So what did she have to tell? Well, she had promised in her letter that there were more names to be given, and she had more information to provide, but the kind of people who would inflict that level of pain on another human being and then leave her to burn were hardly on the side of the angels and were therefore unlikely to be sufficiently interested in the identities of those like themselves to kill for them. No, they would be more interested in curbing the supply of such information. They would want to know whom she had approached, and what she had already given them, and she would have told them because the pain would have been too much for her. Her killers now knew, therefore, that Eldritch & Associates had been provided with a list of names. They might move against Eldritch, which would be unwise, or they might seek to limit the damage caused through other means, perhaps by silencing those on that particular list.
Then there was the small matter of who else might have been approached by this woman. There were few candidates who could be trusted enough. In fact, the Collector could think of only one.
But then, the old Jew could take care of himself.
The Collector finished his cigarette and carefully doused the tip in a pool of water before slipping the butt into the pocket of his black coat. The Collector regularly wore a coat, regardless of the weather. Excesses of heat or cold had little effect on him, and anyway, a man always had need of pockets: for cigarettes, a wallet, a lighter, and an assortment of blades. He looked to the north, where Eldritch was probably still sitting in his office, poring over papers. The thought brought him pleasure, even though they had argued earlier that day, and Eldritch and the Collector rarely exchanged a harsh word. On this occasion, the Collector reflected, it was a matter of conflicting philosophies, a belief in preventive measures coming up against the lawyer’s requirement for evidential proof of the commission of a crime. In the end, though, it would come down to the blade, for the man with the blade always has the final word.
In his office, a banker’s lamp casting soft light across his desk, Eldritch looked up from the list of names as though sensing the thoughts of the other. He and the Collector were almost a single entity, which made their earlier disagreement all the more difficult. Files of varying sizes on most of the individuals named on the list rested by his right hand. All were compromised, but fatally so? Eldritch was uncertain. He approved of the final sanction being used in only the most extreme of cases, and his view was that none of these individuals unconditionally qualified for the Collector’s attentions. But he also acknowledged that, like loaded guns or honed blades, they had the potential to do great harm, and it could be argued that some, by their actions, had already committed serious sins. The question remained, though: was their potential to do harm, as yet unrealized in most cases, justification for taking their lives? For Eldritch, the answer was ‘no’, but for the Collector the answer was ‘yes’.
A compromise of sorts had been reached. One name was chosen, the individual whom Eldritch regarded as the most distasteful. The Collector would talk with him, and a decision would follow. Meanwhile, the problem of the final name remained, the only name typed in red.
‘Charlie Parker,’ whispered the old lawyer. ‘What have you done?’
23
Davis Tate slumped in one of the leatherette booths of the bar and looked at his ratings for the fourth time, hoping to find some cause for celebration, or even mild optimism.
His figures should have been through the roof: the economy was still unsteady, the president was hogtied by his own compromised idealism, and the right had succeeded in vilifying unions, immigrants, and welfare cases, making them carry the can for the greed of bankers and Wall Street sharks, thereby somehow convincing sane people that the poorest and weakest in the nation were responsible for most of its ills. What never ceased to amaze Tate was that many of those same individuals – the dirt poor, the unemployed, the welfare recipients – listened to his show, even as he castigated those – the union organizers, the bleeding-heart liberals – who most wanted to help them. Bitterness, stupidity, and self-interest, he had discovered, would win out over reasoned arguments every time. He sometimes asked himself how this generation differed from that of his grandparents when it came to the election of a president, and he had decided that previous generations wanted to be governed by men who were smarter than they were, while today’s voters preferred to be led by those who were as dumb as themselves. He knew them well, for he made his living by pandering to their basest instincts. He understood that they were frightened, and he fanned the flickering flames of their fear.
Yet still his figures remained stubbornly plateaued. In some states – Kansas, for crying out loud, and Utah, where being a liberal meant having only one wife – his listenership was actually going down. It was unbelievable, just unbelievable. He finished his beer and waved to the waitress for another.
‘What the hell is happening?’ he asked. ‘I mean, is it my voice, my personality, what?’
There were those who might have said that it was all of the above, and more. Strangely, Tate might well have empathized. He knew that he was not particularly talented and not particularly charismatic, but he could rabble-rouse with the best of them. He was also brighter than his enemies gave him credit for, bright enough to understand that most people in America, whether liberal or conservative, just wanted to get along with their lives, and generally didn’t wish ill on anyone who had not done them actual harm. They were fundamentally good people, and pretty tolerant to boot. For those reasons, they were of absolutely no use to Tate and his kind. His role in life was to target those who had resentment and animosity simmering inside, and put those base materials to political and social use. Where there is love, he prayed, let me sow hatred. Where there is risk of pardon, a renewed sense of injury. Where there is faith, doubt. Where there is hope, despair. Where there is light . . .
Darkness.
His producer, Becky Phipps, sat across from him, toying with the olive in her dirty martini; dirty both figuratively and literally. Tate had no idea what she thought she was doing, ordering a cocktail in a dump like this. Tate didn’t even want to use the beer glasses, and he’d wiped clean his bottle of beer before drinking from it. Just because this was the kind of dump frequented by regular Joes didn’t mean that he had to drink there too, not unless it was going to boost his ratings, and right now he didn’t hear anyone applauding.
Tate was also concerned that the bartender might be gay. He was all muscled up, but he was too tanned for Tate’s liking, and he seemed to be camping it up some for a couple of the customers who looked like queer bait. The bar had been Becky’s choice. She said it was better to have this discussion away from the usual watering holes. There would be fewer distractions, but also fewer ears listening in on their conversation.
‘It’s not a crisis yet, but it could become one unless we tackle it now,’ said Becky. ‘There have been some rumblings from advertisers, but assurances are being offered. We’re talking, and they’re listening.’
‘They’re not cutting advertising rates, are they?’ asked Tate, unable to keep a hint of rising panic out of his voice. That could be the kiss of death. Cutting rates, even temporarily, was a dangerous business. It might be taken as an admission that the slide in listeners couldn’t be arrested, and that was like starting a run on a bank.
‘No, but I won’t lie to you: the possibility has been suggested.’
‘How long have we got?’
‘A couple of months. We’ll get together a focus group next week, do some blue-sky thinking, spitball the whole business.’
Tate hated it when Becky used all of that business school jargon. In his experience, people only spoke that way when they had no idea what they were doing, which was a cause for alarm in the case of his producer, even if Becky was a producer more in name than in practice. She monitored Tate, guided him, suggested targets for his tirades, and he never disagreed with her. He knew better than to do that. He and Becky had been together for five ye
ars, and she’d been good for him, but his vanity made him reluctant to attribute too much of his success to her input. On the other hand, Barbara Kelly, the woman who had recommended Becky, had also been responsible for providing seed capital, and for putting him in touch with a whole network of likeminded people: advertisers, syndicators, dealers in influence and information.
But Barbara Kelly was dead. He had to tread carefully here.
‘If you think it will help,’ said Tate.
He tried not to sound too skeptical. He lived in fear of being dropped, of being sent back to the minors. His third beer arrived. He looked over at the bar and saw the bartender staring back at him. The freak took the empty bottle from the waitress, stuck his finger in the top, and dumped it in the recycling bin. While Tate looked on, he then sucked the finger that had been in Tate’s bottle, and winked.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Tate.
‘What?’
‘That fag bartender put his finger in my bottle and sucked it.’
‘What, that bottle?’
‘No, the last one, the one I just drank from.’
‘Force of habit.’
‘He winked at me while he did it.’
‘Maybe he likes you.’
‘Jesus. You think he did something with this one too?’ Tate eyed the bottle suspiciously. ‘Maybe his finger isn’t the only thing he tries to put in bottles.’
‘I got a wipe, if you want to use it.’
‘It’ll make the beer taste bad. Maybe not as bad as if the bartender stuck his dick in it, but still bad.’
‘You’re overreacting.’
‘He recognizes me. I’m sure that he does. He did that deliberately because he thinks I’m a homophobe.’
‘You are a homophobe.’
‘That’s not the point. I should be able to express my opinions without fear of queer bartenders sticking their fingers, or anything else, in my beer. He could have a disease.’
‘You told me he sucked his finger after you drank from the bottle, not before. If anyone’s going to catch anything, it’s him.’
‘What are you, an epidemiologist? And what’s that supposed to mean anyway? You implying that I have something he could catch?’
‘Paranoia, maybe.’
‘I’m telling you, he knows who I am.’
‘It would be great if he did,’ said Becky, and the sarcasm distracted him from fingers and bottles. ‘If every bartender in New York recognized you it would mean that you were a national figure, and all of your problems would be solved.’
‘You mean “our” problems, right?’
Becky sipped her drink. ‘Of course. I misspoke.’
Tate folded his arms huffily and turned away from her, then quickly reconsidered as he found himself catching the bartender’s eye again. Becky swore softly. It was up to her to make some conciliatory gesture. It always was. Sometimes she wished Barbara Kelly had never asked her to take Tate under her wing. He had seemed to be on the verge of breaking through in a big way, at least until recently, but he was a miserable, whiny sonofabitch. It came with the territory. You couldn’t spend hours every day spitting out that kind of bile, then more hours working up more bile to spit out the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, and not pollute your spirit. Although she’d never told Tate this, there were times when she muted the volume in the producer’s booth to give her a break from his poisonous rants, and she agreed with most of what he said. She couldn’t have done the job otherwise. At least Tate represented only part of her responsibilities. In a way, being his producer was little more than a cover story for her.
‘You smell smoke?’ asked Tate. He was sniffing the air like a rat, his head slightly raised. He had even lifted his hands from the bar, and they hung in front of his chest like paws.
‘What, like fire?’ she said.
‘No, tobacco smoke.’ He peered over the top of the booth, but there was no one nearby. They’d chosen the table for precisely that reason. ‘Stinks like cleaning out time at the lung cancer ward.’
For someone who was ostensibly a libertarian, Tate had his peculiarities and inconsistencies. Like so many of those who described themselves as pro-life, Tate was only pro the kind of life that was curled up in someone’s womb. If it emerged from that same womb and committed a crime, then it was fair game for the needle. Similarly he was inordinately fond of war, as long as that war involved kicking someone’s ass in a place far away from decent bars and good restaurants, and was fought by the kind of men and women whom Tate secretly despised when they weren’t wearing a uniform. But he was also cautiously in favor of some form of gun control, albeit a control mechanism that allowed him to own guns and kept them out of the hands of the non-white and the non-Christian; and he certainly did not approve of those who smoked in his vicinity, even while advocating the sort of lax environmental policing that in the long run was likely to have a significantly more damaging effect on the quality of the air that he breathed than the occasional breath of secondhand smoke.
In short, Becky thought, Davis Tate was an asshole, but that was why he was so useful. Still, recruiting men such as he required a degree of care, and their continued use involved careful diplomacy. They couldn’t be stupid or else they would be unable to perform their appointed role in the media, and they couldn’t be too smart in case they began questioning what they were doing, or how they were being used. The easiest way to ensure their continued compliance was to stroke their ego and surround them with those most like themselves. Hatred, like love, needed to be regularly fed and watered.
Tate continued to sniff the air.
‘You sure you don’t smell it?’ he said.
Becky sniffed. There was something, she admitted. It was faint, but unpleasant. She could almost taste it on her tongue, as though she’d just licked a smoker’s fingers.
‘It’s old,’ she said. ‘It’s on someone’s clothing.’ Their skin and hair too, because you didn’t get to smell that way unless the nicotine had ingrained itself upon your system. She could almost hear the cells metastasizing.
She glanced over her shoulder. At the very back of the bar, where the light was at its dimmest, she saw a figure seated in a booth against the wall, a newspaper spread before him, a brandy snifter in one hand, the index finger of the other gently tapping a rhythm upon the table as he read. She couldn’t see his face, but his hair looked greasy and untidy. He struck her as unclean, a polluted man, and not just because the tobacco smell was certainly coming from him.
‘It’s the guy in the corner,’ she said.
‘There’s no excuse for a man smelling that bad,’ said Tate. ‘At least he won’t outlive us.’
Tate was not certain, but for a moment he believed that the rhythm of the man’s tapping might have been interrupted, and then it resumed and he forgot about it.
‘Ignore him,’ said Becky. ‘He’s not why we’re here.’
‘Goddamn disloyal advertisers and fat station managers without an original idea in their heads is why we’re here,’ said Tate.
‘It’s not just the advertisers and the stations we have to worry about, though,’ she replied. ‘You realize that? The Backers are concerned.’
Tate’s mouthful of beer tasted wrong. It wasn’t just his suspicions about the bartender, misplaced or otherwise. He always felt this way when the subject of the Backers was raised. At first, their existence hadn’t bothered him so much. The Kelly woman had approached him when he was a minor player broadcasting out of San Antonio, with barely a dozen statewide syndications to his name. She’d arranged to meet him for coffee in the lobby of the Menger Hotel, and he hadn’t been impressed with her at first. She was dowdy and plain, and Tate suspected that she was also a dyke. He had no objection to dykes as long as they were pretty – that was probably as close to a liberal viewpoint as he’d ever managed to come – but the butch, masculine-looking ones bothered him. They always seemed so angry, and frankly they scared the shit out of him. Kelly wasn’t an e
xtreme case: her hair was shoulder length, and she wasn’t making some protest about oppressive male views of women by refusing to wear makeup or avoiding skirts and high heels. No man would have given her a second look in a bar or a mall, though, and most wouldn’t even have bothered with the first look.
But when she started speaking he found himself leaning forward, hanging on her every word. She had a soft, melodious voice, one that seemed to him both entirely at odds with her appearance yet also curiously appropriate if you considered her as some kind of mother figure instead of a sexual being. She spoke of how there was a change coming, and voices like his needed to be heard if that change was to become permanent. She said that there were powerful, influential figures with an interest in ensuring this was the case, and they had favors to call in, and money to spend. Davis Tate didn’t have to spend the rest of his career broadcasting out of a roach-filled studio in Valley Hi, driving between it and his similarly roach-filled apartment in Camelot in his piece-of-shit Concord hatchback. He could become a big player in syndicated talk radio if he wanted to be. He just had to trust in others to guide him.
Tate might have been a serious hatemonger-in-waiting, but he wasn’t dumb. Even back then he was self-aware enough to know that, at best, most of what he said didn’t make a whole lot of sense and, at worst, was just damned lies, but he’d been saying it all for so long that even he was starting to believe it. Neither was his ego so out of control as to allow him to think that a northern dyke would come all the way to San Antonio just because of his verbal dexterity and his unerring ability to blame the problems of hardworking white, Christian Americans on niggers, spics, queers and feminists without ever having to go so far as to name them as such. There was always a catch, wasn’t there?
‘Are we talking about a loan?’ he asked. He could barely cover his rent and the repayments on his vehicle as it was, and his credit card was maxed out. The word ‘loan’ now had the same appeal to him as the word ‘noose’.