Internecine (13 page)

It wasn’t rainshadows, but tears that streaked her face.

“Why ‘Choral’?” I said. It was kinder than grumbling
that’s the stupidest fucking dream I’ve ever heard,
and asking about her issues.

“It was my maternal grandmother’s name. Really.”

“Why not ‘Cody,’ or ‘Brittany,’ or ‘Ashleigh,’ or one of those designer names?”

She chewed on a knuckle. “Because some women over thirty grow up, I guess.”

Or maybe not, since she was apparently considering the consequences of her actions for the very first time . . . and they did not please her.

I started to speak again—you know, keep them talking, add disposable bricks to the illusion of a client relationship—when Dandine overrode me, from the front seat, having resurfaced from his Zen trance, if that’s what it was. “Mr. Lamb.”

I took a beat for me to recall he was talking about me.

“No chitchat,” he said. He knew where I was headed—disposable chitchat land—and aborted my infield play. “T-one,” he told the cabdriver, as we sped up the airport ramp from 96th Street.

Terminal One was the local hub for US Airways and Southwest, less likely to be overpopulated with cops or soldiers all het up about terrorists. Very few red-eyes to Phoenix at this time of night; downstairs, in the section for arrivals and baggage claim, it would be relatively quiet and nonprovocative. Hell, they didn’t even bother to check your bags for tags anymore, down there.

Dandine “helped” Choral rent a Lincoln Town Car with full options
while I stood near a rack of pay phones, holding my imaginary “gun” inside my jacket. The car was a good choice; sturdy, maneuverable, yet anonymous. When I asked why, anyway, Dandine just said, “It’s heavier.”

“Okay?” she said, seeking some minimal approval for her complicity.

“Okay,” said Dandine.

Choral seemed a degree brighter, tired and put out, but resigned to a program that needed to play out, like a grinding machine, or a record on a jukebox, trapped in the groove. It could have been worse. It could have been fatal.

“I just can’t figure it out,” she said to me, quietly enough not to attract Dandine’s ire again. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve been working on it and rolling it over and over in my mind, but why would Licia be involved in something that required so much deployment of effort, and resources, and like you guys say, even
people?
When it doesn’t appear to amount to anything?”

“Yeah.” I still couldn’t track it, either. “A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Did everybody have to read
Macbeth
in high school?”

“I didn’t start quoting it until college.” Normally, to keep the conversation going, I would’ve launched into an amusing anecdote about the quotidian foibles of chasing a university degree. Obscure the more prickly realities with entertaining details that sounded like facts, and made for a better story. Dandine would have said merely to reveal nothing. Innocent factoids could be turned against you by malefactors.

She didn’t look to me like a ringer. She looked like she simply wanted an honest answer. If it was a spy trick, it was a good one. But my own Trickster, no doubt, had long preceded Choral to the same destination, and would advise me not to step into a potential mantrap. I also knew that Dandine was no Outlaw Josey Wales, and had scant intention of vagabonding through the landscape, collecting enough in formants to form a caravan, suffering them all with detached yet humorous fatalism.

A safe distance from the rental counter, Dandine handed Choral
forty of her own remaining dollars, folded double. He pointed past the automatic doors of the terminal, toward the cabstand outside. “Go home,” he said.

“What about my cards?” said Choral, not willing to be cut loose so ignominiously. “What am I supposed to do about—?”

“Shhh,” said Dandine. “Go home now.”

She looked from one of us to the other, expecting something more climactic, or needing a more definitive closure, or perhaps fearing the long-threatened bullet. All drama, too far gone in the day. All the patterns we endlessly replicate, without thinking. Pretty soon the sun would rise and it would become the
next
day. She couldn’t stop her gaze from seeking the doors; the
EXIT
sign might as well have read
ESCAPE
, and she gravitated toward them despite all her unanswered questions, or her due of outrage at the rough use we had made of her life.

“Sorry,” I said. I don’t know if she heard it.

Dandine did, and poked me with an elbow. “Aww. That’s sweet.”

“On top of everything else, we’re
muggers,
now.”

His eyes indicated that we should walk briskly to the rental car bay and blow the hell out of there, posthaste. “You’re mistaking your attraction to her for an innocence she does not possess. She’s tied up with Alicia Brandenberg, don’t forget.”

“So you cut her loose. She’ll be on a phone in five seconds. Sooner, if the cabdriver has a cell.”

“I think she was only involved as far as contacting Varga. It’s obvious that she’s been kept in the dark. I think she is only realizing that, now, and it will impact how she approaches her employer about what happened to her tonight. It’s more useful to set her free, and gauge the responses to what she does, to try to form a clearer picture.” He consigned her credit cards to the nearest trash can, after wiping them down.

“So everybody’s still in the dark, you included.”

“Less so,” he said. “This operation, this plot, is so shielded as to suggest
NORCO
’s internecine machinations. It’s the way they work.”

“
NORCO
again.” I sighed. I had a right to feel strung out. “What’s inter-ness . . .
what
did you say?”

“Internecine,” he said. “Look it up.”

Dandine drove the Town Car to one of the airport hotels,
any
of the airport hotels. They, too, were comfortably anonymous. He tooled around until he located a gang of private cars from assorted rental outlets, and switched out the license plates. Then he checked into a suite, apparently on his own dime, again.

Right when I was feeling victorious because Dandine had “chosen” me over Choral Anne Grimes, he nailed me.

“Stay or go?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Stay or go—you. You’re not my prisoner. I’ve apprised you of the consequences of trying to innocently resume your life. I don’t need your help, and you don’t have any additional information. By now you have some appreciation of the risk factor. So . . . stay or go?”

Part of me bristled at being so baldly useless. In the world of the walking dead, at least, I always had
something
to contribute. It all seemed peripheral now, less important. I could shrug it off and say the feeling was due to the innate nosiness that normal people have about what goes on behind the scenes of their reality, but what rankled me was the suggestion that it might be preferable, for “somebody like me” (a norm), to re-don blinders and go about my life of un-willful ignorance.

Where, in the next twenty-four hours or so, I was likely to be detained, roughly interrogated, and possibly murdered, because it was cleaner for all the puppet masters—that maddeningly faceless
Them,
the people that
really
run everything. You’ve always suspected
They
exist. You and I complain about
Them
a lot, without considering their actual shape, or scope. “Why don’t They just provide socialized medicine?” we grouse, sipping overpriced boutique coffee. “Why don’t They just give us electric cars?” Or, “What They should have done is bartered grain for petroleum,” or “lowered taxes,” or, in short, “solved my problems for me.” Well,
They
do . . . and we all pick up the check.
They
have trained us so that it’s easier and more convenient to just pay the bill, take it up the ass, and eat our gruel with a smile.

And I’m one of Them. My job is to talk you into footing the bill every time. And you love all my little seductions. But in a merchant economy, the only true god is profit, and I’m on bended knee, just like you.

People love venomless risk. The saccharine danger of amusement park rides and the catharsis of fiction. The torpor of narcotics and the exercise of loveless sex. Bungee jumping cheap thrills for the walking dead, to lend an illusion of “life” to that which is not alive. You can buy all that and more, in the marketplace of distraction. You can be entertained to death, when you are defined by what you consume. Anyone who dares confess a desire for spiritual growth is mocked into marginalization. I’m not talking about religion; I’m talking about being more than the products you buy, and living a life instead of just hanging on and hoping for the best, like a chimp swinging vine to vine. It’s dangerous for someone in the advertising business to be thinking like this.

They
ought to do something about that.

We
prefer
to admit we’re trapped in forceful waters we cannot control, and find success and fulfillment in just being swept along on someone else’s tide. It abrogates our responsibility and makes our lives someone else’s fault. It’s a relief not to be accountable, and we love palliatives. Our whole culture is built on the sand of excuses, excuses. Not my fault; not your fault.
Their
fault.

Some people define success as dying, to beat creditors. Tell me that’s not fucked up.

Why me? I thought yet again. If Dandine was for real, I was being offered an opportunity to acid-test values to which we all pay lip service as ideals. Step up, or step off. You don’t confront yourself without doubt, or excuses. Why
not
me?

“What would
you
do?” I asked Dandine. “If you were me? Stay or go?”

Dandine pinched the bridge of his nose. It was pleasing to see him admit a little human fatigue. “Fair enough,” said this man who usually didn’t give a shit about fairness. “You handled yourself well with our confused little Choral. At Varga’s, too. You probably feel in over your head, but you stuck to my rules and didn’t make any frivolous contacts.”

“Because I’m scared to death to call anybody.”

“You’re examining real fear for perhaps the first time in your life,” said Dandine. “But you haven’t run gibbering into the night.”

“You mean like I could right now? Supposedly?”

“Sure you could. But you’re selling yourself on the idea that you just might learn something about how the real world works. You’re not my squire and you’re not indentured. Yet, you’re still here.”

Brilliant. All along I was trying to saddle Dandine with the burden of blame and here he was—exposing me to myself.

“I told you about
NORCO
because your reactions were intriguing and useful to me. You paid me back by rising to the challenge at Varga’s—you acted like you’d surprised even yourself.”

“I’m surprised I didn’t fill my pants and run around like a decapitated chicken.”

“No, see, you’re still trying to do that huckster thing: shrugging off credit and deferring blame. Like you did with Varga;
that
was a super-sized order of boardroom bullshit. You knew to pretend to kiss his ass because that was what would unlock him. With me and him, it would have been threats and counterthreats.”

“I also know how to deflect the issue with backhanded compliments,” I said, zeroing in on him. “What about
NORCO
?”

“Old news I thought was resolved,” said Dandine. “Apparently, it’s not. Otherwise, neither of us would be here right now. As far as you go . . . well, you decide. I’m willing to let you continue this ride-along because it’s worth it to me to see your perceptions, and I think you’re game because you want to unravel these invisible things that impact your existence. If you don’t like that one, how about this: It’s weirdly fun. I’ve never had a partner before.”

This was far more revealing than I expected Dandine to be.

“Partners usually share intel,” I said. “So far this is pretty one-sided. Need-to-know stuff that only
you
need to know.”

“Here’s what you need to know right now: Some faction inside of
NORCO
has decided to sacrifice me to cover some kind of political play distantly connected to a client of your ad agency. In the process, you accidentally blundered into their crosshairs, but I can insulate you from them—for the time being, and only if I keep my eyes on you. I’m willing to bet some answers can be found if we poke into who’s screwing whom in the election snake pit, and you can help with that.”