Vic Socotra

09 June 2008

Tagged

We knew it was going to be a Code Red day- dangerous for the elderly and the very young. A glance out the window indicated that it was going to be shaping up as a competitive one for prime sunning by the pool.

Cindy, the new gal from the Sixth Floor, was out early and secured her couchette shortly after James the Czech opened the gate. I could see things filling up fast, and decided to stake my place early. The new young couples had secured the first row of couches. They seem nice enough, but don’t understand the pecking order, and are unaware of what is going on around them.

The problem is position. I could tell this was going to be a tough start, what with having to slowly rotate the pool furniture to follow the sun’s arc across the Virginia sky. There is only so much concrete, and life is easier when you can spread out a little and not collide with others who are not so precise in their alignment with direct sunlight.

I could see Uncle Bill had already camped out under the beach umbrella reading. He gets an early start on things. When he doesn’t play golf, he may have ridden his bicycle to somewhere improbable- Mount Vernon or Leesburg- and be back to relax after a couple laps in the pool. He is a California kid, a surfer in his youth, so he isn’t so concerned with the Perfect Tan. A chair is fine with him, and it is for me too. I get plenty of sun as it is, and spend most of the summer trying to turn the lobster color into something that looks a little like burned toast.

Ms Hamilton defines the tan, and she is in good seasonal shape already. She is now working as a personal trainer, and her rich mahogany color complements perfect definition. We are all in her shadow, though what with the news that she is going to get married to Ramon and move to NYC, you can see some hope in the eyes of the newcomers that they, someday, might aspire to be Queen of the Big Pink Pool Deck. Not yet. Not this season.

I threw my equipment in my beach bag. Towel, cell phone, keys, Marlboros, diet ginger ale. If I could get down quickly enough, there would be a chance to drape the towel over one of the couchettes and ensure there was a place for Ms Hamilton and Sarah 1 when they appeared.

It is really the least I can do. I found the latest New Yorker and tossed it on top and made ready to head out. I opened the door and looked down at the carpet in front of my door.

A delicate tracery of dark liquid had been spread right where my first step would have been. If you reversed the colors, it looked almost as if someone had urinated in the snow, attempting to write their name. I froze.

The unit had been tagged.

You cannot have been in my line of work for this long without having some tradecraft burned into you.

First, threat?

I checked up and down the hall. The corridor was the same dim beige as it always was, timeless.

When? This must have happened after my dinner guests left; it had not been there at eight last night.

How? I glanced at the stairwell ten feet away. Easy in, easy out. Probably came via another floor and ducked up or down one.

What? Thank god it was not white powder. I hated the thousand of anthrax alerts we had after the attack on the Congressional office buildings. Everyone reported white powder for months after that.

I stepped over the tracery and tentatively dipped a fingertip in the viscous substance. Slippery. I smelled it. Nothing vile; vaguely citreous in odor. Possibly dish soap, I thought, likely from a squeeze bottle based on the delivery pattern.

I put my pool bag down and got the camera to document the pattern. I could not tell if it was a stylized name in graffiti style. I needed to preserve the image before it got tracked all over the corridor. I took pictures from three angles and examined it carefully. I could see nothing distinctive, though squeeze soap is not the most precise of drawing implements.

Why? I tried to think who I had pissed off lately. I had done the laundry in the machines a little before seven the previous morning; I think I had violated the quiet rules by a few minutes. Would the old lady next door have punished me like this?

Nothing like this has happened in the last seven years of life in Big Pink. I thought not. I have made my share of miscues in adjusting to communal life, but I was not aware of any enemies….except….

Oh shit. It is that little rat-like guy from the pool.

I replayed it in my mind. In the shank of Saturday, he had a little coterie on the other side of the pool. They had brought their toys, a volley ball and frisbees. It was the same crew as the weekend before, three guys and two women. One of them had a nervous habit of bouncing the volleyball on the deck, then on his feet like a soccer player.

That was against the rules, though I did not say anything or make a remark. They were drinking, too, which is technically against the rules, and eating, which is too. I am not cop, though I did keep tabs on what they were up to.

One of the guys had been rude to me the weekend before when I told him that glass beer bottles were not permitted in the pool enclosure. Yesterday, he had disappeared to the parking lot and returned. I looked up form my paddling and saw him trying to push a beer bottle through the fence to the guy with the shaved head, wrap-around sunglasses and the pinched ferret-like face.

“Hey,” I said. “No glass on the pool deck!”

I got some dirty looks, but the beer went away. If they busted one of those bottles on the concrete, we would have bloody feet the rest of the season.

It was simple enough. They must have got my unit number off the pool log-in sheet and paid me a little visit after I went to bed. Little shits. I scrubbed up the soap residue as best I could- it actually could represent a targeting solution, make my unit easier to pick out.

I checked out the log for Saturday when I got down to the pool. “Bachus/730” was the name and number, and he had passed off his friends as residents. They were not. They are “guests.” I got my stuff spread out and found that Uncle Bill had already cycled twenty miles that morning.

Like I said, the tradecraft doesn’t go away. I took a break and hit the computer.

Daniel E. Bachus. 27. Virginia Tech. Addresses in Springfield and Falls Church. Renter.

Asshole.

The prime-time sun was decent; high clouds softened the rays a bit, but the pool deck was brilliant. We had anticipated a brutal day, but a slight breeze kept the sweat factor to something manageable. We got some great color.

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