Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter
He turned off down a steep path cutting through the trees to the left. Eventually it came out on a rocky bluff, where we had to scramble down, using a series of knobs and ledges worn smooth by many hands and feet. At the bottom was a small cove where a slab of basalt protruded out over a natural pool formed by two curving lines of rock. On the other side of a stretch of open water, only a few hundred yards away, rose the precipitous, fir-covered flank of another island.
“You can swim here in the summer,” Sam said, pointing to the pool. “The water comes in at high tide and then gets trapped and warmed by the sun. We go skinny-dipping here a lot.”
He sat down on the smooth rock, his long thin legs extended in front of him. In addition to his regulation work shirt and jeans, he was wearing a pair of fancy sports shoes with inch-thick soles and the logo of a basketball player.
“Wow, cool shoes!” I remarked in a teen-speak voice.
Sam glanced at them indifferently.
“Oh, yeah. Russ bought a pair, and I said I liked them, so he got me some.”
He said it casually, as though this was standard operating procedure.
“On account of you being the landlord and he has to keep you happy?” I queried with a touch of irony.
Sam shrugged.
“I was just kidding about that.”
“So who does own the place?”
“No, I was kidding about them having to suck up to me. Everything they do is done out of love, man. No one lays any power trips around here. We’re all in this thing together.”
He gazed out across the water at the island opposite for a moment, then began to talk in a slow, steady voice, as though reading a speech.
“The island used to belong to a group of Theosophists. This was back in the twenties. Then Theosophy went out of fashion. The place was deserted for years, then in the sixties it was bought by this woman from Seattle. She was working in the naval base at Bremerton, in the kitchens, and one day she put her hand through the meat grinder and lost two fingers. I happen to know she was stoned out of her skull at the time, but she sued the federal government and used the money to buy this place.”
“So where do you come in?”
“Well, what she did, she got all her hippie friends together and they all came over here to set up a commune. That was everyone’s dream at the time, right? Get away from it all, live off the land, all that shit. Well, that lasted as long as those things usually did, and then people began drifting away. In the end Lisa, that was her name, was hanging on here pretty well alone.”
I looked out over the reach of open water glinting and shifting in the raw sunlight. Gulls swooped and plunged for fish, efficient feeding machines, aerial rodents.
“By then she wanted out too,” Sam went on, “only it turned out this place wasn’t so easy to sell. There are a couple of hundred islands round here, but only some of them have a good supply of water, and even then there are shortages all the time. This place had enough for the Theosophists and the hippies and guys like us, but not enough to support people who want showers and washing machines and dishwashers and Jacuzzis. So Lisa found that having invested all her dough in this place, she was kind of stuck with it.”
“I still don’t see where you come in,” I said.
Sam grinned broadly.
“I got in, that’s how.”
He made a circle with the thumb and first finger of his left hand and inserted the forefinger of his right rapidly several times.
“We fell in love,” he added in a tone of contempt.
I thought of Andrea, of my inexplicable attraction to her. Was I too “falling in love”? How lame the phrase sounds, how hackneyed and banal! We need more and better words to describe the experience, a vocabulary as rich as the one that some cultures have for different varieties of snow. Presumably the reason we don’t is the same in both cases: an inability to distinguish, a feeling that neither snow nor love is important enough to our lives to warrant that degree of discrimination.
“Lisa and I had a friend in common,” Sam explained. “That woman who was teaching the class? I got to know her while I was hanging out in Seattle. Andrea used to spend a few months out here in the summer, but she had a job teaching back on the mainland. She introduced me to Lisa, who used to come over every now and then. It started off as a straight mercy fuck, but Lisa thought I was the hottest thing to come down the pike in a long time, and I was kind of at loose ends myself then. Next thing I knew we were married.”
“Oh, so it’s really your wife who owns the place,” I said. “Which one is she?”
I was irrationally furious at the discovery that Sam had known Andrea, and presumably slept with her.
“She’s dead.”
He pointed to the island on the other side of the strait.
“She tried to swim across to Orcas. Lisa was a good swimmer, but the currents around here are very treacherous.”
The sun had disappeared behind the firs massed on the heights behind us, and the air felt cold.
“I know things haven’t been easy for you recently,” Sam said in an almost inaudible voice. “But soon you will regain everything you have lost, and more besides.”
I stared at him, wondering again if he knew about David.
“Speaking of loss,” I said, “why did those kids call you that?”
Sam’s irritating little smile reappeared.
“Ah, you noticed that? Well, I guess you should know the answer to that one, Phil.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I knew,” I replied shortly.
“You do know. But you don’t know you know.”
I laughed derisively.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Sam turned to me, looking me in the eyes.
“You’re like all of us, Phil. You know more than you think, but you also know less.”
I sighed impatiently.
“That’s gobbledygook, Sam.”
“No, Phil, it’s a great truth. A sublime truth.”
He smiled suddenly and slapped me on the arm.
“But just stick around, kid, and pretty soon you’ll know it all.”
I’d had enough.
“Sam, listen!”
I paused, trying to find the right words.
“Can we just get something straight? I get the feeling that you guys are into some kind of religious or philosophical thing here. Is that right?”
Sam’s eyes left me, gazing out over the stretch of water where his wife had drowned.
“I guess you could put it that way,” he said at last.
“OK. Well, let me just say something. I appreciate you inviting me here, and it would be a great pleasure to spend three or four days in such a beautiful spot. But-and it’s a big but-you’ve got to understand that I’m not in the market for any kind of new ideology. I’m not knocking your ideas, whatever they may be. I’m simply saying that I’m not interested in signing up for anything. If you can accept that, I’ll be happy to stay. If not, it would probably be better for me to leave right now.”
Sam looked at me with a frown.
“Chill, man!” he said with a slightly forced laugh. “No one’s asking you to do a damn thing except veg out and enjoy yourself.”
“Great. And I’ll have to leave on Wednesday or Thursday in any case. My car’s at that house on the mainland. Lenny took the keys. Does he live there or what?”
There was a slight pause before Sam answered.
“He’s staying there this week, while Russ and the other guy are away, case they need to call in.”
“But there must be a phone here,” I replied. “You called me in Everett, remember?”
Sam looked uncomfortable for the first time. Then he shrugged.
“I’ve got a cellular, but we try not to use it too much. You never know who might be listening in.”
I laughed.
“Have you got secrets to hide, then?”
Sam jumped up.
“I better get going,” he said, turning away. “I’ve got to choose a reading for this afternoon. You stay if you want.”
I got to my feet.
“No, I’ll come.”
The truth was, I was already looking forward to seeing Andrea again.
I had been faithful to Rachael for the ten years we had been together, and since her death I had not thought of finding someone else. This was not a question of high-minded morality. I was simply out of practice. Without realizing it, I had sealed myself off from contact with the other sex. I had invested all I had in one relationship, and lost everything. The idea of starting all over again seemed more trouble than it was worth.
But Andrea had somehow penetrated the cocoon of indifference and sloth with which I’d surrounded myself, and had done so-this is what really disturbed me-without even trying. There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that she was remotely interested in me. On the contrary, she was almost certainly fixed up with one of these guys who, for reasons beyond my comprehension, were kissing up to Sam. Nevertheless, for reasons equally beyond my comprehension, she had gotten to me, and before I left I wanted to know why.
I was also mildly curious to know exactly what kind of scam Sam was working. I had no doubt that it was one. If he’d bothered to get married to this Lisa, who must have been quite a lot older than him if she’d bought the place back in the sixties, it could only be because he knew that she was sitting on a nice chunk of real estate. This indicated a degree of financial planning I wouldn’t have suspected in Sam, even if he couldn’t have known that Lisa would be out of the picture so soon. But the way he’d parlayed this attractive but unsalable asset into a permanent meal ticket was even more impressive. I didn’t know who was grabbing the check for the cost of keeping the operation going, but it clearly wasn’t Sam. Probably the followers he’d recruited had to go and work on the mainland every so often, and hand over their earnings to him. Maybe that was what this Russ was doing. That would explain why Sam had seemed reluctant to talk about it.
But what were they getting in return? It didn’t have to be anything very much. Most of the people I’d seen so far struck me as classic high school dropouts. Nevertheless, Sam had to be offering them something they felt they couldn’t get anywhere else, the way they were treating him. Even if it hadn’t been for Andrea, I think I would have stayed just out of curiosity, to find out what it was.
At that point, of course, I still thought I had a choice.
11
The moment Russell Crosby saw the venue, he knew it was going to be OK. This was Russ’s third time. By now he had a feel for these things.
It was a one-story frame house with a deep veranda located on a backstreet a couple of miles south of the city center, in an area called Pittsburgh. The main drag was called McDaniel, which ran all the way up to Peachtree. The time he went to scope it out, Russ got off the bus at the next neighborhood up, Mechanicsville. That was what he had been dreading: a mix of late-stage urban decay and scorched-earth redevelopment, housing projects ranked like prison blocks on a bare hillside. There was no place to hide, no reason for whitey to be there, and you didn’t need to read the spray paint to know who ran the streets after dark.
Russell had grown up in rural Washington, and had never actually seen a black person except on TV until he was fifteen and went into Seattle with some buddies. Even now, twenty years later, he had hardly had any dealings with them, good or bad. Nevertheless, the idea of going into a black neighborhood terrified him. Blacks were tough and proud and mean and different. You could never be sure what they were thinking or what they were going to do. The only thing you knew was that a hell of a lot of them had learned the hard way how to look after themselves.
But above all what scared him was the question of visibility. Russell knew he shouldn’t be thinking this way, as though something other than God’s will might be done. That was heresy. But looking at it from a strictly practical point of view, the success of the operations they had undertaken so far depended to a large extent on a profile so low as to be invisible. They came and went virtually unseen by anyone other than their victims. No one else noticed them at the time, and there was no one left to remember them afterward. But Russell knew that no white person could be invisible in a place like Mechanicsville. It didn’t matter that people had never seen you before and would never see you again. They already knew you. You were the enemy. There was nowhere you could go without being watched, nothing you could do without it being an object of interest.
So Pittsburgh came as a big relief. It was predominantly black, but with a way different feel, an old-fashioned neighborhood with a certain battered charm and a lush, green look which was almost rural. On McDaniel there were a couple of jerry-built food stores with heavy wire mesh over the windows. There were no national franchises at this end of town, no big-name brands or fancy advertising. Handwritten posters spelled out the price of fatback and beer and beans. There were also two places of worship, the Freedom Holiness Church of God in Christ and the African Methodist Free Church of Full Gospel.
That was down in the valley, on the flat. On either side, the cross-streets ran steeply up, the blacktop pitted with cracks and potholes. The houses were all small, a few barely more than shacks. All were of wood, some of it unpainted. Most had big porches with beat-up chairs set out and screens to keep out the bugs. But the basic look was country: mature trees laden with an abundance of verdure, gauds of foliage spilling out and over every surface, explosions of crepe myrtle, nature gone nuclear. A pall of kudzu vine had transformed some of the lower trees and shrubs into fantastic shapes, castles and monsters.
Kids of all ages were running loose in the street. A skinny old black guy with braces and a cane stopped to chat with a white-trash mother who had three children in a stroller built for one. A real sharp dude in a powder-blue suit with a purple shirt and white slip-on shoes was having a loud argument with a spectacular woman with a peach-shaped ass sheathed in a tight white dress which showed the outline of her panties. Behind a picket fence, two toddlers played in the copper-red earth.
Russ moseyed around a little, just to get the general feel, then walked down Carson Street itself, just once, and caught the bus back into town. He’d seen enough to know that it was going to be OK as far as the location was concerned. But that was only one of his worries. The other was his partner.
It was a big honor, of course, being the one chosen to handle this difficult assignment. By rights, Andy should have come, but after what happened with Dale his nerves were understandably shot. In the end, Rick had proposed Russell. He’d accepted, but with a heavy heart, because he knew that the subject of the initiation was Pat. The problem wasn’t just that Pat’d been born in the South, which meant blacks. The problem was Pat himself.
