Of course, Smiley had taken Tony Nemo off the board with a container of Drano and had always wanted to do the same for Jaime O’Banion. Word was Jaime had done a whole family with a bomb in Mexico City, children included. Jaime presented another problem. He was the only button man in the business who was so dangerous and good at his craft that he got away with hits inside Miami, which had been an open city since the days of Lansky and Trafficante. Worse, Jaime obviously knew Smiley was following Clete Purcel, and he may have seen Purcel check into the motel behind the truck stop.
Smiley had made a mess of things, as when he had messed in his underwear at the orphanage. He could almost hear the whistle of the belt. After sunset, he abandoned the ice cream truck and boosted a vintage pickup from behind a bar. He threw a backpack loaded with the tools of his trade onto the passenger seat and headed for the motel, wondering if his own time had come.
• • •
CLETE COULD NOT explain the affliction that had spread through his body since the afternoon. It had begun with violent spasms he associated with food poisoning, an aggregate of intestinal pain worse than his wounds in Vietnam, coupled with the fever and chills that went with the malaria he had picked up in El Sal. He was curled in a ball under the bedcovers in the motel, his teeth clicking, the buzz of nonexistent mosquitoes in his ears, when he realized he was not alone.
A lamp burned on a table by the wall. A shadowy figure was pouring soup out of a can into a pot by a hot plate. Clete tried to raise himself and fell back on the pillow. “What are you doing here?”
“A bad man knows where you are,” Smiley said. “His name is Jaime O’Banion. You know him?”
Yes, Clete thought, but he was too weak to say the word. The night chain on the door had been snipped in half, the electric lock probably opened with a key card from a compliant desk clerk. Clete closed his eyes and breathed slowly in and out, his forehead sweating, cold as ice water.
“I need to get you away from here,” Smiley said.
“No,” Clete said.
“Yes. Do not argue.”
“Don’t talk to me that way,” Clete said.
Smiley didn’t reply. Clete could smell the soup heating in the pan; then he heard Smiley take the pan off the hot plate and pour it into the cup of an army-surplus mess kit. Smiley pulled up a chair next
to the bed and filled a spoon with the soup.
“Eat.”
“No.”
“If you don’t eat, your liver will be hurt.”
“It’s already a football.”
“Open.”
Clete got up on one elbow and took the spoon out of Smiley’s hand and drank the soup off the spoon. He fell back on the pillow. “Where’s O’Banion?”
“He’s gone now. But he’ll be back about an hour after the bars close.”
Clete didn’t try to answer. Smiley knew the culture: The pavement princesses and the truckers on the prowl and anyone hooking up late would be doing the dirty bop by three a.m.
“Have some more,” Smiley said. He held out the aluminum cup so Clete could dip the soup from it. Clete dropped the spoon onto the rug. Smiley washed it in the sink. Clete reached for the drawer of the nightstand.
“What are you doing?” Smiley said.
“My piece is in there.”
“Not now, it isn’t.”
Clete lay back on the pillow, his arm over his eyes. “You need to go. I’ll call 911 for an ambulance.”
“He’s close by. He may be in the next room.”
“I’d rather be dead than have whatever is inside me.”
The room was quiet a long time. The pain was like glass twisting inside him. Then, when he thought he could stand it no longer, a strange transformation happened in his metabolism. The pincers that seemed to be tearing his intestines apart turned to snowmelt flooding his body. His head sagged as though his spinal cord has been severed; he felt himself drifting into a dark, safe place beneath the earth. Someone cupped his forehead, taking his temperature, and then the same person folded Clete’s .38 in his hand and placed his hand and weapon on his chest as though arranging a corpse in a coffin. Clete heard the door open and click shut, then he fell asleep.
When he woke, the room was completely dark, and his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow. He fumbled for his cell phone and hit the speed dial. Come on, Streak, answer your phone.
“Clete?” a voice said.
“Yeah,” he rasped. “Mayday.”
“What?”
“I feel like I died. Remember when I told you we might be living among dead people?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Smiley Wimple was here. He said Jaime O’Banion is here, too. Don’t call the locals.”
“Why not?”
“They hate my guts. They’ll put me in the can. Or worse.”
“Where are you?”
Clete said the name of the truck stop and town and passed out again, the cell phone bouncing on the carpet.
• • •
SMILEY WAS NOT equipped to understand a phrase like “intimations of mortality.” But he understood its smell. The smell was in the ditches behind the cantinas where the prostitutes poured their buckets at sunrise, and in the slums where the poor raked rotting food with their bare hands from a smoldering garbage dump, and under a bridge outside Torreón where the narco-gangsters hung their trophies from wire loops and left them for bats to eat.
Smiley never thought about what lay on the other side of death, but he knew one thing for sure—people killed other people all the time. They just did it in a different way. With bombs from an airplane. With drones or rockets. That way the images were reduced to a neat and tidy satellite video, one that had no sound.
Smiley was not one to argue. Nor did he brood upon the ways human beings conducted themselves. The issue for those at the bottom of the pile was simple: Don’t be drawn in by lies, and don’t let others use you. The only people who dismissed the importance of power were those who possessed it or those who liked their roles as human poodles.
The only true friend he ever had was a girl a little older than he in the orphanage. She loved him and washed his body in the morning and hid his wet sheets so he wouldn’t be punished, and sometimes read poetry to him. He understood little of the meaning, but occasionally a line stuck with him that somehow defined a central mystery in his life. He remembered one line in particular. It came at the end of what she called a sonnet, one written by a young man named John Keats: On the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Did that mean we were on our own, and that love and fame were of no value, and that neither the earth nor the crowd provided reward or succor? Did our only victory lie in survival, in solitude, far from the distant crowd? Or was the poet saying it was better to be the giver of death than its recipient?
Smiley chose to believe the latter. But now he was undoing his own ethos, helping the man named Purcel instead of taking care of business first, which in this instance meant dealing with Jaime O’Banion, known as the cruelest and smartest mechanic on the East Coast. The choice of O’Banion as the hitter meant the Mob was going to make an object lesson of Smiley, old-style, the way they did Tommy Fig in the Irish Channel years ago when they freeze-wrapped his parts and strung them from a wood-bladed ceiling fan in his own butcher shop.
Smiley’s problem with O’Banion wasn’t simply professional. They had run into each other at Disney World and at the track in Hialeah and also at the Jazz Festival in New Orleans. O’Banion wore white suits and silk shirts and tight vests and two-tone shoes and a Panama hat, and he had a coarse Irish face that reminded Smiley of a twisted squash. Sometimes a prostitute was glued to his arm. An entourage of sycophants usually followed him. O’Banion called Smiley gusano (worm) to his face; he once said to his friends as Smiley walked by, “Here comes queer-bait. Grab your cocks, boys.”
The sycophants snickered openly, safe in O’Banion’s presence.
O’Banion would be coming soon. But where and how? The truck stop and motel employed servicepeople who came and went at odd hours. O’Banion was a legend when it came to disguises and deception. Wearing surgical garb, he had walked into an OR in Tampa and popped a confidential informant on the operating table. In horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed suit and a wig that fit his head like a football helmet, he’d followed a Mississippi judge into the men’s room of the county courthouse, exchanged pleasantries with him at the urinal, then, on his way out, casually blown the judge’s brains all over the mirror. He also used disposable backup, usually junkies and black gangsters who thought they were about to make the big score and ended up in a Dumpster.
Smiley took a breath. What was the smart thing to do? Easy answer. Let Purcel worry about himself and catch O’Banion down the road with one of his women on his arm, out in public. Yes, stipple his vest with tiny red flowers and look into O’Banion’s eyes while he did it.
Yes, yes, yes.
Smiley twisted the key in the ignition and felt the pickup’s engine jump to life. He saw a black man enter the side door of the motel, pulling a laundry cart behind him. A woman with a vacuum followed. A man in a delivery uniform was smoking a cigarette in front of the main entrance; he flipped it in a high arc and went inside the building. A couple got out of a cab, laughing, walking unsteadily, and also went inside.
Smiley cut the engine, his head pounding. It wasn’t fair. He was being given a choice between abandoning his entire ethos or abandoning Purcel. The only person whose advice he had ever sought and depended upon was the girl in the orphanage in Mexico. But he had killed her and her lover, and now he had only the voice of Wonder Woman to guide him.
What should I do?
Use your imagination, she said.
Go inside?
Pretend you have my magic bracelets and golden lariat.
Those are for women.
Don’t make sexist remarks.
I’m sorry.
I was teasing. I love you, Smiley. I’ll always be with you. These are evil people. You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?
• • •
I DIDN’T LIKE NOT calling on the locals to help Clete. But I also trusted his intuition. He was the bane of the Mob, cops who extorted freebies from hookers, racists, misogynists, people who abused animals, slumlords, and child molesters. I knew insurance executives who probably would have him killed if they could get away with it. Clete was a one-man wrecking ball with steel spikes. He’d obliterated a mobster’s home with an earth grader on Lake Pontchartrain, thrown two pimps off a three-story roof through a pecan tree, dropped a Teamster out of a hotel window into a dry swimming pool, poured sand or sugar or both into the fuel tanks of a plane loaded with wiseguys, lodged the head of a New Orleans vice cop in a toilet bowl, taken out his flopper in the parking lot of the Southern Yacht Club and hosed down the upholstery in the car of Bobby Earl (Louisiana’s most infamous racist) where Bobby was about to get it on with his new socialite girlfriend.
The stories were endless. He was the bravest and most generous man I ever knew, and the most self-destructive. His most valued possession was his code of honor, and he would die rather than compromise it, and for that reason I never argued with him when he put principle ahead of safety.
I clamped an emergency light onto the roof of my pickup and kept the accelerator to the floor until I reached the truck stop and motel forty miles from the Texas line. The stars had started to fade, the darkness draining from the sky in the east. Outside the headlights, I could see the slash pines along the highway, puffing in a balmy breeze that should have marked the beginning of another fine day.
Up ahead, emergency vehicles were pulling into the truck stop, all of them lit up like kaleidoscopes. I saw a fat woman in a bathrobe wailing as she ran from the motel, her eyes as big as half dollars, her hands raised to the heavens.
Chapter Thirty-Five
THE SECURITY CAMERA on the second floor of the motel showed a man wearing gloves and a mask getting on a chair and extending a spray can toward the lens. The mask was made of hard plastic, shiny purplish white, and cast to imitate a weeping spirit in a Greek tragedy. Nothing came out of the spray can. The man shook it and tried again. Still nothing. He looked over his shoulder. No one else was in the hallway. He dropped the spray can into a trash receptacle just as the elevator door opened and a couple who appeared drunk got out. A woman with a vacuum entered the hallway from the fire exit.
There were now four people inside the lens of the camera. The man who had disposed of the can did not take off his mask. The woman with the vacuum removed a small pistol from a pocket in her dress and let it hang from her hand. She was thick-bodied and muscular and had blond hair that hung like dirty string in her face. She hunched her shoulders as though asking a question. The man in the mask pointed at a room a few feet away.
The woman stared at the security camera. The man in the mask pointed again at the room, obviously agitated. The woman’s companion had a lean discolored face, and scar tissue in his eyebrows, and the lithe flat-chested physique of a prizefighter. He also seemed to be staring at the camera. He spoke in sign language to the man in the mask. The woman with the vacuum was short and plump and dark-skinned, perhaps Hispanic. She, too, looked at the camera, then went to the trash receptacle and retrieved the spray can. Her breasts were visibly rising and falling. None of the four people spoke. The man in the mask began to speak in sign language that, later, a police technician would translate as “I’ll shoot it when we leave.”
• • •
CLETE LAY ASLEEP on his stomach in his skivvies, his face flat against the mattress, his arm hanging over the edge, his knuckles touching his piece on the floor. He was dreaming about the Asian woman who died at the hands of the Vietcong because she had taken a shanty Irish grunt into her heart. He never remembered her in an impure fashion or even what others would call an erotic one; instead, she remained with him as a spiritual immersion into the damp flowers he saw in his mind when he entered her, subsumed by the sweetness of her breath and the protective grace of her thighs and the way she pressed his face between her breasts and combed the back of his head with her nails after she came.
But his dreams about her always ended with terror. He saw the automatic weapons blaze from jungle blackness high up on the shore, and the rounds dance across the water, ripping into the sides of the sampan. She had been on top of him when the AK round struck her between the shoulder blades and exited from her chest. She’d fallen forward, dead, her hair tangled across his face.
Now Clete sat up in bed, his hands covering his eyes as though he could shield them from the screen inside his head. He beat his fists on the mattress at the irreversible nature of his loss, and stamped one foot on the carpet. It was the red-black rage he had never been able to leave in Vietnam, the one that sought a victim who had no idea of the danger he had just tapped into.
Clete washed his face in the bathroom and lay back down. In minutes he drifted off in a haze that was as warm and pink as morphine; he hoped the sun was about to rise on a new day, one that contained the gifts of both heaven and earth.
• • •
SMILEY’S FAVORITE LINE from a song was one by Hank Williams: I’ll never get out of this world alive. That was the way to think. Why fret yourself over what you can’t change?
This time the situation was
different. He was making choices that were not part of the program. Wonder Woman told him what to do and when to do it. But when he strayed from the program, her voice turned to static, then disappeared in the wind. That meant one thing: He was on his own. For Smiley, being alone guaranteed a return to his childhood status in Mexico City and a predatory world other people couldn’t imagine in their worst nightmares.
The personality that lived within him at the orphanage had been a victim, a pathetic child who took control of his life by burning himself with cigarettes. Wonder Woman freed him and gave him license to kill and a libidinous joy in the work he did, cleansing the earth of cruel men who had no right to the air they breathed. That was how Smiley saw it.
The only restrictions in the program had to do with conflicts about the targets and self-interest. He didn’t do hits for money alone; the target had to deserve his fate. Occasionally, Smiley worked pro bono. Why not? A Jewish friend of his once told him that a good deed by a Cossack was still a good deed. Smiley couldn’t quite figure out what that meant, but he knew it had something to do with the importance of good deeds.
The second restriction—putting himself at risk on behalf of others—could become an ethical quagmire. A button man in Key West who claimed he had killed forty-five men and seven women had told Smiley, “You got a lot of talent, kid. You’ll probably go a long way. Don’t screw it up.”
Years later, he saw the killer on a television interview inside a maximum-security federal prison. The man’s eyes had the brightness of obsidian, his face the color and expression of cardboard. When asked if he ever felt remorse over the people he’d killed, he said, “I didn’t know none of them.” When the journalist asked about the damage he had done to the victims’ families, the killer said, “I didn’t know none of them either.”
The New Iberia Blues Page 36