by Barry, Mike
Wulff watched her climb down with the motions of someone sinking to their death, he watched the frozen line of troops, he looked at the man with the BAR and he did then what he knew he would have to do very quickly and without any kind of mental set whatsoever. It was impossible to prepare for this kind of thing. You had to do what you did before thought; thought in itself could be transferred to the enemy.
He levelled the point thirty-eight, which he had been holding throughout all of this. He pointed it yards downrange and in one savage motion on the trigger as the girl tumbled the last few strands of rope he blew the BAR man’s head off. The man fell into the sand kicking.
And then he charged the unguarded Browning.
XIV
Williams had been running since he had left the rooming house, he had hit the street, running, had headed in what he hoped was east, running, had paused at an intersection and then, running, had commandeered a car, not even thinking, just running, desperate to get to the beach. He was obsessed with a feeling of lost time; by his watch it was still only three A.M., hours until the rendezvous, but undoubtedly they would have the beach sealed off long before that time and there would be no way for him to get on. He had to get there; what he would do once there he did not know but around that simple essential purpose everything was focused.
The car he had commandeered, simply by going over to it idling at a traffic light, showing his gun and climbing in, was driven by a nineteen-year-old college student and his date who wanted no part of Williams at all. “Listen,” the boy said, the girl huddling against him, hiding her face in his shoulder, shifting and clashing gears, “I don’t want the car. You can have the car. Why don’t you just let me pull over and let us out and you can take it?”
“Not necessary,” Williams said, “I don’t want the car either, I just want a ride. Take me down to the beachfront in front of the Fontainbleau and get out of here. I’ve got no quarrel with you.”
“But I don’t know Miami!” the boy said, “I don’t know where the Fontainbleau is, I’ve got nothing to do with this, I’m just down here on a vacation.”
“It’s hopeless, Lenny,” the girl said, “we’re going to be killed. I come from New York, I know all about these mass murderers. First they make you do whatever they say and then they kill you. You can’t change their evil desires.”
“Take the car,” the boy said, but he was sensible enough to keep on driving, “really you can take it, I don’t want it. It’s never been any good anyway. It’s—”
“Don’t argue with him, Lenny,” the girl said into his jacket, “the more you try to reason with them the more they get to turning around and killing you. The only thing to do is to agree with everything they say. Take him to the Fontainbleau.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“Well don’t look at me,” the girl said, rearing up, wiping a hand across her forehead, then adjusting a strand of hair back over her ear in that casually heartbreaking feminine way which even now Williams found could move him, “I don’t know where the Fontainbleau is, Lenny. Do you know where the Fontainbleau is?” she said to Williams.
“Just keep on driving east,” he said, “I’m sure we’ll hit it.”
“He’s sure we’ll hit it, Lenny. He’s sure we’ll hit it, so just keep on driving east. You know, there’s no need to kill us,” the girl said, “you can just take the car—”
“He doesn’t want the car, Jill,” Lenny said, “remember? We already discussed that. I offered him the car and he said he didn’t want the car and you said to stop fighting with him.”
“Listen,” Williams said, “listen folks, I’m not a murderer or a lunatic. Just do yourselves a favor and relax. I just have to get to the beach, fast.”
“Oh I’m sure you’re not a mass murderer or a crazy man,” Jill said, “I never said that, did I? Of course I didn’t. You just want a ride to the beach. So you’ll get a ride to the beach—”
“Shut up, Jill,” Lenny said, “please shut up.” There was no traffic; they accelerated through the dead streets at forty, fifty miles an hour, Williams holding the gun on them loosely from the back seat. It was his first engagement in criminal activity unless you counted dealing with Father Justice in Harlem or running munitions to the coast or gunning down a group of troops in the trailer park in Los Angeles. He did not. All of those were legitimate acts, the kind that an ex-cop could engage in without rationalization, but this was different. Kidnapping, assault, the threat to murder. It didn’t look good. It just didn’t look very good at all. Still, the remarkable thing was how you were able to accommodate yourself to this. There was nothing difficult about crossing the line; it even gave you a high, dense kind of freedom. It could be fun. He hoped that he would never reach the point where he would see it in just that way.
“You don’t know the way to the Fontainbleau, Lenny,” Jill said, “you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re just driving around, you’re hoping that you’ll come across it.”
“Shut up, Jill, please shut up,” Lenny said, hunched over the wheel, “do me a favor and don’t say anything more.”
“He’s doing a good job,” Williams said, “if you just keep on driving to the beach you’ll hit that beachfront drive and you’ll be able to see it. He’s doing fine.”
“Lenny, I told you I didn’t want to go out tonight,” Jill said, “I told you that we should have stayed in the motel. Why did you want to go out for a drive? Wasn’t the motel enough for you. You spent six months trying to get me to a motel and after two nights you want to go driving around Miami. That wasn’t very smart, Lenny.”
“Jill,” the boy said, “I can’t listen to this anymore. I don’t want to hear it, you’ve got to cut it out, Jill, this is stupid.”
“Well I have a right to say it, don’t I? I just don’t know how you’re thinking, Lenny, you beg me to come away with you, shack up in a motel and I do it finally and then on the second night you want to go out for a drive—”
“Why don’t we just cool it?” Williams said, “I’m sure that everybody here has a good, reasonable point of view but this isn’t doing anybody any good. Now you’ll be out of this in just a little while and you don’t want to do anything or say anything you’ll be regretting; you want to have a good relationship, you want to keep on going with one another, don’t you?”
“Don’t ask me,” Jill said, “ask him.”
“Shut up, Jill,” Lenny said. “Just shut up.” He dropped down a little hill, went up a gentle rise and then Williams could see the beach in the distance, to the right, the huge sign of the Fontainbleau spilling light on it. They might have been three blocks away from the beachfront now.
“You did good,” Williams said, “see that? You did fine.”
“Yeah,” Lenny said, “I always do fine.”
“Now you can stop right here. Right here is fine, I’ll hike it from here.”
“He’s going to get out now Lenny. Get down in the seat, for God’s sake, this is when they put a bullet in your head because they don’t want any witnesses.”
“For God’s sake,” Lenny said, “I can’t stand this anymore,” and the girl thrust her head like an axe into Lenny’s shoulder. “I’m waiting,” she said, lifting a palm to cover the back of her head, “I’m ready, I’m ready.”
“Oh Jesus,” Williams said. The car rolled to a stop, Lenny pumping the brakes spasmodically, and Williams lifted himself against the seat, then was held by the weight of the girl. “Excuse me,” he said, “you’ll have to get out.”
“I knew it. I knew it.”
“You’ll have to move, I’m sorry.”
“I won’t,” she said. “You’ll have to shoot me down right here. I won’t get out. If I’m going to be gunned down it’s going to be in a car with my friends.”
“For God’s sake,” Williams said as gently as he could, “you’ll have to get out because it’s a coupe and I can’t push by you, don’t you understand?”
“Jill,” Le
nny said, “please get out.”
“Oh all right,” she said. She seemed vaguely disappointed as if something for which she had long prepared herself was not coming to pass after all; she tossed her head in a very feminine and to Williams quite infuriating way, poked more hair out of her eyes, lifted the door and got out of the car. Williams pushed through, she looked at him. “I just want you to know,” she said, “that I remember your every feature and that you’ll pay for this.”
“Oh,” Williams said, “in that case I guess I do have to kill you, right? Because we desperate psychopaths can’t have any witnesses to our acts, remember?”
“Oh my God,” Jill said, “oh my God,” and rammed herself into the car, buttocks heaving, trembling as Lenny leaned across her dense weight to pull the door closed and then the Volkswagen yanked itself out of there, the clutch chattering. Williams watched the little taillights bob their way out of his line of sight and then he set out toward the beach, moving as quickly as he had on the street from the rooming house, pacing himself to a level, even run which could hold for distance—
—And although it was ridiculous under the highly dangerous and menacing circumstances, although he hated himself in a way for it because there was so little justification … despite all of that, as he ran he found himself smiling, seeing the girl’s face again and then the bleaker image of the downed guard superimposed itself upon this and he was suddenly out of breath, suddenly staggering to maintain his pace, suddenly very chastened and frightened as he raced toward the beachfront.
But he kept on.
Wulff would need him.
XV
In the copter all of her fright had gone away and she had felt a level, resigned kind of acceptance unlike anything she had known before, unless you counted in the speed jags which would give her that kind of feeling but only in a flushed, overexcited way. Now she was perfectly at rest. She saw her own death, saw it plain, and having seen this she had accepted and with that came strength because she had passed a point which very few of them, the death-dealers, ever had. So, sitting in the copter, cramped up, arms around her knees, she had rocked and plunged with the motion of the craft, saying nothing, only savoring this peace which was not courage because it had nothing to do with the will to resist until the old man sat beside her and shockingly she felt the contact of his palm on her knee.
She pushed it away. “No,” he said, “don’t do that. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
The engine noise was terrific; the walls themselves were shaking, the thin canvas of the bulkheads, but she could hear him distinctly. “Don’t talk to me,” she said, “don’t say anything.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to you, does it?”
“Get away from me, you filthy, dirty, stinking old man!” she shouted at him and the others in the copter heard this: there were only two, the pilot, working over the controls and Calabrese’s ever-present bodyguard who was apparently being airsick in a corner, his face a luminous yellow, staring down, his hands cupped to his cheeks. The pilot smiled thinly.
“All right,” Calabrese said, “have it your own way, then. This isn’t going to do you any good you know. You’re going to go down on that beach.”
“I know I’m going to go down on the beach!”
“If your friend had not been so stupid and stubborn this would never have happened. If we had worked this out in a fashion that gentlemen could, you would never have been taken from your home let alone put up here. I didn’t want to do this, you know. He just gave me no choice.”
She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t have to listen to this. I won’t listen to it.”
“He can’t save you, you know. If you’re counting on miracles of some sort there are none. The only hope is that he does exactly as I have asked him to do. But he has never done that.”
“Please go away,” she said.
“Calabrese shrugged. “Where can we go? We’re in very tight quarters here. I thought that we might be able to make peace before the end.”
“Make peace?” she said The pilot was staring at her frankly now, his hands manipulating the controls in an absent, backhanded way, his eyes flicking to them only with the most casual attention, most of him focused on her, and there was something in his eyes which was inexpressibly dirty. “There’s no peace,” she said, “you filthy, dirty, ugly old man, there’s no peace to be made because you have none. You can’t even function.”
Calabrese drew away from her. “What was that?” he said.
“I said you’ve got nothing to apologize for. You didn’t do a damned thing to require any apology. You just want everyone to think that you did something. You old bastard,” she said, “you can’t even fuck,” screaming this over the whirring of the blades and the pilot sitting in place began to laugh, loud, obscene barks of laughter pouring like liquid from his mouth and Calabrese hit her hard then across the face, bringing flesh into her cheekbones, sending dark pain radiating through her.
Her head smacked into the wall and rebounded but she held her expression, she did not reach up a hand to rub her skull. Undoubtedly she was bleeding. All right, so be it then, she had been bleeding in many small places inside for a long time now; this pain meant nothing. “You can’t even fuck,” she said again, holding Calabrese’s gaze, not blinking, “and you can hit me ten times but you know it and now everybody knows it,” and the old man doubled over then in the limited confines of his position, put a hand to his mouth, began to make loud, retching noises, gagging and choking against his hand, the pilot suddenly very involved in the controls once again, the technique of flying the craft all-absorbing, Calabrese’s guard behind them still looking at the walls from behind yellow eyes, all of this having passed through him, and then she braked her buttocks against the wall, slid away from the bulkhead and tried, clumsily to stand. She was not sure why this was necessary this time; it had something to do, she guessed, with establishing distance from him, with asserting dignity. Who was to say?
The craft rocked in the air and then took a sudden, sickening little jolt and she collapsed to her rear again, her legs coming out straight ahead, the pain of falling and the indignity of it suddenly bringing tears out of her that nothing else would have: not death, not terror, not simple fear but only humiliation could do this to her. She put her head on her knees and sobbed. Something, Calabrese’s hand, yanked her chin up and then he was staring at her, his eyes full and luminous, his face filled with little pockets out of which insects seemed to be crawling, picking away at the scabs and small encrustations of the old man’s ruined face. “Dirty bitch,” he said, “dirty, filthy whore’s cunt, that’s what you are.”
She shook her head, tried to crawl out of there but he held her firm. “Whore,” he said, “stinking slut, was it good for you with him? Did you like it, did you take it deep? You lousy cunt, nobody says to me what you said, I don’t have to take that from anyone, I’m not going to take it from any whore.”
He wrenched a long, surprisingly powerful arm around her neck and began to strangle her.
She could feel the pressure on the windpipe cutting off her breath almost immediately, then when the sights of the copter began to fade away, when she began to see colors behind her eyes, she knew that she was in trouble. Struggling for breath was not so bad, it was almost pleasant to be taken out of the world in this way after suffering so much … but the colors were vivid, too bright, too muddled to have any of the aspects of light and as they began to devour her she saw that she was going to die, trapped in his grasp. Desperately, instinctively, she brought her hands up, tried to break the grasp but it was like the flutterings of a goldfish caught in a palm. She struck the stone of him and fell away and then she felt herself surging into a long, deep pit, trying to scream but unable of course. No breath meant no screams and so she fell silently, moving away from the world until suddenly, spasmodically, the grip broke and she fell away, not into a pit but into the familiar canvas. She rolled feebly on her stomach. Someone was
shouting behind her.
“You can’t do it,” a voice said, and she opened her eyes, peered around, saw that it was Calabrese’s bodyguard who was bellowing at him. “I don’t give a shit what happens down on the beach but you can’t kill her in the copter, you can’t kill her in front of me.” And Calabrese was yielding to the shaking, his body loose, empty, flapping in the guard’s grasp and some sense of the situation must have come to the guard only at that moment, the realization of what he had done, some understanding of his audacity and he released Calabrese and fell back himself against the canvas, retching. “You can’t do it, that’s all, you just can’t do it,” he said in a weak voice and then moved away, fell into the spot where he had been, put his hands across his face and said, “Oh for Christ’s sakes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” until Calabrese himself turned toward him and said, “It’s all right. It’s all right; I shouldn’t have done it, you’re right,” and the guard, stunned by his own actions said nothing, looked at the bulkhead, his eyes flickering, apparently regarding the man who had just done what he had as someone else, some stranger in the cockpit.
The pilot attended to his controls, the helicopter sliding off-angles to the sea, coming in and Calabrese said again, “It’s all right, it’s all right, stop it now,” and she felt herself moving away from all of this, like the guard. What was happening must be happening to other people here, surely she could not be living through this herself, she was eighteen years old in San Francisco and had dreamed these seven years of her life as a nightmare of warning, that was all, and then the pilot turned to Calabrese and said, “On target.”
“Already?”
“Had favoring winds. It wasn’t going to be that long anyway.”
“All right,” Calabrese said, “all right, then. You have the equipment?” His voice was level, controlled, once again he appeared to have himself under hold. That was the most remarkable thing about all of these men, even Wulff, they could do the most unspeakable acts and minutes later not refer to them at all. It was a remarkable quality. “You got it all set?”