by Evans, Jon
“I read about those,” he said, his voice softer. “I saw pictures.”
“Yeah? Don’t let them get to you. They were just bad shit. It happens during wars.”
“You know I’m Jewish, right?”
I blinked. “Actually,” I said, “I’d forgotten.”
“So concentration camps, they feel kind of fucking personal, even when they’re not.”
“Yeah.”
“Zoltan ran one of those, huh? Our man Zoltan ran a concentration camp?”
He hadn’t exactly run them, from what Talena had said, but I sensed it was a bad time to split hairs. “Yep.”
“No shit. Huh. Well, fine, okay then, whatever, go get him, I’ll fucking cheer. But why did you have to tell them about me? And never mind the cops, how the fuck does Zoltan or anyone else know about that back door?”
“Because I told the FBI about it,” I said.
He twitched with surprise. “You found it?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Shit. I didn’t think your C was good enough. But, wait a minute, so you told the FBI, how did Zoltan find out?”
“Because Zoltan’s got a friend in the FBI,” I said. “You want to know how I found that out? I found out last night when he and Zorana came to my house and beat the living shit out of me and my girlfriend.”
“Huh,” Arwin said. “I thought you were walking funny.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Motherfucker. This is so fucked up.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Why did you build that back door into Mycroft?”
“I knew that was gonna get me into trouble. I knew it and I did it anyway.” He sighed. “I figured maybe there’d be some money if I wanted to live dangerously. Sell it to someone else or something. And, you know, it was kind of an Easter egg.”
Easter egg: a flashy piece of code hidden in a program as a kind of signature. I had written a few myself.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Shit. This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. You sicced both Zoltan and the FBI on me because I wrote a back door that doesn’t even fucking work. There’s a bug on the live site. I don’t know what it is but that back door is fucked.”
“Guess again,” I said.
“Huh? I’m not guessing. I’ve tried. I’ve… “
He stopped talking. A metaphorical light bulb lit up over his head.
“Aw, no,” he said. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“What did you do to it?”
“Basic substitution cipher,” I said.
“No shit. Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Either I’m dumber than I thought or you’re a whole lot smarter.”
“Thanks. Might be both. Now listen carefully. If you give me the key, I think I can get the FBI to forget all about you. Maybe even give you some protection.”
He looked amazed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m serious. Give me the key and I’ll tell them to leave you alone.”
“No fucking way! What are you, stupid all of a sudden? That key is the only thing I got. Zoltan’s a big-shot war criminal, huh? Man, all of a sudden that’s great news. That’s fucking great. You go back to them and tell them I’ll trade the key for immunity. And citizenship. And a clean record. And ten thousand bucks.”
I winced. I should have seen that coming. It had never occurred to me that Arwin’s back door was now supremely valuable to him, his only bargaining chip, and he wasn’t likely to give it away for free. “I’m…Arwin, I’m not negotiating for the FBI. They don’t even know I’m here talking to you.”
“So go and tell them. What did you expect, that you’d rat me out and I’d be so grateful I’d turn around and give you the only thing I’ve got? I should kick the shit out of you right now is what I should do.”
“I’m bigger than you are,” I pointed out.
“Yeah? How about Zoltan? Maybe I should say fuck the FBI and go tell him that the keep-your-mouth-shut memo he sent you last night doesn’t seem to have stuck.”
I snorted. “Good luck living long enough to finish the first sentence.”
He paused. “Yeah. True.”
“I’ll talk to the FBI. You don’t talk to anyone.”
“Fine,” he said.
We looked at one another.
“You still want that job?” I asked.
“Fuck you.” He sounded more sour than furious. “I’d rather work in a kitchen with Jeffrey fucking Dahmer than work with you again, you ratfuck piece of shit.”
“Always nice to see you too,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Talena was out at her rescheduled poetry reading, trying to live a normal life as Agent Turner had ordered. I decided to go to the Metreon and watch Johnny Depp play a zombie pirate. Hollywood escapism was just what the doctor ordered. I had rarely wanted to escape reality with such passion. I felt like I had been sucked into a vortex of chaos. Zoltan was a psycho bloodsoaked war criminal, Sinisa was an international smuggler of psycho bloodsoaked war criminals, Zoltan and Zorana had beaten and humiliated Talena and I and threatened to murder us, the FBI didn’t know how long it would take to catch them because one of their agents was a mole, and now Arwin, the only man who had the key that could open Sinisa’s vault of secret messages, the vault that I had helped build, wanted to negotiate a package deal with the FBI before he turned it over.
In a weird way I blamed Dragan. If Saskia’s husband hadn’t been such a sick thug, we would never have gotten involved in this. It was funny that just a few months ago it was Dragan who was the boogeyman we feared, when Saskia and I were living in Albania, when Sinisa and Arwin and Zoltan and Zorana were colourful friends and acquaintances. Now when I thought of Dragan, rendered small by time and distance, compared to Zoltan and Zorana he seemed about as scary as Johnny Depp.
At least Steve and Lawrence had responded to my call for desperate-times reinforcements, and were due to arrive on Friday. I knew I would feel a lot better with them around. But I also knew they couldn’t stay more than a couple of weeks.
When the credits rolled I reluctantly got to my seat, energized by the sight of a good old-fashioned summer Hollywood blockbuster, but dejected at being flung back into the real world and all its treacherous chaos.
My cell phone rang as I walked onto Mission Street. I dug it out of my pocket, unwillingly envisioning terrible things, Agent Turner calling me to tell me in a grim voice that Talena’s mutilated corpse had been found. I looked at the caller ID and was semi-relieved to see it was Arwin.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Hey. I broke your cipher.”
“Not hard. So you looked at Mycroft?”
“Yeah. And I’m not giving you the key, until I can cut some kind of deal, but you should come shoulder-surf some of this shit.”
“All right. Now?”
“I gotta eat. In, like, an hour.”
He gave me an address: the Deluxe Hotel on Leavenworth near O’Farrell. With a location like that I was pretty sure it didn’t live up to its name. That was right in the decaying heart of the Tenderloin ghetto.
“See you in an hour,” I said.
“And we’ll both be alone, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
I called Talena and updated her on the situation. It was a relief to hear her voice. I knew that every time we parted, for the foreseeable future, a terrible fear would begin to cloud my mind, fear that we might never meet again, that Zoltan and Zorana might have found out we had disobeyed them, might have found Talena and taken her away and hurt her and killed her.
After talking to Talena, I killed forty minutes reading magazines at the Borders bookstore off Union Square, then walked down Market Street, which was clogged with the usual crowd of downtown San Francisco’s homeless, filthy and bearded with running sores on their arms and faces, parked next to shapeless heaps that were all their worldy possessions, grimy lumps of clothes and sleeping bags, maybe a few book
s or a shopping bag full of recyclable cans. Some of them were addicts, some of them were deranged, some of them were just way down on their luck. They reminded me very much of the refugees I had seen on Sinisa’s fishing boat in Albania.
From Market I turned up Leavenworth Street into the Tenderloin, the rotting core of downtown San Francisco, a ghetto populated by hookers and junkies, last-chancers and no-hopers, the homeless and those lucky enough to live in the squalid junkyard single-room-occupancy hotels that occupied virtually every corner. I passed broken windows and empty storefronts, porn stores, check-cashing stalls whose tellers sat nervously behind thick walls of bulletproof glass.
The Deluxe Hotel was ironically named. At first glance it looked physically lopsided, but it wasn’t really, just viciously ugly, poorly maintained, coated with grime and smeared with half-erased graffiti. Two of the second-floor windows were broken, apparently from the inside. I was pretty sure that California’s next half-decent earthquake would reduce the whole building to rubble. Two wild-haired homeless men were passed out on the sidewalk in front of the iron cage which guarded the entrance. The whole area stank of urine.
I gingerly stepped around the homeless men and pushed the stained white button next to the iron cage. After a moment the intercom grille above the button barked “What?” in a distorted, inhuman, barely understandable voice.
“I’m visiting Arwin. Room 309,” I said.
“I ain’t got no note about no other visitor.”
“Call him up and ask,” I suggested.
Laughter filtered through that intercom sounded downright scary. “Call him up? You think this the Fairmont? We ain’t got no telephones.”
“Well, I don’t know. He asked me to come here.”
“Well,” the voice said dubiously, “you know his name. And you look all right.”
I supposed a camera was watching me from somewhere. The door buzzed. I went through the cage of the outer door, and the ancient interior door, to the desk, behind which sat a fat bald black man with a thick beard, a pierced septum, and at least twenty earrings, wearing a leather vest.
The green paint on the stairs was faded, the air was thick with a whole collection of noxious smells, and I carefully avoided a syringe that had been abandoned on the first landing. The hallway, probably last cleaned in the 1930s, was an instant asthma attack. The door to room 309 was slightly ajar. I knocked and it yawned open. The room within was empty. After a moment I walked in. Maybe Arwin was still out at Burger King or something.
The room was quite small. Everything was a uniform faded beige. The ceiling was low, uneven, and water-stained. The walls were dusty and peeling. The bed was beneath the only window and was visibly lumpy. A tiny TV was in the corner of the room, high up on a stand that screwed into the wall. The bathroom door was closed. I was surprised that the hotel had individual bathrooms but no phones. I supposed Arwin connected to the Net via some kind of wireless connection. But no computer was visible.
I wondered how long Arwin had been living here. I hoped he had just moved here today, in response to yesterday’s phone warning. I felt vaguely guilty that he was living in a place like this. Despite our recent hostility, he was a friend, I should try to find him something better.
“Arwin?” I asked, loudly, but there was no response. “You home?”
I approached the bathroom door, intending to knock, but then the smell hit me. The rich iron smell of fresh blood. I knew right away what had happened.
My hand, operating on autopilot inertia, reached out and pulled open the bathroom door. I watched it creak open like I was a passenger in my own skull.
Arwin was arranged on his knees, arms cuffed behind his back, bent forward with his head thrust into the toilet. He had been gagged by some bloodsoaked cloth. The soles of his shoes were still covered with wet beach sand. There was a great deal of blood smeared and spattered everywhere, all over Arwin and the toilet and the floor and on the lip of the ancient clawfooted tub. It had just begun to dry.
I didn’t quite compute what had happened to his head at first. It looked shrunken and misshapen, and at the same time he seemed to be wearing some kind of pale baseball cap. I looked at the bloody rag dangling from the shower-curtain rail for a moment and then understanding hit, my knees buckled, and I sat down hard on the floor.
The dark rag tied to the shower rail, with the big bloody clump hanging from it, was Arwin’s long hair. He wasn’t wearing a cap. The pale bloodstreaked hemisphere I saw half-dunked in the toilet was his bare skull. Arwin had been scalped, and his scalp hung over the tub.
Five hours ago we had walked along the beach and talked. Ninety minutes ago I had spoken to him on the phone. Now he was dead. Zoltan and Zorana had somehow found him and come and killed him. Executed him, nineteenth-century style.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket with shaking hands and pushed 911. But I didn’t initiate the call. If it got out that I was the one who had reported Arwin’s death, Zoltan and Zorana might unsuspend the death sentence that hung over us. Better to make it an anonymous tip from a pay phone, at least for now, lay low until Agent Turner found the mole.
If she found the mole. She would have to do it without Arwin’s back door. It would never open again. I was sure Zoltan and Zorana had taken Arwin’s computer, but that didn’t matter. Arwin would not have been so stupid as to write down his private key. It had died with him.
I called the police from a pay phone across the street. I was surprised by my strong and steady voice. I thought of wiping the phone buttons clean, but my prints were probably already on the bathroom door and the hotel doors, and they weren’t on file anywhere, and anyways the cops would be able to work out from time of death that I couldn’t have been the killer. And being a suspect in Arwin’s murder was one of the least of my concerns.
The initial shock of seeing the body had impelled a rush of cool, detached capability, the ability to calmly do what needed to be done. That ended after calling the police. I walked back down Leavenworth, dragging my feet, stumbling twice on curbs. I felt shaky and nauseous. The thick fetid air of the Tenderloin did nothing to help me forget the stench of blood. After a couple of blocks I stopped and leaned against a brick wall, breathing heavily. The gritty texture of brick against my palms steadied me a little. I tried closing my eyes, but the image of Arwin’s kneeling and mutilated corpse danced on the back of my eyelids, as if etched into my retinas. I already knew that sleep that night would be little more than a series of blood-drenched nightmares.
I wanted to walk and keep walking, right out of San Francisco, out of this awful tangle that had become my life. I crazily envisioned calling Talena on my cell phone and having her join me, and the two of us walking south down the Peninsula, past the airport, through Silicon Valley, walking for days until we reached Santa Cruz or Big Sur or somewhere all this madness could not follow us. If such a place existed. I had my doubts.
Chapter 21
Dead Man’s Switch
Arwin’s death merited a two-paragraph item deep inside the Bay Area section of the Sunday Chronicle, ending with
The victim was identified as Arwin Shostakoff, an illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record. INS records indicate that Shostakoff was deported from America in late 2001. Police refused to speculate on how he returned to the country or whether the crime was gang-related.
I crumpled the newspaper into a ball and did my best Greg Maddux impersonation. “They make him sound like some kind of lowlife gangbanger who got what he deserved,” I said, irrationally angry at the Chronicle for not having given Arwin a lengthy and balanced obituary. “He was a good guy, he was really smart, he worked hard, I don’t think he was ever violent unless you count bar fights. He was fucking funny. Was.”
“I’m sorry,” Talena said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Fuck. Never – shit!”
“What?”
“I just realized. Arwin might have talked. Before they killed him. He might have told them t
hat I talked to him on the beach. About negotiating with the FBI.”
We stared at each other for a second, wide-eyed with panic, before Talena shook her head and smiled ruefully.
“Now it crosses our minds,” she said. “Well, I guess he didn’t. Or we’d be having this conversation in the afterlife.”
“Good point.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe he’s actually dead. Not in my gut. Even if I could believe he was actually dead, I couldn’t believe he was actually murdered. And even if I could believe that, there’s no way I could believe all the rest of this shit.”
Talena got up, walked behind me, and massaged my shoulder muscles, which were about as loose as concrete. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
“Was it true, what Saskia said?” I asked. “About you making a point of walking slowly across Sniper’s Alley?”
Talena nodded. “For a while,” she said. “Maybe two months, after Davor died. You met his little brother in Sarajevo, you probably don’t remember. His girlfriend – I don’t even remember her name any more, isn’t that awful? His girlfriend came to the apartment where I was staying, because I was her nearest friend to the hospital, she was just covered with his blood. She couldn’t talk. And the next day she went out and walked up and down Zmaja od Bosne until one of them shot her. Suicide by sniper. It was a head shot, at least she didn’t suffer. Anyways, after Davor, I didn’t want to die, I don’t think, but who lived and who died seemed so random, and I hated them so much, I didn’t want to scurry around like a mouse, running from them all the time. So I started doing the slow defiant walk thing. I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people did it.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Eventually they shot at me.” She smiled bleakly. “After that my self-preservation instinct took over and I ran like hell every time.”
“Hurrah for your self-preservation instinct.”
She kissed me again.
“All right,” I said. “What do you want to do today?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t have any plans.” She sighed. “Oh, the irony. Normally it’d be great to have a whole Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but lie around together.”