Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

She straightened up and came out of her corner. The craziness in her eyes had gone back a bit but it hadn’t disappeared, and when she offered her hand to shake I had to push myself to take it.

“Annie Charles,” she introduced herself.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m the last of the Brontë sisters.”

“Let’s begin,” said True, gesturing. I joined him at the table. There was a third chair, but rather than sit, Annie stood behind it, wringing her hands and making little noises.

“Your Probate assignment,” True said. He handed me a school notebook, the kind with the black-and-white speckled covers; the name ARLO DEXTER had been scrawled in the “I belong to” box in red Crayola. I figured it was an official case file, like the Deeds and Loomis SAT booklets.

The notebook was full of crayon drawings. Page one showed a frowning stick-figure boy—ARLO, according to the caption—in a short-sleeve shirt and black short pants.

On page two, Arlo stood on a chair beside a workbench, his tongue sticking out in concentration as he performed some kind of surgery on a teddy bear. On page three, Arlo was walking, holding the teddy bear out in front of him. On page four, he’d set the teddy bear on the ground and backed away; a second stick-figure boy—ROGER OLSEN—approached from the opposite direction. On page five, Roger picked up the teddy bear, and Arlo covered his ears. On page six, the teddy bear vanished in a cartoon explosion. On page seven, Roger stood crying with his face covered in soot and smoke rising from his head; Arlo, watching from the sidelines, smiled.

On page eight, Arlo was alone again, and unhappy…

The same basic sequence was repeated over and over. Each explosion was a little more powerful than the last one. A boy named Gregg Faulkner who picked up a booby-trapped cereal box didn’t just lose his hair, one of his eyes was X-ed out. A girl named Jody Conrad lost both her eyes, and a boy named Tariq Williams lost a hand. In the most gruesome scene of all, a boy named Harold Rodriguez jetted so much blood from the stumps of his arms that Arlo had to break out an umbrella.

I looked over at True. “You know, I know you guys are obsessed with secrecy, but this is like beyond tasteless…”

“What you’re holding isn’t an internal organization report,” he told me. “It’s a facsimile of a notebook discovered during a search of Arlo Dexter’s apartment.”

“He drew this himself? How old is he?”

“Thirty-two. That’s chronological age, of course. His mental self-image—”

“Who cares?” I interrupted. “When do I kill him?”

“Soon. But there are some questions we’d like answered first, if possible. Turn to the next page.”

On the page following the Harold Rodriguez bloodbath, Arlo was center stage again, but this time he’d been joined by three other stick figures. Not people. Monkeys. Two of them had him bookended and were whispering to him in stereo; the third monkey stood nearby, holding a black briefcase.

On the next page, the briefcase was lying open on the ground, and Arlo was on his knees beside it with his hands clasped and his mouth forming an O of perfect joy. The monkeys clustered behind him, looking pleased by his reaction. As for the briefcase, the drawing didn’t show what was in it, but whatever it was was pumping out yellow and orange rays of light, and given Arlo’s habits it wasn’t hard to come up with possibilities.

“Do we know who these other guys are?” I asked.

“That’s one of the questions we’d like answered.”

“I suppose Al Qaeda would be too obvious, huh?”

“Not too obvious, just unlikely. Arlo Dexter is an apolitical psychopath, not an Islamic jihadist. Besides, look at the way he’s drawn them. To depict Arabs as monkeys would almost certainly be an expression of contempt. But Mr. Dexter isn’t contemptuous of his new associates. He admires them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Turn the page.”

On the next page—actually a two-page spread, and the last drawing in the notebook—Arlo was on the move again, carrying the black briefcase towards some sort of fenced-in area where a huge crowd of stick-figures was gathered. I could tell it was Arlo carrying the briefcase because he was still wearing his shirt and short pants. But he had a new head on his shoulders: he’d become a monkey too, now.

“I take it you don’t know what his target is, either.”

“No,” said True, “and that’s the most important question of all. If Dexter’s confederates aren’t imaginary, then stopping him may not be enough; there could be other monkeys with briefcases.”

“Have you thought about just asking him who his buddies are? I mean, you guys do do interrogations, right?”

“We do, and it may come to that. But the more effective methods of extracting information tend to be time-consuming, and we don’t believe we have much time. So we’ve decided instead to keep a close watch on Dexter and see what he does. Your job will be to help with the surveillance and perform any other tasks that may come up; and if it looks as though Dexter is about to complete his mission, you’ll see to it that he doesn’t succeed.”

“Cool,” I said. “Where’s my gun?”

“It’ll be delivered to you shortly. For now, go with Annie and do as she says; she’s been fully briefed on the details of the operation.”

“With Annie, right…Listen, True, can I talk to you privately for a second?”

“Later,” True said, getting up. “We’re on a tight schedule, and I have other things to attend to.”

Right. I knew a brush-off when I heard it—and Annie, for her part, knew a vote of no confidence when she heard it. When we got back outside, the first thing she said was: “You’re frightened of me.”

“‘Frightened’ is kind of strong,” I lied. “You do freak me out a little, yeah, but—”

“You don’t need to be frightened.” She flashed me this brittle smile. “I know how I seem, but I’m really very dependable. God keeps me focused.”

“Oh-kay, well that’s good to hear…So what does God want us to do first?”

“How much money do you have?”

“Not a lot. Maybe twenty bucks and change.”

“Give me the twenty.”

Two doors down from the deli was a corner grocery that sold scratch lottery tickets. “Which kind do you like?” Annie asked me. There were fifteen varieties to choose from, most with some type of gambling theme: Lucky Poker, Scratch Roulette, Twenty-One, Three-Card Monte…Then I noticed this one kind called Jungle Cash that had pictures of animals on it, including a baboon that was being stalked by a pair of tigers. “That one,” I said, and Annie nodded approvingly.

Jungle Cash tickets were two bucks each. Annie bought ten, and when we scratched them all off, nine were winners. We left the store with over three hundred dollars.

“Does that always work?” I asked.

“‘There will be water if God wills it,’” Annie replied, and flagged down a taxi.

The cab took us to an address in the Richmond, a Pentecostal church called the Chapel of the Redeemer. It reminded me of the Diazes’ church in Siesta Corta, and, already keyed up by Annie’s God-talk, I got worried that my training curriculum was going to include speaking in tongues. But then I noticed the chains on the front doors, and the sign that said PROPERTY FOR LEASE.

“What is this place?” I asked, thinking maybe Arlo Dexter was using it for a bomb factory.

“Home,” said Annie.

“You live here? You and God?”

“Not inside,” she said. “Around back.”

Around back was a small cemetery. Like the church doors, the cemetery gate was chained and padlocked, but Annie had a key.

Her home was a refrigerator box covered with a waterproof tarp. The open end of the box faced a grave marked WILLIAM DANE. The grave plot had been neatly outlined with stones, and Annie was careful to step around it.