Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

He stood for a moment, looking in the remains of the mirror under which he had given up his greatest secret. His face was marked and cut. Worse, it looked old. The expensive veneer of diet and exercise, of unguents and self-obsession, had slipped. He looked his age, and in a way that only someone who had done the things he had, kept his secrets as long as he had, could look.

He had never killed. He had seldom even hurt anyone. Not with his own hands. But he had been present at occasions where young men had been left lying in pools of urine and other secretions, barely alive. Where other men like himself had departed in their expensive cars and had been lucky not to end up as accessories to murder. He owned an extensive collection of videotapes in which such events were documented. So extensive, in fact, that it was very unlikely he would be able to find them all, much less destroy them, before the police arrived.

His father would never understand.

Neither, Wang suspected, would the men and women with whom he did more legitimate business — although he knew that some of them had their own secrets, that the inner fire that drove them to fame and success also drove them to darker acts, in which they strove to prove to themselves that they were different and better than everyone else. The adulation of others is never enough. Sooner or later we all need to be able to idolize ourselves, or external regard becomes meaningless. Substances and materials had been obtained, sobbing women paid off, sometimes by Wang himself, who had always been willing to be people's friend. A confidant of those whose desires transcended society's accepted norms. Who wanted to live harder and faster and sweeter. Who could understand that sex with the frightened was different.

It was one of these, a man who had reason to know how helpful Wang could sometimes be, who had brokered a link to some colleagues of his. The representative of this group had been a tall blond man. The man called Paul. This introduction had only taken place after some years, and it was longer still before Wang had come to realize that this man was not quite what he seemed to be, and that he — and the people he represented — had something more than casual pleasure in mind. He'd never been invited to meet them, which had irked him a little. But he had agreed to provide entertainment, to help the procurers find particular luxuries, and the policeman had been right: money had nothing to do with it.

Each has his own road, and experiences two births. For Wang his second nativity had come thirty-five years before, at the age of ten, with a chance glimpse of a naked servant through a window. A spring morning in another country, a sight that had stopped him in his tracks, blindsided him with the sudden awareness of all of the hidden things the world had to show. His father had been in his home office, from which wafted the sound of baroque music, measured and correct, bright and joyous. Wang had stood still for a moment, lost in a few seconds of sweetness. Most people could have experienced this without it changing their lives, but Charles had never been quite the same. From the smallest of acorns, very dark trees sometimes grow.

After that had come deliberate spying, then magazines, and videotapes, trips alone to parts of Hong Kong and then Los Angeles that not everyone knew. Again, for most people these would have been enough, even too much. The sin was not there in the material, or even in wanting it. It was in needing it, needing it before you even knew of its existence — needing it so much that had it not already existed, you would have had to create it. Blaming pornography is like blaming a gun. Neither created itself. Neither is capable of pulling its own trigger. You need a hand. The human mind is this searching hand, its fingers slender enough to find small gaps, and strong enough to pull out what it finds in them. It is similar, too, in that after a time calluses sometimes form, hardnesses of use that mean that the sense of touch is rendered less acute. Hardnesses that may mean that something hotter or sharper is required to promote the same effect: and there does come a time when you are in blood stepped so far that it stops mattering what you tread in next.

In the last week Wang had experienced only one occasion when the fate of Michael Becker's daughter had crossed his mind. This had been in the context of hoping that Michael got back to work soon, because it looked like the studio really might decide to take a chance on Dark Shift. Laughable though Becker was in many regards, he worked hard, and he had ideas. Ideas, moreover, that were acceptable to the common mind. Wang had his own version of the Dark Shift treatment, written for his own amusement. It would not have been so acceptable.

None of this would be acceptable. Nothing he had ever done that he had meant or enjoyed. And without those things, there was little left to comprehend, and nothing left to live for. Without the memory and legacy of a spring morning, of a glimpse framed by music and the sound of the water falling in a fountain nearby, there was nothing to him.

By the time Zandt was lighting his cigarette outside, Wang had shuffled into his study. The initial shock was beginning to wear off, and his ribs were in agony. He called a number and warned a friend that someone had come too close to understanding the game they played, had perhaps come to understand it completely.

Then he sat back in his chair. There was no sign of Julio, though it must by now have been obvious that the visitors had gone. For just a moment Wang realized that, for once, it might have been nice to have access to someone whose point was not merely that of disposability. Doubtless the boy would have left the compound over the back fence, to run down the road into some other life. Like a smile from yesterday, he was gone.

Wang unlocked the central drawer of his desk and pulled out his gun. It had custom stocks made of cherry wood.

It was beautiful. There was that, at least.

31

At 8.45 the next morning we were waiting in the car just along the street from Auntie's Pantry. It was cold and had been sleeting for two hours, and the sky was full of dark clouds. I had a pack of cigarettes and was smoking them one after another. Bobby had nothing to say on the subject. He was sitting with his gun in his lap and staring straight ahead out of the windshield.

'So what time are they getting up here?'

'No guarantee they'll come at all,' I said.

He shook his head. 'A cop with no badge and a girl. Fuck it. We're invincible. Let's invade Iraq.'

'There's no one else, Bobby.'

A nondescript car turned into the top of the street. We watched as it drove past, but the driver was a middle-aged woman and she didn't even glance our way. We were waiting for someone to arrive at an office, and had been since 8.00 a.m. We were hyped and jumping at shadows. Neither of us had slept very well.

'Okay,' Bobby said finally, pointing across the street. 'Weedy dude, red hair. That the man we're looking for?'

We waited until Chip was inside his office, and then got out of the car. I left the doors unlocked. The street was pretty empty. It wasn't the weather for window-shopping, and any real traffic through the town got routed another way.

I swung the door to Farling Realty wide open and walked right in, Bobby just behind me. Chip had disappeared into an office in the back. The big main room had four desks spread around it. Two of these were occupied by well-coiffed women in their forties, wearing boxy little suits, one green, one red. Both

looked up expectantly, ready and willing to sell us our dream.

'Looking for Chip,' I said.

One of the women stood up. 'Mr Farling will be right with you,' she twittered. 'Can I get you a cup of

coffee in the meantime?'