I knew that there were pencil mikes and pen mikes and mikes that looked like fixtures. There were mikes the size of contact lenses. Mikes you stuck under coffee tables, under phones, in curtain rods, under any piece of houseware with a raised bottom. God only knew the latest mikes. The Chinese had them in kitchen equipment. The Koreans wired up cars. The Russians had a false-tooth mike and the Cubans had a false fingernail. That one, when I’d seen it in Washington, had blown me away.
I found a furniture tack that looked shinier than the rest in a row of brass pieces running across the top of the faux leather sitting chair. I took it off and used a hammer on it. It was just a tack. I tore off felt pads beneath a laptop, and tried a scissor on them.
They were just felt.
“One? What are you doing?”
I whirled and held up both hands in a stop gesture. I shook my head violently, meaning, Shut up! Eddie stood in the doorway, dressed for the field. His expression was a mix of horror, at the news about Karen, and bafflement. But I saw quick understanding appear on his face.
I snapped out, “What do you think I’m doing? Having a drink, that’s what.”
He began to move toward me, in sympathy. I stepped back and shook my head and let him see my rage. I shoved my hands into the air, Keep away. Don’t touch me. He halted, getting it, but not liking it. His shoulders slumped. His eyes said, She was my friend, too. I let him see what I needed. It was not sympathy just now. I shifted my head to the right, then left, scanning. We communicated by glances.
— You’re looking for bugs, One?
— I think someone’s been listening to us.
— Okay, let’s get to it then.
I understood the effort required on his part not to speak of Karen. As he bent beneath the sink cabinet, where the hut toolbox was stored, I started talking again, just in case someone listened in. “Want a drink, Eddie?”
“I got back as fast as possible.”
“They cut her throat. They cut…” My voice really did fail me at that point. “Her throat.”
We took the place apart together, babbling. Me trying to sound broken. It wasn’t hard. Eddie trying to pep me up. Eddie in the bathroom, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, removing, one by one, screws on vanity doors, the knob on the toilet, screws on the overhead light fixture.
“You were right, One. It was rabies.”
“Being right is shit.”
Eddie peering at a screw that looked duller than the rest.
I need to sound useless.
“Eddie, I can’t stop seeing her, lying on the floor.”
Eddie laid the screw down, inside a towel and folded the towel over it and raised a hammer and coughed loudly when he smashed down. He unfolded the towel.
We saw a normal, half-bent screw, with a chipped top.
Together, talking memories, we tipped the couch on its back. We went around front and looked past a sea of dust balls at tacks affixing the fabric in place.
“I wanted to go to Costa Rica for the honeymoon. She wanted Sweden,” I said.
Hmm. I reached out and unpeeled a small brown dot off the false leather. It looked like faux leather, but it was a lighter shade, and had adhesive underneath. It seemed to have no purpose. I said, “So I told her, okay. Sweden.” I saw no other similar stick-on dots under the chair. I took the dot to the kitchen table. I tried to cut through it with a scissor. The blade would not penetrate. It did not seem to be encountering fabric. My head was pounding. Eddie pulled out his Leatherman. The serrated blade sawed halfway through.
It was fabric. Thick. But no mike.
I said, sick of chatter, “I want music.” I switched on a disc already in the CD player. Cajun. Her favorite. Loud. I turned it louder.
We continued looking, kept it up, changed places, in case one of us missed something. I tilted over a kitchenette chair which I’d already looked at. A screw fell out. So did fresh wood shavings. I stared at the shavings, retrieved the screw and bounced it up and down in my hand. It looked brand-new. The thread felt prickly. It seemed to emanate purpose. It had been shoved into the hole because the wood there was worn away, stripped of grooves.
Eddie came over and examined the screw with me like a jeweler staring through a loupe. We put our heads together. We whispered over the raging music.
“It’s just a screw, One.”
“Someone got in here and replaced the old one with this.”
“No, it’s just a hole. How could anyone get in?”
“How? It’s a stupid four-digit code on the door. Anyone could have seen one of us punch it in. Or at a dinner. The quarantine started. No one was here. They knew we might look for bugs and they got in fast and took it out.”
Eddie sighed, and said with exaggerated softness, “It’s a screw. A goddamn screw. That’s what screws do. They fall out after a while.”
I hated the sympathy in his face. Poor Joe, grasping at straws. I felt a red film in my head replace the glow from the fluorescent light. My legs were trembling. The urge to hit something surged into my shoulders. A cold sensation spread up from my belly, and became a hard beat in my head, as if the Arctic was inside, not just out.
“Yeah,” I hissed. “And there’s no rabies. And it can’t be contagious. And there are no fucking microphones because that’s just crazy and—”
I stopped. “Shit, Eddie. You’re the best friend I have.”
He was white. “Just tell me what you want to do.”
“Let’s go over to Longhorn, have a drink,” I said.
“They told me at the airport, security is looking for you. Someone named Hess.”
Outside, we crunched over toward the oil company hut.
“I’m going to be part of it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
His face floated inches from mine. “Don’t worry? We’re Uno and Dos. We’re the team. If you don’t tell me, I’ll be there anyway and probably screw it up. You’ll tell me eventually. So tell me now.”
Eddie’s face close. Eddie’s force and rage and love an unqualified lifetime offer. You won’t stop? Then why would I ever stop, whether or not I think you’re right?
I told him what Homza had okayed for us. He didn’t like it. But he did not protest.
“Do you have a better idea, Eddie?”
“I don’t have any idea,” he said.
We knocked and did not wait for an answer and just walked into the hut, as we’d been doing all summer. They were all there. My neighbors. My friends. Karen’s new buddies, turning to me, consoling me, pouring drinks for me. The fly lights on the shiny web, moves his wings, thinks he’s free, unaware that the trap already has him.
Which one of you did it? Listened to us? Killed her? Went after the Harmons? Introduced the disease?
Come on in, any old time, Dave Lillienthal always said.
Said the spider to the fly.
FIFTEEN
“More Tito, Dave! Man’s best friend.”
I gazed up drunkenly at the Longhorn North Oil exec, who stood over me as I sprawled in his massive corner chair. I held out my glass. He shook his head. He said, “You’ll make yourself sick, Joe, if you don’t slow down, man. Have some coffee.”
“Dave, why keep all this goddamned liquor here if you won’t give people any? All you do is offer drinks, and when I ask for one, you say no.”
Dave Lillienthal grew hazy through the bottom of the olive-green plastic tumbler. He walked off and Deborah replaced him, looking down at me; wan, small, and horrified. Stiff as a petrified stick. She kept her voice down, as if she did not want others nearby to hear.