“Cheese and peppers, okay,” Pol grudgingly allowed. “Just so you don’t start crediting electronic enzymes and solid-state proteins.”
Bolan chuckled and continued. “I’ve been trying to wage a war of attrition. Well, it never worked in ’Nam—I don’t know why I thought it would work here. These guys are like jacks in the box. Close the lid on one, up it pops immediately with a different jack. It’s an endless game, and it’s a game I’m losing. I thought maybe here—given the place and the unusual circumstances—well, I thought I’d try on a new game.”
His companions exchanged glances.
Blancanales said, “We were wondering. About Artie, I mean, then Vino Jules. It, uh, it just didn’t figure.”
“If I can’t control the lid to the box,” Bolan explained quietly, “then at least maybe I can hand pick the jacks. Follow?”
A grin spread across Schwarz’s face.
Blancanales said, “Artie and Jules are more acceptable jacks than Ciglia and Annunzio.”
“That’s the idea,” Bolan said. “They’re old, semi-retired, running a few quiet games here and there, nothing big—they’re more like fleas on the lamb’s back, not wolves waiting to devour the whole animal.”
“You couldn’t play a game like that just anywhere,” Blancanales decided.
“No, I couldn’t. And maybe it won’t work here, even. But I think it’s worth a try. Look—the territory will always be here. Once established, it never dies out completely. I could come back here once a month and whack everything in sight, and every month there’d be new heads to whack. So let’s suppose that I whack Artie, I whack Jules, and the whole cadre. Then I turn to Ciglia and I whack him and his cadre. And when I fade over the horizon to the next battleground, there’s a vacuum here in St. Louis that’s going to suck a whole new regime into the box. There’ll be another Ciglia—and, after him, another one—and on and on.”
“Frustrating, isn’t it,” Schwarz said with a droll smile.
“Worse than that,” Bolan said. “These young turks are like a pack of ravenous wolves. Give them a territory and they start ripping through it and devouring everything in their paths.”
“Won’t New York just send someone down to continue the penetration if you take out Ciglia and leave Artie?” Schwarz asked.
“Depends on how well I stack Artie’s box,” Bolan replied. “It’s a delicate game and I’m not sure I can work it. But I’m going to try. When I leave this town, I hope to leave the locals in firm control—from the mob standpoint, that is. I want Little Artie to stand up and thumb his nose at New York—maybe even shake his withered old fist in their gluttonous faces—and dare them to by God send him another Jerry Ciglia.”
“I get the lay,” Blancanales said grimly.
“You want Artie to get the credit for beating Ciglia,” Schwarz decided.
“That’s about it,” Bolan said. “Now, compadres—how the hell do I go about doing that?”
“You stack the deck, I guess,” Blancanales said thoughtfully.
“The box, not the deck,” Schwarz corrected him.
“But then there’s Toni,” Bolan said with a sigh.
Silence enveloped the table.
Presently, Blancanales released a long sigh and said, “We just have to spring her first, that’s all.”
“Where’s the spring?” Bolan inquired.
“Right here.”
Bolan nodded. “Okay. Use whatever it takes, but find her. You guys know the local scene much better than I do, so that part of the game is yours. Gadgets, I’ll need a car.”
“It’s parked right outside,” Schwarz said, grinning. “Bought and paid for, courtesy of the Stonehenge branch of the Mafia International Bank. And I already got it wired.”
Bolan grinned back. “Okay. I have a date at the airport. I’ll check back with you in exactly two hours.”
He was strapping himself into the Beretta quiet leather. Schwarz tossed him a jacket.
Blancanales said, “We’ll start with a pick-up pass of the standard drops. Could be something interesting on those recorders.”
Bolan nodded his agreement with that idea, then gave the guy a close look. “How’s the head?” he asked him.
Pol brushed the forehead welt with the back of his hand. “That’s a humility reminder,” he replied with a sour smile. “It’s a plus, not a minus.”
Bolan went out of there smiling soberly. Pluses and minuses—that was what it all came down to in the final accounting. Would St. Louis end up as a plus or a minus?
He did not have the answer to that. The answer lay somewhere out there, on those streets and in the minds of desperate men who well understood the desperate games of survival in a hostile world.
For now, Bolan had to take time out from that world to address a personal problem in the other one. He hoped that the problem would turn out to be a minor one. There simply was no room for any other kind—not at this stage of the St. Louis game. He sighed and sent the new vehicle cruising to a rendezvous with the world of Eden. “Johnny, Johnny,” he muttered. “If only I could tell you what a beautiful world it is.”
18: THE DECISION
Leo Turrin had been balancing on the sharp edge of a knife for many years, and he’d lately taken to wondering how much longer his nervous system would tolerate the strain. His marriage was feeling it, that much was certain. He’d managed to keep Angelina ignorant of even his mob activities for longer than one might expect—due, probably, to the fact that Angie was simply that sort of woman. She accepted things on faith and didn’t get too nosy about her husband’s business affairs. At one time, that is.
Bolan the Bold had changed all that, and in a highly distressing manner. The guy had come gunning for him—and Leo Turrin still could not think about that unsettling bit of business without feeling the chills up his spine all over again.
Miracle of miracles, Angie had been the one to save him from that. Of all the people in the world who might take up a gun and begin popping away at somebody—his Angelina had gone gunning for Mack Bolan!
Odd, sometimes, how things work—the funny, kinky turns that life can take to ravel a guy up and keep him keeping on. Probably nothing Leo could have said or done would have saved his blood from Bolan’s grim reaper effect on that chilling night when the big guy came to collect.
Face it, Leo was no match in warfare to a guy like Bolan. Who, after all, was?
And it had been his misfortune to be the selfsame “Leo” whom Bolan had been taking Pittsfield apart to find. No badge and no credentials would have stopped that guy at that time and place.
But Angelina had stopped him.
And she’d done it with a twenty-five-calibre pop gun—emptied the clip at the guy and even connected with a lucky shot. Leo had never asked Bolan about that night—had never inquired why he hadn’t simply disarmed Angelina and gone on with the grim business at hand instead of turning around. Certainly the guy had stood up many times to far more formidable threats than a hysterical woman with a pop gun.
It had to do, Turrin suspected, with the size of the inner man, himself. Bolan was as large inside as outside. Something inside—not fear but something far more moving, more commanding than fear—had responded to that little woman’s determination to keep her husband alive. Compassion, maybe. It was a word that could lose a lot of meaning in this confusing age, but Leo Turrin believed that he understood true compassion and he believed that he at least partially understood the inner man that was Mack Bolan.
Anyway, Angelina then knew about the mob angle. She’d not been able to live with that, not without all of it, so he’d had to tell her also about his federal commission—and Turrin’s life had been growing more and more complicated ever since.
Bolan had the right idea, probably. You could not mix the two worlds together and make the thing jell properly. You ended up weaker in each, less effective in both.
But, God, Leo’s life would not be worth living without Angelina and the kids. That wa
s one of the principal differences between himself and Bolan. Bolan could go it alone, and he could find reasons for even wishing to do so. Leo Turrin could not. And he had no apologies for that weakness. It was not, he knew, in the final sum of things, a weakness at all. It was simply a difference.
But he’d always been in awe of Mack Bolan.
The kid brother was, also.
Johnny had been on pins and needles throughout that long flight from Pittsfield. Thrilled and scared all at once. Thrilled to be going, to be seeing his brother again. Scared of what he might find at the end of that flight—of the reception he might receive. Scared of being thought silly and immature, of being judged harshly for a rash act. Scared most of all, probably, of being totally rejected by the man he’d come to regard as something of a God.
The kid hardly knew his brother, when you got right down to it. Hero worship, sure—but that’s not knowing, it’s not understanding the inner works of a man. After all, Mack had gone to the army while Johnny was a toddler. The trips home had been rare and brief—although usually, according to Johnny, the two had always spent a lot of time together when the sarge did come home.
And, then, of course, there’d been that final homecoming. What a horror, what a miserable damn …
It was another memory that never failed to chill Leo Turrin. Because, in God’s sight, Leo Turrin had been partially responsible for that tragedy. No badge could shield him from that.
And it was no mere accident that Mack Bolan had gone a-gunning for Leo. It was, correspondingly, no mere accident that Leo Turrin had taken personal responsibility for the well-being of this kid brother—for as long as Leo might go on living.
And now the kid did have a genuine problem—in his own mind, anyway. Leo did not begrudge him this time to help straighten out that problem. Not that the resolution was going to turn the way Johnny was hoping for. No way. No way whatever. And Leo could only hope that the sarge would have the time and frame of mind to handle the thing properly.
It was a tender age, Johnny’s was. It was the age when it was so terribly easy to go haywire.
And, yeah, Leo Turrin hoped …
The kid had brought all that damn luggage—imagine!—just to go around the block on an airplane—two damn heavy suitcases, and he insisted on dragging them along all by himself.
Leo finally convinced him to give them to a porter—hey, the guy has to make a living, kid, give him the bags!
The porter had just taken the tip and dropped the suitcases at the motel jitney stand outside the terminal when this blue car pulled up and the tall guy in the denim suit and dark glasses stepped out and called over to Leo.
“Leo! Your car.”
He hadn’t recognized that figure right off, but there was no mistaking that voice.
Johnny looked like he was about to pass out.
The guy grinned at him and got into the back of the car. Leo tossed the bags in front and ran around to get behind the wheel.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” he called to the boy.
Johnny shyly slid in beside the big guy and offered him a hand.
Bolan went right past that hand, swept the dark glasses away, and wrapped the kid in a bear hug.
Leo’s eyes were damp as he wheeled out of there. A reunion like that did not occur every day in the life of Leo Turrin—and this one, very likely, would prove to be the final one for these two.
Bolan stepped over to the window, lit a cigarette, and gazed down onto the pool area as he quietly requested, “Give me that again now, John?”
“I said …” I think … I’m old enough, now … we should be together.”
“You mean …” Bolan waved a hand. “All the time, permanent, a pair.”
“Yeah. We’re the only Bolans left. We belong together.”
“We’ve been through this a couple of times,” Bolan reminded him.
“I know, but—I’ve grown some since then. I’ve been thinking it over. Both of us … alone … this way. Why shouldn’t we be together?”
“John, that would be the greatest thing. I can’t think of anything I’d rather—but it can’t be. You know why. I thought the older you got, the better you’d understand that.”
The kid’s eyes wavered and fell. He was fighting a hopeless battle, and he seemed to know it. “Leo told me about your bus—your RV. It sounds neat. I figured we could, sort of, like live in it, you know. I could wheel it for you, Mack. I’m a good driver. An hour or two, you could show me, I could handle that bus fine. I could even do the cooking, stuff like that. Leo says you don’t eat right. I could remind you. I got a cookbook in my suitcase. Tells you how to fix all sorts of nourishing meals.”
Bolan was genuinely touched. He turned back to the window as he said, “You ready to start housewifing it, John? Know what you’d have to give up for that? What about school? Your friends, your studies, the proms and pep rallies and all the fun things, organized sports, girls—especially that.” He flashed a look from the shoulder. “You have a girl?”
The kid nodded his head.
“Pretty close thing, is it?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“You ready to tell her goodbye?”
“I already did.”
Turrin nervously lit a cigar. When was the kid going to get around to the main event?
Bolan was telling him, “I live in the hellgrounds, John. You can’t imagine what that’s like, no matter how old you are, until you’ve lived there awhile. It’s a lousy life. It’s no life at all. It’s a sort of a death, John. You trust no one, talk to no one, believing nothing. Every man, woman, and boy you meet you have to see as a possible enemy, someone who’d trade your head for a few bucks. There are no hands of friendship, no community of minds—there’s nothing but the hellgrounds. And you’re ready to trade what you have for that?”
“You did,” Johnny replied stubbornly.
“What am I?” Bolan shot back, half-angrily. “Look at me, John. Look! What the hell am I? Is this something to copy?”
“I’d follow you to hell,” the kid said between gritted teeth.
“You already did!” Bolan spat back. “And I told you that you should never do this! I thought you understood!”
Easy, easy. Turrin wanted to say.
“Mack I—I had to. I had no choice.”
Here it comes. The main event.
“There’s always a choice between heaven and hell, John.”
The big guy’s eyes were moist, the emotions tightly reined again but peeping out through those eyes.
“I made my choice out at that cemetery behind St. Agnes. You helped me make it. I’m keeping my end. I expect you to keep yours.”
“I choose hell, tool” The kid was hanging in there. The “main event” had not yet arrived.
Bolan was all but groaning as he replied, “Johnny! There’d be no sense to hell if there were no people in heaven! I want some of mine there! One, anyway!”
Oh God! Turrin wished he’d excused himself and disappeared for awhile—and now it was too late.
Johnny had finally arrived at it.
“That, uh, brings up—Mack, I told you I had no choice. Val, uh, she, uh …”
“What about her?”
“She’s getting married, dammit!”
The big guy just stood there for a frozen moment, framed in that window with the sun’s rays streaming in behind him. Very quietly, then, he said, “It’s about time, isn’t it? It’s what I want, John. Hey—Val owes not a damn thing to either of us. She deserves—”
“I didn’t say she did!”
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
“A G-man.” Pained eyes flicked to Turrin. “One of his.”
“You like him?”
“I guess he’s okay. Val thinks he is. That makes it okay by me. How about you?”
“I’m with you,” the elder Bolan said.
“Well, you see, that’s why—I mean, it’s time now you and I hooked up. That’s what I thought.”
<
br /> No one should ever try to tell Leo Turrin that Mack Bolan was anything but 100 percent human being. Leo knew how much Val meant to that guy. He knew. He’d been there when the guy was running wild through Boston, smashing that town to splinters in the frenzied search for her, one dismal night. Leo had been there, too, when the guy sprung her from a fate worse than several deaths and then told her goodbye, finally, with no open doorways anywhere that would allow a repetition of the Boston thing. Turrin had personally overheard that emotional and tearful parting. Bolan had made the agonizing decision, and he’d given her back to the world—to the bright world. Even so—even though Leo knew of a certainty that this was precisely what Bolan had wanted for her for so long—even so, this thing now had to be like a hot knife in an old wound. The hurt could find no surface of that chiseled face to torment—but it was there in the eyes, that final misery was there, and Leo Turrin knew it.
“It’s going to be hard on you for awhile, John,” the big guy was telling the kid brother. “Sure, you’re going to miss her. But you have to think of it—you need to realize that Val is a human being, a very warm and giving human being, and she has needs. She can’t spend the rest of her life—”
“Mack, dammit!” the kid yelled.
“There’s more?”
There’s plenty more, Turrin silently assured him.
“There’s a hook in it,” the kid said quietly.
“What’s the hook?”
“She won’t leave me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a—a condition. She says either I go with her … or she doesn’t go.”
A terrible thing was occurring upon Mack Bolan’s face. Turrin got up and went to the bathroom to wash his hands.
“You’d better lay it out for me, John.”
“Well, Jack—that’s the guy, Jack Gray—he says he’s marryin’ both of us. Isn’t that a hell of a kick? They want to adopt me, Mack. The whole trip. Change my name and everything. Move away somewhere. Change my name.”
Bolan caught Leo Turrin’s eye through the open door. There was a question there, and Turrin returned a silent answer.
“What’s wrong with that?” Bolan quietly asked the kid. “You’ve got an assumed one now. I have a hundred or so.”
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