The Coincidence Engine

by Sam Leith

  No family, apparently. Good. His employers weren’t going to be reporting this guy missing any time soon. He’d entered the country on his own passport, a guest visa, but that wouldn’t send up flags from USCIS for a while. He’d booked a return ticket, no doubt just for the sake of form, but that was still a fortnight away. Hotel? Car? His partner would probably take care of that.

  Good.

  That they were fielding someone – one of a team, presumably – with traceable connections to them, travelling under his own name, suggested haste and urgency. They were taking very big risks with this thing. So either they were counting on some powerful protectors or they were starting to flail. More likely the former.

  This wasn’t Red Queen’s usual beat. Not at all. The Directorate seldom if ever staged interventions. It soaked information up, spread spiderwebs, moved as invisibly as possible through the world. If it did something stagy, like bringing in Hands, it called in a favour from Our Friends. But this situation was beyond the usual thing. The executive branch, so to speak, needed the DEI’s knowledge. And DEI needed the executive branch.

  There was still at least one more guy loose on the ground.

  Red Queen spoke to Porlock. Explained the situation, though something about his manner suggested he knew about it already.

  ‘Go to Our Friends. Tell them it’s their mess. They need to go, find this dead man before anyone else does, and make him disappear. This needs to be contained, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Sherman waited in the car park of their motel for three hours for Davidoff to return. Better safe than sorry. Then he risked a call to Davidoff’s pay-as-you-go.

  The phone, on the side table of Jones’s room in the motel, trilled and its screen lit up. Jones picked it up and got a pen and wrote down the number but did not answer it.

  Jones waited. The phone went again. Same number. Jones carefully wrote it down underneath where he had written the number the first time.

  Sherman frowned. He knew the big fella would be pissed off that he’d bolted, but there was no great percentage for Sherman in standing around to make friends with Mr One Millionth Customer and the meet-and-greet girls, and Davidoff could take care of himself.

  He’d last seen Davidoff at the front of the shop before it had all gone tits skyward. He’d slipped off, Sherman assumed, to go round and cover any back exits. Much use he’d turned out to be. How the little sod had managed to hit Sherman with the door, he didn’t know, but it had done his shin a mischief and from then on in Sherman hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything but follow his nose.

  This was a crap job, he thought. A crap, crap job. Everything that could have gone wrong had. And now, when he’d like to have been safely indoors having a chod and a read of the paper, he was sitting in some backwater in the middle of America surveilling his own motel room from a car park – he seemed to spend a lot of time in car parks – or feeding crap tin money into crap tin payphones. Lost idiot wanted. Please call Ed Otis, answers to Sherman.

  He didn’t know what was keeping Davidoff. He thought about phoning Ellis but then thought about not phoning Ellis and preferred the second thought. He thought about returning to the shop, wondered about whether the car had been seen. He thought not. As far as they were concerned he was just a violent nutter who missed out on a free trolley dash and the chance to have his photograph taken with a couple of village idiot beauty queens.

  Finally, he decided he’d rather just go than keep sitting here. He waited till after dark, and then drove. The forecourt and the neon sign were still illuminated but the glass front was shut. Sherman parked the car a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the shop.

  The snake of trolleys, locked and chained in the black light, looked like something’s spine. A single car, seemingly abandoned, gleamed grey-white in the middle of the car park. The display windows of the shop faced blankly over the asphalt, eating the dark. Sherman shivered, pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and broke into the beginnings of a trot.

  There was nothing outside the building. Sherman spent a few minutes in a pool of shade near the exit, watching the windows of the building for the sweep of a flashlight – anything that said ‘nightwatchman’. Nothing. He circled towards the back of the building.

  A sign directed deliveries to a roughly laid tarmacked strip down the side of the store. He trotted down under the shoulder of the building, into the dark. He could smell diesel and grass. He walked round – down a long wall, one locked door and a shuttered loading bay. All quiet. On the other side of the loading bay was the fire door that had knocked him over that afternoon. There was a dim, hooded light over it. He shuffled down the wall towards it.

  He was startled, then, by a rustle in the bushes and froze. A tousled figure – not tall enough to be Davidoff – was standing still out there in a pool of dark, seemingly looking in his direction. As Sherman’s eyes adjusted he could see the outline of a rough beard. He’d disturbed a hobo. Dumpster-diving probably. There was another rustle, and the old man stepped back and was gone. He wouldn’t have been able to see much of Sherman, not from that distance and with Sherman in the shadow of the building. Probably just heard him.

  Sherman waited, then went on. Screened from two sides by the low bank and the hedge, he risked the light, tried the door. There wasn’t a handle – just the bar on the inside, and the shop may not have had a nightwatchman but it was bound to be alarmed.

  If Davidoff had got trapped in there, he supposed, he could have decided it was better to wait the night out than risk tripping the alarm. He didn’t have a car. But that didn’t make sense. Davidoff hadn’t gone into the shop, not from the front, anyway. And if he was in there he wouldn’t know that Sherman had taken the car. And why would he have got locked into the shop in the first place? He had a phone… No. Sherman had a bad feeling about his partner.

  It was just as he was thinking about this bad feeling he had, about his partner, that Sherman heard the sound of a motor idling outside the front of the shop, then coming closer. It sounded like it was coming down the side of the building, where he’d just walked. It stopped. Then there was the sound of a car door opening, and closing. What made Sherman freeze was that the noise of the car – throatier, a van of some sort – and the noise of the voices sounded like someone trying to be quiet. His route back was cut off.

  He moved quickly, scrambling out of the light and over the wall and up the slope into the foot of the hedge. He wriggled down into a long, ditch-like concavity he found in the earth. He could hear low, purposeful voices. The foliage was good above him. He risked raising his head.

  Four men – all in dark overalls. They had penlights on them, and they were sweeping methodically, stealthily, down the back of the building and up the slope towards where he was hiding.

  Shit. He could bolt onto the waste ground behind and risk running for it. But an image came into his head of being shot efficiently in the back. He stayed, put his head down. If they rolled him, he’d pretend to be a sleeping drunk.

  He breathed as shallowly as he could. The dancing penlights, he was relieved to see, were moving up towards the ditch a little further along from where he was. Then one stopped, there was a sharp whisper, and the others converged on it. They’d found something. They were maybe six feet away.

  There were now two torch beams. Two of the men had clipped off and stowed theirs to free up their hands. In the play of the light Sherman saw the men haul something up, something heavy. As it came, Sherman knew what it was. He’d seen these things hefted like that often before. They yanked it awkwardly out of the ditch, then each man hooked an arm briskly, professionally, under each armpit – another man picking up the legs. No hesitation, no alarm. One man directing.

  The head flopped back as the torso came up. A splash of light flashed over it. Mouth open, eyes open, a slick darkness down one side of the neck. That was where Davidoff was.

  The four men bore him away, head jouncing, round the corn
er of the building at speed. Sherman heard a car door close – quietly, but firmly, then another one. Then the motor started and retreated and he was left alone in the hedge in the dark. He waited there for a very long time, and then he got up, walked a long route back to his car, and drove to a new motel.

  It was 4 a.m. He found a payphone and he phoned Ellis.

  The first thing Ellis said was: ‘We know.’

  Chapter 17

  Bree and Jones hadn’t said very much since the incident. Bree, because she was nervous. Any second she expected a siren to hiccup and whoop, and blue-red lights to revolve in the rear-view. She didn’t know how far Red Queen’s reach went, but there was only so much you could do. Someone would have found the body, she thought. Made their car from a security camera at the store – as usual, she’d ensured Jones parked with the plate towards a low wall and the car well away from the store, but there’d been only one way in and out of the parking lot.

  Jones had killed. And Red Queen was leaving him in the field? Leaving Bree with him?

  It made Bree feel faintly sick to think about him. That large-knuckled hand settled on the steering wheel had pushed a penknife into a man’s neck a few hours previously. And if he was upset by that he wasn’t showing it. She’d thought – when she’d found him in distress – that she’d been getting somewhere with him. She’d started to feel something towards him – protectiveness, even.

  Bree looked at him as they drove through the city’s backstreets in search of somewhere to lie low. His face was expressionless and his eyes seemed to be watching something out of sight. They scanned the road; his right hand passed the wheel round to his left hand as he turned corners. He blinked, occasionally. He didn’t talk. It was as if, since the incident, there was nobody there. She felt like she was sharing the car with a ghost.

  They had eaten separately and Bree had insisted they check into separate motels, a few blocks apart. She said she’d collect him in the morning and they’d go on. He could cry all he liked.

  She dropped him off, took the car back, found her way into another of those rooms. It had low yellow light, like all the other motel rooms in America. There was a bedspread that made you feel sad, and the sort of mirror that turned even a young face into a landscape of pits and pocks and defeated skin. Bree could feel her DNA fraying, her cells ticking down and closing in. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered what it was like to have fun, not to be scared, not to have to work from the time you got up until the time that, gratefully, you whimpered into sleep. She felt very, very sober.

  Not that she’d sleep. The incident at the store, the sight of the dead man’s face, was going to see to that. Ever since she had been tiny, Bree had been terrified of dying and death. She hadn’t been able to visit her father in the hospital. She’d never seen a dead body. Didn’t know how anybody could do so and carry on. The very thought of it was enough to bring up a small tremor in her hands.

  Whenever you read about dying in books or films it always seemed to picture it as the world darkening and growing silent and getting further away: an old television dwindling away to a white dot, starting at the edges; an inky inrushing in the vision, and the volume going down. That, Bree thought, would be nice. A nice rest.

  Bree’s night terrors cast it differently. What Bree was frightened of was that far from the world going away and shutting the door politely behind it, the opposite would happen. She was worried that the drab world was the only thing standing between her and something much, much gaudier – like the flimsy curtains they put round hospital beds. When that ripped, she knew deep in her bones, the murmur of daily sense data would rise to a screaming hurricane and she would be overwhelmed, drowned, vanished, obliterated but somehow still there just to take it all in like someone with their eyelids stapled open in a violent cartoon.

  When she’d gone to the Freaky Fields with Jess and Anton and taken acid in school – and boy oh boy, was that ever one of her less bright ideas – she’d had a glimpse of it, what it would be like. It had started with a lemony creeping up her cheeks – something like a grin, and they’d been talking and throwing the red ball around until her teeth started to taste funny and she heard sentences a fraction of a second before she spoke them.

  The burr of the light in the yellow grass, the too several voices of her friends, the panoply of facial muscles she was expected to find uses for, the way reduplicative fragments of nonsense words and phrases started muscling into the side of her mind (‘undefunnady’, ‘downshudder’, ‘slidewise’)… she felt panic rising around her like the puddles of silvery water around her hips.

  It felt like she’d been flying the light aircraft of her consciousness for years without incident, on automatic pilot. And here she was suddenly and abruptly switched to manual: strapped into the cockpit of a 737 and seeing bank after bank of winking lights and switches and multiple joysticks and tiny dials: far too much information coming in. She hadn’t needed to think about how to smile, or to pronounce the word ‘funny’, or to separate out the different information coming in from her ears, her eyes, her skin and her own thoughts.

  Now the filters had been removed and she was overwhelmed. She knew then, as she set in for the long haul of a catatonically bad, never-to-be-repeated trip, that this was what dying would be like – only an infinite progression of powers worse.

  She hadn’t been able to explain it well to her ex-husband, when he’d found her sweating and shaking beside him in the still hours of the morning. She hadn’t been able to explain it to the therapist he’d made her see before he’d given up on her and gone.

  She hadn’t been able to explain it to her mother when it had first struck her. Everyone’s frightened of dying. Everyone. But not everyone thinks about it all the time. It was the first thing she remembered from her childhood. Fear in the bones.

  She had been six years old. She knew that, because her younger brother Gill had just been born. He was lying there in his cradle up the corridor, asleep already. Bree had had her bath like always and now, with a too-big, grown-up’s towel around her shoulders and her flannel pyjama bottoms on, the pale blue ones, she was brushing her teeth in front of the mirror over the sink in her bedroom.

  The sink was too high. She could rest her chin on the edge of it only, so she stood on the orange plastic toy crate like her mother had shown her. Now the porcelain was cold on her belly. Her dad had come home and her mother had gone downstairs to fix him a drink.

  She reached up to the toothbrush holder fixed to the tiling behind the sink. The holder had a flat plastic cartoon of Snoopy’s kennel, with Snoopy and Woodstock sitting on the roof. The body of the kennel, like Snoopy, was white. The roof was red. Woodstock was a splotch of yellow. Bree’s toothbrush was red and had a little picture of Snoopy on the handle.

  She squeezed a pea-sized burr of toothpaste onto the bristles and started to brush around her front teeth in the conscientious circles she had been taught. She remembered, or perhaps imagined, looking at herself in the small mirror, her short blonde hair dark from the bath and tousled and her mouth foaming.

  Milk teeth, little round pearls. Soon grown-up teeth, she knew. Then what? Round she brushed. I am Bree, she had thought, looking in the mirror. Nobody else is Bree, only me. It struck her as strange. It had occurred to her that she was a person, a separate person from everyone else, that she was alone in her head – she hadn’t expressed it to herself this way, she thought, not at the time; but she could remember the feeling and it corresponded to that – and that she was moving towards something like abandonment. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, like when she was lost in the supermarket. She knew too that she couldn’t, having once had this thought, ever unthink it.

  The Snoopy toothbrush holder wasn’t friendly. It was inert: just a plastic thing, a small object in a huge universe. Bree’s mother had come upstairs to find her crying disconsolately, still moving the toothbrush in automatic circles across her teeth, and powerless, with a mouthful of peppermint foam a
nd no vocabulary for it, to explain the feeling.

  She had learned to explain it later, to herself. And she had learned to distract herself from thinking about it; but it was there knocking under the floorboards in her apartment, winking at her from the back of the refrigerator, waiting for her in the closet.

  She found herself goggling, occasionally, at the people who walked past her every day, wearing their haircuts on their heads and going about their business, and seeming never to have stumbled on this dreadful thought – or if they had stumbled on it, having forgotten it.

  In her twenties, she had developed a recurrent half-dream: something that would creep in between her being awake and the little mischiefs of sleep starting to derail her mind. She had learned to control it with pills and rituals and work, but the dream was essentially a dramatisation of what was going on in her conscious mind. In these dreams, she died. And instead of things getting quiet and dark and receding, Bree had the sense of something rushing in on her: something that had always been there, but had been hiding – held at bay by the walls and floor and sky, by the surfaces of things. Now her protections fell away. There was a sudden undoing of reality: something unpicking the angles of the corner of the room, the sky unzipping, the floor’s tessellations of atoms untoothing and a downflooding of light.

  At the same time, the sound of something approaching from a very long way off that would also somehow be just the other side of the walls: a gathering roar, which would make it physically impossible to think, but would be recognisable as it overwhelmed your ears as the sound of a million million million million individual voices – everyone who ever lived or could have lived – whispering a single word.