by James Sallis
After six it all seemed academic and I quit counting.
So I started rolling, myself: out of the tight ball I’d tucked myself into and out of the car in a single ongoing motion. Then let momentum carry me onto my feet and sprinted between billboards for steak houses, motels and wrecker services into nearby trees.
I was on a limb high overhead when they finally talked themselves into coming in after me. I could see their cars pulled into a gap-toothed V back at roadside. There were only the two drivers, one a middle-aged, crewcut man in crisp white shirt, tie and windbreaker, the other in Yuppie Lumberjack and baseball cap. The older one had a shotgun. The younger one probably thought his red shirt was weapon enough.
I stayed up there a long while, letting them wear themselves down and lose what edge they had.
Then the kid stepped around a tree into my elbow and went down. His head lay propped against roots. Blood poured from his nose and pooled at his collar, soaking into the shirt, darkening it to maroon. He snored.
The older one was considerably more trouble, and for a time I was afraid I’d moved on him too hard. But eventually light seeped back into the dull gray eyes he leveled at me.
I nodded to him.
After a moment he said: “Correct me if I’m wrong. But I suppose if I move—if I can, that is—you’ll shoot me.”
“With what?”
I was sitting, knees up, against a tree. I spread my hands.
“Okay if I sit up? Again: if I can.”
I nodded.
He came up slowly, hands flat against legs, breathing deeply, forcing the pain back. Put it in the pantry, use it later.
“Adrian?” he said.
“Asleep.”
“Temporarily, or otherwise?”
“Give him half an hour.”
He looked off towards the highway, blinked up at the sun through the canopy of leaves. A squirrel was fussing up there somewhere.
“Right, then.”
He lifted his left hand and probed at its wrist, experimentally, dispassionately, with the fingers of the other.
“Third time now I’ve broken the sucker. So…”
He looked at me again. Eyes depthless.
“So?” I said.
“So what’s the deal?”
“How about we play History? I’m the big bad Russians and you’re Julius Rosenberg. Tell me some secrets.”
“Yeah, well, I know how that one ended.”
“This one doesn’t have to.”
There was a sudden exodus of birds from trees around us. Moments later, half a block long, a truck heaved into view on the service road, cab black and gleaming, bright cars lashed to scaffolding behind, distinct as paints in a paintbox.
“Cigarettes in my shirt,” he said. “All right if I get them?”
“Sure.”
He lit one and sat smoking, watching the truck swing back onto the interstate. I thought of camels lumbering among dunes half a world away. Of Erector Sets, carnival rides, the Eiffel Tower. My sculpture.
“Can’t help you much. There’s this man—an agent, I guess you’d have to call him. No pun intended. Everything comes through him. Someone needs a job done, he gets in touch, and the man sets terms, strikes the bargain. I call in later, a couple of times a day when I’m not already working, otherwise it might be two or three before I get a chance, and he tells me go here or there. Be in Dallas at five, Akron tomorrow morning, this is what you have to do there. Tickets are always waiting for me. Motel rooms. Cash. Everything about it ultraclean, professional. Smooth. So I can’t give you a name. That’s why it’s all set up the way it is.”
He shook his head. “The rest is silence,” he said.
But it wasn’t.
Adrian’s breathing signaled trouble. We both heard the laboring heaves, listened and caught the gasp, realized at the same moment that his breathing had stopped.
And suddenly were there, together, at the tree.
Grabbing ankles, I pulled the boy down flat and thumped at his chest, twice, hard, with a fist. Then quickly measured three fingers up from the xiphoid, locked fingers and began rocking, elbows stiff.
“One thousand, two thousand…”
His companion pinched nostrils shut and blew his own breath into Adrian’s mouth.
“Three thousand, four thousand, five…”
Breath.
“One thousand, two…”
Breath.
“One thousand…”
Breath.
Nothing.
After ten or twelve minutes, on change, we traded places. I watched him there above the boy rock back and forth on his one good hand, counting; and every fifth compression I blew my own breath forcibly into Adrian’s still mouth. It remained still. Our sweat fell onto him.
We shifted places, shifted again.
Until finally, exhausted, we gave up. Adrian’s pupils had been dilated for some time.
“What the hell happened?” my co-rescuer said.
“No way to know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Well.” He lit a cigarette and fell back against the roots, breathing hard, looking up at sky. “It’s all pretty frail, what holds us here.”
“You got kids?” he said after a while.
I shook my head.
“Wife?”
No.
“Not many of us do. Boy there’s the closest I was ever gonna come. Twenty-one years old. Would of been twenty-two next month. You even remember what it was like, being that young?”
Not really.
“Me either.”
He struggled to his feet and to the Pontiac, fished a bottle of Stoly out of the glove compartment and brought it back.
“Join me?” he said.
We passed the bottle back and forth a few times.
“I don’t get out much,” he said. “You know how it is, working all the time, never knowing where you might wake up tomorrow morning. Then I do get out, and I look at all these people with their suits and their station wagons and the next thirty years of their life stamped out like it’s on the back of a coin, and I have to wonder what makes them go on.
“Has to be family, I figure. And I guess Adrian there was pretty much my last chance for family.”
I handed the bottle across.
He took a small, careful sip and passed it back to me.
I finished it off. Held the bottle close to me. Birds sang again. We sat there a while without talking.
“Come on,” he said. “Help me get the boy into the car and I’ll give you a lift to the next town. Get on with our lives, as they say.”
As if we had them: lives.
22
Not that, before this, it hadn’t been “real” to me.
It was real: I’d seen too many bodies, too many cities gnawed at by flame, too many blank faces and shutdown lives, for it to be anything less. But until that moment my own two lives—the old one, which had embraced these things, which was defined by them; and the new, which at first denied them, later and at best strove somehow to understand them, to incorporate them, to absorb them—had not come together.
Like an eye exam where letters right and left loom wrenchingly out of focus, then suddenly swim towards one another and lock together.
Irony, some would say, is the voice of our time, a time perhaps more given to image, to form, than to substance. And it’s difficult to imagine any more ironic image than two veteran killers squatting there at roadside trying to resuscitate a younger, unseasoned version of themselves.
A fever in my bones, Pavese might have said.
It began, truly began, there.
Images swam in my mind. But they swam beneath a dark membrane. I could make out only the faintest outlines of their forms as momentarily they tugged upward, tugged against that surface, then rebounded into the depths.
Premonitions? Memories? Occult understandings?
Trying to escape, to break out—whatever they were.
As do we all.
23
Adrian’s mentor dropped me at a phone booth on the edge of the next town. Johnsson answered on the second ring:
“Again, David, I must ask that you stop calling on secure lines.”
“You had no way of knowing who this would be.”
“Chances were quite good. One develops a feel for that sort of thing, you may recall.”
“I need a priority-one check.”
“Actually, David, that’s the only kind we do in these days of computerized files. But go ahead.”
I told him about my conversation in the café, no more than I had to.
“Michael. The last name may be Danyovich. Father, Dmitri. Mother was Cyprus-born, name unknown, though at one time in her life she used Cybelle.”
I described Michael as only a trained observer can (albeit a long-unpracticed one) and told Johnsson that I’d stand by. I started to give him the number but he said he had no need of it: that the technology was a bit further along these days. I opened the phone booth door for air and watched traffic ease itself along the two-lane street. Within ten minutes, Johnsson rang back.
“Of several names,” he began without preamble, “I find that of Michael Kandinsky—sometimes Michel, or Mikhail—most often used. He matches your description and, as far as we can trace things, the background you sketched. A fairly new player, it would seem. And an extremely cautious one. Almost no tabs to pull.”
“Affiliation?”
“Freelance, like most of the East Europeans these days. They—Hold on.”
Absolute silence on the line, with every twenty seconds the high-pitched bleep of the sweeper.
“David, the computer’s latched onto something else. It’s scrolling up now.…
“Apparently some years ago, still in his teens, your young man found himself in trouble while on holiday in Turkey. Smoked a couple of joints with his girlfriend and a few of the wrong people, it seems. Spent a most unfortunate week in prison there before his father located and, handing over generous sums of baksheesh, retrieved him. The girlfriend was never heard from again. Inquiries were made through channels, officials denied any knowledge, the usual folderol.”
“Not all that unusual a story, as I recall.”
“No. But a year or so later, three guards at that same prison were found flayed and hung upside down on poles just outside the gates. Caused a bit of a stir, even for those times.”
“Could it be coincidence?”
“It could be, as you well know, anything. A familial grudge, a military power struggle, depletion of the ozone layer. I myself am no strong believer in coincidence, however.”
“He’s insane.”
“Perhaps. Remarkably motivated, certainly. The young man returned from that Turkish prison and, with his father’s virtually unlimited funds, went back to school with a vengeance—though his major had changed.
“Over the following years we can track a stream of mercenaries, martial-arts teachers, munitions and surveillance experts, athletic trainers, gentlemen in our own line of work both active and retired, even a terrorist or two, to and from various locations about the world. We would never have been able to discern a pattern, before this; the activities appeared random. With Michael as fulcrum, however, tracing everything back to him, the pattern emerges.”
“He turned himself into one of us.”
“So it would seem.”
“But why? Surely not all that, simply for revenge?”
“Actually, the incident with the guards seems to have been more or less incidental. Something of an advanced training mission, perhaps: who knows?”
I knew, of course—if what Michael had told me was in fact true.
“After that incident,” Johnsson went on, “we keep losing the spoor. Michael becomes in effect virtually invisible, surfacing here or there at will and—again—apparently at random, then quickly resubmerging. There are glimpses of him in Santiago, some intimation of a lengthy assignment in Rio, a possible walk-on in Puerto Rico.”
“Where does Planchat fit into all this? Assuming that he does.”
“Only two roles are possible, David.”
“Hunter or hunted, you mean.”
“Quite.”
“There might be another.”
He waited. I heard, twice, the bleep of the sweeper.
“Mentor,” I said. “He might have been one of Michael’s teachers.”
Three, four, five bleeps went by.
“Yes,” Johnsson said. “Unlikely. But possible.”
Three more.
“There has been no further indication of Planchat’s presence. Were we the sort of men who make assumptions, we might assume him to be out of the picture.”
“You think Michael brought him down, then?”
“Of course we are not that sort.”
“Or that it’s all been Michael, all along?”
That it was Michael I’d been hunting from the first—or allowing to hunt me—made no sense. But then, not much else did, either.
“That is a possibility,” Johnsson said. “One there had been no reason to consider before this.”
“So what do we do?”
“There may be little left that we can do just now. Your instinct, obviously, is that Michael should not be brought down?”
“At this time: yes. What I feel is that Michael’s truly out of the picture now. But if not, then he’s so deeply imbedded that, once we gouge him out of it, there’s no picture left.”
“In which case…”
“I will continue as before.”
“Yes. That is almost certainly best.”
Two bleeps. Three.
“So very much activity,” Johnsson said, “and to so little apparent purpose. Every light in town is on. And still we are able to see so little.”
Or in his case (I remembered suddenly) nothing.
“One thing further, David.”
“Yes?”
“Your friend. Gabrielle. It seems that everything is getting gathered up in this tangle. Perhaps you’d best attend to her safety?”
24
I walked up the street to Norma’s Cafe and went in, remembering the beginning of The Postman Always Rings Twice. At Norma’s, food seemed to be pretty much an afterthought. Instead of dishes there were mostly beer cans. The spécialité de la maison was Bud Light.
I asked for coffee and got something reasonably close. On the counter nearby, a glass bell preserved half a cake passed down, from Norma to Norma, by untold generations of the cafe’s owners. Lift the bell away and the cake would crumble to dust.
I sat sipping at my coffee. Two elderly men played checkers at a rickety back table. Neither one made a move the whole time I sat there. But every minute or two, again and again, from one side of the board or the other a hand would reach out, pause over pieces, and withdraw.
After a while, most of the Cherokee nation came over and sat beside me.
He was at least six-six, easily three-fifty without the boots and belt buckle that would add another twenty pounds or so. He wore a baseball cap, baggy fatigues with a lot of feathers hanging off. I was pretty sure the stool had groaned when he settled onto it.
He sat smiling at me. Two sips of coffee went by, never to be seen again.
“You remember how it was, man? You do. I can tell. How they’d hunker down out there by the fires for hours while bugs crawled all over your rice and boiled grass and in the corner you always tried to get to before you had to shit. Nothing on their faces, man. Absolutely nothing. That’s what I remember. Faces smooth and blank as stones in a riverbed. And they’d rock a little on their heels out there by the fires. Looking like birds. Even sounded like them. And finally you’d just give up and eat the slop, bugs and all.”
He shrugged. Planes flying overhead may have encountered turbulence.
“Fuck that shit. That’s what I say.
Just fuck it. Am I right?”
I told him he was.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said, and drank a few more beers while I had a sip of coffee.
“We’re Asians too, man—you know that? Fuckin’ walked here’s what we did. Everything was still connected back then. And we could of walked anywhere, you know? But this is where we wound up, this was our country. Then you U-rope-peons heard about the buffalo and came over here thinkin’ you could have yourself cheap steaks for dinner ever’day and fucked it all up. Just like you fucked up Nam.”
Everything in the cafe got very quiet. I could hear the flame popping beneath the grill.
“You ain’t listening, man. And I thought you knew what I was saying to you here. Thought maybe you might even care a little. It could happen. But fuckitall: you’re just like the rest.”
He had another beer to prepare himself for what had to be done. Then he turned to do it—but I wasn’t there. So he kept on turning, to where I stood behind him. Still on the stool, he threw an off-balance right that, inches away as I moved, slammed air against my eardrum and left it ringing.
I rolled in a slow circle around the punch, coming back in just as it peaked, adding my own momentum to his. He went along, then somersaulted away from me, unfolded, and slid four or five feet across the floor flat on his back. He would have slid further, but the café’s tables were bolted down, and the second one stopped him.
“All right!” he said, and there was a general exodus towards the far wall as he got up.
It lasted longer than it should have. Finally I did manage to drop him without getting hurt myself or, more important, without having to kill or seriously maim my opponent, but it wasn’t easy. And it took a while.
After the second tumble, he climbed back to his feet and left brute force, all he’d ever needed for civilian life, there on the floor.
He’d been well and thoroughly trained, and had grafted that training onto what was probably from the first a strong natural aptitude. As I watched now, trying to get a handle on what he was likely to do, he was either weightless and gliding, or he was solid stone. Nothing in between. And the edge came back to him then. I could see the difference behind his eyes, in the way he began moving. As though sharks had swum into the goldfish tank.