Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “It’s the only explanation that makes sense. He went to hire a pro. It was too expensive, so he figured he’d save some dough and get it done locally. So he brings George into it. George, get someone to whack Heeney. George says, okay, boss, but we got to be careful with the payoff. We’ll use the giveback money. Lester didn’t think of that himself when he pulled out the ten grand. George is the moneyman, after all. Now Lester needs to get rid of George.”

  “And you assume he’s going to go back to the same guy?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like there’re four columns of these guys in the yellow pages. Besides, I plan on having him sent a flyer in the mail.”

  “A flyer?”

  “Yeah,” said Karp. “A bunch of clips about the Heeney murders and the arrests with a friendly note: ‘Hey, next time, hire the best, regards, Mr. Ballantine.’ ”

  “This is the hit man?”

  “More like a hit-man broker, according to my sources,” said Karp. “There’ll be a number for Lester to call.”

  * * *

  Karp went from Hawes’s office to the hospital. They had moved Giancarlo to a sunny room on the second floor. As Karp passed the nurse’s desk, he saw that the piles of toys and cards and flowers had grown. The townspeople had adopted the boy as a symbol of their current travail and, perhaps, their guilt. People had tied yellow ribbons around their trees. Deputies were wearing little yellow ribbons on their badges. Marlene wouldn’t let any of the material into the child’s room.

  She was there, sitting side by side on straight chairs with Zak. She rose when she saw Karp enter.

  “Are you going to stay? I have to go out.” She had a frantic look on her face. Zak didn’t stir; Karp saw that his lips were moving.

  She moved past him into the hall. He turned and followed her, putting his arm across her shoulders. It was like grabbing a phone pole.

  “Marlene, what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Excuse me . . . ?”

  “I mean what’s going on? We haven’t talked in days, it seems like.”

  “Okay, let’s talk. Nice weather but we could sure use some more rain. How about those Mets!”

  “Marlene, don’t be like this.” She had her hands clutched together. He felt her trembling.

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know how I should be. I keep replaying it in my mind. If only I . . . if only you . . . if only Lucy. I started this. I am the cause of this.”

  “That’s stupid, Marlene.”

  “Right, stupid Marlene.” She looked into his eyes. Her realie was teary and red-rimmed, but the other seemed full of pain, too, a familiar hallucination.

  “I stare at him all these hours,” she said, “and I think what if this goes on for ten, twenty years? It happens. I can’t deal with it, Butch. And he talks, Zak, he talks to Giancarlo, and it’s like he’s listening, too. He’s going crazy like his mother. Lucy walks around like a zombie. . . . I don’t know. Do you remember, whenever we’d have a fight, you and me or me and Lucy, Gianni would make us stop, he’d jolly us out of it, or throw a phony tantrum? How he always wanted us to be ‘regular’? We’re flying apart.” Her voice choked. “I need some air.”

  She broke away and ran down the hall. Karp went in and sat down next to his son.

  “How’re you doing, kid?”

  “Okay. He’s still here, Dad.” Zak’s face was pinched and his tan had gone yellow, like old newspapers. “He’s still here. He wants to come back but there are these nets, like in fishing. I’m helping him.”

  The fear sweat popped out on Karp’s face. He patted the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sure you are.”

  * * *

  Lucy drove. She drove most hours that she wasn’t sleeping or at the hospital, with Magog beside her in the shotgun seat, the dog’s head lolling out the window, tongue flapping in the breeze. Driving passed the unbearable hours, presenting a pathetic illusion of freedom. Once she took the road up to Aaron’s Throne, but shied at climbing to the vista itself. She thought she might throw herself off, and was afraid. Mostly she frequented the bleaker parts of Robbens County, parts with which it was unusually well supplied: yards full of rusting machinery, deserted coal patches, dreary villages of fallen-down miners’ shacks, the great pit of Majestic Number Two itself. She would stroll along the lip of the workings, dodging from time to time immense coal trucks roaring by that showered her with grit. She watched the dragline scoop away the mountain, and the monstrous D11 Cats shove the spoil over the lip into the defenseless hollows, obliterating streams and deserted settlements, sterilizing the country under a pall of rubble. During these hours she thought often of a famous New Yorker cartoon, the one showing a featureless waste studded with trash and old tires, under the caption “Life without Mozart.” She had a copy pinned to a corkboard in her room in the City. It did not seem as amusing as it once had.

  Gradually over a week or so, the first sharp pangs of utter despair scabbed over. She began to consider how she would spend her life, deprived as it now was of something greater than Mozart. She had no experience of living without God. The question of what else to worship arose, for she understood that everyone worshiped something, the usual gods in her society being power, money, sex, fame, and the sacred Me. She had good models: her father worshiped the law and the family; her mother the same, plus justice, minus the law. They seemed to have done all right in life. Not for her, though. The usual secular gods had little appeal, except sex, and she cringed with shame at the memory of how she had tormented that poor boy. She certainly did not believe in justice. Or mercy. A line from Weil flickered through her mind, the one about there being four proofs of the mercy of God here below: the consolations of the saints; the radiance of these and their compassion; the beauty of the world; and the complete absence of mercy.

  How to live, then, on the endless, trashy plain. Usefulness still appealed to her. She could use her gifts. Be a humble lab rat for a while, she owed Shadkin that much. After that, what? Some distant place helping the hopelessly miserable, a Graham Greene sort of burnt-out life. Thinking of what was owed, she found her wheels turning back toward the town, and once there, toward a house she knew on Walnut Street, where Emmett Heeney lived with his girlfriend, and recently, with his brother, Dan.

  The house was small, wooden, red-painted, shaded by maples. Dan had been put up in a room above the garage. She climbed the creaky outside stairway and knocked.

  “I’m surprised to see you.” Dan was wearing a grubby T-shirt and cutoff jeans. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his face was wary.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” He stepped aside. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  Obviously. The room was littered with take-out cartons, cups, and wrappers and smelled of unwashed clothes, man, and fast-food greases. She sat down in a rocking chair, on matted clothing. It was the same rocker that had stood on the Heeney porch.

  Besides the rocker, the room contained an iron bed, unmade, with flowered sheets bunched in the center, a straight chair, an overflowing trash basket, and a deal table on which stood Dan’s computer. The computer had a paused game showing on its screen—a gunsight pointed down a dark corridor.

  “I called you at the lodge a bunch of times,” he said. “Then I gave up.”

  “What’ve you been doing?”

  “Oh, having a ball. Reading astro for next year. Playing Doom. Hanging around on the Net. You know, the usual nerd stuff. How’s your brother?”

  “The same. It’s driving all of us crazy. I’m sorry. I mean about not calling. That was mean.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, no biggie. It’s not like we were engaged or anything.” She was silent. He examined her more closely.

  “What’s wrong? You’re not sick, are you?”

  “No, I’m not sick.” Her voice was dull. Why had she come here? To share the torment? Why don’t I just fuck him and get it over with? At least I would be doing someone some good. As soon as this thought appeared, she felt somet
hing shrivel in her and thought of her mother.

  “Your mother was by a day or so ago,” Dan said conversationally, as if reading her mind.

  Her head snapped up, as if she had been stung. “My mother? What did she want?”

  “Just some maps. When she first got here, I showed her some hi-res topo and side-scan sonar maps of the county. Mine shafts, coal seams, and all that. She wanted me to cut her a CD of a couple of sections—Burnt Peak, surface and sub. She paid me, too.” He paused and looked closely at Lucy again. She had stiffened, was chewing nervously at her lip.

  “Did she say what they were for?”

  “Yeah, she said the cops needed them for their operation against the Cades. It’s proprietary stuff from the company. The cops won’t have anything that good. That’s what she told me anyway. What’s wrong now?”

  Lucy had jumped up, leaving the rocker swaying. “Quick, where’s the nearest phone?”

  “In the house. Who do you want to . . . ?”

  But she was gone, running down the outside stairway. He followed. She ran through the back door. She was on the phone when he came in, twiddling a credit card in her hand, tapping her foot, mumbling impatiently.

  “Chao ong, Ba Diem?” said Lucy, and then began speaking rapidly in a twittering, tuneful language.

  When she hung up, her face was tight-jawed and grim. “They’re all gone. And she doesn’t expect them back. Oh, Christ, that stupid woman!”

  “What? Who’s all gone? Who were you talking to?”

  “I called Bridgeport. Tran’s house.”

  “That Vietnam guy?”

  “Yes. He’s gone and his whole army’s with him. I talked to his housekeeper. She said Tran told her I might call. He said to tell me not to worry and he’d be in contact later.”

  “I don’t get it. What army?”

  She took a deep breath. “The maps. I think my mom has arranged for Tran to attack the Cades on Burnt Peak. God, how come I didn’t see it! All that sneaking away, the helicopter jumping up and down . . .”

  “You think he’s really going to do it?”

  “Yeah, I do. Look, Dan, can you print out those maps you gave my mother?”

  “Sure, but why—”

  “Please, just do it! There might still be time to stop them.”

  Dan pushed some buttons. A DeskJet hummed and clicked into action and sheets of brightly colored paper slid out onto a tray.

  “Show me how to read them.”

  They spread them on the bed, and he pointed out what the false colors meant and how the subterranean views related to the standard topographic ones, and the various structures, old mine workings, and the place where the Cades had their stronghold.

  “What are you going to do,” he asked as she pored over the maps, “tell the cops?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” She put her finger on a sheet. “What does it mean when a red line is broken like that?”

  “A cave-in, usually. The red lines are voids, shafts or adits, the ones that go transversely. Here, see, where the red line intersects with green, it means the shaft hits the surface. Where it intersects with brown or black or gray, it means the shaft hits rock or coal.”

  She kept studying the maps, flipping from one sheet to another. Fifteen minutes passed this way, with only an occasional question.

  “Lucy, if you’re not going to call the cops, what’re you planning on doing?”

  “I’m going to go up there. Here! Look at this!”

  Her finger traced a red line. “There’s an opening on the west side of the mountain. And it goes through to a shaft that opens right in the middle of these structures. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, that’d be the old Canker Run mine. What do you mean you’re going to go up there?”

  “This has to be it. It’s the only place where a road comes close to an abandoned mine tunnel, and they’d want that. They’ll be hauling heavy stuff. It’s a way to penetrate the perimeter the cops must have around the mountain. You say people around here don’t know about all these shafts and things?”

  “Oh, they know about them, but not how they interconnect. Most of these tunnels were dug by wildcat miners, back before Majestic consolidated the county. This here’s the first and only—”

  “Right, and so no one will be watching this hole. When they come out, they’d be west and above where the Cades are, good observation and a strong position in case of counterattack. They could assault through this dead ground to the south or down this creekbed from the northwest.” She sprang to her feet and gathered up the map sheets, folding them neatly and sticking them in the back pocket of her shorts.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  * * *

  Lester Weames dialed the number he had been given, the one from that package. He rubbed his chest. He’d had heartburn on and off ever since the thing had arrived and he’d realized that Mr. Ballantine knew who he was and what he had done. Somehow this was even more disturbing than George Floyd’s defection. George he could deal with, but Ballantine was a complete monkey wrench, a shocking surprise.

  The phone rang twice. A gravelly voice said, “Weames.”

  “How . . . how did you know . . . ?”

  “It was you? Weames, you’re dealing with a professional organization here. Naturally, we have a phone line for each client. It’s not like we do a volume business. When the job is done, we cancel the line. Speaking of jobs, how did you like the low bidder you used?”

  “Okay, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I need to clean some things up. Your message . . .”

  “Yeah, we can help there. Listen, so you don’t feel bad, it’s not that unusual. A lot of our business is cleaning up after do-it-yourselfers. You remember the bar where you made the appointment the first time?”

  “Yeah, it was—”

  “No names on the phone. You be there tomorrow, the bartender will give you an envelope so you’ll know where to meet my associate. You will be carrying fifty large, in hundreds.”

  “Fifty? But . . . ?”

  “Price has gone up, Weames. Inflation. Or do I hang up now?”

  “No, don’t! Okay, fifty. And I’ll be dealing with just you, right?”

  “No. But Mr. Schaeffer has my full confidence. And Weames? This is it. We don’t give you no third strike. Fifty large or don’t show.”

  Ray Guma broke the connection, then called a number on his other telephone.

  When it was answered, he said, “Bingo.”

  “He bought it?” asked Karp.

  “Seems like it. I got Vinnie Cicciola from the Five going to do the interview. He looks more like a goddamn ginzo mobster than the ginzo mobsters.”

  “You did good, Goom.”

  “Hey, it keeps me interested. The docs say that’s a good thing. How’s the boy?”

  “No change.”

  * * *

  “Are you nuts? You can’t go up there by yourself,” cried Dan Heeney. “And that’s all she wrote. You need to go to the cops with that stuff.”

  She seemed about to object, and for a moment he saw a flash of the former Lucy, but then she shrugged, her shoulders slumped, and she said, “Yeah, I guess. I’ll go do that. My dad’ll know what to do. Thanks for the help. I’ll see you.”

  “Yeah, see you round,” said Dan to her back as she walked out.

  Lucy drove the Toyota west on 119, but instead of going right on 130 toward the center of town, she continued past the junction with its little forest of signs and arrows. She drove west, past the hamlet of Till, past Mt. Bethel, almost to the Kentucky line, before she turned north at Marblevale. She was now several miles to the west of Burnt Peak, outside the zone of police activity, which centered on Route 712, the road that ran along the mountain’s western edge.

  She stopped often to check her bearings against the map and against the big floating compass on the dash. Southwest of Ponowon she left the blacktop and took the dirt roads that wound through the hollers, climbing through a landform called J
ubal Ridge, a lower corrugation running parallel to Burnt Peak and five miles to its west. It was surprisingly easy to find, for the little road bore the marks of heavier traffic than it was used to. Some vehicle, a large truck or trucks, had snapped off overhanging branches, scarred the bark of roadside trees, and marked the way with deep, fat ruts in the softer places. These signs led her to a hole in the side of the hill. Brambles and some small bushes that had grown up before it had been hacked down and cleared away. She took a six-cell flashlight from under the seat, and a plastic bottle of water from the side pocket of the door. She filled a large tin basin with water and ripped the top off a ten-pound bag of Purina chow.

  “You have to stay here,” she told the dog. “We don’t want you to get shot. I’ll be back soon. Stay, Magog!” The animal whined in protest, but Lucy calmed her with hands and voice. Then she switched on the flashlight and descended into the pit.

  It was a crude shaft, most likely dug nearly a century ago by a little group of men with picks and shovels, earning a little extra money to supplement their incomes from the land. The floor sloped slightly downward; the ceiling dripped in places and was supported by props made of chestnut logs. She followed it until it was intersected by another adit, at a slightly lower level, this one much larger and clearly made by more modern machinery, an accidental intersection with a newer and hungrier mine, sucking at the same rich seam. She did not need to consult the map. On the soft dust and mud of the floor were the marks of many feet, and also of narrow wheels. They were using bicycles, which made sense. No one on earth had been more successful hauling heavy military supplies by bicycle than the Vietcong.

  She followed this trail for many hours, climbing up or down where tunnels intersected, pausing occasionally to rest and drink from the bottle. Now she noticed other signs, too, cigarette butts and crumpled food wrappers. Not very military after all; she recalled that Tran always shredded his butts.

  She became aware of a strong chemical smell and of noises ahead. She began to sing, in Vietnamese, a song from the war that Tran had taught her: