Drugs, for instance. Well, drugs were everywhere. It was a truism that the economy could not function—or at least compete—without the vast array of stimulants, IQ enhancers, and complex neuropeptides for sale on the street or by prescription. Oberg had done time with the DEA and understood that it was a traffic no one really cared to interdict. Most of the field agents he knew were either neurochemically enhanced or skimming money from the trade. Or both. It was called free enterprise.
But the Floats made dealing a little looser. No government functionaries to take a percentage, although he understood the Filipino and East Indian mobs would sometimes muscle in. Generally, though, it was a loose friends-of-friends distribution network… and that worked in his favor.
For three nights he frequented a bar called Neptune’s, which catered almost exclusively to mainlanders. He watched the canal traffic, the waitresses, the tidal flow of alcohol over the bar. In particular he watched a lanky, pale teenager who occupied a rear booth—same booth all three nights— and who would periodically step out with one or two customers, through a back door onto a catwalk overlooking a waste canal. The boy was not a hooker; there were others, more sophisticated, handling that trade. But he fit the mainlander’s image of a drug pusher, and Oberg guessed that was an advantage here; it was like a sign, an advertisement. The teenager kept his hands in his oversized jacket, and when he brought them out, Oberg imagined, they would be holding pills, powders, blotters.
His fourth night in the Floats he approached the boy.
“I would like to buy drugs,” he said softly.
The teenager looked at him, amused. “You would like a hat?”
Oberg showed him the vial he had taken from Teresa’s studio. He shook out the resinous black pill into the palm of his hand and held it so the boy could see it.
The boy laughed and looked away. “Shit,” he said.
“I’m serious,” Oberg said.
“I bet you are.” The teenager tapped his hand nervously against the tabletop.
Probably he was doing some CNS stimulant himself, Oberg thought, pumping chemical energy out of his neurons. Crash every morning, up every night. It was pathetic, and he resented the boy’s condescension. “I can pay,” Oberg said.
The boy took a second look. “You prepared to buy in quantity? I don’t sell candy.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Well.”
The boy led him outside.
The walkway was narrow and dark. Presumably, it was useful for dumping trash. It overlooked a waste canal, dark water drawn down open conduits to the sea. There was a single sodium-vapor lamp overhead and nothing beyond the canal but the blank stucco wall of an empty warehouse. The sound of music trickled out from the bar through this single door, closed now. The sound was anemic and far.-seeming.
The boy dug into the deep recesses of his jacket and brought out a sweaty handful of pills. They glistened in the harsh light. They were small and black. “This is all I have,” the boy was saying, bored with the transaction already, “but you come back Tuesday, I might—hey!”
Oberg swept his fist out and knocked the boy’s hand away. The pills flew up in an arc, twinkled a moment, dropped inaudibly into the canal.
The boy stared, a little awed. “Son of a bitch!” No one had ever done this to him, Oberg thought. Oberg could have been anyone, a mob enforcer, a new competitor. But the boy had only dealt with mainlanders. He was surprised and confused.
Oberg waited.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “You can fucking throw them away if you want to,” he said finally, “but you pay for ’em either way. So pony up, asshole.” He took a knife from under his belt.
Oberg had anticipated it. He leaned inside the boy’s reach, bent the arm, extracted the knife. He held it against the boy’s throat.
He felt a pleasure in this that he had not felt for years.
He understood it was something he enjoyed, the rush of it, something he had missed all this time. An old and profound pleasure. But it was not a thought worth dwelling on.
Loose cannon, he thought giddily.
The boy was wide-eyed and pale.
“Tell me where you got them,” Oberg said.
The boy said, faintly, “Fuck you!”
Oberg let the blade draw out a line of blood. The blood was bright and oily in the stark light. He felt the boy twisting against his restraint. “Tell me,” he said.
It took time, but in the end he extracted four names and four approximate canal addresses. It would be useful, an approach to the woman, especially if Tate failed to produce any useful information. The boy relaxed, sensing that Oberg had what he wanted: the ordeal was over.
And it was. But not the way the boy expected. Oberg drew the knife deeply across the boy’s throat and in a single motion levered the body over the railing and down into the waste canal. There was a momentary thrashing, a choking sound, silence immediately after.
It felt good. It was deeply gratifying.
He used a handkerchief to clean the blade of the knife, and threw the handkerchief after the body.
The knife he took home.
The past is dead and gone, he thought. That was the way it should be.
He had trouble sleeping sometimes. Tonight, for instance. In part it was the adrenaline that had rivered through him at the death of the boy. In part, a more obscure stimulation.
In his worst dreams he was back in Brazil, back in the war, running what his orders called “punitive raids” on farms and villages where guerillas had been harbored. In the dreams he killed people but they would not stay safely dead: they rose and pointed accusing fingers at him; they protested their innocence. He killed them once, twice, three times. They rose up sullenly and said his name.
In Virginia he had touched Tavitch when Tavitch was touching the stone; and Tavitch had looked into his eyes and had seen these same dreams. But they were not dreams. That was the terrifying thing. Somehow, through Tavitch, through the Pau Seco stone, it had actually happened. The dead had risen stubbornly; the dead had pronounced his name.
He lay in the darkness and was haunted by the memory. It was unnatural; it was alien, an alien ruse, a mind trick. The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.
With this new thought he achieved ease and finally a sleep as calm as that vast and silent ocean; he did not dream; he woke strengthened in his resolve.
In the morning he made a second call to Tate.
“Keller is an Angel,” Tate said. “He’s working for an independent producer name of Vasquez. He’s in L.A. now, probably downloading at the Network compounds.” He regarded Oberg guiltily. “I assume this is what you wanted.”
“Yes,” Oberg said.
“You’re crazy, Steve, you know that? You’re fucking nuts.”
It might be true. It didn’t matter. The monitor blanked, and Oberg stared a long moment at his own reflection in it.
CHAPTER 21
1. Byron knew he was losing her. The knowledge was unavoidable.
He didn’t talk about the pills. They didn’t talk much at all. Talk was superfluous; worse, it might have required lies. He was watching when she tossed her pill bottle into a waste canal, and the act kindled a flare of hope in him. Later he found the pills themselves hoarded in a corner of her dresser; it was only the bottle she had discarded. It was a gesture he had been meant to see.
He understood that this was the old Teresa, the Teresa he had found on his doorstep years ago, dying and frightened of dying and wanting to die. The part of her that needed to survive had been silenced—silenced, he guessed, that day in the hotel room off the Ver-o-Peso—and he was helpless to call it back. He could not touch her that way, because she did not love him.