It was night when he stopped at the flashing arms of a railroad crossing. The klaxons twisted his insides. He opened the door and puked. Murderous thunder of passing flats vibrated his bones. While he was spilling his guts onto the pitted asphalt, someone climbed in on the passenger side, slammed the door hard enough to rock the car.
Conrad wiped his mouth, regarded the dark-haired girl in the denim jacket and bellbottom pants who was calmly checking her makeup in the visor mirror. A livid strawberry keloid ripened on her left wrist, partially occluded by a charm bracelet. She smelled of cigarettes and Prince Matchabelli and seemed unpleasantly familiar. One of those malleable faces he’d seen a lot of lately; it glowed a blurry white in the gloom.
“Ever wonder what’s in those boxcars?” Her voice was husky from the rawness of the country air. “Could be cattle, could be people, political prisoners on the way to Gitmo. Anything, really. See their eyes in the headlights, peeking between the slats.”
Conrad was dizzy. Concussion, definitely. Goddamn, he hoped it was a concussion. Looking at her almost caused him to be sick again. Was he hallucinating? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t certain of anything, even gravity.
“I’m Rhonda. Where you goin’?” Her eyes were small and lively. She nervously rifled a leather handbag with a peace symbol stitched on the flap. “You don’t mind, I hope…? I was freezing out there.”
He hadn’t noticed her at the crossing, hadn’t seen her at all. She likely planted herself nearby, hoped to catch some poor sucker who got blocked by the train. Popped up like a trapdoor spider.
Rhonda nodded at her bag. “So…where’d you say you were goin’?”
“West.” His mantra. And in truth, the answer was South if he kept on to the end. South into the magma boiling heart of the world, and onward to Hell.
“Cool. Me too.” She lighted a clove cigarette, glanced around the interior, wrinkled her nose. “Old car you got here. Wow, is this your mom?” She tapped a black and white photo pinned to the visor; a dark woman in a gypsy kerchief smiled from the shade of an elm.
“It’s a classic.” Conrad stared at the train, the lights.
Rhonda exhaled gustily. “Wow. Somebody kicked the shit outta you, didn’t they. You feelin’ alright, man? Train’s gone.”
Indeed it was gone, reduced to a shadowy wedge lit by blue and red beacons. His hands shook as he put the Eldorado into gear. Seem to fly it, it will pursue…hadn’t Ben Jonson said that about shadows? Jung knew; Hesse knew; Nietzsche absolutely knew. The Germans were canny. Conrad thought about shadows, how there were so many to choose from, how hungry and insatiable they proved to be. Relentless as cancer. “You picked the wrong car.”
“Oh, yeah? Are you a psycho?” The girl smiled as if at a joke.
“It’s a bad time for me.”
“Well, it ain’t so wonderful for me either. My last two hitches were from horny truckers. Some fun. Home, James.”
Conrad sighed. “Wanda, I’m beat. I’m going to get a room and crash for the night.” He’d spotted a sign that said FOOD GAS LODGING THREE MILES. That would be the Happy Raven and it was on his list of places to go, the very reason he’d driven across the belly of the country, taken an unsanctioned bout against a no-name flak. The fight had been one of his many pretexts to lurk in this geographical region, to conduct his private manhunt within a manhunt, a veritable nested Russian doll of plots and stratagems.
The machinery was in motion. It was down to the lounge singer, the English professor or the retired politico. He’d picked the lounge singer because the lounge singer was as good as any and because the lounge singer had been a traveling man. Travel always made for interesting conversation. According to his sources, the man he sought worked the lounge Friday through Sunday, six to ten P.M., had done so for the last eighteen months. Conrad reflected that often the most slippery ones were those who never really tried to cover their tracks.
“It’s Rhonda.”
“Yeah.”
Rhonda tagged along as Conrad registered in the hotel lobby. She adjourned with him to the lounge for the theatre half of dinner theatre. Five minutes and two margaritas later, she spotted a gaunt man in a razor-crisp Armani suit who disappeared through the door with the fly-spackled EXIT sign.
“Omigod—there’s Raul!”
“Who’s Raul?” Conrad asked half-heartedly. Too familiar faces, too familiar names. The only Raul he knew was presumed dead at the bottom of some Mexican landfill. Time for another drink. Rhonda patted Conrad’s hand, promised to be back in a jiff. Her small, quick eyes had gone over to black. She smiled a shark’s smile and followed the immaculate stranger.
Conrad hoped that was the end. Meanwhile, it was just him and the lush and a whiskey river. He even toasted Mr. Willie Nelson. “God bless you, Willie.”
The lush wasn’t interested in Willie Nelson. He was a Rat Pack man. He gazed at Conrad. “Gotta say, real clean,” the lush said. He wore a silk blazer open at the neck to display a clunky gold medallion. His hard cheeks shone like a polished boot. He sat stiffly; an action figure melting under a sun lamp.
The lush called himself Marty Cardinal, although Conrad knew the man’s birth certificate; his forty year old visa stamped a dozen places in the Orient, the Middle East and points between; and his dog tags said something different. But, tonight, as every other smoky, gin-soaked night for several crumbling decades, it had been Marty Cardinal. He sweated through a poorly-dyed pompadour from his last set of Dean Martin and Perry Como covers ala Tom Jones on Quaaludes. The audience of the Happy Raven Lounge, which included the requisite barside lechers and a few drunken seniors on a pit stop from their bus tour, had applauded tepidly as Cardinal ambled from the stage and listed to the dim corner where Conrad nursed a boilermaker. They’d never met before Conrad told the waitress to slip the crooner a crisp g-note and ask him if he could fake his way through My Rifle, My Pony And Me, but no time like the present, according to the singer as he’d ordered a round from the baggy-eyed cocktail waitress, Put it on my tab, sweetheart, baby face.“They sewed you up real nice, kid. Maybe you should get ’em to do you a favor and stitch that cheek of yours. It’s nasty.”
“Bad, huh?” Conrad’s brain had reached the stage where it decided to begin shutting off nonessential functions. Everything from the neck down belonged to a fossilized cave bear. At least his gorge was staying put.
“Oh, yeah. But the old ones…boy, it looks like ya got yourself caught by a buzzsaw, or something’.” Cardinal emphasized that observation by gulping his drink with nary a shudder and snapping his fingers for another Johnny Walker on the rocks and make it a double, those damned lights were hot as the hubs of Hades.
Conrad resisted the urge to touch his own face. Obscured by fresh bruises and the jagged cut that had scabbed quite dramatically, the underlying scar forked from his hairline, paralleled the orbital of his left eye; another branch hooked behind his cauliflower ear. A venerable scar, among the first in his expanding collection.
Conrad fell away from the ticky-tack tables, the guttering votives and swan-necked men in polyester suits, plunged down the black shaft to a lonely farm in a lonely field, the abattoir lit by swaying kerosene lanterns, its concrete floor and antique drains choked with straw and dust, the leopard on his chest tearing at his face until the skin began to flex like a latex mask. All those wet mouths in the gallery, their collective exhortations no louder than a breeze sighing through tall grass; all those empty eyes brittle as malachite, radiating the coldness of serried ranks of knives hanging points-down from a rack.
Few animals were a match for a professional fighting man if the struggle lasted beyond that initial explosion of sinew and adrenaline. Amateur hour; the gallery stifled yawns and rattled ice in their drinks as the blood poured out at their feet.
Conrad had been young and sloppy. And lucky. Mr. Kosokian always retained first class medics. The plastic surgeon, a convict on a short leash, had been a consummate professional. With a good tan, the marks were nearly invisible.
Marty Cardinal said, “I played Vegas once. Shook Sammy’s hand, damned if I didn’t. He was a quick-draw fella. Didja know? Quick-draw. Pow-pow-pow with these six-guns like Marshal Dillon on Gun Smoke. It was a hoot. Dorsey! Dorsey, c’mere a minute!” He waved at the piano player, a fellow septuagenarian in an exhausted white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. “Dorsey an’ me go back. Traveled the Northwest circuit together. Did a USO tour with Neil Diamond. Dorsey tickles those ivories like none other. Billy Joel called him Magic Fingers.”
“Nah, that’s what Billy’s wife called me.” Dorsey summoned the waitress and put in for fresh drinks all around. He constantly riffled a worn deck of cards, first left-handed, then right. “Any chum of Marty C., yadda yadda. Marty this guy a boxer. Looks like a boxer. You a boxer, sonny?”
“I know from boxers, Dorsey. He ain’t no boxer. He look like Rocky Marciano to you? He look like Gerry Cooney? Where’s yer girlfriend, kid?” Marty Cardinal was methodically stacking his dead soldiers in a glistening ziggurat, a sacrificial altar.
“She returned to the Mother Ship, I think,” Conrad said.
“Oh, she wasn’t a hooker, right? She wasn’t a working girl ya picked up from under an off ramp, or anything?”
Conrad smiled wryly, lighted a cigarette and pressed it to his swollen lips.
Dorsey snorted, passed his cards to and fro. He had the jaw of a horse and crooked hands blotched with liver spots. “Ah, Marty, she wasn’t on the job. College kid down on her luck. A dropout for certain—prolly afraid to go home to ma an’ pa, so she’s bummin’ around with dubious sorts. No offense.”
“You a dubious character, kid?”
“Mr. Cardinal—”
“Call me Marty C.”
“What did you do before?”
“Eh? Before what?”
Conrad gestured at the room. “Before Vegas. Before any of this.”
“Hear that, Dorsey? He wants to know about, ‘Once Upon a Time.’” Marty Cardinal helped himself to another drink. His smile was chilly.
“I heard what he said.” Dorsey studied his cards.
“You were in the Army.”
Marty Cardinal nodded. “Korea. Nastiest hellhole on the planet. Still dream about the cold. Ya been checking into my back story, eh kid?”
“Yes. I’ve been to the ends of the Earth, and here you are. In this place.”
“Huh. Hear that, Dorsey? The kid’s been looking for me. Maybe I owe him some money. Cripes, I hope ya can squeeze blood from a turnip, kiddo. My three exes cleaned me out ages ago; took my cars, my condos, the whole schmeer. How’d ya find me, anyhow?”
“Detective agency. It wasn’t difficult.” Conrad pulled a creased flyer from his wallet; a promotional shot of a younger, thinner, slickly-dressed Marty Cardinal bracketed by showgirls. The singer had scrawled his autograph across the back.
“Holy Toledo. That’s from the Sands!” Marty Cardinal shook his head in bleary wonder.
The cocktail waitress leaned into their circle, handed Conrad a cell phone; eyed him suspiciously as if he might go for her throat at any moment. “For you.”
He smiled painfully, hoping to reassure her, said into the receiver, “Conrad.”
Singh said, “Conrad, Conrad. What are you doing?” The connection was poor.
Strangely enough, it seemed these men whose stock and trade was surreptitious communication seldom managed a line clear of interference. Of course, for all Conrad knew, Singh was calling from the bowels of a slumbering volcano, or a submarine at the bottom of the South Pacific. “I’m relaxing. Conducting a pleasant conversation with friends. Yourself?”
“Conducting a what? An interrogation, you say?”
Conrad covered the receiver with his chin. “What happened after the Army.” He swept his hand under the tabletop, groping for a mike, a wire, anything suspicious.
“Whozatt on the horn?”
“It’s not Don King,” Conrad said.
Marty Cardinal and Dorsey chuckled and the glacier receded. Marty Cardinal said, “Broadway, baby. After Korea I moved to the Apple, tried to get my name in lights.”
“Who is that charming, drunken fellow I hear?” Singh buzzed.
Conrad held up a finger as he addressed Singh. “A war hero. I’m drinking him under the table.”
“Oh my, a real live war hero—is there such a thing? You must be punch drunk, poor boy. Buy him a shot for me, though. Just in case.”
“Karmic insurance?”
“Indeed. I’m certainly in the market… Look, Rob mentioned that you called earlier. He’s worried about you.”
“He’s worried about his money, you mean.”
“Our money. We share everything. Basically, we’re married. Please meet me at that museum in Coleville. You know the one—it’s on your way, isn’t it? Fourteen-hundred hours on Friday. We can speak of cabbages and kings, the weather in Buenos Aires.”
“You owe somebody money? Is that why ya got yer head busted?” Marty Cardinal had finished off another round. “That the s.o.b. who beat the tar outta ya, kid?”
“Okay,” Conrad said. “I’ll be there. It may be close.”
“Drive like the wind, mate,” Singh said. “Oh, and Conrad…I’m glad you’re in one piece. Ciao.”
“I’m touched,” Conrad said, but Singh was gone. “Sorry, Mr.—Marty. And after Broadway, you moved west, didn’t you? Washington, Idaho? Do you recall a man named Ambrose Drake?”
“Huh?”
“Ambrose Drake. He was a doctor—a surgeon.”
Marty Cardinal’s face slammed shut. He began snapping his fingers frantically at the waitress.
“Ambrose Drake. A tall, distinguished gentleman. Very dark, very ethnic.”
“What sorta trouble are you in?” Dorsey glanced up from his cards. “Unless you’re writin’ a book—”
“I’m not writing a book.”
“Then what?” Marty Cardinal gripped the edge of the table, a man clinging to a piece of flotsam in heavy seas. “What the hell ya want from me. Y-you’re—this is ancient history.”
“Is it?”
“I dunno a goddamned thing.”
“Dr. Ambrose Drake,” Conrad said. “He treated your grandson.”
“Go to hell.”
“Consider me the Ghost of Christmas Past. I know everything. You came to the Cloister to visit a child. You don’t recognize me? I was a boy, so it’s understandable. You I recall quite vividly. I thought you were an officer, even in civilian clothes. You had that military bearing. Command presence. Hadn’t quite reinvented yourself as Frank Sinatra.”
Marty Cardinal appeared ill. He gagged down an inch of bourbon. “The clinic. I dunno—”
“His name was Dick, your grandson. He had leukemia,” Conrad said. He was hardly drunk, now. His hands were steady, his tone flat with honed menace. Coupled with his grotesque scarring, his brawny shoulders and immense hands, the menace shtick was reliable. “There were a lot of people at the clinic, but I could never forget Dick either. A piano prodigy, just like your pal Dorsey there. Loved model planes and baseball. My brother called him Dicky, talked about him nonstop. Real amigos, those two. My brother had a tumor named Jake, by the way.”
Marty Cardinal spilled his drink, knocked over the stack of empties when he clumsily sopped the mess.
“Dicky’s head was always shaved…”
Marty Cardinal’s eyes leaked; his mouth hung slack and ugly with the shock of recollection, of demons loosed and ravenous.
“Leave him alone,” Dorsey said.
“Are you crying? Don’t do that. Please, I need you to look at something. Dr. Drake gave this to some of them to study.” Conrad made the promotional photo disappear and drew another tattered sheet of paper from his coat, held it near the light. The paper was papyrus-yellow, saturated with water stains and splashed by violent brush-work that resembled the craft of a demented calligrapher. “I’ve been told that the military used tools like this, back in the days when you were in the service. This, however, was originally created by Dr. Drake as a visual psychotropic, albeit inert without the concomitant verbal trigger. Uncle Sam considered buying the protocol, but passed. Have another look—you’ve seen it before.”
“Aww, no.” Marty Cardinal bawled. He covered his eyes. “Aww no, no, no.”
Conrad gaped in wonder and horror, then collected himself sufficiently to proceed with the Hoover-style third degree. “Any of these sound familiar? MK-Ultra. Majestic Twelve. Project TALLHAT. Project Bluebook.”
Marty Cardinal hunched tighter, refused to look. Wow, a monster. Look!
“It’s okay, chum.” Dorsey slung a scrawny arm over Marty Cardinal’s shoulders and glared venomously at Conrad. “You better get. He’s got nothin’ to say to you.”
Conrad forged ahead, implacable as a steamroller. “Some say the doctor is yet among the living. Drake was decrepit when he administered the Cloister. I’d peg him at one hundred, easy. Not many folks see out a century of birthdays. Must be one hell of a medicine man, assuming he even exists. I don’t think the Drake we know ever did.”
“Who sent ya? I’m out. They said I was out. Lyin’ sonsabitches.”
“No one sent me. I’m a free agent, an inquiring mind. I want to know more about the Drake Technique.”
“I don’t know shit.”
“I suppose if the CIA had gotten around to co-opting his research they’d have given it some silly code name. Probably converted it to something absolutely unimaginative—OPERATION MINDFUCK. Bureaucrats, eh? For God’s sake, stop crying, would you.” It was rubbing Conrad’s nerves raw, the moaning and weeping, waking the lizard, the creature that always wanted a bite of something weak and vulnerable. His fingers curled.
“Screw ya, ya punk. This is bullshit.”
“You were on the team of spooks that debriefed Drake and his scientists about his “Technique.” Istanbul, summer of ’60. The CIA was just checking it out, you didn’t actually appropriate the intellectual property, probably because everyone thought it was a hoax. They were correct. So your commanding officers examined the evidence and cut the doctor loose, let him creep back under some rock.”
Marty Cardinal whined.
Conrad grinned, heartless and deranged, and tossed back a raw double vodka without removing his feral gaze from Marty Cardinal. Compassion was too heavy a load this far up the mountain. “But a couple decades later when poor Dicky got sick, you didn’t hesitate, not for one second, did you? You’d sensed something in Drake. You knew he was the real thing, that he held the power of life and death in a big way. Sadly, it wasn’t about helping your grandson. Dicky was, how do you military folks say it?—expendable. Nah, you offered the poor little tyke up to the dark gods in a black magic ritual at the doctor’s clinic. You’d have done a lot worse to become a high wire Vegas act. Irony of it is, that sadist probably didn’t even need your grandson, or any of those kids, to fuel his experiments. I think Drake accepted sacrifices because that’s just how Satan gets his kicks. Cruelty to mortals.”
“Go ’way,” Marty Cardinal said, muffled into his hand.
“Examine the drawing and I will.”
“Go ’way.”
“Look at the drawing,” Conrad said with bared teeth. Then, softly, “I’m sorry, Marty. Truly, I am. You were there. Most of the others are gone, or missing—and my time is short. I can’t leave until you look at the drawing. So look.”
“You prick,” Dorsey said.
Marty Cardinal sobbed, but he spread his fingers and stared at the piece of paper for several seconds, until his bloodshot eye began to blink rapidly and overflowed and he covered it again. “I wasn’t a spook. Nope. Thass just a color field. A fuggin’ Rorschach, maybe. It don’ mean nothin’.”
That’s what they all said, more or less. “Oh, it bears some significance. Try again.”
“Not to me. Not to anybody. It’s a fuggin’ inkblot.”
“When your grandson concentrated on the drawing what did he see?”
“You prick,” Dorsey said.
For a long moment Marty Cardinal remained hunched, his frame sagging in grief. Then he said, “Barbs.”
“Barbs,” Conrad said.
“The Barbs of God. Dicky was eleven years old. The last three months of his life, God is all he talked about. How God was going to eat every one of us. You too, grandpa. You too.” Marty Cardinal pointed at Conrad. “You too, ya lousy sonofabitch.”
“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: Dicky had a word. A trigger. What was it?”
“Whah?”
“The trigger, Marty. The auto-hypnotic trigger. Short, pithy, maybe a tad sinister.”
“I don’ remember.”
“Yes, yes you do. I don’t think you’ve forgotten anything about Dicky. No matter how much you drink, you won’t. My father never got over what he did to his son, either.” Conrad studied the shrinking glare of his cigarette coal, contemplated touching it to the web of Marty Cardinal’s thumb and index finger. Marsh or Singh would’ve carted the crooner to a private location and done exactly that, would’ve done a hell of a lot more than that, in fact.
“Why ya wanna know the word? Takes more than the word. You gotta look at a whole shitpot a pictures like that one there, listen to some scary recordings. Whole series of injections. There’s a chemical protocol. Word won’ help ya.”
“I’m aware of the protocols. Intimately.”
“Ya took the series?” Cunning surfaced in Marty Cardinal’s watery eyes. A glimmer of viciousness and well-oiled deceit. “I read the numbers once…the injections kill six outta ten. Drives three point five more bugshit mad. Ya took the series. No wonder you’re… It was the Brazilian, huh?”
“The process has been refined. It’s a nine in one shot, thanks to modern medicine. No series anymore, not like rabies.” Thanks to Dad. I’ve never been so proud.
“Ya took the Series. Dumbshit. Now they own you. He owns you. Dumbshit.”
“We’ve got a lot in common,” Conrad said. “It grows late, Marty.”
Marty Cardinal must’ve sensed doom in Conrad’s lazy expression. “Yeah, fine. Ya wanna know the magic word, I’ll tell ya. Ain’t a state secret, is it? Whatch ya deserve, I guess.” He half leaned, half sprawled across the table, cupped his hand and whispered the trigger into Conrad’s ear.
Bang.
The world ended.
The world was remade.
The fingernail chasm between destruction and creation was a frozen, howling void, a hairline fracture on the windshield of the onrushing cosmos. It flickered through Conrad’s mind, writhed in microbial convolutions, etched itself into a secret expanse of cerebral membrane, a trilobite embalmed in Paleozoic flowstone.
The lounge sat there, relatively unaffected.
Conrad dropped the paper and it blackened and crisped to ash. Now with the primal rush of aggression leaching from his nervous system he was bone-tired and weak and slightly ashamed of what he’d done. He smoked another guilty cigarette while Marty Cardinal wept and Dorsey wiped his friend’s nose with a napkin and muttered epithets. In a bit the old men lurched from the table, exited through the enigmatic door with the blinky EXIT sign.
Later, when the other drunks were migrating in pods and the bartender began to sadly sweep, Conrad made it to his feet and drifted down the long corridor of swollen, subterranean murk to his room. Empty, thank Christ and the Four Horsemen.
He fell across the bed and sank exactly as a stone dropped edge-first into the sediment far beneath the scales of the sea.
He awoke, although that was not a certainty. His thoughts were sticky, his faculties stupefied. He knew he was in a hotel on planet Earth in the Southwest of the continental United States. This he knew, of this he was certain despite the fact gravity and vertigo conspired against him, despite the open mutiny of his racing heart and shrieking nerves.
The room throbbed with bloodless light, the ashen flush of a landscape under the caul of an eclipse. The amniotic light sluiced against cheap blinds, dripped and seeped through chinks and seams, patterned great, ominous shadows against the clapboard walls. Somewhere, a fan clattered in its cage, a radiator churned.
He was paralyzed. The hotel around him became a translucent honeycomb where nothing stirred in the twilight chill. Rows of beds with lumps of humanity nestled tight.
An inverted female shape hung midway in the gulf beyond the bed and before the opaque blinds. The woman floated, spread-eagle as a Vitruvius Woman, hair flowing against the dingy carpet, her features a sulfurous smear amid velvet and ink. She emitted low static, the electronic snarl of radio waves creeping through the outer regions of solar vacuum. She resonated a Hadal thrum, seethed and roiled like a swarm of wasps in a hive of bones. Her dim shape accumulated mass with each snick of the clock. She achieved a dreadful aspect and unfathomable density and began to uncoil as angel hair, the wings of a man o’ war, a hungry wasp.
(Doyouunderstandwhatishappeningyouunderstandwhatishappeningunderstandwhatishappeningwhatishappeningishappeninghappening?)
He struggled to lift the anchor from his chest and then nothing.
Conrad was alone when gray morning filtered into his brain. He showered and shaved and noted that his bruises were rapidly healing. Marks of violence giving way to simple weariness, the pouches and bags of encroaching age. Dented, but serviceable.
He drove for hours, sluggish and dreamy, imagining the serum, broken down and reduced to its naked, predatory mode, spiraling through his nervous system, clinging and entwining like morning glory wrapping creepers around a trellis, yearning for heat and sustenance. His fingers tingled, felt detached. The flesh of his cheeks was cool as porcelain. Muscle spasms and tremors. No hallucinations, no blackouts at least. No superhuman powers, either; no cosmic leaps of intuition, no burgeoning sense of godly omnipotence. All quiet, except for numbness and occasional nausea.
The city lifted itself from the flat-backed plains as a colony of blue-bottle glass and aerodynamic steel. Everything was polished to an antiseptic gloss; the boulevards ran in perfect geometric grids and russet leaves collected neatly in gutters and along curbs. Citizens wore winter suits and winter haircuts and were scrubbed bone-white to match the sky. They moved with clockwork precision, aboard shiny Peugeots and BMWs, and on the hoof in their Gucci’s and stolid sensible wingtips; the buildings and the people were clever miniatures of the mighty eastern metropolises poured from a bag of jacks.
Conrad liked that the exchange was to occur in the Coleville Museum of Natural History, a massive and modernized brownstone where the halls were so quiet, the creak of his shoes echoed, chased after grains of dust in hidden corners. Following a ludus there was always an exchange, a greasing of the palm; traditionally the transfer was resolved in an exotic locale; a catacomb; a mosque; a half-collapsed amphitheater along the Turkish coast; atop the ramparts of some rundown castle in Scotland; precisely the canvases upon which Conrad performed his cruel and terrible art. Singh relished such melodrama and Singh called the shots. The museum was an improvement for the simple fact it was indoors during the day in a warm, cheery, if naturally, illuminated environment. Conrad was only sorry they hadn’t adhered to their usual conclaves. A public rendezvous complicated the situation immensely. He calmed himself with the idea that he’d think of something ingenious when the moment of truth arrived.
He waited near a towering cube which enclosed wax simulacrums of Neolithic tribesmen hucking spears at a rampant smilodon. Conrad’s visage hung in a panel of glass. My bothers, my brothers! He concentrated on rebuilding his image after the patterns of the government inkblots until his reflection wavered and ran with the fluidity of oil and—
—he was among them shoulder to shoulder in the arid dawn pale as a flood of dying starshine the sun an ochre smear above fields of bloody grass he waited on smiling death spear in hand animal musk fear musk in his nostrils upon his grimy skins his own skin and that dreadnought was coming for them belly low amid the rocks and weeds that killing machine coming for them coming through the bloody grass with its mouthful of knives coming steady for them as a falling tree a wave an avalanche of bloody rocks upon them hungry as fire for their flesh as fire is hungry for the bloody grass but he stood his ground he had his brothers he had his spear here the monster came silent and hungry as a shadow crossing the earth—
The hunter who most resembled Conrad was sideswiped and folded double under curved strokes of black-splattered ivory; head askew, he grinned at Conrad and said, “They Who Wait have always been among us, brother!” Then a tusk dipped into the hunter’s cheek and a sticky sundew replaced his rude features.
Conrad blinked and there was beautiful, exotic Singh sliding toward him, serenely passing through grainy sun shafts thrown down by phalanxes of skylights. It struck him with a sudden, nauseating clarity that Singh was nothing so much as DeKoon’s enigmatic counterpart, the pallid European’s negative. Conrad was disconcerted to picture that duo ferociously coupled upon a bed in some ramshackle bungalow, yin and yang, the Ouroboros swallowing its tail while earthquakes rocked the Andes and a cloud blotted the sun.
Singh waved, desultory and unaffected, inconspicuously attired, according to the fashion of the natives, in tones of steel and coal. He was tall and slim and dark as the bark of an ancient madrone tree. Singh was the chameleon in the madrone tree’s branches. He said, “Say, is that luggage ticking, old bean?”
“Hello.”
“Hullo. My, my, aren’t you lovely as a corpse.” Singh embraced him lightly, kissed his forehead. The dusky man wore heavy, foreign cologne. He gleamed unctuously. “Did you see the Tyrannosaurus on the first storey? Astonishing!”
Conrad extricated himself from Singh’s grasp, hefted the briefcase. “That isn’t a T-Rex.”
“Wot, wot?”
“Nothing. Shall we?”
“No rush. I’m on vacation. Let’s nip off to my flat. Not mine, it’s a corporate timeshare, but anyway. You look like you could use a drink.”
Conrad shrugged as if the suggestion meant nothing to him. His chest constricted and his breathing came shallowly. Red sparks dashed mini novas against his eyelids. “Lead the way.”
As they walked along the promenade, he was tempted to scan the surroundings for Marsh or whoever else lurked behind the potted plants. He didn’t quite dare. Singh would know.
My fly is open.
“You drive,” Singh said when they left the museum and stood on the sidewalk in the austere light of a gathering storm. Snow was possible. Meteor showers.
Is this a capture or a kill team? Is Singh black-ops? I don’t think so, but damn, maybe. Doesn’t matter; it all ends with a gunshot, a dose of something unpleasant from a syringe. DeKoon won’t be happy when I disappear. Unless he really was off his rocker about the Finn. Damn, maybe that was it. One strike and he called in the dogs. Or maybe he’s a member of the club. Forget it. Get your game face on. Zip your pants, idiot.
Conrad couldn’t detect any telltales that his car had been tampered with or searched. Then they were accelerating through the clean streets. Conrad was on automatic. He vaguely registered the myriad hyper-accentuated details—how a goodly quarter of the neon shop signs were in Korean or Thai characters; the bare-boned shade trees, stark and comatose; the lowering clouds, faceless as a mob; the flesh of his lumpen, knobbed hands had begun to wattle and wrinkle, blue-veins bulging as he clasped the wheel. The hair on his knuckles was gray. Tired skin, tired blood. A man could pump all the iron he liked, muscle got old sooner or later, Jack Lalann and Arnold notwithstanding.
“How did your conversation with Mr. Cardinal go?” Singh lighted a cigarette.
“He revealed the secrets of the universe.”
“The secrets of the universe are of scant interest to a brute such as yourself.”
“I wanted him to sign my vintage LP. He promised me backstage passes to a Neil Diamond concert.” Conrad hit the brakes to avoid colliding with a taxi. He seized the diversion to scan the rearview mirror for a tail. Lots of cars back there.
Singh braced his left hand against the dash. His hand was soft and sinuous as the weaving head of a viper. “Do you really take us for total morons?”
“I probably shouldn’t answer that one.”
“To blazes with your personal issues. Your bloody agenda is only permitted so long as it aligns with ours!” Singh’s face was tight. He relaxed with a visible effort. “You’ve been too obvious, too indelicate. You’re starting to attract enemies. I would not be surprised if MI6 is out for your balls after that brouhaha with the Honduran expat last year—what was his name?”
“Kimosa.” Conrad punched the gas, jarred Singh back in his seat.
“Right. Kimosa. I guess the fellow thought you’d come to cut his throat; raised quite a stink with the consulate, I gather. We just tied that to you—all very hush-hush, you see. How did you find him? Never mind, stupid question. Your sister did the heavy lifting, didn’t she. You just pitched cleanup on a bunch of worn down geriatrics. I doubt the majority of them understand what it is you think they know. His relationship to TALLHAT would’ve never occurred to me if we hadn’t confiscated those documents on the island.”
“So, Cardinal played for the Company. Lots of my friends do.”
“The booze hound was indeed a Company man.” Singh gazed at the stop and go traffic, loose-limbed and disaffected as usual. “Wicked stuff he got up to in his day, I must admit. The chap is from the old school—I’m shocked he didn’t pop off to his garret and down a cyanide pill after you forced him to divulge his secrets.”
“I didn’t force him to divulge anything. I asked nicely.”
“Did you get anything useful? He was never trusted with any sensitive information.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Look, Conrad…something has happened.”
“No shit. I thought this was a social occasion.”
They left the metropolitan core, crossed into stark regions populated by grimy warehouse fronts, liquor stores and low income housing complexes stacked in concrete blocks.
It grew steadily dimmer, God’s thumb on the dial.
Conrad parked on the street and followed Singh up steps littered with pigeon droppings to a security door of the Wanderveldt Apartments. It was a tall conical building, a decrepit 1950s tenement riddled with tunnels and chambers like a termite colony in a grey stump. Singh thumbed the button by 203 G. MOTT and shortly, they were buzzed in without comment.
The foyer was damp and papered by dead leaves. A wheezing, shuddering elevator with brassy wall plates raised them to the third floor, deposited them in a claustrophobically narrow corridor that went on and on under a series of dim globes, many of which were broken out, or blank as glass eyes. Flies shrilled in the dark globes; tiny, damned souls searching for the light. Rough plaster walls were scarred by fissures, brown water stains and occasional jags of graffiti that almost made sense to Conrad if he regarded them from the corner of his eye. Voices seeped through the plaster, mingled with the complaints of the flies. Pipes groaned.
Singh knocked at 203 and waited. He pinched open a pack of Gauloises, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and offered the pack to Conrad.
“Thanks,” Conrad said, noting the many pizza delivery fliers before the door, an iris-dilation in the peephole. Sweat greased his face, made the briefcase handle slippery in his fist. He slowed his breathing, forced his neck to relax.
Singh lighted both cigarettes with a match from a small wooden box that he’d carried for as long as Conrad had known him.
“Un momento, por favor.” Locks rattled.
The door swung in to a darkened space, rich with incense, hash and underlying mildew. First Singh, then Conrad on his heel.
A blanket of jungle-ripe humidity smacked Conrad in the face. The door shut and it was full night, except for a sliver of light probing beneath the drapes of a window somewhere to the right. Ghostly classical orchestra echoed from another room. Brahms at work. Someone giggled—bubbly and feminine. The record skipped and began again.
“Don’t move,” Marsh said from the darkness behind Conrad and to the left. Phosphorescent green light bloomed. Marsh stepped around and played a crackling wand over Conrad’s shoulders, chest and extremities. Marsh resembled a hugely ursine airline security checker in cyclopean headgear and a Hawaiian flower print shirt and Bermuda shorts. He sweated Scotch in the sultry confines. “He’s good.” He snapped the wand off and Conrad went blind with green aftershocks.
Singh switched on a floor lamp.
The apartment was subdivided into a hive—Conrad counted four flimsy wooden doors and a curtain of beads. Each door had been painted a different color: red; orange; blue; and white. The outer area had been stripped to some open beer bottles, pregnant ashtrays and a folded laptop computer on the kitchenette counter; a sectional and a moldy phone book, but no phone. Near the balcony sliding door Mediterranean incense sizzled in an iron brazier shaped like a Buddha with pronounced incisors. Conrad wondered if they’d ripped the thing off from an art gallery or a museum.
Marsh unhooked his headgear, slapped it on the counter. He squinted and rubbed his blunt hands on his shirt. His stubbly head was something that should’ve rolled from a cannon barrel. “You got crabs, Singh.”
“Indeed? You are referring to the jet Cutlass, Nevada plates, number Alpha-Charley-two-two-oh-niner? I picked him up at the museum. He parked about half a block down on the west side of the street. Poppa Z’s goons, I presume. They seem quite proprietary regarding our friend here.”
Marsh regarded Conrad. “In the old days, we just garroted guys, or stabbed them with a poisoned umbrella tip. Things are too damned complicated. We got lasers; we got masers; we got nanoviruses and white frequencies that’ll short your cerebral cortex in one-one-hundredth of a millisecond. For instance —we got a killsat in synchronous orbit, keyed to your heat signature. Actually, it’s a Russian surplus geological satellite with minor tweaks; shoots x-rays into the ground so corporations can decide where to drill. The fact it’ll cook any organic life in its projection path is a happy side effect. You can smoke just about any bunker in the world with one of these puppies. It’s all in knowing where to point it. Wanna drink?”
Conrad leaned against the wall in the pale outline where a picture had hung. He didn’t trust his voice. He shook and dripped. His clothes stuck to him as if he’d strolled through a sauna.
“What’s with him?” Marsh grabbed Conrad’s briefcase, tossed it aside. “Going downhill fast, aren’t you, killer? Don’t look much like a world beater from where I’m standing. Good thing we brought you here for this little powwow. Things are getting out of hand.”
Singh rinsed a couple of glasses in the sink and a dumped scotch into each. He pressed one on Conrad. “Health!”
“Your liver’s got to be the size of a soccer ball. How’n the hell do you stay in shape to do what you do?” Marsh said.
It was an old question, Marsh’s notion of an icebreaker. Conrad drank his glassful, enjoyed the ephemeral bite, the transitory and finite thrill, like gasoline drying on pavement. Besides frequent visits to the Big Stage, how did he maintain his edge, his dominant physical power? Ask a crocodile, fat and torpid on its sunny clay bank how it stayed fit and deadly. Same answer would apply. “If you aren’t planning to snuff me, let’s discuss business.”
Marsh and Singh exchanged glances. Marsh said, “Snuff you? You thought—?” The big man laughed. His cheeks flushed and he hacked phlegm into a kerchief. “Oh shit, that slays me. You need to relax, son. Where do you think we are, Zimbabwe? Drama queen.”
“He was joking about the killsat—the cone isn’t that precise; we might get toasted as well. I would’ve just had one of our sniper associates do the deed at the museum. Far less messy. Here, let’s freshen that a bit, yeh. There’s a lad.” Singh poured Conrad another dose with a trembling hand.
Why was Singh nervous? Have I ever seen them like this? Conrad didn’t think so. Damn it, maybe they meant to kill him after the transaction, kind assurances notwithstanding.
Murmurs and a groan escaped the room with the Brahms. More giggling from beyond the white door. The humidity was thicker, stronger. Shadows swelled in the cracks and corners, began to rise in a tidal trough.
“Who’s here?” Singh gestured with his glass at the white door.
“Vonda. The hooker, remember? She got here a few minutes ago.” Marsh gave his partner a bluff and hearty grin that lacked conviction. A convulsion of the jaw and nothing more.
“Wanda?” Conrad said, chilled.
“Vonda.”
“Oh! Vonda. Yes, right then. Let’s hurry this along, shall we. It would be impolite to keep the lady waiting.”
“Yeah. Meter’s running.”
The lamp flickered and everyone stared at it. Conrad’s throat was tight again; his body felt too heavy, too full of sand and water. The room seemed to have gained several gravities.
“Time to get down to brass tacks,” Marsh said, as if briskness would dispel doom. “Here’s the score. This is the kiss off. You and us, we’re through. The operation has been terminated. The operation never existed. We don’t know anything about the underground battle royales, your crazy fucking sister, Project TALLHAT, nothing. We don’t know no Conrad, Conrad.”
“Fine by me. What’s the catch?”
“We’ll be out of your hair once we’ve squared accounts.”
“Squared accounts. What does that mean.”
“Means we needs must part,” Marsh said.
“And the shoe drops.”
“The deal is—you buy out our interest in your future enterprises, indemnify us against the possibility we lose a ton profit on account of your, uh, premature demise. Say, oh, five hundred grand.” Marsh patted the laptop. “We can handle the transaction right here.”
Conrad held up two fingers. “Okay, boys. I’ll go two-hundred even, and this had better be good. Not here. I don’t trust you that much, M. I’ll retreat someplace a tad more secure and wire your payoff.” Half a million wasn’t beyond his capability, but the last thing he wanted was to hand these two jackals enough money to cap him and disappear to whatever tropical paradise they’d been lining up since they were cadets at spook academy.
Even as Marsh opened his mouth, Singh cut in, “Jolly idea. Agreed. Agreed, Robert?”
Marsh shook his head in defeat. “Do you understand what kind of guy you’re messing with? I mean, really, truly, understand?”
“The Brazilian? He’s done some antisocial things—”
“Not him. He’s a patsy, a stooge—just like your daddy was. Ciphers for the real player, the wizard behind the curtain. I’m talking about Drake. Ambrose Zora Drake. Really should a told us about him.”
The jig was up, then. They knew everything. Probably not everything, but more than enough.“What’s to understand? Drake killed my brother and probably my sister. Because of him my mom blew herself to hell and my dad ended up in a nut hatch. I think that covers the episodes you missed.”
“Whoa, whoa. It’s always about baby Imogene, isn’t it, bud? I looked into all that. You poor dupe. Your sister… How can I put it, Singh?”
“Delicately,” Conrad said. He dropped his empty glass and straightened.
“Hey, we’re friends,” Marsh said. He and Singh casually sidled away from Conrad’s considerable reach. “I’m just saying, okay? She might not have given you the whole story. You’re loyal and that’s sweet. But she wasn’t spotless, she wasn’t exactly true blue. I’m not casting judgment—we all gotta eat. Sis hooked up with Lorca, who is quite a dubious character, then they took a hit of the Brazilian’s wonder drug and were never quite the same. She went to the dark side. Am I right?”
Conrad looked at the floor, felt the big vein in his neck throb. “Drake is alive. Really and truly.”
“Oh, that is affirmative,” Singh said.
“Drake was the brains behind the Brazilian. Drake probably owned the Brazilian since Souza enrolled in med school back in Eighteen-fucking-whenever.”
“Why are you afraid of him? Like you say, he’s gotta be older than Mengele. A has-been on the lam from everybody with a badge.”
“Guess again, Connie. Take as many guesses as you need, even.”
“You picked Jonah’s whale for an enemy,” Singh said. “Drake is far beyond the likes of us peasants.”
“An untouchable? Counting down until the ball drops in a Nazi retirement home?”
Marsh and Singh exchanged looks again. Marsh barked and poured more liquor. “Drake runs a show you wouldn’t believe. As for Nazis, well, same ballpark. He’s a satyr. He’s Caligula and de Sade and the Pope rolled in a ball. Frankly, I bet he could buy and sell the Vatican. Guess that qualifies him as an untouchable.”
“What if he’s a terrorist too?” Conrad said.
“Plenty of terrorist masterminds are good with Uncle Sam. As of this moment, mums the word from HQ. Drake definitely has friends in our government. Get the drift?”
“Drake indulges peculiar appetites and our chain of command is at least peripherally aware,” Singh said. “There are documents, pictures… I regret having seen them.”
Coming from Singh, that was saying a lot, Conrad knew. “I’ve heard things. So what. Another rich bastard with the usual kinks. I know the type.”
“Wrong, stud. Whatever you’ve heard, I promise that ain’t the half of it.” Marsh’s eyes glittered. “Nothing is going to see light of day in our lifetimes. Records of his activities have a habit of getting misplaced or destroyed. Don’t they, Singh?”
“Oh, yes.”
“People on high have dropped the cloak of darkness over his shoulders. It’s not unusual, happens all the time. bin Laden, Noriega, guys like that were on the dole long before they became public enemy numero Uno. In some ways, it gets worse. At least for you.”
Conrad was growing cold as the sweat dried and his senses found equilibrium. “Worse. What does worse mean?”
“Drake may be the wart on the ass of an extremely large toad. Surely you figured out he’s not unique.”
“Not unique?”
“He’s junior member of a peer group, the elite of the elite.” Singh lighted a cigarette. He sighed. “The Order of Imago. You’ve probably heard of it during your investigations. It’s one of those loudly whispered secrets—like the Masons and the Satanists, only more so. Powerful, powerful men. Tycoons, industrialists, Old World nobility. A wicked old-boys secret handshake society. We know it exists. We’ve met a member or two, heard some stories. They’ve established a few communes in remote areas. There’s one in Arizona and another in Southern California. Probably five or six others. Didn’t Imogene tell you?”
“Nothing specific. Wild talk.”
The men stared at him. Their faces were luminous as wax. Mummies. The liquid giggle floated from the bedroom and Marsh’s glance twitched that direction. His tongue distended slightly. He sported the lump of a burgeoning erection.
Singh said, “Why did you lie to us about your sister? You should’ve told us from the start who she was after.”
“What, and ruin a beautiful relationship.”
“Perhaps it’s our fault. We should’ve dug a bit deeper, should’ve understood this wasn’t just about Imogene. It all goes back to your father. He owed Drake everything, didn’t he?”
“I’ve always liked you, man. So, I guess I’m kinda sorry about this.” Marsh began to tremor. He looked like a man in the throes of palsy.
Conrad picked up his glass and filled it again. He noticed Marsh had reached into his Bermuda shorts, was stroking himself. “What does this group want? Aren’t you two even a teensy bit curious?”
“Dunno, bud. Cults aren’t my forte. I’m just giving you the Action News headlines…” Marsh’s eyes went dead and his face softened, lost animation. “Sorry, Singh. I’m done here.”
“Rob —”
Marsh wheeled and shuffled to the white door. He hesitated, shoulders heaving, before he shoved open a dark slot and bulled through. No music, no giggling, nothing. Vacuum sucked the door shut.
Singh said dreamily, “Bugger it all.” He wagged his head as if it weighed upon his neck. “Did you follow that trial of a certain naughty senator. Four or five years ago? The one they say raped the intern? I had the dubious pleasure of interviewing that sterling fellow. He’d made an exceedingly strange request during his interrogation. He demanded to speak with an intelligence operative, someone involved with national security. So, in I went. The senator mentioned Ambrose Drake as a benefactor. The senator is from the oldest money, colonial bluebloods in tall hats. Kind of guys who presided over the witch trials. He made this crazy claim his ancestors knew Drake personally.”
The floor lamp began to flicker rapidly.
Something fell. Two, three, four beats and the lamplight steadied. An ashtray had plunged to the floor, dumped its contents; the brazier rocked gently on its base. The red and blue doors hung open, revealing cavities.
“Singh. What’s happening?” Conrad had fallen into a half crouch, fingers spread in anticipation of violence. His terror was muted, muffled, as if this were a dream and the floor was quicksand and it was happening to someone else, someone on TV, perhaps, an actor rehearsing his wooden lines, standing on the X.
“You know.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”
Singh’s eyes were huge and dewy. Saliva gathered in the corner of his slack mouth. “Vonda is lonely.” He shuddered and removed his gaze from the white door. “So this hapless senator, the one with his neck on the block, swore that Dr. Drake was involved in, how shall I say, extreme occult practices. Decidedly anti-American practices. The senator claimed to have made a pact with Drake and friends in return for his celebrity status and all the fruits that accompanied such success. I relayed this story to my superior…expecting to get a laugh. Nobody was laughing. My boss quietly advised me forget what I’d been told. And I did.”
A pact.
Imogene had said it first, shouted it at him. The truth was heavy and it squirmed in Conrad’s mind. Barbs. God will eat us all.
Sudden vertigo and the squeak of neglected hinges interrupted Conrad’s train of thought. The white door had swung slightly ajar; the pitch blackness inside had grown solid and swollen and sprung its cage.
The room rippled at the periphery, distorted and elongated precisely as it might’ve if Conrad had eaten a massive dose of shrooms or suffered a nasty concussion. Pressure built upon his flesh and in his bones. Objects on the counter rustled; the laptop slid several inches. The room seemed to be listing by a few degrees, a cabin in a sinking ocean liner.
“Farewell, Conrad,” Singh said. “It occurred to me we owed you a parting gift, a token of our esteem as it were.” He took a small packet from inside his coat and handed it to Conrad. “I don’t recommend viewing these on a full stomach. Nonetheless, these disks contain all you’d ever care to know regarding the proclivities of Dr. Drake. Some in color.”
“Come here.” A female voice; a soft, sweet invitation that hinted of mysterious pleasure, of chocolate and peppermint, clamps and whips, a long, slow descent into the ultimate darkness of a sundew. “Come here, come here.”
The lamp dulled, dulled and reddened as a beam seeping through closed fingers. Marsh called, “Tell him goodbye, Leo. I need to show you something.”
Singh smiled beatifically. His shadowy face gleamed. “Goodbye, Conrad. See you soon.”
Conrad didn’t answer. He blundered out into the hallway and fled, following the swaying overhead lights. Someone kept calling his name.
The first knockdown fight Conrad had was as a teenager and with his father.
Dad was a scary man. Big body, big brain, murderous temper. A scary man and a terrifying drunk. He was drunk most of the years Conrad knew him and the two seldom spoke. Dad took him aside after Mom crashed her plane and had a father-son type of chat in the cellar of their home in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains where they’d dwelt since Ezra’s death. The cellar was much larger than it appeared and housed a number of machines and assorted lab equipment. Dad spent the majority of his waking hours down there, experimenting, plotting, muttering and cackling to the rats and the spiders. Conrad would’ve rather had the conversation in the traditional venue—on a rowboat in the lake, fixing the junk farm truck, chopping wood, anything but the damned cellar. Unfortunately, the old man had become exquisitely paranoid in his dotage and didn’t like to hang around in the open lest somebody should take a shot at him, or swoop down and roll him in a carpet and rendition him to some middle eastern hellhole for questioning.
Dad popped the cork on a bottle of Bushmill’s and guzzled it, one bloodshot jaundiced eye fixed upon his son all the while. He set the bottle aside and wiped his mouth and said, You like to fight, Connie?
This surprised Conrad. He’d never been in trouble at school, never thrown a punch. Most of the kids liked him. Those that didn’t wanted to screw Imogene in the worst way and left her brother in peace for obvious reasons. The bruisers who didn’t want to fuck her were scared shitless of her. She’d socked one guy who got too fresh in the testicles with the cute little set of brass knuckles she hid in her purse. Those guys left Conrad alone too. On the rare occasion some fool decided to jump him, nothing exciting came of it. Conrad could absorb a golf club blow to the head and shake it off, just stand there and take a beating until the bully got too tired to swing. That scared people worse than Imogene’s brass knuckles and pointy shoes. Which, after messing with Conrad, they experienced close up anyway.
Conrad shrugged. He seldom spoke around Dad, except in shrugs and grunts, and monosyllables.
Dad said, You’re a special case. Some of my friends in the military would be most eager to get you in their clutches. Ever ponder a career in the Marines? See the world with the Navy? No? Glad to hear it, because I won’t allow it. Your mom would haunt me if I did. And he glanced around as if Mom lurked in the shadows, ready to pounce. Anyway, Connie. You’re special and life is going to become extremely interesting for you in the Chinese curse sense of the word. This family has always been afflicted with that kind of thing. It goes back to my ancestors and I’m sorry your mom and you kids got roped into the mess. The thing is, I’m sending you to live with a friend of mine in the Mediterranean. He’s got all kinds of connections. You’ll finish school and go on from there.
What about Genie? Conrad actually looked from his feet and into his father’s eyes.
She’s going to live with Auntie. I have high hopes for that girl.
Don’t separate us. I’ll stay with Auntie too. Conrad began to fidget mightily. Sweat ran down his neck.
Dad chuckled. First, you make Auntie nervous. Second, you and Genie are entirely too close. That’s what comes of letting Mother practice all that fucking New Age child rearing bullshit on you two—way too much confusion. Not your fault, but all the same, it’s best you kids see other people for a while.
Where is she?
Gone, man, gone. They’ll be on the road a while. Out of the country.
Conrad didn’t say anything. He nodded and tore an x-ray machine free of its mooring bolts and broadsided Dad, sent him crashing through a domino row of shelves. He didn’t use his empty hand because he was enraged, not suicidal. A fire started and Dad came out of the smoke, laughing and swearing, ready for murder.
They destroyed the cellar and then the fight moved upstairs into the main floor of the house and they destroyed that too. Dad lifted the the big stainless steel refrigerator and rammed Conrad, bulldozed the whole living room wall, and then they were in the yard, ripping apart the lawn, tearing up lawn sprinklers and whacking each other with them.
Conrad thanked god Dad was dead drunk, because it slowed the old man down a little. He threw some dirt in Dad’s eyes and while he yelled and blindly pawed the air, Conrad managed to tear the Citroen’s passenger door off its hinges. He raised the door overhead and slammed it down across Dad’s back. It took three tries, but eventually Dad stopped trying to get on his feet, and lay there, muttering. Dad eventually crawled over to the car and got a half-full bottle of scotch off the floorboard.
The two of them slumped on the ruined grass and drained the bottle and watched the house explode in a Hollywood-style ball of fire. Dad wiped a tear from his cheek and explained that Conrad was a special case because he’d been engineered via a cloning process and that his DNA didn’t derive solely from his loving parents, but there was other source material. Material of a basic, primitive stock, an atavistic stock. That was why he looked a tad more brutish than the other lads, and why he could wrench car doors off their hinges, and why he could probably regenerate a non-lethal gunshot wound to soft tissue in a few hours. Maybe they could test that hypothesis one day…
That was also the first time Conrad got drunk. It became a trend. Turned out Dad was right about the gunshot wounds, too.