Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Somewhere above the mist, the sun was rising and from the air, the terrain would be light enough for the choppers to find this bowl of pea soup.

  Dawson and I decided we’d gotten to a place where the terrain was rising on all sides, so we stopped and listened for the beating chopper blades, which we hoped we could hear over our heavy breathing.

  We waited. It was ten minutes after rendezvous time, but that wasn’t a worry. The chopper pilots were always wary about these pickups in the middle of nowhere, and they tended to dally and recon a lot. There would be two Hueys to pick up ten men, though there were only two of us, and there’d be two or more Cobra gunships flying cover. If they drew fire, they’d try to suppress the fire, and sometimes they’d come in under fire. But not always.

  It was now fifteen minutes past rendezvous time, and Dawson said, “They’re not coming. They didn’t hear from us, so they’re not coming.”

  I replied, “We’re here at the prearranged spot because they didn’t hear from us.”

  “Yeah, but-”

  “They’re not going to leave us.”

  “Yeah, I know… but… maybe we’re in the wrong place.”

  “I can read a fucking map.”

  “Yeah? Let me see the map.”

  I gave him the map, and he looked at it intently. Sergeant Dawson had a lot of good skills, but land navigation was not one of them.

  He said, “Maybe we should go on to Bravo.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe the choppers saw gooks on the ground.”

  “Unless they’re getting shot at, they’re coming in. Take it easy.”

  We waited. Dawson asked, “You think she’s out there?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  We waited and we listened. At 0630 hours, we heard the distinct beating of helicopter blades against the cool morning air. We looked at each other, and for the first time in a long time, we managed a smile.

  We could hear the choppers get closer, and I knew the pilots were worried about putting down in a mist-shrouded area where they couldn’t see the ground. But they’d been briefed that it was elephant grass, easy landing, and the downdraft would clear the mist for them. Still, we had no radio contact so they wouldn’t know who was waiting for them on the ground.

  I thought about popping a green smoke canister, which meant all clear, or a yellow that meant caution. That would tell them we were waiting, although it would also announce our presence to people who didn’t need to know we were there.

  Dawson said, “I’m gonna pop smoke. Pick a flavor.”

  “Wait. They need to get closer. They don’t want more than three minutes between smoke and pickup, or they get pissed off and go home.”

  I listened to the approaching choppers, counted to sixty, then popped a yellow smoke canister. The billowy plume sat on the ground in the damp, windless air, then began to rise into the mist. At some point, it must have broken through the top of the gray fog because very quickly the sound of the choppers got very loud. A few seconds later, I could see a huge shadow overhead, and the mist started swirling like a tornado was coming through.

  The first chopper was twenty meters away looking very ghostly in the gray mist as it settled toward the earth. The second was about twenty meters farther.

  Dawson and I sprinted toward the first chopper, making hand signals toward the crew to make them understand there were only two of us, and waving the other chopper off. Someone understood because the second chopper lifted off before we reached the closest one. Our chopper hovered five feet off the ground, and I slapped Dawson’s ass indicating he was first. He reached up and grabbed the hand of the crew chief. His feet found the chopper skid, and he was in the cabin in about two seconds. I was right behind him, and I think I actually high-jumped into the cabin, calling out above the noise of the blades and engine, “Only two! Eight dead! Go! Go!”

  The crew chief nodded and spoke into his radio mouthpiece to the pilot.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor as the chopper rose quickly through the mist.

  I looked at Dawson, who was kneeling on the floor of the cabin and already had a cigarette lit. We made eye contact, and he gave me a thumbs-up. Just as the chopper lifted out of the misty depression, Dawson’s cigarette shot out of his mouth, and he pitched forward, his face falling in my lap. I shouted, “Fire!” as I grabbed Dawson’s shoulders and rolled him on his back.

  He stared up at the ceiling of the cabin, blood running from the exit wound in his chest.

  Both door gunners had opened fire with their machine guns raking the forest below as the Huey shot forward away from the area. The Cobra gunships fired their rockets and Gatling guns into the surrounding terrain, but it was mostly for show. No one knew where the shot had come from, though I did know who fired it.

  I got down close to Phil Dawson, face to face, and we stared into each other’s eyes. I said, “You’re okay. You’ll be fine. We’ll go right to the hospital ship. Just hold on. Hold on. A few minutes more.”

  He tried to speak, but I couldn’t hear him above the noise. I put my ear to his mouth and heard him say, “Bitch.” Then he let go and died.

  I sat beside him holding his hand, which was getting cold. The crew chief and the door gunners kept stealing glances at us, as did the pilot and copilot.

  The magic carpet landed at the field hospital first, and medics took Sergeant Dawson’s body away, then the chopper skimmed over the base camp and deposited me at the landing zone of the Lurp Headquarters.

  The pilot had radioed ahead, and Colonel Hayes-Royal Duck-was there to meet me in his Jeep. He was alone, which I thought was a nice touch. He said, “Welcome home, Lieutenant.”

  I nodded.

  He asked me to confirm that I was the only one left.

  I nodded.

  He patted my back.

  We got in his Jeep, which he drove directly to his hootch, a little wooden structure with a tin roof. We went inside, and he passed a bottle of Chivas to me. I took a long swig, then he steered me to a canvas armchair.

  He asked, “You feel like talking about it?”

  “No.”

  “Later?”

  “Yeah. Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He patted my shoulder and went toward the door of the single-room shack.

  I said, “Woman.”

  He turned to me. “What’s that?”

  “Female sniper. A very dangerous woman.”

  “Right… take it easy. Finish the bottle. See you when you’re ready. In my office.”

  “I’m going back to get her.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk about it later.” He gave me a concerned look and left.

  I sat there, thinking about Dawson, Andolotti, Smitty, Johnson, Markowitz, Garcia, Beatty, Landon, and Muller, and finally about the sniper.

  After I made my report, the Air Force carpet-bombed the area of my patrol for a week. The day the bombing ended, we sent three two-man antisniper teams into the area. I wanted to go back, but Colonel Hayes vetoed that. Just as well, since only one team made it back.

  We kept people out of the area for a few weeks, then sent in an infantry company of two hundred men to locate and recover the bodies of the eight guys left behind, and also, of course, to look for the lady with the gun. They never found the bodies; maybe the bombs and artillery obliterated them. As for the lady, she, too, seemed to have vanished.

  I went home and put the whole thing out of my mind. Or tried to.

  I stayed in touch with a lot of the Lurp guys who were still in ‘Nam when I left, and they’d write once in a while and answer the questions I always asked in my letters: Did you find her? Did she get anyone else?

  The answer was always “No” and “No.”

  She seemed to have disappeared or gotten killed in subsequent bombings or artillery strikes, or just simply quit while she was ahead. Among the guys who knew the story, she became a legend, and her disappearance only added to her almost mythical stature.

  To this day,
I have no idea what motivated her, what secret game she was playing, or why. I speculated that probably she’d had family killed by the Americans, or maybe she’d been raped by GIs, or maybe she was just doing her duty to her country, as we did ours.

  I still have the brass cartridge I’d picked up on the riverbank, and now and then I take it out of my desk drawer and look at it.

  I didn’t want to obsess on this, but as the years passed, I began to believe that she was still alive and that I’d meet up with her someday, someplace, though I didn’t know how or where.

  I knew for certain I’d recognize her face, which I could still see clearly, and I knew she would recognize me-the guy she let get away, to tell her story. Now the story is told, and if we do ever meet, only one of us will walk away alive.

  Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf

  WHAT SHE OFFERED

  THOMAS H. COOK

  S

  ounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

  I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Outside, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

  “So what happened?” my friend asked.

  This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The people around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyielding as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

  Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they finally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than standins for the rest of us.

  I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. People were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleeting. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mattered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.

  And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars, and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.

  Then suddenly, she walked through the door.

  To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse… everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.

  She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think… and she’s using it.

  “So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.

  I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”

  And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pensively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.

  Yes, that’s it, I told myself. She is noir in the worst possible sense, thin as strips of film, and just as transparent at the edges. I looked at my watch. Time to go, I thought, time to go to my apartment and stretch out on the bed and wallow in my dark superiority, congratulate myself that once again I had not been fooled by the things that fool other men.

  But it was only two in the morning, early for me, so I lingered in the bar, and wondered, though only vaguely, with no more than passing interest, if she had anything else to offer beyond this little show of being “dangerous.”

  “Then what?” my friend asked.

  Then she reached in her purse, drew out a small black pad, flipped it open, wrote something, and passed it down the bar to me.

  The paper was folded, of course. I unfolded it and read what she’d written: I know what you know about life.

  It was exactly the kind of nonsense I’d expected, so I briskly scrawled a reply on the back of the paper and sent it down the bar to her.

  She opened it and read what I’d written: No, you don’t. And you never will. Then, without so much as looking up, she wrote a lightning-fast response and sent it hurtling back up the bar, quickly gathering her things and heading for the door as it went from hand to hand, so that she’d already left the place by the time it reached me.

  I opened the note and read her reply: C+.

  My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.

  I waved the note in front of her. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  She smiled and offered me a cigarette. “I’ve read your books. They’re really dreadful.”

  I don’t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. “So, you’re a critic?”

  She gave no notice to what I’d just said. “The writing is beautiful,” she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. “But the idea is really bad.”

  “Which idea is that?”

  “You only have one,” she said with total confidence. “That everything ends badly, no matter what we do.” Her face tightened. “So, here’s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn’t exactly true. I know more.”

  I took a long draw on the cigarette. “So,” I asked lightly. “Is this a date?”

  She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. “No,” she said, “this is a love affair.”

  I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.

  “I could do it with you, you know,” she whispered, her voice now very grave. “Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much.”

  From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to “do” with me. “We’d need a gun,” I told her with a dismissing grin.

  She shook her head. “I’d never use a gun. It would have to be pills.” She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. “And we’d need to be in bed together,” she added matter-of-factly. “Naked and in each other’s arms.”

  “Why is that?”

  Her smile was soft as light. “To show the world that you were wrong.” The smile widened, almost playfully. “That something can end well.”

  “Suicide?” I asked. “You call that ending well?”

  She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. “It’s the only way to end well,” she said.

  And I thought, She’s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.

  “A suicide pact,” my friend whispered.

  “That’s what she offered, yes,” I told him. “But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first.”

  “What?”

  “Fall in love with her,” I answered quietly.

  “And she knew you would?” my friend asked. “Fall in love with her, I mean?”

  “Yes, she did,” I told him.

  But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trial,
a road scattered with pits and snares. So she’d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.

  “So, we should go to my place now,” she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. “We need to fuck.”

  “Fuck?” I laughed. “You’re not exactly the romantic type, are you?”

  “You can undress me if you want to,” she said. “Or, if not, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Maybe you should do it,” I said jokingly. “That way I won’t dislocate your shoulder.”

  She laughed. “I get suspicious if a man does it really well. It makes me think that he’s a bit too familiar with all those female clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if perhaps he’s… worn it all himself.”

  “Jesus,” I moaned. “You actually think about things like that?”

  Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. “I can’t handle every need,” she said.

  There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd sexual quirks, any “needs” she could not “handle.”

  “I’m strictly double-vanilla,” I assured her. “No odd flavors.”

  She appeared slightly relieved. “My name is Veronica,” she said.

  “I was afraid you weren’t going to tell me,” I said. “That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pass in the night.”

  “How banal that would be,” she said.

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Besides,” she added. “I already knew who you were.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “My apartment is just down the block,” she said, then offered to take me there.