All-Day Breakfast (55 page)

“Any make of bourbon's okay.”

He threw his head sideways and arched his spine so I thought he was commencing a fit, but he was only tugging something from his back pocket.

“I bought this iPhone, you ever hear of these? Hell, you probably invented it.”

“That's true.” I set a glass on the armrest and poured him four fingers of Maker's Mark. “Invented it for an elementary school project.”

“Just let me find this little movie here. It's an ugly damn thing.”

He glared at the phone, prodding the screen with his thumbs. A movie? Maybe Doug Avery. Svendsen had presented himself as such an authority on the subject, probably just footage of a blood-stained sidewalk. But maybe there'd be a shot of the yellow car. If it was useful I could always track Colleen down in the phone book.

“Once you find the thing we'll patch it through to here,” I said. “Easier to watch.”

I dug the
usb
cable from under the mini-bar and plugged the narrow end into the screen in the back of Mark's seat.

“Good, good,” he said, “this thing's so damn small. Friend on active duty sent it to me. Here's the bastard.”

I plugged the wide end of the cable into the phone. The play arrow appeared on the big screen, then a swirling circle telling us it was nearly ready. Active-duty video of Doug Avery?

“So this is classified?” I asked.

“I thought so!” He took an inaccurate slurp of whiskey and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “But then, other goddamn day, I see some kid in the doughnut shop looking at it, so it must be on the internet too already! I don't know. Here it is.”

His movie started: a flickering patch of golden dirt on the back of Mark's seat, and we heard wind whistle across a microphone. Then the camera swung up from the dirt to show black-bottomed clouds, then slowly came down again past tin roofs a hundred feet away. Buildings looked like black burnt frames. We heard flies.

“Here it is.” Svendsen nodded encouragingly, jogging his knee up and down.

The picture had settled on a thin black arm, severed at the shoulder, lying in the dirt, a mottled black pig sniffing it. The arm's hand still gripped some kind of machine gun. A leafy branch shooed the pig away as voices spoke gravely in a language I couldn't understand. Offscreen kids laughed and shouted. The camera backed up a couple of steps and turned to the left, where thin dogs circled a pile of eight or ten more arms and legs. An object in blue cloth might've been a head.

This looked like Africa, the Africa that the word
Africa
suggested to the American mind—butchered people were that continent's expected output, sad but true.

Someone lifted an arm from the pile, turning it appraisingly, to show the clean purple lip where the limb had come away from the shoulder. Someone had dropped to pieces just like I had.

Our wildly imperfect
d.s. 3
had been deployed to Africa.

I gripped the Maker's Mark between my knees so I could uncork it.

“Had enough?” Svendsen balanced the iPhone across his fingertips like a tray of martinis. “There's more good stuff.”

I took two long swigs of the whiskey.

“The feds never got it,” I said. “No, we said no way.”

“You see for yourself they had it, do have it and will continue to have it. I've dipped a toe in many an organization, sir, and no one ever knows what everybody else knows.”

The grave voices began to shout. Near the half-burnt buildings, women milled around in what might've been giant beach towels, but then the camera swung unsteadily into the clouds, then cutting left onto a wide-winged bird flapping lazily above the rooftops.

“Take hold of your
cajones
,” said Svendsen.

Had too many legs to be an ordinary bird. Jesus, so what was it? The shouting became more distant and urgent, but the picture still hadn't budged and we heard what had to be the cameraman's breathing.

Women screamed, “
Ack-ack-aye-aye
.”

The flying creature moved closer with an up-and-down loping motion across the sky, and though the wings looked wide as a vulture's—no, the thing filled the screen: an open-mouthed baboon, head tilted accusingly, eyes so wide it must've seen the two of us there in Hoover. Raised something dark in its hands. We heard a mechanical bark, then the camera swayed back nauseatingly. It filmed nothing but gray sky. A black wing tip passed across the edge of the frame. The
ack-ack-aye-aye
never let up.

The gray sky froze and the white play arrow reappeared.

“Get it? The monkey must've shot the guy—great stuff.”

Svendsen leaned forward to smile, like he'd caught me sleeping. Shit, maybe he had.

“This was Congo,” I said. Not even a question.

“Democratic Republic of. How'd it come to pass, yeah? Some glimmers have come down to me of you handling yourself in Velouria and points east, sir, and I wonder some why you haven't been in handcuffs since then. You're familiar with a lot of deals on your behalf, clemency and such?”

“For handcuffs you need two wrists.”

“They can cuff your ankles.” He pawed at the phone again. “I've seen it on those trials on
tv
. Here's a—here's another quality segment.”

Blue sky above blowing green jungle, and a baboon, sitting in profile on a huge fallen log, its brown wings drooping to the ground. Only the wind could be heard. The picture tightened on the thing's face as it lifted something to its mouth, tearing a strip away with a sidelong pull. It chewed placidly. The object had fingers—another baboon.

The screen went black. This was Duffy's lab, spilled out across the world.

“Isolated incidents,” I said.

“My buddy scooped that camera up 'cause he was first on the ground in that village—they sent the baboons in ahead of him! The Rangers, the Green Berets!” Svendsen leaned back into his corner of the seat, studying me, massaging a kneecap through his brown trousers. “I saw our guys chasing a pack of those LRA into the woods. And one of our boys, he didn't have his helmet on.”

Svendsen refilled the glass, running his tongue over his teeth.

“That might've compromised his head,” I said.

“Well, yes, it did!” He flopped into the corner. “Son of a bitch had half his head compromised, just a pound of raw hamburger, but he had an Uzi in each hand and he was hopping over the logs.” He gulped back half the glass. Belched succinctly. “Think your concoction might've done that too?”

Jesus, was
d.s. 4
really that good? Alice couldn't have been handing it around—had to have trickled out during Duffy's day.

A shiver up my neck,
someone walking on your grave
, Mom called it. Our miraculous formula, used only for the betterment of humanity? No, thrown in my face like flat beer.

“Show me that video,” I said.

“Got rid of it! Gave me nightmares. Kept dreaming a lot of boys standing for reveille, but no arms to salute with.” He looked at me sideways, like a shark drifting by. “So. How'd you lose the ears?”

“Be surprised how seldom
I get asked that.”

“Know what I think? And I've got to tell you, it's relief like a week's shitting at once to be hashing all this out,
capiche
? I think with all your hellfire in Velouria you crushed so many toes, your bosses had to give the medicine up to save your bacon, yes?”

“That might be,” I said.

I fished my phone out of the inside pocket. My bosses were only one person.

“Call Alice,” I told the phone, then asked Svendsen, “Can you play Angry Birds for a minute?”

He pursed his lips and tapped a fingertip on his knee—there was one more topic we had to touch on, he and I.

“Hey there,” said Alice.

The old guy glanced our way. It wasn't on speaker but might as well have been.

“Hi,” I said. “You busy?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “You're making a splash today. If you felt that strongly about not doing
tv
, you should've said so.”

“I've just seen that maybe
d.s. 4
hasn't only been used for medical applications.”

“Oh, have you?” She muttered as if she wasn't quite listening, which was possible since she usually watched televised tennis when she was on the phone, even if Warren Buffett was on the other end and it was a rerun of a match from the seventies.

“I'm looking at some images here that—”

“Okay, you got me. Well done. I won't even ask what you're seeing since it could be anything with a mangy dog in the background, am I right?”

“It's not—”

“Well, you've risen to the occasion on the R & D, I'll give you that, rerouting the nitrate situation—”

“Ni
trite
,” I corrected, purely out of habit.

“Exactly, but you aren't a money guy. Something's got to pay your salary, manufacturing, distribution—can cancer cure itself? No, pal, it needs finessing. We work it from both ends. So do I start with abstracts or specifics?”

Svendsen took a pocketknife out of his trousers and started whittling his thumbnail. His sour-milk smell was infiltrating my robust interior.

“Neither one,” I told Alice. “I'm taking time off. See my kids for once. Lena and Glen can run the clinics. You don't need me.”

“I actually planned for this. Know why I kept you out of the loop? I knew you couldn't swallow this scenario. You were a bloodthirsty nut when you were a zombie, true, but—”

“So I know exactly what the future should
not
look like.”

Though what really nauseated me about flying baboons with machine guns was that pointy-bearded Mike had predicted the future with one-hundred percent accuracy. I watched graduates pile into cars to back out of their parking spots, stereos booming. Svendsen helped himself to bourbon with sixty percent accuracy. Mark would have to wipe the seats down.

“You still talking?” she asked. “Sorry, pal, I'm brushing my hair before this Uzbek embassy guy comes in.”

“He came out to Preston?”

“Fuck, no, I'm in Washington. Before you go, you need to absorb this stuff and realize
d.s. 4
's done a world of good that'd never have happened if you'd had any say in it. Is it better to heal the wounded with unprecedented success, pal, or for nobody to be wounded in the first place? Oh, and Harvard's sending a team into Kuwait to look into the Bedouin origins of the compound and whatever else they can drum up, wanted to know …”

I pictured her staring into space in her white
Flava
T-shirt, but, no, it was probably her ruffled blouse and the tall boots. Svendsen licked spillage off the back of his screaming eagle.

“Wanted to know what?”

“Sorry,” she said, “I've got two other calls. Yeah, Harvard Middle Eastern Studies wanted to know if you could tag along but I said you'd be too busy homeschooling your kids at an undisclosed location. They thought I was kidding.”

“Wanted me in what capacity?”

“Call me back sometime when your head's together. I've got to make open-pit coal miners indestructible. See you, pal.”

I threw the phone into the front seat.

“That's right.” Svendsen set his glass down, smiling vaguely, and I almost liked him. “We doing our best for the big boss but in fact the big boss had something else in mind all along, and poof, you're on the outs. Wash their hands of you.”

“I said no military applications. Basic stuff!”

We both shook our heads at the calculated injustice of it all, though as I looked out at two guys in suspenders shake hands in the parking lot and a broad-hipped woman strap a baby into a carseat, it suddenly seemed that whatever had upset me was intangible and even unimportant. Violence wasn't the way to move the human race forward, and however they'd done it, the Congo war was over. Eventually those baboons would run out of ammunition.

“See, in the forces it was always clear as a bell.” Svendsen sat back with his hands out on the armrests, like the Lincoln Memorial, no slapping his gums, no jitters. Bourbon was medicine. “Before every mission there'd be the briefing, spell it out for you like winding a watch. No briefing? Then you do your chin-ups, you wait around. But, by God, when I tried to freelance afterward—I've got a pension but I want airfare to Patagonia, right? See how they grow their soybeans? So I talk to a gentleman on the phone, seems like a good man, sounds like there might be a little wetwork in it for me, as they say. So I have a little to drink, feeling loquacious, friend to the common man, maybe I say too much about the nature of the work to this Douglas Avery. And I realize I've mucked up! You know what I had to go and do?”

I was watching him with my mouth open. My orphan shoulder tingled.

“You had to run him down,” I said. I swallowed the trace of bourbon swirling behind my teeth. “That's, uh, sure, that's understandable.”

This topic took precedence over baboons.

“Sure it is! Nobody'd told me to do it, not so much, but this guy was a liability! If I didn't do it, it'd be somebody else, so why not show the highers-up I'm willing, right? They never gave a briefing on it one way or the other!”

“Gosh.”

“That's what working a job is like! Do one thing for the boss man, just like you, and all along the boss man wants another thing. A joke. So, how'd you lose the ears?”

He clacked his lips together, all bug-eyed intensity, then fell back and cradled his cheek in his hand, gazing at the floor.

“And you knew this Doug Avery's wife?” I asked. “You recognized her?”

“I don't know anyone in this town.” He shut his eyes. “Not a welcoming place.”

“But it must've dented the car up when you hit this guy, hey?”