The Empty Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  “Can’t you …”

  “Not with Harry giving the orders, I can’t. You’re just as dead as Lloyd darling. You’re standing there dead. Now you want a drink?”

  Her eyes were staring. She looked at Lloyd and through him. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Benny brought Tulsa the glass and the bottle he had just opened. Tulsa poured the glass more than half full of tequila. She sipped it. Lloyd stared at Valerez. The man looked uncomfortable, embarrassed. Benny glanced at Sylvia greedily.

  “Hurry it up,” Tulsa said.

  She gulped and coughed and gulped again. Her face looked dulled, her eyes glazed, her complexion grayish. There was sweat on her face and shoulders and breasts. She finished the last of the tequila. Tulsa took the glass from her, threw it to Benny. Benny caught it deftly. Tulsa pushed the girl back into the bedroom and closed the door behind the two of them.

  Lloyd stared incredulously, with a sick horror, at the closed bedroom door. He shut his eyes hard upon the scene in his mind, but he could not blot it out. Benny pulled his chair—the chair with Lloyd in it—over to the table.

  “Join the party,” Benny said cheerfully. “You keep sitting around in corners with your mouth shut, people won’t like you. You know how to play gin, Giz? Good! You got some competition.” Benny slapped the cards on the table and fanned them. He leaned close to Lloyd, winked in a jovial, insinuating way, jerked his thumb toward the closed bedroom door and said, “Little card game keeps a fella’s mind off stuff and things. My deal.”

  Benny dealt deftly, picked up his hands, brows knotted, lips moving as he read off his cards to himself. The radio had been tuned low, so low the hillbilly music from Texas was but barely audible. Lloyd looked at Benny and recognized the expression on his face. It was the same expression he had seen so many times when Benny sat reading one of his comic books. Benny specialized in the fantasy comic books, full of slimed monsters, leggy girls in space suits, young scientist heroes and death rays. Lloyd remembered all the times he had forced himself to endure patiently Benny’s retelling of one of the plots, little squat Benny with his lumpy clown face, wriggling with intensity, exuding a fine spray of spittle when he came to the most dramatic parts. He had heard that Benny Bernholz was one of Harry Danton’s most reliable and efficient hoodlums, but that did not seem credible. He remembered how Benny had become fascinated with the way the landscape architects were turning the raw land around the Hotel Green Oasis into a tropical garden, how he annoyed the workmen with countless questions. Later, Harry Danton had let Benny take sole responsibility for a large formal flower bed to the east of the hotel, between the Olympic pool and the Copper Casino. Benny haunted the garden supply store down in the village of Oasis Springs, had struggled through the terminology of dozens of catalogues. The flower bed had been a masterpiece. Benny had made an event out of each new bloom, a disaster out of any hint of blight. No tourist could take a photograph of the large flower bed without Benny quickly sidling into the scene, chest inflated, carefully casual, his lesser version of a Durante nose as red as his bald spot from the long hours in the desert sun.

  It was easier to picture Tulsa in the role of hired assassin, yet even that had not seemed plausible a thousand years ago when he and Tulsa had played gin at odd moments, when he and Tulsa had gone out into the big kitchens when the skeleton night staff was on and had made the thick sandwiches of tongue and imported cheese and rare roast beef. Tulsa’s last name was Haynes, and he was from Oklahoma and he was half Indian. His shoulders were so broad that at a distance he looked much shorter than his six feet. Lloyd had seen him, on a drunken wager, plant his feet, stand with his back to the hood, squat so he could grasp the bumper, and lift the front wheels of a Buick clear of the ground.

  Lloyd had felt he was close to them, friendly with them. In the chain of command, as hotel manager, he was their superior. Almost, but not quite. Harry Danton had said, “Use the boys when you can, Lloyd. I’d rather have you keeping them busy than have Charlie trying to use them.” Charlie Bliss was in charge of the gambling end and worked with Harry Danton on the entertainment.

  But, with both Benny and Tulsa, there was a curious reserve he could not penetrate. He was not quite one of the club. Sometimes he felt they came very close to patronizing him. Benny and Tulsa would go off on unexplained missions, sometimes alone, sometimes together, for as long as two weeks, though usually for only a day or two. Once when Tulsa came back, Lloyd made the mistake of asking him where he had been. Tulsa looked at him without any expression and said, “I’ve been to London to see the queen.” Lloyd didn’t ask again. He knew that the Hotel Green Oasis was but one phase of Harry Danton’s operations, and that for various reasons Harry had chosen it as his headquarters. There were often special guests who had to be given rooms, the best suites, regardless of the reservation picture. These men generally drank and ate in their suites, spent hours in conferences with Harry, and seldom appeared in the Copper Casino. One of them, a small grey man without hair, eyebrows or lashes, registered often as J. Baron. Harry Danton treated him with respect bordering on servility, and had instructed Lloyd to see personally that Mr. Baron received top service. Each time Baron was in the house, Charlie Bliss had to move a silver dollar slot up to his suite after having a mechanic drop the 60-40 odds back to 50-50.

  He had known Benny and known Tulsa, and now he knew that he had not known them at all, nor had he known Harry Danton. These men had been outside the range of his experience, and beyond his ability to project an awareness of evil. But now he had a new appreciation of them. Now he had seen them on the job. Now he knew their value to Harry. Any man without heart or conscience, with only ruthlessness and cruelty, can be invaluable to the Harry Dantons.

  Lloyd sat tied in the chair. The script was wrong. There were always the good guys and the bad guys. And the beautiful woman. Lloyd had known all his life that he was one of the good guys. That made it simple, because then you always knew how it came out. The good guy and the beautiful girl would always get into one hell of a mess, but something always happened just at the very last minute, just when they both seemed doomed. Something happened. The bonds were worked loose, and you felled the bad guys with a chair. Or the cops came. Or the cavalry. It usually happened just when they were getting set to torture you. But something was wrong with this script and they went right ahead and did it. It didn’t happen in the nick of time. The nick of time went right on by while you screamed and screamed onto a bloody towel. And always the beautiful girl was threatened by a fate worse than death. And they never quite got to her. They made some error in timing, or they left a gun around loose. But this nick of time went right on by too. So you sat and watched a game of rummy and you looked hard at the cards in Benny’s hand and the cards he drew so you could take your mind away from the crawling horrors behind a locked door.

  Tulsa came out of the bedroom, buckling his belt. He left the door open. He looked casually at Lloyd, and stood behind Benny, looking down into his hand. Benny drew the ten of spades, went down with four and caught Valerez with twenty-three count.

  “Take it from here,” Benny said. “It’s no blitz. He lucked out on me two hands ago.” He got up and Tulsa took his chair. “How is it, Tuls?” he asked.

  “She ain’t what anybody’d call cooperative,” Tulsa said.

  “Me, I got enough cooperation for two.” He swaggered over to the door, hitching his pants up. He knocked on the door frame and cooed, “Oh darling! Are you decent?”

  He went in and shut the door. Tulsa and Valerez played cards. They drank tequila. Lloyd saw a mosquito land on Tulsa’s shoulder. The muscles quivered like the hide of a horse and the insect whined away. He looked at Tulsa’s thick brown neck and thought of knives. Valerez went gin three times in a row and Tulsa scowled with annoyance. As far as the two men were concerned, Lloyd did not seem to exist. Benny came out, burlesquing extreme exhaustion. He kibitzed until the game was finished. Then Valerez looked inquiringly at Tulsa.

&nb
sp; “Go ahead,” Tulsa said. He went quickly. When the door had closed behind him, Benny said, “They like to get hold of a white woman. He’d like it better if she was blonde.”

  “Was she still crying?” Tulsa asked.

  “No. She’s like a zombie. Your deal, Tuls. Say, there’s a pretty smart operator, that spic.”

  “He found ’em quick.”

  “You don’t give me any more cards than he did. Want to make this a half buck a point?”

  “Sure. After this game.”

  “Wise guy,” Benny muttered and put down a cold hand for gin.

  Valerez came out, pulled another chair over, and combed his hair straight back with a small green comb. He gave Lloyd a quick nervous glance. They started a three-handed game at higher stakes. They played for an hour. Tulsa went back into the bedroom. After he came out, Benny went in. Then he came hurrying right back out, rigid with indignation.

  “Chrissake, Tuls. She’s dead! You killed her! What the hell did you do? Her face is all dark like.”

  Tulsa flexed one big hand in a descriptive gesture.

  “What the hell for?” Benny demanded.

  “You want to say goodby or something? I said goodby, for you and me and Giz and Harry and Lloyd darling and all the folks back home.”

  Benny sat down and looked petulantly at Tulsa. “You know, sometimes you give me the God damn creeps, you thick-headed Indian.”

  “You want in the game or don’t you?”

  Benny sighed. “So deal me in. How much longer we got?”

  Tulsa looked at his watch. “An hour.”

  “Want I should get a fresh bottle outa the car?”

  “No more drinks.”

  The gag made Lloyd’s jaws ache. He watched the three of them and thought of all the ways he could kill them, all the ways he would enjoy. The chair back cut into his upper arms. His arms were numb from there on down. Finally Tulsa said, “Go put clothes on her, Benny.”

  “Hey, Tuls! Honest! I can’t touch nothing like that.”

  Tulsa put his cards down. “She’s gotta have clothes on. So go dress her. Now!”

  Benny mumbled, whined but obeyed. He came to the bedroom door and said in a surly voice, “So she’s dressed. Now what?”

  “Now put her in the Pontiac.”

  “She’s too heavy.”

  Tulsa cursed and got up. Lloyd watched him carry her out of the bedroom. He got one look at her dead face. Her right eye had been hammered shut. It was knotted like blue grapes.

  And then there had been the ride up out of the night of the valley into the dawn of the mountains.

  He lay on his back and the small leaves of the brush made a pattern against the stars. The wind changed. A whisper of breeze carried the scent of decay to his nostrils. He heard a dog bark, very far away. The stream made a hurrying sound close by. A few insects made a thin and endless screaming.

  Tulsa, Benny, Valerez. Harry. I’ll get out of here. Somehow I’ll get out of here.

  3

  From then on there was no coherence to thought or memory. There was blazing sun, a memory of the car, crumpled as though it had been wadded in a fist, and beginning to rust. There was a pasty mess in a hub cap and he tried to swallow it. There were the birds waiting. Then he burned, and he made his croaking shouts and he listened for the inhuman echo. There was rain, and pain, and the heat of fever, and all kinds of curious things that came to him, Harry stepping carefully over the stones, Sylvia clinging to his arm, both of them smiling as they came toward him, and on their shoulders were perched the black vultures, riding easily there.

  Then he was face down and something carried him along, lurching with him, something with shaggy brown hair and small hooves. Much later there was a dark and smoky place and hard hands holding him down as he screamed and screamed.

  Everything was twisted and distorted, without continuity or meaningfulness—bright flashes and long patches of blackness. It was like a storm that passed over and through him and faded away down a valley.

  By turning his head to the left he could see the bright irregular oblong of the door, the sunlight outside. He lay on a rustling softness, close to the floor, and the floor was of packed dirt. He liked to look out. He could see the side of a hill, and a wedge of sky. The hill was cultivated. Sometimes he could see people working in that incredibly steep field.

  When the light was right, when it was late in the day, the sun walked slowly in across the dirt floor. It never quite reached him. Before it reached him, the sun dropped behind a mountain. When it was closest he could reach out and touch the edge of the sunlight. It was a long time before he had strength to do that. His hands were too heavy to lift. When the light was strongest, he often looked at his hands. They were pale and trembling and skeletal. His wrists were like stalks. The right palm was deeply scarred. The left wrist was lumpy, and had but limited movement. The fingers worked. The wrist would bend forward, but he could not move it from side to side.

  He often felt of his face. His lower jaw was tied in place. It felt like a piece of rawhide that passed under his chin, over the top of his head. There was no familiarity in the contours under his fingertips. He was heavily bearded, yet there were shiny places where the beard did not grow. His nose felt like a withered button, and the left side of his face felt strangely hollow. His tongue explored the splintered stubs of teeth, finding the sharp places, lingering there.

  At night six of them slept in the small square room and an adjoining room. They cooked there, on a sheet of metal over charcoal. There was an old lantern lighted only on special occasions. Smoke found its own way out a hole in the thatched roof. Sometimes, when the wind was wrong, they all coughed and choked. It seemed a long time before he could tell them apart clearly, or isolate their names out of the babble of conversation. For a long time he had not had the energy to try, but as the life trickled slowly back into him, and as his mind came alive, he began to listen for the names, try to figure out the relationships, try to pick up words and phrases of their conversation. There were three children, three boys. Pepe was about twelve, Armandito about eight, Felipe about six. They were happy children, with wide brown almost identical faces. They would often come and look down upon him with solemn unwinking curiosity.

  The man of the house was named Armando, a squat brown man with a look of leathery toughness, a shock of startlingly white hair. His woman, the mother of the boys, was Concha who was perhaps thirty, perhaps twenty years younger than Armando, a placid heavy woman who sometimes fed him, spooning soups and thick pastes through the gap where teeth had been, holding him up gently when she held the pottery cup of cold water to his lips, washing his body with brusque efficiency in which there was a leavening of tenderness.

  Usually it was the girl who took care of him. Her name was Isabella, and often they called her ’Bella or ’Bellita. She seemed to be seventeen or eighteen, a sturdy girl with a broad brown face in which he saw a family resemblance to the three boys, with black thick brows, black braided hair coarse and shiny as the tail hair of a black horse. She came to feed him and care for his needs during the day when the others worked, came to him smelling of sun and the fields and of sweat, impersonally gentle, sometimes crooning to him with the reassuring sounds you make to a small child. He knew she was not directly of this family, yet somehow related. She called Concha Tia, and Armando Tio. It was Isabella who taught the small boys. She made them drone lessons in unison, and she made them draw letters in the packed dirt outside the room with a pointed stick.

  Other people often came to the rooms and there was much talk. And much laughter. And often music and singing. These were poor people, he knew. They worked very hard. Their life had a certain cadence of love. Many times other women, two or three, would come to visit Concha. They would bring flat stones and stone rollers and they would sit for tireless hours on the floor, crosslegged, grinding corn. With water and lime water they would turn the white powder into a paste, then slap it into tortillas. The slapping sounds merg
ed with the sun and the sleepy afternoon, and their light quick voices as they worked and talked.

  They were a clean people. He could hear the sound of falling water not far away. They used a coarse soap. Isabella sometimes wore her braids in coronet fashion. Other times the two long braids dangled. Sometimes when she bent over him, one of the coarse gleaming ropes would fall across his face, smelling of sun and freshness and the strong soap. There were goats that sometimes came and peered in at the door. When the wary scrawny chickens wandered in, Concha would flap her skirts and chase them out.

  For a long time he was aware only of such a complete weariness, such an utter exhaustion, that he could not do anything for himself, nor could he concentrate long on what went on around him. His attention span was as short as that of a small child, and he slept often. He did not try to speak. In sleep he did not dream.

  Then, when the days were very warm, he began to take an interest in things around him, and began to do more for himself. When he hitched himself up into a half-sitting position and reached for the bowl, Isabella let him feed himself until, half-way through, his hands and arms became too weary. It was then that he began to exercise as he lay there, working the muscles of arms and legs, shoulders, back and belly, bringing the strength slowly back. And he began to try to say some of the words he heard. Because of the tied jaw, his articulation was both guttural and hissing, but he could say “Gracias” to them so they could understand it and smile at him and beam very proudly. He listened when they talked, and though he began to understand a phrase here and there, he could not follow any conversation.

  It was Isabella during one day of rain who took the initiative. She sat crosslegged by his pallet, expression earnest, voice taking on the same flavor of authority she used when she taught the small boys. She pointed to her head and said, “Cabeza,” then waited until he repeated it in his curious voice. Then a heavy braid in her hand. “Pelo.” Then, “Pelo negro.” And then the words for hand, foot, arm, eye, nose, mouth, tongue, teeth, neck, fingers, knee, ear, stomach, heart. Then, mutely, she pointed at each object in turn. He missed two out of the list the first time, made a perfect score the second time. She smiled broadly and with pleasure at him.