An excerpt from Underkill:
(from Chapter One)
If you thought you knew her, you didn't. If you thought because you had seen her on TV and read her features in the Sentinel, and maybe even met her once or twice at a panel discussion or at a news conference, that this gave you some idea of who she was, you would be wrong. Sometimes even Linda didn't know. She would look at herself in the mirror, and I witnessed this many mornings, her restlessness kicking her out of bed and in search of a newspaper, the coffeemaker gurgling, the radio murmuring NPR and the smell of buttered toast filling the kitchen-I would see her stop and stare at her reflection in the large mirror in the hall outside her bedroom. It was as if she suddenly glimpsed inside of herself, and this held true especially in the mornings when her guard was down and the softness of sleep still lingered around her. She stopped. She stared. She wasn't examining her face for blemishes or wrinkles. She wasn't looking at pores or pimples or pouty lips. She was looking into her own dark, drowsy eyes, searching. I kept still, watching from the bed, angled from her view. I feigned sleep. Linda pulled her hair back. She leaned forward, her gaze deepening into itself. I didn't know what she saw, and never asked. Hers was a private act.
Linda and I had been dating for two years, marking not only the longest relationship I'd been in, but the most puzzling as well. The initial rush of infatuation and lust was over. The grinding details of daily life had set in. And something was happening to us. We were-as some seasoned partners might say quietly to a friend over drinks, the lights low and the mood somber-we were having a little trouble.
Trouble? Sorry to hear that. What kind of trouble?
With this, a pained look would cross my face, a look of shame and melancholy as I would weigh the consequences of revealing personal truths that would expose Linda's and my faults, and yet the prospect of having a sympathetic listener would be too great a temptation. I would feel the gentle tug to which weary confessors surrender. I would yearn for compassion.
You see, I would say tentatively, lowering my voice. You see, she might be leaving me.
No lightning bolts. No sudden flashes of insight with this revelation. No, just the dull clang of painful truth.
This is a story about Linda as much as it is about me, about the disturbing events we would witness together and separately, about what happened after she visited her mother and stepfather in Los Angeles. She had flown down for a few reasons, though the most compelling seemed to be that she wanted some distance from me. A few hundred miles of distance. Three hundred and forty-four miles, to be precise.
She needed, as she explained, some time alone. But there were more reasons. Her younger brother Hector had disappeared again, though this time her mother was really worried. Linda had a few weeks of vacation time from her newspaper job, and she hadn't seen her parents in almost three years, despite being only an hour away by plane. So, Linda flew out of San Francisco, and away from me. She flew out of our discord, out of her job as a features writer with which she was growing more unhappy, out of her daily life. She flew away to think, to evaluate.
I could understand that. I am a believer in taking stock.
So, this story begins with her uncertainty about us, and with me vaguely disappointed and confused. This story begins with my pained realization that maybe I had done something wrong but didn't know what, and that the pleasures of discovering someone whom you liked, whom you connected with, whom you've found engagement with, once worn away, was quickly replaced by the shocking understanding that these things - these relationships - were very, very difficult. This story begins with a phone call from Linda after I returned home from a long run around the neighborhood. I bad been trying to wash away a stressful and moderately hazardous day at work, and my thoughts had kept circling back to Linda, to my job, to a strange sense of solitude that I was actually enjoying but then feeling guilty about.
This story begins, as many do, with a sense of regret.
I view my life as a struggle for engagement. No, not the engagement to marry, or the engagement of a battle, though the two might possibly be related; rather, a more general sense of engaging with others and myself. We try to connect through work, through play, through love, and yet the forces around us constantly keep us off balance and isolated. We wrestle endlessly in a vacuum, in a suffocating void, reaching out.
But first, this: I was finishing up a surveillance job for Larry, since his workload was heavy. Last year he had taken me on as a conditional partner at Baxter Investigations in order to expand into executive protection and security, something for which he wasn't licensed. Larry, a private investigator, could legally handle client protection only if it was directly relevant to a PI case, but because I was licensed as a private patrol operator, I was certified by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services to protect people and property. I was a bodyguard, a term most security professionals abhorred, but I didn't mind so much. No need for pretensions in this business.
Larry knew where the money was. The hourly rate for executive protection started at twice that of a PI.
The long-range goal sounded good. I would steal clients from my old firm, ProServ, and drum up new clients. Larry would get licensed as a private patrol operator, and we would move into full-scale executive protection. Baxter Investigations would become Baxter & Choice Security. Larry had even mocked-up a business card, "B&C Security," that had a smart sword-and-shield logo in the background.
Although this sounded good, the reality was different. I was having trouble bringing over old clients because ProServ and its main competition, Black Diamond, were undercutting each other's rates. The Silicon Valley economy was crashing, and companies were going bankrupt. Everyone was reining in expenses, especially in areas considered nonessential, like executive protection. Also, even with the small amount of publicity I had received two years ago, new clients were wary of small boutiques. Large companies, the best clients, wanted to deal with other large companies. The only steady work I'd brought in was a jewelry appraiser and dealer requiring an escort every three weeks as he transported uncut gems to and from jewelers around the Bay Area. This guy had chosen me, it seemed, because he was Korean and liked the fact that I am Korean American. That was okay. I took what work I could find.
Yet for some reason Larry's end of the business was revving up. He had been getting more insurance companies and law firms asking for research, employee screenings, workers' comp investigations, and general background checks. Executive protection might have been extraneous, but cheating employees were always a problem. Larry had even upped his rates to cool off demand, but the insurance companies weren't blinking. So now he needed help. The only problem was that I wasn't licensed as a private investigator and couldn't conduct interviews or deal with cases in any direct way.
I could tail people, though. I
could use a video camera. And that was what I did this afternoon...