Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  “Cabrion?” he heard Gadwa call to the Turk.

  Joe waited for the response, but the Turk was too smart to acknowledge.

  He waited some more. The sight of Marie’s eyes entered his mind, her eyes as he had stepped into the room, eyes surfeit with terror and confusion. He held the impulse to call to her as he held the impulse to shoot. In the dancing darkness of the room, he felt the familiar architecture of his past, one of fear and violence. Except, in that room’s battle he knew who he wanted to kill and why he wanted to kill that man. The knowledge neither comforted him nor troubled him. His hand did not shake, nor did his desire to kill slacken.

  He checked the Webley and found it empty. He checked his Smith & Wesson, a single chamber hollow, and others filled with 325-grain roundtip bullets. He heard the whispered French of another man as that man stepped into the doorway from which he had entered. The man was small. His eyes, lit in the fire’s glow were like a weasel’s. He wore a coat and hat too large for him and would have looked comical in his desire to be a big man if not for the large pistol he held.

  Joe registered the information in a blink. Without consideration, he flipped the cylinder shut and swung the revolver in a slow curve, light running along its barrel. The little man saw the reflection and began his own reaction. Completing his arc of action, however, Joe fired once into the middle of the little man’s body. The little man fell backward into a pile with his over-large clothes and did not move beyond a final convulsion followed by a high, liquid gurgle.

  After another series of shots that sailed above Joe’s head, the room fell back into a silence in which Joe felt himself trapped. He was backed into a corner with a thin chair for cover. Gadwa hid behind a sofa. The Turk lay behind some overturned chairs. Quire was nowhere, as was Ballard, who was probably unlucky enough to have been ambushed around back of the house.

  Marie was lost inside the room’s field of fire.

  “You are trapped, Monsieur Henry,” called Gadwa. “Mademoiselle Dillard is here. . . with me. You do not wish to injure her. Give up your weapon and possibly we can come to some sort of accommodation.”

  Joe looked from behind his chair. In the dark room, he could not find Marie. He hoped that Gadwa was lying, but even if he were, Joe knew that Marie was caught somewhere within the lines of fire.

  “Damn,” Joe whispered.

  “Quoi?” Gadwa asked.

  “No damn way.” A silence followed.

  That short silence was broken by the Turk, who fired again at Joe. A bullet passed over Joe’s head, its wind and whistle close enough to cast shadows.

  “Shit,” Joe screamed and let loose, firing quickly and tightly toward where he had seen the muzzle flashes. The revolver bucked like it wanted to jump from his hand and make its own separate peace. He heard a grunt like an animal. He kept firing until he heard the hollow click of an empty chamber.

  Tired from the pain and the loss of blood from his wound, he stood and listened and watched for the Turk or Marie or Gadwa. Although his wound was not deep, it bled readily. His mouth was dry. The breath he drew in had the texture of red sand and lodged in his throat dry and barren.

  “Cabrion?” Gadwa called again, and again there was no answer. Joe felt certain that the reason had changed, that the Turk could not answer now because he was dead.

  Joe’s concern then was with Dapper and the other man who had left the room when he had first entered. He hoped that the little man in the large coat was one of those original two, but that still left Dapper unaccounted for. Then that last soldier became accounted for as Joe heard the sound of a car coming to life and then the opening of large carriage doors and then the surety of shots fired and the automobile left to run in the absence of its driver.

  “Décès,” Joe said to no answer. “It looks like it’s just you and me, Gadwa.”

  “We can make a deal, Mr. Henry. You, yourself, commented on my wealth.”

  “No deal, Mr. Gadwa.”

  He decided to chance that Frederick Gadwa was the coward he had proven himself to be, that the man who had taken Rene Marcel’s name and surrounded himself with henchmen could only kill through others. He stood and crossed the room to turn on the electric ceiling light.

  Near him lay the Turk. In front of the fireplace stood Gadwa, blood showing through the sleeve covering his left arm which wrapped around Marie. In Gadwa’s right hand was another small Webley pistol.

  “Dammit,” Joe said, shaking his head. “Webleys grow on trees around here?”

  He looked down at the Turk, who lay motionless on his side, one arm bent under his head as though he were cradling himself to sleep and the other reaching impossibly for the pistol that lay several inches from his curled fingers. He lay on his side with his neck twisted so that he looked with dead eyes at the ceiling. Blood percolated from a hole in his chest, and another hole opened most of his cheek and exposed the dark and bloodied cavern of his mouth.

  Looking down on the Turk, Joe recalled something his major had said one frosted morning in the Argonne, that more death does not mean anything other than just more death.

  As dark stains formed in the lines of the dead man’s neck, Joe bent and touched the pistol, its barrel still warm and placed his emptied revolver on the floor next to it. His entire body ached and he was beyond tired, a weariness deep within his bones and a weariness that had been building within him for years.

  “It seems that once again I hold the trump card,” Gadwa said and smiled.

  Joe looked at Marie, tears in her brown eyes and lines of tears down the sides of her nose. Her eyes wide, dark, and undone against the pale of her skin. She stood in that hushed moment of uncertainty.

  “I wouldn’t be so certain,” said Quire from the entryway, holding the small brown valise in one hand and a pistol in the other. Beads of sweat had formed on his brow, and blood had dried from a cut on his cheek. Blood also stained the fronts of his shirt and coat as he entered the room like a combatant stepping from the tableau of a bloodied field. While his breathing was unsteady and emphysemic, the aim of his revolver was as steady as his stare.

  They formed a triangle with each watching the movements of the others. Gadwa held the barrel of his pistol against the side of Marie’s head, Quire had his revolver aimed toward Gadwa’s good shoulder, and Joe stood without a gun in his hand. Gadwa’s wounded arm wrapped around Marie’s shoulder, holding tight to her upper body. The blood in the wound to his shoulder remained red and sharp and glistening in the room’s light and dripped onto her side. Blood also ran from his nose, staining Marie’s shoulder and dripping to the wood floor.

  Gadwa said, “Since I have Miss Dillard as a shield, I believe that I remain in control. Drop your weapon.”

  “Think again. You won’t shoot her because then I’d kill you deader than shit, and if you use her as that shield, she’ll die and then so will you. And the longer we stand here talking, the better chance of the police arriving for you. Not something you want, I’m sure,” said Quire. “So think about this. A trade. The girl for this suitcase. That’s what you wanted.”

  “The manuscript?”

  “The manuscript,” Joe said. “We came here to make the trade, just like you planned. Your men were too fast on the draw, so we didn’t have time to talk. Now we do. I give you the manuscript, you give me Marie.”

  “Open it,” Gadwa spat.

  Quire coughed a single laugh and handed the brown valise to Joe. “Open it, Joe,” he said. “I don’t especially want to drop my pistol.” He did not look at Joe nor did he wipe away a runnel of blood that had started down his cheek from the cut there. Joe cradled the valise in his good arm and opened it. He picked up a sheaf of pages wrapped in string and held it up for Gadwa to see, then returned the pages to the valise.

  “So?” Joe asked as he closed the valise.

  “Well, shit,” said Ballard as he entered the room from the door behind Joe. “There’s been a lot of killing here tonight. Two in here and the two we shot de
ad out back by the automobile. Just one more killing,” he said as he raised his pistol to aim straight at Gadwa. “One more killing and this thing’s done.”

  Quire smiled and said, “What we have here is a Mexican stand-off inside a French house between expatriate Americans and a false Brit. There’s got to be something like irony in there, don’t you think, Mr. Gadwa?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re saying,” Gadwa said. His voice cracked from frustration at trying to decipher Quire’s words and maybe even at the growing realization that his night had turned over on him.

  “What he’s saying,” offered Joe, “is that we each have something the other wants, and we have more guns. You can’t have this manuscript until you let her go, and you won’t let her go until you have the manuscript.”

  “How long does this last?” Marie asked. Her voice did not crack although Joe heard something like her own frustration. He looked at Quire, who smiled but did not avert his eyes or his aim from Gadwa.

  “Up to him, sweetheart,” Quire said.

  Joe saw concern in Gadwa’s eyes. The longer the game played out, the worse for Gadwa. That, Joe knew. He could see from the sweat on Gadwa’s forehead that Gadwa had also come to realize it. This would not end well for the traitor.

  “Oh, mon dieux,” Marie said. She grabbed Gadwa’s gun hand with her right hand and she pushed the thumb of her left hand into Gadwa’s shoulder wound.

  Gadwa screamed and shot, but Marie had pulled the pistoled hand from her direction. The bullet struck Quire in the chest. He bounced back on drunken legs and went down with a groan.

  Marie fell to the floor. Joe ran to her. Gadwa aimed again at Joe. Joe looked up into the barrel hole at the end of the Webley, at how damn large that cavern was from which a heavy-grain bullet would exit.

  A single shot exploded and Gadwa fell backward, both arms now useless and bloodied from gunshot wounds. He stood, eyes wide like a frightened and cornered animal, but Ballard shot again, taking out one of Gadwa’s legs. The traitor went down and could not stand again. He sat ruined on the floor like an old marionette, his feet splayed in front of him and blood running from wounds to three places on his body.

  Ballard stepped closer to stand over Gadwa, who lay on the floor trying to stop the bleeding and the pain in his arms and leg. Sweat ran down the side of Ballard’s face. His eyes had lost meaning, black coals deep and burning and seeing the deaths of his friends so many bloodred mornings earlier on that terrible and misted field of great death.

  He leveled his pistol against Gadwa’s temple. He said as his finger tensed on the trigger, “You’re lucky my friend needs you, else you’d be dead right now.”

  He dropped the aim of his pistol, then said, “Oh, what the hell.” He casually placed the pistol back against Gadwa’s temple and pulled the trigger. The firing pin hit on an empty chamber. He laughed a full and deep laugh.

  Gadwa wet himself, a pool of liquid expanding around his body to join with the blood spilling from his wounds.

  “Piss-ant,” said Quire, sitting and rubbing his chest. “Don’t let the ball play you, son, you play the ball.”

  “Hell’s that mean?” Joe asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Quire. “But my sergeant used to say it every morning before we went over the top, just before he put his Bible in his chest pocket.” Quire held the small Bible up for Joe to see. A bullet had bored into the leather cover and lodged inside its preachments. “Somewhere around Revelations, I’d say.”

  “It is over now?” Marie asked, her eyes soft, and Joe recognized what had first drawn him to her. He nodded, and she said, “Oui,” with a softness, and Joe knew that maybe, after all, the right person and the right time had met.

  Marie pulled the valise to her. “It was all over this,” she said. “A book.”

  “No,” said Joe. “It was all over a lie.”

  “Lies and money,” Marie said.

  “You don’t know the half,” said Ballard. “In that auto he was planning on driving away in, I found two suitcases filled with Swiss francs.” He whistled. “Legal tender for all debts public and private.”

  “And there’s our payment for a job well done,” Quire said.

  “Batard,” Marie spat. A tear rolled from her eye and she repeated in English, “Bastard. And for this?” She held a sheaf of papers from the valise. “All for this?”

  “No, not for that,” Joe said. “That manuscript exists, and I’ll see it published, but that’s not it.”

  “What’s this then?”

  “Look.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Gadwa.

  “Insult to injury,” said Quire.

  Marie slid the valise to Gadwa, who opened it and read the name on the pages of papers. His bloody hands shook, from pain or rage. “Who is this Hemingway? This is not it.”

  Quire laughed.

  Gadwa threw the papers into the fire, pulled another handful from the valise, inspected them and tossed them into the flames as well. His hands had been dyed red from his wounds and the blood stained the pages as he grasped them and the valise where he touched it.

  Gadwa then smiled. “Without the manuscript, how will you prove anything that you are saying?” He looked at Joe with a slick smile.

  Quire shrugged. “We’ll think of something.”

  Marie said, “My brother is still alive. When I visited him this afternoon, he talked. The doctors told me that they are optimistic.” She looked at Gadwa, “Paul will be able to explain.”

  Gadwa snorted. “I sent one of my men to his room tonight to kill him. So you see, it is your word against mine. The police will accept mine long enough for me to leave the country.”

  Quire said, “If that fellow you sent is that short, little, dapper dressing fellow, he’s got a third eye in his forehead. He’ll be making his bed with a shovel tonight.”

  Gadwa sat back against a leg of the sofa, his body hunched even further into itself.

  “And,” said Joe. “I sat across from Gresham long enough to see his routine when he wrote—everything in triplicate. One copy of the manuscript ended up in the mud in Greenwich when your men ran off the road. The other copy I placed in a small case on the train. If the owners don’t take it to the police, I can trace them through an American Express office.”

  “But you don’t. . . .” Gadwa said with a hint of confidence.

  “No. I don’t, but I have a good idea where they are. I know them from the ship, but even if they tossed out the copy I placed in their baggage, I know where the final copy is. In a safe deposit box in Greenwich. He had one copy to take with him to France—the copy your men stole from the house after shooting him. He sent one to Paul. The other copy would have been stored for his safe return. It’s there and waiting to be read by the right set of eyes.”

  Ballard added, “It appears to me, you traitorous son of a bitch, that your pancake butt has been handed to you.”

  The distanced sounds of sirens came closer, and Ballard said, “I’ll be driving that car away now. Stop by my apartment in a couple of days, and we’ll have a money dividing party.”

  “Will do, brother,” said Quire. “And you two might as well leave. I’ll clean up here. One thing, though, get me a lawyer because I can foresee this mess getting deep. Get one for yourself before you come in.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Go,” Quire said. “Don’t worry about this old bastard. Remember, I have luck with trouble.”

  “I thought you had luck for trouble.”

  “Luck for, luck with. Same thing. Now go.” He smiled, then added with a wave of his hand, “Both of you need something the night don’t hold.”

  “Yes,” Marie said. “We could use some rest.”

  “What’s the night have to do with rest?” Quire laughed. “Now go.”

  The city’s fog had not lifted although it had lessened. The rain had eased and then ceased as they walked away from the house and had left dark liquid pools shimmering in the rain darkened
street. A few morning stars shown through the clouds, distant as diamonds. In his youth, Joe had imagined a world rich in possibilities. He could almost imagine that again as he walked down the street next to the woman he wanted very much to be in love with.

  They passed the pantheonic structure of the white-stoned Sacré Coeur, and Marie said, “How beautiful it is in the night.” Her voice cracked as brittle as her tears.

  She reached her hand for his. He took hers in his. Joe rolled his fingers around her hand, cool and fragile and strong at once.

  “Come,” she repeated. “Walk with me.”

  Joe stepped close to her. They walked together, their arms touching electric in the dark night. He took his hand from hers and put his arm around her and she moved into the circle of his arm. The lights of the Sacré Coeur cast a warm yellow glow around them, and they walked a long time without speaking.