Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  Rhees was quiet for a time. ‘You really sure you want to see this guy Bascombe?’

  ‘It’s no big deal. In and out toot sweet.’

  ‘I’ll find a bar and have a beer,’ Rhees said.

  ‘Let’s meet back here in half an hour.’

  He kissed her. She wolf-whistled him as he walked away and he turned back, smiling. He was dressed in a beige linen jacket and black jeans and his skin was lightly tanned. He looked luminously attractive. Six years and her heart still went into orbit.

  ‘Take care,’ she called to him.

  She went in the direction of the Federal Building, where she walked through the metal detector, then stepped past the armed guards and headed for the elevators.

  8

  ‘I haven’t seen a police report yet,’ Lewis Bascombe said.

  Amanda said, ‘Drumm wouldn’t submit it directly to you in any case. It would go to Chief Kelloway. You’ll get it through whatever your regular channels are.’

  Bascombe tapped his desk with a ballpoint pen which had on it the legend, ‘Shop’n’Go 24 Hrs’. Sunlight was thinly sliced by the drawn slats of a blind. The walls of the office were bare except for a photograph that depicted Bascombe and former President Bush handshaking.

  Bascombe was an unimposing man with a toupee the colour of a mouse. ‘The guidelines say I need a copy of a police report, Amanda. I need confirmation.’

  ‘Confirmation? Of what? The body was definitely Galindez, and he’d definitely been shot. What is this, Lew?’

  ‘I have to have a report from a law enforcement officer.’

  ‘Lew,’ Amanda said. ‘Why can’t we skip your guidelines here? If there’s even the slightest chance of a security screw-up, you can’t fart around waiting for a report.’

  ‘I’m not saying I doubt it was Galindez, and I’m not going to shed any tears over him, but put yourself in my place.’

  ‘I spent the best part of my career bending the law to make it work. If it didn’t fit, I had to twist it, and if that didn’t work, I had to tweak it again. One thing I know about guidelines. They’re malleable.’ She was impatient. ‘All I’m asking is that you notify the proper authorities immediately, Lew.’

  ‘You don’t have official status these days, Amanda.’

  ‘So call me a concerned citizen, if that makes it easier for you.’

  Bascombe appeared to consider this statement. Amanda couldn’t tell anything from Bascombe’s face about his inner world. Maybe he didn’t have one. Maybe he was all surface, the bad wig and the sweat-rings in the armpits of his shirt. He liaised between the US Marshals Service and the Department of Justice in the operation of the Federal Witness Protection Program, which meant he worked in a secret hinterland, an altogether cloudy place. Maybe his lack of expression was a prerequisite for the demands of this shadowy territory.

  She said, ‘I placed Galindez in the Witness Program, Lew. He turns up dead in a place he should never have been, so naturally I’m concerned. If the Program’s fucked we should know about it.’

  Bascombe continued to tap his pen. ‘Presumably you considered the possibility that Galindez left the Program of his own accord?’

  ‘Of course I considered it, but I don’t gamble when it comes to people’s lives. Do you?’

  ‘I work in the dark, Amanda. My job is to make sure witnesses are well protected before and during their testimony. After that, I don’t know where they go, and I don’t want to know. They’re taken into custody by US marshals and then they vanish inside the Program in accordance with Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Section 3521, Witness Relocation and Protection. The less I know the better for my own safety and for security in general.’

  ‘Lew, don’t go spouting title this and section that at me.’

  Bascombe rolled his pen back and forth across his desk. He had stubby fingers. Amanda glanced a moment at the photograph on the wall. Former President Bush was smiling like a man trying to hang tough through a prolonged bout of constipation.

  Amanda sighed. ‘All I want is for you to make contact with the Program, tell them about Galindez. A favour to me, that’s all. And if you won’t do it, if you can’t do it, give me the name of somebody I can contact personally.’

  ‘A name?’ Bascombe shook his head, as if Amanda’s request were too preposterous to consider. ‘The story going around is you’d lost your enthusiasm, Amanda. Turned your back on things.’

  ‘I think of it as lawsick.’

  ‘For a lady with no appetite, you sound pretty keen to me.’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of a leak, Lew.’

  Bascombe nodded his head slowly. There was a bovine quality about the gesture. He studied the logo on his pen. ‘OK. OK. I’ll send along the message on Galindez today, but I think what we’ll find is that he made the stupid decision to go walkabout and found his way back among his old cronies, and one of them administered the coup de grâce. Criminals have shit for brains, Amanda, as you well know.’

  ‘I appreciate this,’ Amanda said.

  ‘And if anything comes up you need to know about, I’ll be in touch,’ Bascombe said.

  Amanda gave him the telephone number at the cabin. Bascombe scribbled it down on a piece of paper and stuck it in the drawer. ‘Something else on your mind?’ he asked.

  She hesitated, then shook her head. Nothing, she thought, just some vague unfocused disturbance way at the back of her mind, like wind blowing on a distant lake. The feeling faded as quickly as it had come.

  She rose from her chair. ‘When did you meet Bush?’ she asked.

  ‘About nine years ago.’

  ‘Likeable?’

  ‘A regular guy,’ Bascombe said. ‘But I didn’t vote for him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t vote period,’ Bascombe said.

  ‘Undemocratic of you, Lew.’

  Bascombe said, ‘You might not believe this, but I have a quiet rebellious streak deep inside, and sometimes it just bubbles up.’

  ‘You’re a dark horse. You take my breath away, Lew.’

  9

  Anthony Dansk was attending early evening mass when the cellular phone buzzed in his pocket. He shut it off at once, but not before it had drawn the attention of other worshippers, some of whom turned to stare. The priest heard it and frowned across the faces of his congregation.

  Dansk slid out of the pew and walked up the aisle. In the vestibule, he pressed a button on the phone and said, ‘I can’t talk now, McTell. I’ll get back to you.’

  Dansk severed the connection and glanced at leaflets tacked to a bulletin-board. Hot-line numbers for manic depressives, alcoholics, battered wives’ support groups, a schedule for a kindergarten class. He also noticed dust on ledges and an old cobweb with a skeleton of an antique fly hanging under Christ’s armpit.

  He stuck the phone in his pocket, re-entered the church and slipped quietly into a pew at the rear. Churches impressed him: he liked the majesty and the mystery. His mother used to tell him he was a mote in Jesus’s sunbeam. For years he’d thought of himself as a fleck floating in mid-air, with only Christ keeping him from falling. The things you believe.

  He watched the priest, the rose-coloured scalp glowing under subdued light. Dansk pondered the concept of chastity, what it would be like not to get laid. Unreal. Pecker forever in your pocket, unless you had a taste for choirboys and indulged yourself with much fumbling of cassocks in the quiet of the sacristy.

  When Mass was over Dansk walked outside and lingered on the sidewalk. The other worshippers drifted out. They were a well-scrubbed crew: wives with sculpted hair, men in suits. These people had homes to go to, kids to look after.

  The priest appeared on the steps and looked at him.

  ‘Visiting?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Yeah, more or less,’ Dansk said.

  ‘I thought your face was new.’

  ‘New? It’s thirty-five years old.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Dansk said,
‘A joke. You said new.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes. Forgive me.’

  ‘Me forgive you? Shouldn’t that be the other way round, Father?’

  The priest laughed this time, but uneasily. Dansk often had an unsettling effect on others. He’d recognized this in himself long ago. People he met sometimes sensed a nebulous danger in him, a dark core. It was as if they were receiving vibrations that unhinged them a little. He considered it a kind of power he had. He fingered the Swiss Army knife in his pocket.

  ‘Good Mass,’ he said.

  ‘We have a nice bunch of people here,’ said the priest. ‘My name’s Father Hannon. Brian Hannon.’

  ‘Anthony Dansk.’

  ‘Are you staying long in our city?’

  ‘It depends on business.’

  ‘Ah. A man of commerce.’

  ‘Commerce, right.’

  ‘Well, if you decide to worship with us again, Anthony, you know where to find us. Just remember to switch your phone off next time.’ The priest wandered off to chat with members of his congregation.

  Dansk walked to the end of the block where he’d parked his rented car. He sat behind the wheel, took out his phone and punched the button that connected him with McTell.

  ‘OK,’ Dansk said. ‘Talk.’

  ‘We traced her.’

  ‘You traced her before, I seem to remember,’ Dansk said.

  ‘This time’s different.’

  ‘It was different before,’ Dansk said.

  ‘I know, I know. But this time. I swear.’

  ‘What are you swearing to, McTell?’

  ‘She gassed her car on Thunderbird about forty-five minutes ago.’

  ‘Thunderbird. What is that?’

  ‘Name of a road. The guy filling her tank said she was unglued. Dropping coins, crying, the shakes, talking to herself. The guy figured a loony.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Pasquale is on her.’

  ‘Even as we speak?’

  ‘Yeah,’ McTell said.

  Dansk considered this. ‘I don’t want you calling me later just to hum the same old tune, McTell. Don’t get in touch unless you can sing me a lullaby.’

  Dansk cut the connection. Through the windshield he watched Father Hannon shake hands with his departing flock. Dansk thought about white suburban houses and morning newspapers landing on porches and cookies baking in ovens and kids laughing in backyards. This life he led was one of hotels and endless highways and greasy spoons open all hours and lonely demented strangers.

  He changed the angle of the rear-view mirror and looked at himself, the thick red hair, grass-green eyes, lips almost cherubic, pale skin. Thirty-five. He could pass for twenty. Baby face.

  He twisted the mirror away, shoved the phone inside the glove compartment, then locked it. What he’d do was go back to his hotel downtown and wait for McTell to call again.

  He glanced along the sidewalk at the priest. Commerce my ass. You don’t know, Father, he thought. You probably think computers or life insurance or hotel supplies.

  Wrong. My commerce is darkness without end.

  10

  Morgan Scholes shook Rhees’s hand effusively, then embraced Amanda. He had thick white hair cut short. He smelled of Old Spice, a scent Amanda always found comforting.

  Morgan Scholes said, ‘I keep telling you, Mandy, marry this man. You don’t, one day he’ll just slip through the cracks.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m about to slip anywhere, Morgan,’ Rhees said.

  Amanda said, ‘We’ve discussed matrimony, Dad. It’s a subject we circle warily.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the old man said. ‘It’s an ocean, and you plunge in head first and go with the tides. Is it cocktail hour yet?’

  ‘There’s a perfectly plausible theory that it’s always cocktail hour somewhere on the planet,’ Rhees said.

  ‘See, Mandy. This is my kind of guy.’ Morgan Scholes clapped Rhees on the shoulder. ‘First time I ever liked any guy you brought home. Some of the cretins you used to hang out with, all those upwardly mobile types with one eye on their portable phone and the other on my money – I could sniff those guys a mile away.’

  ‘Hey, they weren’t all fortune-hunters,’ Amanda said.

  Morgan Scholes uttered a dismissive snort. ‘They were wimps, girl. Transparent as all hell.’

  She saw no point in pursuing the matter of old boyfriends, so she let the topic slide. Morgan’s opinions tended to be cemented in his brain and therefore unshakable anyway. Besides, she knew that the matter of her past lovers, even if they meant zip to her, wasn’t high on Rhees’s list of favourite conversation subjects. He had an endearing insecurity at times.

  She followed Morgan inside the house, which clung in defiance of gravity to the side of a mountain, and consisted of three wings built around a central courtyard where a clay mermaid lay in a fountain. There were arched walkways, open spaces. In the sunken lounge, stained-glass windows hand-crafted in the Baja filtered and changed the late afternoon sun. Traditional Western art hung on the walls: cowboys in glossy wax coats, a chuck wagon by camp-fire.

  ‘Gin and tonic OK?’

  The old man, dressed in grey slacks and sand-coloured shirt, made the drinks. He passed them out, then sat down next to Amanda and said, ‘You look good in white. Like an angel.’

  ‘Flattery, Dad. The old silver tongue.’

  ‘Flattery doesn’t enter into it. I never lied to a woman in my life. Made it a rule. Broke it only once and that was when your mother asked me outright if her disease was terminal. I told her no, said she’d get well. Three weeks later, dead.’

  ‘An excusable lie,’ Rhees said.

  ‘You don’t look the woman you love in the eye and tell her she’s dying from cancer.’

  Amanda tasted her drink. What she remembered of her mother was the voice, soft and Virginian. She’d died when Amanda was three. After that, there had been a series of ‘companions’ who came and went quickly because they couldn’t compete with the dead. Morgan was more interested in the brutality of business than the delicate structures of relationships anyway. He’d made a fortune pioneering greetings cards with high-art reproductions on their covers. He’d parleyed this into even greater wealth in a series of speculative land deals in the days when property could be bought one morning and sold the next for fabulous profit.

  ‘It was a damn good marriage,’ the old man said.

  ‘You were fortunate,’ Rhees said.

  ‘Sure I was fortunate. I used to wonder about remarrying, having more kids. Then I’d think, hold on, I’ve probably used up a whole lifetime’s luck with Amanda’s mother. You two staying for dinner?’

  Amanda said, ‘Not this time. We want to get back before it’s too late.’

  ‘That cabin grows on you,’ Scholes remarked. ‘I think you did an admirable thing when you quit, Mandy. You don’t like what you’re doing, dump it. Move on. You’re young.’

  ‘Relatively.’

  Morgan Scholes waved this aside. ‘Forty-two.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three then. That’s young. Right, John?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Rhees said.

  ‘And if you get bored at the cabin, enrol in some college courses, study something different – economics, business. Something practical. It’s not like you have money problems.’

  ‘I have some savings,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Pah. Nickel and dime. I’m talking about your inheritance. I shuffle off, you’re a very rich woman.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about shuffling off,’ Amanda said.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with inheriting money, Amanda. What do you want me to do with it? Leave it to some charity? I don’t understand why you’re always so damn narrow-minded and Bolshevist about it. It’s not like it’s tainted, for God’s sake.’

  The subject of her inheritance, which Morgan raised at every opportunity he could, made her uncomfortable. At some point on the graph of her life, she’d decided it was an injustice th
at one person should inherit another’s wealth because of an accident of birth. During her years at law school in Los Angeles she’d worked nights and weekends as a cocktail waitress in a Brentwood hotel, instead of accepting her father’s persistent offers of tuition and expenses. It came down to the fact that she wanted to be her own person, not the brat offspring of a rich man.

  She didn’t need her father’s money, and she didn’t like the way wealth influenced Morgan’s life. He was always consorting with ossified people who just happened to be as rich as himself, industrialists, powerbrokers, men whose wives were face-lifted and ditzy and spent their days in listless shopping or fund-raising for Third World countries they couldn’t find on a map if they tried. Wealth bred in some people a kind of blind ignorance, isolated them in a cocoon.

  The old man, in a rare display of tact, changed the subject. ‘You’re better off out of law anyhow. It’s a joke in this country, unless you’ve got money to burn. Lawyers like only one thing, and it’s the folding green. Justice? What’s that? John deserves better than a lawyer for a wife when you get right down to it.’

  ‘How many times, Dad? We’re not contemplating marriage.’

  ‘She ought to have her head examined,’ the old man said to Rhees.

  Rhees smiled and said, ‘I don’t think there’s much wrong with Amanda’s head, Morgan.’

  ‘You always take her side, John. Don’t encourage her. I want to be there when you and she walk down that aisle, all sweetness and light.’

  Amanda glanced at Rhees over her gin and tonic. ‘He doesn’t know when to quit, John.’

  ‘Carve that on my stone,’ the old man said. He finished his drink and looked at Amanda for a time, then he said to Rhees, ‘She’s stubborn and strong-willed. Don’t know where in the world she gets it from.’

  He winked at Rhees, then stood up and laughed. ‘Bad habit telling other people what’s good for them, huh? Can’t break some habits at my time of life.’

  ‘You mean well,’ Amanda said.

  ‘But the road to hell is paved, yadda yadda,’ the old man said. ‘Another drink?’