“With all the swimming did it get wet?”
“Not very. It was in a waterproof bag that leaked a little the first time I went in. After the first dunking I rinsed it out in fresh water and I put it in a waterproof Ziploc bag, then back inside the waterproof bag. After that I think it was dry.”
“It’s plastic. It should be fine. I can get you someone. Probably someone in academia. But you’re right about Grace. It’s their property. Trade secrets. No wonder they were after you.”
“How dangerous are they?”
“I think they are business people. Would they kill somebody? No. They’ll try to get their property back. This is really eating on you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“It was an honest mistake with Jason. You can’t blame yourself. ...”
“Well, I do. And now to top it off I’m going behind Sam’s back.”
“You have no ill motive whatsoever. You’re trying to protect yourself and Jason.”
As she left Josh’s she felt guilty, nasty. There had been a little magic cord between her and Sam—something mysterious and indefinable. Now it was gone. At home she sat down at the computer and tried to compose an e-mail to Sam, but she couldn’t think what to say.
“What are we gonna do?” Paul asked.
“Hit it head-on and hard.”
They waited thirty minutes over some take-out Chinese food that Typhony brought from her brother-in-law’s place. He was blond and hadn’t a speck of Chinese blood, but he cooked great Chinese.
With one last swallow Sam picked up the phone.
“What have you done?” he said to Anna. His voice was firm but soft.
“Please, Sam, just trust me.”
“I trust you fine. You have one chance. Tell me what you’ve done.”
“Don’t be a jerk, Sam. You’re putting me in a corner.”
“I’m gonna hang up now.”
“No!” she shouted. “Can’t you see I need some autonomy here? Some freedom. You’re pulling this ridiculous macho crap on me.”
“Listen to me.”
He could hear her take a deep breath.
“I’m going to have a sponsor call you.”
Before she could ask “A sponsor?” he hung up.
“Well?” Paul said.
“We call Peter Malkey.”
She plopped the receiver into its cradle. She should have known what Sam was capable of. Damn him.
The phone rang.
“Anna. It was great to see you at the party last month.”
Instantly she recognized Peter Malkey. The producer was one of the few LA people she trusted.
“Are you calling about Sam?”
“He gave you the ‘Sam’ card, huh? Then he likes you.”
“What if he hadn’t liked me?”
“Actually, whether he liked you or not, you might have gotten any one of the other cards. He’s got John of the
Silverwind.
Sonny of the
Silverwind.
Or maybe Robert I don’t know them all. Those of us in his little club mostly call him Sam the History Man.” Malkey seemed to search for what to say next. “This call is unusual because you already know him. Few people know him before they get this call, and most don’t even know him after they get it. Sam works in mysterious ways.”
“Well, you tell Sam to get his mysterious ass back on the phone. He hung up on me.”
“That attitude won’t work with Sam. Not even for Anna Wade.”
“All right, what do I do?”
“You told someone to find out about Sam, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” She sighed.
“Who?”
“Josh.”
“Oh, damn.”
“What’s that mean—oh, damn?”
“Josh still loves you. Everybody knows that. He’s stubborn and powerful. Bad combination. Somehow you have to make him stop if you ever want to hear from Sam again. I can vouch for Sam. He’s pure gold. Total integrity. Other than stretching the law a little.”
“I’m not going to simper. I want to talk to Sam. Tell him to call me.”
“A contest of wills. Okay. I told you I can’t do that. But he says you have an e-mail address. Write him.”
With that Peter hung up.
She typed out an e-mail:
We went through a lot together. You need to help me through this. I need to know you’re safe for me.
She sent it. Instantly a reply came back, and a dialogue began.
Trust Peter.
I want to trust you.
Good, that’s fine. Trust me.
I need information!!!
Good-bye.
Come back here and fight like a man, you weenie!!!!!
Nothing. Boiling, she called Peter.
“Help me.”
“I can’t.”
“What the hell do I do?”
“Call Josh. Tell him it’s imperative that he stop immediately.”
She called Josh and argued for twenty minutes. Finally, hearing the desperation in her voice, he agreed to stop, at least temporarily.
She called Peter back and explained.
“Temporarily isn’t good enough. Make him stop until you tell him to start.”
Josh relented.
Her e-mail in-box dinged.
Good girl.
She typed back:
Don’t call me girl.
Remember, Peter said to charm me. So charm.
Crapola on you!
Call Peter for lessons.
The phone rang. It was Peter.
“He wants to meet you in LA as planned, Friday at eight P.M., but you’re to meet at the Fish House instead of the Plaza. The Fish House is—”
“I know where it is.”
“Okay. There will be a man at your door shortly. His name is Shohei. Don’t ask him a bunch of questions. He’s Sam’s man. He’s there to protect you.”
She rolled her eyes but said nothing.
“Also he says this about your meeting. Are you listening closely?”
“Yes.” She sighed into the mouthpiece.
“You know, you’re Anna Wade. You’re above whining. Not even a whisper of a whine should cross your lips.”
“Peter, how did you know to say that?”
“It’s word for word what Sam told me to say.”
“Does Sam scare you?”
“In the beginning he scared me every day.”
“Does he bug people?”
“Oh, he bugs a lot of people. I’d say he just bugged the hell out of you.”
Normally she was in control of everything and everybody in her life. Even the chaos was ordered. Nothing about what was happening with Sam felt like control.
Growing up, she had not been one of those kids who kept her things organized all the time. Her room was usually a mess. Her mother nagged her when there was a spare moment.
However, at the end of every week she picked up her things, got all the books on the shelf, the clothes in the hamper, the papers in their proper place or thrown away. She started over. Thus, as to her physical space, she presided over a gradual deterioration of orderliness that was always recovered at week’s end by a sort of reverse big bang.
Even in adulthood she lived that way when she wasn’t traveling. Her assistant was to leave her worktable alone until the end of the week. There could be no inspiration on Thursday if it didn’t look like she had been doing something on Wednesday. On Saturday morning, however, she and her assistant cleared her desk so that it was completely free of everything but the telephone and the letter opener. Things would be filed, put away, or shelved as appropriate.
Not only her desk but the entire apartment was to be put back in order at week’s end. The magazines that on Friday were on all the little tables, or the manuscripts on the couch, or the week’s opened mail at the kitchen desk, were all to be gone by Saturday morning. Normally Anna started before the cleaning lady arrived, feeling as though she had to get the place clean so that it would be presentable to the cleaners. Somehow this struck her assistant, whose back ached along with Anna’s, as slightly ironic. Anna couldn’t see it as the least bit strange.
People were different. With people she was much more cautious because unlike things, people could not be put back in place once they moved. She liked the people in her life not to move. Although she found it disquieting, she discovered that she tended to relate to people on the basis of how they fit into her plans. If they didn’t have a place in her plans, she tried to be nice, because she wanted everyone to like her, but she didn’t want that more than she wanted to get on with her plans. That was especially true by the time she reached eighteen. It made understanding Jimmy difficult because he didn’t have any plans.
After her father died, a slow determination began to build in Anna that culminated when she moved out. It wasn’t determination to be on her own, or to be a movie actress, or to find the right man. It was a determination to
make
life happen in place of
letting
life happen. That was the only way she could later explain it to herself and the few others who got to know her well.
It seemed as though the day she moved out her mother began paying attention to her. In fact they began talking almost every day. That was the year she wrote the poem. She lied when she told Sam she couldn’t recite it.
Day Care
“I’ll take you with me,” she would whisper each morning
and pull strands of hair from the slick of tears
that washed across my face. “Look,
I’ll put you in my coat pocket”—
this made me smile, this way she had
of pretending I was still tiny enough
to ride in her pouch—“and you can come with me
to all my classes, then at lunch
I’ll slip you little bites of my sandwich
and if I get a Coke in the afternoon,
you can have a sip” and I knew she would,
rather than leave me at the day care
with its broken games and pots of dried paint.
Because she knew what it was like to be apart,
like a valve of my heart had closed,
like a lung was slowly deflating.
Everyone else tore across the playground
howling and flinging sand at each other as if
they were born there, as if
they never felt cut off from oxygen,
as if they never held their breath,
turned white and damp, couldn’t exhale
until someone came to take them home.
Here I would wait all day,
try to make myself smaller, try to imagine myself
wrapped in the flannel lining of her pocket,
among the lint and bread crumbs
until my pulse slowed to match hers,
until she began to breathe for the both of us,
until I lifted my mouth to her fingers for food,
went back to that place where I was a part of her.
I knew she would take me back, on those mornings
when she had to leave me in the parking lot,
I knew she would shrink me and keep me with her if she could.
Sam knew he had only temporarily cured Anna of the snooping disease, but told Paul that New York could dismantle the parabolic mike aimed at Joshua’s window and take it back to Anna’s, with the result that they would have two such mikes aimed at Anna’s apartment. They would also need to get the mike out of the sprinkler system.
Next he went to work on the Grady Wade situation. He had run a credit check. Not surprisingly she had a couple of credit cards, but they were billed to a PO box. Sam had a cop friend run a DMV check, and that yielded a driver’s license and street address.
Sam took an outdated e-mail address given him by Anna, called for Grogg, and asked him to do what he could with the old address. Perhaps when she changed e-mail addresses she kept the same service provider. When they breached the security for the service provider’s database, they found her current e-mail address.
A random password generator quickly concluded that her password was Tease.”
They viewed her in-box and copied the contents. They needed to extract her deleted items and sent items. To accomplish their task they put an electronic watch on her line and waited for her to access the Internet. Fortunately it didn’t take long. They sent in a retrieval program based on computer virus technology that went into her desktop to copy and then compress her deleted-items folder, her sent-items folder, and all her personal correspondence under “My Documents.” When her computer was at rest, but on, it went to the “connect” function of her modem, and dialed up her Internet provider and sent an e-mail to Big Brain with a “winzip” file containing copies of all of her deleted and sent items as well as the correspondence from “My Documents.” The virus then removed the sent-item e-mail that was the only trail back to Big Brain. Thereafter the virus self-destructed, leaving no trace and doing no damage to the computer. They called the entire process and the program a “Grogg Job.”
Sam now knew substantially more about her, including her current employer. He called the manager of a cab company with whom he did business, and for a thousand dollars cash asked him to query all his drivers about the Gold Spurs, where she worked. An hour and twenty minutes more and Sam had the private phone of the Gold Spurs management, the names of all three bartenders, the doorman, and the owners, along with names of cabbies who knew Grady or the establishment.
Big Brain broke down the computer e-mails and correspondence documents, isolating all declarative sentences and focusing particularly on any sentence that included a descriptive emotional word or phrase such as glad, mad, pissed off, happy, heartbroken, and the like.
Big Brain then did a loose but revealing personality inventory on Grady, which Sam printed out and placed in an envelope marked “Spring.”
In a few minutes they had a cabby on the line who knew the Gold Spurs manager. The manager was new. Very professional. A straight-up guy. One of the cabby’s wealthy regular fares went to the place twice weekly and usually paid for the cabby to go in. Since the patron was a high roller, the manager came around. Always count on the cabbies.
Sam was on the freeway, headed to the establishment, in minutes; for another two hundred dollars the cabby greased the skids with the manager and the bartender on duty. (Of course both names went immediately into Big Brain for future use.)
Gold Spurs was a big sprawling place with a lot of limos. Money obviously flowed here; bouncers were thick and Sam saw plenty of tuxedo-clad floor managers. The place featured semiprivate rooms, nonalcoholic beer and soft drinks, chocolate-covered strawberries, and a menu of sorts.
Sam wanted Grady Wade, known as Mirage, in a semiprivate room. Normally the rooms would hold a party of eight and went for three hundred dollars per hour. Plus the girl at thirty dollars a dance for steady lap dances or a hundred and fifty dollars per half hour for friendly chats and lap dances, as the customer required. Before Sam went into the room he needed some background. There was a little bristling from a floor manager at the request for information about Grady, but it could be arranged for two hundred dollars—just local color about her work at the club, no address, no phone number.
Upstairs in the VIP lounge he found Nester, the so-called bartender who poured soft drinks. The guy was handsome, not too smart, and obviously spent the better part of his mornings pumping iron. Sam elected to go straight to the manager.
Two twenty-dollar bills got Nester to flick his head with practiced vanity at the office door.
Sam was greeted by a man with a neatly trimmed beard, a slim build, and a seemingly genuine smile. Not the sort he expected to find.
“I’m Will,” Sam said.
“Come in. I’m Guy.”
The office was nice, even plush. Guy had putters and golf balls in the corner and a carpet cup and fake green behind his desk.
“What can you tell me about Grady Wade?”
“You don’t look like the type to get moonfaced over a young dancer.” Guy smiled to take the sting out of the comment. “Or a serial killer.”
“That’s gratifying,” Sam said.
“It would be helpful if I knew your motives.”
“I’m a friend of her aunt’s. I think maybe Grady needs some help, but I’m not sure, and I want to find out.”
“Fair enough.”
“Tell me about her. I mean about her, not how she wiggles her ass.”
“Men admire her in droves. They follow her around like sick puppies. Her hair is golden, her eyes are the deepest blue. None of the customers can usually catch the sadness. They watch the plastered-on smile.
“She loves to please the crowd, she wants them all to fall in love so that she can walk away and leave them hurting, wanting more. She succeeds.
“She can smile and touch a head or pat a shoulder, and some old guy with his tobacco-stained teeth will lay his head over where that hand touched. He’s trying like hell to remember what it was like to be eighteen.
“She likes all the downtrodden. If a rich man catcalls a dancer, she’ll walk up and throw a Coke square in his face. Of course I threaten to fire her; half the men in this strip club are here to watch Grady throw her butt at the door boy. Or they’re sitting around waiting until she pats their shoulder, or if the planets are lined up right and the gods are smiling, kisses their cheek and squeezes their ass.
“More than anything else she wants someone to discover that she’s something special and yet she’s terribly afraid of it.”
Sam nodded his understanding.
“She had a baby when she was seventeen. She loved that kid out of her mind. That baby was the light in her soul. Maybe she loved him too much. He died when he was a year old. Name was Jace. Dad’s nickname as a kid was Jace. Her dad didn’t come to the funeral.
“All the men move across the room to be near her. Her regulars, the guys with the big money that she goes for, have learned to be cool and sit in the shadows. That’s how you get to be a Grady regular.
“Her dad has never come to the place but if he showed an interest, he could maybe motivate her to make something of herself. She’s smart enough to go to college but won’t. She is jealous as hell of her aunt’s success and won’t admit it. Since you’re sort of the Salvation Army, I think she just started coke. Maybe in the last week. Maybe only once, but I think she started.”
“When did you fall in love with her?” Sam asked.
The man laughed and shook his head. “Back when I was just a customer, managing another business.”
“You couldn’t land her. How come?”
“You tell me. Once when she’d had a couple too many Harvey Wall Bangers, I thought I was making headway. We talk but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
“Have you slept with her?”
“Of course. Not that it’s any of your business.”
Sam rose. “You’ve been more than helpful. Thanks.”
Sam held out a fanned handful of cash. Guy shook his head and waved it off.
“Thanks again. I’m going to see if Grady can do something for herself,” Sam said.
“Have at it. Once Grady makes up her mind it’s history. You’ll see. Good luck.”
“I’ll wait for her to come around,” Sam said, shaking his hand. “You think I could buy her shifts for five days, starting tonight?”
“No need. She is a free agent. But you won’t get to her. She wants no part of her aunt and she’ll smell you coming a mile away. I could talk to her for you ...”
“No, thanks. I’ll go down in flames by myself.” Sam let himself out.
He parted with another twenty-five dollars to find his way to a semiprivate room with the help of a floor manager. Then he parted with the three-hundred-dollar room cost. At least the couch was comfortable. For some reason Guy wanted Sam to believe that he was a straight-up in-love guy. That was interesting. He read a magazine to pass the time.
Grady was standing over him before he realized it. “Expensive place to read a magazine, under that pathetic little light.”
The way she said it, she sounded as if she were talking about his genitals.
“You haven’t met me and already you don’t like me.”
“I don’t like people throwing their money around asking about me. Especially ones sent by my aunt.”
“One hour of your time—a thousand dollars.”
“That’s a lot of lap dances.”
“No dances, just talk. You have to talk for the money.”
“What do I have to talk about?”
“Your life.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re here to save me. That’s why Anna sent you.”
“That’s right. And something tells me you want to be saved.” Sam stood and looked into her eyes. “Now do I stay or leave?”
She hesitated. “What’s your name?”
“Sam. Make up your mind. I haven’t got all evening.”
“All right.”
“For another thousand you come with me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. I talked with Guy. He’s got no objections.”
“Is he part of this?” She looked surprised.
“No. But he seems like maybe he wants you out of here almost as much as you want out. I know you’re in this for the money. There’s two grand for you to come talk to me. Way more than you typically net in an evening.”
“It’s just business? Just talk? Nothing more?”
“Just business; go get dressed.”
“I’d like to talk to Guy first.”
“What’s he going to tell you?”
“I don’t know. What do you know?”
“I know a lot. Enough to care. Now go get dressed.”
While Grady changed her clothes she dialed Guy’s office on her cell phone.
Guy’s first reaction mirrored her own: This Sam was just another droid sent by her aunt. When Guy couldn’t dissuade her from going with Sam he encouraged her, and she thought that a bit odd.
“You promise to stay in touch?” Guy asked.