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  He said, ‘There’s a turn coming up. Slow down.’

  Amanda touched the brakes. The landscape was lunar and malignant in its indifference. She’d spent the last 100 miles or more ransacking her brain for ways she could shake off Dansk, but the ideas that came to her were fruitless. She was conscious of time seeping away. Only one thing was certain: Dansk hadn’t brought her and Rhees out here for a barbecue.

  Dansk had a map open under the rear light and one fingertip pressed to the paper. There were no colourful Native American attractions anywhere near here, Navaho rain ceremonies or Hopi dances, no trading post to attract tourists with trinkets and postcards. This was beyond nowhere, awesome in its desolation, perfect.

  ‘Hang a right here,’ Dansk said.

  No track, landmark, sign. She felt the car rock as she turned off the highway. She wondered if she might find a ravine, hammer the car down it and hope for the best, but there were neither gulleys nor fissures deep enough for any action that desperate.

  The dark was disintegrating. Dust blew from under the wheels, spreading a thin ashen film on the windows of the car. Dansk leaned towards her and said, ‘You’re looking pale, Amanda. She look pale to you, John?’

  ‘A little,’ Rhees remarked.

  ‘She’s wondering where we’re going and how she can get out of it, except there’s no way, not even for the lady prosecutor.’

  Dansk tapped his gun a couple of times on Rhees’s plastered arm and Rhees winced. ‘Two professional types, and all I had was high school and two years in some sleazoid community college with metal detectors in the hallway.’

  Dansk sat back again. Two educated characters, degrees and diplomas up the kazoo, and he had them helpless, playing a glissando on their nerves. They were afraid of him. This was a high. Watch me fly, Ma. The respect I’m getting.

  He looked from the window. Out here was a hell of a place to die. Fifteen miles from the highway and you were in the heart of a zero state nobody claimed, nobody wanted.

  The car swayed across ruts. Amanda’s hands on the wheel were as white as her face. Dansk saw her eyes in the mirror. Our Lady of the Sorrows. She was no longer the smart-ass Amanda with the precious letter in her pocket. She was broken, afraid of where she was going and what awaited her when she got there. Afraid of knowing.

  He remembered the way he’d kissed the back of her neck, prompted by mischief, but he’d liked the contact, the taste of salt and sweat on her skin. He’d imagined sliding down her jeans and fucking her from behind, right there on the porch with the gun in the back of her neck, and Rhees watching helplessly and the fire ripping through the pines. Little erotic signals from nowhere. The mind beamed out strange notions and impulses like a cock-eyed lighthouse in your head. He didn’t want to fuck her, he wanted her dead. That was the square root of his desire.

  ‘There,’ he said, and pointed a finger. Strands of rotted wire hung between posts which rough winds had battered out of position. A sign, tilted backwards, bore a bleached message illuminated by the headlights of the car. All that was left to read were the meaningless fragments of words. S DEP F AG RE.

  ‘What is this place?’ Amanda asked.

  Dansk said, ‘Some kind of agricultural station once. I guess they were trying to develop a sturdy breed of soya bean or some such shit. They gave up twenty years ago. Nothing grows here. Drive between those posts.’

  She drove where Dansk had indicated. Her heartbeat was violent and she couldn’t slow it down. She turned and glanced back. ‘John doesn’t belong here,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for that one. Oh, please, Anthony, let John go. Weep, weep.’ Dansk gave his voice some falsetto, made a sobbing sound and pretended to wipe a tear away from his eye.

  Rhees said, ‘I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, Amanda.’

  Dansk said, ‘What a downright loyal guy.’

  Amanda braked. ‘Let him go,’ she said.

  ‘You heard what the professor said. Just drive.’

  ‘This is just between you and me, Dansk.’

  Rhees said, ‘Don’t, Amanda. Drop it.’

  ‘See,’ Dansk said, ‘he’s here for the duration. Now drive.’

  Amanda clamped her hands on the wheel and stared ahead. ‘Drive yourself.’

  Dansk raised the gun to the side of Rhees’s head. ‘You don’t drive, and guess what, Amanda.’

  Her obstinacy against Dansk’s gun, a serious mismatch. From the time Rhees had been beaten and hospitalized, Dansk had had the upper hand.

  Dansk pressed his gun into Rhees’s jaw. Rhees was maintaining a look of very quiet dignity. She wondered whether it was simply resignation or a façade he’d built against terror. She took her foot from the brake and the car slid forward. She stared through the dusty windshield. What had she expected from Dansk anyway? Compassion?

  ‘Very sensible,’ Dansk said. He lowered the gun. He’d wanted to blow Rhees’s head away, but not in the car. He didn’t need bloodstains in a rental car.

  ‘Over there,’ he said.

  The structure was the colour of the land around it, camouflaged by years of exposure. It was a windowless wooden rectangle about 50 feet by 30 with a roof of rusted tin.

  ‘Park,’ Dansk said. ‘Give me the keys, then step out the car.’

  Amanda switched off the engine and handed the keys back to Dansk, who stuck them in a pocket. She opened her door and got out, then helped Rhees from the back seat.

  Dansk was already outside the car, gesturing towards the building. She didn’t want to go inside. The absence of windows enhanced the general sense of doom, even with the rim of the dawn sun pale on the horizon. You could run, if Rhees was fit and healthy, if running could get you anywhere.

  ‘Open the door,’ Dansk said.

  She didn’t move. She looked at Rhees but she couldn’t read his expression. Six years of living together had come down to this moment when he seemed remote. She walked a few feet, Rhees at her side. She wanted to say something but words wouldn’t come. She took his hand. His skin was cool.

  ‘Push it,’ Dansk said.

  She touched the door and it swung open. Beyond, she was aware of dark space, nothing else. Dansk came up behind and nudged her forward, then he edged Rhees inside. Dansk fumbled against the wall, pulled a handle, and after a moment there was a creaking sound that changed to a deep rumbling, a groaning, and the whole structure trembled. A strip of overhead light flickered a couple of times and then was steady but gloomy. The noise, Amanda realized, originated from an old generator reluctantly coming to life somewhere. It whined and rattled, complained and chugged.

  Amanda looked round. One large room, 300 square feet or more. Dust was everywhere: between rotted floorboards and on the shelves that lined the walls and clinging to the yellowy light-strip overhead.

  Then she noticed the drums, dark-blue metal cylinders stacked on the shelves, layered with the same dust as everything else. She saw stencilled letters on the sides of the drums: DANGEROUS. TOXIC WASTE MATERIAL. Drum after drum, each about 2 feet tall, perhaps thirty-five or forty of them, and they all had the same warning in silver letters.

  Dansk said, ‘Toxic waste.’

  The sound of the generator roared in her head. She watched Dansk walk to the nearest drum, saw him reach out and tip it forward at an angle. The lid came off and went spinning away like a wheel beyond the reaches of the light, and landed, still spinning, in the shadows. Toxic waste, she thought. She realized she didn’t want to see, didn’t want to look at the drum Dansk was tilting downwards from the shelf.

  The drum fell. The generator changed pitch a moment and the overhead light flickered a couple of times, and then the machine was rumbling again wholeheartedly, making the floor shake.

  Dansk said, ‘There’s a profitable sideline in jewellery, money, whatever these people had. It’s like a bonus system. This watch I’m wearing, for instance,’ and he held up his wrist. He might have been talking to himself. ‘A perk. Usually I don’t touch any of
the stuff, it goes to people of minimal sensitivity who aren’t fussy about the previous owners, but this took my fancy. I’m just a little wary of the karma that might be attached to it. It’s a nice watch though. I figured, take a chance, karma’s a lottery anyhow.’

  Perks. A bonus system. Karma. Dansk stared at the spilled contents of the drum, and Amanda turned her face aside. She felt her heart drop and go on dropping like a stone down a well whose depths were beyond measurement.

  ‘Don’t be queasy,’ Dansk said. ‘Professors and prosecutors, it doesn’t matter. This is what we all come down to.’ He was sifting through the stuff that had spilled from the drum. ‘After we incinerate them, they’re delivered here in these drums. We stash them and then dump them in the sea when air transport’s available. Some of the work isn’t up to scratch. Look at this.’ He held something out in the palm of his hand.

  She turned her face. She was aware of Rhees watching, his body hunched a little. Her eyes moved to Dansk and she stared at what he held in the centre of his palm.

  ‘Now this is part of a fingerbone. See?’ He plucked something else from the grey-white heap of human remains. The bone was charred and blackened and about 2 inches long. ‘Looks like some spinal debris,’ he said. ‘Maybe even Benny Vialli’s, huh?’

  Benny Vialli’s.

  ‘Or maybe it’s Isabel’s,’ Dansk said.

  She’d known Isabel was dead, of course she’d known, but there must have been a level where she hadn’t altogether accepted the fact, because she felt nausea. She folded her hands over her stomach. ‘What else do you do? Wrench out the gold fillings, Dansk?’ Her voice was dry. Her throat was parched. There was no oxygen getting to her lungs. Her heart seemed to have stopped pumping blood and she was outside of herself in a strange disconnected way.

  ‘You make me laugh,’ Dansk said. ‘You’ve got this warped thing about justice. You go in a court of law and you think you’re hot stuff, setting the world right. Bad guys go to jail, good guys don’t. Except you have to make deals with some serious lowlife forms to get what you want –’

  ‘It’s the system,’ she heard herself say. She was dizzy and there seemed to be ash in her mouth, a fine film of human ash.

  ‘The system’s fucked. But you were a serious player in the game. And there are people out there who ought to be behind bars or sucking on cyanide fumes, only they turned into songbirds singing tunes prosecutors need to hear, and you reward them by shipping them back out into society, which has rules and laws these lowlives have never paid attention to since the fucking day they were born. You think because they’re in the Witness Protection Program they’re all of a sudden saints? They go to PTA meetings and join the church choir? Make me laugh. They’re shit on the sole of my shoe, and I wipe shit off.’

  ‘They had guarantees,’ Amanda said. She shut her eyes and swayed a little. Her stomach pitched, as if she was riding a boat on a very rough sea.

  ‘Not from me they didn’t,’ he said.

  ‘You’re above the law.’

  ‘There’s more than one law in this great land, lady. You did your stuff on the surface where it shows and looks good. I’m the guy underground, I’m the miner working the dirty shafts all hours. You give your guarantees and I pop up and invalidate them. The scum you need to get your convictions, they don’t deserve freedom. There are some evil fuckers wandering around out there, courtesy of people like you.’

  ‘You select your … candidates and you bring them here, you take them into permanent custody –’

  ‘That’s how it works, and it’s beautiful. They go into the Program, they disappear and nobody ever comes looking for them, and even if somebody does get nervy – like Mrs Vialli say – there’s too much security to get through. And if these people persist, hey, we solve that problem.’

  ‘What in God’s name did Benny ever do to deserve this?’ She had her hands clenched so tightly she was stemming the flow of her circulation and her knuckles were white.

  ‘Guilt by association. He was tainted.’

  Tainted. It was lunacy. No, it was out there beyond lunacy in a place she couldn’t describe.

  ‘As for your pal Mrs Sanchez, she was also scheduled for disposal, except she happened to split, which caused some needless delay, as you know.’

  ‘All Isabel ever did was testify against her husband, she wasn’t a criminal –’

  ‘She married one. She knew what Sanchez did for his money, but she went on living the life of luxury anyhow on the proceeds of his work. Then, when it suited her, she walked away and became one of your little songbirds, lady.’ Dansk laughed. ‘And all this time you figured Victor Sanchez was the one pulling the strings, didn’t you?’

  ‘You’re cleaning up the country, Dansk.’

  ‘I’m the Rotorooter man with a fucking vengeance,’ Dansk said.

  She stared at the drums and wondered how many had ended up in this place, sealed in cylinders, their names lost, their identities gone. Her brain was leaden. You couldn’t take this in.

  ‘I like my work,’ Dansk said, and let ash sift through his fingers and looked thoughtful, maybe even a little serene. ‘Some people came to me and told me I was the kind of guy they needed for this kinda operation. These are people who believe the Witness Program pumps megadoses of poison into the arteries of the nation. People who ask, What the fuck are we doing helping out the scum you lawyers pass down the line? People who say the whole thing is shaky on the morality issue – aside from the fact that it’s costing millions and millions of dollars. And for what? To keep a criminal element safe and well? We’ve got thieves and killers receiving monthly federal pay cheques and job-training and relocation at the taxpayer’s expense, and all this at a time when budget deficits are out of sight, and decent ordinary people can’t find work and their fucking homes are being repossessed by banks?’ Dansk, whose voice had been rising, stopped in an abrupt way. She heard the sound of his hand running across his wet lips.

  She thought, Budget deficits, unemployment, the country stretched on a rack of cosmic debt, and certain people looked around for programs to slash. It didn’t matter which ones, just cut the numbers. School lunches, kindergarten classes, welfare hand-outs, the Federal Witness Protection Program, wherever, it didn’t matter.

  Dansk said, ‘These people felt a line had to be drawn somewhere, and this is the line right here, lady.’

  ‘These people,’ she said. ‘Some of them work in Justice, some in the US Marshals Service. Places where ID cards can be made up in the blink of an eye, and messages intercepted, and official papers obtained without question.’

  Dansk said, ‘Where they work, what the fuck does that matter? The whole point is, what I do has moral merit. People like you leave a mess and I’m the guy who cleans it up.’

  Moral merit. Morality was modelling clay. Shape it any way you like. Dansk had rationalized his role on the grounds that the Protection Program was wrong, but she guessed that whoever had dreamed up the unholy idea in the first place were more likely to be spreadsheet types on an economy drive than philosophers fretting over an ethical dilemma. She pictured memos going out in droves to assorted Federal agencies. She saw them landing on the desks of various department heads in these agencies. She imagined they all carried the same vaguely innocuous message, written by some bland bureaucrat in the Office of Management and Budget. ‘At the present time, the condition of the general economy necessitates a reduction in Federal spending, consequently you are requested to analyse those areas of your operation where budgetary measures might be taken …’

  And a devious functionary in Justice, Loeb say, had scanned his domain and seen the bloated form of the Protection Program, and he’d had a bright idea which he’d whispered to somebody else: here’s a place where we can put the knife in, provided we go about it a certain way. So a sick scheme is born in furtive whispers and quiet consultations, and a few people like Dansk are recruited to implement it, people who lived on a dark rim of experience and who were
n’t particular, and they were issued cards that identified them as marshals or agents of the Justice Department. And money could be saved in accordance with the vague suggestions of the memorandum, and where there was money moral problems were nuisances that had a way of dissolving like a skeleton in acid.

  She wondered about the mechanics. You didn’t need hundreds of people to work it. You needed only some killers, a couple of supervisors in Arlington, two or three computer operators to falsify data, two or three insiders in Justice. Guys like Loeb.

  Then, without any warning, Rhees moved, urgently and recklessly. As if he’d decided that his own pain was irrelevant, he grunted and threw himself against Dansk, who stepped effortlessly to the side. Rhees fell without making any contact and was lost a moment in shadows, and when he tried to get up again Dansk kicked him in the ribs and Rhees clutched his side and groaned.

  Dansk said, ‘They always say it’s the quiet ones you need to watch. It’s the bookish types you need to keep an eye on.’

  Amanda went to Rhees. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had shrunken in the bewilderment of pain. The generator faded, the rumbling was less intense, and the overhead light dimmed. She wished it would die completely so she’d be blind, immune to her surroundings. This place where all your curiosity ends.

  She could smell death, death packed inside drums, and she wondered how many people had been brought here, 300, 400, and the process of flame they’d gone through, the furnace that had reduced them. She imagined rings and watches, lockets and ear-rings removed from limp bodies, ghouls sifting the possessions of the dead. She wondered about bank accounts and houses, and how monies must have been plundered and ownership documents transferred, and how many ‘For Sale’ signs throughout the country stood on posts outside homes where the lawful owners were never returning because they’d been shot and burned and brought here.

  Dansk stepped towards her and placed a hand under her chin. ‘Look at me,’ he said. She kept her eyes shut.