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  He raises the woman into a sitting position and props her against the side of the stall. He removes the plastic bag and her head tilts towards her chest. He takes a length of rope from his pocket and prepares a noose that goes round her neck. The other end of the rope he tosses round the curtain rail.

  Now pull.

  He raises Mrs Vialli up from the floor inch by inch. Hard fucking work. The curtain rail trembles but doesn’t pop loose from the wall.

  He pulls until she’s about 24 inches from the floor, then he makes a knot and watches the woman hang, her body turning very slightly. She brushes the edge of the shower curtain which makes a tiny creaking noise. Her big bunny-rabbit slippers are wet with piss which trickles down her legs. McTell has seen a lot of effluence in his time.

  He finds a chair in a bedroom and carries it into the bathroom and places it on the floor under Mrs Vialli’s feet. He wads sheets of toilet paper together and steps up on the chair, then he cleans the goo of cream from the woman’s face.

  He steps down, flushes the papers and makes sure they’ve been sucked away, then kicks over the chair.

  Check-list.

  Climbs up, tick, hangs herself, tick, knocks chair over as she chokes, tick.

  Anything else?

  He looks round the bathroom and goes down the stairs. He puts the chain back in place and turns off the hallway light, then walks with the aid of a pen-sized flashlight through the kitchen to the back door. He opens it, steps out, pulls it shut again behind him, hears the Yale snap at his back. No sign anywhere of forced entrance. No intrusion.

  Just a very depressed woman hanging in her own bathroom.

  50

  Amanda, who’d slept badly, dreaming again of Galindez turning over and over in black waters, drank a quick coffee in her room at 7 a.m., then checked out of the hotel. She rented a Ford from the Avis office in the lobby. She drove past plazas and shopping-centres not yet open. The world was uncontaminated in the early sunlight.

  She entered a parking-lot, idled outside a Walgreen’s emporium, checked the street. The only vehicle that came along was a beat-up old van with the logo PEACE and a hippie floral design peeling from the body. Time-warp travel. Groovy.

  She drove again. When she reached the Hideaway Knolls Motel she parked and sat looking at the jaded two-storey cinder-block construction. This was the motel Dansk had telephoned three times, according to the information from the hotel computer system. The other number he’d called turned out to be an escort service called Romantic Liaisons. A receptionist with a voice like smooth ice-cream had told Amanda, ‘We can help you in ways the Red Cross never dreamed about, honey.’

  Amanda lit a cigarette. The dashboard clock read seven-forty. Dansk had phoned the Hideaway Knolls three times. Who does he know here? She got out of the car. She’d sit in the coffee-shop and wait until it was time to visit Rhees. She put on a pair of sunglasses, walked inside and took a table in a far corner with a view of the door. She skipped quickly through the menu, ordered coffee and gazed round the room. This could be nothing, a waste of time.

  The place was crowded. Some of the customers had the stunned dead-eyed glaze that comes when you’re crossing the continent with your possessions in a U-Haul and wondering what your new lives will be like when you get where you’re going.

  New lives. Just what the Program offered.

  She looked through the window at sun glaring off the pavement. She saw her image reflected in a knife on the table and she thought about Dansk and the sickening sensation of his fingers on her breast.

  The waitress came with her coffee.

  What was she expecting to discover in this place anyway? Dansk phones here, but you could hardly go from table to table asking people if they knew a man called Anthony Dansk, any more than you could trek from room to room knocking on doors. She went to the telephone and called the hospital. Rhees was fine and alert, the nurse said. He’d passed a comfortable night and eaten a good breakfast.

  She walked back to her table, finished her coffee. She looked at her watch. Eight a.m. She wondered what Rhees might need, if there was anything she could take to him at the hospital. Reading material, maybe? Clean underwear for sure. Fresh clothes in the unlikely event they decided to discharge him in her care –

  The door of the coffee-shop opened.

  Startled, Amanda held the menu close to her face. Don’t panic.

  The man who came inside sat up on a stool at the counter and yawned. He checked the room with a casual movement of his head but he didn’t see her. He wasn’t wearing his neck brace, but this was the guy from the hospital waiting-room. This was the one, she thought. This was who Dansk phoned here.

  The thought raced through her mind that he might also be one of the pair who’d attacked Rhees. He resembled an athlete who’d let himself go: muscled, but slackly so. She watched him as he blew on the surface of his coffee. She looked at his yellow-grey hair and sideburns and his crumpled dark-blue suit. He turned to survey the room again and she laid the palm of one hand like a mask against her face, something to reinforce the dark glasses and the menu held in mid-air.

  She couldn’t play this hiding game indefinitely.

  He was hunched on his stool, staring into his coffee. He yawned, stretched his arms, performed some business with his hands, applying the force of one against the other in a form of callisthenics, fingertip pushed upon fingertip. He tugged a tissue from the dispenser and in an absent-minded manner stroked it with his fingers.

  It disappeared a second between his palms, and when he opened them the tissue had been transformed into a shape like the head of a white rose.

  He pushed it across the counter towards the cashier, a teenage girl who smiled and said, ‘Hey, neat little party trick you got there.’

  There was an unusual grace and suppleness about those hands. They could play a cello, shuffle cards as if they were lubricated, conjure hankies or rabbits out of top hats, pick locks.

  Amanda thought, Wait. Rewind all the way back to the moment when he’d leaned across her at the hospital, the soda can he’d suggested she use as an ashtray. The memory was like a scene filmed through cheesecloth, muted halos, soft edges.

  Hands like those could pick more than locks. They could slide inside pockets, deft and weightless, they could remove two sheets of paper from the hip pocket of a highly distressed woman in the space of a breath. Two sheets of paper, gone in a whisper.

  It was possible, more than possible.

  He steals the letter. He slips a hand inside her back pocket and steals the goddam letter. She didn’t want to think.

  She dropped a couple of dollar bills on the table and hurried outside. Her dark glasses slid off her face and fell to the pavement and she stooped to pick them up. The left lens was cracked. She moved in the direction of her car. The world through cracked plastic. The tinted sun had a spidery fracture.

  She reached her car and sat behind the wheel. OK, you didn’t lose the letter after all. And all the time you were in Dansk’s company, he knew you’d read it, you’d read Isabel Sanchez’s hasty words that had dynamited the bunker of Program security.

  She backed up the car into a green plastic dumpster that rocked to and fro, then she edged forward into the traffic flow. She avoided the clogged freeways. It took her twenty minutes driving along suburban back streets to get to her house. She parked and went indoors. She didn’t look at the mess. She walked quickly inside the bedroom and found a freshly laundered shirt and a pair of jeans and clean socks and underwear, gathered them together hastily, then turned around to head back out again.

  The telephone rang. She was tempted to let the answering machine pick up, but she reached for the handset before the recorded message kicked in.

  It was Willie Drumm. ‘Next time you go to a hotel, leave me the name of the place,’ he said. ‘That way I can reach you.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking straight, Willie.’

  ‘Whatever. Here’s the run-down on my activity.’
<
br />   ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘First Mrs Vialli. She hasn’t heard from Benny since he went inside the Program, except for some flowers on her birthday and a card she feels isn’t kosher.’

  ‘Not kosher how?’ She clutched Rhees’s clothing against her body as if she were holding the man himself.

  Drumm told her. She listened carefully through an unexpected flutter of static on the line. She imagined Mrs Vialli reading and rereading a terse message she considered fake and replaying a taped phone message and thinking odd thoughts about a bunch of flowers long-since withered. She remembered Bernadette and the way she’d embraced her son outside the courthouse after he’d given his testimony, how she’d wept because she knew he was going away.

  Amanda thought about this a moment. ‘What are we saying here, Willie?’

  ‘Maybe only that Benny’s less loving and attentive than Ma Vialli wants to believe. She reads something into a message that isn’t there. I don’t know.’

  Amanda thought Drumm’s voice lacked conviction. ‘When I spelled out for Benny what it would involve going into the Program, the only thing that bothered him was leaving his mother, nothing else. They’re pretty close all right.’

  ‘There’s a note in your voice I don’t like, Amanda. What are you thinking?’

  ‘We know security’s screwed-up. So … maybe there’s some kind of connection between the apparent disappearance of Benny and the Sanchez-Galindez affair. Something we haven’t thought about.’

  ‘I don’t see how there could be a connection,’ Drumm said. ‘Two different cases six months apart with nothing in common.’

  ‘Except me, the prosecutor,’ she said.

  ‘So somebody’s got it in for you personally? Dansk, say.’

  ‘Until a few days ago I didn’t even know he existed, Willie. I’d be inclined to dismiss anything personal.’

  ‘If it’s not personal, what is it?’

  She didn’t have an answer. Her brain was scurrying here and there, but coming up with nothing. ‘I don’t know what it is, Willie.’

  Drumm was quiet a moment. He said, ‘Speaking of Dansk. Let me just shift the scene to Bascombe a moment. This is a sensitive area, he tells me. Highly confidential. I tell him I don’t give a rat’s fuck how sensitive it is or who he works for, he’s got no right to stand in the way of a homicide investigation. I mention Dansk’s name has cropped up.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘Never heard of the guy. Total blank. So I press him just a little. He says he’ll run a check on the name and get back to me this morning.’

  Amanda let John’s shirt slip to the floor and stooped to pick it up, balancing the handset between jaw and shoulder. ‘That’s the best he can do?’

  ‘He says. I get the funny feeling he’s gonna come up with nothing, even if he comes up with something. You know what I’m saying? He guards his territory like a killer Dobermann. He’d prefer to bite your face off than give you any information. I think it’s time I had a word with Dansk in person.’

  ‘You’ll find him at the Carlton.’

  ‘I’m also going to call Justice, check if they have anybody called Dansk.’

  Something she’d meant to do. ‘Contact me at the hospital as soon as you can.’

  ‘Will do. Say hi to John for me.’

  She hung up and left the house, stepped inside the car. She felt a shivery motion at the back of her mind, dark gauze shimmering in a draught.

  Say hi to John for me.

  It occurred to her then that if Dansk knew she’d read Isabel’s letter, he’d assume Rhees had also read it. It was something she hadn’t considered before, an oversight she attributed to the way events had whirled and jigged around her, but now she found herself worrying about hospital security and if Rhees might be in even more danger because he’d seen the letter, and in Dansk’s distorted view of the world that made him a threat as much as herself.

  She had a feeling of sinking through a sudden quicksand of panic. She thrust the key into the ignition and roared out of the cul-de-sac.

  51

  Dansk stared through the windshield of his car at the huge pink and aquamarine hospital, which bore some resemblance to a massive birthday cake. He turned to look at McTell in the seat. ‘I want a gun, Eddie.’

  ‘Say?’

  ‘Something out of your private arsenal.’

  ‘A gun,’ McTell said and smiled in an uneasy fashion. Suddenly, outta the blue, Dansk wants a gun. Dansk’s head was red flags, bad tides, No Swimming Beyond This Point.

  ‘What kind of weapon can you give me?’

  McTell said, ‘I got a nice Heckler & Koch P7M8. Also a Ruger P89. You sure about this, Anthony?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s just when it comes to guns, me and Pasquale usually –’

  ‘The Ruger,’ Dansk said. He imagined the gun in his hand, the weight of it, the deadliness. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He was stuffed-up on account of this city air. His head ached, he was probably coming down with desert fever or whatever evil spore floated in from the hot canyons and clogged your nostrils and rooted itself like a fungus in your lungs.

  McTell said, ‘The Ruger’s a joy. Square post front sight, square notch rear adjustable. It comes in blue steel, but I always had a soft spot for the stainless version.’

  Dansk watched visitors getting out of cars and strolling towards the entrance with their flowers and candies. There was a certain type of person who thrived around sickbeds. They drew up their chairs and flashed their own epic scars. Here’s where they did the bypass, a quadruple job, and down here’s the appendectomy.

  He looked for Amanda and saw no sign of her. Maybe she’d enter the building another way, a side door, a rear door, thinking she was being clever.

  There’s a note in your voice I don’t like, Amanda. What are you thinking?

  We know security’s screwed-up. So … maybe there’s some kind of connection between the apparent disappearance of Benny and the Sanchez-Galindez affair. Something we haven’t thought about.

  Dansk thought about the tape that had been delivered to his hotel at 9.15 a.m. just as he’d been finishing his press-ups. A brown padded envelope, no message. It hadn’t needed any message. It was Loeb’s way of telling him things had drifted too far. Well fuck you Loeb, I do this my way. Who needs a dying man’s shit? He remembered sweat falling on the envelope. He’d called Pasquale immediately. His hand had left smudged prints on the phone.

  ‘Is the gun handy?’ he asked McTell.

  ‘It’s in the trunk of my car over there.’

  ‘Get it for me.’ Dansk watched McTell walk to his car, unlock the trunk and take out a brown-paper sack. McTell returned to the car and gave the sack to Dansk, who placed it in his lap, peered inside and saw the Ruger.

  ‘Tell me about Mrs Vialli,’ he said.

  ‘What’s to tell? It went off OK.’

  Dansk said, ‘You looked in her eyes, Eddie.’

  ‘I don’t think much about these things.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Like in her eyes?’ This is Dansk. Dansk who never wants to hear details. All of a sudden he’s interested. ‘She just looked kinda surprised. She wet herself. She had on these furry slippers. Big fluffy things with like rabbit ears.’

  Dansk thought of fuzzy dampened ears, the body discharging piss. He said, ‘Here’s what I want you to do, Eddie. Check the room Rhees is in.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Just look inside, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s it?’ McTell opened the door and stopped halfway out. ‘And if she’s there with him? I just kinda look and walk away?’

  Dansk said, ‘Right. Buy a bunch of flowers, they’ll make you appear legit. Go inside. Make it seem like you got the wrong room.’

  ‘Rhees is gonna recognize me from that time we spoke.’

  ‘Let me worry about that.’

  McTell shrugged, stepped out of the car and walked a
cross the lot.

  Dansk regarded himself in the rear-view mirror and noticed a small brown wad of his morning toast stuck between his front teeth. He picked it out with his finger then wiped the finger on a Kleenex, a pop-up box of which he kept on the dash. Amanda Scholes had good teeth, he remembered. Strong and clean, healthy gums.

  Good teeth. Everything decays though.

  The hospital shimmered in front of him. All that sickness wrapped in a huge blue and pink cake. Terminal cases attached to machines, bony old women hunched behind screens.

  On an impulse, he picked up his phone and called a number in New Jersey. He heard his mother’s voice, faint and far away. Spectral.

  ‘Anthony? That really you?’

  ‘Yeah, really me. How are you?’

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘I’ve been busy, Ma.’

  ‘Mr Chomsky was just asking after you,’ she said. She had a quivery voice. It kept fading in and out.

  ‘Where you calling from, Anthony?’

  ‘Las Cruces, New Mexico.’

  ‘You coming this way?’

  ‘Soon, Ma.’

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘Listen, I met a girl.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Nice girl, you’d like her. Maybe I’ll bring her up there. Introduce you.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I can’t hear you, Ma.’

  ‘What’s the girl’s name I asked.’

  ‘Amanda,’ he said.

  ‘Pretty name,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, nice lady. Works for the same company as me.’

  ‘I’ll light a candle for you,’ she said.

  ‘You do that, Ma. I gotta go now. Talk to you soon.’

  ‘I love you, Anthony.’

  Dansk put down the phone on the passenger seat. The call would make the old woman’s day, brighten her calendar. Sometimes you did what you could to spread a little cheer. He could see her hurry down the narrow gloomy stairs to the violin repairman’s rooms where, surrounded by ancient amputated fiddles and a mountain of pegs and coiled strings, she’d tell Chomsky she’d just had a phone call from her son. He’s got a girl called Amanda. She’d build it up into a big thing, a church wedding and decrepit Father McGlone conducting the service, and old Chom would tip his head in the manner of a blind person listening, and he’d smile in his gap-toothed way and say, ‘Miracles happen when you least expect ’em. You gotta believe.’