The Knowland Retribution l-1

by Richard Greener

  Maloney had some lunch already in the suite. Walter wasn’t hungry. He accepted a Diet Coke, but that’s as friendly as it got. Maloney lied… again. What did Walter expect? He had no heart to argue with the puffy and pink Irish sonofabitch. They just wanted Leonard Martin to know how sorry they were and to demonstrate their contrition with an enormous amount of money. That’s what Maloney kept saying. He practically begged Walter to find him again. The meeting was short. Walter felt all Maloney wanted to know was if Walter too might want to kill him. Nathan Stein was probably cowering behind one of the four closed doors leading God knows where. Walter had no idea how big the penthouse suite was, and no inclination to guess. Suitably convinced of his immediate safety, Maloney rose from his seat, signaling Walter that it was time to conclude their little talk.

  “Walter,” he said. “We know you’ve encountered some rather unusual expenses. This has taken more of your time than you probably thought it would. We want you to have this.” Holding a bulky brown envelope in his fingers, he reached out to Walter. “It’s another hundred thousand,” said Maloney, as if he were talking about twenty bucks.

  Walter considered turning and walking away, leaving Tom Maloney with his hand outstretched. His eyes caught Maloney’s, and neither man blinked. Who could walk away from a hundred thousand dollars? An extra hundred thousand dollars! “Not me,” Walter realized. He took the envelope, stuck it under one arm, and said, “I’ll be in touch.” The last thing he saw before turning to go was relief in Tom Maloney’s face.

  The next morning, instead of heading home to St. John, Walter was unexpectedly back at the Waldorf. Maloney had called him at the Mayflower. He was clearly panicked. Walter was already awake, eating his breakfast, contemplating his next move, hoping to take an afternoon flight home.

  “Get over here right away,” Maloney said. There was no sweetness in his voice, no pretense of fellowship or comradery. Definitely master-to-servant.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just be here.” Maloney paused and Walter thought he heard a sigh. “He got Louise.”

  Thirty minutes later Walter was in the penthouse again. This time Nathan Stein was there too. Maloney filled him in on the details. The ME’s report was not yet available, but the fact that the bullet struck her below the breastbone told Walter she had died a miserable death. Leonard gutted her. He was a better shot than Walter had given him credit for. The Hopman shooting involved such a powerful gun it ripped him in half, but a hit anywhere on his torso would have done that. MacNeal and Ochs were sitting ducks, and he may have passed over Grath’s death without enough consideration of the difficulty of that shot. A long-distance shot from a floating boat. Maybe it wasn’t a lucky shot. And now, a gut shot from somewhere on a mountainside. Walter worried. Had he misjudged this one too? He remembered what Aat van de Steen told him about the German rifle.

  “Where’s Pitts?” Walter asked.

  “Some place in Mississippi,” Tom said. “He won’t even tell us exactly where.”

  The image of Christopher Walken trying to get Dennis Hopper to give up his kid came to mind. Walter scoffed at the idea that Leonard would try, or need to try, to get information from any of his targets. He’s researched all of them thoroughly. And of course he caught Louise. Christ, the guy’s a real estate lawyer. Her stupidity cost her her life. Or maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was a mistake she wouldn’t ordinarily have made. Now Walter understood what Tom meant, back on the island, when he asked for some understanding of the stress they were under.

  “He’ll show there,” said Walter, referring to Mississippi, “before he comes here.”

  “Show where? How the fuck will he know where Pitts is? Christ, we don’t even know.” Nathan’s questions, taking the form of only a minor outburst, came without so much as a “good morning.”

  “How’d you know about my wife-ex-wife-my daughter, my bank account?” Walter waited, but there was no response. “You found out, didn’t you? So will Leonard.” That hurt. Nathan and Tom prided themselves-a foolish pride to be sure, assumed Walter-on being able to find out things about people, things they felt sure others could not discover. “A problem you guys have, among many, I’m sure,” continued Walter, “is you live in a world where you think you know everything. As a result, you mistakenly underestimate your adversary. You think your resources are somehow exclusive. I haven’t looked into it at all, but my guess is that Wesley Pitts has family of some sort in Mississippi, and my assumption is Leonard Martin knows exactly who they are and where they live.” Silence filled the room. Neither Maloney nor Stein reached for a cell phone to call Wes and warn him. In the same tone of voice he might use to ask a waiter what the specials were, Walter said, “Did you guys kill Dr. Roy?” Nathan Stein leaped from his perch on the couch.

  “You arrogant fuck! Who the fuck do you think you are!”

  “Nathan, calm down!” Maloney cried. “Easy now.” Stein was more given to outburst than real confrontation. Frustrated, he backed away. Walter hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “No,” said Tom. “We did not kill Dr. Roy. She did that to herself.” Nathan turned and was about to say something. Tom glared at him, and the frightened little man backed farther away, walking over to the French doors opening onto the patio. It was too cold to go outside, but he stood there looking through the glass, his back to Walter and Tom. He mumbled something, and then he was quiet again.

  Walter said, “Why did she do it?”

  Maloney turned to Walter with his very best “honest to goodness” look, and said, “We arranged for Dr. Roy’s apartment to be burglarized. That’s true. Made it look like some kind of hate crime. We were concerned she had made a record of her work for us. We needed to find out. We found nothing. But we were right, weren’t we? She had it all on a disc, a CD she kept someplace else. And before she died, she obviously sent it to Leonard Martin. We didn’t find anything, so we thought our concerns were unfounded. You know the rest of the story. But we didn’t kill her.”

  “You guys are a piece of work,” said Walter. “Good cop; bad cop. Out of control nutcase; Mr. Calm, Cool, Analytical. Lying bastard; fucking saint. This kind of routine, it really works in your business, doesn’t it? Crock of shit! You knew what your interests were and you acted accordingly. People died and you knew they would. Dr. Roy told you, but it didn’t matter. Leonard Martin’s family died and now he’s taking out everyone who knew and let it happen. You’re all there on Dr. Roy’s CD. You’re all lies and bullshit. I’m going to send your money back to you. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “No you’re not,” Maloney said. “You are going to find Leonard Martin and you are going to kill him for us. That’s your job and you will do it.”

  Walter rose to leave. The anger he felt turned his face beet red. He didn’t care.

  “Do it yourself,” he said.

  Nathan Stein said, “Sit down Sherman.” Walter did not stop or look behind. He continued walking toward the door. “Sit down!” As Walter’s hand grasped the doorknob, Stein yelled, “Na Trang!” Walter froze.

  “What, do you think we’re fucking idiots?” It was Stein who was walking now. He went right up to Walter’s back and said, “We know. We know.” Walter’s head was spinning. He had the look of a man about to pass out. The rules of the game were shifting. “Now sit,” said Stein.

  There is no such place as Na Trang and no one knew that better than Walter. But he remembered it. He’d spent the last thirty years trying to forget, but he remembered it. They dropped him by rope because they were too scared to put the helicopter on the ground. Too many warrant officers had touched down, never to rise again. As he reached for the rope, the crew looked at him in a way that Walter knew meant they never expected to see him again. He was less than an hour from a little village, no more than a collection of shacks and huts on the outskirts of a vast rice field. The map they gave to Walter was the only one this place appeared on. Not even captured VC maps showed anything here. Perhap
s two or three hundred people lived and worked in what Headquarters had named Na Trang. They chose the name because it closely resembled the sound of a popular Vietnamese slang for “shithole.” Another helicopter had gone down in this area the day before. The crew was killed except the pilot, who suffered injuries to his legs, but had survived and radioed his condition and location back to base. Then communications were lost. Na Trang, that shithole of a village in the middle of fucking nowhere, was the only place a captured American who couldn’t walk could be taken. Walter’s job was to locate him and bring him back. Nobody told him how to do it, just do it.

  Crawling through the wet rice paddies, ducking down under the water whenever he thought he heard someone, Walter approached the tiny village at dusk. He carried his rifle, his bayonet, a 45-caliber sidearm, and eight grenades. His face and hands were covered in charcoal. The nearest he could get to the shacks themselves was about fifty yards beyond a small hut standing between him and the center of the village. As he lay in the wet rice-it sure seemed like weeds to him-he saw four young men, one in uniform, all armed with rifles. They emerged from one shack, stood in the dirt path outside, talking, and then three of them seemed to be getting instructions from the one in uniform, who turned and walked away, leaving them standing there. The three went back into the shack. A few minutes later, Walter saw the uniformed soldier return, accompanied by another soldier also in uniform. They entered the shack together. None of the other three had left. There were at least five men in there now. The American was undoubtedly there too. The sun was almost completely gone, Walter’s vision already compromised. He decided to stay put. No one was looking for him, and with nightfall nobody seemed likely to stumble upon him. He didn’t smoke and had no fear of being discovered. He’d adjusted to the water. He had brought a Milky Way bar with him and pulled it out of the small pack he wore on his back. He was careful to put the empty wrapper in his pocket.

  The scream was so loud Walter thought it was right next to him. It was followed by another, and then a third. The horror increased in each one. The anguish and pain subsided slowly to a moan. He heard choking sobs. Two or three voices, all speaking Vietnamese, were yelling at the same time. More screams, and finally a moan that was endless. He couldn’t lie there any longer. Clearly the man he was looking for was inside being brutalized. God only knows what they were doing to him. Walter scrambled out of the rice paddy. The small hut fifty yards away stood between him and any attempt to rescue the downed pilot. Walter looked, but there was no way around it. He would have to sneak past it. There were people living there. He saw light inside and the smoke from a cooking fire rising from the top of the roof. He crawled quietly, passing only a few feet from the hut. Whoever lived there was still inside. The awful moaning ahead never stopped. And then more bloodcurdling screams. Now they too were unending. He had to hurry. He took a big chance. He ran the last twenty yards. The screams and the moaning so close to him were more than he could stand. Walter looked through the loosely attached walls of thatched reeds and large, heavy leaves. He could not believe what he saw. The American, blonde, in his mid-twenties at most, lay on a wooden table. He was naked. Both legs were mangled at the knees, crushed in the crash of his aircraft. A knife was embedded in the table and stuck through his balls. Half his penis had been cut off. It lay to the side, still bleeding. Two of the men were slicing the fingers off at the first joint. The fingernails had already been torn out. Another was doing the same to the American’s toes. The uniformed soldier, the last one to have joined the group, was actually skinning the man alive. He made long, thin cuts across the abdomen, and peeled the skin away as if he were cleaning fish. The longer the American remained conscious the more horrific his ordeal and the more gruesome his death. Walter could not imagine what sort of sanity could possibly remain in the man’s brain. There was no way he could save the pilot, not even if he killed the five men and carried him away. The captured American would just as certainly bleed to death being carried by Walter as he would at the hands of his captors.

  Walter did what he thought to be the most humane thing possible. He tossed a grenade through the open window. The explosion killed the American and the five Vietnamese. It blew the hut to pieces and started a small fire. Walter hit the ground in anticipation of the blast. Now he jumped to his feet and entered the smoking rubble. He grabbed a severed foot, knowing it was the pilot’s because the toenails had been pulled out. He found the stub of a hand, a piece of skull, half an ear, each one obviously from a white man. He shoved the body parts into his backpack. Walter heard the village come to life. A fire had begun just behind the now demolished shack. People were running toward it. He removed two more grenades from his belt, pulled the pins, and threw each of them as far as he could into the darkness in opposite directions. Two explosions rattled the night. More fire. More screams. More casualties. Now people were racing in all directions, some ducking behind huts, others fleeing toward the rice fields. Voices everywhere, all yelling in Vietnamese. Walter understood nothing. He needed to deflect their attention to make his escape. He spotted the American’s dog tags and reached to pick them up. A piece of skull with blonde hair spared by the flames lay next to them. He put both in his backpack.

  Backing away from the village, the same way he had entered it, Walter had to pass by the outlying hut again. This time he could not move unnoticed. The family living there was standing outside, huddled together in fear, watching the chaos from a distance. There was no way for Walter to crawl past them. He decided the safest passage was the most direct. He moved out of the shadows and began walking slowly, but at a steady gait. He was only a few feet away when he could see them and they could see him. A man, a woman, a much older woman, and two small children looked straight at him. At that moment they realized what and who had approached their home. Walter returned their stare. Then, the man-Walter could not be certain how old he was-dashed into the hut. Instantly, he reappeared, holding a rifle he pointed at Walter. And just as quickly Walter shot him. The old woman rushed at Walter, her high-pitched scream barely audible through her tears. She lunged at him, grabbing his shirt and tearing the top button off. Walter shot her and she fell to the ground. The younger woman, undoubtedly the children’s mother, drew her children to her. They held tightly to her side and she laid a hand on the head of each. All three were weeping. Walter stood there, looking at them, unsure what to do next. The shots he fired gave him away, and he could hear the villagers behind him. He had to go quickly. They would catch up to him in less than a minute. Which direction should he go? This way? That way? Whichever way he chose, this mother and her children would tell the others. He pushed them into the hut. They disappeared in the darkness, but he heard them. He heard the children crying and the mother trying to calm her babies. It may have been a strange language, but Walter knew she was comforting them, telling them, “It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright.” He tossed the grenade into the hut and began running. The explosion was the most violent thing he had ever heard, much louder than its actual sound. It was the sound of a mother and her children being attacked by millions of tiny pieces of sharp metal, a shower of death. He did not stop and he did not turn around. He navigated the rice paddies and made it into the jungle on the other side. The search for him was relentless. He evaded soldiers and villagers day after day, hiding in empty caves, climbing trees, taking cover in leafy swamps. He ate insects when his meager rations were used up. Three times he stole food, again picking on the most remote hut farthest from its village. The first of these huts was empty and he walked off with enough to eat for almost a week. The other two times he killed the occupants and took their food. Once he sneaked up behind a teenage boy who had lost his right leg at the knee. He cut his throat. The last time he beat an old man and his wife to death with the butt of his rifle. He needed to eat to live. On the twentieth day since being lowered into the high grass on a rope, he spotted a patrol of American soldiers. He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was, but he knew h
e had made it back safely. The odor from his backpack sickened the soldiers who rescued him, but he refused to take it off until he could deliver its contents to Headquarters. Walter’s report described everything that happened to him, down to the smallest detail. It made difficult reading for some. There were others who found it thrilling. All those who read it looked at Walter Sherman with a mixture of awe and fear. And there were the rumors. In time, Walter heard them all. He never believed them, but could not totally dismiss them. He’d been gone three weeks. In Vietnam that’s as good as forever. Had officers at Headquarters really placed bets on whether or not he would return? Had members of his own unit done the same? After the first week, had some demanded payment? When the Colonel smiled and promoted him to sergeant, was he counting his money?

  New York

  Maloney tried to ease things. He was an expert at that. In moments of self-doubt he often feared he was an expert at only that. Once more he saw a need to apply his gifts. Walter was still standing in front of the door to the suite. “Na Trang!” had stopped him in his tracks, but he had not yet turned to face the little man who knew more about him than he dreamed possible in his worst nightmare. Tom Maloney walked over to the bar and poured a Diet Coke. He approached Walter with it. “Take it,” he said, his voice and demeanor very much the opposite of Stein-Stein the jackal, Stein the screecher, Stein the sonofabitch. “Go ahead,” he said, handing the glass to Walter. He put his other hand on Walter’s shoulder and guided him to the couch across the room, nearest the doors leading to the patio. He motioned for Walter to sit.

  “A man’s history,” he said, taking a seat himself, “it’s never a complete mystery. It’s always there waiting to be unearthed, discovered, brought into the light of day by those whose interest is served by disclosure. You should know that as well as anyone. You’ve been a historian of men for many years, haven’t you? Of course you have. And a brilliant one at that. Who else could have identified Leonard Martin and then found him? Leonard Martin, the most hunted man in America-perhaps in the entire world-and who else could have done that? No one, that’s who. You are a historian, but you’re fallible, Walter. You’re just a man. You have your limitations, like all men. We do too. But we have resources to overcome those limitations. Resources you cannot imagine. You think we live in a world where we think we know things others don’t? No. You’re wrong.” Maloney’s eyes motioned Stein out of the room, or at least out of Walter’s sight. “We know we live in that world. That world belongs to us.” Maloney left Walter sitting there and moved to a chair in the middle of the room. Nathan Stein sat off to the side and behind Walter. He said nothing. Maloney was on a roll, and Nathan recognized it as he had so many times before. Finally, Walter sipped his Diet Coke. That single, simple act worked to return the color to his cheeks and bring his respiration back to normal. He looked up into Tom Maloney’s angelic, Catholic face.