Box Nine (28 page)

“Oh, please.”

“Screw you, you don't like the way I talk. I'm saying mostly we keep Cortez and company bouncing within their borders. And sometimes someone is slow on the flipper and the ball rolls through.”

“And is that someone ever you?”

“I've got my own problems. According to you anyway. And I've got my own theory about Cortez.”

“Which is?”

“Puppet. Total, willing puppet. He's a smart guy and a better actor. He's probably even a pretty good manager. Maybe he knows how to move money. And maybe there are connections back in South America. But I don't care. There's someone above him. There's someone who never walks into Quinsigamond. They can shred and shove every file from Interpol to the FBI to Lehmann and his Federal walking egos at DEA. There's somebody else. I call them the Aliens.”

“The aliens?”

“You really popped crank, Freddy?”

“Through all of graduate school and for a year after.”

“How'd the nervous system do?”

“How do you think?”

“How'd you deplane?”

“Rough but intact.”

“No, I mean, was there a method or anything?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I walked about ten, twelve miles a day. Fast pace.”

“Around Quinsigamond?”

Woo nods. “Went through a half dozen Adidas in a little over half a year. And I poured gallons of this tea through my body. I drowned in tea. Honestly, I choked on it, I drank so much, but it washed everything out.”

“Must've made it tough walking.”

“Again, it's easier for a man. There's usually a tree to step behind.”

“I lift weights.”

“It's not the same thing. It's not aerobic. Do you still think you're in control?”

“Absolutely. Have I looked rattled to you? I'll know when the compass swings.”

“A classic cliché. Where do you buy?”

“C'mon, Freddy.”

“Oh, of course. Bangkok. Little Max?”

“He's been helpful on occasion.”

“Curious drug, speed. I really fell in love. Head over heels.”

“Mine's much more a working relationship.”

“Sure. You'll be chasing it around the desk before you know it.”

“It's all a matter of will, Freddy.”

“How long have you been a regular abuser? Do you find you can still think clearly? I found I could for the first year, almost two. Then things shifted. It was really as fascinating as it was terrifying. The brain images started coming faster than my ability to identify and label them. Like race cars at the Indy 500. Have you ever had a seizure?”

“That's pleasant. No, never. Listen, enough on this topic. Why don't you show me the rest of this place.”

Woo smiles, brings his mug up to his mouth, and stares into it as he sips.

“All right,” he says. “Let's have a look.”

She follows him deeper into the room. Somehow, it seems to get wider as they approach the library area. There are books, most of them big, thick volumes, oversized and without dust jackets, lying in stacks on the floor. The books look like old, obscure encyclopedias. Some of the stacks are eight and nine volumes high, rising up three and four feet high like models of ragged skyscrapers.

On either side of the library area are two identical couches, both covered in black leather and looking inviting, like you'd continue to sink deep into the cushions a full five minutes after you lay down. There's no sign of chrome or wood on them and Lenore thinks they look like weird twin animals, some mistake in genetically controlled husbandry. She stares from one to the other and thinks of a flabby, glossy black cow lying down in a rainy field at night.

The only other piece of furniture in the room is an enormous monstrosity of a desk that almost spans the width of the building. It's actually several desks and tables cobbled and bolted together to form a startling new creation. And it is genuinely startling. It begins at either end of the room with two old-fashioned rolltops complete with an assortment of cubbyholes and tiny drawers. They face each other and jut out perpendicular from the back wall of shelving forming two secretarial L's, two right angles turning at either end of the main desk body. The main body is comprised of two conventional mahogany executive desks, each bolted to its adjoining rolltop, and then joined to an eight-foot conference table that runs between them.

Stationed behind the table, in the center of the whole setup, is the largest swivel chair Lenore has ever seen. She decides it must have been custom-built. Of course it's black and leather with a subtle pucker design, but it's the back of the chair that's so attention-getting—it rises up, narrowing as it goes, almost five feet tall at the top of its curve. Lenore thinks the height is a foolish mistake. It's humorous and ends up detracting from the rest of the power look of the office.

Stationed on top of the two conventional desks at either side of the main table are state-of-the-art reel-to-reel and compact disc players. Lenore spots three different sets of headphones hanging from hooks in the rolltops. In the center of the conference table sits an oversized computer monitor and the longest keyboard she's ever seen. It looks more like a musical keyboard, a synthesizer keyboard, than one for a computer or word processor. There's no logo that she can see on any of the equipment, but she can tell in a glance it's not Apple or Wang or IBM. It's got to come from someplace she's never heard of.

Taking up every bit of surface space around the sound and computing equipment are small versions of the book stacks on the floor. There are several stacks of paperbacks with plain white covers and a couple foot-high blocks of typing paper, the top sheet which is covered with tiny type that seems to run off the page in all directions, marginless. Lenore isn't close enough to be sure, but it's possible the words are in another language.

She steps up next to the main table and knocks on it like it was a door.

“So,” she says, “you tell me who the Nazi is.”

Woo squints at her and pulls his head in like a turtle. “The desk,” he says.

“A desk Goebbels and Göring would fight over.”

Woo gives a small smile. “The last time I checked, furniture choice was not a characteristic of the Nazi.”

“We could argue about that, Freddy.”

“I need a great deal of room. I need to spread out when I work.”

“Ship this baby down to Latin America. There's a whole bunch of petty dictators who'd kill for this monster.”

“You find it offensive.”

“Overwhelming. It's the biggest desk, if you can call it a desk, that I've seen. You should coin a new word, Dr. Woo. This kind of thing requires an addition to the language.”

“All I can tell you is it suits my needs. Form follows function perfectly.”

“Yeah, and there's a lot more going on there besides.”

“There's so much room here. I decided, why not use it?”

“Uh-huh. Where do you sleep, Freddy?”

“The couches are tremendously comfortable. They fold out into beds. Often I don't even bother pulling one open. I'll sleep right on the couch.”

“Okay, Freddy, let's think about this for a second. You've gone to the trouble of making Godzilla's desk in here, because there's so much room, as you say, but you don't own a bedroom set.”

His voice goes low and his eyes shift to the floor.

“My work is quite important to me, Lenore.”

She realizes she's offended him and she's a little surprised that she regrets what she's said. Whatever mood of sparring and playfulness was between them feels gone and in its absence she's aware of how much she enjoyed it. She wants to get it back, reinstall it at once. She reaches up and places a hand on Woo's shoulder and says, in an apologetic voice, “I'm sorry, Fred, I was just teasing. I stepped too far there. I just got caught up, carried away a little, you know. I was just riding you a little and I just … I don't know.”

Without lifting his eyes he takes her wrist and pulls it to his mouth and plants a long kiss on the inside span of skin just below the border of her hand.

She doesn't say a word and she doesn't pull away. She wishes only that she had a moment to swallow some crank. She wouldn't even need water for the wash-down.

He moves his way from wrist down the inner arm to the bend at the elbow. She knows she should find it funny, a caricature, a sloppy imitation of John Astin in a long-ago sitcom. But she doesn't react with a laugh or a comment. She lets him go, lets him work on the inner skin of her arm, kissing it slowly, wetting it barely. Her breath starts to come a little heavier. He makes the jump to the neck beautifully. He kisses below the ear and starts to suck and lick and really taste her skin, take in her salt and maybe a bitter drop of left-over perfume. She pushes herself closer to him, works her way into a tighter embrace so that their bodies press together in longer, unbroken spans.

His mouth drops lower on her neck and he hits a spot that makes her buck slightly. He feels it and speeds up, his tongue gets more aggressive, his lips pull on her and in spite of herself she lets out a noise, a breath-grabbing sigh and it comes out as a moan and she hopes, for a second, that he doesn't mistake it for a laugh, and then the thought is gone and their hands are at each other's clothing, feeling for buttons and zippers where there are none, furious at working so blindly.

His hands fall to the rim of her jeans and start to unbutton them, but she grabs them at the wrist and pulls them up underneath her turtleneck, but on top of the thermal undershirt. He starts to alternately squeeze and rub her breasts, like he can't decide which he wants to do, and while his hands move she takes a second to pull the jersey off and drop it to the floor. Then she pulls his hands away and places them at the sides of his legs. His head comes up from her neck and he looks like a horrified child, but she smiles and calms him and mourns the word
slow
, then she starts to unbutton his cardigan and pulls it from his arms. He makes no motion beyond the visible rising and falling of his chest and a smile that he can't suppress. She knows she now has full control and it sets her off, gives her a charge almost as heady as swallow of meth. She goes slowly to her knees and unties his old sneakers, getting playful, improvising, dipping fingers inside the elastic band of his socks and tickling just above the ankle. He doesn't say a word, but his body seems to tremble a bit and she loves it.

She lifts each foot and removes the shoe and the sock, slowly, with an almost detached air, like this was her profession, like she'd worked a lifetime at Kinney's. She rises back up and strips him of his Ezra Pound shirt. She steps back for a second and stares at his chest. It's neither hairy nor completely void of hair, but rather has a few single curly strands in a dozen or so random places.

Now she steps back up to him, very aggressive, with the same body English she'd use just before a cuffing, or better, a full-blown strip search. He seems to love it. His breathing gets more obvious. His head does a stutter on his neck. She reaches around his back, drops her hand, and squeezes his ass with all her strength. There's a part of her that would like him to shout out her name, but she controls herself as well as Woo, lets go, and comes back around front to unfasten his chinos. They're held at the waist by a small metal clip and she releases it fast, but takes her time drawing down the zipper. He's got a continuous tremble going and Lenore finds it both disturbing and satisfying. For less than a second she questions the sincerity of the tremble, but she lets the thought go and pushes the pants down over his hips.

He's wearing white boxer shorts underneath. They have a grey pinstripe in them. They feel a little brittle, starchy, as she grabs them at the sides and yanks downward. When they touch the floor, she pats his hip and he steps out of all the clothing around his feet.

He's naked now, but she keeps her eyes on his eyes as she reaches forward and takes him in her hands. His mouth drops slightly and he makes a noise and takes some air. She squeezes very lightly and he grows. She releases and steps backward and motions that he should lie down on the floor.

He complies, moving carefully, finding a narrow strip of space between the mountains of books. He stretches out on his back, his hands folded behind his head for a pillow, his legs bent up at the knees. She likes him on the floor, likes the picture of him. She wants to remember it, press it into her memory, saved vivid for the distant future, for times when she's void of a partner and less in control of her life and herself. She wants to save the image in her mind, not as some mild, personal pornography, but more as a symbol, a suggestion of this feeling that has no title she knows of. It's a feeling beyond the words
power, control, dominance
, or
will.

She walks a full, dramatic circle around Woo, taking giant steps over the smaller book piles. His eyes follow her path, stay on her face. She stops when she arrives back at his feet. She knows there'll be no speaking, no communication using the spoken language. They'll exchange messages, or rather, she'll indicate what she wants and he'll respond, a simple and efficient cause-and-effect equation.

She starts to give him the full show. She brings her feet together. She grabs her undershirt at its bottom and pulls it up slowly so that it forms loose ribs, bunches of ribbed material, she holds for a minute, arms crossed and prepared to pull, under the bottom rim of her breasts, gives him the hesitation tease she knows he wants, stares at him. Then she pulls the shirt free, up past the neck and head and simultaneously off the arms. Her breasts bob as the shirt rubs past. Her nipples are hard and she brings her fingers up and runs them around the areolas. It's a show for his benefit and his body continues to visibly respond, but it also feels as good as it looks.

She begins to unbutton and unzip her jeans. She gauges her speed to a midpoint where he's on the verge of frustration and fulfillment. She pushes the jeans down her legs and steps out of them. She's wearing white cotton panties, not bikinis, but close enough. Woo doesn't seem to notice the difference. She smiles at him, places her right hand over her navel for a minute, then inches it downward until her fingertips dip into the waistband. She waits, then teases him with a few more inches of finger sliding downward into still-invisible hair.