Dance of Death

by John Case

  “It’s just a small thing,” Bo explained, “but –”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes, he thinks he’s a character in a novel.”

  Hakim stared at him, nonplussed. He wasn’t quite sure just what it was that his nephew was saying. “A novel?” he asked.

  Bo nodded.

  “You mean, like this man, Mahfouz? A novel like one of his?”

  Bo bit into his Dove Bar, savoring the interplay of chocolate on vanilla. “No, Uncle. Nothing as good as that.”

  Two

  Washington, D.C. | December 17, 2004

  THE FIRST THING Jack Wilson did when he got to Washington was take a bath. Which was strange. Because baths had never been his thing, not at all. But after nine years of showering under surveillance, the prospect of a long hot soak by himself was irresistible.

  So he lay in the water with his eyes half-closed, listening to the faucet drip, transfixed by the silence, mesmerized by the steam. Slowly, the days and nights in prison began to fall away, like blocks of ice calving from a glacier.

  One of these days, he thought, I’ll go to a hot spring. Like the ones they have in Wyoming. Just me and the rocks and the water, the trees and the stream. Pine needles. They say it’s a whole other world. A world like … Then.

  The day replayed itself at its own speed. First, the fingerprinting at the prison in Pennsylvania, then the paperwork, then the dressing out. This last, a joke. Because nothing fit. Just his shoes and his watch. And the watch was dead.

  Not that it mattered. Everything that happened in Allenwood, or in any prison for that matter, happened early, and went downhill. There was nothing to do except time, and the badges got you up at dawn to make sure you did every second of it. So you didn’t need a watch – you needed a timer. Something that counted backward in years, months, and days.

  That morning, when the last gate rolled back, it was about an hour after daybreak. A federal Bureau of Prisons van waited outside the fence, fuming under an iron sky. The driver took him and another guy to a bus stop outside a country store on the outskirts of White Deer. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees out, and all Wilson had for a coat was the suit jacket he’d gone to prison in.

  He’d hurried inside, but he didn’t stay long. There was a “No Loitering” sign on the register, and the cashier had a look on his face that said “This means you.”

  So he and the other guy stood in the cold like a couple of temple dogs, wary of one another, stamping their feet at the entrance to Buddy’s Pik ’n Pak. The locals, cannon fodder to a man, wouldn’t even look at them.

  Was it – were they – so obvious?

  Well, yeah. There was the van, for one thing, with “B.O.P.” stenciled on the side. (That was a clue.) And the running shoes. No one on the outside wore running shoes in winter – not when there was snow on the ground. And then there was the “luggage” each of them carried: a cardboard box with duct tape along the seams. No wonder people looked the other way. (Not that looking away would save them. Nothing would save them. Nothing could.)

  Eventually, the bus showed up. In a blast of wit, the other guy said something like, “Well, if it ain’t the Long Dog!” (Get it? Like the bus is a Greyhound?) They each bought tickets to the Port Authority in New York, which turned out to be as hivelike as any federal prison he’d been in. But it was exciting, too, because it was the first time in years that Wilson could spend money – real money – in a store. So there was a hot dog at Nathan’s, and a newspaper at Smith’s. After that, he got on a second bus, heading down to Washington.

  He rolled in a little after four o’clock, and took a cab to the Monarch Hotel, where there was a room waiting for him, courtesy of Bo. (And a good thing, too. He had less than fifty dollars on him.)

  “Everything’s taken care of. Room service, minibar, Nintendo …” The clerk smiled at his little joke, then slid a registration card across the desk. “If you’ll just fill this out …”

  Wilson printed his name, then hesitated when he came to the space for an address. There was a chance, if not a likelihood, that the desk clerk would recognize a phony zip code. But the only zip code he could think of was the P.O. Box at Allenwood, which wouldn’t do at all. So he changed the last number to six and made up the rest. 12 Pine St., Loogan, PA 17886. The clerk didn’t blink an eye, which probably meant that he’d never been in prison. If he had, he’d have smiled, because a “loogan” was slang for an inmate who’d gone nuts.

  “Will you need any help with your luggage?”

  Wilson looked up. Was this guy dissing him? The cardboard box that held his belongings rested on the floor beside him. “That’s okay,” Wilson said. “I can carry it myself.”

  The clerk cocked his head deferentially, then slipped a Ving Card into the registration folder. Jotting down a room number on the outside, he pushed the folder across the counter, and paused. Looked thoughtful. Frowned. “I think we may be holding something for you,” he said. Turning away from the counter, he disappeared through a doorway, then reemerged a few seconds later, offering a FedEx Pak as if it were a coronation pillow. “Welcome to the Monarch …”

  Wilson lay in the tub for half an hour, topping off the hot water with little twists of his left foot. At some point, the temperature of the bath was almost the same as his own so that, with his eyes closed, he couldn’t be sure where the water began and he ended. It was as if he’d dissolved.

  Asleep, awake, he floated between two worlds and multiple identities. Copworld and Washington. Inmate and guest. Light danced on the back of his eyelids.

  A voice in the back of his head whispered, You can’t let go like this. You float, you dream – you end up like Marat.

  He was thinking of the painting, the one by Jacques-Louis David with the revolutionary dead in the tub. Supine. Bled out. At Stanford, Wilson’s art history professor had joked about the picture, saying it gave new meaning to the word “bloodbath.” (Which reminded him: He had work to do.)

  A wall of water surged to the end of the tub as Wilson got to his feet, climbed out, and went to the sink. Standing in front of the mirror, sleek and flushed and glistening, he felt like a snake that had just crawled out of its skin.

  But the tats on his chest gave the lie to that. With a broken needle and a ballpoint pen, his cellmate had scratched a ghost shirt into his flesh. A crescent moon on one shoulder, stars on the other. Birds and a bear, a dragonfly and a rough sketch of the man whose name he shared, copied from a daguerreotype in a book. And just below all that, a dipsy-doodle of dots and slashes that, translated from the Paiute, read:

  When the earth trembles, Do not be afraid.

  He was the Ghost Dancer.

  Drawing a razor across his cheek, it occurred to him – not for the first time – that the ink might have been a mistake. It was the kind of macho bullshit that was everywhere in prison, as unavoidable as the smell of Lysol.

  If anything, he was inconveniently memorable, even without the ink. For one thing, he was six-four – and he’d been working out for years, living clean in the cage they’d built for him. His face was the color of copper, flat and broad. His nose was a hook between his eyes, which were, like his hair, Jim Jones black.

  He had the light beard of his people, so he didn’t need to lather. Just a few scrapes and he was done. Tossing the razor into the wastebasket, Wilson reached for the white robe on the back of the door. Putting it on was like stepping into a cloud.

  The FedEx Pak lay on the bed, just past the bathroom door. Stripping the package open, he found a videocassette box inside and, with it, the winter issue of Documenta Mathematica. With a faint smile, he opened the journal, and turned to the title page:

  J. WILSON:

  ISOTROPY AND FACTORIZATION IN PHASE-CONJUGATE SCALAR PAIRS

  A soft snort of satisfaction propelled him over to the minibar, where he found a chilled split of Veuve Clicquot. Working out the cork with a soft pop, he took a long pull from the bottle. How many federal prison
ers, he asked himself, had published articles in mathematics journals over the past year? Had there been another? Almost certainly not. And it wasn’t a fluke, either. This was his third publication in the last four years, which would have been good enough for tenure at a lot of universities. And his degree wasn’t even in mathematics!

  Tossing the journal onto the bed, he turned his attention to the video box. Prying it open, he found a stack of hundred-dollar bills held together by a metal clip, and a blue passport with copper-colored lettering: República de Chile. Even without opening it, he knew what he’d find inside: a picture of himself and, if he was lucky, the name he’d requested of Bobojon. He opened the passport with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

  And there it was. The name: d’Anconia. Francisco d’Anconia. A plume of adrenaline shot through his heart as the realization hit him: It’s on. It’s actually on. Vertigo whirled in his chest and it seemed, almost, as if he were looking into an abyss. His heart kicked. The room turned and there it was, just as Nietzsche said: The abyss was looking into him.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Maybe the thing to do is start all over. Just take the money and run. He could set up shop in Mexico, and go to work on his own. Just take it apart, brick by brick, all by himself. He didn’t need Bo for that. He didn’t need anybody.

  But he definitely needed money. More money than this, actually. Which is why he had Bo, Bo and his partners.

  Swigging champagne, he sat down on the bed and stripped the tape from the box that he’d brought with him from Allenwood. Inside were a sheaf of old patents, a battered Sony Walkman, and copies of motions his lawyers had filed. There were also a couple of cassette tapes (Colloquial Serbian, I & II) and a small collection of well-thumbed books: Hari Poter i kamen mud rosti, Atlas je zadrhtao, and Plato’s Dialogues.

  Stacking the books on the table beside the bed, he slipped cassette #2 into the Walkman. He’d listen to it later.

  But first, he decided to hit the stores. There were a couple of things he ought to get, just to look respectable. A coat, for one thing, and a decent pair of shoes. A sportswatch.

  As he dressed, his eyes strayed to the VHS box. Its cover depicted a busty blonde, eyes wide with terror, fleeing a tidal wave of unimaginable proportions. Between the blonde and the wave was a doomed, if futuristic, metropolis on which the film’s title was stamped in bloodred letters: Atlantis – Pop. 0!

  Wilson wondered if the box was supposed to be a joke, but decided that it wasn’t. In all likelihood, it was Bo’s idea of “research.” And why not? Even if the drowned civilization was a myth, its relevance was clear.

  Lying awake in their cell at night, they had talked about a lot of things, including the books they were reading. Wilson introduced Bo to Nietzsche, and Bo repaid him with the words of an Arab revolutionary named Qutb. Atlantis came up in the context of a television show they’d watched and the two of them had talked about it often. Since Plato was the source of the Atlantis myth, Bo insisted that the tale must be true. Wilson was skeptical, but the myth had a certain utility: It reinforced the notion that civilization was a fragile enterprise.

  It was dark when Wilson left the hotel, but it wasn’t late. He took a taxi across the Potomac to the Pentagon City mall, where he went Christmas shopping for himself, using some of the cash Bo had sent. He found a pair of shoes he liked at Allan Edmonds, a cashmere overcoat and a change of clothes at Nordstrom’s. A jeweler replaced the battery in his watch, and he bought the few toiletries he needed at the local Rite Aid. By then, it was too late to get a haircut, but not to buy a laptop. He found a cheap one at Circuit City Express, right there in the mall. Incredibly, it cost half as much as his old computer, the one the government had seized, and this one came with ten times the power and fifty times the memory.

  The ride back to the hotel was bumper to bumper, but Wilson didn’t care. Sitting in the back of a taxi with a pile of presents for himself reminded him of the glory days when Goldman Sachs was calling twice a day with updates on … what did they call it? The “impending financial event.”

  So it was great to be out again, out on his own, cruising the political theme park that was Washington. The Pentagon on one side, Arlington on the other. River and bridge. The shrine to Lincoln. The setting made him feel like he was starring in his own movie.

  Then he was back at the Monarch, and he had to hand it to Bo. The place was a palace, a tower of glass with an eight-story atrium filled with fountains and tropical plants, marble walkways and Persian rugs. Women in expensive suits sipped martinis on white couches in the lobby, while businessmen and bureaucrats huddled over little bowls of nuts, talking quietly.

  There was a time when he’d have taken all of this for granted. But that was then, when he was flying around the country looking for venture capital. Now, he took nothing for granted. Not even the little bowls of nuts.

  Even the elevator was a marvel, a dimly lighted sanctum of inlaid woods, with a Cole Porter melody piped in over the soft whir of the cables. In the air, a hint of perfume. Quite a change, in other words, from the dead white light and pale green cinder block, the incessant clamor and general stink of the last few years.

  When he got to his room, Wilson unpacked the laptop and plugged it into a jack beside the phone. It took about ten minutes to get everything up and running, and then he was on the Internet for the first time in a long while.

  Going to my.yahoo.com, he logged on with the user ID (“wovoka”) and the password they’d agreed upon (“tunguska”). The home page loaded slowly, at first, then all in a rush. Clicking on Mail, he selected the Draft folder, where he found a single message waiting:

  To:

  Subject: thursday

  Message: just wait in room. dont go out

  Wilson erased the message, and replaced it with “That’s what I’ll do.” Then he saved the new draft and signed out.

  The protocol was his idea. Yahoo!’s e-mail accounts were free, and they were accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and the right password. As easy to abandon as they were to open, the accounts contained a feature that allowed the user to store messages in a Draft folder until they were ready to be sent, which, in the case of Wilson’s communications with Bo, would be never. For them, the folder served as a bulletin board, a password-protected message center that was, to all intents and purposes, invisible. Since the messages were “drafts,” and the drafts were never sent, they wouldn’t show up on anyone else’s radar screen.

  That was the idea, at least.

  just wait in room. dont go out

  In other words: I’m on my way.

  Good, Wilson thought. The sooner we get started, the better. Meanwhile, he had the Internet. Wilson hadn’t surfed the Net for years, and the prospect excited him. This Google thing … it was like nothing he’d ever seen. He put his own name in the box, surrounded by quotes, then hit Return and watched as nearly 200,000 hits were generated. Most were not about him. He shared his name with lots of other people, including a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Florida car dealership, and the president of the University of Massachusetts – not to mention his namesake. So he added “prison” to the search, hit Return a second time, and watched as the number of hits fell to 1,408. He might have narrowed it down even further, adding words like “patent” and “conspiracy,” but there was something else that Jack Wilson wanted to do even more.

  Backspacing through the Google data field, he erased the earlier entry, and inserted what he really wanted to know about: “russian brides.” In an instant, he had a million hits. Clicking on a website called ukrainebrides.org, he trawled through the pictures and the pitch: Marina … Olga … The Russian woman is a feminine gal … Lydmila … It is in her expectation to be a lady. Tatyana … The Russian woman has no interest in women’s lib. She works for husband first! Career is second!

  This thing with the brides was Bo’s idea. Their last year together in Allenwood, the two of them had sometimes lain awa
ke, talking quietly about what it was going to be like After. For Bo, After would take care of itself, inshallah. Not so for Wilson, who wasn’t a Muslim. For Wilson, After was going to take a lot of work. And unlike Bobojon, he expected to survive it.

  Wilson’s cellmate saw himself as a dead man, so his interest in Paradise was predictable. Listening to Bo talk about it, Wilson got the impression that “Paradise” was a lot like a spa, except that the spa was up in the clouds, where wine was served by transparent virgins who were desperate to go at it for the first time.

  Still, it was Bo who told him about the Russian brides. But now, Wilson saw, it wasn’t just Russians. You could pick from different countries: Colombia, the Philippines, Thailand. You could have any kind of girl you wanted. Just click on the little box that read Add to Cart, and the woman’s e-mail address was yours. After that, it was up to you to woo her, meet her, marry her.

  The page that Wilson was looking at contained a dozen photographs of attractive, if heavily made-up, women with long hair and coy smiles. There was a brief résumé next to each, listing their particulars.

  Lydmila, for instance, tipped the scales at 57 kilos and 168 centimeters. She was twenty-four years old. Blond hair, blue eyes. A “technologist” by profession. “Warmhearted.” Enjoyed the occasional drink. Smoking? No. Hobbies? Yes! Sewing, knitting, and decorating cakes. “Is seeking respectable Western gentleman with kind heart.”

  Well, Wilson thought, that lets me out.

  Sitting back in his chair, Wilson remembered that he had an appointment with a social worker on Thursday, a person charged with “assisting” him in his adjustment to life on the outside. There would be job and housing leads, earnest advice, etc. For the smallest part of a moment, he toyed with the idea of going through with the meeting. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see if the Pentagon was paying attention. Did they know he’d been released? Would they restrict his employment? His travel? Maybe.

  But only if they knew he was out. Only if they were paying attention.