He didn’t tell them that he was a chemist. They had learned that on their own, which meant they must have run a background check on him and therefore knew about the embezzlement charge brought against him nine years earlier. He had been guilty, but he’d known worse about his employer than his employer had known about him, so the bastard called a truce.
As if they’d never heard of constitutional rights, the cops moved him from one patrol car to another, trying to keep him off balance, questioning him politely at first, then more aggressively. When he accused them of being fascist vermin, they threatened to take him downtown to grill him further, which they would have done earlier if they hadn’t worried he would demand to have an attorney.
They needn’t have worried about that, because the last thing Spondollar wanted was to put his fate in the hands of a lawyer. He despised lawyers, who in his estimation were unscrupulous ambulance chasers or servants of the ruling class.
They called this patrol-car-to-patrol-car ordeal “crime-scene interrogation in situ,” although there had been no crime, although there had been instead a spectacular eruption of the unknown into an ordinary Oregon night. After more than four hours, just when Harley Spondollar thought they were at last going to take him in and book him on some bogus charge, the mystery man arrived, whereupon the needle on the scale of weirdness pegged out at the top.
Four black Suburbans swept into the street, the kind that the FBI employed in movies, except none was marked with an official insignia or bore license plates. Sixteen agents of some clandestine service, men and women, got out of the vehicles. All were dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties. Whoever these people were, they outranked the guys in uniforms. Spondollar was escorted to a Suburban by an attractive blond newcomer with eyes as gray as brushed steel. “The worst is over, Mr. Spondollar. Everything will be made right.” She sounded as insincere as any politician. She left him alone in the front passenger seat. The patrol cars departed.
Maybe two minutes later, a moving van arrived and parked in front of the lot on which Spondollar’s house once stood. Men in black boots and black uniforms, again lacking insignia, spilled out of the big truck, while the agents in suits departed in pairs to all the houses on that block, with what intention Spondollar could only surmise. Soon the men in uniforms were erecting an eight-foot-tall chain-link construction fence around the property, with fabric sheeting that prevented the curious from seeing anything beyond.
In the last minutes of darkness, as these busy worker bees finished installing an opaque gate across Spondollar’s driveway, a white Suburban arrived. It cruised through the gate, around the great mound of finely rendered debris to which the house had been reduced, out of sight onto the backyard. One of the construction crew closed the gate and stood beside it as if on guard.
Harley Spondollar watched all this with amazement and interest that for a while displaced his fear. Gradually, however, a profound uneasiness gathered in him.
In the half-light that preceded sunrise, the icy blonde with gray eyes returned. She escorted Spondollar through the gate and around the ruins. He asked questions as she shepherded him, but she ignored him. He almost used the C-word and several lesser insults on her, but intuition warned that he might deeply regret doing so.
Although his house was gone, the concrete patio behind it remained intact, and the Suburban was parked on it. Beside the vehicle stood a four-foot-square white folding table and two white wooden folding chairs. The blonde instructed him to sit in one of them. He said, “What if I don’t?” As if speaking to a stubborn dog, she said, “Sit.” While in the custody of the police, he had been allowed to urinate behind a tree, but his bladder felt half-full again, and he considered her shoes as a target. Once again, with some disappointment, he yielded to intuition and sat in the chair.
As the woman departed, the sky filled with peach light in the east, and a man came around the front of the SUV. He was tall and slim, his face and hands the color of tea, his hair and eyes jet black. White shoes, white suit, white shirt, bright-red necktie. His smile was whiter than his clothes. He appeared to be from India.
He seemed to float down into the chair. He carried a sheaf of papers and a white ballpoint pen, which he placed on the table. His fingers were long, well manicured. His hands moved with the grace of a close-up magician’s hands. He was the epitome of elegance. During Spondollar’s chaotic life, he’d made attempts at elegance, sought to develop good taste and acquire refinement, but he had never pulled it off. He hated those who, like this guy, were naturally graceful, lithe and trim and confident in their skin.