Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  Rhees said, ‘… in ski masks.’

  ‘Ski masks, OK,’ Drumm said.

  Rhees started to add something but his voice dried up. Amanda held a container of water to his lips and adjusted the angular straw for him. She thought about ski masks. A terrorist nightmare in your own house, your backyard.

  Drumm leaned closer to the bed. ‘Did they say anything, John?’

  Rhees opened his eyes. His pupils were black and enormous. ‘Nothing. They had a … tyre-iron.’

  This was the first time Amanda had thought about an assault instrument. It had been an abstraction before, but now Rhees had identified it, she could picture it rising and falling on his face and body. The brutality of it, the destruction of bones and tissue.

  Rhees turned his face to the side and for a second it seemed he’d drifted off into sleep, but he hadn’t. He looked into Amanda’s eyes. She saw in his expression stress and puzzlement, only slightly obscured by the glaze of painkillers. She experienced a flutter of anger. Rhees had been reduced to this wrecked figure lying in a hospital bed. He’d been traumatized and diminished, and for what? Money probably. Credit cards. Stuff. Anything of value.

  Rhees closed his eyes and this time didn’t open them again.

  ‘He’s out,’ Drumm said.

  Amanda held his hand a moment longer before she stepped back from the bed. She leaned, kissed Rhees on his forehead, then walked into the corridor.

  Drumm said, ‘It sickens me to the gut. What do you do?’ He shook his head in a slow side-to-side manner.

  Amanda looked up at a fluorescent strip on the ceiling. A voice was issuing through the sound system: ‘Dr Strapp to Emergency. Dr Strapp to Emergency’. More casualties. More damaged humans swept in from the streets. Smashed cars, bullet-wounds, stabbing victims. What do you do? Drumm had said. You went up to the mountains, was the answer. You ran off up into the pines and you never came back, and if everything was going to hell in the city you didn’t give a damn. You stayed where it was safe and the nights were as deep as all the oceans.

  The elevator arrived. She and Drumm got in and rode down in silence. She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, thinking of Isabel’s letter, expecting to encounter it with her fingers. She wished she’d never received the goddam thing. She wished it had been lost in the mail system, overlooked, shredded inside a franking machine, anything. She wished she’d never heard of Isabel Sanchez.

  The letter wasn’t in either hip pocket, and it wasn’t in the front pockets.

  She searched again, fumbling among keys and a bashed cigarette pack and a crumpled receipt chit from a Walmart and three washed-out dollar bills that must have gone through a laundry cycle.

  No letter.

  ‘Looking for something?’ Drumm asked.

  Without answering, she got out of the elevator and walked towards the waiting-room, thinking she might have left the letter there, tugged it out of her jeans along with her cigarettes. She checked the room, saw the Coke can she’d used as an ashtray, but no sign of Isabel’s two pages. Just an empty room painted lavender and grey.

  Drumm, who’d limped behind her, asked, ‘Lost something?’

  She didn’t reply.

  42

  Willie Drumm walked ahead of Amanda into the house. She was reluctant to enter. She was picking up on echoes, hearing the noise of Rhees’s funny-bone snapping.

  In the living-room Drumm circled the fallen typewriter, the scattered papers and books with broken spines. ‘They did a number here,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t deal with this,’ she said.

  ‘A quick look round is all,’ Drumm said. ‘See if anything’s missing. You keep jewels in the house, Amanda?’

  ‘Any jewellery I had was in the bedroom, except for this silver chain I wear.’ A gift from John, she remembered, with one of his poems attached.

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘John might have had a few dollars. We weren’t planning to stay here.’

  ‘Where’s the bedroom?’

  She showed Drumm the way. The closet had been ransacked. Her underwear had been rummaged through like lingerie at a frenetic post-Christmas sale. Panties in a heap, some of them flimsy and silken, sexy gossamer items. She thought of strangers crudely handling these intimacies and making off-colour jokes.

  The drawers of the dressing-table lay open. ‘There should be a small black velvet box with a string of pearls inside,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see it, Amanda.’

  ‘So they stole the pearls. I never wore them anyway.’

  Drumm peered inside the bathroom. ‘They didn’t bother with this room,’ he said.

  She followed Drumm into the kitchen. He bent, picked up something and held it carefully, dangling it between thumb and index-finger. It was John’s brown leather wallet. He flipped it open. ‘What did he keep in this?’

  ‘An Amex card, a Visa, a couple of library cards. Probably some cash.’

  ‘All they left were his library cards,’ Drumm said. He wrapped the wallet in a sheet of waxy kitchen paper and stuck it in his pocket, then he stepped into the backyard and wandered off through the long grass, skirting the pool. She puzzled over what kind of inventory he was making. One wallet, empty of cash and credit cards. One jar of beets, spilled. Frog in pool, deceased. This wasn’t his regular field of inquiry. He was here as a favour she hadn’t asked for.

  He came back indoors. ‘They steal some jewels and a couple of credit cards and a negligible sum of money,’ he said, ‘but they don’t take the PC or the TV and they don’t rip off your expensive stereo system. That’s a little strange. Usually it’s the kind of stuff they make a beeline for.’

  ‘They’re not interested in carrying things,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’re worn out by the physical exertion of beating up on John.’

  Drumm laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’ll get some fingerprint guys in. And when John’s feeling up to it, he might have more information we can use.’

  She sat down at the table and looked through the kitchen door into the backyard. The setting sun was an otherworldly gold. A postcard. Wish you were here. Miss you.

  She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids to ease the headache that was threatening. She glanced down at the puddle of beet juice. ‘What makes them choose one house instead of another anyway? Why not the house next door, or the one next door to that? Is it like some kind of violent lottery, Willie? Spin the wheel, come up with an address?’

  Drumm said, ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Our house is the only scruffy one in the street. The yard’s a mess. It doesn’t exactly shout prosperity.’

  ‘Exactly what makes it so attractive. Nobody comes to mow the lawn or clip the trees. Thieves watch a place. Who comes, who goes. They get the impression of vacancy and they think an easy score.’

  ‘They watch,’ she said.

  ‘Sure they watch.’

  They watch. They monitor. They drive past in the night, doing quiet U-turns in the cul-de-sac.

  Anthony Dansk sailed into her mind.

  She needed air. She walked out of the house and went to the bottom of the driveway and looked the length of the cul-de-sac. She glanced at parked cars. She moved until she came to the corner of the through street. Here, vehicles were tightly parked all the way along the sidewalks. Street lamps had come on, globes of orange-yellow light.

  She stood on the corner, looking left and right, not at all certain what she expected to see. Maybe a guy behind a wheel, a woman staring idly into space, a man deep under the hood of his car, pretending he had engine trouble. Potential disguises were unlimited. Any innocent presence or movement was open to sinister interpretation.

  She tried to imagine Dansk sitting in the vicinity, watching her coming and going, maybe even parked in the cul-de-sac itself now and again, brazenly observing the house. And if not Dansk, somebody who reported to him. And if not that, maybe Sanchez’s people.

  She went back, pausing in the driveway to look inside t
he VW, wondering if she’d dropped Isabel’s letter on the floor. She checked under both front seats and found only a discarded Tab can. She flashed on the empty Coke can in the hospital waiting-room, the guy in the insurance-collar, the way he’d sat down right next to her and how a certain amount of fumbling and body-contact had gone on while he’d adjusted the position of the can for her. I don’t mind, smoke all you want. The memory was smudged. She hadn’t been in a frame of mind to register details.

  Drumm was standing in the doorway. ‘What are you looking for, Amanda? You were looking for something at the hospital too.’

  She leaned against the car and gazed up at the dusky sky.

  Drumm was silent for a time. ‘You still interested in the Sanchez matter?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m interested in any more. I’m not thinking clearly, Willie.’

  ‘A little bird told me you went down to Florence. You saw Sanchez. He became violent, made threats.’

  ‘You’ve got good sources,’ she said.

  Drumm said, ‘We sent up a chopper.’

  She thought of the desert, Isabel’s broken shoe, the shadow of a helicopter.

  ‘The pilot found nothing,’ Drumm said.

  ‘Why didn’t they steal the goddam TV and the stereo?’ she asked. ‘You said yourself it was unusual.’

  ‘Back up. We were talking about the Sanchez thing.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘It’s time I phoned the hospital.’

  ‘Amanda. What do you know that I don’t?’

  ‘I just want to call the hospital.’

  ‘You’re being evasive. You don’t trust me?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’ she answered.

  She went inside the house and Drumm followed. She called Directory Assistance, got the number of the hospital and dialled it. She asked to be connected to the nurses’ station on the third floor. Immediately a woman answered.

  Amanda said, ‘I’m calling about a patient, John Rhees.’

  ‘And you are?’

  What was the appropriate word? Lover? Cohabitant? ‘His fiancée, Amanda Scholes.’

  There was the sound of a keyboard being tapped. ‘He’s stable, Miss Scholes.’

  ‘When’s the earliest I can see him?’

  ‘Visiting hours are from ten a.m. until noon.’

  Amanda thanked the woman and hung up. She looked at Drumm and said, ‘He’s stable. That’s hospital-speak.’

  ‘He’s stable. What about you?’

  ‘I can’t stay in this place. I’ll check into a hotel for the night.’

  ‘Smart idea.’

  ‘Pack a few overnight things, I’m gone.’

  Drumm caught her hand. ‘Look. If there’s something you’re keeping back, this is as good a time as any to tell me. You left a message for me before. What did you want to tell me?’

  It was an invitation to talk. Fine, why not? Break the goddam lid off the box and let the contents fly. She looked into Willie’s eyes. There was never any guile in that face.

  ‘This isn’t for public consumption, Willie. This is strictly between you and me.’ And she told him. About the letter, and the loss of it. The way she’d coerced the Program into sending Anthony Dansk to Phoenix. When she was finished, she felt vaguely relieved. She’d shifted a burden even if she hadn’t removed it.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. ‘What I wonder is how in God’s name Sanchez pulled it off. I mean, you’re talking fake papers, funny badges, serious access to the inside track, knowledge of the MO of the Program, the location of witnesses, et cetera. You’re talking more than a leak, this is the whole dam.’

  ‘That’s what it is,’ she said.

  ‘And this guy Dansk says he’ll fix it.’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘He never saw Isabel’s letter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And you’ve no idea where you lost it?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘So Dansk says he’ll investigate and let you know how it comes out. You got a problem with that?’

  ‘Yeah, but my head’s like a carousel going round and round and I can’t get it to stop long enough to think clearly.’

  ‘Talk to me some more, Amanda.’ He put his hand under her chin and turned her face slowly towards his own. ‘Unload. Dump the rest on me.’

  Dump what? All she had was instinct, vague and fuzzy, like a photograph screwed up in the dark-room. All she had were reverberating doubts and the conviction that Dansk was seriously missing a hinge, and that made him dangerous.

  ‘He has me under surveillance, Willie,’ she said.

  ‘You know this for a fact?’

  ‘Not for a fact,’ she said. It sounded, she thought, loopy. ‘Next I’ll be hearing voices.’

  Drumm didn’t smile. He’d always given her the courtesy of taking her seriously. ‘OK. He wants to know what you’re up to. What’s he so lathered about, Amanda?’

  ‘I made a threat about speaking to the newspapers, which went down like the Hindenburg. I guess he’s uneasy because he can’t be one hundred per cent certain I won’t go through with it. He doesn’t enjoy the possibility of me trespassing where I don’t belong. Namely, Program security.’

  ‘Program security seems a little thin on the ground at present,’ Drumm said. ‘Maybe he’s covering his ass because he’s got something to hide.’

  ‘For example?’

  Drumm took a toothpick out of his breast pocket and placed it between his lips, moving it from one corner of his mouth. He tilted his head back. She knew this ruminative look so well she could practically hear wheels turning in his head. ‘I’m just thinking out loud. Sanchez penetrates the Program, right. But he needed a whole lotta help. What if …’ Drumm snapped the toothpick in two. ‘What if he hired this character Dansk?’

  ‘Sanchez hired Dansk?’

  ‘Keep in mind, I’m only saying what if, that’s all. Dansk is running around doing some damage limitation on a situation he created himself. The monster he built for Sanchez is roaring out of control. He’s got nothing to do with the Program. He’s a freelance operator –’

  She interrupted Drumm. ‘And somebody else inside the Program is providing him with information?’

  ‘Maybe. Just maybe.’

  She pondered Drumm’s speculation. Suppose Dansk’s performance was all some elaborate masquerade. She remembered calling the number Dansk had given her, and the taped message in a voice that wasn’t his. You have reached the office of Anthony Dansk. Mr Dansk isn’t available to take your call at present. She wondered about this, tried to imagine the location of his office, and if Dansk really had any connection with the Justice Department. The office could be anything, rented space, an answering machine in an empty room. But whose voice was recorded on the machine? Then she remembered her earlier intention to telephone Justice, but when she’d entered the house and found chaos the notion had been swept out of her mind like debris in a flash-flood. And something else, another phone call she’d meant to make, but it evaded her. What the hell was it? She searched her shook-up memory.

  Drumm said, ‘What I can do is poke around, ask a few questions about this Dansk and see what comes up. A cop’s badge still opens some doors, remember.’

  ‘What doors do you have in mind?’

  ‘For starters, Lewis Bascombe’s,’ he said.

  ‘Bascombe? He’s probably the most secretive man in this city,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ll get out of him, even if he agrees to see you.’

  ‘I’ll kick my way in,’ Drumm said and smiled.

  ‘And wave your thirty-eight in his face?’

  She couldn’t imagine Drumm getting anywhere with Lew Bascombe. She shut her eyes a moment. Bernadette Vialli, of course. That was the missing thought. Like so much else, it had drifted away from her.

  ‘Do me a small favour,’ she said. ‘Remember the Vialli case?’

  ‘Scorched into my memory,’ Drumm said.

  ‘Benny’s
mother tried to get in touch with me. I’m not in the mood for calling her back right now.’

  ‘You any idea why she phoned?’

  ‘No.’ Amanda looked at John’s typewriter on the floor and the scattered papers and books and all at once she heard a low-pitched humming reminiscent of wasps disturbed and zooming in crazy disarray. She recognized this anger, a delayed reaction to the fact that her world had been chopped like kindling, and somehow Dansk was the one with the hatchet, and a lit match in his fingers.

  ‘You want me to contact the woman,’ Drumm said.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘No sweat,’ Drumm said. ‘Any favour you need, come to me. Night, day, it doesn’t matter. You got that?’

  ‘Bless you,’ she said. She kissed him on his plump warm cheek. Direct this animosity, she thought. Harness this rage.

  ‘Meantime, I suggest you try and get a good night’s rest,’ Drumm said.

  A good night’s rest. It was the last thing on her mind.

  43

  At 7.30 p.m. Anthony Dansk and Eddie McTell stood in a park where a floodlit softball game was going on about 200 yards away, a serious affair played with raw enthusiasm between one team in blue shirts and another in orange. The guy on strike had a massive roll of rubbery white flesh that leered between his shirt and waistband. A small crowd was gathered behind the wire fence at the catcher’s back.

  McTell asked, ‘You uh like this game, Anthony?’

  ‘I’m no big fan,’ Dansk said. ‘I just like to see people at their leisure, because I forget what leisure is.’ He watched the fat guy swing and miss. Americans at play. An innocent contest under the lamps. Also shadows beyond the outfield where anything might lurk. A perv offering some seven-year-old a Snickers-bar bribe for a blow-job, or a sick dickhead junkie shooting up.

  McTell stroked his beard. ‘What’s on your mind, Anthony?’

  ‘A burden the size of a cathedral,’ Dansk said. He handed two sheets of paper to McTell, who held them angled towards the distant floodlights.

  McTell read, then raised his face and gazed at the softball field. ‘This is from …’

  ‘You know who it’s from. She sent it to the lady prosecutor and the lady prosecutor read it.’