His tirade put the shakes into her. Her eyes began darting about. I knew the feeling too well—looking for an exit. An excuse to resume whatever less thrilling thing she was doing before her phone rang, and she was foolish enough to pick it up.
“Not a dog,” she muttered, eyes down, submissive and hurt. “Cat. His name is Horace.”
That almost derailed Dandine; I saw it in his eyes. “Horace?” he said, caught between doubt and absurdity. “That’s a terrible name for a cat.”
“Rough night,” I said, mostly to contribute.
This was clinical, bug-under-the-microscope stuff. I was watching Linda a.k.a. Choral Anne react the same way I had when Dandine first showed up in his ninja suit. Except now I was on the other side of the fence, watching her and judging her weak, full up with denial. Now I was one of the good bad-guys. Dandine shot me a glare, already knowing what was going on inside my head. Don’t protect her, the glare said. Not worth it.
“Those guys you said, you know, the narcos?”
I realized Dandine had not made a mistake; he had said “narcos.” If Choral had responded by saying NORCO, then she would have been lying to us. Normal people weren’t supposed to know about NORCO.
“I think they may have been the same guys Licia had some meetings with. Closed-door stuff. I wasn’t invited.”
“You call your boss Licia?”
“Better than calling her Horace,” I said.
“Stop making fun of my cat,” she said.
“Choral, what did the guys look like? Government bodyguard types, identical suits, too tight?”
“Yeah. Short hair, no smiles, a lot of sunglasses.”
“Some fashions never change, Choral.”
She was on the verge of tears, but I had to marvel at Dandine’s tactic. He had started off ridiculing her name; now he was using it normally—the same way he’d used mine, when he began talking me into shit. We were already moving north.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Cab stand, a couple of blocks up,” Dandine said. “One of the few places in Hollywood you can actually grab a taxi right off the street without phoning for an appointment.”
I trooped along behind them, trying to remember that I was supposed to be holding down on Choral with a firearm, all business.
“Choral,” said Dandine, “you don’t happen to know a gentleman who might have given his name as Gerardis, do you?”
“No. Why?” She was back to monosyllables.
“Not important. But here’s how I think you were lied to: Somehow, some way, your boss found out there was a plan to do harm to her. You drew the scut-work duty of securing Varga and his hirelings to pull a short-term cleanup. I think your boss—Alicia—mentioned this to her secret advisers, because when we went to see Varga to get your name, all of a sudden we had a lot of gunners shooting at us. You see how this all sifts out? Your boss doesn’t give a shit about you, and if she needs to sacrifice you, she will . . . because she answers to someone higher up.”
“That’s crazy,” she said, actually stopping to look at him. “If everybody’s in on it, and she doesn’t get hurt, then what’s the deal?”
And why is NORCO so concerned? I thought. Assuming that NORCO even existed. After all, I only had Dandine’s word for it . . . and his name probably wasn’t even Dandine, not for real. I tried to listen to what he told Choral with fresh ears, displacing myself from my own recent nightmare, testing the alternate perspective for leaks.
All he said to her was: “Now that’s an intelligent question.” To me, he added, “I’ve got to think about this. You sit in back with her.”
There were several Checker cabs congregated around a traffic triangle at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont. all passengers ride for one fare, a sign in the backseat advised. It was a flat fee to LAX, plus surcharges, plus an extra $2.50 for making the trip at night, which I’ve never understood. Dandine made sure there was enough cash in Choral’s wallet to cover us.
Most of the forty-five-minute ride passed in eerie silence, on nearly empty surface streets. Choral was scared, moping, catatonic, or all three. Dandine was folded inward, running more meditation protocols or whatever it was he did to clear his head. Processing data. And what was I going to do, talk to the Russian driver about the fucking weather?
“I’ve been having this really bad dream,” Choral said, her gaze defocused out the port window of the cab. We had ridden together, about a foot apart in the backseat, in silence for nearly half an hour. Just as she spoke, rain droplets began to pelt the glass, smearing backward from our speed. “I’m trying to put together this outdoor party thing, to call a lot of people at the last minute, and it starts to rain. I get frustrated and run away, down a very long staircase to a city street. There are security gates on the staircase; I have to climb around them. Then I look down and the stairs aren’t stairs, but those round wooden things—you know, dowels. They hurt my feet. I jump around the last security gate and land on a city street, and a Chinese photographer snaps my picture and tries to sell me a copy, but we both have to move out of the rain. I don’t have any shoes on and my feet are soaked. And I’m huddling under an awning near a newsstand, and a Persian man tries to sell me a self-published book explaining how Allah is really running things, and that Allah isn’t such a bad guy, for a deity.”
During our transit time I had been formulating my own fantasy about Choral—pondering whether she was for real, loading up options in case she wasn’t, trying very hard not to make her a castaway in the same boat as me.
Maybe I didn’t want to share the boat. I had convinced myself I was caught up in Dandine’s slipstream and pulled along blameless as drift-wood, but how necessary was I now that he had achieved the newest link in his logic chain? I could have resisted harder, or told him no two dozen times between here and his home invasion, but frankly, I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe I was part of whatever was going on. Conrad the player.
I had chosen this. It was outside my skin and I hadn’t fully admitted it yet, but the pick was mine and Dandine, for whatever reason, was letting me ride. Maybe he was curious as to my exterior world versus his interior one, but that was hopeful me, still kidding myself. Maybe he had grown a sprig of conscience and was looking for a confessor. No, that was still too rosy. More likely, he was some kind of demented chaos theoretician who reaped a perverse glee out of mixing in random factors. He’d said as much back at the coffee shop.
I could have resisted harder. Oh, yeah—sure. You try it.
Choral Anne was what Dandine had called a “complicitor.” She was connected to Alicia Brandenberg, and hence the briefcase that had impelled me on my own wild ride, so I did not want to feel sympathy for her. Since she had failed as the be-all, end-all Answer to my questions, she had become the Enemy. But my increasing sense that she was in the dark, too, did nothing but elevate my sympathy for her. She would have to clean up the mess Dandine would make of her credit cards, and probably wasn’t well-paid enough to just have some stranger vacuum her wallet of cash without feeling it on some other level. Maybe poor Horace, the cat, would have to go without fresh litter and kitty treats. If Horace really existed at all, if he wasn’t another of those smoke-screen details that belie a story being told as overspecific hooey.
It wasn’t rainshadows, but tears that streaked her face.
“Why ‘Choral’?” I said. It was kinder than grumbling that’s the stupidest fucking dream I’ve ever heard, and asking about her issues.
“It was my maternal grandmother’s name. Really.”
“Why not ‘Cody,’ or ‘Brittany,’ or ‘Ashleigh,’ or one of those designer names?”
She chewed on a knuckle. “Because some women over thirty grow up, I guess.”
Or maybe not, since she was apparently considering the consequences of her actions for the very first time . . . and they did not please her.
I started to speak again—you know, keep them talking, add disposable bricks to the illusion of a
client relationship—when Dandine overrode me, from the front seat, having resurfaced from his Zen trance, if that’s what it was. “Mr. Lamb.”
I took a beat for me to recall he was talking about me.
“No chitchat,” he said. He knew where I was headed—disposable chitchat land—and aborted my infield play. “T-one,” he told the cabdriver, as we sped up the airport ramp from 96th Street.
Terminal One was the local hub for US Airways and Southwest, less likely to be overpopulated with cops or soldiers all het up about terrorists. Very few red-eyes to Phoenix at this time of night; downstairs, in the section for arrivals and baggage claim, it would be relatively quiet and nonprovocative. Hell, they didn’t even bother to check your bags for tags anymore, down there.
Dandine “helped” Choral rent a Lincoln Town Car with full options while I stood near a rack of pay phones, holding my imaginary “gun” inside my jacket. The car was a good choice; sturdy, maneuverable, yet anonymous. When I asked why, anyway, Dandine just said, “It’s heavier.”
“Okay?” she said, seeking some minimal approval for her complicity.
“Okay,” said Dandine.
Choral seemed a degree brighter, tired and put out, but resigned to a program that needed to play out, like a grinding machine, or a record on a jukebox, trapped in the groove. It could have been worse. It could have been fatal.
“I just can’t figure it out,” she said to me, quietly enough not to attract Dandine’s ire again. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What?” I said.
“I’ve been working on it and rolling it over and over in my mind, but why would Licia be involved in something that required so much deployment of effort, and resources, and like you guys say, even people? When it doesn’t appear to amount to anything?”
“Yeah.” I still couldn’t track it, either. “A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Did everybody have to read Macbeth in high school?”
“I didn’t start quoting it until college.” Normally, to keep the conversation going, I would’ve launched into an amusing anecdote about the quotidian foibles of chasing a university degree. Obscure the more prickly realities with entertaining details that sounded like facts, and made for a better story. Dandine would have said merely to reveal nothing. Innocent factoids could be turned against you by malefactors.
She didn’t look to me like a ringer. She looked like she simply wanted an honest answer. If it was a spy trick, it was a good one. But my own Trickster, no doubt, had long preceded Choral to the same destination, and would advise me not to step into a potential mantrap. I also knew that Dandine was no Outlaw Josey Wales, and had scant intention of vagabonding through the landscape, collecting enough in formants to form a caravan, suffering them all with detached yet humorous fatalism.
A safe distance from the rental counter, Dandine handed Choral forty of her own remaining dollars, folded double. He pointed past the automatic doors of the terminal, toward the cabstand outside. “Go home,” he said.
“What about my cards?” said Choral, not willing to be cut loose so ignominiously. “What am I supposed to do about—?”
“Shhh,” said Dandine. “Go home now.”
She looked from one of us to the other, expecting something more climactic, or needing a more definitive closure, or perhaps fearing the long-threatened bullet. All drama, too far gone in the day. All the patterns we endlessly replicate, without thinking. Pretty soon the sun would rise and it would become the next day. She couldn’t stop her gaze from seeking the doors; the EXIT sign might as well have read ESCAPE, and she gravitated toward them despite all her unanswered questions, or her due of outrage at the rough use we had made of her life.
“Sorry,” I said. I don’t know if she heard it.
Dandine did, and poked me with an elbow. “Aww. That’s sweet.”
“On top of everything else, we’re muggers, now.”
His eyes indicated that we should walk briskly to the rental car bay and blow the hell out of there, posthaste. “You’re mistaking your attraction to her for an innocence she does not possess. She’s tied up with Alicia Brandenberg, don’t forget.”
“So you cut her loose. She’ll be on a phone in five seconds. Sooner, if the cabdriver has a cell.”
“I think she was only involved as far as contacting Varga. It’s obvious that she’s been kept in the dark. I think she is only realizing that, now, and it will impact how she approaches her employer about what happened to her tonight. It’s more useful to set her free, and gauge the responses to what she does, to try to form a clearer picture.” He consigned her credit cards to the nearest trash can, after wiping them down.
“So everybody’s still in the dark, you included.”
“Less so,” he said. “This operation, this plot, is so shielded as to suggest NORCO’s internecine machinations. It’s the way they work.”
“NORCO again.” I sighed. I had a right to feel strung out. “What’s inter-ness . . . what did you say?”
“Internecine,” he said. “Look it up.”
Dandine drove the Town Car to one of the airport hotels, any of the airport hotels. They, too, were comfortably anonymous. He tooled around until he located a gang of private cars from assorted rental outlets, and switched out the license plates. Then he checked into a suite, apparently on his own dime, again.
Right when I was feeling victorious because Dandine had “chosen” me over Choral Anne Grimes, he nailed me.
“Stay or go?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Stay or go—you. You’re not my prisoner. I’ve apprised you of the consequences of trying to innocently resume your life. I don’t need your help, and you don’t have any additional information. By now you have some appreciation of the risk factor. So . . . stay or go?”
Part of me bristled at being so baldly useless. In the world of the walking dead, at least, I always had something to contribute. It all seemed peripheral now, less important. I could shrug it off and say the feeling was due to the innate nosiness that normal people have about what goes on behind the scenes of their reality, but what rankled me was the suggestion that it might be preferable, for “somebody like me” (a norm), to re-don blinders and go about my life of un-willful ignorance.
Where, in the next twenty-four hours or so, I was likely to be detained, roughly interrogated, and possibly murdered, because it was cleaner for all the puppet masters—that maddeningly faceless Them, the people that really run everything. You’ve always suspected They exist. You and I complain about Them a lot, without considering their actual shape, or scope. “Why don’t They just provide socialized medicine?” we grouse, sipping overpriced boutique coffee. “Why don’t They just give us electric cars?” Or, “What They should have done is bartered grain for petroleum,” or “lowered taxes,” or, in short, “solved my problems for me.” Well, They do . . . and we all pick up the check. They have trained us so that it’s easier and more convenient to just pay the bill, take it up the ass, and eat our gruel with a smile.
And I’m one of Them. My job is to talk you into footing the bill every time. And you love all my little seductions. But in a merchant economy, the only true god is profit, and I’m on bended knee, just like you.
People love venomless risk. The saccharine danger of amusement park rides and the catharsis of fiction. The torpor of narcotics and the exercise of loveless sex. Bungee jumping cheap thrills for the walking dead, to lend an illusion of “life” to that which is not alive. You can buy all that and more, in the marketplace of distraction. You can be entertained to death, when you are defined by what you consume. Anyone who dares confess a desire for spiritual growth is mocked into marginalization. I’m not talking about religion; I’m talking about being more than the products you buy, and living a life instead of just hanging on and hoping for the best, like a chimp swinging vine to vine. It’s dangerous for someone in the advertising business to be thinking
like this.
They ought to do something about that.
We prefer to admit we’re trapped in forceful waters we cannot control, and find success and fulfillment in just being swept along on someone else’s tide. It abrogates our responsibility and makes our lives someone else’s fault. It’s a relief not to be accountable, and we love palliatives. Our whole culture is built on the sand of excuses, excuses. Not my fault; not your fault. Their fault.
Some people define success as dying, to beat creditors. Tell me that’s not fucked up.
Why me? I thought yet again. If Dandine was for real, I was being offered an opportunity to acid-test values to which we all pay lip service as ideals. Step up, or step off. You don’t confront yourself without doubt, or excuses. Why not me?
“What would you do?” I asked Dandine. “If you were me? Stay or go?”
Dandine pinched the bridge of his nose. It was pleasing to see him admit a little human fatigue. “Fair enough,” said this man who usually didn’t give a shit about fairness. “You handled yourself well with our confused little Choral. At Varga’s, too. You probably feel in over your head, but you stuck to my rules and didn’t make any frivolous contacts.”
“Because I’m scared to death to call anybody.”
“You’re examining real fear for perhaps the first time in your life,” said Dandine. “But you haven’t run gibbering into the night.”
“You mean like I could right now? Supposedly?”
“Sure you could. But you’re selling yourself on the idea that you just might learn something about how the real world works. You’re not my squire and you’re not indentured. Yet, you’re still here.”
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