Cosmopolis (14 page)

He was tired of looking at screens. Plasma screens were not flat enough. They used to seem flat, now they did not. He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists.

He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in 60/91

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English and Finnish. He knew a little Finnish. Eric hated him for that. He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. He coded the screens into their hatches and cabinets, restoring the interior of the car to its natural grandness of scale, with sightlines unobstructed and his body isolated in space, and he felt a sneeze begin to develop in his immune system.

The streets emptied fast, barricades loaded into trucks and hauled away. The car moved forward now, with Torval seated up front.

He sneezed and then felt a sense of incompleteness. He realized that he always sneezed twice, or so it seemed in retrospect. He waited and it came, rewardingly, the second sneeze.

What causes people to sneeze? A protective reflex of the nasal mucous membranes, to expel invasive materials.

The street was dead. The car moved past the Spanish church and the cluster of scaffolded brownstones. He poured a brandy and felt hungry again.

There was a restaurant ahead, on the south side of the street. He saw it was Ethiopian and imagined a chunk of spongy brown bread dragged through lentil stew. He imagined yebeg wat in berber sauce. It was too late for the place to be open but there was a dim light back toward the kitchen and he had the driver stop the car.

He wanted yebeg wat. He wanted to say it, smell it and eat it.

What happened next happened fast. He stepped onto the sidewalk and a man approached running and struck him. He raised an arm in defense, Eric did, too late, and threw a blind punch, maybe grazing the man on the head or shoulder. He felt the sludge, the sort of mush of blood and matter on his face. He could not see. His eyes were coated with the stuff but he heard Torval nearby, their rustles and grunts as the two men skirmished.

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and stood on the curbstone wiping his face, cautiously, in the event an eyeball had been dislodged. He was able to see that Torval had the man bent over the trunk of the limo, forearm locked behind his head.

"Subject reduced," Torval said into his lapel.

Eric smelled and tasted something. First there was the handkerchief, soured by his own secretions of the testes and seminal vesicles and various other glands, collected earlier in the day when he'd used the square of cloth to clean himself after one or another expulsion of fluid. But he was confused about the taste on his tongue.

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 61/91

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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?"

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"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.

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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. Torval 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.

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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.