The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  'Don't just tell me what you think I want to hear,' Zandt said. 'I think you're lying, I'll kill you.'

  'He's a tall guy,' he said. 'Blond. Husky,' he said. 'His name is Paul.'

  Zandt stood up and wiped the man's sweat off his hand. He took a step back to stand with Nina, leaving Michael facing Wang.

  'Is this true?' Becker's voice was barely audible. 'How. How could. Why? Why, Charles? I mean…' At a loss, standing in a house he would never be able to afford no matter how many studio asses he kissed, he fixed on something trivial but concrete. 'It can't be for the fucking money.'

  'You're a little man, with little goals,' Wang said bitterly, wiping blood off his lip with the back of his hand. 'Silly girls who've never been fucked. An old maid imagination. You've never touched anything big, and you never will. You'll certainly never touch her, not now.' He winked. 'You'll never know what you're missing.'

  Zandt was faster. He intercepted Becker, grabbing his shoulders and throwing all of his weight in the other direction. He was heavier than the other man by some margin, but still only just managed to hold him away.

  'Didn't happen, Michael,' he said. 'It didn't happen.'

  After a moment, the force in Michael seemed to drop away. Zandt still held him firmly, as Becker stared over his shoulder at the man who smiled up at him from the floor.

  'We're not going to kill him. Do you understand?' He pulled Becker's face round, so that he could look at him properly. The man's eyes were wide, unseeing. 'I can't promise I can give your daughter back. She may be dead, and if she is then this man is partly to blame. But we are going to leave this house and walk away. That's the only thing I know for sure that I can give you. That you not walk out of here as a murderer.'

  Becker's eyes slowly came back into focus. His body went slack for a moment, and then became rigid again. But he took a step back, and let his arms rest down by his sides.

  Zandt put his gun away. The three of them looked at the man lying on the floor. 'You're going to have company very soon,' Zandt told him. 'Cop company, fed company. Company with search warrants. Better get the place tidied up.'

  Then they left, leaving a pale man staring after them.

  Nothing was said until they stood beside the car. Michael looked back up at the house. 'What am I supposed to do?'

  Nina started to speak, but Zandt overrode her.

  'Nothing. Don't tell the police. Don't tell your wife either. I know you'll want to. But not for the moment. Most of all do not come back up here. What needs to be done will be done.'

  'By whom?'

  'Get in the car, Michael.'

  'I can't let you do that for me.'

  'Just get in the car.'

  Eventually Becker climbed in and drove away, the car barely rolling down the road, veering slowly from side to side.

  Nina got out her phone and started to dial. Zandt knocked it out of her hand, and it fell to the ground to skitter six feet along the road surface.

  'Leave it,' he said.

  She glared at him, but let the phone lie where it had fallen. 'So—did you really call the cops?'

  'You know I didn't.'

  Zandt lit a cigarette and they waited. Ten minutes later they heard the sound that Zandt had been expecting, the muffled report without which he would have walked back into the house and done what was required, regardless of anything Nina did to try to stop him.

  And yet, as soon as he heard it, he felt utterly weary and not in the least triumphant. More as if by getting closer to the source of these events all he had done was further compromise himself; as if the smell from what lurked under mankind's surface was now so strong that he would never be able to wash it off.

  She turned to look at him. 'So he's dead.'

  'All he did was hand the girls higher up the ladder. We could have wasted days interrogating him and all he would have done is fuck us around.'

  'Not saying you're wrong. I'm just asking what you're thinking of doing next.'

  Zandt shrugged. 'Good,' she said, stooping to pick up her phone. Lights were coming on in porches across the street. 'Because it won't be too long before the cops do get up here. I don't want to be around when they do.'

  She strode off toward her car, adding over her shoulder. 'And I have a couple of people who think they might be able to show you where to find a blond man kind of like the one you've just heard described.'

  Zandt stared at her. 'What?'

  'Hopkins and the other guy. He called just before you did. They have a video showing a man at half of the major-league atrocities of the last decade, including the school in Maine this morning. A guy who Ward also thinks he saw at this place up in the mountains.'

  'If you knew this, why didn't you stop me with Wang?'

  She looked at him across the roof of the car. 'I didn't want to save him any more than you did.'

  Chapter 30

  Neither Zandt nor Nina knew that, while Wang had killed himself, he had made a phone call before doing so.

  First he had laboriously pulled himself to his feet, hands slipping in the smears of his own blood. He was unable to stand completely straight. He had been beaten up before, had volunteered for the experience on more than one occasion, but this was different. The cop had not been bearing Wang's pleasure in mind, and things were broken.

  He stood for a moment, looking in the remains of the mirror under which he had given up his greatest secret. His face was marked and cut. Worse, it looked old. The expensive veneer of diet and exercise, of unguents and self-obsession, had slipped. He looked his age, and in a way that only someone who had done the things he had, kept his secrets as long as he had, could look.

  He had never killed. He had seldom even hurt anyone. Not with his own hands. But he had been present at occasions where young men had been left lying in pools of urine and other secretions, barely alive. Where other men like himself had departed in their expensive cars and had been lucky not to end up as accessories to murder. He owned an extensive collection of videotapes in which such events were documented. So extensive, in fact, that it was very unlikely he would be able to find them all, much less destroy them, before the police arrived.

  His father would never understand.

  Neither, Wang suspected, would the men and women with whom he did more legitimate business—although he knew that some of them had their own secrets, that the inner fire that drove them to fame and success also drove them to darker acts, in which they strove to prove to themselves that they were different and better than everyone else. The adulation of others is never enough. Sooner or later we all need to be able to idolize ourselves, or external regard becomes meaningless. Substances and materials had been obtained, sobbing women paid off, sometimes by Wang himself, who had always been willing to be people's friend. A confidant of those whose desires transcended society's accepted norms. Who wanted to live harder and faster and sweeter. Who could understand that sex with the frightened was different.

  It was one of these, a man who had reason to know how helpful Wang could sometimes be, who had brokered a link to some colleagues of his. The representative of this group had been a tall blond man. The man called Paul. This introduction had only taken place after some years, and it was longer still before Wang had come to realize that this man was not quite what he seemed to be, and that he—and the people he represented—had something more than casual pleasure in mind. He'd never been invited to meet them, which had irked him a little. But he had agreed to provide entertainment, to help the procurers find particular luxuries, and the policeman had been right: money had nothing to do with it.

  Each has his own road, and experiences two births. For Wang his second nativity had come thirty-five years before, at the age of ten, with a chance glimpse of a naked servant through a window. A spring morning in another country, a sight that had stopped him in his tracks, blindsided him with the sudden awareness of all of the hidden things the world had to show. His father had been in his home office, from which wafted the so
und of baroque music, measured and correct, bright and joyous. Wang had stood still for a moment, lost in a few seconds of sweetness. Most people could have experienced this without it changing their lives, but Charles had never been quite the same. From the smallest of acorns, very dark trees sometimes grow.

  After that had come deliberate spying, then magazines, and videotapes, trips alone to parts of Hong Kong and then Los Angeles that not everyone knew. Again, for most people these would have been enough, even too much. The sin was not there in the material, or even in wanting it. It was in needing it, needing it before you even knew of its existence—needing it so much that had it not already existed, you would have had to create it. Blaming pornography is like blaming a gun. Neither created itself. Neither is capable of pulling its own trigger. You need a hand. The human mind is this searching hand, its fingers slender enough to find small gaps, and strong enough to pull out what it finds in them. It is similar, too, in that after a time calluses sometimes form, hardnesses of use that mean that the sense of touch is rendered less acute. Hardnesses that may mean that something hotter or sharper is required to promote the same effect: and there does come a time when you are in blood stepped so far that it stops mattering what you tread in next.

  In the last week Wang had experienced only one occasion when the fate of Michael Becker's daughter had crossed his mind. This had been in the context of hoping that Michael got back to work soon, because it looked like the studio really might decide to take a chance on Dark Shift. Laughable though Becker was in many regards, he worked hard, and he had ideas. Ideas, moreover, that were acceptable to the common mind. Wang had his own version of the Dark Shift treatment, written for his own amusement. It would not have been so acceptable.

  None of this would be acceptable. Nothing he had ever done that he had meant or enjoyed. And without those things, there was little left to comprehend, and nothing left to live for. Without the memory and legacy of a spring morning, of a glimpse framed by music and the sound of the water falling in a fountain nearby, there was nothing to him.

  By the time Zandt was lighting his cigarette outside, Wang had shuffled into his study. The initial shock was beginning to wear off, and his ribs were in agony. He called a number and warned a friend that someone had come too close to understanding the game they played, had perhaps come to understand it completely.

  Then he sat back in his chair. There was no sign of Julio, though it must by now have been obvious that the visitors had gone. For just a moment Wang realized that, for once, it might have been nice to have access to someone whose point was not merely that of disposability. Doubtless the boy would have left the compound over the back fence, to run down the road into some other life. Like a smile from yesterday, he was gone.

  Wang unlocked the central drawer of his desk and pulled out his gun. It had custom stocks made of cherry wood.

  It was beautiful. There was that, at least.

  Chapter 31

  At 8.45 the next morning we were waiting in the car just along the street from Auntie's Pantry. It was cold and had been sleeting for two hours, and the sky was full of dark clouds. I had a pack of cigarettes and was smoking them one after another. Bobby had nothing to say on the subject. He was sitting with his gun in his lap and staring straight ahead out of the windshield.

  'So what time are they getting up here?'

  'No guarantee they'll come at all,' I said.

  He shook his head. 'A cop with no badge and a girl. Fuck it. We're invincible. Let's invade Iraq.'

  'There's no one else, Bobby.'

  A nondescript car turned into the top of the street. We watched as it drove past, but the driver was a middle-aged woman and she didn't even glance our way. We were waiting for someone to arrive at an office, and had been since 8.00 a.m. We were hyped and jumping at shadows. Neither of us had slept very well.

  'Okay,' Bobby said finally, pointing across the street. 'Weedy dude, red hair. That the man we're looking for?'

  We waited until Chip was inside his office, and then got out of the car. I left the doors unlocked. The street was pretty empty. It wasn't the weather for window-shopping, and any real traffic through the town got routed another way.

  I swung the door to Farling Realty wide open and walked right in, Bobby just behind me. Chip had disappeared into an office in the back. The big main room had four desks spread around it. Two of these were occupied by well-coiffed women in their forties, wearing boxy little suits, one green, one red. Both looked up expectantly, ready and willing to sell us our dream.

  'Looking for Chip,' I said.

  One of the women stood up. 'Mr Farling will be right with you,' she twittered. 'Can I get you a cup of coffee in the meantime?'

  'I don't think Mr Hopkins will be staying.'

  Chip was standing in the doorway to the other office. There was a livid bruise across one cheek and his forehead. 'In fact, I think he'll be leaving very soon.'

  'Exactly what we had in mind, Chip. But you're coming with us. We're going up to The Halls, and we need someone to get us in. In your recent capacity as the only realtor working for them, you're in pole position. You can either come with us under your own steam or we can pull you out onto the street by the throat.'

  'I don't think so,' he said, an irritating expression on his face.

  There was the sound of a bell ringing as the door to the office opened behind us. I turned to see two cops. One was tall and black-haired. The other smaller and fair. The latter spoke.

  'Good morning, Mr Hopkins,' he said.

  'Do I know you?'

  'We've spoken on the phone.'

  'I don't recall the circumstances.'

  'You called the station. We discussed your parent's deaths.'

  Behind me I was aware of the rustle of Bobby's hand, as it moved within his jacket pocket.

  'Officer Spurring,' I said.

  'He's here at my request,' Chip said. 'I saw you and your friend sitting outside. I've already reported the way you attacked me.'

  'I saw it as a minor difference of opinion,' I said. 'Then you had a weird whole-body spasm.'

  'I didn't view it that way. And neither do the police.'

  'This is bullshit, Ward,' Bobby said.

  Chip turned to the two women, who were watching the exchange like a pair of interested cats. 'Doreen? Julia? I wonder if you could go into the back office for a moment.'

  'We've come for you, Chip,' I said. 'Nobody else needs to move.'

  'Now,' Chip said, staring hard at the women. They got to their feet and trooped past him into the other room. He pulled the door shut behind them.

  'It would really be better if you came to the station,' Spurling said. His manner was calm and very reasonable. 'I don't know if you're aware of this, but there has been damage to your parents' house and a hotel fire that seems to bear some relevance. Officer McGregor and I want to help.'

  'You see, the thing is,' I said, 'I'm just not sure I believe that.'

  'What's the deal with your partner?' Bobby asked Spurling. 'Doesn't say much, does he.'

  The second cop gazed back at Bobby, but didn't say a word. That's when I started to get twitchy. Guy looks in Bobby's eyes for long with anything less than respect, he's either stupid or extremely dangerous or both.

  'Division of labour,' I said, hoping the situation, such as it was, was salvageable. 'Maybe McGregor here is a dab hand at filing forms.'

  'You're an asshole, Hopkins,' Chip said. 'Obviously it's genetic'

  Spurling ignored him. 'Mr Hopkins—are you going to come with me?'

  'No,' Bobby said.

  Chip smiled. McGregor took out a gun.

  'Hey, easy,' I said, now very nervous. Officer Spurling looked even more surprised than I felt. He stared at the weapon in his partner's hand.

  'Uh, George…' he said. But then McGregor started shooting.

  We were on the move the moment Chip's face creased into his smug little grin, but it was still too slow. There was nowhere to run in the
office. Hiding wasn't going to cut it.

  Bobby's gun was in his hand and firing at McGregor. The cop took bullets in the thigh and chest. But the hits didn't make the sound they should have, and I realized he was wearing Kevlar. The impact was enough to smack him over a chair and onto his back, but he was soon struggling to his feet. Meanwhile Spurling remained stockstill, his mouth open.

  I was a foot ahead of McGregor's bullet, having hurled myself to the floor in a roll. I came up behind Doreen's desk and shot back, catching him in the shoulder. Something swished right past my head, and I realized that Chip, too, had a little pistol in his hand. After that I really don't remember too much. I just emptied the gun at whatever came up. You get involved in a gun battle on an open plain, maybe you've got time to consider, to take note of the blow by blow, to think. You spend time thinking in confined quarters with two guys shooting at you, you're never going to complete the thought.

  Ten seconds later the shooting stopped. By then I was jammed behind Julia's desk and I had a stinging pain on my cheek and forehead where something had sliced across it. Not a bullet, I didn't think. Something that got hit and exploded. I was very surprised not to be more badly hurt. The contents of Chip's head were spread across the back wall. McGregor was nowhere to be seen, and the door to the office was hanging open.

  Spurling had gotten hit in the leg and fallen over a desk. He was moving but not very fast. His head was still where it should be. I left it mat way.

  Bobby was pressed back against the wall near the door, hand clamped over his arm and blood coursing from between his fingers. I ran over and grabbed him.

  We fell out onto the pavement, stumbled across the road, and I opened his door and pushed him in. A passing couple dressed in bright orange ski wear were looking back and forth between us and the shattered realty office windows with their mouths open.

  'It's some movie,' one of them said. 'Got to be.'