Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  “Brew had Mule under surveillance. It was spot surveillance usually done in the early evening. For four days it couldn’t be done because Mule disappeared from Prairie Port. Those four days were spent in South Carolina briefing Otto Pinkny on the crime. Washington’s spy saw to Mule’s secret traveling arrangements back and forth.”

  They were into a tunnel beyond a grotto now, a wide, curving tunnel. Strom and Jez, who had gotten tired oaring, were told their destination was near. They paddled somewhat harder.

  “Everything worked out,” Yates continued. “Otto Pinkny came to Prairie Port like Lindbergh returned to New York City. They gave Otto everything but a parade. He deserved one, I suppose, if for no other reason than convincing everybody he and his gang pulled off Mormon State. Most of our office was convinced, if you remember. Still are. Mule, as I said before, was fairly honest with Washington’s spy. Fairly, but not totally. He forgot to mention one thing … he’d blown Cowboy Carlson’s head off a few nights after the robbery and dumped the body in the river. Mule had said he thought one of the other gang members might have killed Cowboy. This wouldn’t have mattered any more than him admitting to the murder if two things hadn’t happened. One, his alibi specifically stating he was away from Prairie Port the night of the robbery as well as the week after. Two, somebody saw him kill Cowboy.

  “That somebody was your wife, Strom.”

  The only sound to come from Strom Sunstrom’s end of the boat was that of constant paddling.

  “Alice had been visiting a friend that night and looked out the window and saw Mule do it,” Yates said. “And Mule saw her. Saw her in a compromising situation. That’s why she couldn’t say anything to you. She was with who you suspected, Elaine Picket. Alice began to realize she had to say Mule was in Prairie Port. So what she did was pick up the phone and dial our hot line, dial FBI-2000. She disguised her voice and said when and where Mule had killed Cowboy. It didn’t take Washington’s spy and Washington long to find out and verify this. The spy even confronted Mule, and Mule owned up to the murder.

  “Now the spy’s boss, or bosses, in Washington had a new set of problems. Not only had they conspired with an assassin, which in and of itself could be devastating if ever revealed, but the whole charade of having Otto Pinkny replace the actual robbers was in jeopardy. If Mule’s alibi could be disproved, the whole house of cards would come falling down. So they solved it very simply, they gave Alice to Mule. Whatever was done to her, whatever Mule did, she was trying all the time to protect you, Strom. When the pain, and shame, got to be too much … she killed herself.”

  Again, only the sound of paddling was heard from the bow.

  Yates steered the rubber boat into a recess beyond a curve in the tunnel. “So who was this spy? This confederate of ours who brought all this down? If we think back, it isn’t hard to figure out. Which one of us was ever alone with all three suspects before their release … alone with Mule, Ragotsy and Wiggles?”

  “Are you trying to say it was me?” Jessup said.

  “Had to be, Jez.” Yates had his gun out and pressed to Jessup’s neck. “Hands up, nice and easy. Strom, better see if he has his gun.”

  “I don’t, and you’re looney-toon.” Jessup seemed unconcerned.

  Strom searched Jez, found nothing.

  “It was left to you and you only to get the final confessions from Wiggles, Mule and Ragotsy. You went to see each one of them two or three times. I chauffeured you a few of those times but never went inside. Nobody saw them except you. You told us it looked like they might confess. But all the while you were working out the deal with them. When it was finally negotiated you told us they refused to see you any more. They did refuse to see you any more, because you had told them to do it that way.”

  Jez turned in the darkness. “Strom, he’s full of shit. He and his buddy Brewmeister brainstormed this crap and now he’s trying to—”

  “Strom, you know who in our office took the call the night your wife dialed FBI-2000?” Yates asked. “It was Jez. He was sitting in at the switchboard so the duty agent could go to the john. You know who went and looked at the address Alice gave, and then went over to talk to Elaine Picket? Jez. Know who got Elaine Picket to tell him what went on the night Alice was over there, say that Alice had seen someone get shot? Jez. Elaine Picket couldn’t describe what the person looked like that Alice saw, but Jez had a better way of finding out. He asked Mule, or beat it out of him.

  “No, from top to bottom it was you, Jez, always you,” Billy told him. “And at the end, when Brew and I wouldn’t buy Otto Pinkny, wouldn’t let up insisting it was Mule and Rat and Wiggles who were it, only one person wouldn’t bother to argue with us … only one person looked the other way.”

  “You’re damning a man because he looked away?” Jez’s voice was scornful.

  Yates jabbed the gun hard into Jessup’s chest. “Keep your voice low. As for damning, you’ve done that to yourself. I broke your line of communications, Jez. The same line of communications Wilkie Jarrel used, the same system of phone booths and callbacks we have listed in our reports on him. Wasn’t it you and Brew who did most of the investigation on those reports? It doesn’t matter, I’ve got you on tape.”

  “You’re crazy.” Jez turned in the dark to Strom. “He’s goddam crazy, believe me, he’s—”

  Strom was on him, in the refraction of the search beam had lunged forward and gotten Jez by the throat, was choking him with all his strength. Yates struggled to keep the boat even, telling Strom, “Stop and you can have them all. For God’s sake, stop. Wait for the rest. They’ll all be here.”

  Yates, in desperation, kicked his leg forward, caught Strom in the shoulder and knocked him back. Jez lay on his side, wiping blood from his mouth.

  “They’re coming here to meet you, Jez,” Yates told him. “I know about Howard. I imitated your voice. I called Mule imitating your voice and told him not to bother with Howard and to come down here and meet you where he did last time. When he called back to verify, I was tapped in again and confirmed he should come here. Know whose phone number he called to confirm, whose number I was tapped into? Yours, Jez.”

  “Then you couldn’t have heard anything like that because nobody would have called me.” Jez spoke calmly and started to sit up. Yates pushed him back down.

  Sounds were heard in the distance.

  “Can you cover him without shooting him?” Yates asked Strom.

  Strom said he could, took the gun Yates handed him, trained it down on Jez.

  Yates unfastened a rifle from inside the prow gunnel. “Better kill the light.”

  Strom placed his foot on Jez’s chest, reached behind his back and snapped off the search beam.

  Putt-putting echoed far off. So did the voice of someone singing “We’re in the Money.” Light flickered in the darkness of the tunnel to their left. Putt-putting turned to the constant whirr of a motor. The lyrics grew louder.

  Yates brought the rifle onto his lap.

  The tunnel to the left filled with glaring light. The deafening roar of an outboard motor resounded. A rubber boat burst into view carrying Mule, Wiggles and Rat Ragotsy, all of whom were singing at the top of their lungs “We’re in the Money.”

  As they passed the dark recess in which Yates, Jez and Strom were hidden, Jez, in one fast move, shoved Strom’s foot backward, knocking Strom down, and jumped up and into the black water. Hitting the water, Jez grabbed hold of a guide rope on the side of Mule’s boat, yelled for Mule to get the hell going. Mule threw open the throttle. The boat lurched into the darkness.

  Yates hurriedly arranged a dazed Strom on the floor, started up the motor. Seeing nothing but blackness ahead, he stretched forward and snapped the search beam on, stood up to follow the turbulence in the water ahead. The tunnel opened into a small water-filled cave, then a large cave, then into a wider, curving tunnel. Speeding into another cavern, he heard gunshots ring out. Strom, now recovered, snapped off the searchlight as Yates zigzagged the
boat, reduced the power, followed the sound of Mule’s roaring outboard motor. In the next stretch of tunnel, the light went back on. Gunshots ricocheted back off the tunnel walls.

  Yates was gaining on the boat, around another turn in the tunnel momentarily caught sight of it … and caught a hail of gunshots. Strom answered the fire. They sped into a narrower maze of tunnels. More shooting erupted from ahead. Again Yates and Strom had to kill their searchlight, travel at halfpower.

  Tunnels gave way to cavern after cavern, each wider and higher than the last. Colder too. Yates felt his fingers numb. Strom was shivering. But the caverns offered an acoustical advantage … Yates and Strom could now hear the motor ahead in the darkness more clearly. They briefly caught sight of Mule’s boat. Yates threw open the throttle. Strom began to fire. The fire was returned. Mule’s boat turned off its light. Strom turned on his search beam, sighted in on Jez kneeling down and firing back at them with an automatic weapon. Again Strom switched off the light.

  The chase crossed more caves. Mule’s boat was gaining speed, outdistancing its pursuer. Again Yates reduced power so he could follow the sound of the motor ahead of him in the middle of a grotto. The sound cut off. Yates shut down his motor as well. There was a slight current in the water. He let the boat drift. It bumped against the grotto wall, moved along the wall until an opening was found. Yates and Strom paddled through into what seemed to be a narrow corridor. Shafts of light flickered in the distance. Navigating toward it, they reached another opening and started in.

  They floated out onto a vast underground lake spread across an enormous cavern. The walls had a pulsating blue sheen to them, a sheen that cast shimmering reflections onto huge mud stalactites hanging from the arching ceiling high overhead. At the far end of the lake was an island. On the island, and draped between odd-angled, truncated telephone poles, were string after string of glowing, low-wattage light bulbs. Running from the lights to a pile of industrial batteries that powered them was a frayed cable. Mule’s boat was drifting just off the island. All four men in it, Mule and Jez and Ragotsy and Wiggles, were standing. Standing motionless as if frozen by what they were encountering. Drawing closer, Yates and Strom saw what that was.

  Sitting cross-legged on the island, in front of the charred logs of a burnt-out fire and clutching canvas money sacks, was the decomposed corpse of Meadow Muffin Epstein. Jessup and Ragotsy noticed something else. So did Strom, who nudged Yates to look beyond the island and higher up, to look at the mud-crusted cavern wall curving up behind Meadow Muffin and the mud-covered ceiling arching down over the island. There, frozen in the mud, were the bodies of the remaining gang members … Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale and Reverend Wallace Tecumseh “Windy Walt” Sash and Thomas “Worm” Ferugli, each contorted in the final postures of struggling mortality. Embedded amid the corpses, like the treasure from some great Pharoah’s tomb, were the artifacts of their last lost achievement, the tools of Mormon State … torn rubber boats and parts of a large log raft lashed together with strands of fusing cord and segments of outboard motors and sections of metal scaffold and shovels and picks and hammers and walkie-talkie radios and drills and thermos bottles and dollar bills and waterproof crates of dynamite and a shattered television monitor screen and a field telephone and a first-aid kit and a bottle of whiskey and cans of beer and bits of food and faded packs of cigarettes and pulpish leftovers of magazines and comic books or whatever else was read or looked at to kill some time while preparing for the heist. Tattered rubber wet suits and hardhats with plastic visors and hip-high fisherman’s boots lent an eerie animation to the gigantic frieze of robbery and death, made it appear as if a cavorting band of specters, in parts and in whole, were performing some mad and ghoulish dance.

  “Don’t shoot,” Mule hissed out rather than shouted.

  Yates looked down to see Strom standing beside him with a rifle raised at Mule and Jez. Their two boats had drifted within twenty feet of one another.

  Mule waved his hands frantically and pointed to the ceiling. “There’s nitroglycerin in them ceiling and walls.” His tones were still hissing and low. “Dynamite too. Enough to blow us all to kingdom come.”

  Sunstrom, his gunsight alternating from Mule to Jessup and back to Mule, tried to control his rage, his hatred of the two men who had conspired to violate and murder his wife.

  “We’re in the salse,” Ragotsy, who was standing beside Wiggles and Jez, whispered urgently. “The heart of the volcano. Them blue lights at the other end of this place, them’s from the salse. You don’t need dynamite to send this whole place up. A sneeze can do it. Don’t fucking shoot no gun.”

  The image of Alice won out. Strom fired at his old friend, the man who had once kept him from seriously harming a SAC who had impugned his wife. Jez collapsed into the boat, his shoulder splintered. As he did, Wiggles ducked down, came up a split second later brandishing a submachine gun. Strom fired again. Wiggles dropped … and as he sank, his dead finger contracted on the trigger. The submachine gun fired into the air. Into the ceiling.

  Something detonated. A chain reaction of explosions began, each one more powerful and shattering than the next.

  Yates knocked Strom down into the boat, scrambled to the stern, jerked on the motor, sped across the lake as segments of ceiling began to fall … as dropping segments themselves began to explode. Mule, too, was speeding his boat through the subterranean holocaust, reached the cavern exit moments after Yates and Strom sped through. More explosions followed. Then came a rumble of terrifying proportions. A lateral quaking of untold immensity. The underground mud volcano, the salse, erupted.

  The caves and tunnels through which the two rubber boats were fleeing trembled and shook, split at the seams in many places. Lightning flashed, thunder volleyed. Torrents of water, greater than any unleashed when the reservoir had been opened after the robbery, poured in. Long-dormant pockets of underground mud began to flow in avalanche enormity. A phenomenon known as “tunnel wind” occurred, sent gusts of up to sixty miles an hour whistling through the subterranean passageways.

  The boats, one following the other, found themselves being swept along the rampaging waters at a dizzying speed. Yates concentrated on survival. Strom was obsessed with Mule … he waited and watched the lightning-streaked darkness behind him for glimpses of Mule’s boat. Mule’s boat, like their own, had the search beam on.

  It was in a wide bend of tunnel that Strom found his chance. The other boat had been brought almost parallel with their own. Mule was at the outboard motor, holding onto a gunnel cord for dear life with one hand, trying to steer with the other.

  Strom dove out across the darkness, caught Mule around the neck, dragged him down into the turbulent current, forced him under … tried to hold him there. Mule thrashed and twisted and broke loose long enough to get a breath. They were in the darkness and alone and being carried along at great speed. Strom was on Mule again, trying to pull him under, strangle him or drown him.

  Abruptly the combatants were sucked backward and spun upside-down around a maelstrom and spat out into a side tunnel of shallow water. Mule ran off, splashing through the tunnel trying to escape. Strom caught him, punched him, again tried to strangle him. Mule somehow freed himself, trudged up onto dry concrete flooring, was hit by a small piece of tunnel roof, glanced back to see Strom coming after him, ran forward, dodging falling concrete.

  Strom brought Mule down with a tackle, wrestled him over on his back, put his hands on Mule’s neck and began choking. Mule had no strength left, could do nothing … began to die.

  The chunk of failing concrete struck Strom squarely on the back of the head and instantly killed him. Mule didn’t realize what had happened. Let Strom lay there motionless on top of him, thinking, hoping maybe the FBI man had changed his mind about murdering him. When Strom’s fingers loosened and fell away from his neck, Mule realized something else had happened, soon determined exactly what it was.

  Mule stripped Strom’s pockets of money, a penlig
ht, credit cards and an FBI shield, then went trooping up the unflooded tunnel. For a brief stretch the footing was dry. Then mud began to appear. So did the end of the tunnel and an electric light. The light was beside a metal door. Mule pulled it open, switched on a second electric light. He was in an underground supply room belonging to the water or sewerage company. He climbed onto a high concrete shelf and immediately fell asleep.

  Yates’s boat was rocketing through the sewerage tunnel under Prairie Port. Ragotsy, a wounded Jez Jessup and the corpse of Wiggles rode in the boat directly behind. They were traveling at breakneck speed and the water currents were growing faster. So was the water turbulence. Yates’s craft was the first to capsize. The other boat overturned moments later. Yates managed to get to Jez, kept him afloat as they were carried along. He got a hand on Ragotsy too, tried to hold him up but couldn’t, and in the dim lights of the sewerage tunnel watched him drown.