BEING PREPARED
The chaise longue is low to the floor, which facilitates the transfer of the unconscious attorney onto it, where he lies faceup in the center of the former gym as well as in countless reflections of reflections, like an army of sleeping clones. His arms trail off the furniture, hands resting palms up on the floor. His wrists are secured to the legs of the chaise with long, plastic zip ties. He is murmuring, muttering, a few minutes from regaining consciousness.
Calaphas is never without his Springfield Armory .45 Tactical Response Pistol, a second pistol that can’t be traced to him, an aerosol can of chloroform provided by the agency, and a combat knife with a spring blade. He also always carries four zip ties; during his lifetime, the world has become a place where such convenient instruments of restraint are ever more frequently essential to the conduct of business.
Since childhood, Durand Calaphas has believed in being prepared for unexpected opportunities. He was thirteen when he began to carry a knife, a simple switchblade. A week past his fifteenth birthday, he put it to interesting use. For the month of July, he was staying with his grandmother, Jane Jones, in rural Ohio. Jane was a twinkly-eyed white-haired cookie-baking pie-making apron-wearing cliché whose unvarying and tedious daily routine confirmed what Calaphas sometimes believed back then—that he was the only real person in the world and that everyone else was a product of his imagination. His grandmother lived in a Victorian house with much ornamental millwork, a grandfather clock swinging its pendulum in the front hall, the arms and headrests of furniture protected by antimacassars that she crocheted, and sweet aphorisms rendered in needlepoint framed on the walls. The house backed up to a woods where Calaphas, during one of his explorations, encountered a sixteen-year-old boy, Bill Smith, who possessed no more depth than a walk-on character in a thinly written TV show, just like Grandma Jane. Bill wore chunky hiking shoes, kneesocks, khaki shorts with patch pockets, a sweat-stained white T-shirt, braces to straighten his teeth, and horn-rimmed glasses with tortoiseshell frames. He carried a book about mushrooms, with full-color illustrations of a hundred seventy common varieties. He said he was going to be a mycologist, a biologist specializing in fungi. He wasn’t merely interested in mushrooms; he was fascinated by them. He thought Calaphas must also be obsessed with mushrooms, as if no other reason existed to be in the woods. Calaphas followed the wannabe mycologist around for more than an hour, expecting this prince of nerdhood to become semitransparent and thereby prove that he was a dreamed presence in a dreamed world, imagined into the scene to keep Calaphas entertained. When Bill found a colony of cortinarius alboviolaceus, an edible variety that he declared delicious, he began to harvest them into a plastic bag, which was when Calaphas got the idea to test Fungus Bill’s reality by harvesting him. Although he was a year younger than the amateur mycologist, Calaphas was by far the stronger of the two. He drew his switchblade and fell on the startled boy, cut his throat with one furious slash and then drove the blade between ribs, into the nerd’s heart. He sat beside the corpse for a while, waiting to see if it would fade away, but it didn’t.
This was when he began to reconsider his belief that he was the only real person in the world. If Bill Smith was real, then so might be whoever found his body and the police who would investigate the murder. A fifteen-year-old boy like Durand would not be the first suspect in such a case. Nevertheless, he took steps to ensure that he was unlikely to fall under suspicion at all. He pulled off Bill Smith’s khaki shorts and underwear, cut away the primary evidence that the nerd was male, took the severed package deeper into the woods, and dropped it through a vacancy in a rock formation, into the inaccessible cave below. Now the authorities would be searching for some adult pervert with a macabre collection of genitalia in his home freezer or in jars of formaldehyde. A fresh-faced boy visiting from Colorado would excite no interest. Having come into the forest bare-chested, in sneakers and cut-off jeans, he needed to deal with the blood he’d gotten on himself. A stream cut through the trees and fed a swimming hole in its passing. Calaphas bathed in those cool mossy-smelling waters, and sat in a meadow until the sun dried his hair and clothes. In spite of the blow to his philosophy of life that these events had delivered, when he returned to the Victorian house, his grandmother still seemed to be a thinly imagined figure in a lame TV drama.
All these years later, the most recent Bill—Carter Woodbine, Esquire—groans and opens his eyes and rolls his head from side to side on the chaise. His chloroform-abused nose issues a clear, watery discharge. He tries to move, but his zip-tied hands prevent him from sitting up.
Standing over the chaise, Calaphas waits until his captive is awake and giving voice to his outrage in a flood of invective. He focuses Woodbine’s attention by knocking on the man’s forehead as though on a door. “Is anyone at home?”
The frivolous nature of this insolence at last alarms the self-assured attorney, and his contorted expression of indignation fades out as fear fades in. He has never before been at a loss for words either as a servant of the law in a courtroom or as a caring patron providing capital and connections to visionary entrepreneurs in the dark-market pharmaceuticals industry. However, when Woodbine looks into Calaphas’s eyes, he sees something there that silences him and from which he is powerless to look away.
“I have your iPhone. I need the pass code,” Calaphas says.
In fact, he might not need the use of Woodbine’s phone because he can probably find the Bentley by other means than locating the AirTag signal. Being a prudent man, he always likes to have a backup plan in case the sure thing turns out not to be so sure, after all.
Instead of providing a pass code, the attorney says, “Santana?”
“Dead.”
“Harris?”
“Dead.”
“If I give you the code?”
Calaphas has the pleasure of saying, “Dead.”
“Then why should I cooperate?”
They both know the answer. In this otherwise deserted fortress, with its state-of-the-art soundproofing and triple-pane windows retrofitted with a quarter-inch bullet-resistant laminate, the sounds of the world beyond don’t intrude. No volume of screaming arising within these rooms can be sufficient to gain the attention of anyone beyond its walls.
Calaphas says simply, “Do you relish pain to the extent that you would like me to spend the night in the application of it?”
Instead of replying to that question, Woodbine provides the pass code to his phone. When he has answered a few other questions and senses that this brief interrogation has come to an end, his eyes are swimming with what might be bleak and bitter sorrow. The only witness to any weakness he reveals is the man who will murder him, but the attorney bites back any plea for mercy he might be desperate to express. Whatever arrogance had been instilled in him at Harvard Law, he didn’t acquire machismo there. His years of associating with the likes of Santana and Harris have evidently evoked in him the idea that the proper response to impending and inescapable death is austere fortitude, even if he has to fake it. He says only, “I’d like to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“You’re ISA.”