[Corentine] Page 5

  "We've got it, man," Hip Dave said. I must have growled.

  Janine winked at me as I left the booth and made my way to the bar.

  I sat down and ordered a pint, checking the door for Partain. Nothing seemed unusual, and no one had entered the bar in the past few moments. The bartender quickly brought my drink to me, and I started sipping on it.

  "I heard a pretty good joke the other day," he said, leaning on the counter top. "Want to hear it?"

  I shrugged.

  "Okay," I answered, not really feeling up to being an audience, but not wanting to brush the guy off, either.

  "All right. Here goes," he said. "What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean?"

  I waited for the inevitable.

  "A good start!" He exclaimed, laughing at himself as he delivered the answer. I smiled courteously.

  "That's a pretty good one," I said.

  "What's a mathematician's favorite dessert?" He asked, continuing.

  I rolled my eyes. Was this guy serious? I hoped that he wouldn't keep talking for so long that Partain would stop in, notice, and skip the meeting. I checked the door again.

  The bartender didn't really wait for me to guess the answer, anyway.

  "Pi!" This time he revealed the answer gleefully, as he was delighted by his own wit. His amusement at himself was much more humorous to me than his stupid jokes, and I chuckled a little bit at my own internal jokes, which were at his expense. I took a long draw from the glass of beer.

  "Okay, okay," he continued. "One more and I'll stop."

  I was ignoring him already.

  Some dolphins broke the waves, leaping out of the water close to the shore.

  "Hey, check that out! Dolphins!" I said, pointing towards the sea.

  "Dolphins?" She asked, looking out past the sand and over the breaking waves.

  "You know, like porpoises. They're sea mammals, quite intelligent. I read somewhere that they're learning how to use computers to talk to us."

  "I don't know what that means. I've never heard of them before. They look like really big fish!" she said.

  I thought that it was weird that she'd claim to have never heard of dolphins, but I kept in mind that she might have forgotten them, too. Usually when she heard a name or saw an animal, she recognized it, so this deviation from the precedent seemed exceptionally strange.

  Sometimes that happened, though. We ran into things that she'd never heard of or experienced, like coffee. And now, dolphins. While it was different from anything I'd ever had to deal with before, it didn't really matter to me. Once she'd seen them, experienced them for the second first time, she'd always be able to remember what they were.

  "I went swimming with some dolphins, once, at this water park," I told her. "It was really cool; you could tell that they were talking to you by the way that they looked at you and in the way that it seemed like they expected you to answer them. Like you were the stupid one for not being able to answer them back."

  "I think a lot of animals are much more intelligent than we think that we are, or at least capable of high levels of intelligence. We might have to give them a little coaching and a lot of patience, though," she said.

  "In the future, do you think that we'll do something good with all of our technology? Maybe modify the animals so that they're smarter?"

  "I don't see why we couldn't. Aren't there already computers that can help the deaf to hear and sensors that can help the blind to see? Maybe cats and dogs won't really be pets so much anymore as they will become true companions. They could carry on conversations with you and flat out demand that you take them for a walk when they've got to go to the bathroom," she laughed. "It seems like we're not so far off from a future where that's happening, anyway."

  "Ask any cat owner," I said," and they'll probably tell you that it's already the case. I had a cat when I was in college; the stupid thing had a bad habit of relieving himself on people that he didn't like. Maybe he wasn't so stupid, though, because it turned out that I didn't really like most of the people he peed on, either. He was probably trying to tell me something and save me the time."

  "Cats are strange animals, that's for sure."

  It was growing dark, so someone switched the strings of party lights on all around us, and suddenly the balcony was a lot more festive looking that it had been before. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, she grabbed my arm and started for the door.

  "Let's go," she said, her enthusiasm contagious. I followed her out into the streets, where we purchased some masks with skulls on them from a local vendor.

  Even though we wore long masks of death, we celebrated living and loving long into the latest hours of night.

  "Slowly," the bartender continued, delivering the next punch line. "Very slowly. So that they never know what's happened to them. Then they're dead, and it's too late for anyone to ask any questions. Kind of like boiling a frog." He smiled at me, waiting for me to laugh at the joke. I didn't understand it, but I guess that I'd missed the first part.

  "I don't get it," I told him.

  "Eh," he paused, wiping the counter top where the condensation from glasses had collected. "Jokes like that aren't for everyone. Want another drink? You went through that first one pretty quickly."

  I looked down, surprised at myself. I really had finished off the pint a lot more quickly that I thought.

  "Sure."

  "Coming right up," he said, happy to make another sale. "You meeting someone?" he asked.

  "If they actually show up, I am."

  "They usually show up," he told me. As if he knew the kind of person I was waiting on.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Janine and David. David looked away, quickly. Too obvious. She smiled, bounced in her seat a little, and gave me a thumbs up. Too obvious.

  And too late.

  Partain sat down on the bar stool beside me.

  "I'm only meeting you because I owed a favor to the wrong person," he stated, before I'd even sized him up. "You should advise your friends in the booth over there to turn off the camera. I don't have to tell you anything, and I don't want to be recorded."

  That threw me off. I wasn't expecting Partain to be so… on top of things. I quickly scanned over him, hoping to gather some information about him from his appearance, but there was nothing remarkable about him at first glance. Expensive glasses, a crisply starched white shirt, dark slacks. He looked like he might have skipped a day between shaves, but his hair looked like he'd just had it cut and styled. He wore a black tie, loosely, and he didn't have on a coat. He glared at me impatiently, making direct eye contact with me, challenging me to deny his demand.

  I turned towards Janine. Her arm was over the back of the booth, pointed in our general direction, just as we'd planned. Good girl. David nodded towards us, and she turned to look at me. I made a motion for her to stop filming by waving my hand in a cutting motion in front of my throat, and she raised an eyebrow: Are you sure? I nodded an affirmative response. She pulled her arm, along with the media recorder, back into the booth.

  "She follows orders, at least," Partain commented.

  "It's a weird situation. None of us really know what's going on," I offered, defensively. "She doesn't want anyone to get hurt."

  "You? Or me?" He asked.

  "Anyone," I answered.

  "Why do you need to talk to me?" Partain asked me while flagging down the bartender.

  "I'm looking for some information about Synchro Systems. Not just the company, though; I need information about a possible patient, or," I hesitated, swallowing the lump in my throat. "Possible test subjects," I finished.

  The bartender arrived, breaking the conversation.

  "I see your friend showed up. What can I get for you?" he asked Partain. I hoped that the bartender wouldn't try his comedy routine with us again.

  "Something darkly, in a glass."

  "One sec," the bartender said, strolling off.

  At least we like
d the same kind of beer.

  "Why should I tell you anything, friend?" Partain asked me. "I've already told everything I know to the interviewers, the papers, the police, and the courts. You can look it up in the public archives if you're interested."

  "I was kind of hoping that you'd have a particular kind of information that those people wouldn't be asking about," I said.

  The bartender dropped off Partain's beer without saying a word, apparently noticing that we didn't want to be disturbed.

  "What's your story?" He asked, changing direction.

  I sighed, feeling the heavy weight of having to explain something that didn't make any sense to someone who hadn't lived through it weighing down on my shoulders and on my mind.

  "Not too long ago, I woke up, and my girlfriend was missing. I didn't suspect it at the time, but it appears that a person or people working for Synchro Systems abducted her from my home, or she left in fear of them arriving, and in a really big hurry. Somehow, I slept through it all, possibly because I'd been drugged. What makes it weirder is that all of her personal documents and files were removed from the house, too."

  Abduction explained why the hot water was still running in the sink when I woke up, since she always brushed her teeth with the hot water on. I hadn't even thought to check for the presence of her toothbrush at the time, though, as I was primarily focused on cleaning the water up off of the floor before the tenants below us noticed a leak, though I'm sure that even by then, it was too late. The flood in the bathroom didn't really matter too much a week later, when someone had broken into the place and turned it inside out while I was out with Janine searching for her.

  I mentioned that unknown individuals had ransacked my home when I'd been out and he didn't even react.

  "Someone knows that I'm looking for her," I said. "And I don't think that they want me to be able to find her."

  "Someone wants you to find her, it seems, otherwise you wouldn't be here in this bar, and I wouldn't have been… coerced into showing up," Partain said, clenching his teeth together as he balled his hands into fists. Then he relaxed again, as if something upsetting had crossed his mind but he'd been able to block it out. He took a long drink from his pint.

  "Coerced you? What happened?" I asked.

  "It's none of your concern, stranger," he said, turning to look at me again. He stood up and stepped away from the bar. "However, this is ridiculous. Good luck finding your friend."

  I wasn't sure how to respond to that. He hadn't given me any answers!

  "Partain, wait!" I protested, standing up.

  He didn't reply as he walked out of the front doors of the bar and into the blurry world outside.

  I turned and looked at Janine and David, shrugging. They both came over and met me at the bar.

  "What did you find out?" Janine asked, her face a mixture of concern and anticipation.

  "Nothing," I said. "Nothing useful at all."

  She took my hand in hers, as she often did, a gesture that I'd grown to find comfort in. It seemed right, the way that our hands fit together, the ways that we fit together; it seemed like the day wasn't complete if we didn't hold hands for a minute or two. I guess that probably sounds strange or unusual, pathetic even, but if you've ever been in the same position, you know what I'm talking about.

  "There's another one!" she said, pointing at the sky.

  I didn't see it because I was looking at the way that the wind was blowing just a few strands of hair at a time across her face. I noticed that the sun had lightened her hair a lot in some places so that she had blonde streaks running through it. We'd spent a lot of time outdoors when we were in Europe, and she rarely wore a head covering of any type, although handkerchiefs were popular at the time. Some of her hairs went into her mouth as she spoke, and she removed them with precise fingers.

  She took her hand back after a moment and leaned back across the hood of the car. She put her hands together and looked over at me.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Nothing, really. Just making sure of you," she answered.

  "You get five points, then. It should be less, but I'm feeling generous," I said. "That was too easy."

  "It wasn't all that easy!" She protested.

  "Are you kidding? I caught the reference right off," I replied.

  "Not everyone reads Milne, you know."

  "Everyone should."

  Chapter 06

  The phone was ringing. Had I fallen asleep again? What was the dream, fading around the edges at first, into nothingness? The bed was warm, the sheets soft. It was dark outside; it must have grown late. For a moment, I thought that Coren was beside me again. I thought that I could feel her hair spilling off of her pillow and into my mouth. The phone continued to ring.

  I reached over to the nightstand, taking the phone off of the receiver, hoping that the caller had given up. It was hard to focus; my eyes weren't cooperating with me, my reflexes were all out of sync.

  "Hello?" I muttered, still groggy.

  "I have more information for you," the woman said to me.

  "More information?" I asked. "Is this Department 809?"

  She didn't answer my question, but I thought that I could hear clicking in the background, something that sounded like typing.

  "Listen to me. We are sending someone else to meet with you."

  "When?" I sighed.

  "Tonight."

  "Why are you being so mysterious? Where will we meet this time?"

  "A gentleman will arrive for you momentarily. You are to enter the car when it arrives, but be inconspicuous about it, if you can. He will arrive at your residence and allow you to enter the vehicle but will he not wait, so be ready."

  She hung up. The line went dead. I placed the phone back on the receiver and considered what had just happened. The conversation, how the caller was already becoming familiar to me, how she already assumed that I would trust her and do what she demanded. I walked over to the window and looked out onto the street below. Raining and cold. Every day.

  I grabbed a jacket and headed outside to wait.

  The car was already in front of the building when I opened the front door. I ran towards it, dodging puddles and checking for traffic as I crossed the street. The passenger door was unlocked, so I got into the car.

  I didn't wait for him to say anything, taking first initiative at starting our conversation.

  "What the hell is going on? Where the hell is Corentine? Why the hell do you have me bouncing from place to place, all over this city, just to pick up a little crumb of information here and another bit there, when none of it's really informative to me at all? I met up with Partain, you know, and while he gave me some interesting things to think about, why should I believe that he's telling me the truth? Why should I believe any of you?"

  I'd been making a list.

  "I will answer all of your questions to the best of my ability. Would you prefer that I do so in the order in which you asked them?" The informant calmly pressed the cigarette lighter down, and then turned the radio off.

  "Please," I answered, trying to relax. I reached for my own cigarettes, but I'd misplaced them somewhere.

  "Excellent. Here, have one of mine," he said, and then he lit two cigarettes at once, passing one over to me. How did he know that mine were missing?

  "First, there are a lot of things that I can't tell you. You're too much of a liability to the people that I work for if you go public with the information." I didn't ask for much of an explanation on that, since I had so many other questions that I felt were more important and in need of answers. The people that he worked for could keep their secrets as long as they told me where I could find Cor. I understood that they were serious enough, given the great lengths that they'd gone to towards remaining anonymous.

  "Feel free to provide inquiries whenever clarification is required."

  I noted to myself that his excessively clinical approach to our conversation might be useful to me; if I decided to make
a play to squeeze more information out of him, I knew that he probably wanted to remain as detached as possible, so it might be easier to throw him off by expressing an emotional reaction to his statements. Low blow, maybe, or cheap trick, but I didn't care how I manipulated the answers from him, as long as I got what I wanted. My concerns were clouding my objectivity, though, and I didn't realize my own limits, much less give thoughtful consideration towards the limits of the strange man who didn't want to be known and worked for a shadowy group of people who would only meet me in the strangest places, on their terms and on their time tables.

  I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  "You're going to want to meet up with Evan Partain again, I'd venture," he stated. "Especially after you've had a day or two to think about this." He reached into his pocket and removed a small brown paper bag, folded up around a square object and taped closed. My first thought was that it was a Christmas present – all that it lacked was a bow on top; a very small box wrapped as I'd wrapped my own gifts, year after year. He handled the package with care, perhaps even with some sort of reverence. I looked out of the windows, checking to see if there were any people walking the streets outside of the car, and if so, if they were exceedingly interested in what we were doing.

  I remembered how my ex-wife had scored some opium, so long ago, towards the part when things were getting really bad. I remembered how we had started searching outside of ourselves and far away from our hearts for things that would numb us, hoping that anything would be the salve that would ease the ache of love falling from its course. I remembered feeling paranoid then, too, in her car, as she removed a small plastic bag with a square block inside of it. She handled that small gift with her own form of reverence, though her awe was misguided, and her respect for things had diminished to a point that it seemed at times to hardly remain at all.

  "What's in the package?" I asked, returning my attention to the informant, this nameless man in the car sent by the anonymous woman on the telephone just a few moments ago. He didn't respond.

  He began unwrapping the brown paper, revealing a small metal box. He discarded the wrapping onto the floor of the car and removed the top of the box by sliding it open. I leaned closer to him to get a better look inside of the box as he shook an object out into his hand. He closed his fist around the object and cleared his throat.