The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (8 page)
Friendly residents warned that despite evidence of extensive remodeling, such cosmetics masked a host of problems. Plumbing leaked and power came and went at inopportune moments. At such times, the elevators were out of service, and the air conditioning offline. Then, the population of the Lord Raleigh Arms endured the blackness of sweltering apartments and listened to cockroaches scrabble in the hollow spaces behind freshly painted gypsum. Sirens bugled in the city where its towers formed the corner posts of a skein of nictitating lights.
He'd scarcely unpacked when he overheard complaints about noise, especially in regard to loud music practiced by an amateur flautist in a nearby block; then there was the indelicate matter of bag people creeping around late at night. One of his fellow American neighbors, an engineer he'd met in passing, heard a noise in the hall, an odd knock at the door. When he checked through the peephole, an eyeball blinked at him. "The freak's face must've been squashed up against the door!" The engineer was an excitable fellow given to padding bare-chested in striped pajama bottoms around the foyer and community annex. He said he realized the "freak" was a woman when she stepped back and ran away, giving him a better look at her. "Scurried, I mean. Like a cockroach hit with a light. Moved pretty fast, too. All this blasted security and we can't keep bums out! Next thing you know, we'll be getting stabbed in our beds, or rolled up in a carpet and carted off for ransom." For their part, the security personnel did immediately capture vagrants who slipped in on occasion, but denied the existence of any permanent interlopers.
Similar stories ran through the block. Elvira, as the English-speaking residents referred to the haunt, in reference to her black dress and bone-white face, seemed the most popular object of speculation. Elvira didn't haunt alone, in any case. One of the janitors confided "little friends" followed her around.
"Kids?" Royce said, thinking of the brats shrieking through the hallways, wild as the painted savages who populated Golding's dark vision.
The janitor, a sunburned elder statesman in blue paper work clothes, shook his head emphatically and motioned near his hip. "No, no. Little friends." He glanced nervously over his shoulder, then back at Royce. He smiled with the obsequious reflex of a career servant, and pushed his squeaking cartload of mops and brooms down the hallway of doors toward the distant elevators.
The sweep proceeded routinely and monotonously—the life of an investigator was unglamorous and fraught with glacial tedium. Prior to his insertion, he'd been provided a list of "at risk" technologies and the names of persons associated with them. It would've been impossible to monitor the scores of individuals who might be involved in nefarious activity. Instead, he relied on the installation of state-of-the-art security software designed to track anomalous activity on the company network. He received authorization to order a couple dozen wiretaps of private residences. He outsourced the data collection to local specialists and quickly acquired potential informants with connections to the black market. Occasionally, he arranged casual social meetings with subjects on the list and recorded all conversations via a microwire and relayed details of these transactions to his handlers back in the States. The bulk of his work was as involving as watching paint dry.
Royce felt restlessness more keenly than usual. This wasn't a run-down burgh in Soviet Russia, or a backwater in the South of Italy. This was Hong Kong in all its glitz and glory, a great, seething den of LED-brilliant iniquity; and him marking the hours like a two-bit private eye who'd been paid to keep tabs on a cheating spouse at the local Dew Drop Inn.
Many of Royce's colleagues frequented a posh cocktail lounge a few blocks from the compound. The bar was called the Rover in honor of its itinerant patrons; a smoky, dim place with poker lamps on chains over the lacquered chestnut tables, and curtained booths; the kind where three sides rise six feet and one could practically jam a small dinner party inside. The help were strictly locals; cute-as-buttons Cantonese girls who might be high school sophomores or thirty-year-old mothers of three. A burly ex-fire chief from the Bronx ran the show. Jodie Samuels was quite the character; gods, he looked uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Something of a taskmaster; he didn't have a choice about Asian servers, but he'd only hire white bartenders and chefs; forced HR to ship in personnel from England and America.
Racist management notwithstanding, the lounge ran like a top. They'd tucked an exclusive billiards room in the back; a gentlemen's club. Billiards weren't popular with the regular crowd and most of the power players belonged to swankier, more prestigious clubs in the hip, upscale districts; however it served as a convenient niche to entertain guests and relax after a stressful day at the office.
Royce wormed his way into Samuels' good books because he received an outrageous per diem and wasn't shy about spending it. Samuels probably could've scored a new Cadillac from the tips Royce left him. Before long, Royce got the nod to enjoy the accommodations. A small group of businessmen made the place their home away from home and he became chummy with many of them. They smoked cigars and drank a lot of XO and swapped more lies than he cared to remember. All this in order to maneuver close to his quarry, the irrepressible Brendan Coyne.
It wasn't difficult to make the connection: he spilled a drink on Coyne's shirt, bought him another round and insisted on picking up the cleaning tab. Soon they were comparing their exploits as Americans at large and marveling how they lived a stone's throw apart. After that, they socialized at the Rover three or four evenings a week. He methodically compiled a list of Coyne's business associates and social acquaintances, flagging several of these as potential conspirators. Coyne possessed peripheral ties to the Hong Kong underworld and a onetime convicted CEO of an extinct American corporation. In itself, these casual associations proved little; Royce personally knew and consorted with a baker's dozen crooked lawyers, accountants and corporate officers, most of whom functioned quite efficiently within their various organizations; a bit of skullduggery, like the graft Royce loved so well, went with the territory. Nonetheless, this compounded the difficulty of ferreting the truth about Coyne's extracurricular activities.
He knew plenty about his subject's personal life at this point: Coyne's father, a career Army lieutenant, dropped dead of a heart attack at a formal dinner a couple years back, and Coyne summoned his aged mother to Hong Kong rather than abandon her in Seattle among cold-hearted relatives. During their frequent interactions, Royce applauded his associate's loyalty while secretly speculating about his ulterior motives. Royce had been forced to put his own mother in a home and he doubted a would-be playboy like Coyne had an altruistic bone in his body.
Coyne and his mother lived in an apartment across the quadrangle. Coyne was a hard partier who'd broken up with a longtime boyfriend and developed a neurosis about staying in shape. He munched on trail mix and lifted weights at the gym every other day, basted himself in a tanning booth with regularity, and did laps in the pool at night; he invited Royce to join him. Royce laughed. All the chlorine in China wouldn't have persuaded him to stick so much as his toe in that water. "The sauna in the executive washroom suits me fine, thank you," Royce said.
Royce kept him under constant surveillance. He purchased a small, high-powered telescope from a shop that catered to private detectives and suspicious spouses; the proprietor dealt in hidden cameras, thumbnail recorders, lowlight scopes, and other apparatuses. During the day, he positioned a video camera on his terrace in a bamboo blind, lens oriented at Coyne's apartment. At night, he killed the lights and watched through his telescope while Coyne moved from room to room. On Tuesday and Friday when his mother was away at the community center playing bingo, Coyne slowly undressed, habitually lingering at a panel mirror in the bedroom. Other nights mother and son shared dinner before the dizzy blue screen of their television. He frequently made innocuous calls on the landline to his brother in Seattle, other colleagues overseas, a stock advisor in Taiwan; nothing damning; nothing remotely interesting, in fact. Coyne observed these rituals until his clockwork emergence for two dozen laps in the pool. The mechanical repetition of the affair caused Royce to ponder his own patterns, the automated nature of humans in general.
Other days, he followed Coyne around the city, making note of his itinerary, the people he visited. There wouldn't be any momentous revelation, no potboiler twist. Ultimately, success in these matters boiled down to the inexorable compilation of data.
After nearly a month of monitoring Coyne, lassitude eroded Royce's patience. It was an inevitable consequence of prolonged field investigations. Hyper-sensitivity, too much liquor and caffeine, cigarettes and lack of sleep coupled paranoia and mania to birth a form of high-functioning schizophrenia. Before Hong Kong, he'd kicked smoking and reserved his drinking for infrequent social occasions; both habits had returned with a vengeance. Such were the hazards of his occupation; alongside venereal disease from liaisons with barflies and unscrupulous prostitutes, and death or imprisonment at the hands of disgruntled foreign interests.
Sometimes, during the grind, he allowed himself to daydream about his erstwhile college plans to become an engineer, to marry the cute orthodontist in training, Jenny Hodge. Paranoia had always been a problem, though.
You never could buy the fact a babe like Jenny saw something in you, surely she was laughing behind your back, making time with the rugby stud in her dorm
. When she discovered his love of telephoto lenses and hidden microphones, his paranoid fantasies came home to roost. She sobbed during their melodramatic breakup scene, said she figured he'd lied about everything, when the truth was he'd only lied about half and the half was harmless, mostly.
Bye, bye, sweet Jenny, I loved thee well. Here I sit, fifteen years older and wiser in big bad Hong Kong trying to hang a guy by his testicles for corporate espionage. How much damage has he done? A hundred mil? Two hundred? Shit, I'm the poor man's James Bond. Eat your heart out, baby
.
As his mind wandered, he tended to focus on peripheral subjects: the elegant young lady in a single bedroom diagonally opposite his unit who'd moved in after the apartment waited empty as a cave; the previous family departed within a day of Royce's arrival after setting the place afire due to a stovetop mishap. Each evening she paraded in the choreographed flood of track lights, nude, but for a shiny waist chain and a bead necklace. Then the blond European couple, apparently engaged in a ceaseless war punctuated by broken windows and routine police visits. And finally, a squat, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Ward who trundled onto her balcony after dark and played shrill, discordant tunes on various woodwinds, she being the flautist so reviled in certain quarters of the LRA.
Royce learned she was a chief organizer of senior activities—the chairperson of bingo tournaments and the Saturday evening mixer in the Governor White ballroom. Something in her corpulent stature, the pagan timbre of her horrid musical pretensions, riveted him. She resembled almost completely an aunt on his mother's side, Carole Joyce, a dowager widow with a place just outside San Francisco. Mom and Dad pawned him and his brother on her one summer. He didn't remember much about that, except the house was gloomy and full of dusty furniture, and his aunt filled him with loathing. Carole Joyce had been a large woman as well, and vaguely unwholesome in her appetites. Her fetishes hadn't diminished with age. She enjoyed erotic art and favored French Renaissance gowns the better to display her ample cleavage; she wore black eye shadow and ghastly white pancake makeup that didn't blend where it ended under her jaw. Aunt Carole Joyce slept in her makeup, seldom scraped it off, preferring to add a new layer every morning. She was a dilettante spiritualist who'd managed some travel and vacillated between Buddhism, Taoism and more esoteric systems according to whim. Aunt Carole Joyce was particularly fascinated with punishment and doom and she'd told a wide-eyed Royce numerous hair-raising parables about wretched boys in foreign cultures going to the thousandfold hells in a hand basket where they were inevitably certain to suffer the most exquisite torments imaginable.
Be glad you're an American. We've got just the one hell
.
A bloated creature in her sixties, she prowled the boardwalks for handsome, tanned young men, solicited them with cash and gifts to come up and swamp the scummy pool and to hack at a halfacre garden, which had been overgrown for some thirty years. Royce was nine or ten and didn't know much, but he figured from their behavior Aunt Carole Joyce gave them the creeps too. She certainly went through a number of the strapping lads in the three months Royce spent in captivity. He never discovered whether his aunt tossed them aside, or if they cut and ran of their own accord.
Whenever Royce caught sight of Agatha Ward, he instantly revisited that summer with Aunt CJ and shuddered, but couldn't look away. Indeed, Royce cultivated a morbid preoccupation not only with Mrs. Ward, but the whole tribe of female elders. Mrs. Tuttle and Mrs. Fox, the inseparable canasta partners; Erma Yarbro, an emaciated wasp from Yonkers who made no secret her dislike of the Far East and its inhabitants; Mrs. Grant, who'd lost her legs to diabetes and trolled the quadrangle in a motorized wheelchair; and solemn Mrs. Cardin, an inveterate smoker with a button in her trachea. He fixated upon their poolside klatches, knitting parties and weekly luncheons at the community annex.
These women brought to mind so many seniors he'd known over the years, familiar in the interchangeable way of babies; they were the ghosts of teachers, librarians and neighbors who'd populated his childhood, although they didn't behave in the torpid, desultory manner of other seniors. Their movements seemed vigorous, their interactions lively. Occasionally, he caught a strange sign pass among them as they played at cards, or reclined poolside, soaking up infrequent sun; an occulted ripple of intention, a shibboleth that spoke of subterranean things; and some late nights, he spied their movements in the courtyard as they formed in disorganized groups and filed out of the compound. He felt like an anthropologist stealthily documenting the customs of an alien culture; scientist and voyeur in one pathological bundle.