Brainquake

by Samuel Fuller

  Paul was wondering…Why was his brain eaten away by the jackal?…Why his brain?…Why his brain?…There must be a reason. He saw Eddie. Eddie changed into the jackal. Then back into Eddie, then Paul fired at the jackal.

  The Inspector steadied his aim at the homicidal head.

  Must everything have a reason?

  The Inspector fired.

  Paul’s brain was blown apart by the red explosion.

  49

  “He’s dead. No bag.”

  “Keep looking,” Hampshire said.

  “Jesus himself couldn’t find it.”

  “Father—you ought to know the bag’s no write-off just because they’re dead.”

  “I didn’t hit the widow.”

  “Then she’s got the bag. Find her.”

  “I never lost her.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I passed.”

  “You could’ve hit her and you passed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must’ve had a damn good reason.”

  “I don’t think she knows where it is.”

  “You don’t think…?”

  “That’s right. She’s no saint, but she got swept up in this because of her husband. Just wanted to get away from the Codys. She didn’t know who she was getting in bed with.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “No. Page wouldn’t talk. Even when his life depended on it. I think he physically couldn’t. Not to the police, and not to her.”

  “You think so, Father? You’re that confident? Confident enough to pass? Why?”

  The Why? was the crack of a 240 mm gun. Father Flanagan knew exactly what Hampshire would say before calling him. He stood in the coffin-like phone booth, sweating. Two more ambulances roared past him to pick up more dead cops. The phone booth was suffocating him. His head choked with scrambled words Hampshire would never buy.

  He felt no betrayal. No guilt at all. Then why was he sweating like a spent horse? He knew his decision to pass on the hit would only give her the briefest freedom. Eddie would find her after the New York police had given her a clean slate. But he couldn’t stop Eddie. Father Flanagan was a professional and he only killed on contract. To kill Eddie was murder. That he would never do. Not even for a widow and her baby, not even to keep a baby from being orphaned.

  He stayed in the booth, one hand depressing the metal tongue, the other holding the receiver. He concentrated on what he would say. The words in his head began to fit.

  He placed the call. It took a few minutes for the international connection to go through, and then he heard Hampshire’s voice on the other end of the phone.

  He told Hampshire everything from the time he had walked onto the barge with the cop to the bloody catastrophe at the end. He explained there was no sign of the bag, no sign the widow even knew about the bag. He explained about the murder of the skipper, about the massacre of the police. He described the interrogation by the Inspector. He confirmed that Paul had gone to his death without naming any names. His voice was hoarse when he finished.

  He waited. One word from Hampshire and another hit man would get the widow.

  “I buy it,” Hampshire said. “You did good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Take a vacation, my friend.”

  “I need one.”

  “Take a month.”

  “Okay.”

  “God be with you, Father.”

  * * *

  Hampshire hung up and smiled, thinking about Paul.

  He was proud of Paul. Bagman loyalty was stronger than any kind of insanity. Opening the bag for the widow had been suicidal thievery, but never mentioning a name under pressure… that was the apex of loyalty. The man had redeemed himself in death.

  If Paul had mentioned Railey, Uncle Sam’s top psychiatrists would have put together Paul’s insane jigsaw under the scrutiny of a federal judge. They would’ve climbed the ladder and tried to get to Hampshire at the top, and who knows, they might have succeeded.

  He hadn’t slept well since Paul had run off with the bag.

  Now he would sleep like a baby.

  Yes, he was very proud of Paul Page.

  50

  Father Flanagan shed his uniform of God in Avoriaz, a ski resort in the French Alps he had always liked. Its quaint fairy-tale hotels and inns drew beautiful girls.

  The first week he struck out. He tried hard, but couldn’t get the attention of a certain gorgeous blonde. His X-ray eyes revealed her to him nude as she swept down the slopes. She made all the others also-rans.

  The second week he tried to catch her eye at the bar of their inn, on the road, in a lift while it was snowing, on a slope.

  The third week he even joined kids in a snowball fight and deliberately threw one that broke on her back. She scolded the boys. He announced he had thrown it. She kept walking without a word.

  The fourth week he spotted her with a group at the bar watching the morning news on TV. Logs were crackling in the huge fireplace. He ordered a Bloody Mary and sat on the stone bench near the fireplace and kept watching her. He sipped his drink. She paid no attention to him.

  When he heard the name of Inspector Sainte-Beuve on the news, he turned away from her to look at the TV newsman reporting:

  “Sainte-Beuve’s videotaped statement, made from his Paris hospital bed and transmitted to the New York police ten days ago, was said to be the decisive factor in the judge’s decision to release Michelle Troy. Mrs. Troy could not be reached for comment. Paul Page, the New York taxi driver who was slain following a murderous rampage…”

  The blonde shivered and switched to another station. Some sort of philharmonic performance. The others in the group showed relief. They were on a vacation. They wanted to enjoy themselves, not listen to the sort of news they’d come to the Alps to escape.

  Father Flanagan left, gathered up his skis, still rueful about Michelle’s Pyrrhic victory. He knew that no matter where she hid—California or Alaska—Eddie would find her and kill her. There was no statute of limitations on vengeance.

  But if she was very fortunate, she’d live long enough to see her son grow up past toddlerhood.

  He trudged through the snow on the road crowded with early skiers on their way to the lifts. Kids were still in snowball fights. Pictures were being taken of a family in a horse-drawn sleigh while the driver bit off a chunk of his baguette.

  Taking the lift to the highest slope to see what it looked like from above, Father Flanagan watched experts in action. When the last skier queued up ahead of him asked if he wanted to go first, Father Flanagan shook his head. The skier sailed off. The way he soared made Father Flanagan’s courage sink lower. He was not a brave man and viewed any steep slope with suspicion.

  He was startled when the blonde got off the lift with her skis. She glanced through him, as if he didn’t exist. It was his chance. They were alone.

  He performed the suicidal feat. Sailing in the air, flying spread eagle with his legs apart, he made a perfect landing. He waited. She didn’t follow. He waited.

  She came down in the lift.

  “You’re wonderful!” she said. “I haven’t the nerve to tackle that slope.”

  “How about a double lift to an easy one?”

  “I’ll race you,” she said.

  They trudged through snow to the double lift. They enjoyed the safe downhill race. She won. They lunched, raced down safe slopes the rest of the day, dined, slept in his bed.

  The next day they repeated the same program.

  When she learned he was only staying one more day, she was disappointed. She was staying on another week. Today they would enjoy themselves and tomorrow, his last, they would do the same. They were tired. Too much skiing.

  But they slept well in his bed.

  When he woke up, she was gone. The note on the floor was brief. She was going to the slope they met on, didn’t want him there in case she proved cowardly and backed out once again. He was to wait for her at the bar.
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  He smiled. She didn’t want him to see her chicken out or fall on her ass. There was no time to shower. Swiftly, he pulled a purple turtleneck over his head, thrust his legs into emerald green pants, jammed his feet into his heavy yellow boots, buckled them, put on his red skiing jacket, slung his tinted goggles round his neck, clapped on his knit cap, rushed out, grabbed his skis, hurried down the snow-banked road.

  He kept his eyes on the highest slope. Deserted. No movement whatsoever. He looked for orange. Vivid orange—her jacket. No orange.

  He stopped in the middle of the road. Steadied his gaze. Maybe she was still going up the lift. Maybe she had tried the slope and fallen.

  He spotted orange on the top of the slope. It sparkled in the blinding sun. She stood there like an orange monument. He shared her fear. She was making up her mind.

  She stood there for over a minute.

  Suddenly she vanished. An instant later she appeared flying in the air. She sailed like a swan. She made a wonderful landing. Soon she would be skiing down the road to tell him all about it.

  The sun burned his eyes. He put on the goggles and started along the road, waiting for her. Behind him, the approaching jingle of bells made him step out from the middle of the road as he turned toward the horse-drawn sleigh.

  In it, he saw the widow. She was wrapped in mink. With a mink cap.

  With her was a man. Both were laughing. On his lap was the baby pulling at the tail of the toy monkey in his tiny gloved hands.

  The sleigh was coming closer. He knew she couldn’t recognize him, with goggles and hat and collar pulled high. But he recognized her. He also recognized the face sitting next to her. He had seen that face on TV and in newspapers threatening blood revenge for the murder of his brother.

  Edward Cody.

  Eddie and Michelle kissed.

  The sleigh passed. He watched it heading toward the inn. The shock was brief. He had been taken in. Because of him, the mob wasn’t looking for Paul’s bag. She had made a horse’s ass out of him. She’d made a horse’s ass out of Hampshire. She had pulled the old collusion sting and it had worked. Eddie, the avenger, was her partner. It was a setup that had fooled everybody, even the cops. Father Flanagan admired her cunning, her acting ability, recalling the way she had goaded Paul to blow his top, yelling Eddie’s name. And Paul shot down by a French cop. What a goddam brilliant sting. She had the ten million and nobody was looking for it. Nobody.

  His mind traveled back to his room, to the closet in his room, to the highest shelf of the closet, to the small leather satchel on the highest shelf, to the tools tucked away in a deep, reinforced pocket of the satchel. He was on vacation, he’d had no intention of working for a month, but because you never know what might come up, he hadn’t traveled empty-handed.

  He smiled, thinking of the hammer, of the spikes.

  No one was paying him to rectify the situation. True enough. But sometimes an extraordinary situation calls for unusual measures. And this was a matter of pride. Of self-respect. Of justice.

  And of ten million dollars.

  A small, strained voice in the back of his head spoke then: If you let them live, the baby won’t be orphaned!

  But he silenced it. There was orphaned and there was orphaned. Most of the ten million remained, surely, and a generous fraction donated anonymously to the orphanage in France would ensure a better childhood than he’d ever have had with his mother. It would ensure a good childhood for quite a few orphans.

  Through his brown-tinted goggles, the gorgeous nude on skis was approaching. She saw his smile, thought it was for her, returned one of her own. “You saw what I did? I felt so bold!” She leaned in toward him, nuzzled his cheek. “Are you up for doing something bold yourself?”

  “Yes,” said Father Flanagan. His eyes never left the sleigh.

  AFTERWORD

  By Charles Ardai

  The word “hero” gets thrown around a lot these days, to the point where using it might inspire cynicism rather than admiration. But there’s no other way to say it: while he never considered himself one, Samuel Fuller was a hero.

  Not just a hero of mine, though he was that too. An actual, honest-to-god hero.

  He’d have earned that description just for what he did in World War II, enlisting in the notorious 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army (known as the “Big Red One,” and not just because of the red numeral sewn on their uniforms) and fighting in North Africa and Italy before landing in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. If you’ve seen the brutal opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan (or Fuller’s own autobiographical war movie The Big Red One), you have a tiny sense of what that experience entailed. Some 160,000 troops stormed the beaches, where they were mowed down by Nazi machine gun fire. Thousands died. Sam survived.

  He marched on to Czechoslovakia, where he and his fellow infantrymen participated in the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. “Participated in”—what a bloodless phrase. It was not a bloodless event. The hand-to-hand combat was horrific, and what the soldiers discovered inside the camp was even more so. Interviewed years later, Fuller said, “War is so insane…it’s impossible for anybody to appreciate the word ‘insanity’ unless you are in combat. In war, we actually got used to seeing violence, horrible things. But we never thought that we would ever come across anything that would make that whole nightmare seem almost a holiday—except at Falkenau.” Already a budding filmmaker with several film scripts to his credit, he was carrying a little handheld movie camera with him, and his footage of the camp is shocking and unforgettable.

  In Tunisia, I wrote to my mother to send me a movie camera. It took her over a year and a half, or more. That was ’43…I received a 16 millimeter Bell & Howell, which you had to crank…

  [After the fighting ended at Falkenau, the] first man I ran into was Captain Walker. He said, “Do you still have that camera your mother sent you?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said: “Get it.”

  I returned, with my camera, loaded it and all that, walked right into the camp. And didn’t know that I was going to photograph…was going to shoot my first movie. It might be the work of an amateur, but the killings in it are very professional.

  Samuel Fuller witnessed horrors. But he did more than witness them—he bore witness to them, not just through the film he shot in the moment, on the spot, but through the extraordinary career that followed. He made two dozen movies, many of them controversial, most of them deeply personal, all of them concerned with the topics of violence, cruelty, madness and suffering. He wrote and he directed. He was an auteur before the term existed. He made his pictures for very little money, in very little time, and sometimes it shows. But what also shows is his passion and absolute commitment to his subjects, to the telling of a story you can’t stop watching, a story he believed was important to tell. A gruff, snarling, cigar-chomping figure who used to fire a gun loaded with blanks to commence filming rather than calling Action!, Fuller told stories like his life depended on telling them—and yours depended on hearing them. It wasn’t a job. It was a calling.

  The war wasn’t Fuller’s first taste of this calling. At twelve he went to work as a newspaper copyboy and at seventeen he became the youngest reporter in New York City history to cover a crime beat, writing about murders, suicides, executions and riots for the New York Evening Graphic. That experience later inspired his film Park Row, an attempt to convey the brutality and the glory of the newspaper business in its early days.

  Through Prohibition and the Great Depression he worked as a journalist, reporting on Ku Klux Klan rallies, riding the rails with hoboes, covering the San Francisco longshoremen’s strike that culminated in Bloody Thursday. He also began writing fiction at this time, starting with novels with titles like Burn, Baby, Burn! and (improbably enough, given that this was in 1936) Test Tube Baby. In 1944 he published The Dark Page, a classic noir crime novel later filmed (though not by Fuller) as Scandal Sheet.

  Fuller broke into Hollyw
ood himself as a screenwriter and script doctor, ghosting for other, better-known writers. His big break came in 1949, when he got the opportunity to direct his own script for the disturbing Western I Shot Jesse James, most memorable for depicting the psychological torment of James’ killer, forced to reenact his crime nightly on stage to the jeers of frontier audiences. He made his name with his third film, The Steel Helmet, which was the first Hollywood movie about the Korean War, shot and released while the war was still going on. It, and Fuller, came under fire for the movie’s realism, including a scene where an American solider shoots a prisoner of war. Fuller’s response: he’d seen it done himself, and not just once.

  More war movies followed, more Westerns. Also crime pictures such as the moving and visceral film noir Pickup on South Street. Many of the movies dealt head-on with previously untouched and untouchable themes, in particular racism, and drew criticism down on Fuller’s head from both ends of the political spectrum.

  The fifties were a fertile time for Fuller, who wrote and directed twelve films in ten years. Then came the sixties, and sources of funding began to dry up, both because of changes in the studio system and because of the controversial content Fuller avidly embraced. But Fuller kept making movies, including two of his greatest: Shock Corridor, about a newspaperman who gets himself committed to an insane asylum to investigate a killing, and The Naked Kiss, about a prostitute trying to start her life over in a small town. After that, it was sixteen years before Fuller cemented his reputation as a filmmaker with The Big Red One.

  Along the way, he inspired a legion of other filmmakers who went on to do unforgettable work of their own: Spielberg, Coppola, Tarantino, Wenders, Jarmusch, Godard, Scorsese… the list goes on. Spielberg gave Fuller a cameo in his first World War II film, 1941, and (together with George Lucas) named the scrappy young sidekick in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom “Short Round” after the similar character in The Steel Helmet. Footage can be found online of Coppola screen-testing Fuller for the role of Hyman Roth in The Godfather. Jean-Luc Godard famously cast Fuller as himself in Pierrot le Fou, where he filmed Fuller expounding, “A film is like a battleground…there’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotions.”