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They first show up in July, just in time to save Budge and Pepper from dying of boredom.
The agents’ notes have become significantly less detailed since they discovered that random passersby tend to be more worthy of observation than the people they’ve actually been tasked with observing.
Which is why, if Agent Budge had to hazard a guess, he’d say that the two men currently having a completely silent disagreement on the sidewalk are far too interesting to be syndicate.
The bearded one in front walks with his hands in the pockets of his black suit, his eyes covered by dark sunglasses. He has the aura of a celebrity trying to avoid the paparazzi. Sure, he’s styled to perfection, but that doesn’t mean he wants people to see him.
His friend with sideburns is tall, even without the cowboy boots adding an inch to his height. He’s wearing a suede jacket that looks sweltering in the summer heat. Fringe accents swing to and fro as he gestures furiously at his companion, who’s making a point of not looking at him.
The one in shades shoves his way into the building, followed closely by the one in fringe, who’s still buzzing around him like a bee. The door slams shut behind them, and just like that, the box is open, and the cat is dead.
Budge turns to his partner. “You saw them too, right? I didn’t imagine that?”
It’s the sort of question that would usually earn him a sarcastic reply, but in this case even Agent Pepper looks like he was considering hallucination as a possibility.
“Yeah,” he says, still staring past Budge through the open car window. “I saw them.”
When the two men emerge from the building fifteen minutes later, all the tension from before has evaporated. The one in the suit, who previously looked like the human embodiment of a frown, is actually grinning from ear to ear. His friend is apparently saying something very amusing with his hands.
The movie star dons his sunglasses and walks backwards in front of the cowboy for a few paces, signing something of his own in response. The other man smiles — a small, subtle thing that’s hard to catch without squinting.
They fall into step beside each other, eventually disappearing around the corner.
“So,” says Budge when they’re out of sight. “Who are they?”
In their official reports to the Bureau, Pepper and Budge refer to each syndicate member by an ID number attached to a detailed profile. But in their everyday notes, they find nicknames easier to remember.
Boss. Australian. Glasses. And now Beard and Sideburns.
They don’t show up very often, which means they’re probably either out-of-towners or contract. The agents have deduced that only Sideburns is deaf, after witnessing Beard interpreting between him and a few of the regulars.
The two of them are practically joined at the hip, which is why it’s notable when Beard emerges from the Chinese restaurant by himself one day. Lunch has gone on especially long, and it looks like it’s wearing on him.
He lets out a full-body sigh and paces back and forth on the sidewalk a few times, scratching at his beard like he’s considering something. Then he pulls a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and lights one up.
The agents twist around in their seats to observe as he leans against the side of the building, savoring each drag like it might be his last.
Pepper doesn’t smoke, but he’s pretty sure he understands the feeling. It’s like when he goes out for a McMuffin on Sunday mornings, without his partner there to inform him of its cholesterol content.
“Did you know that every cigarette a person smokes takes eleven minutes off their life?”
Speaking of.
“No way that’s true,” says Pepper. “Eleven minutes exactly?”
“Yeah, they did studies,” Budge replies, because there’s always a study. “You know how much you can do in eleven minutes?”
“You could probably smoke at least two cigarettes,” Pepper estimates.
Budge ignores him. “You could read a poem. You could hard-boil an egg. You could listen to ‘Free Bird.’”
“Jesus, I’ll smoke a cigarette right now if it’ll get me out of that.”
At that moment, the restaurant door swings open, and Sideburns emerges. Beard rushes to stomp the cigarette out under his shoe, but it’s too late. Sideburns is already signing his obvious disapproval.
“Oh, shit,” says Pepper. “I think he’s telling him the eleven minutes thing.”
They sign back and forth, with Beard looking defensive. Eventually, he throws his hands up and starts walking away. By the time he turns around again, Sideburns has stalked angrily back into the restaurant.
Beard’s posture crumples, and he pinches the bridge of his nose. Then he takes out his cigarette pack, and Pepper thinks he’s going to light up again. Instead, he turns the pack over in his hand a few times before tossing it into a nearby trash can.
“Well, they do say you should quit by age forty,” Budge muses, facing forward to take notes. “There may be hope for him yet.”
The morning after Labor Day weekend, Sideburns shows up to the Showalter Block alone, loping up to the door in his usual get-up, which is almost weather-appropriate.
“Interesting,” mutters Budge as the man disappears inside.
Ten minutes later, a taxi pulls up to the curb, and Beard steps out. Budge almost doesn’t recognize him. His shirt is half-untucked, the hem of one pant leg is trapped in his sock, and his hair is sticking up in every direction.
“Looks like somebody overslept,” Pepper remarks.
They watch as he hurriedly attempts to pull himself together. He manages to straighten out his clothes, but there’s absolutely no hope for his hair, and he knows it. He runs a halfhearted hand through it before entering the building.
“You ever think,” Budge says, “about how there’s probably only a tiny part of the day when night owls and morning people are both asleep?”
“It’s too early for this,” Pepper replies, sipping his coffee. “It’s always too early for this.”
“What would you say is the most likely time?” Budge wonders. “Between four and five in the morning?”
“Just because somebody gets up early, it doesn’t mean they’re a morning person,” Pepper points out. “I get up early, and I’m not a morning person.”
“Right, but for the purposes of this discussion,” says Budge. “If you get a hardcore night owl and a hardcore morning person, there might not be any crossover. The night owl goes to bed when the morning person gets up.”
“Some people work the night shift,” says Pepper, still nitpicking. “Doesn’t make them night owls.”
Budge waves him off and ponders the subject privately until the door across the street creaks open again. Beard emerges looking just as disheveled as when he arrived, and twice as grumpy. Sideburns follows him out, his frown replaced by a look of smug satisfaction.
Budge snickers. Beside him, Pepper yawns.
“I have an idea,” Budge announces one day.
“No,” says Pepper. It’s a reflex he’s developed.
“At least let me say what it is first.”
Pepper sighs. “Fine. What’s your idea?”
“We should learn sign language.”
Pepper swallows his second no, because he has to admit that’s actually not a bad suggestion.
After all, the only syndicate member who’s consistently loud enough for them to hear from across the street is the Australian — and half the things he says make no sense, while the other half are almost definitely bullshit.
“Sure, why not,” Pepper agrees.
Two weeks later, Budge sits up in the driver’s seat when Beard and Sideburns turn the corner. Just before they pass through the door, Sideburns signs something to his friend.
“Okay, I saw we and need,” Budge says with determination, like he’s code-breaking during the war. “But what was that other one?”
He turns to Pepper to demonstrate — both hands in the H shape, then he brings one pair of fingers down on top of the other pair before letting both hands fall outward.
“That looks violent, right? Like sharpening knives, or maybe pistol-whipping.”
Pepper doesn’t recognize it. But he also hasn’t absorbed as much as his partner, who apparently has unlimited space in his brain, based on how many parables, factoids, and riddles he recites on a daily basis.
Budge frantically searches the American Sign Language book he bought at Barnes & Noble. He’s still flipping through it half an hour later when the men leave, thankfully without signing anything else.
“Eggs!” Budge exclaims triumphantly, slapping the book shut. “He said they need eggs. Do you think that’s code for something? Grenades, maybe?”
Pepper isn’t so sure. He thinks over the pair’s interactions — bickering, then making up, then bickering, then making up — and suddenly it all makes sense.
“I think they just need to buy eggs,” he says. “Like, at the supermarket.”
“Huh.” Budge considers this for a moment, and then his eyes widen. “Oh.”
Pepper clicks his pen and writes couple? into the day’s notes. He stares at it for a second, then scratches out the question mark.
Eventually, the observers become the observed.
It’s honestly pretty miraculous that they’ve spent months sitting in this car, thirty-ish feet from the syndicate’s doorstep, staring at them through untinted windows, and no one has ever spared them a glance.
When it finally happens, it’s Sideburns who sees them. On his way out of the building, he makes direct eye contact with Budge for what feels like an eternity but is probably no more than three seconds.
He’s scowling, which doesn’t reveal much considering it’s his default facial expression.
“Shit,” says Pepper. “Did he just look at us?”
Budge lets out a long breath. “He broke the fourth wall.”
“The what?”
“The fourth wall,” Budge repeats. “Like when someone in a movie looks straight into the camera. It’s jarring.”
“What are you even…” Pepper shakes his head in disbelief. “You know he’s a real person, right?”
Logically, yes, Budge knows this. But when it’s your job to watch the same people day after day without any of them watching you back, the lines begin to blur. You might, for instance, start to think of two probable hitmen as a couple of quirky fictional characters.
Budge hesitates to use the word starstruck to describe how he felt when Sideburns locked eyes with him, but he did see Malcolm Gladwell in the produce section at Hornbacher’s once, and it wasn’t too far off.
“Right, of course he’s real,” says Budge, realizing how he must sound. “I meant it more like… the gaze, you know? Awareness of one’s existence as a physical object that can be observed.”
Pepper blinks. “Or… awareness that you’re an FBI agent whose presence has just been discovered by a member of the crime syndicate you’ve been tasked with surveilling?”
“Yeah,” says Budge. “That too.”
It turns out to have just been a passing glance, or at least the syndicate is doing a damn good job of feigning ignorance. The next time Sideburns shows up to the Showalter Block, he ignores them.
Budge tries not to take it too personally.
The last time Pepper and Budge see them, it’s almost Christmas.
The syndicate is so committed to their front that they actually put a wreath on the door. It swings wildly on its hook as two familiar figures emerge from the building mid-argument.
Just another Tuesday afternoon in Fargo.
This time, Sideburns is the one in front looking pissed, and Beard is the one trying desperately to talk to him. He’s even using his voice, loud enough for the agents to hear.
“Look at me,” he says uselessly, reaching for the other man’s arm. “Just let me—”
After a few insistent tugs on his sleeve, Sideburns finally whirls around to glare at his partner, who expertly avoids being pelted in the face by flying fringe.
For someone who was just so desperate to communicate, Beard looks like he’s at a loss for what to say. He takes a few seconds to collect himself before lifting his hands.
Pepper doesn’t catch everything from this distance, and his personal glossary of signs is significantly smaller than Budge’s, but a few of them are unmistakable.
Like, for example, I’m sorry and I love you.
He manages to say it more sincerely with his hands than Pepper has heard most people say it with their mouths.
Sideburns must recognize this, because he pulls Beard into a crushing hug right there on the sidewalk. Beard stiffens up at first, and it looks like he might even try to squirm away, but he succumbs soon enough, burying his face in his partner’s shoulder as they hold each other.
Both Pepper and Budge turn away.
By doing this, they’re technically failing to perform their assigned duties. But Pepper can confidently say that this wasn’t what the Bureau had in mind when they put them on surveillance.
It may be a public street, and the people involved may almost certainly be criminals, but there are some moments you just shouldn’t spy on. He’s glad that Budge, for all his talk of the fourth wall, seems to agree.
They’re silent at first. Pepper sits with his pen suspended over the notepad, trying to figure out how the hell to document this, or if they even should.
“You know,” Budge says suddenly, “some studies have shown that hugs—”
“Please don’t,” says Pepper.
Call it a Christmas miracle, but Budge actually shuts up.
“Where do you think they are?”
Pepper looks up from a file. “Where do I think who are?”
Budge bounces the tennis ball on the linoleum and glances dejectedly at the surveillance photo still taped to the wall. The two weeks he initially predicted have come and gone, and the groundhog saw his shadow, so it’s been hard to stay optimistic.
“You know,” he says. “Them.”
The them he’s referring to weren’t there the day it happened. Budge and Pepper know this because, for one, they never saw them walk in. This admittedly means very little, considering they also didn’t see the shooter.
More helpfully, they know this because they stepped through all three floors of the crime scene afterward, guns drawn and guilt fresh, and never found them among the bodies.
It was surreal, staring into the dead eyes of twenty-two familiar faces. But even more surreal was the relief Budge felt when he confirmed that two particular faces weren’t among them.
After all, it’s generally frowned upon for federal agents to have favorite criminals.
Pepper pushes one drawer shut and opens another one. There’s a smear of pink frosting on his tie from the Valentine’s Day cupcakes in the cafeteria.
“Wherever they are,” he says, “I’m sure it’s better than here.”
Budge is always going on about Schrodinger’s cat, but Pepper doesn’t think he’s ever really understood the concept until he looks at Deputy Solverson’s whiteboard in the Bemidji police station.
Deaf Fella. Deaf Fella’s Partner.
As it turns out, the answers were right there waiting for them, tucked away in newspapers they didn’t read, in towns they’d never been to.
Thanks to the deputy, it’s all here now. Suspect. Motive. Witness. And them.
Either this Malvo guy already knew them, or he got them to reveal who they worked for. Based on the knife wounds in the dead man’s back, Pepper figures it was the latter.
It doesn’t shock him that Beard would give up his organization under pain of death. Sometimes, after a particularly long lunch, he looked like he was plotting a massacre of his own.
But Pepper guesses there was something else running through the hitman’s brain as he made that decision. Namely, the fate of his partner.
They argued like it was going out of style, but Pepper saw how he threw away those cigarettes. How easily he smiled when Sideburns said something funny. The emotion in his gestures when he apologized.
After all, being an irritable bastard doesn’t preclude a person from giving a shit. They may not have done any pseudo-scientific studies on it, but Pepper has firsthand experience.
“Deputy, did you get a chance to talk to the surviving Fargo man?”
Deputy Solverson is standing at the front desk, jotting down directions to Leroy’s Motor Inn, when Budge asks her the very question Pepper has been trying to formulate for the past five minutes.
“Before he escaped from the hospital,” Pepper adds.
“I did, actually.” Deputy Solverson finishes writing and pockets her pen. “Didn’t get much out of him, I’m afraid. I asked him about Malvo, but he shut me out pretty quick. Seemed real upset about his partner.”
Pepper and Budge exchange a look. The deputy seems to notice.
“Oh, that’s right,” she says. “You must have seen a lot of those fellas.”
The joint um that precedes the agents’ response says more than a hundred carefully typed reports for the Bureau ever could.
“Sort of,” Budge says with a shrug.
Pepper nods. “Here and there.”