Knife Fight and Other Struggles (20 page)

I blinked, and my eyes stung ferociously, so I blinked again.

In front of me stood a tall man, hair close-cropped in the Marine style. He wore an olive-green T-shirt that showcased a powerful physique—black trousers that tucked into high military boots. His fists were clenched at his side. Jaw clenched too, with tendons swelling and subsiding up and down his neck. His eyes were wide. Brimming with tears.

And again, I blinked.

Behind him, on the staircase, was an upright vacuum cleaner, a dozen steps up, unattended, abandoned—the power cord descending taut from the dark of the second floor, like a single, black marionette string. At the very end of its reach.

Once more: the blink. With a grandiose leisure now, as though the passage of time had slowed . . . was readying itself to stop here, in the infinite silence of the instant between heartbeats.

I couldn’t let it. I didn’t let it. I took a shuddering breath—and shouted, and so did he, and then we both screamed, yowled like animals, into the dark chambers of 12 Sandhurst Circle.

And it was only then I turned from him—and fled out the front door, into the deepening night.

His name was Scott Neeson, and the haircut did not lie. He was a former U.S. Marine Sergeant, recruited after three tours in Iraq. He was living just now at 84 Twilling Row, and there he would stay until he could finish building a vast wooden deck with an installed hot tub and a covered grill-house.

He came over with a twelve-pack of beer and a pair of sirloins, the day after I settled in to 37 Ridgeway. So named because the houses scattered along the northern edge, their yards edging on a drop that looked down on woodlots and farmlands in the old marsh. A ridge-way. In moving in to #37, I had inherited an immense barbecue grill, five burners on the grill itself, with a small gas range attached. The cover was fire-engine red, with a round brass thermometer dial in the middle that looked like a device from a Jules Verne novel. Neeson, sporting a pale blue Hawaiian shirt and long brown cargo shorts, came around the back of the house in the late afternoon, set down the clinking case of beer and fired the beast up.

“You’re joining us,” he said, bending to pull bottles from the case. He handed me one.

“Something like that.” I twisted the bottleneck and set the cap down on the deck-railing.

“Good. We can use good people here. And it’s a nice place.”

“Is it?”

“It is. Nice big houses, and the money’s good when you don’t have to pay for them. Nobody bothers you.” Neeson turned to the grill, examined the dial. “Pretty light lifting, is what. You come from the Service?”

“You think I’m a Marine?”

“I thought you were a Marine, I’d have said the corps. But service isn’t the word I was looking for, either.” He snapped his fingers as he spoke.

“You’re thinking about Company?”

He nodded. I shook my head.

“Does that even mean anything?” he asked. “You saying no?”

I smiled. “I told you, I’d have to kill you.” And although that is what I always said, and that is what most of us always said when we could not think of a proper joke, Neeson laughed as though he’d just heard it.

“But you’re from up the chain,” he said, turning serious, “aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“You came here to check out what was happening with. . . .”

“Nu.”

“With him.” Neeson lifted the grill and peered into the dark, hot space. “We met in Sandhurst, you and I.”

“We did.”

He let the grill cover down.

“And now, you’re moving in.”

I took a long pull of my beer. It was a dark-coloured ale from a local brewery. I thought I might remember the brand, for later.

“Word gets around,” I said. “I’m moving in.”

“That’s some inquisition you must be planning. How long do you think?”

I sipped my beer. Stephan had told me I could have Ridgeway as long as I needed it, so long as I kept up the lawn and did the same for four other houses, two to either side of mine. By the book, I would rotate out of it after a month. But that could be extended, he explained, if I were engaged in some special project, one that only I could properly finish—like Neeson’s deck.

Neeson leaned back against the railing, crossed his arms. “So you have any questions? Figured I’d come here, save you another trip out.”

“In.”

“Yeah. It is ‘in’ from here, isn’t it?”

We looked at each other for a moment. In the sunlight, Neeson’s face took on a harder quality than it had in the shadowy foyer of Sandhurst. No tears, that was one thing. But the late afternoon tempered him in other ways. Lines at the corners of his eyes, a droop in the corner of his mouth, flesh beneath his eyes folded like lava-flow. It made him a hard statue that the years had eroded as much as they ever would. He was a man who knew about car batteries and pliers.

“What have you learned?” I asked.

Neeson opened the top again, and the heat hit us like a wind. He nodded, lifted the sirloins from their wrapping, and draped them over the grill. There was a ferocious sizzling and a great cloud of smoke came up.

“Better get a spray-bottle,” said Neeson. “There’ll be flare-ups, and we don’t want to turn this fine meat to shoe-leather.”

I found a tall plastic spray bottle beside the sink, filled it with tap water, and hurried back. Sure enough, he was right—fat from the steaks had dripped down to the steel plates that stood in for the rocks you’d find in older models, and it was burning furiously. We sprayed and sprayed, but the flames never quite went out.

The subdivision is fairly remote from major shopping districts. The nearest is a forty-minute drive through farm country, past cornfields and finally across a great, near-empty parking lot, to the massive building supply store that had once been a continent-spanning chain.

The road is never very busy, but it is a particularly pleasant drive on a Sunday, in the dark green minivan from Ridgeway’s garage. It is a drive that I have done more than once—gathering paint and lumber and what exotic power tools as are not already in the well-equipped workshop in Ridgeway’s basement.

Some days, I recognized my neighbours in the aisles: Scott Neeson on more than one occasion, hauling sheets of plywood as big as flags and bags of concrete on orange-painted dollies; Stephan and Lynette, a slender south-Asian woman some years older than he, looking speculatively at kitchen cabinetry; Luis, a small and swarthy man with black hair to his shoulders, a thin and patchy beard and an unstoppably cheerful grin, who one Sunday afternoon admitted to me that he is flirting with the idea of building a sauna, but mostly shops for floor lamps and fine art prints. “There are so many
rooms
,” he explained.

One day, I met Benoit there.

“It has been months,” he said. We were loitering in the aisle for drop-ceilings, me in my Chinos and golf shirt, Benoit in a white starched shirt and tie, his navy blazer slung over his shoulder.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry.” Benoit snorted. “I hear that you have taken a house there. You are doing—what?”

“It’s a complex enterprise. I cannot complete it in a day.”

“Months,” he repeated and glared up at me. Benoit was a head shorter than me, and heavy in the gut. If he was higher on the chain than me, it was not by much—and although I don’t think he was much lower, either, I have taken it as a matter of pride that he has never had the capacity to intimidate me. But when our gazes broke, it was I, not he, who looked away.

“I haven’t reported much, I know,” I said.

“You haven’t reported at all. We received word of your arrival from the Superintendent. But from you?
Rien
.”

Benoit led us to the end of the aisle as a couple pushing a big orange cart appeared at the other.

“What is your impression of Mr. Nu?” he asked. “From the meetings you have no doubt had by now?”

I didn’t answer, and Benoit nodded.

“No meeting, hmm?”

We rounded the end of the tandem, and stepped into an aisle filled with exterior siding materials and window frames. Benoit smiled gently.

“You think that I will be shocked now, and angry—don’t you?”

“You would have the right.”

He shrugged. “I, the right. Do you know that there was a time that I actually feared you? Now—
you
tell
me
I have the right to be angry with you. I wonder: is it because I have become so much more impressive?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, and he nodded knowingly.

“Marisse,” he said. “What was your impression of her, after our interview at the Marriott?”

“You have my report—”

“I do,” he said. “Now tell me. Do you still think that she suffers from a ‘simple dissociative disorder resulting from mission-related trauma’?”

“That’s what I wrote?”

“It is.” Benoit looked down. “Two weeks ago, she killed herself. Shot herself through the eye with a semi-automatic pistol. Her customary sidearm. You’ll forgive me if I cannot summon the precise make—”

“A Glock,” I said. “Lately. She also has a Desert Eagle.”

“Not the Desert Eagle. Absurd. No. The Glock. Yes. She was the fourth member of the team that assailed Larchmount to attempt suicide, the second to succeed.”

I put my hand on the shelving and leaned hard. It had been built for siding and window frames and, on the other side, ceiling tiles, and it didn’t so much as quaver.

“Her family?”

“Grieving, I imagine. I have not had opportunity to inquire in detail. We are concerned now with the examination of other links in the chain.”

We hurried from window frames and siding, and moved into gardening supplies. There, Benoit expounded on the fate of the transfer team, whose leader had simply vanished three weeks before; on the firm’s government contact, a small former FBI woman named Lester, who had spent ten minutes with Mr. Nu, the two of them on either side of a glass barrier . . . suddenly and inexplicably replaced by an older man—because, the firm’s intelligence indicated, she had gouged her eyes out and attempted to disembowel herself with an X-Acto knife during a debriefing.

And then . . . the matter of Sandhurst, and the changes that had wrought themselves there.

“You have noticed,” said Benoit, “or perhaps you have not—that we have suspended prisoner intake at Sandhurst these past few months. We are making other arrangements.”

I had not.

“You must have noticed,” said Benoit, “that in spite of your obvious failure to resolve matters—we have not taken steps to replace, or indeed even supervise you.”

That, I had.

“Don’t worry. I am not doing so now. You can continue where you are—as long as you wish—to do what you wish. You will be compensated. You may leave. Or stay. You may also, of course, do the thing you went to do. But I will remind you, my friend. . . .”

And we made it through gardening supplies, and stood by the tall glass doors that were wide enough to haul a house frame through, and Benoit extended his hand.

“. . . Marisse shot herself in the eye.”

And with that, he turned and stepped into the brilliant Sunday afternoon sunlight. And that was the last I ever saw or heard of Benoit.

One evening not long after, Scott Neeson stopped by Ridgeway. No beer this time. He came with a single bottle of red wine. It had no label and he bashfully admitted that was because he had made it himself, using a kit he’d obtained from the wine-making outlet next to the building supply store. He suspected that it might not be adequate. I suggested we try it and see.