“She pretends to be crazy to keep from going crazy?”
“It’s slightly more complicated than that, but essentially, yes. Spend enough time with her, and you’ll notice she only acts out when it’s safe or advantageous to do so. Where sanity is required, she’s sane. She’s very dependable.”
“Yeah, I got that memo. ‘God keeps me focused’?”
“You don’t believe in God.”
“No. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize to me. But I’ll tell you a secret about God: if you’re careful not to ask too much of Him, it doesn’t really matter whether He exists. Annie doesn’t ask much.”
“Just three squares a day and a cardboard roof over her head, right?”
“She wants to be useful. It would be very easy for someone in Annie’s position to spend the rest of her life paralyzed by guilt, but she wants her remaining time to count for something. The organization gives her a purpose; God holds her to it.”
“And you’re not worried about the Almighty countermanding your orders during a mission?”
“If I feel a need to worry about disobedient operatives,” True said, “Annie won’t be the first one who comes to mind.”
“Yeah, yeah, OK…Point taken.”
“I hope so.”
“Seriously, True, I get it.” I reached up and tapped my headset. “So can I order breakfast on this thing?”
It was actually a couple more hours before I got to eat. After I went back and woke Annie, she took forever in the bathroom—I guess when you live in a box, you can’t get enough of indoor plumbing—and nearly as long choosing an ensemble from the collection of rags in her backpack. I was good, though: I only got a little impatient. Finally we made it out the door and went to Silverman’s Deli, where I pigged out on bagels and lox.
From there, we fell into a routine: we went for a post-breakfast walk; Annie muttered; I listened. Then, back to the hotel, where I had dream class while Annie—the waking Annie—took another shower. Then, all-night sentry duty. Then, more Silverman’s. Rinse and repeat, for seven days straight. By the time we were done, I knew everything a Bad Monkeys operative is supposed to know.
On the morning of the eighth day, Annie told me I’d completed the initial phase of my training. “Go home and relax,” she said. “We meet back here in seventy-two hours.”
“What about Arlo?”
“If we’re very lucky, he’ll have been taken care of by then. If not…you’ll want to be sharp.”
I went home, crashed, and slept for a day. I woke up starving, but the thought of more smoked salmon made me queasy, so I gave the deli a rest and went to this pub I knew instead. I was working on my second plate of cheese fries when Phil showed up.
“Those must be really good,” he said. “You look happy.”
“It’s not the fries. I got a new job.”
“Is it the one you’ve been looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think it might be. If I don’t fuck it up.”
Did you tell him what the job was?
No. I could have, I mean, Phil’s probably the only person I know who’d have believed me, but…no. I just called it a “public service” job, stayed vague on the details, and Phil, he knew enough not to push. He smiled like he was proud of me, though—like he would have been proud of me, if I’d told him everything.
I did tell him about Annie. I called her my supervisor and had her living in a homeless shelter instead of a cemetery, but other than that I stuck pretty close to the truth. “She’s growing on me. At first I didn’t want to be around her, but now that I know the crazy thing is mostly an act—well, not an act, exactly, more like a coping strategy—I’m starting to like her…The God thing still bugs me, though.”
“Why?”
“Besides the fact that it’s just stupid? I can’t see giving the time of day to a God who let your kid drown.”
“Well,” said Phil, “it wasn’t God’s responsibility to watch the kid. It was hers.”
“What, and God’s too busy to pick up the slack the one time she takes her eyes off him?”
“Was it just the one time?”
“Shut up. Annie’s not like that. She wasn’t a bad mother.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know her, OK? She’s a little weird, but she’s not a bad person. This organization we work for, they’ve got standards. They wouldn’t keep her on if she was bad.”
“Maybe she’s not a bad person now. But before…?”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure she used to be a real terror. Hey, here’s a theory, maybe God killed her kid as a character-building exercise: ‘Go on, Billy, jump in the bay, it’ll help Mommy get her priorities straight…’ How’s that sound?”
“I don’t know. Could be.”
“Could be? Are you fucking serious?”
“Or maybe it’s the job. You say you’re doing important work. But would this woman even be a part of that, if her son hadn’t—”
“Jesus, Phil, are you trying to piss me off?”
He swore he wasn’t, but he kept doing it anyway, and pretty soon I told him to take a hike. Goddamned Phil…Nine times out of ten, you know, talking to him made me feel better, but that tenth time left me wondering why I even bothered. I spent the rest of my break alone at home, sacked out on the couch with a bottle and my post-Ganesh drug stash, watching spy shows on cable.
When I reported back to work, Arlo Dexter was still alive. Eleven a.m. on a weekday morning, Annie and I were watching from the Rose & Cross as he opened up the model-railroad store.
“So is that his shop?”
“He runs it,” Annie said. “But his grandmother holds the lease and pays for the inventory. She covers the rent on his apartment, as well.”
“Generous grandma. Did the organization check her out?”
“Yes. She’s not evil, just lonely.”
“What about employees?”
“He doesn’t have any. Not many customers, either. He’s not what you’d call a people person.”
“So basically the store is just a private playroom for him.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“And what’s our play? We just hang out while Arlo fools with his trains?”
“That depends,” Annie said. “I spoke with True earlier this morning, and he told me that Cost-Benefits is divided on how to proceed. Some members feel that we should continue to watch and wait. Others, including True, think that this is taking too long. They’d like to provoke Dexter into making a move, if we can come up with some way of doing that.”
“You mean if I can come up with some way of doing it, right? Is this my final exam?”
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Yeah, actually…Did your son like model trains?”
Her expression got all brittle again, but then she said: “Model planes. Billy wanted to be a pilot when he grew up.”
“OK, planes, same difference. The point is, you’ve been to a hobby shop.”
“We went every Saturday.”
“And the geeks who ran the place, you remember how they reacted to having a woman in the store?”
She nodded, seeing where I was going. “Yes.”
“Yeah—and those guys probably liked having customers.”
Annie turned back to the window and looked down at Arlo’s shop. “You want me to go in?”
“No,” I said. “Let me mess with him. I’ve got a mood I feel like sharing.”
A taxi sat just up the block from the model-railroad store, its driver working the Daily Jumble and picking at a carton of chicken vindaloo that had come from Catering’s kitchens. If Arlo made a break for it, the taxi would help track him, or, if necessary, run him down. That was the plan, anyway, but there was a wrinkle. As I crossed the street, this black guy approached the cab and tried to hire it, and when the driver belatedly flipped on his off-duty lamp, the black guy took it personally. They were arguing as I slipped inside Arlo’s shop.