The Decoy (21 page)

'I'm doing, uh — there was this time when I had to get to the airport and I lost my car keys. I got into a real panic.'

'Why did you panic?'

'Because I had only, like, two minutes to find them or I'd miss my plane.'

'So what happened after two minutes?'

'What?'

'What happened after two minutes? You were looking for the keys for what, about five minutes just now. Why didn't you stop looking for them once it was too late? Why didn't you phone for a cab or ask a neighbour to take you?'

Leon, who has gone a deeper shade of red, mumbles, 'I thought—'

'Haven't you listened to a single fucking word I've said?' Paul shouts suddenly. 'Don't think, you moron. Don't ever think. Act.'

'Screw you,' Leon says.

There's a dangerous silence. 'What?'

'Screw you. And screw your fucking mind games. It's just a power trip, man. You've got your favourites, and you tell them they're wonderful. Like
her.'
He gestures at Claire. 'The rest of us might as well not exist.'

'I'd praise you, too, if you just put an iota of effort in,' Paul says. His voice is very calm now. 'But you don't. It's just another class to you, isn't it? Another bunch of grades to count towards your major. Towards a nice comfortable job.'

'I'll get a better job than yours, anyway,' the student jeers. 'If you're so hot, how come you aren't famous? It's like they say: those that can't do, teach.' He pulls on his sweat top. 'Fuck you, asshole. I'm outta here.'

When he's gone, Paul says, 'Good. A class like this shouldn't have to carry passengers. Elouise, why don't you show us what you've prepared?'

The class goes on, a little stunned. Paul is so calm that Claire wonders if he didn't choose Leon with the express intention of pushing him into walking out. A ritual sacrifice, she thinks, to reinforce their collective sense of identity as a group.

===OO=OOO=OO===

When she leaves the rehearsal building she sees an unmarked car by the kerb. Frank leans against the trunk, waiting for her.

'Hey, Frank,' she says wearily.

'Hey, Claire.' He opens the rear door. 'Need a ride?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'You always have a choice.' The way he stands there, holding the car door impatiently, seems to contradict what he's saying.

'I know, I know,' she says, sliding into the back seat. 'I'm sorry I took the mike off last night.'

Frank grunts. 'That's City property, that surveillance stuff. We spent most of the evening going through the restaurant trash for it.'

'I said I'm sorry.'

'Why d'you do that, anyway?' he says. He glances at her in the rear-view mirror as he pulls out into the traffic.

She shrugs. 'I guess I'm fed up with this lack of privacy.'

'You giving up on us, Claire?'

There's a moment's silence, then she says, 'Christian said something odd last night.'

Frank grunts. 'That man says a lot of odd stuff.'

'He said I couldn't go to Europe with him because I'd never get back through Immigration.' She traces a mark on the side window with her finger.

'That's fair enough,' Frank says. 'You wouldn't.'

'But how did he know that?'

'How'd he know what?'

'How did he know I haven't got an American passport? I've never told him.'

'Musta done.' Frank takes a hand off the wheel to gesture. 'Maybe you told him when you were talking about Raoul. You know, how Raoul said you were getting a New York accent.'

'I never said I had a British passport,' she says, shaking her head.

'Maybe he found it when he was snooping round your apartment, or maybe he just assumed.'

'Maybe,' she says. Then, looking at the traffic, 'How come you never see any motorbikes in New York?'

'It was amazing,' she says, 'the way he goaded this guy Leon into losing his temper. It was like, poke you here, poke you there, poke you again just here, bang. Like watching someone who's really good at origami — you can't quite work out how it can be that easy.'

Christian, lying in bed beside her, grunts as he reads some academic book. She swings her legs onto the floor. 'I'm going to take a shower.'

'I'll join you in a minute,' he says, turning a page.

She smiles.

The shower is in a tiled cubicle, set apart from the rest of the sleeping area. She turns the shower taps on so the temperature will settle. 'What's that you're reading?' she calls to him over the noise of the running water.

'It's a new biography of Baudelaire. They've asked me to give them a quote for the jacket.'

She's leaning into the bathroom mirror now, unhooking her earrings. 'A puff.'

'A what?'

'A puff. That's what publishers call them. Puffs. Ah, shit.' She's dropped an earring. Getting down on her knees, she gropes behind the column of the washbasin. 'Is it any good?'

'Average. There's some new stuff on his relationship with Poe. But overall…'

She can't hear him. His voice has vanished, as if sucked away down a long tunnel. All her concentration, suddenly, is on the thing she's just noticed behind the pedestal: a tiny black wire, no thicker than a strand of vermicelli, clinging to the back of the porcelain. She touches it. Like vermicelli, it's sticky to the touch. She gets one of her nails underneath it and gently prises it away.

It leads down to the edge of the carpet. She pulls again. The little strand of black lifts itself from the skirting, like a mooring rope on a beach lifting out of the sand. She raises her arm higher, and then higher still. When her arm is at full stretch she's pulled ten feet or so of miniaturized cable clear of its hiding place.

'… doesn't seem to grasp how unconventional the Decadents really were,' Christian is saying.

'Sure,' she says.

She goes the other way. The thin black wire snakes up around the back of the taps and through a tiny hole. She follows it to where it disappears behind the mirror.

For a moment she stares at her own reflection, not quite believing, then she takes the mirror off the wall and turns it over. Stuck to the underside, where a tiny aperture has been scratched in the silver, is a little chip.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the van, Frank says, 'Oh, shit.'

The image of Claire's face sways crazily as she takes the mirror off the wall. Their point of view travels down past her knees into blackness.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Claire peels the tiny camera off the back of the mirror and examines it. Then she makes a loop of cable around her fingers and starts to wind it up. She pulls more wire from the edge of the carpet, and then more still. It leads round the corner of the shower cubicle. Behind a cupboard there's a tiny junction box, where another cable joins. She takes the path of the now doubled cable and pursues it on all fours.

Christian is still talking. Lost in his book, he doesn't see her following the wires into a recess. Books are piled in there, and she moves them.

Behind the casually piled up textbooks is a bigger junction, crouching there like a big black spider, its legs the dozen or so wires that spread in different directions around the apartment.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Shit,' Durban says, more emphatically this time. 'Get hold of Connie. And call the backup. Tell them we've been—'

Suddenly, the images of Christian's apartment on their monitors simultaneously turn to snow.

===OO=OOO=OO===

She throws it on the bed in front of him. A plastic disc the size of a biscuit, trailing wires.

'What's this?' she asks him quietly. She sees him stiffen.

'You tell me,' he says over his glasses. 'I've never seen that before in my life.'

Slowly, ironically, she starts to clap. 'Bravo. We'll make an actor of you yet.'

'I'm sorry, I don't think I get this,' he begins. And now he's starting to look a little frightened, a little uneasy.

'No, Christian. You don't get it, do you? You don't understand at all.' She can feel herself losing control, can feel the anger starting to explode. 'What did they tell you, you stupid fuckwit? That I was some kind of
psychopath?
That I might have killed your fucking
wife?

'Come and get us,' Christian calls to the ceiling. 'Come and get us,
now.'

'They can't hear you,' she mocks. She throws another handful of cables onto the bed and imitates a sound technician's voice, 'Just give us one more for level, will you, Christian? You're not coming through very well.'

He rolls away from her, keeping the bed between them.

'Don't you understand?' she says disbelievingly. 'They think it has to be one of us. They just can't be sure which one. So they've bottled us up like two rats in a maze, and now they're watching to see which of us gets eaten first.'

She hears the lift whirring and knows they'll be here soon. Already there are shouts and the sound of banging doors. 'You stupid fuck,' she says incredulously. 'At least I told them I knew you didn't do it.' She starts to pound him with her fists. 'At least I fucking told them I knew you didn't do it.'

The entryphone is buzzing, on and on. 'Quickly,' he shouts, fending off her blows. 'Quickly. In here.'

The apartment door starts to thud as the men outside put the hydraulic ram to it. Claire backs away from him and sits down on the bed. 'Go on,' she says wearily, in her real voice. 'Let the bastards in.'

TRANSCRIPT NO. CR2449H (DURBAN, RODENBURG, VOGLER, OTHERS)

INTERIOR/EXTERIOR SOUNDS —
some indistinguishable. Regular thumping sound identified as hydraulic ram. Door being opened.

VOICE #2 (VOGLER): For Christ's sake get in here.

VOICE #3 (DURBAN): You OK?

VOICE #1 (RODENBURG): Let me through.

VOICE (NO ID) Wait a—

VOICE #2: Let her go.

(PAUSE ON TAPE)

VOICE #3: What did she say to you in there?

(PAUSE ON TAPE)

VOICE #2: (indistinct) Nothing.

END OF TAPE.

The first thing she notices the next morning, waking in her own bed, is that a familiar warm shape is missing.

Augustus the cat has become accustomed to creeping onto her bed in the night, where he kneads his sharp claws against her back before curling up and going to sleep. This morning, there's no sign of him.

'Guess the cat's pissed off with me, too,' she murmurs. She gets up. To get to the shower she has to step over a mass of debris on the floor.

Last night, when she'd finally made it back to the apartment, she'd gone a little crazy. The TV lies on its side. Drawers have been pulled out and flung against the walls. The cheerful Swedish sofa has lost two of its legs, and now lurches sideways, like a crab.

Surveying the mess, she says, 'Can't say I blame him.'

Before she takes her shower, she pulls down the bathroom blind and switches off the lights.

===OO=OOO=OO===

That day, during Affective Memory, Paul stops the others and gets them to watch her. When she's done he says, 'What emotion was that, Claire? Anger?'

She nods.

'And the action?'

'I was hitting someone,' she says. 'It felt really good.'

After a few moments he says, 'Go home, Claire. Go home and get some rest.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Walking down the sidewalk, she stops abruptly half a dozen times, turning round to see if there's anyone behind her. But they're good, these watchers, sliding out of her line of vision a split second before she turns.

She mutters to herself, 'I know you're there.'

She turns to a shop window, casually, as if she's simply looking at the display, scanning the reflections of the passers-by.

Nothing.

She goes into the shop, stands by a rack of CDs and picks one up. The plastic case is clear enough to use as a mirror and she angles it towards the door.

After a few moments a man comes in. Raincoat, plaid trousers. She knows she's seen him before. Quickly, she crouches down, as if she's refastening her trainers.

The movement triggers a sudden flash of memory. The time she met Victor in the cyber cafe. A man in a raincoat, watching them.
It's much more convincing if you turn the computer on, detective.

She walks after him. The store is full of kids clustered around the listening posts, blocking the aisles, and she has to hurry to keep the brown raincoat in view. When he stops to scan the room, she increases her pace.

'Why don't you fuckers leave me alone?' she hisses, loud enough for other shoppers to hear. Heads turn in their direction.

Abruptly, the cop turns and heads for the exit. She goes after him. They're moving in parallel now, separated only by a rack of CDs. He breaks into a run and she does the same. 'You've got the wrong person,' she shouts at him. More people are looking now. The exit is at the end and he makes it just ahead of her. She follows him out. 'Come here, you
wanker.'
But there's a shrill beeping coming from behind her, an alarm of some sort, and just as she's about to grab at the arm of the raincoat, someone grabs her own arm from behind, a burly black hand fastening on to her wrist.

The store security guard. He gestures at the CD in her hand, the one she used as a mirror, and growls, 'We don't have many cash tills on the sidewalk, lady. Why don't you step back inside while we call the police?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

She tries to talk her way out of it, to no avail. The security guard simply points to a notice on the wall saying, 'WE ALWAYS PROSECUTE', and shrugs.

'Zero tolerance,' he says. 'They got the idea from us.'

She tries flirting and pleading and crying. None of those work, either. To her surprise, once she's started crying she finds it hard to stop.

The cop, when she finally turns up, is a uniformed woman so overweight Claire can't believe she can still walk the beat. Her name is Ryder, and she is gravely attentive as Claire explains what happened.

'This detective who was following you,' she says when Claire has finished. 'Do you know his name?'

'No.'

'How do you know he was a cop?'

'It's a long story.'