Metzger's Dog (14 page)

“Sorry,” said Mr. Bob. “No extortionist in the history of the world has ever left his payoff in the container you gave him. If they’ve already asked for the money, they already know where they’re putting it when they have it. No, this time it sounds as though the money isn’t the solution to your problem.” Mr. Bob nodded to them and walked out the door.

“Who’s next?” said Goldschmidt to the Director. “Sharpshooters or electronic surveillance or a team of specially trained midget commandos who will be dressed as fire hydrants?”

The Director’s jaw tightened and he sat quietly, as though in deep thought.

21
                  
Chinese Gordon stared up at the luminous pearl-blue of the sky. There would be no real clouds, just a low ceiling forming in the early afternoon. He looked around him at the hundreds of small, shining cars, all waxed and rubbed to gleaming hard surfaces like colored porcelain on the green grass.

Kepler pointed to the broad white banner strung between the two trees that flanked the pasture road. “I hate that. ‘Foreign Car Rallye.’ You can’t even say it, and if you could, you’d sound stupid. So every time you say what you can say, which is ‘rally,’ you feel tense about it.”

“Not so loud. What do you think? Is everybody ready?”

“Sure. The bags are ready, Immelmann and Margaret are ready. And you. You know what you look like? A motorist. That coat makes you look like the kind of person who would wear that hat.”

“Fine. Just be sure everybody here gets the standard issue.” He moved off a few feet and turned to Kepler. “It’s a pleasure to meet another motoring enthusiast such as yourself,” he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

On the other side of the broad green field Immelmann carefully wiped the thin film of dust off the hubcaps of Margaret’s Volkswagen. “There. It’s never looked so good.”

“It’s a little intimidated by the Porsches and Jaguars and BMW’s, I think,” Margaret said.

“There are at least a hundred Volkswagens here today. Don’t worry. It’s not a race, it’s more like a picnic. These people don’t notice your ride. They just want you to notice what their ride is and be impressed. They let anything in because it keeps the crowd young.”

“I suppose. I just wish it were over. This wig feels like it’s squeezing my brain.”

Immelmann glanced at his watch. “Soon.” He unlatched the trunk and stared at the horizon, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses. “If I can do it, I’m going to live like this.”

“You’re going to live in a state park?”

“This was Will Rogers’s ranch. That was his house up there on the rise. He used to pasture his horses down here. You have to imagine it with all these morons and their little cars gone, and maybe a dozen horses grazing here, nothing making any noise but the birds in that grove of eucalyptus along the road.”

“We’ll come and see you sometimes.”

“I hope you do. But you and Chinese are so much smarter than anybody else, I hope just winning this one quietly will be enough for you. I used to wonder about Chinese Gordon. Now I wonder about both of you.”

“You think we’re going to get caught, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “We’ll all know soon enough.” He shielded his eyes and stared up at the sky, then turned his head slightly to listen.

I
N THE CABIN OF THE
P
IPER
sat the young man who had stood guard at the door of the conference room in Langley. He wore a blue nylon jacket and baseball cap like the pilot’s, but his jacket was heavy with the radio receiver that fit better into his specially cut suits. The hat was new and too small for him, so he looked like a foreigner who had never worn one before. For the first time in twenty minutes he spoke. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“What doesn’t?” The pilot looked over at him, but he had the radio out again and he was pressing buttons on it and wincing at something coming through the earplug.

The young man bent over, peered at the map in his lap, and said, “It appears to be Will Rogers State Park. It’s full of people, cars.” He looked out the window at the scene far below. “There are lots of cars. Maybe a thousand, and crowds of people. It doesn’t make sense, sir.”

There was a long pause, then he said to the pilot, “All right. One pass over the park down there, just over the treetops, while I drop the bags. Then get up and out. They say everything is under control.”

T
HE MONOTONOUS, DISTANT HUMMING
of the airplane far overhead seemed to change in pitch as Immelmann watched the wings tilt for a bank. “They’re coming in for it, Sunshine. The main thing is to stick with the crowd until the second when they start the climb, then run like hell. They’re going to have to work at it to get out over the trees on the ridge, and that’s when we have to do whatever we’re going to do.”

In the center of the pasture near the table where officials of the Foreign Automobile Touring Club were preparing to hand out route maps, Kepler and Chinese Gordon had finished stacking the green trash bags. Chinese Gordon heard the airplane engine begin to idle for the slow descent, then set the sign atop the first pyramid—“Free Beer”—and quickly moved away through the crowd. Damn, it was too early, they’d have to scramble. He saw Kepler setting up the second sign, “Free Soft Drinks,” and heading in the opposite direction. At the pile under the trees he set up the third sign and moved up the hillside where he could see. The crowd was beginning to swirl inward already, the news beginning to ripple in all directions from the center. Seconds later, there were already competing eddies of people under the trees picking up the plastic trash bags, each containing a six-pack of cans. He could see another, smaller group near Margaret’s tiny yellow car. He stared across the pasture and caught a glimpse of Kepler being buffeted aside by several people who were taking up the green trash bags and trotting off toward their cars. He had gotten only as far on his sign as “Free” before the crowd converged. When the swirl of people parted for an instant, Kepler was gone.

Chinese Gordon stood beneath the trees and watched. The momentary frenzy had begun to die down already. People were walking with the plastic bags, some loaded with six or seven that they distributed to neighboring cars.

T
HE SOUND OF THE AIRPLANE ENGINE
was growing louder now, and he saw some of the people near him raise curious faces to the sky. Then the airplane appeared directly above him, still gliding toward the end of the green field marked by the white sheet with the blue painted “X,” the pilot idling his engine just high enough to reassure himself. The plane’s shadow crossed the pasture, and four dark spots plummeted to the ground, bounced once, and lay still. He saw Margaret and Immelmann step to the bags as the airplane soared over the trees on the ridge beyond the ranch house and momentarily swept from sight. Chinese Gordon smiled to himself as he watched them fade into the crowd.

The loudspeaker was blasting something he couldn’t understand into the hillside, which echoed it back. Then engines started. It sounded as though all over the field people were starting their engines. The engine noises seemed to reverberate and merge with one another and then grow into a loud, droning noise. Then Chinese Gordon stopped trying to understand, because as he watched, a second airplane swept over the field and wheeled at the far end for another dive, its engine roaring into the green basin as it searched the ground for its prey. A few seconds later a third airplane appeared, and then a fourth, each circling beyond the park and then coming back in a maneuver like a strafing run. Chinese Gordon knew he spoke aloud, but no human ear could have heard it if he had shouted. “I knew you’d try, you bastards.” Then he stepped aside because a small blue Fiat was already in gear and bouncing down the hillside toward him, its driver a girl with what seemed to be a pretty face but with eyes that didn’t seem to see him. She was staring toward the entrance to the pasture road behind him with a demented ferocity. She missed him by inches, then accelerated rapidly across the center of a blanket some picnickers had laid on the ground, narrowly edging out a Triumph TR6 for the privilege. Chinese Gordon sprinted for the safety of the trees, then hurdled a pile of fallen brush and ran through the tall weeds that skirted the field toward the distant grove where the van was parked.

“S
OMETHING’S WRONG DOWN THERE
,” said the pilot to the man beside him. “They’re all running for their cars. We must have stampeded them.”

“Look at them,” the other man shouted. “Everybody on the field is carrying a green sack.” The man’s baseball cap had fallen off, and he was yelling into his radio, “Get them. Move in. They’re getting ready to drive out.” He listened for a moment, then shouted, “All of them. Any of them.”

In the second airplane the photographer held his camera steady, his elbow propped against the door in the stance of an expert marksman, the camera clicking and whirring as the plane’s movement brought new targets into his sights. “What exactly is that down there?”

His companion said, “Damned if I know. It looks like they decided to have the Indianapolis Five Hundred in the woods. Just be sure to get everybody carrying a green sack.”

Immelmann said to Margaret, “This doesn’t feel like a good place to be. In a minute they’re going to figure out some way of closing off the road.” As he said it, the sound of horns honking in the distance reached them.

“Into the car,” said Margaret.

Immelmann sat beside her, his knees nearly to his chest as the car began to creep across the field among hundreds of others. An ancient Austin Healey sedan drifted beside them in somnolent dignity, the driver a tiny, elderly lady with blue-gray hair who held a stemmed wineglass in her free hand.

To their right a squadron of howling Porsches knifed across the green toward the right-hand margin of the dirt road, only to find their flanking movement blocked by a narrowing at the first turn. They crouched in a frustrated line beside the main stream of traffic, sputtering and growling, the lead car rolling backward a few feet and then rocking forward again, threatening to wedge its nose between two Mercedes convertibles if so much as a yard of space should appear between them.

In the distance other cars were driving the perimeter of the broad pasture, streaming contrails of dust. “I guess we did this wrong,” Immelmann said. “There just wasn’t any way of knowing when they’d start up.”

“Why did they?” said Margaret. “Where are they going?”

“I don’t know. The way it works is that they hand out the route map when you start, and write down your starting time. At each of the checkpoints along the route they write down the time you got there. It’s not a race. The idea is to be efficient, not fast. We don’t have the route because we didn’t register.”

“Have you seen anybody get out yet?”

“Not yet. They’re all just driving around or joining the traffic jam. We might be better off with the crowd. There doesn’t seem to be a service road or anything.”

“I’m not going out there with stolen license plates and all this money in the car. Make sure no mental defectives come up on our right.” She steered the car to the right, veering over quickly while Immelmann held his arm out the window. Behind them the driver of an orange Audi hesitated and let Margaret break through the line to drive straight for the stand of tall trees along the edge of the field.

Immelmann said, “Trees ahead, Sunshine. Hard to starboard.” He waited a few seconds and said a little louder, “Trees. Big ones.” At last he said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“The biggest trees. You said Will Rogers had horses, so that’s got to be the way out.” She drove relentlessly, the trees now looming above them like palisades.

“Horses don’t live in trees,” said Immelmann.

“No, but there have to be bridle paths, and that’s where they’ll be, where the trees were already big enough to have room between them, and the underbrush is stunted, and—” The car slowed, then labored up a small slope and in among the trees. It jiggled over a line of exposed roots, then jerked up and down violently a few times as she meandered among the tree trunks. Immelmann gripped the dashboard and the door, but as they turned and bumped over a rock that was hidden by a tuft of weeds his head hammered into the roof of the car. “Are you okay?” she asked.

His eyes were closed. She couldn’t tell if he was nodding or if his neck had gone limp. She stopped the car, and he opened his eyes and smiled.

“I said, ‘Are you okay?’”

“Better by the second. Stay here.” He got out of the car and ran through the woods, staring at the ground. For a time she could see him running from side to side like a football player dodging invisible tacklers. Suddenly he seemed to throw himself full length on the ground as though one of them had caught him, but then she noticed the root he’d tripped on. He got up and ran again, this time out of sight beyond the trees. Overhead Margaret could hear the airplanes again, louder now that she was far from the noise of the cars in the pasture.

She wondered if she’d made a mistake. Immelmann must know more than she did about horses and riding and—if only he hadn’t looked that way a moment ago, running off like a madman in the woods, with the airplanes up there, and who knew what else down here, searching. She shivered, suddenly aware of herself: Here I am. I know this woman sitting in the woods in a car, and I’m not somebody else watching her, and it’s not a dream I dreamed. I am in trouble. I may very well die in a few minutes. I may die. Why does it matter so much that I’m alone in this car when it happens?

Immelmann appeared beside her, and she jumped. A wave of heat seemed to slide down her spine, but she said, “Oh.”

“Follow me.” He started trotting again, and she put the car in gear and drove after him. At first she felt as though it really was a dream, watching his muscular back bobbing up and down as she drove. It was as though she were floating after him among the trees. After the first few turns her body wasn’t cold anymore, it was just hands and eyes gauging the space she had to weave along the meandering path, her touch on the wheel precise and accurate. Once she steered between two trees that nearly touched the fenders, but miraculously the car passed without scraping.

Finally they were through the woods, and Immelmann was standing in a clearing, waiting. She stopped the car and he got in and closed the door. “Driver, take me to the bank. Lots of room up there,” he said.

Margaret’s eyes followed his finger, and she drove toward the spot. It was a path, old and overgrown with weeds and grass, but now she could drive faster.

“Margaret, you’re a genius,” Immelmann said.