“What I believe isn’t important,” Banning said. “My head is filled with truths that are lies, and lies that are truths. I walk carefully and watch what I say.”
“Not all the time,” Callas said.
He swallowed and licked his lips, avoiding her gaze.
Callas returned her attention to Lissa. “You’ve never been threatened?”
“No. But I watched my husband deteriorate. It could have been something like what Mr. Banning describes.”
“Mr. Banning worked with your husband?”
“He had some insights my husband thought could be useful.”
The interview continued for an hour. Callas asked us about our personal habits, whether we had ever had firearms, weapons, or martial-arts training, our political affiliations, fringe groups we might be associated with. She listened and took notes on a yellow legal pad. At the end of the hour, she flipped the pad over, and said, “I can’t make heads or tails out of this. What you’re describing combines mind control with pointless violence or threats of violence from complete strangers.” She shuddered. “I don’t see how I can train you to protect yourselves against that kind of effort, if it’s real. The woman with the Dobermans . . . chilling.
“Before I decide whether to proceed, I want to do more research. It could take a day or two.” She rapped her pencil sharply on the desk. Our first interview was over.
As we descended the stairs from Callas’s gymnasium, Lissa told Banning to bug off. Just those words. Banning shrugged and said he would meet me back at the hotel room.
“What a Sad Sack,” she said when he had left. She walked me down several side streets and up an alley to a diner that served the industrial area. We sat in a back booth under a dusty and flyspecked window. A small bud vase decorated the table, but the carnation had long since given its all.
The waiter, a muscular young man with sideburns shaved into a Sony ad, ogled Lissa and honored me with a congratulatory smirk. I ordered two iced teas, and the waiter departed. Lissa tapped her serrated knife on the scarred tabletop.
“I am really angry,” she said. It was her turn to look vulnerable.
“At whom?” I asked.
“Rob. Myself. We screwed up, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“You both pretended you weren’t close to each other.”
“We weren’t.”
She shook her head and tapped the knife hard. I could see the glassy core of Lissa’s direction now, and it made me uncomfortable.
“You and Julia are divorced, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What went wrong?”
“Julia stopped being interested in me or what I was doing. She started being more interested in other men. I don’t share that way.”
Lissa’s smile was a sad ghost. The way her face worked, I doubted she smiled often. Her kind of beauty almost precluded that emotion. “I haven’t been with another man since leaving Rob. Or since marrying him. I didn’t lie to your mother. I wanted to get back together with Rob, but it was impossible. He was acting crazier than Banning.”
I remembered the phone call at Lindbergh Field. What a pair Rob and I were. What a lovely pair of failures, hoping to live forever, but unable even to enjoy our allotted moment in the sun.
“I’ve been doing my own detective work. I checked up on Banning, and I checked up on Rob to see if he was involved in anything suspicious. Drugs, that sort of thing. My family’s pretty well-off, so I can afford it. When we were still together, Rob went to Lake Baikal. After he got back, he read a book by Banning. I found a copy of the book in our house.”
“Rob mentioned an organization called Silk,” I said.
“A clandestine organization, formed before the outbreak of the Second World War,” Lissa singsonged. “It’s in Banning’s book, self-published about ten years ago. Along with his belief that Winston Churchill forced Hitler to go to war against England, that the Nazi concentration camps were educational resorts, and the gas chambers were actually fashionable saunas.”
A silence over the table. “Bastard,” she muttered. “My grandfather lost his entire family at Dachau.”
“If you have any explanation that makes sense, I’d love to hear it,” I said. “What did Banning do for Rob?”
“Banning was supposed to be a whiz at tracking down documents. Rob wanted corroboration. He didn’t trust Banning very far, and Rob and I were . . .” She was having a hard time speaking, the emotion of a few seconds before still working through her. She swallowed hard. “We’d separated. I didn’t want to give him up, but he had this other life, this crazy search. Banning was helping him, and I couldn’t go there.
“The last time he talked to me, he said he was taking samples from his skin and his nose. From his feces. Listening to his intestines. He said he was tracking down messages from some sort of supermind. Complete babble.” Lissa looked up from the gouge she was making with the knife. “I hired a private detective to track you,” she said. “I would have found you whether Banning called or not.”
“I’m flattered,” I said. That was true, but her words also made my stomach muscles tighten.
“You are so much like Rob,” she said, but it wasn’t a criticism. Her eyes were more than windows. I put my hand on hers—to stop her from cutting the wood.
Then she turned away, and it was like throwing a switch. “I’m a glutton for punishment,” she said. She released the knife with a clatter, reached into her purse, and draped six dollar bills on the table, covering the fresh scars. “Where are you two staying?”
We left the diner, walked to Lissa’s Toyota, and she drove me to the Haight.
I rode the tiny elevator to the hotel room.
Banning had just finished taking a shower and stood in his slacks and a T-shirt. He acknowledged my return with a curt nod, then reclined on the bed, inching down like an old man fearing a fall. He closed his eyes as if darkness were a delicious luxury and almost immediately began snoring. The worry lines around his lips and forehead softened.
