“Ask Rich Kelleher. Or the junkman.”
After that, the discussion flagged. And just as the fire began to sink down into itself, so did the others draw down into themselves. They grew quiet and even solemn, lost in thoughts that Stone figured probably centered on the days ahead, on the road. Looking at Eve in the firelight, as the flames flickered in her hair and across her gravely beautiful face, he imagined this would be the way he would remember her, his ice maiden, so perfect in every way, including her inviolability.
As inscrutable as she was, Eddie was the opposite, transparent in his concern about what to do. Stone had no doubt that if Eddie had been there with him alone, the little man would have joined him in an assault on Valhalla. But Eve made the difference, somehow seemed to have replaced Jagger in his mind as the sun around which the tiny planet of his person had to revolve. Maybe it was because of what they had shared, the great stoned days of the tennis tour. Or maybe it was simply that he loved her too. Whatever the reason, Stone did not question that Eddie would go or stay, depending on Eve’s wishes. And there, Stone knew, he could not have much hope. Passive, egocentric, sybaritic, she struck him as about the last person in the world who would volunteer to make war over a principle, or for that matter, any other reason.
As for Jagger, he did not enter into the discussion at all, perhaps feeling that his new position as a laughingstock, an object of scorn, placed him beyond the pale of the group. Still, Stone wanted to know what the man’s plans were. So he asked him.
“What about you, Jagger? Is it the road or Valhalla for you?”
The question seemed to bewilder him. “What are you talking about?”
“Your plans. What are you gonna do?”
The tennis star bristled. “What do you care? Whatever I do is my affair. It don’t involve you or anyone else.”
Stone smiled. “No shit. Gonna take on the big world out there all by yourself?”
“If you say so.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I was hoping you might join me on Valhalla.”
Jagger took this as an insult too, and he was breathing hard now. He looked away from Stone, his eyes skittering past Tocco and Annabelle before finding Eve.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going upstairs. To bed.”
There was a long moment of silence, during which Eve did not move. She glanced at Stone and then looked down at her plate again, saying nothing. Stone stood up.
“She’s not going anywhere,” he said.
But Jagger ignored him. In three quick strides, he went over to Eve and roughly pulled her to her feet.
“I told you to come on!” he bawled.
“And I told you she ain’t going anywhere!”
Stone had moved between them and the loft, a challenge Jagger seemed only too willing to meet. Letting go of Eve, he spun toward Stone, his fists rising at the same time a grin was spreading on his handsome face, as though all this was just what he had wanted, needed. Remembering the man’s speed against Tocco, Stone raised his hands too, but only as a feint to cover the movement of his right foot, which he brought up into Jagger’s groin now with brutal swiftness. Tocco was already yelling like a fight fan—a yell that went dead at the sound of contact, which was like that of a cleaver chopping into meat. As Jagger started down, not even screaming yet, Stone punched him in the face, hard enough to reverse the direction of his fall.
In the brief silence that followed, Stone was already regretting what he had done, that he had not just stood there and traded punches with the man, beaten him fair and square, for Eve’s benefit if for no other reason. But somehow, because it had been Jagger, because he despised the man so absolutely, his reaction had been virtually automatic. The man simply did not deserve a fair fight. It would have been stupid to chance a cut eye or a broken tooth brawling with such a tinhorn. And yet, looking at Eve now, at the shock and puzzlement distorting her face as she looked from Jagger to him, Stone wished he had done otherwise. Nevertheless it was not she but Eddie who went to Jagger’s side. Tocco was yelling again.
“Beautiful! Beautiful! Just goddamn beautiful, Stone!”
Annabelle’s reaction was more restrained. “Didn’t realize you were from South Chicago, Walter.”
Stone was more interested in his victim, who was still breathing, but only inward, it appeared, sucking in short sobbing breaths as he lay on the floor in the fetal position, his legs still trembling uncontrollably. Eddie was kneeling over him, but he obviously did not know what to do. He looked up at Stone.
“You had to do that?”
Stone shook his head. “It was just a reaction, Eddie. I didn’t think.”
As Jagger let out a low keening sound, Eve pulled her coat around her and started for the door. Stone reached out and took hold of her arm.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he tried. “I didn’t have time to think.”
She turned to look at him, and her eyes seemed filled with regret more than anything else, almost as if it had been she who had kicked Jagger.
“I wasn’t going with him,” she said.
Then she pulled her arm free and went on outside. Stone knew better than to follow her.
The weather the next morning was foul, rain turning into sleet and then snow, all of it combining into a gray slush as the afternoon temperature rose toward forty degrees. During the night Eddie had looked after Jagger until that inevitable point where the man began to berate him for his solicitude, calling him a wimp and a kiss-ass. After that, Jagger was left pretty much on his own, lying on a cot close to the fire. The only time he got up was to go to the bathroom, and he limped noticeably, falling back into bed finally with a cry of pain. But he would not accept help from anyone. Nor would he speak with them, or even look at them.
Stone meanwhile did not press the others as to when they planned to leave, and they in turn volunteered nothing on the subject. But as the afternoon wore on, they all became more uneasy and testy, toward each other and especially toward him.
A southerly wind shift did not help matters either, as it brought with it the first steady odor of putrescent flesh—the dead cows and chickens and humans. Just before the light began to fail, Stone saw a party of Mau Mau work their way down the steep face of Valhalla to the bodies that had snagged there. One by one, they dislodged the corpses and either rolled them or tossed them the rest of the way down into the water. Then the Mau Mau worked their way back to the top, where Stone saw the General standing on the parapet with folded arms and spread legs, like Alexander looking over his too-small world. And even though it had begun to rain again, the outdoor lights were on and the stereo was blaring.
But as darkness fell, it would have taken more than music to rout the gloom in the cabin. The gagging odor of the carrion made it almost impossible to eat, impossible to think of staying there, and yet the rain pelting on the ceiling-high window began to turn to sleet again. They could not leave, and they could not stay.
Annabelle was the first to break. Standing at the window, watching the ice form on it, she spoke without emotion. “Stone—if we joined you on this Valhalla thing, what would we have to do, Eve and me? What would our role be?”
In the momentary silence that followed her question, Stone had the feeling that even the sleet outside had stopped falling. The others, who, like Stone, had been trying to eat, put down their pans of food. Annabelle continued to face the window.
“Mostly, you’d be back-up,” Stone told her. “You’d have my pistol and the twenty-two rifle. As we moved forward, you’d watch behind us and to the sides.”
She turned to face him. “And shoot anybody who shoots at you.”
“That would be the general idea.”
She looked at Tocco and shrugged. “Why not, Paul? What’ve we got to lose? All this?”
“Your life, baby,” he told her. “You could lose your life.”
“Haven’t we already?”
Tocco said nothing for a time, just sat where he was on the floor looking up at her.
Finally he shrugged too, as indifferently as she had. “If you want to do it, I want to do it,” he said.
And as if on cue, the two of them and Stone all turned toward Eddie, who for once failed to look to Eve for advice. Gazing over his cup of steaming water, he nodded almost casually. “Sure, count me in,” he said. “I been wanting a hot shower forever.”
At that, Eve suddenly got up and walked over to the fireplace. She held her hands out to the fire, then she hugged herself, as though to keep from shivering. Stone and the others were waiting.
“Eve?” he said.
Over her shoulder she gave him a wry look. “You mean I have a choice?”
“Of course.”
Turning then, she smiled inscrutably. “Well then, of course I choose Valhalla.”
Stone knew that he would get nothing better from her, nothing more convincing. “Okay. Good. It’s settled then.”
“Except for one or two things,” Eddie said, looking over at Jagger. “Like, what about him?”
Stone shook his head. “He’s out. He stays here. Later, if we succeed, he can come crawling up—I don’t give a damn. But he’s not in the assault. No way.”
“You hear that, Jag?” Eddie asked. “Is that okay with you?”
In answer, Jagger rolled over on the cot, giving them his backside.
Stone asked Eddie what the other problem was.
“When,” Eddie said. “When do we do it?”
Stone looked at the rain and sleet pelting against the window. He looked at the distant lights burning faintly in the stormy darkness.
“Why not tonight?” he said.
Thirteen
At two in the morning Stone and Eddie went to the lodge and felt their way down the steps and through the lightless basement until they found the ladder Stone wanted, a wooden twelve-footer. They carried it outside and across the yard to the dock, where Tocco and the two women stood waiting by the rowboat. Other than their guns, and now the ladder, the only equipment they were taking was a thirty-foot length of rope and a pair of canteens filled with water—Stone expected some very dry throats by the time they reached their destination.
The sleet had stopped falling but the footing was treacherous. Ice covered everything, grass and trees and brush, making it all look crystalline, a delicate world just made for breaking. On the dock, Tocco gingerly got down into the boat and helped the women aboard. Stone and Eddie handed the ladder to them and then boarded themselves, after undoing the tie-lines. Eddie took the rower’s seat and Stone the bow, where he pushed off, shoving against the pier.
The lights of Valhalla, shining on the water, formed a lane of quicksilver for the small boat to follow. And as it moved steadily along that lane, Stone began to feel a strange exhilaration, almost as if he had ingested some powerful drug. He had expected to feel only fear, ice in his belly and a deadening weight in his arms and legs. But there was none of that. And curiously he had no thought of killing or being killed but only of the mission itself. It was as though the Mau Mau were not human beings at all so much as technical obstacles to be overcome, about the same as locked gates and bolted doors.
Looking back into the boat, he wondered what the others were feeling. Eve, who was nearest him, kept her face in profile as she stared out across the lake instead of up at Valhalla or at her fellow soldiers in the boat. Oddly, she seemed more apathetic than frightened, as if she found the prospect of death not all that uncongenial. As for Eddie, Stone could only see his back, as the little man continued rowing steadily. Though Tocco and Annabelle were sitting together in the stern, they seemed very much alone. Tocco kept fussing with the Sten gun, opening and closing the breech, and then glancing up at Valhalla every few seconds, as though he were comparing the two things, the gun and its target, weighing the one against the other. Annabelle meanwhile sat staring blankly down at her lap, oblivious of the rifle cradled there. Stone decided he had better say something.
“In four hours the sun will be up. And we’ll have won.”
Tocco gave him a queasy look. “All of us?”
“All of us. They’ll be asleep. They’ll be a pushover.”
As the boat kept moving, Eve turned to look at Stone, and he was surprised by her expression, open for once, void of irony.
“Don’t worry about us,” she said. “This is the right thing to do. We’ve got no choice. We trust you.”
Stone was not sure which he felt more strongly, pleasure or surprise. Before he could think of anything to say to her, she turned away again. And he thought back to how it had been earlier, when he first suggested they make the attack this night. He had not expected them to leap at the idea, and they had not disappointed him. Tocco immediately had questioned the whole undertaking, saying that he wasn’t going to follow “no psycho into no battle.”
Eddie had seemed more bewildered than resistant. “My God, Stone, it’s sleeting out there. Just look at it.”
“And we haven’t even had time to get used to the idea yet,” Annabelle added. “We’re not ready.”
“I know all that,” he had told them. “And those are the very reasons we should go tonight.”
He pointed out that the sleet was falling on Valhalla too, which made it much more likely that everyone there would be inside, drunk and asleep. And as for taking time to get accustomed to the idea of the attack, all that would do was weaken the five of them, he said. During the past twenty-four hours they had had a good deal of meat and vegetables to eat and so they were stronger now than they would be later, after days of eating only cornmeal. And thinking about the operation, talking about it, would only vitiate their resolve. Inaction bred inaction, he said.
Eddie had conceded these points but asked if they still didn’t have to plan the attack. Certainly they couldn’t just plunge into it without a battle plan. Why, the women didn’t even know how to use the guns yet, he said. What was needed was a plan and practice. They would have to have dry runs.
Tocco and Annabelle echoed Eddie’s objections, until Stone explained that they didn’t have enough ammunition to waste any of it on practice shooting. And as for a battle plan, he already had one, he said—a simple, classic commando operation. They would go by boat and avoid having to wade from the blacktop out to Valhalla. They would follow the dirt road up to the top and gain access to the main house as quietly as possible and then go from room to room rounding up the sleepers. Tocco, with his Sten gun, would keep them covered until they were all rounded up.
“And then what?” Eddie asked.
It was a good question, and one Stone did not really have an answer for yet. But he did not tell them that.
“I’ll take it from there,” he said.
So they gradually had come around. The hours had passed and they had made what preparations they could. Finally, just before leaving, Stone had put some more wood on the fire for Jagger, who still had not left his cot. Stone told him that there was enough food for a couple of days and enough corn for the whole winter.
“But if you decide to try Valhalla later,” he added, “it’ll be okay. Unless we lose, of course.”
Eve had been watching him from the doorway, and as they left together, she thanked him. “Don’t worry, he’ll come,” she said. “I know him.”
Now the small aluminum rowboat was passing right under Valhalla, so close to its rocky shore they could not even see the lights high above them. But for the first time this night they were able to hear the outdoor stereo, turned low for once, and playing not Aretha Franklin but the eerie electronic score of some late-Seventies space epic. Eddie kept rowing and the boat edged into the narrow channel separating the rock from the mainland. As they nosed toward the entrance road, which seemed to come right up out of the water, Stone took hold of the tieline and jumped ashore. Grasping the gunwales at the bow, he pulled the boat farther up onto land. Eddie slid the oars under the seats while Stone lifted the ladder and carried it up onto the road, near the stone pillar on which graffiti all but covered the word Valhal
la. The iron gate itself hung open and askew on one enormous hinge.
The others had piled out of the boat now too and were slipping and muttering on the icy ground. Stone checked his forty-five and returned it to his coat pocket. He picked up the ladder again, motioning for Eddie to take the other end.
“Come on, let’s move,” he said. He did not want to give them time to think about the ice underfoot or the task before them.
The road ahead was all but invisible in the darkness, here where the sodium lamps did not reach. On the other side, as the road climbed, the problem would be different—there the lights would be shining directly down upon them. For the Mau Mau to see them from above, however, Stone judged that they would have to be standing on the parapet itself and looking straight down. And the likelihood of that, at this hour, on this night, he deemed very slight. So he walked quickly, openly, carrying his end of the ladder. At any moment he expected one of them to break and stop, saying he or she could not go through with it. But there was not a word. They worked their way around the curve at the far end of the great rock and came into view of the lights up ahead, shining down upon the narrow twisting road as it climbed toward Valhalla and that last defile between rock walls before coming upon the second—and functioning—iron gate. On this side of the defile, however, was that less steep rock-and-earth incline rising up to the parapet itself. It was there that most of the Mau Mau had clambered up and tumbled over the rock wall into the courtyard—but in daylight and without ice underfoot. That was the reason for the ladder.
Slipping occasionally, sometimes stumbling, they finally reached the incline, and Stone quietly put the ladder into place. He got the coil of rope from Tocco and hung it around his neck. He took his hunting knife out of its sheath and clamped it in his teeth. And then he started to climb, without a word or gesture to the others. He reached the top and struggled onto the pitched, ice-covered ground, where he dug his boots in sideways and clawed his way upward with his bare hands. Scooting on his side, he came to the parapet and sat back against it for a few moments, catching his breath. Made of huge limestone blocks, the wall was about four feet high at that point, screening him perfectly from the courtyard and buildings. He listened for any sound on the other side—any voices or footsteps—but all he could hear was the strange astral music, much louder here.
Valhalla Page 27
