Death Will Have Your Eyes (8 page)

Not that, before
this, it hadn't been “real” to me.

It was real: I'd seen too many bodies, too many cities gnawed at by flame, too many blank faces and shutdown lives, for it to be anything less. But until that moment my own two lives—the old one, which had embraced these things, which was defined by them; and the new, which at first denied them, later and at best strove somehow to understand them, to incorporate them, to absorb them—had not come together.

Like an eye exam where letters right and left loom wrenchingly out of focus, then suddenly swim towards one another and lock together.

Irony, some would say, is the voice of our time, a time perhaps more given to image, to form, than to substance. And it's difficult to imagine any more ironic image than two veteran killers squatting there at roadside trying to resuscitate a younger, unseasoned version of themselves.

A fever in my bones,
Pavese might have said.

It began, truly began, there.

Images swam in my mind. But they swam beneath a dark membrane. I could make out only the faintest outlines of their forms as momentarily they tugged upward, tugged against that surface, then rebounded into the depths.

Premonitions? Memories? Occult understandings?

Trying to escape, to break out—whatever they were.

As do we all.

Given paper and crayon, the ape draws, laboriously, precisely, only the bars of its cage, again and again.

Adrian's mentor dropped
me at a phone booth on the edge of the next town. Johnsson answered on the second ring:

“Again, David, I must ask that you stop calling on secure lines.”

“You had no way of knowing who this would be.”

“Chances were quite good. One develops a feel for that sort of thing, you may recall.”

“I need a priority-one check.”

“Actually, David, that's the only kind we do in these days of computerized files. But go ahead.”

I told him about my conversation in the café, no more than I had to.

“Michael. The last name may be Danyovich. Father, Dmitri. Mother was Cyprus-born, name unknown, though at one time in her life she used Cybelle.”

I described Michael as only a trained observer can (albeit a long-unpracticed one) and told Johnsson that I'd stand by. I started to give him the number but he said he had no need of it: that the technology was a bit further along these days. I opened the phone booth door for air and watched traffic ease itself along the two-lane street. Within ten minutes, Johnsson rang back.

“Of several names,” he began without preamble, “I find that of Michael Kandinsky—sometimes Michel, or Mikhail—most often used. He matches your description and, as far as we can trace things, the background you sketched. A fairly new player, it would seem. And an extremely cautious one. Almost no tabs to pull.”

“Affiliation?”

“Freelance, like most of the East Europeans these days. They—Hold on.”

Absolute silence on the line, with every twenty seconds the high-pitched bleep of the sweeper.

“David, the computer's latched onto something else. It's scrolling up now.…

“Apparently some years ago, still in his teens, your young man found himself in trouble while on holiday in Turkey. Smoked a couple of joints with his girlfriend and a few of the wrong people, it seems. Spent a most unfortunate week in prison there before his father located and, handing over generous sums of
baksheesh,
retrieved him. The girlfriend was never heard from again. Inquiries were made through channels, officials denied any knowledge, the usual folderol.”

“Not all that unusual a story, as I recall.”

“No. But a year or so later, three guards at that same prison were found flayed and hung upside down on poles just outside the gates. Caused a bit of a stir, even for those times.”

“Could it be coincidence?”

“It
could
be, as you well know, anything. A familial grudge, a military power struggle, depletion of the ozone layer. I myself am no strong believer in coincidence, however.”

“He's insane.”

“Perhaps. Remarkably motivated, certainly. The young man returned from that Turkish prison and, with his father's virtually unlimited funds, went back to school with a vengeance—though his major had changed.

“Over the following years we can track a stream of mercenaries, martial-arts teachers, munitions and surveillance experts, athletic trainers, gentlemen in our own line of work both active and retired, even a terrorist or two, to and from various locations about the world. We would never have been able to discern a pattern, before this; the activities appeared random. With Michael as fulcrum, however, tracing everything back to him, the pattern emerges.”

“He turned himself into one of us.”

“So it would seem.”

“But why? Surely not all that, simply for revenge?”

“Actually, the incident with the guards seems to have been more or less incidental. Something of an advanced training mission, perhaps: who knows?”

I
knew, of course—if what Michael had told me was in fact true.

“After that incident,” Johnsson went on, “we keep losing the spoor. Michael becomes in effect virtually invisible, surfacing here or there at will and—again—apparently at random, then quickly resubmerging. There are glimpses of him in Santiago, some intimation of a lengthy assignment in Rio, a possible walk-on in Puerto Rico.”

“Where does Planchat fit into all this? Assuming that he does.”

“Only two roles are possible, David.”

“Hunter or hunted, you mean.”

“Quite.”

“There might be another.”

He waited. I heard, twice, the bleep of the sweeper.

“Mentor,” I said. “He might have been one of Michael's teachers.”

Three, four, five bleeps went by.

“Yes,” Johnsson said. “Unlikely. But possible.”

Three more.

“There has been no further indication of Planchat's presence. Were we the sort of men who make assumptions, we might assume him to be out of the picture.”

“You think Michael brought him down, then?”

“Of course we are
not
that sort.”

“Or that it's all been Michael, all along?”

That it was Michael I'd been hunting from the first—or allowing to hunt me—made no sense. But then, not much else did, either.

“That is a possibility,” Johnsson said. “One there had been no reason to consider before this.”

“So what do we do?”

“There may be little left that we
can
do just now. Your instinct, obviously, is that Michael should not be brought down?”

“At this time: yes. What I
feel
is that Michael's truly out of the picture now. But if not, then he's so deeply imbedded that, once we gouge him out of it, there's no picture left.”

“In which case…”

“I will continue as before.”

“Yes. That is almost certainly best.”

Two bleeps. Three.

“So very much activity,” Johnsson said, “and to so little apparent purpose. Every light in town is on. And still we are able to see so little.”

Or in his case (I remembered suddenly) nothing.

“One thing further, David.”

“Yes?”

“Your friend. Gabrielle. It seems that everything is getting gathered up in this tangle. Perhaps you'd best attend to her safety?”

I walked up
the street to Norma's Cafe and went in, remembering the beginning of
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. At Norma's, food seemed to be pretty much an afterthought. Instead of dishes there were mostly beer cans. The
spécialité de la maison
was Bud Light.

I asked for coffee and got something reasonably close. On the counter nearby, a glass bell preserved half a cake passed down, from Norma to Norma, by untold generations of the cafe's owners. Lift the bell away and the cake would crumble to dust.

I sat sipping at my coffee. Two elderly men played checkers at a rickety back table. Neither one made a move the whole time I sat there. But every minute or two, again and again, from one side of the board or the other a hand would reach out, pause over pieces, and withdraw.

After a while, most of the Cherokee nation came over and sat beside me.

He was at least six-six, easily three-fifty without the boots and belt buckle that would add another twenty pounds or so. He wore a baseball cap, baggy fatigues with a lot of feathers hanging off. I was pretty sure the stool had groaned when he settled onto it.

He sat smiling at me. Two sips of coffee went by, never to be seen again.

“You remember how it was, man? You do. I can tell. How they'd hunker down out there by the fires for hours while bugs crawled all over your rice and boiled grass and in the corner you always tried to get to before you had to shit. Nothing on their faces, man. Absolutely nothing. That's what I remember. Faces smooth and blank as stones in a riverbed. And they'd rock a little on their heels out there by the fires. Looking like birds. Even sounded like them. And finally you'd just give up and eat the slop, bugs and all.”

He shrugged. Planes flying overhead may have encountered turbulence.

“Fuck that shit. That's what I say. Just fuck it. Am I right?”

I told him he was.

“Fuckin'
A,
” he said, and drank a few more beers while I had a sip of coffee.

“We're Asians too, man—you know that? Fuckin'
walked
here's what we did. Everything was still connected back then. And we could of walked anywhere, you know? But
this
is where we wound up, this was our country. Then you U-rope-peons heard about the buffalo and came over here thinkin' you could have yourself cheap steaks for dinner ever'day and fucked it all up. Just like you fucked up Nam.”

Everything in the cafe got very quiet. I could hear the flame popping beneath the grill.

“You ain't listening, man. And I thought you knew what I was
saying
to you here. Thought maybe you might even care a little. It could happen. But fuckitall: you're just like the rest.”

He had another beer to prepare himself for what had to be done. Then he turned to do it—but I wasn't there. So he kept on turning, to where I stood behind him. Still on the stool, he threw an off-balance right that, inches away as I moved, slammed air against my eardrum and left it ringing.

I rolled in a slow circle around the punch, coming back in just as it peaked, adding my own momentum to his. He went along, then somersaulted away from me, unfolded, and slid four or five feet across the floor flat on his back. He would have slid further, but the café's tables were bolted down, and the second one stopped him.

“All
right!
” he said, and there was a general exodus towards the far wall as he got up.

It lasted longer than it should have. Finally I did manage to drop him without getting hurt myself or, more important, without having to kill or seriously maim my opponent, but it wasn't easy. And it took a while.

After the second tumble, he climbed back to his feet and left brute force, all he'd ever needed for civilian life, there on the floor.

He'd been well and thoroughly trained, and had grafted that training onto what was probably from the first a strong natural aptitude. As I watched now, trying to get a handle on what he was likely to do, he was either weightless and gliding, or he was solid stone. Nothing in between. And the edge came back to him then. I could see the difference behind his eyes, in the way he began moving. As though sharks had swum into the goldfish tank.

I'd go in for feints, just enough to get him moving, then roll away, out of reach.

Like a lot of fighters trained by the armed forces, he was strictly a full-out man: all offense and attack, every movement revved up till the metal screamed, every blow delivered like a bomb.

So I dogged it, made him keep coming after me. Got in close enough for him to strike and rolled off it when he did, looking to be much more affected than I was. I even stumbled once or twice. And then when he came in the last time, low, to shut me down, I wheeled around him and went back off the wall with both legs, adding my own weight and momentum to his, and rode him headfirst into the stainless-steel lunch counter.

The waiter set another coffee down in front of me.

“That happen very often?” I asked him.

“Never more'n a couple times a day. 'Cept Saturdays, of course. Indian's flat crazy.”

“Nam was a bitch.”

“Probably so. But Lee there was flat crazy
'
fore
he went.”

“Is there anyone we should call to see after him? A wife, maybe?”

“Lee done killed one wife and run at least two others off. But I expect someone'll be along shortly.”

He nodded at my cup.

“Better hurry and finish your coffee,” he said.

Heavy in the
hindquarters, with his small, sharp face, J. B. Pickett reminded me of a rodent standing erect. He was stooped, head bent down and forward, and his hands moved all the time. His skin was the color of flour sacks, hair brown and lifeless. He was, he told me, “the law” around here. He was also the Indian's half-brother.

“You can flat fight, that's for sure. Ain't nobody stomped Lee in a good long time.” He poured coffee for both of us, into ceramic mugs, and handed one to me. His said
Roy
. Mine said
Dale
. “Reckon the last one who did was me.”

We sat at what served for his desk, an old pine table with gouges and grooves polished smooth as marble and saturated with half a century's oils and cleaners. School libraries used to have these tables. Now they have particle board. Hot air poured in through an open, screenless window. So did endless streams of unhappy insects.

The law blew across his cup, blinked at the steam when it rolled back in. Every inch polite, professional and proper, but I couldn't shake the feeling that on a slow day he might sign up for lessons at the Arthur Murray Studios for the chance to step on toes.

“Just passing through, I guess.”

I nodded.

“Headin' anywhere in particular?”

The first three words ran together in a long slur. The last one's syllables were ticked off in cadence,
par-tic-u-lar,
like a banker counting out bills.

“Not really. New Orleans, eventually.”

I hadn't known that until I said it, but realized it was true.

“
Coming
from anywhere in particular, then?”

“Last stop was Boston.”

“Boston. I was up that way once.”

He tugged a Styrofoam cooler from under the desk, nudged the top aside and took out a pint carton of Half 'n' Half. Held it towards me and, when I shook my head, dumped some in his coffee.

“You have a car, Mr. Edwards?”

He replaced carton in cooler, cooler beneath desk.

“I've been hitching several days now. I'd hoped I might find new transportation around here, though. Something inexpensive and more or less dependable. If anything like that exists.”

“I 'spect you'd be likely to find something, if you were to look. You have a job, Mr. Edwards?”

“Self-employed.”

“You prove that?”

“Do I need to?”

“Might.” He leaned forward, chair springs groaning. “Let me tell you what came to me. You want some more coffee?”

I held the cup up to indicate that plenty remained.

“Came to me that, first, you don't look much like your standard hitcher, if you know what I mean. And that you knew just a little too much about what you were doing in there up against Lee. Came to me that you might be a person someone was looking for, and if so, that I ought to know about that. You able to follow my thinking?”

I nodded. I was following it all too well.

He leaned back in the chair again, springs sighing with relief.

“I was able to lift the better part of three good prints off that cup of coffee you had over to Norma's. Friend of mine who works up in the capital, I had him run those prints for me. Have any notion what he might have turned up?”

I drank some coffee. Waited.

“Well, his computer kicked the prints and ID right out, no problem:
David Edwards
. Along with a dossier it pulled in from various linkages on the data system. But my friend wasn't satisfied with what he got. Said it was too easy, too quick and clean, that he got more than he asked for. That made him suspicious. And the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. So
he
called in a favor—these guys all know one another, I gather—and piggybacked on a system that's tied into some pretty obscure, and exclusive, data banks. Privileged, my friend put it. Shielded.”

Without asking, he got up and poured more coffee into my cup. Then refilled his own and put the glass carafe on the desk alongside. His chair wheezed like a laryngitic accordion as he settled back into it.

“A strange thing happened, Mr. Edwards. Whatever data banks my friend accessed—credit, military, census—he got back the same thing.
Exactly
the same thing. Said it reminded him of obituaries waiting in newspaper files. Three or four tight paragraphs set as though in cement, scattered facts giving no notion of a real life behind those names, places, dates. And he'd never had anything like that happen before. Never.”

He held out the carafe to me and, when I declined, emptied the rest into his own cup.

“My friend has an awesome curiosity. Not for the information itself, you understand—actually he cares little at all for that—but for the getting of it. Says it's the only thing he's ever been good at. And so he dug in, blind as a mole, buried like a dung beetle, burrowing the contemporary world's
real
subterrain.”

He drank coffee for a while, smiling across at me.

“Eventually, my friend tells me, he managed to find a few cracks, get his foot in a door or two. But then, almost as though his presence somehow had been detected, those doors slammed shut, all at the same instant. And he was left with only a glimpse, the barest intimations of something, a dissolving shape.”

He looked into his cup, moved it in slow circles.

“How old are you, Mr. Edwards? What: late thirties? Forty?”

I picked an age at random. “Thirty-nine.”

“Yet, up until nine years ago, your life's a fortune cookie.”

I inclined my head slightly, asking that he go on, inviting further information, by my own silence.

“I don't suppose there's a number I should call, anything like that?”

I shook my head.

“So,” he said. “The horns of the moment's dilemma.”

He looked towards the window. A wasp flew in, circled the room quickly and fled back outside.

“Obviously you'll provide me no information. Yet on the other hand I am enjoined, by my profession and by my charge to this community, to insist upon the answers I cannot have.”

He leaned closer to me, arms flat on the table.

“Mr. Edwards. Are you willing, or able, at least to tell me what you're doing here?”

“I haven't misrepresented myself in any way, Sheriff, nor do I have reason to do so. I truly am just passing through. There's no more to it than that.”

“And if I should release you now, you would continue that passage?”

I nodded.

“Your presence here has nothing to do with Lee Raincrow?”

“Nothing.”

He looked into my face. A kind of information beyond words, small tides of recognition, passed between us.

“Buy you a drink,” he said shortly, rising. “Said you had need of a car, I believe?”

I nodded.

He nodded back. “Reckon I might know where you could locate one.”