Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  When he was a child, his father died

  His mother left him all alone,

  Yet he grew well, like a healthy plant,

  In wartime now he lives for himself

  The boy makes himself into a man, by himself

  Never mourning the orphan he is.

  A flashlight beam shot out of the blackness ahead, blinding her. She stood still, turned off her own light, and held her hands high. She heard footsteps approach. Squinting around the glare, she made out the face of Phuong, one of the Lost Boys. He was staring at her in amazement. Held tightly under his flashlight was a sub-machine gun pointing at her.

  “Hello, Phuong,” she said cheerily. “I’ve come to visit Uncle Tran. Would you kindly take me to him?”

  * * *

  “Anything new?” asked Marlene when she came in to relieve Karp at the hospital.

  “No, he’s always the same. Zak says he’s dreaming. How’re you holding up?”

  “Marvelous. The press is out in force. There’s no news from the siege, so they’ve discovered Giancarlo. I had twenty cameras shoved in my face coming in here. How do you feel?”

  “I’ll get some more security.”

  “Oh, the security’s fine. Deputy Petrie is in charge. He likes pushing people. He’s got a yellow ribbon tied to his badge. We’re a national spectacle.”

  “Marlene, cripes! I feel like I’ve a lance piercing through my chest. I can give a shit about a so-called spectacle.”

  Momentary stone silence filled the room. Then Karp said matter-of-factly: “I have to go back to the City tomorrow.”

  “What is this now, Saturday? I’ve lost track of the days.”

  “Yes, Saturday. Mac and cheese at Rosie’s, that’s how I can tell.”

  “This is for the scam on Weames.”

  “Right. Guma came through.”

  “Good old Goom. Well, I wish you luck. If it works, can you get a conviction?”

  “Oh, yeah. I got both of them if it works, without any deals. They’ll both go for the max.”

  “What is that? Being eaten alive by army ants?”

  “No, just life.”

  “Fuck life.” She looked at the still boy on the bed.

  * * *

  Phuong led Lucy through the mine tunnel, which became gradually lighter, until they came to a section illuminated by large fluorescent fixtures and stinking of phenol and acid. Here there were fifty-five-gallon drums of chemicals, and rows of plastic garbage cans rigged with hoses and duct tape. Racks of steel shelves held cartons and brown bottles and laboratory glassware. Lucy had never been in an illegal meth lab before, but Billy Ireland had described them to her, and she figured she was in one now. A former meth lab. A good deal of destruction was apparent, bullet holes, smashed and punctured equipment, the marks of fire, dark stains on the duck-boards they walked on, spatters of red-black. She could reconstruct the events these suggested. The Cades, or their employees, had been peacefully making poison when Tran and his people had burst in among them.

  They arrived at an elevator cage. Phuong used a phone attached to the wall, and immediately Lucy heard the sound of a large motor. The boy motioned her into the cage. It was large enough for twenty men and moved fast enough to blur the black walls outside.

  Tran was waiting for her at the head of the shaft along with Freddy Phat and several other Vietnamese. They were wearing black cotton pajamas and military web gear. Tran had his Stechkin in its big wooden holster on his hip; his face was wooden, too, and unsmiling. In French he said, “You know, this is the first time that I have not been happy to see you. I am quite displeased. Why have you come?”

  “To try and stop you. I’m sorry you’re angry.”

  Tran took her arm. “Come with me.”

  He led her past the staring, glowering men, through a door to a large room, wooden, painted flaking green and gray. Tangles of rusting pipes and smashed enamelware lay in heaps—some kind of bathhouse for the miners. Out into the air again, across gritty, black soil, to another building, also wooden, unpainted gray, with most of the windows smashed out. A loud noise of flies. Lucy saw that the flayed and gutted carcasses of a dozen large dogs hung from the eaves of an adjoining building. He took her to a room, formerly an office. On the wall, the same map Lucy had carried, with a plastic sheet over it, marked with grease pencil, and a calendar showing a train and the month of October 1977. There was a bench, a table, some chairs. They sat.

  Tran said, “You see we are quite comfortable here. It was lucky for us that the Cades maintained the lift for their drug laboratory. I had visions of having to climb up five hundred meters in the dark, with all our equipment. They maintained as well the water and the electrical generator. And the dogs were a benefit, as well. We brought very little food, you see.”

  A volley of shot sounded from a distance, answered by several short bursts of automatic fire.

  “Yes, the war has already started. They know we’re here, of course. They’re rather dismayed, I think. They thought their rear was secured by the strip mine. I think they had no idea that the network of tunnels debouched ultimately in an area outside their control. Your mother was clever to discover it. As were you, to be sure.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this? For her?”

  “To an extent. My own reasons are, as usual, complex, but my people are doing it for the gold. And now the drugs as well.”

  “I don’t understand. You said you were sick of killing.”

  “Well, yes, but you understand, much of that sentimentality was the drug talking. In the light of day, I am just another bloodthirsty bandit chief. It is not a constitutional regime, I am afraid. The old guard is loyal to me, naturally, my old comrades, but the young guard . . . I am afraid Freddy has them in his grip. He is more stylish and modern than I am. This brings us to the problem of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We will go into action soon, perhaps tonight. From this action, either Freddy or I will not return. If it is Freddy, he will certainly kill you, or worse. But I can’t let you go either.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No, because you will inform either the Cades or the police of our plans, which I dare say you know as well as I do.” He paused and gave her an amused inspection. “Don’t you?”

  “The dead ground to the south, the creekbed to the north. A diversion at one or the other, and strike at their flank.”

  “Excellent. What a coup d’oeil you have, my dear! It’s a pity you are not coming with us.”

  “You’re enjoying this?”

  “To an extent. It makes a change from breaking the arms of defaulting gamblers. Besides, my old comrades always enjoy killing Americans.”

  “There are women and kids down there,” said Lucy. “Families. It’s a village, not a camp.”

  “Oh, well, we could not possibly attack a village with women and children in it. That would be wrong. Tut tut tut.” For a moment he showed her his shark look, his dead-souled eyes.

  “This . . . this can’t be about the war.”

  “Everything is about the war.” Then Tran grinned. “Let me show you my treasures.” He led her to another room, where equipment was standing in neat piles.

  “We have a mortar, one of yours in fact. And fifty rounds. Here you will recognize the M60 machine gun. We have three. These are RPG-7 rocket launchers—”

  “Stop it!” she cried. “I’m not interested. I think it’s all hideous. You’re planning on murdering maybe eighty, a hundred people, and you’re treating it like some kind of jolly game? And you’re not like that. You’re not like Freddy Phat. You’re kind, and you love poetry . . .” She started to cry and bit her lip and turned away so that she would stop and not shame herself.

  “Yes, well, Mao liked poetry, too. It’s quite irrelevant. Seeing the good in everyone is a virtue, to be sure, but it may be misleading. I am horrid, au fond, as you must know, and your country helped make me so. It thus has a certain pleasing symmetry, this
thing.”

  A dull boom echoed among the hills. Another. A sustained burst of machine-gun fire.

  “They are attacking again, I suppose. I must go. While I decide what is to be done, I must secure you. You can keep our prisoner company.”

  “What prisoner?”

  “Some young fool who tried to penetrate our lines last night with some dynamite bombs. You might ask him where the gold is kept. Otherwise he will tell us later under circumstances far less pleasant.”

  “You intend to torture him.”

  “Indeed.”

  “That’s contemptible.”

  “Yes. But necessary just now. And I am good at it. Freddy is not so good at it because he likes it. That is the unfortunate choice. Come along.”

  He led her down a corridor to a rusty steel-bound door. “They must have kept their payroll here. It makes a fairly good dungeon. Go through. I will see that you are fed later.”

  He closed the door behind her, and she heard it lock. Shafts of dusty sunlight came through glassless, barred windows. In the center of the room was a man hanging from his bound wrists tied behind his back, his toes just touching the floor. He was naked except for a pair of camouflage-patterned briefs. She approached him, her Swiss army knife already pulled from her pocket. She sliced through the supporting rope. He collapsed at her feet, groaning. She cut the cords that bound his wrists. She looked around the room. On a long table was a length of thick, rubberized electrical cable, below the table a plastic bucket full of water. She carried the bucket over to the man, knelt, dipped her bandanna in it, and washed his bruised and swollen face.

  He opened his eyes. Recognition dawned and he shied. “You!”

  “Yes. Lucy Karp. You’re Bo Cade.”

  “Jesus H. Christ! Every damn time I get my ass handed to me, you’re somewheres around. Why in hell is that, huh?”

  “Because you hang around in bad company probably. You remember I tried to warn you. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I been kicked by a horse. Are you in with them all? Those chinks?”

  “They’re not chinks. They’re Viet Kieu.”

  “What?”

  “Vietnamese living here.”

  “What the hell do they want with us?”

  “Your gold, for one thing. Another thing is that one of you shot my little brother. There’s a revenge angle. My mother is Sicilian.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Mafia is Sicilian.”

  “Your ma’s in the Mafia?”

  “No, but she has a sort of private mafia, and these are them. Look, we probably don’t have much time. I need you to tell me where the gold is.”

  “Hell, no, I won’t!”

  “Yes, you have to, because here are your choices. You can tell me, and then I’ll help you escape. Or you can refuse to tell me, and in a little while they’ll come back and torture the truth out of you and then they’ll kill you.”

  “They ain’t gonna make me tell, I don’t care what they do.”

  She sighed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake! They’ll break you in twenty minutes, you poor sap. You think your cousin Wayne is mean? Wayne is a church lady compared to these people.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you something, girlie. When my kin get finished with them, they’re gonna be sorry they ever messed with the Cades.”

  “There won’t be any Cades after tonight. Oh, God give me strength! You’ve heard of the war in Vietnam?”

  “Yeah, my uncle Ralph got kilt there. What about it?”

  “Those men out there, they’re Commie Vietcong sappers, you dolt! They will go through the Cades like a blowtorch through a newspaper.”

  He was staring at her, his mouth slightly open. “I could get out anyway. You couldn’t stop me. I could take them bars off with that fancy knife you got.”

  “Yes, you could. But I’d yell and they’d come in here and stop you.”

  “I could fix it so you didn’t do no yellin’.”

  “Could you? Well, go ahead, then.” She lay the open blade down on the floor. “See what happens.”

  Warily, he reached for the knife. She said, “Let me give you a hint. The man who’s running this operation is a good friend of mine. If you manage to hurt me, he will stop everything he’s doing and track you down. Then you’ll die in the kind of pain you can’t even imagine. Plus, you’ll tell them everything they want to know in the first five minutes.”

  He stared at her, looking for fear or some trick in her eyes. But he didn’t find anything like that. He grappled with that knowledge. Everyone was afraid; specifically, everyone was afraid of the Cades, and within the Cades there was a defined hierarchy of fear, with Ben Cade at the top. He himself was fairly low down in the order, liable to be beaten on by his brothers and his uncles. In turn he got to beat on his smaller cousins and any women, although he found he didn’t like doing it all that much. In his mind there grew the desire to know the secret she had.

  “You want to know why I’m not frightened, don’t you?”

  He felt a chill run through his body. He replaced the knife. She said, “It’s a long story, but you’ll never get to learn it if you’re tortured to death or get killed along with the rest of your kin. Your old life is finished, but you could have a different life.”

  “Yeah, in jail.”

  “Yes, you’ll have to go to prison, maybe for years. But you’re young. You’ll get out of prison. The world is a lot larger than Robbens County.”

  He felt a long sigh escape from his throat. “It’s in the big house. In his bedroom. There’s a trapdoor in the floor that leads to a shaft. . . .” It was complex, involving a descent into the underlying mines, turns and backtracks, and a number of booby traps that had to be disarmed. He told her all this in a low, dead voice. When he was through, and she had asked a few clarifying questions, she rose, checked out the barred windows, and chose one where rank growth pressed against the building. She thought of what Tran had said: “a fairly good dungeon.” But a strong room was meant to keep people out, not in. The bars were screwed in on the inside, of course, and she used the screwdriver on her knife to remove them.

  “Get into some thick laurel and stay there,” she said. “I think it’ll all be over by tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. Good luck.” Without a word, he boosted himself over the sill and was gone in a rustle of weeds.

  * * *

  Lester Weames got into La Guardia at around two on Sunday, rented a Taurus, and drove into Manhattan. He drove through the City slowly and carefully, to a bar on Greenwich Street. He told the bartender he was looking for a Mr. Schaeffer. Last time he had been looking for a Mr. Ballantine. The bartender gave him a plain envelope and turned away. Weames noticed that the man did not look him in the eye, just like last time. In the envelope were driving directions to Rector and West Streets, near the Battery Parking Garage. He drove there and parked. An August Sunday afternoon in the financial district; you could fire a machine gun down the street and not hit anyone. The only other car on the street was a white Cadillac Seville. He picked up his briefcase, walked over, slid into the backseat of the Cadillac. As before, Frank was singing low on the stereo and the AC was maxed out. Weames felt the sweat prickle as it dried on his face.

  The man in the front seat checked Weames in his rearview. As before, he didn’t turn around.

  “First things first. You got the fifty large?”

  “Yes. Right here.” Weames opened his briefcase and lifted up a fat manila envelope. The man in front raised a restraining hand. “Not so fast. We haven’t decided to take your business.”

  “What the hell! What’re you talking about?”

  “Because the problem’s not so simple anymore. You screwed up so bad that half the FBI’s down there. If we’re going to take the extra risk, we need to know what happened, the planning, who did what, and what went wrong. Otherwise, no deal.”

  “Hell, it’s no big story. I told George Floyd to get rid of him, Heeney, and George hir
ed a gang of goddamn slows to do it, and they left evidence all over the place, and the cops caught ’em. That’s it.”

  “You told Floyd to do it. You told him to get rid of Heeney and his family, or just him?”

  “I told him to get everyone in the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes more of an effect. Man might take a risk himself, but not if he knows his family’s going to get dead, too. It’s better for business.”

  “And this Floyd supplied the money.”

  “Yeah, from the union. Untraceable, except the damn fool goes and licks it all before he gave it out. Now he’s going state’s evidence on me.”

  “Which is why you want to take him out. He’s not in jail?”

  “No, out on bail. He’s living in his house. Got a couple of union security people with him, but they ain’t much. You can take them out, too.” Weames hesitated. “Or would that be extra?”

  “No, that’s covered. Bodyguards are always covered in the sticker price. Okay, Mr. Weames, I think we can do business. You’re going to hand me fifty thousand dollars now, in exchange for which you want me to arrange the murder of George Floyd. Have I got that right?”

  “Yeah, as soon as you can.”

  The man held his hand up.

  Weames placed the envelope in it. “When do you think you can get it done?”

  Mr. Schaeffer did not answer, but took the bills out of the envelope, riffled them, rolled down his window, and waved the wad out at the empty offices, as if trying to attract a wandering stockbroker.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “It’s an old Italian custom. It takes the curse off blood money.”

  “I asked you when you’re gonna do it. I’m thinking I need to fix me up with an alibi for the time.”

  Squeal of tires. A car pulled up alongside on the left, the right-hand door flew open, a big dark man in a suit slid into the seat beside Weames. He felt queasy fear. A face appeared in the window next to him. Mr. Schaeffer swiveled around in his seat and pressed the button that rolled down the rear window.

  Karp said, “Hello, Lester. How about moving over and letting me sit down?”

  The big dark man put an arm around Weames’s shoulders and jerked him across the seat. Karp got in. Mr. Schaeffer was grinning and showing a gold NYPD detective’s badge.