Silencer (28 page)

She had a feeling of sinking through a sudden quicksand of panic. She thrust the key into the ignition and roared out of the cul-de-sac.

51

Dansk stared through the windshield of his car at the huge pink and aquamarine hospital, which bore some resemblance to a massive birthday cake. He turned to look at McTell in the seat. ‘I want a gun, Eddie.'

‘Say?'

‘Something out of your private arsenal.'

‘A gun,' McTell said and smiled in an uneasy fashion. Suddenly, outta the blue, Dansk wants a gun. Dansk's head was red flags, bad tides, No Swimming Beyond This Point.

‘What kind of weapon can you give me?'

McTell said, ‘I got a nice Heckler & Koch P7M8. Also a Ruger P89. You sure about this, Anthony?'

‘I'm sure.'

‘It's just when it comes to guns, me and Pasquale usually –'

‘The Ruger,' Dansk said. He imagined the gun in his hand, the weight of it, the deadliness. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He was stuffed-up on account of this city air. His head ached, he was probably coming down with desert fever or whatever evil spore floated in from the hot canyons and clogged your nostrils and rooted itself like a fungus in your lungs.

McTell said, ‘The Ruger's a joy. Square post front sight, square notch rear adjustable. It comes in blue steel, but I always had a soft spot for the stainless version.'

Dansk watched visitors getting out of cars and strolling towards the entrance with their flowers and candies. There was a certain type of person who thrived around sickbeds. They drew up their chairs and flashed their own epic scars. Here's where they did the bypass, a quadruple job, and down here's the appendectomy.

He looked for Amanda and saw no sign of her. Maybe she'd enter the building another way, a side door, a rear door, thinking she was being clever.

There's a note in your voice I don't like, Amanda. What are you thinking
?

We know security's screwed-up. So … maybe there's some kind of connection between the apparent disappearance of Benny and the Sanchez-Galindez affair. Something we haven't thought about
.

Dansk thought about the tape that had been delivered to his hotel at 9.15 a.m. just as he'd been finishing his press-ups. A brown padded envelope, no message. It hadn't needed any message. It was Loeb's way of telling him things had drifted too far. Well fuck you Loeb, I do this my way. Who needs a dying man's shit? He remembered sweat falling on the envelope. He'd called Pasquale immediately. His hand had left smudged prints on the phone.

‘Is the gun handy?' he asked McTell.

‘It's in the trunk of my car over there.'

‘Get it for me.' Dansk watched McTell walk to his car, unlock the trunk and take out a brown-paper sack. McTell returned to the car and gave the sack to Dansk, who placed it in his lap, peered inside and saw the Ruger.

‘Tell me about Mrs Vialli,' he said.

‘What's to tell? It went off OK.'

Dansk said, ‘You looked in her eyes, Eddie.'

‘I don't think much about these things.'

‘What did you see?'

‘Like in her eyes?' This is Dansk. Dansk who never wants to hear details. All of a sudden he's interested. ‘She just looked kinda surprised. She wet herself. She had on these furry slippers. Big fluffy things with like rabbit ears.'

Dansk thought of fuzzy dampened ears, the body discharging piss. He said, ‘Here's what I want you to do, Eddie. Check the room Rhees is in.'

‘Then what?'

‘Just look inside, that's all.'

‘That's it?' McTell opened the door and stopped halfway out. ‘And if she's there with him? I just kinda look and walk away?'

Dansk said, ‘Right. Buy a bunch of flowers, they'll make you appear legit. Go inside. Make it seem like you got the wrong room.'

‘Rhees is gonna recognize me from that time we spoke.'

‘Let me worry about that.'

McTell shrugged, stepped out of the car and walked across the lot.

Dansk regarded himself in the rear-view mirror and noticed a small brown wad of his morning toast stuck between his front teeth. He picked it out with his finger then wiped the finger on a Kleenex, a pop-up box of which he kept on the dash. Amanda Scholes had good teeth, he remembered. Strong and clean, healthy gums.

Good teeth. Everything decays though.

The hospital shimmered in front of him. All that sickness wrapped in a huge blue and pink cake. Terminal cases attached to machines, bony old women hunched behind screens.

On an impulse, he picked up his phone and called a number in New Jersey. He heard his mother's voice, faint and far away. Spectral.

‘Anthony? That really you?'

‘Yeah, really me. How are you?'

‘It's been a while.'

‘I've been busy, Ma.'

‘Mr Chomsky was just asking after you,' she said. She had a quivery voice. It kept fading in and out.

‘Where you calling from, Anthony?'

‘Las Cruces, New Mexico.'

‘You coming this way?'

‘Soon, Ma.'

‘I miss you.'

‘Listen, I met a girl.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Nice girl, you'd like her. Maybe I'll bring her up there. Introduce you.'

‘What's her name?'

‘I can't hear you, Ma.'

‘What's the girl's name I asked.'

‘Amanda,' he said.

‘Pretty name,' she said.

‘Yeah, nice lady. Works for the same company as me.'

‘I'll light a candle for you,' she said.

‘You do that, Ma. I gotta go now. Talk to you soon.'

‘I love you, Anthony.'

Dansk put down the phone on the passenger seat. The call would make the old woman's day, brighten her calendar. Sometimes you did what you could to spread a little cheer. He could see her hurry down the narrow gloomy stairs to the violin repairman's rooms where, surrounded by ancient amputated fiddles and a mountain of pegs and coiled strings, she'd tell Chomsky she'd just had a phone call from her son. He's got a girl called Amanda. She'd build it up into a big thing, a church wedding and decrepit Father McGlone conducting the service, and old Chom would tip his head in the manner of a blind person listening, and he'd smile in his gap-toothed way and say, ‘Miracles happen when you least expect 'em. You gotta believe.'

Dansk leaned forward against the steering-wheel. You tell a lie or two and they bring a little happiness. Where's the harm?

Amanda. It was the first name that had sprung to mind. He wondered about that, then decided it was on account of how much she occupied his thoughts, the way she eclipsed all other business. In one bizarre sense, he was more intimate with her than he'd ever been with any other woman in his entire life. He looked at the back of his hand, seeing the red mark left by the knife she'd used against him. Pathetic.

So somebody's got it in for you personally. Dansk, say
.

Until a few days ago I didn't even know he existed, Willie. I'd be inclined to dismiss anything personal
.

Personal, yeah. It hadn't started out that way, but somewhere along the line it had changed.

Dansk opened the paper sack, dipped a hand inside and gripped the Ruger. It had a lovely gravity. It seemed to emit a low humming sound, like a machine plugged into a power source. He took the gun out, passed it from one hand to the other, over and over. This killing device. This snuffer of human candles. He imagined saying, Open your mouth a little, part your lips just enough for me to slide the gun inside your mouth, Amanda. Let me bring an end to your troubles. The gun is foreplay. The rest is darkness.

He shut the sack. She was nearby and he knew it, he could sense it. He was tuned into her frequency. She was a clear image on his radar screen.

The wedge of pain had shifted to the front of his brain, and when he looked at the hospital it seemed to him that the edifice was disintegrating, like an ice-cream concoction melting in the heat.

A pigeon flew from the roof, flapping into the sun. Dansk watched it climb. He tightened his hold on the Ruger and imagined shooting the bird out of the sky. This was an unsettling junction where past and present intersected, and for a moment he seemed to hover outside himself, looking down and seeing a red-haired man sitting in a car with a gun in his lap and a freckled kid in the back seat clutching an air rifle. Both had murderous expressions.

52

She parked at the back of the hospital in one of the slots reserved for physicians and, wearing her cracked sunglasses, walked quickly between a fleet of ambulances. She went inside the building through double doors marked DELIVERIES, expecting to be challenged by hospital security guards. Nobody appeared.

She found herself in a wide corridor leading to the laundry. She passed a glass-panelled door, behind which she saw industrial washing-machines, enormous dryers rumbling, people in white smocks ironing and folding bed sheets. She took off the glasses when she reached the service elevator and punched the button for the third floor, where she emerged into a warren of corridors stretching into great pastel infinities. She took a left turn. Two security officers in chocolate-brown uniforms were talking together. They gazed at her, a moment of professional assessment, then turned away. She'd passed their scrutiny. A woman in a dark business suit, not worth challenging.

The door of room 360 was open.

He was propped up against pillows. His face was pale and swollen, his plastered arm in a white sling. His eyes were lacklustre. She drew up a chair to the side of the bed and Rhees managed a smile.

‘How are we?' she asked.

‘Prodigious amounts of Percodan in my bloodstream,' he said. ‘I feel like a passenger on a slow-moving train crossing Kansas.'

She held his good hand between her own. Her and Rhees and nothing else. If only that small world could be restored. She watched him tilt his head back against the pillows. She wanted to protect him, make him safe. She wished she had the magic to turn back clocks.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘Coughing's the real killer.'

The real killer, she thought. She looked at the window, seeing the frazzled morning gathering the kind of momentum that would lead to 100 degrees and change, mercury exploding in glass tubes.

She said, ‘I don't think they were burglars who came to the house, John. Dansk sent them.'

He looked at her for a time. ‘He gets to you through me. Is that the idea?'

She looked round the room, the walls the colour of mango flesh, the wheelchair in the corner. ‘I'm sorry for this, all this.'

‘What's the point? I don't think you can help yourself. You're programmed to run in a certain direction, Amanda. It just happened that this time you ran into a bad place.'

‘I might have disconnected the program,' she said. ‘Ripped out the logic board. Anything.'

‘You might have, but you didn't, and I didn't do enough to stop you.'

‘I look at you and I feel like shit,' she said.

He closed his eyes and turned his face slightly away from her.

She said, ‘Dansk got Isabel's letter from me.'

‘How?'

‘I was distracted. The point is he got it, he read it, and I think he knows you read it too. I don't know what conclusion he imagines I've reached.'

‘Have you reached one?'

‘I wish I could say yes. Willie's helping now.'

‘You finally enlisted him? That's a step forward.'

‘One I might have taken sooner,' she said.

Rhees flexed the fingers of his undamaged hand. ‘How safe are we in this place?'

She looked through the door towards the corridor. People passed carrying flowers, bags of fruit, paperback books, magazines. People visiting the sick. She wondered about them and their credentials, whether at least one of them had a hidden purpose. She walked to the window and gazed down at the parking-lot. The roofs of cars were like tinted mirrors. Tension was rising inside her.

She was aware of Rhees watching her. ‘Well?'

‘I don't think we're safe, John.'

‘Where is Drumm right now?'

‘He said he'd call me here.' She looked at her watch. Ten-thirty. She had no idea when Willie would contact her. He'd talked about going to see Dansk, an idea that seemed to her suddenly loaded with menace.

Rhees said, ‘You know what would be nice? A little protection. A cop posted outside the room. Somebody handy with a gun.'

A man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in an open-neck shirt and held a plastic-wrapped bouquet of mixed flowers to his chest. He wore tinted glasses and his beard was neatly trimmed.

Jangled, Amanda rose immediately from her chair.

‘This three zero six?' the man asked.

Amanda stared at the bouquet. Bright petals, green stems slick with water. They seemed fake, pressed out of synthetic materials. Anything could be hidden in those flowers. Plastic crackled against the guy's shirt and Amanda thought of explosives detonating miles away, like something you'd hear in the background of a TV broadcast from Bosnia or Sarajevo or wherever the world was at war.

‘Three six zero,' Amanda said. This is what your condition comes right down to: a place where guns might be hidden in flowers and you hear bombs in the crackle of plastic.

‘I guess I got the wrong room,' the guy said, and drifted back into the corridor.

Rhees was staring at the empty doorway. ‘Last time I saw that guy he was selling magazine subscriptions on our doorstep. I signed up for
Sports Illustrated.
'

‘That's the
same
guy? You're sure?'

‘No question. We chatted a few minutes. It was raining and I felt sorry for him. It's no coincidence he's here, is it?'

‘Dansk wants us to know how exposed we are,' she said.

‘I guess that answers my question about safety. Call Drumm, Amanda. Do it now. Get him to come here.'