Tate still had the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing the point, and the complexity of the legal document in his hand had only increased his suspicion that somewhere a mass of fine print was waiting to come back and bite him in the ass.
‘Excuse me, but what is your job, exactly?’
‘It’s on my business card.’ She pointed at the card where it lay next to Tate’s coffee cup. ‘I’m a consultant.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that I consult. How much simpler can it be?’
‘But for whom?’
‘You see, that’s why we want you, Mr Tate: ‘‘for whom.’’ You’re bright, and you can speak well, but you never talk down to your listeners. You address them as equals, even if they’re not. You give the impression that you’re one of them, but you know that you’re superior. You have to be. Someone has to guide ignorant men and women. Someone has to explain the reality of a situation in a way that’s comprehensible to ordinary people or, if necessary, adjust the nature of that reality slightly so it can be comprehended. You’re not the only person in the media to receive this approach from us. You’re not alone. I’m offering you the chance to become part of a greater purpose, to put your gifts to their optimum use.’
Tate was almost convinced. He wanted to be convinced but still he doubted.
‘What’s the catch?’ he said, and he was surprised that Kelly looked pleased he’d asked.
‘Finally,’ she said.
‘Finally?’
‘I always wait for that question. It’s proof that we have the right person. Because there’s always a catch, right? There’s always something in the fine print that could come right back to bite you in the ass?’
Tate stared at her. She had used almost exactly the words that he had spoken in his head. He tried to remember if he might have said them aloud, but he was certain that he had not.
‘Don’t be shocked, Mr Tate,’ she said. ‘In your position, I’d be thinking the same thing.’
She removed another sheet of paper from her briefcase and placed it before him. There was a single long paragraph at the center of the page. Typed neatly in the middle of an ornate script was his name. It reminded him of a university scroll, not least because it appeared to be written in Latin.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘The catch,’ she replied. ‘In your hand you hold the formal contract, the minor one. This is your private contract, your agreement with us.’
‘Why is it written in Latin?’
‘The Backers are very old-fashioned, and Latin is the language of jurisprudence.’
‘I don’t read Latin.’
‘Allow me to summarize, then.’ Tate noticed that she didn’t even have to look at the page. She knew its contents by heart. She rattled off what sounded to him like the pledge of allegiance, except it was loyalty promised not to a country, but to a private body.
‘Excercitus Noctis?’
‘The Army of Night. Catchy, don’t you think?’
Tate didn’t think it was catchy at all. It sounded like one of those ‘Reclaim the Streets’ movements. More dykes, he thought.
‘And that’s it? That’s all I have to sign?’
‘Nothing else. It will never be publicized, and you will never see the name of our organization written anywhere but here. In fact, the Army of Night doesn’t exist. Call it a private joke. Basically, some suitable nomenclature was required, and that one appealed to the Backers. This particular contract is really just to reassure them. We wouldn’t want you to take our money and head to Belize.’
Tate didn’t even know where Belize was, but he wasn’t about to head there even if he did know. He was ambitious, and he’d never get a better opportunity than this one to advance himself in his chosen field.
‘Uh, who are these Backers?’
‘Wealthy, concerned individuals. They’re worried about the direction in which this country is heading. In fact, they’re worried about the direction in which the whole world is heading. They want to alter its course before it’s too late.’
‘When do I get to meet them?’
‘The Backers like to keep their distance. They prefer to operate discreetly through others.’
‘Like you.’
‘Exactly.’
He looked again at the documents before him. One was written in a language that he didn’t understand, and the rest were written in a language that he should have understood but didn’t.
‘Maybe I ought to run these by my attorney,’ said Tate.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. This is a one-time offer. If I leave here with these papers unsigned, the offer will be rescinded.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Perhaps this will be enough to convince you of our bona fides,’ said Kelly.
She passed him a plain white envelope. When he opened it, he found that it contained access details for three bank accounts, including the 501(c) organization that Kelly had implied was merely being considered. It was called the American League for Equality and Freedom. Together, the accounts contained more money than he had earned in the last ten years.
Tate signed the papers.
‘All this money is mine?’ he asked. He couldn’t quite believe it.
‘Look upon it as your war chest,’ said Kelly.
‘With whom are we going to war?’ he asked.
‘Again with the “whom”,’ said Kelly, admiringly. ‘I just love the way you talk.’
‘The question remains,’ insisted Tate. ‘Who are we fighting?’
‘Everyone,’ said Kelly. ‘Everyone who is not like us.’
One week later, he was being introduced to Becky Phipps. One year later, he was a rising star. Now that star appeared to be on the wane, and Becky was alluding darkly to the Backers. The Backers, Tate knew, tended to act when they were displeased. He’d learned that early on. Kelly hadn’t just been speculating when she spoke about the union organizer with a taste for skirt: his name was George Keys. He liked to tell people that he was named after George Orwell. Nobody knew if that was true or not, but Keys certainly came from socialist stock. His father had been a union organizer all his life, and his mother continued to be heavily involved with Planned Parenthood. His grandfather, meanwhile, had set up a Catholic Worker camp in California and was personally close to the CW founder, Dorothy Day, who ticked every box on Tate’s hate list: Catholic, anarchist, socialist radical, even anti-Franco, which, as far as Tate was concerned, meant that she wasn’t even consistent in her own wrongheadedness because the Catholics were supposed to be for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, right? If the son was one-tenth of the man his grandfather was, then he deserved to be wiped from the earth, even without screwing Mexican factory workers on the side.
It hadn’t been difficult to bribe a whore who worked part-time as a waitress – or was she a waitress who worked part-time as a whore? Tate could never quite tell – to come on to Keys with a sad story about her family back in Mexico, and her cousins working in indentured servitude on Texas chicken farms. Keys bought her some drinks, and the whore bought some back, and one thing led to another until Keys and the whore ended up back at Keys’ place.
What happened after that Tate didn’t know, and didn’t care, but he had photographs of Keys and the woman together. He then shared what he knew with his listeners, and made sure the photographs were disseminated to every newspaper in the state, and for an outlay of five hundred dollars he did his part in setting back union activism in the state of Texas. Keys denied everything, and Tate later learned from the waitress-cum-whore that all he’d done back at his place was to play her some jazz that she didn’t like, talk about his dying mother, and then start crying before calling her a cab. Afterward, Kelly had contacted him personally to say that the Backers were pleased, and he’d received a substantial bonus in cash through Becky. The waitress-whore was shipped back to Mexico on some trumped-up immigration charge, and there she quietly vanishe
d into the sands somewhere around Ciudad Juarez, or so Becky had hinted when she was drunk one evening and he was almost considering making a pass at her, until she told him about what probably happened to the girl in Mexico, and how the Backers had contacts down there. She grinned as she said it, and any desire for Becky on Tate’s part had vanished there and then and had never returned.
Unfortunately, there were other individuals who weren’t so pleased with what Tate had done, and he hadn’t yet learned to be clever enough to protect himself from his own vices. Tate wasn’t above doing a little banging of his own. He wasn’t married, but he did have a weakness for colored girls, and particularly the colored whores over at Dicky’s on Dolorosa, a hangover from the days when San Antonio’s red light district was one of the largest in the state, and the least racially segregated. Anyway, on those nights when a colored whore wasn’t available Tate wasn’t above dipping in some dark Mexican, and one thing led to another, and somehow it became known that Davis Tate frequented Dicky’s, and when he emerged one evening smelling of the disinfectant soap that Dicky’s provided for the hygiene needs of its customers he was photographed by a white man in a car, and when he objected, the car doors opened and three Mexicans piled out, and Davis Tate got the beating of his life. But he remembered the number plate of the car, oh yes, and he made the call while he was still waiting for treatment at San Antonio Community Hospital. Barbara Kelly had assured him that the matter would be taken care of, and it was.
The car was registered to one Francis ‘Frankie’ Russell, a cousin of George Keys who did a little PI work on the side: marital stuff, mostly. Twenty-four hours later, the body of Frankie Russell was found at the eastern edge of Government Canyon. He had been castrated, and it was suggested that he shared some of the weaknesses of his cousin, and the story of the union organizer who liked screwing immigrant women, illegal and otherwise, was dragged up again. No connection was made between Russell’s murder and the discovery a week later of the remains of three Mexican chicken farm workers dumped in Calaveras Lake. After all, they had not been castrated, simply shot.
It was, said those who knew about such matters, probably a gang affair.
But Davis Tate knew better, and he was very, very frightened. He hadn’t signed up to murder. All he wanted was for one beating to be avenged with another. On the night that the bodies were pulled from Calaveras Lake he got shitfaced drunk and made a call to Barbara Kelly, in the course of which he complained that he had not wanted the men who attacked him to be killed, merely taught a lesson, and Kelly had replied that they had been taught a lesson, and Tate had begun shouting, and making threats, and talking about his conscience. He’d hung up, and opened another bottle, and somehow he must have fallen asleep on the floor because he wasn’t sure that he was even awake when he opened his eyes and saw the beautiful, dark-haired woman looking down at him.
‘My name is Darina Flores,’ she said. ‘Barbara Kelly sent me.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to warn you about the importance of remaining faithful to the cause. I want to make sure that you understand the seriousness of the document that you signed.’
She knelt beside him and clutched his hair in her left hand, while her right fixed itself on his throat. She was very, very strong.
‘And I want to tell you about the Backers, and more.’
She whispered in his ear, and her words became images, and something inside Davis Tate died that night.
That memory came back to him now as Becky spoke. She wasn’t on his side. He’d guessed that a long time ago. She represented the interests of the Backers, and those who used them in turn.
‘What should I do?’ he said. ‘How do I get these ratings back up?’
‘It has been suggested that you’re too subtle, that you’re not being radical enough. You need to stir up some controversy.’
‘How?’
‘Tomorrow you’re going to hear about the disappearance of a teenage girl from upstate New York. Her name is Penny Moss, and she’s fifteen years old. You’ll be given an exclusive: when Penny Moss’s remains are discovered, you’ll be supplied with proof that her killer is a Muslim convert who decided to make an example of her for wearing inappropriate dress. Even the cops won’t know before you do. The material will be sent to you anonymously. We’ll have speakers ready to comment. You’re about to become the eye of the storm.’
Tate almost vomited up his beer. He didn’t mind tearing meat from the bones of liberals because, say what you liked about liberals – and Tate did, more than most – they didn’t tend to voice their objections by pointing a gun at someone, just as they didn’t blow up federal buildings in Oklahoma. Muslims were another matter: he was happy to bait them from the safety of his radio station as long as he was just one voice among many, but he didn’t want to become a figurehead for anti-Islamic feeling. He owned a nice apartment in Murray Hill, and parts of Marray Hill were becoming like Karachi or Kabul. He preferred being able to walk the streets there without endangering his life, and he certainly didn’t want to have to move because of a radio show.
‘But how do I know that it’s true?’
‘Because we’ll make it true.’
All of his taste for beer had left him. If this went down the way Becky was suggesting it would, he was going to need a clear head. Only one further detail bothered him.
‘This girl, this Penny Moss, I haven’t heard anything about her. When did she go missing?’
Later, just as he was about to die, he would realize that he had known the answer already, had guessed it before Becky even opened her lips and began to speak, and he could almost have mouthed the words along with her if he chose.
‘Tonight,’ said Becky. ‘She goes missing tonight.’
24
Back at Nicola’s, Epstein had resigned himself to the absence of his bodyguards, not that he had a whole lot of choice in the matter. Nick’s office was warm and smelled faintly of fresh baked bread, and his coffee was very good. At first I felt that I was being more hospitable to Epstein than he probably deserved given the nature of our previous encounter, but it didn’t take me long to realize something about the confrontation that my anger had caused me to underestimate at the time: the extent to which Epstein had been frightened, and frightened of me. Even now he remained uneasy, and it wasn’t due only to the absence of his protectors. Despite all of my protestations, and Liat’s nod of salvation, I was still a troubling figure for the old man. The presence of Louis in the room probably wasn’t making him feel any better about the situation. Louis could make the dead nervous.
‘Your hand is shaking,’ I said, as I watched him sip from his cup.
‘It’s strong coffee.’
‘Really? I could have walked on the surface of that Arab stuff you served me last night if the cup had been big enough, and Nick’s coffee is too strong for you?’
He shrugged. ‘Chacun à son goût.’
Louis tapped me on the shoulder
‘That’s French,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘It means,’ said Louis very carefully, as if explaining something to a small, slow child, ‘“Everyone to his own taste.”’
‘You done?’ Sometimes I wondered if Angel didn’t act as some kind of stabilizing influence on Louis. It was a possibility that I found worrying.
‘Just helping,’ said Louis. He looked at Walter Cole as if to say, ‘What’s a man to do?’
‘I didn’t know it was French,’ said Walter.
‘See?’ said Louis to me. ‘He didn’t know.’
‘He’s never been further east than Cape May,’ I said. ‘The closest he’s been to France is patting a poodle.’
‘What does it mean?’ resumed Walter. ‘What he said?’
‘I just explained what it meant,’ said Louis. ‘Everyone to his own taste.’
‘Oh,’ said Walter. ‘It sounded different the other way.’
‘That’s because it was in Fre
nch,’ said Louis.
‘I guess,’ said Walter. ‘French people got a lot of words for stuff, don’t they?’
At that point, Louis stopped talking to him, and therefore missed the wink that Walter threw my way.
‘So what now?’ asked Epstein.
‘You speak German, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I speak German.’
‘Jesus,’ said Walter, ‘it’s like Ellis Island in here.’
‘Do you know what Seitensprung is?’ I continued.
‘Yes,’ said Epstein. ‘It is the act of changing partners while one is dancing.’
Walter shifted in his seat and tapped Louis on the arm.
‘The Germans got a lot of words for stuff too, don’t they?’ he said.
‘You’re fucking with me, man, I know it.’
‘No, it’s like a whole other language . . .’
I tried to ignore them and concentrated on Epstein. ‘I don’t know why or how I ended up on that list, but you have no reason to believe that I’d harm you. That’s why I brought you here, and that’s why you’re without your bodyguards. If I’d wanted you dead, then you’d be dead, and these two men wouldn’t be here to witness it.’ I caught Louis’s eye. ‘Well, one of them wouldn’t be.’
‘My fear, as I explained to you last night, is that there may be a presence within you that has not yet revealed itself,’ said Epstein.
‘And I told you that, if I was like them, whatever was sleeping inside me would have awakened by now. There were so many times when, if I was a host for something foul lying dormant in me, it could have shrugged off its torpor and intervened to save those like it, but it didn’t. It didn’t because it isn’t there.’
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