal with a stick. Wanda was just Wanda again, anyway.
Wanda’s eyes glazed and she began the inevitable recoil into flight. Even the fearless ones had their limits. Ancient hist
ory was sexy; current news was less appealing. She was getting sober fast. The grisly cavalcade of memories from last night in the strip mall parking lot had doubtless begun to trickle, trickle, had begun to rearrange the landscape of her preconceptions.
Conrad wasn’t surprised. Bearing witness to the spectacle left the Wanda’s of his life cotton-mouthed and remorseful come sunrise when reality sifted through the frame, reshaped his pagan fugue into the sterile thrum of a modern world full of telephone poles and bellied wires, cracked highways and naked skulls withered to nutshells along the endless maze of ditches. He dressed in plumed helmet and cape and killed men and beasts for the pleasure of hideously rich beings who were only too glad to pay him a yeoman’s wage. His would-be girlfriends had difficulty reconciling the reality of his avocation with the nature of their desires. Consequences returned full force with the cockcrow.
Daylight bleached his moonscape of a face. Black and blue on deadly nightshade, red meat bulged like an intestine in the corner of his right eye. The left eye was a glistening purple bud, clenched as a toddler’s fist, its roots sunk deep in a hidden fracture that yawned with each hoarse exhalation. Blood drained steadily from crushed cartilage and ruined sinuses, yolked in the back of his throat, and he frequently hawked into the wastebasket.
Conrad knew he looked bad, had seen the Finn’s handiwork as he leaned to spit phlegm in the sink. The face could’ve been his father’s, and he cursed himself because it was the same morbid thought that pricked him after every bout when he was morose and more than half drunk from the adrenaline of kill or be killed. Self loathing was a purer addiction than any combination of alcohol and cocaine, than any adrenal rush.
He’d weighed the damage as he slowly pulled on his grey and blue leisure suit, loose-fitting for the purpose of gliding over the lacerations of his rectangular torso, the welted minefields of his pylon thighs. None of it was truly serious, no important bones were broken, he was on top and a custom leather briefcase stuffed with sixty-five grand lay under the bed. Money to pay the tax men.
The Light is the Darkness Page 5