“No. He was nice. I liked him.”
“What did you like about him?”
“He played with me. The general talked bad to my dad but the nice one played with me. For a long time.”
“Hannah,” Justin said, and suddenly the inside of the car seemed very quiet and still. “Did he play jacks with you?”
“Yup,” the little girl said. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“He was really, really, really good.”
He was back in his house by a few minutes before ten, happy to be in East End, happy to be away from soldiers and bureaucrats and widows. By ten, he was at his living room window, looking at the house across the street, catty-corner from his. Reggie’s lights were on. She was awake. Go on, he told himself. She told you to come over. So go. Go. But he stayed, one knee on the couch, his arms leaning on the backrest, looking at the stillness of her front yard.
Justin’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness outside his window. He could make out the edges of the telephone wires across the street. And the hedges that sat below them. He thought about the little girl’s jacks, the way her soft hands curled around them, and it made his stomach hurt. He thought about Martha Peck, not knowing whether or not she’d come through as promised. And the colonel; his fierce and misplaced loyalty. Again, he could see Hannah Cooke’s hand curl around the jack, and now he closed his eyes and he was back inside Harper’s, walking through the bombed-out remains, and Chuck Billings was pulling a jack out of the wall. A tiny children’s toy, embedded in the wall. A toy stained with dried red-brown blood.
He opened his eyes. Saw-or maybe just felt-some kind of movement in Reggie’s house. Maybe she’d noticed his car. Maybe she was coming over. He waited but there was no further movement. Just silence. And shadows.
Things are muddy, he thought. Things are muddy.
He looked at his watch. Ten-twenty.
He walked over to his computer, turned it on, waited for it to boot up. When it was ready, he went to his “Shared” folder, where he kept his downloaded music. He turned the volume on his computer all the way up, clicked on a Tim Curry song from the early ’80s, “I Do the Rock.” He let the music wash over him, its hard, staccato rhythm and its cynical obscure lyrics. In a crazy world, the only thing that still made any sense was to do the rock. Forget ideology. Forget growing old. Stay away from fame and politics and philosophy. Just do the rock. Justin agreed. It was about the only thing that still made sense to him, too. But his job was to make sense of things he didn’t understand, so, music blaring, he went to the folder he’d cleverly labeled “MI” for “Murder Investigation” and began to update his list. The first column he went to was “Connections.” There he found the link he’d initially marked as so tentative-Vice President Phillip Dandridge-between Bradford Collins and Hutchinson Cooke. He had typed in several question marks his first go-round. Now he deleted every one of them. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had a firm connection. Dandridge definitely knew both men. Justin stared at the fact, couldn’t make anything new of it, glad in a way that he couldn’t because what the hell was he possibly going to do to the vice president of the United States if it ever came to that, so he began typing again, adding everything he’d learned in D.C. Not a hell of a lot, he realized as he typed. But small bits and pieces. In the space he’d allotted for Hutch Cooke, he added, “Daughter plays with jacks,” and to the right of that he put in “Connection to bomb?”-and then he typed in all the question marks he’d just removed from link number one. He also wrote down just about everything he could remember that had come out of the mouth of Theresa Cooke. He even wrote down, “I fell down the tower-Eiffel Tower.” It seemed idiotic, but he’d learned never to dismiss anything. It meant that Cooke was a game player, he liked puzzles. Info that somehow might prove relevant since this was as complicated a puzzle as Justin could imagine. When he’d entered everything he could recall, he was about to shut down the computer, stopped, went back into the file, and added one more thing: “Everything’s muddy.” It seemed fitting.
Then he turned the computer off, took the half bottle of single-malt scotch left over from the night before, and went back to his lookout spot on the couch.
Reggie’s windows were dark now. She’d gone to bed.
Justin decided he’d better do the same.
His visitors would be arriving at nine in the morning. It was going to be a long and interesting day. He had to stay sharp. He’d have to be alert because he was going to need to absorb a lot of information.
Yes, he decided. Definitely time for bed.
One last look across the street.
Nothing but darkness.
Everything’s muddy.
He went to his computer, clicked on an illegally downloaded version of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine,” and cranked it up. It was the perfect song.
A half a bottle of scotch and three-quarters of a thick, hand-rolled joint later, Justin Westwood was sound asleep.
19
Nuri Al-Bazaad liked driving American cars.
They were so quiet. When you rolled up the windows all the way, you couldn’t hear a thing. It amazed him every time because it was like being in a small room shut off from the rest of the world. You could see what was going on in that world, you could sense the mayhem, the corruption, the evil all around you, but you couldn’t hear any of it. And it couldn’t touch you. You were sealed off and removed. Safe. Protected.
Everything was soft and spotless inside American cars, too. It must be very similar to being in heaven, Nuri decided. So clean, so far away from the pain of the world, so comfortable and relaxing. He couldn’t wait to go to heaven. Nuri did not like it very much on earth where everything was so filthy and rough and corrupt. Where women exposed themselves and tried to be like men, and nobody had respect for anything or anyone, and everyone was in so much pain. So much awful, awful pain.
Nuri turned up the volume on the car radio now. Not too much, just a little. Just enough so the gentle strings washed over him like a soothing bath. The sound systems in these cars amazed him. It was like having an orchestra playing in the backseat. You could hear the resonance, the timbre in the music. Nuri thought there would have to be beautiful music in heaven, too. He couldn’t imagine it more beautiful than the surround sound coming from the four speakers in the rented Buick.
Nuri was never bored sitting in a car like the one he waited in now. How could you ever get bored? he wondered. As the music played, he slid the front seat back and forth. It moved so easily forward and back, up and down. He was parked now, he had to wait for the people to come out of their house, and he was becoming a little anxious. Not because he was worried about what he was going to do but because he was anxious to drive again. He was very impressed with the smoothness of the ride, the way this car barely felt any bumps, the way it seemed to glide over any obstacle in its path. He had to give credit to the American roads, which were paved and solid and built to last. Not at all like the roads at home, which were hardly even roads; they were ruts for wagons. They were filthy and ragged and bumpy. They were not like the road that led to heaven. That road would be like an American highway: long and straight and smooth and beautiful.
More than anything else, Nuri liked the heating system that warmed the car. He would turn it all the way up and blast himself with hot air until he would be dripping with sweat on even the coldest day. He still had childhood memories of his cold desert home, of lying awake at night shivering, of thinking he would never be warm again, of his father beating him when he had the temerity to ask for a blanket. “Men do not need blankets,” his father would say, and then slap, hard across the face. “Men do not fear the cold.”