Silencer (20 page)

None.

37

Rhees was killing time fishing detritus from the pool – dead butterflies, limp insects, leaves – when the telephone rang inside the house. He laid the net on the ground and walked into the kitchen. He half-expected to hear Amanda again, but it was Morgan Scholes on the line.

‘Is she around?'

‘Not at the moment,' Rhees said. He looked across the backyard at the cedar fence. Water reflected by sunlight rippled against the wood, a dappled effect. A few yards down the alley beyond the fence a telephone lineman in a white hard hat was climbing down from a ladder propped against a pole. He vanished out of sight and Rhees heard doors slam and the sound of a van start up.

‘You there, John?' Scholes asked.

‘I'm here.'

‘I call her, she says she'll get back to me, I don't hear a goddam thing.'

Rhees said, ‘She's running an errand, Morgan.'

‘Don't tell me. It's this stiff in the river business she's got herself into, right?'

‘You know what she's like,' Rhees said.

‘The back of my hand,' Morgan Scholes said. ‘You're too soft on her, John. Who's in charge there anyway? You or her?'

Rhees said, ‘We're equal partners,' and wondered how true that was. Sometimes he thought of Amanda in terms of a storm, a river suddenly flooding. His role was to stack sandbags along the banks and wait for the waters to recede.

‘Equal, I don't think. She has you by the short and curlies.'

‘That's not true, Morgan.'

‘I blame myself. I gave her too much freedom when she was a kid and what good has that done? I should have laid down the law more.'

Rhees glanced at the kitchen clock. Half an hour had passed since he'd hung up on her. Maybe she was sulking somewhere, taking her time coming home, trying his patience.

‘I don't think this has to do with you giving her too much freedom, Morgan,' he said.

‘No?'

‘One minute she wants the cabin and peace,' Rhees said, ‘the next she's not sure it's inactivity she's really after. She's always had goals in the past. Now … I guess it's a question of redefining herself, which isn't easy for her.'

Morgan Scholes said, ‘She's old enough to make up her mind, John, and you ought to tell her that.'

Rhees said, ‘I'm trying.'

‘Get her to phone me when she comes in.'

Rhees said he'd pass along the message.

He hung up, wandered through the house, room to room, restless. In the bathroom he looked inside the medicine cabinet. He had an urge to gather together Amanda's vitamin supplements and immune-system boosters and just dump all that quackery in the trash. He studied the labels: dried seaweed, powder derived from a green-lipped mussel, whatever the hell that was. He imagined plants and creatures fished out of the deep sea, ground down and then stuffed into capsules.

There were a couple of prescription medications: Diazepam, Dalmane. Downers she'd used during the Sanchez trial when she'd needed to sleep, when she was fraught and wound too tight, and it was three a.m. and she was collating material or studying Isabel Sanchez's testimony, or poring over transcripts of her interviews with Galindez. When she was fraying at the edges.

And now, now she'd said Dansk was following her. Her gut feeling, she'd said. She usually had good instincts, but this time he had to wonder if she was interpreting the signals accurately, or if she was creating her own little melodrama because of Isabel.

A touch of paranoia? Possibly.

He shut the cabinet. He listened to the silences of the house. He wished she'd come through the front door and he could hold her and say something like, I'm sorry I hung up on you, let's talk. Let's clear the air about everything.

He walked into the kitchen. The door to the backyard was open. He thought he'd closed it. No, he
remembered
closing it to keep the cold air from the air-conditioning escaping –

He saw the tyre-iron but couldn't move out the way before it smashed into his ribs with an impact that forced all air out of his lungs, and he staggered, clutching the area of pain, aware of light being sucked out of the room, and he had the sensation of plummeting down a greased cylinder. The second blow struck the side of his head and the sense of slipping inside a darkening tube was even stronger now, and he gave up trying to keep his balance and went down on his hands and knees.

He raised his face. He made an effort to get up by clutching the edge of the table, and that was when the third blow was launched, sharp and dreadful, metal coming down so hard on his left hand that he could hear the sound of his finger-bones breaking. He slumped and the room was like one of those deranged rides at a carnival when you went spinning round and round in the air and the spectators far below you were just a sea of faces in white light. He rolled over on his back and dimly saw two guys wearing ski masks. He launched a foot, the best effort he could make, and struck one of the guys in the groin.

‘You mother
fucker
,' the guy said.

The tyre-iron cracked against the back of his knee and he was dragged across the kitchen floor and out into the yard towards the swimming-pool where his head was forced underwater and held there, and all he could see were pale red bubbles rising from his mouth. Drowned, he was being drowned. He wanted to scream, but then his head was yanked up from the water and the sunlight was blistering against his eyes and he was whacked again, this time across the shoulders. And then his face was forced underwater a second time, or maybe a third, he couldn't count, he was beyond making elementary measurements. Now the pain came roaring through him, gathering strength, but that was only the first stage, because after that he found himself entering a place of pain beyond pain, where a deep burgundy tide hurried into his brain.

38

Amanda drove into the cul-de-sac. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was no sight of Dansk or anyone else, no car behind her. She parked in the driveway.

OK. Time to get practical. Go inside the house and call the Justice Department in Washington, and ask through the central switchboard to be connected to Anthony Dansk. The private number he'd given her could be
anything
. If she found herself connected to his extension, then at least she'd know he worked for Justice. If the operator told her there was no listing for anyone called Dansk – but she wasn't ready to think this through to a conclusion.

She got out of the car. She turned and looked the length of the cul-de-sac. It was calm and somehow completely unsettling. It was as if a cortège had recently passed, leaving behind a somber pall of silence. No kids, no pedestrians, no lawnmowers roaring, nothing. It was wrong, only she couldn't think why. Some form of charged static hung in the still air, like the atmosphere before a storm.

She opened the car door, glanced at the house, saw the sunstruck windows. Fiery glass blinded her. She walked to the house, unlocked the door and entered the hallway, where the shattered mirror on the wall reflected her face in a series of jagged slivers.

She didn't move. She understood at some level of memory activity that there was a procedure to follow in situations like this, you were supposed to back out of the house at once and call the police, you were advised not to run the risk of confronting the intruder if he was still on the premises, there were rules to follow if you wanted to survive. Rules didn't enter her head.

She took a step forward. Broken bits of mirror crunched under her sneakers. She glanced through the open doorway of the living-room. A typewriter lay upturned on the floor. The drawers of Rhees's desk hung open. Papers were strewn all around.

Terror comes in variations on the ordinary. Papers where they shouldn't be, a typewriter lying upside down, a broken mirror. She edged closer to the door, conscious of the way a deep silence was clinging to the house, all noise vacuumed out of the place, dead space, just this void. She was numb, circuits down.

She entered the room.

‘John,' she called.

His books were scattered. His files lay in utter disarray. A chair was overturned, a lampshade trampled and bent. No sign of Rhees.

‘John!'

She moved to the kitchen doorway. No Rhees. On the kitchen table a jar of beets had been toppled and dark purple liquid dripped to the floor like a strange wine.

She was finding it hard to breathe. The space through which she moved was viscous. Go back, turn, get out of here. She walked to the half-open kitchen door and gripped the handle.

‘JOHN!'

The yard was silent. Butterflies flapped over the long grass and her own voice returned to her as an echo she couldn't identify. Blue sky, frail bright wings, an echo dying. She went through the grass, drawn for some reason towards the pool, then stopped dead. The sun darkened.

He was seated motionless on the steps in the shallow end. His head was inclined forwards against his chest. His eyes were shut. The water, which rose as far as his waist, was ribboned with spirals of red.

This happens, this kind of thing, you read it every day in the papers – home invasions, suburban terrorists, dopers looking for quick cash, fix-money. This is the way it happens, only it's supposed to happen next door to somebody else, not to you.

No way. Never to you.

She rushed to where Rhees sat and, bending at the knees, gripped him under the shoulders, and then she pulled until she was breathless and her head was burning with a kind of fever and she'd hauled him out of the water and the air smelled of chemicals and damp clothing.

A mosquito landed on John's face, humming its blood song.

39

Dansk stepped inside the confessional. He noticed a scab of pink chewing-gum pressed to the wall and a crayoned item of graffiti close to the floor: ‘Jesus Saves at Citibank'. And here on the floor was a wrinkled condom dumped by some moron with a distasteful sense of humour. These signs of decline in the national fibre were everywhere – in churches even.

‘I've sinned, Father. Fornication, hookers, call-girls.'

A thread of sunlight sneaking from somewhere illuminated the priest's skull on the other side of the grille, outlining a frizz of white hair, a halo effect. Dansk heard the priest yawn. Even priests suffered from the general malaise of things.

He thought of his mother and her unlimited piety. She lived in Patterson, New Jersey, occupying three brown twenty-watt rooms over the workshop of a blind violin repairman called Chomsky. To the accompaniment of plucking sounds coming up from below, she prayed a lot in front of a plaster statue of the Virgin that stood on top of the TV. Under the base of the statue were the words,
Souvenir from Knock, Ireland
. You grow up, Anthony, be an accountant, an optometrist, something people will respect.

Respect was her mantra. And always go to confession when you can.

Three or four times a year he phoned her, told her he was moving around from place to place, going where the oil company sent him in his capacity as a surveyor. He made up names for things that didn't exist. The
calsidron
broke down yesterday. There's one site near Amarillo that's probably the world's biggest deposit of
vobendum
.

His mother never asked questions, not even if he had a girlfriend and if she could look forward one day to being a grandmother. Whenever he thought about her he saw her stooped in front of that statue with her eyes shut, praying for her dead husband, Albert, who'd succumbed to a cardiac arrest on Dansk's fourth birthday. All Dansk could remember of his father was the smell of fried food that clung to his clothes from the fourteen-hour days he spent as a short-order cook in a truck stop on the edge of Patterson. Some memory. Some life.

‘Do you believe in God?' the priest asked.

‘I believe,' Dansk said. Confession boxes made him apprehensive. They were filled with the echoes of millions of sins, ghostly voices asking forgiveness.

‘Ten Hail Marys,' the priest said.

Dansk said, ‘Thank you, Father.'

‘Bless you.'

Business done. Religion was a hurried affair like everything else in these days of acronyms and sound bites and nobody with the time to listen. Dismissed, Dansk stepped out of the box. I pay for sex, I consort with call-girls. I'm Chief Surveyor for Transamerica Explorations Inc. A man to be respected in spite of his sexual inclinations. I have nothing to do with death.

Ten Hail Marys, low-impact aerobics for the soul. You wouldn't even break sweat. He dropped some coins in a collection box for a Patagonian mission and went out to the street. He moved towards his car where a tall black man was leaning with folded arms against the hood. Dansk kept going, slowing his pace just a little, hearing the drone of imminent danger.

‘You Dansk?' the man asked.

Dansk reached the car. He studied the man quickly. Black silk bomber jacket, black polo-neck, the face with the monstrous overhanging brow, huge hands, no rings. Dansk had the general impression of brutality.

‘I wanna word,' the guy said.

Dansk said, ‘I don't know you.'

‘You're about to,' the guy said.

Dansk could feel it in the air around him, a kind of static, and somewhere in his head a sound that reminded him of Chomsky stretching a violin string to breaking-point.

The black guy had his hands clasped in front of him. ‘Let's you and me walk over there,' he said.

Dansk looked, saw an entrance to an alley, dumpsters, plastic sacks, one of which had broken and disgorged its contents. He saw chop-bones and a lettuce oozing brown slime. ‘I don't walk into alleys with strangers,' he said. ‘Rule of mine.'

The black man said, ‘We can do this right here on the street.'

Dansk gazed the length of the street. He saw quiet houses, empty sidewalks, palm trees, and a few blocks beyond, the high-rises of downtown. Nobody moving. This was one of those upmarket streets, reclaimed from disrepair by lawyers, ad executives and local media types.