Dark Places

12. Consolidation and Restructuring

I got to work, logged in, read my email, and realized I had absolutely nothing to do. Suited me fine. I pointed Internet Explorer to www.interpol.com and began to read.
   About a half-hour later I had given up my hope in Interpol. They seemed like a fine enough organization, sharing information and police techniques around the world, but they didn't run from country to country chasing international terrorists the way the movies made it seem. More of a bureaucracy than anything else. They specifically said on their site: to report a crime, don't contact us, go to the National Contact Bureau for your country.
   What the hell, couldn't hurt. I compiled all the information I already had, except for the bit about the Lonely Planet web logs — didn't want to get Talena in trouble — and sent it the USA's NCB. I figured it would get read once and forwarded to the email equivalent of the Dead Letter Office, or Psycho Conspiracy Theorist Office, but at least I had tried.
   Just as I finished Kevin came over to my desk.
   "Paul," he said, "can I see you in my office? Something's come up."
   "Sure," I said, guessing that the Morgan Stanley contract was finally official. "Should we wait for Rob? I think he's at lunch." He was due to be the lead designer on the project. Actually I hadn't seen him all day, but that was typical, he was an Artiste and played up his impetuosity for all it was worth.
   "No," he said, "this doesn't involve Rob."
   I went into his office and sat down as he closed the door.
   "All right," he said. "Well. Look, Paul, everyone knows you're a brilliant programmer."
   "Thanks."
   "So brilliant that we've allowed you continue with your rather unorthodox work schedule of, is it four months vacation a year?"
   "Four months unpaid leave." Was this one of their biannual attempts to convince me to work all year?
   "But as you know the company's been going through difficult times lately. The bottom's really dropped out of the market, and we've been burning money like water."
   I was going to bring his attention to the amusing mixed metaphor but decided against it. Instead I switched to rah-rah-rah mode and said "But the Morgan Stanley contract is going to save our bacon, right?"
   "Yesterday," Kevin said, "Morgan Stanley assigned the contract to Quidnunc."
   "Ah." One of our competitors.
   "This has left us in a bind where we simply have too many employees and very few billable projects. As this was not totally unexpected we have assembled a contingency plan which we are now putting in motion. As a result of losing this contract market forces are forcing us to significantly restructure the size of the organization. We predict that this is a temporary expedient, only lasting until this anomalous market downturn is corrected."
   I began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Kevin —"
   "It's important to realize that our growth paradigm will not in the long run be affected by this and we view it as a hiccup. However in the interim we have been forced to make some very difficult decisions with a view towards consolidating our operations—"
   "Kevin, are you laying me off?"
   He tried to look me straight in the eye, I'll give him that, but at the last second he failed, and staring at the desk he said "Yes."
   "Okay," I said.
   "Paul, I'm really sorry, I fought as hard as I could for you, but the top brass —"
   "I'm not just saying okay," I interrupted. "I actually mean it. In fact I'm happy to hear it." And I did too. In fact I realized I was smiling. I felt as if a huge weight was ballooning away from my head. Unemployment! I felt like I was being paroled.
   "Really?" he asked.
   "Absolutely."
   "Why?"
   "Middle management like you will never understand." I meant it as a tease but I think he took it as an insult. Ah, well, he had after all just fired me, I could live with him thinking I'd taken a shot at him.
   "What about Rob?" I asked.
   "Him too."
   "Severance package?"
   "Four weeks pay and one month free COBRA health coverage. Here." He gave me a manila envelope from a frighteningly tall stack on his desk.
   "That sounds fair. Am I supposed to sign a contract saying that I won't sue you or something?"
   "Jeez. We never thought of that. Do you think you could… " he began.
   "Kevin," I said. "I'm not suing you, but I'm not signing anything either. Anything else?"
   "What about the Palm Pilot we gave you?"
   "I threw it into the San Francisco Bay," I said. It was the truth.
   "You — what?"
   "Can't stand the things," I explained.
   "Oh," he said. "Well. I guess we'll just write that one off. Your laptop's here?"
   "It sure is," I said, very glad that all of my important notes and correspondence were backed up on my Yahoo account. "I'll just leave it."
   "Okay. Well. Thanks for taking this so well."
   "My pleasure. Are you supposed to escort me out of the building now?"
   He looked miserable.
   "Ah, jeez, you are, too." I shook my head. "Just watch your own back. I've heard that in some places the last guy to get the axe on a day like this is the guy who just fired everyone else. Spares the place a lot of bad blood, or something."
   This was a total lie but it was worth it for the frightened expression that crawled over his face. I followed him out of the building feeling a little guilty about it. But only a little.

* * *

   I walked out of the office, crossed Mission Street, took the little pathway that led to Market Street, intending to go down to the Muni station and go home. Just at the corner of Market and Montgomery I stopped dead in my tracks so abruptly that an Asian woman nearly collided with me. I barely noticed her furious look.
   I stood there for what felt like a long time. I think maybe it really was a long time. Maybe half an hour. People gave me strange looks. Probably because I was dressed normally. Part of San Francisco's charm; if I had covered myself in silver paint or mummified myself in leather strips nobody would have paid me the least bit of attention, but a tranced-out yuppie like myself, that was man bites dog.
   I guess I flipped out a little just then. It was a whole bunch of things. Partly it was being newly unemployed. It's something that rattles you, a lot, even if you have money in the bank, even if you know you can get a new job in a matter of days, even if you're actually happy about it. And I was happy about it. I was happier than I had been for months, but I didn't understand why. That rattled me too.
   I had never been so free, not in my whole life. It was terrifying.
   I don't know why, but I felt like there were an infinite number of roads leading from the corner of Market and Montgomery, and the one that I chose would define my entire life. That half hour felt pregnant with… whatever you want to call it. Doom. Fate. Destiny.
   I could get another job. I could stay here. I liked Talena, and Talena liked me, and she hadn't said anything about a boyfriend. I thought there might be possibilities there. I could stay and try to teach myself how to be happy. It couldn't be that hard, could it? Lots of people seemed to manage it.
   I could move to London. Move to my tribe, or at least find out once and for all whether they were in fact my tribe. Maybe a change of scenery was just what I needed. Maybe my problem was that I was never meant to live in America, and I could never be happy here.
   I could go home to Canada. I could work for a year as a volunteer teacher in some godforsaken village in Chad or Suriname or Bangladesh. I could move down to L.A. and start writing screenplays. I could move to Zimbabwe and join my cousins on their farm. I could go to the South Bronx and begin a romantic Dostoevskyesque death spiral of drugs and violence and empty sex with crack whores. I could become an Antarctic explorer, or a professional scuba diver, or a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. I could enter the Shaolin Temple and become the baddest motherfucker in the whole wide world.
   The man who killed Stanley Goebel was in Kuta Beach, Bali. He might be the same man who killed Laura.
   I reflexively told myself to stop thinking about Laura. I had done enough thinking about Laura. I had done more deep wrenching thinking about Laura than I ever would have if she had not been murdered and we had gotten married and spent the rest of our lives together. I had to get on with my life. She was dead. A man had killed her. For a long time I had nursed a suspicion that her killer was someone I knew, someone on the truck. But I could let that suspicion go now. I was free of it at last. One thing this whole Stanley Goebel thing had made clear was that there was no way that someone on the truck could be The Bull. And that meant that Laura's murder had been nothing but a random act of senseless violence. It proved that her killer was John Doe, faceless, anonymous, unknown.
   Wait.
   Did it?
   Or was there another possibility?
   I turned away from the Muni station and walked back along Market Street. I entered the American Express travel office at the next corner.
   "Hello," I said to the lady behind the desk. "I want to go to Bali."
   "And when would you like to go?" she asked.
   "Today," I said, living out a fantasy I had long had, and despite the emotions flickering and straining within me, a toxic maelstrom of suspicion and anger and confusion and loss and the need to do anything rather than nothing, I managed to enjoy the look of surprise on her face.

* * *

   It all worked a charm. There was a flight from Los Angeles to Denpasar that left at 10PM. Shuttle flights went from SFO to LAX every half hour. It wasn't even that expensive, two thousand dollars return, not so bad for a last-minute ticket across the Pacific. I could afford it. I scheduled the return flight for three weeks later.
   I went home. I packed. I called SuperShuttle. I wanted to check the Thorn Tree, but my laptop had been repossessed, so I went to the nearest copy center and checked from there. And indeed:

BC088269 11/07 08:02
As a matter of fact I am pretty smart, Mr. Wood. A lot smarter than you're going to look when I'm through with you.

   I felt triumphant. I'd lured him into a conversation. I wrote back:

PaulWood 11/07 16:51
Spare us, OK? I'm talking about real murders here. I don't have time for a juvenile full-of-shit wannabe like you. You say you're the Bull? Then tell me this, what colour jacket were you wearing up on the trail? You know when I'm talking about. Or you would if you were for real.

   Then I went back home and called Talena at work. She'd just left. I called her at home. She wasn't there yet. I left her a message telling her to call me right away. I waited in the study, for her phone call or the SuperShuttle van, whichever got there first.
   The phone rang. I picked it up.
   "I called my friend in Cape Town," she said. "The South Africans were the same as the others. Swiss Army knives in their eyes. He's reopening the case and he's going to talk to your friend Gavin and call Interpol."
   "Great," I said. "I'm going to Indonesia."
   "You're what?"
   "I'm going to Indonesia."
   "When?"
   "Tonight," I said.
   "Tonight? Are you crazy?"
   "Maybe."
   "What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you idiot?"
   "Hey," I said, more than a little hurt. I was doing this, I suddenly realized, in part to impress Talena. "I got laid off today, I got nothing better to do, I'm going to go down there."
   "And do what?"
   "Find him," I said shortly.
   "Yeah? Suppose you do. And then what?"
   "And then I'll know who he is."
   "No, you dumb shit, and then you'll be dead, because in case you've forgotten, you're a computer programmer, and you're chasing a fucking serial killer, and he already knows who you are, and he's going to fucking murder you if you find him. You're being the worst kind of macho moron. Cancel the tickets and stay here."
   I chose to ignore her advice. "Listen," I said, "he sent another message today."
   "I know. I saw."
   "Could you try to check to see if it came from the same place? If you remember anything about what I did?"
   "I remember fine, I already checked, it came from the same place," she said. "Now tell me you're going to cancel the tickets."
   "I'm just going to go there and see what I can find out," I said.
   "Balthazar," she said quietly. "You stupid shit. You think I want to find you with knives in your eyes?"
   "Call me Paul."
   "All right, Paul. Tell me this. Suppose you do find him. Then what exactly are you going to do?"
   "I don't know," I said.
   "You think you're going to kill him because he killed your friend?"
   "I don't know," I repeated.
   "Because I'm telling you now, you're not the type."
   "How do you know what the type is?"
   "I've seen a lot more murder victims than you ever have, you… Look." She abruptly switched from angry hectoring to pleading. "I grew up in Bosnia. I was there for the war. I've met enough nice guys who wound up dead for one lifetime. Take it from me, you're no killer. And I know you're a guy and that sounds like an insult, but it's not, I like you for it. And believe me, please believe me, chasing him down to Indonesia is the worst and stupidest thing you can do right now."
   "I gotta go," I said. "SuperShuttle is here."
   "No, Paul, don't be a total fucking -"
   "Wish me luck," I said. "I'll be in touch."