Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  The local newspaper made it front-page, with a separate foldout to explain. Architectural plans, computer-generated images of what the display would look like from all angles. They also showed three different pictures of Benton, one the usual head shot, one of him superimposed against something that looked like a flowing wall, and another of him standing before an audience.

  A small audience—just the council, the County Attorney, and a few other people I didn’t recognize.

  One photo was captioned: “What better way to represent our community’s connection to the ocean than a wave?” George Benton says, as he demonstrates the unique features of his incredible act of philanthropy.

  The story explained in detail. An acrylic wall “the length of a football field” would be constructed as a “sandwich.” It would have a flip-up slot running the length of its top for insertion of anything that could fit: photography, painting, poetry in some sections, small sculpture, glass-blown creations, even scale-model airplanes in another.

  The sandwich would be made of varying thicknesses, so it could accommodate “all the art forms.” There was even an “electronic slot” that would house tablets on which different blogs could be posted or a staged performance could run continuously. Benton was quoted:

  If you look at the irregularity of the wall, you’ll see it’s really a sine wave, much as an oscilloscope would record sound. But, for our community, it becomes a “Sign Wave.” A message to all tourists and visitors that our village is the artistic epicenter of the coast. And how much we value all those who contribute to it.

  There it was. A potion of magic words. “Art” and “tourism” were the most sacred anyone in this town could ever speak.

  —

  “You saw the paper?” I said to Dolly.

  “Of course I did. But…Well, so what, Dell? It’s not going to hurt anyone, and the kids are really excited—it’s all they’re talking about.

  “And now we know what he wanted that strip of land for, don’t we? What if he does have an ulterior motive? Another tax break for his hedge fund—who cares? That’s what it’s like in this place. Everyone who donates anything gets his name on a plaque; part of the deal. I don’t care if it’s helping support the library, or buying some new chairs for the waiting room in the hospital; you put some money in, you get to put your name on it.

  “And, believe me, Benton’s name is going to be all over this ‘Sign Wave’ wall. Forever. You won’t be able to look at one without looking at the other.”

  “So why tell you to not run around half-cocked?”

  “Dell! Just stop it, now. Isn’t it obvious? He’s a supreme egotist. What’s so strange about that? He just wanted to be the one to spring the big surprise himself. So, when Undercurrents ran that story about that useless strip of dirt being bought up, piece by piece, I guess he put two and two together and—”

  “He saw the story in Undercurrents, right? So how did he know you had anything to do with it? They don’t disclose their sources.”

  “I…I don’t know. Maybe one of the girls bragged about the super-secret ‘investigation’ we were all doing.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “How could you not, Dolly? One of them talks about one of your damn crusades, how long before another one finds out she’s doing it? And then the girl with the loose mouth goes from insider to outsider in a half-second. Teenage girls—you really think any of them want to run that risk?”

  “Well…”

  “There’s got to be more.”

  “More than huge tax breaks and an even bigger ego?”

  “Why is this PNW Upstream group buying up tracts of land right around where you’re going to build your dog park?”

  “I don’t know, but…”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think I should drop Undercurrents another hint?”

  “No, Dolly,” I said, thinking to myself how desperately she had wanted to find her dream cottage by the ocean. Not for the cottage, not for the ocean…for a place where she could live in peace. “That’s the last thing you should do.”

  “Then I won’t, okay, honey?”

  “Sure.”

  “Dell…”

  —

  “There was nothing to vote on,” Dolly said when she got back from the “open meeting” of the council.

  “Because it’s not going to cost the taxpayers a dime?”

  “That’s the least of it. It’s going to bring in business, sure. And this place is always going to be way in favor of anything that supports the arts. I saw people in the audience who do all of that. Poems and crafts and…you know. Just imagine, all their stuff, on display—if it was put to a vote, it’d be a landslide.

  “And you know what? It is kind of fascinating. The project, I mean. Nobody ever heard of anything like it. It’s going to be built with local labor, too. All Benton has is the design. Which he paid for himself. They’re going to have to build a small casting plant just to create the acrylic sections, never mind transporting them and fitting them into place. That means even more new jobs.”

  “Everybody wins, then?”

  “Who loses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  —

  That was the truth—I didn’t know.

  But what I did know was that, for whatever reason, Rhonda Jayne Johnson was still part of Undercurrents. So the boss hadn’t talked to her. Or stabbed her. But I dismissed that last thought as soon as it came up—whoever that severe-looking woman was in her heart, she was a journalist in her bone marrow.

  I was still thinking about that when Dolly came into the dark kitchen where I’d been waiting for her to return from another council meeting.

  “We’re never going to have our dog park,” she said. Not raising her voice, but I could see the steam coming off her.

  “Why?” is all I asked.

  “You know what ‘eminent domain’ is, Dell?”

  “When the government takes private property for some public purpose.”

  “Ah! You’ve been reading up on it?”

  “No.”

  “I…Never mind. Listen to this: That strip of land, you know, where they’re going to build that ‘Sign Wave’ thing Benton promised? It’s not wide enough to let people park their cars. There’s only space for a walkway. We’re not getting any tourists to come here just to drive by and see that wall at thirty miles an hour. And we’re not getting any ego strokes for the artists if people can’t stroll by and admire their work.”

  “So now they want to…?”

  “Build a bridge! A quaint little wooden bridge, but with a heavy steel skeleton for bracing.”

  “But if they can’t park, what’s the use?”

  “The bridge isn’t for cars, Dell. It’s for people. The parking is on the other side.”

  “On parcels this PNW Upstream group owns?”

  “Yes. But that’s not the…the all of it. There has to be a road built to get to those parking spots.”

  “Even so…”

  “Even so, nothing! If the town takes the land by eminent domain, it has to pay for it. Full market value—whatever that means. And, remember, they have to supply electricity to the strip, too. To light up that ‘wave’ at night.”

  “So the taxpayers…?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But Benton, he had all that covered. His group is going to build all kinds of special shops along that strip. Rent them out. Plus, they expect to make money from the parking. So this hedge fund, it’s going to give us all that for free! Clear the land, build the bridge, and even pay the electricity bill. Pretty nice, huh?”

  “What else?” I asked her, knowing there had to be more. If Dolly was this hot, it wasn’t over losing land for a dog park. With this “fair market value” coming into the picture, her crew would come out way ahead. And land wasn’t that scarce around here that they couldn’t just buy some other parcel.

  “The council
says, after the land is cleared, and the bridge built, and the wall in place, and everything, then there’s a way for the town to turn a big profit, too! The town, not the hedge fund. A ‘convention center.’ A big one, with hotel space attached, so people could come down to the coast to have their annual meetings and things like that.

  “There’s plenty to do here, and conventioneers, they always have money to spend. We can’t have a casino, not with the Tribe so close by, but it’s not much of a drive if you want to gamble. And they were talking about bringing those MMA fights here. Big-name acts, too.”

  “And the hedge fund would own it?”

  “No! We’d own it. The village, I mean. You know how much that would cost, just to get it built? Sixty-five million dollars!”

  “Where would…?”

  “Municipal bonds.” Dolly chopped off what I was trying to ask and got right to it. “It turns out that there isn’t a single GO bond issued by this entire state.”

  “You’re losing me, honey.”

  “Ah…” Dolly exhaled. Then she started brewing herself a cup of tea.

  —

  Even Rascal relaxed as Dolly sat down.

  She threw him a rawhide chew, said some sweet things to the mutt, and laid it out for me.

  “It works like this: a GO bond is a tax-free municipal bond, backed by the full faith and credit of whoever issues it…which means that the investors get paid back from government revenue. Fancy word for taxes. Oregon doesn’t issue them, because this state doesn’t have the credit rating of a deadbeat dad. But individual cities can issue them, usually only on a project-specific basis.

  “Say they want to improve a road where it passes through the town. They can issue these bonds, but the full-faith-and-credit deal only applies to the revenues of an individual department, not the whole government. So, say ODOT—Oregon Department of Transportation—doesn’t get enough revenue coming in from the new highway. Well, that’s just too bad for the investors.

  “And what that means is two things: one, taxes go up; two, the bonds have to pay a pretty high interest rate to attract investors. The smaller the municipality, the higher the rate…in both directions.”

  “The council can’t just decide to raise taxes, right?”

  “No, they can’t. In fact, there’s a state law that prohibits bonds from imposing too high a percentage of property taxes on any community. But there’s one exception to that law. If the town itself votes for it, they can issue those bonds.”

  “Why would…?”

  “I already told you, Dell. People want this ‘wall’ thing. It doesn’t matter what you call it—they want it bad. They don’t see it costing them much of anything, not really. But, given the sixty-five million—and you know everything that gets built runs over budget; it’s actually expected to—just to put the place up, the bonds may not sell all that easy.

  “That’s the joker in the deck! Amazingly enough, PNW Upstream is willing to build the whole thing—convention center, hotel, the golf-cart transport system so tourists can drive around for free, and not pollute the environment, of course. They’d run it, too.”

  “Damn! That’s a bigger score than a thousand kilos of dope. All legal, too. Between the graft on the contract to build it—”

  “With local labor.” Dolly dripped scorn over the garbage dump. “An endless stream of revenue; all of it high-profit, no-risk…it’s a beauty.”

  “Too late for Undercurrents to expose…?”

  “There’s nothing to expose. So the hedge fund makes money—who cares? People are getting what they want, and it’s not coming out of their own pockets.”

  “The taxes—”

  “Like I said, they’ll go up a little bit. Not nearly enough to start a tax revolt. Sure, Undercurrents could expose that this whole thing was a staged setup from the beginning, but there’s no one really interested in that kind of news. It’s the result people care about, and this result is one they want.”

  “No one’s going to raise a stink?”

  “Fait accompli,” my wife said.

  —

  Some people get confused by logic—their emotions fog the mirror.

  Olaf had taught me never to make that mistake, months before he spat out his last will and testament through the blood frothing his mouth.

  “All true logic centers in mathematics. All else is nothing but perception. And emotion clouds perception, making the picture even more hazy.”

  “I don’t get it,” I told him.

  “A refusal to understand is no different from volunteering to be stupid.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Shall we see?” the icy man asked. He wasn’t taunting me. Olaf didn’t do things like that, amuse himself by mocking others. I’m not sure he did anything for amusement. He stood apart from the rest of us. Not physically; he was just on a different level inside his head. It was only because he could occupy that ground without judging the rest of us that I had ever gathered the courage to begin to speak with him. After that, he was my teacher.

  Pressuring him to say “yes” or “no” was a bad move. Just a couple of weeks before, a Slavic thug who I knew from my legionnaire days was trying to get some players for the dice game he always set up whenever we made camp. He never changed his pitch: “Afraid to risk a little cash, pal? We’re out here risking our damn lives, what’s a few bucks?”

  He hadn’t been stupid enough to try that on Idrissa. The Senegalese warrior didn’t always understand English perfectly. If he thought he was being called any kind of coward, his long, curved sword would flash and blood would spurt. Idrissa carried his weapon on a leather strap that he could cover if we were in sunlight, but he did his best work in the darkness.

  But I guess the Slav thought Olaf’s age and his Nordic skin made him a better target. Like I said, Olaf was very good with his “scribes.” But if you didn’t force his hand, you’d never know that.

  Olaf’s spikes were always out of view. And he never seemed to carry them in the same place.

  Nobody mourned the Slav. It wasn’t like La Légion—mercenary commanders never demanded explanations when they saw a dead body lying just past where we camped. We weren’t “comrades in arms,” we were hired guns. And we didn’t bury our dead unless we were going to be in the same place for weeks—vultures are afraid of live humans, but they have more patience than any of us do.

  “Yes,” I said to Olaf’s proposal.

  “One plus one equals two?”

  “Yes…,” I said, kind of wary. Olaf didn’t mock, so there was something behind that simple question I knew I was missing.

  “That would be true if it was, let us say, one rock plus one rock. That would be two rocks.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But rocks can range from pebbles to boulders. One man plus another man could be a force equal to five men. Or putting them together could result in the death of both—so less than one.”

  “But—”

  “We are walking a trail when we pick up the enemy’s spoor. If I toss you two grenades, what do you do with them? If you perceive them as weapons to be used against the enemy, you silently signal your gratitude. If you perceive them as duds, you know that I am your enemy.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  I was about to say, “Because you’re my friend,” but I could see that would be a wrong answer, so I said, “Because you’d have to carry those duds around with you. Extra weight. And for what? If you wanted to kill me, you could just do that.”

  Olaf nodded. “That is a logical conclusion. But it is your logical conclusion, based on your perceptions. Worse, it assumes I share your logic. Who would carry dud grenades in some insanely elaborate plot that had such a small chance of success? And the very real possibility of death if it failed?”

  I shrugged.

  “Then listen: an insanely elaborate plot would seem quite logical to an insane man.”

  “But you can’t walk ar
ound assuming everyone you meet might be crazy.”

  “Why?” Olaf said. “Why must that be so? Is it some law of nature I don’t know about? If it is logical to be suspicious of all strangers—and that is logical—why is it not logical to include the possibility of insanity in your assessment of others?”

  I wasn’t a kid anymore. I didn’t have Patrice, and that hurt. But I wouldn’t have needed him to teach me things I’d already learned. “Whether you get shot in the heart or you get your throat slit, you’re just as dead.”

  “Yes. But there is a significant difference between the two.”

  “Dead is dead.”

  “So—no difference, then?”

  “I don’t see one.”

  “You could be shot in the heart from a half-mile away. But your throat could be slit only by someone who was able to get very close to you.”

  I nodded my head. What Olaf said was obviously true. But it wasn’t until he was dying that I realized that what he had been trying to tell me wasn’t about logic at all.

  —

  I thought about that. All the different pieces of it.

  People say things like “Why would a man with millions of dollars steal?” as if they were employing some form of dispassionate logic. But I knew better. Some people do things because they need to. A wealthy man might not need money…but he might need to steal.

  So, yes, there was a mammoth pile of money in the whole scheme—not a guarantee, but certainly in potential. Still, whenever I went over the whole thing, it reminded me of Olaf’s “insanely elaborate plot.”

  Posing as gay, a patron of the arts, a community activist for years. And then putting a lot of pieces together: bribes, graft, kickbacks. Why go to all that trouble for money when you already had money, especially when you risked losing money if some thread got pulled and the whole thing unraveled?

  I let myself fall into those thoughts, releasing a carrier pigeon with a question I couldn’t be sure would be delivered, much less that an answer would be returned to me.

  It ran through my mind like a ribbon unrolling. Why pay a prostitute when you could get all the women you want for free?

  And Olaf was there, watching. Logic inside the illogical. You pay a whore to be a whore. Not to use her body for your own pleasure, to use it for your own purpose.