by Thomas Laird
Maybe that’s what we both had in common, back when we met. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. She, however, doesn’t have to turn out the way I did.
“What is your given name?” she asks when we’re grabbing some Mexican food near the Wharf District.
I can hear the foghorns moaning, and I can see a tug coming in to dock, not far from where we’re eating. I’m looking out the restaurant’s windows and I see the Bay stretched out in front of us.
“My name is … William.”
I almost slipped and gave her my correct moniker. It almost flopped right out. I have to remember to be on guard with her when she asks me personal shit like that. She’s never questioned me about my background. Maybe it’s because she never talks much about her own history, either.
“You don’t look like a William Roberts.”
“I don’t?” I grin.
“No. You sorta look like that actor, James Dean, but you have the wrong color eyes, hazel. His were blue. I used to sneak into that theater on Biltmore that shows old movies, and I saw him in Giant and East of Eden. I saw him in Rebel Without a Cause, too, but I thought that flick sucked. He looked a little too preppy to be a delinquent. Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo sucked, also, but Dean was okay in a bad movie.”
“I don’t look like Dean. I don’t look like anybody famous.”
“And you like it that way, right? You like looking … anonymous?”
“Yeah. You got me. You’ve captured my very essence.”
“Now you’re being sarcastic.”
Our tacos arrive and we stop talking and begin inhaling all this Tex-Mex food. It’s very good, as good as advertised. When I’m done with the tacos and the rice and the beans, I look up at her.
“I have to go out of town for a few days.”
“Again?”
“It’s the life I’m in.”
“You’re talking like in a gangster movie.”
“You watch too many films, Li. It is the life I’m in.”
“You never tell me what you really do.”
“Yeah, I did. I’m a troubleshooter, and I go where they send me.”
“That tells me nothing… I like calling you William. Calling you Roberts sounded so impersonal.”
“I’m just giving you a place to crash until you can make it on your own. I can’t help you forever.”
“You telling me you’re gonna disappear on me sometime soon?”
Her face goes dark. She looks genuinely concerned, and I think her concern is over me and not over her free place to lay her head at night.
“You knew this wasn’t permanent, Li. You knew there’d come a time when you’d be on your own.”
“Don’t you like me, William?”
“Sure I do. I like you a lot.”
“But not in the way that I’d like you to.”
“That would complicate things, Li. And I don’t want you to be a part of what’s coming.”
“You’re frightening me, William.”
“I don’t want to discuss my business because it’d get you caught up in my shit. You already know that I’m doing things some people might not think is legal.”
“Are you a gangster, William?”
Her face is so deadpan that I have to laugh.
“No, I’m not a gangster.”
“Then what are you?”
I look at her brown eyes, and I want to tell her everything, but that would spoil the very short time we have together. She’s the only good thing I’ve got in my life, and I suppose I’m trying to keep hold of her for as long as I can.
“It’s nothing that concerns you. You got a whole life ahead now.”
“And you don’t, William?”
She damn near breaks my heart when she calls me by that bogus name.
“My time is all behind me.”
“Are you dying?”
Now her face goes gray.
“Take it easy. I don’t have cancer or any damn thing like that. You worry too much. The point is that we were never going to be together the way you were saying. I’ll be leaving soon. Let’s just leave it like that. But I’ll try to hang on until you’re ready to go off on your own. That’s the best I can do, Li.”
The tears begin to descend.
“I love you, William.”
“Jesus, you don’t even know me.”
“I know you. I know that you’re a good man. That’s all I need to know. I just don’t understand why you never touch me.”
“We better get going. I have to leave early in the morning.”
I divert my eyes to the glass of the windows, but I can’t see any more boats making their way to these docks on the Bay water just a few hundred feet from where we both sit.
*
A feel a hand on my shoulder, and I reach for the .22 under my pillow, but then I see her face above me.
“Can I lie down with you?” she pleads. “I had bad dreams.”
I look at her face, and I can’t say no.
“Okay.”
I lift up the blanket and the sheet, and she gets under them beside me. I give her one of my pillows. It’s a double bed, and it’s not very spacious, so we’re very close together. When she’s positioned against me, I feel that she’s not wearing anything.
“Li—”
She puts her first finger on my lips, and then she bends over and kisses me. There’s a very distinct stirring below, and I tell myself that I can’t, but then she takes over, and she descends down on me, and in a moment I feel her mouth, warm and wet, on me, and a few beats later she’s turned on her side and her hand guides me into her. It is torrid where I am now, and there’s nothing I can do to stop this.
“I don’t have a rubber,” I tell her, and my bluntness makes her laugh out loud, but it’s a gentle laugh.
“You don’t need one. It’s safe. I’m on the pill.”
She keeps rearing back at me, and I find myself lunging toward her now, and I’m going at her ferociously, like it’s some kind of battle between us to see which of us can throw themselves harder at the other.
It goes on and on, and now I don’t want her to stop, but she ceases and then urges me onto my back, and she throws the blanket and sheet off us, and she climbs atop me and starts another furious rhythm on top of me. I can no longer hold back, and then her head is thrust backward and she opens her mouth in a perfect ‘O’ and I hear the raging sounds of finish come out, and I find myself uttering the name of a God I know doesn’t exist, and then she flops onto my chest.
“Can’t you put off your business for a few days?” she smiles.
*
I cancel my flight tickets to Tacoma, Washington, and I postpone my meeting up with Terry Dellacord. I know the cancellation is very unwise, but I cannot break away from Li. Not now, anyway. I tell myself that I’m doing something human for the very first time in longer than I can remember. I seem to have always been a soldier. I seem to have forever wandered with the Hmong as the Vietnamese chased them into extinction. It’s been perpetual that I’ve been trying to settle a score that only I know needs settling. No one else gives a shit what happened in that village in Quang Tri Province twelve years ago, and no one cares. No one ever brought charges against the men I fought with or against me. We were free. Why did I have to carry this obligation like a two-ton weight on my shoulders?
It was all self-imposed, self-inflicted. Why did I feel it was necessary to sacrifice myself for some very unholy quest? There was no Grail, no Christ, no cause that I was giving my life up for. And now why shouldn’t I just stop, cease, desist, and stay with Li and maybe even be happy?
I told myself when she asked me to stay with her that I had every right to call it off. No one even knew for certain that Evan Azrael existed any longer. I could make William Roberts come alive, and I could send him down a very different path than the one he’d been treading with all those bloody footsteps.
Let God, the non-existent one, handle the justice for McIntosh and Dellacord and Jam
es. It really was suicide to keep going after them all, wasn’t it? And wasn’t self-immolation the crazed act of some loony zealot? I was no apostle of blood vengeance, I kept telling myself. I had a chance to do something for myself this time. No more competing with my father, the war hero. No more being the skilled assassin the Army had invested in. It was finally my time.
They couldn’t catch a ghost, could they?
I would have to sever ties with my Italian employers. I couldn’t do it directly, so I would have to disappear the way I’d arrived here. I could get away with it again. I could take her with me.
Where would I go? Canada came to mind. I would go a great distance from here.
I’d always heard how beautiful Toronto was, so I decided to take Li there with me.
“Would you like to go away somewhere, with me?” I asked her as we finished making love for the third time that morning.
“I want to go where you are, William.”
She reached up her lips and kissed me. We began again. I could feel a sort of sexual exhaustion, but it didn’t seem to stop anything. The fire became re-stoked, and we writhed and bucked against each other until it was finished for the fourth time.
“How about Toronto?” I asked her.
“What’s in Toronto?” she smiled.
“Us. Isn’t that enough?”
*
The red cobblestones were part of the charm here. People on the street would greet you as if they’d known you for a lifetime. Li and I could walk the streets of this Canadian city at four in the morning, and there was no one in sight to molest you. Of course I carried a snub-nosed .38 I had smuggled into the country inside my shaving kit that the people at the San Francisco airport had not inspected very efficiently, but I had to come armed because you never knew if one of my former associates would spot me on the streets, and now I had Li to protect. She was my new full-time endeavor.
I told her I loved her in Toronto for the first time, and I asked her if she wanted to marry me.
We were walking in the city, on those red cobblestones, at two in the morning. It was peaceful and cold, and we were wearing winter coats that I’d bought here in Toronto. All we had back in California were light jackets and sweatshirts to fend off the chill of the Bay.
“We don’t need to be married, William. You have me and I have you and we don’t need anybody else to make us right.”
I told her I loved her for the second time, and my whole life before our meeting in San Francisco seemed to evaporate instantaneously from me. The war was gone, the Hmong had disappeared, my associates with the Italian surnames no longer existed. My list of targets was fiction. It was all made up.
Are you happy, William Roberts? I asked myself. The answer was yes. I was William Roberts, now, at this precise moment. Evan Azrael was no more. I had Li, and she was enough.
*
I had to get a job somewhere, and I had proper papers courtesy of the Italians, and our money was not enough to feed us for very much longer nor was it enough to gain us shelter for a Toronto winter. We secured a modest apartment in one of the middle-class areas of Toronto, but there were no red cobblestones—that was for the wealthier habitués of this Canadian city. The area was decent, the neighborhood was safe and clean, and, as before, we didn’t need anything except each other.
I answered a want ad for a job as a security man for a department store. In the interview I showed the man my bogus military papers. In the new version of me, I wasn’t an elite Army Ranger, but I was an ex-MP. Which served me well, and they gave me the job. I was to check the stores in a strip mall and see if their security measures were being enforced. The pay wasn’t great, but it was substantial enough for me to pay rent and buy groceries.
Li seemed to like working at coffee cafés, so she found a full-time position at a nice bistro about a mile from my strip mall.
I was William Roberts, now, completely. I had a new life. No one would find us here. I had dissolved again, the way I did in 1972. There was no trace of me for the police or for the Italians to find. I grew a beard and a mustache, and I kept them properly trimmed.
Li and I made love as if some clock were ticking somewhere, but we were so deliriously in love that neither of us cared about time running out on us.
The snow fell heavily that winter, and November bled into December.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chicago, 1984
The reason I became a policeman was because of my father, Jake. Being a cop was all I ever wanted to be. He died young, the old man, and Christ knows he had problems—booze and an on-again-off-again relationship with my mother, Eleanor. But he was a decent man, all in all, and they don’t build that model anymore.
Rita and I are still within our on-again mode. Things are going well, but it feels like the floor’s full of egg shells, and I’m always on-guard.
I get a call from a homicide detective in San Francisco. His name is Michael Serafin, and he has some news to share about Evan Azrael. We talk on the phone while Rita is in her own cubicle, next door.
“We have some word that a guy who matches Azrael’s physical description has been spotted here, in the Bay Area. The street slick who gave us all this says this guy’s working for the Italians, for our version of the Mafia. He’s doing hits for the Costello gang. That’s what this informant says, and he’s been straight with us since I’ve used him.”
“Do you have him going by that name?” I ask.
“No. The snitch said he goes by William Roberts. After you talked to my partner a month ago, this sighting lit up my radar about the murders of those Army guys. I remembered the name, and I showed the informant a picture we got from the Army, and he fingered Azrael as Roberts. Says he’s done more than one whack, but he has no idea where this guy Roberts lives.”
“We found an apartment near the Wharf, and the building manager said it was our guy also, but that Roberts had left the building a few weeks ago. Says there was a Vietnamese girl—woman, I guess—living with him. Nineteen, twenty years old, he figured.”
“I hear anything else, Detective Parisi, I’ll be in touch.”
I walk over to Rita’s office and I tell her about the call.
“You think it really is Azrael, Jimmy?’
“The man said it fits the Army’s description, and the snitch picked his photo out that they got from the Army.”
“You think he might be moving toward us?”
“He’s got a girl with him, maybe twenty years old. Vietnamese, this Serafin guy said.”
“What do you think she’s got to do with everything?”
“Maybe Azrael fell in love. Who knows?”
“He’s been quiet for a while, and the remaining three Rangers are still breathing, as far as we know, right?”
I nod at her.
“What if he really did fade away on us, Jimmy? You think he can stop and just disappear?”
“If he’s really a serial murderer, he can’t stop. You know the pattern. But perhaps this one’s different. Maybe he’ll just evaporate.”
“Maybe. If he really was smitten by this babe.”
“You mean the way I’m smitten with you, Rita?”
She looks at me with a little light dancing in her brown eyes. Then she looks down at the file in front of her on the desk, and I know that it’s all business again.
*
Steven James is running silent. We’ve been by his place a few times, and nothing’s happening.
Then, in mid-November, he gets picked up for drunk driving and for assaulting a police officer. I get the call from a patrolman named Leo Hardesty, a ten-year vet on the streets.
So I go down to the jail to have a look at the ex-Ranger. Rita stays back downtown, working on some paperwork for a murder case we closed in three days regarding a domestic in which a twenty-two-year-old male dispatched his eighteen-year-old lady with a baseball bat. It was a very unpleasant scene we encountered on that one, and there wasn’t much left of his
live-in lady’s head after he got done with her.
James is in a cell by himself. The jailer here at Cook County Jail lets me into the cage with him after I hand over my gun. Steven looks haggard, thin, and pale. He was brown and healthy looking the last time Rita and I talked to him, but now it’s as if he’s been suffering with a killer flu bug.
“The hell’s wrong with you?” I ask as I sit across from James, who perches on his cot.
“I’ve been sick.”
“I mean with the assault. Drunk driving—shit happens. But I thought you were smarter than having at it with a copper. What provoked you?”
He looks at me, sullen, and maybe even despondent.
“How would you like to have a noose around your neck, your hands tied behind you, and you’re standing on a very wobbly chair, outside, in a very stiff breeze?”
“You want to interpret that shit for me, James?”
He looks at me and shoots me a very sickly grin. It’s like he’s given up on everything and he’s got himself planted in the shit house on purpose. As if he got arrested intentionally.
“You hiding out here at Cook County Jail, Steven?”
“You sound like a shrink, Detective Parisi.”
“You can call me Jimmy if you promise not to go kung foo all over me.”
It raises a real smile on his lips this time.
“Maybe I need a psychiatrist, yeah.”
“This have something to do with what happened in Vietnam with Azrael and all the others?”
“Yeah. I suppose. Whatever. My life’s ruined, and maybe it was that that destroyed everything. And now I’m sitting around and waiting for Azrael to show up unannounced so that he can strap me to a chair and blow a hole in the back of my skull. Maybe I am hiding out here.”
“What happened? I’m not a judge in a tribunal, Steven. I’m only interested in the guy who killed Carl and the other two.”
“We wasted a village called Dia Nguc in Quang Tri Province. Azrael got hit, but he wasn’t a participant. He was on the ground, yelling for us to stop, but we didn’t. We shot the three VC targets we’d come there for, but then it all went to hell and we killed every living thing in that dink-assed hamlet. We shot women and children and old men. Apparently, the young men were off in the fields doing the rice or some goddam thing. We caught them when the only adversaries there were those three Cong cocksuckers. But they weren’t enough. The blood lust took over, and we said forget orders and we murdered the indigenous personnel, you know, the innocent bystanders?”