by Matt Ruff
“I see. That’s a rather convenient development, isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah, it’s very convenient, having you think I’m full of shit…”
“Why ‘Catering’? That’s a strange name for a counterintelligence division.”
“They do a lot of logistics work,” she explains. “One way the organization keeps itself off the radar is by not having a fixed headquarters. Cost-Benefits, the whole bureaucracy, it’s constantly moving around, and Catering are like the movers. They scout new locations, pack and set up equipment, and provide transport for personnel. And as sort of a natural extension of that, they’re also in charge of meetings and special events: scheduling, security, hors d’oeuvres, whatever.”
“So if you needed to arrange a rendezvous with another operative, you’d contact Catering.”
“Right.”
“And how does that work? Is there a number you call?”
“No number. You just pick up a phone and start talking.”
“Operators are standing by?”
“Unless the phone’s in an insecure location. Then you just get a dial tone and look stupid.”
“All right,” says the doctor. “Let’s get back to your story. Once you’d been accepted into the organization, I assume you underwent some sort of training regimen…”
“They call it Probate. Training is part of it, but also they’re still testing you, making sure it wasn’t a mistake to offer you the job. They team you with a senior operative called a Probate officer, and you’re given a Probate assignment, which is like a standard op but more complicated, with more ways to screw up.”
“What was your Probate assignment?”
“A guy named Arlo Dexter.”
“Another serial killer?”
“More like a serial maimer. His thing was explosive booby-traps: he’d take, like, a Scooby-Doo toothpaste dispenser, fill it with black powder, ball bearings, and a motion trigger, and leave it on a store shelf for someone to pick up. He hadn’t actually killed anyone yet, but he was definitely working his way up to it—and then, right before the organization stepped in, he met some people who wanted to leapfrog him straight to mass murder.”
“You stopped him?”
“No.” She frowns again. “I was supposed to, but it went wrong.”
“What happened?”
“He saw me coming.”
Look Both Ways
THE VOICE ON THE PHONE SAID: “Jane Charlotte.”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to make an appointment to meet my Probate officer…”
“Southeast corner of Orchard and Masonic, tomorrow, eight-thirty a.m.”
“Do you know what this guy looks like? Or will he know me?”
“Southeast corner of Orchard and Masonic,” the voice repeated, “tomorrow, eight-thirty a.m.”
Dial tone.
Oh well, at least I knew where I was going. That intersection was in the Haight, and assuming I had my compass directions straight, the southeast corner was just across Orchard Street from the elementary school that Phil and I had both attended.
Next morning I was there, standing under the awning of a candy store where I used to shoplift Mars bars, and playing “Who’s the Probate officer?” with the other pedestrians. Despite the drizzle there were plenty of prospects: a guy waiting at the bus stop who didn’t check the numbers of the buses pulling up; another guy who’d been out in the wet so long that the newspaper he was reading had soaked through; a bag lady who had her forehead pressed up against a utility pole like she was trying to mind-meld with it; a bored-looking school crossing guard.
My money was on the crossing guard. His uniform didn’t fit him, and he held his stop sign the way a circus bear would, like this meaningless prop some midget had just handed to him. He also didn’t seem to care whether any kids made it across the street in one piece. At the school, the second bell had already rung, but there were still a few members of the Jane Charlotte tribe racing to get in under the wire; if the guard happened to be facing the right direction when they darted out into the crosswalk, he’d make this token gesture to stop the traffic, but for the most part they were on their own.
So I decided this was probably my guy and tried to make contact with him, which wasn’t easy, because he wasn’t paying any attention to the adults around him, either.
“Hey,” I said, waving a hand in his face. “Hello?”
Three more kids ran into the street behind the crossing guard’s back, on an intercept course with a speeding delivery truck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bag lady come to life. She whipped her shopping bag up in a circle and let fly; the bag arced above the heads of the jaywalkers and burst on the truck’s front hood, spraying cans everywhere. The truck screeched to a halt; so did the rest of the traffic, and every pedestrian within earshot.
The bag lady went charging at the kids, shrieking, “Look both ways! Look both ways!” Two of them bolted straight off; the third, definitely my tribe, stood his ground long enough to give the woman who’d saved his life a one-finger thank you.
She went after the crossing guard next: “Not…paying…attention!” She started smacking him on the chest and shoulders—“Pay attention! Pay attention!”—sloppy, overhand girly slaps that he was too stunned to defend himself against. Then her slaps turned into punches and he got mad; he stiff-armed her and raised his stop sign threateningly. The bag lady fell back into a cringe, chanting “Hit me? Hit me?” (Or maybe it was “Hit me! Hit me!”—when I thought about it later, that seemed more likely.)
“Get the hell out of my face!” the crossing guard said, and she did—but as she turned to go she stumbled and fell into me, hissing three words in Latin into my ear. Then she was gone, fast-walking east along Orchard.
“What do you want?” said the crossing guard, finally acknowledging me. I gave him the tribal salute and took off after my Probate officer.
By the time I caught up to her she was in full schizophrenic muttering mode. Most of it was impossible to make out, but here and there I’d catch a few words: “Pay attention!…Watch! Watch!…Not on the rocks, Billy!”
She led me to a delicatessen called Silverman’s. A sign in the window said CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY, but when she stepped up to the door, it opened for her.
Inside, Bob True was sitting at a table by the meat counter. The bag lady breezed right past him, going into a back corner of the room and putting her face to the wall. True gave her a moment, then called out gently: “Annie. We need you in the present day.”
She straightened up and came out of her corner. The craziness in her eyes had gone back a bit but it hadn’t disappeared, and when she offered her hand to shake I had to push myself to take it.
“Annie Charles,” she introduced herself.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the last of the Brontë sisters.”
“Let’s begin,” said True, gesturing. I joined him at the table. There was a third chair, but rather than sit, Annie stood behind it, wringing her hands and making little noises.
“Your Probate assignment,” True said. He handed me a school notebook, the kind with the black-and-white speckled covers; the name ARLO DEXTER had been scrawled in the “I belong to” box in red Crayola. I figured it was an official case file, like the Deeds and Loomis SAT booklets.
The notebook was full of crayon drawings. Page one showed a frowning stick-figure boy—ARLO, according to the caption—in a short-sleeve shirt and black short pants.
On page two, Arlo stood on a chair beside a workbench, his tongue sticking out in concentration as he performed some kind of surgery on a teddy bear. On page three, Arlo was walking, holding the teddy bear out in front of him. On page four, he’d set the teddy bear on the ground and backed away; a second stick-figure boy—ROGER OLSEN—approached from the opposite direction. On page five, Roger picked up the teddy bear, and Arlo covered his ears. On page six, the teddy bear vanished in a cartoon explosion. On page seven, Roger stood crying with his face covered in soot and s
moke rising from his head; Arlo, watching from the sidelines, smiled.
On page eight, Arlo was alone again, and unhappy…
The same basic sequence was repeated over and over. Each explosion was a little more powerful than the last one. A boy named Gregg Faulkner who picked up a booby-trapped cereal box didn’t just lose his hair, one of his eyes was X-ed out. A girl named Jody Conrad lost both her eyes, and a boy named Tariq Williams lost a hand. In the most gruesome scene of all, a boy named Harold Rodriguez jetted so much blood from the stumps of his arms that Arlo had to break out an umbrella.
I looked over at True. “You know, I know you guys are obsessed with secrecy, but this is like beyond tasteless…”
“What you’re holding isn’t an internal organization report,” he told me. “It’s a facsimile of a notebook discovered during a search of Arlo Dexter’s apartment.”
“He drew this himself? How old is he?”
“Thirty-two. That’s chronological age, of course. His mental self-image—”
“Who cares?” I interrupted. “When do I kill him?”
“Soon. But there are some questions we’d like answered first, if possible. Turn to the next page.”
On the page following the Harold Rodriguez bloodbath, Arlo was center stage again, but this time he’d been joined by three other stick figures. Not people. Monkeys. Two of them had him bookended and were whispering to him in stereo; the third monkey stood nearby, holding a black briefcase.
On the next page, the briefcase was lying open on the ground, and Arlo was on his knees beside it with his hands clasped and his mouth forming an O of perfect joy. The monkeys clustered behind him, looking pleased by his reaction. As for the briefcase, the drawing didn’t show what was in it, but whatever it was was pumping out yellow and orange rays of light, and given Arlo’s habits it wasn’t hard to come up with possibilities.
“Do we know who these other guys are?” I asked.
“That’s one of the questions we’d like answered.”
“I suppose Al Qaeda would be too obvious, huh?”
“Not too obvious, just unlikely. Arlo Dexter is an apolitical psychopath, not an Islamic jihadist. Besides, look at the way he’s drawn them. To depict Arabs as monkeys would almost certainly be an expression of contempt. But Mr. Dexter isn’t contemptuous of his new associates. He admires them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Turn the page.”
On the next page—actually a two-page spread, and the last drawing in the notebook—Arlo was on the move again, carrying the black briefcase towards some sort of fenced-in area where a huge crowd of stick-figures was gathered. I could tell it was Arlo carrying the briefcase because he was still wearing his shirt and short pants. But he had a new head on his shoulders: he’d become a monkey too, now.
“I take it you don’t know what his target is, either.”
“No,” said True, “and that’s the most important question of all. If Dexter’s confederates aren’t imaginary, then stopping him may not be enough; there could be other monkeys with briefcases.”
“Have you thought about just asking him who his buddies are? I mean, you guys do do interrogations, right?”
“We do, and it may come to that. But the more effective methods of extracting information tend to be time-consuming, and we don’t believe we have much time. So we’ve decided instead to keep a close watch on Dexter and see what he does. Your job will be to help with the surveillance and perform any other tasks that may come up; and if it looks as though Dexter is about to complete his mission, you’ll see to it that he doesn’t succeed.”
“Cool,” I said. “Where’s my gun?”
“It’ll be delivered to you shortly. For now, go with Annie and do as she says; she’s been fully briefed on the details of the operation.”
“With Annie, right…Listen, True, can I talk to you privately for a second?”
“Later,” True said, getting up. “We’re on a tight schedule, and I have other things to attend to.”
Right. I knew a brush-off when I heard it—and Annie, for her part, knew a vote of no confidence when she heard it. When we got back outside, the first thing she said was: “You’re frightened of me.”
“‘Frightened’ is kind of strong,” I lied. “You do freak me out a little, yeah, but—”
“You don’t need to be frightened.” She flashed me this brittle smile. “I know how I seem, but I’m really very dependable. God keeps me focused.”
“Oh-kay, well that’s good to hear…So what does God want us to do first?”
“How much money do you have?”
“Not a lot. Maybe twenty bucks and change.”
“Give me the twenty.”
Two doors down from the deli was a corner grocery that sold scratch lottery tickets. “Which kind do you like?” Annie asked me. There were fifteen varieties to choose from, most with some type of gambling theme: Lucky Poker, Scratch Roulette, Twenty-One, Three-Card Monte…Then I noticed this one kind called Jungle Cash that had pictures of animals on it, including a baboon that was being stalked by a pair of tigers. “That one,” I said, and Annie nodded approvingly.
Jungle Cash tickets were two bucks each. Annie bought ten, and when we scratched them all off, nine were winners. We left the store with over three hundred dollars.
“Does that always work?” I asked.
“‘There will be water if God wills it,’” Annie replied, and flagged down a taxi.
The cab took us to an address in the Richmond, a Pentecostal church called the Chapel of the Redeemer. It reminded me of the Diazes’ church in Siesta Corta, and, already keyed up by Annie’s God-talk, I got worried that my training curriculum was going to include speaking in tongues. But then I noticed the chains on the front doors, and the sign that said PROPERTY FOR LEASE.
“What is this place?” I asked, thinking maybe Arlo Dexter was using it for a bomb factory.
“Home,” said Annie.
“You live here? You and God?”
“Not inside,” she said. “Around back.”
Around back was a small cemetery. Like the church doors, the cemetery gate was chained and padlocked, but Annie had a key.
Her home was a refrigerator box covered with a waterproof tarp. The open end of the box faced a grave marked WILLIAM DANE. The grave plot had been neatly outlined with stones, and Annie was careful to step around it.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she said, and crawled into the box.
Some questions you don’t ask, especially of a crazy person. So while I was waiting, I decided to treat this situation as one of the organization’s test puzzles, which for all I knew it was. I hadn’t seen a ring on Annie’s fingers, so William Dane probably wasn’t her husband. He could have been her lover, I thought, but then when I took another look at the plot, I noticed the stone outline was too small for an adult-sized coffin.
“All right…” Annie reappeared, wearing a light blue knapsack that clashed with her bag-lady couture. She crouched beside the grave and patted the headstone in a way that dispelled any doubt Billy Dane was her son. Then she looked up at the sky. The rain had stopped but it was still overcast, and I could tell she didn’t like the idea of leaving the kid alone in bad weather; I half expected her to pull the tarp off the refrigerator box and use it as a blanket. But she resisted the impulse, and got back up after giving the headstone one more pat.
“Where to now?” I asked.
“Just follow me. And pay attention.”
We set off on foot in the general direction of downtown. We’d gone maybe a block when Annie started doing the muttering thing again. This time I couldn’t make out a single word. I tried to just ignore it, but I couldn’t do that either—the babble coming out of her mouth had this weird insistent edge to it, like fingernails on a blackboard.
“Annie?” I said. “Snap out of it, Annie,” but all that did was up her volume a couple notches. People on the street were turning to stare at us, and so I started
craning my head around, looking up at the clouds, at the buildings we passed, my body language sending out the message: “Just because I’m walking next to this person doesn’t mean I’m with her.”
Then suddenly the mutter cut off, and Annie’s hand caught my wrist. I looked down; my right foot was in midair, about to step down onto the jagged base of a broken wine bottle.
“Pay attention,” Annie said.
So after that I watched where I was walking, while Annie’s mutter wormed its way into my ear and set up shop in my back brain. Next thing I knew we were back in the Haight, in front of a hotel called the Rose & Cross. The doorman nodded to Annie and slipped her a set of keys.
We went up to the second floor, to a room with a single twin-size bed. The bed was just made, the covers turned down invitingly; Annie pushed me towards it and said, “I’m going to take a shower. You sleep.”
“Sleep?” I said. “It’s like eleven o’clock in the morning…” But the truth is I was exhausted; the miles of listening to her babble had worn me out. I kicked off my shoes and climbed under the covers. By the time my head hit the pillow I was elsewhere.
I was in a classroom, sitting at a pupil’s desk, third row center. Up at the blackboard, a younger, saner-looking Annie was sketching out an organizational chart. The boxes in the chart formed a rough pyramid; the one at the very top was marked T.A.S.E. Directly below this, connected to it by a double line, was a box labeled COST-BENEFITS. More lines radiated downwards from there, linking to other divisions and subdivisions, some of which I already knew about (Catering, Random Acts of Kindness), but most of which I didn’t (Scary Clowns?). I was kind of disappointed to see that despite having a direct link to Cost-Benefits, Bad Monkeys was at the bottom of the pyramid.
While Annie finished up the chart, I looked around for a distraction. There were no other students, so note-passing was out, and the classroom windows didn’t offer a view, just this white glow, like the school was floating in a cloud. Then I lifted up my desktop and found a textbook inside, something called Secrets of the Invisible College. It sounded interesting.