Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (24 page)

I picked the picture up and showed it to Boutros, whose hands had found their way into her mouth. She tore her eyes away from Lyn Vaughn and looked at it. “
Tia Marta
,” she said around nine grimy fingers.

Another picture, the largest of all, showed Elena, the boys, and the girl, considerably younger, standing in front of a greener, lusher, muddier world that had to be El Salvador. They were all looking past the camera, laughing at something. The boy in the center had thrown his arms comfortably over his brothers’ shoulders.

No picture of the baby. No man to take it since she was born? There wasn’t much of anything to suggest a man’s presence. There wasn’t, in fact, much of anything at all: a couch, two chairs, a low table. A closed door.

Through the door, a hallway, parallel to the street. Three bedrooms, one with three beds—the boys?—one with two—Elena and her older daughter?—and one, the tiniest of all, a penitential nun’s cell with a bare brown linoleum floor, an iron-framed single bed, and a four-drawer dresser of unpainted, unfinished wood, the kind people buy cheap, meaning to paint it, and never do. Surrounded by a pink plastic frame on top of the dresser, Marta’s face squinted apprehensively out at me, waiting for the next blow.

The mystery of the child’s hands was solved. Aunt Marta’s room apparently served as a trap for all the dirt that entered the house. There were dust rats under the bed, grit on the linoleum. It may be sexist stereotyping, but it seems to me that when a woman lets her space get seriously dirty, she’s usually depressed.

In the top drawer, rolled up into a sock, I found eleven hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. A lot of money for a maid. The child gazed up at me solemnly as I unrolled the sock’s mate and heard something jingle. Marta’s cache: a ring, another, a gold chain, a—

Somebody moaned, a constricted little vocal shiver with no force behind it. I looked at Boutros, but she’d dropped to her fanny on the floor, where she was rolling dirt ropes on the linoleum.

My spine went stiff, and the pain in my back wrapped itself around my middle, saddled me, and dug in the spurs. I closed my fingers around the sock and replaced it silently. For insurance, I picked up the saltshaker, which I’d been toting around with me, and zapped the child. A dirt rope went into her mouth, but she kept quiet. Easing the salt-shaker into my left hand, I pulled my gun out of my pocket, trying to keep my body between it and the child, and slid my feet toward the door. My shoes squealed on the linoleum. Boutros got up and slid along behind me.
Her
shoes squealed on the linoleum.

Okay, skip stealth. I sprang across the hall and into the boys’ room, gun extended, and kicked the door back against the wall. The child squealed happily at the noise. No one behind the door, no one in the room, no one in the closet, no one in the little bathroom.

I kicked the door again as I hurtled back into the hallway and slammed my back against the wall. Pulling both hands from her mouth, the child clapped them together. She was having a great time. I took three long steps sideways, hugging the wall, and then whirled and kicked the open door of the largest room, the room I’d taken to be Elena’s.

It banged against the wall and bounced shut behind me, but by then I was raking the clothes in the closet with my free hand, keeping the gun back, at waist level, pointed into the closet. The clothes swayed back and forth, hangers rattling. No one.

There were two beds, a queen-size one with a cerise coverlet in the center of the room and a smaller one, a child’s bed, up against the wall to the right. Boutros squatted Asian-style, bottom touching the floor, next to the larger bed and put a dark brown handprint on something white protruding from beneath the bedspread. A shoe.

It was a small shoe, a white canvas sneaker. It had a foot in it. It was perfectly still, as still as the foot of a corpse.

I put the gun in my left, reached down, and took hold of the corpse’s foot. Boutros scuttled backward, and the corpse said, “
Yaiiii
.”

“Mr. Max give me,” Marta Aguirre said sullenly. She was even smaller than I’d expected, a shrunken, malformed woman who seemed to have been compressed unevenly by external pressure, collapsed inward like a tin can at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

She was sitting on her hands on the queen-size bed, and I was perched on the smaller one, the child’s bed, feeling oversize and overtired and stretched far too thin for any of this. Boutros, whose name turned out to be Tina, was in the living room, glued to the latest carnage from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’ve already admitted you took the rings and the gold chain. Why would Max give you more than a thousand bucks?”

“For gold,” she said.

It was what she’d said before. I put a hand behind me and rubbed at the small of my back. Peter Pain immediately whammed me a good one. “Gold for what?”

“Surprise.”

“Well, you’re going to have to spoil it,” I said. She glowered at me, and I tried the direct approach. “What kind of a surprise? For whom?”

Her mouth shrunk at the corners like a poison kiss, giving her an expression of surpassing bitterness, the expression of something little and bent that lived in the dark under a bridge and frightened dogs. “
Maricón
,” she said venomously. “Fancy boy.”

“You don’t mean Christy,” I ventured.

“New boy,” she said. Her right shoulder was a good two inches higher than her left. It made her look like a beast of burden.

“Marta,” I said, “did you ever see this new boy?”

She squinted darkly at me, assessing me and finding me wanting on some private scale. “No.” The word dropped like a stone.

“So let’s say you’re telling the truth, just for fun. You were supposed to buy gold for Max’s new boy?”

“
Make
,” she said, packing a surprising amount of contempt into such a short word. “
Make
gold.”

I closed my eyes and thought briefly about lying down. The bed was too short. “You were going to take Max’s money,” I said slowly, “and make gold for his new boy.”

“Stupid,” Marta Aguirre said. I was beginning to share Christy’s feelings about her. “Uncle make. Uncle make gold.”

“Your uncle,” I said, picking my way through the sparsest of verbal thickets, “is a goldsmith?”

“Wha?” Marta Aguirre said.

Maybe the bed wasn’t too short. “A jeweler.”

“
Sí
. Jeweler.” She nodded vigorously, in case
sí
was beyond my powers.

“What was he supposed to make?”

“Stupid,” she said again. “Gimme.” She reached out a stunted hand, and I gave her the sock that had held the rings and the necklace. She fished around in it and pulled something out: a pack of military dog tags. “Make gold,” she said, explaining the obvious to an idiot. “Uncle make gold. For fancy boy.”

Steel dog tags. The steel chain taken from around Max’s neck. I got up, feeling stronger and more energetic than I had in days, and pulled Max’s wad from my pocket. I dangled a fifty in front of her, and when she reached for it I relieved her of the dog tags and read them. They said:

McCARVEY, JD SGT

AR5144597082

TYPE AB

ROMAN CATHOLIC

I hung the chain around my neck. Then I gave Marta Aguirre the fifty.

“Fix the window,” I said.

It looked okay to me.

YOU’RE INVITED!!!

TO A WAKE!!!!

FOR MAX GROVER

THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN

PARAGON BALLROOM, 7:30 P.M.

TRY OUT YOUR COSTUME!!!! WIN PRIZES!!!!!!

GRAND PRIZE: COMPLETE G. I. JOE OUTFIT

(VERY ALDO RAY) WITH…

SOLID GOLD DOG TAGS!!!!!

“Nothing about the holy water?” Ferris Hanks’s feelings were hurt.

“Let’s make it a surprise,” I said. In the Sunday-afternoon light streaming through the window of
Nite Line
, Ferris’s face was as orange as a carrot. He’d chosen to meet the world in a sober gray business suit, conservative in cut, made out of elephant hide. His eyes were green today, to go with his tie, which was wide enough to serve as an apron for a sumo wrestler and covered in shamrocks. The knot was the size of a fist.

“You don’t know this audience,” Ferris said from above his knot. “This is just the audience for holy water.” Henry stood behind him, soaking up daylight. His black T-shirt said HAVE WE MET? on the front and HAVE ME WET? on the back.

“How do we know it’s real holy water?” asked Joel Farfman,
Nite Line’s
editor, ad salesman, head reporter, and circulation manager. Farfman, a compact man with weight lifter’s shoulders and a toupee that appeared to be made out of recycled lint, had a journalist’s professionally suspicious face, and at the mention of holy water he looked like someone who’d just been handed a Xeroxed hundred.

“Oh,
please
,” Ferris said disdainfully. “
Nite Line
is suddenly worried about truth in advertising? Your classified pages would be
blank
.”

“You’ve answered them, have you?” Farfman wasn’t awed by Ferris Hanks.

Hanks started to say something, and Henry spoke up. “Looks fine,” he said. Hanks closed his mouth.

“And you’re sure,” I said, “that you can get this into Monday’s—tomorrow’s—paper.”

“Piece of cake,” Farfman said. I noticed that he had a punctured pupil in his left eye, almost as wide as the iris. The damaged eye lagged slightly behind the good one when he shifted his gaze from Henry to me. “Ready-mix.”

“I thought, with typography and everything—”

Farfman allowed himself a lofty smile, a smile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the face of a Druid high priest, the one who knew how eclipses worked. His eye made the smile slightly mysterious, as befits a keeper of secrets. “There’s no such thing as type any more,” he said. “We use soft fonts, graphics, really, composed on the computer, and then we send the layout over the wire to the hard drive on the computer at the printing house. They park it there, on their drive, until it’s time to print, which in this case will be…” He looked at his watch. “Ninety minutes from now.”

A little bell went off in my head. Not much of a bell, probably in the egg-timer class on the international bell scale, but it got my attention. I hadn’t been hearing a lot of bells lately.

“I notice you don’t question the ‘solid gold’ bit,” Ferris said, still rankling.

“Gold I can check,” Farfman said resolutely. “Holy water? It could be bottled Arrowhead for all we’ll be able to tell.”

Hanks took his knot in both hands, apparently warming up to strangling himself.

“There isn’t room for the holy water, Ferris,” I said soothingly. “How much will that be?”

Farfman held up a hand so inky that I suspected him of inking it on purpose. “Gratis. For Max.”

“I’m paying for this,” Ferris said severely. “I don’t want to owe you any favors.”

“I hope it keeps you awake nights,” Farfman said.

“Who sleeps
nights
?” Hanks snapped.

Farfman wasn’t having any. “What I hear, I’m surprised you can sleep at all.”

“Hold it,” I said. “Tell me about how it gets printed again.”

“We compose it here,” Farfman said, using his hands to show me where
here
was and then moving them to the phone, “and send it over the wire to the—” I interrupted his hands halfway to
there
. “Jesus,” I said. I looked at the three of them looking at me. “You know, I’m really too stupid for this job.”

Grizzly Jack was dubious. “On my hard drive?”

“Why not? He had the telephone hookup. He probably had a macro so he wouldn’t even have to dial the number. What easier place to park stuff?”

“Without telling me?” There was betrayal in the tone. In the living room the phone boys whispered digital nothings over the wire.

“He was keeping secrets,” I said.

His fingers tangled themselves up in the beard, found a knot, and broke it. He didn’t even wince. “That’s not like Max.”

I searched for an explanation that
would
be like Max and came up with one. “He didn’t want to hurt Christy.”

This time the knot got dissolved in a gentle rolling motion between thumb and forefinger. “It would be an archive file,” he said, “one that you can’t access without a password.” My spirits plunged. “Probably in the library. That’s where we put the archives.”

“But if you can’t access it—”

His hands emerged from the beard and waved me off. “No, no, no.
You
can’t access it. From outside.
I
can access anything.” He led me through the hallway toward the computer room. “I have to be able to read it all,” he said. “Do you know who the bulletin-board cops are? The fucking Secret
Service
, that’s who. You’d think they’d have their hands full protecting the president, but no, they’ve got lots of time to sneak around on boards. All the time in the world. First they lurk—”