by Barry, Mike
The man fell from the chair, straight down, the magazine arcing away from him, spattering against the wall, then falling in an explosion of pages and Williams followed the flight of the magazine, finding it preferable to the expression on the man’s face as he fell to the floor. Then as the croaking and squealing sounds began Williams forced himself to look there again, see the man struggling on the floor, his hands working against the panels, an agony on his face so indescribable that Williams could not even approximate it, his face turning green, his mouth pursing, struggling for air and Williams felt a flare of hatred: it had been a rotten thing to do. He had nothing against this man; within the confines of the relationship forced upon them he had been treated decently. But there was nothing to be done, he made himself look at this the way that Wulff had done and the thought of Wulff, walking into the trap on the beach, was enough to galvanize him. Williams knelt, clubbed a forearm’s weight into the man’s jaw and the man mercifully rolled into unconsciousness, giving little gasps that might have been sighs of release from the greater pain.
Quickly Williams went inside his clothing, took a heavy point forty-five and a smaller thirty-eight out of the inner pockets, checked them for weight and loading and then put them in his own pockets. Then he rolled the man over quickly, extracted fresh clips from the right pants pocket and put them against the guns in the jacket. When he had done that he stood, breathing heavily, and faced the door.
Probably, he thought, the three of them, including the other guard, were the only people in the rooming house at this time. The girl and her own man had left an hour ago, there had been a surveillance detail in front of the house but they had gone at the same time, and it was doubtful if there was anyone presently watching the dwelling or in it. They had made the quite reasonable calculation that two men should be sufficient to handle Williams, who was not going anyplace except possibly his grave after the business on the beach was transacted; they had not calculated the excellent relationship which he had had with his guards but then how could they? communication such as the three of them had found was rare under almost any circumstances, this tenderness was particularly not to be expected in this context.
So it was just the guard on the floor, breathing more easily now through his mouth, his body slack and relaxed and Williams felt better about that, knowing that the man was not seriously hurt, and the one down the hall, and he had to decide whether it would be best to lay in wait for this one or to pursue him; either way was just as safe with the slight edge to waiting for the man to come back, unaware, to the room. But there was also the time element to be considered. He had to be on that beach considerably before five-thirty himself because he was sure that it was going to be so staked out that by four o’clock it would be next to impossible to get on there; they would have it tight. So knowing this, knowing that the time element was crucial and that it was now two in the morning and the other guard might well have fallen asleep somewhere out there, Williams pushed the door open quietly and stepped into the dazzle of the hallway fluorescence, the light bombarding him, momentarily overwhelming, he had not been outside of his room or seen the sunlight for several days now and the full intensity of the hallway lighting drove him to the wall for an instant while he quietly gasped and rubbed at his eyes. Chalk up another one for Calabrese. The man thought of everything.
But everything or nothing, sight came back to him in little stages and he prowled through the hallway strangely confident of his bearings despite the fact that he had seen it only once, when he had been escorted in here. He had been in his room otherwise; only emerged under guard to go to the bathroom at the opposite end, but the guards had locked him in during these expeditions, it had been the only time that they had pulled the plug on their relationship, probably orders from Calabrese to keep tight surveillance. Either that or the hallway was public as opposed to private territory; a kind word or joke might tip spies that they were getting on famously.
In any event the hall was easy to negotiate; he could hear from the far end of it the television set roaring away, some late-night combat movie with howitzers, cannons, the sounds of sirens over quiet weeping and taking the gun into his hand he kept on moving quietly, stalking. A door moved at the end of the hall exposing a sudden beam of light … and then Williams found that he was facing the other guard, the guard rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, yawning and mumbling, and he looked up and saw Williams.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” he said, “you know you shouldn’t be coming out of the room yourself, what the hell are you trying to do to us?” and then he saw the gun.
He reacted in slow trembling stages, first his mouth, then head, then all of his body was trembling as if being electrified by fine, subtle, stringing wire. He backed against the wall and slowly put his palms flat there. “What the hell is this?” he said, “now what the hell is this?”
“I’m sorry,” Williams said. Pull the trigger, something professional within advised him. But he could not: he simply could not do it.
“Sorry? What do you mean sorry? Put that fucking gun away now, will you for Christ’s sake?”
“I can’t,” Williams said. Now was the time to pull the trigger, fire the stunning shot and yet still he could not do it. Something held him back, something choking and burning casting loops downward to his hand, freezing it on the trigger. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Where is Howie?”
“Howie? Who’s Howie?”
“Howie’s the other guy. You mean to say you don’t know his name?”
“No,” Williams said, “I don’t know anyone’s name.”
“Where the hell is he?”
“He’s in the room stretched out.”
“You killed him,” the guard said, “you killed Howie.” On the television, drifting from the room was the sound of an explosion, then heightened shrills from the air-raid sirens. The noise was grinding, insufferable. “You killed him.”
“No, I didn’t kill him” Williams said. “he’s all right. He’s just unconscious.”
“He’s just unconscious,” the guard said, with a stupid, bemused nod. “You just knocked him unconscious.”
“I’m sorry,” Williams said again. “It’s not the way I wanted it. I’ve got no choice.”
“You’re a real prick son of a bitch, you know that? We try to make things easy for you, make it pleasant—”
“No,” Williams said, “it had to be this way. I don’t want to shoot you. Is there any place that I can lock you in?”
“Lock me in?” the guard said, “you turn on me like this, you take advantage of our trust and then you ask me how you can lock me up? You stupid prick, I’m going to kill you,” and it was only this that must have saved Williams, the guard’s announcement of intention that was, otherwise he would have been caught flat, dumb. Suspended between the necessity and the impossibility of shooting, he might have let the guard kill him there if it had not been for that warning but as it was Williams had the necessary two seconds in which to prepare himself.
The first shot tore the guard’s hand off, literally sent the dismembered limb fluttering into the wall, the second, somewhat lower, hit him in the thigh in the vicinity of the pocket holding the gun and turned him around and the third, going in at the base of the neck, pulped the guard’s brain. He exploded in a fountain of blood and death and then fell to the floor in front of Williams, climbing doglike to hands and knees in a parody of activity for an instant, belching torrents of blood which spattered against the wall and Williams’s fourth, fifth and sixth shots went in, hitting a shot-target within half an inch of one another in the space between the shoulder blades, firing uncontrollably, spasmodically, ripping them in because he had lost control utterly and now only wanted the man dead. The obverse signature of guilt was punishment, he thought, shit, should have known that all the time, how about that man? and finally the guard lay before him bleeding from a hundred small and large holes which crossed his body in network from neck to g
roin and everything between. The small thirty-eight fired at such close range had even blown out the guard’s intestines; he could see them hanging in frail, greenish little loops from the violated belly. Not five minutes ago these intestines had been twitching along in their accustomed tasks, accepting, sorting, depositing, voiding, nothing in them was prepared for the embrace of open air and yet here they were, already in decomposition, their dark interior also cut and spilling open.
From too much flesh Williams turned away. He remembered Wulff telling him about his kill in Chicago, the rough one, the kill which had been too strong even for Wulff’s stomach and which had made him realize that he was not fighting a war against objects or forces but against human beings who were as stricken as he, could bleed as freely, decompose as fast. Flesh, he was choking in oceans of flesh, some of it lying to pulp on the floor in front of him, more in the room behind and Williams felt his stomach heave. Death, even in the police training films, had not been such an unsanitary business. He could not take it anymore. Death in the abstract was one thing; to see it demonstrated before you in this way was quite another and these men, by their own lights at least, had been his friends. That made things a little worse.
Putting the gun inside his jacket, pedalling his feet desperately to initiate motion where the impulse for motion seemed to come from some higher, denser, more desperate part of himself, Williams urged himself down the hall, onto the steps, down the steps and clattering out the glass doors of the rooming house, then running freely in the empty air outside, running, he hoped in the direction of the beach.
It was fully five minutes of gasping, stumbling running against poles and walls, crazy, dazzling running that made him realize he was making a fool of himself and that he had to approach this systematically.
And that if he had handled it differently, he might not have had to kill the guard at all.
XIII
On the beach Wulff could see only vague forms, the impression of distances, no specifics. He had run the first cordon of Calabrese’s men through sheer stealth; as he had anticipated the old man had the beach within a certain perimeter ringed with troops, forty or fifty men staking out, but he knew things about combat terrain learned in Vietnam which Calabrese could not have sensed and he was able to get into this ring by entering the water far downrange, moving in hip-deep waves and surges past the point where he could see the line and then wading ashore, his pants damp to the skin but the sack held high above his head throughout still safe, still dry. Now, having low-crawled up the beach working himself behind a lifeguard’s chair as improvised cover he was able to command a good view of the beach, that central point where he was fairly sure Calabrese would bring the girl. But from where? That was the only question he had to evaluate. He had to know where they were before they could locate him.
It was quite clear that Calabrese had planned to cross him on the exchange. He had never doubted it for a minute, nor had he ever intended to go through with the switch. It was impossible for the old man to use the girl as anything more than bait, there was no way that either of them could walk out of here with what they wanted before killing the other one. So any thoughts of an honest swap had been dismissed at once.
The only thing was: could he get down here and get the girl away anyway? Could he use his presence and the bag as bait in order, somehow, to get her free? The girl was all that mattered now; if Calabrese had been willing to deal honestly, the old fool might have gotten what he wanted anyway because he was more interested in seeing Tamara free than in holding onto the sack of heroin. But Calabrese could not understand that. Nor would the old man have it that way. Looking for the corrupt, meanest, neatest way through every loophole always, he would, of course, project his motives onto others. He could not understand that Wulff might have been agreeable to an honest swap. He could not understand that in at least this one case the shortest distance between two points was indeed a straight line.
Well. It was too late for all of that now. He had the beach ringed with soldat; clearly he intended to encircle Wulff as soon as he uncovered his position and bring upon him enough firepower to utterly destroy him. Those forty men standing in an impassive line, ringing the beachfront were not there as witnesses or to protect Calabrese: no, each of them had to be multiply armed and each of them would be ready to fire upon signal. Execution squad.
But he was safe in the darkness. It was going to be a cloudy day; that was in his favor, the heavy cloud cover over the sun which, in October, would not be rising weakly for another hour and a half at the earliest; he had, in the meantime, an almost perfect dark with which to work and to use. The troops were murmuring to one another, their heads inclining down the line and then Wulff saw what they were reacting to. A man was coming onto the beach from far back. Under his arm was a bulky object which could only be a Browning Automatic Rifle.
A BAR! Calabrese was leaving nothing whatsoever to chance. Wulff permitted himself a grim smile; if Calabrese was moving in a BAR man to cover this he must really feel under pressure. Forty armed men and a hostage and he wanted a Browning Automatic; that was a kind of tribute, Wulff thought. It was a badge of honor; if he lived to see this one through he could always say that he was the man that Calabrese in these circumstances had put a Browning on. If the word got around it would destroy the old man’s reputation, not that the old man was going to get out of this alive.
He was quite determined. It was going to be nothing equivocal; this was the last showdown. If he didn’t walk out of this with what he wanted he wasn’t going to walk out at all.
It did not look, however, as if he would have that choice.
The BAR man put his weapon down with a groan, then began to work in a clip. The BAR was a heavy son of a bitch, the heaviest piece of mobile combat machinery going. They weighed forty pounds and could only be fired from a stationary position; still the beauty of them, at least for platoon combat commanders, was that they could have this kind of firepower brought along with the unit. Of course your BAR man had to be strong as hell with a back made out of planks of wood and he could not be a corn-plainer because complaining BAR men in Vietnam had a way of getting themselves shot by their own troops. In highly justifiable circumstances, of course.
The BAR man was finished now and then Wulff heard another sound; high above them all a shaking roar, growing in force, and as he looked up he could see the copter lumbering over the sea, the blades almost static in this perspective, the bird suspended in the air and at the same time, from far back, a huge spotlight came on, catching the copter in a blaze. Wulff huddled in his position, hoping that the spotlight would not sweep; it did not. It wavered, holding the copter in the center of the light, then as the bird hung motionless it locked in.
Helicopter, spotlight, Wulff thought, all of this on the beachfront not more than a couple of hundred yards downrange from the hotel and the sweep of the city itself. Certainly the man did not care, certainly he understood that he had no more than a few minutes before, no matter how deeply the guests were sleeping, the first calls came to headquarters, the police were summoned … and then he realized that the man did not care. This was Calabrese’s play, all of the chips were on the line and he was quitting Miami. It was exactly as he had figured; all of it was going to end here.
A ladder unfurled suddenly from the copter, the rope dangling below, waving like a pennant and then a hatch opened. As that latch fell there was a high whine and then Wulff heard the sound of an amplifier seeking modulation, a high, shrieking scream piercing the beach, and then Calabrese’s voice came out of that amplifier, magnified ten times but characteristically his, the slight lisp, the rolling consonants. “All right, Wulff,” the voice said, “we’re going to let the girl down now. Leave the stuff under the spot in clear view and she’ll be coming down.”
He made no move, rigidly held his position. The spot slowly backed off the helicopter, settled onto the beach, illuminating a circle perhaps six feet in diameter about twenty yards east of his posi
tion, near the waterline. “Let’s go, Wulff,” the voice in the amplifier said, “let’s do it now. I promise you safe passage forward and back.” It paused “I know you’re there. I know you’re on the beach with the rest of them. Now let’s go.”
Still he did not move. Instead he found his attention fixated on the BAR man. The man, exhausted by his trudging journey with the ordnance, had settled into the stand next to it and was smoking a cigarette, shaking his head. He looked utterly weary and not at all alert.
There was at least a chance that he could rush that position and take it. All of the troops were facing the copter, the spot had carried their attention far away from that line. Surely, he could get off a killing shot into the BAR man at just this moment. The point was taking over the gun. The point was also what Calabrese, overhead, planned.
“I’m not going to wait,” Calabrese said, “I’m not going to wait this out much longer. I want the stuff, Wulff. Otherwise, we’re going to kill the girl. Look now. Look at this.”
Tamara’s figure appeared at the hatch and then suddenly, convulsively, she was on the rope itself, struggling like a fly, impaled in that position, slowly moving downward. She struggled on the rope awkwardly, her body constricted at the joints, obviously no rope-climber, obviously a girl who had never been on a rope in her life and Calabrese said, the amplifier holding a strange, mocking note which infuriated him, “We’re going to drop the girl on the beach, Wulff, and if you don’t make the plant we’re going to shoot her. Do you want her to die in front of your eyes? She’s going to do it.”
She hung on the rope desperately. Then, sinking, staggering, Tamara began to descend. The troops looked at her without pity but with fascination. The man at the BAR, revealed now in the light of the spot, was leaning forward intensely, holding the cigarette, drawn into a line of attention which locked with the girl.
