The Straw Men Page 12

  Though he now lived in Arizona, Bobby still worked for the Company on and off, and was in contact with a few old mutual friends. Two of them were now working to infiltrate militia groups, and hearing this made me glad all over again that I'd left the firm. That's not the kind of work you want to get into. Not if you value your life. One of these guys, a skinny nutcase called Johnny Claire, was actually living in one of the groups, a collection of ineffectively socialized gun fanatics holed up in a forest in Oklahoma. Better him than me, though Johnny was weird enough to hold his own in any company.

  'Okay,' Bobby said, when armed with another beer, 'are you now going to explain how come you're out here in the sticks and suddenly conceive of a need to digitize some home-video footage?'

  'Maybe,' I said, admiring the way he was pumping me without revealing what was on his own mind. A trick of the trade, now evidently habitual. When we met he was spending a lot of time in interrogation rooms with citizens of Middle Eastern countries. They all talked in the end. From that he'd sidestepped into surveillance. 'Not definitely. And certainly not until you finally reveal why you hopped on a plane and flew across three states to buy me a beer.'

  'Okay,' he said. 'Okay. Let me ask you something first. Where were you born?'

  'Bobby

  'Just tell me, Ward.'

  'You know where I was born. County Hospital, Hunter's Rock, California.' The place name rolled off my tongue as easily as my name would have done. It's on-e of the first things you learn.

  'Indeed. I remember you telling me. You got all upset about the fact that nobody uses the apostrophe in 'Hunter's' any more.'

  'It pisses me off.'

  'Right. It's a scandal. Now. When we spoke earlier today you told me about your folks, and you said something about the video having something to do with your childhood. So there I am, when we've done talking. I've got nothing to do. I'm surrounded by computers and I've surfed the Web all I can bear and I've already had my handjob for the day.'

  'Nice thought,' I said. 'I'm hoping that wasn't while you were on the phone to me.'

  'Keep hoping,' he said, with a sly little smile. 'So I think, what the hey, maybe I'll poke around in Ward's life a little.'

  I stared at him, knowing that he was my friend and that this was okay, but still feeling like he'd intruded.

  'I know, I know,' he said, holding up a placating hand. 'I was bored, what can I tell you? I'm sorry. So anyway, I get the computers buzzing and hit a few databases. I should say straight away that I didn't find anything I didn't know about already. Held for questioning over a few matters over the years, blah, released through lack of evidence. Plus a witness who recanted. And the one who disappeared. The drug-dealing bust in the Big Apple in 1985, quashed when you agreed to inform on a certain student group at Columbia.'

  'They were assholes,' I said, defensively. 'Racist assholes. Plus one of them was sleeping with my girlfriend.'

  'Come on, man. You already told me about it and I don't give a shit either way. You hadn't done that, you wouldn't have wound up in the Agency and I wouldn't know you, which I'd regard as a bad thing. Like I say, either there's nothing in the files that I don't already know about, or you've got it hidden well. Real well. Kind of like to know which, just as a matter of interest.'

  'Not telling,' I said. 'A guy's got to have some secrets.'

  'Well, Ward, you got them. I'll give you that much.'

  'Meaning?'

  'After an hour or so I'm kind of annoyed not to have turned anything up, so I come down to checking stuff in Hunter's Rock—and I said that with an apostrophe. Got the street address of your parents' house, plus when they moved in and out. They took up residence there on July 9th 1956, which I believe was a Monday. Paid their taxes, did their thing. Your father earned a wage at Golson Realty, mother worked part-time in a store. Little over a decade later you were born there. Right?'

  'Right,' I said, wondering where this was going. He shook his head.

  'Wrong. The County Hospital in Hunter's Rock has no record of a Ward Hopkins having been born on that date.'

  The world seemed to take a little sidestep. 'Excuse me?'

  'There is also no such record at the General in Bonville, or at the James B. Nolan, or at any other hospital within a two-hundred-mile radius.'

  'There wouldn't be. I was born in the County. In Hunter's.'

  He shook his head again, firmly. 'No, you weren't.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Not only am I sure, but I checked five years either side, just in case you'd misled people on your age for some reason, like vanity or not being able to count. No Ward Hopkins. No Hopkins

  under any name. I don't know where you were born, my friend, but it sure as hell wasn't Hunter's Rock or its environs.'

  I opened my mouth. Shut it again.

  'Maybe it's no big deal,' he said, and then looked at me shrewdly. 'But has this got any bearing on your digitizing needs?'

  •••

  'Play it again,' he said.

  'I honestly don't think I can bear to, Bobby.'

  He looked up at me. He was sitting in one of the hotel room's two chairs, hunched over my laptop. I'd just played him the MPEGs, and strongly believed I'd seen them enough times for one day. Perhaps for one lifetime. 'Trust me. What you see the first time is all there is.'

  'Okay. So play me the audio file.'

  I reached across, navigated to the file and double-clicked it.

  He listened to the filtered version a few times, then stopped it himself. He nodded. 'Sounds like 'The Straw Men' all right. And you got no idea what that might mean?'

  'Only in the sense of 'surrogate', which doesn't seem to go anywhere. You?'

  He reached for his glass. We were in possession of a half-bottle of Jack Daniel's by then. 'Only other thing I can think of is straw purchases.'

  I nodded, thought about it. He was referring to the process by which those who shouldn't be able to buy guns—either through youth, previous convictions, or lack of a licence—are able to get hold of them. What you do is go in the gun store with a friend who has the requisite qualities. You negotiate with the dealer, find what you want. When the time comes to pay, then your friend—the straw purchaser—is the one who actually hands over the cash, who makes the buy. Of course the dealer isn't supposed to let this happen, when he knows it's you who's going to wind up having the gun, but a lot of them will. A sale is a sale. Once you're out of his store, what does he care what you're going to do? As long as you don't go around and shoot his mother he isn't likely to give a damn. There are, of course, a great many honest and upstanding people who sell guns. But there are also many who feel in their hearts that every American, every man jack of us and the little ladies, too, should be equipped with a firearm at birth. Who are at ease with the fact that these small, heavy pieces of machinery are a simple means by which to halt someone's life, who trust that guns are morally uninflected and that it's only their users who have the power to make them bad. Users with black skins, mainly, or no-good white trash punks on drugs who we don't serve in this gun store, no way.

  'You think that's it?'

  'Seems unlikely,' he admitted. 'Though there's been a thing about them in the last couple of years. The Feds and a few cities have been trying to crack down, targeting dealers who are too blatant about letting people get away with it. Huge percentage of inner-city guns get onto the streets that way, via guys who buy in bulk and then sell them to corner boys. Couple of test cases pending, and I think one of them actually went through a year ago. Can't remember how it played. But either way I don't get how it relates to your folks.'

  'Nor me,' I agreed. 'Far as I know, my father never owned a weapon. I don't remember him ever coming down hard on the subject either way, but those in favour tend to have a well-stocked gun cabinet. Plus I just don't see it.'

  'You looked it up?'

  'Looked it up where? The Big Book of Short Sentences?'

  He rolled his eyes. 'On the Net, of course.'
/>
  'Christ, no.' I like the Internet. Really, I do. Any time I need a piece of crap shareware or I want to find out the weather in Bogota or to look at a picture of a woman and a mule, I'm the first guy to get the modem humming. But as a source of information, it sucks. You got a billion pieces of data, struggling to be heard and seen and downloaded, and anything I want to know seems to get trampled underfoot in the crowd. Somehow, whenever I'm looking for something in particular, I get 404s right across the board.

  'You're a fucking Luddite, Ward.' He was already plugging in the phone cable. I left him to get on with it, wishing I hadn't thrown away the cigarettes earlier in the day.

  Five minutes later he shook his head. 'I get nothing with the major search sites, nothing with the minor ones, nothing with a bunch of specialized Netcrawlers I happen to know about including some you need robust security clearance for.'

  'That's the Web for you. The deaf and dumb oracle with amnesia.' I made no effort to sound like I hadn't told him so.

  'Doesn't mean there's nothing there. It just means that if the term does appear on a site, then it's one that isn't known to the search engines.'

  'Bobby, there's no reason to believe anything will be out there. Not every single thing that ever happened is typed up there yet. Plus, it's just a sentence. Three words. You leave a bunch of monkeys for long enough, one of them will type it a lot sooner than they'll get around to Macbeth. But it doesn't mean he's going to whip up some HTML and sling it on a server with some banner ads and a hit counter—and even if he did, why should it have anything to do with what's on the tape?'

  'You got anything better to do?'

  'Yes,' I said, firmly. 'The bottle's running low and I'm tired and need a lot more to drink.'

  'We'll do that after.'

  'After what? You already found out there's nothing there.'

  Bobby rapped his fingernails on the table for a while, squinting at the curtains. I could almost hear his brain humming. I was bored and the whiskey was making my brain feel heavy and cold. Too much new information in the last two days was making me want to forget everything I knew.

  'There must be something else in the house,' he said eventually. 'Something you missed.'

  'Only if it was hidden in a fucking lightbulb. I tossed the place. There's nothing else there.'

  'Everything changes when you know what you're looking for,' he said. 'You thought you were looking for another note. So that's what you looked for. That's the grid you had. You only happened to think about video by chance.'

  'No,' I said. 'I thought about it because the house had been set up that way. I think my father had gone to some trouble to ... '

  I tailed off. Got up, rummaged in the laptop bag.

  'What?'

  'I backed up his hard disk onto a ffiz! cart. It's the one thing I haven't really checked.'

  I sat back down in the chair next to Bobby and slotted the tiny cartridge in the machine. Soon as it was mounted I got a Find Slip onscreen and typed in 'straw men'. Hit return. The machine chirped and whizzed for a while.

  NO MATCHING ITEMS FOUND.

  I tried it with 'straw' only. Same result.

  'Well, that's that,' I said. 'The bar beckons.' I stood, expecting him to join me. Instead he started doing something with another Find Slip. 'What are you doing now?'

  'Getting Find to index the contents of all the text files on the disk,' he said. 'If this straw thing is some big deal, it would make sense that there'd be no file by that name. You'd want to be less obvious about it. But it might appear inside one of the files.'

  It was a reasonable point, so I waited. The ffiz! has a fast access time, and the process only took a couple of minutes.

  Then it told us: the text was still nowhere to be found.

  Bobby swore. 'Why the hell didn't he just leave a letter or something, just telling you whatever the fuck he wanted to say?'

  'I already asked myself that question a billion times and the answer is that I don't know. Let's go.'

  He still didn't get up. 'Look,' I said. 'I know you're doing this for me, and I'm grateful. But in the last twenty-four hours I've discovered either that my parents were insane and that I once had a twin or they were really insane and pretended I had. I've had nothing to eat in days. I stupidly had a cigarette this morning and now I want about a hundred more and it's taking all my mental energy to resist. I'm done here. I'm going to the bar.'

  He turned his head toward me, but his eyes were far away. I'd seen that look in him before. It meant he couldn't even really hear what I was saying, and wouldn't until he'd run his course.

  'I'll see you there,' I said, and left.

  Chapter 11

  I remember feeling proud of something when I was young—the fact that mosquitoes didn't bite me. If we went on holiday to the right kind of area, or I went on a school trip at the wrong time of year, I discovered that most people found themselves covered in little red bumps that itched like hell—no matter how much they futzed around with creams and sprays and nets. I didn't. I'd get maybe one bite, on the ankle. Kind of a strange thing to be proud of, you might think, but you know how it is when you're young. Once you come to realize that you're not the centre of all creation, you're so keen to find some concrete way of differentiating yourself that just about anything will do. I was the boy who didn't get bitten by insects. Take note, ladies and gentlemen, and have a little respect: there goes No-Bite Boy, the Mosquito-Free Kid. Then, one day when I was in my late twenties, I realized I'd got it wrong. Chances were that I got bitten just as much as everybody else. The only difference was that I didn't have as strong an allergic reaction, so I didn't get the bumps. I was still 'special'—though by then I was old enough to realize this wasn't any great distinction to have, and also to be more concerned with hoping that I wasn't actually so different from other people—but not in the way I'd thought. I got bitten like the rest of you, and No-Bite Boy was vanquished there and then.

  As I sat there in the bar and waited for Bobby, this memory was hard to dislodge. My family, my life, was something I suddenly didn't understand. It was as if I'd noticed that I saw the same buildings in the background of my life, wherever I was, and had finally begun to wonder if it was a film set. As a matter of fact, I did generally see the same buildings. Since the Agency, I had never really gotten a mainstream existence on track, and seeing Bobby had made me realize this far more acutely than ever before. I did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that; some of this had been illegal, and some of that had been violent. Most of it was hard for me to even remember. It blurred. I lived in motels and restaurants and regional airports, talking to strangers, reading signs written to people in general and never meant just for me. All around me seemed to be people whose lives had content, who looked like the folks you see on television. Contextualized. Part of a story with the usual beats. Mine seemed to have none. The 'this is where you came from' section had just been abruptly scrapped, leaving an undisclosed number of empty pages.

  My barman was on duty, and once again proved an able and efficient ally. He got over the whole 'previous incident' aspect of our reunion by bringing it up right away.

  'Going to get your gun out later?'

  'Not if you give me some peanuts.'

  He got me some. He was a good barman, I decided. The place was free of corporate androids, and the only other guests were a very old foursome in the corner. They'd looked up at me grimly when I came in. I didn't blame them. When I get to their age, I'll resent young people, too. I resent them already, in fact, the slim little fresh-faced assholes. I don't find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don't even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they'll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they'll wind up married to a movie s
tar. They're out the other side of all that, onto a flat, grey plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about. I don't blame them being a little out of sorts. I'm just surprised more oldsters don't take to the streets in packs, swearing and raising hell and getting drunk. With demographics going the way they are, maybe that's going to be the next big thing. Gangs of octogenarians, taking drugs and running amok. Though walking amok is more likely, I guess—with maybe an hour of dozing amok in the afternoon.

  After a while the group in the corner seemed to accept that I wasn't going to start playing a new-fangled musical instrument or challenging conventional sexual mores. They got on with their business, and I got on with mine: we co-existed, two species warily sharing the same watering hole.

  Nearly two hours later, Bobby came striding in. He caught sight of me slumped in my booth, signalled to the barman for two more of whatever I was drinking, and came over to join me.

  'How shit-faced are you?' He had an odd look on his face.

  'On a scale of one to ten,' I said breezily, 'I'd have to give myself an F.'

  'Good,' he said. 'I've found something. Kind of.'

  Suddenly feeling tense, I sat up and saw that he was holding a small sheaf of paper.

  'Got reception to let me use their printer,' he said. 'Where the hell are the drinks?'

  At that moment the barman appeared with them. 'Any more nuts?' he asked.

  'Oh no,' I said. 'Just the two of us.' Then I laughed for quite a long time. I'm pretty sure I was laughing. The barman went away. Bobby waited patiently for me to get a grip. It took a while. I think that for just a moment I was on the verge of losing it.

  'Okay,' I said eventually. 'Shoot.'

  'First thing is I had another look on the Net. Still no record of the Straw Men as an actual thing, but I found encyclopaedia references to other meanings of the term 'straw man',—something about guys who in the last century would stand outside courts with straw in their shoes—didn't really understand that part—indicating they'd give false testimony for money. And another reference regarding lack of conscience—I guess a straw versus flesh thing.'