“I’m not a soldier.”
“Of course you are.” He held up the Beretta. “Anyone who straps on a gun for someone else who can’t or won’t is a soldier. The uniform is optional.”
“Is that why you Pearl-Harbored my car in the warehouse district?”
“That was a mistake. Separating the allies from the enemy isn’t as easy as it used to be.”
“Sturdy and the Shooter would agree.”
“Minor casualties.”
“You’re short a man,” I said. “He’s probably talking to the cops right now. I didn’t quite let all the blood out of him at Ma Chaney’s place.”
“He won’t say anything.”
I knew then that he wouldn’t, ever, even if he recovered and outlived his sentence. I changed tactics. There were too many automatic weapons in the room to give much thought to the tiny pistol in my pocket.
“You’re too tidy for your own good, Colonel. All I wanted in the beginning was a line on Doyle Thayer Junior’s activities in the gun trade, enough to convince a jury that his wife wasn’t doing society any great harm in killing him. If you hadn’t tried to ambush me I’d never have suspected you were involved in the home invasions or the other thing. You compounded the error by trying to take out Ma Chaney. She talks when she’s mad. Maybe she never sat in on any of your training sessions.”
“Who’d listen to a crazy old bat who’s also a known felon?”
“Nobody, until you made her worth listening to. Attempted murder is a great credibility builder.” I let him chew on it. “I won’t lecture you about Shooter. Doing him with my gun at the fairgrounds was somebody’s half-baked idea of getting in good with you. I guess you thought a show of loyalty would make the Colonel forget how quickly you ditched Ma for him, right, Hube?”
Hubert, still holding the handkerchief to his face, said, “Keep it up, champ. I ain’t forgot I still owe you one for the other day.”
“Even a big chief can’t know what all the Indians are up to all the time,” I told Seabrook. “But it wouldn’t have happened if your highly trained Hitler Youth had shot me instead of my car.”
“Water over the dam. I never waste time refighting old battles.” He stroked the Beretta. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at your office. You hung up before I had a chance to explain that I always choose my own rendezvous sites.”
“You picked a good one. Who’d have predicted Mark Proust’s basement? Especially with elections coming up.”
Jerry had pried himself into a cross-legged position on the floor with his head in his hands. The man who had hit him had returned to his station at the door. Jerry’s labored breathing was the loudest thing in the room for a long moment.
Seabrook glared at Hubert. “I gave orders to blindfold him as soon as he was in the car.”
“We did. He didn’t see nothing the whole way.” He sounded afraid, which was a surprise. I hadn’t thought he was that smart.
“You should have covered my nose too,” I said. “I was here once before, although not in the basement. I’m not Elizabeth Taylor, but I know a horse farm when I smell one.”
The Colonel shook his head sadly. “I take back what I said before. You wouldn’t make a good soldier. You think too much.”
“It’s a fault. Sometimes I envy Hubert and Jerry.”
“They don’t think enough. But they’re useful, up to a point.” As he spoke, the Colonel removed the Beretta’s clip from his pocket, rammed it into the handle, and racked a cartridge into the chamber. He thumbed off the safety and shot Hubert Darling. The bullet pierced the bridge of his nose and took off the back of his head.
Hubert took a month to fall. His head came up as if someone had called his name. That pulled his split cheek away from the handkerchief in his hand, and in the instant of consciousness left to him he started to raise it to the cut. It never got there, because by then his knees were bending and he turned and sort of screwed himself down until his center of gravity changed and he fell the rest of the way with a flop. After that he lay as motionless as a sack of mud.
Jerry groaned. It was hard to tell if it was because of his brother or his own aching head.
“I should have done that when he executed Shooter against my orders,” said the Colonel, absently wiping the gun up and down one leg of his trousers. His voice sounded muffled in the echo of the blast. “I definitely should have done it after Stoudenmire. But I rather like the justice of it this way: He used Walker’s gun on Shooter, I use Walker’s gun on him.”
I thought of telling him it wasn’t my gun, but decided he wouldn’t appreciate it. What I did say sounded a lot like nothing. The air smelled of brimstone.
29
SOMEONE BATTERED AT the door. The noise was loud in the throbbing silence following the shot and Colonel Seabrook’s words. The Colonel’s eyes flicked over my shoulder to the man at the door. He nodded. The door was opened.
“What was that shot?” Proust barreled in past me, glanced down at Jerry Darling being sick on the rug, saw his brother lying on his face with the back of his head gone. He recoiled. “I said no killing. What did you do to me?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Seabrook said. “I told you the blindfold wouldn’t work. Walker guessed where he is.”
Proust looked at me, or rather through me. He was wearing a short-sleeved plaid sport shirt and tight jeans that emphasized his paunch. His face was grayer than usual. “I didn’t want him here in the first place. You should’ve taken him somewhere else.”
“You should’ve sent me packing when I proposed our partnership. But you didn’t, and I did, and that’s the big picture. A good commander doesn’t waste time wishing things were better. It’s beginning to smell in here.” He strode toward the door, avoiding the gore underfoot.
“What about him?” Proust was looking again at Jerry, who wasn’t looking at anything but what he’d had for breakfast.
“A man should be with his brother.” On his way out, Seabrook glanced at the man at the door.
The other two sentries came away from the wall. I turned and followed the Colonel out. Proust stumbled along at the rear. Behind us the third sentry’s M-16 burped briefly, like an engine starting and stalling. He came out a moment later, drawing the door shut. Blue smoke curled out with him.
We were in a larger room, paneled similarly, with a ceramic tile floor speckled like blue cheese and a furnace and a pool table in opposite corners. Rectangular windows along the ceiling let in light between blades of grass growing outside. The Colonel stood at the far end of the pool table with the first two sentries behind him, resting his hands on the corners of the table. He looked a little like Eisenhower studying a map of Normandy.
“Cut to the chase,” he told me. “Have you got it?”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?”
“You might, if my reconnaissance reports on you are reliable. You’re what we jarheads used to call a nighthawker. You go it alone and fight by your own rules. That’s fine when the nighthawker’s in command; he wins battles and seizes objectives no one dared count on back at HQ. When he isn’t, more often than not he gets shot for insubordination, if he comes back at all. Individual heroism’s good for the folks back home. It helps recruitment. On the front it just spoils the casualty projections.”
“I’m not a hero,” I said. “Just curious. What do you want it for?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Call it a last request.”
“Are you planning on dying soon?”
I leaned on the other end of the pool table, imitating his pose. The little automatic shifted in my pocket. “You as much as told Proust just now I wouldn’t leave here alive,” I said. “The blindfold didn’t work, and anyway it was just a gesture to keep him from squawking too loud about using his house. What’s it matter whether I die before or after I hand over the stuff? I just don’t want to die ignorant.”
“You’re safe at least until I have the fissionable material. After that you’re on your own. But th
en you always were.”
“Fissionable material.”
His face twitched. It was as near as he would come to smiling when he wasn’t rereading Clausewitz. “Plutonium. Do you mean to say you have it in your possession and you aren’t even aware of the terminology?”
“Give some people a gun and they’ll shoot you with it. They don’t have to know how it was made. What are you planning to blow up?”
“That’s my secret.”
“So’s the place where I stashed the plutonium.”
“Do you think I can’t get that out of you?”
“You could have gotten it out of Sturdy the same way, but he took precautions, or told you he did. I imagine they took the form of a sealed envelope left with someone to be mailed to the cops in case of his death. It’s an old tune but it still holds up.”
“I don’t hear sirens.”
“The mail’s always slow on Monday. You could start hauling on my toenails, but that takes time. You were working against a deadline from the start or you wouldn’t have scheduled those home invasions so close together. You needed money fast to buy the plutonium from Sturdy. Sturdy’s been dead twenty-four hours and you still don’t have the stuff. Meanwhile, what amounts to a deathbed testimony by the man Hubert accidentally killed is on its way to someone who will listen. If time were gasoline you couldn’t get out of the garage.”
He straightened and locked his hands behind his back. He’d made a decision.
“There is a mountain in Zimbabwe,” he said. “The natives who have been to it come away with clay on their sandals. Diamond clay. So far no one knows about it beyond a dozen half-wild tribesmen and a handful of government officials, all of them in my pay. By Christmas the whole world will have heard about it, by which time I intend to be in control of the country.”
“A nuclear bomb is fairly heavy as mining equipment goes. Why not use picks and shovels?”
“It won’t be detonated anywhere near the mountain. A simple demonstration in the Kalahari Desert should be enough to convince the government of my ability to blow the whole place into the South Atlantic if the mountain isn’t deeded to me along with all mineral rights.”
“Jesus.” Proust had collapsed into an overstuffed chair whose upholstery was too worn for upstairs and was mopping his face with a lawn handkerchief. The gesture reminded me of Hubert Darling. “You told me you were raising money to buy arms to sell to African revolutionaries.”
“If I’d told you the truth you’d never have given me the safe harbor I needed in Iroquois Heights. You small-town crooks never think big enough. With that mountain’s resources at my command, in five years I can control two thirds of the continent of Africa; in ten years, the Persian Gulf. I’ll own four fifths of the world’s oil. And all thanks to a string of forgotten domestic robberies in and around Detroit.”
He didn’t foam at the mouth or throw himself down on all fours and start gnawing at the legs of the pool table. His voice retained its light youthful quality and his eyes were dead gray behind the prop glasses. Well, I hadn’t expected histrionics. They aren’t all like Hitler or the Ayatollah, except in the ways that count.
I said, “You’ve got the bomb?”
“Missile, to be precise. I have four Jupiters, outmoded but still quite effective. The technology is a matter of public record. All I need is the juice.”
“Who told Sturdy you needed it?”
“He came to me. Everyone around here knows there is only one person to go to with a cargo like that.”
“You’re underestimating him,” I said. “People did. He smelled something on the wind or he wouldn’t have started working on his brother-in-law to steal the stuff from Fermi Two. That kind of heist is never easy, but not as difficult when you’re with plant security. Myrtle didn’t figure he owed anything to the place he thought gave him cancer, so he agreed to try.”
“Try.”
That was a mistake. What I said next was another, but I was talking to keep him from thinking. “How much was Sturdy soaking you?”
“You were his partner; you should know. Or were you?” He took his hands from behind his back. One of them held the Beretta. He had stuck it inside his belt under his tan coat. “I was right about you being a nighthawker. I should have quoted you their depressing survival statistics.”
I straightened and let my hands drop from the table. The first knuckle of my right thumb grazed the .25 in my pocket. I might have left it with Constance Thayer for all the good it was doing me there. I kept talking.
“Sturdy moving up into the big time was like a kid getting his first taste of whiskey; he liked the lightheaded feeling and wanted more. Jacking you up for all you could spare and could score from the home invasions wasn’t enough. He went to Doyle Thayer Junior, who had the collectors’ bug and the wherewithal to outbid you into next year, or for as long as he could get away with forging his father’s signature on checks. That was when one of your wind-up soldiers gossiped to Ma Chaney that Sturdy wouldn’t be around much longer.
“He was wrong. They didn’t call him Sturdy for nothing. He’d still be with us if his heart hadn’t given out while Hubert was trying to drown the truth out of him. I’ll take part of that,” I added. “If I hadn’t forced your hand by telling you I was his partner you wouldn’t have sicced Hubert on him to begin with. I thought he was safe in jail.”
Seabrook wasn’t listening. “You said Stoudenmire’s brother-in-law agreed to try to steal the plutonium. He didn’t get it, did he?”
Casually—I felt as jerky as an actor crossing a stage for the first time—I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. The maneuver had all the unstudied naturalness of a feather dancer performing in a high wind.
“No,” I said. “He got too sick and had to leave the job before he got near the stuff. Sturdy was bluffing you right along. Me too.”
Tension came into that room like another person. The three sentries, spaced out expertly with identical fields of fire, gripped their automatic rifles so tightly they creaked. The Beretta in the Colonel’s hand lay as steady as a stone.
We were all in our places, all the lines had been spoken. It only remained for one of us to start the show.
Jerry Darling stole it. The door to the other room bumped open, so quickly he lost his balance and fell on his side. He was a mess. His head was bleeding where the butt of an M-16 had cracked it open and the blood had trickled down his neck in a forked pattern, where it vanished inside the neck of his mesh T-shirt and mingled with more blood from a tight ragged line of bullet wounds in his chest. From there it had drenched his right sleeve and hand. The revolver in it must have been slippery. It went off when he hit the floor, squirting fire and a slug that struck the furnace with a clang and a rumble, as of a theater prop man shaking a sheet of tin to simulate thunder.
Then the thunder was silenced by a louder peal of three M-16s clearing their throats in unison. Their actions rattled and their spent shells plink-plunked to the floor and smoke smudged the room’s details and Jerry’s big body jerked and twitched as if attached to three strings, his mouth falling open and his eyes rolling white.
The Colonel, who had not stopped watching me since we had entered the room, was momentarily distracted. I took the small pistol out of my pocket—.25s are barely effective at best, and when fired through fabric are useless—but even as I squeezed the trigger I knew I wasn’t fast enough. He was already firing the Beretta in my direction.
I thought.
I was too caught up in the moment to know that an army had come clattering down the stairs behind me, led by a coarse-featured black Detroit police inspector named Alderdyce and a delicately built Hispanic Iroquois Heights lieutenant named Romero and backed up by a dumpy Wallace Beery type of a federal agent who answered to Horace Livingood. The Beretta’s bullet flicked my left jacket sleeve and splintered the staircase railing an inch to the right of Romero’s right ear as he crouched and returned fire with his bone-handled service pistol. I was firin
g at the same time, squeezing off three rounds as fast as my trigger finger could flex and relax. The tiny automatic might have belonged to Marcel Marceau for all the noise it made in that pounding room. Four bullets, one large, three no bigger than pencil erasers, made black holes in Colonel Seabrook’s tan suit. He took two steps back, then one forward, and sprawled face down across the pool table, one hand still clutching the Beretta. The nails of his other hand made five distinct tracks in the green felt as he slid to his knees. After that there was no more room to fall and he knelt there between the wall and the table—dreaming, no doubt, in whatever time was left for dreaming, of conquest and diamonds.
The two local cops had brought reinforcements, and between their handguns and sawed-off shotguns they tore apart the three young men with assault rifles like teddy bears in a shooting gallery. It seemed the Colonel hadn’t trained them to meet armed resistance in close quarters, because later two uniformed officers were treated for minor wounds and a third for a shattered wrist, while one of the mercenaries was pronounced dead at the scene and another died on the operating table at Detroit Receiving. The last was admitted there in critical condition and upon improving was transferred to the infirmary at the Detroit House of Corrections.
The walnut paneling would never be the same, along with every eardrum on the premises.
When the shooting stopped, someone had to ram a shotgun butt through two of the windows to let the smoke out. In the clearing air, a Detroit uniform pried a white and quivering Mark Proust’s fingers loose from the back of the overstuffed chair, behind which he had taken cover. When he let go the chair listed toward one corner where a leg had been shot away. A spring tore loose from the riddled fabric.
“Caramba,” said Romero, standing among the flung and spraddled bodies. “For this I could have stayed in Havana.”
30
THE LIVING ROOM of Ernest Krell’s home, large and sunken and lighted through amber panels instead of windows, looked dim and remote, like an Egyptian tomb that had remained unchanged throughout the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the life of Christ, the Middle Ages, two world wars, and the entire career of Mason Reese. The walls were still burled walnut and I didn’t much care for them because they reminded me of the paneling in Mark Proust’s basement. Krell’s Korean War portrait hung above it all, a proud flag on a ship in drydock.
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