Glass House (8 page)

The agent gave it a minute before he dropped
the ice puck to the ground, leaving it to melt away to carbon
dioxide. He handed the Tupperware to Saifee, who replaced it with a
cylinder the size of a cigar tube.

Hanley uncapped one end, revealing a small
nozzle, and he gave the tube a sharp snap. The end came to life
with a stubby flame that jetted out, a dime-sized,
quarter-inch-long blue tip of fire. Raising it to the chilled
scoring on the window, he traced along the line once more, quickly
heating up what he’d just quickly cooled down.

It didn’t take long. There was a crack, a
twig break that was hardly audible, and the window parted in a
perfect square that surrounded the in-place suction cup.

The cut-out square dropped toward him,
catching at the string’s looped length. Hanley gave the torch to
Saifee, who snuffed it out in the dirt.

The agent set the glass gently aside. He
reached in through the hole, found the handle of the lock, and
twisted. He slid the window up and the men climbed in.

_______________

The paperwork was easily located, the
register they found relatively accurate and complete. Hanley traced
Anthony Dikembé’s name to a number and the number to a chamber that
was slotted in the wall.

There wouldn’t be a problem with locks,
because there weren’t any. With Saifee opposite him, Hanley pulled
the door open and slid the long tray out, extending it like a plank
reaching out from a ship.

A black-bagged, rumpled hill of a shape was
on it. Hanley read a sticker that was pasted to the side, saw
Dikembé’s name, and gave a nod to the others.

He opened the bag, dragging the zipper
halfway down its seven-foot length, the throat-clearing buzz of it
the only sound in the room. Anthony’s body was inside, wrapped in
more plastic, a polyvinyl sheet that surrounded him like a blanket
that had been tucked around his shoulders to keep him warm.

The face was sunken, the cheeks hollow and
deep, the lips thinned, the one remaining eye a ball that was
misleadingly massive under the tight and emaciated skin. The other
one would have been plucked, Hanley figured. Dikembé was found on
the beach, and the crabs there would have gotten the other eye
before anyone came across him.

Or maybe something out at sea took it first,
leaving the crabs to scavenge on the rest of him. His body showed
an amazing array of abusive marks – cuts and gouges, bites,
skin torn completely away in small chunks with ragged edges left
behind. The flesh of his left thumb and forefinger were removed,
the uncovered bones a visible, shining white. Anthony’s remains
were battered from head to toe by the sea, the shore rocks, and the
things that lived in those places.

And he smelled. Hanley could pick out the
dank scent of water and salt, mixed together with bitter pathology
chemicals and an underlying hint of decay.

The agent hesitated at seeing his friend’s
face and the condition the body was in. He didn’t have time to feel
sorry or disheartened or anything but hurried, but he pushed the
hurry away for a second and felt those other things anyway.

He’d liked Anthony. They got along and had
worked well together. When Hanley needed someone to go in and learn
a few things about Laurentian, Anthony was the first man he thought
of and the first one who volunteered.

“It bought you a bag,” Hanley whispered.
Saifee glanced up at the words from the other side of the tray.

“Jackson,” he said softly. Hanley looked at
him. Saifee tapped his watch.

Time.

Hanley nodded again. He zipped the bag
closed, and they lifted and pulled the body out together, the other
men joining them. Saifee slid the tray back in and closed the
chamber door.

Deadweight is called that for a reason.
Living people who are carried help out – they stagger along or
wrap arms around shoulders or necks. They tote a little of their
own load.

Anthony never was a large man, but his
deadweight required some managing. Jackson had the head, Saifee
carried the equipment but still had an arm slung around the waist,
and the two other men took the legs.

As they moved, none of them had concerns for
what they were doing. They knew it’d be at least a day or two
before anyone caught on to the fact that one of their dead was
missing.

They heaved Dikembé’s body unceremoniously
out the window, then followed it one by one. They re-collected him
outside, Saifee taking the head this time.

Hanley pulled the window closed and reached
through the hole to lock it tight. He retrieved a roll of clear
mailing tape from the small box. Tearing off strips, he outlined
the cut-out square of glass, then lifted and pressed it gently back
into place.

It wouldn’t withstand a close look, but it
would handle a casual glance or two. Satisfied, Hanley helped the
other men carry the dead agent’s beaten body away from the morgue
and toward the waiting car.

_______________

“Neria’s getting impatient.” Saifee was
driving, his eyes intent on the road. He didn’t glance at Hanley as
he spoke.

Neria Motaung, the detective warrant officer
who’d walked down to the Atlantic shore with Kofi to find Anthony’s
body, was the South African Police Service liaison to the Bureau.
The SAPS lieutenant general who oversaw the North Cape province had
personally chosen her to coordinate with Hanley and the Laurentian
investigation, and Neria had kept her fingers in it as much as she
could. She hadn’t had much to do, but she’d been persistent and
dedicated – the body in the back proved it, and Hanley had to
give her credit for that if nothing else.

“Neria spent her life to the age of twenty
waiting for the right to have a decent job,” Hanley replied. “She
spent another fifteen after that, pushing for that job. For
something more advanced than housemaid. So she waits all that time
to be a SAPS warrant officer and detective, and now she’s
impatient?” He shook his head. “Who isn’t getting impatient?”

“She thinks we should have better
information and results.
Some
information and results, I
suppose. The Police Service called her in and asked for an update,
and she didn’t have anything to tell them.”

“Fuck the Service,” Hanley said. He tipped
back against the seat’s headrest, closing his eyes. He looked
exhausted. “Fuck Neria, too, for that matter. She’s the local, and
she should be acting like it. She wants information and results?
I’m perfectly happy for her to use whatever connections or sources
she might have to come up with them.”

“I told her that,” Saifee said.

“And?”

“No one’s being kidded here. She knows why
she was picked to work with us, and so do we. Laurentian is too
remote from anything that matters, and we haven’t shown SAPS enough
for them to get worked up about it. You screamed loud and long,
sure. But the mine’s still too incidental in the scheme of things
for South Africa to take a real interest. It took a year to get
their attention on Laurentian, and when we finally got them to
move, they responded by giving us Neria Motaung, the Soweto girl
that no one else in SAPS wanted to work with. So I don’t know that
she has the connections and sources you’re talking about.”

Hanley tipped his head forward again. He
stared out at the road ahead of them, his eyes half open and
bleary. “She goes to the mine in a couple days?” he asked
quietly.

“Briefed her myself yesterday.”

“And Rupert will blow smoke up her ass.”

“Probably.”

“Jesus, what I’d give for a chance to have a
Bureau agent sitting down with him.” Hanley straightened. He rubbed
his hands against his face. “She won’t be telling him about
Anthony, of course.”

“Not a sound.”

“She know about our recovery tonight?”

“Not yet,” Saifee replied.

“Make sure she’s told. Let’s get her looped
in some more. It’s time she had a better understanding of what she
found and what this is about.”

Night

The house Megan had shared with Ben faced
north, across Sixth. It was more highway than street, once a
neighborhood road and now a crosstown avenue with a traffic volume
that was far too high and speeds that were far too fast. The
passage of cars never stopped, not even in the depth of the night,
and not an hour passed without a police cruiser or ambulance
wailing its sirens down the street, parting the traffic and making
for one end or the other of town.

The house sat on a small rise, on a lot at
the corner where Illinois Street met Sixth. Broken stairs led from
the screened front porch to the cracked and rarely used sidewalk
that ran along the road. The stairs separated two ragged halves of
overgrown, dying lawn and three massive black walnut trees that
were dense enough to have killed the grass off entirely in patches
beneath their branches.

The house was a Vallonia. A Sears, Roebuck,
Modern Home Number 3049, straight from the 1921 catalog, purchased
for $1,870 in a pre-fab kit. Ben had found the original paperwork
while rummaging in the attic. Megan came across him there one
afternoon, dirty from his knees to his chin, his hair a tangle and
his soft smile on his face. The sun was a cotton ball glow through
a cloudy window, its light picking out the attic’s floating dust
and falling on Ben, who held the catalog out to her. They shared a
chuckle about his grandmother’s businesslike drive to get a home
that she could pass down through her family.

She’d actually managed that passage not
quite three years ago. The lawyer reading her will after the
funeral surprised the gathered family of mother, son, and
daughter-in-law, telling them the Vallonia was going to Ben and
Megan. Ben’s mom had smiled the same soft smile that Ben showed in
the attic. She’d patted a knee of each as they sat on either side
of her, and she announced with a tear that it was just perfect that
way.

Ben’s mom died about a year after that. She
was sixty-three and a smoker, two packs a day at the peaks and one
pack easy, even in the valleys. She had pulmonary hypertension and
borderline emphysema, the yellowy skin and watery eyes of nicotine,
and a heart that, if anyone ever got a chance to listen to it,
probably would have screamed its weakness long before she tipped
gently forward over her book during a late night of reading.

They buried her next to her mother. Coming
only a dozen months apart, the funerals matched down to the
tombstones. And in another twelve, Ben got the same. A year after
they moved into the Vallonia together, the house had passed to
Megan alone.

Like all the houses in the neighborhood, the
entrance everyone used was in the back, off the alley. It didn’t
come in the original plan, but someone added a porch there at some
point. Like the one in front, the back porch was shielded with a
heavy, black-painted and countless-times-patched yardage of
screening. Thick gray paint on the porch boards. Two chairs, one
metal and the other a rocker needing repair. A bare yellow bug bulb
lit it all with a fakeness that made Megan cringe when it caught
her eye as she came popping up the graveled alley in the
Chrysler.

She pushed the garage door opener clipped to
the visor and waited as the door lifted. It creaked, she gave it a
second to collapse if it was going to, then she drove in and
thumbed the button shifter to park.

Attached garages didn’t exist for houses
bought as kits from 1921 Sears, Roebuck catalogs. The garage was
separate and a dozen yards over. It was built there sometime after
the house, no doubt with another kit Ben’s grandmother saved to
buy. A dotted line of divided sidewalk slabs, grass between them,
marked a path between the two buildings.

Megan slung her briefcase, heavy with
papers, over her shoulder. She collected a box from the trunk and
strode toward the steps.

She balanced the box on an uplifted knee as
she opened the screen door. It was hung on a spring, and she
squeaked in as the door slammed behind her. She repeated the box
balancing and the careful opening for the house door, then set
everything inside the kitchen. She turned the porch’s bug light off
and closed the door.

The kitchen was long past its original
color. Back when she once gave it thought, she supposed the paint
originally was a pleasant pale blue or buttery yellow. But she’d
never dug deep enough through the layers to get to the bottom. She
and Ben had attacked it when it still showed the sickly key lime
green they’d always known it to have, and they’d given up a week
later, four layers down in strata and no closer to the first
one.

They painted the kitchen terra cotta, and it
was still that color – a muted, earthy red-brown that was
highlighted with cream trims. The only thing missing in the room
was a stained glass window they planned for over the sink. That was
Ben’s last project, never to be completed.

A fan was perched on the kitchen counter.
Megan clicked it on, and its head began to twist slowly from side
to side, a nearly imperceptible whir coming as it moved each
direction, hit a louder
tick
, and started back the other
way.

There wasn’t any air conditioning. Only
fans. At least one in each room, with window boxes in the bedrooms
and the attic. There wasn’t a modern furnace, either. Only the
black octopus in the basement, its arms reaching up from the
central core and stretching to the corners of the floors above
it.

At night in the summer, she melted in the
Kansas humidity, the fans churning away and the heat never
stopping. The windows had to stay open, and the cicadas would
rattle in the trees outside. Every now and then the cry of an
ambulance would rise in the distance, grow louder as it hurried
along Sixth, and fade as it slipped away. The bugs would stop when
the ambulance was at its peak, but they’d step it back up again
when it was disappearing, like mourners who’d hushed to watch as a
procession came by.