The Omission Index, Ch 36: Whispers in the Dark Pt. 3

Kwan had been nursing the same scotch for forty minutes. The ice was gone. He turned the glass a quarter turn on its coaster, then another, and watched Devin work the far end of the bar. Towel over one shoulder. Three glasses at a time, stems laced between his fingers.

"Six blocks," Reid said in his ear. "They have him inside six blocks and they're still cutting."

Kwan did not answer. His earpiece was set to receive.

The Embers smelled of old leather and lemon oil. The brass foot rail had gone pale in two places where the regulars put their shoes. A card taped by the taps read NO TABS AFTER 11. Two men in the corner booth were arguing about Sutcliffe's arm and how many starts he had left in him. A woman near the door had been crying for a while without making any sound at all.

Third night on this stool. The first two he had come in wrecked and left early, which was the entire point, and both times Devin had walked him to the door and put him in a cab himself. Kwan had gotten a look at the register tape on the second night while Devin was in the walk-in. Every drink he had bought had been rung up short.

Devin came down the bar, set out a bowl of nuts, and pushed it two inches toward Kwan's elbow.

"Worse than yesterday," Devin said.

"You have no idea." Kwan let his shoulders come down. He leaned over his forearms and brought his voice under the jukebox. "My partner didn't go around me. He went to somebody. A shell company. Aliento Dorado."

Devin took a glass off the rack and put the towel into it.

The name had come out of a filing cabinet in Oaxaca eight months ago. Nine people in the country had heard it said out loud. Six of them drew A.G.I. paychecks. Kwan let it sit on the bar between them and reached for the nuts he did not want.

"Never heard of them," Devin said.

"Nobody has." Kwan turned the glass again. "In nine days they lose four hundred million dollars through a door I found. My partner is going to walk in and hand them the man who found it."

Devin set the towel down and put both hands on the bar. He had not done that either of the other two nights.

"Four hundred million," he said.

"Give or take."

"And your partner has a name."

Kwan gave him one that had belonged to a man dead since 1979. Devin nodded once and picked the towel back up.

Devin did not write anything down. He never did. Reid had been through eleven weeks of the bar's paper and turned up liquor invoices, a linen contract, and a bowling league sheet from the Elks.

The pull came up under the back of Kwan's skull. It had been there since he sat down, a slackness behind his eyes, an invitation to keep talking. Now it drew in. Devin's face did not change. He set the glass on the rail, reached for another, and the pressure behind Kwan's eyes narrowed to a point.

"That's a lot to carry alone," Devin said.

"I've been carrying it since March."

"Say it out loud and you'll see the shape of it." Devin put down a fresh coaster. "People do. Every night. Right where you're sitting."

Kwan put his face in his hands and held it there.

The briefing had not prepared him for the shape of it. The pull did not push. It waited, and it made waiting feel like the only sane thing left to do in the room, and the part of Kwan that wanted to keep talking was not a part he could argue with.

"Kwan." Reid, flat. "They stopped narrowing. Four of them, converging on you, ten minutes out. Whatever you just said went straight up the line."

Kwan counted to five behind his hands. Then he sat up and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until the room came back yellow.

Devin checked his watch and started toward the office door behind the register.

"One more," Kwan said. He pushed the glass forward.

Devin stopped. He came back down the bar and reached up for the bottle. The front door opened and let in the cold off Wabash.

***

Hale had four monitors and not one of them showed him the whole room.

Two cameras inside The Embers, one over the register and one down among the bottles, both grainy under the sconces. A third on the alley door. The fourth carried Reid's plot: the Loop street grid under a sheet of acetate, red grease pencil for A.G.I., blue for Knopff, redrawn every forty seconds by a hand that came into frame and went out again.

Under all of it, Kwan's breathing. Slow on the exhale. The count he had learned at Quantico and had never given up.

He had asked them to split the audio so Kwan came in on the left and Reid on the right. Three weeks in the chair had taught him that he could not hold two voices in one ear and still hold a man's head fifteen hundred miles off.

Fifteen hundred miles east, four men crossed Wabash thinking about entry angles and fields of fire. A fifth stood behind a bar and thought about money. Hale held all five at the edge of hearing. It cost him. His hands had been flat on the arms of the chair for eleven minutes and he had not moved them.

Below his right knee something had started up again. He did not look down. The pitcher on the tray table had gone warm hours ago and he had not asked anybody to move it closer.

"They're splitting," Reid said. "Two front, two to the alley. Knopff, ninety seconds."

Hale pushed out past the static. Four pressures came back. Three of them shut and hard. One of them open.

"Knopff." He kept his voice level on the net. "Rear pair. Left-hand man is open. Take him first."

"Define open."

"He's carrying their radio and he's the only one out there I can hear."

Knopff's breathing changed. A car door shut somewhere behind him. "And the other three."

"Closed. I can tell you where they are and nothing else."

"That'll do."

At 11:42 the man from the corner booth stood up, crossed the floor, and put a hand on the back of Kwan's stool. Hale watched him say six words. He watched Kwan give him a face.

The alley feed showed a doorway, a dumpster, and three seconds of nothing. Then Knopff came in from the left of frame, low and fast, and the left-hand man went down on the wet brick and stayed there. The second one got a hand inside his coat. Knopff broke the wrist against the lip of the dumpster and put him down on top of the first.

"Rear's down," Knopff said. Nothing in his voice moved at all. "Two of them. Reid, I need a wagon on Adams."

The front doors came open at the same moment.

Two men in dark coats moved in past the coat rack, weapons already up. The booths emptied. On the register camera Hale saw the woman by the door go down onto the floor and pull her purse in after her.

Devin's face was the clearest thing on any of the four screens. Hale had spent three weeks reading a man who kept his face still for a living, and it came apart in under a second.

What came off him crossed fifteen hundred miles and put the Oregon room sideways. Hale's vision whited at the edges. The four monitors ran together into one bright band, and for a stretch he could not count he was hearing The Embers through somebody else's ears, every mouth in it open.

He got his hand to the key.

"Kwan. Get him down."

Kwan already had a fistful of Devin's collar. Three darts went into the back bar and took out a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and both sconces on the right-hand wall.

Reid's charge went off under the coat rack. The two men in dark coats came off their feet. Knopff's team came through the kitchen door, and it was finished in under twenty seconds, and most of that was shouting.

On the register camera, the woman by the door crawled out from under her booth and began putting things back into her purse, one at a time.

***

Devin was on the floor behind his own bar with scotch coming through the knee of his trousers.

Everything in the room came into him at once and none of it belonged to him. The dark coats were cold and orderly and thinking in numbers. The men who came in after them were thinking in numbers too. Under the booth by the door a woman was saying her sister's phone number over and over. Devin had spent twenty years opening himself a finger's width at a time. Somebody had taken the door off the frame.

He had never had a defense. He had never needed one. He took, and he wrote it down, and he sold it back at a fair price to people who could afford it.

A man came over the bar and landed in the glass without a sound.

"It's over, Devin," Kwan said. He crouched down among the bottles.

Devin pushed backward and his palm went into the scotch. "Who are you."

"We're the people who stop you." Kwan glanced toward the front of the room. "We're also the people who stopped them."

Them. The dark coats had come through his door for him. Eleven years behind this bar and he had believed the whole time that he was the one doing the taking, and in a building he had never seen, men who had never sat down in front of him had put a number on him and sent a van.

Then the rest of it came.

Judge Sarkisian and his son's markers. The man from Continental Illinois who had spent nine years explaining to himself why it was not stealing. Councilwoman Terry and 1968. The trader who cried on Thursdays and paid on Fridays. The surgeon who had not gone into an operating room sober since Easter. The alderman's driver, who knew where two cars had gone into the river and which of them had somebody in it. Devin had taken all of it and written it on index cards and put the cards in his mother's cedar chest, and now every card was reading itself aloud to him at once.

Under the cards, Eleanor.

Her face came up whole. The laugh. The front tooth that turned in a little. The hotel bar on Rush Street where she had said it and then finished her drink and put on her coat while he was still sitting down.

He had gone back to that bar every Thursday for a year. The man behind it knew his drink by the third week and never once asked him a question, and Devin had gone home each time and lain awake working out everything that man could have taken off him if he had wanted to.

"She told me everybody wears one," Devin said.

Kwan did not move.

"Nineteen sixty-four. She said I wasn't smart enough and I wasn't rich enough." Devin's mouth had stopped working properly. "She said I was a child for believing anyone means what they say."

"So you went and proved her right."

"I proved it about all of them." He had both hands flat on the rubber mat under the taps. "Every man who sat down here had something. Every one of them. The money was only how I kept count."

Kwan picked a curve of green glass off Devin's shoulder and set it down on the floor between them. "Sarkisian's son died in April."

The sound that came out of Devin went on longer than he wanted it to. He could not stop it and he did not try after a while. He sat in the glass and the scotch behind his own bar and wept in front of a man whose name he had known for an hour.

"Where do you keep them," Kwan said.

"Cedar chest. In the office, under the coat." Devin wiped his face on the back of his wrist and got scotch on it. "Key's on the walk-in ring."

***

The tape of Kwan's debrief ran fifty-one minutes. Hale listened to it twice. The second time he stopped at 1964 and sat, thumb on the key. Then he ran it back and played that stretch again.

He had his own version. Two lawyers, four years, a house in Royal Oak that neither of them wanted by the end of it. He had come out and gone back to work. Devin had come out and bought a bar.

The rest arrived over the next four hours. One A.G.I. operative alive and breathing in a room in Colorado. Two in restraints. One in the alley, covered. Reid had the dart launchers apart on a folding table before midnight and was already complaining about the trigger group. Devin and the man from the corner booth went downtown on federal wire fraud. The Tribune would get a high-tech extortion ring and a multi-agency task force.

Knopff came on the line at two, still in the alley, still short of breath. He wanted to know whether Hale had been reading him or the other man when he called the left-hand one open. Hale said both. Knopff said that was fine and rang off before Hale could ask about the hand.

At three in the morning Hale raised the night desk. He asked for the second console out of storage, a phone line that did not route through the ward switchboard, and a work order on the wall between his room and the empty one next door. The nurse wrote all of it down and asked whether he wanted the lights off. He told her to leave them on.

At 4:40 Reid patched through the first of the recovered files. Personnel rosters, most of them initials only. Requisition orders for a facility outside Cheyenne that A.G.I. had never pulled a permit on. Purchase orders for eleven thousand gallons of a coolant nobody made anymore. A routing memo with E.R. in the block, dated eleven days before Detroit.

Hale read that one three times.

The doctor came at five to argue about his sleep. Hale asked her to come back at eight.

Then he pulled the legal pad off the console and wrote the date across the top. The first line was a phone number in Royal Oak. He wrote it from memory, took the card out of his wallet, and checked it, because he had gotten it wrong before.

***

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