Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp said, “Lester, this is Detective Cicciola of the New York police. He’s going to arrest you for conspiracy to commit murder, which is a major league felony in the state of New York.”

  “This is entrapment.”

  “Oh my, Lester, you’ve been watchin’ too many crummy TV crime shows. When a scumbag like you is ‘ready,’ ‘poised,’ ‘wanting,’ and ‘predisposed’ to engage in the criminal activity, entrapment goes out the window. Lester, we got you on tape. You’re goin’ down as big time as it gets for the Heeney slaughter and the Floyd attempt. While you’re in custody, I wouldn’t be surprised if the state of West Virginia attempted to extradite you for ordering the murder of the Heeney family. What I can assure you of is that the New York district attorney’s office will make no objection to that extradition.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “And you shall have one, my murderous little hick,” said Karp, “but it will not do you much good.”

  19

  TRAN ENTERED THE STRONG ROOM. He was carrying a steel bowl with a cover and a pair of chopsticks on it and a steel mess-kit mug from which steam rose. The aroma from the bowl reached Lucy. She felt liquid rush into her mouth and her belly quivered. Tran placed the things on the floor, then removed the cover from the bowl.

  “Pho. And tea.”

  “Thank you.” She picked up a sliver of meat with the chopsticks. “Not dog, I hope.”

  “No, it’s dried beef. I recalled that you did not care for dog.”

  Lucy was already slurping away at the pho. Between bites she asked, “How is your war going?”

  “Well. There are about twenty-five of them on a little knob in front of their settlement. A stupid position and easily outflanked. When night falls, we will have them.” A pause. “I assume you have the information we require. I could not help noticing that our prisoner is gone.”

  “Yes. You planned that, didn’t you?”

  “I thought it was a reasonable assumption that you would act as you did. You are a clever child. I hope I didn’t terrify you too much.”

  “You did. You still terrify me. And you really would have tortured it out of him?”

  “Of course, or Freddy would have. But having been tortured, I find I have lost my taste for it. In others, you know, the same experience heightens the taste. I am glad not to have to do it.”

  “What will happen now?” she asked in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care.

  “Tonight we will do our operation, return here, and go through the tunnels with our prizes. A truck will be waiting. You should not be here when we return.”

  “Because you might be killed.”

  “Yes. Freddy will certainly kill you if you remain. He will almost certainly try to kill me, and therefore I must arrange that this doesn’t happen.”

  “You’ll kill him.”

  “Not I. Someone else. Someone he believes has been suborned, but has not. It is quite complex and boring. We Vietnamese! In any case, you will not observe the last charge of the 614th Battalion of the National Liberation Front’s popular forces. We were five hundred and fifty in 1965. Ten survived the war’s end, of whom four are here with me today.” He stood up. “I will look in on you before we depart. There is a guard at the door. No one will disturb you for the next few hours.”

  He waited for a moment, as if expecting some comment. She was, however, silent, and he left.

  She drank the tea. It grew dark outside, and darker still inside. She loved him and he was a devil. What did that make her? She rocked back and forth with the pain of it. Her brother was probably dead by now, or a vegetable. There was no help in this world or out of it. She fell to the floor, arms outstretched, face against the dusty, splintered planks. Priests lie this way when they are ordained, but she was not thinking of that. Her head hurt, a nauseous pounding behind her eyes. She pressed her forehead against the floorboards, as if she could press clear through the wood, down to the earth, down to its hot bowels and be lost. There was no time, no light, the universe was nothing, deep stupidity, suffering, meaningless death, forever.

  “Help me,” a small voice said to nothing. Lucy was surprised to find that it was her own voice. “Help me,” she said again. After that, silence, the blood in her ears, pain.

  An odor touched her nostrils, cutting through the dry-wood and dust smell of the boards. Roses, heavy and sweet, and something sharper. Roses and onions.

  Lucy lifted her head, groaning. She saw a woman dressed in dark robes, with a white wool coif around her face, sitting on a chair. She was cutting pieces from an onion with a small knife and eating them. The woman looked uncannily like her mother—dark, large, luminous eyes, thick brows, a straight, perfect nose, the mouth full and sensuous. The skin of her face was smooth and fine like her mother’s; unlike hers, it was adorned with three small moles.

  “You’re a hallucination. Go away.” Lucy said this in Spanish.

  “If I am, then you are mad,” said the woman in the same language, with a thick Castilian lisp. “Do you feel mad otherwise?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “So you claim. In the meantime, you are performing works of mercy at the risk of your own life. That is the behavior of a good Christian, not a maniac.”

  “Why are you eating an onion? I didn’t know they ate onions in heaven.”

  “There is much about heaven of which you are unaware, child. Although you are as full of pride as Lucifer, at least you haven’t claimed that.”

  “I’m not proud. I’m miserable.”

  “That is one of the worst forms of pride. I know it very well.”

  “Permit me to doubt that,” said Lucy. “You’re a saint. God spoke to you every day.”

  “He speaks to everyone every day, but only those who listen hear. Now you will listen to me, you silly girl, since you still seem to require these hallucinations as you call them. Our Lord has allowed you, of His grace, to suffer some tiny part of what He suffered, as much as a single tear is to the whole ocean. And what do you do? You cry, you pout, you complain, you have the affrontery to throw back in his face the gifts He has deigned to bestow on you. And why? Your brother is hurt? He will live or die according to His will, blessed be His name. Are you the keeper of heaven, to bar the way when He calls a soul to Him? Ten thousand times you have prayed, ‘Thy will be done.’ Was that a lie? Did you mean, Thy will be done as long as it is pleasant for me? Don’t you know you must give thanks for your afflictions as well as for your graces? More thanks, to tell the truth. If he lives, rejoice. If he dies, mourn. Such is the life of us below. You speak of saints; what can you possibly comprehend of how the saints suffer? You know, at one time I was in danger of being called before the Inquisition, and I found this amusing, because nothing they could have done to me with their racks and red-hot pincers could equal what our Lord laid upon this poor body, out of His mercy. Many times I twitched like a crushed worm on the floor of my cell, my head bursting, my entrails all afire, praying myself hoarse for an end to the agony, and there was nothing, nothing answered. You know what I mean now, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was in such a state, lying in a pool of my own tears and filth, when His Majesty came to me for the first time. So what is the lesson? He waits for us in the darkness; there we seek Him. The light, if it comes, is a pure gift, and we cannot summon it, however we may try. Kings are not summoned, my girl, although you imagined in your infernal pride that it was so. Now you have learned something, and you feel like you have been flayed. It won’t be the last time, I can assure you.”

  The woman leaned forward in her chair, leaned and came much closer to Lucy than the geometries of ordinary space and matter would normally allow. She dropped her onion in Lucy’s hand.

  “Consider the onion, my dear. Its many layers. And when the layers have all been peeled away, what?”

  The woman was gone. The onion sat in Lucy’s hand, cool, weighty, pungent.

 
She heard the door swing violently open; Tran burst into the room, pointing his Skorpion.

  “I heard voices,” he said, peering into the dark corners. “Two voices. Who were you talking to?”

  “Teresa de Alhuma.”

  “Who?”

  “Teresa of Jesus, of Avila, saint, Doctor of the Church. Don’t worry, she died in 1582.”

  “Hm. I should have known, this being you. My little sister used to talk to our grandmother’s ghost and swore to me that she talked back. I never heard it myself, but my sister was otherwise never known to lie. Hien was her name.”

  “Your sister’s?”

  “Both of them were called Hien.”

  “What happened to her? Your sister.”

  “She became a Buddhist nun. She immolated herself in front of the American embassy in Saigon, in 1966. We are going out now. Wait until we are gone and then leave the way you came. I will arrange for the power to be left on. The elevator is easy to operate. Your flashlight is outside this door.” He dropped down on his haunches next to her, squatting in the easy Asian way. He was dressed in black cotton, with a floppy black hat, bandoliers of magazines across his chest, and a pair of big Zeiss night glasses around his neck. It was what he must have looked like during the war, she thought.

  He said, “If it should happen that I perish, I would like you to do me one last service. It is ridiculous, I know, but I find that it still gives me comfort. I would like you to collect my bones and deposit them at Tan My. It is our ancestral village, just a little south of Saigon, near the river. Mrs. Diem has the details and will contact you at need, if you are willing, that is.”

  “Of course.” They both stood. He kissed her on both cheeks; she hugged him, smelling her childhood in his scent, her own wolf.

  “What power you have, my dear,” he said, “to make me feel even for a few moments like a human being again. It is almost better than opium. I am truly grateful. Good-bye.”

  “God bless you, Uncle,” she called after him. She sat on the chair, her mind quite blank. But the crushing despair was gone, too. The world was flowing again with all its horror and beauty. She sniffed at her fingers. Onions.

  * * *

  “How’s your siege coming along?” Karp asked.

  “Hell, it ain’t my siege, it’s the damn FBI’s siege now,” said Hendricks. “I’m lucky they give me the time of day.”

  “But you don’t expect it to be over anytime soon?”

  “I would doubt that, unless they come up with a new plan.”

  The two men were in the back of a state police vehicle, returning from the Charleston airport. Night was closing in; the driver had switched on his lights. They had seen Weames booked and jailed in Manhattan, and Karp had made the calls that would grease the extradition process. If Weames had a good delaying lawyer, and he would, the process might take weeks. Karp didn’t care, as long as the mutt stayed behind bars. Maybe the word would get around Rikers that he’d had a little girl killed. That would be of more than sociological interest to Lester.

  “One thing that they can’t figure out is the Chinamen,” Hendricks was saying.

  “Come again?”

  “The Chinamen, or some kind of oriental fellas. Morrisey’s been sending a chopper over the mountain pretty regular to take film, and he’s got a couple of guys in black clothes, orientals, running for cover. He said it looked like something out of an old Vietnam news show. He asked me if there was any Asian gang activity in the area, and I told him that besides the Chinese restaurants in Charleston, I didn’t think we had any Asians in this part of the world.”

  “Oh, fuck!” said Karp. “That stupid woman!”

  “How’s that?”

  “Wade, we need to go to the FBI command post,” said Karp. “Right now.”

  “The command post? You mind telling me why?”

  “They’re not Chinese. I think they’re Viets, and I think my wife arranged for them to be there. Could you tell him to step on it, please?”

  They made good time until they hit the access road up the mountain, after which it was a slow crawl through herds of media. Huge vans sat in cornfields and on the shoulder, beaming nothing much to an anxious world. Searchlights probed the passing police car. Karp was recognized, of course, and the car was pursued by newsies holding cameras, mikes, tape recorders. How’s Giancarlo? they screamed. Is he dead, is he talking, how do you feel?

  The FBI command post was in a forty-foot-long mobile home, squashing a lot of young corn, surrounded by generator trucks, pole lights, and enough antennae and electronics to launch the space shuttle. Ahead, on the road proper, an army-green armored bulldozer was making slow progress clearing boulders off the road.

  Morrisey was not pleased to see them, and less so when he heard Karp’s theory.

  “That’s crazy,” he said authoritatively. “Your wife sent in a team of Vietnamese gangsters for revenge against the Cades? How the hell did they get in there? On little fairy wings? That whole mountain is sealed up tight as a bank vault.”

  “My wife is very resourceful,” said Karp.

  “You’re suggesting that she’s conspiring to commit murders?”

  “I have no knowledge of any murders. Nor do you. I’m reporting my suspicions to you as officer in charge of this operation, which is my duty as a citizen and an officer of the court. The main thing I want to avoid is any more people getting hurt.”

  “That’s very good of you, Karp. Your federal government appreciates it. What you really have up there, in my opinion, is an Asian drug gang transporting dope. Or trying to. They got stuck up there when we locked the mountain down. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  Outside the command post, Hendricks said, “Nice fella. What do you think?”

  “Of his theory? I liked the one about fairy wings better. Look, I’m going to hang around here for a while. If you’ve got stuff to do . . .”

  “I got some sandwiches and Cokes in a cooler. Why don’t we sit on that rock over there and have us a picnic. Maybe we can learn something watching how the big boys do it.”

  They sat and ate as men in FBI jackets and SWAT attire and combat-dressed National Guardsmen strode or rode by. Pole lights were emplaced in the woods and along the road, giving the scene an air of carnival. They watched the bulldozer for a while, then went back to the car. Karp dozed. He awakened to gunfire.

  “Sounds like something’s going on,” said Hendricks. “Sounds like a firefight. Those just now were machine guns, I think. Damn! That’s artillery. Mortar fire.”

  “Yes, all your drug gangs have mortars nowadays. Let’s go see what the FBI has to say about all this.”

  When they found Morrisey, he seemed a good deal less confident than he had been, and nearly glad to see Karp’s face again.

  “I may owe you an apology,” he said into his shoulder. “One of our people picked up a kid wandering along Highway 712 in his Skivvies. We just got finished interrogating him. He says he’s Bo Cade. He says your daughter’s up there in some old mine buildings along with the whole Vietcong. According to him, she’s best buddies with the chief Commie in charge. You know anything about this?”

  “Not a thing,” said Karp with his stomach up around his throat. “They never tell me anything. Did he say whether she was okay?”

  “She was alive and well when she helped him escape. We’ll need to talk about this at some length, but not now. First light I intend to send a couple of teams up through those woods. Then we’ll find out what the holy hell is going on here.”

  * * *

  When she heard the firing and explosions die down, Lucy let herself out of the strong room and moved among the buildings. The moon was nearly full and she hardly needed the flashlight. She found a place near the wreck of the coal tipple where she could climb onto the roof of a machine shed and lie down on her belly. Some hours passed. She dozed and was brought to full attention by the sound of men moving through brush. There was a line of them, not as many as there had been, som
e of them carrying stretchers, some in groups of four struggling with heavy chests. So they had the gold. She strained her eyes to see whether Tran was among them, but the distance was too far to make out anything but silhouettes. She heard the sound of the lift motor and the squeal of its gearing.

  She slipped off the roof and went north, using the flashlight now, until she came to a nearly dry creekbed and began walking along it. After ten minutes, she found her first corpse, one of the Lost Boys. She didn’t know his name. A little farther there was an older Vietnamese, Vo, who had kept the house in Bridgeport, and who had survived fifteen years of the French War and then the American War, only to die in his enemy’s country. She said a prayer for the repose of his soul. Farther on, at just the place she would have chosen, her flashlight picked up a thick carpet of brass. This was where they had placed one of the flanking machine guns. Beyond that, she found the Cades, in small groups or individually, looking like dreamers in the moonlight, or smashed beyond humanity, like props from a horror movie. She passed a place where the ground was torn and bushes were uprooted, and where she had to walk carefully to keep from stepping on viscera and chunks of former people. This was the kill sack. The Cades had been pushed from both flanks back to what looked like a good defensive position, and then the mortar bombs had started to fall on them. Some, she found, had run and been cut down by automatic fire, probably from a squad that had infiltrated to their rear. There was another black-clad corpse, but his head had been so smashed she could not tell who it was. She rolled it over with her foot. There was no Stechkin holster and her heart lifted a little.

  It was growing lighter in the east, a hint of dawn. She found a rutted road and walked down it, smelling smoke. As she walked, the smoke grew thicker and more acrid, mingling unpleasantly with the morning mist. A figure came toward her out of the fog, stumbling, a girl in a pink nightgown. Her face was smudged with ash and she was barefoot and grossly pregnant. She looked about fourteen.