Silencer (41 page)

‘I like my work,' Dansk said, and let ash sift through his fingers and looked thoughtful, maybe even a little serene. ‘Some people came to me and told me I was the kind of guy they needed for this kinda operation. These are people who believe the Witness Program pumps megadoses of poison into the arteries of the nation. People who ask, What the fuck are we doing helping out the scum you lawyers pass down the line? People who say the whole thing is shaky on the morality issue –
aside
from the fact that it's costing millions and millions of dollars. And for what? To keep a criminal element safe and well? We've got thieves and killers receiving monthly federal pay cheques and job-training and relocation at the taxpayer's expense, and all this at a time when budget deficits are out of sight, and decent ordinary people can't find work and their fucking homes are being repossessed by banks?' Dansk, whose voice had been rising, stopped in an abrupt way. She heard the sound of his hand running across his wet lips.

She thought, Budget deficits, unemployment, the country stretched on a rack of cosmic debt, and certain people looked around for programs to slash. It didn't matter which ones, just cut the numbers. School lunches, kindergarten classes, welfare hand-outs, the Federal Witness Protection Program, wherever, it didn't matter.

Dansk said, ‘These people felt a line had to be drawn somewhere, and this is the line right here, lady.'

‘These people,' she said. ‘Some of them work in Justice, some in the US Marshals Service. Places where ID cards can be made up in the blink of an eye, and messages intercepted, and official papers obtained without question.'

Dansk said, ‘Where they work, what the fuck does that matter? The whole point is, what I do has moral merit. People like you leave a mess and I'm the guy who cleans it up.'

Moral merit. Morality was modelling clay. Shape it any way you like. Dansk had rationalized his role on the grounds that the Protection Program was wrong, but she guessed that whoever had dreamed up the unholy idea in the first place were more likely to be spreadsheet types on an economy drive than philosophers fretting over an ethical dilemma. She pictured memos going out in droves to assorted Federal agencies. She saw them landing on the desks of various department heads in these agencies. She imagined they all carried the same vaguely innocuous message, written by some bland bureaucrat in the Office of Management and Budget. ‘At the present time, the condition of the general economy necessitates a reduction in Federal spending, consequently you are requested to analyse those areas of your operation where budgetary measures might be taken …'

And a devious functionary in Justice, Loeb say, had scanned his domain and seen the bloated form of the Protection Program, and he'd had a bright idea which he'd whispered to somebody else: here's a place where we can put the knife in, provided we go about it a certain way. So a sick scheme is born in furtive whispers and quiet consultations, and a few people like Dansk are recruited to implement it, people who lived on a dark rim of experience and who weren't particular, and they were issued cards that identified them as marshals or agents of the Justice Department. And money could be saved in accordance with the vague suggestions of the memorandum, and where there was money moral problems were nuisances that had a way of dissolving like a skeleton in acid.

She wondered about the mechanics. You didn't need hundreds of people to work it. You needed only some killers, a couple of supervisors in Arlington, two or three computer operators to falsify data, two or three insiders in Justice. Guys like Loeb.

Then, without any warning, Rhees moved, urgently and recklessly. As if he'd decided that his own pain was irrelevant, he grunted and threw himself against Dansk, who stepped effortlessly to the side. Rhees fell without making any contact and was lost a moment in shadows, and when he tried to get up again Dansk kicked him in the ribs and Rhees clutched his side and groaned.

Dansk said, ‘They always say it's the quiet ones you need to watch. It's the bookish types you need to keep an eye on.'

Amanda went to Rhees. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had shrunken in the bewilderment of pain. The generator faded, the rumbling was less intense, and the overhead light dimmed. She wished it would die completely so she'd be blind, immune to her surroundings. This place where all your curiosity ends.

She could smell death, death packed inside drums, and she wondered how many people had been brought here, 300, 400, and the process of flame they'd gone through, the furnace that had reduced them. She imagined rings and watches, lockets and ear-rings removed from limp bodies, ghouls sifting the possessions of the dead. She wondered about bank accounts and houses, and how monies must have been plundered and ownership documents transferred, and how many ‘For Sale' signs throughout the country stood on posts outside homes where the lawful owners were never returning because they'd been shot and burned and brought here.

Dansk stepped towards her and placed a hand under her chin. ‘Look at me,' he said. She kept her eyes shut.

‘Look at me,' he said again.

But she didn't.

He thought, You don't want to see the face of your executioner, lady. You don't want me to be the last person you'll ever see. Carrying Anthony Dansk's image all the way into eternity with you.

She was thinking of dying. She'd hear the explosion of the gun. She wasn't sure. How could she know what she'd hear?

‘Fucking look at me,' Dansk said.

‘Dansk,' Rhees said hoarsely. ‘Wait –'

‘For what, John? The lady dies, then it's your turn. These are the facts. Face them.'

She felt the gun against the centre of her brow. She was linked to Dansk and the gun was a bridge. She heard the sound of the generator, the clunking and the asthmatic whirring noise which sometimes flared into a roar. Or maybe it was just the noise created by the broken dynamo of her brain. Outside, inside, there wasn't any difference, you knew you were going to die, you knew this was an ending.

She raised her face and looked at him finally.

He gazed into her eyes and saw what he wanted to see there, and it excited him. Defeat and despair, the pits of anxiety. It was how you looked when you turned the last page in your own history book.

‘This is where curiosity gets you,' he said. He was the dispenser of darkness, the tourist guide to the other side.

‘
Hey, Anthony! Check this out
!'

Surprised, Dansk turned. Amanda looked towards the doorway, dropped to the floor and shut her eyes.

The sound of automatic gunfire roared, shot after shot kicking up clouds of dust and splintering the wall behind Dansk. Amanda lost count, confused between the gunfire and the echoes it created. There was no spatial logic to the acoustics, just noise and more noise, until the place sounded like a shooting-gallery where all the clients had gone insane. Dansk was punctured everywhere, arms, legs, chest, skull. He took a series of staggered steps, and when he fell he rolled over and over, and was finally motionless a few feet from Amanda.

Two men in shadow. They walked to where Dansk lay and studied him, as if they half expected him to have survived the fusillade. One of the men kicked Dansk in the chest. The other said, ‘Hey, enough.'

She couldn't see their faces. She didn't want to see them. The generator failed. The big room was suddenly quiet and dark, and the silence was strange and terrifying.

One of the men said, ‘We ought to do surgery on this pair, you ask me.'

The other said, ‘That ain't the way it was spelled out by Loeb.'

‘No names, asshole.'

She heard them walk to the door where they stopped. She held her breath because she knew they were going to turn back and use their guns against her and Rhees. A bad moment, dust in your throat and the bitter taste of panic, but they stepped outside. Then a minute later she heard the sound of a car kick into life and then fade in the distance.

She moved to Rhees and held him for a long time, his face against her body, her arm round his shoulder. She sat until her body was numb and the sun had climbed high enough to send light through the open doorway into the room.

She wiped the gritty ash from her clothing and went to where Dansk lay. She searched his jacket for the car keys but didn't find them. Instead she found a notebook held shut by a thick red rubber band. She removed it, then rummaged in the pockets of his pants and found the keys, which were wet with blood.

The side of his skull was shattered. She could see bone and more blood than she would have thought possible. She had the impression he was turning to liquid. Hair sodden, mouth open and crooked. The eyes stared into nothing, but were curiously bright. A strange vigilance. She imagined some elementary form of life lingered in Dansk, that he was watching her, that when she turned and walked to the door with Rhees he was still following her movements and somehow in his ruined brain recording them.

She wondered how long it would take to liberate herself from this feeling, or if it was going to stalk her a long time. But she knew.

It wasn't going to go away.

76

Rhees sat in the passenger seat with Dansk's notebook in his lap, flicking pages in a listless way she found distressing, as if he'd used up too much of himself and had nothing left inside to give. The small arid towns they passed through had an air of despondency. In Holbrook they used the rest rooms of a gas station to clean themselves up. In Winslow she bought a pair of sunglasses and telephoned Kelloway from a pay phone outside a liquor store.

‘I've been waiting,' he said.

‘Let's meet in Flagstaff.'

‘What's wrong with Phoenix?'

‘Because I don't think I can make it without falling asleep at the wheel. I'm a road hazard, Kelloway.'

‘Yeah, you're a hazard all right. Forest fires, serious loss of life. Name a location.'

‘The airport.' It was the first place that popped into her head.

‘I'll be there in a couple of hours,' Kelloway said.

She hung up and went back to the car. She sat behind the wheel. Weariness was like woodworm tunnelling through her. But you're alive because Loeb had issued certain instructions. Maybe he'd come to the conclusion that enough was enough, no more killing after Dansk, because the whole sick clandestine business was coming apart.

Rhees hadn't even raised the subject. He seemed to accept the fact that he was alive without any curiosity. He was slowly turning the pages of the notebook as if he were reading text in a language he didn't know, one that held no interest for him.

Dansk's notes were centred on the pages, framed by sequences of tiny crosses and arrows and jagged lines that suggested thorns. One page contained a single word with a question mark: ‘friends?' She couldn't imagine Dansk having friends.

Rhees continued to flick pages and sometimes read Dansk's notes in a disturbing monotone. In obscure ways, in phrases and fragments, Dansk had recorded his impressions. People were referred to by initials. L had to be Loeb. Dansk had written, ‘I wish I could cut L's fucking throat like a pig.' She had no notion of the identities of Mc and P, initials that recurred. Willie Drumm's name was inscribed inside a rectangle, like a crude coffin.

Pages were crammed with letters, followed by abbreviated place names. BNDenv McKSeat FSaltLk RMDenv QDalbu RDalbu PROgd JROgd. In the back, the pages were covered with a series of digits, some of them phone numbers, others that looked like PIN codes for bank cards. You needed a key to unlock the significance of all these numbers. You needed another kind of key to reveal a different kind of accounting: the numbers of the dead.

A cryptic notebook, a cryptic life. She wondered what could be deduced from these pages, from the abbreviations and the numerals, the mysteries in Dansk's world.

Something slipped out of the notebook into Rhees's hand. It was a folded newspaper clipping. He opened it.

‘What's that?' she asked.

Rhees gave her the clipping and she read it.

LOCAL WOMAN SLAIN
. Under this headline was a terse story:

Mrs Frederica Danskowski, aged sixty-seven, of 2343 Drake, was killed yesterday by unknown assailants in broad daylight outside her apartment building. She was stabbed several times. She was taken to County Hospital, and pronounced dead on arrival. Police are asking for information from anyone in the vicinity of Drake Street between three and three-thirty yesterday afternoon to call the Patterson Police Department. Mrs Danskowski is survived by one son, Anthony, a surveyor for an oil company.

It was dated April 1994. A surveyor, she thought. She remembered the photographs Dansk kept. Mother and son. Anthony Danskowski, shortened to Dansk, a surveyor.

Somewhere between Winslow and Flagstaff she drove 100 yards off the road. She got out, opened the trunk, found Dansk's case and set it down. She battered it open with a tyre-iron, sweating as she smashed the lid, the hinges, the lock again and again. She went down on her knees in the dust and rummaged through the contents, looking for papers, documents, files, any text of substance that might yield intelligible clues to Dansk's world. All she found were his clothes, folded neatly. His toiletries. But no papers. She kicked angrily at the stuff, scattered it around, then went back to the car. Sweat dripped into her eyes, blinding her.

She took the notebook from Rhees's slack hand, shut it and imagined this simple act might silence Dansk's voice, which had seemed to issue from the pages in whispers and incomprehensible asides. But it didn't quieten Dansk at all, because she could still hear him.
Check the destruction in your own wake before you pass judgement on me. You're like some kind of fucking Typhoid Mary spreading a deadly plague
.

Flagstaff marked a change, mountains and high green forests and a soft breeze. Amanda drove a mile or so beyond the town, where the airport was located. A small terminal, it served mainly short-hop commuter flights north to Las Vegas or south to Phoenix. A couple of picnic tables were situated at the edge of the parking-lot.