Read Online Internecine by David J. Schow - Free Book Online Page B

Celeste’s body there, cooling off.
    Somebody (just a black cutout shape against the light) came out onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and was joined by another black shape.
    “ NORCO ,” said Dandine.
    “Shit,” said me.
    “You don’t have any, like, nasty Polaroids of yourself hidden up there? Incriminating evidence about your secret, gay double life? The infamous ‘second set of books’?”
    “No.” I felt weirdly embarrassed that my home life offered no evidence whatsoever that I was cutting edge. The knives from my De Vries butcher block barely ever got food on them. The most provocative thing in the kitchen was a few bottles of pretentiously priced Cabernet, alongside some higher-class gift wine. There were five or six photos of my ex-wife shoved away in a drawer, in exile, and she had her clothes on in all of them. We had never been huge snapshot hounds. Most of the stuff in the kitchen had been bought out of catalogs. There were one or two framed prints on the walls, practically screaming my lack of personal character. My home looked like an upscale hotel room, anonymous and functional. They’re weren’t even any intriguing stains on the 300-thread count sheets.
    The ultra-dull catalogue of my previous existence. Like, from birth until . . . yesterday.
    “They’re turning the place over,” said Dandine, “trying to get a handle on where you’d run away to. It’s important for you to avoid anything familiar. If you’ve thought of it, they’ll know it. Including people. You want to get closer, or you want to take a side trip to your office so I can show you
that’s
open for business, too, right now?”
    Strobes of flash starkened the balcony shell at regular intervals.Pictures of things being captured for analysis and discussion. Maybe some of them would be suitable for framing, as urban studies. Still lifes.
    “See the van?”
    “Where?” I lowered the binoculars.
    “Double-parked over there, no running lights, no trim. That’s where our friend Celeste will be dumped, like baggage nobody will claim. They’ll have a hand-to-hand team watchdogging this place for a while, hoping you’ll think the heat is off, and come back for something valuable. They go to training seminars to learn how to be inconspicuous. It’s a growth industry.”
    Dandine eased back in his seat, like someone used to long stakeouts. “The best smugglers look like accountants. No sharp edges on their personae that would stick in your mind. That’s been going on for so long that the bland outward face has itself become a template for a potential smuggler, for all those VICAP and profiling obsessives. Back and forth, like a seesaw, and you always have to know which end you’re on today.”
    “Civilians,” I said. These ghosts had to
rehearse,
to look like the walking dead. “What media define as ordinary people.”
    “Exactly; now you’ve got it.”
    Pause now, for my insanity defense.
    It had been hectoring me ever since I noticed Dandine and I were the same height: the notion that he might not exist, that he was a projection, my doppelganger, an idealized, spy movie alter ego. An invisible man in the “real” world. Dandine’s commentary emphasized how un-special I was, then he trumped the game by noting how un-special he
had
to be, in order to succeed. I quit smoking five years ago, but when Dandine whipped out his little case (augmenting it just enough with the history hinted at by his nicotine diet), I felt the old jones for a butt slam in harder than ever. I knew without asking that he would not smoke another until the next stage of our nighttime mission had been accomplished. He used the cigarettes, as I would have, as punctuation in his workday. I would mention that maybe I was losing my mind and that he was me, like that guy in that Brad Pitt movie . . . and Dandine would say he’d read the book, but not seen the film. Stuff like that. He avoided talking about himself
(always make the client sell