The Language of Cannibals

by George C. Chesbro

  “Mongo?!”

  “I’m coming, Garth! Don’t be so goddamn impatient!”

  I used the stock of the machine pistol to push myself to my feet, then continued my descent. I came to a spot where there was a cleft in the rock wall to my right, affording me a clear view of the scene below. Acton had arrived and was cuffed, hands behind his back, to the handle on the passenger’s door of Mosely’s patrol car; he was standing very rigid, staring off down the road. Mosely had taken the automatic weapons from Garth and Mary, laid one on the hood of the car, and was holding the other. I whistled to get their attention, then saluted; Garth and Mosely saluted back, and Mary waved. I stepped around a boulder, continued down.

  It was a damn good thing Acton had tried to be clever, I thought, or Garth, Mary, me, and every member of the Community of Conciliation would be dead. Clever, yes, except …

  Except …

  I only had another ten or fifteen yards to go in the rock chute before I reached the road, but I abruptly stopped, sat down again, and tried to sort out the problem in logic that had just occurred to me.

  Assuming Acton had been believed, a massive vetting operation would have been instituted by the FBI, with every member of Congress, and possibly every official in the government, being obliged to prove they were who they said they were. But the process would have been fairly simple, focusing primarily on birth records and early childhood history; for the vast majority of those being investigated, a copy of a grammar school report card would probably suffice. No KGB operatives would turn up. So what had Jay Acton planned for an encore after he was exposed as a liar? Intelligence work as a double agent? No way. As he had pointed out, the CIA would never trust him, and by now Moscow Centre would certainly have learned that he had been blown.

  What could Acton have been planning …?

  “Hey, Mongo?!”

  “Yo! Hold your horses!”

  Yet Acton had wanted to get straight to Washington, to an even tighter trap, where it would be proved even faster that he was a liar, and where he would be turned over even faster to the friendly ministrations of the CIA, with their walled-in safe houses, drugs, and other unpleasant interrogation techniques. Calling Hendricks to get home delivery of an assassin had been my idea, not his. He hadn’t liked the idea one bit.

  “Shit,” I said to myself with venom, as I turned and scrambled back up the rock chute to the cleft. I leaned through the opening, whistled and waved.

  “What the hell are you doing, Frederickson?” Mosely shouted, impatience ringing in his voice. “I haven’t got all day!”

  Indeed. The police manning the patrol cars at the base of the mountain had to be wondering by now why they had been ordered to stay in place on Pave Avenue for so long, perhaps even wondering why their chief had issued such an order in the first place. Maybe.

  “Chief, I sprained an ankle! Send Garth and Mary up here to give me a hand, will you?”

  Garth started forward, but Mosely abruptly reached out and grabbed his arm, restraining him. Garth wheeled around, them stiffened when he saw the service revolver in Mosely’s right hand aimed at his chest. The machine pistol in the man’s other hand was raised just slightly, leveled on the ground at Mary’s feet.

  “I can’t allow that, Mongo!” Mosely shouted in a strained voice. “Until we get this business all sorted out, I have to place all of you under arrest! Throw out your weapon, and I’ll let your brother come up!”

  I ducked back as sweat suddenly broke out on my face, ran into my eyes. The muscles in my stomach knotted painfully, and I cursed Elysius Culhane anew—not only for being a KGB dupe in the first place, but for then continuing to be their dupe right up to his death, when he had served as a stalking horse to expose any ambush we might have set.

  And now what was I supposed to do? I thought, trying to choke back the panic I felt rising in me. Even if I could see straight, which I couldn’t, I couldn’t fire on Mosely without the risk of hitting Garth and Mary.

  “Let’s compromise, Chief!” I called, still desperately hoping that I might be wrong about Chief of Police Dan Mosely. “I’m just a little bit nervous after all the commotion we’ve had up here, and the sight of a lot of cops will make me feel better! Order your men to come up here to join you! And then send McAlpin up here to give me a hand! I’ll give him my gun!”

  But I wasn’t wrong, and now Jay Acton realized what was happening. I heard Acton shouting in Russian, and I poked my head back up in the cleft in time to see Mosely club him with the barrel of his service revolver. Acton’s head snapped back, and he sagged, unconscious. Garth started to react, stopped when the other man’s gun came up and was pointed at his head. The machine pistol in Mosely’s left hand was now aimed directly at Mary’s spine.

  “Throw out your weapon and come down, Frederickson,” the KGB assassin who had masqueraded as an officer of the law said in an only slightly louder than normal speaking voice that nevertheless carried up clearly to me. “Do it right now, or your brother and the woman die.”

  “Don’t do it, Mongo!” Garth called. “He’ll kill us all anyway!”

  “I’m not afraid to die, Mongo!” Mary shouted defiantly in a voice that was strong and steady. “Do what you have to do!”

  “Don’t you think I’m serious, Frederickson?” Mosely snapped. “Don’t you think I’ll kill them?”

  I licked my lips, swallowed hard, trying to think of something—anything—to say to stall for time, and keep the other man from pulling the triggers on the weapons he held on my brother and Mary. “At the first sound of gunfire, those cops down below will be all over here, Mosely. They may be up here any moment, as it is. I think I’ll wait.”

  “But your brother and the woman will be dead.”

  “So will you, pal. Give it up. Give yourself up to us, and we’ll take you in and see if we can’t help you cut some kind of deal. This is a standoff, which means you lose. You have absolutely nothing to gain by killing Garth and Mary, because then I’ll blow you away.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” the man who called himself Dan Mosely replied in a perfectly steady voice, as if I had suggested he was in danger of nothing more serious than catching cold. “You’ve got a head injury, and I’m belting you may not be able to see too clearly. All I need to do is get off one burst up that rock chute you’re sitting in, and the ricocheting bullets will do the rest.”

  “I can see well enough to blow you away with a machine pistol, Mosely. Let it go. What the hell? The KGB makes a point of always getting their own home, so they’ll trade for you. Going back to Russia with KGB honors is a hell of a lot better than being dead.”

  “I won’t negotiate, and I won’t give up your brother and the woman as a shield while you’re sitting up there with a gun on me.”

  “Is that what we’re doing, Mosely? Negotiating?”

  “A machine pistol isn’t the most accurate weapon in the world at that range, Frederickson. I believe I can kill these two people and escape your burst of fire. Then I’ll be the one shooting up that rock chute. I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t thrown out your weapon and started down by then, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The police will be told you all managed to shoot each other.”

  “Nobody’s going to believe that, Mosely!”

  “They’ll have to believe it; there are no other witnesses. I’m the chief of police, remember? One!”

  “Don’t come down, Mongo!” Mary shouted, her voice clear and strong. “He means to kill you too! I’m not afraid to die!”

  “Two!”

  I leaned out through the cleft, bracing my elbows against the rock, and used both hands to aim the machine pistol at the point where Dan Mosely would be if Garth’s body weren’t in the way. I felt paralyzed with indecision. Sweat continued to run into my eyes, stinging them, blurring my vision even more.

  “Don’t let him bullshit you, Mongo!” Garth shouted. “Just divide by two and shoot the fucker!”

  “Three!”


  And I knew that the KGB assassin wasn’t bluffing; he fully intended to play out his string to the very end. I desperately wanted to plead with the man to give Garth and Mary a few more seconds of life, perhaps even throw out my weapon to buy those seconds for them. But I knew that giving up my own life, which I would surely be doing if I disarmed myself and stepped out onto the road, would be a futile gesture, and would only ensure that I wouldn’t be able to avenge my brother’s and Mary’s deaths. I sighted down the barrel of the machine pistol and prepared myself to pull the trigger at the moment Mosely pulled the triggers of his weapons, killing Garth and Mary. I anticipated that he would immediately try to dart to his left, toward the stone wall on my side of the road, and then try to come at me. Tears sprang to my eyes; I blinked them away, choked back a sob.

  “Four! They’re going to die in front of your eyes, Frederickson, if you don’t throw out your weapon and come down. If you do, I promise that we’ll negotiate. Maybe I’ll let them go and—”

  Mosely abruptly stopped speaking, started, and then reflexively turned to his left as a flesh-colored artificial leg dropped into the road beside him and bounced high into the air. An instant later there was a sharp crack of a high-powered rifle somewhere above and behind me. A red hole appeared in the center of Mosely’s forehead a moment before his head exploded in a cloud of blood, brains, and bone. In death, his fingers tightened on the triggers of the service revolver and machine pistol he held, but Garth had ducked away at the instant the prosthesis of plastic, wood, steel, and leather landed, grabbing Mary around the waist and carrying her to the ground with him. The bullets fired by the dead man flew harmlessly through the air over their heads and clattered in the rocks of the quarry further up the road.

  As the echo of the gunfire blended with the sound of fast-approaching police sirens, I glanced up behind me, shielded my eyes against the setting sun, and saw a blurred but unmistakable figure on a rock ledge high above me. Jack Trex, dressed in camouflage fatigues and cap, was sitting on the ledge with his good right leg drawn up and his chin resting on his knee. The empty sleeve of his left trouser leg hung over the edge of the ledge, flapping in a stiff breeze rising off the Hudson. I saluted smartly, and he saluted smartly back.

  Garth and Mary were waiting for me in the road at the bottom of the chute. We all embraced, and then Garth pointed at the figure silhouetted against the sky high above us.

  “Mongo, who the hell is that?”

  “Gregory Trex’s father,” I replied quietly. “That was payback time for one of the men who helped eat up his son.”

  What looked like the entire Cairn police force, led by Officer McAlpin, came pouring out of the three patrol cars that had screamed to a halt behind Mosely’s car on the other side of the rockslide. Guns drawn, they clambered over the loose rock, then fanned out in the road, leveling their guns on us and on the figure high in the quarry. Only then did I realize that I was still holding my machine pistol. I dropped it to the ground at the same time as Jack Trex tossed his .30–30 out over the ledge. The weapon plummeted down through the air like a broken bird, black against the sky and stone, to shatter on the rocks below.

  McAlpin holstered his own revolver, indicated to the others that they should do the same, men slowly walked toward us. His almond-colored eyes were filled with horror as he looked around him, and he nervously stroked his droopy mustache. “What the hell happened here?” he asked hoarsely.

  Garth walked over to where the artificial limb had landed, bent over, and picked it up. “Mongo will explain it all to you,” he said over his shoulder as headed for a break in the stone wall that looked as if it could be the start of a trail to the top of the mountain. “I’m going to see if I can get this man’s leg back up to him.”

  Epilogue

  Jack Trex’s The Language of Cannibals stood propped up, unwrapped, against the trunk of an elm tree down by the river, along with the other wedding gifts.

  “I’m a paramedic with the volunteer ambulance corps in Cairn, so after the shooting at the Community’s mansion I was on the scene a few minutes after the police. But I ended up a hospital patient myself. When I saw and heard about what had happened, when I found out that my son was a … killer, I collapsed. The doctors thought I’d had a heart attack. It wasn’t that, but I spent the night in the hospital, under observation. My roommate was one of the Community members who’d been wounded in the shoot-out. She gave me all the details of what had happened, and what she could remember of the conversation between the three of you after Jay here had come to your rescue. She finally told me you’d left just before the police arrived, and that she was pretty sure you’d taken canoes out onto the river and that Gregory was with you. If you’d escaped by way of the river, I knew there was only one place you would have any chance of reaching and hiding out in without being spotted, and that was the quarry. The questions were why you had left the mansion, who or what you were hiding from, and what you hoped to accomplish. And, of course, why you had taken my son. I felt a need to find out what had happened and the reason why you were hiding. I felt responsible for what Gregory had done, since I should have taken steps to straighten him out years ago.”

  We were sitting at one of a dozen linen-draped tables set up in Jay Trex’s riverside yard where the wedding reception, hosted by Cairn’s Vietnam veterans, was in progress. Across from us, Jay Acton was leaning back in his lawn chair, practicing chords and idly strumming his father’s guitar, which Mary was teaching him to play. Jack Trex seemed to harbor no resentment toward the former KGB operative, indeed seemed to be very fond of him, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was Elysius Culhane, not Acton, who had stolen his son’s soul—and Acton hadn’t so much stolen Culhane’s soul as probed, twisted, and manipulated the darkness that was already there. Also, the affection might have been due to the fact that Jack Trex was nothing if not patriotic, and it was thanks to Jay Acton that the largest and most insidious KGB operation ever mounted against the United States was being rapidly closed down; we tend to forgive a great deal in those onetime enemies who slip over to our side.

  I sipped at my Scotch, said, “You did everything you could for your son, Jack,” and wondered if it was true. “Culhane manipulated and stroked him in ways you never could. Gregory was determined to go his own way, and that was the direction in which Culhane steered him. In the end, we all have to be responsible for our own behavior. If it wasn’t for you, Garth, Mary, Jay, and I would be dead, Dan Mosely would probably still be Cairn’s chief of police, and the KGB would still be using people like Elysius Culhane and your boy to damage the country. You picked one hell of a good time to weigh in.”

  Jack Trex shrugged his broad shoulders. “Like I said, I felt responsible; I felt I had to do something, even if it was only to find you and my son, try to understand just what the situation was, and help you if I could. I guess I was also looking for a way to help Gregory, although I didn’t know what help I could be to him any longer. I had the feeling that something very important was at stake, and that’s why I dressed in my old uniform. I guess it gave me courage, maybe even a feeling of … legitimacy.

  “I’d played all over the quarry when I was a kid, so I knew my way around up there. In fact, up there where I was is very close to the site where the veterans have a Watchfire every Memorial Day weekend. There’s a trail leading down from the top to the ledge I was on. I didn’t want to be seen—by you or the police—and that seemed the best route for me to take to get into the quarry and look around without being spotted. I was already on the ledge, resting and checking out the quarry through my binoculars, when you people came down out of the rocks and took up your positions. I almost called to you then, but I wasn’t sure what your reactions would be, and I figured it was just better to wait and see what it was you were up to.

  “I saw Elysius Culhane murder my son, and it threw me into a kind of state of shock; it felt like I was paralyzed. I still can’t remember clearly w
hat I was thinking while I stared at my son’s corpse in the road, but the next thing I knew Dan Mosely was down there with your brother and Mary, Jay was handcuffed to the door of the patrol car, and you were on your way down that rock chute to join them. The rest—well, I couldn’t hear everything that was being said, but it didn’t look right for Mosely to be holding the guns on Garth and Mary the way he was, and I couldn’t understand what all the rest of the cops were doing waiting down at the bottom of the mountain; I know a little something about police procedure, and I knew they wouldn’t be there unless Mosely had ordered it. It was clear to me that Mosely wanted you to keep coming down, Mongo, but for some reason you’d changed your mind and were staying put—even if it meant that Mosely was going to shoot your brother and Mary. Nothing Mosely was doing by now looked much like standard police work to me. I’d talked to you, and I knew you were a good man. I figured you had good reasons for what you were doing. Then I heard Mosely starting to count, saw that he intended to kill your brother and Mary, and I made my decision.” He paused, smiled faintly, continued, “I was hoping having that leg of mine land next to him might distract him for the half second or so I needed to get a clear shot at him, and it did.”

  “Thanks for trusting me, Jack,” I said quietly.

  I had not even been aware that Jay Acton, absorbed as he seemed to be in his guitar playing, had been listening to our conversation. However, he now laid the Gibson gently down on the grass, pulled his chair close to the table, leaned forward on his elbows as he spoke to the Vietnam veteran.

  “In the KGB, Jack, there are always watchers watching the watchers, which may explain what Mosely was doing in Cairn. We think now that the KGB, by manipulating the ultra-conservatives under their control, maneuvered to get Dan Mosely, another one of their plants, and a trained assassin, the chief’s job primarily because of me. I’d been successful in planting the idea for a death squad in Culhane’s mind and then actually getting him to act on it. The KGB considered Culhane’s death squad the prototype for right-wing terrorist squads they wanted to see formed all over the country; the squads would, of course, serve Soviet interests whether or not they were ever discovered, since in no case would there be any direct link to the KGB. So this prototype death squad was of immense interest to the KGB, and it turns out that they weren’t too pleased with the fact that I was the operative who’d augmented it. I was suspect—all plants are suspect, but some more than others. The truth is that I’ve been ambivalent about a lot of things, and particularly about my relationship to America, for some time. I didn’t know that my superiors were aware of my feelings, but they obviously were. Their answer was to send a trusted KGB officer and assassin to keep an eye on the embryonic death squad, as well as me. Mosely, whose real name was Sergei Kotcheloff, was a product of the American Academy system in the Soviet Union, a system I spoke to Mongo about. He was infiltrated into this country when he was in his early twenties, and part of his legend included a distinguished service record in Vietnam. That part of his false background enabled him to easily get a job with the NYPD, and he used his position as a police officer for twenty years as a cover for his real job, which was to carry out assassinations in and around the metropolitan area as the need, as the KGB saw it, arose. It was Kotcheloff who killed Mongo’s friend, and then my father, in an attempt to keep the whole thing from unraveling. When the death squad failed to kill Mongo, he figured he still had a chance to protect the operation if he killed me, to prevent me from talking if I was captured. It seems possible now that Kotcheloff himself, without Culhane ever being aware of it, was giving direct orders—or suggestions—to members of the death squad, but now we’ll probably never know for sure.”