Silencer (19 page)

He glanced away, then looked back at her, but she'd shifted the angle of her head and the impression of youthfulness had left her and he experienced a certain relief. She flicked a lock of hair from her forehead and he realized he wanted to do this for her and clenched his hand and held it against his leg. Touching the lady prosecutor. Fixing her hair. Don't start
liking
the woman. Don't get drawn in. OK, you had one of those wayward sexual fantasies before, which meant zero, just random discharges of the imagination. Don't even think in terms of her being a woman, she's the subject of your scrutiny, that's it. She's what you're working on. This is your job. This is what you do with your fucking life, Anthony.

She slipped her hand inside her hip pocket. He thought about the papers she'd treated so preciously. He needed a pickpocket, a deft hand in Amanda's jeans. He needed to see these papers.

She asked, ‘Do you ever lose people?'

‘Lose people?' Dansk weighed the question. He had the feeling she was asking something completely different. ‘You mean, do they ever stray?'

‘Maybe,' she said.

‘A few. They miss their old hang-outs. They wander off. Not often.'

‘Are there stats available? How many people have walked away, for instance. What percentage stays with the Program. It would be interesting to look at the figures.'

Dansk said, ‘Information like that would be confidential, Amanda.'

‘Confidential. Of course.'

He looked at her.
Do you ever lose people
? It was more than simple fishing. Her question was a radar scan of deep waters, a probe for undersea life-forms. She was somehow different today than she'd been during the meeting at the Biltmore, only he couldn't quite figure it. She seemed more confident, self-assured. He wondered why. Maybe she'd stumbled on something by chance.
She knows something
. No way. What could she have found out anyway? There was nothing to find out. This whole thing was watertight, chained and padlocked.

Still.

His attention was drawn to a woman with a small rodent-like dog on a leash. The dog squatted, deposited excrement on the sidewalk, then shook its ass and strutted on.

Dansk stared at the little pile of shit and said, ‘Goddam, I
detest
that. People let their dogs mess the sidewalks and just walk away. Morons throw beer cans from cars and pickup trucks. The freeways are filthy. You find furniture just lying around outside houses. Mattresses, old refrigerators, beds, clothes, abandoned shopping carts. You have to wonder what kind of mentality is at work and why people can't keep the environment clean –'

Stop here, Anthony. Don't take this any further. Quit at this stage.

‘This really gets to you,' she said. She looked at him with a little element of surprise.

‘Goddam right it gets to me. Doesn't it bother you?'

‘Yeah, but I can't honestly say I've given it as much thought as I should, Anthony.'

Dansk took a deep breath. Calm was the important factor here. He was supposed to be
detached
, not the kind of guy who'd get worked up over dog poop. Not that kind of guy at all.

In more measured speech, he said, ‘That's just it: nobody thinks any more. They dispose of stuff but they don't do it properly, and somebody else has to come along and clean it up. The seas are filled with chemicals, rivers are poisoned. The air. Everywhere you look there's graffiti.' He ran the back of his hand across his lips.

‘You're a tidy freak,' she said. ‘You dispose of your own garbage in an orderly way, do you?'

‘I try,' he said. ‘I don't know about being a tidy freak.' Freak was a word he didn't like. Freak rubbed him all the wrong ways.

‘Is this some kind of parable, Anthony?' she asked. ‘You complain about litter and pollution, but really you're talking about something else.'

‘I was talking strictly about trash.' He laughed. He heard a weird strain in the sound.

She glanced at him. ‘Frankly, I'm more interested in other kinds of disposal: Galindez. Isabel.'

The way she said
disposal
– she gave it sly layers of meaning. She looked in a store window. A thousand kinds of old-fashioned candies in jars, stripes and swirls and a sense of rainbows trapped in bottles. She said, ‘Fudge, look, butterscotch fudge.'

She entered the store and Dansk followed. The air was heavy with vanilla and cinnamon. Dansk studied an array of lollipops and liquorice laces and jaw-breakers. He was brutalized by scarlets and greens and screaming yellows. He'd never had a sweet tooth, and this kind of place made him feel as if silver foil had been placed directly against a metal filling.

Amanda bought a bag of butterscotch fudge. She popped a piece in her mouth before they were even back on the street.

‘Want one?' she asked.

‘No thanks.'

‘Butterscotch fudge is my secret weakness,' she said. There was a bulge in her cheek. ‘Do you have one, Anthony?'

‘You mean a secret weakness? I don't think so.'

‘Let me guess,' she said. ‘Your secret weakness is so secret you don't even know what it is.'

Dansk smiled. She's playing with me. She's going too far. He thought, My finger's on the button.

‘We were talking about your investigation,' she said.

‘Right, we were.'

‘This anticipated report concerning Sanchez may tell you nothing.'

‘You never know.'

‘And then what? Back to HQ?'

Dansk nodded. ‘Right.'

‘Back to your internal investigation. And when you learn something, I get to hear about it.'

‘That's still the deal, Amanda. We shook hands on it.'

‘Right, we did.'

‘Call me old-fashioned, but a handshake means something to me,' he said.

‘And to me, Anthony.' She rattled the paper bag containing the fudge. ‘My secret weakness is really pretty tame when you think of what I could get up to.'

‘What could you get up to, Amanda?' he asked.

‘Oh, mischief, I guess.'

He looked at the slender little chain she wore round her neck and visualized twisting it until her eyes popped and her tongue hung out and that was the end of her. Then he imagined burying her alive. Soil falling on her face and darkness coming down on her, her hands upraised against the relentless rain of dirt. How she'd scream until her mouth filled up with earth and sand, and nothing to mark the grave, nothing to say, ‘Here Lies The Lady Prosecutor'. Then he thought of her catching fire, burning. He imagined the air filled with cinders.
I
have power over you, lady. I can fuck with your life like you wouldn't believe
.

They strolled until they came to an intersection. Dansk had a feeling of ropes tightly knotted inside his skull.
You're keeping me stuck in this burg when I have other places to go, other business elsewhere. I can't spread myself thin like this, lady
.

She said, ‘My car's over there. This is where we part company.'

‘I guess so.'

She shook the bag of fudge again. ‘Sure you won't try one? Last offer.'

‘You're persistent.'

‘Oh very,' she said.

She opened the bag and he dipped a hand inside and came out with a crumbling brown cube, which he placed on his tongue as if it were nuclear waste. She smiled and walked to her car, and as soon as her back was turned he spat the candy from his mouth.

She drove past him and honked the horn twice and waved. He waved back. The sickly flavour of the fudge adhered to the back of his throat like sweetened chalk. He watched the VW disappear round a corner.

He went back to his car and sat behind the wheel. There were tracer bullets screaming in his head. His brain was a war zone. Trenches, casualties, men rushing with stretchers, the rumble of cannon, the dead littering the field of battle.

Mischief
, he thought. I'll show you some genuine fucking mischief, toots. You have Anthony Dansk's personal guarantee. He had an image of his hand hovering over a control panel, lights blinking, his index finger poised, the pull of Amanda's gravity drawing his fingertip down and down to its destination.

One touch. Smithereens.

He phoned McTell.

36

She dialled Drumm's number from a pay phone at a filling-station. He was still unavailable. She left a message to say she'd called, then decided to phone Rhees. She watched traffic slide past and wondered if Anthony Dansk was nearby, if he'd really followed her downtown and seen her going inside the Federal Building, if he was following her still. Watching her moves.
You were meant to be smelling the flowers, Amanda
.

She'd surprised him when she'd popped out of the phone booth. He'd made a big effort to seem unflustered, but he'd reacted like a man caught in an act of voyeurism, an eavesdropper surprised behind a door, a whole flurry of give-aways: scratching his birthmark, nibbling the tip of his pinky. And then out of the blue the whammy, the bizarre diatribe against litter, white flecks at the corners of his lips.

A dog craps on a sidewalk and Dansk reacts badly. A neatness freak. Captain Hygiene. The thing that bothered her was the voltage in his eyes as he spoke. It was a zealot's intense stare, unblinking and focussed on some remote place only he could see. The eyes had become hard bright emerald stones, and spooky. He meant what he said. He was a man who'd gone up the mountain and come down with a big-time revelation. Keep America clean.

No, it was more than that, more than litter and graffiti and shopping carts left all over the place. She had a low allegory threshold in general, but it seemed to her that he was saying, in his own roundabout way, something about the condition of the country. What? The heart of the nation was trashed? As a people, Americans had drifted too far towards a disregard of law and order, as evidenced by their tendency to litter the streets and let their pets shit anywhere they liked?

She wasn't sure, but his sudden outburst had made her uneasy, more than uneasy. There was clearly a very strange and worrisome compartment in Dansk's head, and for a moment she felt an odd sense of vulnerability, as if inside the phone booth she presented a clear target for a sniper nearby, her skull in somebody's scope, a nicotined finger on a delicate trigger. She looked across the street. The stucco building opposite was an office block, four storeys, blinds in windows, a solitary date palm outside. She gazed up at the roof, thinking, This is absurd. Dansk might be more than a little weird and scary, but he is an agent from the Justice Department, he is supposedly on your side …

And yet. She felt pressured by menace.

Rhees answered the phone.

She said, ‘It's me.'

Rhees was quiet for a time. ‘Where are you?'

‘Glendale Avenue,' she answered.

‘You're on your way back, I hope.' He sounded sullen.

‘I didn't mean to rush out like that, John.'

Rhees said, ‘You never
mean
to rush, Amanda.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘Now I'm hearing the contrite bit,' he said.

‘OK, I'm contrite.'

‘And furtive. I hate furtive.'

She felt a tense band across her forehead. ‘Truce?'

‘You can't just say that word and think it makes everything peachy. Have you contacted Dansk?'

‘I saw him.'

‘Tell me you gave him the goddam letter, Amanda. That's all I want to hear.'

‘I think he's been following me, John.'

‘
Following
you?'

‘Watching me.'

‘Why would he do that?'

‘He wants to make sure I leave town. He doesn't want me hanging round. I also get the strong feeling he's a carrot short of a coleslaw.'

‘So he's following you. He's watching you.'

‘That's a gut instinct, I can't be sure –'

‘But you're saying you don't trust him.'

She answered quickly. ‘Yeah. I don't trust him.'

‘You don't trust him to be honest with you? Or you don't trust him period?'

‘Period,' she said.

‘Why don't you just come home and we'll discuss all this face to face. Meantime, I'm still waiting to hear about the letter, which you managed to sidestep quite neatly.'

She was quiet a moment. ‘It's in my pocket,' she said. ‘I'd like to discuss it with Willie before I do anything else.'

‘Drumm, Dansk, I really don't give a shit who you give it to just as long as you get it out of our
lives.
'

He hung up. He'd never done that before. He'd never once just hung up on her in all six years of their relationship. She stuck the handset back. She felt slightly fragmented, as if some mild explosion had occurred inside the phone booth.

She stepped out and the hot sun zapped her and she suddenly remembered she was supposed to return Bernadette Vialli's call. She went back to the pay phone, searched through the tattered directory and called the number. There was no answer.

She walked to her car, drove a little way, checking her rear-view mirror, wondering how she could tell if she was being tracked through the stream of traffic. She steered into the parking-lot of a shopping plaza, killed the engine and then she sat for a time, staring through the windshield and watching traffic come and go. So many cars, so many people, all movement eventually fusing together in one unbroken sunlit glow that after a time became surreal.

Her thoughts drifted to Sanchez, to the threat she could hear echo and roll inside her. She thought of shadows and stalkers, the possibility of harm lurking behind the glare of light.

Dansk.

Or somebody else, somebody hired by Sanchez.

How could you
possibly
know if anyone was following you through this crazy bright urban nightmare? And by the same token, how could you know the plastic Dansk had flashed at you was genuine issue? What evidence did you
really
have that he was who he claimed to be?