by J. B. Hadley
“They are all gone,” he said once they were downhill of the burned forest, “the friends I came here with, all gone now. I cannot stay here without them. I will return home.”
Sally panicked. “Take me with you!”
“I am only a campesino from a small mountain village,” Miguel said. “What would I do there with a blond norteamericana? The soldiers would hear of it and come. Either them or the guerrillas. I can’t take you with me.”
“But you could drop me off in San Salvador at the Sheraton, on your way,” Sally pleaded urgently.
“San Salvador! The Hotel Sheraton!” Miguel laughed. “I have seen pictures of these places. I have never been to a place like a big city. I live in the mountains—in a place like where we are now—a few days’ walk from here. I will pray for you, senorita.”
“Thanks a lot, Miguel,” Sally said bitterly and watched him go.
The sun was getting low in the western sky, and she trembled at the thought of night coming on, with no one for company on this mountain slope except for a dozen bodies bombed and then barbecued in a forest fire. The pines were still burning farther up the mountain, and smoke from the fire stretched away over the valleys and slopes in a long yellow-gray cloud.
Sally thought of Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill. That was the real world. For the first time, she began to believe that she might never see it again.
Chapter 6
“WHY not put it bluntly?” Andre Verdoux asked Mike Campbell. “Just say to me, ‘Andre, you can’t come with us because I think you’re over the hill.’”
“Andre, you can’t come with us because I think you’re over the hill.”
Verdoux shook his head. “Mike, you have to say it with conviction—as if you believed it.”
“I do believe it!”
“I wonder what you will do when the team gets in a tight spot and you find you can’t rely on these younger, inexperienced men. You’ll regret not having me by you then. Remember the time in Angola when—”
“Forget it, Andre,” Mike interrupted. “If it were just you and me going alone, that would be okay with me. But I can’t endanger the lives of the other team members by taking along one man who, through no fault of his own, can’t hack it with everyone else. You got more guts maybe than any of the rest of us, but you’ve put a lot of mileage on your engine and body parts, Andre.”
“I’m in better shape than that lamebrain Aussie there,” Andre said, pointing at Bob Murphy.
Bob looked away, embarrassed for Andre. He had no liking for the Frenchman, but he respected him as a soldier and did not want to see him humiliated.
Andre himself grew embarrassed by the way Bob did not return his insult through feeling sorry for him. He muttered something in French and lapsed into silence.
Mike went to work to ease his own feeling of guilt at having to treat Andre this way. Mike had let Andre down easy several times, and that hadn’t worked. Letting him down hard didn’t seem to be working any better.
They sat in the gun room of Bob’s Vermont home, sipping twelve-year-old Scotch and looking out through large windows over the lawn to where Eunice and a gardener were hacking at rhododendron bushes.
The peaceful slopes of the Green Mountains rose on the far side of the extensive gardens and a large field with show-jumping fences.
Mike opened that day’s Wall Street Journal. “It’s a good paper f’or Harvey Waller to use, since you can get it almost anywhere in the country. Though I find it hard to imagine Harvey reading it.”
Mike said no more, because only he knew of Harvey’s heroic record as a Marine in Nam; his rejection in his hometown as a warmonger and “baby-killer” after he came back; how this, on top of bad combat experiences, had all gotten too much for him, so that now he associated with what Mike regarded as the loony fringe of patriots who saw the Russian KGB messing with mom and apple pie and spreading gypsy moths and elm disease.
Mike flipped the newspaper pages till he came to the classified ads. “Here’s the section—BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES——in which he says he has all his contacts put their ads. Seemingly he knows who it is by the kind of business, plus key words. You know what he assigned to me? ARIZONA DENTAL PRACTICE—Root Canal Work a Specialty—Partner Wanted.”
Andre smiled grimly. “That man is emotionally disturbed. I find it interesting you value him more highly than me.”
Mike ignored him and turned to Bob. “Can I use your phone number here in the ad?”
“Hell, no,” Bob said. “I don’t want crazy Harvey calling me here. Use your own number in Arizona.”
Mike smiled. “I don’t think I will. For the same reason as you.”
“You may give him my New York number,” Andre said coldly.
Mike phoned Tina to say he would be back in Arizona the next day. But only for a few days. Then he had to take a trip.
“I see,” Tina said in a disappointed voice. “For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“And it’s not Switzerland this time.”
“No, it’s not.”
She found the phone number for him for the Bunch o’ Shamrock saloon in Youngstown, Ohio. It was eleven in the morning, but he made the call on the off chance.
“Shamrock,” a gruff voice answered.
“You the bartender?” Mike asked.
“That’s what I started out as this morning.”
“Joe Nolan there?”
“Naw.”
“Will you see him later?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him I called. Just say Faraway Hills, all right?”
A pause. “I get it. The Call of the Faraway Hills. You’re some joker, fella.”
This hadn’t been Mike’s idea—it was Joe’s. “Just tell Nolan. Can you write down this New York number for him to call?”
“Sure.”
Mike gave him Andre’s number.
* * *
Like a lot of other people in Youngstown, Ohio, Joe Nolan was out of work. Some of those who had loaded up their cars, said good-bye and left for a new life in what they called the Sun Belt had come back to the grime and spring cold of Youngstown—preferring to be out of work among friends than strangers. A man who has spent fifteen years ladling; molten metal from a smelter does not turn in the twinkling of some economic eye into a computer programmer tapping coded jargon onto a keyboard about people’s credit status in a twenty-sixth-floor glass-shrouded “controlled environment.”
Joe was thin, moved fast, and his face was long and sad. He had very bright blue eyes, long teeth like a dog and light brown hair. He didn’t mind being called “mountainy,” because his folks had come north from Kentucky during World War II to work in the plants; but when a man called him a “hillbilly,” he had better mean it as a compliment—and not too many did.
Joe didn’t mind what he had to put his hand to to turn a buck. He had messed with dope-selling, but since that meant dealing with assorted creeps at high risk, he was seeing if he could stay out of that type of employment. Lack of economic security had not hit Joe hard, as it had most of his friends. Since coming back from his stint as a Green Beret in Vietnam, Joe had gone from job to job, woman to woman, drink to drink.… When there were no jobs, there were always women and drinks.
From his mission to Vietnam with Mad Mike Campbell, he had taken home what would amount to three or four years’ pay for many workers in Youngstown. He hadn’t blown it as he’d intended, but had paid for hospitals, funerals, weddings, christenings, charter buses—everything imaginable—for his family, cousins, close friends, fellow union members, the guys down at the bar. Not one bottle of champagne, no visits to Playboy clubs in New York or Chicago, not even a new car. Now the money was gone. Had been for a month. But his family and friends had not forgotten how generous he had been when he had it. So in Joe’s eyes, the money had not been wasted.
There was only one side effect of his generosity that disturbed him: it made him a respected member of respectable socie
ty. He had always been a floater; the last thing he wanted was to be a pillar of anything. He hated the way people smiled at him as if he weren’t a crazy son of a bitch anymore.
Well, he had found his opportunity now to show ’em that the bad old Joe Nolan they all hoped was dead and buried was still alive and kicking.
His cousin Tommy was retarded, a big harmless slob of eighteen who shambled around the neighborhood with a smile on his vacant face and drool running from his mouth. Occasionally Joe had kicked someone’s ass for making fun of Tommy. People who didn’t know Tommy were often scared of him, but the locals all had a few kind words for him, and he went through enormous quantities of homemade cookies and Kool-Aid.
“I reckon maybe it was Tommy’s own fault he got hit by that truck,” his mother told Joe at the hospital, “but that don’t mean it’s right for the driver to take off and leave him lying there on the road.”
Both Tommy’s legs were broken, his right hip fractured and some ribs cracked. According to the doctors, he’d be on his back two months minimum.
“And we don’t have no medical insurance that covers him now that his father took that non-union job on the building site,” she went on. “If that driver had done the proper thing, his insurance company would take care of everything. I’m not asking you to help out, Joe,” she added hurriedly. “You done enough for us already, and I heard you’re as broke as the rest of us these days.”
“’Fraid so,” Joe said. “Tommy told me he recognized the truck and driver. Hit-and-run is a crime. What did the cops say? Tommy said they had been to see him.”
“The officer came and wrote down what Tommy said. But the driver denied it.” The woman’s face clouded with shame. “The officer tried to put it nice to me when he said poor Tommy’s word wouldn’t count in a court of law; that his evidence would be ruled… not regular.”
Joe himself talked to the driver of the truck, a loud—mouth who ran metal bars from Youngstown down to Wheeling, West Virginia, five times a week and who liked to highball along a two-lane highway between the plant and Route 11, scaring the shit out of oncoming traffic. Joe spoke to him, and the guy didn’t even bother to deny it was he who’d hit Tommy. He told Joe to fuck off, and stuck the banel of a Smith & Wesson .38 in Joe’s neck to make his message clear.
Joe let two days go by so he could simmer down and put in a little thought on how best to straighten out this cowboy. He sure as hell didn’t want to go to the pen for eight years on a manslaughter rap.
The trucker shouldn’t be hard to locate. He had a big mouth and a CB radio in the cabin of his truck tractor. Joe parked his Chevy on the shoulder of the two-lane highway between Route 11 and the plant a little after 10:15 in the morning. He knew the voice on the truck’s CB long before he saw the blue-and-white rig. The driver’s handle was “Bullhead,” and he was talking up a storm.
Next morning Joe borrowed a friend’s Ford Escort and fixed a pair of New York plates on it, a pair from a collection he had taken from car wrecks on Route 80 in the bad old days when he had need of such things. He waited on the shoulder of the two-lane road, listening on his CB and carefully watching the occasional trucks that roared by at more than 70 mph on this deserted stretch. He heard Bullhead mouthing off to all and sundry, right on time, a little after 10:15.
Joe started his engine and pulled onto the road. He would meet the truck head-on. He rolled down his side window all the way and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. Bullhead’s voice came loud and clear over the CB, with only short pauses for replies.
The blue-and-white rig came into view down a long straight that they had to themselves, waterlogged empty fields beyond sunken ditches on either side of the road. Joe goosed the Escort and came down the straight at about 80 to meet the tractor-trailer, which was highballing along at more than 70 itself. Joe reached down with his left hand to the side of his seat and hefted a red building brick.
West Virginia license plate. As the rig barreled toward him, towering over the Ford, Joe flipped the brick up in front of its windshield on the driver’s side.
He was doing 80; the rig at least 70. Which meant the brick would take out Bullhead at 150 ph. Be like being hit with a fucking rocket. They’d have to scrape Bullhead off the inside walls of the cab.
In his rearview mirror, Joe saw the rig leave the road. The tractor went down in the ditch; and the trailer jackknifed, jumped the ditch and fell on its side in the field. Last look he got, it hadn’t burst into flames or anything dramatic but just lay there quiet, like some big dead animal.
Joe dumped the New York plates in a pond for safety’s sake, though he was a hundred percent sure there had been no witnesses. He returned the borrowed Escort and went for a beer.
“Hey, Joe,” the bartender said, “some weirdo called for you awhile ago—said something about the prairie and left a New York number for you to call.”
When Joe phoned, a recorded voice told him, “This is Andre Verdoux. At the sound of the tone, please leave a message and 1 will get back to you as soon as I can. Au revoir.”
The name Andre Verdoux was enough for Joe to know the score. The tone sounded.
“Andre, this is your old friend from Youngstown. Count me in. Whenever.”
* * *
Lance Hardwick put down the phone in his West Hollywood apartment. He was getting his big break! His opportunity to break into professional soldiering!
He glanced at the unopened letter from his mother. “Dear Miroslav,” it would begin. She even addressed the envelope to Miroslav Svoboda c/o Lance Hardwick, refusing to accept his stage name in any form. She was crazy and stubborn as always. Imagine calling her kid born in Minneapolis by a name like Miroslav Svoboda and expecting they would all go back to live one day in Czechoslovakia when things changed over there. Yeah, he could admit that his stage name, Lance Hardwick, was as much of a joke as his real name, but it suited a stuntman.
That was how he had met Mike Campbell. The famous mere known as Mad Mike was a consultant in the shooting of a war movie. Lance and a few others filled in for the stars every time the action got rougher than toddlers playing in a sandlot. It was a laugh. In the final version of the movie, Lance and the other stuntmen had more actual camera exposure than the stars who were credited with the action roles.
Campbell had advised the director on the authenticity of the action shots, so there were no huge globs of plastic explosive and technicolor blasts fifty feet high in order to destroy a simple bamboo bridge. Neither did the enemy blast away with machine guns at good old USA choppers and never seem able to hit them only fifty yards away! Mike had insisted on realism, and the movie had been a huge success as a result of that. Helped along by Lance’s stunts, of course.
Lance had asked Mike outright for a chance to go on a mission. “Look, Mike, you seen me do my stuff here. I know it’s only stunts. But you can check on my army record. I been a Ranger. I never got to see any action then, either, so it was like being a stuntman then too. But that wasn’t my fault, was it? Not that I’m loco for a firefight or crazy or reckless, ’cause I’m not. You seen the way I handle myself. So far in this movie, I don’t have a scratch; and that fucking director has me practically humping the barbed wire. You seen I can do what people tell me, exactly like they say, but also how I can think for myself and make suggestions.” Lance remembered how Mike had let him go on and on like this and then had burst out laughing at him. Lance had been pissed, but kept it to himself.
Then Mike had suddenly turned serious and said, “I agree it might be good for you to test the real thing against the make-believe. I think you’d handle it just fine. And I’m a good judge of character.”
“So you’ll give me a chance.”
“I didn’t say that,” Mike responded.
That was all Lance had managed to get from him, but he had never given up hope Mike would call the number he had given him.
Here it finally was! Be in New York City in three days. Call this number when you get there. You
will receive instructions. No word of this to anyone. One hundred thousand dollars will be placed in your bank account. Be sure to make a will.
The real thing!
First thing he’d do was something he’d been waiting to do for four months now: feed a lion to the Christians. Stunt work had been slow. Not slow. Dead. They were shooting movies on location these days, and practically no work was being done in L.A. In fact, it seemed as though half the movies were shot in Mexico, no matter what their locale was supposed to be. These runaway productions were supposed to cut down costs. And there was always some local half-assed daredevil ready to perform genuinely dangerous stunts at almost vanity rates for the sheer glory of it. The producers didn’t need professionals like him anymore, except when the insurance companies insisted. And they could only insist when they knew what was going on. And in North Dakota or Chihuahua, no one knew or cared. Muscle was cheap.
Lance had been doing some work as a bodyguard. Mostly for an English rock singer with a luxury place—lawns, walls, fountain, stables, the lot—in Pacific Pallisades. The guy couldn’t sing concerts anymore because of the bad habits he’d picked up, but on good days in his private sound studio he could get enough on tape for the sound engineers to doctor. The more the singer went to pieces, the cleverer the audio technicians became. They kept the LPs rolling, and each LP always delivered at least one hit single that often went gold or even platinum.
The rock star was a monster when he was having the horrors, and when he wasn’t he was a louse. He paid everyone three times what they could get for the same work anywhere else, and treated them three times worse than they would put up with anywhere else. If the singer had a real genius for anything, Lance decided, it was for working up personal hatred for himself in others.
Some months previously, an article had appeared in Rolling Stone that put the Pacific Pallisades estate and its inaccessible occupant in a scenario fit for the residence in Paraguay of Dr. Mengele or some other Nazi hotshot. Guard dogs, electrified wire, electronic surveillance, armed guards, martial arts experts… His record company picked up on this by putting out a video on the place—the only video to appear on MTV that did not show a shot of the star musician—and an LP cover to match. The kids took two days to find the place, and carloads began arriving for beer busts and much more. As often as not, they threw the empty cans over the wall after leaving a message in spray paint.
