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  ‘It don’t name names,’ McTell remarked and went into a defensive slouch, like a tired pugilist.

  ‘And we’re thankful for small mercies,’ Dansk said.

  ‘How did you get this letter?’ McTell asked.

  ‘Pasquale let his fingers do the walking.’ Dansk took the letter back. ‘I’d like to be happy, Eddie. Instead what I get are problems and headaches.’

  ‘And you’re blaming me and Pasquale, right? I gotta say this, Anthony, you never have a good word. You never say we did this right or we did that right.’

  ‘What are you looking for, Eddie?’ He raised both arms in the air and made a salaam motion. ‘The mighty McTell, praise his name.’

  McTell said, ‘A kind word now and again is all. Instance. We did some terrific work on Rhees. You lay into a guy with metal, you run the risk of maybe puncturing a lung or breaking the skull and then it’s serious. But we did it the way you wanted it: delicate, Anthony. Like fucking artists.’

  Dansk stared at the softball field. Artists. McTell and Pasquale were up there with Van Gogh and Reubens. He pondered the letter. ‘The lady’s learned something she wasn’t supposed to learn, McTell.’

  ‘Ask me, I don’t see where she’s learned anything,’ McTell said.

  Dansk thought of pushing the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife into McTell’s brain. ‘Show me where the fuck it’s written that you’re paid to make judgements, McTell. You’re reimbursed to kill, I’m the one paid to think and organize and forecast. And the problem here’s not so much what she’s learned as what she thinks she’s learned, what she believes. Her brain’s on overtime.’

  ‘She don’t even have the letter,’ McTell said.

  Dansk said, ‘No, but I’ll bet good money she showed it to Drumm.’

  ‘So she tells this cop. What’s he gonna do? Drag Sanchez outta his cell and interrogate him day and fucking night? Who did he bribe? Who did he buy? That kinda thing. And what’s Sanchez gonna say? Jack shit.’

  Dansk said, ‘You’re not taking into account the woman’s persistence. She’s like a termite. She’s not happy unless she’s nibbling away at timbers.’

  ‘What you do with a termite is you drop poison.’

  ‘Poison,’ Dansk said. He felt entangled in a variety of possibilities suddenly. The softball game seemed very far away, miniature figures participating in a meaningless ritual under the lamps. His lips were dry. He took from his pocket a tube of salve and applied it. He tasted lemon.

  McTell’s voice was surly. ‘So beating up on the guy was a waste. All that labour for what? Shit?’

  ‘Without this goddam letter, she’d have withered on the vine, McTell. She’d have shrivelled to a puckered substandard little raisin. Without this hysterical fucking note from the runaway señorita, she’d have dropped out of sight and done her Nurse Nightingale bit and tended to her lover’s wounds. But the letter arrives and she reads it and her head starts running and she can’t stop it.’

  McTell had a look that might have been exasperation. ‘So what now?’

  The phone in Dansk’s pocket went off. He felt it vibrate against his hip. He flipped the device open and heard Pasquale say, ‘I lost her, Anthony.’

  ‘Lost her?’

  ‘She was in the house with this cop Drumm for maybe an hour. He leaves and a coupla minutes later she comes outta the house and gets in her car. I follow her along Lincoln Boulevard, she pulls into a Circle-K, goes inside, ten minutes pass and she still hasn’t reappeared. So I look in the store, only she’s not there. I figure she’s using the john, but when I take a look-see the john’s empty and she’s nowhere around. I walk back outside. Item, her car’s still there. No sign of her.’

  ‘So she slipped out the back?’

  ‘Item, I go round the back. There’s this alley. No sign of her. I check the front and her goddam car is still there. So I check the streets round the store: nothing. Then I haul ass back to the store again. Her car’s still there. I can see it from where I’m sitting.’

  ‘So this is like some magical illusion? She vanishes into nothing?’

  ‘I don’t know where she went.’

  Dansk thought for a moment. ‘Here’s what I want you to do. Take her car, and don’t tell me you don’t have the keys and can’t get it started. I’ll call you back soon.’

  Dansk snapped the phone shut and shoved it back in his pocket. She knew she was being followed, so she took steps to lose Pasquale. Nice. Did she ease through the back door of the store and into a maze of suburban streets? Stroll until she found a gas station where she could phone a cab? This lady has more than a degree of cunning.

  ‘She skipped,’ he said. After talking with Drumm.

  ‘Anything you want me to do?’

  Dansk was silent a moment. ‘One thing,’ he said.

  ‘I’m listening,’ said McTell, and inclined his body forward, his head tilted in what he considered his concentration mode.

  44

  From the window of the hotel Amanda could see the freeway, the lights of the suburbs stretching towards darkness. She drew the curtains briskly, dumped her overnight bag on the bed and opened it. The motions, remember the motions. Focus. She worked fast. She dressed in the suit she’d worn at the Biltmore. She went inside the bathroom and applied thick make-up. She painted her lips a high gloss red and drew exaggerated lines around her eyes with a fine brush, then sprayed gel into her hair and ran a comb through it. The glistening look. She walked back inside the bedroom and varnished her nails a dreadful nuclear pink that would glow in the dark.

  A new Amanda. Overstated.

  She opened the mini-bar and took out several miniatures of liquor, mainly brandy and gin. She loosened the caps a little and stuffed the tiny bottles in her purse, along with cigarettes and all the rest of the junk she’d need.

  Then she thought of the car that had been following her along Lincoln Boulevard. When she’d slowed down, so had the car. She pulled into the parking-lot of a convenience store. The car had sailed past the store and then hung a U-turn at the next lights and come back. She’d stepped inside the store, walked towards the john and kept going, pushing the metal crossbar of the delivery door at the rear, and then she was running.

  I can’t go through with this. This loony plan. This trip to the moon. Drumm would disapprove and Rhees would have a cardiac arrest, but they don’t know what I’m doing.

  You’re not even sure yourself.

  Yes you are. This is called focussing your rage.

  She felt an inner tremor, a doubt. Shove it aside, cast it off. No time for indecision. She let her hand hover above the telephone. Her fingernails looked like they belonged to somebody else’s hand.

  She picked up the telephone and called the operator. ‘Connect me to Anthony Dansk,’ she said.

  ‘Hold.’ Ringing, ringing, ringing.

  ‘I’m sorry, the room isn’t answering. Is there a message?’

  ‘No message,’ Amanda said.

  She put the telephone down. How much time, she wondered. She couldn’t begin to guess. She slipped her feet inside her black shoes, picked up the bulky purse and headed for the door. She rode the elevator downward to the reception area where a great chandelier spiked the air with light at all angles, like a wayward laser.

  The concierge’s desk was unattended. At reception there was only the young man who’d checked her in earlier. He had a smile designed to please.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet somebody here, but he hasn’t shown up,’ she said. ‘He’s a guest.’

  ‘You know his room number?’

  ‘I think its eight seven three four. I’m just hopeless with numbers.’ The helpless shiny lipsticked smile.

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Dansk. Anthony.’

  The clerk punched his computer. ‘You certainly are hopeless with numbers,’ he said, still smiling.

  ‘Did I get the room wrong?’

  ‘Miles out.’<
br />
  ‘Typical. What is his number anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t say. Security reasons.’

  ‘Makes sense these days,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll call the room for you.’ The clerk picked up a phone.

  Amanda thought, Do it now. Do it before you lose whatever momentum you have.

  She tipped her purse and it spilled open, tubes of lipstick, eyebrow pencils, a compact, a bottle of liquid hair gel, everything rolled across the surface of the desk in a variety of directions.

  ‘Oh, Christ, clumsy me,’ she said, and then the cigarettes followed, and six loose tampons, and the miniatures of liquor, which scattered across the desk leaking brandy and gin. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  The clerk said, ‘It’s no problem really.’

  ‘My friends all call me Amanda Accident,’ she said, in a bubbly airheaded fashion. ‘I guess you can see why.’

  ‘I’ll just clean it up.’ The clerk took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and began to swab the desk like a cabin-boy. Booze was soaking through the tampon-wrappers, making rainbow puddles around the eyebrow pencils and the tubes of lipstick.

  ‘Jesus, it’s a mess, it’s a terrible mess. I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s nothing, really. I can clean it up in no time.’

  ‘Let me help,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t need help, really,’ the clerk said.

  ‘No, I insist.’ She reached across the desk to retrieve some of the spilled items and she struck the computer screen with her elbow and it swivelled slightly towards her, even as a few of the cylindrical beauty enhancements dropped on the clerk’s side of the desk and booze dripped onto his paperwork.

  ‘Now it’s all over your papers. I’m so damn sorry, really I am. I shouldn’t be allowed out.’

  7320.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m absolutely fine,’ he said.

  Bless his heart, he was still smiling. Slapstick, she thought. I have a knack for it, a clown’s gift.

  The clerk had collected everything together in a wet mound on the centre of his desk. ‘There, I think that’s most of it. I guess you want me to dump this stuff.’

  ‘Would you please,’ she said.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘You’re very understanding,’ she said. ‘I come in here and before you know it, disaster.’

  ‘I’m trained for emergencies, large and small,’ he said.

  She fished a wet five-dollar bill from her purse. ‘Here,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ he said.

  ‘Call it guilt money,’ she said.

  He took the bill tentatively out of her fingers.

  She walked quickly out of the reception area. Act one over. She was conscious of time again.

  She rode up in the elevator to her room. She looked at the room-service menu, picked up the phone and said, ‘This is Mrs Anthony Dansk, seventy three twenty. Send up a Union Jack burger and fries. How long will that take?’

  ‘Ten minutes, ma’am.’

  She checked her watch. Ten minutes. Mrs Anthony Dansk, she thought. She wondered if Dansk had a wife. She couldn’t imagine it.

  She walked up and down the room. The slapstick was over. The next part was different. She sat on the bed, but her heart was like a racehorse and she had to get up again. She went inside the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. The surge of nervous energy that had transported her through the comedy of errors at reception was still flowing vigorously. All the time at the desk she’d wondered what would have happened if Dansk had chosen that moment to enter the hotel and he had seen her. A sliver of luck. You needed it now and again.

  Let it hold.

  She checked her watch again. She took off her shoes and left her room. She rode the elevator down and stepped out on the seventh floor. She found room 7320 and she waited outside the door. Ten minutes since she’d ordered from room service. Eleven. Twelve. This is no way to do things, the heart flat out. Dansk could appear. Dansk could materialize in the corridor. And then what? Hello, Anthony, I was just in the neighbourhood.

  She heard the elevator in the shaft, the clank of cutlery. She saw the room-service waiter come into view with a tray balanced on one hand. He was a tall black kid in a striped vest. She smiled at him as he approached.

  ‘I know, I know, you’re gonna think I’m a total moron,’ she said. ‘I locked myself out. I’m not even wearing my shoes, for God’s sake. I thought I heard somebody at the door, so I went to see, the door swung shut behind me. What do you put on the hinges here? Electromagnets? Now I’m standing here like an idiot.’

  ‘Happens all the time,’ the kid said.

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Oh sure.’

  ‘So do I eat my dinner out here in the corridor or are you going to be like my knight in shining armour and let me back inside my room?’

  ‘You’re a damsel in distress,’ the kid said.

  ‘Distress is right. I think I’m beyond the age of damsel, though.’

  The kid laughed. ‘I never heard of an age limit to damsels.’ He slipped a keycard from his shirt pocket.

  ‘Will that work?’ she asked, looking at the card and thinking, Hurry, hurry.

  ‘This is a magic card. One size fits all.’ He slid the card into the slot, turned the handle and said, ‘See? Open sesame.’

  She walked ahead of him into the room. He set down the tray and gave her a slip of paper to sign. She wrote Mrs Anthony Dansk and added five dollars in the gratuity column.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ the kid said.

  ‘You deserve it.’

  The kid left the room, closing the door behind him.

  She thought, I’m in.

  45

  Dansk, stepping out of his car in the parking garage, saw the man emerge from the shadows. Long black coat, beret, black gloves even. The man was seized by a fit of coughing and dug inside the pocket of his coat and came out with a small chocolate-brown bottle which he uncapped and held to his lips. He took a swig and stuck the bottle away again. His eyes watered. He looked as if he’d hawked up a chunk of diseased lung and was sickened by the taste in his mouth.

  ‘What is that shit you’re drinking, Loeb?’ Dansk asked.

  ‘Morphine in a syrup base.’

  ‘Morphine?’

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ Loeb said. ‘Anybody ever tells you there’s dignity in pain is talking unadulterated crap. Let’s get some air.’

  They walked together through a door marked EXIT and entered an alley at the back of the hotel where Dansk saw dark-green plastic garbage sacks and cardboard boxes, all very orderly.

  In his beret Loeb resembled a raddled, hollow-faced 1950s poet, a guy sitting outside a café on the Left Bank or in Greenwich Village, scribbling intense odes and drinking cheap red vino. ‘I was wondering about our lady,’ he said.

  ‘This is territory I work my own way. This is mine,’ Dansk said, keeping his voice in check.

  ‘Yeah, it’s your domain all right. But this work can contaminate a man. I’ve seen people get a taste for death. They develop a jones.’

  ‘Oh spare me the fucking lecture,’ Dansk said.

  ‘Sometimes enthusiasm’s great, Anthony. Other times it fogs a man’s judgement.’

  Dansk said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with my judgement, Loeb.’

  Loeb said, ‘You’re so damn defensive these days, I wonder if you aren’t just losing the place a little. I worry about your detachment.’

  ‘I’m detached,’ Dansk said.

  ‘Maybe. But this work can get to you in such a way you wouldn’t even notice it happening.’

  ‘I’d notice,’ Dansk said.

  ‘So tell me about her. Share, Anthony.’

  Dansk laughed. ‘Share? What is this? Like a counselling session?’

  ‘Carry too much inside, you get stressed, Anthony. I attend this group in Fairfax, it’s people like myself living with a death sentence. And we talk things through, and it helps, because
you realize you’re not entirely alone in the universe.’

  Dansk imagined a room filled with dying people. Incurables Anonymous. ‘I don’t need to share,’ he said. ‘I’m not the one sick.’

  ‘Pardon me, I forgot, you’re invincible. Captain Fucking Marvel. The occasional services of a hooker and a whistle-stop tour of a church or two, and suddenly you’re walking on water.’

  ‘Don’t give me static, Loeb.’ Dansk was irritated with Loeb prying, carping, carrying that dark bloom of death. He didn’t want to be in Loeb’s company. Hanging round terminal people was depressing. Even if you couldn’t catch the other person’s disease, you were vulnerable to the despair they hauled like leg-irons.

  ‘She goes here, there, so I track her movements and I try to read her mind and see how much of a problem she is.’

  ‘How much of a problem is she, Anthony?’

  ‘I’m tired. This has been a long day and I feel like one of those plastic sacks there. There’s grime attached to me, which I don’t like. I need to shower.’

  Dansk moved a few steps along the alley. Loeb followed, catching him by the arm. ‘You think you can handle her, Anthony?’

  Dansk shrugged the hand aside. ‘I can handle her.’ He thought about the letter in his pocket which he had no intention of showing to Loeb. Why give the nosy old fart something to criticize?

  Dansk kept walking. He stopped only when he heard Amanda’s voice:

  ‘Oh God, this is an emergency I need an ambulance and police, and I need them five minutes ago.’

  ‘Give me your address and the nature of your problem, please.’

  ‘The address is three six one Kennedy. That’s Scottsdale, near the Civic Center.’

  ‘And the problem, miss?’

  ‘My boyfriend … I think he may be dying … somebody came in the house and he’s beaten up and I found him in the pool and –’

  ‘Try to remain calm. I’ll have somebody with you as fast as I can.’

  ‘How fast is fast?’

  ‘As fast as possible.’

  ‘Hurry, for Christ’s sake …’

  Enraged, Dansk said, ‘Jesus, you got a wire on her fucking phone.’ He felt he’d been cuffed around the ears and the inside of his head was ringing, his skin stinging.