Silencer (24 page)

‘Ten minutes, ma'am.'

She checked her watch. Ten minutes. Mrs Anthony Dansk, she thought. She wondered if Dansk had a wife. She couldn't imagine it.

She walked up and down the room. The slapstick was over. The next part was different. She sat on the bed, but her heart was like a racehorse and she had to get up again. She went inside the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. The surge of nervous energy that had transported her through the comedy of errors at reception was still flowing vigorously. All the time at the desk she'd wondered what would have happened if Dansk had chosen that moment to enter the hotel and he had seen her. A sliver of luck. You needed it now and again.

Let it hold.

She checked her watch again. She took off her shoes and left her room. She rode the elevator down and stepped out on the seventh floor. She found room 7320 and she waited outside the door. Ten minutes since she'd ordered from room service. Eleven. Twelve. This is no way to do things, the heart flat out. Dansk could appear. Dansk could materialize in the corridor. And then what? Hello, Anthony, I was just in the neighbourhood.

She heard the elevator in the shaft, the clank of cutlery. She saw the room-service waiter come into view with a tray balanced on one hand. He was a tall black kid in a striped vest. She smiled at him as he approached.

‘I know, I know, you're gonna think I'm a total moron,' she said. ‘I locked myself out. I'm not even wearing my shoes, for God's sake. I thought I heard somebody at the door, so I went to see, the door swung shut behind me. What do you put on the hinges here? Electromagnets? Now I'm standing here like an idiot.'

‘Happens all the time,' the kid said.

‘It does?'

‘Oh sure.'

‘So do I eat my dinner out here in the corridor or are you going to be like my knight in shining armour and let me back inside my room?'

‘You're a damsel in distress,' the kid said.

‘Distress is right. I think I'm beyond the age of damsel, though.'

The kid laughed. ‘I never heard of an age limit to damsels.' He slipped a keycard from his shirt pocket.

‘Will that work?' she asked, looking at the card and thinking, Hurry, hurry.

‘This is a magic card. One size fits all.' He slid the card into the slot, turned the handle and said, ‘See? Open sesame.'

She walked ahead of him into the room. He set down the tray and gave her a slip of paper to sign. She wrote
Mrs Anthony Dansk
and added five dollars in the gratuity column.

‘Thanks a lot,' the kid said.

‘You deserve it.'

The kid left the room, closing the door behind him.

She thought,
I'm in
.

45

Dansk, stepping out of his car in the parking garage, saw the man emerge from the shadows. Long black coat, beret, black gloves even. The man was seized by a fit of coughing and dug inside the pocket of his coat and came out with a small chocolate-brown bottle which he uncapped and held to his lips. He took a swig and stuck the bottle away again. His eyes watered. He looked as if he'd hawked up a chunk of diseased lung and was sickened by the taste in his mouth.

‘What is that shit you're drinking, Loeb?' Dansk asked.

‘Morphine in a syrup base.'

‘Morphine?'

‘Whatever it takes,' Loeb said. ‘Anybody ever tells you there's dignity in pain is talking unadulterated crap. Let's get some air.'

They walked together through a door marked EXIT and entered an alley at the back of the hotel where Dansk saw dark-green plastic garbage sacks and cardboard boxes, all very orderly.

In his beret Loeb resembled a raddled, hollow-faced 1950s poet, a guy sitting outside a café on the Left Bank or in Greenwich Village, scribbling intense odes and drinking cheap red vino. ‘I was wondering about our lady,' he said.

‘This is territory I work my own way. This is mine,' Dansk said, keeping his voice in check.

‘Yeah, it's your domain all right. But this work can contaminate a man. I've seen people get a taste for death. They develop a jones.'

‘Oh spare me the fucking lecture,' Dansk said.

‘Sometimes enthusiasm's great, Anthony. Other times it fogs a man's judgement.'

Dansk said, ‘There's nothing wrong with my judgement, Loeb.'

Loeb said, ‘You're so damn defensive these days, I wonder if you aren't just losing the place a little. I worry about your detachment.'

‘I'm detached,' Dansk said.

‘Maybe. But this work can get to you in such a way you wouldn't even notice it happening.'

‘I'd notice,' Dansk said.

‘So tell me about her. Share, Anthony.'

Dansk laughed. ‘Share? What is this? Like a counselling session?'

‘Carry too much inside, you get stressed, Anthony. I attend this group in Fairfax, it's people like myself living with a death sentence. And we talk things through, and it helps, because you realize you're not entirely alone in the universe.'

Dansk imagined a room filled with dying people. Incurables Anonymous. ‘I don't need to share,' he said. ‘I'm not the one sick.'

‘Pardon me, I forgot, you're invincible. Captain Fucking Marvel. The occasional services of a hooker and a whistle-stop tour of a church or two, and suddenly you're walking on water.'

‘Don't give me static, Loeb.' Dansk was irritated with Loeb prying, carping, carrying that dark bloom of death. He didn't want to be in Loeb's company. Hanging round terminal people was depressing. Even if you couldn't catch the other person's disease, you were vulnerable to the despair they hauled like leg-irons.

‘She goes here, there, so I track her movements and I try to read her mind and see how much of a problem she is.'

‘How much of a problem is she, Anthony?'

‘I'm tired. This has been a long day and I feel like one of those plastic sacks there. There's grime attached to me, which I don't like. I need to shower.'

Dansk moved a few steps along the alley. Loeb followed, catching him by the arm. ‘You think you can handle her, Anthony?'

Dansk shrugged the hand aside. ‘I can handle her.' He thought about the letter in his pocket which he had no intention of showing to Loeb. Why give the nosy old fart something to criticize?

Dansk kept walking. He stopped only when he heard Amanda's voice:

‘
Oh God, this is an emergency I need an ambulance and police, and I need them five minutes ago.
'

‘
Give me your address and the nature of your problem, please.
'

‘
The address is three six one Kennedy. That's Scottsdale, near the Civic Center.
'

‘
And the problem, miss
?'

‘
My boyfriend … I think he may be dying … somebody came in the house and he's beaten up and I found him in the pool and
–'

‘
Try to remain calm. I'll have somebody with you as fast as I can.
'

‘
How fast is fast
?'

‘
As fast as possible.
'

‘
Hurry, for Christ's sake
…'

Enraged, Dansk said, ‘Jesus, you got a wire on her
fucking
phone.' He felt he'd been cuffed around the ears and the inside of his head was ringing, his skin stinging.

Loeb had a tiny cassette player in his hand. He said, ‘Listen some more.'

Amanda's voice: ‘
I'm calling about a patient. John Rhees.
'

‘
And you are
?'

‘
His fiancée, Amanda Scholes.
'

‘
He's stable, Miss Scholes.
'

‘
When's the earliest I can see him
?'

‘
Visiting hours are from ten a.m. until noon
.'

Loeb shut off the machine. ‘And that's what you ordered, Anthony? You had the shit kicked out of her boyfriend?'

‘It was a simple diversion,' Dansk said.

‘Is that what you call it?'

‘You had absolutely no goddam right, Loeb,' he said.

‘No right to run an eye over your operation?'

Dansk said, ‘The deal was you don't interfere, you don't question my decisions.'

‘I question this one. Rhees is one half of a couple. You've trespassed into some very dicey emotional territory.'

Dansk said, ‘Emotional territory? Where did you get your psychology degree? Some school in Guatemala that advertises on the back of matchbooks?'

Loeb looked morose. ‘You didn't take into account the obvious thing, Anthony. You've only tossed more kerosene on the woman's bonfire.'

Dansk said nothing. He was seething at the idea of Loeb criticizing him.

‘You never used to put a foot wrong, Anthony, but what you didn't take into account is the fact that other people have strong feelings, and sometimes those feelings lead to unpredictable responses. Am I coming through to you on any known frequency?'

Dansk was silent. Let Loeb drone on.

‘The question is, what's your next step, Anthony?'

‘I go up to my room and I take a shower.'

‘About the woman,' Loeb said.

Dansk said, ‘I can take care of her.'

Loeb looked infinitely weary and sad. ‘God knows why, but I'm your friend, Anthony. Maybe the only one you've got.'

‘I don't need friends that go behind my back,' Dansk said. He listened to Loeb's ruined breathing. ‘You know what I think? The drugs have addled you. You're stoned morning to night. You can't make judgements.'

‘I don't believe I've ever seen the world more clearly in all my life,' Loeb said.

‘Drugs'll make you believe anything,' Dansk said.

Loeb folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Under his eyes were dark sooty rings. ‘This work we're doing, we're pushing boulders up mountains, and there's always more boulders. There's a job in Seattle should have been taken care of yesterday. Another in LA.'

Open-mouthed, Loeb was sucking on shallow pockets of air. ‘What I'm saying is we need to get the business done here because we're falling behind. I need to know you can finalize things in a straightforward way. I need to believe that this business you engineered with Rhees was just some brainstorm along the way.'

‘I can cope,' Dansk said. Brainstorm, he thought. Loeb didn't appreciate intricacy. He didn't like filigree. Angles baffled him, curved surfaces bewildered him. His was the geometry of a wasted old pen-pusher. X belongs in this box, Y belongs in that. There's only one road from A to B, and that's the straight and narrow. Maybe for you, Loeb.

Loeb looked bleak. ‘I don't want an extravaganza, Anthony. I don't want to hear about diversions. Give me quiet, and don't leave any mess. Bury your litter.' Loeb turned and moved in his slow-footed manner down the alley. He stopped and called back, ‘I'm trusting you, Anthony. Just don't go off at tangents.'

Tangents. You brain-dead fuck. Dansk chewed on the small finger where no nail grew, a nervous mannerism he'd acquired in fifth grade. A brutally dumb kid called Skipper Klintz had smashed his pinky with a clawhammer. It was all on account of Skipper's need to assert his tribal superiority over Dansk, whose birthmark rendered him odd and imperfect, and consequently a victim. The nail had never grown back again. Two weeks later, on a bleak sub-zero night, Dansk had waited in an alley for Skipper and battered his head with a baseball bat. He could still feel the whap of the bat in his hands and the crack of Skipper's skull. A home run and the crowd going crazy in the bleachers and the electronic scoreboard popping.

Now he watched Loeb go, a sick shambles of a guy shuffling away, dying with every step he took.
I'm trusting you
. Bugging phones behind my back, you call that trust?

Dansk walked to the end of the alley, reached the street where the hotel sign created a soft yellow glare and a uniformed doorman stood motionless on the steps, misted by the light falling all around him.

46

Amanda found stacked on Dansk's bedside table the following: a map of Arizona, a paperback entitled
Guide to Restaurants in the Valley of the Sun
, and an inky copy of something called
Phoenix After Dark
, which was a list of swingers and spouse-swappers, strip joints and gay bars and escort agencies. Dansk had circled some of these agencies in red ball-point. Romantic Liaisons. Sweet Dreams. Phantasy Chix. Some had come-on lines, like, ‘Meet Miss Foxxy Foxx and get out of that rut.' ‘See Petal, ripe for plucking.'

In the drawer of the table she found a packet of condoms, a set of old rosary beads and a plastic wallet-insert that contained a series of photographs.

She glanced at these snapshots. Dansk was unmistakable in each of them. Some depicted him as a kid, others as a teenager. A woman figured in every shot. In some of them she had an arm round Dansk's waist or a hand on his arm. Amanda guessed Dansk's mother because there was some slight resemblance. Touching, she thought. He carries pictures of Mom. And the beads. She tried to imagine him smoothing them with his fingertips but she couldn't.

She opened the drawers of the dressing-table. The potent aroma of sandalwood emerged from a sachet that had been placed over a neat stack of boxer shorts. She dug around the polka dots and the paisleys, noticing how fastidiously they'd been ironed and arranged. The next drawer down contained a couple of shirts, still in their Cellophane packages, and a half dozen pairs of socks, coupled and folded. The third drawer was empty.

She walked to the closet and checked the clothes that hung meticulously on hangers: two suits, both designer labels, two sports coats, a couple of pairs of shorts. The pockets were all empty. They yielded nothing, not a coin, a scrap of paper, not even lint. What did he do? Vacuum them?

On the closet floor was a combination-locked aluminium case. She picked it up, shook it and heard what sounded like papers sliding around inside. She longed to open the case, but it was useless. She set the case back.