“Okay, truce. These kinds of arguments can never be won.”
“And winning is quite important—”
“Here we go again, you don’t quit, Freddy.”
“Liability of the profession.”
“There you go. Every profession has its dangers, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Isn’t it exciting when we agree?”
“So how long have you been popping speed?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s today’s phraseology? Crank? Meth?”
“You’re a loon, Freddy.”
“Please, Lenore. I acquiesced on the money question. You balked on Mr. Zarelli. It’s still my turn.”
“What does a guy in your position know about crank?”
“Ignorance of history is a dangerous flaw, Lenore. Before speed was seized by the working class, it was certainly graduate student domain. How else does one read almost two hundred very dense texts in less than a year?”
“You did that?”
“Nineteen eighty. The year the assault on language began.”
“What makes you say—”
“To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure. I took a learned guess. My big question is … I can’t believe the others, Zarelli, Shaw, Peirce, I can’t believe they haven’t noticed.”
“Please, this is narcotics. Sooner or later, everybody has a hobby. If it’s not crank or crack, it’s shoe boxes full of hundreds and foreign cars. I think you know what I’m saying.”
“Zarelli? Shaw?”
“Zarelli, yeah. Shaw, I don’t think so, but she’s young. Give her time. See, Freddy, I’m not a Nazi, I’m a cynic.”
“You’re saying the whole department is corrupt?”
“No, you’re saying that. I’m saying that a blanket statement like that, in a situation like ours, like mine, like the department’s, I’m saying it’s completely grey, I’m saying every day is relative. No, I don’t use the word corrupt. I don’t think it applies. I don’t think it’s like anyone is on Cortez’s payroll. Unless even I’m totally blind. I’m saying there’s a huge system that employs both our side and Cortez’s. And we both work for it. We maintain a pathetic balance. We play yin and yang and keep the wheel turning. Bangkok is a pinball machine, Freddy. Zarelli and Shaw and Richmond and me are the flippers and Cortez is the silver ball—”
“Oh, please.”
“Screw you, you don’t like the way I talk. I’m saying mostly we keep Cortez and company bouncing within their borders. And sometimes someone is slow on the flipper and the ball rolls through.”
“And is that someone ever you?”
“I’ve got my own problems. According to you anyway. And I’ve got my own theory about Cortez.”
“Which is?”
“Puppet. Total, willing puppet. He’s a smart guy and a better actor. He’s probably even a pretty good manager. Maybe he knows how to move money. And maybe there are connections back in South America. But I don’t care. There’s someone above him. There’s someone who never walks into Quinsigamond. They can shred and shove every file from Interpol to the FBI to Lehmann and his Federal walking egos at DEA. There’s somebody else. I call them the Aliens.”
“The aliens?”
“You really popped crank, Freddy?”
“Through all of graduate school and for a year after.”
“How’d the nervous system do?”
“How do you think?”
“How’d you deplane?”
“Rough but intact.”
“No, I mean, was there a method or anything?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I walked about ten, twelve miles a day. Fast pace.”
“Around Quinsigamond?”
Woo nods. “Went through a half dozen Adidas in a little over half a year. And I poured gallons of this tea through my body. I drowned in tea. Honestly, I choked on it, I drank so much, but it washed everything out.”
“Must’ve made it tough walking.”
“Again, it’s easier for a man. There’s usually a tree to step behind.”
“I lift weights.”
“It’s not the same thing. It’s not aerobic. Do you still think you’re in control?”
“Absolutely. Have I looked rattled to you? I’ll know when the compass swings.”
“A classic cliché. Where do you buy?”
“C’mon, Freddy.”
“Oh, of course. Bangkok. Little Max?”
“He’s been helpful on occasion.”
“Curious drug, speed. I really fell in love. Head over heels.”
“Mine’s much more a working relationship.”
“Sure. You’ll be chasing it around the desk before you know it.”
“It’s all a matter of will, Freddy.”
“How long have you been a regular abuser? Do you find you can still think clearly? I found I could for the first year, almost two. Then things shifted. It was really as fascinating as it was terrifying. The brain images started coming faster than my ability to identify and label them. Like race cars at the Indy 500. Have you ever had a seizure?”
“That’s pleasant. No, never. Listen, enough on this topic. Why don’t you show me the rest of this place.”
Woo smiles, brings his mug up to his mouth, and stares into it as he sips.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s have a look.”
She follows him deeper into the room. Somehow, it seems to get wider as they approach the library area. There are books, most of them big, thick volumes, oversized and without dust jackets, lying in stacks on the floor. The books look like old, obscure encyclopedias. Some of the stacks are eight and nine volumes high, rising up three and four feet high like models of ragged skyscrapers.
On either side of the library area are two identical couches, both covered in black leather and looking inviting, like you’d continue to sink deep into the cushions a full five minutes after you lay down. There’s no sign of chrome or wood on them and Lenore thinks they look like weird twin animals, some mistake in genetically controlled husbandry. She stares from one to the other and thinks of a flabby, glossy black cow lying down in a rainy field at night.
The only other piece of furniture in the room is an enormous monstrosity of a desk that almost spans the width of the building. It’s actually several desks and tables cobbled and bolted together to form a startling new creation. And it is genuinely startling. It begins at either end of the room with two old-fashioned rolltops complete with an assortment of cubbyholes and tiny drawers. They face each other and jut out perpendicular from the back wall of shelving forming two secretarial L’s, two right angles turning at either end of the main desk body. The main body is comprised of two conventional mahogany executive desks, each bolted to its adjoining rolltop, and then joined to an eight-foot conference table that runs between them.
Stationed behind the table, in the center of the whole setup, is the largest swivel chair Lenore has ever seen. She decides it must have been custom-built. Of course it’s black and leather with a subtle pucker design, but it’s the back of the chair that’s so attention-getting — it rises up, narrowing as it goes, almost five feet tall at the top of its curve. Lenore thinks the height is a foolish mistake. It’s humorous and ends up detracting from the rest of the power look of the office.
Stationed on top of the two conventional desks at either side of the main table are state-of-the-art reel-to-reel and compact disc players. Lenore spots three different sets of headphones hanging from hooks in the rolltops. In the center of the conference table sits an oversized computer monitor and the longest keyboard she’s ever seen. It looks more like a musical keyboard, a synthesizer keyboard, than one for a computer or word processor. There’s no logo that she can see on any of the equipment, but she can tell in a glance it’s not Apple or Wang or IBM. It’s got to come from someplace she’s never heard of.