This Is How It Really Sounds (16 page)

“It'd be a lot more reasonable to just let it go. Punching a man in the face may not be as pleasant as you imagine.”

“It's not about having a pleasant experience, Charlie.”

The old man considered his words without responding, just looking carefully into the musician's face. He put a five-dollar bill on the table and they both got up to leave. “It wasn't the girl,” Charlie said. “It was a guy with glasses and maroon sweatpants.”

“I don't remember seeing him,” Pete answered.

“That's how it's supposed to be.”

 

4

Wreckage

As Charlie drove
down La Cienega toward West Hollywood, forty-five years as a day agent were telling him that this was a bad job. It had all the signs: the shaky client, the bullshit objective, a whole operation that boiled down to somebody's petty personal grudge being worked out on a bigger scale just because they had the money or the power to play it out. He'd turned down a dozen jobs like this over the years, chickenshit assignments where the top guy had no idea what they were getting into. Sometimes you got stuck with them; you woke up in some beauty spot like Tegucigalpa or Vodochody realizing that you weren't a knight on the global chess board; you were just on some bureaucratic fool's errand that might get you killed. This one had that air about it, but without the danger. The only gun that would get pulled on this deal was one of those clown pistols where a little sign popped out that said, “Bang.” Or maybe, “
Fucking
bang.” Charlie smiled to himself.

No, twenty years ago this job would have been a definite walk-away. He was still getting good work back then. Some high-profile terrorism cases. Consulting on the blast pattern in Oklahoma City. It had gotten pretty thin the last few years. He got the occasional surveillance job, since a man his age was basically invisible anyway, but all his best contacts at the Agency were dead or retired. He spent too many days sitting at home browsing through his books on chemistry and ballistics, trying to stay fresh, trying to keep his mind from letting go of all those details. Even so, he wasn't modern anymore. Now everybody wanted to read satellite images and do electronic penetration. Then this came up, and he found out the target was in Shanghai, and it all made sense. He'd started his career in Shanghai, and he still had some unfinished business there. At this age, Pete Harrington was the last excuse he'd ever have for making the trip.

Charlie rolled up to the address Harrington had given him and rang the bell. The singer came to the door wearing a black tank top and a gold chain around his neck, his hair all poofed out, like he was fresh from the hairdresser.

Charlie! Come on in!

He instinctively took in Harrington's bare arms and shoulders. Strength only meant so much, but it did show a certain willpower if they'd acquired it, and that meant more than the strength itself. This man's arms seemed fleshy and weak, and he didn't like the skull tattoo. Or the dice. Or the barbed wire etched around his bicep. The fashion in this crowd, he guessed. They thought etching barbed wire on their arms showed how tough they were, but what it really showed was how little they knew. He'd seen his share of barbed wire.

Harrington was walking him in, offering him a drink at eleven in the morning. The apartment looked cluttered, with towers of cardboard boxes that said things like
DISHES
and
AWARDS
. The kitchen counter was a nest of empty takeout containers and plastic bags. Pretty much what he'd expected when the manager hired him. He noticed an empty bottle of vodka and a couple of dirty glasses sitting on a coffee table. This client would need a lot of babysitting, and he wasn't a babysitter. There were guitars and keyboards, microphones and other musical paraphernalia around, mixed with posters that hadn't been hung and a couple of gold records in black frames lying on top of a pile of laundry. The man's life had been packed up and tossed into this apartment in a hurry.

He smiled at the musician. “Are you ready to start?”

“Let's do it!”

Harrington wasn't in particularly good shape for a man his age. He had a little potbelly, probably from drinking too much, and though he said he used to do high kicks in his act, he couldn't kick above the waist anymore. In his heyday he must have been fairly muscular: he said he'd had a personal trainer who went on tour with him. The definition was gone, though. Charlie asked him to throw a few straight punches, and they looked girlish and awkward. He held up a pad he'd brought and asked him to hit it as hard as he could, any way he wanted, and Harrington drew his hand down to his side and then swung in a wide arc that only ended up clipping the top of the pad. Charlie worked at not letting his disdain show.

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Harrington—”

“Pete”

“
Pete
. I read on the Internet that you got in a fight about three years ago.”

The musician looked a bit wary. “With the bass player from Uncle Sam's Erection.”

“What happened there?”

“I was doing a gig at the Tacoma Dome. Actually, it was me and some other acts, and I was opening. And I was like,
Me?
Opening for punks like Uncle Sam's Erection? I should have just said, like,
No, I flush turds—I don't open for them,
but Bobby had already set it up, and I didn't want to make him look bad.”

“How did it start?”

Harrington's energy level rose as he recounted the story. “Well, he had his bass sitting out blocking the stage left entrance, where I always come in, and I'm supposed to come running out, that's kind of my thing, and it's time, and I say,
Dude, your bass is blocking the entrance.
And he says,
We're the top billing. Work around it!
I was, like, Am I really hearing this from this punk? But I had to go on, so as I was getting ready to run out, I accidentally knocked his bass over, and he starts cussing at me, and I was already partly on stage, so I turned around and gave him the finger…”

“Hold on—how accidental was it when you knocked his bass over?”

The singer looked sheepish. “I guess I could have been a little more careful.”

That was good. He'd started it. It was the first glimmer of good news since he'd taken this job. “Go on.”

“So he comes roaring out … I think he was pretty wasted. And I'd had a few drinks myself. So he comes roaring out, barking at me, and I said
Bitch! Go back to your kennel!
And I'm, like, mic-ed up! So everybody hears me call this guy a bitch!”

“How many people were watching this?”

“The house was around seventeen thousand that night.”

So, Charlie reasoned, the guy had to fight. You don't let someone call you a bitch in front of seventeen thousand people. “How big was your opponent?”

“About my size. Some young guy, full of himself. Thinks he's the next Flea. Except Erection's last album completely tanked, so what's he putting on airs for, you know?”

“Go on.”

“So he comes out to where I am, at the edge of the stage, and he, like, takes this big swing at me and clips me on the cheek, and I have this kind of ventriloquist raven on my shoulder, you know, it's part of my act, for ‘Raven at My Window,' and he knocks it off, and then it's just … you know, game on! You can't fuck with my raven.”

Charlie managed to stifle his laugh into a smile. He'd heard a million fight stories, but none quite this funny. “So he landed one on your cheek. Did he hurt you?”

“Not at the time, but it looked pretty bad the next day. Anyway, he clips me, and then I swung back at him, but I kind of ended up hitting his shoulder, and then he comes charging at me and pushes me down. Now the crowd's screaming, and a lot of these are my fans, you know, and I can't just let this guy fucking knock me down in front of my people. And besides that, I'm super pissed. So I get up and I come running at him, like”—Harrington put up his fists in front of him as if he were a child pounding on a wall—“but then, somehow, the guy gets away and hits me a couple more times in the head.”

Charlie reasoned that the other musician must have been nearly as incompetent a fighter as Harrington. A good fighter would have dropped him in seconds.

“Then we were sort of wrestling around, and then I got free, and this guy was still coming after me! He was crazy! I said, ‘Just chill, guy. It's all good!' But he came at me again, so I saw this, like, flute sitting around, so I grabbed it, and I, like, did a
Seven Samurai
kind of thing on him, like”—he moved his arm in a cross-body slashing motion—“and the second time, I caught him in the face, and there was blood and stuff. That kind of ended the fight.” He shrugged. “I can show you the whole thing.”

The musician walked over to the computer, and the next thing Charlie knew, there was a stage with two tiny people on it, blown up onto a huge flat-screen television. He'd seen a blurry cell-phone video of the fight, but the figures in it had been very small. Now the camera zoomed in. The blond one was wearing red leather pants and a black muscle shirt: his client. He looked a bit thinner than the present-day Pete Harrington. His opponent was slightly bigger and moved much more quickly than Harrington. Both men were off balance, lurching around and swinging amateurishly without a specific target. It happened just the way his client said it did, probably because he'd watched this video over and over again. When it was you, and it was your first fight, you usually got some of the details wrong. What struck Charlie about it, though, wasn't the fight. It was the crowd. When Harrington shouted,
Bitch! Go back to your kennel!
their voices ballooned into a white roar, and at the first blows they exploded into a jubilant howling, the like of which Charlie hadn't heard since seeing an adulterer get stoned to death in Pakistan back in the fifties.

It got weirder, though. Harrington whacked his adversary with the flute. The guy staggered, blood gushing out of his nose. Then, amazingly, Harrington started waving the flute around like a baton, signaling the drummer to start the beat along with him and going straight into his act, cueing the guitar player to slam out their first earsplitting attack, and then he jumped into the middle of the stage and let out a long, loud scream, a cry of exultation that Charlie understood immediately and completely. Amazingly, it was the first note of his song, and he went right into the show, the crowd so beside itself that they nearly drowned out the music. He could see now that there was a reason Harrington had been a star. In some ways, he was fearless. Harrington watched himself sing another ten seconds of the song, then he seemed to remember Charlie and stopped the video.

Charlie stared at the screen for a few seconds. He looked up at the musician with a faint smile. “Never seen one like that before,” he said.

“Yeah, I was originally going to start with ‘Raven at My Window,' but under the circumstances I changed it to ‘Wreckage' on the fly.”

“Looks like it went over pretty well.”

“Are you kidding? They practically tore the place apart. My downloads went through the roof. My sales are still feeling it three years later. Look at this…”

He pointed to a number on the screen, among all the disconnected commentary and phrases in black, red, and blue. It was 12,874,311.

“That's how many times this video has been viewed.”

Twelve
million
! “Holy smokes!”

He could see now why the manager wanted this to happen. He'd never dealt with show-business people before, but underneath their smooth exteriors he sensed there were some characters as slippery as any double agent. And the ex-wife was a piece of work! She'd have made a good station chief.

So Harrington had a few of the ingredients. He'd started the verbal attack, which meant he could do it again. And he'd responded as soon as his opponent attacked, instead of standing there in a little cloud of disbelief, which was what a lot of people did. Best of all, he'd improvised a weapon and used it, which meant he could escalate if things went that way. And he wasn't going to crumble if he got hit.

He'd already thought about how to train him. It would take a long time to turn him into a real fighter, in the sense of someone who could spontaneously attack or defend with a variety of techniques. At the monastery they figured a year to make a decent fighter, minimum—decent being someone who could defeat a stronger, larger, untrained opponent. That was training for hours, every day. After that, it was just a matter of how many opponents you wanted to defeat, and how good they were, or what weapons they had. At the highest levels it became almost a matter of style. He'd seen monks look at a flock of chickens, point to one, make a strange, high-pitched guttural sound, and have the chosen chicken jump up in the air and fall down dead. Harrington wouldn't be killing any chickens.

“Here's how we're going to do it,” he said. “I'm going to teach you one technique, and you're going to practice it every day. Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. With both sides of your body. You get that one down, I'll teach you one more, and so on. As long as I see improvement, I'll keep teaching you. You start sandbagging me, I'm done. And you'll still have to pay me.”

“Okay.”

“Rule number two: no drinking on the days we're training. If I smell alcohol on your breath, we're done. And you still have to pay me.”

There was a longer pause before he answered that one. “Okay.”

“Let's see your heavy bag.”

He brought him into one of the rooms, and the big black cylinder he'd sent over was hanging there from the ceiling with its dull leathery sheen like an electromagnet in a junkyard. As always, part of him instinctively wanted to hit it—that's how heavy bags were. The red bag gloves were still sitting in their plastic wrapping on a chair. Nearby was a treadmill that probably didn't get much use either. “I have some weights in the other room, too.”