Turn Loose the Dragons

by George C. Chesbro

  Alexandra nodded thoughtfully. She stared at the floor for a few seconds, then abruptly looked up at her husband. Long moments passed, and suddenly she frowned and blinked rapidly. “John, what were you doing here?”

  Peters waited, keeping his own face impassive as he watched the other man’s features reflect a series of emotions: shame, wounded pride, and embarrassment vied for supremacy in John Finway’s gray eyes. Finway stiffened, bowed his head and thrust his hands into his pockets.

  “John?”

  Finway’s head slowly came up. Now agony was clearly reflected in his features. His mouth was a thin, tense line. However, he managed to meet his wife’s gaze, and his voice was steady when he spoke. “I came here to see if you and Rick were sleeping together.”

  “Oh,” Alexandra said in a small voice suddenly deflated of its resonant madness. She flushed, then quickly turned her head away.

  “Swarzwalder was here when I came in,” the lawyer continued in the same flat tone. “I caught him going through Rick’s luggage. He came after me, and that’s when Rick came in.” He paused, directed his steady, tortured gaze at Peters, and drew himself up even straighter. “You saved my life. I thank you, and I want you to know that I’m very much ashamed of the way I behaved.”

  “Hey, forget it,” Peters said, smiling broadly. “I’ll know who to call if I ever need a lawyer. Right now we’ve got something else to worry about; we’ve got a body to get rid of.”

  Peters narrowed his eyes when he saw Alexandra turn her back on her husband. He was certain the gesture was symbolic as well as physical, a rejection, and the warmth in her eyes when she looked at him seemed to confirm it.

  Alexandra turned the radio back on and adjusted it to a low volume. “What about the lake?” she asked softly, walking back to the center of the room. “We can weight the body.”

  Peters thought about it, shook his head. “That’s the first place they’re going to look when this guy turns up missing. We can’t afford an autopsy. If they drag the lake and bring up a weighted body with marks on the throat and a little hole in the back, we’re all going to be held up here some time. There’d be a background check, and we especially can’t afford that. Besides, the desk clerk would be sure to remember the noise up here. We’d be in trouble.”

  “What then, Rick?”

  “He needs a steep fall, something that will bust him up. He could have gone hiking.”

  “Well, we’ve got mountains.”

  Again, Peters shook his head. “The mountains are too far away, and we don’t know the roads around here. We have to steal a car or a truck somewhere, and we could be gone too long; the party’s over if we get caught out there. If there is a backup man, he’ll have a clear shot at Salva on Friday night.”

  John Finway cleared his throat. Peters glanced at the man, but Alexandra did not turn.

  “I went for a walk around the lake earlier,” the lawyer said in a strained voice. “There’s a steep cliff at the opposite end of the lake that you can’t see from the hotel. There’s a path leading up to the top. I suppose a man could fall off there and kill himself.”

  Peters nodded. “The lake’s close enough, but we can’t carry him down there. Too much open ground. Is there any kind of a road back there?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for a road.”

  Peters walked to the body, pushed it over with his foot in order to examine the puncture wound in the back. There was virtually no bleeding. “All right,” he said, “let’s assume there is one. If not, we’ll find someplace else to dump him. It’s a rugged countryside.”

  “Where are our three watchdogs?” Alexandra asked.

  “They’re on their way to Peleoro,” Peters replied. “Every one of the Germans is gone, so we only have the hotel staff and a few of our own people to worry about. With the exception of the desk clerk, I’ll bet most of the staff is sacked out by now.”

  “Let’s get it over with, Rick,” Alexandra said tightly.

  “Okay. You go downstairs and check out the situation. The workers must have their cars parked somewhere in the back. See if you can get to one. We can take the body down the stairway in the back and out through the delivery entrance. I’ll take care of the dumping; you stay here to run interference if anything happens.”

  Alexandra nodded curtly. “I can always stage one of my sexy drunk acts.”

  “We’ll eyeball this guy’s room when I get back.”

  “I’d like to help,” John Finway blurted out.

  Alexandra still would not look at her husband. Peters shrugged casually, said, “Sure. You can help me get rid of the body.”

  John

  He felt blurred—a spectral, peripheral presence in someone else’s dream.

  A confident, glittery-eyed Alexandra returned to the room twenty minutes later to report that she had found the employees’ parking lot in the back. She had crossed the wires in one of the cars and it was waiting for them, running, near the delivery entrance at the rear of the hotel.

  They rolled the stiffening corpse up into a blanket. John lifted the shoulders and Peters the feet. With Alexandra going ahead of them to make sure the way was clear, the men carried the body down a narrow service stairway at the rear of the hotel and out through the delivery entrance. Alexandra opened the back door of an ancient 1956 Chevrolet and the men slid the body across the rear seat. Alexandra retrieved the blanket, checked to make certain there were no bloodstains on it, then headed back into the hotel. Peters got into the car behind the wheel and John slid into the seat on the passenger’s side. Peters eased the clutch out and steered the car down a narrow, dirt auxiliary drive used by delivery trucks and hotel employees.

  Why, there was nothing at all to this spy business, John thought; hell, all you did after stabbing and strangling a man to death was to dump him in a stolen car, drop him off a cliff, and then go back and act as if nothing had happened. All in a day’s work for a dragon. Don’t worry about being caught; don’t worry about a worker coming off duty and reporting that his car is gone; don’t worry about conditions in Sierran prisons. Caution: dragons at work. But then, everyone knew that dragons didn’t exist.

  John swallowed the laughter bubbling in his throat, afraid that once released it would not stop.

  He’d been led astray by mythological beasts, John thought. That’s what he’d tell the Sierran authorities.

  The dream feeling persisted. He was aware that his body was efficiently performing certain actions, but in his mind he wasn’t making connections between action, reason, and morality; he was simply hiding somewhere in the dream and letting his body do the work.

  But his memory worked all too well.

  He could remember the fight; he recalled his paralyzing feelings of ambiguity and terrible vacillation in vivid contrast to Alexandra’s instant decisiveness the moment she’d entered the room; he could remember her speed in going to the aid of her comrade.

  He could remember the contempt he’d glimpsed in his wife’s eyes when she’d looked at him.

  Alexandra and Peters were dragons, all right, John thought. But they breathed ice, not fire.

  He’d become aware of the fact that the man and woman shared a camaraderie he could never share. Now that he had seen the dragons in action, John fully appreciated just how ludicrous and presumptuous it had been for him to think that he should stay in San Sierra because Alexandra might need his protection. He now realized that Alexandra—this strange woman who was his wife and whom he now felt he had never really known—had never needed his protection. Indeed, he thought, if it hadn’t been for this beautiful stranger who’d borne him three children, he’d probably be dead, the victim of an equally strange, chameleon-like man who had given him back his life but who would certainly have snatched it away if Peters had not intervened.

  He’d been sucked into an alternate universe, John thought. When he had boarded the plane for San Sierra he had fallen through a crack someplace in space and time, and now the seam h
ad closed behind him. This place—this surreal, self-contained arena of easy lies and quick, violent death—was the dragon’s natural milieu. He did not belong in this place; he simply could not function in the manner needed to survive. Here he was good only for disposing of corpses.

  He continued to loathe the man sitting next to him. But Rick Peters was the man Alexandra openly admired, John thought. Peters was now the man she was closest to. And John had begun to suspect that Peters was the man his wife would end up with when the trip was over. Still, as much as he despised the man, John’s pride demanded he offer what he felt was a due measure of courtesy to the dragon, the warrior who had saved his life.

  He now understood perfectly why Alexandra had never told him about her life as a dragon. Before San Sierra, there was nothing she could have told him that he would have understood, no way for her to explain how she and Peters could operate smoothly, even cheerfully, in a lunar landscape of the mind and spirit where he could barely breathe.

  Now he was terribly sorry that he knew, and he deeply regretted coming to San Sierra. He knew that his presence on the tour, his witnessing of the kinds of acts dragons could perform without hesitation, had changed him, perhaps forever. For the first time in his life he was tormented by feelings of insecurity, helplessness, and self-contempt, and he sensed that an apparently insurmountable barrier had formed between himself and Alexandra.

  Once he’d thought that a woman named Selma was a problem. Now he could not remember what Selma looked like, much less why he’d ever been attracted to her in the first place. It was as if that memory, like everything else in his life before Saturday, had been broken under the feet of dragons.

  Nor did he believe that his life would necessarily come back into focus when he returned to Pomona, even if Alexandra decided to stay with him. Once through the crack, he thought, it was not so easy to find your way home again. Things like the pieces of your soul were not where you thought you’d left them. He was not sure he would ever be able to live normally again; he would always be scarred by the memory of the way Alexandra had looked at him.

  Peters drove east a mile on the highway, then cut south and circled back. He found a narrow, pitted dirt road that led almost to the perimeter of the lake, drove up it, and parked the car behind a thick stand of trees. Together, they carried the body to the top of the cliff, then set it down. For a moment John thought that Peters was going to pause for a few seconds in some kind of bizarre memorial rite for a fallen colleague; he ended feeling merely ridiculous when Peters planted his foot against the ribs of the corpse and unceremoniously pushed the body off the cliff to be smashed on an outcropping of jagged rocks below.

  John looked down over the edge of the cliff and was vaguely surprised to find that, in this strange new dream world, he did not even feel nauseous at the sight of Swarzwalder’s bloody and twisted body. In the company of dragons, the broken lump of flesh somehow seemed a natural part of the landscape.

  Alexandra emerged from the hotel’s delivery entrance as Peters drove up the dirt auxiliary driveway. She nodded to them, indicating that everything was all right. Then, with the two dragons functioning as smoothly as an Olympic relay team, Alexandra and Peters switched places: Peters got out and Alexandra slid behind the wheel in order to return the car to the parking space where she had found it.

  John quickly stepped out of the car. He did not want to be alone with his wife.

  “You all right, Finway?”

  For a moment John felt confused and panicky when he saw that Peters was not going back through the delivery entrance; the blond-haired man had thrust his hands into his pockets and was walking casually around the side of the hotel, heading toward the front. Then John realized that they were finished with their job; Swarzwalder’s body had been disposed of, and they had returned without being caught. They were out of danger. Once again they could appear to be nothing more than members of the tour group enjoying a carefree stroll around the hotel grounds.

  “No,” John said abruptly. “I’m not all right.”

  “Then you’d better stay out of sight until you get your act together,” Peters said absently. He paused and looked back over his shoulder to make sure that Alexandra was out of the car and following them. “See you later.”

  Alexandra

  She had done it. She had acted without fear or hesitation when it had counted.

  “… good thing you popped in when you did.”

  Her reflexes, speed, and strength were as good as they had ever been.

  “Christ, you’re beautiful when you’re like that.”

  She was as good as she had ever been. The years, the bearing of three children, had cost her virtually nothing.

  “… my beautiful, sexy panther.”

  She was an artist, and artists always pay a price for what they do best.

  “… some set of steel claws …”

  She was an artist deprived of materials; she had thrown away her own paints and canvas.

  “Alexandra!”

  “Huh?”

  She was suddenly aware that Peters was in front of her, blocking her path. He put his hands on her arms, then leaned forward and kissed her gently, lingeringly, on the lips. Alexandra stood passively, eyes closed, accepting the kiss and moving her own lips slightly. She had the vague realization that she was not acting; Rick Peters’ kiss suddenly seemed the most natural thing in the world, warm and caring flesh that formed a bridge to a past she was beginning to think she had never understood. The man with his lips on hers understood, and she was sorry when he withdrew.

  “Where are you?” Peters asked softly.

  Alexandra blinked several times, trying to focus her thoughts. The hot, white Sierran sun reflected brilliantly, painfully, off the blue water of the pool to her right into her eyes, and she turned away.

  “Trying to figure out where I’ve been.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you, Rick?”

  “Yes. From the moment I saw you through the snow in that parking lot, I knew you’d been living as the stranger in town for fifteen years. You pay a lot of rent for that kind of living.”

  “I paid a lot of rent to be a dragon.”

  “Only because you never came to terms with what you were; how great you were, and are.”

  “Rick, how have you handled being away all these years?”

  Peters shrugged. “I’m a hell of a realtor. I’ve made a lot of money.”

  “You didn’t miss … this kind of thing?”

  “Not really. Remember, I never felt guilty about being damn good at a job that had to be done, or about my personal needs. Also, I left the dragons on my own terms. You left on John’s terms, although, of course, he wasn’t aware of it. You talk about lies, but you’ve been living a lie by trying to be a person that you thought John wanted you to be.”

  “Rick, I feel so … very strange. God, I hope I don’t screw this thing up.”

  Peters laughed easily. “You’ve got to be kidding. In fact, I think the layoff may have done you good. You’ve never been better.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “I want to say something else,” Peters replied evenly. “I love you, Alexandra. I’ve never stopped loving you. We’re the same. We could live together and be happy because there are no lies or false expectations between us. The Company might damn well want us on staff after this, but that isn’t the point. Even if we’re never involved in the business again, we could love and be at peace because we know what we are, how good we are, and we’d take pride in it. Maybe now, after fifteen years, you realize that you need me as much as I need you.”

  Not trusting herself to speak, Alexandra said nothing. She turned and started walking. When Peters came up beside her, she reached out and put her hand in his.

  John

  John felt light-headed and disoriented. He went quickly to his room, where he stripped, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor, and took a hot shower. When he had finished and to
weled off, his limbs felt leaden. He turned off the air conditioner, slipped on a pair of shorts, then sat down heavily on the side of his bed and stared blankly at the empty bed across the room.

  He should get dressed, John thought. He should stop thinking about Swarzwalder. But he did not feel like getting dressed, and he could not stop thinking about Swarzwalder. He did not feel like doing anything, and he decided he would simply sit and wait for dinner.

  John sat for many hours; the scheduled dinner hour came and went, and still he sat. Finally he toppled over on the bed and slept fitfully until seven-thirty in the morning, when they came for him.

  Thursday, January 24; 11:15 A.M.

  Raul

  He wouldn’t be in this position if they’d built the hotel with a bugging capacity, Raul thought angrily. People who were not planning to commit crimes should not object to having their conversations overheard.

  Raul was very conscious of the microphones in the desk and the presence of the two Sierran intelligence agents in the anteroom behind him. If the DMI had been monitoring the conversations of these people during the week, Raul thought, they would already have their answers and he wouldn’t have to do this job.

  Raul glanced at his watch. The three Americans had been kept waiting in a locked room for more than three hours, and Raul was certain they’d seen or heard the buses leaving earlier. He was satisfied they would be feeling increasing pressure, if they were guilty of anything.

  It was the alternate possibility that disturbed him; if the Americans were not guilty, Raul thought, they would be feeling an ever-increasing sense of outrage, and Raul had no doubt whatsoever whose head was going to roll if Sierran intelligence had made a mistake. He would undoubtedly be thanked privately for doing his patriotic duty, perhaps even secretly honored by the Party. But he strongly doubted that he would finally be admitted to Party membership, and he would almost certainly be publicly criticized and humiliated, all so that the Americans would continue to come with their dollars and their stupid ideas. The DMI would shrug its massive bureaucratic shoulders and go back to its other business, and he would end up having to work ten hours a day in a factory or on a farm. He deeply resented the fact that he was being set up as a token sacrifice in the event other people were wrong, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it.