Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “You are not, I think, from this part of the country?” He looked at her through lowered eyes and shrugged, as if to assure her that it was not his intention to pry. Having kidnapped her, one gathered, didn’t qualify as an introduction.

  “No. No—I’m from New Jersey. That’s. . .”

  “I know where it is. I traveled through it by train on my way here. But one can tell very little about a place from the window of a train.”

  He smiled as he said it. He didn’t want to imply any criticism of her home state.

  “I’ve enjoyed America. Aside from the police, everyone has been most cordial.”

  “Perhaps after the war. . .”

  “There will be no ‘after’ to this war, madam.” Von Niehauser seemed to draw himself in, like someone shrinking from contact with an unpleasant fact. “At least, not for such as myself. Perhaps here, it will be different.”

  He finished buttoning his shirt, a process that had been interrupted by the arrival of the sandwiches, and began tucking the ends into his trousers, which couldn’t have been easy for a man with only one good arm. He didn’t seem in a hurry to resume the subject.

  “Why here?” she asked, not quite sure why she wanted to goad him on; it just seemed that they had been on the verge of something. . . “Why should it be any different here?”

  “Because all the battles have been far away. We in Europe—the French, the Russians, and now, it seems, finally, the Germans—we’ve been bleeding into the land where we were born. You Americans, you’ll be able to forgive and forget; in five years the whole business will seem as vague as a dream. With us it’s gone too far for that. The choices have become very simple—win or die.”

  “You sound like your Führer.”

  From the sudden flash of anger that appeared in his eyes as he looked at her, she was certain that he would retreat into silence. She felt a giddy twinge of fear as she recollected that, after all, this wasn’t one of her husband’s friends she was listening to, and they weren’t sitting around over a couple of beers in the recreation hall at Los Alamos.

  And then his expression changed. It was just something that happened around his eyes—the anger had been deflected from her, and had found some other object.

  “Hitler is a flabby Austrian peasant who eats cream cakes with his secretaries and long ago stopped listening to anything but his instincts and his astrologers—people say he’s mad, but I’m inclined to think that he’s merely stupid.”

  His mouth tightened in a compressed little smile, as if it gave him some sort of relief to say such a thing, and then he shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of dismissal.

  “Europe will be a dead world,” he went on, almost to himself. “A dead world, no matter who wins. I grew up listening to my father telling stories of the last war, and this is nothing like that. This is a contest of dishonor.”

  . . . . .

  She couldn’t recall what had awakened her. Suddenly she was awake; that was all. She couldn’t even remember having gone to sleep.

  Von Niehauser had found a blanket that he could roll up and put behind his back, allowing him to rest in a chair. He was the first thing she saw. It was impossible to tell whether he was awake or not—his eyes were open, but he didn’t appear to be seeing anything through them. For a moment she thought he might actually be dead.

  No, he wasn’t dead, but if he didn’t get to a doctor pretty soon he might well be. He looked wasted and pale and painfully weak, as if he had run through his whole life in a single night. The bones in his face seemed almost to be sticking through the skin. He gave the impression of breathing through a conscious effort, as if he had to remind himself to draw in the air.

  As soon as she began to stir, his eyes came back to life. He smiled at her, but otherwise hardly moved at all.

  “You’re in a bad way,” she said. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “I will live long enough.” And then he smiled again.

  She could hear something tapping against the cabin window, which faced south to the plain and the mountains beyond, and when she looked outside it was snowing.

  She could see it spreading across the flat ground, swirling around the rocks and mixing with the parched, ocher stained earth. Sometimes it would whip itself into dust devils of angry white that would travel for a hundred feet or so and then collapse. The sky beyond the mountains was black. In a few hours, no more, they would be in the middle of a howling storm.

  It was hard, she thought to herself. It was hard. She stood there by the window, her arms folded across her breast, fighting down the temptation to weep.

  The war was here.

  27

  Romero hadn’t been quite so confident that the risks involved in obliging Mr. Hoover would be as “insignificant” as Havens claimed. Agustin Gomá, as he was quick to point out, wasn’t precisely one of the faceless masses.

  “He will doubtless resent being detained, and he is a man who does not shrink from avenging smaller slights than that.” The elegant crime czar with the broken hands stood in front of his living room window, looking down into the bottom of the gorge where the Rio Grande snaked its muddy way to the sea. “He is a man of political consequence, Mr. Havens. In my business it is not considered prudent to antagonize such men.”

  “Then you can kill him when we’re finished. Believe me, no one will raise any objections to that.”

  Romero turned around from the window, frankly astonished. He was more than astonished, really—he was shocked.

  “The norteamericano police seem to have changed the rules rather drastically from that to which we have all grown accustomed. Are you serious, Mr. Havens? Are you authorized to say such things?”

  Havens grinned—he was acting, and he was scared to death; he was strictly on his own down here, but he had to make it sound like he had President Roosevelt’s letter of authorization in his shirt pocket. So he nodded and grinned and bluffed it out.

  “Senor Gomá is strictly expendable,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back so that Romero wouldn’t see them shaking. “Senor Gomá is an agent of his country’s enemies. No one will think to inquire into his death, and if anyone should we can blacken his name so completely that the Mexican government would probably feel obliged to give his murderer a pension. As perhaps I’ve suggested, we’re playing for high stakes.”

  “So it would seem.”

  And so it was that George Havens, federal agent, found himself in the back seat of a ‘37 Ford, heading off into the desert with five of the toughest thugs he had ever seen in his life.

  “When do you wish this thing accomplished?” Romero had asked, with the polite disinterest of a waiter inquiring if you were ready to order.

  “Right now, yesterday—it’s not something that can wait. Do you know where Gomá is to be found?”

  “Yes—of course. When half a dozen of the local banditi suddenly come into possession of enough money to pay off their gambling debts and buy their girlfriends out of the bordellos, I make it my business to know the why of it.”

  He smiled—it was a tight, faintly condescending smile that said that the police were amateurs in such matters, that Mr. Hoover had done better than he knew to put his trust in the Razor of Juarez.

  The men in the car seemed to have nothing to say, and no interest in their surroundings: they stared straight ahead, in perfect silence, during most of the drive. They were dressed in city clothes—woolen overcoats and neckties and felt hats—but something about them suggested that all that was merely a species of disguise. They were heading into the desert, into the wilderness where Pancho Villa had held off armies from both the north and the south, and one had the impression that these hard, wordless mercenaries were probably closer to that tradition of the mountain desperado than, appearances notwithstanding, to the pool hall tough in his candy-stripe silk shirt and his patent leather shoes.

  Havens glanced at the speedometer—they were loafing along at a shade under forty miles an hour. Rea
lly, these people. . .

  “Can’t you step on it a little?” he snapped, leaning forward toward the driver. But the driver merely caught his eye in the rear view mirror and smiled.

  “No hurry, señor,” he said pleasantly. “If they gone, they gone. But they no leave tonight.”

  With his right hand, he pointed across his body to the southern sky, where a peculiar greenish-black line ran along the horizon.

  “Big storm coming. Tomorrow maybe. They wait for that to pass.”

  “Terrific.”

  They had been driving for well over an hour when Havens saw another car, pulled over to the side of the narrow dirt road and seemingly deserted. They drew up behind it and came to an abrupt stop; all four doors opened at once, and Havens found himself sucked outside by sheer momentum.

  It was only when they were all standing around, and the driver had opened the trunk and was passing out shotguns, that the owner of the other car stepped out from behind a clump of yucca, still buttoning his fly with one hand while the other kept a casual hold on an antique Winchester 30-30. He nodded glumly, shook hands with the driver, who seemed to be in charge, and listened with evident skepticism to the murmured explanation that one gathered, from the number of times Havens felt the two men’s eyes on him, was as much about the yanqui passenger as the upcoming job.

  Finally the driver turned to Havens, attempting a rather unconvincing smile. “Zee hacienda is five, six miles more, señor. We take two cars.”

  “Have you got another shotgun?”

  The driver’s thin, ascetic face took on a worried expression. This, it would seem, wasn’t covered in his orders.

  “Señor, is no game,” he said blandly, as if that were the last possible word on the subject.

  Havens went over to the trunk, which was still open and where there were in fact two shotguns, and picked up a Browning pump. He grabbed a handful of shells from an open box, fed one into the chamber and another three into the magazine, and clicked on the safety.

  “Who said it was?”

  The plan, so far as there was one, and so far as the driver had been able to render it into intelligible English, consisted of nothing more than driving right up to the house, bold as brass, hoping that not everyone would be concentrated inside and that, in the face of such suicidal audacity, Gomá and his troops wouldn’t immediately assume they were under attack and would hold their fire until after they had lost whatever advantage was theirs by position. After all, even in Mexico you didn’t kill people just for rolling up to your front door.

  After that it was a simple pincer attack, one car covering the back while the other shot out the porch window. Guns booming, it was to be the storming of the Bastille.

  There didn’t seem to be any alternative, really. The house was in the middle of a huge stretch of flatland, with only the one approach road and no surrounding cover, so you could forget about the lightning commando raid from out of nowhere, but Havens still didn’t like it. He didn’t like the apparent indifference with which these soldiers of Romero’s contemplated the very real risks of getting their heads shot off. People who were that cavalier about losing their lives didn’t fill him with much confidence.

  What was he doing, trusting the most important operation of the war—perhaps even the war itself—to a pack of reckless Mexican hooligans?

  That wasn’t quite fair. After all, all he had to do was give the word and probably every one of them would breathe a sigh of relief and head right back to Juarez. And if there was a better plan, he hadn’t been able to think of it.

  Truth to tell, it was principally Inspector Havens’ conscience that was giving him trouble. He was beginning to realize—as an imaginative fact, which was the only way that mattered—just what it was he had bought with little brother Juan’s neck. A great many men were probably going to be dead in another ten minutes. What he had done was to order himself up a massacre.

  “There she is, señor.” The driver held a bony finger up to the windshield. A small, squarish speck was just visible on the edge of the horizon. “Keep the gun from sight.”

  The men on the back seat began rolling down their windows. There were no signs of anyone on the front porch.

  It might work, Havens thought to himself, clutching the shotgun between his knees. It might really. . .

  They were about half a mile away when the first of Gomá’s forces stepped out through the front door and onto the veranda. He just stood there, his hands in the pockets of his heavy jacket, and then another man joined him. The second man raised an arm to shade his eyes—thank God, the sun was in their faces—he looked relaxed and unworried, and he didn’t appear to be armed. Perhaps they were still only curious.

  A quarter of a mile, and the front car, where Havens was sitting on the front seat, began to gather speed. They were close enough now that a man with a rifle might have had a chance of disabling them. The engine was roaring, and a huge cloud of dust was churning up behind them. The man in the door frame ducked back inside. Two hundred yards now, then a hundred, then fifty. . .

  The driver swerved to the right with a great screeching of tires, and just in time. Havens heard the ping of a rifle bullet as it creased his door, but there was no time for anything as complicated as fear. They weren’t twenty yards from the house now—as the side windows went flickering by, he could see people inside, like still photographs that succeeded each other so fast that they seemed to blur into one.

  As they rounded the back, they saw a man burst out through the rear door. He was bent almost double and running, with a rifle cradled in his arms like a child. The car began skidding to a stop—the noise was sickening—and, as the man began to raise his rifle, Havens jerked the shotgun up from where it was resting against his leg, nearly throwing it through the window. Without thinking, without even aiming, he fired. The man stumbled and fell, almost under their wheels.

  The car stopped, but the noise didn’t. Like everyone else, Havens burst out and began running toward the house, exactly as if he expected the car to explode behind him. He had barely presence of mind enough to work the pump on his shotgun—the expended shell was a tiny red stain seen in the corner of his eye; for a moment he thought he might have been hit.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered. There was only him and the back door, nothing else. Him and the back door, about to collide.

  And then there was someone else, and he did matter. He was just a shape in the doorway, but that was a gun in his hand. He raised it up—it seemed to take him forever—and then there was another sharp explosion, almost next to Havens’ left ear it seemed, and the shape in the doorway fell over backward.

  Havens made it through. He was in a little kitchen; that, and the relative darkness, registered on his brain, and then he stumbled on something and found himself lying across a body that seemed to have most of its head gone.

  Outside, the sound of gunfire was almost deafening.

  Where the hell was everybody, he thought. What was he doing here all by himself, with his nose stuck in the remains of somebody’s windpipe? He kept waiting for someone to take a shot at him, to serve him in his turn, so he could lie there on the board floor with his brains scattered around like loose change.

  And then he saw another door, and heard one of his men behind him, and got up and picked up the assault again.

  “You okay, señor?”

  Miraculously, it seemed, it was the driver, with his hand on Havens’ arm.

  “Yes—fine—terrific!” Havens heard himself shouting. And then a bullet fractured the thin wooden door in front of them, and he turned around and saw his companion with a surprised expression on his face and a hole in his cheekbone. Blood was leaking out through it, thick as oil.

  Did I do that to him?

  There was only time for the one fugitive thought. Still on his feet, the man was dying, right there in front of him. Havens found himself staring in appalled fascination.

  He forced himself to look away. And then, in an unpl
anned, maniacal blending of fear and rage, he charged the door. It gave way in front of him as easily as if it had been made of paper.

  Inside, in what was obviously the main room, he saw a man with a heavy, blockish face, wearing an overcoat, standing next to the fireplace, holding a pistol. Havens didn’t have to ask who it was—he knew who it was. There was a tiny curl of yellow flame from the fireplace. Havens brought the shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

  After that, the noise stopped. Outside, inside—everywhere. Havens ran for the fireplace, saw that it was a small packet of papers that was burning, pulled it out, threw it on the floor, and stamped out the flames under his boot heels.

  Gomá was still alive. It was astonishing—his chest was torn open and looked like the waste barrel in a butcher’s shop—but he was alive. Havens picked him up by what was left of his coat lapel and tried to shake him out of his trance.

  “Where is he, señor? Where the fuck have you got von Niehauser?”

  Gomá merely stared at him, with an expression of scandalized incomprehension.

  And then he died. From one instant to the next, he just died.

  Someone came through the front door. Havens had his shotgun raised, ready to blow him away, when he saw that it was one of his own. The two men exchanged an embarrassed grin—it was impossible to know why; Havens didn’t feel the least little bit like laughing.

  “Is it over?” he asked. Outside, as if in answer, he heard two blasts from a shotgun, prefaced by a short, high-pitched scream.

  The Mexican nodded impassively.

  “Si, señor. Están muertos.”

  When he stepped out onto the porch, Havens saw three dead men stretched out in the dirt, one of them lying with his legs tucked up underneath him, as if he had been kneeling when he got it. One of the corpses Havens recognized as the man they had met along the road. The dust was spattered with blood. He decided it would probably be just as well if he didn’t ask any questions about what had happened out here.