“Listen close. You’re tired and it’s time to show me what you can do.” The voice began to read a long list of numbers.
“Wait,” I begged. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Please slow down.”
“Got that?” the voice asked. “Read me back the last three numbers.”
I tried to remember but couldn’t. “I saw Lissa today,” I said.
“Yeah? Listen again, and this time use your head. This is important.”
Was it Rob? I was convinced for a moment that it was. I had never seen him with his brains leaking out; the stupid funeral director who turned down tips had seen him that way, not me. I had to take my twin’s death on faith, and that was certainly not enough.
It was good to believe he was still with us, so I could apologize. “Are you nearby? Downstairs?” I asked. “Rob, I am so sorry—”
“Please shut up.” The voice read me the list of numbers again. The air seemed thick as warm Jell-O. When I couldn’t or wouldn’t recite the last three numbers on the list, he swore under his breath and hung up.
I had disappointed my twin once more. I felt devastated. I so much wanted to please somebody, do what somebody expected me to do.
I lapsed into a low state of fugue. Remembered it was time for my tablets, to be taken with food. That would be all right. I opened another can, this time of kidney beans, swallowed my pills, and ate half of the contents. Then I leaned back in the chair and fell asleep.
When I awoke, I was stiff all over and it was nine in the morning. Banning was shaking my shoulder. He held a white-and-silver blur in front of my face. “This isn’t our can opener,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I bought a cheap one. That one’s gone. Someone’s been in our room. Did you eat anything?”
I stared at him stupidly, then reached to the nightstand. The valise and Rob’s papers were still there. “I ate a can of peaches and half a can of beans,” I said.
“I did not buy a can of peaches,” Banning insisted. He backed off two paces, bumped up against the defunct air conditioner, and stood with a rigid, military bearing that might have been comical in another circumstance. “You might be tagged.”
I said, “I’m fine. Bad dreams, though.”
His look changed to puzzlement. “Did anybody call?”
“No,” I said.
“We have to find another place to stay.”
“All right,” I said.
Within half an hour, we had paid our bill and taken our belongings—pitifully few—down to Banning’s car.
“What do you know about the City of the Dog Mothers?” I asked him as we drove through downtown.
“Awful,” he said. “But not the worst.”
23
Lissa, Banning, and I sat before Monroe Callas’s desk at ten o’clock. We had stood for an hour outside the warehouse, saying little; our appointment had been for eight-thirty, and Callas had insisted we be there on time. The tension in the big room was thick, and it did not come from our being kept waiting.
Callas leaned back in her chair. “My front door was spray-painted early this morning,” she announced, with an extra lilt in her voice that could have been mistaken for caffeine energy. “I live in a good neighborhood. Vandalism is rare, graffiti unheard of. There’s substantial security, three perimeters, two of my own design and under my control. Nobody who comes to this warehouse knows where I live.” She looked directly at Banning. “You have no idea where I live, do you?”
“No,” he said.
“Can you guess what was spray-painted on my door?” Callas asked.
“No,” Banning said, brows lowered defensively.
“’Jew Bitch Whore.’”
Banning’s face hardened. “Why,” he began, pausing to gather his words, “would I do such an obvious and stupid thing?”
Callas shrugged. “I’m not Jewish. I’ve never practiced the world’s oldest profession. As for being a bitch—you bet. No argument.”
She let that sit for a while. I began to feel sorry for Banning.
“I doubt very much it was Mr. Banning,” Callas finally said. “It was probably one of our gardeners. I’m late because I traced his muddy footprints from the front porch to a garbage bin in the rear. I won’t go into details, but he must have sprayed my door about 5:00 p.m. last night, just after he finished weeding the lawn. If I confront him . . . a gardener, a guy who hardly speaks English and who has no rational motive to do any such thing . . . What will I discover?”
“Confusion,” Banning said.
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Lines appeared beside her lips—lines pointing down. “Is my gardener being controlled by some top-secret Russian spy agency?”
None of us answered. Ridiculous, paranoid, too much to admit.
“Do they go door to door, ‘Avon calling’?” Callas reached into a desk drawer and pulled up a folder full of printouts and clippings. “A Mr. Hefner Thorgood was brought up on weapons charges yesterday for firing an unlicensed .45 in Berkeley city limits. The People’s Republic doesn’t like that. He shot two dogs he said were attacking a man. Sound familiar?”
I nodded.
“There’s no police record of the dogs’ owner filing a complaint, so I can’t trace her. But there is an earlier report of a man who claims a woman set her pooches on him, then called them off and moved on.”
Banning nodded, as if what she was saying fit some pattern.
“Did our pooch lady make a mistake? Run into someone about your size and age before she found you?” Callas asked. “Next we have a Mr. Alvarado Cunningham, transient. Mr. Cunningham is a drunk. He’s known to the police for urinating in public and tossing plastic bags full of his own excrement into the backyards of well-to-do citizens. A general nuisance. He’s accused of setting a fire in Berkeley on August 8. Mr. Banning, are we thinking that maybe somebody hypnotized him? Or is he a Russian agent in disguise?”
