The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved

by Steven Hardesty

  Patchway drove without headlights to the foot of the hill and put the car in a depression to hide it from the road. They took blankets and water from the trunk and climbed to the citadel and its tower.

  “Where are the ships?” said the boy.

  “A hundred miles further south.”

  “I’m scared of this place,” Georgie said.

  Patchway bundled the boy in blankets and put him in a corner where Georgie could watch through the fortress entrance.

  “Stay here. Be still. Be quiet,” Patchway said. “I have to leave you here for five minutes. I’m going to search the tower.”

  “Can we eat?”

  “I don’t have any food. Are you very hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drink some water.”

  The boy asked, “Will he come up here?”

  “I think we lost him for tonight.”

  “Not for tomorrow?”

  “We’ll be on the Gulf tomorrow.” Patchway got up to search the tower.

  Georgie said, “Talk to me. I don’t want to be alone.”

  Patchway searched the upper floor of the tower and the land around the fortress, all the while talking to the boy, not noticing what he said to the child but speaking quietly.

  Then he stood silent in the night, watching the hills made a brighter blackness by the light of the stars. He watched for Saifallah.

  He smelled the chill of the evening, the dust from the earth below his feet. He felt for the pain in his belly. It was there, the poison was still in him making him weak. But the pain was less. It had not killed him.

  Not going to die? Patchway’s hands trembled. He clasped them together. It was not the tremble of fear or pain or of the anticipation of soldierly action. It was more than that. It was a tremble of excitement from something new and unnamed that had come into him. He was going to live but what would he do with life?

  Out there were a very few car headlights still churning away from Shiraz along a dirt roadway laid down in Queen Esther’s time as a camel caravan trail, and it was still. Mene mene tekel upharsin. The trail ran west beyond to the Tower of Babylon, the Blue Gates of Ishtar, back past Sumer and Akkad and the first kings and farmers of human civilization.

  It was then Patchway saw that this highway to the ancient heart of the world had brought to him a message he could not yet read. The message was out there, along the road, waiting for him to learn its language. His hands trembled in his unexpected hope.

  Patchway returned to Georgie who said, “I’ll sleep now.”

  “Good.” Patchway wrapped them both in blankets and put his arm around the boy to warm the child. How desperate was this boy to trust Patchway whom he did not know but whose mother had sent him Patchway’s name. What a grand and powerful hunger drove the boy to want return to his mother.

  All this was part of the language of the message Patchway could not yet read. He understood that the meaning of what he was doing had changed. That somewhere back there in Shiraz, in the demented, murderous confusion of all that had happened, everything had changed for Patchway.

  He was no longer running from Ardjovani and his killer. No longer stealing a boy to punish the father. Not even returning Georgie to his terrorized mother. No, he was doing it all for that unnamed thing in him that had changed.

  Patchway saw the red flame from his rifle muzzle and saw the dead and dying children and saw the burning hooches and saw himself in the awful center of it all and saw his own dying baby in his hands and he despised himself. Then he felt the sleeping boy’s head pillowed on his arm and Patchway read the message that had been waiting for him to learn its language.

  A man who will not live, who will not risk facing the demons of his own twisted spirit, is doomed to darkness. But a man who can enjoy the gentle sound of a child sleeping in his arms is a man who must live. He has no choice. There can be no hollow place in him. He must live.

  Patchway sat through the night with the boy and stared into the darkness, reading and rereading the message, astonished with hope.

  In the last of night, in the moment before dawn, Patchway drew the revolver from his pocket and waited for Saifallah.

  * * *

  Saifallah in his black Mercedes was moving so quickly through a pack of cars that he nearly missed seeing the yellow Peykan as it darted behind a hill on which sat an old fortress and tower.

  He bulled his way across traffic and drove the Mercedes dropping off the roadway into the desert and stopped to study the tower, certain that the yellow car he had seen was Patchway’s. The American was a fool to give Saifallah this chance to catch him up. Or Patchway was tired of the chase and had set a trap. Either way it was time to end this game.

  Saifallah left the Mercedes behind a hillock and scrambled uphill as the tower vanished in the sudden desert night. The first glow on the horizon of the distant flare towers glimmered behind the fortress and let Saifallah distinguish between the blackness of stone and the blackness of open air.

  He drew the automatic he had stolen from Ardjovani’s office and replaced the single cartridge he had spent that day on the road when he had fired at Patchway’s car. He began a long, silent, careful climb to the fortress.

  The night grew cold, nearly freezing, a temperature for which the hot winter day had not prepared Saifallah. It took him three hours to work his way in careful silence to the ridge of hills holding the tower. He arrived stiff with chill.

  He found the yellow Peykan. He drew a pocket knife and punctured each tire. He worked up behind the fortress, on the side away from the pale silhouetting light from the flare towers, and squatted in the dust, watching, waiting.

  The night’s cold grew deep enough to match the bitterness in Saifallah’s spirit. The bitterness was his understanding that the responsibility for a man’s life is his alone. Any corruption he allows into that life is his sin alone. And he must suffer the punishment alone.

  Saifallah concentrated on that bitter thought in this long night. It chilled his core and made him equal with the night. He wanted to weep in his despair but he knew he no longer had in him the human heart that makes tears.

  Chapter 8

  The Citadel

  When the first of false dawn put more color into the sky than did the flare towers, Patchway left the sleeping boy and crept out of the adobe tower to check the car and to reconnoiter. The tires were punctured. He drew back from the car crouching, studying the hilltop. It was the echo and not the discharge of the gunshot that he heard.

  The bullet had been fired from downhill. It buzzed past him up into the gray sky, its echo clattering across the desert.

  Patchway threw himself down in the sand. He heard the climbing, scrabbling footfalls of the man who had fired the shot and knew the man could not fire accurately as he climbed. Patchway leaped up and ran into the tower of the fortress, the gunman’s surprised shout loud in the still air.

  Patchway scooped up Georgie, startled awake, and ran into the dark recesses of the fortress. He took the pistol from his pocket. Saw the trembling of his hand that could not hold it steady. For God’s sake, how would he shoot?

  “Patchway!” the gun man shouted from outside. “I am Saifallah Vakili-Mohseini! Come out now and end this for both of us!”

  Georgie screamed.

  “Patchway, you son of a dog!” Saifallah called. “Don’t make me come in there and shoot the child, too.”

  Patchway shoved Georgie in among tumbled down adobe blocks.

  The boy said in fright, “Are we going home?”

  “We’re both going home.”

  Georgie sank into the shadow of his hideaway. “I hope so,” he said. “I’m afraid to die.”

  “I won’t let you die,” said Patchway.

  “I believe you.”

  Patchway ran up the broken tower and made a circuit of the parapet, studying the desert around the fortress looking for Saifallah. The sky was thick with morning gray, the hill shadows dark and Saifallah in that barren country was
well hidden. The chill twisting of the poison in his gut made a new pain. He looked at the hand that held the pistol. No more tremble.

  Could this be the end of it for me? Patchway thought. The just blood payment for all the wrong he had done as a young man adventuring in someone else’s war? Payment for his child who lived just enough minutes for Patchway to fall in love with the baby?

  But those had been the thoughts of Patchway the hollow man, the man with the cold patch of scar on his belly, the man who would not love and could not live. They were not the message he had read on the ancient road last night. Sometimes, said the message, a very rare moment can come when a man has the chance to redeem himself. Was this his moment?

  Patchway wiped poison sweat from his face. It was not sweat but tears.

  Patchway climbed down from the parapet and looked out through the tower’s entrance into an empty desert. He moved in a half-crouch, holding the pistol at eye level, and put himself against the wall by the empty doorway. He could see nothing out there but his car in the depression below the tower. Saifallah had to be crouched beside the tower waiting for him to come out. There was no other close-by place for the man to hide.

  Patchway could stay there in the rubble and force Saifallah to come in after him. But that would give Saifallah the advantage of calling reinforcements or laying siege when Patchway and the boy had no food and little water. Patchway would have to go out after the killer.

  Patchway dived out into the desert morning, rolling and searching for the killer, and came up on Saifallah’s gun hand side. The man was pressed against the tower wall by the entry.

  Saifallah shouted in surprise.

  Patchway rolled onto his belly and fired once to conserve his ammunition.

  Bullets from Saifallah’s gun kicked up sand beside Patchway and scored his face and arms with pebbles and fragments of steel.

  Patchway shouted and rolled away from the target zone and raised his pistol to fire again but Saifallah was gone, behind the tower.

  Patchway scrambled down into the shadow cast by the car, cracked open the revolver and counted the remaining cartridges – three of them. That was all he had. His fingers shaking like a drunk’s, he wiped sand from the cylinder and closed up the pistol and waited.

  Saifallah came running up over the hill firing his automatic. The bullets pounded into the car where Patchway huddled, metal fragments spattering off the car and driving into his face and chest. Patchway jerked back from the spray and a bullet tore through the fender and into Patchway and he was flung flat in the shadow.

  Good God, is it over so soon? Patchway felt the pain in his leg and he wanted to scream! It was not like the ache of the poison in his stomach. This was dull and sharp together and felt as though his leg had been torn off.

  He dropped the pistol and put his hands around the wound to close up the flesh and end the pain but the wound was too big. Gigantic! He had been crouching and the bullet had entered beside his knee and driven up his thigh and exited at his hip.

  Blood! He had never seen so much blood come out of a man who was not dead.

  Patchway tore apart his shirt and made a tourniquet and used more cloth to bind shut the long wound. When that hectic activity was done, he lay back in the dirt, sweating and gasping, his hands gripping the cold, slick scar over his poisoned stomach.

  Bone? Had the bullet broken any bone? He pulled off his shoe and wiggled his toes. They moved. The bone was whole or enough of it was whole for him to walk. He almost laughed he was so happy to see his toes wiggle.

  But he could not crouch anymore. He could not bend the ruined leg. He could not hide and he could not escape. The runaway man had come to the end of his run. The child was over there in the tower of the crumbling mud brick fort with the killer Saifallah hunting for him.

  Patchway had to finish this before he bled to death.

  He heard Saifallah scrabble around to the tower entrance and run inside.

  Patchway pulled himself to his feet and ran hopping and limping and dripping blood into the fortress. He heard Saifallah scrambling up the stone staircase of the tower, loading a fresh magazine into his automatic, cocking the slide, calling the boy’s name.

  Patchway, one hand on his bleeding wound and the other holding the revolver, stood at the foot of the stairs. He saw Saifallah silhouetted for an instant against a morning sky full of orange and yellow and then the man was gone into shadows.

  Patchway wiped sweat from his face. Tasted sand in his mouth. The pain in his thigh was the pain of boiling water poured down his leg. The poison in his belly twisted his gut. He threw up and nearly fell.

  “Patchway!” Saifallah shouted. “Listen to me. Give me the boy and go away. I am not your executioner!”

  Patchway waited.

  “I am coming down!” Saifallah shouted.

  Patchway said nothing.

  “Finish this with me,” cried Saifallah.

  “I am not your executioner!” Patchway shouted.

  “Let me tell you something to give you heart,” Saifallah said. “I killed Hossein Afkhami. I killed Reza Horiat. I meant to kill Sheila Bond. I am sent here to kill you and that is the end of it for me.”

  “Come down and finish it!” Patchway shouted.

  Patchway propped himself against the wall at the foot of the stairs. He took his hand from holding shut his bloody wound. He used both hands to raise the pistol to sight. There was no trembling in his hands now but he could barely stand for the pain of the wound. He had three bullets in the revolver and then he had nothing.

  Patchway saw a black mass against the orange sky at the top of the stairs.

  Patchway fired his three cartridges. Saifallah fired. The yellow streaks of their bullets crossed, ricocheting up and down the staircase. The boy in his hiding place screamed.

  Saifallah was gone.

  Patchway saw only the red and yellow light at the top of the staircase.

  He saw the black mass that was Saifallah but he had no more bullets.

  Patchway had failed and he was going to die.

  Saifallah shrieked, “I have wasted everything!”

  He fell out the orange light, a mass of blackness tumbling down the stone stairs, and was crushed on the rubble at Patchway’s feet.

  Patchway dropped his empty pistol. He lowered himself to take away the automatic Saifallah still clutched.

  He felt for the man’s pulse. It ran down to dying. Two bullet holes in his chest. Out of the wounds came the last wheeze of breath.

  Patchway hurled the automatic into the desert.

  Georgie crawled out of hiding. He was weeping and moaning. He took Patchway’s hand and tugged him hobbling away from the corpse and out of the fortress.

  Across the desert they could see the high-rising smoke of Shiraz burning. The road below the fort was filled with refugees fleeing toward the Gulf. One of those cars down there would take them to the sea.

  The boy led Patchway stumbling downhill. In that dying country, a dead man had come back to life.

  The End

  Check out more international thrillers at the author’s website

  http://www.stevenhardesty.com

  Or jump straight into a hard and violent pursuit of money stolen and re-stolen across the Great Plains of the United States and the high Andes Mountains of Argentina in

  Running in Heels

  Click to order – http://tinyurl.com/kc5aw9u

  A Note on Language Pronunciation

  Farsi, the language of Iran, is the simplest Middle Eastern language for a Westerner to learn. It is flat in tone, nearly all of its verbs are regular and it has only one alphabet, unlike English which has two – upper and lower case. True, it is written backwards and looks like Arabic shorthand, and that may seem strange at first. But its freedom from accent marks makes learning to read and write Farsi a lot easier.

  Farsi is pronounced similar in tone to a Midwestern American accent in English. It sounds flat. Farsi is spoken just as written, unlike E
nglish. “I” in a word’s last syllable sounds like “ee,” so the name transliterated into English as “Yasamin” is pronounced “Yasameen.” “Kh” is a harshly aspirated “H!” – not the English “kawn” for khan but “h!awn”. “Q” is a guttural sound – Qajar is “Gaw-jar” with a choke on “G.” “Gh” is a more dramatic guttural that must be spoken with a strangled intake of air – “bagh” (garden) is less “bag” and more “ba!gh!”

  Like many things in Iran today, Farsi can be a lot of fun when it isn’t dangerous to your health.

  Special thanks to

  Flora Purim

  at Ronnie Scott’s, London,

  February 13, 1988,

  for music that cured a writer’s block