by Barry, Mike
“Yeah.”
“Then help me,” Calabrese said, “let’s get it set up,” and the guard lumbered to a standing positon, unfolded burlap behind, came out with some kind of electronic equipment and began to struggle with it and Calabrese turning toward her said, “We’re going to send you down a hatch. You understand that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—”
“We’re going to send you out of here. You’re going to cooperate with us.”
“Send me down a hatch? On what?”
“On rope. On a rope ladder.”
“I can’t climb.”
“You’re going to go down,” Calabrese said. “You’re going to cooperate. If you don’t cooperate you’re going to make it that much worse for your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“I have no time,” Calabrese said, “I have no time to argue with you.” The hatch fell away and she was looking into darkness, below that darkness were sudden prickles and blemishes of light, spinning below. Rope unfurled, plunging into the darkness. “Now,” Calabrese said, “get down there.”
“I’m afraid,” she said, “I’m afraid of that. I don’t want to go—”
“Go,” the pilot said, struggling with something by the hatch, “don’t argue with him. Don’t ever argue with him. Just get out of here.”
“Please,” she said. For some reason the rope terrified her; the abstract acceptance of death had gone down easily, like gelatin or a wad of phlegm, but the actual quality of this climb through the night was unbearable. “I don’t want to go out there.”
“But you’ve got to,” Calabrese said, “you’ve got to get out there.” He flicked a switch, she heard a high, amplified shriek. “You’ve got to get out right now.”
“Please,” she said, “please—”
“Believe me,” the pilot said, “believe me, it’s going to be much easier if you’ll just go. Go.” He touched her, the sliding, clamping feel of his flesh against hers somehow revolting but breaking through her as well, moving past terror into activity, perhaps exactly as the pilot had calculated … and then she was out in the air, she felt the dampness on her face, felt wind like breath gasping at her and then, hand to rope, rough strands to palm she was sliding through the darkness as overhead, filling all of the world, she heard the rasp and boom of Calabrese’s voice.
She knew, she must have always known, if only in dreams, that it would end this way.
XVI
The Browning came into his hands roughly, even grasping it was to recover through memory a hundred fields in Vietnam where he had heard its boom, and then he was lying in prone position behind the cannon, doing nothing for the moment, merely trying to locate his position, to see what was going on. It would make no sense to begin firing wildly until he had established his position and the situation; for one thing it would uncover him … and as yet he had not been placed.
The shot, the single squawk of the downed BAR man, had turned the attention of the troops in that direction and they had seen him fall, but even as that had happened the girl was tumbling the last few yards in the air, impacting upon the sand and that had brought the focus of attention back to her. Several of the troops had run toward her, others were pivoting in confusion between the fallen girl and the place where the BAR man had been but in the dark none of them could see anything … and Wulff had been able to make his sprinting, staggering run toward the BAR without any of them seeing him; their confusion had been accentuated by the rasping and scream of the speaker above which had, perhaps, been there with the intention of distracting Wulff but had instead only upset the troops. No, Calabrese was not thinking all right.
The old man could not be functioning anymore, not the way that he used to. What had happened to him?
But, then, nobody was functioning. In the confused leakage of the spot, the big beam twitching now as its point of origin, obviously something near the beachfront, moved, Wulff could see the forms beginning to scatter freely, the line of troops broken, the enemy scattering through sections of the beach, and then his attention was riveted, the girl was up on her feet, gesticulating, screaming. She was waving at him, an insect figure hundreds of yards downrange, desperately trying to semaphore and he could not understand her gestures, sharp and intense. Moving within a small frame, she was trying to communicate but even as he watched the megaphone noise separated into distinct syllables. “There she is, Wulff,” Calabrese’s voice said, “there she is, now deliver the stuff,” and he clamped down on the BAR, pointed it toward the copter thinking this is insane, he had no business to do this, his primary responsibility was to rescue Tamara … but how could he do it? no way to get to her … and then, even as his finger was coming into the trigger someone shot her.
He could see her leap in the characteristic gesture of the stricken, her form twitching. Then she was at full height spinning, trying desperately to move away … and the second shot hit her in the chest, a web of blood sprang from that space visible even at this distance … and she fell into the sand.
He went a little bit crazy then.
Well, the craziness had been there, had been lurking behind all the time: there had always been that madness, the lust for massacre, peeking out behind the curtains of personality, sometimes coming through: the townhouse on the east side, that freighter in San Francisco, the refuge in Boston, the casino in Las Vegas … oh yes, he knew what it was to feel that urge to murder extruding, poking densely from the torn-open scars of hatred, but what hit him now was stronger than all of those put together. As the girl went down something in Wulff went down as well, something which he did not even think was there, which had perished on West 93rd Street … and then, scrambling, his fingers hit the trigger and he began to fire.
He must have taken ten of them down in the first burst.
It was just a matter of guiding the BAR, the monster put down its own fire, its own profound weight guiding it through an arc of destruction, all that he had to do was to ride it out with a supporting palm, like steering a big, fast car on a straight road he merely had to pulse in little reminders now and then to keep it on course. Calabrese’s men were jumping, shrieking, hopping on the beach like rabbits, and then he saw no more because he guided the BAR toward the spotlight and hit it dead center; there was an explosion of glass and then the beach slid into total darkness. All that he could hear were the cries of pain.
Men were shrieking, praying, gasping, running and he enjoyed those sounds, not only for their own sake, but because they guided his fire; they led the tracers from the BAR deliberately into their center and although in the darkness he could no longer tell how many were dead he knew that it was quite a lot. There was no thought of going to the girl, he knew that there was no point to it. She was indisputably dead; to approach her would be only to join her. He only had one mission now and that with a grim and central ferocity:
He wanted to kill everybody, everywhere, who had made her die.
So he fired off the BAR until it was exhausted. He got a fresh clip out of the shirt of the man who was lying beside him, jammed it in and fired off the Browning again and now his fire was no longer being returned. There had been at first a few feeble gunshots, experiments really, half-hearted attempts to find him in the darkness, but now the enemy had been routed past the point of returning fire. Men were jostling, screaming, the survivors were trying desperately to get up the beachfront and over the line, up on the boardwalk but the Browning tracked the screamers and knocked them down too.
He heard the explosion of copter exhaust above him and then the megaphone was screaming once more, “You bastard,” Calabrese said, “you dirty bastard,” and he let the Browning track the voice; bullets hit something, the amplifier went dead with a hiss, and a smell of burning drifted over the sea. Then the engine of the copter was revving desperately, five thousand cycles a minute, hitting unevenly, a bad miss in at least one of the cylinders but nevertheless fighting, fighting for altitude and t
hen the copter was moving out of there, he could tell by the receding sound that Calabrese had somehow made good his escape. He was leaving thirty dead men on the beach but he had killed a girl, he had failed utterly in his objective but he was going to get out of this alive while the others stayed and died. Well, that was leadership for you. Wulff, screaming, weeping in frustration, fired off the Browning in the direction of the copter, hoping that a lucky shot or two would puncture the fuselage, would miraculously make the bird dead but the steadier throbbing of the engine as it pulled away was testimony that it would not, and so he could only return his fire to the beachfront, pump off shots into the last remaining troops, the few staggering forms which remained but it was no good, no good, no satisfaction to it at all, he was really shooting at Calabrese and hitting stone and he knew when the sun came up it would show the litter on the beach, the blood sunken into the sand and the police would come from five counties and they would rope off the beach up and down around ten miles but not a one of the officials, not one of the photographers, not one of the reporters or the news analysts or television cameramen or commentators or crime experts … there was not a one of them who would understand that everything here, this great massacre which would be remembered for fifty or a hundred years, was merely a substitution for what he really had been wanting to kill all of the time … and most of him lying dead, dead, dead, near the water on the ruined sands.
XVII
In the copter Calabrese passed out and did not regain consciousness until the helicopter was hovering above the Dade County airport, the pilot indecisive. What the hell was he supposed to do? nothing in his orders so far had ever anticipated anything like this. The guard was no help at all, he was hunched against a bulkhead, gibbering to himself. The pilot just hung there in the air. This would not work, he knew, they had to transfer to another plane, they had to get out of here … he had no idea of exactly what had happened down on that beach but of one thing he was quite sure: it had been very bad. At length, Calabrese’s eyes opened and he stared at the pilot. “What is it?” he said.
“I’m waiting to descend.”
“Where are we?”
“Above the airport.”
“Above the airport,” Calabrese said, “above the airport,” and then something convulsed within him, some flare of intelligence, and he said, “We didn’t get the stuff, did we? He didn’t throw it out on the sands, did he now?”
“No,” the pilot said, “he did not.”
“The girl is gone?”
“The girl is out of the plane,” the pilot said, his hand tapping the controls, “you arranged that, remember? I think that she’s dead. She was shot down there. There was a great deal of shooting going on down there. I think, I think that he got hold of a machine gun or a Browning Automatic.”
“Shit,” Calabrese said.
“There was nothing to do but to get out of there. Our men were being massacred.”
“Shit,” Calabrese said again, “there were thirty-five men down there. How could he? I mean how could he do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I prepared for everything. I prepared for every single goddamned thing. How could he have gotten out of it?”
“I don’t know,” the pilot said. “We’ve got to get out of here ourselves. We’ve got to land.”
“The girl is dead,” Calabrese said. “She is definitely dead?”
“I think so.”
“Fucking fuckheads,” the guard said in the corner, “miserable fucking sons of bitches. Fuck you too.” He took out his gun, pointed it at Calabrese. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he said, “I’ve really had enough of it. How much can I take? It’s not right, is it? I mean, a man shouldn’t have to take shit all his life. Sooner or later a man has got to stand on his own.”
The pilot sat rigid, his hands imprisoned between his thighs, looking from the guard to Calabrese. “It’s an old problem,” Calabrese said, “it means nothing.”
“Sure it means nothing, you son of a bitch,” the guard said, “nothing means anything to you. Just death. Death means a lot.”
“You’re in a great deal of trouble,” Calabrese said calmly. The calm was unshakable, the events back at the beach had purged him or at least, he thought, had put him at a level removed from feeling. He simply did not care anymore. Some capacity to be moved had vanished. The guard accordingly was simply another obstacle, more difficult than most. “You could be in worse trouble if you don’t stop this. Put the gun away.”
“Why should I put it away, you bastard? You killed that girl. You sent her out to die.”
“I did not do that,” Calabrese said. His own gun, he found himself thinking with acute clarity, his own gun was in his hip pocket, he knew he had put it there when he had left to board the copter. That solid, unresisting weight against his buttock must be it, for he had not changed its position. It would be a simple matter to get to it, to shoot the guard … but somehow he had to first distract the man. The guard looked distractible, his eyes blank and yet glowing, focused through Calabrese, on the wall behind him, his attention diffused over a wider area … but it was still too risky. He could not do it. He could not do it yet. “I did not kill the girl,” he said, “she did it to herself.”
“You kill everything. You make everything you touch rotten. You didn’t have to kill her.”
“Drop the copter,” Calabrese said to the pilot. “We’re going to land.”
“You’re not landing. You’re not landing anywhere,” the guard said. “You’re going to die here.”
“I don’t think so,” Calabrese said. This guard was named Nicholas and had been with him for four or five years. Before that he had worked in the household staff, getting into that position of trust through honorable work in the collections division. He had never exhibited, in all of this time, a hint of rebellion. So that core of loyalty must remain; it was merely a temporary episode, if he could pierce through and reach that vulnerable, dedicated core which had served him so well he would be in no danger. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to die here. No one is going to die here. Put that gun away.”
“You kill everything, you fucker. You think I don’t know what’s going on? I tell you,” the guard said, “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take this filth.”
“Drop the copter,” Calabrese said to the pilot again. The pilot nodded once bleakly, put his hands on the controls. “Are we over the airport?”
“We’re over the airport.”
“Then drop it.”
“Don’t drop it,” the guard said. He came off position, held the gun half-crouched on Calabrese. Sweat came off him freely, little drops of it lodging in the collar of his shirt, with the free hand he pulled the shirt away from his neck. “You’re not listening to me,” he said, “you think that this is bluff. You killed that girl. You had no reason to do that. I can’t put up with it anymore.”
“But you have to,” Calabrese said. It was amazing how calm he was under the circumstances; how that calm held. Having seen everything, nothing could touch him. “That’s the way the world is, Nicholas. Now stop making a fool of yourself and forget this. Forget this nonsense.”
“Why did you kill her? Because you raped her?”
Calabrese said nothing. The helicopter began to sink; it fell through the air as if it was water, heavily, jouncing. “We’re about half a mile to go,” the pilot said, “we’re going to go on the far side of the field. It’s going to be fast and hard so hold on.” His voice shook.
“Fast and hard, Nicholas,” Calabrese said, “did you hear that? A fast and hard landing. Better hold on or you’ll get shaken.”
“No,” Nicholas said, “no, I’m not going to go through any more landings with you. I’m not going to have anything fast and hard, I’m not going to see any more death, I’ve reached the end of the line with this now,” and his finger tightened on the gun began to bear forward. Concentration flowed in waves across Nicholas’s face and Calabrese took the gun
which he had managed to get out of his pocket during the last lines of exchange, wedging himself against the bulkhead and shot the guard in the throat.
Blood leaped in small jets from the adam’s apple but Nicholas seemed strangely alert, completely conscious. “You son of a bitch,” he said, “I shouldn’t have let you get away with that,” and Calabrese took another shot, this one getting Nicholas in the wrist, spinning the gun out of his hand, the gun crashing to his side, above his head. Nicholas screamed, grasping his wrist, and then spouting blood from the two sites, fell at Calabrese’s feet.
Calabrese shot him in the back of the head.
“All right,” he said to the pilot then, not even looking at the corpse, “proceed on landing. Put this goddamned thing down.”
“All right,” the pilot said, “all right.”
“We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to get back to Chicago.”
“That suits me,” the pilot said. The copter was in a swift descent now. Calabrese lurched, swayed, pitched across the dead body of the guard and lay there, feeling the dead man’s flesh palpating his and as he felt that death, that moistness against him, it occurred to him with an utter sense of finality that someday soon he was going to be that way too. He was going to be dead. The only thing that separated Nicholas from him was time and not very much of it. The dead flesh had a familiarity against his.
“We’re going to get out of here!” Calabrese shrieked and the pilot said yes again and the helicopter fell gracefully toward the concrete of the Dade County airport where the private plane that would take him back to Chicago was waiting … but comparing the way he would board it as against how he imagined this triumphal return flight would be, he did not know if he could go through.
The girl dead, the drugs lost, Wulff free and now surely, the line of defenses ruptured, bound to attack him. And how could the victims of the massacre not be tied to him? nothing could shield him from that. He had no lines of defense. Miami was to have been the final arena of victory. Instead, it was he who fled and behind him now the avenger with multiple cause, multiple righteousness.