Falling like a rock.
All that ice, no way the chutes would have opened. Even with the automatic activation devices as backup, no way.
Mackenzie opens her eyes again, because that’s the last of it. There’s nothing left to remember, nothing left to tell, and she finds that the stick figure is gone and she’s alone in the black place. And now there’s nothing left to do but wait.
12.: Casey’s Last Ride (Cue Ennio Morricone)
(West Hollywood, Whiskey A Go Go, January 16, 2018)
The Signalman takes a sip of his J.T.S. Brown and swishes the bourbon around in his mouth for a moment or two before swallowing. He has a bad tooth that’s starting to go hot, and the alcohol dulls the pain a little. That rotten molar is just one more thing he keeps telling himself he’ll take care of and just one more thing he can’t ever seem to get around to dealing with. There’s a framed Johnny Cash poster on the wall, Johnny Cash showing the whole damn world his middle finger, and the Signalman raises his glass in a toast to the Man in Black, then takes another swig of bourbon. Mackenzie Regan is sitting across from him, the two of them sitting together and alone in the horseshoe booth upholstered in cherry-red Naugahyde. She ordered a vodka and cranberry, but she’s hardly touched it. Mackenzie’s not really one for drinking on the job. She’s not really one for drinking off it, either.
It’s late on a Tuesday afternoon, and no one’s in the club but the two of them and a couple of the staff. A Thin Lizzy cover band is scheduled to go on at eight, and the Signalman keeps checking his silver pocket watch, like eight o’clock isn’t several long hours away from now. The Doors’ “Strange Days” is playing, and it’s almost enough to make him go find whoever’s responsible and get them to play something else instead. Slip them a sawbuck to swap out Jim Morrison’s apocalyptic crooning for any song a little less grim and a lot less fucking apropos. His life is plenty weird enough without the universe supplying a soundtrack.
“I wish you could have met her eight or nine years ago,” he says to Mackenzie, resigning himself to the Doors. The song will be over soon, anyway, and there are better ways to blow ten dollars. “She was good. Most times, she was better than good.”
Mackenzie frowns and stirs at her drink with a pink swizzle stick, then glances up at the Signalman. “Well, be that as it may, as far as I can tell all she is now is a junkie and a burnout and a liability. Putting her back into play might be the worst move I’ve ever seen personnel make.”
“Which just shows to go you haven’t been around very long,” says the Signalman. “That’s not to say I think she should be on the street, but there’s nothing left to be gained by belaboring the obvious. And whatever Ellison is now, it doesn’t negate who she was or what she did back then. You read her file.”
“Mostly,” says Mackenzie. “The broad strokes. Enough to get the gist.”
“Is that how we’re judging folks these days, by getting the gist?”
Mackenzie doesn’t reply. She just stares into her neglected drink.
“Anyway,” says the Signalman, “since you know the broad strokes, you know about that thing in Germany, back in aught nine, the job she did in Babelsberg?”
“Babelsberg? Where’s Babelsberg?”
The Signalman sighs and rubs his temples with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He wants a cigarette so badly that the craving is almost as painful as the occasional jolts from his bum tooth. He thinks again about ignoring the No Smoking signs and reaching for the pack of Camels in his jacket pocket. He’s got a badge, if anyone wants to complain, a badge that says he’s an NSA agent, even if he isn’t anything of the sort. No one at the NSA is going to be complaining, either, and what the fuck good is a phony gold shield if it can’t at least get him a smoke when he needs one.
“Potsdam,” he tells Mackenzie. “I assume you’ve heard of Potsdam.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of Potsdam,” she replies, and he can tell she’s doing her best not to sound annoyed with him. “But I haven’t heard of Babelsberg.” Mackenzie takes a swallow of her vodka and cranberry, then goes back to stirring it with the swizzle stick.
“So, you didn’t read about the thing with Ellison in Babelsberg?” he wants to know.
“No,” she tells him, “I guess not. I must have skipped over that part.”
“But you got the gist,” he says.
The Signalman takes out his cigarettes and lays the half-empty pack on the table between them. Mackenzie points to one of the No Smoking signs, and so the Signalman points at the poster of Johnny Cash flipping the bird.
“Fine,” she says. “I just thought we were keeping our heads down.”
“I’ll see if I can’t smoke it inconspicuously,” he tells her, but doesn’t actually fish one of the cigarettes from the pack. “Anyway, so Ellison’s assignment in Babelsberg—in Potsdam—it was this soirée being thrown by a neo-Nazi outfit, a sorta latter-day offshoot of the Thule-Gesellschaft calling themselves the Schwarze Sonne. Crazy bunch of well-heeled fascist sonsabitches trying to open a doorway to Hyberborea and lead all the good Aryan boys and girls off to the promised land, etcetera and etcetera. Ellison was sent in undercover, as a heroin dealer from Tijuana, a Romanian expat named Elle Grau. So she shows up for this shindig, right, hosted at some billionaire’s mansion on the Griebnitzsee. And it’s a goddamn unholy bacchanalia of Rhineland mysticism and far right-wing politics, also known as pretty much what you’d expect. The cocaine and liquor flows like proverbial milk and honey. There’s whores of every conceivable flavor
