Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Sam stood looking down at me. His smile had disappeared. I suddenly realized how dumb it was to think that I could ever find a niche for myself in something as dippy as what was going on here. I had to go, and the sooner the better, before anyone’s feelings were hurt.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I told him, getting to my feet, “I think maybe I’d better be moving on. It’s been great to see you again, and this place is certainly interesting, but, you know, it’s not really my thing.”

He looked at me in that set, level way he had when he felt challenged.

“You want to go?”

I nodded. He stared at me some more.

“When?”

“Any time tomorrow would be good.”

I had expected protests, but he merely nodded slowly, as though he regretted my decision but understood. Then he turned away.

“I’ll see what we can do about that,” he said.

Sam didn’t appear at dinner that evening, but Andrea did. She sat opposite me at the table, and kept looking pointedly in my direction. I didn’t know how to respond. My main feeling was one of guilt for having shown an interest in her in the first place. If she was as desperate as Sam had suggested, this might loom a lot larger for her than it did for me. But the fact remained that I was leaving the next day, and that I would never see her again. I eventually decided that the only responsible course of action was to ignore her. I finished my meal as quickly as possible and then retired to my room, where I went to bed with a copy of Lewis and Clark’s journal of their expedition to the coast in 1804. The account of their harrowing experiences put my little problems in perspective. It also put me to sleep.

I was awakened by the sound of voices. I couldn’t distinguish what they were saying, but the tone was angry, a violent clash of wills and egos. Mark’s smash-mouth delivery was recognizable enough, as were Sam’s frosty responses, but their dialogue was punctuated at intervals by two other voices which I could not identify.

At first I tried to ignore the whole thing and go back to sleep, but a combination of curiosity and anxiety made this impossible. I knew that Mark was in a snit about my presence, and assumed that this must be the cause of the conflict. But in that case why didn’t Sam just tell him I was leaving? If there was a problem with this, it was something I needed to know about. I was already uneasily aware that I could not get off the island without Sam’s cooperation. The idea of being trapped there against my will, even for another day, seemed intolerable.

I got out of bed and crept to the door. I cautiously turned the handle, opened the door an inch or so and looked out, but the speakers were not in my field of view and I was afraid to draw attention by opening the door any further. Despite the flabby acoustics of the hall, I could hear much of what was being said, particularly when, as was often the case, it was actually being shouted. I was also able to put names to the other two men, Rick and Andy.

In the course of the next ten minutes, I gradually pieced together a few elements of the story. What escaped me was its significance, and above all any clue to why Mark was making such a big deal of it. What it seemed to come down to was that the guy called Russell, who was away, had failed to phone them. The whole thing sounded absurd to me, like Mom and Dad losing it because their twenty-year-old son hadn’t called in to tell them what time he’d be home. There was also some talk about the one called Dale. I remembered Sam saying that he had left the group. It was now clear that his departure had created tensions, and that Mark was worried that Russell might go the same way.

“Anything could’ve happened,” he yelled at one point. “We can’t just sit around here with our thumbs up our butts. We got to find out!”

Sam’s reply was too quiet for me to hear, but it evidently defused the situation somewhat.

“OK, it’s a deal,” Mark said grudgingly. “But if we don’t hear tomorrow, we got to do something.”

Sam’s response was again inaudible.

“Well, I do!” Mark snapped, his old charmarola self again. “I’ll run over to Friday, put in a call to one of the papers, radio station, something. If anything happened, they’ll have heard. And they better have, or you’re fresh out of excuses.”

Sam raised his voice for the first time.

“I have revealed the Secret to you, and raised you up unto eternal life! And what the fuck thanks do I get in return? You guys whining and bitching and scheming and sowing the seed of discord here in Beulah! Sure I was deceived by Dale. We all were. I just hope I haven’t been deceived by you, Mark! For I am Los, prophet of the true God, and all those who seek to deceive me shall be exposed and cast out into Ulro, where the dead wail night and day!”

With this, Sam stomped off to his quarters on the other side of the hall, slamming the door behind him. Mark, Andy and Rick retired to Rick’s room, next to mine, where they continued to talk until well into the night. I heard the drone of their voices through the wall, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

I lay awake for hours, trying and failing to make sense of all this.

By the time the uniforms reached the scene, there wasn’t a lot that could be done. The black victim lay stretched out in a puddle of blood, his body contorted, scowling like a newborn baby. One of the white guys was dead too, with a hole in his chest you could have set a grapefruit in. The other had a stab wound in the side, and his left shoulder was almost blown apart, but he was still breathing. There was blood all over the sidewalk, soaking into the pages of an outspread copy of The Watchtower lying between the bodies.

“Poor guys,” murmured one of the patrolmen, who had recently accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior in the course of a three-day Pray-a-Thon on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. “How come you let this happen to your people, Lord?”

Lamont Wingate was working another case when they paged him-a vagrant found beaten to death in a boxcar. A switchman had found the body that afternoon, but death had occurred at least twenty-four hours earlier. Lamont had contacted the Southern Railway office and learned that the train had come in the day before from Alabama, having stopped off at just about every town between there and Birmingham. The victim and his assailants could have boarded anywhere, separately or together.

Wingate imagined an argument during an interminable wait somewhere on the line, the heat pressing down like the covers when you crawled into your bed head-first as a child and then couldn’t find the way out. They would have been wasted on Thunderbird or muscatel. One thing led to another, and then two or three of them ganged up on this guy, taking out all the frustrations of their miserable lives on him. Not only were there no suspects, there wasn’t even a motive. This time, he was the one getting beat on, that was all. It could have been any one of them.

By the time Wingate got out to the Pittsburgh call, the medics had taken away the only victim they could do anything for, the medical examiner and the police photographer had been and gone, the corpses had been covered with plastic sheeting and the area sealed off with crime tape. A patrol car was parked so its headlights illuminated the scene, which was enlivened still further by the array of blue and white flashing lights on the roof. A policeman with crew-cut blond hair and acute blue eyes was trying to move on the rubberneckers who had descended on the scene, while brushing off the efforts of an elderly black drunk to interest him in some completely irrelevant calamity which had befallen him that day.