Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins

by Ahern, Jerry

  Paul Rubenstein opened his hands and let the empty brass fall through his fingers. His throat felt tight. He stood up, walked toward his friend, put his arms around him and John Rourke rested his arm across Paul’s shoulders and wept.

  Seven

  Annie already knew that something terrible had happened, but not quite what. While Natalia kept talking with her, she dressed, telling Natalia nothing at all about her dream-initiated fears.

  “Michael’s been thinking about trying to pass himself off as Martin with Deitrich Zimmer. I don’t seem to be able to talk him out of it,” Natalia said despairingly.

  Annie was pulling her slip over her head, stopped with it still bunched up over her breasts. “He shouldn’t do that. There’s been enough tragedy, Natalia.” She finished putting on her slip, smoothing it along her thighs, then walked over to the dresser, picked up her brush and started doing her hair. She’d showered, washed her hair, dried it. She would have to look her best, today. Her mother always liked her to look her best. “Besides, Michael could never convince Deitrich Zimmer. It would be like Martin having tried to convince daddy that he was Michael, instead. It’d never work.”

  “I know that. But Michael feels he has to do something. Men are crazy.”

  “We let them be, even admire it in them, don’t we?”

  “Paul is so sensible.”

  Annie smiled. “He’s exciting. Trust me.”

  “Ohh, I didn’t mean that!” Natalia told her hastily.

  “I know you didn’t mean anything,” Annie replied.

  “It is only that Paul doesn’t seem to have to be spectacular, that he does what needs to be done without any—what’s the word?”

  “I’m amazed!” Annie said. “Fanfare?”

  “Yes, like that. ‘Fanfare’ isn’t the sort of word one uses every day, you know.”

  Annie shrugged her shoulders, straightened her straps. The sides of her hair were caught up in a bar-rette just near the crown of her head, the rest of her hair hanging down, almost to her waist. Natalia had helped her a few days before, trimming off about two inches of split ends.

  It was a cool day. She took down a long-sleeved medium blue blouse, began putting it on. “Michael is just like Daddy; he’s naturally heroic. And it’s unnatural for him to be otherwise. Paul is just naturally competent; when it’s competent to be heroic, he’s heroic, but he doesn’t go out of his way to constantly do that. Do you know what I mean? It doesn’t define him.”

  “Yes. I want Michael’s baby.” And Natalia laughed. “Can you imagine that? Me? A mother!”

  “You’ll make a wonderful mother. What’s Michael think about it?” Her blouse was buttoned except for the button at the neck. She closed the cloth-covered buttons at her cuffs.

  “I haven’t mentioned it to him, not yet, anyway.”

  Natalia lit a cigarette, stood up from where she’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, walked to the window. Natalia wore black slacks and a loose-fitting, black, long-sleeved cotton sweater with a round neck. Except for very small pierced earrings—diamonds—and her Rolex wristwatch, she wore no jewelry. As usual, she looked stunning.

  Natalia was frequently in black. Annie felt a chill along her spine, that the color might be especially appropriate today. Natalia’s hair was up, making her look very sophisticated. But she was always that, at least in appearance.

  “Why did Paul go off like that, Annie?”

  “I’m not sure. I think there’s something going on and he didn’t want to worry me.” Annie closed the button at her collar and tied the collar into a long, drooping bow at her throat, then stepped into her skirt. It was straight and navy blue. She pulled it up, closed the zipper, then the double waist buttons at the small of her back. She picked up the skirt, at its hem, smoothed her slip beneath it, then let the skirt fall back, its hem only a little bit above her ankles.

  In China’s First City, Annie had become much taken with high heels, for the way they looked and made her feel. She stepped up and into a pair of blue pumps, then saw to her jewelry. This consisted of only a thin gold chain at her neck, a gold bracelet on her right wrist, her wristwatch on her left wrist and a pair of gold pierced earrings.

  She liked dressing well, and the mere process was usually a way to clear her mind, get her thinking of something else. “Could you do my eyes, Natalia? I’ve never been good at it.”

  “All right. Sit down. How about a very pale blue?”

  “It wouldn’t be too much blue?”

  “You’re right. Here we go. Close your eyes.”

  Getting her mind on something else had worked a little. But when she closed her eyes in order for Natalia to apply the eye liner and eye shadow—she didn’t use mascara and hated the stuff anyway—Annie could still see the dream. It was as if she had been inside one of the cryogenic chambers in New Germany, and then there was fire and there were explosions.

  Perhaps she should have contacted the German authorities right away, alerted them. Tell them she’d had a bad dream? That she never dreamed unless someone she loved was in danger? If Colonel Mann had not himself been in cryogenic sleep, he would have believed her.

  She was tempted to tell Natalia, but somehow felt she should not. Not yet, at least.

  “There, kid! You look great.”

  Annie smiled, kissed Natalia’s cheek. “You look great. I look okay,” Annie corrected, going over to the mirror to inspect Natalia’s handiwork. “You have to show me again, sometime. I always get too much on so it looks like I got my eyelids dirty or something.” She did her lips. All men got to do was shave. That couldn’t be much fun. Maybe she should tell Natalia. “I had a dream.”

  “Ohh, God,” Natalia almost whispered.

  As Annie started to explain, she heard the door to the apartment opening. In the mirror, when she moved her head just right, she could see beyond the bedroom doorway and into the small living room. Paul. Michael. Her father.

  “Annie?”

  “In here. We’re decent. Come on in, Paul.”

  She turned away from the mirror, looked at her husband as he filled the doorframe. He wasn’t as tall as her father or her brother, but he was tall enough, and even though he was lean, he had good muscles and solid shoulders. There was a look of terrible sadness in his eyes. “It’s Momma, isn’t it?”

  “Your mother’s dead, Annie.” Her father wasn’t even in the room as he spoke.

  Natalia ran back to the window, clutched at the curtains, leaned her head against the glass.

  “We’re gonna get the damn—” Michael began.

  Paul crossed the room, folded Annie into his arms. Annie realized only then that tears were already flowing down her cheeks, thought absently that her eye makeup was waterproof. She closed her eyes as she sagged into her husband’s arms, saw the dream again. “The cryogenic chambers were burned. And there were explosions,” she related, her own voice sounding muffled to her, her head so close against Paul’s chest.

  “You should have said something.” It was Michael’s voice “But it was already done, wasn’t it?”

  “I, uhh—”

  “She doesn’t know,” Paul said for her. “She had a headache, was feeling sick to her stomach earlier. I suggested that she should he down. She probably experienced it without knowing it, then only saw it after she was alseep.”

  “Yes,” Annie said, trying to nod, but Paul was holding her so tightly she couldn’t. Her voice was gone and that was the last word she could say for a time.

  Michael’s voice sounded strained, as if he were

  holding back tears. “They’ll pay, but never enough.” On the last word, his voice broke.

  She pulled away a little from Paul’s embrace, looked past him. She saw Michael, his head against the doorjamb, his right forearm over his eyes, his body shaking. Natalia went to him. She saw her father, John Rourke, dark circles under his eyes, his face expressionless, his cheeks drawn down, the tendons of his neck—visible under the open collar of the black kni
t shirt he wore—pulsing.

  She could hear Natalia crying. Paul wept.

  Annie put her arms around her husband’s waist, touched her lips briefly to his cheek, let him hold her while the tears came and her body shook.

  She said the word, “Momma.”

  Eight

  It was nearly four in the afternoon when Emma Shaw heard the crunch, the muted hum of synth-rubber leaving pavement and coming onto gravel. The news broadcasts had been full of the events which had unfolded at New Germany in Argentina. The death of Sarah Rourke and of the heroic German General Wolfgang Mann at the hands of Nazi terrorist commandoes almost overshadowed the continuing eruption of Mt. Kilauea and its resultant devastation.

  There was definitely a car outside.

  Emma Shaw picked up the .45 automatic from under the couch and walked across the great room toward the windows.

  She almost dropped the gun when she looked out, realized that the man in the car was John Rourke.

  She had wanted to call him, not known what to say to him. “I’m sorry your wife is dead?” It would have sounded as hollow to him as it did to her. But, she really was sorry. She’d never known Sarah Rourke except from history books in school and that silly movie that

  was made in Eden. But she’d resented the woman, a woman who was more dead than alive holding a man who was so wonderfully alive but who refused to live, a man she wanted for herself and knew she could never have.

  The driver’s side door of the F.O.U.O. car was open, but John did not get out, just sat there. Emma Shaw watched him, her hands shaking. She set down her gun, ran the palms of her hands over her skirt, dug her hands into her pockets in order to stop her hands from shaking. Now her shoulders trembled instead.

  Why had John Rourke come here?

  “Ohh, God,” she whispered aloud, her own conjecture terrifying her.

  He just sat there, still. What was he doing? Should she go out onto the porch? And what would she say then. “Want a drink? Coffee? Tea?”

  Or herself.

  She couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t sound trite and, at the same time, cheap, about them both.

  She saw a long-fingered, strong, graceful hand reach out to the door and pull it shut, heard the soft purr as the electric motor restarted.

  “No!” She shouted the word, but he couldn’t hear her, of course. She pulled open the door, ran out onto the porch, shouted louder, “John, wait!”

  The car stopped.

  What had she done? Emma Shaw almost verbalized. The door opened.

  Should she run to him, should she— John Rourke stepped out of the car and she took a step back closer to her open door. John wore the same brown leather bomber jacket he’d worn when she picked him up off the slope of the volcano, the leather just as scarred and ash-smudged now as then. Black knit shirt, black BDU pants, black combat boots. A black mood?

  And, why not, his wife and a son dead within less than the span of half a day. And, he would blame himself. Men did that. “John?”

  “I, uhh—” The words came out of him like a sigh. He took off his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses and she could tell from his eyes that he’d been crying. And, before she was conscious even that she was moving, she was running down from the porch, running to him. She stopped, less than a foot away from him, balanced on the balls of her feet, the hem of her skirt swaying back and forth against her bare legs, her hands away from her sides, fingers splayed. “I had nowhere else that I could go, no one else that I could talk to. Paul and Annie needed to be alone. And Michael and Natalia, too. It’s my wife, you see. The Nazis killed her and I have to talk to somebody.”

  John Rourke’s voice was tight sounding, his breath coming in short gasps as, she realized, he fought back tears.

  That was why men died younger now as they always had, always would. Because they had to be men all the time.

  Emma Shaw’s hands moved, jerky and awkward-feeling to her—moved slowly toward John Rourke’s face, touched him gently, caressed his face. “Talk to me.”

  John Rourke nodded.

  “And let me hold you,” Emma Shaw whispered,

  drawing John Rourke’s head down toward her, his arms folding gently around her, his head bowing. She heard his tears, felt them against her own cheek, brushed her lips against his face, whispered, “I’m here for you, John.”

  For such a long time that her arms and legs began to go numb, she held him like that, afraid to let go of him, or that he would let go of her.

  Nine

  Alternately, but not often, he would sip at one of the drinks on the table. One was a cup of decaffeinated coffee which had to be cold by now despite the self-warming cup in which she had served it. The other was a glass of red wine.

  Neither the coffee nor the wine was very much gone. She had finished her coffee, sipped at her wine, watched John Rourke from across the table, listened.

  “We were really going to make it,” he told her. “The baby, the hospital, her work and mine. We were going to make it this time. No going off ever again, no leaving her. And after one hundred and twenty-five years, Zimmer finished what he started.”

  “My dad always told me that the one comfort he had as a cop was that the ones he didn’t catch up with on this side, God’d catch up with on the other side.”

  For the first time since he had arrived more than an hour ago, John Rourke smiled. Then the smile left him. “God won’t have the chance, at least not before me, unless Zimmer drops dead before I find him.”

  “There’s a whole world war about to happen between you and him, John.” She lit a cigarette, almost absently offering one to John. He just shook his head. She told him, “Go ahead and light a cigar. I’ve got air freshener.”

  He nodded again, took a cigar from the coat beside him (his coat was getting her couch filthy from dried mud and volcanic ash, but that didn’t matter). He lit the cigar with his battered old lighter, the lighter perhaps only a few years younger than he was.

  He set it down on the coffee table. She’d read once that psychologists believed that a man setting down some personal object—like a lighter, a key ring, something like that—was symbolic of feeling at ease, in control.

  “May I see your lighter?” Emma Shaw asked him.

  “Of course,” John answered almost absently, picking up his lighter and reaching it across to her.

  She leaned forward, took it, leaned back in her chair and turned it over in her hands. The lighter was bare brass, and she was uncertain whether it had started that way or had once been possessed of a finish. Engraved across the bottom beneath the word Zippo, partially obscuring the words Bradford, Pa., were the intitials JTR. “How long have you had this, John?”

  “Since I was a kid,” he told her.

  “And you were always very careful with it; I don’t mean the finish, but careful to keep it functional, never lose it?’

  He looked up from the glass of wine he seemed to be studying with microscopic intensity and asked, “What’s your point, Emma?”

  “That sometimes we lose things—or people—even though we tried our best not to. And, it’s not our fault. When my mom died, for a long time I wondered if maybe something I’d done or hadn’t done could have changed things. After a while, I guess I learned that nothing I could have done could have changed things. If you had a hole in your pocket, and your lighter fell out, you might never find it.”

  He smiled. “I know it sounds obsessive, but I always check my pocket seams before I put on a pair of pants. The same with jackets.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And anyway, this is different.”

  “Why? Because when the Nazis hit your hospital a hundred and twenty-five years ago, you survived and she didn’t survive as well? So, you should be feeling guilty for living? I don’t buy that, John. Want some dinner?”

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “Where?’

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the sensible one. Eating regular meals is good for your he
alth. If you want to be healthy enough to go after the men you want to kill, then you’ll need your strength.”

  “Mother?” John asked, smiling. But the smile faded again.

  “Maybe that’s what you need, and maybe not. But, that’s not what I am. But I like cooking for you. Want some fresh coffee or are you planning on poisoning your digestive system?”

  John Rourke said, “Well, since you put it that way.”

  She got up to start dinner.

  *

  He ate little, having no taste for it, despite the fact that she was right and the food was good. He’d eaten nothing all day.

  She sat across from him, looking at him now and again. Finally, John Rourke said to her, “You’re a good friend.”

  Emma Shaw stirred her coffee with a spoon, didn’t look up from it as she said, “What’s on your mind?’

  “I don’t know.” He got up from the table, walked across the room and went out onto the porch.

  After a few seconds, she followed him. He was lighting one of his thin, dark tobacco cigars as she came up beside him.

  “Those things taste any good?’ Emma asked him.

  John Rourke just looked at her. “What?”

  “I asked if they taste any good, the cigars.”

  “I like them,” Rourke told her, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. What a pecular woman Emma Shaw was, Rourke thought.

  “Let me try,” she said, her hand touching his, taking the cigar from between his fingers. She inhaled; to her credit, Emma Shaw did not cough. “Strong. Sure these things aren’t carcinogenic?”

  “The ones I smoked in the Twentieth Century were, even the ones Annie made for me out of tobacco she raised herself. These are German. Won’t cause cancer.”

  “And when there’s the war, will the Germans fly them into Hawaii just for you?”

  “If I asked them to,” Rourke nodded, “they’d get me a few.”

  She inhaled again, this time exhaling smoke through her nostrils. “But you’d go without before you’d do that, smoke cigarettes. Strategic material would take preference, right?’