Two for the Show (10 page)

SEVEN

Wallace the Amazing, of course,
is the perfect blackmail candidate. A criminal past to hide. Everything to lose. A public that will be merciless. A persona that will be destroyed. In his vulnerability, he is pretty much irresistible. I could see that. Here in Vegas, he is like a walking slot machine, overloaded with coins, ready to pay off. And the real Wallace—he is the found coin, the dusty roadside quarter, ready to be pushed into the slot. Pull the lever and coat yourself in riches.

I could understand it, Wallace suddenly peeling away from me and Debbie, deciding to do it on his own. What did he need any of us for? This was to retrieve his own identity, after all. Yes, to compensate himself for the financial loss, to force financial redress, but also to retrieve and restore his self. I could understand the impulse. But he was a babe in the woods. He had no idea what a high-stakes game he had entered. Blackmail was not blackjack. This was a mirrored casino, and everyone at the table was disguised, and nothing was as it appeared.

Blackmail.
You’d think the word’s origin would be straightforward: an incriminating or threatening piece of mail, a practice you’d assume arose in the shadows of the spread of literacy. But online, I see it actually comes from the black “mail,” the dark coat of armor that a knight wore—a mounted, intimidating form of threat.

It has evolved, of course, with technology. The written missive became the telephone call: furtive, intimate, the insinuating whisper of violation or rape, before the line goes dead with threat, with intent. The twentieth century’s most celebrated version, of course, was the cutout letters from various sources, forming words and phrases into a jagged and untraceable message of threat, the letters ironically cheerful and colorful and angled jauntily. The typeface of a clown, if you ignored its content.

Today’s blackmail message? It arrives cloaked in the same electronic anonymity as a hundred other daily marketing come-ons, sexual solicitations, unfiltered spam, delivered via Facebook, text message, Twitter, LinkedIn, or conventional e-mail, and its job is to stand out in its anonymity as not anonymous at all—as in fact, more intimate and targeted than any of the messages around it. An old nickname will do it. A small tantalizing piece of a shared long-ago secret. Any concise form of “I know. And you know that I know.”

TO: Archer Wallace

FROM: Archer Wallace

SUBJECT: Archer Wallace

Need to settle our account. Let me know if you receive this e-mail. Details for payment to follow.

This was the e-mail that Wallace—the real Archer Wallace—sent to Wallace the Amazing. The e-mail I saw a day after I was settled into Debbie’s and went online. And probably the most remarkable and mysterious thing about it was that I was copied on it, put right away into the coiled, tightening loop, a bystander shown the precise twists of the hangman’s knot. Archer Wallace must have seen my e-mail address over my shoulder at some point while he was in my apartment. Does he want to impress me with being bold enough to take on the blackmail project himself? Does he want me to be a witness should something happen to him? Does he want Wallace the Amazing to know that he knows about me—although he doesn’t know the nature of our relationship exactly—and knows that we’re meaningful, important to each other, and he wants to threaten Wallace the Amazing with that, hold it over his head? Does he intend to cut me in? It’s mysterious to be included in the communication. And nothing says that Wallace my employer will include me in the response, if he responds at all.

Of course, everyone knows that e-mail can be traced, that it’s not ever truly anonymous, that there is a tech-geek subset that knows how to follow its trail, that the digital fumes can be sniffed to their source. But you need experts for that. And you know by now that I am one.

A little research shows me that the e-mail was sent from the Las Vegas public library. (Yes, there is such an entity—a gleaming but sleepy and somber downtown institution whose very existence is steeped in a half century of irony; its existence, in an age of municipal cutbacks and a challenged local economy, is increasingly precarious, but like any other desert creature, it somehow persists and survives.)

So innocently direct, that e-mail. The Stewartsons will eat Archer Wallace alive, swallow him whole.

I can picture the Stewartsons searching the early dawn. Scooping him up off a sidewalk like some wild-eyed, skulking piece of wildlife with the broad swift net of their combined expertise. Unlicensed fishing. An unfair contest. Reaching out of their red Mustang, grabbing his twiglike arm, hustling him off the street . . . but if they’ve been looking, so far they’ve missed him. So far he’s slipped their net.

I don’t say a word to Debbie. She wouldn’t understand. She’d never let me go. I slip out to her Triumph. I need to get to Wallace, the real Wallace, before the Stewartsons do. To extort the money from the Amazing Wallace, to threaten his successful present with the reality of his past, they need Archer Wallace alive, yes, but not by much. And not for long.

Presumably, the e-mail gives me a considerable head start in finding him. The public library is one place he might actually blend in—where his bald head, wisps of white hair, translucent skin, and fragile physique might not stand out amid the shut-ins, the blinking bespectacled researchers, the nocturnal, the dispossessed, the pallorous, the vampires caught here in Vegas through some chain of error.

But he is not here. He has not installed himself in a research carrel, as I had assumed. Has not unobtrusively set up shop. He is gone, on the move, stealthy, thinking at least a step ahead, observing and adapting the professionalism of his previous hosts; he will pick up e-mail responses from somewhere else, if he doesn’t circle around and retrieve them here later. He’ll issue his instructions from elsewhere. I search the periodicals room, double-check every one of the easy chairs where the bums are stretched out, snoring, muttering, off their meds. I slip up the long, silent aisles of books like an explorer heading upriver into deep jungle. But there is no one here except the occasional hunched, bespectacled native. Archer has disappeared into the Vegas ether. Maybe he only cc’d me as a test, to see if I could track him here through e-mail, so he’d know if he needed to be more careful or not, to check how far my technological powers extended, to see if he was safe or not.

And what was I going to do if I found him? Advise him not to go through with it? Tell him how dangerous blackmail is? He already knew all this. It was hardly information. I was only here to somehow protect him from the Stewartsons. And if they weren’t here, if they hadn’t found him, then perhaps he was protected enough, and there was no reason for me to be here.

Is he looking at me from the window of some standpipe? From behind some air-conditioning or heating vents or machinery?

The Vegas library. I had expected it to be a kind of oasis, but for me it turns out to be more empty desert. I head out of its cool gloom back into the searing sunlight.

I pull Debbie’s old Triumph into her driveway, head back inside with a carton of milk, orange juice, a can of coffee, and a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread—sufficient explanation, I thinly hope, for my sudden disappearance with her car.

Crack!

An explosion at the side of my head.

The concussive noise so close.

A spinning room.

A sudden blackness.

In a moment, I find myself surrounded by my own groceries.

Lying on Debbie’s bright-green entrance rug and hardwood floor.

I’m staring down into the rug’s forest of bright-green fibers, as if I’ve just tripped.

Which I have. Tripped on my own stupidity and carelessness.

Dave holds the gun to the back of my head as I lie there. “Hey, hero. She ain’t here. But you are.”

And when I am once again shackled to a chair, when my mouth is once again taped and I am nice and docile and cooperative, I am subjected again to the verbal stylings of Dave Stewartson/Stewart Davidson—as if merely picking up where we left off.

“Now where were we?” he says with a smile. As if mainly to demonstrate how I can be taped back into a chair, easily, anytime, anywhere. That it’s nothing for them. To show that I can’t escape. Not really. Not ever.

Dave once again pulls a chair up next to mine, once again turns the chair to sit on it backward, like any and every old-movie interrogation. I am looking once again at the strangely angular face, the tautness around his mouth, the fearsome bulge of his eyes. But despite my once more being a “captive audience,” the tenor and purpose of this conversation prove entirely different.

“Wallace the Amazing, he fooled you, didn’t he? Took you in as much as he took in Archer Wallace. Maybe worse, for all the years it’s gone on for you.”

He couldn’t know that. He was speculating. I didn’t say anything.

“I know you grabbed your laptop when you left your place. I don’t know the exact nature of your relationship with him, but I’ll bet it has to do with that laptop. And the fact that there’s so little record of you, so little paper trail or evidence of your existence. And the thing I noticed the night we watched him on TV—whatever you were doing for him, apparently he doesn’t need you to do it anymore. Clearly you’re more dispensable than you thought.” He smiles thinly. “He’s abandoned you to the likes of us.”

He pauses, examines his hands for a moment, frowning, as if hoping to find a cigarette in one, or a cuticle that needs some work, or another section of an orange. “But
we
want you, Chas. We respect your skills. This is your town, not ours. And we know you can find us Archer Wallace.” He flexes and stretches his hands, and I see in them mute experience, the tools of wet work. “Think about what I’m saying. Think about how shocked you are, how disillusioned, how uprooted you feel by what you’ve learned about your boss. Think about how your world has already been turned upside down. Think about the state you found the real Wallace in. And as you’ve realized by now, that wasn’t something we did. That was something he did to himself.” He leans back, exhales (as if releasing frustration in a controlled discharge) into the air above him—and if it were an exhalation of cigarette smoke in a backroom interrogation, the smoke would now hang for a silent moment, dramatically, like a complex question, gray and musing. “Think about what it means to have agreed to a certain existence, to a certain life, and it turns out that whole existence came with false terms. Under false pretenses. See, I think you know a little something about that.” Those big hands drum for a few beats on the back of Debbie’s chair. (I had her car—so where, how, is she not here?) “We want to propose something. Don’t say anything right away. You’ll be skeptical at first. Just think about it before you respond. We’re willing to cut you in. Substantially. That’s how much money there is. Do you have any idea what kind of stake we’re talking about? How much Wallace the Amazing has? Your years of service. You can get compensated for it—by your employer, no less—in one lump sum. We’re offering a partnership. Something Wallace the Amazing, your former employer, if that’s what he was, never did.”

It was, of course, everything I’d been thinking. Everything that irked me, that I had been brooding over, that I was bristling about. Wallace suddenly
didn’t
seem to need me. This could be my severance package.

“Think of it as your severance package,” says Stewartson. I blink at hearing what I’ve been thinking uttered aloud.

I squirm in Debbie’s chair. I don’t know how I feel. Stewartson can see that. “Let me give the idea a little shape and substance for you. Your share would be five mil.”

The sum has finality, authority, clarity to it.
Five million
.

He rips the tape off my mouth in one motion. I wince from the sharp sting.

I look at him. “Five million.” I wanted to hear myself say it. To hear my own voice utter the words into actuality.

“Five million if this works. Five million, or nothing. Nothing in between.”

I nod. Understanding? Acceptance? Acquiescence?

Sandi is already freeing my nimble keyboard fingers.

After a few minutes the Stewartsons took off, leaving me alone to start on my side of the bargain. I watched the red Mustang pull out from behind a truck down the street, where I had never thought to look.

I didn’t bother to search the little house for Debbie, I knew the Stewartsons had already looked thoroughly. She had been smarter than me, must have escaped when she saw their car. Her cell phone was on the kitchen counter. She must have left in a hurry. She might not risk coming back so fast. Seeing her cell phone there—that thin last thread of connection, now broken—I felt the pang of separation more than I thought I would, sharp and immediate. A further severing from each other. Her even temper, her straightforwardly upbeat view of things, the familiar comfort of her voice, coming from the darkness in bed beside me or through a tiny phone speaker—all now gone.

I did the only thing I could think of. The only thing that would inch me toward normal. I opened my laptop.