Cold Silence (12 page)

He opened another box. There wasn't food inside that one either. The box was filled with pink iPhones.

That night former Sergeants Robert Delaney and Arnold Hasselbach visited Sykes's trailer, sat down with him, acting less like noncommissioned officers, more like pals. They handed him a fat white envelope.

“You're a born soldier,” the ex-sergeants said.

“I don't want this money.”

“Yes you do. You did well today. Don't spoil it. Hey! Is that your grandfather in that photo, Sykes? Back home?”

“Are you threatening me?” Sykes said.

“Don't be a hard-ass. You were a hero. Money is gratitude. Why are you here if not for that?”

Sykes shook his head. He didn't want to look at the envelope. “Those guys we killed were gangsters, not soldiers.”

“They were terrorists.”

“I killed four kids over vodka!”

“You saved your buddies, Sykes! Man up!”

From then on, two convoys went out each week, and Orrin Sykes did a good job protecting them. He rode shotgun on the lead truck. He was promoted and got a raise. One day he killed a civilian driving toward them in an old Ford Fairlane. After the violence was over, they found a dead baby in the backseat, also shot, and no bomb. Another time he and other guards shot it out with ex-Iraqi soldiers when negotiations over some stolen iPhones went bad. Sykes killed two men. Hasselbach gave him an extra thousand that night.

“Hey, man, there's nothing you can't do,” Hasselbach said.

He started drinking away bad feelings. Hasselbach gave him some cocaine, and later sold him more. Hasselbach smiling and praising but always watching. “We're the tip of an iceberg, Sykes. Take the money.
Go home. Spend it on that girlfriend in the photo. You blew away some bad murderer dudes, man. You saved American lives.”

Six months later he was out, living in Los Angeles, burning through the $68,000 cash. There were medical terms for his condition—the hours spent playing games at a computer, the inability to get a job, the laughter he heard when he couldn't perform with women. Some days he didn't even go outside. He drew the curtains in his little studio on Havenhurst Street. He sat in the glow of a screen. The money trickled away.

IS THERE NOTHING ORRIN SYKES CANNOT DO?

But there was, apparently, because casting agents turned him down. “You're not good on camera.” The payoff money ran out. He remembered the laughing face of a beautiful young actress at a swimming party in Beverly Hills. The girl leaning close, green eyes glowing, bikini snug, body filled with vitality. Half-drunk that day, he'd been going on about a wrestling award, trying to impress her. “You're from where, Orrin? Crystal Lake? You weren't even a big fish in a little pond! You were a protozoa in a little puddle!” She'd turned away, as if he were already gone.

Now as Sykes reached the Capitol area, the images came faster, like flipping cards. Carol Ann on the phone when he called her from L.A. “I'm getting married! You disappeared!” Sykes in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, blood on his face, but he could not remember why. Sykes waking in a men's shelter to find a skinny guy, pants down, trying to rape him. Sykes in a jail cell. Sykes too humiliated to call Grandfather for money to get home. But finally he did, and did not even hear a dial tone, just a recording. The line was disconnected. He hesitated before calling Uncle Merrill, but knew he had to get out of L.A.

“Hi, Uncle.”

“You piece of shit! Your grandfather died asking for you! You ran away from the job! You ran away from Carol Ann. Go fuck yourself. Don't call me again, loser.”

Now, in D.C., Sykes got turned the wrong way for a few minutes
and steered the Honda along Independence Avenue, past the Museum of the American Indian and the Air and Space Museum. He made a U-turn. The road rose back toward Congress, past bomb barriers ringing the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, hydrant-shaped concrete blocks designed to block a car bomb. The gaps were large enough for a trillion microbes to float through.

But Sykes was still in the past, remembering the months after that phone call. Each time he'd thought things couldn't get worse, they did. Each time he knew he'd hit bottom, the bottom dropped out again.

Sykes saw himself in a police line-up, but the woman whose purse he'd grabbed failed to identify him. He saw himself breaking the lock on a gas station men's room door for a place to sleep, in Omaha, near a rail freight yard. He saw himself standing in a concrete spillway in Buffalo, gazing at a billboard announcing Warner Bros. Pictures' Academy Award nominees. Sykes a full-fledged member of the academy of failure.

And finally the day it changed. Sykes taking refuge in an old record shop in Albany in a storm, not to buy anything, just to keep dry, standing amid vintage rock albums disdained as old-fashioned ten years ago, but regarded as valuable again. In a record store second chances were contagious.

“You look hungry,” a girl's voice said as he stood in back, trying to stay invisible and not get kicked out.

She was pretty: jet-black hair, glistening blue eyes, lean figure, and firm belly visible below the cutoff top. He saw sympathy instead of revulsion in her eyes, kindness where he usually saw dread. Girls had not regarded him that way for years.

“I'm Mariko. You look like you need a friend.”

She'd taken his hand as if she knew him, led him outside, just opened the door to her late-model Toyota, unafraid. A miracle. An angel.

“Don't be shy. Get in.”

The house where she brought him was filled with wonderful people
who gave him a bed, and food, and didn't ask questions. Carla and Fritz, Mariko and Morgan and Shahid. They didn't make him leave. Weeks passed before he blurted out the story, sobbing, and even then they accepted him, gathered around and hugged him and told him he was welcome. He belonged. In that house Orrin met a man who had answers. And in his mind, he was reborn.

And now, heart slamming with excitement, Orrin found parking on 2nd Street, five blocks from the Longworth Building. At one time, years ago, you could park closer, but between the security precaution tire shredders, bomb barriers, and no parking signs, you needed to range farther to find a legal two-hour parking space on Capitol Hill.

He left the car in front of a townhouse. His size eleven footprints filled with falling snow as he walked. A few Diamond cabs cruised Independence, exhaust trailing like breath. Orrin had shaved. His dress shirt was blue and his tie was maroon, the suit gray. His hair was combed and he wore Washington's ubiquitous belted raincoat. He was a lawyer. A lobbyist. The effect was enhanced by clear-lensed, thick-framed rectangular glasses.

The line to get in stretched outside—people stamping in the cold, waiting to go through metal detectors. Longworth filled a city block. Its gray edifice represented the Capitol's 1930s love affair with neoclassical revival architecture, a combo of boxy Soviet utilitarianism with glommed-on Ionic colonnades.

At the security station he watched the Tumi bag float through the x-ray machine. This was the moment when he could be caught, and for an instant he was scared. The bag contained news clips about today's hearing on a religious revival at U.S. Air Force bases. There was also the day's
Washington Post
, Tylenol, and a pill vial labeled Cipro, an antibiotic. But it was not.

It did not cure illness. It created it.

The security guards didn't even open the case. Sykes kept his head down so cameras would not show his face. He walked with a small limp,
turned his feet slightly inward. A smart observer watching a tape later and then seeing the real Orrin walking, would not connect the gaits.

The hearing room was packed, standing room only. He stood there for thirty minutes, pretending to listen, because Harlan said that security people would later go over the tapes. He opened the notebook. A Congressman from Buffalo grilled an Air Force major about evangelical meetings at air bases in Colorado Springs and at Creech in Nevada. Daily readings from the New Testament. Lunchtime prayers in a dining area. Hazing of non-Christian personnel.

“Major, wouldn't you say that there is no place for religious proselytizing in an air base?” the Congressman said curtly. “That our Constitution specifies the separation of Church and State?”

The man at the witness table looked up at seven Congressmen and women on a raised dais, and frowned.

“I would say, sir, that at no time were any personnel coerced into participating. Prayer was purely voluntary.”

The blood roared in Orrin's ears so loudly that it all was gibberish to him.

The clock ticked toward noon, when the chairman adjourned for lunch and Sykes joined a stream of people heading downstairs to the underground level of the Capitol. It was a maze down there! A mini city. Corridors filled with staffers, tourists, witnesses from the hearings, lobbyists trying to get bills passed or shut down. Orrin saw a post office and a Quick Mart and a dry cleaners. There was a Verizon shop. One tunnel led to the Rayburn Building and another to a little open train taking riders back and forth to the Senate side of the Capitol.

The cafeteria was packed, smaller than he would have imagined. At one table: Iñupiat Eskimos from Alaska, here to lobby against blocking off their entire coastline, polar bear habitat, to development; at another, pro-football players fighting against salary caps. Nuns on the left. Ten guys in AFL-CIO jackets sat in a corner. A Toyota Motor Corp. legal team sat beneath a flat-screen TV showing a Midwest snowstorm. The
cafeteria was like a high school lunchroom for the whole country, each table a clique, each group wearing their group uniforms, clerical collars, pinstriped men at the deli counter, logo sweatshirts by the steam table reading,
A FETUS IS A PERSON
.

“You will want the salad bar,” Harlan Maas had said.

Sykes put his right hand in his pocket and palmed the little vial. The blood rushed in his head and his voice, when he ordered a burger, sounded astoundingly calm. The fries looked soggy. The burger looked like paper. He had no appetite to eat. He carried the food to the salad bar; shiny bins offering up red tomatoes and black olives, here a bin of yellow pineapple squares, there a container featuring freshly cut rings of red onions.

He'd rehearsed the hand movements last night before a mirror. He was, after all, in public, moving down a line. This was his most vulnerable moment. He felt sweat inside his socks. If someone saw him, there would be no question that he was contaminating the food.

All heads swiveled for a moment to the TV on the wall, rebroadcasting an argumentative part of today's hearing. As Sykes's tray passed over the mushroom bits, he pinched the capsule, felt plastic give. He envisioned the mushroom-colored powder falling on the veggies. Then his legs—as if by themselves—carried him to a four-person table. He sat down. From his pocket he removed a small clear plastic vial labeled
HAND SANITIZER
. He felt the liquid squishing between his fingers. Stomach churning, he picked up the burger and forced himself to take a bi
te.

“Remember, surveillance tapes will be scrutinized,” Harlan had warned him. “Make yourself eat.”

Sykes finished the burger. Heart slamming in his chest, he felt a fry ooze down his throat, as if it were a living creature, wriggling and trying to get back out.

He watched the room. No one went to the salad bar.

Then suddenly his throat constricted as a cafeteria worker approached the bar with a rolling cart filled with replacement vegetables. He was going to take away the infected food before anyone ate it!

The worker wore thick blue rubber gloves as he replaced some of the vegetable bins in the salad bar with fresh ones. Sykes wanted to scream at him to stop. Not even one person had eaten from the mushroom bin yet. Sykes had to contain himself from launching himself across the floor at the cafeteria worker. But then the worker broke off his activity before replacing the mushroom bin. The attendant rolled the cart away, looking bored.

Harlan's voice, in Sykes's head, said, “Relax, friend.”

Orrin Sykes watched a trio of men in expensive suits—including a Congressman he recognized from the TV—step up to the salad bar. Sykes uncapped his bottled water. The Congressman added mushrooms to his salad, then the men carried their trays to the
STAFF ONLY
area.

Orrin rose and placed his tray with the empties. Leaving the room, he turned back to see a half dozen Amish women, in bonnets, at the salad bar, loading up.

Orrin Sykes walked out of the Longworth Building and down the marble stairs and hit the cold air outside. The weather had turned vicious. The temperature had plunged. A barrage of snowy hail slanted from the sky, smashing taxis, slashing the rooftops of government. In wonder, Sykes recalled that sometimes Harlan Maas sermonized about the ten plagues that God visited upon Egypt when Pharaoh denied the Hebrew slaves permission to leave. The prophet Moses warned Pharaoh that if he did not relent, great suffering would afflict his people. Pharaoh laughed, never imagining that any force existed that was more powerful than him.

Boils. Hail. Leprosy, Harlan said.

The wind blew punishing granules into his face. He tilted forward against gusts to reach the car. Inside, the noise lessened, and the radio announcer said a worse storm was coming. Today it was ravaging swaths of the Midwest.

“We're in for the biggest blizzard of the decade!”