The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [60]
LeBov reached into his coat and removed a long darning needle.
“Here,” he said, rolling it over. “If you don’t jam it in too hard, you won’t do any permanent damage.”
“To myself?”
“To anyone. Jesus, you are so self-centered. Thousands of years of Judaism, topped off by exclusive, secret access at your hole, for ultra-rare religious guidance, and this is all your people have come to?”
He gestured at our surroundings as if I, too, was meant to examine them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but this place is sad. I examined your, what do you call it, your Moses Mouth? Your enabler? You all have different silly words for it.”
He was referring to the slashed-up listener in his bag.
“Listener,” I whispered to him. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud.
“You examined it?” I asked.
“And you didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged. You only used it to tap into Burke. That’s insane. I’ve never seen such a rudimentary listener, and I have a good collection of them now. Anyone can listen to Burke, because there is no Burke. You don’t even need a fucking listener. I can drop a copper wire into any conductive soil and pick up that signal. Probably with my landline telephone I could dial it up. It’s completely unsecured. Public domain. Probably ham radio. I bet people get it in their houses. I bet you could pick it up off a filling in your molar. You spent all this time out here with this amazing device and you never wondered if you were hearing the right broadcast? The deepest feed? Instead you fucked on the floor like animals. Honestly, sometimes I had to look away. You didn’t care and you fucked in a pile of musty sweaters. I’m kind of astounded. The Burke sermons were recorded years ago and play on a loop.”
“Right. And you’d know that how?”
“Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking. They’re not real. They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to activate your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the glass. Those tools were untouched.”
“It was never broken,” I whispered.
“But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”
LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.
“You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”
I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.
“No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”
“Is what?”
“Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”
“I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.
“Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do anything. I guess that’s your play?”
LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.
“You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a rabbi? You didn’t recognize my voice?”
“You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”
“No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”
“Agreement is a poison, right?”
“That’s part of it.”
“So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.
“I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”
“And your promise to my wife?”