Chant

by George C. Chesbro

  Alistair had never been told how John Sinclair and Vito Biaggi, a man sworn to uphold the law, had become friends He did know that the Italian magistrate had been involved for more than a year in an intense and thorough investigation which attempted to unmask the identities of certain Europeans he suspected of channeling funds through Italian banks to terrorist groups around the world. Alistair also knew that the information Biaggi had acted upon in launching his investigation had been provided by John Sinclair, who had unearthed it in the course of an unrelated operation. The document John Sinclair had found and given to Vito Biaggi had hinted at the existence of an international cabal of amoral, apolitical businessmen who, in an attempt to purchase a kind of “terrorist insurance,” provided a significant amount of funds to both left and right-wing terrorist groups, in exchange for assurances that, in the event of the overthrow of certain governments, the interests of the funders would not be harmed.

  Patiently but persistently, the Roman magistrate had taken the kernels of information that John Sinclair had provided and doggedly investigated, piecing together more bits of information and tracking down rumors Only three weeks before, Vito Biaggi had announced that he could prove the existence of a global conspiracy that had already cost the lives of hundreds of people; indictments were imminent, and Biaggi had warned that the names of some very prominent people in the European Common Market would eventually surface.

  Now, Alistair thought, Vito Biaggi was dead, at the hands of an expatriate street criminal; the Italian had been hunting monsters in the European forests, and he’d been killed by a maggot that had crawled out of the American criminal justice system, a man Alistair had once known.

  Alistair sat still for a long while, then finally broke the silence “Do you want me to make arrangements for you to attend Mr. Biaggi’s funeral, sir?”

  “I’m not going to the funeral,” Chant said softly as he looked up from the fire “You’ll extend my regrets to Bianca, and tell her that I’ll be in touch. I’m going to make some inquiries into Vito’s death, and I want to start before too much time passes.”

  “Sir, I know the man who shot Mr Biaggi.”

  The iron-colored eyes flicked in Alistair’s direction “Where do you know him from?”

  “His name was Tyrone Good, and we were in San Quentin together. He was a lifer, like me, and we must have been together fifteen, sixteen years.”

  “Were you friends?” Chant asked evenly.

  “Not likely. Good was a real pain in the ass; we just shared the same prison, and it’s pretty hard in prison for long-termers not to get to know each other. He must have been paroled six or seven months after I was, and he must have heard of the Fortune Society in New York City That’s where I saw him again, at one of their meetings. It was just a few months after that when you—” Alistair turned away and wiped at his eyes; it was impossible for the old man to speak of what John Sinclair had done for him without tears coming to his eyes.

  “Go on, Alistair,” Chant said softly.

  Alistair swallowed hard, found his voice “There really isn’t anything else After you wiped out the Salieri family and saved my granddaughter from them, you asked if I’d like to come and work for you. I never saw Tyrone Good again. That was better than two years ago.”

  “Was this Tyrone Good Mafia?”

  Alistair shook his head. “No way. I know what you’re thinking; that the people Mr. Biaggi wanted to nail might have hired a hitter to kill him. Tyrone Good wouldn’t have been the man, too stupid. You saw yourself: he got himself blown away.”

  “Indeed,” Chant said in a slightly distant tone. “It would take a monumentally stupid man—”

  “That was Tyrone.”

  “—to try and rob another man on the street in broad daylight, when the man was surrounded by three or four bodyguards.”

  Alistair nodded. “When I say Good was stupid, Mr. Sinclair, I mean like retarded. He also had a mean streak a mile wide, real psycho. After all the years I spent in San Quentin, I know something about Mafia types; some of them may be stupid, but they’re highly disciplined—and they’re not suicidal. I don’t think Good was working for anyone, Mr. Sinclair. He was crazy, and he just did a crazy thing.”

  Chant sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. “And what do you suppose this crazy man was doing in Rome?” he asked softly.

  Alistair thought about it, shook his head. “Good question, Mr. Sinclair. I don’t think Tyrone even knew there was such a place as Europe, and if he had there would have been no reason for him to go there. As a matter of fact, I can’t imagine where the hell he got the money; he was on welfare when I saw him in New York, and the only time I ever knew him to have more than five bucks in his pocket was when he and I both picked up a quick C-note by taking part in some weird college research project where they were studying ex-convicts” Alistair paused, again shook his head “How Good got to Rome is a puzzle, all right, but I still don’t see him being hired as a hitter by anyone who could afford better—and, from what I understand, the people Mr Biaggi was after can afford to hire the best Besides, Tyrone had his share of street smarts, he’d kill anyone for the fillings in their teeth—but not if there was a chance he’d be killed I still think he just wigged out.”

  “Alistair,” Chant asked slowly, “do you know, or have you ever heard of, a man by the name of Axle Trent?”

  “Nope, can’t say that I have Who’s Axle Trent?”

  “Another American ex-convict Seven months ago, in Geneva, Trent shot down a British diplomat who was a key figure in ongoing truce negotiations between two waning factions in the Sudan Like Good, Axle Trent took it into his head to try to mug his victim in broad daylight, on a busy street, the police considered Trent, like Good, a most unlikely assassin, and they wrote off the murder as a senseless act by a psychopath with a long record of violent behavior.”

  “Was this Trent killed by the police?”

  “He bashed out his own brains on the bars of his holding cell an hour after he was arrested. The police never found his passport, and nobody could explain what he was doing in Geneva. I remember the incident, because I happened to be in Geneva at the time; the killing was widely publicized.”

  “You think there could be a connection, sir?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Chant said slowly, and lapsed back into silence, staring intently into the fire.

  Alistair knew better than to interrupt him.

  Finally Chant looked up again “I’ll be flying to New York tonight,” he said “Can you call British Airways and arrange for tickets?”

  “I’ll do that, sir, and I’ll also call Mrs. Biaggi for you, as you asked.”

  Chant nodded “Express condolences for both of us, tell her I’m sorry I can’t be with her right now She’ll understand. Don’t mention anything about our conversation concerning Tyrone Good and Axle Trent.”

  “You’re going to New York to talk to Tony Black, aren’t you?”

  Again, Chant nodded “Yes, I am, Alistair,” he said “Thanks for all your help You did well noticing that news broadcast when you did. I trust you to do all that’s right in Italy.”

  “Thank you sir,” said the old man, quietly and with dignity.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His legs always hurt in cold, wet weather—the legacy of an old prison injury—and Tony Black paused at his desk to reach down and massage his thighs. After a minute or two the pain began to ease, and he went back to the pile of paperwork on his desk—applications for state and federal funding grants, correspondence with prisoners, requests for information and interviews, all the kinds of administrative details the ex-convict had learned to cope with since he had assumed the post of President of the Fortune Society almost a decade before.

  He had not heard the downstairs door open, nor footsteps on the wooden stairway leading up to his second-floor office. However, suddenly he felt a presence in the room with him. He looked up and was mildly startled to see a big man, with longish red hair and a thick, dro
opy mustache, leaning in the doorway, looking at him. The man wore a three-quarter-length gabardine topcoat against the December chill, and in his right hand he held a sturdy walnut cane. Black leaned back in his swivel chair, ran the fingers of his left hand through his thinning blond hair, pushed his thick bifocals up on the bridge of his nose, and stared back at the man. He knew no one with fiery red hair who walked with a cane, but there was something about the presence of this big man with the thick shoulders, slim waist, and powerful thighs that seemed familiar.

  “That you, Chant?”

  Chant smiled, put aside the cane, and walked across the office. “Hello, Tony. How are you?”

  Black rose, hurried around the desk, and embraced the man with whom he shared a friendship that had begun in the blood-soaked jungles of Vietnam. “Damn, Chant, it’s good to see you.”

  “And you, Tony, How are the legs?”

  “They hurt like hell in weather like this, but just the sight of you makes them feel better. It’s been a long time, my friend. Too long.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “You still have my bottle?”

  “Of course I still have your bottle. It’s been sitting there gathering dust since the last time you were in the city.”

  “It only improves with age.”

  Tony Black limped across the room, closed the office door, and pulled a shade down over the window. Then he went to a large filing cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a bottle of Scotch and one of fine, imported saki. He removed a tiny china cup from a plastic bag, filled it with saki. Holding the cup by its rim with his fingertips, he passed the flame of a cigarette lighter four times across its bottom before handing it to Chant, who accepted the cup with a slight bow from the waist. Black poured himself a small tumbler of Scotch, lifted his glass to Chant, sipped. Then he went back to his chair, leaned back, and studied his friend.

  John Sinclair had often remarked that ceremony could enhance the pleasure of many things, yet Black was still struck by many of the small things his friend did, such as the ritual he went through in consuming the tiny amount of saki in his cup. The ex-convict knew that Chant would take as much as fifteen minutes to drink the saki, and during this time he would not wish to speak. Sitting straight in his chair with both feet on the floor, Chant would take tiny sips of the rice wine as he stared straight ahead, his eyes slightly out of focus. The expression on his face would be distant, as though the smell and taste of the saki were evoking memories of … Tony Black did not know what.

  And then his own memories began to flow.

  Black recalled how he had met John Sinclair many years before, at a boot camp in Georgia, where they had become friends; yet now, when he thought about it, he was amazed at how little—virtually nothing—he knew of the other man’s life before it had intersected with his own Indeed, it had not even occurred to him until many years later—when there were no longer bullets flying through the air, and he had only the demons in his mind to contend with, and he had lots of time to reflect in his prison cell—that John Sinclair had never spoken of his background, where he had been or what he had done, before joining the Army at the age of twenty-three.

  Black had always assumed that Chant had been born and raised in the United States, now, as he watched the man go through his ritual of drinking saki, he questioned this assumption. Not that it made any difference. The mystery surrounding John Sinclair did not bother Black now any more than it had when they were together in Southeast Asia The only thing that had mattered there was whether or not a man could be trusted and could fight John Sinclair had always been trusted by everyone whose opinion was worth anything. And he was the best fighter—with any weapon, from antitank gun to his bare hands and feet—Black had ever seen, before or since. Upon entering the Army, John Sinclair had already been a consummate master of the martial arts, and no one, at least not to Tony Black’s knowledge, had ever learned how or where the twenty-three-year-old had acquired his skills.

  Memories of fighting … of awesome technique pitted against monstrous brutality; the epic duel between the young John Sinclair and the maniacal Tommy Wing, the man they called Hammerhead, a fight which had landed both men in an Army hospital for weeks. Black considered Tommy Wing, a man apparently impervious to pain, to be the most dangerous and terrifying man he had ever met—but he knew there were many who would think and say the same of the man sitting across from him, savoring a tiny cup of saki.

  Memories.

  They had trained together, fought together, been promoted together—at least for a time. Senior officers began to take notice of, and reward, John Sinclair’s fighting and leadership skills, and there were many who predicted a long and illustrious military career for the young man with the iron-colored eyes and hair, with his eventually becoming the youngest general in U S. Army history. They had even been recruited by the CIA at about the same time, and had become Company operatives in addition to their Army duties.

  Then their careers had gone in different directions. Chant had been assigned to the CIA’s secret war in Laos, his mission to equip, train, and fight with the Hmong villagers against the Pathet Lao. Almost two and a half years had gone by, and then the stones had begun trickling back of the fierce American who had become a legend to the Hmong, and was the Pathet Lao’s most feared enemy, a man upon whose head they had placed a great price.

  And then had come the devastating rumors of Chant’s desertion The rumors hinted of something terrible that had happened, a dark event that had involved Chant—but no more. Then even the rumors had stopped when a tight lid of secrecy had been clamped down and the men had been forbidden ever to speak of John Sinclair and the story that he had killed six American servicemen in the process of deserting.

  Memories and loss of them.

  Eventually, Black had forgotten John Sinclair. Black had survived combat in Vietnam, then returned to a society that suddenly seemed alien to him. Emotionally scarred like so many Vietnam veterans, he couldn’t seem to keep a job, couldn’t function with nightmare memories which even vast amounts of liquor didn’t wash away. Eventually he’d turned to crime. Caught and convicted of armed robbery, he had served eleven years in prison before gaming an early release on parole as a model prisoner.

  With the help of the Fortune Society, he had found a job and rebuilt his life. When he had been elected President, he had been told by his predecessor that a considerable part of the society’s operating budget came from an anonymous donor living somewhere in Europe.

  The donor had turned out to be John Sinclair, who had decided to make himself known to an astonished Tony Black. Their friendship had blossomed anew, and since then Black had learned that John Sinclair represented many things to many people: he was either an unspeakably brutal vigilante and terrorist, or a man of unmatched courage and kindness who carried on a global war for justice as a kind of one-man mercenary army. The most amusing—and, Black had often mused, possibly accurate—description of John Sinclair the ex-convict had ever heard had come from an FBI agent who’d called him a “badass Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor—after taking a big cut for himself.”

  For Tony Black, it was enough that John Sinclair was simply his friend.

  “Thank you,” Chant said, leaning forward and placing the empty china cup on Black’s desk. “I enjoyed that very much.”

  “Another one?”

  Chant shook his head. “One is enough.”

  “Are you here for the holidays?” Black asked carefully, not wishing to seem to pry.

  “Perhaps,” Chant replied. “Actually, I was in Florida recently for quite a while.”

  “Business?”

  “Paying a visit to some crooked nursing-home operators.”

  Tony Black smiled. “Sounds like small potatoes for the infamous international criminal and extortionist, John Sinclair.”

  “It wasn’t small potatoes for the old people who were trapped in the home.”
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  “I’m sorry, Chant,” Black said quietly. “I was trying to be funny, and I made a bad joke. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “I know that,” Chant said easily. “By the way, you’ll be interested to know that Alistair played a key role in putting those guys out of business.”

  “Alistair!” Black cried, grinning “How the hell is that feisty old bastard?”

  “Still feisty, for sure,” Chant replied with a wry smile “Alistair’s a good man, Tony.”

  “How much does he know by now about the man he’s working for?”

  Chant shrugged. “He knows enough to know not to talk about what he knows.”

  Black splashed some more Scotch into his tumbler, but did not drink. “Speaking of criminals,” he said in a soft, serious tone as he stared down into the amber-colored liquid, “I heard a rumor a couple of months ago that the state had let Hammerhead out of whatever hospital for the criminally insane they’d been keeping him in.” Black paused, looked up at Chant, and shook his head in disgust “Can you imagine letting that fucking cannibal loose on the streets? I mean, there were a lot of ‘fragging’ incidents in that war, potheads throwing a fragmentation grenade into the tent of a CO he didn’t like; but that fucking Tommy Wing literally chewed his CO to death.”

  Chant felt the puckered scars on his belly, thighs, and arms slowly begin to throb, burning with a kind of cold fire “Tommy Wing is here in New York?”

  Black lifted the tumbler and drained it off, set it back down on the desk. “I don’t know if he’s here now—in fact, I don’t know for sure that he was ever here. One of the guys who was with us in ’Nam said he saw him coming out of Bloomingdale’s, of all places. That was some time ago, maybe a year or more. The guy could have been mistaken.”