“Stay back,” Larner said, joining the ravagers. They gathered in a more or less invisible line along the sidewalk on the next block. All eyes were on one single building, a ramshackle house, one of two buildings that remained in the rubble of the neighborhood. It was already surrounded by a well-organized series of ATF men with submachine guns. They were everywhere, pressed up against dirty stucco walls that seemed to crackle in the desertlike sun. The asphalt quavered. It was silent and desolate amid, instead of black faces, black jackets with yellow letters. A few pigeons flapped up and flew around the house in strangely rising circles, as though aiming for the sun. The sole streak of cloud broke up before their eyes.
Everyone was in position, as in a photograph, a still image. Then all at once, everyone moved, streaming into the ruin, an army of superior ants intent on taking over the disintegrating anthill. Finally Hjelm and Holm were alone on the street, a vulnerable duo of foreign observers who might at any moment be dragged into a doorway and given a liberal taste of American reality. They heard sporadic gunshots from inside the house, muffled, somehow unreal, as though Hollywood had supplied some sound effects. A few submachine gun rounds. Individual shots. A minor explosion. It only took a minute, then silence. A figure popped out the door, black with a black jacket, and waved in their direction. It took a moment for them to realize that it was waving at them, and even longer for them to realize that it was Larner. They made their way over to him.
“Come on,” he said, waving his pistol. “This is reality.”
Inside a light haze of dust met them, crystallike, with the sun dazzling through it-it stung in their throats. Gradually they realized that the cloud that they were breathing in was drugs-crack. Big black men were lying on the floor with their hands behind their heads. The bodyguards, disarmed. Two were without their hands on their heads; their torsos were half-lying against the walls, their legs and spines at strange angles. Blood oozed out of an open wound, drop by drop, looking increasingly viscous until the last drop hung in the air and seemed to be sucked back in.
They went up to the second floor. Room after room looked like one chemistry lab after another, with shattered flasks, overturned bottles, flickering Bunsen burners-and thicker clouds of dust. A dead body lay among the shards on a table, shot to pieces, segmented, half-covered in white dust that became pinker and pinker until it finally turned to red and ran into a body upon the body. People were on the floor here, too, with their hands on the backs of their necks. All was silent. The calm after the storm. The silence of the storm warning.
The next floor, the third. Chemistry workshops here too, with different devices. Packs of plastic bags with white contents, half-open, the dust still rising, like a fog sliding over a lake. Hands on necks. A dead person half-hanging out the window, a piece of glass like a shark’s fin straight up through the trunk. Windows were opened. The cloud of dust was carried out over the city. Drugged pigeons cooed audibly. A white wind swept through the house, reaching well-wrapped bundles of dollars in the room farthest in, the inner room. The paper band around one bundle was torn; the wind caught the green bills, and they whirled about the room, were seized.
The room spun. A brown spot spread out around a prostrate jeans-clad backside. They were all the way in, in the very innermost room. Larner smiled, and his smile seemed to split his head. Half his skull flew up eighteen inches and then fell back. His skin was drawn down from his head, his skull flopped around, his skin was sucked back up.
Hjelm staggered toward the open window and greedily inhaled the dirty but uncrystalline air.
“You’ll be drugged for a few seconds,” said Larner. “It’ll pass.”
Holm sat down on the floor next to the window and hugged herself. Hjelm leaned out through the window, tried to find stability, to focus his eyes. Everything was flying around. The still image was heaving behind them. The silence died. People were being moved out, with shouts and bellows. They didn’t see it.
A pair of pigeons descended unexpectedly from the sky and landed gently on the slightly lower roof of the neighboring building. Hjelm stared at them as they sat placidly on the ridge of the roof. A fixed point in the spinning world.
“You have to avoid inhaling for a while,” Larner said behind him. “You learn from your mistakes. Trial by error.”
He was punishing them-Hjelm realized that now. He kept his eyes on the pigeons. They flew off a ways and pecked at something, then took off again but stayed within sight. He followed their flight; they were doing aerobatics, mimicking each other precisely. When they reached the stinking crater of the crack house, they swept upward, then glided down through the filthy air and stopped on a windowsill on the top floor of the building next door. The window shone like gold in the sun. Hjelm looked through the dirty but golden windowpane and saw a man and a boy. As if in slow motion, the father lifted his hand and struck his son, a classic, traditional box on the ear, several times, using exactly the same motion, as though a minute in time were being repeated again and again, just for him, demanding his attention, and each image ended up on top of the last in a fabulous multiple projection. The son’s expression after the blows, peering up at his father, inexhaustible. It was like Laban Hassel, looking up at his father; like Danne, looking up at his; then Gunnar Nyberg’s children, looking up at theirs. Finally K. The very last in the bunch, K looking up at K.
Bad blood always comes back around.
“Holy shit!” he yelled.
Holm staggered over and saw that he had it.
“This is it!” he yelled again, like an idiot.
The collective glares of the ATF men ate into the back of his neck. He didn’t give a damn.
“What is it?” Holm shouted in a strange, muted voice.
“The impulse,” he said with sudden calm. “Clear as a bell.”
He turned abruptly and went over to Larner, who was regarding him with deep skepticism.
“I’ve got him,” he said, his eyes boring into Larner’s.
Then he rushed down the stairs. Larner looked at Holm, bewildered. She nodded, and they rushed after him. He was outside on the street with Schonbauer, who had just shoved a substantial drug manufacturer into one of the black cars.
Schonbauer got into the driver’s seat in one of the other cars; Hjelm hopped in, and Holm and Larner scrambled into the back. They drove off. Hjelm didn’t say a word.
“What are we doing?” Larner said after fifteen minutes.
“Looking at a picture,” said Hjelm.
They said no more on the way back to the FBI building. When they arrived, they reached the corridor, and Hjelm got to Larner’s office ahead of the others. He grabbed Wayne Jennings’s thick file and flipped through the photographs. He found the horrible picture of Jennings and the Vietnamese man and placed it to the side. Then he held up the photo of Jennings with a child on his lap.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Jennings’s son,” Larner said, surprised. “Lamar.”
Hjelm placed the picture on the desk. Jennings was dressed like a cowboy, minus the hat: jeans; a red, white, and blue flannel shirt; and sandy brown snakeskin boots. He had his hand on his son’s head, but he wasn’t smiling; his face was expressionless, and the ice-cold blue gaze penetrated the camera. You might almost get the impression that he was pressing his son’s head down, as if to hold him in place. The son was perhaps ten years old, just as blond and blue-eyed, but his eyes hardly seemed to see. Upon closer examination, one could make out an absentness in them, as if he were only a shell.
“This is K,” Hjelm said. “Both of them.”
His manic state ending, he shed the dramatic persona and became a policeman again. He cleared his throat. “What happened to Jennings’s family after he died?”