The Insides (4 page)

A bell jangles as she pushes into the tiny lobby. It’s cool inside, but even despite that the space seems swampy, as though there’s mildew beneath the cream wallpaper, as though the rust-colored carpet has spent time under stagnating floodwater. She can feel the client, just one room away now; she turns her head to face the door set in the far wall and closes her eyes for a brief moment, perceives him as a shape in the darkness, which is a thing she couldn’t do when they were communicating transatlantically, via e-mail. It’s not like she sees a glowing silhouette or anything. It’s more like she sees a kind of floating Rorschach blob. Not his shape, but rather the shape his personality makes in the world.

She is unsurprised when she finds the flaw, the part of this shape that tastes to her mind the way rancid oil would taste on her tongue. It repulses her, somewhat, but it generates no alarm; there’s no surprise in it. Years ago, when she first began finding for others, it would startle her to peer into a client and discover
damage
there: some wound that never healed correctly, some emotional apparatus that had grown wrong, curled inward, rankled, bloated. But before too long she realized that those people—damaged people—were
the kinds of people who needed her the most, and that she wouldn’t get far if she turned and walked back out the door every time she caught wind of something foul. Thus, she learned that sometimes you have to know when to stop looking inside someone, you have to know when to get out of someone else’s head and get back to your own. And that’s what she does now.

She opens her eyes and rests them on the small, unattended reception desk, finds the least interesting thing available—a selection of highlighters fanning out of a plain white mug—and she waits.

After a minute, the office door opens and she gets her first actual look at the prospective client, Mr. Hogarth Unger. He’s sixtyish, ruddy complexion, wearing an ill-fitting navy suit that looks about thirty-five years out of date. Big brass buttons.

“Maja Freinander?” Unger says, in a voice pitched loud, bordering on a shout. The accent catches her off guard for a second: it’s European, French, where she was expecting coarse Boston honk. “Yes,” Maja says, taking the time of one blink to recover. “Mr. Unger. Hello.”

“Please come in,” says Unger, gesturing into the office with a sweep of his arm.

He does not offer her his hand to shake, which she takes as a sign that he’s remembered the instructions that she laid out in their preliminary exchanges. So she might not have needed the gloves after all. A good sign.

Together they step into the office, into a space barely wider than the desk that Unger settles behind. She takes a seat in the molded plastic chair available to her, looks quickly
over the array of items on the desktop. A large beige computer monitor dating back to before the era of the flatscreen. A letter opener with a wrought handle, resting atop three file folders stuffed thick with documents—old documents, some of them rotting at their edges, as though they’ve been recently salvaged from the depths of a forgotten basement. A statue of a peregrine or some other bird of prey, the very tip of one outstretched wing missing, lost to fracture. Each item swirls with tempting histories, but there’s no time to read them. She takes one final moment to coolly examine the banner hung on the wall behind Unger’s head—emblazoned with what looks like an archaic French coat of arms, featuring a crown—and then she looks Unger in the face.

Actually, she decides, the accent suits him: he looks like he could have enjoyed a comfortable life in some lower rung of French provincial government. His hair falls into a sort of rough bowl cut that gives off the strong impression that he cuts it himself. He has the chunky, somewhat toadlike face of a minor councilman, a face built by heavy sauces. Bulbous nose like a root vegetable. And yet there’s something troubled in the face as well, something that deforms the picture. The sockets of flesh around the eyes look clenched. There’s an angry welt forming over his cheekbone, something that suggests interesting stresses, convolutions, pain.

We all end up with the features we deserve
, she thinks again, although she knows that the Archive was right: it’s not as simple as that. She’s looked through enough history books, seen her share of Nazi soldiers looking into the camera, blithely pretty although God only knows what they’d done. She’s worked for psychopaths who smiled at her with
telegenic faces, smoothly untroubled. It’s not what you’ve done that changes your face so much as how you feel about it, what you think about it. And when she looks at Unger, even willing herself not to look beneath the surface, she sees someone who has done bad things, but who has done them with some degree of discomfort, who has done them knowing that they were wrong, fully anticipating to be troubled by them but electing to do them anyway, in the name of some greater good. This, Maja knows, makes him more dangerous than the usual psychopath, not less. So she’ll have to be cautious.

Unger’s face breaks into a broad grin. “So how do we begin?” he says.

“I was under the impression that you wanted to use this meeting to address some final questions,” Maja replies.

“A demonstration,” Unger says. “I would like to ask you for a demonstration. If that is all right with you.”

“Of course,” Maja says. This is the part that she’s used to. The clients always want a demonstration. “Do you have something in mind?”

“I do,” Unger says. Of course he does. They always do. “Shall we begin?”

“Certainly.”

“And it works like you said? I can ask you to look for something? Does it have to be something specific? Can I say
find something interesting in this room
?”

“Yes,” Maja says.

“Then let’s begin there.”

“That’s fine,” Maja says. She closes her eyes, feels her way around the room. Picks over the desk, the statue, the file folders, the monitor. Of course, viewed a certain way,
everything in the room is interesting. The folders are full of fat veins of information but she’s guessing that he’s not asking after anything intangible like that. She follows the cable from the monitor to a big CPU stashed on the floor, hidden from view by the desk. More intangible data there, finely ranked, but for now she skips over that as well, instead letting her perception flow to the back wall, where there is a heavy hard-walled suitcase; she guesses that her fee is inside and quick probing confirms it. Bundles of American currency. She probes a little deeper, checking for anything extra in the case, something tricky, a surprise. But she finds only the usual baseline that most people consider
nothing
: dust, bits of skin, microbes, rich histories of exchange.

Moving on, she finds a long crate, next to the suitcase.

She looks inside, and an instant later her eyes snap open.

“Guns,” she says. “Two guns.”

“What kind of guns?”

She needs to close her eyes and concentrate a moment for this, but it’s easy enough: the guns appear to her wrapped in a radiant layer of information, spiky with facts, just waiting to be peeled. “One is a Beretta M9A1 9mm pistol,” she says. “The other is an M4A1 carbine rifle.”

“What else can you tell me about them?” Unger asks, quietly.

Cautiously, she closes her eyes again, looks back into the gun, follows the through-line of its travels. She gets glimpses and fragments of scenes. It is a bit like the process of remembering a dream in the morning, or pulling something up out of memory. Only not her memory: the memory of the thing itself.

“They were stolen,” Maja says. “Stolen from a National Guard armory here in Massachusetts.”

“Stolen by whom?” Unger says, leading her.

Maja frowns, goes deeper. “A man,” she says. “A young man.”

“Can you identify him?”

She tries extracting the history of the man from the weapon, but it’s hard. Sometimes she can pull knowledge about a person she’s never met or seen out of an object that that person has handled, but the traces tend to quickly get obscure, and so it is here. She gets a glimpse of a head, shaved, the shape of a skull. A tattoo. Some number, some heavy black bars. Not much more. She opens her eyes, flicks her attention away from the weapons, back to Unger. If he knows the man, the information’s probably there, in his skull, just waiting to be read. She doesn’t really want to go there, but for the sake of the demonstration she looks, and, sure enough, she finds a whole history there, years of it, piled up in heaps, strata.

“Your son,” she says, intuiting this just from the volume of the material alone.

“Correct,” Unger says, his face threatening to beam. “Martin.”

“You’ve mentioned him before,” Maja says. “You’re sending him with me. He’ll be serving as the agent of retrieval?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Unger says. He looks at his watch with a degree of evident irritation. “He was supposed to be meeting us here this morning; I expect that he’ll be here soon.”

“He’s in the National Guard?” Maja asks. She’s guessing now, rather than looking. She still wants to spend as little time in Unger’s head as possible.

“No, no,” Unger says. “He was in the Marines for a time, but that was, oh, ten years ago now. He retains some contacts from those days—including some helpful ones in the Guard. However, Martin has realized—wisely, I think—that his talents are best deployed, shall we say, more flexibly than is usually encouraged within a traditional military structure. It’s outside of those structures that he can do actual good, that he can really do his utmost to address the concerns that face the civilized nations.”

He pauses here, looks expectantly at her. Maja assumes that he’s waiting for her to take the bait, to ask something like
And those concerns are?
Or maybe he wants her to fill in the blank, to meet him halfway. Maybe it’s a kind of test. She’s not very interested in being tested in that way, though, and so she waits, her face blank.

“I speak, of course, of degeneracy,” Unger says, right as the pause begins to grow uncomfortable. He looks down at his folded hands with a tinge of remorse, as though to even utter the word is somewhat shameful. “The rise, globally, of degeneracy. A tide which it is in the interest of all civilized peoples to stem.” He lifts his amphibian gaze to her face once again, and waits.

Maja nods, to show she’s heard. She’s heard these sorts of ideas before, of course: those old nationalist ideologies never quite died out entirely; you can’t live in Europe without coming across them every now and then. You can’t read the news without eventually seeing some hint of them smoldering at
the periphery. Smoldering, and occasionally flaring up: she remembers Anders Behring Breivik, back at home, who first killed eight people with a bomb and then went on to shoot and kill sixty-nine more, mostly teens. Not that long ago. She remembers reading excerpts from his manifesto in the paper, remembers his remarks against Islam, against multicultural Europe. Repellent—but perhaps that’s the test; perhaps Unger is waiting to see whether she’ll balk, whether she’ll show some sign of distaste that would give him reason to question her commitment to the job. But she can keep neutral when it’s necessary. All she has to do is wait the moment out.

Sure enough, Unger eventually claps his hands together and says, “So! I am impressed by your demonstration. I suppose I would like you to offer me one final assurance that you can find the—how did you put it—the target item?”

“It will be complicated,” Maja says.

“You said as much in our correspondence.”

Maja continues as though he hasn’t spoken: she wants to make sure she is perfectly clear. “You haven’t handled the item,” she says. “You don’t have access to anyone who has handled the item. So it will take me some time to find it.”

“I accept this,” Unger says. “But you
can
find it.”

“Yes,” she says. “I’ve done the preliminary work. At this point I know something. An area. If I go to the area, I’ll know more.”

“And the area is—where, exactly?”

“For that answer, you pay me.”

A thoughtful look clouds Unger’s face, then passes. “I have a final stipulation,” he says. “There are two parts to it. Either part may serve as something of a sticking point.”

Maja leans forward incrementally, a little irritated. She doesn’t appreciate surprises.

“As we’ve discussed,” Unger says, “Martin will be traveling with you, serving as the agent of retrieval.”

“As we’ve discussed,” Maja says.

After a hesitation, Unger offers this: “People can find Martin—difficult to get along with.”

Difficult how
, Maja wonders, but she figures she’ll be able to glean that information later. Everyone she works with is difficult in some way; it’s in the nature of the job. And so she says the thing that she says when future difficulties begin to make themselves known, a prepared disclaimer: “If he makes it impossible for me to do my job, I take the first half of my fee and I walk away. You get nothing. No refund, no recourse, no second chances.”

“I understand,” Unger says. “Martin will not interfere with your work. I can make this clear to him. He
hears
when one tells him things, it’s just—” He sighs. “Well, you know—
sons
.”

Maja knows nothing at all about sons. She knows what it’s like to have a difficult brother, but that information she opts not to volunteer. Instead, she waits until she’s certain that no more is forthcoming. “And the second part?” she asks then.

“The second part,” Unger says. He smacks his lips once, loudly. “He will be traveling with these guns.”

She expected this. They didn’t discuss weaponry in their correspondence but weaponry is almost always involved in any job she does. It does require her to embark upon a speech she’s given before, a disclaimer. “I don’t hurt people,” she begins.

“I understand,” Unger says.

“I don’t hurt people,” she repeats. “I just find things. You have to understand that or we call the whole thing off, right now.”

“I understand,” Unger says.

They hold one another’s gaze for a moment, until she’s certain he means what he’s said.

“OK,” she says.