Tate still had the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing the point, and the complexity of the legal document in his hand had only increased his suspicion that somewhere a mass of fine print was waiting to come back and bite him in the ass.
‘Excuse me, but what is your job, exactly?’
‘It’s on my business card.’ She pointed at the card where it lay next to Tate’s coffee cup. ‘I’m a consultant.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that I consult. How much simpler can it be?’
‘But for whom?’
‘You see, that’s why we want you, Mr Tate: ‘‘for whom.’’ You’re bright, and you can speak well, but you never talk down to your listeners. You address them as equals, even if they’re not. You give the impression that you’re one of them, but you know that you’re superior. You have to be. Someone has to guide ignorant men and women. Someone has to explain the reality of a situation in a way that’s comprehensible to ordinary people or, if necessary, adjust the nature of that reality slightly so it can be comprehended. You’re not the only person in the media to receive this approach from us. You’re not alone. I’m offering you the chance to become part of a greater purpose, to put your gifts to their optimum use.’
Tate was almost convinced. He wanted to be convinced but still he doubted.
‘What’s the catch?’ he said, and he was surprised that Kelly looked pleased he’d asked.
‘Finally,’ she said.
‘Finally?’
‘I always wait for that question. It’s proof that we have the right person. Because there’s always a catch, right? There’s always something in the fine print that could come right back to bite you in the ass?’
Tate stared at her. She had used almost exactly the words that he had spoken in his head. He tried to remember if he might have said them aloud, but he was certain that he had not.
‘Don’t be shocked, Mr Tate,’ she said. ‘In your position, I’d be thinking the same thing.’
She removed another sheet of paper from her briefcase and placed it before him. There was a single long paragraph at the center of the page. Typed neatly in the middle of an ornate script was his name. It reminded him of a university scroll, not least because it appeared to be written in Latin.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘The catch,’ she replied. ‘In your hand you hold the formal contract, the minor one. This is your private contract, your agreement with us.’
‘Why is it written in Latin?’
‘The Backers are very old-fashioned, and Latin is the language of jurisprudence.’
‘I don’t read Latin.’
‘Allow me to summarize, then.’ Tate noticed that she didn’t even have to look at the page. She knew its contents by heart. She rattled off what sounded to him like the pledge of allegiance, except it was loyalty promised not to a country, but to a private body.
‘Excercitus Noctis?’
‘The Army of Night. Catchy, don’t you think?’
Tate didn’t think it was catchy at all. It sounded like one of those ‘Reclaim the Streets’ movements. More dykes, he thought.
‘And that’s it? That’s all I have to sign?’
‘Nothing else. It will never be publicized, and you will never see the name of our organization written anywhere but here. In fact, the Army of Night doesn’t exist. Call it a private joke. Basically, some suitable nomenclature was required, and that one appealed to the Backers. This particular contract is really just to reassure them. We wouldn’t want you to take our money and head to Belize.’
Tate didn’t even know where Belize was, but he wasn’t about to head there even if he did know. He was ambitious, and he’d never get a better opportunity than this one to advance himself in his chosen field.
‘Uh, who are these Backers?’
‘Wealthy, concerned individuals. They’re worried about the direction in which this country is heading. In fact, they’re worried about the direction in which the whole world is heading. They want to alter its course before it’s too late.’
‘When do I get to meet them?’
‘The Backers like to keep their distance. They prefer to operate discreetly through others.’
‘Like you.’
‘Exactly.’
He looked again at the documents before him. One was written in a language that he didn’t understand, and the rest were written in a language that he should have understood but didn’t.
‘Maybe I ought to run these by my attorney,’ said Tate.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. This is a one-time offer. If I leave here with these papers unsigned, the offer will be rescinded.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Perhaps this will be enough to convince you of our bona fides,’ said Kelly.
She passed him a plain white envelope. When he opened it, he found that it contained access details for three bank accounts, including the 501(c) organization that Kelly had implied was merely being considered. It was called the American League for Equality and Freedom. Together, the accounts contained more money than he had earned in the last ten years.
Tate signed the papers.
‘All this money is mine?’ he asked. He couldn’t quite believe it.
‘Look upon it as your war chest,’ said Kelly.
‘With whom are we going to war?’ he asked.
‘Again with the “whom”,’ said Kelly, admiringly. ‘I just love the way you talk.’
‘The question remains,’ insisted Tate. ‘Who are we fighting?’
‘Everyone,’ said Kelly. ‘Everyone who is not like us.’
One week later, he was being introduced to Becky Phipps. One year later, he was a rising star. Now that star appeared to be on the wane, and Becky was alluding darkly to the Backers. The Backers, Tate knew, tended to act when they were displeased. He’d learned that early on. Kelly hadn’t just been speculating when she spoke about the union organizer with a taste for skirt: his name was George Keys. He liked to tell people that he was named after George Orwell. Nobody knew if that was true or not, but Keys certainly came from socialist stock. His father had been a union organizer all his life, and his mother continued to be heavily involved with Planned Parenthood. His grandfather, meanwhile, had set up a Catholic Worker camp in California and was personally close to the CW founder, Dorothy Day, who ticked every box on Tate’s hate list: Catholic, anarchist, socialist radical, even anti-Franco, which, as far as Tate was concerned, meant that she wasn’t even consistent in her own wrongheadedness because the Catholics were supposed to be for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, right? If the son was one-tenth of the man his grandfather was, then he deserved to be wiped from the earth, even without screwing Mexican factory workers on the side.
It hadn’t been difficult to bribe a whore who worked part-time as a waitress – or was she a waitress who worked part-time as a whore? Tate could never quite tell – to come on to Keys with a sad story about her family back in Mexico, and her cousins working in indentured servitude on Texas chicken farms. Keys bought her some drinks, and the whore bought some back, and one thing led to another until Keys and the whore ended up back at Keys’ place.
What happened after that Tate didn’t know, and didn’t care, but he had photographs of Keys and the woman together. He then shared what he knew with his listeners, and made sure the photographs were disseminated to every newspaper in the state, and for an outlay of five hundred dollars he did his part in setting back union activism in the state of Texas. Keys denied everything, and Tate later learned from the waitress-cum-whore that all he’d done back at his place was to play her some jazz that she didn’t like, talk about his dying mother, and then start crying before calling her a cab. Afterward, Kelly had contacted him personally to say that the Backers were pleased, and he’d received a substantial bonus in cash through Becky. The waitress-whore was shipped back to Mexico on some trumped-up immigration charge, and there she quietly vanished into the sands somewhere around Ciudad Juarez, or so Becky had hinted when she was drunk one evening and he was almost considering making a pass at her, until she told him about what probably happened to the girl in Mexico, and how the Backers had contacts down there. She grinned as she said it, and any desire for Becky on Tate’s part had vanished there and then and had never returned.
Unfortunately, there were other individuals who weren’t so pleased with what Tate had done, and he hadn’t yet learned to be clever enough to protect himself from his own vices. Tate wasn’t above doing a little banging of his own. He wasn’t married, but he did have a weakness for colored girls, and particularly the colored whores over at Dicky’s on Dolorosa, a hangover from the days when San Antonio’s red light district was one of the largest in the state, and the least racially segregated. Anyway, on those nights when a colored whore wasn’t available Tate wasn’t above dipping in some dark Mexican, and one thing led to another, and somehow it became known that Davis Tate frequented Dicky’s, and when he emerged one evening smelling of the disinfectant soap that Dicky’s provided for the hygiene needs of its customers he was photographed by a white man in a car, and when he objected, the car doors opened and three Mexicans piled out, and Davis Tate got the beating of his life. But he remembered the number plate of the car, oh yes, and he made the call while he was still waiting for treatment at San Antonio Community Hospital. Barbara Kelly had assured him that the matter would be taken care of, and it was.
The car was registered to one Francis ‘Frankie’ Russell, a cousin of George Keys who did a little PI work on the side: marital stuff, mostly. Twenty-four hours later, the body of Frankie Russell was found at the eastern edge of Government Canyon. He had been castrated, and it was suggested that he shared some of the weaknesses of his cousin, and the story of the union organizer who liked screwing immigrant women, illegal and otherwise, was dragged up again. No connection was made between Russell’s murder and the discovery a week later of the remains of three Mexican chicken farm workers dumped in Calaveras Lake. After all, they had not been castrated, simply shot.
It was, said those who knew about such matters, probably a gang affair.