A very old woman tottered by, walking quickly home along the Hudson.
“She should not be out by herself,” the bull-shouldered man said.
“I don’t think she’s a she,” the raincoated one answered. “Probably a policeman. They do that now.”
“America.” The bull-shouldered one shook his head.
They sat in silence until the old woman was gone from sight.
“Time!” the bull-shouldered one said.
“Twenty-five past.”
“Scylla is late! He’s trying to goad me!”
“Scylla is never late” came from behind them.
They whirled.
Scylla’s voice came from the dark shadows. “I’ve been watching your stomachs churn ever since you got here. And, may I add, enjoying it thoroughly.”
“Come out here!” the bull-shouldered one said. It was an order.
Not obeyed. “Before the passwords?” Scylla’s voice contained astonishment. “Such a breach of etiquette—where is our respect for tradition?”
Angrily, the bull-shouldered man said, “Once they could swim there.” He was pointing to the Hudson. “Now, if they try it, they die.”
There was the sound of a fingersnap. “Would you believe it,” Scylla said, “I’ve clean forgotten what I’m supposed to answer.”
“ ‘There are many ways of dying’—say it—‘there are many ways of dying’—all right, we’re done with that, now come down here.”
“All right,” Scylla said, “but if I’m a fraud, it’s your fault.”
The bull-shouldered man watched as suddenly a shadow moved away from the trees, down the slight grassy incline toward them.
“Your behavior is very irritating to me, I want you to know that,” the bull-shouldered man said, and probably he would have gone on, but Scylla was all over him saying, “Don’t give me any static about my behavior after the shit you’ve been pulling.”
“You know perfectly well why.”
“We’ve had a business relationship, that’s what it is, that’s what it’s been, and what you’ve been pulling hasn’t got a goddamn thing to do with business.”
“It has to do with trust.” The bull-shouldered man stared angrily up at Scylla. “What it comes to is this: Can I trust you?”
“You never could, you only had to, and you don’t any more—you’re the one that hired Chen, aren’t you? You already tried to have me killed, so don’t give me any innocent shit about ‘can I trust you?’ ”
The bull-shouldered man softened. “What happens to us now? Surely I cannot fight you; if Chen failed, there wouldn’t be much point to me trying, I’m a little too old for hand to hand ...” He stopped talking then, because the blade had been in his grip since the word “point,” which meant there really was no further need for prattle.
To prevent a master technician from performing at peak efficiency, not a great deal has to be done. This surprises most people, but is nonetheless true. To prevent a hook shot by Abdul-Jabbar, you don’t have to knock him down. You don’t even have to come in contact with his hand. A simple nudge at the elbow is sufficient to make the missile lose target, and just so, the one in the raincoat did not need to do a great deal to Scylla—just hold tight to Scylla’s hand for a brief moment; one brief moment, really, and that was enough.
Scylla, of course, saw the blade, saw something, at any rate, and he immediately knew the bull-shouldered one was into a supposedly lethal act, but he was not worried. Scylla also knew that he had not paid much attention to the raincoated one, but that was because there was no way the enemy could match him when it came to strength or skill.
He was right, but he was wrong.
The raincoated one had no intention of matching anyone, just a simple movement to delay, holding tight to Scylla’s hands for barely a breath intake. But it was enough. Scylla ripped free, of course, and his great arms went quickly to protect his stomach.
But too late. Too late. The knife was home.
Was it a knife? Scylla had been stabbed before, but never by anything like this, never by a weapon that went so deep so quickly. He was like a figure sculpted from clotted cream, and the blade or scalpel or whatever it was entered below his navel with such speed and force that Scylla could only grunt and drop his arms in weak surprise.
Then the blade began its journey upward.
Scylla would never have guessed the bull-shouldered man possessed such strength, because no matter how sharp the weapon, flesh and gristle still require power to sever, and the bull-shouldered man moved in close for leverage and lifted the blade straight up through his body.
Scylla began to spurt.
The bull-shouldered man continued his butchering in silence.
Scylla commenced falling.
The bull-shouldered man stepped out of the way. He had a vast acquaintanceship with death, and he pulled his blade free, and before Scylla had hit the ground he was on his way out of the park, knowing the big man was dead or on the verge. The raincoated one followed closely behind.
“That was too bad,” the bull-shouldered one said.
“You did what you had to do.”
“I know that. But now it starts to get ugly.”
The raincoated one knew truth when it was spoken.
Back by the bench, Scylla lay. He was familiar enough with anatomy to know that he was done. Death was a certainty; the only choice remaining was whether to die by the Hudson or not.
It was a filthy fucking place and it smelled in summer and was really good only for rat housing, and that thought, that the rats might get him, served to make him blink. Work on anger, he told himself. Stay with anger, anger might get you going, and he forced the functioning sections of his mind to concentrate on his stupidity in allowing himself to get caught from behind. Wait till the news of his passing hit The Division. The great Scylla, done in by an old fart and an amateur.
“JESUS!” Scylla screamed, and while his fury echoed, he was halfway to his feet. He clutched his arms across his body and held himself together as best he could. Then he started to find his way out of the park. It was going to be hard. Probably impossible. No. Nothing was impossible.
He was Scylla the rock, and he had promises to keep.
17
BABE PACED.
His room was small, his legs long, and he couldn’t really get started before he had to stop, spin, turn. What he wanted more than anything was to sprint to the reservoir, just take it all full out and see how many times he could circle the thing before he fell exhausted on the October grass.
He paused, looked at his watch. Still not midnight, but coming up fast on the outside. If Elsa was going to call, it would be soon, because movies would be letting out soon. She must have left the restaurant by half-past 8 at the outside, reservations had been for 7:30, and the whole fiasco couldn’t have taken more than an hour.
He had gotten out Doc’s Gucci bag, packed it full, which was a stupid gesture, probably—“Never darken my door again”—and he felt like an ass for having done it, but when he’d gotten back to his room and seen Doc’s toilet articles in the bathroom, it had gone through him bad, and he’d just grabbed everything and stuffed it in the goddamn Gucci.
Maybe I better unpack it, he decided. It would be more fun than just pacing. He opened the bag, studied it. I’ll unpack his stuff, and I’ll put it back, but I’ll do a crappy job, so that way he’ll know I’m not forgiving him but I’m not grudge-holding either.
Babe knew what Doc’s line would be—he was just trying to look out for his kid brother. Doc would say that, and probably it was true, because Doc had always looked out for him, ever since H.V. died. He had been ten, Doc twenty, and for the next years, Doc had always been the one to bind up his adolescent wounds. He took out Doc’s shirts, dumped them back where they’d been, grabbed the toilet-articles kit and the goddamn Burgundy bottles, and was putting them in their proper places when the phone rang.
Babe swooped down on the thing. “Elsa?�
� he said.
“He didn’t ask me if I loved you. I waited, but he never did.”
“Elsa—listen to me—nothing happened, you got that?”
She sounded hollow. “What do we do, Tom?” she said; then, after a pause, “now?”
“Forget it, I told you—there’s not a damn thing to remember.”
“I’ve been to the movies. Almost two times through I sat there thinking. We can’t forget it, because it did happen, it took place, we were both there, and it was all true. Except he never once asked me if I cared.”
“Let me run on up and see you, huh? I’ll cab, it’ll only take a sec.”
“No. You would hold me, and I would hold you, and nothing would be spoken. I lied about my age because you looked a child, even younger than you are, and I didn’t want to frighten you, and I lied about the German because Levy is Jewish and many Jews still hate us. I was four when Hitler died, but many Jews think all Germans planned the blitzkrieg.”
“Well, I don’t, so just lemme come up there, I swear we’ll just talk, like now.”
“There’s more. There are other things he did not ask. I’ve been married and divorced. I almost yelled that at him before I ran away. The only mistake he made was he didn’t ask me if I loved you. I let him touch me and pretended to smile because he was your brother and he had that same look so many of your businessmen have, the successful ones, arrogant, this is mine, they seem to say, and that is mine, I make lots of money so everything my eye sees is mine, you are mine, and wine was being drunk and I did not want a scene, only that he should like me, that he should approve, he was your brother and you care for him. I want to take today and burn it off the calendar.”
“It didn’t happen,” Babe said. “I told you to forget it a million times already.”
“It would fester if we did that. Don’t you want to know about my husband?”
“To tell the truth, no, I don’t,” Babe lied. “Why should I want to know about him? If I told you I’d been married, would you suddenly go to pieces if I didn’t describe my wife to you? I haven’t been married, nothing like that, but hell, if it makes you feel better to tell me a little about him, I won’t stop you or anything. You were probably just a kid, right? You were probably young and he was some jock and gorgeous, only stupid, except, being as you were practically an infant, you didn’t really know what a moron he was, and when you did, you ended it, right?”
He could tell she was trying to keep things Teutonic and serious, desperate not to laugh.
“Probably a shot-putter,” he went on, “you krauts are big on the weight events, probably grunted on his release—hey, if you’re German do you grunt in German? I mean, an American shot-put guy, he goes ‘oof’ when he lets fly, do your guys go ‘ach’ or along those lines?”
“You really are impossible,” she managed, before she began to laugh.
Hot damn, I did it.
“Babe.”
Doc stood in the doorway, arms across himself.
He hung up the phone.
“BABE!!!” On that cry, Doc reached his arms out for his brother.
And his stomach began to slip away.
Doc went into his fall.
Babe caught him before he hit, cradled him, hugged him with everything he had till they were bathed in blood. Doc tried to whisper, Babe tried to listen.
It must have been fifty seconds before Doc died.
Long time.
18
THE COPS WERE ACTING funny.
Not in the beginning. But before too long, there were crazy things going on.
Babe sat quietly in the corner. Maybe they were acting funny in the beginning too and he just hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t noticing a whole lot along about then. He had called the police, they had come, two men, quickly, and then, soon after that, three more. They had all five talked to one another in muffled tones—at least they seemed muffled to Babe, but maybe they weren’t. He wasn’t hearing a whole lot then either. He was just sitting quiet. Quiet in a chair. The chair in a corner. His arms dangling down.
Thinking.
He was the last one left. That’s all he was thinking. Just that, putting it through his mind first one way, then another. Once there had been four of them, mother, father, Doc, and Babe. His mother went in a car crash when he was six, and he had no memory of her, except for the couple of pictures H.V. kept around the house on places like the piano or tucked in a bookcase corner.
But it wasn’t the car crash that killed her. They just had to put down something for a cause of death, and her car had met a tree and she had been driving, but what really killed her was the scandal, H.V.’s humiliation; that was what had done her in. Sometimes Babe thought she wasn’t dead at all, but was down passing the time in Florida with McCarthy and Kennedy and old FDR. Whenever there was a peculiar death, always the rumors had it that the person was alive and in Florida. Why Florida, Babe wondered. Jack Kennedy was a vegetable in Florida, and Roosevelt had been bombed by Stalin and the other commies, but he’d survived, and he was down there too, taking in all that sunshine. Sometimes Babe wondered if it wouldn’t be an interesting subject for a paper. If you were a little paranoid and enjoyed tracking suspicion. Like the Bermuda Triangle. That would have been fun to write too.
His father he had found, just like he’d told Biesenthal. And in the fifteen years since, whenever he really wanted to ruin himself a little he’d scream, “It’s your fault, your fault, if you’d taken the fucking wool paper in to him he never would have done it, you’d have been there in time, you could have kept him alive!”
Except, even when he’d told Biesenthal the truth, he wasn’t telling the truth. Because he was ten and he could hear H.V. in his bedroom, staggering around, cursing, sometimes falling down, and he was frightened, afraid that if he went in, his own father would do something to him, hit him for interrupting, cause even more pain, a substance nobody needed any more of just then. Simply put, it came to this: If he had been less of a coward, his father wouldn’t have died.
Doc had been at classes when the shot came. Doc was always around except for school, where he was a whiz, if you didn’t count chem class, which he hated. That was Doc’s first reaction when he got home and found H.V. dead and Babe hysterical. “It was chem class,” he kept saying. “I was gonna cut the goddamn thing. If I’d just cut the goddamn thing, I could have kept him alive.”
It was almost, but not quite, funny, Doc railing how H.V.’s death was his fault while all the time Babe knew that was hot air, it was really his; the wool paper proved it. It would have made a terrific argument, once Babe got old enough to give Doc trouble verbally. Nothing was as much fun as a neat argument, two guys going at it, wham-wham, knocking each other’s points to smithereens. God they had had some great times, screaming at each other while Babe was losing in his attempt to cope well with puberty.
No more arguments now.
Babe glanced quickly at the sheet the cops had spread over his brother. Someone was definitely under there, but there was no possibility of its being Doc. Babe didn’t think about his own death much, but when he did, it was always going to be Doc who would be there to put him in the ground. Doc was so big and strong and he never got sick, and if there was a flu bug moving through Cincinnati and Babe was in Cleveland, he caught it. No question: When Babe died, Doc would take care of the details, see that it all went right, no goof-ups, all smooth and proper and fine.
The cops were mumbling again; the head cop was saying it couldn’t have been robbery because there was still a wallet. Motive—Babe thought for a moment. That must be what they’re mumbling about. The head cop went through Doc’s wallet, then hurried to the phone.
And that, Babe guessed, was when things started getting funny.
They hadn’t asked him anything, in the first place. Oh, a few things, like about who and when, and Babe did his best to speak sentences, but that was hard, so he just nodded or shrugged; he wasn’t being difficult, he wanted to explain, it was that
he wasn’t in any terrific mood for words just then, but he didn’t really have to explain that, they seemed to understand, kept the questions to a minimum, and simple ones at that.
The head cop was mumbling on the phone. Babe couldn’t make it out exactly. I should really try, he told himself. That’s your brother they’re talking about, pay attention.
But he couldn’t concentrate on anything until he heard Elsa’s voice from the hall. One of the cops was blocking the entrance, and Babe stood, made his way to them, muttered “Please” to the cop, then went into the hallway with Elsa.
“You hung up so without warning, I didn’t know what to do. I waited but you didn’t call back. I had to know you were all right, so I came.”
“Doc’s dead,” Babe said. There—after all these years, he’d given away the secret, said “Doc” without even realizing it. But that was all right. You needed two for a secret. “My brother’s dead, murdered.”
She wasn’t buying. Not from the way her head shook, side to side and back.
“It’s true, believe me, okay? I’m awful tired, Elsa.”
“Are you sure?”
Babe began to lose control of his voice. “Am I sure what? Am I sure he’s my brother or am I sure he’s dead? Yes and yes, Elsa, I’m sure.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and took a step away. “I was only worried about you. I’ll go now.”
Babe nodded.
“How could such a thing happen? Here; what a terrible city. A robbery was it? An accident with a car?”
“That was my mother,” Babe answered, and the second the words popped out he saw the look of absolute confusion starting across her splendid face, and right there, within half an hour of the death of his beloved, Babe broke out laughing. It was like a woman he’d heard of who’d lost, in the very same hour, in two separate and totally unrelated accidents, in two entirely different states, a father and a child. The father died first and she went to pieces, and when the call about the child came she heard herself laughing. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was just sometimes you had to laugh or go wiggy.
The Novels of William Goldman: Boys and Girls Together, Marathon Man, and the Temple of Gold Page 105