Talk Talk (17 page)
She didn't argue. All at once they were strolling again, following the gravel path as it looped back across the gentle grassy undulations and neatly recessed flowerbeds the landscaper had thought to provide so the denizens of Shelter Bay Village could delight in the contrast as they gazed out over the property to the flat shining void of the water and the hills beyond. A woman in jeans and a windbreaker emerged from behind the bank of buildings and jogged toward them, a small black dog scrambling ahead of her on the tether of its leash. Someone was getting out of a car in the lot--another woman, dipping forward to retrieve her purse and a bag of groceries. Dana felt as if she were about to lose consciousness. Something flitted before her eyes, but it wasn't palpable, and then they were on the doorstep--a deep-pile mat, two pots of begonias, brass knocker--and she was glad she couldn't hear the sound the buzzer made in response to the weight of Bridger's index finger.
The door pulled abruptly open and the woman was there, prettier even than she'd looked at a distance, and there was a child there too, four or five years old, a girl, tugging with all her weight at her mother's wrist--her mother, this was her mother, and anybody could have seen that. The woman gave them a blank look. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
Bridger said something then and for a moment it seemed to immobilize her: “Is Dana here?”
The child kept tugging, chanting “Mommy, Mommy,” and something else Dana couldn't read, and the woman's face changed in that instant, the eyes retreating, lips hardening round the bitter savor of the lie. “No,” she said, “you must have the wrong house.” She glanced away to shoot her daughter an admonitory look and then came back to them. “There is no one of that name here.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN they asked for me? By “name”?”
He'd just come through the front door, feeling harassed, his shirt soaked under the arms, and he hadn't had a drink yet or anything to eat either and the first thing she said to him was that somebody had been there looking for him. That snapped him to attention, all right. That froze him. Right there in the front hall, the three white plastic bags of takeout Chinese dangling from his fingertips and the unread newspaper pinned to his chest. He'd spent the better part of the afternoon and well into the evening hassling over things, the little details that prick you like multiple beestings till your flesh is scored and bleeding and you barely have the energy or will to do what you have to do--like take three carloads of Natalia's clothes and accessories to the storage unit in Larkspur she'd insisted on renting and FedEx six cardboard cartons of dresses, handbags, shoes and kiddie toys to Sandman's place in Croton--and now she'd sprung this on him. He stood there, stupefied.
She was wearing her martyred look, the look she'd put on two nights ago and hadn't taken off since, the savage dark strokes of her eyeliner crushing the life out of her eyes, her mouth set in a permanent pout, her nostrils flaring with self-pity. “No,” she said, “not you,” throwing it over her shoulder as she turned away from the door, padded across the room on bare feet and flung herself down on the couch that was strewn with the chaos of her packing. “Not you,” she repeated in a withering voice. “Da-na. They want Da-na.”
For two days and nights it had been going on like this, the aftermath of his confession a rain of ashes, the village gone and all the people in it, no-man's-land, and he'd had it. Enough. Enough already. Before he knew what he was doing he'd dropped the bags to the floor--and he didn't give a shit if the war wonton soup leaked into the Szechuan scallops and leached right on through to the carpet and if the carpet was ruined and the floorboards underneath and everything else all the way on down to the goddamn basement--and he was there and he had her by the arm, all the rage in him concentrated in the grip of the five fingers of his right hand. “Don't fuck with me,” he said, low and hard, tuning his voice to the register of violence the way he'd learned to do when he was inside, when people were holding their breath and listening and the whole place went suddenly quiet. “You just tell me, you understand? No more of this shit.”
She looked alarmed--scared--her eyes flaring up and then dwindling down to nothing, and that made him feel bad, but not enough to loosen his grip. He jerked her arm, shook her like one of the big fifty-pound sacks of flour stacked up on the shelves in the back room at Pizza Napoli. She didn't cry out. Didn't protest. She said, “A man and a woman. For you, they ask for you.”
Still he held her and he could feel the pressure beating at the sclera of his eyes as if it was too much to contain, as if it would all blow out of him like spew. “How old?” And when she tightened her mouth, a second's hesitation, he jerked at her arm again. “I said, how old?”
“You are leaving a mark.” Her voice was cold, distant, as if she were alluding to an arm that was attached to someone else in another apartment altogether. He became aware then of the constricted burst of cartoon voices emanating from Madison's room, a sudden crazed drawn-out cackle of a laugh, crepitating music. He let go. Natalia gave him a look of resentment, as if he were the one at fault. She wouldn't rub at her arm--she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She was going to suffer. She was a martyr. “The man maybe twenty-five, I don't know,” she said finally. “The woman thirty. Tall, pretty. Blue jeans she was wearing and a tan jacket from bebe, one hundred and thirty-nine dollars on special sale. Okay?”
“They weren't selling anything? You're sure, right? They asked for me by name, not 'Mr. Halter' or 'the man of the house' or anything like that?”
In one swift sure movement she snaked away from him, sliding over the arm of the couch and spinning to her feet like an acrobat. Her eyes lashed at him. She clenched her fists at her sides. “What do you tell me--for months, what do you tell me? You want me to be Mrs. Halter. Mrs. Halter! And who am I to be now? Mrs. Nobody? Yes?”
He took a step toward her and she backed up against the double doors that gave onto the deck. “Shut it,” he said. “Just shut it. We leave in the morning, first thing. So get this shit”--and here he snatched an armful of clothes from the couch--“in your fucking suitcase and get your fucking suitcase in the fucking car, you hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you,” and she was rubbing her arm now, ““Mister” Martin. If that is even your name. Is that your name? Huh, “Bridger?” Is that your name?”
He had no time for this. “A man and a woman,” two nouns that beat in his head with the force of revelation. They knew what he looked like, knew where he lived. They could be out there now, watching him. He looked past her, through the windows and out beyond the deck where the colors were neutering down toward night and the water had blackened along the gray fading shore. Something released in him then--“he had no time”--just as Madison appeared in the doorway calling “Ma-ma” in a piteous attenuated voice and both of them turned to her. “It's all right,” he heard himself say. “I got the food. It's right here. Right here in the hallway.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table, an interval of peace, lingering, the candles lit, wine poured, the chopsticks at their lips, and Madison, revitalized, telling them the plot of a movie she'd seen about a dog and a cat on a cross-country trek, when the doorbell rang. If he'd allowed his internal motor to idle over dinner--and he didn't care how crazy things got, dinner was sacrosanct, because if you didn't sit down over dinner you weren't even civilized--now it revved suddenly, so suddenly he didn't even know how he'd got through the double doors and out onto the deck, ready to drop down a story into the flower bed below. “I'm not here,” he called to Natalia, slipping a leg over the rail, “you never even heard of me.” And he eased himself down till he was dangling by his arms, then dropped to the ground.
It took all of sixty seconds, legs and arms pumping, and he was around front, letting the fronds and tendrils of the vegetation conceal him. There were two figures on the doorstep--a man and a woman--and Natalia was just opening the door. The man--he was in his twenties, soft-looking, with spiked hair, a two-tone jacket and the oversized black jeans the street punks and club aficionados affected--was the one who spoke up, because the woman (and here it hit him: “Dana Halter,” she was “Dana Halter,” in the flesh) just stood there as if she'd been molded out of wax. And she “was” something to look at. She had Natalia's hair, thick and dark, though it twisted out and away from her scalp and hung loose over the collar of her tan jacket and she was taller, slumping her shoulders awkwardly because this was no fun for her. Somebody had assumed her identity, fucked with her life, and she was slumping her shoulders because she was embarrassed by the whole thing. But not so embarrassed she was about to just give it up and let the credit card companies and the insurance people sort it out. That gave him pause. Who was she? Why was she doing this to him? Was it payback, was that what she wanted? And the guy, Bridger--what was it to him?
“You again?” Natalia's tone was peevish, hard. “I told you. I already told you.”
“Frank Calabrese,” the man said. “Is Frank here?”
“Who?”
He repeated himself. His voice took on a pleading quality. “Look, we've been victims of a crime--or she has.” He pointed to the woman. “My fiancée. She--somebody stole her identity. We're looking for Dana Halter. Or Frank Calabrese. You sure he's not here? Frank?”
From where he was hiding, crouched in the bushes, and he would not go down on one knee and stain a good pair of Hugo Boss twill trousers for nothing, he made sure to take a clean mental snapshot of these two, because they were going to pay for this--he was going to make them pay, both of them--and that was a promise.
The light in the entryway shone weakly, casting a jaundiced glow over the little gathering on the doorstep. Natalia's face hardened. She looked ready to do battle, and that was a good sign--she was on his side, at least, and he felt in that moment that she was going to stay there, no matter what he wound up telling her. “Listen,” she said, her voice gone higher now, pinched and querulous, “there is nobody of this name, no Da-na, no Frank, nobody. This is not the correct house, understand?” A car pulled into the lot--the cream-colored Lexus that belonged to the Atkinsons, in one-eleven--and for a moment he felt his pulse leap as the headlights swept the bushes and then died. “If you come here to this house again,” Natalia was saying, her face a sallow over-laid mask in the rinse of yellow light, “to, to “discommode” me and my daughter, I will call the policeman.”
“Yeah, you do that,” the guy snarled, trying to tough it out, but this was the same voice that had come at him over the phone and it had nothing behind it, nothing at all, and the door slammed and the night went quiet but for the solitary receding footsteps of Rick Atkinson on the gravel walk.
And then the strangest thing: the two figures stayed there on the doorstep a long moment, conferring, but without saying a word. Their hands--they were working their hands like ghostly shrouded puppets, and it took him a moment to understand. They were deaf. Or she was deaf. She was the one who hadn't spoken and so here she was juggling her hands as if she were molding something out of the air and passing it to him and then he juggled it and passed it back. It was so unexpected, so private and intimate, that Peck lost all consciousness of the moment. He felt like a voyeur--he “was” a voyeur--and his rage at what had just taken place cooked down into a sort of wonder as he watched them walk down the steps and up the path to the parking area. He was going to leave it at that--they were going, that was enough, and by morning he'd be gone too and all this would be behind him--but he recovered his wits in time to slip out of the shadows and follow them. Just to see what they would do next.
Somehow they'd traced him to the condo, but what did that mean? He wasn't Dana Halter anymore, he wasn't Frank Calabrese. “Frank Calabrese”--that gave him a chill. How in Christ's name did they get hold of that? But still, even if they called the cops and the cops came--a remote possibility--nothing would happen, or at least not immediately. Where was the proof? He'd deny everything, act bewildered. And then, if he had to, incensed. The cops could see just by looking at him, by the way he was dressed, by the way he held his ground at the door of his three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar luxury condo, that they were out of their league. These two must have known that. But then what were they doing--playing amateur detective? Looking to run him down, confront him, settle this outside the law? For all he knew they could have a gun. Anybody could have a gun, the rangiest no-chin kid on the street, the old lady pushing a shopping cart, housewives, mothers--guns were the currency of society, and he, personally, wanted nothing to do with them, especially not on the receiving end.
The shadows played to him. He stayed out of sight, following the scrape of their shoes on the gravel path, watching their silhouettes bob against the hard fixed umbrella of light opening out of the pole at the far end of the lot. He saw them juggle their hands again when they reached their car--a black Jetta, California plates--and then they were speaking aloud, but he couldn't make out what they were saying, her voice blurred and thumping at the syllables as if she had a blanket over her head, his voice blending with hers in a way that made them both indistinct. After a while, they climbed into the car and the doors slammed with two soft detonations, one on the tail of the other.
And what was he thinking? He was thinking he could just step out of the bushes and lay the guy out, break him up, and her too, some applied discouragement to end it right here. But no, that wasn't the way. The way was just to cut his losses and move on. He still had Natalia, he still had money--and a new Mercedes S500 in Bordeaux Red. Peterskill wasn't Mill Valley, maybe, but he'd missed the leaves changing in the fall, snow for Christmas, all of that, and it wouldn't be so bad, not once he got settled. Plus there'd be Florida, Florida in the winter, and they had this whole trip ahead of them with nothing to do but see the country and kick back and enjoy themselves.
For a long while he crouched there in the bushes, watching the back end of the car, letting his mind run--Natalia would be in a state, no doubt about it, and there'd be no rest at all, not till he got her in the Mercedes and pulled the door shut behind him. The story, as it was evolving in his head, the one he would refine at length as they rolled cross-country, had to do with his bankruptcy, the failed restaurants, a fictitious name to smooth things out so he could track his investments, and yes, of course they were going to keep the condo for a summer place, no need to pack the dishes, towels, cutlery, and did she really think he was going to leave his wine cellar behind? He put a fist down in the wet to ease the pressure on his knees. There was a smell of rankness, of knife-shaped leaves and eucalyptus buds going over to rot. Across the lawn, up against the buildings, a bank of sprinklers started up with a hiss of released air. And then, finally, the Jetta's brake lights flashed and the engine turned over and he watched the car back out and glide across the lot to pass on into the black grip of the night.
When he got out of prison he didn't spend a whole lot of time dwelling on his hurts and sorrows, on what could have been and what Gina had done to him and all the wasted effort and sweat and blood he'd put into Pizza Napoli and Lugano or the fact that he was bankrupt and an ex-offender who didn't even have his silver Mustang anymore because he'd sold it and everything else he owned to pay his fish-faced lawyer. No, he was too wise for that. His wisdom had been accumulated through the twelve-ton nights in his bunk and the zombie days doing food preparation and staying out of trouble--and he had to work hard at that. Had to work to rein himself in. Dwell deep. Control the rage that beat in him like a hammer every minute of every day. Because there were some very twisted people inside and the sole meaning and extent of their lives was to fuck with you, and to respond in kind was a lock on extending your sentence. He'd heard the stories. And he put his head down and counted the days off the calendar and when push came to shove he let his hands speak for him, hard and fast, so fast nobody saw it coming and if some dickhead had to go to the infirmary with a pair of sausage eyes and a broken nose, it was nothing to him. He wasn't like the rest of them--of all the put-upon victims of circumstance in the place he was the single one who really truly didn't belong because he hadn't done anything anybody else wouldn't have done in his place and there was no way he was going to complicate things by letting people get to him. That was the beginning of wisdom.
