The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  There was much joy, much lust, and a great deal of instant fucking beginning with the first night. Kranak saw Gussow in the half light and dragged her and Fantome Duloissier into the room assigned to them and performed prodigies upon them for at least twenty-five minutes, after which he collapsed and they ran out of the room looking for some real action. There was nothing faulty about either Kranak’s intentions or his equipment. He was just so out of practice since he had refused sex with anyone for three years, that his gun went off at the touch of Gussow’s horny hand, and how long could anybody, even a top achiever, be expected to keep that up? At least they were honed by Kranak, so when the women ran into Buckley in the corridor everybody was ready and waiting. They dragged him into the laundry room and raped him on a pile of denim sheets. Then he raped them. Then they raped him again. Before they finished, they had worked up a wonderful appetite for dinner.

  Throughout the campus, men and women from the same countries tended to seek out the same love-making tastes and styles. As Sally Winn said, Major Wong was the greatest, but he was so far-out that she suddenly knew how much she had missed that real American home cooking. In the first two months or so they worked it out by having all the people from all the countries screw all the people from the other countries, but after that they began to settle down slowly until half the women were permanently paired off with twelve of the men, leaving eleven women for twenty-six men or, depending on the viewpoint, twenty-six men for eleven of the women.

  A few paired off as “permanent” couples. Out of all those sixty-one people, only one of them “fell in love.” Enid fell in love with Kranak from the first moment she saw him. She didn’t analyze why, she just loved him as the schoolgirl loves the French professor; because he was there, like Everest; perhaps because there were attitudes, expressions and postures he assumed which were so much like Daddy. Kranak simply did not see Enid. He would have been drawn to Enid had he seen her; he had a strong distaste for these coarse, criminal, disgustingly liberated women. There were too many goddam niggers, and Jews, and guineas and greasers and gooks.

  If he had seen Enid he would have appreciated her. She could fuck in French or German, which would have impressed him. She could have played the guitar or piano to him. Her soft, cultivated, helpless voice knew poetry and that was surely a gentling thing in a woman. She washed several times daily. She showered each evening. She cared for her hair, her fingernails and the men she was with and did not cry “Shit!” with every fourth word. Enid was a lady.

  But—he didn’t see her, so she moved in with Jonas Teel, who was back with the class for his final year at the War College. Enid grabbed Jonas because he was strong, he was new, and he was American. She wanted to be with just one man. She was confused from the rapid-fire, free-lance fucking she had been enjoying during the first few weeks on the campus. Jonas was the gentlest man of all of them. He was blacker than Janie Bossle and sweeter than Bart. He was her gentleman. It would have been better if he had come from Maryland instead of way up north. But none of that mattered because she didn’t love him.

  Sally Winn and Orin Dawes were the most successful alliance during the year at the War College because they were opposite numbers of the same kind. They had both always believed in the destruction of authority but they had each mastered separate ways to achieve this. They fascinated each other. She was a master street fighter. He was a West Pointer. That unbelievable proximity stunned, almost muted, Winn. Dawes had the feeling that, at last, he was going to get away from classroom theory on guerrilla warfare and hear it from someone who had looted and killed in the streets.

  Winn had seen two recent West Point movies on television before she left the States, one starring William Haines and the other with a new young actor named Dick Powell who sang all the fucking time. So she knew about West Point. In between the eating and the hard studying and the fucking, she and Dawes talked about West Point all the time. “How come they don’t let women go there?” Winn asked.

  “I can’t understand that,” Dawes said. “I mean—look at us. I mean we could be at West Point right now.”

  They talked about Blücher, Grant, Caesar, Bradley, Napoleon and Von Paulus; Winn at the level of West Point, Dawes trying to put it all into the context of street fighting.

  After two weeks of living with Jonas Teel (and making him very happy) Enid was finally discovered by Kranak. Winn told Dawes how Enid was feeling about Kranak. “That man don’ deserve a woman like Simms,” Winn told him. “But she want him, so we gotta get him for her.”

  “Get him? How?”

  “There’s somethin’ wrong with him. You told me yourself he didn’t touch a woman for three years, an’ I know why.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they was all Chinee women. He ain’t touched one black woman here. So you just pass the word on Enid to him for me and tell him she’s a real lady. Tell him she’s the niece of Herbert Ryan Willmott. Then stand back, man.”

  Kranak dropped everything and everyone to get at Enid. He sat with her in the mess hall for two days talking earnestly in a low voice. She said she couldn’t just walk out on Jonas. He said she had to walk out She walked out. She told Jonas, “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Jonas. This is something else. I mean, I don’t have any control over this.”

  “It’s all right, baby. I dig. I do. I swear, I understand.”

  Kranak and Enid were right for each other for nearly six months. Enid picked up quickly that he wanted her to play the Victorian lady. She knew how to do that. He sensed she wanted some special private consideration which he could identify with something the song writers called “tenderness,” some element of inner courtesy she had always had in her life with Bart. Kranak knew how to fake that. Enid went deeper and deeper like a gambler with her last inheritance because Kranak was infallible in all things, as her father had been when she was a little girl. And he moved like Daddy. And he talked in the same commanding, slow, self-important way while he handled his pipe as if it were the sword of Arthur. He was so strong. He could keep going at the same set pace whether they were in a blizzard or without water in the desert. He was so narrow-minded and jealous, it brought Enid security. If, basically, it was possible that he was a very cruel man, he taught her the golden values of snobbism all over again.

  Then it all got smashed. He and Sally Winn had been working out mustard gas problems for the public school systems. It was a matter of pre-placement in school ventilators, then a remote control trigger. Kranak had gotten himself into a temper because he was working alone in a room with a black woman and he had called Sally a nigger slut. Sally asked him, all sweetness, if the term had been meant to be affectionate or vicious. He had hawked phlegm and spit it into her face. Sally wiped it off carefully, staying very, very calm. She said—even and cool—that she thought everybody at the War College adored niggers—because his own special shack-up certainly did.

  “Watch your filthy tongue,” Kranak said.

  “I was only saying that Miss Enid was fucking and sucking Jonas Teel for ten hours a night before she moved in to do the same for you, so she must adore us niggers like the rest of the folks here.”

  “That’s a goddam lie!” Kranak’s voice shook so much he could hardly get the words out.

  “Well, say, I’m sorry—you hear? Because if you shaky about niggers—how you feel about Chinee men? Miss Enid love Chinee men. She gone down on Major Wong so many times he call her his li’l Yo-Yo.”

  Kranak knocked Winn over four desks and left her unconscious in a corner of the lab, then he raced out to look for Enid. He found her crocheting little white gloves, the kind he felt a lady should wear, at their small apartment.

  “What’s the matter, Ed? You look terrible. Gizzakiss.”

  “You listen to me, then you tell me the truth—you hear?”

  “Which truth?” she said naïvely.

  “Did you live with Jonas Teel before you moved in with me?”

  “Well—yes.” Enid thou
ght everybody knew that.

  “You screwed that big, sweaty nigger?”

  “Sweaty? Nigger? What kind of a word is that? Sweaty? You’re a lot sweatier than Jonas Teel will ever be. Jonas is a gentleman who believes in showers, Eddie.”

  “Shaddop!” Kranak was working himself into a frantic state. “Did you screw the Chinese on off-time?”

  “Of course. Didn’t you?”

  “What I did is different! I am a man, you are a woman! Man dominates the woman and he throws her away when he’s through with her the way I am through with you now!”

  “Ed, what is this? What is happening? Don’t say things like that.”

  “A woman is just a part of man’s hard-on,” Kranak yelled, “not a part of his life. Everything is opposite for women!” He threw a lamp at the wall and it crashed into splinters. “A woman mews for the attention of the man. She lives for the man and she would die for him if she had to do without him. But she cannot do without him so what you have done with a stinking, rotten nigger and a pile of Chinese bodies is just disgusting! It is cheap and perverted and pukingly low and dis-GUSS-ting.” He began to beat her; a hard left hook to the side of the head. She staggered backward; a viciously hard right cross into the other side of her head. “Get out of here!” he screamed. “Out! Get out!” He kicked her in the stomach. “You little whore! You slimy, nigger-loving, chink-loving whore—get out of here!” He dragged her to the door by her right wrist and flung her out into the stairhall and a quarter of the way down the stairs. He ran back into the room, piled up her gear into his arms, her foot locker, cakes of soap and hair curlers and flung them down on top of her, yelling hysterically. Two men came out into the hall and shoved him back into his room. Three women helped Enid down the stairs and out of the wooden house.

  Enid stumbled out of the common yard and along the company street to Jonas’s building. She knocked at his door. He let her in without a word. He made her a cup of tea.

  “He beat you up?”

  She nodded and sipped the tea dumbly.

  “You want me to really take him apart?”

  She looked at him in fright and shook her head. “He couldn’t help it, Jonas. He suddenly lost his mind the way my father could just lose his mind.” He washed her face. They put talcum powder on her bruises.

  Three hours later on the way to the mess hall, Enid and Jonas were walking along silently in a dispersed group of people all going in to chow, when they heard heavy running behind them and turned around. It was Kranak, coming up fast, wild-eyed. Kranak was yelling, “Nigger! You, nigger!” Jonas grinned at Kranak’s despair, and when Kranak came flying in at his throat, Jonas picked him up and threw him contemptuously into the winter river making its way down the slope from the mountains. They all moved along into the mess hall, ignoring Kranak trying to get a foothold on the river bottom.

  Kranak came into the mess hall late, wearing dry clothes. He ate silently. As the mess detail was clearing the tables, Sally Winn got up and walked across the big room to where Kranak was seated. She opened one of the long, clean, straight razors in her hand and dropped it on the table in front of him.

  “Pick it up, good-lookin’,” she said, “then come on outside. There’s good light out there and we won’t make a mess. Come on. You and me gone fight.”

  He stared at her coldly. “I don’t fight with women or with razors,” he said loftily.

  “You gone fight this woman with that razor or there won’t be anything left of you but about three yards of ribbons.” Winn moved the razor in her hand very fast. Her razor opened a deep, slanting wound in his right cheek. He held his hand under the dripping blood with amazement. He looked at her, hardly comprehending what had happened, then, grabbing the razor with a great and terrifying scream, he was on his feet overturning the table. He moved so fast Sally never had a chance. He had her by the hair, snapping her head back, exposing her throat to the razor and would have taken her head off at the shoulders with it, if Enid hadn’t hit him with two tremendously hard double kicks, knocking him sideways to the floor, sprawling him out on his back. Winn darted in and using all her wiry strength delivered a mighty back-swing kick into his balls. Kranak’s scream before he passed out made his screams at Winn and Enid seem like little theatrics.

  A whistle was blown. The hall emptied, leaving Kranak writhing there.

  A formal investigation was held by the Chinese authorities while Kranak recovered slowly in the hospital. Wise men in Peking decided it was not their problem and sent the file to Teel in New York, via Bogotá. Teel weighed all of it and replied. She said that a man could not help his prejudices, that he had very little to do with them. She wrote that Kranak was a great officer who was potentially a great commander. “What the hell are we running,” she asked, “a revolution or a popularity contest?”

  After graduation all American assignments were made. Ed Kranak was given the Eastern Action Area. Sally Winn drew the Western Action Area. Orin Dawes got the Army Corps command for the dense midwestern urban region; the units under his command were divisional, brigade, regimental and battalion. He reported only to Kranak. Jane Bossle Weems became Army Corps Commander in the cities of the American northeast; Lurky Anderson got an ACC for the deep South and middle-Atlantic cities. Buckley took the heavy Cuban and Latin-American sector in the southeast; Reyes commanded the southwest across all the Mexican border states. Jenny Duloissier got the northwest; Gussow got the far west. Dolly Fingus got blown up while making a bomb.

  Jonas Teel was named Central Commander and seconded Colonel Pikow. At the command officer level Jonas was the only guerrilla who knew of Colonel Pikow’s existence as Chief of Staff. Only Teel, Pikow, Jonas, and Enid were aware of the existence of the fourteen-man General Staff. The chain of command was always invisible. It went from Agatha Teel to Pikow to the General Staff to Jonas Teel to Kranak and Winn to Action Area Army Corps Commanders, then downward into combat levels. No commander knew of the siting or rank of command of any other. Kranak and Sally Winn knew more than any other operational officer and they only knew how to reach their Army Corps Commanders, no one else. It was a fail-safe system.

  Enid Simms, who had acquired Spanish and Chinese to add to French and German, and graduated number three in the class (men and women) was given Inter-City/Intra-City Guerrilla Intelligence, a function which would not really begin until the war started.

  For greatest security only on the day before Kranak’s departure for New York (first out because he was highest ranking commander) was he given his false passport and his new name—in the same way as these would be given to every graduate just before departure. They had come into China as convicted men and women; the men had disappeared from a U.S. Army combat zone and were therefore deserters, so new, permanent identities were necessary with new American passports. Teel had chosen the new names so she could keep permanent track of her commanders. She had also chosen his name to take skin off Kranak.

  He came bursting into Headquarters office brandishing the new passport. “Cal, what the hell is this? What kind of a practical joke do you think you’re playing here?”

  “What?”

  “This fucking passport! What are you doing to me?”

  “I am very busy, Kranak. Either speak up and state it or get the hell out.”

  “This-name. Chandler Shapiro. Do I look like a Jew?” The major stared at him. “Yes. A little. Why? What’s wrong with that? I happen to look like a Taoist.”

  “I am a Lipan Apache! This has to be changed. I demand that this passport be changed or I am not leaving.”

  “Kranak, llissenamee—that passport came from Peking. You dig? It came from the Foreign Office in Peking and it came from a security department in the Foreign Office which is so high up, you or I couldn’t breathe there. You are telling me that I am going to tell those kind of people in Peking that they don’t know how to forge a passport—right? Get the hell out of here, Kranak!”

  4

  January 1976

&n
bsp; They moved out of China singly in January 1976. Through Hong Kong.

  Teel, then Enid Simms followed Kranak, everyone traveling three days apart. No one knew the destinations of the others. Western Action Area Commander Winn went out next, followed by Dawes, Reyes, Buckley then Lurky Anderson. The last to leave was Chelito Gurma, after Weems, Gussow and Duloissier. The CIA plant sent a cable to Winsted, Connecticut, which said simply FLYING HOME TODAY MOM AND DAD. SEE YOU SOON.

  Teel had made all the assignments. She had chosen Chelito, the strangest of all the commander-trainees, to be her bodyguard in New York. Before recruitment by William Buffalo, through friends, Chelito had been a monastic for twelve years from the age of seventeen. She said to Winn who had also been a monastic, in solitary in state prisons around the country, “You know, it was a wonderful life for me. I gave myself to Jesus and I did as I was bade. On this earth my abbess was the symbol of Jesus so that, whenever I was confused about my life or my mission, I spoke to her, I put everything into her hands, and she decided for me. It was a life of pure prayer; very beautiful. Prayer is not like communication in a letter or by a telephone. It is speaking directly to Jesus. It brings you peace. I was so happy.”

  “So?” the lanky black girl said. “What the fuck did you get out for?”

  “Well,” Chelito shrugged. “I had a complete physical and mental breakdown. That is no good, you know? I was the Cistercian order. I hadn’t spoken for twelve years except to answer to my abbess for the essential needs of the monastery. But I didn’t need to speak. My abbess loved me. Jesus loved me. But I began to decompose and I don’t know why.”