36

She dialled Drumm’s number from a pay phone at a filling-station. He was still unavailable. She left a message to say she’d called, then decided to phone Rhees. She watched traffic slide past and wondered if Anthony Dansk was nearby, if he’d really followed her downtown and seen her going inside the Federal Building, if he was following her still. Watching her moves. You were meant to be smelling the flowers, Amanda.

She’d surprised him when she’d popped out of the phone booth. He’d made a big effort to seem unflustered, but he’d reacted like a man caught in an act of voyeurism, an eavesdropper surprised behind a door, a whole flurry of give-aways: scratching his birthmark, nibbling the tip of his pinky. And then out of the blue the whammy, the bizarre diatribe against litter, white flecks at the corners of his lips.

A dog craps on a sidewalk and Dansk reacts badly. A neatness freak. Captain Hygiene. The thing that bothered her was the voltage in his eyes as he spoke. It was a zealot’s intense stare, unblinking and focussed on some remote place only he could see. The eyes had become hard bright emerald stones, and spooky. He meant what he said. He was a man who’d gone up the mountain and come down with a big-time revelation. Keep America clean.

No, it was more than that, more than litter and graffiti and shopping carts left all over the place. She had a low allegory threshold in general, but it seemed to her that he was saying, in his own roundabout way, something about the condition of the country. What? The heart of the nation was trashed? As a people, Americans had drifted too far towards a disregard of law and order, as evidenced by their tendency to litter the streets and let their pets shit anywhere they liked?

She wasn’t sure, but his sudden outburst had made her uneasy, more than uneasy. There was clearly a very strange and worrisome compartment in Dansk’s head, and for a moment she felt an odd sense of vulnerability, as if inside the phone booth she presented a clear target for a sniper nearby, her skull in somebody’s scope, a nicotined finger on a delicate trigger. She looked across the street. The stucco building opposite was an office block, four storeys, blinds in windows, a solitary date palm outside. She gazed up at the roof, thinking, This is absurd. Dansk might be more than a little weird and scary, but he is an agent from the Justice Department, he is supposedly on your side …

And yet. She felt pressured by menace.

Rhees answered the phone.

She said, ‘It’s me.’

Rhees was quiet for a time. ‘Where are you?’

‘Glendale Avenue,’ she answered.

‘You’re on your way back, I hope.’ He sounded sullen.

‘I didn’t mean to rush out like that, John.’

Rhees said, ‘You never mean to rush, Amanda.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Now I’m hearing the contrite bit,’ he said.

‘OK, I’m contrite.’

‘And furtive. I hate furtive.’

She felt a tense band across her forehead. ‘Truce?’

‘You can’t just say that word and think it makes everything peachy. Have you contacted Dansk?’

‘I saw him.’

‘Tell me you gave him the goddam letter, Amanda. That’s all I want to hear.’

‘I think he’s been following me, John.’

‘Following you?’

‘Watching me.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘He wants to make sure I leave town. He doesn’t want me hanging round. I also get the strong feeling he’s a carrot short of a coleslaw.’

‘So he’s following you. He’s watching you.’

‘That’s a gut instinct, I can’t be sure –’

‘But you’re saying you don’t trust him.’

She answered quickly. ‘Yeah. I don’t trust him.’

‘You don’t trust him to be honest with you? Or you don’t trust him period?’

‘Period,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you just come home and we’ll discuss all this face to face. Meantime, I’m still waiting to hear about the letter, which you managed to sidestep quite neatly.’

She was quiet a moment. ‘It’s in my pocket,’ she said. ‘I’d like to discuss it with Willie before I do anything else.’

‘Drumm, Dansk, I really don’t give a shit who you give it to just as long as you get it out of our lives.’

He hung up. He’d never done that before. He’d never once just hung up on her in all six years of their relationship. She stuck the handset back. She felt slightly fragmented, as if some mild explosion had occurred inside the phone booth.

She stepped out and the hot sun zapped her and she suddenly remembered she was supposed to return Bernadette Vialli’s call. She went back to the pay phone, searched through the tattered directory and called the number. There was no answer.

She walked to her car, drove a little way, checking her rear-view mirror, wondering how she could tell if she was being tracked through the stream of traffic. She steered into the parking-lot of a shopping plaza, killed the engine and then she sat for a time, staring through the windshield and watching traffic come and go. So many cars, so many people, all movement eventually fusing together in one unbroken sunlit glow that after a time became surreal.

Her thoughts drifted to Sanchez, to the threat she could hear echo and roll inside her. She thought of shadows and stalkers, the possibility of harm lurking behind the glare of light.

Dansk.

Or somebody else, somebody hired by Sanchez.

How could you possibly know if anyone was following you through this crazy bright urban nightmare? And by the same token, how could you know the plastic Dansk had flashed at you was genuine issue? What evidence did you really have that he was who he claimed to be?

None.