Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  “What?” Quire asked, looking at Joe, his hands open-palmed and away from his body.

  “This is too much,” Joe said.

  “What is?”

  “Your talking, your joking. You’re acting like we’re hiking Mont Blanc. Man, don’t you understand what this night holds? We are killing people.”

  Quire lowered his eyes for a moment and removed the cigar from between his lips. When he again looked at Joe, his eyes were glassed and hard. He stepped forward to stand close to Joe and spoke, his voice deep and collusive, “Would you rather I talk about how many men I have killed in my past or who I have seen die and how and how long it took? Should I tell you how sickened and frightened I am at how much I am looking forward to this killing I know will take place? Would it be better to tell you that my hands are shaking and my legs feel weak as gimcrack? That my stomach is turning? Would that be better?”

  “No,” Joe breathed. “I suppose not.” He knew then something that he had long wished, that the world was not as empty as he had supposed, that it was not a world constructed of no known or moral paradigm. Good men lived, even though their goodness was covered in veneers of past evils, not necessarily all of their own making.

  They stood shadowless in the dark night across from the building, stark and obscure and cast within numberless shadows. They waited and stood and waited across from the house and watched and listened. Their eyes adjusted, the form of a house became a house, its frontal visage taking shape and appearance.

  “Dark as a wolf’s mouth,” Ballard said from a shadow nearby.

  “Ballard,” Quire said. “Glad you’re here.”

  “Man, I was there before the curtain raised on this drama, and, Quire-boy, I’ll be damned if I miss the last act.” His dark eyes were calm and appraising as he spoke. The eyes of a man who had seen too much, and, since those interrupting sights, had slept too little.

  Joe swallowed what little moisture he had. A coldness cut raw to his bones as he anticipated the violence cast within the oncoming moments. He studied the exterior of Gadwa’s building, his stomach tightening cold and hard as a shot of lead. People were about to die.

  Tall behind a waist-high iron fence, four bare elm trees sentried the building’s front. The front stoop and brick exterior rose three stories from the level of the street. Two curtained windows were to either side of the ground-floor entrance like blindered eyes. The two floors above each had four windows spaced evenly across the front and which were outlined in light sandstone. Gadwa’s was a house of the rich, not quite a centuries-old aristocrat’s palaise but maybe once a wealthy merchant’s home. Set off from surrounding houses, ostentatiously removed from the fronting sidewalk as though to say that the owners cared not for the added taxes on wasted space, probably with a back entrance and a delivery entrance all its own. Ironworked bars laced the windows of the top two floors, and the front doors were a dark wood with square Judas holes in each.

  “This man’s afraid of something,” Joe said.

  “Evidently,” Ballard agreed. “I been around back. The place is surrounded by a wall—eight foot. It’s like its own Medieval fortress, fully enclosed. There’s a delivery door back there but it’s set pretty tight.”

  “Rich people, especially rich French people, don’t trust poor people, especially poor foreign people,” Quire said.

  “But like I said,” Joe said, “he isn’t French.”

  “No. He isn’t, but he tries to be.”

  Joe leaned against the brick of the building behind him. He took a deep breath and looked around at the street and the quilted sky above and the light rain still falling and the front of Marcel’s home. He looked for something he could not find.

  He said, “What would make a man sell out the lives of so many of his countrymen? His friends? I get the money part, but I still don’t understand.”

  Ballard answered, “What would make a man produce defective ammunition for you and me to use in that war? Like you said—money. Just money.”

  “Men do things for only two reasons, love or money. Money is all this man loves,” Quire added.

  “How can it be worth it?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy, brother,” Quire said. “All of my money came from my old man, and that son of a bitch didn’t care where his came from.”

  “Shit.” It could have been any one of three voices that said it.

  There was a long silence during which Joe again looked around. A hidden moon, no lampposts, no people walking, no automobiles, no lights in nearby house windows. Only a dark and leprous night, cold and wet and tactile.

  Ballard broke the silence, “We should do something, and we should begin doing it.”

  “All right,” Joe said. “What do you think?”

  “Ballard goes around back and finds his way in or stops whoever tries leaving.”

  “And us?”

  “We have two choices.”

  “They are?”

  “Either you follow me or I follow you.”

  “Goddamn but you’re a strategist.”

  “I do my best.”

  “Shit,” said Ballard. “Let’s do it.”

  Quire rolled his shoulders like a boxer between early rounds and took the first step into the street. As they crossed to Gadwa’s house, he said, “Remember. Start tight, stay tight.”

  “Shut up with that shit,” Ballard said. He picked up the valise and carried it with him.

  Each step toward Gadwa’s house opened another cleft in Joe’s reservoir of remembered deaths and losses. Even with the night air a palpable cold, he could feel a ball of sweat run his spine.

  Ballard separated from them and made his way into the shadows that lined the houses and around to the back. Of the two windows on the building’s lower floor, one had light behind the heavy curtains and the other darkness. They went first to the dark. The window was double-hung, and the bottom of the windowsill was even with Joe’s chin. He pushed up on the lower half but no movement. The window was latched shut.

  “Give me your knee,” Joe said.

  Quire bended to one knee and braced his other leg behind him, his shoulder against the building. Joe stood on Quire’s elevated knee and held the window’s frame to look in at the lock, a simple brass rotating latch fastened where the double-hung windows overlapped.

  Joe dropped to the ground and bent next to Quire.

  “We’ll have to break the glass,” he said.

  “First,” Quire said, placing a levelling hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Let’s have a look inside that lit window and see what we may be up against.”

  Joe smiled. “Since when did you stop to think before jumping into action?”

  “It doesn’t happen very often, so you should take heed of it when it does.”

  Joe nodded.

  They crossed the front walk. Once again Quire boosted Joe up so that he could peer through a finger opening in the drapes.

  Gadwa and Dapper stood in front of a fire in the brick fireplace. Dapper was buttoning the front of his overcoat while Gadwa held a glass of brandy. He held the glass as if he were offering it for view, the way a man does when he wants to remind others of their relative position to him.

  The floor was hardwood and shined in reflection of the fire. Gadwa and Dapper, however, stood on an Oriental rug, rust-colored and worn only slightly from use.

  Marie sat cross-legged on a sofa and her hands in her lap. She looked at the fire. Joe saw only her portrait in profile but could see that she had recently been crying. The skin around her eyes was maroon. A smudge of black mascara remained on her cheek. Joe watched her chest move with unsettled breaths. The Turk hovered near her.

  The sofa Marie sat on was antique and elaborate in its design and construction, something from some Louis who had spent the lives of his countrymen on his own comfort. The mantel held small statues ready for observation. Sepia portraits and small paintings, neither modern nor Impressionist but much older, ringed the walls. It looked like the type
of room some people might call home, but Joe saw sterility and falsity and pretense.

  In the fireplace behind Gadwa and Dapper, a full fire popped and hissed. Joe smelled the sweet smell of burning wood, a smell that would usually remind him of his boyhood home.

  Gadwa looked like a man entertaining guests in a pre-yule time fete—brandy and a warming fire and conversation.

  Joe saw all that in a short time, just long enough to have peeked through the narrow opening in the curtains and scan the room. Then he dropped beside Quire and whispered, “Just the four.” He held up four fingers. “Marie, Gadwa, Dapper, and the Turk. That guy at Marie’s was right.”

  “Dapper the dandy who gave me my shiner?”

  Joe smiled and Quire smiled back. His blue eyes shined significantly in the darkness, and he started for the front door.

  Joe placed a hand to Quire’s shoulder then a finger over his own mouth. He held out his hand, palm downward, to signal that Quire slow down and wait for a moment. He whispered to Quire, “Listen to that little voice that wants you to think before acting.”

  The time had come. Joe knew that he could not hold it back any longer, but he needed Quire’s assistance first. “Help me through the window,” he said.

  “Let’s make it quick.”

  They re-crossed to the darkened window. Joe took off his overcoat and wrapped the Webley inside. He tapped his hand to gauge the strength of this softened mallet, unwrapped and rewrapped with less insulation around the butt of the pistol, and winked at Quire. “Ready?”

  “Just don’t swing for the fence, Babe.”

  “A tap should do it.”

  Quire bended his knee again and Joe stood. His first swing bounced from the glass with little more than a dull thud. The second swing hit more fully and more forcefully, streaking a crack from the bottom center of the glass where Joe had hit it to the top right corner. Another, softer blow sent the glass into a spider web of cracks.

  Joe dropped his gun and overcoat to the ground and began poking at the broken glass until he had loosened a few pieces enough to push them into the room. They hit the wood floor with more sound than Joe was prepared for. He fixed himself to jump and run had the noise been heard from the other room. Nothing. He pulled another couple of pieces loose and dropped them in the bushes until he could reach through with his hand and unlatch the window. He felt a shard cut a single line along his forearm.

  Jumping back down to the ground, he said, “I’ll go through the window. When you hear things going down, you come in. Break it down if you have to.”

  “A little gunplay, Wyatt.”

  “Just don’t shoot one of the good guys.”

  Quire pushed open the window then cupped his hands for Joe to use as a prop. “You watch your back,” Quire said.

  “You do the same,” said Joe.

  “Ain’t no thing for me. I’ll be in there soon.”

  Joe stepped onto the brace of hands and pulled himself up and over the sill. He stood for a moment looking into the dark precinct of the room until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the outline of furniture, electric floor lamps, the outlines on the walls where pictures hung, and the cord of light at the bottom of the door to his left.

  One last look out the window at Quire padding to the front room window to watch as things began. Joe listened to the sounds of muffled voices, but could hear little more than his heart beating in his ears. From a long ways off, he heard the thrum of thunder sounding like artillery rounds. Standing in that dark room with a sliver of yellow light at the bottom of a door he was set to open, he drew a deep breath and felt the muscles of his body pulled as tight as a bow string.

  XII

  After a bombardment which continued for seventy-five hours, the French human wave started forward by irresistible bounds.

  —Henri Vast, Little History of the Great War

  JOE TURNED THE GLASS DOORKNOB IN SLOW TEMPO. WHEN HE HAD pushed the door less than an inch, he looked through the sliced opening. He saw nobody and continued opening the door to expand his field of vision. Against the wall opposite from Joe, a girandole holding four tapered candles sat on a wood hall table like a chancel lamp. The feathered flames of the candles lit the entranceway, and the flames of the candles bent then righted themselves as Joe stepped through the doorway then closed the door behind him.

  Feeling like the thief in the night, he walked to the open doorway from behind which came the sounds of voices. He felt a little tremble in his free hand and clenched it into a fist, the other hand held the Webley. He breathed deep and silently, then stepped close to the corner and listened. The voices were of two men and a woman, Marie.

  He looked quickly, peering around the door frame and looking only through his left eye. A fire bounced from the hardwood mantel behind Marcel and the Turk. Marie sat on the sofa near the fireplace. The two men stood together at the mantel, ignoring Marie.

  He could not see Dapper. If Dapper had left the room, Joe wondered whether Quire would stick to the original plan, as nebulous as it was. Quire wanted Dapper. That might take precedence in Quire’s mind.

  He leaned close to the edge of the doorway, eavesdropping again on the conversation in the other room.

  Gadwa and the Turk spoke in French. Joe could understand most of what they were saying—driving that night for Lausanne. In Switzerland, nobody cared where one’s money came from and the Swiss had a myopic view of the world that extended only as far as their own borders. With his riches secure in Swiss banks, Gadwa would be rich and free, regardless of the blood on his hands.

  “The train would be faster,” the Turk said.

  “True,” said Gadwa. “However, the trains establish our itinerary. With an automobile, we have the freedom to change our plans if necessary. We also have more control over our baggage.”

  “Oui,” said the Turk.

  Marie said, “You lied to me.”

  “Oui.” In the way Gadwa dropped the word, Joe could imagine it being accompanied by a dismissive huff and wave of the hand. “We have been through this,” he said.

  “You lied to me,” she repeated. “For years, you lied. Everything you do and say is a lie.”

  Joe heard her stand and walk. “You tried to kill my brother.” He heard her slap Gadwa, a flat sound like raw meat dropped on wood.

  He heard another slap and then someone fall back. That sound almost began the violence. “Your brother will be dead soon. And the American will either be here to save your life . . . or not.”

  No answer.

  Gadwa said, “We should leave soon, within the half hour. If he does not arrive, then I must deal with whatever happens.”

  “Shall I bring around the automobile?” asked the Turk.

  “Yes. Send Bert. The bags are stowed in the back?”

  “Oui.”

  “We should pack some wine for the trip and make sure we have blankets. The ride is long and cold.”

  “And her?”

  “Later.”

  “And if he comes?”

  “All the better.” In his mind, Joe could see the words spoken with a smirk and received with a smile.

  A silence beneath a shuffling of feet.

  A couple of fuses in Joe’s brain burst in anger. He saw a kaleidoscope of reds and blacks. Only one thought focused in his mind. That thought was darkness.

  He took a second to breathe then stood and felt the familiar adrenaline kick of fear and excitement. This had all begun years before on a single haze-laden morning in central France. This had all begun that long-ago day with the sun rising to greet the deaths of 20,000 young men. Men whose lives were ended like candle flames in the wind. But it had all come to that night and that room in that house on a cobblestone street near the Sacré Coeur in Paris. Where, when, and how it had all begun belonged in other men’s histories. Its ending, however, was Joe’s.

  He felt balanced. He was wanted for killing people in America, on the Atlantic crossing, and in France, as well as for attacking the
sheriff in Greenwich and any number of other crimes both high and small. He felt set to face down a man who had sold out his country as well as the lives of thousands of his own comrades. He was outnumbered. If that were not enough, he had no home, no job, an enormous henchman ready to murder him in a shake. All-in-all, a shifting world in which he stood. Still, his pulse beat slow and steady. He stood resolved that his world had spiraled to that place and that moment in time, and in that place and time he was resolved to end the spiral.

  “It ends now,” he heard his voice echo within his mind. He stepped into the room. In a moment slowed to its increments, Joe saw Gadwa turn as though with an inchoate sense that the room’s dynamics had changed, saw the Turk begin his draw and Marie’s surprise, and he saw two other men standing in the far corner of the room. They backed through the door behind them, flipping off the electric ceiling light as they left and leaving the room lit only from the flames in the fireplace.

  Joe was surprised at how quickly Gadwa saw and reacted, raising the revolver he had taken from Joe on the train as Joe aimed the Webley. The Turk, however, was faster than either Gadwa or Joe and fired first, grazing Joe’s arm and knocking him off balance. A quick and short volley of rounds erupted between the triad of shooters. A crash of pottery glass and a single slow moan of pain followed.

  Joe fell behind a padded chair, the thickness of which offered no protection. His left arm ached from the bullet’s grazing, a burning pain as though stabbed by hot pokers. The bullet had opened a small trough on his arm, more bloody than harmful. He flexed to test his strength. It remained, more or less.

  From his place behind a single chair, Joe looked and saw Gadwa sitting in a crumpled heap on the floor, holding his arm. A vase lay in shards on the mantel and on the bricks in front of the burning fire. Water ran in corded streams inside the mortar amid the broken vase and the loose pipettes of flowers.

  Joe heard a shuffling from behind some chairs across from him followed by two undirected and errant shots, one of which splintered the wood on the wall behind him and the other sent the window into an eruption of glass. He fired four quick shots from the Webley toward the Turk, and retrieved his Smith & Wesson from where Gadwa had dropped it, moving to behind another insufficient chair for cover. The room danced only in the amber shadows of the fireplace. He hid in silence in the darkness of a corner away from the fire’s fingers of light.