Robinson risked a sly glance around, not moving his head. The red star was the slowly pulsing crashlight on the roof of a big police prowlcar parked across the road. A younger policeman (still rookie enough to care; spit-polished boots; see the light shimmer from the ebony toes) stood by the smoldering spotlight that was mounted near the junction of windshield and hood. He was trying to look grim and implacable, the big regulation revolver awkward in his hand.
Motion on the far side of the road. Robinson swiveled his eyes up, squinted, and then bit the inside of his lip. A mud-caked MARC jeep was parked halfway up the grassy embankment. There were three men in it. As he watched, the tall man in the passenger’s seat said something to the driver, swung his legs over the side and slid down the embankment on his heels in a tiny avalanche of dirt and gravel. The driver slipped his hands inside his field jacket for warmth and propped his elbows against the steering wheel, eyes slitted and bored. The third man, a grimy corporal, was sitting in the back of the jeep, manning a .50 caliber machinegun bolted to the vehicle. The corporal grinned at Robinson down the machinegun barrel, his hands fidgeting on the triggers.
The tall man emerged slowly from the shadow of the road shoulder, walked past the nervous rookie without looking at him and entered the pool of light. As he walked toward Robinson’s car, he slowly metamorphosed from a tall shadow into a MARC lieutenant in a glistening weatherproofed parka, hood thrown back. A brown leather patch on his shoulder read MOVEMENT AND REGIONAL CONTROL in frayed red capitals. He held a submachine gun slung under one arm.
The police sergeant glanced back as the lieutenant drew even with the hood. The muzzle of the shotgun didn’t waver from Robinson’s chest. “Looks okay,” he said. The lieutenant grunted, passed behind the sergeant, came up to the window on the driver’s side. He looked at Robinson for a second, expressionless, then unslung his submachine gun and held it in the crook of his right arm. His other hand reached out slowly and he tapped once on the window.
Robinson rolled the window down. The lieutenant peered in at him, pale blue eyes that were like windows opening on nothing. Robinson glanced once down the small, cramped muzzle of the machinegun, looked back up at the lieutenant’s thin, pinched lips, white, no blood in them. Robinson felt the flesh of his stomach crawl, the thick hair on his arms and legs stir and bristle painfully against his clothing. “Let me see your card,” the lieutenant said. His voice was clipped, precise. Slowly, slowly, Robinson slid his hand inside his rumpled sports jacket, carefully withdrew it and handed his identification and travel control visa to the lieutenant. The lieutenant took the papers, stepped back and examined them with one hand, holding the submachine gun trained on Robinson with the other. The pinched mouth of the automatic weapon hung only a few inches away, bobbing slightly, tracing a quarter-inch circle on Robinson’s chest.
Robinson worked his dry tongue against his lips and tried unsuccessfully to swallow. He looked from the coolly appraising eyes of the lieutenant to the doughy, tired frown of the sergeant, to the nervously belligerent glances of the rookie, to the indifferent stare of the jeep driver, to the hooded eyes and cruel grin of the corporal behind the .50 caliber. They were all looking at him. He was the center of the universe. The pulsing crashlight threw long, tangled shadows through the woods, the shadows licking out and then quickly snapping back again, like a yo-yo, pulse-flick, flick-pulse. On the northern horizon, a smoldering red glow stained the clouds, flaring and dimming, pulse-flick. That was Newark, burning.
The lieutenant stirred, impatiently trying to flip a tacky page of the travel visa with his free hand. He muttered, planted a boot on the side of Robinson’s hood, braced the submachine gun on his knee and used his teeth to help him open the sticky page. Robinson caught the rookie staring at the lieutenant’s big battered combat boot with prim disapproval, and started to laugh in spite of the hovering machinegun. He choked it down because it had a ragged hollow sound even inside his throat; it was hysterical laughter, and it filled his chest like crinkly dead leaves, like smoky moths. The lieutenant removed his foot and straightened up again. The boot made a dry sucking sound as it was pulled free, and left a blurred muddy footprint on the side of the hood. You son of a bitch, Robinson thought, suddenly and irrationally furious.
A nightbird went screeaaaa somewhere among the trees. A chilly wind came up, spattering the cars with gravel, a hollow metallic wind full of cinders and deserted train-yards, tasting of burnt umber. The wind flapped the pages of the travel visa, rumpled the fur on the lieutenant’s parka hood, plucked futilely at his close-cropped hair. The lieutenant continued to read with deliberation, holding the rippling pages down with his thumb. You son of a bitch, Robinson raged silently, choked with fear and anger. You sadistic bastard. The long silence had become heavy as rock. The crashlight flicked its red shadows across the lieutenant’s face, turning his eyes into shallow pools of blood and draining them, turning his cheeks into gaping deathhead sockets, filling them out again. He flipped pages mechanically, expressionless.
He suddenly snapped the visa closed.
Robinson jerked. The lieutenant stared at him for a smothering heartbeat, then handed the visa back. Robinson took it, trying not to snatch. “Why’re you traveling,” the lieutenant said quietly. The words tumbled clumsily out: business trip—no planes—had to get back—wife—(Better to say wife. Oh, Anna—) The lieutenant listened blankly, then turned and gestured to the rookie.
The rookie rushed forward, hurriedly checked the back seat, the trunk. Robinson heard him breathing and rustling in the back seat, the car swaying slightly as he moved. Robinson looked straight ahead and said nothing. The lieutenant was silent, holding his automatic weapon loosely in both hands. The old police sergeant fidgeted restlessly. “Nothing, sir,” the rookie said, climbing out. The lieutenant nodded, and the rookie returned smartly to the prowlcar. “Sounds okay, sir,” the sergeant said, shifting his weight with doughy impatience from one sore foot to another. He looked tired, and there was a network of blue veins on the side of his graying head. The lieutenant considered, then nodded reluctantly. “Uh-huh,” he said, slowly, then speeded up, became brisker, turned a tight parody of a smile on Robinson. “Sure. All right, mister, I guess you can go.”
Another pair of headlights bobbed over the close horizon behind.
The lieutenant’s smile dissolved. “Okay, mister,” he said, “you stay put. Don’t you do anything. Sarge, keep an eye on him.” He turned, strode toward the prowlcar. The headlights grew larger, bobbing. Robinson heard the lieutenant mutter something and the spotlight flicked on to full intensity again. This time it was aimed away from him, and he saw the beam stab out through the night, a solid column of light, and catch something, pinning it like a captured moth.
It was a big Volkswagen Microbus. Under the spotlight’s eye it looked grainy and unreal, a photograph with too much contrast.
The Microbus slowed, pulled to a stop near the shoulder across the road from Robinson. He could see two people in the front seat, squinting and holding up their hands against the glare. The lieutenant strolled over, investigated them from a few feet away, and then waved his hand. The spotlight clanged down to quarter intensity.
In the diffused orange glow, Robinson could just make out the bus’s passengers: a tall, thin man in a black turtleneck and a Nordic young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing an orange shift. The lieutenant circled to the driver’s side and tapped on his window. Robinson could see the lieutenant’s mouth move, hardly opening, neat and precise. The thin man handed his papers over stolidly. The lieutenant began to examine them, flipping slowly through the pages.
Robinson shifted impatiently. He could feel the sweat slowly drying on his body, sticky and trickling under his arms, in the hollows of his knees, his crotch. His clothes stuck to his flesh.
The lieutenant gestured for the rookie to come over, paced backward until he was standing near the hood. The rookie trotted across the road, walked toward the rear of the vehicle and s
tarted to open the sliding side door. Robinson caught the quick nervous flicker of the thin man’s tongue against his teeth. The woman was looking calmly straight ahead. The thin man said something in a low joking tone to the lieutenant. The rookie slid the side door open, started to climb inside—
Something moved in the space between the back seat and the closed tailgate, throwing off a thick army blanket, rolling to its knees, scrambling up. Robinson caught a glimpse of dark skin, eyes startlingly white by contrast, nostrils flared in terror. The rookie staggered backward, mouth gaping, revolver swinging aimlessly. The thin man grimaced—a rictus, neck cording, lips riding back from teeth. He tried to slam the bus into gear.
A lance of fire split the darkness, the submachine gun yammering, bucking in the lieutenant’s hands. He swept the weapon steadily back and forth, expressionless. The bus’s windshield exploded. The man and woman jerked, bounced, bodies dancing grotesquely. The lieutenant continued to fire. The thin man arched backward, bending, bending, bending impossibly, face locked in rictus, and then slumped forward over the steering wheel. The woman was flung sideways against the car door. It gave and she toppled out backward, long hair floating in a tangled cloud, one hand flung out over her head, fingers wide, reaching, stretching out for something. She hit the pavement and lay half in, half out of the bus. Her long fingers twitched, closed, opened.
The dark figure at the back of the bus tore frantically at the tailgate, threw it open, scrambled out, tried to jump for the shoulder. From the embankment, the big .50 caliber opened up, blew the back of the bus’s roof off. Metal screamed and smoked. The black man was caught as he balanced on the tailgate, one foot lifted. The .50 pounded harshly, blew him almost in half, kicked his limp body six or seven feet down the road. The .50 continued to fire, kicking up geysers of asphalt. The rookie, screaming in inhuman excitement, was firing his revolver at the fallen figure.
The lieutenant waved his arm and everything stopped.
There was no noise or motion.
Echoes rolled slowly away.
Smoke dribbled from the muzzle of the lieutenant’s submachine gun.
In the unbelievable silence, you could hear somebody sobbing.
Robinson realized it was himself, ground his teeth together and tensed his stomach muscles to fight the vomit sloshing in his throat. His fingers ached and bled where he had locked them around the steering wheel; he could not get them loose. The wind streamed against his wet flesh.
The lieutenant walked around to the driver’s side of the Microbus, opened the door. He grabbed the man by the hair, yanked his head up. The gaunt face was relaxed, unlined, almost ascetically peaceful. The lieutenant let go, and the bloody head dropped.
Slowly the lieutenant walked back around the hood, paused, looked down at the woman for a second. She was sprawled half out of the bus, face up, one arm behind her. Her eyes were still open and staring. Her face was untouched; her body was a slowly spreading red horror from throat to crotch. The lieutenant watched her, gently stroking the machinegun barrel, face like polished marble. The bitter wind flapped her dress, bunched it around her waist. The lieutenant shrugged, moved to the rear of the vehicle. He nudged the black man sprawled across the center line, then turned away and walked briskly to the prowlcar. Above, the corporal grinned and began to reload his smoking .50. The jeep driver went back to sleep.
The rookie remained standing by the side of the bus, excitement gone, face ashen and sick, looking at the blue smoke that curled from his revolver, staring at his spit-polished boots, red clotting over ebony. The flashing crashlight turned the dead white faces red, flooding them with a mimic flush of life, draining it away, pulse-flick, flick-pulse.
The old sergeant turned toward Robinson, grimly clutching the shotgun, face drawn and strained, pale dough with hollow-socketed, yellowing eyes, looking suddenly twenty years older. “You’d better get out of here now, son,” he said gently. He shifted the shotgun, looked toward the smoldering bus, looked quickly away, looked back. The network of blue veins throbbed. He shook his head slowly, limped away hunch-shouldered, started the prowlcar and backed it off the road.
The lieutenant came up as Robinson was fumbling for the ignition switch. “Get the lead out of your ass,” the lieutenant said, and snapped a fresh clip into his submachine gun.
<
* * * *
The Asian Shore
by Thomas M. Disch
I.
There were voices on the cobbled street, and the sounds of motors. Footsteps, slamming doors, whistles, footsteps. He lived on the ground floor, so there was no way to avoid these evidences of the city’s too abundant life. They accumulated in the room like so much dust, like the heaps of unanswered correspondence on the mottled tablecloth.
Every night he would drag a chair into the unfurnished back room—the guest room, as he liked to think of it—and look out over the tiled roofs and across the black waters of the Bosphorus at the lights of Usküdar. But the sounds penetrated this room too. He would sit there, in the darkness, drinking wine, waiting for her knock on the back door.
Or he might try to read: histories, books of travel, the long dull biography of Atatürk. A kind of sedation. Sometimes he would even begin a letter to his wife:
“Dear Janice,
“No doubt you’ve been wondering what’s become of me these last few months…”
But the trouble was that once that part had been written, the frail courtesies, the perfunctory reportage, he could not bring himself to say what had become of him.
Voices…
It was just as well that he couldn’t speak the language. For a while he had studied it, taxiing three times a week to Robert College in Bebek, but the grammar, based on assumptions wholly alien to any other language he knew, with its wavering boundaries between verbs and nouns, nouns and adjectives, withstood every assault of his incorrigibly Aristotelian mind. He sat at the back of the classroom, behind the rows of American teen-agers, as sullen as convicts, as comically out of context as the machineries melting in a Dali landscape—sat there and parroted innocuous dialogues after the teacher, taking both roles in turn, first the trustful, inquisitive John, forever wandering alone and lost in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, then the helpful, knowing Ahmet Bey. Neither of these interlocutors would admit what had become increasingly evident with each faltering word that John spoke—that he would wander these same streets for years, inarticulate, cheated, and despised.
But these lessons, while they lasted, had one great advantage. They provided an illusion of activity, an obelisk upon which the eye might focus amid the desert of each new day, something to move toward and then something to leave behind.
After the first month it had rained a great deal, and this provided him with a good excuse for staying in. He had mopped up the major attractions of the city in one week, and he persisted at sightseeing long afterward, even in doubtful weather, until at last he had checked off every mosque and ruin, every museum and cistern cited in boldface in the pages of his Hachette. He visited the cemetery of Eyüp, and he devoted an entire Sunday to the land walls, carefully searching for, though he could not read Greek, the inscriptions of the various Byzantine emperors. But more and more often on these excursions he would see the woman or the child or the woman and the child together, until he came almost to dread the sight of any woman or any child in the city. It was not an unreasonable dread.
And always, at nine o’clock, or ten at the very latest, she would come knocking at the door of the apartment. Or, if the outer door of the building had not been left ajar by the people upstairs, at the window of the front room. She knocked patiently, in little clusters of three or four raps spaced several seconds apart, never very loud. Sometimes, but only if she were in the hall, she would accompany her knocking with a few words in Turkish, usually Yavuz! Yavuz! He had asked the clerk at the mail desk of the consulate what this meant, for he couldn’t find it in his dictionary. It was a common Turkish name, a man’
s name.
His name was John. John Benedict Harris. He was an American.
She seldom stayed out there for more than half an hour any one night, knocking and calling to him, or to this imaginary Yavuz, and he would remain all that while in the chair in the unfurnished room, drinking Kavak and watching the ferries move back and forth on the dark water between Kabatas and Usküdar, the European and the Asian shore.
He had seen her first outside the fortress of Rumeli Hisar. It was the day, shortly after he’d arrived in the city, that he had come out to register at Robert College. After paying his fees and inspecting the library, he had come down the hill by the wrong path, and there it had stood, mammoth and majestically improbable, a gift. He did not know its name, and his Hachette was at the hotel. There was just the raw fact of the fortress, a mass of gray stone, its towers and crenelations, the gray Bosphorus below. He angled for a photograph, but even that far away it was too big—one could not frame the whole of it in a single shot.
Orbit 6 - [Anthology] Page 20