Whick-whick went the trees along the highway, whick-whick like the frames of a movie flashing through the shutter. Whick-whick while the fields lazed in sunlight, the grass a little brown from too little rain and too much sun, water spurting from irrigation pipes wrapped in grape vines. Whick-whick, marking space, marking time. Marking time, which is all I’d done as long as I could remember, not that that was very long.
I used to be good with words, I remember that. Words and me got along. They tell me I was a writer for Stars amp; Stripes, till my brains got rattled one time too many. I still play with them but all I get are phrases, flickers-whick whick-and each new one just drives out the old. In the end, it’s just light through the trees-pretty and whispering all kinds of promises but nothing real and nothing that’s a part of anything bigger. And that’s not enough.
Mr. Dulles was driving. He was a lousy driver, real intense but never seeming to be where he was. It was like he was keeping real good track of traffic a hundred and forty miles ahead while just barely lurching through the close-up stuff.
“The government?” I asked. “Their program, right?” It didn’t hurt to talk anymore; it just felt weird. It was so peaceful ignoring everybody once they accepted they weren’t getting much out of you.
“They disowned it. Everybody was put out to pasture. Governments are not real interested in re-exploring their failures.”
“But if it’s a failure-”
“The guys who murdered Dave didn’t think it was,” Dulles said and it hurt to hear the word ‘murder’ out in the air. “The guys who hired them didn’t either.” He was glaring at the driver ahead of him. “Get moving, willya?” he snapped.
“Those guys-part of the program?”
He shook his head. “Too young. The programs ended years ago. But…they must have trained with people from the program. ”
“Why?”
“Just procedures they were using, defenses they tried against me.”
“Are they dead?” I asked, buying time to think as much as anything else.
“They’ll come around by morning,” he said. Seeing my reproach, he added, “They don’t matter anyway. If you want revenge, you want the guys who sent them.”
“Big guns,” I said, though I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant.
“Guns are just their first line of defense. With guys like that, guns always are. They had more dangerous weapons, if they’d been a little more imaginative.” He swerved around the car in front of us, cursing a blue streak. “Who teaches them to stack up like this?”
“Who?”
“Look!” he said, gesturing out the windshield. It looked like regular traffic to me. “Three slowpokes, clogging all the lanes. They stack up right next to each other so you can’t pass them.”
“The guys we’re warning-in the program-they dangerous too?” I asked.
“With any luck,” he laughed-a nasty, harsh laugh. “Hopefully, they’re dangerous too.”
I waited a long moment before the next question. “You?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a half-smile that actually seemed genuine. “Yeah. You saw. Me too.” He banged at the steering wheel. “Okay, that’s enough, dammit,” he grumbled at the traffic. “ Move!”
His face turned red and I wouldn’t have wanted him looking at me like that. And as soon as he spoke, the car in front of us suddenly swerved out of the way, weaving and pulling to the right. We sped through the empty space and, for the next few miles, anytime anyone was ahead of us, they moved over as soon as we approached. Sometimes they jumped out of the way like something had startled them but Mr. Dulles wasn’t leaning on the horn and I didn’t see any reflection to suggest he was flashing his headlights or anything. The cars just seemed to be getting out of the way on their own, which didn’t seem a bit natural.
“Dave was a spy,” I said, straight out. It just seemed like I knew all at once.
“Not the way you’re thinking,” he answered. “Not James Bond.”
I wasn’t thinking of James Bond. Well, maybe a little but not seriously. I turned on the radio. It must have been the original radio that came with the car because it had the rotary dial for the stations-you turned the knob to tune in. I hadn’t seen one of those before except in pictures.
I didn’t like the music they were playing so we ended up with the news, the shooting of the Indian premier. The man who shot him was in custody and being interrogated; a state funeral was scheduled for the next morning. Most of the coverage wondered how the killer got through state security, close enough to fire at close range-and speculated about the next premier.
There was the usual parade of all-male candidates but the headline was the premier’s daughter, a woman speaking with an eerie serenity (and Oxford English) to what sounded like a pretty unruly crowd. She proclaimed herself her father’s successor and said she would be meeting with party officials that afternoon to claim control. The experts didn’t think much of her-Western-educated and an engineer, an attractive face to put on the party, possibly, but untested and not ready for the hurly-burly of Asian politics, they concluded. Probably gone in a week, with the pack of experts and male politicians scrambling to take advantage.
At the end of this, I realized we weren’t swerving or speeding any more. We were holding our place in traffic, maintaining a mere 60 miles an hour, Mr. Dulles more focused on the radio than I was. All he said was, “We need the newspapers.”
We pulled off at the next exit and he bought every newspaper they had. “Read,” he ordered as we pulled back onto the highway.
“Read what?”
“The headlines. Everything. I’ll tell you what I’m interested in.”
This was a torture. My mouth wasn’t used to three words in a row. It wasn’t used to two. Now he had me reading paragraphs. The muscles just weren’t in shape; the sounds were garbled half the time. I couldn’t figure out how he could understand what I was saying but he would bark at me to keep going every time I paused.
The headlines were the usual: Gridlock in Washington, each side blaming the other, embargos and sanctions against our favorite enemies, unemployment and gas prices up, sales and real estate booming, some expert says now’s the time to buy something or other, if you’ve got any money. None of that did much for Mr. Dulles though he was paying attention to every line. Then I got to: POWERPLANT MISHAP ‘ONE-TIME GLITCH,’ SAYS OPERATOR.
“Read me that,” he said immediately. And somehow, with him focusing on me, I could.
“Second Sun Energy, operators of the Biggs Hollow nuclear powerplant, called yesterday’s radiation leaks ‘minor and harmless’ and blamed them on improperly calibrated instruments. State regulators, however, expressed concern at instrument readings that indicated a meltdown, leading to the plant venting radiation and the evacuation of three surrounding towns. After a ‘thorough and rigorous’ examination of the plant, no actual problems were found. ‘Instrument readings,’ said a source close to the state regulatory authority, ‘have to be foolproof. A false reading can cause as much chaos as a real crisis, as this incident proves.’ ”
“Tear that out,” Dulles said. “Keep reading.”
It took a while to find something else that appealed to him: MAYOR RESIGNS AFTER BIZARRE VIDEO SURFACES was the headline. “Read that,” he said.
“Greta Kobel, Mayor of Copenhagen for twenty-four years, resigned today after a bizarre video surfaced on the Internet. The clip, which documented what her spokesperson called ‘a momentary breakdown,’ shows Mayor Kobel barking, clawing at the podium and spouting gibberish and racial slurs to an audience of Japanese businessmen at a reception yesterday. Among her statements was one characterizing Hindus as ‘the dogs of the world,’ which sparked riots in several countries last night. A statement from the Mayor’s office said she apologized for her behavior and called it ‘inexplicable, as the views expressed are not true to my own feelings or views. I take responsibility for my actions without, frankly, understanding them.” The Mayor announced that she was resigning, effective Friday, to seek counseling and medical treatment. Longtime friends and critics alike characterized the incident as out-of-character. Mayor Kobel has won numerous prizes throughout her stewardship for open government and human rights.”
“Tear that out too,” he said. “If there are pictures, keep them.”
“What’s in common?” I asked, tearing. “The Mayor of Copenhagen and a nuclear plant in Tennessee?”
“There’s our turnoff,” he said and I saw the sign to merge onto 95. He pulled into the right lane and we waited in traffic for the exit.
Savannah was hot, hot like they’d set the whole place on fire. The trees sagged under the weight of their own perspiration. Do trees sweat? I don’t care; these seemed to. Sweating trees, steaming brick houses from before the Civil War, swans and geese battling for position on a pond in the park as we drove by in slow traffic. Mr. Dulles wasn’t much at city driving either, from what I could tell-we would circle the same area several times before lighting out in a different direction.
“You lost?”
“No.”
“Why’re you circling?”
“Do you have an address? Or just ‘Mark Tauber, Savannah Georgia’?”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Then have a little patience.”
Each new direction led to dingier and dingier neighborhoods. In heat like this, most everything looked washed-out but I couldn’t miss the missing shingles on the roofs, the cars with missing fenders and the bars over the street-level windows. After about twenty minutes of this, we hit an area where the streets were flat-out empty, scary empty.
And then I looked over and he was driving with his eyes closed.
I grabbed for the wheel but he threw his hand out to block me. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Your eyes are closed.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“No it’s not. I’m driving with somebody who thinks they can drive with their eyes closed. That’s not okay.”
He actually laughed at that but didn’t open his eyes. “We have three houses between us and the corner,” he said and that was true. “There’s a blue pickup parked at the corner but we’ve got plenty of space to miss it.” I checked to see if his eyes were slitted open, if he was peeking. He wasn’t. “We’ll make the left turn at the corner coming up. I’ll wait to see if the red Ford let’s us go first.” I could see the corner coming up-there was no Ford there. Then, as I watched, it pulled up and waited for us. “There’s a silver Nissan SUV parked around the corner with a flat tire on the rear passenger side. There are two garbage cans-black and brown, in that order-lined up on the sidewalk a bit beyond it.” He started to hum to himself some odd off-key trance kind of a tune.
We turned past the Ford and onto the street, passing the silver Nissan with the flat on the passenger side and the garbage cans, black and brown in order. And then he swerved around the garbage can lid that blew into the street-still without opening his eyes-and I gave up trying to think. It wasn’t that I disbelieved-I couldn’t get a handle on what I was disbelieving.
“Okay?” he asked, eyes still shut, as though that settled something.
“No,” I answered because I didn’t know how to form a question. “Mr. Dulles-”
“Call me Max,” he said and that was okay but I still didn’t know what to say.
This neighborhood was about a century-and-a-half dingier than the last one. We had started with picturesque dingy and had now descended to watch-your-back, all-the-neighbors-have-guns dingy. Several of the houses looked abandoned; the store on the corner was boarded up solid. A few old people came out to take laundry off the line or walk the dog but they kept a close eye on approaching cars.
When Mr. Dulles pulled to the curb, all at once, there was the tune he’d been humming, tinkling off the wind chimes on the porch. “Your Mr. Tauber lives in the second house from the end,” he said. “He’s not expecting company.” He looked around, like he was surveying the neighborhood, except there was almost no one on the street. “We’ll walk directly from the car to his place,” he said, as if I needed any prompting. He was planning on leaving me here?
He locked the car conspicuously when we got out. The front door of the house was locked the first time he pulled but he ran his finger over the lock a couple times and I heard the bolt throw. As we came into the front foyer, people were scuttering out of sight in the back of the house, like rats running from a light.
Jazz was blaring in the front apartment, honking jazz, Coltrane or Sun Ra or something. Max knocked but it was just pro forma-no one could possibly hear knocking over that racket. So he gave it a moment and then banged. After several attempts, the music went quiet and we heard footsteps. I could sense someone on the other side of the peephole for a moment and then a voice through the thin plywood. “What do you want?” The voice was unwell, full of tremors.
“We’re friends of Dave Monaghan,” Mr. Dulles-Max-said and waited. After a pause long enough for second thoughts, there was a working of chains and locks and the door cracked open.
“How do you know Dave?” the man asked, looking us up and down. He was tall and creaky, with a stiffness that could have been dignity or arthritis. His hands shook holding his cigarette and his shirt was buttoned wrong, out of synch at the collar, so I bet on arthritis. “Where is he these days?”
“We should talk inside,” Max said and flashed him the look that had made my skull hot. Tauber stood up straighter all at once.
“Ah,” he said with a wry smile, “ that’s how you know Dave,” and he pulled the door open and waved us in.
It was shabby inside, even considering the neighborhood. The furniture was clearly other people’s throwaways. The chairs, scattered around the room, needed cushions-they were all stained and torn, bits of stuffing leaking out the seams. A couple of pictures hung at Tauber’s eye level, the kind of things they sell at the 99? store so you can have something on your wall.
Last night’s dishes were in the sink-or maybe they just lived there full-time. A supermarket shopping cart stood in the kitchen, next to heaping plastic bags filled with cans and bottles for recycling. Tauber wandered the room, a proud man in hard times, trying to disguise his frailties. He pushed chairs into a group for us and then pulled up the shades a little, letting in some light.
“Not expecting company,” he grumbled. The radio was still playing low; he walked over and switched it off. “Keeps down the voices in my head,” he explained-at least he seemed to think that was explaining something. He was slurring a little. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woke up still drunk from the night before-not so long for Tauber, apparently. “So if ya came from Dave,” he said, “there’s two questions: What’d ya come for and why didn’t he come himself?”
“Dave’s dead,” Mr. Dulles said, no ceremony, just like that, and hearing it made it hurt all over again. “He was shot to death this morning.” The words passed through Tauber like a shiver-a couple shivers maybe, replaced finally by a numb stare. I couldn’t tell if shock had him or if he was just used to numb most of the time.
“Who did it?”
“The question is who sent them,” Max answered. “They were under suggestion and knew what they were doing. They torched the house-expertly-and rifled his store immediately after.”
“For what?”
“Dave kept a list of the old team.”
“It wouldn’t be much of a list,” Tauber drawled. “Not many of us left.”
“Well, I think they were after the list,” Mr. Dulles said. I was having a hard time thinking of him as Max or any other kind of first name. “Whoever they are, they’re going after the old team.”
“Ha!” Tauber cracked a laugh. “Come after me? If they ignore me, I’ll fall apart all on my own.”
“You’ve still got power,” Mr. Dulles said. “I felt it at the door.”
“Power? For what?” Tauber responded. “I can read the crack dealer upstairs when he pays off the local cop-the cop’s got gout and a fixer-upper on the Outer Shoals but he won’t make the mortgage if his wife doesn’t stop running up the credit cards. The dealer lost some ‘merchandise’ last month-I found out who lost it for him so he gave me a couple bills but then he put two guys to watchin’ my every move for two weeks.”
“It’s still power.”
“Sure-against morons, I’m a master. Against a trained mindbender? Give me a break.” Tauber’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“A friend of Dave’s,” Mr. Dulles repeated.
“And him?” Tauber asked, jerking a thumb in my direction.
“He’s a vessel,” Mr. Dulles answered. “He’s Dave’s list, actually. It’s locked in his head. I can’t access it, he can’t access it, all he can give me is one name at a time.” He watched Tauber closely while explaining, the same way Tauber was watching me.
“Weird,” he said.
“I was hoping it was some procedure from the program-something you might know how to break.”
“News to me,” Tauber shook his head. “Don’t remember anything like that.”
There was a bang at the door.
“Rent!” came a nasty, snarling, gravelly voice. “Now!”
Tauber clearly didn’t want to answer the door, but the banging resumed immediately. “You told me today. Don’t think I’m forgetting about it like last month either-I’ve got it written down!” Tauber cleared his throat and opened the door.
“”Now!” she shrieked, bursting into the room. That this was a woman’s voice knocked me over-I couldn’t imagine what kind of life would have earned her that rasp. It had to have taken hours to paint her face on, not that it was worth the effort. “It was due yesterday. Where is it?” Tauber stood wavering, unsteady.
“He paid you last night,” Mr. Dulles said. “Don’t you remember?” As soon as he said it, I knew it was a lie but somehow she didn’t.
“Last night?” she said, confused. “When?” She was staring at Max now as though trying to place him.
“He gave it to you at the party, remember?” Mr. Dulles answered, speaking slowly and enunciating, his voice deepening as he went, until it sounded like he was in a tunnel. “The party in the back yard?”
Her uncertainty grew. Max was watching her closely, like he was reading the right thing to say off her face. “You were wearing…the green dress?” he offered.
“Uh-I-”
“I liked the green dress,” Max said. He threw her the smile of a man who’s interested. Not that this smile was any more convincing than his regular one but somehow he sold it to her. “I also liked the secret pocket inside,” he added, his smile growing. “The check’s in the pocket.”
“The…pocket…?” she said, flustered. Clearly, she expected that pocket to remain her secret. Her expression changed, a coquettish smile teasing across her kabuki face. “Were you naughty?” she snarled. You could see her struggling to remember-she might have forgotten a few things over the years but nothing good, dammit!
She stood uncertain for a long moment. I saw her touch the back of her head for a second, the same place mine went hot in the swamp.
“Go check,” Mr. Dulles said, in a voice so soft it was like I was just hearing it in my head.
“I’ll…go check…” she repeated, her words like half a second behind his, more an echo than a reply and suddenly she was on her way out the door.
I looked around a second later and Tauber had disappeared. “It’ll take her maybe three minutes to check that pocket,” Max warned firmly in the direction of the bedroom. “And then maybe another two checking drawers and cabinets. She came home drunk so she can’t remember where she would have left it.”
“If I’d paid her,” Tauber’s voice came from the bedroom.
“If you’d paid her,” Mr. Dulles repeated. “So you’ve got about three minutes to pack.” He turned to me, disappointment on his face. “I guess we’re moving on,” he said, like he expected me to be sorry too.
Tauber emerged a minute later, zipping his overnight bag. “Not much here I can’t replace cheap,” he said, cracking the door as quietly as he could. We hustled out the front door. Max unlocked the car, Tauber folded himself into the back seat, the landlady threw open the upstairs window and started screaming and chucking stuff out the window at us but her arm was lacking.
“So where are we going?” Tauber said as we drove away. “Washington surely doesn’t give a shit.”
“I’ll get the list together and you can decide what you want to do.”
“What we can do is the question,” Tauber said. “I can’t defend myself against an attack; I’m totally out o’ practice.”
“That’s up to you,” Max answered. “Dave wanted me to get you together so I’ll do that. Then you’re on your own.”
“How do you know what he wanted?”
Max turned to me. “What’s the next nearest?”
“Miriam Fine, Durham, North Carolina” came out of my mouth like a belch, a reflex. Max reached for the glovebox; I pulled out the map and unfolded it for him.
“Miriam! Oh hell,” Tauber said. “Now we’re in for it.”