‘Yes,’ he said, and he wrote down the name and address of the coffee shop as she gave it to him.
‘Now do me one favour, sugar. You have a paper there with this phone number on. Tear it to bitty pieces and flush it down a john.’ When Joe hesitated, Demi said, ‘Won’t be no good ever again, anyway,’ and she hung up.
The three typed sentences would not prove that Dr. Tucker had survived Flight 353 or that something about the crash was not kosher. He could have composed them himself. Dr. Tucker’s name was typed, as well, so there was no evidentiary signature.
Nevertheless, he was loath to dispose of the message. Although it would never prove anything to anyone else, it made these fantastic events seem more real to him.
He called Demi’s number again to see if she would answer it in spite of what she had said.
To his surprise, he got a recorded message from the telephone company informing him that the number he had called was no longer in service. He was advised to make sure that he had entered the number correctly and then to call 411 for directory assistance. He tried the number again with the same result.
Neat trick. He wondered how it had been done. Demi clearly was more sophisticated than her grits-and-collard-greens voice.
As Joe returned the handset to the cradle, the telephone rang, startling him so much that he let go of it as if he had burned his fingers. Embarrassed by his edginess, he picked it up on the third ring. ‘Hello?’
‘Los Angeles Post?’ a man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Is this Randy Colway’s direct line?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you Mr. Colway?’
Startlement and the interlude with Demi had left Joe slow on the uptake. Now he recognized the uninflected voice as that of the man who had answered the phone at Rose Marie Tucker’s house in Manassas, Virginia.
‘Are you Mr. Colway?’ the caller asked again.
‘I’m Wallace Blick,’ Joe said.
‘Mr. Carpenter?’
Chills climbed the ladder of his spine, vertebra to vertebra, and Joe slammed down the phone.
They knew where he was.
The dozens of modular workstations no longer seemed like a series of comfortably anonymous nooks. They were a maze with too many blind corners.
Quickly he gathered the printouts and the message that Rose Tucker had left for him.
As he was getting up from the chair, the phone rang again. He didn’t answer it.
On his way out of the newsroom, he encountered Dan Shavers, who was returning from the photocopying centre with a sheaf of papers in his left hand and his unlit pipe in the right. Shavers, utterly bald with a luxuriant black beard, wore pleated black dress slacks, red-and-black chequered suspenders over a grey-and-white pinstripe shirt, and a yellow bow tie. His half-lens reading glasses dangled from his neck on a loop of black ribbon.
A reporter and columnist on the business desk, Shavers was as pompous and as awkward at small talk as he thought he was charming; however, he was benign in his self-delusion and touching in his mistaken conviction that he was a spellbinding raconteur. He said without preamble, ‘Joseph, dear boy, opened a case of ‘74 Mondavi Cabernet last week, one of twenty I bought as an investment when it was first released, even though at the time I was in Napa not to scout the vintners but to shop for an antique clock, and let me tell you, this wine has matured so well that—’ He broke off, realizing that Joe had not worked at the newspaper for the better part of a year. Fumblingly, he tried to offer his condolences regarding ‘that terrible thing, that awful thing, all those poor people, your wife and the children.’
Aware that Randy Colway’s telephone was ringing again farther
back in the newsroom, Joe interrupted Shavers, intending to brush him off, but then he said, ‘Listen, Dan, do you know a company called Teknologik?’
‘Do I know them?’ Shavers wiggled his eyebrows. ‘Very amusing, Joseph.’
‘You do know them? What’s the story, Dan? Are they a pretty large conglomerate? I mean, are they powerful?’
‘Oh, very profitable, Joseph, absolutely uncanny at recognizing cutting edge technology in start-up companies and then acquiring them — or backing entrepreneurs who need cash to develop their ideas. Generally medically related technology but not always. Their top executives are infamous self-aggrandisers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.’
Confused, Joe said, ‘He Who Must Be Obeyed?’
As do we all, as do we all,’ said Shaver, smiling and nodding, raising his pipe to bite the stem.
Colway’s phone stopped ringing. The silence made Joe more nervous than the insistent trilling tone had done.
They knew where he was.
‘Got to go,’ he said, walking away as Shavers began to tell him about the advantages of owning Teknologik corporate bonds.
He proceeded directly to the nearest men’s room. Fortunately, no one else was in the lavatory, no old acquaintances to delay him.
In one of the stalls, Joe tore Rose’s message into small pieces. He flushed it down the toilet, as Demi had requested, waiting to confirm that every scrap vanished, flushing a second time to be sure that nothing was caught in the drain.
Medsped. Teknologik. Corporations conducting what appeared to be a police operation. Their long reach, from Los Angeles to Manassas, and their unnerving omniscience, argued that these were corporations with powerful connections beyond the business world, perhaps to the military.
Nevertheless, regardless of the stakes, it made no sense for a corporation to protect its interests with hitmen brazen enough to shoot at people in public places — or anywhere else, for that matter. Regardless of how profitable Teknologik might be, big black numbers at the bottom of the balance sheet did not exempt corporate officers and executives from the law, not even here in Los Angeles, where the lack of money was known to be the root of all evil.
Considering the impunity with which they seemed to think they
could use guns, the men that he had encountered must be military personnel or federal agents. Joe had too little information to allow him even to conjecture what role Medsped and Teknologik played in the operation.
All the way along the third-floor hall to the elevators, he expected someone to call his name and order him to stop. Perhaps one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts. Or Wallace Blick. Or a police officer.
If the people seeking Rose Tucker were federal agents, they would be able to obtain help from local police. For the time being, Joe would have to regard every man in uniform as a potential enemy.
As the elevator doors opened, he tensed, half expecting to be apprehended here in the alcove. The cab was empty.
On the way down to the first floor, he waited for the power to be cut off. When the doors opened on the lower alcove, he was surprised to find it deserted.
In all his life, he had never previously been in the grip of paranoia such as this. He was overreacting to the events of the early afternoon and to what he had learned since arriving at the offices of the Post.
He wondered if his exaggerated reactions — spells of extreme rage, spiralling fear — were a response to the past year of emotional deprivation. He had allowed himself to feel nothing whatsoever but grief, self-pity, and the terrible hollowness of incomprehensible loss. In fact, he’d striven hard not to feel even that much. He had tried to shed his pain, to rise from the ashes like a drab phoenix with no hope except the cold peace of indifference. Now that events forced him to open himself to the world again, he was swamped by emotion as a novice surfer was overwhelmed by each cresting wave.
In the reception lounge, as Joe entered, Dewey Beemis was on the telephone. He was listening so intently that his usually smooth dark face was furrowed. He murmured, ‘Yes, uh-huh, uh-huh, yes.’
Heading toward the outer door, Joe waved good-bye.
Dewey said, ‘Joe, wait, wait a second.’
Joe stopped and turned.
Though Dewey was listening to the caller again, his eyes were on Joe.
To indicate that he was in a hurry, Joe tapped one finger against his wristwatch.
Hold on,’ Dewey said into the phone, and then to Joe, he said, a man here calling about you.’
Joe shook his head adamantly.
‘Wants to talk to you,’ Dewey said.
Joe started toward the door again.
‘Wait, Joe, man says he’s FBI.’
At the door, Joe hesitated and looked back at Dewey. The FBI couldn’t be associated with the men in the Hawaiian shirts, not with men who shot at innocent people without bothering to ask questions, not with men like Wallace Blick. Could they? Wasn’t he letting his fear run away with him again, succumbing to paranoia? He might get answers and protection from the FBI.
Of course, the man on the phone could be lying. He might not be with the Bureau. Possibly he was hoping to delay Joe until Blick and his friends — or others aligned with them — could get here.
With a shake of his head, Joe turned away from Dewey. He pushed through the door and into the August heat.
Behind him, Dewey said, ‘Joe?’
Joe walked toward his car. He resisted the urge to break into a run.
At the far end of the parking lot, by the open gate, the young attendant with the shaved head and the gold nose ring was watching. In this city where sometimes money mattered more than fidelity or honour or merit, style mattered more than money; fashions came and went even more frequently than principles and convictions, leaving only the unchanging signal colours of youth gangs as a sartorial tradition. This kid’s look, punk-grungeneopunk-whatever, was already as dated as spats, making him look less threatening than he thought and more pathetic than he would ever be able to comprehend. Yet under these circumstances, his interest in Joe seemed ominous.
Even at low volume, the hard beat of rap music thumped through the blistering air.
The interior of the Honda was hot but not intolerable. The side window, shattered by a bullet at the cemetery, provided just enough ventilation to prevent suffocation.
The attendant had probably noticed the broken-out window when Joe had driven in. Maybe he’d been thinking about it.
What does it matter if he has been thinking? It’s only a broken Window.
He was certain the engine wouldn’t start, but it did.
As Joe backed out of the parking slot, Dewey Beemis opened the reception-lounge door and stepped outside onto the small concrete
stoop under the awning that bore the logo of the Post. The big man looked not alarmed but puzzled.
Dewey wouldn’t try to stop him. They were friends, after all, or had once been friends, and the man on the phone was just a voice.
Joe shifted the Honda into drive.
Coming down the steps, Dewey shouted something. He didn’t sound alarmed. He sounded confused, concerned.
Ignoring him nonetheless, Joe drove toward the exit. Under the dirty Cinzano umbrella, the attendant rose from the folding chair. He was only two steps from the rolling gate that would close off the lot.
Atop the chain-link fence, the coils of razor wire flared with silver reflections of late-afternoon sunlight.
Joe glanced at the rear-view mirror. Back there, Dewey was standing with his hands on his hips.
As Joe went past the Cinzano umbrella, the attendant didn’t even come forth out of the shade. Watching with heavy-lidded eyes, as expressionless as an iguana, he wiped sweat off his brow with one hand, black fingernails glistening.
Through the open gate and turning right into the street, Joe was driving too fast. The tyres squealed and sucked wetly at the sun-softened blacktop, but he didn’t slow down.
He went west on Strathern Street and heard sirens by the time that he turned south on Lankershim Boulevard. Sirens were part of the music of the city, day and night; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him.
Nevertheless, all the way to the Ventura Freeway, under it, and then west on Moorpark, he repeatedly checked the rear-view mirror for pursuing vehicles, either marked or unmarked.
He was not a criminal. He should have felt safe going to the authorities to report the men in the cemetery, to tell them about the message from Rose Marie Tucker, and to report his suspicions about Flight 353.
On the other hand, in spite of being on the run for her life, Rose apparently hadn’t sought protection from the cops, perhaps because there was no protection to be had. My life depends on your discretion. He had been a crime reporter long enough to have seen more than a few cases in which the victim had been targeted not because of anything he had done, not because of money or other possessions that his assailant desired, but merely because of what
he had known. A man with too much knowledge could be more dangerous than a man with a gun.
What knowledge Joe had about Flight 353 seemed, however, to be pathetically inadequate. If he was a target merely because he knew that Rose Tucker existed and that she claimed to have survived the crash, then the secrets she possessed must be so explosive that the power of them could be measured only in megatonnage.
As he drove west toward Studio City, he thought of the red letters emblazoned on the black T-shirt worn by the attendant at the Post parking lot: FEAR NADA. That was a philosophy Joe could never embrace. He feared so much.
More than anything, he was tormented by the possibility that the crash had not been an accident, that Michelle and Chrissie and Nina died not at the whim of fate but by the hand of man. Although the National Transportation Safety Board hadn’t been able to settle on a probable cause, hydraulic control systems failure complicated by human error was one possible scenario — and one with which he had been able to live because it was so impersonal, as mechanical and cold as the universe itself. He would find it intolerable, however, if they had perished from a cowardly act of terrorism or because of some more personal crime, their lives sacrificed to human greed or envy or hatred.
He feared what such a discovery would do to him. He feared what he might become, his potential for savagery, the hideous ease with which he might embrace vengeance and call it justice.
3
In the current atmosphere of fierce competitiveness that marked their industry, California bankers were keeping their offices open on Saturdays, some as late as five o’clock. Joe arrived at the Studio City branch of his bank twenty minutes before the doors closed.
When he sold the house here, he had not bothered to switch his account to a branch nearer his one-room apartment in Laurel Canyon. Convenience wasn’t a consideration when time no longer mattered.
He went to a window where a woman named Heather was tending to paperwork as she waited for last-minute business. She had worked at this bank since Joe had first opened an account a decade ago.