Howard Lewis finished his call, pressed another button on his phone, listened for a moment and then looked at me with a blank expression on his face.
‘Your withdrawal is ready, Mr Spinola.’
Gennady arrived at nine-thirty the following morning. I’d just woken up about twenty minutes before he arrived and I was still feeling groggy. I’d intended to be up earlier, but from about seven on I’d kept waking and then falling back to sleep again, slipping in and out of dreams. When I finally managed to get out of bed, the first thing I did was take my MDT pill. Then I removed the bowl from the shelf above the computer. After that, I put on a pot of coffee and just stood around in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, waiting.
There were two possibilities. Either Gennady had done the pills – and if he’d done one he’d have done them all. Or, for some reason, he hadn’t done the pills. I reckoned that when I saw him I would know fairly quickly which one it was.
‘Morning,’ I said, studying him closely as he made his way in from the hallway.
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then I watched him as he silently surveyed my apartment. At first, I thought he was looking for the missing ceramic bowl, but then I realized that he was just registering how different the place was from the last time he’d been here. Looking around with him, following his eye, I registered the changes for myself. The apartment was a mess. Papers and documents and folders were strewn about the place. There was an empty pizza box on the couch and there were a couple of Chinese takeout cartons on my desk beside the computer. There were beer cans and coffee mugs everywhere, and full ashtrays and CDs and empty CD covers and shirts and socks.
‘You some kind of fucking pig?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
He furrowed his brow at this, slightly puzzled, and I knew straightaway that he wasn’t on MDT – not right now at any rate.
‘Where the money?’
After he said this I noticed him glancing over at the shelf above the computer. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he stepped a little closer to the desk and continued his discreet search.
‘I want to pay off the whole thing now,’ I said.
This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.
Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Twenty-two five.’
‘But I want to pay it all off.’
‘You can’t.’
‘But-’
‘Twenty-two five.’
I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five. When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.
‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.
He sighed and shook his head.
‘No time. Too busy.’
He glanced over once more at the desk.
‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.
I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out – not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started drinking vodka Martinis.
Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.
The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the headlines.
‘Middle East peace-talks at Camp David break down after two weeks of intensive negotiations. Hurricane Julius arrives off the south coast of Florida, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. And Donatella Alvarez, who has been in a coma for two weeks after a brutal attack in a Manhattan hotel room, dies this afternoon – police say they are now conducting a full-scale murder investigation.’
I stared in shock at the screen as the newscaster went back to the details of the peace-talks story. I grabbed on to the side of the bar, and held it tightly. After a couple of seconds, I mumbled something – maybe audibly, maybe not – and swung around to get off my stool.
I stood there for a moment, swaying from side to side, very unsteadily. The room then began to spin, and I moved, staggering the few yards over to the door. I just about made it out into the street before splatting an evening’s worth of vodka, vermouth and olives up on to the sidewalk.
20
I CONTINUED DRINKING OVER the weekend, mostly vodka, and mostly at home. After all, what else was there to do? I’d just become the subject of a full-scale murder investigation – albeit, and very con veniently, under an assumed name – so surely, in the circumstances, a little drinkie or two could hardly be seen as anything other than appropriate. I wasn’t making any further pretense at reading ‘the material’ either, so I gave in for a while and went back to watching the news on TV. This quickly became all I wanted to watch and again I found myself wading through hours of mindless crap, shouting drunken abuse at the screen as I waited for the next bulletin to come on.
There wasn’t much for the media to say about Donatella Alvarez herself – the woman had died and that’s all there was to it. What most of the reports were focusing on now was the political fall-out from her death. This came in the form of renewed calls for the Defense Secretary to resign. The brouhaha over Caleb Hale’s original comments about Mexico had received a shot in the arm when the Alvarez story first broke, and another one now with her death. I hadn’t followed the story too closely, but I’d been aware of it in the background – aware of it as one of those bizarre developments that takes on a life of its own and enters the news-chain like some kind of virus.
Six weeks or so earlier, Caleb Hale was reported to have said at a private gathering that Mexico had become a liability for the US and that ‘we should just consider invading the damned place’. The source that leaked the story to the Los Angeles Times claimed that Hale had name-checked corruption, insurgency, the breakdown of law and order, the debt crisis and drug-trafficking as the five points on ‘the pentangle of Mexico’s instability’. The source went on to claim that Hale had even cited John O’Sullivan on our ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent’ and had mentioned an op-ed piece he’d once read called ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door’. Caleb Hale immediately issued a classic non-denial denial, but then proceeded, in an interview, to more or less justify precisely what he was claiming not to have said. The President was perceived to be weighing in behind Hale when he not only refused to demand the Secretary’s resignation but also refused to condemn his alleged remarks – which of course opened the floodgates of comment and speculation. Everyone was initially shocked and incredulous, but as the days passed certain influential quarters appeared to warm to the idea, and early conclusions about the Defense Secretary being seriously out of touch softened a little, with some even transforming into a broad endorsement for, at the very least, a tougher line on foreign policy.