by Inconnu(e)
“Now, we shall see what we shall see,” said Cassidy. He pulled out the music box Hugo had given him and pushed the button. It emitted three clear notes. He tried it with Hugo’s box. It emitted three quite different notes.
“Aah,” said Cassidy. “He vindicated my total lack of trust. Betrayal to the bloody end, Gypper. Hugo had an unbroken record of duplicity.”
Very careless of them to leave the music box on Hugo. Clearly they’d frisked him because the body contained nothing else—no wallet or keys. They just hadn’t quite finished the job.
Their first mistake. Perhaps their only one.
The lights went out.
All the light—the light in the little library, the corridor, the whole apartment—was extinguished at once, as if someone had thrown the switch.
In the blackness, Cassidy thought, with paralyzing certainty, they’ve switched off the whole building. There was only one place they could do that—the control room Hugo Dorn had shown him.
“The one thing I didn’t think of, Gypper, was a flashlight,” said Cassidy apologetically in the darkness.
The Gypper’s torch cut through the blackness at that moment, cheerful as a ray of sunshine, playing on the dead man’s black eyes. “Never travel without one, Boss. Not since Korea. Bloody dark in Korea!”
Gypper’s last words.
Or almost. That last word of all was a half screech . . . “Cass . . .” He never quite finished that word, Cassidy. It ended in an exclamation point of silence but that half screech sent Cassidy to the floor, rolling to get away from the spot he’d been in. In the nick of time.
In the light of Gypper’s torch, now doing a parabola which ended on the floor where it went out abruptly, Cassidy caught a surreal impression in black and white, like one of those old German silent films, of an icepick clutched in a female hand. Even at the speed the icepick was traveling through the air, and it was going very fast indeed, Cassidy clearly distinguished the hand that clutched it as a female hand. By the width of a straw, the icepick missed Cassidy’s skull, his rolling shoulder, his revolving body; it went into the wooden floor with such force that the hand could not pull it loose.
The Gypper’s torch had gone out at that instant but Cassidy still rolling—a roll which ended painfully with a crash into the wall of the library—heard a hiss of rage at the impervious icepick, a hiss that sound like “Gltl.”
Cassidy put his head down and threw a body block where the arm was last seen, but she was darting quick. His legs cutting through the air struck her legbone, but not nearly hard enough. In the pitch blackness, he heard rather than felt her go on hands and knees, then her fingers whistled past his ear. Even in total darkness, he knew a dike shot, and he riposted with a short openhand chop at where he thought the head should be. He caught only the shoulder bone—but hard—and heard an exclamation of pain.
She must be on hands and knees now, couldn’t be anywhere else considering where his chop had hit, and Cassidy did a bull rush, arms outstretched. Again she was fast, and he crashed against bookshelves. He heard a quick scuttling sound and knew she’d got out of the library. She was scuttling down the corridor on all fours from the sound of it. It was the first chance Cassidy had to pull his gun.
The shot from the .38 lit up the blackness of the corridor for an instant like a lightning flash and in that flash Cassidy caught a glimpse of his antagonist.
Two bits of information registered—one after another:
1. It was Titi.
2. She had a gun and it was pointed at him.
The last bit of information was easily the most urgent. Cassidy rolled to his left, and her shot missed him by a considerable margin. Her second shot was closer, and this time Cassidy bounded right through the bedroom door to get out of range.
In the blackness, he heard her taking to her heels down the corridor, running through the blackness as surefootedly as a cat. He would have taken after her, but his Radox came alive at that moment, uttering its high shrill command.
Cassidy pulled it out of his breast pocket and pushed the INCOM button.
“May Day,” screeched Fingertips in tones that sounded both anguished and hopeless. “May Day! May Day!”
Behind it Cassidy heard the crackle of automatic fire—a lot of fire from more than one gun.
“May Day! May Day!” The voice was weakening. Clearly some of that fire had got to Fingertips. Presently the voice stopped and there was only the sound of the guns on a crowded dance floor where 225 people were screaming. The screams of the super-rich and super-sophisticated, Cassidy noted at the time, were no more well-bred than anyone else’s screams. If anything, a little louder, because the rich were better fed and had better lungs.
Cassidy crawled through the blackness, feeling his way into the little library, his fingertips groping for Gypper’s flashlight. A door slammed at the kitchen end of the apartment. Titi had left the apartment.
His fingers closed on the flashlight. Cassidy jiggled it and it came on, the ribbon of white light cutting across Gypper’s dead and open eyes. With the tip of his index finger Cassidy closed the two eyes, then permitted himself a single caress of the tough cheek. “Not with icepicks. I’m pretty good with icepicks,” Gypper had said. But it was with an icepick, and that was just that, after twenty years—Korea, Bulgaria, and a lot of other places.
Cassidy permitted himself the luxury of a moment’s grief—and, in retrospect, he thought this may have saved his life because it slowed him down, it gave him a moment’s reflection, and he needed that very badly. If Gypper had been alive, the pair of them would have hurtled after Titi, up the stairs, into the maelstrom at the rooftop restaurant. And probably been killed.
Lying on the floor in the blackness next to his dead comrade, the Radox spitting out screams and rifle fire, Cassidy thought things over.
If you were assaulting a fortification—and what was the Windletop but a fortification—take command first of the cellar where the underpinnings of the castle are. Then command the stairwells. Who said that? I said that, said Cassidy, to Lucia—Titi listening in, crouching in her corner like an animal. They’re in control of the controls. No elevators so the cops can’t get up, and they got the stairwells. I taught her all that.
So what do I do now . . .
• 30 •
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
Of all the great massacres of the twentieth century, that of the Windletop is believed to be the only one by candlelight. (1) Candlelight was, in fact, a very great strategic problem to the planners of this massacre. Their original plan had been to douse the lights before the shooting began and control of the light switch was always essential to the plan. Only the combat team was to have had flashlights. However, this twentieth century tactic ran headlong into the eighteenth-century esthetics of the Principessa who personally determined the disposition of all the 7,265 candles which lit the party.
There is no known way of shooting out 7,265 candles or putting them out in a hurry, (2) and therefore the plan had to be changed slightly which meant we are aware of details of the raid that would not have been known if the restaurant had been plunged, as originally planned, into total darkness. The combat team—all of it—came up the stairs eschewing the elevator for reasons, we presume, of surprise. In superb condition after intensive mountain training in Iraq, the twenty-two man combat team ran up the thirteen flights of stairs in roughly seven and a half minutes. (3)
The team poured first into the kitchen, where two men held the kitchen crew at gunpoint (4) while their teammates poured out the door next to the strategic table where sat the Times society reporter Jane Atchison and Fingertips. The gunmen fanned out along the upper rim of the restaurant, holding their fire for twenty-six seconds. This gave them time to go clear to the end of the restaurant before firing or even attracting very much attention, carrying their automatic weapons inconspicuously straight down parallel with the seams of their trousers.
One of the
few to notice was Fingertips, who dove under the table seconds after he saw the gunmen. Apparently Jane Atchison stayed in her chair, notebook poised in her lap like a good reporter, trying to understand what was happening, when she was cut down by one of the first bursts of fire, still in her chair. (5)
Fire was not altogether at random. Of my four men, all armed, three, Fingertips, Freddie, and Jacoby, were all killed early on, apparently by design. Of the CIA’s known four men, two were cut down, and it is thought another waiter was killed because he was thought to be CIA. Alison escaped by diving under a table so thickly surrounded by dancers that the bullets aimed at him found instead the merrymakers on the dance floor. Summing up, this meant that of the nine men, myself and Alison included, at the party for security reasons, the Red Wind combat team cut down five and missed four; which is a fairly normal rate of success for an operation this size. For reasons they could not have foreseen, Gypper and I were not on the floor, Alison was preserved by accident, one waiter was shot by mistaken identity. From all this we deduce that it had been planned to eliminate all of us. This shows not only the thoroughness of their preparation but the brilliance of their intelligence, which penetrated the CIA.
Even after the fire became general, the gunmen firing into the mass of dancers and diners, it was fairly selective. Analysis of the dead and wounded clearly shows that the prime targets were the most dissolute, featherbrained, and useless of the very rich—Gogo Canossa, the Duchess de Angelis, the Princesse de Bruxelles, and others whose names were bywords in the gossip columns for insensate triviality—whose slaughter would excite headlines without censure (and perhaps even with approval) from the masses and derision from the intellectuals.
As a public relations coup this careful selection of victims was superbly planned but not always that well executed. Robert, the headwaiter, was gunned down, possibly because he got in the way, or perhaps because of some ideological confusion as to which category—bourgeois or proletarian—one properly puts a headwaiter in. Or maybe some gunman didn’t like the scornful smile, which was found fixed on Robert’s face even in death.
We come now to the Principals in the case—Lucia and the Principessa. The Principessa was continuing her round of the tables, greeting her guests, and there are four different sworn statements in the FBI files, claiming that at the moment the storm of bullets started, she was at this particular table, all of them different ones.
A waiter swore to the FBI that the Principessa remained standing throughout the entire massacre while everyone else threw themselves to the floor. According to three other witnesses, she was almost the most conspicuous person in the entire room for one reason or another. (1) The fact that she didn’t get killed or wounded in spite of this is significant, of course. There was intense speculation as to what she was doing during the sixty-seven seconds (2) of the massacre, some saying she just stood there, others that she continued to dance as a gesture of defiance, one that she was weeping, another that she was laughing. Actually, she told me afterward, she was searching the dance floor for her daughter.
Fortunately, Lucia was dancing with the most combat-wise man in the whole room, Alvin Feinberg, a veteran of eleven wars, and within an instant of the first shot, Feinberg pulled Lucia to the floor and sprawled on top of her to protect her. There was, however, tremendous competition for floor space from the other dancers who pushed and shoved in an effort to get as flat as possible. Somewhere in this maelstrom, Lucia slipped out from under the protecting body of Alvin Feinberg and disappeared. Feinberg himself thinks she wriggled away, and he’s not at all sure she wasn’t helped by someone whom he couldn’t identify because of the crush of bodies on him at the time.
There were enormous discrepancies in the accounts of how long the operation took, ranging from half an hour to two minutes. From all accounts, added up and known times of blackout, it appears the elapsed time from the moment when the gunmen first entered from the kitchen to the moment when they left the same way they came, was about five and a half minutes.
During all that time, both elevators were shut off from the main control room in the sub-subbasement which meant police were cut off from the rooftop by fifty-three flights of stairs.
• 31 •
In his stocking feet Cassidy descended the pitch dark stairwell by memory, the flashlight in his left hand, the .38 in his right. (And the Gypper’s .44 in his waistband.) The flashlight would have made things easier but Cassidy now was consumed by caution. Bravado was for other times, other people. He’d lost the Gypper and Fingertips. He didn’t yet know he’d also lost Jacoby and Freddie, but he suspected it, and anyway they were nowhere near.
There was just himself. He had to be careful, and being careful meant he was slow. The blackness did things to his wits—sharpened them. Or over-sharpened them until he saw Titi in that brief terrible instant way out of scale, big as the Minotaur and as menacing.
Meanwhile, counting each landing.
Thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five . . .
He stopped and listened hard for sounds of pursuit, sounds of anything . . . Nothing.
Thirty-four, thirty-three . . .
Had they left a guard on the stairwell? They had to get out of the building and it would tell a lot about their plans if they had left a guard. If they had. Would he be disciplined enough to remain in total darkness, silent and still. Or she? (Terror was completely bisexual, conceivably the first occupation to have equal pay, equal rights, equal opportunity for both sexes.)
Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen . . . Then came the noise which, in the terrible silence of the stairwell, sounded like the crack of doom. A tremendous clang and then a shhhhrrrrrr sound, sustained and approaching.
They’d put the elevator back in commission, but not the lights. Very clever.
The elevator passed Cassidy as he was between sixteen and fifteen. He could hear it descend and stop far below him. How far below? He didn’t know.
After a ten-second interval, during which he could hear them decanting from the elevator (but on which landing? Rooftop’s?) the elevator door clanged shut again with its ear-splitting bang and started up again.
Bringing them down in relays?
Cassidy picked up the pace. He had a long way to go in the pitch blackness. He abandoned caution. Or perhaps “abandon” is too sweeping a word. No one past fifty, thought Cassidy, feeling his way down the blackness, abandons caution. Past a certain age a man plays a little fast and loose with it. That’s the best he can do.
Still on stockinged tiptoe, keeping very quiet, just picking up the pace a little, Cassidy rounded down twelve, eleven, ten . . .
The shot came as he rounded the midpoint between the landings on nine and eight and came from the eighth landing. The noise on the enclosed stairwell was headsplitting. The shot missed, largely (he decided much later) because he was crouched sideways to make the turn.
The muzzle flash lit up the shooter perfectly and Cassidy shot him in the heart from a crouch, with a noise like a thousand thunderclaps.
Cassidy changed position, fast, scooting to the landing and crouching to reduce his targetability, in case there were two of them. Even if there weren’t, he was thinking, the terrible noise would bring a platoon of Red Wind.
Or perhaps not.
The Red Wind was notorious for leaving their fallen where they lay and proceeding according to the blueprints.
The elevator was coming down from the rooftop restaurant. It passed in darkness and silence and proceeded down. Far down. Cassidy listened to the stop—as if life depended on it. Lower than street level. Much lower.
He used his flash for the first time, confident there was no one else on that stairwell within shooting distance.
A very ordinary man, almost a boy, wearing almost too ordinary street clothes. Collar and tie, even. What a way to come a-murdering. All dressed up for church. But that was the fashion in terror. Merge with the crowd (like a fish in the sea, according to Mao) and if you were urb
an, you must look like what you most despised—bourgeois—because that’s what the masses looked like these days. The most romantic new occupation, that of terrorist, dressed like a file clerk.
Cassidy snapped off the flash and started down again in his stockinged feet, this time really tearing along. He doubted there’d be another one.
The blackness conjuring up little pictures in his brain. Out of the past! His one and only wife accusing him with her level stare of loving another. But you’re dead, cried Cassidy in the noiselessness of his mind. It’s not adultery, it’s . . . anyway, I was raped. Imagine you caring, after fourteen years dead. I thought there was a statute of limitations. Jupiter, what am I doing maundering around in the past when I am mired so viciously and dangerously in the right now of it . . .
They say that in the darkness you lose all sense of time. Maybe it’s three days later. Certainly my spatial is out of whack. I’ve been on these stairs for forty miles at least.
Five, four . . .
The obstruction was on the third floor landing—a triple-plated steel door that had no ordinary look. Cassidy felt his way down in the blackness, step by step, encountering nothing. The triple-plated steel door was open. Why? Had they expected him? More probably it was left that way as the escape hatch for that terrorist dressed like a file clerk.
The elevator had not gone back up again.
That meant . . . what? They were all down there. How many? Must be at least twenty. Otherwise, they’d all have gone in one load. Me, against twenty. Who said a man does not abandon caution after age fifty? I said it. I’m now about to make a liar of me.
He counted the flights, one, two, three. Stiflingly hot, which meant that he was in the basement with its array of steam pipes and those ancient red pumps. Twice he risked a momentary beam from the flashlight in order to pick his way through the antique machinery.
