R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

“I… ah…” Jon Bonjour croaked through his sinuses as though ready to spit a la NASCAR, swallowed instead. He wiped tears from his eyes with a fat thumb. “I… I don’t know what to say.” These last words were pinched through a sob. His face flushed red beneath the hood of his hand.

“Jonny blames himself,” Mrs. Bonjour said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault.”

“I appreciate your honesty,” I said as professionally as I could. “Most people try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served if they come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth.” I leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. Very Remington Steele. “You do understand that?”

Irritation scuttled across his fat face. “Of course,” he said.

Rates, conditions, and so on are always difficult items to discuss, so you have to be opportunistic, take what chances the ebb and flow of conversation offer. I typically use money talk to doctor breakdowns in the conversation, especially if things become emotionally overwrought. No small amount of defensiveness and aggression walks into offices like mine. But as soon as you mention money, most of the personal shit just evaporates. I could literally see Mr. and Mrs. Bonjour’s heart rates slow as I discussed the terms. Few things are more dear to the human animal than simplicity, or the appearance of it anyway. And few things are more simple, more apparently superficial, than monetary transactions.

Open the wallet, close the heart-that’s generally the rule.

They agreed to everything without comment or question-even the exorbitant rate. Something told me that I could have charged double, even triple, and Mr. Bonjour would have responded with precisely the same numb nod. Mrs. Bonjour, I’m sure, would have sold her liver to a Chinese penal hospital if that meant finding her daughter. I suffered that vague and momentary regret that accompanies lost opportunities. You know, Oh well… I realize this isn’t the kind of stuff you want to hear from your heroes. But I was juggling too many bills with too few hands-no different than you, I imagine-and Jonathan Bonjour had a big fat wallet just bursting with hands.

“I have one last question,” I said, “for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour.” The obvious disparity between our income brackets reminded me of an itch I’d wanted to scratch ever since I had realized that Jonathan Bonjour was a lawyer. “Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not?”

A moment of shock. He hadn’t told me his profession.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Stuff like this… personal stuff with consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine… such stuff requires trust…” I let him twist on that word for a second. “Why wouldn’t you go to people you know?”

“This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. I had already guessed as much, but it was good to hear.

“Even still… “

“No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather… jaded…”

This was like a hooker saying she finds the company of strippers embarrassing. No offence, he says. Fucking lawyers.

“And?”

“Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience.”

“But it’s not just that,” Amanda added nervously. “You see… Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are… well, more like you.”

“Like me?” I smiled despite myself, nodded. “You mean, like… socio- economically disadvantaged.”

I counted exactly three seconds of embarrassed silence.

“We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language.”

Fucking rich people, man. Always riding the yo-yo of entitlement and embarrassment. The good ones, anyway.

“My ad in the Yellow Pages that bad, huh?”

Twin anxious laughs. The conversation seemed pretty cut and dried, even though the case was anything but. Still, after-the-fact interpretation being what it is, there were enough hanging threads for me to realize this apparent simplicity would likely buckle under scrutiny, if not flip into something altogether different.

I told them I had a couple of cases pending, but that I would start right away anyway. Time is everything when it comes to missing persons. Then I did what I always do with new clients when I take a job: I gave them a list of things to do. Search her room for anything that might help: an old diary, drug paraphernalia, computer disks, or camera SD cards. Call Nolen to tell him they had hired me, that they expected him to do everything in his power to assist me. The same with Xenophon Baars, taking care to conceal their outrage, of course. “No ego allowed,” I told them, quite oblivious to any irony. “This is not about scoring points.”

You see, the Bonjours had come to me because they were helpless. Sure, they’d contractually engaged my services, but emotionally they’d simply swapped one kind of helplessness for another. Who hasn’t suffered a pang of impotence in the presence of a mechanic, a plumber, or (worst of all) a computer technician? My clients not only leave my office with a professionally legitimated Don’t-worry-about-a-thing lie, they also take home a false feeling of empowerment.

A to-do list.

Makes them happy, and it makes my job easier-sometimes, anyway. Clients have a way of fucking things up.

I ushered the Bonjours to the plate glass entrance with the solemn efficiency of a funeral home director. There was an uncomfortable pause as Mrs. Bonjour knelt on the mat to retie her shoes. Mr. Bonjour simply didn’t know what to say; he just copped that stiff pose that so many husbands assume when their wives interrupt otherwise economical social transactions with nitty concerns. Why couldn’t she just say fucking goodbye and be done with it?

Meanwhile, I wrestled with the embarrassment peculiar to cracked ceilings and beaten linoleum floors. My place had that bankrupt-travel- agency feel to it-stale, grime in the creases. Real chic. I could imagine the two of them sizing it up from the soundproofed confines of their BMW, saying, “Well, it looks like a dump,” with the worn-out irony of those run down to their final options.

Then I realized that Mrs. Bonjour was crying. She had knelt on one knee to tie the shoe on the opposite foot, then switched to the other and just… hung there, her cheek pressed against her knee. Sunlight cut across her at an angle, casting arthritic shadows of her hands and wrists across the mat.

She trembled like a timid dog at the vet, keened in a baby-small voice. Her words, if there were any, were inaudible.

Fawk.

My first thought was of me: she was crying because she had been reduced to the likes of me. But that blew away like the flimsy conceit it was. It was something else-someone else. Suddenly I saw, not Mrs. Bonjour, but the woman my subsequent research would reveal as Mandy Bonjour nee Patterson. The woman with the secrets she had never told her husband, who hoarded little mementoes that only she could decipher.

It’s strange, isn’t it, glimpsing the person behind the type. The feeling of inside-out recognition. The lining up of first-person perspectives. The twinge of ghosts moving through each other. You bat an eye and suddenly, somehow, this stranger has become a family member.

She cried for all of thirty seconds. Then, abruptly, she stood up, glared at her husband for a hateful heartbeat, then, with a cursory nod at me, pressed her way through the door into the stark world of light and shadow beyond. She strode down the street, a kind of watery walk, the laces of her left shoe kicking in front of her and trailing behind. Jonathan Bonjour wordlessly followed.