The man, the subject was saying something and there were radiant bursts, as of muzzle flash nearby, but without ensuing reports. Torval yanked the man off the rear of the car and splayed him toward Eric, then snapped his head back smartly.
"I am after you long time. Son of bitch," he said. "I glop you good."
Now Eric saw three photographers off to the right and a man shooting video from his knees. Their car sat with doors flung open.
"Today you are cremed by the master," he said. "This is my mission worldwide. To sabotage power and wealth."
He began to understand. This was Andre Petrescu, the pastry assassin, a man who stalked corporate directors, military commanders, soccer stars and politicians. He hit them in the face with pies. He blindsided heads of state under house arrest. He ambushed war criminals and the judges who sentenced them.
"I am three years waiting for this. Fresh baked only. I pass up president of the United States to make this strike. I creme him any time. You are major statement, I tell you this. Very hard to zero in."
He was a small guy with hair dyed glossy blond, in a Disney World T-shirt. Eric caught the note of admiration in his voice. Carefully he kicked him in the nuts, watching him spaz and crumple in Torval's grip. When the flash units lit up, he attacked the photographers, landing a number of punches, feeling better with each one. The three backpedaling men stumbled into a row of garbage cans, then scuttled up the street. The videographer fled in the car.
He walked back toward the limo, ladling whipped cream off his face and eating it, snowy topping with a trace of lemon in the taste. He and Torval were bonded now by violence and exchanged a look of respect and esteem. Petrescu was in pain.
"You lack of humor, Mr. Packer."
Eric gave him a forearm shiver, bouncing him off Torval's chest. It took the man a while to speak.
"You are living up to reputation, okay. But I am kicked and beaten by security so many times I am walking dead. They make me to wear a radio collar when I am in England, to safe the queen. Track me like rare crane. But believe one thing please. I cremed Fidel three times in six days when he is in Bucharest last year. I am action painter of creme pies. I drop from a tree on Michael Jordan one time. This is famous Flying Pie. It is museum quality video for the ages. I quiche Sultan of fucking Brunei in his bath. They put me in black hole until I am screaming from my eyes."
They watched him stumble away. The restaurant was locked and empty and they stood in the hush of the moment. Eric had whipped cream in his hair and ears. His clothes were streaked with cream and dashes of lemon pie. He could feel a cut on his forehead from a camera one of the men had wielded in self-defense. He needed to take a leak.
He felt great. He held his clenched fist in the other hand. It felt great, it stung, it was quick and hot. His body whispered to him. It hummed with the action, the charge at the photographers, the punches he'd thrown, the bloodsurge, the heartbeat, the great strewn beauty of garbage cans toppling.
He was brass-balled again.
He found his sunglasses in the champagne well and put them in his shirt pocket. There was a sound outside, a bouncing ball. He was about to give the driver the signal to move when he heard the sporadic heavy bounce of a basketball, unmistakable. He got out of the car and crossed to the north side of the street, where a playground was located. He looked through two fences and saw a couple of kids crouched and growling, going one-on-one.
The first gate was locked. He climbed the fence of spiked iron palings without hesitation. The second gate was also locked. He climbed the chain-link fence, which was twice as high. He went up and over and Torval followed, fence to fence, wordlessly.
They went to the far end of the park and watched the kids go at it, playing in shadow and murk. "You play?"
"Some. Not really my game," Torval said. " Rugby. That was my game. You play?"
"Some. I liked the action in the paint. I pump iron now"
"Of course you understand. There's still someone tracking you.
"There's still someone out there."
"This was a petty incursion. The whipped cream. Technically irrelevant."
"I understand. I realize. Of course."
They were intense, these kids, hand-slapping and banging for rebounds, making throaty sounds. "Next time no pies and cakes."
"Dessert is over."
"He's out there and he's armed."
"He's armed and you're armed."
"This is true."
"You will have to draw your weapon."
"This is true," Torval said.
"Let me see the thing."
"Let you see the thing. Okay. Why not? You paid for it." The two men made little snuffling sounds, insipid nasal laughter.
Torval removed the weapon from his jacket and handed it over, a handsome piece of equipment, silver and black, four-and-a-half-inch barrel, walnut stock.
"Manufactured in the Czech Republic."
"Nice."
"Smart too. Scary smart."
"Voice recognition."
"That's right," Torval said.
"You what. You speak and it knows your voice."
"That's right. The mechanism doesn't activate unless the voiceprint matches the stored data. Only my voice matches."
"Do you have to speak Czech before it fires?"
Torval smiled broadly. It was the first time Eric had seen him smile. With his free hand he took the sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and shook the temples loose.
"But the voice is only half the operation," Torval said, then paused invitingly.
"You're saying there's a code as well." "A preprogrammed spoken code." Eric put on the glasses.
"What is it?"
Torval smiled privately this time, then raised his eyes to Eric, who leveled the weapon now "Nancy Babich."
He shot the man. A small white terror of disbelief flickered in Torval's eye. He fired once and the man went down. All authority drained out of him. He looked foolish and confused.
The basketball stopped bouncing twenty yards away.
He had mass but no flow. This was clear as he lay there dying. He had discipline and a sense of pace, okay, but no true fluency of movement.
Eric glanced at the kids, who stood motionless watching. The ball was on the ground and slowly rolling. He gave them a casual hand signal indicating they ought to continue their game. Nothing so meaningful had happened that they were required to stop playing.
He tossed the weapon in the bushes and walked toward the chain-link fence.
There were no windows flying open or concerned voices calling. The weapon was not equipped with a sound suppressor but there'd been only one shot and maybe people needed to hear three, four, more to rouse them from sleep or television. This was one of the routine ephemera of the night, no different from cats at sex or a backfiring car. Even if you know it's not a backfiring car, because it never is, you don't feel a prod to conscience unless the apparent gunfire is repeated and there are sounds of running men. In the dense stir of the neighborhood, living so close to street level, with noises all the time and the dead-ass drift of your personal urban anomie, you can't be expected to react to an isolated bang.
Too, the shot was less annoying than the basketball game. If the effect of the shot was to end the game, be grateful for moonlit favors.
He paused imperceptibly, thinking he ought to go back for the weapon.
He'd tossed the weapon in the bushes because he wanted whatever would happen to happen. Guns were small practical things. He wanted to trust the power of predetermined events. The act was done, the gun should go.
He climbed the chain-link fence, tearing his pants at the pocket.
He'd tossed the weapon rashly but how fantastic it had felt. Lose the man, shed the gun. Too late now to reconsider.
He dropped to the ground and advanced to the iron fence.
He didn't wonder who Nancy Babich was and he didn't think that Torval's choice of code humanized the man or required delayed regret. Torv
al was his enemy, a threat to his self-regard. When you pay a man to keep you alive, he gains a psychic edge. It was a function of the credible threat and the loss of his company and personal fortune that Eric could express himself this way. Torval's passing cleared the night for deeper confrontation.
He scaled the iron fence and walked to the car. A man from the century past played a saxophone on the corner.
The Confessions of Benno Levin
MORNING
I am living offline now. I am all bared down. I am writing this at my iron desk, which I pushed along the sidewalk and into this building. I have my exercise bike where I realpedal with one foot, simulate with the other.
I am planning to make a public act of my life through these pages I will write. This will be a spiritual autobiography that runs to thousands of pages and the core of the work will be either I track him down and shoot him or do not, writing longhand in pencil.
When I was employed I kept small accounts at five major banks. The names of major banks are breathtaking in the mind and there are branches all over town. I used to go to different banks or to branches of the same bank. I had episodes where I went from branch to branch well into the night, moving money between accounts or just checking my balances. I entered codes and examined numbers. The machine takes us through the steps. The machine says, Is this correct? It teaches us to think in logic blocks.
I was briefly married to a disabled woman with a child. I used to look at her child, who was barely out of infancy, and think I'd fallen down a hole.
I was teaching and lecturing then. Lecturing is not the word. I dart from subject to subject in my mind. I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone. It is in me to hurt someone and I haven't always known this. The act and depth of writing will tell me if I'm capable.
I frankly want your sympathy. I spend my bare cash every day on bottled water. This is for drinking and bathing. I have my toilet arrangements that I made, my take-out places that I patronize and my water needs in a building without water, heat or lights, except what I provide.
It's hard for me to speak directly to people. I used to try to tell the truth. But it's hard not to lie. I lie to people because this is my language, how I talk. It's the temperature inside the head of who I am. I don't aim remarks at the person I'm speaking to but try to miss him, or glance a remark so to speak off his shoulder.
After a time I began to take satisfaction in this. It was never in me to mean what I said. Every unnecessary lie was another way to build a person. I see this clearly now. No one could help me but myself.
I watched the live video feed from his website all the time. I watched for hours and realistically days. What he said to people, how he turned so sharply in his chair. He thought chairs were largely stupid and demeaning. How he swam when he swam, ate meals, played cards on camera. The way he shuffled the cards. Even though I worked in the same headquarters I waited out on the street to see him leave. I wanted to pinpoint him in my mind. It was important to know where he was, even for a moment. It put my world in order.
They were not lies anyway. They were not falsehoods, most of them, but simple deflections off the listener's body, his or her shoulders, or they were total misses.
To speak directly to a person was unbearable. But in these pages I am going to write my way into truth. Trust me. They demoted me to lesser currencies. I write to slow down my mind but sometimes there is leakage.
Now I bank at one location only because I am dwindling down financially to nothing. It's a small bank with one machine inside, one in the street set into the wall. I use the street machine because the guard will not let me in the bank.
I could tell him I have an account and prove it. But the bank is marble and glass and armed guards. And I accept this. I could tell him I need to check Recent Activity, even though there is none. But I am willing to do my transactions outside, at the machine in the wall.
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.
Allow me to speak. I'm susceptible to global strains of illness. I have occasions of susto, which is soul loss, more or less, from the Caribbean, which I contracted originally on the Internet some time before my wife took her child and left, carried down the stairs by her illegal immigrant brothers.
On the one hand it's all a figment and a myth. On the other hand I'm susceptible. This work will include descriptions of my symptoms.
He is always ahead, thinking past what is new, and I'm tempted to admire this, always arguing with things that you and I consider great and trusty additions to our lives. Things wear out impatiently in his hands. I know him in my mind. He wants to be one civilization ahead of this one.
I used to keep a roll of bills wrapped in a blue rubberband that was stamped California Asparagus. That money is in circulation now, hand to hand, unsanitized. I have a stationary bike that I found one night with a missing pedal.
I advertised clandestinely for a used gun and bought it subtly and privately when I was online and still employed but barely, knowing the day was coming, he is erratic, his work habits are disintegrating, which was visible in their faces, despite the humor and pathos of owning such a complicated weapon for a person such as me.
I can see the scornful humor and pity in what I do sometimes. And I can almost enjoy it on the level of being helpless.
My life was not mine anymore. But I didn't want it to be. I watched him knot his tie and knew who he was. His bathroom mirror had a readout telling him his temperature and blood pressure at that moment, his height, weight, heart rate, pulse, pending medication, whole health history from looking at his face, and I was his human sensor, reading his thoughts, knowing the man in his mind.
It tells your height in case you shrink at night, which can happen anabolically.
Cigarettes are not part of the profile of the person you think I am. But I'm a violent smoker. I need what I need very badly. I don't read for pleasure. I don't bathe often because it isn't affordable. I buy my clothes at Value Drugs. You can do this in America, dress yourself from a drugstore head to toe, which I admire quietly. But whatever the sundry facts, I'm not so different from you in your inner life in the sense that we're all uncontrollable.
They carried her down the stairs in her wheelchair with her baby. I was disoriented in my head. Maybe you have seen the spikes on a lying polygraph. This is my wave of thought sometimes, thinking how do I respond to this. I left teaching to make my million. It was the right time and tide to do this. But then I felt derived, sitting at my workstation. I felt inserted there, a person in a situation not of his choosing, even though I'd made the choice to be there, and the closest he ever came was overhearing distance.
I'm ambivalent about killing him. Does this make me less interesting to you, or more?
I'm not one of those trodden bodies you try not to look at when you walk down certain streets. I don't look at them either. I'm knocking down the walls in my living space, a task of many weeks that's nearly done now I buy my bottled water in the Mexican grocery up the street. There are two clerks or an owner and a clerk and they both say No problem. I say Thank you. No problem.
I used to lick coins as a child. The fluting at the edge of a common coin. The milling it is called. I lick them still, sometimes, but worry about the dirt trapped in the milling.
But to take another person's life? This is the vision of the new day. I am determined finally to act. It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before. But how to imagine the moment? I'm not sure I can reach the point of even doing it mentally, two faceless men with runny colored clothes.
And how will I find him to kill, much less actually aim and shoot? So it is largely
academic, this give-and-take.
When I pay with coins I go into small fixations of miscounting and fumbling.
But how do I live if he's not dead? He can be a dead father. I will offer this hope. They can harvest his sperm, then freeze it for fifteen months. After this it's a simple matter to impregnate his widow or a voluntary mother.
Then another person will grow into his form and flesh and I will have something to hate when it is old enough to be a man.
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
I have my iron desk that I hauled up three flights of stairs, with ropes and wedges. I have my pencils that I sharpen with a paring knife.
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
4
The limousine was a striking sight under the streetlamp, with a bruised cartoonish quality, a car in a narrative panel, it feels and speaks. The opera lights were on, twelve per side, placed between windows in sets of four. The driver stood at the rear, holding open the door. Eric did not enter immediately. He stopped and looked at the driver. He'd never done this before and it took him a while to see the man.
The man was slim and black, medium height. He had a longish face. He had an eye, the left, that was hard to find beneath the deep sag of the lid. The lower rim of the iris was visible, shut off in a corner. The man had a history, evidently. There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun. Things had happened in his life.
Eric liked the idea that a man with a devastated eye drove a car for a living. His car. This made it even better.
He remembered that he needed to urinate. He did it in the car, stooping, and watched the bowl fold back into its housing. He didn't know what happened to the waste. Maybe it was tanked up somewhere in the underside of the automobile or possibly dumped directly in the street, violating a hundred statutes.