I opened it and confirmed what I’d been told. There were two files, a piece of music stored as an MP3 file and the message. Nina had told me that the quote at the beginning of the text had been nailed to a German writer called Heinrich Heine. The recording of the Fauré Requiem was from a well-respected issue of the early 1960s, which didn’t necessarily mean anything either. There’s a timelessness to classical music performance. Most recent is not necessarily best. The most I could take from the music was to note it had been digitized at 192 k/sec in joint stereo, a high-quality setting. Given that most people can’t hear the difference between 192 and 160, that maybe suggested either it had been designed to be played through a quality audio system, which could reveal the deficiencies of the lower sample rate; or more simply—and more obviously—the music was of importance to the person who had put it there. So, big deal either way. I listened to it several times while getting on with the next part, and noted what sounded like a little channel hiss, and a fairly certain click or two. It was possible the MP3 had been recorded from a vinyl source. It seemed unlikely that someone computer literate would disdain CDs entirely, so this maybe suggested the person owned an LP of the music that had some kind of sentimental value. Big deal again.
I fired up a piece of industrial-strength scanning software and waited while it went about its business. A lot of people seem to think computers are just machines, like vacuums or VCRs. They’re wrong. Right from the start, from the jumped-up abacuses of the Amiga and Apple II, we’ve had a different relationship with computers. You knew right away that this was something that had rights. If your washing machine stops working or TV goes on the fritz then you get it repaired or take it to the dump. These are pieces of old, transparent tech. They have no magic anymore. If a computer messes you around, however, you’re never really sure whose fault it is. You’re implicated. You feel vulnerable. It’s like the difference between a pencil and a car. A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There’s only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model (too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rust bucket most of us got for our first ride, it’s more complex. There’s coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There’s that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None of it means it’s broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealt with. Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by the things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.
A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousandfold. It has fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multilayered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser’s history log and in the disk cache—not to mention stored by all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a coworker but carefully throw them all away, you’ve still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually empty your software’s trash.
Even if you think you’re being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren’t out of the woods. All that happens when you “delete” a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it—like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It’s like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can’t put his finger on them, can’t show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files; making it impossible to return to what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real—the computer’s earlier experiences; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We’re like that.
It took half an hour for the software to do its pass. This brought up nothing, and merely proved what Nina’s pet tech had already established: the disk had been very comprehensively wiped before the two files were copied onto it. Not only had the note-writing man been blinded, he’d then been taken out and shot.
The jug of coffee was cold. I set one of Bobby’s proprietary pieces of pattern-matching software working on the disk. This would trawl over the surface looking at the junk that had been written over it, checking for any irregularities—or unexpected regularities—in the binary stew. Short of physically taking it apart and going in with tweezers, this was as deep as man could go into the shadowy childhood echoes of the digital mind. The past resists intrusion, even among the silicon-based.
A dialog box popped up on the screen and told me the process would take a little over five hours. It’s not very exciting to watch. I made sure the power was plugged in, and went for a walk.
AT THREE O’CLOCK ZANDT CALLED FROM THE AIRPORT. I gave him directions to L’Espresso and headed back over there to wait. Forty minutes later his cab pulled up. John got out, glared at the guy in costume in front of the hotel, and walked up the street to me. He came at a moderate pace and very steadily. I knew what that meant.
He told a passing waiter to bring him a beer, and sat down opposite me. “Hello, Ward. You’re looking kind of lived-in.”
“Me? You look like a crack house. How’s Nina?”
“She’s great,” he said.
He waited for his beer. The beard had gone. He didn’t ask me how I was or what I’d been doing. In my limited experience of Zandt, I’d learned he didn’t do small talk. He didn’t do tiny talk or big talk either. He just said what he had to say and then either stopped or went away. He was drunk. You’d have to have spent time with a drinker to know—as I did, for a year, once—because there were few external signs. The bags under his eyes were darker, and he reached for his glass the moment it was put down; but his eyes were clear and his voice calm and measured.
“So what do you have on Yakima?”
“Like I said, not much. I went back to L.A. and told Nina what we’d found. She reported it, and nothing happened. I basically started looking into it because . . .”
He shrugged. I understood. There wasn’t much else. He had been involved in the investigation of the Delivery Boy murders, as a result of which his daughter, Karen, had been abducted and never seen alive again. His marriage fell apart. He quit the force. I believed he had been a very good detective: it was he who had worked out the Upright Man was running a procuring ring for well-heeled psychopaths up at The Halls, abducting people to order. But even if Zandt had wanted to go back to being a cop, which he didn’t, LAPD wasn’t likely to be in the market. So what else was he going to do? Become a security guard? Go into business? As what? Zandt was as unemployable as I was.
“We could join the feds.”
“Right. You were thrown out of the CIA. That’s always impressive. Anyway. Do you remember the word on the door of the cabin we found?”
“Not really,” I said. “I saw there were letters there, but they just looked like they were part of the general mess.”
He reached into a pocket and produced a small piece of glossy paper. “One of the pictures I took,” he said. “Printed at high contrast. You see it now?”
I looked closely. There certainly were letters hack
ed into the door. If you studied it hard, you could just make out the word or name “Croatoan.” It had been there a long while, too, and was partially obscured by later weathering and further marks. “Meaning?”
“I thought it might be an old mining company name or something. But I can’t find one. The only reference I could find to it is strange.”
He pushed a thick sheaf of paper toward me. I saw a lot of words in a variety of very small typefaces, divided into sections, underneath the overall title “Roanoke.”
“I’m hoping there’s a précis.”
“You’ve heard of Roanoke, right? The one on the east coast?”
“Yes,” I said. “Vaguely. Bunch of people disappeared a long time ago. Or something.”
“They disappeared twice, in fact. Roanoke was England’s first attempt to establish a colony in America. The Brit explorer Walter Raleigh was granted a stretch of land by Elizabeth I, as one of her charters to try to grab a chunk of this New World. In 1584 Raleigh sent an expedition to see what he’d gotten: specifically, they checked out an area called Roanoke Island, on the tidewater coast of what is now North Carolina. They took an initial look around, made contact with the local tribe—the Croatoan—and wound up heading back to England. In 1586 a second group of a hundred men went out. They didn’t have it so good. Didn’t take enough supplies, ran into trouble with the locals through not treating them well, and in the end all but fifteen were picked up by a passing ship and went home. But Raleigh was keen to establish a working colony, and so the next year a further party was sent to make sure this new ‘Virginia’ got consolidated. He appointed a man called John White to lead them and be their governor. One hundred and seventeen people went along. Men, women, children—the idea being that family groups would make it more permanent. They were specifically told not to head for Roanoke Island, but . . . that’s where they ended up. They found the fortifications the previous group had built, but no sign of the fifteen men who’d been left to guard it. Just gone. Vanished. White reestablished contact with the Croatoan, who said an ‘enemy tribe’ had attacked the fort and killed at least some of the soldiers. White was ticked, obviously, and when one of the new colonists was found dead he decided to attack the local bad-boy tribe, the Powhatans. Except his men screwed it up and managed to kill some Croatoans instead, presumably on the time-honored ‘they all look the same to me’ principle.”
I shook my head. “Nice going.”
“So of course the Croatoans suddenly and reasonably retract all previous goodwill—and refuse to supply them with food. The colonists had arrived in summer, too late to plant crops, and what little they’d brought was going bad.”
“They were kind of stupid, the early settlers.”
“Stupid or brave. Or both. Either way, White decided to go back to England for supplies. There was no choice. It was agreed that if they ended up having to go inland, the colonists would leave markings showing which way they’d gone. Also, that if they left because of attack, they’d carve a cross somewhere prominent. Problem was, when White got back to England he found the country was at war with Spain—and he didn’t make it back to Roanoke for three whole years.”
I thought about that for a moment. Abandoned in an alien land with neighbors who hate you, the food running out. The leader pops home for a take-out and stays gone for nearly the period between two Olympic Games. “And when he returned?”
“Gone. Every single one. Disappeared. Nobody living, no sign of bodies. Personal possessions left behind. No sign of a cross carved anywhere. There was the word Croatoan, however, carved on a gatepost.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s kind of spooky. So what happened?”
He shrugged. “That’s the last sure thing anybody knows. White wanted to know what had happened to the people he’d left behind, but the captain and crew of his ship could care less, so he was forced to go back to England. He tried to get another expedition out there in late 1590 but by this time Raleigh and his investors had lost interest. Since then lots of people have tried to put the thing together, starting with a guy called John Smith who was at the Jamestown settlement twenty years later.”
“And?”
“Smith talked to the locals and came up with a few ideas, and they’re pretty much the ones still floating around. It turns out the word Croatoan was applied not just to a tribe but also to a large and not very well defined geographical area. So it could have been carved to indicate a destination, as agreed with White. Alternatively it could have implied that the Croatoans themselves had had a change of heart and started helping the hapless colonists. Or, if you choose to believe it meant the named tribe had started attacking, then you could theorize that the colonists were forced to head inland. Either idea leads to the possibility that some or all of the settlers (some theories have the male colonists being killed, leaving just the women and children) became assimilated into a local or not-so-local tribe, and there are a couple of native peoples—notably the Lumbee—who have long-term claims in this direction, some of which sound pretty solid. This theory has been taken seriously since the mid 1800s at least, and speculated about since Jamestown. There’s stories of a minister in the mid 1600s meeting friendly natives in the area who spoke English, and talk of some German explorer whose name I couldn’t track down who claimed to have had meetings with ‘a powerful nation of bearded men’—i.e., possible descendants of the settlers.”
I’d thought the carvings on the door of the cabin hadn’t made much impact on me, but as John said this, I found myself suddenly cold, out in the middle of nowhere, in the company of the dead.
Zandt waved an arm to catch the waiter’s attention. The waiter started to explain he was busy, caught the look in Zandt’s eye, and went to get him another beer. “The question is why it was carved on the cabin door we found.”
“A quote?” I said. “Some reference to the Roanoke mystery? But what sense would that make?”
“He’s trying to tell us something.”
“I really don’t think that place had anything to do with Paul. There was nothing to tie him to it. And anyway—why would he care? Why would he want to tell us stuff?”
“He spent half of Sarah Becker’s incarceration lecturing her. Then there’s the piece you found on the web three months ago, the diatribe about how everyone except the Straw Men are infected with a social virus that made us start farming. He’s on a mission to inform.”
We paused as drinks were put in front of us. “The big thing about Paul,” I said, “is that he doesn’t think he’s just another lunatic.”
“None of them do, Ward. None of these men get up in the morning and think, ‘I’m going to do something evil today.’ They do what they do, and some of them understand that it’s bad, and some don’t, but either way it’s not why they do it.”
“Yes,” I said, irritated at his tone. “I understand.”
“They do it because that’s what they do, just like addicts jack themselves with smack. They’re not trying to kill themselves. They’re not trying to fuck up their lives. They just have to have some heroin, as you need a cigarette and some people need their shoes to be clean and others have to make sure they tape their daily shows or check the door’s locked three times when they leave the house. Everyone’s got their magic spell, their maintenance rituals, the private thing they do that makes the world work.”
“What’s yours these days—beer?”
“Fuck you.”
“What’s the deal with you and Nina?”
“It’s none of your fucking business.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, angry now. “There are three people in the world who know about the Straw Men. I’ve spent three months skulking around the country keeping out of the way. I beat the shit out of some poor guy in Idaho because I thought he’d come to clip me. I’m out on a very long limb with very few resources. You two are it.”
“What about the money from your folks?”
“Gone,” I said. “Not spent. Wiped. They got
to it.”
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He looked across the street for a moment. “Things got fucked up,” he said eventually, apparently watching a man who was moving paintings around in a gallery window. “I moved in. You know we’d been together before, back when I was married. I thought it might work. We both did. But . . . she’s quite intense.”
“Right. Whereas you’re just a big fluffy teddy bear.”
He turned his head back, his gaze ending on me as if I was by only a narrow margin the most interesting or relevant object in vision. “I’ve always thought so.”
“What were you doing down in Florida?”
He just shook his head. He was beginning to really piss me off.
“Okay, so what else have you found out?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“That’s it? You came all the way over here to tell me this? That’s your big news?”
“I haven’t spent my entire time on it, Ward, and I don’t report to you. I’ve been trying to have a life. There are other things that are important. The Straw Men aren’t everything in the world. The Upright Man is just another killer.”
“Bullshit,” I said loudly. “He killed your daughter and my parents. He’s not just another anything. And your investigative response is some crap that happened four hundred years ago?”
“Sometimes you have to go back a long way to do what needs to get done.”
“And that means . . . what?”
He shrugged. He’d said all he had to say.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Check into a hotel somewhere, I guess.”
“This one’s not bad.” I felt exposed the moment I’d said this, and wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
He smiled. “Too expensive for the likes of me, Ward.”
Digging myself deeper: “So accept a loan.”
“A loan? I thought you were the guy with no resources.”
The Upright Man Page 14