Absolute Rage (53 page)

“What're you doing?”

“It's an old Italian custom. It takes the curse off blood money.”

“I asked you when you're gonna do it. I'm thinking I need to fix me up with an alibi for the time.”

Squeal of tires. A car pulled up alongside on the left, the right-hand door flew open, a big dark man in a suit slid into the seat beside Weames. He felt queasy fear. A face appeared in the window next to him. Mr. Schaeffer swiveled around in his seat and pressed the button that rolled down the rear window.

Karp said, “Hello, Lester. How about moving over and letting me sit down?”

The big dark man put an arm around Weames's shoulders and jerked him across the seat. Karp got in. Mr. Schaeffer was grinning and showing a gold NYPD detective's badge.

Karp said, “Lester, this is Detective Cicciola of the New York police. He's going to arrest you for conspiracy to commit murder, which is a major league felony in the state of New York.”

“This is entrapment.”

“Oh my, Lester, you've been watchin' too many crummy TV crime shows. When a scumbag like you is ‘ready,' ‘poised,' ‘wanting,' and ‘predisposed' to engage in the criminal activity, entrapment goes out the window. Lester, we got you on tape. You're goin' down as big time as it gets for the Heeney slaughter and the Floyd attempt. While you're in custody, I wouldn't be surprised if the state of West Virginia attempted to extradite you for ordering the murder of the Heeney family. What I can assure you of is that the New York district attorney's office will make no objection to that extradition.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“And you shall have one, my murderous little hick,” said Karp, “but it will not do you much good.”

T
RAN ENTERED THE STRONG ROOM
. He was carrying a steel bowl with a cover and a pair of chopsticks on it and a steel mess-kit mug from which steam rose. The aroma from the bowl reached Lucy. She felt liquid rush into her mouth and her belly quivered. Tran placed the things on the floor, then removed the cover from the bowl.

“
Pho.
And tea.”

“Thank you.” She picked up a sliver of meat with the chopsticks. “Not dog, I hope.”

“No, it's dried beef. I recalled that you did not care for dog.”

Lucy was already slurping away at the
pho.
Between bites she asked, “How is your war going?”

“Well. There are about twenty-five of them on a little knob in front of their settlement. A stupid position and easily outflanked. When night falls, we will have them.” A pause. “I assume you have the information we require. I could not help noticing that our prisoner is gone.”

“Yes. You planned that, didn't you?”

“I thought it was a reasonable assumption that you would act as you did. You are a clever child. I hope I didn't terrify you too much.”

“You did. You still terrify me. And you really would have tortured it out of him?”

“Of course, or Freddy would have. But having been tortured, I find I have lost my taste for it. In others, you know, the same experience heightens the taste. I am glad not to have to do it.”

“What will happen now?” she asked in a tone that suggested she didn't much care.

“Tonight we will do our operation, return here, and go through the tunnels with our prizes. A truck will be waiting. You should not be here when we return.”

“Because you might be killed.”

“Yes. Freddy will certainly kill you if you remain. He will almost certainly try to kill me, and therefore I must arrange that this doesn't happen.”

“You'll kill him.”

“Not I. Someone else. Someone he believes has been suborned, but has not. It is quite complex and boring. We Vietnamese! In any case, you will not observe the last charge of the 614th Battalion of the National Liberation Front's popular forces. We were five hundred and fifty in 1965. Ten survived the war's end, of whom four are here with me today.” He stood up. “I will look in on you before we depart. There is a guard at the door. No one will disturb you for the next few hours.”

He waited for a moment, as if expecting some comment. She was, however, silent, and he left.

She drank the tea. It grew dark outside, and darker still inside. She loved him and he was a devil. What did that make her? She rocked back and forth with the pain of it. Her brother was probably dead by now, or a vegetable. There was no help in this world or out of it. She fell to the floor, arms outstretched, face against the dusty, splintered planks. Priests lie this way when they are ordained, but she was not thinking of that. Her head hurt, a nauseous pounding behind her eyes. She pressed her forehead against the floorboards, as if she could press clear through the wood, down to the earth, down to its hot bowels and be lost. There was no time, no light, the universe was nothing, deep stupidity, suffering, meaningless death, forever.

“Help me,” a small voice said to nothing. Lucy was surprised to find that it was her own voice. “Help me,” she said again. After that, silence, the blood in her ears, pain.

An odor touched her nostrils, cutting through the dry-wood and dust smell of the boards. Roses, heavy and sweet, and something sharper. Roses and onions.

Lucy lifted her head, groaning. She saw a woman dressed in dark robes, with a white wool coif around her face, sitting on a chair. She was cutting pieces from an onion with a small knife and eating them. The woman looked uncannily like her mother—dark, large, luminous eyes, thick brows, a straight, perfect nose, the mouth full and sensuous. The skin of her face was smooth and fine like her mother's; unlike hers, it was adorned with three small moles.

“You're a hallucination. Go away.” Lucy said this in Spanish.

“If I am, then you are mad,” said the woman in the same language, with a thick Castilian lisp. “Do you feel mad otherwise?”

“I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.”

“So you claim. In the meantime, you are performing works of mercy at the risk of your own life. That is the behavior of a good Christian, not a maniac.”

“Why are you eating an onion? I didn't know they ate onions in heaven.”

“There is much about heaven of which you are unaware, child. Although you are as full of pride as Lucifer, at least you haven't claimed that.”

“I'm not proud. I'm miserable.”

“That is one of the worst forms of pride. I know it very well.”

“Permit me to doubt that,” said Lucy. “You're a saint. God spoke to you every day.”

“He speaks to everyone every day, but only those who listen hear. Now you will listen to me, you silly girl, since you still seem to require these hallucinations as you call them. Our Lord has allowed you, of His grace, to suffer some tiny part of what He suffered, as much as a single tear is to the whole ocean. And what do you do? You cry, you pout, you complain, you have the affrontery to throw back in his face the gifts He has deigned to bestow on you. And why? Your brother is hurt? He will live or die according to His will, blessed be His name. Are you the keeper of heaven, to bar the way when He calls a soul to Him? Ten thousand times you have prayed, ‘Thy will be done.' Was that a lie? Did you mean, Thy will be done as long as it is pleasant for me? Don't you know you must give thanks for your afflictions as well as for your graces?
More
thanks, to tell the truth. If he lives, rejoice. If he dies, mourn. Such is the life of us below. You speak of saints; what can you possibly comprehend of how the saints suffer? You know, at one time I was in danger of being called before the Inquisition, and I found this amusing, because nothing they could have done to me with their racks and red-hot pincers could equal what our Lord laid upon this poor body, out of His mercy. Many times I twitched like a crushed worm on the floor of my cell, my head bursting, my entrails all afire, praying myself hoarse for an end to the agony, and there was nothing, nothing answered. You know what I mean now, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I was in such a state, lying in a pool of my own tears and filth, when His Majesty came to me for the first time. So what is the lesson? He waits for us in the darkness; there we seek Him. The light, if it comes, is a pure gift, and we cannot summon it, however we may try. Kings are not summoned, my girl, although you imagined in your infernal pride that it was so. Now you have learned something, and you feel like you have been flayed. It won't be the last time, I can assure you.”

The woman leaned forward in her chair, leaned and came much closer to Lucy than the geometries of ordinary space and matter would normally allow. She dropped her onion in Lucy's hand.

“Consider the onion, my dear. Its many layers. And when the layers have all been peeled away, what?”

The woman was gone. The onion sat in Lucy's hand, cool, weighty, pungent.

She heard the door swing violently open; Tran burst into the room, pointing his Skorpion.

“I heard voices,” he said, peering into the dark corners. “Two voices. Who were you talking to?”

“Teresa de Alhuma.”

“Who?”

“Teresa of Jesus, of Avila, saint, Doctor of the Church. Don't worry, she died in 1582.”

“Hm. I should have known, this being you. My little sister used to talk to our grandmother's ghost and swore to me that she talked back. I never heard it myself, but my sister was otherwise never known to lie. Hien was her name.”

“Your sister's?”

“Both of them were called Hien.”

“What happened to her? Your sister.”

“She became a Buddhist nun. She immolated herself in front of the American embassy in Saigon, in 1966. We are going out now. Wait until we are gone and then leave the way you came. I will arrange for the power to be left on. The elevator is easy to operate. Your flashlight is outside this door.” He dropped down on his haunches next to her, squatting in the easy Asian way. He was dressed in black cotton, with a floppy black hat, bandoliers of magazines across his chest, and a pair of big Zeiss night glasses around his neck. It was what he must have looked like during the war, she thought.

He said, “If it should happen that I perish, I would like you to do me one last service. It is ridiculous, I know, but I find that it still gives me comfort. I would like you to collect my bones and deposit them at Tan My. It is our ancestral village, just a little south of Saigon, near the river. Mrs. Diem has the details and will contact you at need, if you are willing, that is.”

“Of course.” They both stood. He kissed her on both cheeks; she hugged him, smelling her childhood in his scent, her own wolf.

“What power you have, my dear,” he said, “to make me feel even for a few moments like a human being again. It is almost better than opium. I am truly grateful. Good-bye.”

“God bless you, Uncle,” she called after him. She sat on the chair, her mind quite blank. But the crushing despair was gone, too. The world was flowing again with all its horror and beauty. She sniffed at her fingers. Onions.

*  *  *

“How's your siege coming along?” Karp asked.

“Hell, it ain't my siege, it's the damn FBI's siege now,” said Hendricks. “I'm lucky they give me the time of day.”

“But you don't expect it to be over anytime soon?”

“I would doubt that, unless they come up with a new plan.”

The two men were in the back of a state police vehicle, returning from the Charleston airport. Night was closing in; the driver had switched on his lights. They had seen Weames booked and jailed in Manhattan, and Karp had made the calls that would grease the extradition process. If Weames had a good delaying lawyer, and he would, the process might take weeks. Karp didn't care, as long as the mutt stayed behind bars. Maybe the word would get around Rikers that he'd had a little girl killed. That would be of more than sociological interest to Lester.

“One thing that they can't figure out is the Chinamen,” Hendricks was saying.

“Come again?”

“The Chinamen, or some kind of oriental fellas. Morrisey's been sending a chopper over the mountain pretty regular to take film, and he's got a couple of guys in black clothes, orientals, running for cover. He said it looked like something out of an old Vietnam news show. He asked me if there was any Asian gang activity in the area, and I told him that besides the Chinese restaurants in Charleston, I didn't think we
had
any Asians in this part of the world.”

“Oh, fuck!” said Karp. “That
stupid
woman!”

“How's that?”

“Wade, we need to go to the FBI command post,” said Karp. “Right now.”

“The command post? You mind telling me why?”

“They're not Chinese. I think they're Viets, and I think my wife arranged for them to be there. Could you tell him to step on it, please?”

They made good time until they hit the access road up the mountain, after which it was a slow crawl through herds of media. Huge vans sat in cornfields and on the shoulder, beaming nothing much to an anxious world. Searchlights probed the passing police car. Karp was recognized, of course, and the car was pursued by newsies holding cameras, mikes, tape recorders. How's Giancarlo? they screamed. Is he dead, is he talking,
how do you feel?

The FBI command post was in a forty-foot-long mobile home, squashing a lot of young corn, surrounded by generator trucks, pole lights, and enough antennae and electronics to launch the space shuttle. Ahead, on the road proper, an army-green armored bulldozer was making slow progress clearing boulders off the road.

Morrisey was not pleased to see them, and less so when he heard Karp's theory.

“That's crazy,” he said authoritatively. “Your
wife
sent in a team of Vietnamese gangsters for revenge against the Cades? How the hell did they get in there? On little fairy wings? That whole mountain is sealed up tight as a bank vault.”