by Barry, Mike
At length, he could take it no more. He closed the valise and sealed the clips. He put his weight on top of it and pressed it into the desk. Then he turned once again to the man on the floor.
“Where next?” he said.
The man said nothing. He had fainted. No mercy for the fallen. Wulff walked over and kicked him in the ribs. The man’s body gave under the pressure like a bag of water.
He revived, looked up at Wulff. Everything inside had been mashed, smashed, broken. Give him credit then. The spirit held on, imperishable yet in the framework of the man.
“Where next?” he said again.
The man’s eyelids fluttered. There was comprehension in the eyes but little more. The dead oriental kicked a foot in a curiously animate way. Flexus. Wulff turned and put another bullet into the head, just to be sure. Blood came out of the corpse like a geyser.
He went to the door, looked out, listened. In the distance he heard rumblings, screams, the pounding of feet but nothing at the rim of the corridor. Everyone was getting out. He was alone in the room with two dead men and one who would have been a better corpse. Little seams of water bulged out at the bottom of the walls and spread thickly, like blood, along the floor. The ship was listing. Already it had probably taken enough water into the holds to send it under. Time was limited—unless, of course, he wanted to stay here. He would have the valise to take down with him, though. That would be some comfort.
He went over to the fallen man and said yet again, very calmly, “Where next?” Speak to the dying and the agonizing very slowly, use simple words, repeat those words constantly. That was the only way to get through to them. You learned a few things lurking around hospital wards. Wulff had been there.
The man shook his head. “Kill me,” he said distinctly.
Wulff showed him the gun. “I’ll think about it,” he said, “but first you tell me where the stuff goes next.”
The man said nothing. It could have been agony or a last, desperate attempt to hold out. “That’s a bad idea,” Wulff said.
He shot the man in the forearm.
The man buckled on the floor. His eyes, far away from all of this looked up at Wulff, empty, detached. “I’ll tell you anything,” he said, “if you’ll just kill me.”
“Delivery is taken here. Then where does it go? Where does the valise go next?”
“All broken up. It all—”
“No,” Wulff said. He put a bullet into the wall. “See that?” he said as the plaster sifted, “that could all be for you. The next one could have your name on it. It isn’t all broken up. It goes in a piece. Where?”
“All right,” the man said. He tried to breathe. “It goes to Boston.”
“Boston? Not New York?”
“Boston,” the man said. “That’s the major Northeast distribution point now.” A glint of humor, of all things, appeared in the tormented eyes. “You don’t think we’d go into New York, do you? Why that’s the most dangerous city in the world.”
Wulff knelt over the man and showed him the gun again. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. The man said nothing. “I won’t do it,” he said. “I want you to suffer all the way as the ship goes down. I want you to know what you are and where you’re going. I wouldn’t give you the mercy.”
He stood and hefted the briefcase. It was surprisingly light. All of the evil things were light; it was only the avenger, the prophet, the saint, who found their burdens heavy. He carried a half a million dollars worth of death to the door of the room, stumbling over the corpse of the oriental and only at the door did he look back.
“I want you to think,” he said, “think of all of it, think of what you are and where you’re going.” He looked out; saw the water rising, spilling into the hall. Things accelerate. There were now three inches. The ship was perishing.
“And when it’s all over,” he said to the dying man, “I want you to look them up where you’re going, about fifteen or twenty people, and I want you to send all of them my best regards.”
Almost delicately, he closed the door behind him.
The water was over his shoes now, he could fell it grabbing him with fingers of ice almost up to the ankles. Pneumonia. Bronchitis. That was something to think of now, wasn’t it? He went down the hall, carrying the suitcase. Taking it had been only an impulse but he knew he was committed to it now as he had been committed to a few things in his life.
At the landing he smelled smoke. Billows of it were drifting downward. He peered up, saw the fire. Fire was leaping at him. A dim explosion had rocked the ship or maybe it was a kind of last, desperate sabotage and the fuel had ignited. The ship was fragmenting. He could feel the heat assaulting him. The fire might get the ship before the water did. Fire and water and ice and death.
He struggled up the thin, metal stairs. He had to go on, he had to get out. The suitcase tugged against him, impeding his flight, but he did not relinquish it. The suitcase was his little piece of destiny now, as close to a realization of purpose as he might get. Hundreds of men had worked and died for this thing. He would be damned if he would allow the waters to get it.
He began to understand the passions of the men who moved this stuff. It meant too much in to small a space; it was so small that you could hold a hundred thousand dollars cut in a palm. It became a focus then for passions that could hammer themselves down in no other way. He sighed, grunted, screamed with a flare of pain and dragged the suitcase after him.
At the top he felt the heat of the fire working through layers of clothing, impaling him. The topdeck was blazing; sheets of fire moving toward him like ghosts. In the midst of this fire he thought that he could see forms waving, struggling. Men were dying on this topdeck and yet he had to get out.
He divested himself of the machine gun, of the clips. Excess weight could only destroy. He allowed the grenades to go as well. No more grenades would be needed tonight. God help him if the pins were not secure; if the fire tore through the binding and ignited these grenades—but again, as before, he would trust in the old man’s integrity. The suitcase he would not relinquish. He held onto it desperately, grimly. He was the junkman. Half a million dollars worth of junk. They might write songs about him someday. He plunged through the fire.
For an instant he thought he would not make it; that he miscalculated, and would join those other staggering forms on deck, devoid of breath, consciousness, everything except the factor of fear. But holding his breath and plunging through he decided that he had not. That if he only concentrated and kept his mind on the only necessary objective, which was getting off this ship and onto dry land, he would be safe. The trouble with the forms was that they had lost their sense of direction. They did not know water from land, safety from hazard, and so they were in the midst of the flames still trying to calculate the means of escape. But the fire had skewered their brains open after only a few seconds of disorientation, and now they did not know where they were anymore. They would all die. Survival of the fittest. Holding his breath against that one last instinctive gasp of air that could destroy him, Wulff headed toward the land.
He found it. He hurtled through the railing feeling splinters of wood parting for him; he plunged through space feeling the air cooling even as he fell, so that by the time he hit ground level some seven or eight feet below, he was less shaken by the impact than he was revived by the gasps of air he now permitted himself to take in slowly. The air was still burning hot, impossible for a man to breathe indefinitely, but compared to the atmosphere on the ship it was clear. He could feel sensibility drifting back to him. The suitcase was still in his hand, the reassuring thong of the handle solidly in his grip. He stumbled away from the ship wiping cinders from his weeping eyes, feeling his sight reconstitute itself.
From bow to stern the ship was ablaze, lighting up the whole wharf in the roaring, building fire. The fire was leaping from one dock to another, like an inflamed lover it drew fuel from its own energy and it was cutting huge, jagged holes in the dock, i
gniting pilings, leaping over the oily waters. It might bring the dock itself down, it might set the harbor ablaze.
Beyond him he could see the enforcers arriving. A thousand sirens were driving their way through the air, a hundred fire engines, patrol cars, emergency vehicles were tearing through the city. The first of them had already arrived. Yet few of the enforcers had moved beyond this established line. They were holding back, waiting for the engines to come. Smart enough, Wulff thought. It was too dangerous beyond that line and they had everyone bottled up here anyway.
Including a running man with a valise.
He swerved, picking up his speed, aware that it could all, ironically, terribly, end right here. If they stopped him he would be too weak to resist, could not outman a squad, and once they tore open this valise as surely they would, it would be all over for him. They would take him to be at the center of the operation. He could explain, he could put things to rights, one way or the other he would get out of custody tomorrow. But the valise would be impounded, forever, and his Boston rendezvous destroyed.
He realized that he badly wanted to go to Boston.
And he wanted to go to Boston with the junk. He wanted the damned valise, that was all. He had worked too hard to get it, it meant too much to him, he was not going to sacrifice it now. If that put him forever on the other side from the enforcers, so much the better, because the enforcers would do nothing with it. They would put it into a stash room and after twenty years someone or something would come to trial and in the meantime the contents of the valise would have painfully, inch by inch, been replaced by cane sugar or wadded up newspaper….
He kept on running. He could see the Continental now through the forms, through the confusion of men, miraculously it occupied a little space of its own and had not been covered. He put down his head and bulled his way toward it, the valise banging, dragging, hitting against his ankles. He realized that his physical reserves had almost vanished.
He had a chance. He had a chance to get out. Still some yards from the car he was observed for the first time by someone downrange, probably a patrolman. “Stop!” this one shouted. “Hey there!”
He did not respond but kept on moving. The valise was a dead lagging weight now. If he dropped it and concentrated on escape, his path to the car was clear—but he would not drop it. He had gone too far, worked too hard to get to this point. “Stop it!” the voice said again. He heard the crack of a pistol.
And another crack. They were shooting at him. They would kill him. But in the haze and fire the aim of the gunman was bad. The shot stirred up ground some distance from him.
Now his commitment to flight was absolute. They had turned him into a felon. He could no longer turn himself into the hands of the enforcers even if he wished; the valise had marked him irrevocably. It was no longer surrender with which he would have to deal but death. He felt himself collide, running, against the car. The roof came under his chin. He toppled to the ground.
Got up. Stood, wavering, still holding the damned valise, then yanked open a door. Left rear. He tossed the valise clumsily inside, slammed the door and, his eyes beginning to burn from the fumes, opened the driver’s door and put himself inside, closing it.
The keys dangled from the ignition. At least he had shown that much foresight—he would never have been able to find them on his person. The engine turned, perilously, the battery weak, and then it caught. He raced it, dropped the car into reverse, spun away from there.
More gunshots. One impacted the windshield. The car stalled. Wulff ducked his head below the dash weeping from the fumes, struggled with the keys. The engine turned over slowly. Weak battery. Really, the owner of this Continental had been pressing his luck. But then he had probably not intended it as a getaway wheel. The engine turned over reluctantly just when he was about to abandon hope. He floored the accelerator, put it into drive that way and blasted the car in a circle, turning, heading toward the street. A spotlight caught him, the light blazing and digging into his eyes. He squinted, eyes burning, closed his eyes and headed out on instinct.
He was going to make it. He was going to make it now; for the first time he allowed himself a reasonable confidence. They were still shooting but the shots were coming blindly, without rhythm. They were already far behind him.
He heard a dull rumble, then, a tentative sound like a forest animal muttering to itself—and then the ship blew up.
He heard the explosion as a series of interrupted shocks, then the dull, whooping roar of ignition and the street underneath him shook. Risking a quick glance behind him, he could see the ship, prow up, blazing, sinking into the water. And there were no longer any forms on the docks. They had either run for cover or been completely devastated by the explosion.
He couldn’t think of that now. Later, later, there would be time to think of this, time to deal with the fact of the explosion and the devastation it had wrought. He supposed that more than a few people had been killed or seriously injured, and he would have to deal with the responsibility for that, but right now the explosion was a complete benefit. It covered his escape. Behind him, under the roar, everything was very quiet. No one was in pursuit.
He wheeled the Continental through the streets of San Francisco. Left, right, up, down. In, out, around. The valise jiggled on the seat behind him: his only companion his escort, his friend. He was certainly alone now.
He had never been so alone in his life.
Half a million dollars worth of junk to keep him warm, Wulff headed for a freeway to get the hell out of San Francisco, the Golden City, the Gateway to the West.
XIX
The girl was sleeping when her mother came into the room and said there was a call for her. She had been in and out of sleep all day like a boat bobbing in water, the dreams sluiced her but the waking periods seemed to be filled with dreams too, different and harsher dreams, and she could not separate the one from the other as she had been able to. She stretched on the bed and then slowly, reluctantly, came out of it.
“It’s a man,” her mother said with what seemed to be disapproval. Nevertheless, the woman had to be given some credit. She had led the girl into her bedroom, she had not asked questions, she had let her sleep. Her husband had wanted to make it a police matter. She’s been gone for months and now she just walks in? She’s probably hiding from the law and we’re harboring a fugitive. But the woman had insisted that whatever the girl had done, she was not a criminal, she was not in flight, she needed them and eventually there would be time to talk. It was funny what stress did to people. The girl would have guessed it to go exactly the opposite way. But her mother, it seemed, could stand up under a crisis.
She took the call in her parents’ bedroom. It was an elegantly furnished room; the phone was elaborate. These people lived well. They seemed to be dedicated to the proposition that no reality whatsoever should intrude into these rooms, or at least any reality of the type they thought unpleasant. Maybe they did not think of unpleasantness as being reality at all. It was something she would have to work out for herself later. Right now she was too tired; her last energies had been extended a day ago. She did not want to admit it but she was even glad to be home. “Hello,” she said into the phone.
“Tamara?” a man’s voice said.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello, Avenger.”
“Hello.”
“My name isn’t Tamara. I don’t want you to think that it is. Tamara is the name they knew me as, but really my name is Betty. I wanted a glorious, exotic type name for my glorious, exotic type life. Do you feel the same way, Avenger?”
“Sometimes,” the man said. He paused. “How are you?”
“I’m home. I’ll be all right. How are you?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Where are you now?”
“I seem to be somewhere in the state of Nevada,” the man said. “I haven’t checked too closely. On route 80 everything looks the same. But I’m pretty sure it’s Nevada. It sure as hell i
sn’t California.”
“All right,” she said. She held the phone more tightly against her ear, feeling her respiration increase. She could not have imagined that once away from him the man would affect her so deeply, but he still seemed to have that capacity. It was interesting. “When am I going to see you?” she said.
He paused. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just called to say goodbye. I’m heading east.”
“Where?”
“It looks like Boston.”
“You’re going to avenge Boston?”
“Going to avenge something,” the man said with what might have been a laugh. “Haven’t quite figured out what yet.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Are you going to get killed in Boston?”
“I hope not,” he said. Behind him she could hear the sound of horns, tires skittering on pavement. He must have called from a roadside phone, not even pulling off to a rest area. That would be her avenger for you. He was a dedicated man. Still, he had called. That was something. It was definitely something. “Of course I could,” he added, “but I’ll try not to be.”
“You weren’t killed in San Francisco.”
“No,” he said, “I definitely was not.”
There was another hanging pause. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something but the words were cut off. She looked around at the gleaming, porcelain surfaces of her parents’ room, the late sunlight filtering in through the elegant curtains. People could do worse. People could do worse than this, she supposed. She had been one of them.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” she said.
“I hope so too. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“On many things. Listen, Tamara—”
“My name is Betty.”