He got onto his knees then and, peering over the top of the parapet, he saw the courtyard and the swimming pool, a large kidney-shaped affair with a diving board and a curving slide. On two sides of it sprawled the house, low, L-shaped, “contemporary,” all redwood and glass, incongruously built onto the original stone-block monastery, which was a squarish three-story structure with odd little towers and cupolas and the steep red-tiled roof Stone had been able to see from the Point. The living, dining, and play areas appeared to be in the brightly lit modern part of the building, the bedrooms in the darkened older part. Gray against the black sky, the rocky summit of Valhalla rose up behind the entire structure, shielding it on every side except the one Stone was coming from.
At first, he thought he saw no one in the house. Then, beyond the drapes in one of the front rooms, he spotted someone lying on a davenport, apparently asleep. But he saw no one else, no other sign of life. He looked down the length of the wall toward the iron gate and still he saw no one, no guards posted anywhere. There was a hardtop Jeep parked just this side of the gate, but he could not see anyone in it. So he turned back to the ladder, taking the coil of rope from around his neck. Holding one end of it, he tossed the other over the top rung and down to the ground. Eddie immediately climbed up and took hold of the rope. Digging his heels into the ground, Stone gripped the rope tightly as Eddie used it to pull himself the rest of the way to the top.
“What’d you see?” Eddie asked. “Anyone?”
Stone shook his head. “No, but keep your head down anyway.”
Annabelle was at the top of the ladder now, and Stone had to pull on the rope himself to bring her on up. Then he did the same with Eve and Tocco. As he joined the four of them at the wall, Eddie told him that there was someone lying in the Jeep, a guard.
“I just saw his head move,” he said. “He’s in the front seat, stretched out.”
Stone nodded, surprised. “Okay. We’ll take care of him first and then move on to the house.” He told Tocco to take the right side of the Jeep while he took the left. He would make the first move.
“The rest of you stay here,” he added.
He and Tocco quietly slipped over the parapet and crept up on the Jeep, which was parked parallel to the wall, with the front end facing away from them, toward the iron gate. While Tocco went around to the other side Stone moved in between the parapet and the Jeep, crouched, getting ready to open the driver’s door. His one fear was that the door might be locked and he would either have to shoot through the window or leave the guard as he was and come back for him later. So he took hold of the handle as if it were a bomb, turning it very slowly until he felt it catch. Then he yanked the door open, and like a jack-in-the-box, the head of a young black man jumped into the opening. Stone quickly thrust his forty-five into the youth’s gaping mouth.
“Not a word,” he said. “Not one fucking sound.”
Stone pulled him out of the Jeep and pushed him down onto the icy surface of the courtyard. Tocco came sliding around the back of the Jeep, his Sten gun at the ready. He seemed surprised at what he found.
“You got him, huh?” he grinned. “I couldn’t tell.”
Stone pulled the muzzle out of the youth’s mouth but kept the gun at his face. “How many in the house?” he asked.
Popeyed, the kid choked and gulped and finally found his voice. “Ten, maybe.”
“How many of the family that lived here?”
“Two.”
“And how many of you?”
He moved his lips, counting to himself. “Eight. I guess eight of us.”
“How many men? How many women?”
“Five men.”
Stone finished it for him. “And three women. Plus the other two.”
The black nodded, shivering on the cold pavement. Stone then asked him about the house, what was the best way to enter it and who was sleeping where. The kid told him haltingly, finishing with the information Stone wanted most to hear. The General was in a second-floor corner room with a large window looking out on the pool—and on them. The junkman’s daughters were with him and the “other brothers,” the youth said. The girls were both “mamas” now.
“Okay, I’m gonna let you up,” Stone told him. “You clasp your hands behind your neck. And you lead us into the house, hear?”
The kid nodded again, hope growing in him. But as soon as he was on his feet and turning away, Stone hit him on the head with the forty-five’s heavy barrel, not with all his might, but not holding back much either. Whether the black lived or died did not figure in the action—all Stone wanted was to make sure that the kid posed no further threat to them. And the blow seemed to have almost as immediate an effect on Tocco, surprising him for a moment and then opening his eyes to a whole new world of violence available to him. He promptly picked the youth up by his coat and pitched him over the wall onto the icy ground, where he slid a short distance and then fell the rest of the way down onto the road. There, he did not move.
“Well, that’s one of ’em,” Tocco said.
Stone was rummaging through the front seat of the Jeep. On the floor he found a tire iron and a single-shot four-ten shotgun. Other than the shell in it, there was no more ammunition. He left the gun in the Jeep, pushing it under the seat. Tocco picked up the tire iron.
“Just what I need,” he said. “Insurance.”
He followed Stone back to where the others were waiting, on the inside of the parapet now. Stone told them where they would be entering the house, and he reiterated that this was to be a roundup operation, with no shooting unless it was absolutely necessary. They all nodded and he moved on, walking along the stone wall for about fifty feet before cutting across to the rear of the house and a doorway situated next to the attached four-car garage. Farther to the rear was a separate building, from which Stone could hear the thrum of an engine—the generator, he imagined, converting well gas to electricity. All along the front of the house there were other doors—sliding glass doors leading to one room or another. But this one, the door to the back hallway, was open, the youth had said.
And it did open as Stone tried it now. The rest of them followed him inside and down a carpeted hallway toward a well-lighted kitchen. They passed doors to the garage and to a laundry room. And through a third door just this side of the wide kitchen entrance, Stone recognized the room where he had seen someone stretched out on a sofa. Speaking softly, he told Eddie to stand guard where they were, at the kitchen entrance, while he and Tocco “cleared” the rooms downstairs. As he moved on, treading the same deep burgundy carpet that covered the hallway floor, he saw that he was in a recreation room. There was a bar, a pool table, two pinball machines, a Foosball and an entertainment center with a big-screen television and videotape console. It was a huge room, with a stone-and-glass wall dividing it from the next room, which looked even larger, and decorated in the same expensive modern style. Both, however, were a mess, with books and tapes and pillows and bottles and plates strewn about. There were stains everywhere, even fire stains, and the whole place stank of booze and rancid food and backed-up toilets. Unexpectedly, the music playing outdoors was not playing inside and could barely be heard.
So Stone moved as silently as he could to the sofa he had seen from outside. Coming up over the back of it, he found not just another Mau Mau but the same light-skinned young man he had seen weeks ago at the creek bend, the one who had contentedly rifled luggage while his general raped. Sound asleep, he stank of wine. Stone intended to wake him and have Annabelle stand guard over him, the first of many. But just as he was reaching out to prod him, Tocco hit him in the head with the tire iron and a film of blood spread down the side of his face. Stone motioned for Annabelle.
“You stay here,” he told her. “Keep an eye on him and anyone else we bring you.” He looked at her. She seemed all right, but her hands were trembling. “Your gun off safety?”
Nodding, she moved back from the unconscious, bleeding youth, to cover him from behin
d a chair. Stone winked at her and moved on, with Tocco and Eve following him. They went through the living room and into a study that contained all the books and phonograph records Stone had only imagined before. But most of them were dumped on the floor and piled in heaps. Half the records appeared to have been broken, thrown against the walls in contempt and disappointment. There was also a huge sound system, with a turntable spinning silently in the debris, playing the astral music over and over. On the console Stone noticed two switches designated interior and exterior, of which only the latter was turned on. It crossed his mind that all he had to do was switch on the other one and wait for the Mau Mau to come to him. It crossed his mind, that was all.
The three of them moved on through a large dining room and circled back to the kitchen, where Eddie stood waiting. Stone told them that they would start on the upstairs now. He and Eddie would go into the bedrooms one at a time and bring out whoever was in them. Eve and Tocco would remain outside in the corridor. Eve would cover those brought out and Tocco, with his Sten gun, would cover the whole operation, protecting them against anyone coming out of the other bedrooms unexpectedly.
They signaled agreement and Stone led them up the rear stairway, beyond the kitchen. As they reached the second floor, he was surprised to find the structure and decor identical to that of the new part downstairs, which meant that the old part, the monastery, had been totally rebuilt inside. Instead of a narrow central corridor positioned between two rows of small bedrooms, there was a wide, outside hallway running the length of the structure, with a number of sofas and easy chairs facing the windows, which looked out on the lake. There were four doors giving off the hallway. Trying the first in line, Stone entered a dark room and switched on the lights. In one bed a ratty-looking blond teenage girl lay on top of the covers, still dressed, cowgirl style. Stoned or dead, she did not move, even when Eddie prodded her with his rifle. In the other bed a naked, prematurely balding black man lay sleeping, with one of the junkman’s daughters in his arms. Stone put his hand over her mouth at the same time he jammed the man in the face with his forty-five.
“Not a word,” he said to him. “Not a sound. Just get up and do what you’re told, and you might live.”
The man nodded, already very much awake. The junkman’s daughter started to cry and Stone told her to be quiet. He said that everything was all right now, they had come to rescue her. But his words made no difference and he had to shake her to quiet her. Getting through to her—making her believe—would have to wait till later, he decided.
Eddie meanwhile still could not rouse the other girl. “She’s out,” he said. “She smells like a wine vat.”
There were empty bottles on the table and on the floor.
“Leave her,” Stone said.
When the black man tried to wrap a blanket around himself, Stone pulled it away from him.
“As you are. Both of you.”
He pushed them out into the hallway and made the man lie face down and spread-eagled on the carpet.
“If they make a sound, shoot him,” he told Eve.
In the next bedroom, he and Eddie found a fat young Chicano male in bed with two black girls. Oddly, the man was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and nothing else. The girls too were in bizarre states of undress, one wearing only a garter belt and the other a filthy cut-off sweatshirt bearing the image of an Arkansas razorback. They were all drunk, and Stone and Eddie practically had to drag them out into the hallway, where they were only too happy to collapse onto the floor. Tocco, evidently bored, kicked the Chicano in the ribs, and Stone told him to lay off.
Tocco grinned at him. “What’s that, Colonel? Did you say something, sir?”
He said it much too loudly. So as Stone approached the next room, he waved Eddie to the side and got down on his knees himself before throwing the door open. At that same moment the door began to disintegrate above him in a rattling fusillade of automatic gunfire and he dove forward onto the rug, managing to get off just one shot in the direction of the fire across the room, a spitting horizontal flame that went out now as the figure behind it pitched back into a table and fell slowly and heavily to the floor, knocking over bottles and a lamp and finally the table itself.
Standing, Stone turned on the ceiling light and saw the General sitting back against the wall next to the tipped-over bedtable. He was naked and bleeding heavily at the hip. A blade of bone stuck out of him like an ivory dagger. His gun lay on the floor. Across the bed from him, the junkman’s other daughter stood clutching a sheet to her nakedness. Her eyes looked wild with fear. Stone took hold of her arm and pulled her out from behind the bed and gave her over to Eddie, who had followed him into the room. Eve was at the door now too, pale and shaking. But he could see her relief at finding him alive.
“Anything you wanted to say to the General?” Stone asked Eddie.
Eddie shook his head. “Looks like it’s already been said.”
“Most of it,” Stone agreed. He told Eddie to take the girl and that he and Tocco should herd them all down to the rec room, where Annabelle was standing guard over the first one. Meanwhile, he and Eve had some business with the General.
As Eddie and the girl left, Eve looked forlornly at Stone.
“I’ve got no business with him,” she said.
“Sure you do,” Stone insisted. “But first I have to ask him a few questions.”
He did not wait to see if she understood. She would soon enough, he knew. With his foot he moved the grease gun out of the way, and then he got down on one knee in front of the man. Close up, Stone could see that the General’s wound was not a fatal one, even though it had been a forty-five caliber slug that hit him. His pelvis appeared to have taken the brunt of the impact, which left him shattered and maimed but apparently not bleeding from an artery. His eyes were dull with shock.
“Can you hear me?” Stone asked.
The General smiled slightly, in contempt. He was a handsome young black, with a lean, beautifully muscled body.
“I’ve got a couple of questions,” Stone told him. “You answer them to my satisfaction and we’ll take care of you. Understand?” At the man’s nod, Stone went on. “A week ago I was hunting north of here, and I came on a black boy in a camp you’d just left. He’d been blinded. His tongue had been cut out. He’d been castrated. Can you tell me why?”
The General shrugged and shook his head.
“If you want care, you’ll have to tell me.”
The General made a face: the matter was unimportant. “It was the girls,” he got out. “Our mamas.”
“What about them?”
“They didn’t like Rollo.”
“That’s all?”
“He was a pig. They took care of him.”
“And Rich Kelleher—the blond kid we gave you, the one who shot your chicken thief?”
“You from down there, huh?” Pain twisted the General’s smile.
“Yeah. From down there. Tell me—why did you have to kill him?”
“’Cause he kill one of us.”
Stone nodded thoughtfully. “I see. So I guess that means we have to kill you now. Isn’t that right?”
The General’s eyes came alive under the glaze of pain and shock. He looked at Stone in fear.
“But first, one last question.” Stone motioned toward Eve, who was still standing inside the doorway. “You remember her at all?”
The General shook his head.
“You don’t remember her from the creek bend?”
“No.”
Stone stood up. He turned to Eve. “Well, now’s your chance,” he said, holding out his gun. “You can kill him. You can show me how it’s done.”
Eve stood there looking at Stone, tears welling into her eyes now. She kept shaking her head.
“You don’t want to?” he said. “You sure you don’t? Well, then I guess it’s up to me.”
Turning back to the General, he raised the gun and fired a bullet into the man’s chest. The s
hot was like a thunderclap in the room, an explosion that left Stone’s ears ringing as he followed Eve out of the room. She was already running down the hall, running nowhere, he knew, except away from him. But before he could go after her, more shots suddenly sounded downstairs—first the sharp pop of a pistol and then the rattle of Tocco’s Sten gun. Hurrying down the stairs and into the rec room, Stone found Tocco sitting in the middle of the floor with a worried pout on his face. He was digging at his checkered coat, and now he tried to unzip it, but failed. He put his arm out to brace himself and teetered onto his back.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Mother of God.”
Across from him, the black he had hit with the tire iron now lay on the floor next to the davenport, his hand cradling a twenty-two pistol, his face and shirt stitched with new wounds. Beyond him, near the fireplace, the other black from upstairs was on his hands and knees, bleeding colorlessly into the burgundy carpet. The others—the Chicano and the two black girls—appeared to be all right, as were Eddie and Annabelle and the junkman’s daughters, who were wrapped in sheets and hugging each other at the far end of the room. Annabelle, who had been with them, was slowly moving out across the room toward Tocco. She seemed mesmerized.
Eddie picked up the guns of Tocco and the black. “I guess he had it in the cushions,” he said to Stone. “He must’ve just come to a few minutes ago. He shot Paul, and Paul opened up.”
Stone got down on the floor with Tocco and Annabelle. “Where you hit?” he asked.
But Tocco could not answer. He was crying. Feebly he touched his chest. Unbuttoning his jacket and shirt, Stone found that the wound was not in his chest but farther down, between the bottom two ribs on his left side, where a skein of bright blood forked from a tiny hole.
Valhalla Page 28
