Powder Burn

by Blake Banner

  Orlando had closed his eyes.

  Pete said, “Kind of…” but he was watching the joint passing from Orlando’s hand into Tracy’s. “The men from the department came and took some of it away.”

  “What department?”

  He shook his head and took the joint from Tracy. “I don’t know. It’s upstairs. First door next to the bathroom…”

  I stood, left the room and climbed the stairs. On the first landing, directly ahead, there was a bathroom. Next to it, on the right, there was a closed door. I opened it and went in. It had been thoroughly turned over. I stood a moment and examined what I could see. They had torn open the mattress and the pillows. And after that, everything had been dumped on the bed, or beside it in the middle of the floor. The clothes had barely been rifled, but all and any papers had been systematically set aside and examined. I noticed there were books: no fiction, only books on mathematics and quantum physics. I bent and picked one of them up. ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Copenhagen Interpretation: An Analysis’ I opened it and leafed through it. For every paragraph, there seemed to be a page of equations. This was not pop quantum physics for the layman. This was the real thing.

  I picked up another: ‘So Where Is the Moon When I’m Not Looking at It? Copenhagen after Sillanpää’. This one was more of a discussion, but at a very advanced level. There was a piece of torn notepaper tucked between a couple of pages, used as a marker, with something scrawled on it: “The interrogative particle ‘where’ only has meaning in three dimensions of space.”

  Fair point. The rest of his books were in a similar vein, they all had very creased spines and well-thumbed pages, and they were all annotated. Some of the annotations were equations, with no ‘real’ words. I wondered if they were his, or some previous owner’s.

  I went down to the kitchen and found a couple of plastic bags. I took them back up to the bedroom and filled them with his books and his notebooks. Nothing else in the room seemed to be of much importance. As I was leaving, I noticed a calendar hanging on the back of his door, so I took that, too.

  Out on the landing, I paused and considered the door next to Zack’s. On a hunch, I knocked. It was opened by a skinny guy with heavy glasses and short hair. I recognized him as one of the guys who had left when I arrived. He examined me cautiously. I said, “Hi, I’m Zack’s uncle.”

  He shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

  I nodded. “OK, I’m not. I’m a friend of his sister’s. She was worried about him. I’m going to have to tell her he’s dead.”

  “He was hit by a car.”

  “Tracy told me.”

  He did an odd thing with his face, like a secret sneer. “I’m surprised she can remember.”

  “Can you tell me anything about the men who came and turned over his room?”

  “Why should I?”

  It was a reasonable question. I shrugged. “Because I’ll pay you if you do?”

  “How much?”

  “Name a price. If it’s too high, I’ll kick your door down and throw you out the window.”

  He examined my clothes. “Fifty bucks?”

  I nodded.

  “There were two of them. They were like you. They had that kind of military look. They said they were from the Department of National Security. They fooled those morons downstairs, but I know there’s no DNS. Like you, I know Zack didn’t have an American uncle. I’m not stupid.”

  “What did they take?”

  “His diary, his laptop, his cell, some notebooks. He was murdered.”

  “Do you know who by?”

  He shook his head. “Might have had to do with his job.”

  “What was his job?”

  He leaned against the doorjamb. “You going to pay me after this, or just walk away?”

  I pulled out my wallet and gave him twenty. “You get the rest at the end if I’m happy.”

  “He never talked about his job. But he had an iPhone and a Mac, so he was making money. They’d call him and he’d go out. Sometimes a few hours, sometimes a day, then he’d come back.”

  I lifted up the books. “This is advanced stuff. There are professional physicists who don’t understand this stuff.”

  “I know.” He nodded, examined me a moment. “He read it like other people read novels. Then he’d read it again, because he said the second and third time, you picked up stuff you missed the first time.”

  I had brain-ache but tried not to let it show. “Was he at college?”

  He shook his head. After a moment he said, “I was the only person he could talk to in the house, but even so, he didn’t talk much.”

  “What about his friends, did you know any of them?”

  “No.”

  I sighed and took out my wallet.

  As I pulled out the thirty bucks to pay him, he said, “He was weird. I don’t just mean how smart he was. I mean, he would have days when he was kind of normal, friendly, and we’d have a beer and talk, discuss things. We never mixed with the others, but we’d talk about quantum theory and, like, the Matrix and conspiracy shit. He was good to talk to like that.” He drew breath and sighed. “But other days he would be kind of weird, like a bit crazy. He could sit for hours just staring at the wall. I remember one time he told me that one was an equation and the answer was infinite regression. I found him crying once, like somebody had died. It was bad. He looked like he had flu, but he was sobbing. I asked him what was going on and he said that he had realized that absolute potential was nothing. And he kept repeating, ‘We are all made of nothing.’ He was hysterical. I mean, who cries about stuff like that?” He thought about it for a minute, then added, “Pete said he’d done too much acid, but I never saw him take anything.”

  I gave him the money. “Did you see the accident?”

  “I saw just after. I heard it and went to the window.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was a dark blue, foreign car. It might have been a Mercedes or an Audi. It was reversing…”

  I frowned. “Reversing?”

  He nodded, chewing his lip. “The driver got out and went back to where Zack was lying in the road. He was wearing a dark blue suit. He kind of squatted down and seemed to check if he was dead or alive. Then he got back in the car and drove away.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No. I told you. I’m a friend of his sister’s.”

  “I won’t testify. I don’t want those men coming after me.”

  “I don’t plan on making anybody testify. I just want to know what he looked like.”

  He sighed. I pulled out another fifty and showed it to him.

  “Fine, he was maybe late thirties, balding on top, white, strongly built…”

  “Military type.”

  He nodded.

  “Was he one of the men who took his stuff?”

  “Yes. I figure the other one was driving, because he got in the passenger side.”

  “Americans?”

  He frowned. “Yeah, like, I assumed they were CIA. I thought Zack had maybe uncovered something, and they had to silence him. Was that it?”

  I went downstairs and let myself out. I stood on the stoop for a moment and scanned the street. I didn’t see anybody conspicuous watching me. But these guys would not be conspicuous. I went down the steps and took my time putting the bags in the trunk. I paused, acutely aware suddenly that I had left my kit bag at home in Weston. I had one of my two 9 mm Sig Sauers, but nothing else. Charlie had disappeared, claiming he feared for his life, and his best buddy was dead.

  I closed the trunk and climbed in behind the wheel. Bran lived down the road, across Madison Avenue. I’d pay him a visit, and depending on what I found, I’d give some thought to my kit bag.

  I pulled away and kept my eye on the rearview mirror. It didn’t take long for the dark blue Audi to pull out and follow.

  FIVE

  At the intersection with Madison Avenu
e, the blue Audi turned right. I crossed over and found a parking space outside the church and walked back to number twenty-three. It was pretty shabby, but not like Zack’s place. I climbed the eleven steps to the front door and looked at the bells. There was the basement, and then A, B and C. I rang A and after a moment, a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

  “Hi, is Bran there, please?”

  There was a moment’s silence, then the voice asked again, “I’m sorry. I didn’t get that. Who did you say you were?” There was an edge of sarcasm to the voice and I smiled to myself.

  I said, “My name is Lacklan, Lacklan Walker. I am a friend of a friend, Charlie Vazquez. I wonder if I could speak to Bran, please.”

  The intercom went silent and after a moment, a figure appeared at the bow window, looking oddly transparent. I smiled at it and it went away again. Then the door buzzed and I pushed my way in.

  The lobby looked a little better than the outside. The carpet was new and an agreeable deep, sage green, the mahogany banisters had a high, wax polish and the brass knob on the door on my right was shiny. That door opened and there was a girl framed in it who looked Southeast Asian. She was wearing tight, black pedal-pushers and a white T-shirt, and she was watching me with a face like a harsh sentence.

  I tried a nice smile, but it was the wrong key for that door. I said, “Hi, I am Lacklan Walker…”

  “I heard who you are. What do you want with Bran?”

  I thought about telling her that was none of her damn business, but figured that would probably be unproductive, so I said, “It’s a little complicated, and I should perhaps discuss it with him.”

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t close the door either.

  I sighed. “I am a friend of Charlie Vazquez. Charlie has gone missing and his sister is very worried about him. I know Charlie and Bran were friends, so I was hoping he might be able to give me some idea…”

  She stood back and held the door open for me. “Come in.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was more of a space than a room. By the big window overlooking the street, there was a sofa and a couple of armchairs gathered around a sealed fireplace and a big, flat screen TV. That was on the right. On the left, there was a dining table and an open-plan kitchen with a window overlooking an overgrown backyard. Opposite the kitchen, there was a door that I figured led to a bedroom and a bathroom.

  She pointed at the dining table, grabbed a chair and sat. As I sat opposite her, she said, “Who are Charlie and his sister?”

  I smiled for the third time and felt it was getting old. “Ms… um… I don’t want to take up your time. If Bran isn’t here, I can try and call him or come back another time…”

  “Bran isn’t here,” she said, “because Bran is dead.”

  I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “How did it happen?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  I frowned at her. “Why would you say that?”

  Her face flushed with anger. “Why don’t we cut the bullshit, Mr. Walker or whatever your real name is? Look at you! It’s written all over you! What are you, CIA? NSA? Secret Service? You got so many goddamn agencies we don’t know who to be paranoid about anymore!”

  I gave a small, humorless laugh. She wasn’t wrong. I spread my hands. “I am a private citizen. I don’t even know your name.” I pulled out my cell phone, found Charlie’s message and slid it across the table to her. As she read it, I said, “Charlie, Bran, Zack and a couple of others were friends who used to hang out together. When Charlie sent me this message, I came to New York to see what it was about. But he seems to have disappeared. He hasn’t been at his apartment for a week, he hasn’t been to work or to college.” I shrugged. “So I am checking out the friends he used to hang with.” I hesitated. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you seem pretty paranoid.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then said, “Can I see some ID?”

  I laughed. “My private citizen’s card?”

  She didn’t laugh with me. “Anything that says that you are Lacklan Walker.”

  I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to her.

  “Weston?”

  I nodded. “We’ve been there for three hundred years. You can check. I live there with my wife and two stepchildren. I’m real.”

  She handed it back. “Bran was my…” She hesitated. “My roommate.”

  “I know he was at a bar called the Mezcal just a week ago.”

  She made a kind of single, upward nod and looked down at the tabletop. “Is that where he went?”

  “You never went with him.”

  It wasn’t a question, but she shook her head. “No. Bran was kind of special. He told me he needed his ‘special time’,” she crooked her fingers into inverted commas, “with his ‘special friends’.”

  “What was special about them?”

  “I guess they were smarter than everybody else. They were like the Big Bang Theory on steroids.” She stood. “You want a beer?”

  “That’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me all day. Thanks.”

  “That a yes?”

  I glanced at her. She was smiling. Her face was nicer when she smiled, so I smiled back. “It’s a yes, thank you.”

  She pulled two beers out of the fridge, cracked them and handed me one as she sat. I took a pull and sighed. “Bran was Australian, right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I don’t know. So far, all of Charlie’s friends seem to have been…” I trailed off, shaking my head. “…from just about every country on Earth, except the U.S.A.”

  She looked almost affronted. “I’m from U.S.A.!”

  “Exactly, and you didn’t know Charlie, even though one of his best friends was your roommate.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “And perhaps a little more than that?”

  “That obvious, huh? But it was kind of one way. I was really into him, but he was undecided.” She sighed. “I know what you’re thinking, I don’t look all that upset for a girl who just lost the love of her life. Well, FYI, Mr. Walker, I cried Sunday, all of Monday, all of Tuesday, and all of Wednesday. Now I’m being brave. Tonight we’ll see.”

  I believed her. I have seen plenty of death in my life. It is the most agonizing and incomprehensible thing that we can face, and everybody deals with it in their own way. “I’ve been there,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Lin.”

  “Lin, do you feel up to telling me how Bran died?”

  She studied my face for a long time, her eyes making small, flitting movements, like the features of my face were lines of text that would tell her if she wanted to share Bran’s death with me. Finally, she said, “You’re not just a,” she did the little sign with her fingers again, “‘private citizen’. Who are you?”

  I gave a small laugh. I thought about telling her, but had no idea where to begin, and was also certain that she would never believe it if I did. In the end I said, “It would take far too long for me to explain, and even if I did, you wouldn’t believe me.” I sighed. “Almost two years ago, I was in Arizona. I met a girl, Carmen. She had been abducted in Mexico by a drugs cartel and was being exploited in Arizona. I helped her to escape, gave her a place to stay until she got on her feet. I never heard from her again. But…” I gestured at my phone, which was still on the table.

  “A regular Galahad, huh?”

  “Not exactly. I’m not looking for any Holy Grail. I’m just looking for Charlie Vazquez.”

  She thought for a while, picking imaginary motes of dust off the table with her fingertips. “I never met Charlie, like I told you. That Saturday, Bran went out with his ‘special’ friends. He came back late and drunk. Sunday we were supposed to have a small, informal barbeque.” She hesitated. “I’m an actress. Bran was a very talented actor. The Sunday barbeque was a few friends, mainly actors, but one of them was a director who was casting for a new TV show. We were both hoping that Bran would be cast.”
/>
  She trailed off. I said, “But?”

  “No, no but. I was mad with him because he had been going to discuss the show, and his possible part in it, with Al—the director. But because he’d come back so late, and drunk…”

  I finished for her. “He hadn’t read his part.”

  She nodded, then shook her head and gazed out the kitchen window at the trees in the back yard. “He sat down, memorized the whole episode in an hour, and proceeded to critique it to me while we set up the barbeque, talking about how he would nuance the character and explore all the paradoxes of his personality in his interpretation.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “Yeah.” She took a pull from her bottle and set it down carefully on the table. “Al thought so and gave him the part. He said the network would sort out his Green Card. We were, as he would have said, ‘sorted, no worries’. We were all so happy.”

  “This was Sunday.”

  “Yeah. The party went on and in the evening, somebody said they had brought some coke. I never do coke. I have better things to spend my money on than that shit. That was one thing me and Bran were agreed on. But about one in the morning, Sunday night, I realized I hadn’t seen Bran for a while. I asked Al if he had seen him and he said he’d been speaking to some guy at the door. After that, he’d said he didn’t feel so good and he had gone to lie down. Some people said the guy had given Bran some coke. I was worried, like I said, Bran never did coke, or anything else. I went to check on him and he was dead. Massive heart attack.”

  I frowned and scratched my head. “What did the ME say?”

  “I called the ambulance. Al and everybody else went crazy getting rid of any trace of the cocaine. At the hospital, they did a load of tests and found the cause of death was a massive heart attack brought on by unknown causes. He was twenty-four, for God’s sake. He went jogging every day. He went to the gym. His diet was almost entirely fresh fruit and vegetables and the only meat he ate was organic.”

  “And there was no trace of coke in his system?”

  “None.” She shook her head, then shrugged. “He’d been stressed. He’d been having moods lately, getting real upset sometimes, but nothing so severe it could bring on a heart attack.”