The Language of Cannibals

by George C. Chesbro

  I planned to do some dropping myself.

  I found a DKW I could drive, crossed the wires, and was off, heading for the open country southeast of Rome. It would take some fast driving over rough terrain, but I figured I could make it if I didn’t slow down for the towns.

  I was well beyond any limitations imposed by pain, hunger or exhaustion. My mind and senses were very clear, and I was running on the most efficient fuel of all: high-octane, one-hundred-proof hate. That hate made it a personal thing, a demand that I be the one to put Pernod away. Pernod had used me to kill another human being, and that act required a special kind of payment that only I could collect.

  Garth’s unintentional directions were right on the money. It was 8:30 when I finally spotted Pernod’s ranch from a bend in the road at the top of a hill, about twenty minutes outside Cinecittà. It was a spread of about one hundred acres or so, and the air strip ran right up to the rear of the wood and brick farmhouse. The fields of grain glowed golden in the morning sun. It would have made an idyllic scene were it not for the electrified wire surrounding the whole, and an armed guard at the only gate.

  I drove the rest of the way down the hill, past the gate. I waved to the stony-faced guard, who stared right through me. I drove around another bend, pulled the car off to the side of the road and sat down in the grass to think.

  If there was a drop coming in, I was sure Pernod would be in the house waiting for it. The problem was getting to him without getting myself killed. The fence was about seven feet high, with an additional foot of barbed wire crowning the top. With two good arms I might have tried to fashion a pole and vault it. In my present condition there was no way. I would have to meet the guard head on.

  The area in back of me was wooded. Using my belt, I strapped my useless left arm in close to my body, then stepped back into the trees and made my way back toward the guard. I stopped when I was about twenty yards away, picked up a stone and hurled it at the fence. The wire greeted the stone with a shower of electric sparks and a high-pitched, deadly whine. The guard came running down the road.

  He was carrying a sub-machine gun, Russian made, which meant it had probably come from somewhere in the Middle East along with a shipment of drugs. It also meant to me that I was right about the drop that morning. Nothing else would justify the risk of arming a roadside guard with such a weapon; a man standing by a gate with a sub-machine gun would be sure to arouse suspicion, and could blow whatever cover Pernod maintained. No, something—something very big—was coming in, and I suspected it could be Pernod’s retirement nest egg.

  I had to get close to the man, and the gun in his hand meant I had very little margin of error. I doubted that another ruse would work; any sound from me and he’d simply spray the trees with machine gun fire. I would have to go to him.

  I waited until he was about fifteen yards beyond me, then took a deep breath and exploded from the line of trees. Suddenly, the scene seemed to shift to slow motion inside my brain. I was running low, my right arm pumping wildly, my eyes fixed on the spot at the base of the man’s skull I knew I must hit if I was to get him before he got me. But he’d heard me, and his finger was already pressed against the trigger of his weapon as he began to make his turn.

  The muzzle of the gun described an arc, bucking, firing a shower of bullets that kicked into the trees, the circle of death coming closer and closer. The muzzle finally zeroed in on me and I left my feet, arching my back and thrusting up my arm in a desperate effort for height. An angry swarm of steel whirred by beneath me, and then I was at his head. There was no time to do anything but aim for the kill.

  I twisted my body to the side, tucked in my left leg, then lashed out, catching the point of his jaw with my heel. The man’s head kicked to one side and I could hear a dull click. He fell as I fell.

  I landed on my left side and was almost swallowed up by a white hot flash of pain that must have ascended all the way from hell. Somehow I managed to get to my feet, crouched and ready to move in case I had missed. I hadn’t.

  The hot barrel of the gun had fallen across the man’s arm and was scorching his skin, but he didn’t move. The click I had heard had been the sound of the man’s neck breaking.

  I turned and glanced in the direction of the farmhouse. Two figures were running toward the road. Both carried machine guns. I grabbed the dead man’s weapon and sprinted back to the shelter of the trees.

  They wasted no time examining the body of their dead comrade. The moment they saw him they dropped to the ground on their bellies, their guns pointed into the woods. My mind told me they couldn’t possibly hear me breathing; my fear insisted I take no chances. I held my breath. It was like Old Home Week; one man was the one who’d been tailing me in Rome, the other the one who’d slugged me in Venice.

  They were patient. It was ten minutes before the older man finally signaled the younger to move out. Both rose to a crouch and began moving off in opposite directions, still keeping their guns trained into the woods on the left and right of me. I crawled forward on my belly up to a large oak at the very edge of the road, then straightened up and flattened myself against the trunk.

  I was not at all sure I could even fire the gun with one arm, at least not with the accuracy I would need. Add to that the fact that any move I made would require exquisite timing and you come up with a situation that was not exactly favorable. Still, my adrenaline was running low and I had no desire to simply pass out at their feet. Besides, I hadn’t come this far to fight a defensive action.

  Now the men were about twenty-five yards apart, on opposite sides of the tree, and still moving. In going for an attacking position, I had crawled into a cul-de-sac; sooner or later the angle would be reduced to the point where one of the men would spot me. It was time to make my move.

  I knew if I swung on one man the tree would protect me from the other, at least for a few seconds. I decided to go after the older, more experienced man first. He was the most dangerous. I braced the gun on my hip and swung to my right.

  “Freeze! Both of you! Freeze, or this man dies!”

  Of course, they were going to hear none of it. Bullets beat an obscene tattoo on the trunk behind me while the man in front of me tried to drop to one side.

  I had anticipated it. I cut loose with a quick burst and the older man’s body danced in the air like a bloody rag doll.

  Immediately I pressed back against the tree, counted to three, and rolled around the back to the opposite side. The other man had done exactly what I had expected, running down the road to the other side of the tree. I stepped out on my side and pressed the trigger, catching him in the belly, blowing him backwards.

  He was dead before he hit the fence but that didn’t soothe my sensibilities. I shielded my eyes from the twitching figure stuck with electric glue to the deadly wire mesh.

  It occurred to me that I had killed my first man—plus two others for good measure—in the space of the last ten minutes. Oddly enough, I felt strangely unaffected by the blood and death around me; I kept thinking of a young man struggling for life while a man plunged a needleful of eternity into his veins.

  I figured the odds were better than even that one of the men I had killed had held that needle; the other two had probably held Tommy Barrett down.

  But the man responsible for it all was still alive and free. I glanced in the direction of the farmhouse; it was perfectly quiet. I looked at my watch and found it had been shattered. I figured the time at around 9:30, which meant I had only a half hour before the plane landed. I had to get to Pernod before help arrived.

  I reloaded one of the guns from ammunition I found in the older man’s pocket, then went through the gate. I knew it would be safer to work my way down through the grain fields, but I figured I couldn’t afford the time.

  Keeping low, trying to ignore the pain in my left arm, I zigzagged down the rutted road to the house. I expected to hear—or feel—a volley of shots at any moment, but none came; there was only the lazy singin
g of crickets. I reached the house and came up hard against the side, just beneath a window. I rested a few moments, sucking air into my lungs, trying to right the landscape around me, which had a maddening tendency to spin.

  I suspected a bullet between my eyes might be the reward for looking in that particular window so I resisted the impulse and crept around to the other side of the house.

  There was another window. I counted slowly to one hundred, then looked in.

  Elizabeth Hotaling was tied to a chair, a gag in her mouth. Her face was very pale, her eyes wide and red. Pernod was standing over her, a knife pressed against her throat. It looked as if the arsenal had been depleted.

  “I’m here now, Pernod,” I said quietly. “I just killed off your zoo.” I kept the gun out of sight. I was curious to see if Pernod would move away from the girl. He didn’t.

  “Get in here, Frederickson,” Pernod said tightly. “I want to see the rest of you. If I don’t, I kill the girl.”

  “You’re an idiot, Pernod,” I said evenly, allowing myself a short laugh for effect. I cut it off quickly as I felt it building to hysteria. I didn’t look at the girl. “That girl is the only reason you’re alive right now. Besides, she’s your girl friend, not mine. Chop her head off if you want. In any case, the second her blood spills, you’re dead.”

  Pernod smiled uncertainly. For a moment I thought he was going to drop the knife. I was wrong. Pernod pressed the point into the soft flesh of the girl’s throat and blood blossomed. I groaned inwardly.

  “I don’t believe you, professor. I don’t believe you’d let a young girl die if you could prevent it. But we’ll compromise. If I can’t see you, I want to see the gun I know you’re carrying. I want to see it now!”

  The knife point dug deeper, fractions of an inch away from the girl’s jugular. I pressed the loading lever on the side of the gun and the magazine dropped to the ground. I tossed the rest of the weapon through the window. Pernod reacted as I’d hoped, leaping at the gun, picking it up and aiming it at the window.

  It was a few seconds before he realized there was no magazine. By then I was over the ledge and into the room, standing in front of the girl. Once again, my left arm had come loose from its impromptu sling. I let it dangle.

  Pernod laughed. Apparently he thought he was in charge of the situation. He glanced once at the knife he still held as if to reassure himself.

  “All right, dwarf,” Pernod said without a trace of the manners I remembered, “stick that good arm behind your back and lay down on the floor.”

  “If you put the knife down I won’t kill you, Pernod,” I breathed. I straightened up and smiled.

  Pernod blinked in disbelief before rage gorged his eyes and he came at me. I ducked under the knife and kicked out at his knees. It was a glancing blow, not enough to cripple him. Pernod stumbled and sat down heavily on the floor, a stunned expression on his face. He stared at me stupidly.

  “Stay down, Pernod,” I said, fighting down my own blood lust. “Stay down.”

  I didn’t really want him to, and he didn’t. Switching the knife to his other hand, Pernod rose and lurched toward me. This time I let him get close, feeling the blade of the knife cutting through my shirt and slicing across the skin over my ribs.

  But I had the shot I wanted. I brought the side of my hand down hard on the bridge of his nose, breaking it cleanly. In the same motion, my hand described a lightning arc and drove those shattering fragments of bone up behind Pernod’s eyes and into his brain.

  It was almost over, and almost was the key word. I couldn’t let up now, not even for a moment. If I did, I would be finished but the job wouldn’t. I quickly took the gag out of Elizabeth Hotaling’s mouth and untied her.

  “You—you’re the man. He called you—”

  “Mongo,” I said. “Just Mongo.”

  She was in shock, which was just as well, because I had nothing to say to her. I felt completely empty, devoid of anything I could put into words. I covered her with a blanket and headed for the door, stopping just once to look back and meet her gaze. The look in her eyes stunned me, and I wondered, now, if that was how other people would also look at me.

  A dwarf? Yes. But also a killer, a dangerous man. Never mind the circumstances. Never fool with Mongo. Once I had thought that look was what I wanted. Now I wasn’t sure at all, and I wondered how much of myself I had paid for the look in the girl’s eyes. And whether it was worth the price.

  Clouds had eaten at the sun while I’d been in the house and it looked as if it would rain. I thought I heard the wail of sirens in the distance but I couldn’t be sure. It was almost time. I crouched down in the morning to wait for the plane.

  The reluctant editor mentioned in the introductory article was Ernest M. Hutter, a friend and early mentor who was among the first to begin actually buying my short stories and offering encouragement. But he wasn’t about to buy “The Drop.” If he ever understood that a certain bit of dialogue between Mongo and Garth in the following story was inspired, as it were, by him, he never let on. The important thing to me was that he sent a check.

  High Wire

  I’d been lecturing on Suzuki’s technique of identifying individuals through lip prints and was turning to a chart I’d drawn on the blackboard when I caught a glimpse of the man standing just outside the door to my classroom. I stopped in mid-sentence, momentarily disoriented, suspended in that spiritual never-never land that appears when widely disparate worlds of the mind collide. It had been a few years since I’d seen Bruno Jessum.

  I dismissed my graduate seminar and motioned for Bruno to come in. The students filed out slowly, casting furtive glances at the huge tattooed man who stood shyly to one side. I half smiled; my students were just getting used to the fact that their professor was a genuine, card-carrying, four-foot-eight-inch dwarf, and now their classroom had been invaded by a man who looked for all the world as if he’d just stepped out of a circus. Which, of course, he had.

  The smile was ephemeral; I was happy to see Bruno, but he jogged memories I’d just as soon have forgotten. I extended my hand and he shook it, staring down at me with the same soft, gentle eyes that had always seemed misplaced in the giant body.

  “It’s good to see you, Mongo,” Bruno said uneasily.

  I motioned for him to sit down and I sat beside him. “Circus in town, Bruno?” I was trying to put him at ease. I always knew when the circus was in town, although I avoided it as one always avoids something that causes pain. Old habits die hard.

  “Yeah. Been in ten days. Foldin’ up tomorrow.”

  Bruno obviously had something on his mind, but it looked as if it was going to take him a while to get around to it.

  “I have a friend who keeps a bottle in his desk, Bruno. Would you like a drink?”

  Bruno shook his head, which seemed to have the effect of loosening his tongue. “Gee, Mongo, you look funny here. I mean, Mongo the Magnificent teachin’ a bunch of college kids. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said evenly. I knew what he meant.

  “I heard you was some kind of a doctor.”

  “Ph.D. It’s just a degree. I’m a criminologist. I was going to school during the years I worked for the circus. You could say Mongo the Magnificent was supporting Dr. Robert Frederickson.”

  “I heard you was a private detective, too. I went to your office and your secretary said you was up here teachin’.” Bruno’s eyes shifted away from mine. “I thought I’d come up and say hello.”

  It was more than that, but I figured Bruno would tell me in his own good time. Actually, I didn’t regret the delay. I was having trouble concentrating. Bruno had brought with him the smell of animals, sawdust and greasepaint. It was like a drug, focusing the blurry edges of my life.

  I’d been born with a small body and a big mind, statistically speaking. After a childhood devoted primarily to consuming vast quantities of food, I had discovered there wasn’t much I could do about the small body, but having a measured I.
Q. of 156 made it difficult to accept any of the roles society usually metes out to people like myself. True, I’d ended up with the Statler Brothers Circus, but Nature had smiled, endowing me with improbable but prodigious tumbling skills. It made me a star attraction, but I wanted more and I’d worked for it. I’d always been interested in the criminal mind and, as I explained to Bruno, I’d used my circus earnings to finance my education, eventually earning my doctorate and an assistant professorship on the faculty of the New York City college where I teach.

  Not bad for a dwarf, but pride does funny things. I was—and am—a good teacher, but that still left me on the public payroll, so to speak. Some men—my brother, Garth, for example, a cop on the New York police force—are there because they choose to be. I’d longed for the bloodletting of the marketplace and had managed to obtain a license as a private investigator. Clients weren’t exactly forcing the city to repave the sidewalk outside my office, but I was reasonably happy, and that’s not to be discounted.

  “I haven’t changed that much, Bruno,” I said quietly. “I’m still your friend. You used to be able to talk to me.”

  Bruno cleared his throat. “I saw your picture in the paper a few months ago. You were in Italy. Said you helped break up some drug ring. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “I can’t help you, Bruno, unless you tell me what the trouble is.”

  “It’s hard,” Bruno said in a voice so low I could hardly hear him. “It’s about Bethel.”

  Bethel Jessum, Bruno’s wife, was petite, beautiful, but with the mind of a child—a mean child.

  “She’s been running around on me, Mongo,” he continued, “and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s driving me crazy.”

  I studied the other man’s face. Pain was etched there, and I thought I saw him blink back tears. I felt as if Bruno had put me in a box and was closing the lid. I don’t normally handle divorce cases, not because I can’t use the money but because they don’t interest me. The fact that I knew Bethel as well as I knew Bruno only served to complicate matters. Of course, I had just finished reminding Bruno that he was my friend; now I had to remind myself.