The Placebo Effect (15 page)

Before his arrest he was number one on her NSA special synaesthetes file. Now he was an aging, balding man with a greying beard.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Armistaad,” Yslan began.

The man scratched a red patch on his flabby left forearm and nodded.

“I know you didn't have to agree to this meeting, sir.” That last made her feel queasy—more Clarice Starling crap. She reminded herself that Hannibal Lecter was a fiction, then stopped herself from such sophistry. The man sitting in front of her was as otherworldly as Thomas Harris' nightmare creation—not a cannibal but someone with uncanny abilities. And both she and Mr. Armistaad knew it.

For a moment Yslan wished that she'd never been introduced to the idea, let alone the reality of synaesthetes—that the ground beneath her feet was the solid terra firma that she thought it was before she met the likes of Martin Armistaad. That the world was a real place with real rules. Not the shifting miasma of Martin Armistaad—and Decker Roberts.

She looked up and felt as if the creep somehow read her thoughts. “How's the food in this joint?” she said, unable to stop herself from poking out at the man across from her.

“The dining lounge leaves something to want but if you're bad enough you get room service, so…” He allowed his voice to trail off as he raised his eyes to hers.
Pretty eyes
, he thought, then he corrected himself;
Hider's eyes.
It almost made him laugh.

“You don't know, do you, Special Agent Hicks?”

“Know what, Mr. Armistaad?”

He winked at her then said, “Nothing that I could tell you. Something you'll just have to figure out for yourself.” Before she could respond he added, “So what do you say we start again. You pretend that I didn't have to agree to this meeting—I believe we were on that lie, weren't we.”

Yslan took a breath and spat out, “Thanks for taking this meeting, Mr. Armistaad.”

He opened his arms and then laced his fingers behind his head, shimmied down in his chair so that his pelvis was aimed more directly at her face. “What can I tell you, Ms. Hicks? My social calendar is very full but I was able to sneak it in—as I did the
last time we met.” He smiled, the antecedent for his “it” obvious to both of them. He was missing a front tooth.

“Thank you for seeing me again.”

“Not a problem.” More scratching.

“In your early essays you state that all your thinking is purely mathematical. That there are natural cycles in the world and that they relate to the figure eight point six, which is generated from the mathematical reality of pi.”

He stared at her. No more scratching.

“Do you still believe that, sir?” Still too much Clarice fucking Starling!

“Yes… and no, Ms. Hicks. I think I believe, as you are learning, that there is something else at work in the universe. Something that Hamlet sensed when he saw the ghost of his murdered father, something that great artists see—something other.”

“I see.”

“Not yet you don't.” He smiled again then added, “Do you?”

“No. Not personally. No I don't see ‘something other.'”

“That's why you are here, isn't it, Ms. Hicks. You could read my writing online—everything I've written is in the public domain. You see, I'm not allowed to charge for anything I write in here—am I?”

“I guess not.”

“I'm not.” This last was very hard. Angry. “So I ask again, Ms. Hicks, be honest with yourself and answer my question: why exactly are you here?”

“To understand what I can about how you worked.”

His surprisingly thin tongue licked his lips, leaving a glistening sheen as he whispered, “Liar.”

“Tell me how it works, Mr. Armistaad.”

“Fine,” he said. Then just as she thought he wasn't going to speak again he added, “I closed my eyes, Ms. Hicks, and the world aligned—the other world.”

The rest of the interview was unhelpful. He tinkered with her—enticed her—then threw cold water on any idea that she
thought she'd understood. But he had confirmed something that she and Harrison needed confirmed—that there might well be an “other” out there.

And Yslan was convinced that somehow her special synaesthetes were the access—the path—to that “other.”

DECKER EXITED THE SUBWAY AND HEADED TO THE BANK OF
pay phones. He knew where almost every remaining pay phone in the city was located because Eddie preferred that he used them whenever possible.

He called Visa for the third time to see if they had finally figured out what the problem was with his card.

Six prompts later he was informed by an electronic voice that his account at the RBC had been emptied of all its funds and as a result his last payment check had bounced so his card had been cancelled.

After swearing at the electronic voice and trying in vain to find a real person to talk to he flashed his Metropass and got back on the subway and headed first north then west—to Eddie's place.

The city was doing its rain/sleet dance. No doubt the local news would try to pacify the public by mentioning that although our weather was bad, Buffalo was getting slammed. But who cared? He pulled up the collar on his coat and bent into the wind. The city was quickly being transformed from its usual overpractical unhandsomeness to just plain old ugly—and fast.

“But Eddie, you said they were secure.”

“Did I say that? Doesn't sound like me.” Eddie moved the old doll from its perch on the counter to the table.

“Eddie!”

“Well, it's simply not possible to make anything one hundred percent safe any longer.”

“So someone could hack into my bank account?”

“With ease, I'm afraid. The only thing that keeps any individual bank account safe is how many individual bank accounts there are. But if the hacker has you personally in his sights—then forget it. He's got you—game
finito
—kill
la musica.
”

“Then there's nothing you can do to keep your money secure?”

“Not a damned thing.”

“Then how's all that razzle-dazzle with blind websites and digital drop boxes and closed chat rooms keeping my identity safe—or secure, for that matter. You were the one who said I needed all that stuff.”

“You do need all that ‘stuff'—your truth-telling business could get dangerous, which is why I bounce your data through fifty different servers in thirty-five different countries and of late I've looked into using quantum cryptography.” Seeing Decker's quizzical look he explained, “It uses photons on dedicated dark fiber remains of laid cable.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me, Eddie?”

“Soon it will be in every home—but not yet.”

“Would that keep information safe?”

Eddie thought for a moment then said, “Not for long. Any lock one human being can invent another can pick. It's just a natural process.”

“So there's no real way to keep my identity safe?”

“Well there is—sort of.”

“How?”

“By balancing things.”

“What?”

“I keep your identity safe by balancing things.”

“Balancing things between what and what?”

“Between simple and complicated, Decker. Your identity is digitally kept safe by being too simple for the smart guys to consider but too complicated for the uninitiated to figure out—balance.”

Decker looked at him. Something was different about Eddie, or
was it about this conversation? He didn't know. Finally he said, “So balance keeps my identity private and secure?”

“And safe.”

“Unlike the money in my bank account, which is neither and hence is gone.”

“Like dust under the bridge,” Eddie said, then added, “You'll just have to use the money in your other bank accounts and the cash in your safe. Come on, Decker—we should all have such problems.” Eddie stood and hobbled over to the sink. He plunked a bit of dishwashing liquid on his hands and scrubbed.

Decker watched Eddie's back for a moment, then grabbed his coat, felt for his car keys, and left.

Decker sat in his Passat across the street from the remains of his house and watched as two heavyset men secured floodlights to the tops of several metal stands. They were evidently preparing to continue their work through the night. Decker counted two cars, two trucks, and half a dozen police techs—most of whom were dressed in white protective coveralls. He knew they would shortly be going over every charred beam and fragment of what had been his life.

An hour later, from the pay phone at the corner of Bloor and Runnymede, he called into the answering service that Eddie had set up for him. He punched in his thirteen-digit PIN number—s-e-t-h-m-y-o-n-l-y-s-o-n. There was a single new message.

A tense male voice identified himself as representing the TD Bank, and that “as of this moment the bank is canceling your line of credit and calling in your two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan. Any failure on your part to respond to this phone call within twenty-four hours could result in criminal proceedings.” He then went on to list a series of numbers for Decker to call.

Decker stepped out of the glass phone enclosure.

“You all right?”

Decker turned. The drunk who stood outside the liquor store
and usually banged a tambourine as he massacred “Yes Sir, That's My Baby” had just asked him if he was all right.

I must look as awful as I feel
, Decker thought as he put coins into the man's battered ball cap on the sidewalk between his feet.

“Any requests?” the man asked.

Decker resisted saying, Can you sing “Far, Far Away,” thought of Seth and instead asked, “Do you know anything from
Tea for the Tillerman
?”

“Ain't he a terrorist now?”

A believer
, Decker thought,
not a terrorist
, but he said nothing.

“Don't do that.”

Decker quickly put the stack of books back on the floor. “Sorry, Theo.”

“I like the mess here exactly the way it is, so don't move things, don't try to impose your sense of order on my things, Decker.”

“Okay, I'm—”

“Sorry, yeah, you said that—always moving stuff around. What is that, anyway?”

“I won't do it again.”

The dingy little gay man was the owner of the Junction's best used-book shop and the area's foremost amateur historian—and Decker's friend and coresearcher on the documentary.

They went down the aisles narrowed by thousands of used books, some on shelves, many simply stacked on the floor, passed rotting cardboard boxes of old cassettes from which Decker had first heard John le Carré read his novels, then racks of yesteryear's porn rags with the genteel appellation of gentlemen's magazines—as if women's magazines had pictures of naked men flaunting their parts. Then down a steep set of stairs made narrow by six-foot-high stacks of books on either side.

“Trish thinks we need more mystery for episodes five through eight.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? As in you have something mysterious?”

“Yep. I found a real oddity in the amalgamation between the Junction and the city. A fact that doesn't align.”

“Meaning what?”

“One of the police cases in the Junction didn't make it onto the police blotters of the amalgamated city police force.”

“Clerical error?”

“It's possible, but it was the only pending police investigation in the Junction that didn't survive the amalgamation.”

“What kind of—”

“A public lynching.”

Decker looked at him sharply.

“Of a boy.”

“In the Junction?”

“At the corner of Annette and Mavety—just around the corner.”

“And there's no mention of the crime on the city's records after the merger?”

“I've checked and rechecked and there's no mention of it—anywhere. The crime just went away. Just like that.” Theo snapped his fingers. They made no sound.

“Things do get misplaced in a merger,” Decker said.

“Or mergers are arranged so things can get misplaced. We always wondered why the Junction bothered to join the big bad city.”

That sat like something hot and heavy between the two men.

“No mention of suspects in the Junction's records, I assume?”

“None.”

“Details of the victim?”

“Not much. He was a fourteen-year-old male—no distinguishing marks, nothing except that his fingernails were long and painted.”

“A gay kid?”

“They didn't call us gay back then.”

Decker thought about that. Theo seldom talked about his sexual orientation.

Then Theo asked, “What reaction would a fine upstanding
Junction family have if one of their own was smitten by one of mine?”

“It would have to be a powerful family to have bought all that silence for all these years so that all that remains of a boy's entire life is one sentence in a police file.”

“I agree.”

Theo took a long wheezing breath and coughed up something whose colour hadn't yet been named. The coughing suddenly increased in intensity, grabbed hold of him, shook him like a hard wind does a loose canvas sail.

“Damn it, Theo, take a pill.”

“They only work sometimes,” he huffed out between spasms.

“Well maybe they'll work now.”

Decker reached into Theo's shirt pocket and took out the bottle of pills, shook one out and handed it to the older man, who swallowed it dry. Theo's breathing shallowed and slowly his cough eased.

“See, Theo, it worked,” Decker said. “Take your damned pills, will ya.”

Theo muttered, “Yeah, that pill—that particular pill worked. I'm telling you they don't all work anymore. It's like new razor blades. When they come out with a new product they're great—actually cut the whiskers off your face. Then once people begin to buy them, they lower the quality.”