Bloodroot (9 page)

“So that’s what you’re doing these days, for work?” I asked. “Sound?”

“Some,” Danny said. “Video mostly.”

“No more recording studios?”

“Nothing there for me but sweeping up. I burned too many bridges getting high. I’m doing private systems, now. It was tough for a while, catching up on the new technology, but Bavasi’s old tech took me under his wing. Al set it up, after I got outta rehab.”

I was shocked and a little ashamed of how relieved I was at Danny’s answers to my questions. They explained a lot. “So there’s decent money in this?”

“When Bavasi’s other guy retired,” Danny said, “I took over all his accounts. It’s pretty profitable, making sure the yuppies can hear their Norah Jones in every room in the house. Making sure they can hear precious Toby’s every breath from his thousand-dollar crib. Setting up their multimedia entertainment systems. I can charge a fortune to show up at the condo and follow the owner’s manual. They’re proud to get overcharged for it. I think in their heads, techs are the new servant class.”

Bavasi brought over a bottle of red wine, poured us each a glass.

“So you work for Al?” I asked.

“No, I work for me,” Danny said. “Like every man should. Al throws me a job every now and then, some things we do together. Bavasi’s my main source; he knows everyone in this neighborhood. It’s strictly word of mouth.” Danny reached into his jacket pocket. “But I do have these.”

He handed me a business card.

“Impressive,” I said, taking the card. There was a laughing devil in one corner and a weeping angel in the other. I read the card aloud. “Far Beyond Technology. I like the name. Good play on words.”

“You get it?” Danny asked. “The joke in the company name?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s technology beyond what your clients are used to, you know? And having your own company, that’s far beyond where you were personally a few years ago. I like the name. I like it a lot.”

Danny smiled at me, benevolent and amused, his eyes a little sad. It was the look you give a kid who believes his dog died because God wanted it that way.

“I love you, man,” he finally said. “I envy your mind. I always have.” Danny studied his reflection in his gleaming silver knife. “I wish I thought more like you, Kevin. When I came up with the name, I was thinking in terms of beyond the grave.”

“Morbid, bro,” I said. “As usual.”

Danny shook his index finger at me. “But true.” He stood. “We got time before the food gets here.” He grabbed his wine. “Come upstairs. I’ll give you a tour of the empire. Explain a little more.”

Outside, only a few feet to the right of Santoro’s, Danny unlocked a windowless metal door, first by punching a code into a keypad, then by turning three different keys in three separate locks. He led us up a brightly lit, narrow staircase carpeted in a deep maroon.

His front door opened into a high-ceilinged room with white walls and a gleaming blond wood floor. To our left was a small kitchen area, the walls and floor tiled in chessboard black and white. Stainless steel appliances shone like surgeons’ equipment atop the granite counters. In the wall to our right a huge black pocket door sealed off Danny’s bedroom. Seven cherubs carved in a panel of blood-red wood writhed in wicked, twisted contortions over the doorway.

“Something else, isn’t it?” Danny said. “It was here when I moved in.”

“I can’t tell if they’re fucking or fighting,” I said. “It’s disturbing.”

Danny laughed. “That’s what I love about it. I can’t tell if that’s agony or ecstasy on their faces, if they’re in Heaven or Hell. Betcha they can’t tell, either.”

“Maybe they’re in between,” I said, “trying to get one way or the other.”

I walked farther into the room, toward what I took to be Danny’s workstation, a sprawling, patchwork construction of desks and shelves covered with monitors, hard drives, and an assortment of devices I didn’t recognize. Danny followed me, hovering over my left shoulder. The whirring and blinking hardware, no doubt expensive and complicated, impressed me. But it was the enormous painting hanging over the workstation that had caught my eye. It had to be ten feet tall. Twice, maybe three times the size of the original. I stood beneath it, awed and repulsed.

“Saturn,” I said. “Devouring his young. Goya.”

“I paid a fortune for it,” Danny said. “Gave the artist, this girl I ran with for a while, a nice bonus, compensation for the two weeks of nightmares that painting gave her. It’s funny. She dumped me right after she finished the painting.”

I stared up into the inhuman, crazed blue eyes of a naked, muscle-roped wild man, his white hair flying, a small, headless figure clutched in his withered fist. The cannibal god’s chin dripped with blood, the blood of his own children.

“It’s monstrous,” I said. “Why would you want
that
watching over you?”

“It reminds me not to be afraid,” Danny said. “Fear. That’s why Saturn murdered his own children. Fear of the future. Fear of the unknown. Frightened people are capable of awful things. Believe me, I know. I used to be one of those people. I’m not anymore. He’s not watching me. I’m watching him. Caught in the act.”

“I thought the problem with fear,” I said, “was what it kept you from doing.”

“A common misconception,” Danny said. “A guy like bin Laden? Everyone thinks hatred motivates people like that. Or that he’s so courageous because he takes on the American Zeus. But that’s all bullshit. Bin Laden’s just another wannabe god hiding in a mountain cave.

“I don’t care what he says on those tapes. He murders because he’s afraid, of the future, of worlds and people he’ll never understand and never be part of. We call them terrorists because they cause terror, but it oughta be because that’s all they feel. The War on Terror? It should be the War
of
Terror. It’s about who feels it more, them or us.” He sat in his black leather office chair, turning in it to face me. “So there it is.” He raised his hand. “Sorry for the lecture. As you can imagine, there’s no talking to Al about this stuff. He’s not much of a thinker. And I spend most of my time either with him or alone.”

“No apology necessary. You wanna come guest lecture in my class?” I said, touching one of the hard drives. Its warm metal shell vibrated under my fingertips. “All this gear, all these ideas. Is this when you tell me you work for the CIA? That you’re really fighting the War of Terror?”

“Nonsense,” he said, turning in his chair. “The feds don’t pay nearly enough.”

Danny tapped his mouse and six different monitors flickered to life. “Stereos and baby monitors isn’t all I do,” Danny said. “Some of my work is more . . . complex.”

All the images looked live. Two I recognized: the sidewalk in front of Santoro’s and the hallway leading up to the apartment. The four others captured people’s apartments, the screens blinking back and forth from living rooms to kitchens to bedrooms. On three of the screens nothing much happened. A baby slept in a crib, an older couple watched TV, a woman read in an easy chair, holding a glass of cold white wine. I could see the beads of condensation on the glass. Sudden motion on another screen caught my eye. I stared, trying to believe what I was seeing. The scene was shot in profile.

A naked woman, about forty or so, her bottle-blond hair tied back in a ponytail, perched on the edge of a bed giving a nude, standing man a vigorous blow job. Her enormous, obviously fake breasts quivered as her entire upper body pistoned up and down. The recipient of her efforts stood with his buttocks clenched and his fists pressed hard into his fleshy hips like Superman atop a skyscraper.

My brother’s fucking with me, I thought. He’s called up some Internet porn site as a joke. But the scene looked awful real.

“You want sound?” Danny asked, wiggling his fingers above the keyboard. “A close-up of those tits?”

I forced my eyes away from the screen. “No thanks. What is this? Who are these people?”

“I’ll tell you who that woman isn’t,” Danny said, tapping his fingertip on the woman’s thigh. Her legs needed a shave, but her hero didn’t seem to mind. “She is not Superman’s wife. She is, in fact, his sister-in-law. Her name is Denise. She’s visiting from Red Hook. She and her husband just moved into a new condo of their own out there. They had Park Slope Chad, here, and his wife, Sharon, over to dinner just the other night.”

I was deeply confused. “So, you’re doing some kind of PI work on the side?” Chad dropped his head, his shoulders and ass started to shake. “Turn this shit off. Please.”

“Sure thing,” Danny said. “Every episode ends the same, anyway.” He tapped some keys and the couple disappeared, replaced on the screen by an aerial map of Park Slope. One street featured a blinking red dot. “There’s Chad’s wife, Sharon. Same place, same time as always.”

“Doing what?” I asked. I tried not to care, but part of me was fascinated. “These people, they don’t know they’re being watched, right?”

“Whadda you think?” Danny rocked back in his chair. “Sharon’s pumping iron, in theory, at a women-only gym.”

“In theory?”

Danny shrugged. “Rumor has it it’s more of a singles club. Private lounges, fancy showers. You get the picture.”

“I do.” I tilted my chin at the screen. “I’m surprised you don’t.”

“I haven’t figured out whether it’s worth anything to me.” Danny checked his watch. “Time for steak. We better get back downstairs.”

“So wait,” I said. “Denise’s husband, he hired you to catch her in the act with Chad?”

“Nope.” Danny powered down his monitors. “You know where they live? Sharon and Chad? In Grandpa O’Malley’s old brownstone.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I shit you not,” Danny said. “It’s the same building. Tell you what else, when Santoro drops whatever he’s got planned on Chad and Sharon and their marriage implodes? I’m gonna snatch that building up. Mom grew up in that place. It oughta be in a respectable family, not with those cretins.”

“I thought you couldn’t afford to walk the street around here.”

Danny stood, patted my shoulder. “I got some things working.”

He led me out of the apartment, speaking over his shoulder as we walked down the stairs. “You see what I mean about fear and awful things? Those sad, terrible people? Disgraceful. If they would show some nerve and tell each other how they really felt, what they really wanted, they wouldn’t have to shame themselves. They might not lose that beautiful house.”

“Maybe that’s part of the excitement,” I said as we headed down the stairs. “The risk of losing everything, the thrill of breaking the rules, of maybe getting caught.”

“Yeah, sure,” Danny scoffed. “That’s why I became a junkie. For the excitement of losing everything from my shoes to my heartbeat. There’s no risk, no thrill in cowardice. If Chad’s wife walked in on that blow job, he’d drop a turd right there on the bedroom floor.” He opened the door out onto the Brooklyn night. “You wanna really walk the line? Try telling the truth.”

 

 

 

NOT THIRTY SECONDS AFTER
we sat back down, a blank-faced waiter arrived at our table, a huge plate in each hand. After setting down the steaks, he refilled our wineglasses, generously overpouring the deep purple pinot noir. My steak, a porterhouse, was enormous and served blood-rare, exactly the way I liked it. It steamed in the center of its bone-white platter in a pool of its own hot blood.

“You gonna eat that?” Danny asked, already chewing. “Or stare at it all night?”

“This thing is a miracle,” I said, picking up my knife and fork. “I hate to defile it.”

“Then send it back. We’ll save it for Al. He’s got no problem defiling things.”

I set my silverware back down, plucked a warm roll from the basket. It steamed when I broke it open. I set both halves on the edge of my plate. I had to ask. “What was that? Upstairs.”

Danny took a big gulp of wine before he spoke. “Look, I had some help getting back on my feet after rehab. I’m not exactly qualified for straight work, you know?” He waved his knife over the dining room. “Santoro, who owns this place, he’s a man of varied interests, business and otherwise. In this neighborhood and beyond. He’s a man of considerable . . . influence. Reach. Much of that influence comes through information.”

“Which you gather by spying on people,” I said. “Jesus, Danny.”

“I help a little. Slip in an extra camera here or there on a job, when he asks. Watch who he tells me to watch.”

I kneaded my fingertips into my temples. “Danny, this is fucked up. You steal people’s secrets.”

“What? Nobody’s watching you?” Danny said. “Every store, bar, bank, and restaurant has cameras. Every dressing room, tollbooth, gas station, ATM, and half the intersections you drive through. Fucking
Starbucks
is filled with cameras. You probably got them at school. Most of your life is lived in front of a camera, Kev. And do you really know when you’re being watched and when you’re not? If you ask, will they turn the cameras off for you? And you, you’re just goin’ about your all-American business. It’s a violation. Illegal search and seizure, that’s like, what, amendment two? Three? You taught me that.”

“But that’s what you do. Watch people that don’t know it.”

“No, it’s not. People who live outside normal society surrender its protection.” Danny gulped his wine. The waiter floated over and refilled his glass. “I promise you, everyone I watch is into Santoro for something. I don’t waste my time peering into the lives of innocents. I got respect for people.”

“That lady? Those old people?”

“They look innocent enough,” Danny said, “but not one of them is.” He tipped his knife toward me. “Nobody is. That’s why they need to be watched.” He slid a huge slice of steak into his mouth. Blood ran down his chin. “Besides, the pay is extraordinary. Cash. Tax-free.”

“Fuck that,” I said. “It’s gross and it’s gotta be illegal.”

“I never said it wasn’t either of those things,” Danny said. “But after you’ve been where I have, seen what I’ve seen, those words don’t mean a whole lot anymore. No offense, Kev, but school’s out.” He tapped the point of his knife on the edge of my plate. “Now eat that glorious steak before it gets cold. You can worry about the ethics of it later.”