Box Nine (13 page)

Finally Eva gets up and dumps the whole package into the wastebasket. She goes to the supply closet and takes down a full bottle of generic ammonia, uncaps it, and pours a little into the basket. She puts the ammonia back in the closet and says to Ike, “You never know when you're going to need that.”

He thinks that in a few minutes the room will be suffocated with the burning reek of ammonia, but at the same time he likes the idea of all of the parasites and germs being poisoned into oblivion. He guesses Eva has made the right choice.

“Who do you think sent it?” she asks.

Ike says, “The fish?” even though he knows she means the fish.

Eva stays mute.

“No idea,” Ike finally says. “There's no way of knowing. That's the thing about mail. It can come from anywhere, out of the blue. Without a return address there's no way to know where it came from …”

He almost bites off his own tongue. What the hell is he saying? Twelve years with the service and he can make a statement like that? The fish must have shaken him on some deeper level that he's not even aware of yet.

“The cancellation stamp,” he moans.

“Don't bother to look,” Eva says.

Ike wasn't really thinking about looking. “No,” he says.

Eva shakes her head slowly and emphatically. Ike thinks she'd look perfect right now if she took a long, thin, foreign cigarette, already in an antique black holder, and inserted it between her lips.

“There was no cancellation mark,” she says. “There was no postage stamp at all. No meter sticker. No indication of origin whatsoever.”

“I was so taken back,” Ike says, “so surprised and all that I didn't …”

She cuts him off with a single and unconvincing word. “Understandable.”

He pauses, thinks, and says, “So how did it get here?”

Eva puts her hands together and moves them to crack her knuckles, but no sound issues.

“Two possibilities,” she says. “At least two that are most likely. Someone got in here when we were closed and deposited the package.”

“Or?”

“Or one of our own brought it in.”

Chapter Nine

I
t's a beautiful car,” Woo says, honestly admiring Lenore's restored Barracuda.

“Yeah,” she says, not knowing why she's annoyed by the comment. “I'm saving for a Porsche.”

“Expensive car.”

“Expensive is a relative term.”

Miskewitz spoke to her once about the Barracuda. With its ten-coat black paint job and its perpetually gleaming coat of polish, he felt it was a little too conspicuous down in the Park. Lenore didn't give an inch. Without coming flat out and saying he was an office boy who didn't know gak when it came to the Park, she made the point that where there are smack dealers, there are flashy cars and that the Barracuda was as appropriate as she could get on her insulting salary. It was a tense moment. Miskewitz sensed there was a line he could cross over, that there was an intricate balance between getting what he wanted and holding on to experienced field people. Lenore carried the day and since the incident there's never been another word about the car.

Woo pulls a cassette from a built-in pocket on his door and reads the title aloud. “Discount Lobotomy by Goebbels and the Woofers.”

Lenore refuses to be embarrassed. “It's cutting-edge stuff,” she says. “It's the music of tomorrow. It's not for the average person. The average person couldn't handle it.”

Woo has enjoyed her reaction. He starts pulling out other cassettes, mumbling their titles.

“Your Aryan Masters Sing Songs for the New Order.”

“These people are artists …”

“Drop the Bombs, I Want to Get Off.”

“You have to look past the limitations of history …”

“Genocide Rag by Stalin's Moodswing.”

“Shock is a freeing-up tool, a device for liberation …”

Woo smiles and raises his eyebrows at the same time. “Quite the music library, Detective.”

Lenore smirks, decides not to waste her breath, and says, “What do you know about it?”

“Not too much,” Woo says. “My taste runs to Gregorian chants.”

“You're kidding me,” Lenore says, half interested.

“Not at all. There's real power there, believe me. An overwhelming confidence. I could give you some tapes. I really think you'd like it if you gave it time.”

“Yeah, well, time is a problem these days.”

They're sitting in an unused delivery alley on Voegelin Street in the heart of Bangkok Park. Across the alleyway and a half-block north they can see the rear of Hotel Penumbra. Lenore is waiting for an olive-green Jaguar XJ with customized, heavily smoked, and bulletproof windows to roll up and park in the private garage below the hotel. Cortez is late and that's a bad omen. Cortez has a penchant for being on time.

Lenore speculates that maybe it was Mingo Bouza's fault. Bouza is Cortez's chauffeur/valet/comedian, the latest in a series of aides that seem to chronically disappear without any notice or explanation. Maybe Bouza was late picking Cortez up at the Masseurs, where he goes three times a week for a rubdown.

Cortez has been the proprietor of Hotel Penumbra for a little over a decade now. There are a good many people, and Miskewitz is one of them, who regard Cortez as the main reason for the blindingly rapid and catastrophic downfall of Bangkok Park. Not that the Park was ever a garden spot, but there are still a few people alive in Quinsigamond, in some dim, forgotten nursing homes, who could tell you about a neighborhood of blue-collar but upright immigrant people, a place where you could walk the streets day or night and children grew up in enormous numbers. The Park fell into a common ghettodom in the postwar years and gradually, drugs, gambling, barterable perversion and weaponry moved in more and more. But it wasn't until about fifteen years back that Cortez came to town and the Park became an official war zone and any atrocity was an ongoing possibility.

Lenore is one of the few people who will not lay blame at Cortez's feet. She's seen more than most of the others, and she knows he's up to his elbows in a kind of limitless and surreal, postmodern vice, but he's a player like the rest. She's sure there are people above Cortez. They don't come near the Park. They may not even venture into the county. She has no idea of their names or identities, their ages or positions, creeds or lands of origin. There's not a shred of physical evidence that they exist. But Lenore is absolutely certain of their existence. It's one of the few principles that reside in the vague and shifting cortex of her brain she silently calls
faith.

Lenore has labeled these suspected higher-ups, these alleged invisible handlers of Cortez, “the Aliens.” She does not discuss her belief in the Aliens with anyone. She thought about broaching the subject one night over dinner with Ike, but he fell into a coughing fit as she began to open her mouth and by the time he recovered, the moment was gone. Lenore's highest goal in life is to discover the Aliens and annihilate them. This is not because she finds their exploitation of the Park morally abominable or ethically unacceptable. She can no longer debate things in these terms. It is because she views their unflinching refusal to show face as a sign of ultimate cowardice. They want unlimited rewards without any risk. They want complete bounty without exposure or effort. Lenore views this mode of behavior as an affront. She feels her future destruction of the Aliens will simply be a lesson to them in the ways of nature, in the city of Quinsigamond.

To achieve her hidden goals, she's had to use a substantial amount of savvy and deception. Her sole connection between herself and the Aliens is Cortez, so she's had to walk a line that grows finer each passing week between practically protecting a known if elusive felon, and appearing to perform her job not only correctly but aggressively. Her major ploy, and she fears it's growing thin, has been to continually hint at major future arrests, the leveling of Cortez, Hotel Penumbra, and the entire network of illicit activity that flows in and out its doors. She has had several uncomfortable conferences with Miskewitz, told him she's building an elaborate investigation that will lock Cortez up in Spooner Correctional for life, rather than the pitiful wrist-slap he'd serve if they grabbed him on the small-time charges they're already sure of. Luckily, Zarelli backs up everything she says. She knows that's because he believes it. He's accepted the fact that Lenore cannot live by the good-partner rule of shared information, that she's a reservoir of secrets. Zarelli doesn't even care anymore that he's left in the dark. His world has narrowed until its boundaries consist solely of Lenore's neck, breasts, hips, thighs.

Does Lenore find Cortez attractive? There's no question. Often, as Zarelli clumsily climbs on top of her, smelling of Fiorello's garlic and cigars, she's made him into Cortez, lean, foreign, murderous, a slightly hyper nervous system under rigid inner control, a huge and twisted sense of humor, daring in bed up to the line of perversion. Maybe sometimes darting over the line.

She has dreamed of Cortez, the images very faded and confusing now, but involving, among other things, a bed of fresh poppies, leather, gunpowder smoke, scarred dark flesh. She would like, just once, to taste him, to run her tongue from his Adam's apple slowly down to the imagined patch of jet-black hairs near the navel.

What does Cortez think of Lenore? It's possible, maybe even likely, that he knows she's a cop, though neither of them has ever communicated the fact and both continue to play at the vague cover story that she is either a misplaced and rootless, existential bohemian walking foolishly into the dark world of psychotic outlaws and anarchy, or a mysterious, very smart and tough hooker-cumpimpette looking to advance into the world of narcotic brokering. Or, possibly, some weird mutant, an anomaly with an untold story, moving into Bangkok Park for reasons no one is quite connected enough to grasp. In his heart of hearts, at the unstable core of his self-honesty, he is intrigued by Lenore to the point of foolishness. He finds her the most exciting woman in his memory. And Cortez has had more women than Elvis.

Lenore and Cortez have never spoken. All of the communication between them is suggested, implied, an almost too-subtle blend of gesture, attitude, eye movement. She thinks he's aware that she's protected him from serious harm for over a year now. He thinks she knows he's placed her off limits for the normal Park harassments and shakedowns that fall under his domain. They've both extended these cloaks of safety for a common, simple reason: they both want to see what will happen in the course of their future interactions.

Cortez secretly refers to Lenore as “the Widow” because of her penchant for wearing black when visibly in the Park. No one understands the intricacies or delicate logics of their relationship and, in fact, though unbeknownst to her, it is Lenore that has been the cause of so many of the right-hand men getting the sack. Already Mingo Bouza, wise in his own way, suspects this. He treads lightly when the boss makes obscure comments about the Widow from the backseat of the Jaguar.

Lenore and Cortez have never really come into direct contact. They see each other from a distance, on the street late at night. They have winked to each other across the packed dance floor at Club 62, in the lobby of Hotel Penumbra. They communicate solely through the written word. They seem to leave humorous and taunting messages for each other in odd, exposed locations—graffiti scrawled in telephone booths and on the walls of dingy unisex rest rooms. Cortez has Mingo drive to strange spots in the middle of the night, run to a designated area, and copy down words off a wall, into an expensive leather notebook. Sometimes, Mingo's instructed to leave behind some words he doesn't even understand.

•      •      •

“How much do you know about this Cortez character?” Woo asks.

“More than anybody else,” Lenore says.

Woo's presence is more than an aggravation. It's a kind of personal insult. There's no way the mayor can know what he's doing to her, forcing on her the presence of Dr. Woo. It's an intrusion on the one area of life, the few continuous moments, where she's satisfied. And in this way, it's like a subtle rape, a forcing of an alien will. But the rapist isn't Woo. It isn't even Miskewitz. The attacker is Welby and Lenore won't forget that.

She decides to talk, to lay out what she knows. It isn't that she has any interest in appeasing Woo or being polite or helpful. It's simply that she loves talking about Cortez and is frustrated by the limits she's imposed upon herself. Talking about him makes her feel more connected to him, more a part of his world. She wonders, given the right set of tragic circumstances, could she ever draw down on Cortez, grip tight on the Magnum, and fire death into his chest? Unfortunately she knows that she could, that there would be little question about what to do, that self-preservation would carry the day and she'd leave the King of Bangkok in a bloody, gasping heap outside the revolving doors of the Hotel Penumbra.

“The big fact that you have to know,” she says to Woo, “is that Cortez is the King of Bangkok.”

Woo nods, feeling hip, feeling like he's ready to slide into the swing of things. “He's the top dog,” he says.

Lenore raises her voice. “That's not what I said. I said he's the King of Bangkok. Inside Bangkok, he's the King. But Bangkok isn't the whole world, is it? There's a lot more terrain to this planet than Bangkok Park, right?”

Woo is at once cut back to a fumbling humility. He goes quiet and Lenore, content in his silencing, begins her story.

•      •      •

Cortez's history begins the day he got off the bus in Quinsigamond. Logic and the nature of life tell Lenore that he obviously came from somewhere, that there is more information, probably stored somewhere south of the border, in bulging police files in Colombia or Bolivia. But that ancient history is incidental.