A Murder of Crows (2 page)

“It's all—”

“I know it's all in there, but I want to hear it in your own words.”

He leaned against the window, the Lincoln Memorial over his shoulder, and Special Agent Yslan Hicks began to speak about what had become her life's work—her special synaesthetes—the Gifted.

DECKER ROBERTS WAS NOT A HAPPY CAMPER.

If his son, Seth, wasn't sick and might need extra cash he'd never have taken this job. This was not the final vetting of an executive for a high-ranking position or the interviewing of a potential buyer for a company. No.

This was clearly personal.

Personal to the creepy, middle-aged casino exec with the polio limp who had hired him—and besides, Las Vegas wasn't his favourite American town.

He took off the headphones and looked at the exec, then looked at the svelte Eastern European woman being questioned on the other side of the one-way mirror.

“Put them headphones back on,” the man ordered.

“I'm not some cheap detective for hire—unlike Jake Geddes, I don't do divorce work.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Hey, this is business. Besides, she ain't my wife.”

No,
Decker thought,
she's more important to you than most wives are to their husbands. She's your heart's desire—the one. The one you were willing to give up everything for. Or at least so you thought.

Decker glanced at the printout that was slowly scrolling onto the table. Somewhere in the vast casino complex someone else was listening to the interrogation and committing it to paper. “Do me a favour.”

“Wha's that?”

“Flip the printout to the front page.”

The casino exec did.

“See where she says her name and when and where she was born?”

“Yeah.”

“Underline where she was born.”

“Why?”

Decker put the headphones back on their hook and said, “Because it's the only truth she's told in the entire interview.”

“You kidding!”

“No. Where she's born—that's it.”

“And all the rest?”

“Equivocation, prevarication, paltering or just plain old-fashion lying—I can't tell you which.”

“Why?”

Decker heard it. The man wasn't asking why he couldn't tell the difference; he'd leapt all the way to “why” his love had deceived him. But Decker sidestepped the man's real question and answered, “Because I only know when someone's telling the truth or at least the truth as she believes it. That's what you pay me for.”

The casino exec ran his hand through the few strands of hair that he'd carefully manoeuvred to cover his liver-spotted scalp, then moved to the console and flipped a toggle. For a moment Decker wondered why a casino would have a room set up like this—then he stopped his mind from going there. It was none of his business.

The casino exec flicked the toggle a second time.

Decker saw the interrogator on the other side of the one-way mirror put his hand to his left ear.

After a pause the exec leaned into the console and said, “Ask her directly if she met with that reporter guy.”

Decker put the headphones back on, felt the cold approach and something metal in his hand—then the slime of blood between his fingers.

The interrogator asked, “Have you ever met with Charles Lipinski?”

“No. Never,” the woman answered.

Squiggles crossed Decker's retinal screen.

The exec shot Decker a look.

Decker shook his head.

The exec leaned in and flipped the toggle twice then said, “Ask her what the fucking day of the week is.”

The interrogator gave a quizzical look then asked, “What day of the week is it?”

“What kind of dumb—”

“What day of the week is it?”

“Wednesday, March sixteenth, 2011.”

The exec looked at Decker.

Perfect squares crossed his retinal screen. He nodded.

“Now ask her what she had for breakfast.”

“Coffee—I only have coffee in the morning.”

Squiggles. Decker shook his head.

“Fuck!” the exec shouted.

“Ask her to give the interrogator her name in her native language,” Decker said.

“Why?”

“Maybe her accent is confusing me.”

Leaning into the mic on the console the exec said, “Have her say her name in Romanian.”

Question, answer, squiggles—not the truth.

Decker looked more closely at the man at the console—fortyish, a sedentary man's gut, that pronounced limp, probably never was handsome even as a child, and that would put him in some way outside, alone, ostracized. The man was pacing now, clearly not just hurt, frightened. It occurred to Decker that this man ran the casino but didn't own it. Money—big money—owned it. “Did she have access to a lot of the casino's secrets?” he asked. He wanted to add “and your secrets” but didn't.

“All of them,” the man said and seemed to deflate as if his bones had turned to mush. Decker thought he might fall and smash his head on the edge of the console.

“Then I'm afraid you're going to have to consider that those secrets are not secrets any longer.”

The man was staring through the one-way mirror—at his love.

“
Everything
she said was a lie?”

“Except where she was born.”

“Not even when she was born was the truth?”

“I wouldn't hold that against her,” Decker said, putting aside the headphones again. “Do you have my money? My work's done here.”

Without taking his eyes from the woman the exec pointed to a thick envelope on the table.

Decker picked it up, quickly riffled through the bills and took one last look at the casino exec. He wanted to ask, “What's going to happen to her?” then thought the better of it. After all, this was Las Vegas. As Hunter S. Thompson so accurately put it, it's the kind of place that “the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.”

AS NSA SPECIAL AGENT YSLAN HICKS PUT ASIDE THE FILE FOLDER
with the information on Martin Armistaad, who was still in Leavenworth Penitentiary, she allowed her fingers to trace Decker Roberts' name on the thick file on her desk. She felt her eyes drawn to the wall of her office where a print of a black on black Rothko painting hung. She stared at it. The colours began to pulse and she recalled where she'd first seen the painting: in the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, thirteen months ago.

She'd been sitting on the bench in the very centre of the nine Rothko canvasses, where they had videotaped Decker Roberts after his fruitless search for his son, Seth.

In the video it was clear that Roberts entered the chapel terribly agitated. Every move betrayed his deep distress. He had walked up close to the large painting on the south wall then slowly turned a full circle and a half, ending facing the huge canvas on the north wall. Then he sat on the bench where Yslan sat and somehow his agitation—after only a minute or two—ceased and he remained perfectly still for the better part of a half hour, after which he got to his feet and walked calmly out of the chapel and headed back to his Toronto home in the Junction. Once there he picked up his life where he'd left off before his confrontation with the head of Yolles Pharmaceuticals in that old Pittsburgh synagogue.

It had surprised Yslan when Roberts moved in with Eddie—Crazy
Eddie—who had so profoundly betrayed him. But she thought she understood it better after watching the tape of Decker's acting exercise, the Betrayal Game.

She looked back at the massive darkness of the print on her wall and thought,
Maybe all this—this abstract expressionist stuff—was all just one big hoax.

Three months ago she'd been called in to watch the interrogation of a trickster who'd gotten himself in trouble passing stolen strip bonds. She couldn't have cared less about the theft, but this guy, Mike Cranston, had for a few years been the toast of the New York City art scene and his canvasses—large white things with diagonal slashes of crimson—had at one time sold for in excess of a hundred thousand dollars. That all ended when, in a drunken stupor, he'd confessed to a fellow party guest that he didn't know shit about art—“Just copied what was popular and made it bigger.” His line “The real ones commit suicide, the smart ones just sit on their shoulders and make money,” made headlines in the
New York Times
Arts section—the party guest had been a reporter for that paper.

For a while Cranston was actually made into a hero by the Fox News folks. They called him the Robin Hood of modern art, fooling the intellectual elite. He had his fifteen minutes of fame seven or eight times over.

But there he sat in the interrogation room, ravaged by some inner torment, the skin on his arms and face seemingly alive with angry red blotches that he tore at with his ragged fingernails.

She watched closely as the lead cop presented the evidence against him. Cranston didn't request a lawyer or deny any of the charges. And when they put a confession in front of him, he went to sign it—then stopped.

“One request.”

“Maybe.”

“Let me keep the painting in my room.”

Yslan quickly went through the police photos of his shabby tenement room. In the sixteenth photo she saw it: hung to one side of
the entry door a perfect, reduced in size, copy of the massive Rothko painting on the north wall of the chapel in Houston that bears the great artist's name. It was the same print that now hung on her office wall.

She stared at the print again.

Decker Roberts believed in art. And somehow she thought that understanding the art he believed in would allow her to understand him—and his gift.

But the more she looked, the more bewildered she became.

“Bewildered,” she said softly.

She thought about the word. She knew it came from the Anglo-Saxon fear of the danger in the woods. To be confused was to be lost in the woods—bewildered. She sensed that she was in the woods when it came to knowing her special synaesthetes, but she also sensed that she had to go deeper into the woods to really understand them.
Deeper into the woods! What does that even mean?
she asked herself. But she ignored her own question because she sensed that there was a profound secret in the woods—in bewilderment. And after her time with Decker Roberts she'd begun to believe in her intuition, that which she sensed.

Her private line buzzed and she picked up.

“We lost him.”

She was suddenly on her feet. She held the phone away from her face until she had her anger under control then asked, “How?”

“Don't know. We've got watchers on the front and back of their house.”

“And no one left?”

“For fourteen hours, no one came or went. Lights on and off but it's probably a variable timer.”

“But you saw no one leave?”

“No. No one left.”

“But now they're gone? Both gone? You're sure?”

“Yeah, we've been inside. They're gone. “

Yslan grabbed her coat. “Wait for me. Don't do anything else till I get there.”

The sharp beep of a cell phone turned her to the door.

“Lost someone, Special Agent Hicks?” Leonard Harrison was standing in the door of her office, his eyes fastened to his BlackBerry. “One of your Gifted perhaps?”

“
Our
Gifted . . . sir.” This last she added quickly.

“Decker Roberts?”

Yslan nodded. She wanted to ask how he knew—but she knew how. One of her two assistants up in the Junction—guys Decker Roberts had named Mr. T and Ted Knight—had clearly called Harrison before he called her. Shit!

“Well, what are you waiting for, Special Agent?”

Yslan leaned forward to pick up her briefcase. Leonard Harrison watched every move, every arch, and muscle contraction—all of it.

Then Yslan felt Harrison's gaze move past her to the west wall of her office where she'd hung the Rothko print. “Sir?”

His phone gave off a quick sequence of beeps, the digital equivalent of dashes and dots, paused for a three count, then gave a single high-pitched tone.

Harrison's phone had been switched over to high encryption. He hit the accept button.

She knew that he had accepted a countdown to some operation or other. She'd seen him do this very thing several times before, but never had she seen him smile as he set his watch to the countdown timer. He mumbled just loud enough for her to hear, “One for the good guys.”

“Sir?”

“All you need to know is that it's T equals plus a month and counting,” he said, then without any further explanation, turned and left her office.

So that's what he had been hiding,
she thought.

She knew better than to ask her boss for clarification. T plus a month and counting to something that's one for the good guys was all she was going to know about that operation. She closed the door behind him and turned back to the Rothko print. Only thirteen
months ago she'd have scoffed at the idea that she'd buy a piece of abstract expressionist art. But that was before she'd kidnapped Decker Roberts from that restaurant in New York City and interrogated him for three days.

Before she'd accompanied him to the Junction.

THE DRY HOT AIR OF LAS VEGAS HIT DECKER LIKE A STEAMROLLER.
He shielded his eyes by pulling down his Djuma Game Reserve baseball cap. He never wore sunglasses because he valued the accuracy of his sight too much to allow a coloured lens between what was out there and what he saw.

He flipped open the new cell phone Eddie had insisted that he buy and called Eddie, who picked up on the first ring. “You asked me to call when I finished. I never do that—why this time?”