The Light is the Darkness (6 page)

The Finn unfolded from his chair and strolled over to where the party girls were flirting with the hapless locals. The local boys were stout, blue collar types, probably construction workers; corduroy jackets, greasy ball-caps on backward, half-blitzed and irritable as bulls. Neither was too happy when the Finn told them in an exaggerated accent to get their filthy Yankee paws off his women. There was a long moment where nothing happened, then one of the men smashed the Finn’s jaw with a bottle and his partner broke a pool cue across the Finn’s spine. The Finn shrugged and laughed and wiped a trickle of blood from his lip. He turned and stuck his thumb in the eye of the guy who’d hit him with the pool cue. The other man threw a haymaker punch, but the Finn absorbed it and caught his arm and twisted it until it crunched. He ground the jagged base of the bottle into the man’s nose. Blood rushed over his knuckles. Then he leaned over and caught the man who was shrieking and crawling away by the testicles and the scruff of the neck, hoisted him shoulder-high and pitched him through the big picture window in a shower of neon. The bikers cheered and the polo shirt boys gave the Finn a round of golf claps.

The Finn wasn’t breathing hard. He looked at Conrad, hand on hip.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Conrad said. He poured another glass of booze and drank it all in one steady pull.

The bikers stirred, but the Finn waved and they settled. “Are you afraid of me?” His accent was completely invisible now.

“He’s a tub of shit. Smash him, Ronnie,” one of the girls said. She popped her gum.

Conrad frowned and poured again and drank again. His short hair was combed. He wore a casual navy blue suit, nice shoes, everything.

“Be quiet,” the Finn said to the girl and she shut up.

“He’s afraid okay,” one of the polo shirt boys said. “Lookit him. Jill’s right. Chubs is a round mound of ground. Givin’ you the hairy eyeball. Kick his ass, man. Fuck, lemme.” And everybody but the Finn laughed.

“I apologize for the idiots,” the Finn said. “I know who you are. Fight me.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Conrad said. But he did want to, very, very much. The more he watched the Finn’s entourage, the more he yearned to taste blood. “I don’t do unsanctioned matches. My people aren’t comfortable with it.”

“Please do not be disrespectful.”

“
You’re
disrespectful and you’re unranked. Don’t bow up to me, son. It’s unseemly. Look at my scars.”

“I apologize. We would have a good match. You’ve seen my films. You know I can fight.”

“Pick on some other guy, some other night. Sit down, have a drink.”

“Name the terms.”

“Go away, son.”

The Finn gestured at one of the polo shirt boys and they held a whispered conference. The Finn said to Conrad, “Tomorrow night. There’s a place not far from here. You call your support people, whatever. I’m bringing my own staff and a film crew. So, full panoply.”

“Full panoply.” Conrad favored the simplicity of shoes and a t-shirt for something off the cuff like this, but the Finn obviously needed film, and film stock sold far better to the collectors if the contestants dressed in their peacock finest. “Seventy-five, winner take all.”

The Finn didn’t blink. “Done. Weapons? Hands and feet?”

“What do you prefer?”

The Finn smiled and made a fist.

IV

He found the town in a dried up basin valley, dropped his film at a one-hour-photo-mat. The pictures were sequences of him and Wanda in various poses against the landscape and others of just the empty land itself shot from the moving car. Photography didn’t particularly interest him. He snapped the photos because on occasion he’d spotted ghostly figures and orbs floating in the background of the developed film; hints of the unseen forces that surrounded him.

Wanda skipped off to have nails done at a salon. Conrad checked his battered and mutilated roadmap. His vision doubled; he wiped tears away with his sleeve. The sky contracted rhythmically, an origami nautilus.

The town was gritty, the kind of town one might expect from a macho man cigarette advertisement. High country, wind-blasted and strange in the provincial sense that such places have ever been strange to outsiders. Every structure creaked, every skinned surface ate the anemic light or gave it back too harshly.

Conrad squinted, clutched his head to keep it from cracking like a plate. His fingers were going numb, and that was odd; such a thing had never happened before unless he was blind drunk or succumbing to the sweet balm of unconsciousness from repeated blows to the head. The sensation came and went, tiny surges of disquiet.

He dialed Marsh from a payphone in the arcade between a tattoo parlor and a gun shop. It was a lengthy number printed inside a matchbook from the Egyptian Casino in Atlantic City. Conrad had no need to dig up the matchbook. His memory wasn’t perfect, not like Dad’s, or Imogene’s, or even Ezra’s had been; even so, he possessed a mnemonic knack with patterns and sequences. Number strings were cake. No, he used the green and gold matchbook because he enjoyed the gilt lettering, its cured scent, the suggestion of great mysteries unfolding in the dark.

The line hummed.

A pit bull wandered the street, snuffling garbage. People gave it a berth without seeming to notice the object of their apprehension.

The line stuttered and snapped like a fire.

A kid in a biker jacket a couple of sizes too large stopped at Conrad’s car, peered into the dirty windows.

“Hah,” Marsh said, far away. Chamber music droned, water rushed over rocks. Woodwinds, violins, recorders, river stones rubbed smooth as glass. No opera today. Marsh had once confided that he preferred opera when his mood was savage.

“Marsh,” Conrad said.

“What… Goddamn it.” Marsh disconnected.

Conrad waited.

The kid in the biker jacket whistled to the pit bull. They walked across the deserted lot, went through a break in the cyclone fencing, soon became specks in the outlying fields. The white gulf was penetrated by water towers, train tracks, abandoned box cars, a million miles of scrub. Someday alien probes might descend, drill core samples and speculate whether life could’ve possibly existed here in aeons gone by.

The payphone rang. Marsh said, “It’s okay now. How’d you get that number? That’s my private number.” The chamber music was gone.

“You gave it to me.”

“Hell I did. When? When did I give you that number?”

“I don’t remember. Perhaps Singh...”

“Call the other number, next time.”

“The recording.” A heavily-accented voice would answer, say Conrad had reached Kow’s Mandarin Grill, please wait.

“Uh-huh. That one.” Marsh did something away from the receiver, came close again. He coughed. His voice was raspy; it thickened when he was upset. According to Singh, Marsh suffered from a rare bronchial disease, a souvenir from the Dark Continent. “Y’know we clandestine types wallow in the traditions of argot and subterfuge. It’s genetic.”

“Ah.”

“You know, Conrad, I was kinda worried you weren’t going to call in. Thought maybe you’d forgotten.”

“No worries, Rob. I’ll have your money.”

“Oh, don’t I know that. Where you headed, bud?”

“West.”

“Uh-huh. Where to?”

“There are sites in Washington. I might visit those.” Conrad smiled and his lips split, dribbled blood down his chin into the receiver. Marsh had him pigeonholed as a wannabe naturalist. That was fine, that was convenient, it kept them off his back. The Mima Mounds. The Juniper Dunes. The Horse Cliffs. A dozen others, most of them nameless and unmapped. He’d trod the ground of those places; camped in their primordial circumferences and watched star-fields blaze like iron in a crucible; burned innumerable rolls of film and waited for epiphanies that yet eluded him. Going back to those hallowed sites wasn’t likely to make a difference; the key to the whole mess was surely elsewhere in an exotic region, upon a darksome shore. However, he had to give Marsh something. Otherwise, Marsh would take what he wanted.

“Shouldn’t you be training?”

“I’m always training.”

“And that’s it. Huh.”

“I’m just driving.” Conrad wasn’t an artful liar; bluntness was his weapon of choice. However, when dealing with the likes of Marsh he’d gradually learned to adopt cursory camouflage, to blend in with his current habitat, an ant trundling in the shadow of aardvarks.
Huh, I’m becoming proficient. Should’ve gone into law.

“Uh-huh. Say, bud. People came by your house yesterday. The New England house.”

“Who?” Conrad had almost forgotten about that place—monumentally gothic, surrounded by overgrown gardens and fieldstone walls; he hadn’t been there in several years. An industrialist fan had given it to him as a present. Conrad had owned several homes before liquidating them to fuel his search for Imogene. Gifts from patrons and admirers. Cars too; and planes. All of it gone now, except for the New England house, a cabin in Washington State.

“People. We called in an eye in the sky and ran the pics—nada. They weren’t ours and they weren’t Company guys; probably foreign. Got any foreign friends?”

“I don’t know them.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh. Stranger things, I guess.”

“I’m just driving.”

“Sure, sure. Could be a coincidence. Maybe whoever owned that house before had some heat. That could be the deal.”

“I don’t know them.” The conversation compounded Conrad’s headache; his brow was slick and feverish. He feared the tension would prompt him to do something ill-advised. Occasionally, nerves caused him to burst into maniacal laughter. He had to get off the phone.

“Uh-huh, could be a coincidence. That’s how a pal of mine got cashiered. I ever tell you that story? No? Sullivan ran an LP in Lima. Boring stuff, I promise you that. Not much of a health risk. Except Sully went into the wrong nightclub to get drunk and came out at exactly the wrong time; somebody thought he looked like somebody else who was also there, it was dark, and blah, blah, blah. Piece of piano wire will fit around anybody’s neck if you cut it long enough.”

“I don’t know them.”

“You’re just driving, right?”

“Right.”

“Uh-huh. Singh can meet you. He’s got business in the area. If you don’t hear from him in a few hours—”

“I’ll call back.”

“At the other number.”

“Okay.”

Marsh disconnected.

Conrad stared into the receiver. The concave oval of miniature black holes radiated waves of soft static like heat shimmering from desert highway.

He made another call, this one to some medical technicians affiliated with the Pageant and told them when and where the ludus would be, then hung up and slouched into a dollar store, bought a bag of aspirin packets and three bottles of generic seltzer water. The clerk at the register was excruciatingly polite. She seemed pleased to inform him that yes, the Happy Raven Hotel was about seventy miles up the highway,
Bon voyage, sucker
. He thanked her, went outside and chewed a fistful of aspirin, gulped the water.

Packs of urban cowboys trolled in pickups, spat tobacco at the gutters in well-rehearsed arcs. Some gave Conrad the evil eye, muttered to their partners, if they had any, to themselves if they didn’t. Country & Western tunes slithered from tin sheathes, coiled into his eardrum, tweaked the knob of his adrenal drip, caused a surge of testosterone that threatened to wake the prehistoric lizard. Opera for Marsh, Hank Williams for Conrad.

He revisited the photo shop and picked up his film. He sat on the bumper of the Cadillac and reviewed the stack flashcard style. Then he burned the pictures in a sodden pile, kicked the ashes to pieces as an afterthought. The ashes drifted across white and yellow parking stripes and were lost in the boundless fields.

V

The ludus went down at a mostly defunct strip mall just off the highway a few minutes after midnight. There was a film crew, a couple of equipment vans, the assorted handlers and hangers on attendant to these ludi. A small crowd, even for this. He’d placed a call to one of Uncle K’s former liaisons and arranged for a surgeon, a couple of emergency techs, and three security guys. The security guys dressed in suits and carried Uzis slung under their coats. Their leader, a short, mean looking guy with false teeth shook Conrad’s hand and said it was an honor to meet him.

Conrad strapped on a glorious plumed helm, a harness, greaves and boots. He wrapped his left fist in a cestus. The for-show-minimum. Across the lot the Finn was a terror with his oiled body and spiked-everything. The Finn opened his mouth and arched his back, sucking in oxygen. Conrad smiled without emotion and stared at the ground and waited for it to begin.

The Finn had killed his share of men, but they were lesser men, not first class talents. The last victim was a second-tier brute in Gibraltar; a real bloodbath, that one. Nothing for Conrad to scoff at, but nothing to worry about either. He’d watched the tapes, studied the taller man’s movements, his favored techniques. The Finn was a striker, a pugilist enamored of cestus and cleats, knees and elbows. Conrad wasn’t concerned with strikers; he was built to absorb that kind of punishment. A primer, a tune up for the real battles down the line. Easy money.