“I don’t think we can make it back to here. We can walk the boat down the shore and land further down when we leave. Then walk back up to the car and tell them where the boat is. They can get it when the river quiets down. The worst part is going to be right at the start. Let’s get it parallel to the shore, Tal.”
We struggled with the boat. She slipped on the muddy bank and sat down hard and cursed. I held the stern. The bow was pointed downstream.
“Shall I row?” I asked, over the sound of the water.
“I’m used to it. Wait until I get set. When I say go, you get into the stern.”
She got in and put the oars in the locks, held them poised. She nodded to me. I got in. The current caught us. It threatened to spin the boat but she got it quickly under control. It wasn’t necessary to row. She watched over her shoulder and guided us by fast alternate dips of the oars. She was quick and competent. As we neared the island the fast current split. She dipped both oars and gave a single hard pull that sent us directly at the island.
The boat ran ashore, the bow wedging in the branches and rubble that had caught there on the shelving shore, brought downriver by the hard rains.
She was out quickly, and pulled the boat up farther. I jumped out onto the shore and stood beside her. Her eyes were wide and sad and thoughtful. “We used to come here a lot. Come on.”
I followed her. We pushed through thickets and came to a steep path. They had come to the island often. And so had a lot of other people, leaving behind them empty rusting beer cans, broken bottles, sodden paper plates, waxed paper, tinfoil, empty cigarette packs.
The path climbed between rocks. She walked quickly. She stopped at a high point. I came up beside her. It was the highest point of the rocky island, perhaps sixty feet above the level of the river. We stood behind a natural wall of rock. It came to waist level. I could see the shack, see Anita, in the distance, walking heavily across the littered yard, see the gleam of my car through the leaves.
“Look!” Antoinette said sharply. I looked where she pointed. A flat-bottomed boat was coming down the river. It was caught in the current and it spun. The man, kneeling in the stern, using a single oar as a rudder, brought it under control. A dingy red boat under a yellow sky on a soapy gray river. And the man in the boat had pale hair. He came closer and I saw his face. He looked up and saw us. To him we were outlined against the yellow sky. Then the dwarf trees screened him.
“He landed on the island,” Antoinette said.
I knew he had landed. I knew he had watched us. I guessed that he had gotten hold of a boat and waited on the opposite shore. Fitzmartin would not take the chance of trusting me. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe Ruth was dead.
“That’s Fitzmartin,” I said.
She stared at me. Her eyes were hard. “You arranged this?”
“No. Honestly. I didn’t arrange it.”
“What does he know? Why did he follow us?”
“I think he’s guessed we’re after the money.”
She leaned calmly against the rock and folded her arms. “All right, Tal. This is the end of it. You and your friend can hunt for it. Have fun. I’ll be damned if I’ll tell you where it is.”
I took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Don’t be a damn fool. That man is insane. I mean that. He’s killed two people. Maybe three. You can’t just wait for him and say you won’t tell him. Do you think he’ll just ask you, politely? After he gets his hands on you, you’ll tell him.”
She pushed my hands away. I saw the doubt in her expression. I tried to explain what Fitzmartin was. She looked down the path the way we had come. She bit her lip. “Come on, then,” she said.
“Can we circle around and get to the boat?”
“This is better,” she said.
I followed her.
• THIRTEEN •
I thought I heard him call, the sound mingling with the noise of the river. I followed Antoinette. She led the way down a curving path toward the south end of the island. The path dipped into a flat place. Rock walls were high on either side of us. It was a hollow where people had built fires.
She paused uncertainly. “It’s so overgrown,” she said.
“What are you looking for?”
She moved to one side and looked at the sloping wall. She nodded to herself, and went up, nimble as a cat, using the tough vines to pull herself up. She stopped and spread the vines. She was above a ledge. She turned and motioned to me. My leather soles gave me trouble. I slipped and scrambled, but I made it to the ledge beside her. She pushed tough weeds and vines aside. She sat down and put her feet in the dark hole and wormed her way forward. When she was in up to her hips she lay back and, using her hands on the upper edge of the small slit in the rocks, pulled herself in the rest of the way.
I made hard work of it. It was narrow. She pulled at my ankles. Finally I was inside. She leaned across me, her weight on me, and pulled the weeds and vines back to cover the hole. At first I could not see, and then my eyes became used to the light. Daylight came weakly through the hole. The hole itself, the slit in the rocks, was not over thirty inches long and fourteen inches high at its widest point. Inside it widened out to about five feet, and the ceiling was about three feet high. It was perhaps seven feet deep.
She said, in a low voice, “Timmy found it. He was climbing on the rocks one day and he found it. It’s always dry and clean in here. See, the sand is dry, and feel how fine it is. It became our place. It became my favorite place in the whole world. I used to come here alone, too. When things got too—rugged. We used to keep things here. A box with candles and cigarettes and things. Nobody in the world could ever find us here. We kept blankets here and pillows. We called it our house. Kid stuff, I guess. But it was nice. I never thought I’d come back here.”
“Then this is the place he meant.”
“Let’s look.”
It was easy to dig in the sand. She found the first one. She gave a little gasp of pleasure when she found it. She dug it out of the soft sand. We held it close to the weak daylight and opened it. The wire clamp slid off easily. The rubber ring was stuck to the glass. I pulled the top off. The bills were tightly packed. I pulled some of them out, two tens and a twenty.
We both dug in the place where she had found it. We found three more jars. That was all. We lined them up against the wall. I could see the money through the glass. I looked at the money. I remembered how I had thought it would be. I had thought it would be an answer. But I had found the answer before I found the money. Now it meant only that perhaps it could still be traded for a life.
“Now he’s coming this way,” she whispered.
I heard him when he called again. “Howard! Tal Howard!” We lay prone, propped up on our elbows, our heads near the small entrance, her cheek inches from mine.
“Tal Howard!” he called, alarmingly close. He was passing just below us, his head about six or seven feet below the ledge.
He called again at a greater distance, and then all we could hear was the sound of the river.
“What will we do?” she whispered.
“All we can do is outwait him. We can’t deal with him. He won’t make any deals. He’s way beyond that. We’ll have to wait until night. I don’t think he’ll leave. We’ll have to try to get to the water at night. Can you swim?”
“Of course.”
“We can make it to shore then, with the money.”
There was no point in telling her the deal I had planned. There was no chance of making the deal. I was certain that if he found us, he’d kill both of us. When he had talked to me, I had sensed the pleasure he took in killing. The way he had talked of George, and the way he had talked about holding the knife at Ruth’s throat. That can happen to a man. There are men who hunt who do not take their greatest pleasure in the skill of the hunt, but rather in the moment of seeing the deer stumble and fall, or the ragged bird come rocketing down. From animal to man is a difference in degree, not in kind. The lust to kill is in som
e men. It has sexual overtones. I had sensed that in Fitzmartin. I could even sense it in the tone of his voice as he had called to me when he had passed the cave. A warm, almost jocular tone. He knew we were on the island. He knew he would find us. He felt warm toward us because we would give him pleasure. Come out and be killed, Tal Howard. A warm and confident voice. It was not so much as though he had stepped beyond sanity, but as though he had stepped outside the race, had become another creature. It was the same way we all might one day be hunted down by the alien creatures of some far planet. When the day comes, how do we bargain for life? What can the rabbit say to the barrel of a gun?
I lay on my side. She lay facing me. I saw the sheen of her eyes and the whiteness of her teeth in the half light of the cave. I could sense the soft tempo of her breathing.
“So we wait,” she said.
“And we’ll have to be very careful. He likes the night.”
“We’ll be careful. It’s worth being careful. You know, Tal, I thought all along this would get messed up. Now I don’t think so any more. Isn’t that strange? Now that it is as bad as it can get, I think we’re going to make it.”
“I hope so.”
She rolled onto her back. Her voice was soft. “We’re going to make it. We’ll get to the car. There’s enough money here. It isn’t worth the risk of going back after my things. We’ll drive through the night, Tal. We’ll drive all night. We’ll take turns. I’m a good driver. I know just how it’s going to be. We’ll go to New Orleans. We can be there late tomorrow. I know a man there. He’ll help us. We’ll sell the car there. We’ll catch our plane there. We’ll have everything new. All new clothes. Mexico City first, I think. Then over to Havana. I was in Havana once. With—a friend. No, not Havana. Where will we go from there, Tal?”
“Rio, Buenos Aires. Then Paris.”
“Paris, of course. It’s funny. I’ve always been looking. Like that game where you come into the room and they’ve named something but you don’t know what it is and you have to find out. I’ve been looking for something I don’t know the name of. Ever feel like that?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know what it is, but you want it. You look in a lot of places for it. You try a lot of things, but they aren’t it. This time I know I’m going to find it.”
We were quiet for a long time. She turned toward me again. I put my hand on the curve of her waist, let it rest there, and felt the quickening tempo of her breathing.
I do not try to excuse it. Until then she had had no special appeal to me. I can try to explain it. It is an urgency that comes at times of danger. It is something deep in the blood, that urgency. It is a message from the blood. You may die. Live this once more, this last time. Or it may be more complicated. There may be defiance in it. Your answer to the blackness that wants to swallow you. To leave this one thing behind you. To perform this act which may leave a life behind you, the only possible guarantee of immortality in any form.
When catastrophe strikes cities, people learn of this basal urge. Men and women in war know it. It is present in great intensity in many kinds of sickness. Men and women are triggered by danger, and they lie together in a hungry quickness in the cellars of bombed houses, behind the brush of mountain trails, in lifeboats, on forgotten beaches, on the grounds of sanitariums.
By the time it happened I knew that I was hopelessly in love with Ruth Stamm. And I knew this woman in the cave with me was hard as stone. But she was there. I took from her the stubborn slacks and the bulky sweat shirt and the satin white bra. Her flesh gleamed dusky in the cave light. We did not speak. It was very complete for us.
It was enough that she was woman. But with her first words she turned back into Antoinette Rasi, and destroyed any possible emotional overtones. “Well, aren’t we the ones,” she said, her voice a bit nasal.
She bumped her head on the roof as she was getting her shirt back on, and commented on it with a very basic vocabulary. I turned so that I did not have to look at her. I lay and looked out the entrance, through the gaps between the vines and leaves. I could see the rock wall on the other side of the hollow, thirty feet away. By lowering my head and looking up, I could see a wedge of yellow sky above the rock.
As I watched I saw Fitzmartin’s head and then his shoulders above the rock wall. Behind me Antoinette started to say something in a complaining voice. I reached back quickly and caught her arm and grasped it warningly. She stopped talking immediately. She moved forward and leaned her warm weight against the back of my left shoulder so that she too could see. It was instinctive to want to pull back into the cave, but I knew he could not see my face or hers behind the dense screen.
He stood on the rock against the sky, feet spread, balancing easily. He held a gun in his hand. His big hand masked the gun, but it looked like a Luger. The strange sky made a dull glint on the barrel. When he moved his head he moved it quickly, as an animal does. His mouth was slack, lips parted. His khaki pants were soaked to the knees. He studied the rock wall where the cave was, foot by foot. I flinched involuntarily when his gaze moved across the cave mouth. He turned and moved out of sight.
She put her lips close to my ear. “My God, I can see what you mean. Dear Jesus, I’m glad I didn’t wait to have a chat with that! He’s a damn monster. How come he was running around loose?”
“He looked all right before. It was on the inside. Now it’s showing.”
“Frankly, he scares the hell out of me. I tell you they ought to shoot him on sight, like a crazy dog.”
“He’s getting worse.”
“You can’t get any worse than that. What was he looking over here for?”
“I think he’s eliminating places where we could be, one by one. He’s got a lot of daylight. I hope he eliminated this place.”
“You can’t see much from over there. Just a sort of shadow. And the hole looks too little, even if it didn’t have the stuff in front of it.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“He gives me the creeps.”
I kept a careful watch. The next time I saw him, he was climbing down the wall on the far side. Antoinette saw him, too. Her hand tightened on my shoulder. Her breath was warm against my ear.
“What’s he doing down there?” she whispered.
“I think he’s trying to track us. I don’t know how good he is at it. If he’s good, he’ll find that our tracks end somewhere in the hollow.”
“The ground was soft,” she whispered. “Dear God, I hope he doesn’t know how.”
He was out of sight. We heard one rock clatter against another, audible above the soft roar of the river. We moved as far back in the little cave as we could get. Nothing happened for a long time. We gradually relaxed again, moved up to where we could watch.
It must have been a full half hour later when I saw him on the far side, clambering up. He sat on the rim at the top. He aimed carefully, somewhere off to our right, and pulled the trigger. The sound was flat, torn away by the wind. He aimed and fired again, this time closer.
I realized too late what he was doing. I tried to scramble back. He fired again. Antoinette gave a great raw scream of agony. Blood burst from her face. The slug had furrowed down her face, smashed her teeth and her jaw, striking at an angle just under her cheekbone. She screamed again, the ruined mouth hanging open. I saw the next shot take her just above the left collarbone, angling down through her body. She dug her fingers down into the sand, arched her body, then settled into death as the next bullet slapped damply into her flesh. I was pressed hard against the rocks at the side. He shot twice more into her body and then there was silence. I tried to compress myself into the smallest possible target.
When he fired again, it was from a different angle. The slug hammered off rock, ricocheting inside the small cave, hitting two walls so quickly the sound was almost simultaneous before it buried itself in the sand. The next one ricocheted and from the sharp pain in my face I thought it had hit me. But it had filled my right cheek with sh
arp rock fragments. I could move no farther to the side. If he found the proper angle he would hit me directly. If he did not, a ricochet could kill me. I grasped her body and pulled it over me. He fired several more shots. One broke one of the jars. Another hit her body. My hands were sticky with her blood. I shielded my head against her heavy breast, my legs pulled up. I tried to adjust the body so it would give me maximum cover. A ricocheting slug rapped the heel of my shoe with such force that it numbed my foot.
I gave a harsh, loud cry of pain. The shooting stopped. After a few minutes he spoke in an almost conversational tone. He was close under the cave.
“Howard! Howard! Come on out of there.”
I did not answer. He had thought of caves, had fired into the shadowy places, had hit the right one. I hoped he would believe us both dead. It was my only chance, that he should believe us both dead. I wormed my way out from under her body. There was no loose stone in the cave. There were only the jars of money.
I took one jar and crouched off to the left of the entrance. I heard the rattle of the rocks and knew he was climbing. I saw the vines tremble. I was poised and ready to hurl the jar at his face. But his face did not appear. His strong hand appeared, moving slowly into the cave, inviting me to try to grasp it. It was a clever move. I knew that he was probably braced there, gun in the other hand, waiting for such a try. More of his arm came into the cave. I could see his shoulder, blocking off the light. But I could not see his head.
His brown hand crept across the sand. It touched Antoinette’s dark hair, paused for a moment, felt its way to her face, touched lightly her dead eyes. She lay curled where I had pushed the body in crawling out from under it. The hand moved across the sand again. It came to her flexed knee, touched the knee, felt the material of the jeans. In that moment I realized that he thought it was my knee. He had only seen her from the waist up when he had approached the island in the boat. She was curled in such a way he did not relate the knee to the face he had touched. His powerful fingers bit through the blue jean material, caught the flesh underneath and twisted it cruelly.
A Bullet for Cinderella Page 16
