Pronto

by Elmore Leonard

  "He was old then," Harry said, but without much conviction.

  Raylan wondered how often they had this discussion, Harry defending his hero, Joyce tearing him down. There was a silence and Raylan said, "You spoke to him, that time in the prison camp?"

  Harry nodded. "Once. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was watching a wasp build a house with four rooms. I saw him again a month later, after he'd been transferred to the medical compound. He was sitting at a desk typing. I'd heard that he wrote letters for prisoners who were illiterate. They liked him, called him Uncle Ez. Anyway, he was typing something, I asked him how he was doing. This twenty-year-old kid talking to Ezra Pound. He looked at me and, while he was still typing, said, 'The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity...' I said, 'What?' But now he was staring at what he'd typed. 'The ant's a centaur...' I remembered the line and found it three years later in a book of his poetry, The Pisan Cantos, in number Eighty-one."

  Joyce said, "Does it make sense to you?"

  Still after him.

  Raylan thinking, It doesn't have to make sense. Not to Harry.

  As Harry said again, "The man was a genius."

  "You're taking someone else's word for that."

  "Sure, why not?"

  "A genius, and more than a little nuts."

  "That too," Harry said. "But it got him off, didn't it? His friends said he had to be crazy to have made so big a fool of himself."

  Joyce looked at Raylan. "You know what happened to him?"

  Raylan shook his head. He knew the name, Ezra Pound, and that was about it. Following the trip to Atlanta he'd tried reading some of the man's poetry and had given up, telling himself he was too dumb. He was glad to hear hardly anyone else understood it either.

  "He was declared insane," Joyce said. "Instead of doing time for treason he was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C."

  "Twelve years in St. Liz's bughouse," Harry said. "No way to treat the old darling of the U. S. expatriate intelligentsia. I think it was Time magazine called him that." He said to Ray-Ian, "You know that hat you wear? There's a picture of Ezra wearing one just like it in one of my books. I'll show it to you, taken in Rome in 1960." He looked at Joyce and said, "In the library by the big chair, the only good one in the house. You'll see two biographies there and a book of poetry, Selected Cantos."

  "Dinklage, where art thou,with, or without, your von? You said the teeth of the black troopsreminded you of the boar-hunt, I think yr/first boar hunt, butThe black prisoners had such a nice way with children, Also what's his name who spent the night in the air caught in the mooring ropes. Lone rock for sea-gull ho can, in any case, rest on water! Do not Hindooslust after vacuity?"

  Joyce closed the book with her finger marking the place. "You want me to go on?"

  "You mean," Harry said, with his deadpan expression, "you don't understand that? A very nice reading, Joyce, we should have some wine and cheese with it."

  She said, "It almost makes sense and then loses you. First I had to find a passage that's in English." She said to Raylan, "Some of it's in Italian, Greek, and he'll throw in Chinese characters every once in a while."

  "He had a Chinese dictionary with him," Harry said, "and a book of Confucius, when they threw him in the cage. Show Raylan the photographs in the biographies. The gorilla cage, pictures of his wife Dorothy and Olga Rudge. The bigger book has the picture of Ezra Pound wearing the hat like Raylan's, taken in Rome in 1960. I remember that because after they let him out of St. Elizabeths he couldn't wait to come back here. Listen to this, with Dorothy and another girlfriend forty years younger than he was, Marcella, he thought he was in love with and ought to marry once he divorced Dorothy. What happened, Dorothy teamed up with Olga, who was still in Italy, and they sent Marcella packing. Then, it wasn't long after that he became depressed about his work, wouldn't eat or talk much. Dorothy gave up trying to take care of him and he came here to live with Olga, where I saw him again," Harry said, "in sixty-seven. Three days in a row, in fact, I saw them at the same cafe, Ezra Pound and his mistress, always with a group having lunch. Anytime I saw him there were people with him, friends, or writers getting interviews. Poets flocked around him. There always seemed to be a party at lunch, everybody laughing and talking. One time when I was at the next table, he had some kind of fish and complained about the bones the whole time he was eating it. That same day, I followed him to the men's room, got ahead of him, and held the door open. As he reached me I said, The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.' He looked at me and walked right past into the can, didn't say a word. So, that was okay. He had people bothering the shit out of him all the time. They'd come and ring the bell, tourists, and Olga Rudge would tell them, 'If you can recite one line of his poetry you can see him.' She'd turn a hose on them if they wouldn't leave." He said to Joyce, "We should be having lunch. Isn't it time?"

  She said, "We have cheese and sausage. Some kind of cold pasta Robert put together."

  Harry was going through one of the biographies. He said to Raylan, "Here, this is what he looked like when I last saw him. He was eighty-two then. Look at the hat. You ever see a brim like that? The coat and the walking stick; the coat's like a cape. The guy had style right up to the end, eighty-seven when he died in Venice the night of his birthday. Olga was there with him. Here's a picture of her. Good-looking woman, uh? They were together fifty years. Here, this is the one. At his wake, Olga touching him I guess for the last time. Born in Hailey, Idaho, died in Venice." He said to Joyce, "We going to have lunch or not?" He handed the book to Raylan and watched him turn to the photographs of the gorilla cages and the military stockade. "I went back there on one of my trips," Harry said. "You know what's there now? A nursery where they grow roses. Another time in Rapallo, you know who I saw? Groucho Marx."

  They left Raylan to go out to the kitchen and fix lunch.

  It was right after that, alone by the window, he saw a dark-colored Mercedes sedan drive past. Black or dark blue, he wasn't sure. The car slowed to a crawl, Raylan watching it until it was out of sight. He waited awhile before looking at the gorilla cages again.

  Joyce came back with sandwiches. Harry had two glasses of wine on top of the Galliano and was taking a nap.

  She said, "You'd think if he was going to recite poetry it would be someone more like... I was going to say Edgar Guest and it reminded me of that Dorothy Parker line, 'I'd rather fail my Wasserman test than read a poem by...' Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  Raylan nodded, eating the sausage-and-cheese sandwich. "So far."

  "Harry picks a guy who wrote the most obscure poetry I've ever read. Nothing that makes sense, but Harry won't admit it."

  "I don't think whether he understands it or not," Raylan said, "matters to him."

  "I know, but he pretends he does. Now," Joyce said, "he even makes it sound as though he recognized the guy in the cage as Ezra Pound and was the only person in the camp that knew who he was. Harry might've known the name, but it was after the war he looked Ezra Pound up and found out, my God, this guy's famous. And started reading his work, if you can imagine, the Miami Beach bookie feeling some kind of rapport with the world-renowned poet who might be a little nuts. The next thing you know Harry returns to Rapallo. Comes back again, and again, and finally twenty years after seeing Ezra Pound in a cage, there he is again, an old dude now but still with that flair, the black hat and walking stick, a man who'd been dining with his mistress at sidewalk cafes all his life and Harry wanted to do it, too, see what it was like."

  Raylan said, "And the bad guys came and ruined it for him."

  "Even if they hadn't," Joyce said, "Harry would have changed his mind about sidewalk cafes. It's one thing to sip Galliano with an espresso on a nice day and watch the girls go by. But it can get cold and damp and the girls put on coats, the ones still around. On top of that he has trouble communicating and shouldn't drink, not even coffee. What Harry found out was, he's too late for sidewalk cafes. I
don't think he'd last more than a few weeks, even with the sun out. Harry might be a romantic at heart, but he's a practical kind of guy, too, set in his ways. When he called and asked me to come? He tells me how much he misses me, he can't wait. And then he says, 'Oh, yeah, and bring me a couple bottles of after-shave. Caswell-Massey Number Six.'"

  Raylan said, "That's after-shave?"

  "His favorite."

  "It sounds more like an East Kentucky coal mine."

  He was alone again in the sitting room, looking around, wondering if he could live in a place like this, a museum with ceilings higher than he'd ever seen inside a house, and not a chair or table you dared put your feet on. Harry was right about the chairs, Harry dying to be left alone so he could get smashed. Put him in the car and go. Fly out of some other city besides Milan or Rome. Joyce had left to take the lunch dishes to the kitchen and check on Harry. She was easy to talk to. He'd asked if she and Harry were planning on getting married and she said, "Are you crazy?" Told him a couple of weeks in the same villa with Harry would be about all she could manage. She had been married to a real estate salesman less than a year when he divorced her. Raylan had said, "Well, we have something in common," and told about his wife, Winona, divorcing him for a real estate salesman. Joyce said maybe, like her marriage, it wouldn't last and he and Winona would get back together. He told her it would never happen; he missed his boys but not his ex, not for a minute. And was glad he'd made that clear. If it happened he and Joyce ever started keeping company, he didn't want complications in the way.

  She should be back any minute.

  Raylan looked from the doorway out into the front hall to the window again and saw the dark-colored Mercedes coming from the other direction, from Montallegro, creeping along. He thought it was going to stop, but it turned in the drive and was coming toward the house now. Dark blue, like the one those guys drove.

  Chapter Twenty.

  The time Robert Gee quit working for the Kuwaiti sheik they were in Cannes during the Film Festival, the sheik looking to meet movie stars. Robert Gee finally had enough of the man's shit and left him sitting in his stretch in the middle of traffic: said fuck it, got out and walked away, the sheik calling him nasty names as he joined the crowd that was causing the traffic jam, everybody wanting to see the starlet who'd taken her shirt off. It was the sheik telling him how to drive that got to him. To do what the man said Robert Gee would've had to kill people walking in the street. He looked at the rearview mirror thinking, You want to drive, raghead? But only said "Fuck it" out loud before he quit. The man was abusive: treated Asian girls working for him like slaves, liked to beat up on them. Robert Gee was afraid he might let go and deck the man sometime and end up in a Kuwaiti prison. So he'd walked away and felt good, even though it was dumb to leave without getting paid first.

  This time he had money, he had Harry's Visa card, and if he walked away it would serve the man right for acting nasty to him. If it was just Harry up there in the villa he might even consider doing it, but not with Joyce and Raylan there, they never did anything to him. He didn't owe them his life, though, if it came to that. Like, tell us where they're at or we'll kill you. That kind of situation. He wasn't going to die for them. They wouldn't expect him to anyway. Raylan would know that if he wasn't back by dark, then something had happened to him and they had better move their asses out of that house quick.

  Robert Gee settled all that in his mind riding down from Montallegro in the funivia, getting an aerial view of the town and then some close looks into apartment windows as the cable car neared the station. The room he rented was on this side of town. He thought of looking in to check on his umbrellas and jewelry and shit, stuff he'd bought off a Tunisian leaving the wannabuy business, going home. And then thought, Check on it for what? It was still there or it wasn't, all that junky stuff. Selling it was more something to do than a way to make a living. He sure couldn't live off the proceeds like the African dudes did, happy to have a chunk of hash to smoke and that sticky sweet tea they drank. Maybe give all the wannabuy shit away and go home, back to Houston, Texas, where all the northern people had left when the oil business went to hell and the ones that stayed were living under overpasses in cardboard boxes.

  He thought of that riding across town in a taxicab, over to the Avis office on della Liberta.

  Kiss his mama, hang around the house awhile and be gone before she got used to him, off across some ocean to offer his experience. He could drill to French with a German accent and field-strip Belgian FNs, Austrian Steyrs, versions of the AR15, both the Soviet and Chinese AK47s, the Valmet, the Sterling -- name an automatic weapon -- and was certain he could find a war somewhere that would accept him.

  Two Avis men behind the counter, Robert Gee their only customer, and it took them close to a half hour to get a contract ready for him to sign. They said they weren't sure they had a Mercedes. Robert Gee said, what was that out front, the white one? They had to make a phone call in the office, they said to check on the credit card, Robert Gee hoping to God the man wasn't talking to who Robert Gee suspected he might be talking to. By the time he walked outside with the keys, ready to go, two guys were leaning against the car with their arms folded, trying to act cool. Robert Gee said, "Shit," as the one unfolded his arms to show the pistol he was holding and the other one said to the Avis guys, "Grazie."

  Raylan stood by the front door putting his hat on, getting it to sit lightly where it felt good, down some on his right eye. He put his hand on the doorknob, still not sure if he wanted to meet them outside or in the house, and heard Joyce in that same moment call to him.

  "Raylan?" From the front stairs. She was about halfway up. "A car just pulled in the yard."

  Raylan nodded. "I saw it."

  "You're going out?"

  "I was thinking about it." He wanted her to stay calm. So far she sounded more surprised than excited. "Where's Harry?"

  "He's asleep." She said, "Raylan, if we're quiet they won't know we're here."

  "No, 'less they come in."

  She said, "Stay with us," and it sounded like a better idea than going outside.

  He watched her rear end go up the stairs ahead of him in blue jeans, a nice compact one, he had noticed before. Upstairs in the hall she said, "You were really going out there?" Still having trouble accepting it.

  "Try to come up behind them," Raylan said. "I think since we're going to have words, it would be good to get a position on them. Some kind of advantage."

  She stopped at an open doorway.

  "Have words?"

  "Show 'em they can't win."

  "Or shoot them?"

  "I don't know."

  She said, "I have to get my gun," and went into her bedroom.

  Raylan went on to Harry's room. He was stretched out on the bed with his mouth open, not exactly snoring, making a wheezing sound. Harry's pistol was on the night table next to the bed. Raylan moved to a window.

  They were in the side yard, out of the Mercedes now, going toward the garage, the structure with the three heavy wooden doors, all padlocked. He watched the two guys pull on the locks and then look this way, toward the house.

  Joyce came in saying, "There're fifteen shots in this?"

  Making it sound like a simple question. He glanced over his shoulder at Joyce holding the Beretta he'd given her, Nicky's or Fabrizio's, inspecting it closely: a foreign object to someone who'd never fired a gun.

  "Fifteen in the magazine and one in the throat, that's sixteen," Raylan said. "When it's empty the slide opens and that's it, you're done. But I doubt you'll have to shoot. Don't, okay? 'Less you have no other choice."

  "How do I know when that is?"

  "You see if you don't shoot you're gonna die. Then, squeeze the trigger. Don't yank on it."

  "Take a breath first and let some of it out," Joyce said.

  "Yeah, well, I wouldn't try to remember everything I told you. Just make sure the safety's off and hold the weapon in two hands."

&nbs
p; Raylan turned to the window again.

  "It looks like they're trying to find a rock, something they can bust those locks with and take a look in the garage. The one's the same guy that was driving the Mercedes the other day. Had on a white shirt? He's wearing a striped one today. No coat. The other one's wearing a suit coat that looks too small for him." Raylan didn't mention the guy's cut-down double-barreled shotgun. He said, "I guess you better wake Harry up," and heard her then as he looked out the window.

  Her voice sounding calm as she said, "Harry? There's someone here."

  Like friends come to pay a visit. Raylan half turned to look past his shoulder. He saw Harry pushing himself up, eyes wide open, Harry in a tan sweater and white socks, Joyce bent over helping him, aiming her good-looking rear end this way -- not anywhere near the size of Winona's. It was funny, the things you thought of when you'd never think you would. He watched Joyce straighten and stand with one hand on her hip, the gun in the other, like she knew she had a good-looking behind. Harry reached for his gun on the night table and Joyce told him to put his shoes on first. Raylan liked the sound of that, her voice still calm. Harry looked bewildered, maybe from the Galliano and wine and just waking up. Twice, though, he'd shot a man dead coming at him. One more than you have, Raylan thought. Harry could do it again if he had to.

  But then had to ask him, "Harry, you okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  Raylan looked out the window and turned back to them. "They're coming toward the house." He looked again and said, "Now they're out of sight. I imagine going around back. All the doors are locked..."

  He stopped as they heard the sound of glass breaking. A window, or one of the French doors.

  "I was going to say, but if they want to come in, they will. Without bothering to knock."

  "As soon as they look in the kitchen," Joyce said, "they'll know we're here."

  "We could've left," Raylan said, "but you're right, they'll have to search the house."