Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (28 page)

The desert was so flat, hard, and endless that planes could actually land anywhere, but they were supposed to use the airstrip’s fenced-off landing zone. Black Rock Airport even had a terminal, albeit one that consisted of a shack dressed with signs warning pilots they were basically on their own. A couple of dozen light airplanes were parked in neat rows between the airstrip and the terminal.
   “Hey, Hatter,” I said, “how far can these planes go?”
   He looked at them with a jaundiced professional eye. “It varies. Mostly a few hundred miles. A few of them can go further.”
   “How much further? Like to Mexico?”
   “Hmm.” He considered. “Mexico’s about 700 miles from here. That’s a long way. The only ones that could make it are those two, there and there.” He pointed to two airplanes very similar in appearance, larger than most. “Cessna 182s with long-range tanks. Why do you ask?”
   “Just curious,” I lied. Zoltan and Zorana’s getaway plane might not have arrived yet. It might be hidden somewhere in the empty miles of Black Rock City beyond the trash fence. But it might be one of the two that Hatter had just pointed out.
   “That’s my ride,” Hatter said excitedly, pointing to a half-dozen skydivers strapping on their harnesses next to a small plane. “See you back in camp, Paul. Drop by Crackhaus anytime!”
   “Count on it,” I assured him.
   We left Steve with the goths at DeathGuild’s workshop. After he suggested doubling the range of Rogue’s flamethrowers they all but adopted him. DeathGuild was a huge camp, the only one I had seen with a fence, where the big attraction was a thirty-foot high geodesic battledome out front. Every night would-be combatants strapped themselves into bungee cords and fought for bragging rights with padded clubs while hundreds cheered them on.
   We had ninety minutes before Lawrence was due to be relieved, and we decided to go for a walk. Enjoying ourselves was surprisingly easy, despite the sword of Zoltan hanging over our heads, thanks to the sea of distractions that surrounded us. I began to understand, as we wandered, what Hatter had meant by a bazaar.

There were hundreds of “theme camps”, groups ranging in size anywhere from a few people up to maybe a hundred, and each camp did something to entertain, amuse, aid, delight, feed, bewilder, or annoy the passing crowds. Giving out coffee, or Kool-Aid, or pancakes, or massages, or sunscreen. Showing movies. Constructing a merry-go-round, roller-skating rink, bowling alley, or haunted house ride. Creating an Irish pub, hosting live music, and giving drinks to all. Littering their turf with weird sculptures and croaking menacingly at those who approach. Firedancers, flame guns, naked brunches, bondage tutorials, costume workshops, dance clubs, temporary tattoos, DJs, art cars – Black Rock City was such a giddily unreal place that I was able to spend as long as half an hour gaping at its many spectacles before suddenly remembering why we were here.

Those were bad moments. I shuddered despite the heat, and heavy slimy trepidation congealed in the pit of my stomach, when I realized that we were chasing the two people who had left the dark bruises on my belly and Talena’s, the angry red scab that still lay between her breasts, two people who were perfectly willing and able to kill us both. We had come here because Burning Man’s anarchy was a world of its own, with no authority oversight. But that worked both ways. We would not be rescued if something went terribly wrong. We were on our own.

Eventually we ventured into the playa and past the Man, along the 12:00 walkway that led to Burning Man’s second largest structure, a mosque-like edifice called the Temple of Honor. Above us, as we walked, an airplane disgorged its load of skydivers, one of them presumably the Hatter. In the distant west, clouds of dust were beginning to form and drift above the playa.

The Temple was gorgeous, fluted pillars supporting enormous bulbs and spires, breathtaking art and architecture made of humble papier-mache and black-and-white wallpaper. Talena and I chatted and chuckled and held hands during the walk, but as we approached, we fell quiet. The dozens of other burners who stood beneath and around the Temple were hushed and serious. This was a solemn place.

Couples held each other tightly. People spoke in soft murmurs. Half a dozen people were quietly weeping. Others stood or knelt as they wrote on the Temple’s walls. The wallpapered exterior was mazily patterned in black and white, and most of the strips and patches of white that could be reached from the ground had been covered with spidery handwriting. We approached and read some of what had been written.
Philip Hann 1971-2003 He was a good man and his wife and son and friends loved him and miss him very much
I loved you, Lisa. I will always love you. All I ever wanted to know was why.
Dad I’m trying to understand how you could have done it and what must have happened to you to make you do it but it’s SO FUCKING HARD I’ll try I promise I swear
After this temple burns I will stop cutting myself
david i’m so sorry it was the worst mistake of my life. it was the worst thing i ever did.  i should have believed you. i should have trusted you. it was my fault you did it. it was my fault. god please believe me i’m so so sorry.
Naomi Anne Foster 1974-2002 Elena Sophia Anderson 1999-2002 I never believed in Heaven until I met you my daughter I will see you and mommy there I promise
   There was more, much more, some of the entries so harrowingly personal that I couldn’t finish them. There were books chained to the base of the Temple for longer messages. Some of them went on for pages. All of them were anguished, heartrending, mournful. Requiems and regrets, story after story that told of awful loss and pain.
   I began to understand. The Temple of Honor was not meant as art or architecture. It was a literal temple, a place to honour the dead, the lost, the mourned. On Sunday the entire Temple would burn to the ground. Every message here, every word that had been written, would be consumed by flame and reduced to ash by the Temple’s funeral pyre. It was a powerful thought.

After several minutes I had to stop reading. The words were too raw, too electric, and the abrupt transition from the bacchanal that was the rest of Burning Man worked like an emotional sucker punch. The overflowing sorrow of the epitaphs and lamentations all around us, the soundtrack of quiet sobs and whispers, and the colossal austere beauty of the Temple amid this dead arid land, were overwhelming. I felt like I had been immersed in terrible sadness, like it was a physical thing, a fog, and I couldn’t help but think of all the people, all the futures, I had ever lost. I took Talena’s hand, my throat thick, my eyes damp.
   “Do you have a pen?” she asked me quietly.
   I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, shrugged off my day pack, and unearthed a pen. She took it and led me to a bare patch of wall. There she wrote:
Goodbye Mom. Goodbye Dad. Goodbye Zlatan. Goodbye Sarajevo. Goodbye Bosnia. Goodbye my home. I loved you all.
Then she wrote it again in Croatian.
   “Here,” she said, handing me the pen, her voice cracking, her lips quavering. “Write something. Please.”
   I hesitated for a moment. Then I turned to the wall and wrote next to her entry, with a shaking hand, the words barely legible even to me:
Goodbye, Laura. In another world.

I felt cold tears slide down my cheeks. I tried to ignore them while I put the pen back in the day pack but I couldn’t make my limbs work properly. In the end I just dropped them both and put my arms around Talena and for some time we held each other tightly.
   The dust storm hit us as we leaned on one another. It wasn’t as bad as the Sahara’s skin-grating sandstorms, but it was rough. The playa dust was alkaline and burned our tear-soaked eyes. We took our T-shirts off and wrapped them around our heads, baring the wounds Zoltan and Zorana had left on us, not that anyone could see them in the storm’s whiteout. Between the thick whirling dust and the thin cotton we could barely see each other. We had to wait for the storm to lessen before we dared leave the Temple.
   “You’re late,” Lawrence cheerfully accused when we arrived back at our camp, our eyes red with tears and playa dust, but feeling stronger, like we had left a physical burden behind at the Temple. He sat on a folding seat he had somehow scrounged and sipped a Michelob. Saskia sat on the ground next to him, relaxed and smiling.
   “Your friend Anders is impressively generous with his beer,” I said.
   “I told him we’d go out tomorrow to get more water and resupply his beer fridge.”
   “Any flies at the honey pot?”
   “Two people wrote in the book,” Lawrence said. “Normal people. Given the highly flexible definition of ‘normal’ one uses around here. Apparently he’s been seen earlier today at the Man and walking along the Esplanade around 3:00.”
   “Sweet,” I said. “I wasn’t sure people would participate.”
   “I suppose it’s just weird enough for burners to approve,” Lawrence said.
   “Burners. I see you’re picking up the lingo,” Talena said, amused.
   “Yes. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try picking up the women.” He looked over to Saskia and gave her an up-and-down leer. “Want to go for a walk, my dear?”
   “Lawrence!” she said, scandalized. “It is rude to look at a woman like that.”
   “She acts like she thinks I don’t know that already,” Lawrence said to me.
   “I will walk with you,” Saskia said. “But you must behave.”
   Lawrence winced with exaggerated pain at the last stricture, and then the two of them left. Talena looked at me and arched a single eyebrow, smiling faintly.
   “You will not matchmake,” I said sternly.
   She smiled. “I don’t know if I need to.”
   Talena and I stayed in camp for the rest of the afternoon, screened behind our tents lest Zoltan and Zorana walk down Gospel Street and recognize us. We didn’t talk much, but our silence was warm and comfortable.

Two more people entered Zoltan sightings, both citing Center Camp Café as the location. Steve and Saskia and Lawrence returned around sunset for our dinner of corned beef, rice, canned vegetables, and canned peaches. Lawrence and Saskia brought disquieting news.
   “The Center Camp posters have been torn down,” he reported.
   We paused to absorb that.
   “Probably not randam vandals,” I said.
   “Probably not,” Talena agreed.
   “So they’ve seen the posters. But we haven’t seen them at the honey pot yet.”
   “Might be they’ll come visiting tonight,” Steve said.
   I nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe they saw us first, and now they’re the ones planning an ambush.”
   A silence fell.
   “So much for my hopes for a good night’s sleep,” Lawrence muttered. “Cheers, mate.”

“Paul,” Talena whispered urgently, shaking me awake. “Paul, someone’s here.”
   “Muh,” I croaked, wishing she would just go away and let me sleep. Then I remembered where we were. I sat straight up, burying my head in the tent fabric for a moment. “At the honey pot?”
   “Yes. Hurry.”
   I wriggled out of the sleeping bag and the tent as quickly and quietly as possible, remembering just in time to grab the shotgun mike and binoculars. I glanced at my watch. Two in the morning. The desert air was cold and windless.
   A gigantic tricycle, fifteen feet high, painted in gleaming lacquered primary colours, was parked in front of the honey pot. Dim lights emanated from the hubs of its three wheels, red and green and blue. A single brilliant headlight perched atop a pole that protruded up from its cab, like a giant glowing eye on a stalk. The tricycle was so elegantly designed it looked like it had come straight from the set of Alice In Wonderland as directed by Tim Burton. If I had seen it anywhere other than Burning Man I would have assumed someone had slipped hallucinogens into my food.
   I saw flickers of motion, someone descending the ladder that hung from the tricycle’s side, someone else in front of the tent. I couldn’t tell how many. The lantern in front of the honey pot had gone out or been extinguished. I fumbled with the shotgun mike, which looked like a lot like a police billy club, putting its headphones in my ears and trying to find the “on” switch. Eventually I succeeded and aimed it at the honey pot. Nothing happened. After a moment I realized I was holding it backwards and rotated it 180 degrees.
   The noise was deafening, like the sound of plastic being torn amplified to hardcore-clubber levels. I grabbed frantically at the volume control and turned it down. When the noise dropped to sane levels I realized it was the sound of someone going through a tent door.
   “What is it?” Talena whispered. I removed a headphone and passed it to her. We stood next to one another, listening.
   “There’s nothing in there but a bunch of water,” a voice said. Neither Zoltan nor Zorana; an American voice, male.
   “But it’s him, right?” Another male American voice.
   A light went on at the honey pot, aimed at the picture of Zoltan duct-taped to the tent’s exterior. We saw three people silhouetted, two men and one woman, before it switched off.
   “It’s definitely him,” said the first voice.
   “I don’t like it,” an American woman said. “Maybe we should call it off.”
   “It’s weird, but it’s not cops,” the first voice said. “I don’t know what it is.”
   “We should make him tell us,” the woman said.
   “Make him?” the second voice asked, incredulous. “I’m not going to try to make that motherfucker tell me anything. I’m going to smile at him and his crazy wife real nicely and pay them for their cargo and get the fuck out of there. And I’m sure as hell not going to tell them we’re calling it off. Those two are fucking crazy.”
   “We shouldn’t have agreed to this,” the woman said.
   “Too late,” the first man said. “Kevin’s right. I don’t think we can back out now.”
   Talena and I looked at each other and nodded our mutual understanding. It wasn’t Zoltan or Zorana. These were the drug dealers, the ones who had come to Burning Man with thirteen million cash U.S. dollars to buy Sinisa’s high-grade Afghani heroin. They had obviously already met the Couple From Hell.
   “Whatever,” the first voice said. “There’s nothing else here. Let’s go.”
   The light went back on and the three figures climbed back onto the tricycle.
   “We should follow them,” Talena whispered.
   “I know,” I said. “Let’s wake up the others.”
   The headlight on the spire atop the tricycle’s cab lit up and it started to move away, even though the third climber was still only halfway up the ladder.
   “Shit,” Talena said. “No time. Come on.”
   Black Rock City’s 5 MPH speed limit made for a low-speed pursuit, but we still had to jog to keep up. The tricycle went inward, towards the Esplanade, and then to our dismay it continued across the playa towards the Man, picking up speed as it went, breaking the speed limit and getting up to the the speed of a fast run. Both Talena and I were wearing socks and no shoes; there was no way we could keep up with it all the way across the playa.
   “Shit,” I panted. “Fuck!”
   “Wait! Come here! Please!” Talena called out – not to me, but to an art car she noticed driving along Authority, the first street out from the Esplanade. “Car” was really too grand a term. The vehicle that swerved and turned towards us was a motorized couch on wheels, piloted by a naked old man with a beard that descended to his navel. He sat in the middle of the couch, directing its motion with a joystick between his legs.
   “Give you a ride, darling?” he asked Talena, leering.
   “Yes!” Talena said.

 We boarded the couch, Talena to his left, me to his right.

 “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Talena said, “but follow that art car!” She pointed at the light of the tricycle, fading in the distance.
   The old man looked at her for a moment, looked at me, shrugged, laughed, and pushed the joystick forward. The couch leapt forward, pushing us back into its lumpy seats.
   “Holy shit, this thing is fast,” I said approvingly, part flattery, partly genuinely impressed.
   “It’s all about the power to mass ratio,” the old man said. “What’s that you got there?”
   I saw no point in lying. “Binoculars and a shotgun microphone.”
   He raised his eyebrows. “Spying on someone?”
   “Yes,” Talena said.
   “Well then. I’ll keep a discreet distance.”
   We followed the tricycle all the way to 10:00, one of the ends of Black Rock City’s horseshoe, where music from a half-dozen rave camps still pounded rhythmically and would until dawn, and along 10:00, all the way to Vision, near the city’s uttermost edge, and to the only camp we had seen other than DeathGuild which had a fence. A six-foot-high chain-link fence with a gate, guarding a large trapezoidal area that contained a half-dozen geodesic domes and three Ryder trucks.

One of the trucks hummed with generator noise, and there was enough light to make out some details through my binoculars. There were only about a half-dozen figures moving about, but I guessed the camp as a whole had some forty residents. Each dome had not just its own electric light but a fridge, unthinkably decadent luxury for Burning Man. I thought I saw an espresso machine. And there were three other art cars parked in the complex: a giant spider, a Batmobile straight out of the movie, and a van dressed up as a great white shark. Like the tricycle, and like everything else in this camp, the production values were very high. Which made sense. After all, if we were right, this was a camp of multimillionaire drug dealers.
   “You want to go knock on their door?” our driver asked.
   “Not tonight, thank you,” Talena said politely. “That’ll be fine.”
   The driver turned the couch around and returned to the Man.
   “Have a good burn,” he said cheerfully, when we disembarked.
   “Have a good burn,” we echoed, and walked back to camp, feeling triumphant.
* * *
   Major heroin dealers lived the high life. No question about it. The crew at Smack Dealer Camp, as we christened it, dressed in expensive clothes, did a lot of expensive drugs, and surrounded themselves with expensive toys and expensive women. They talked about chalets in Lake Tahoe and yachts docked in Honolulu and booking whole floors of Manhattan hotels. Mostly they were at Burning Man to party, although a few of them seemed to have come for the art, and one talked learnedly about studying Burning Man’s distributed community as an example of what the future would bring.
   You can learn a lot about a group of people if you spend a whole day spying on them. Of the dozen men and two dozen women, only five men and two women were actually involved in the business. The rest were buddies and hangers-on. High-school friends who had grown up in suburban Orange County with the core crew and now acted as gofers and kept the camp running smoothly so the real dealers didn’t have to do any work, and lithe young women who were there for decorative value and/or to sleep with the men in exchange for living off their largesse, playing with their many toys, and partaking of their endless supply of drugs. Ecstasy, acid, and nitrous oxide were the most popular substances. The dealers themselves used drugs only sparingly, and no one was allowed to touch the hard drugs that were their business.
   The core crew and most of the men were in their early thirties, and all their money and flashy tattoos couldn’t hide the fact that the men in the camp tended towards pudgy, greasy, slovenly, lazy and unattractive. The cloud of decorative women – Talena quickly took to calling them “concubines” – were in their early twenties, some of them embracing their party-across-America lifestyle, others torn by moral qualms, sexual repulsion, or the desire for some kind of normalcy. It was an interesting crowd and under other circumstances I would have studied them with utter fascination. The intellectual member of the core crew wanted to retire, but the rest wanted to move from rich to ultra-rich, from first class to corporate jets, and that conflict simmered all day. They complained about money launderers who took forty per cent of their hard-earned money. A woman agonized to one another about whether she should sleep with the man who invited her, she wanted to but worried he would then lose interest and expel her from this drug dealer’s Eden she was enjoying so much. Another told her friend in strict confidence that she couldn’t stand the lifestyle any more and she was going to go back to stripping as soon as they got back from Burning Man. Two of the gofers resented the core crew because they couldn’t get promoted into membership and were thinking of striking out on their own. Just a few of Smack Dealer Camp’s dozen in-progress micro-soap-operas.
   For a group of big-money drug dealers they were amazingly easy to spy on. Maybe they had let their guard down for Burning Man. Maybe they had just grown overconfident. They seemed to be good at their business. None of the core crew had ever been arrested, and while one of them talked about guns a lot, and we briefly saw one of the gofers carry two handguns from one Ryder truck to another, we overheard no anecdotes of violence.

We had moved our camp almost next door to theirs, killing two birds with one stone; we no longer risked discovery by staying close to the address Zoltan and Zorana knew from the posters they had torn down, and we were close enough to Smack Dealer Camp that we could sit in our tent with binoculars and shotgun mike and see and hear just about everything that went on. It was uncomfortable work, our tent was like an oven even with door and window flaps wide open and two rapidly-melting bags of newly-purchased ice cooling the air a little, but at the same time it was voyeuristically fun.
   “Smack Dealer Camp,” I suggested to Talena at lunch, crackers with corned beef and more soup, “would be the greatest reality TV show ever.”
   In the afternoon, when Steve and Lawrence and Saskia took over the eyes-and-ears work, Talena and I went roving across the disc of playa that surrounded the Man, and the vast wedge between the Man and the trash fence, looking at the art installations. Some of them were amazing. Some of them were just weird. A vividly painted forty-foot-tall fallen chandelier. A huge ball of fire on a chain that endless wound and unwound itself around an iron pillar. A three-story house of wood made of fifty-two wooden panels, each one painted as a different playing card. A field of little bobblehead dogs rippling in the wind. A telephone with which one could talk to God, who had an unexpectedly nasal voice. A tall and disturbing jagged metal sculpture of some inhuman beast. A row of blown-up, six-foot by four-foot pictures of two dozen people, along with a note from the artist explaining that she rejected family and country and religion; these pictures were of her closest friends, who she saw as her nation, her tribe, her gods. I looked at that one for a long time.
   After the art we went to the trapeze. I expected a long line but there were only a few other burners and we both spend a giddy hour leaping and swinging about, high above the net, learning how to swing from our legs, to backflip into the net, to do a two-person catch-and-release. We cruised back to dinner high on endorphins, giggling and nudging one another like teenagers.
   By the time we got back our camp had changed. Steve and Lawrence and Saskia sat on folding seats beneath a tall shade canopy, drinking bottles of Stella Artois, playing cards on the red surface of a brand-new cooler. As we approached, flabbergasted, Steve and Lawrence loudly started to complain that Saskia, who had a much larger pile of paperclips in front of her, was clearly cheating.
   “What the hell?” Talena asked. “Where did you get all this?”
   “Empire. Turns out they stock up on all this gear so lazy forgetful people like us don’t have to drive all the way back to Reno,” Lawrence said. “Very thoughtful of them. Can you believe Anders wasn’t happy I bought him Stella? He wanted Michelob instead? There’s just no telling with some people. It’s good that we moved. He’s clearly not a trustworthy neighbour.”
   “Speaking of neighbours,” I said, “what happened to keeping an eye on our new ones?”
   “No need, mate,” Steve said. “They went and blabbed it all.”
   “Blabbed what?”
   “Tomorrow night,” Lawrence said. “Four and thirty, ante meridian. Between the Temple of Gravity and the trash fence. That’s where the deal goes down.” He grinned. “You like that? ‘The deal goes down’? Very convincingly American of me, no?”
   “Lawrence,” Talena said, “you couldn’t convince Helen Keller that you were American.”
   “Flattery will get you everywhere,” he said, pleased.
   “Tomorrow night,” I repeated. Somehow it seemed too soon. I had thought it would happen Saturday, the night of the Burn, when all the rest of Burning Man clustered around the Man and watched him erupt into a pillar of flame.
   “A bit of action,” Steve said, cracking his knuckles. “About bloody time. Tell you the truth, all this sitting around watching was getting a bit dull.”