David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

Calo snapped his head at Burden.

“We're in, ”he said. “We'd like to look at your LorGuides now. First, we start with who's where so we can start setting priorities, and at the top of the list is isolating Luquin. That's the bitch. Everything comes down to that.”

Burden was sweating. He was fascinated. The man was sitting where he had sat the night before, but now he was dressed. Nearly. He wore the trousers of a suit. No shoes. No shirt. His skin glistened in places with perspiration. His hair was slicked back with water.

Burden had watched him walk into the dank bathroom. Standing next to a plastic shower curtain with turquoise fishes to and froing amid rising blue bubbles, he had stuck his head under the faucet and run cold water on it. Then he'd stood up and let the water drip over his neck and bare shoulders as he'd combed back his thinning hair in sleek convenience.

Then he'd come back into the room and sat in the chair by the window. He'd rested the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other. His trousers were limp in the heat, and Burden imagined the sweat underneath them.

Burden liked talking to him.

“Where do you stand now with your list? ”he asked.

“Four of five.”

Burden nodded. Should he say, That's good? He said nothing.

In the afternoon heat, the room smelled horribly of dank. The old motel was only just on the edge of reality. Its reality was all past, and there was no future at all, or so little of it as to make it incapable of being quantified. The curtains by the man's head were creamy with age, their white as distant and irretrievable as the children who had played on the merry-goround.

“Can you name them? ”Burden asked.

“Only you, Garcia, would ask that. ”He paused. “Sotomayor. Zabre. Vega. Mojarro.”

He spoke their names as if he were reciting the rosary, a relished exercise. Breathed words. Each syllable was pronounced with precision, pungent with remembrance. To Burden, the recitation was scintillating. And despairing. It was a recitation that almost pulled from Burden the antiphonal response after each name: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Cicadas and grasshoppers hummed in the high dead grass that grew up around the seesaw and broken swings.

“And that leaves…? ”Burden said.

The man turned his eyes on him. He was by the window, beyond which the July sun sizzled through the cysted leaves of the hackberries. The light behind the rancid curtains created a gauzy, luminous veil behind him. In this backlighting his features sometimes deepened out of sight, nearly making him a silhouette. But the whites of his eyes remained distinct, shards of bright in dirty shadow.

“Only one more, ”the man said without speaking the name.

“Do you worry about not finishing? ”Burden asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“There's no rush.”

“You don't want to get it over with?”

“Why?”

“I don't know. To finish it.”

“And then what?”

“I don't know.”

“Exactly.”

“Just to have it done.”

“Closure?”

That word sounded strange coming from a man like him. Burden wouldn't have believed he even knew the word.

“I guess.”

“No. There is no closure.”

That was why there was no future. It wasn't going anywhere. And the man wasn't going anywhere. Like Zeno's arrow, he was only where he was, in the instant. His existence was within a continuum that was neither past nor future, neither leaving nor arriving. It was all of a piece. And yet, like the arrow, he miraculously advanced all the same, between instants, where there was neither time nor memory, neither hope nor disappointment.

The man wasn't ordinary. Maybe he had been before it happened, but not anymore. Some men rise above the ordinary because of who their fathers were, or because of the amount of money they have made, or because of something they have done, or because of the women they have bedded or lived with or married. But this man rose above the ordinary because of what had happened to him, of what he had seen and lived with… and because of what he had become as a result.

A fly appeared and lighted on the man's bare right shoulder. In the sunlight it threw a shadow twice its length across the collarbone. The man looked at it to see what he'd felt, then ignored it. The fly was thinking, and so was its host. Moving in advancing jerks, the fly went down into the concave shallow near the man's neck, the relief of trapezius, it was called. The fly stayed there, out of sight.

That, Burden thought, was an odd thing.

Burden watched the relief of trapezius, waiting for the fly to emerge. The shallow wasn't that large. The fly must be sitting in just the perfect square centimeter deep enough to conceal it. What were the odds of a fly positioning itself like that, to become lost in a man's anatomy?

The man raised his right arm from where it rested on the arm of the chair and wiped at the sweat trickling out from under his other arm. Burden watched for the fly to shoot off into the room somewhere. It didn't. Now both the man's arms were resting on the arms of the chair again. He coughed softly, a kind of grunt. Burden cut his eyes to the relief of trapezius. Nothing. It was as if the fly had crawled into a tiny hidden orifice and entered the man's body. Gone.

“It's going to be tonight, ”Burden said.

The man didn't react. Burden felt sorry for him. It wasn't much of a life, at least the way Burden measured it. Only a few things kept this man alive. And after all five of them were done, he would find solace in suicide. It was as predictable as night. Burden could hear it in his voice.

But Burden knew that was unfair. One man measuring another man's life was always unfair, or unbalanced, or a misunderstanding. In reality you never knew what another man's life was like, and even if you thought you knew, you wouldn't get it right. You never knew, because the only thing you had to measure by was your own life, and that was such a limited thing. You had to live a long time in your imagination to approach another man's life with any sympathy or genuine understanding at all.

Burden thought of Lucia; he didn't know why. He thought of her looking through the viewfinder of her Hasselblad, the world upside down, but even so she understood it and recorded it through a lens of kindness that in itself was misunderstood. He was curious that the man had asked about her. He was curious about it, and he wasn't. Men who lived on the cusp of hell sometimes tended to be sensitive to kindness. It was a little-known fact about great sinners. It was often misunderstood, mostly by people who mistakenly believed they had little in common with those who were lost.

“It's Tano Luquin, ”Burden said. “I've found him.” The man quit breathing. The movement in his sternum just stopped. Slowly he turned to wax, and his eyes became glass. Though he had been perspiring before, now he began to glisten profusely, as if overwhelming emotion had sucked away his breath and condensed it within him into an oleaginous concentrate that now oozed from every pore.

Then something caught Burden's eye. On the man's shoulder the fly had crept to the cusp of the relief of trapezius. It had stopped, its black head only just emerging from the verge of the shallow. And there it waited.

“I don't know what to think, ”Rita said. Norlin had left soon after finishing his story of Mourad Berkat, and she had gone straight to the sink to run a glass of water while Titus had walked out to Norlin's car with him. Now he was gone, and Titus had just come in through the kitchen door. Rita was standing with the back of her hips against the sink, the glass of water in one hand, her hand on her hip.