by Paul Gallico
He set off, slipping and half falling on the uneven footing, down into the darkness. He would find them. Then tonight there would be fun and money and girls and vodka.
The other two watched him go. The man with one eye—the other was a closed flap—had lost his gun in the panicky scramble when the tiger came out. He had retrieved it and now its menacing aim followed his flashlight down the corridor. “Let him go,” he said. “We take it more careful. They’re not armed, but no chances, huh?”
The second agreed. He was a thin-faced, pale man, a moustache weakly hanging on his upper lip. He too had been stunned by the frightening sequence of events in the engine room. But at least he had recovered in time to shoot the old man. He also had his flash in one hand, his automatic in the other. “Anton, he’s crazy,” he mumbled.
Shoulders nervously hunched, they worked their way warily into Broadway. They ignored the bodies their feet bumped against; dead men held no terrors for them. They ignored too the windless stench of the place.
The man with one eye took the left-hand side. There were several doors, mostly open, in the first few yards. He stood boldly in the doorway of the first; there was little to fear. It had been a storeroom which was now a jumble of broken shelves and scattered tins. There was nowhere anyone could hide. He checked two more, each one revealing nothing. His companion was several yards ahead, with fewer rooms to search, and was now only a scuffling shadow.
The next room took longer. It was the children’s playroom. That meant they must be moving from the part of the corridor which housed the unseen services to the public facilities. He kicked over a toy house which had landed on its side. Then he searched behind a huge shiny slide. Nothing.
The next door was already open. Again he stood boldly. The extraordinary topsy-turvy scene had only begun to reassemble itself in his mind as a hairdressing salon when his light picked out the girl. He flicked his gun up quickly. She was standing against the far wall, her arms flung open and her hands empty. Her wet suit was unzipped, and the browns and golds of her body burned like flames in the cold black coffin of the ship. Her stance, feet apart, head thrown back, unsmiling mouth parted, was unequivocal. She held out one hand and with all four fingers beckoned him. Her body arched backwards, a switch of silver hair flickered across her shoulder. He began to walk, mesmerized, towards her, the light, the gun, his one eye, all on that tense and bending body.
There is a fraction of time so small that the mind can only record a picture, without analyzing or rationalizing it. He saw clearly the girl. He saw too that into his picture there came a leg. From above, out of the blackness. What seemed a single, amputated leg. And it was moving fast. For all that, his eye recorded the faded blue of the denim, whitening at the knee. That was all. The two fantasies, of half-naked girl and dismembered limb, blew apart as the foot stabbed into his throat. It hit deep and hard, just below the chin. He gave a small cough as people do to attract attention, and slumped over backwards. His fantasies died with him.
Jason knew the short, slashing blow had connected properly as his foot sank into the softness of the neck and felt the snap as the man’s head kicked back. He let go of the chair suspended from the ceiling, where he had been clinging like a monkey, and dropped to the floor lightly.
He turned the man over. One eye stared at him. Jason closed it with a delicate finger. He was dead. “Well,” he said, “I guess he won’t be chasing the chicks anymore. You were great, Hely. You sure staged one hell of an act there. I nearly forgot to jump the bastard.”
Hely said, “That wasn’t an act, Jason.” He looked over his shoulder. She went on, “No, Jason. It was for you. Now!”
The tone was imperative. Jason rose and advanced towards her. They both saw in that blinkered moment the force that drove them together. It was beyond attraction and love. It was beyond even strength and sexuality. It was one of those few dark, undeniable, elemental powers that cross all moralities and codes—that raw instinct that canceled all others. It was life and death, together. And for a time the whole earth revolved around the axis of their spinning, greedy bodies, until at last they sank into each other’s exhausted arms.
As natural as the cries and gasps that had come from her throat, the tears then came from Hely’s eyes. She sobbed joyously on his shoulder. She cried, and cried again in delight at her own tears. She had discovered something in herself—the capacity to feel. She was no longer independent. She was no longer free. She was no longer untouched by the world around her. She was part of it, and she wept.
She would throw the rings away, she thought. They no longer mattered. She lay in the crook of his lap as he sat, knees up, back against the wall, her tears warm on her cheek. His voice spilled over, her, comforting and warm.
He was talking about his early life. It was all about a small town somewhere, a sunny place where fish took boys’ hooks, and it seemed right that they should. He talked too of men called slants and gooks who suddenly seemed to have thoughts and feelings and families like him, and a friend who went fishing with him, and the fish took the hooks just the way they did back in his small town, and the friend, the man who never waved or spoke as the helicopter left, but stayed to die.
He spoke of what he called “the little people,” the victims of vast international policies, whose lives were upturned at the stroke of a dictator’s pen or the whim of a fickle electorate half a world away. The little people all around the world whose lives are exposed in the name of expediency.
His voice came through her trance. “All they taught me was warfare. I can fire any gun in the field, I can drive a tank, I can fly a chopper, I can sail a boat, I can climb a mountain, and I can kill with my bare hands. That’s my craft. Only now I try to use it to straighten out a debt I can’t repay in full.”
Some of it she understood. But all of it revealed a man who was propelled by belief. That belief would change her life as surely as it had changed his.
The moustache had not grown as he had hoped. With the back of his flashlight hand, he brushed it and it felt soft and feminine. It was not easy to be a respected killer at the age of twenty if you could not even produce a virile moustache.
He kicked open the door on his right. It looked like a small theater. From the corridor, his flash beam revealed little of the inside, and he waited for a moment. He was anxious to accomplish this job well and was prepared to be cautious.
So far it had not been a good day. He was tired of the other members of the crew of the Komarevo teasing him about his age, his slight build, and the not absolutely essential morning shave. What was it Bela had said? “It looks like a baby mouse that lay down and died.” The others had laughed.
Then there had been the tiger. He had not run away, it was true, but he had frozen in the corner, the Stechkin useless in his hand. He had recovered only in time to shoot that stupid old man with the pistol, and the captain had also got in two shots at him. Captain Bela had been furious about the way things were going wrong. This was his chance to recover the situation for his boss. There were only four men and two girls, all unarmed, and he would run them down and destroy them. Then Bela would respect him, and the others would stop treating him like a child.
He walked slowly through the doorway. His right hand was ready on the trigger. His left, holding the light, also supported the gun. There would be no mistakes.
Yes, it was a theater. His light, clumsily angled upwards, revealed the dangling seats. It was odd, this upside-down feeling everywhere. The dead air was unmoving. He had to brace his legs to hold his position on the ceiling, cambered by the angle of the ship. His feet inched forward until they stopped against a heavy, inert object. He knew what it would be. A body. On the blurred rim of the beam he could see three or four of them: men, judging by their clothes. Two of them appeared to be in dinner jackets. Another was in an undershirt. What had he been doing at midnight on New Year’s Eve that entailed being half-dressed? Well, at least he would have died happy.
Something was
wrong about the seats above his head. One of them, only one, was not hanging down. There was a tape or something hanging from it. The seat suddenly crashed down, and he felt his nerves prick and his stomach hollow and dropped into a crouch. The gun and light pointed at the seat. Why had there been that sudden movement? His left leg rested on the back of one of the bodies, the one in the undershirt. Eyes, light, gun, nerves, everything was directed to that seat which completed the perfect symmetry of the row, like inverted gravestones.
The movement of the seat had been odd. There was something else odd too. Even as he realized what it was, it was too late. It was the body beneath his leg: it was warm. But before he had a chance to work on the thought he found himself being catapulted into the air and across the room. The body beneath him had thrown him three or four yards away. He landed on his face, his arms and legs flying, and for a moment felt himself spinning on a surface of glass, like a fallen skater. His Stechkin had gone. Where was his gun? Still spinning, he wildly swung the light around. He moved it too quickly and the beam skimmed over the unhelpful shadows. The gun must be nearby somewhere. Frantically he saw the dead man rising. The bulky figure in the underwear shirt was heading toward him, a menacing, waddling figure, with arms bent, holding a rope or something. He grasped the light in both hands, half sitting up, to steady it. He must find the Stechkin before that living corpse got to him.
The now steady beam found it, cool and black and polished. It had come to rest about four yards to his left, against the wall. Two leaps, two frog leaps from this position, and he would reach it. But there was no time. The advancing figure was almost upon him. Then there was a crashing, splintering sound. The pounding figure sank a foot into the ground. He saw the look of stupefaction on his pursuer’s face and saw him lift enraged, imploring hands and cry, “Sweet Suffering Jesus!” Of course, the lights! The theater lights were concealed in glass-fronted boxes built flush into the ceiling. That was the glass surface he had traversed. The bulky man had crashed through. He was imprisoned around his calves by jagged knives of glass.
Bela’s man spluttered a mad laugh of triumph and leaped towards the gun. He landed halfway there and immediately sprang again. But the trapped man grabbed his own legs and tore them free of the savage glass teeth and sprang towards him.
Desperately Bela’s man scrabbled to regain his gun. It was still warm from his previous grip. But his panting pleasure exploded into a scream of pain as he felt two battering-ram knees punch into the small of his back. He felt a dry, stubbly material across his face, and then stretch and tighten round his neck. There was no air now, not even the poisonous air there had been before; white lights came behind his eyes and his tongue turned to a balloon. Then the blinding lights in his head went out.
Rogo stayed on his back for a whole minute afterwards, holding his suspenders stretched as tightly as he could. Then he slid off and spun the dead man over. He saw a small weasel face with what might have been a moustache or just a careless shave. He was only a kid. Festooned around his neck were Rogo’s suspenders, and the light showed the decorative horses that pranced down them.
Linda had bought them for his Christmas present. When was that? A week ago. She got them with horses because she said they had class. Horses! Class! Horseback riding ain’t my style, Rogo remembered saying, but it was no use. Linda was dead now, and Rogo had killed a man with the suspenders. Well, one thing you gotta give good-class suspenders: they don’t bust when you strangle guys with them. He unwound his gift and stood up.
The trap had worked. Just a pair of suspenders and a movie seat. It was the oldest trick in the world. Get the guy to look the other way and then hit him. He’d fallen for it all the way. Christ, he thought, but that had been close when the kid just about sat on him. Rogo had been worried for a second then. And those goddamn panel lights! He felt the warmth creeping into his shoes. He took the light from the man’s unprotesting fingers and shone it down. His evening dress pants, filthy, greasy and shapeless, were now shredded below the knees. He looked like a castaway. Blood rose through the long, straight lacerations that fringed his legs. The hell with it, he thought. Mike Rogo ain’t no ballerina anyway.
THE TUNNEL OF DEATH
10
It was the sight of that familiar freckled face that snapped the screaming woman out of her hysterics.
“You remember me,” Martin pressed, holding her face in his hands. “Mr. Martin. You know, the Mr. Martin who kept on pestering for vitamin pills?”
“Oh, Mr. Martin!” She groaned with relief. “Oh, Mr. Martin, you and those pills. And I told you they didn’t do a scrap of good.”
He grinned up at Coby and Klaas as they gathered round the sobbing woman in the library. “I haven’t had any since dinner last night and I’m doing okay. You must’ve been right.”
As soon as the shock of the screams had worn off, they had seen where they were coming from. They had picked their way through the mounds of books to the furthermost corner of the library where the slumped body shuddered and groaned.
At first Martin did not recognize her. She was soaking and filthy. The impeccable white uniform he remembered was now a torn, stained rag. The jauntily authoritative hat gone. The hair, formerly severe, straggled around her face, greased with water and oil. It was hard to imagine that this defeated, whimpering creature had been the affable despot he had known as the ship’s nurse. He had last seen her with the doctor leading a group of passengers along Broadway towards the bow of the ship. They had insisted that it was the only way to escape. What had happened to them all?
Talk of Martin and his pills jerked her back to reality. She sat up and looked at the little group. At the sight of Coby, another woman, however young, she made a futile attempt to shape the drenched wreckage of her hair. Then she explained. She had been sent by the doctor to bring up the rear of their column of refugees, and they had headed towards the rescue they were confident awaited them. The water hit them quite unexpectedly when the doctor opened a watertight door, and the force of the inrushing flood had swamped them.
She had managed to run a little way before the waters caught her and swept her back along Broadway. The currents that must have swirled through the ship had taken her into the library, and she lay clinging on the top of the shelves in a bubble of air that remained when the water level settled. With the ship’s last shift of angle, the sea had been sucked from the room, and she simply dropped to the ceiling. She had lain there since, terrified, disorientated, sobbing, and screaming.
She was fast recovering the self-possession of her training, and Martin was beginning to explain the new circumstances, when they heard the heavy clumping of feet and bumping and cursing in the corridor. The oaths were not in English. One of Bela’s men must have penetrated the traps.
They listened anxiously.
“There’s nothing we can do by ourselves, is there?” Coby said.
Martin’s irritation was fueled even further when Klaas said to him, “How can we fight them if they have guns?”
“Well,” Martin was pleased to hear that his thin voice sounded quite firm. “We’re on our own now. We must try to fight. Don’t be afraid, Coby, they’ve only got two arms and legs like us, you know.”
He checked their faces for the confidence he was seeking to inspire. There was none. He understood. It was hard for them to feel confidence in a little guy with red hair and baby-blue eyes.
He tiptoed back nearer the door and signaled the others to follow him. The nurse got to her feet. Klaas shook his head in doubt. Coby looked at the unlikely hero with the Adam’s apple bobbing in his stalk of a neck, but she followed him, and squeezed his arm in encouragement.
Even Martin’s eagerness for action wavered when he saw the shape in the doorway. It was the one they had called Anton, the giant who was going to torture Mr. Rogo. Martin felt his breathing quicken.
Anton stepped in and shone his light around. This was the room, he was sure of it. And there they were. The old seaman. The pr
etty girl. A woman he had never seen before. The skinny little man. He gave a chuckle, a genuinely gratified chuckle. He reached for the gun in his belt and rocked towards them.
Martin knew that was the moment. “Right, let him have it, folks!” he shouted. For one paralyzed second, he realized he had no idea what to do next. Then he snatched up a book and flung it with a twist of his wiry frame. It hit Anton just below the eye.
Anton swayed clumsily. He shifted his foot to regain balance and it slipped on a pile of soaking books. His great arms waved wildly, the flashlight beam flying around the room like a demented lighthouse.
Another volume caught him on the temple. “Great stuff, Coby!” said Martin. She had been the first to follow his example. Then Klaas too joined in, and the nurse.
Suddenly the air was thick with books. Some half open and spinning and fluttering, others cemented with water and flying as straight as rocks, and the darkened room seemed filled with them, clattering and whirling. Anton reeled around, confused by the din and blinded by the hurricane all around him. His head flinched back and his arms tried to fend off the blows as he lurched around.
Martin was whooping jubilantly. “More, more, Coby. We’ve got him going now!”
The nurse was recovered. She hurled a book that smacked Anton loudly on the ear. “There, you big brute!” she shouted, and pushed back a strand of dyed blonde hair.
It was a bear-baiting. Anton was the huge, powerful beast unable to come to grips with the little terriers that tormented him, and the angrier he got the less he could think clearly. His gun was gone. As he tried to hold out the light before him to see his torturers, a heavy book from Klaas’s hand caught him full in the face. His balance went completely. He crashed over backwards like a demolished building. They had felled him.
Martin was beside himself with excitement. He was grinning and laughing, the wild glee of the action surging through him. They had done it. They had conquered the giant. Who needed Jason? Mr. Rogo would have to treat him with more respect after this!