Serpents in the Cold (22 page)

_________________________

Carney Hospital, Boston

DANTE SAT ON
a bench in the hallway outside Cal's room and vacantly watched nurses and doctors passing on their rounds. He went to light a cigarette and then realized that there was one already hanging unlit between his lips. He shook his head and slipped the other cigarette between his fingers back into the pack. He lit a match and watched the flame and felt that same sense of guilt all over again. He held the flame, and the tobacco blazed a pulsating ember as he inhaled with small, staggered breaths.

A hand came down upon his shoulder, squeezed gently. He looked up at Lynne, wearing her nurse's uniform. It was the first time he'd seen her in it, and she looked authoritative in the crisp, well-ironed white, her blue eyes radiant despite the flesh around them appearing swollen, as if she'd gone without sleep.

“You doing better than him, I hope?” She smiled, but it was clear she was tired and the smile disappeared.

“I'm trying my best, Lynne.”

“Well, you should try harder. Haven't seen you since summer, and you look like you'd barely push one hundred and forty on the scale.”

Dante smiled, sucked on his cigarette. “It's all part of the jazz diet. Strictly cigarettes and gin.”

“Yeah, and that other stuff.”

Dante turned his eyes away from her and glanced down the corridor.

“I'm a nurse, Dante, and I've seen it all. I can tell when somebody is strung out as opposed to hungover.”

I'm not strung out, he wanted to say, but his voice broke, and she sat down beside him on the black bench. An intercom cackled with static, clicked and clicked, but no voice came through. The squealing roll of a wheelchair carried down the connecting corridor.

“Will he be all right?” he asked.

“He'll be all right,” she said without emotion.

Dante let the cigarette smolder between his fingers, scratched at the stubble on his cheek. The lighted end of the cigarette came dangerously close to his eye. There was silence, and the hospital hallway was suddenly still. The hairs on his neck stood. It was a similar sensation to somebody whispering in his ear, like Margo did so many times when she had woken up before him, beckoning him from sleep with a soft kiss to his cheek, his temple.

Lynne shifted on the bench and sighed. “It's time I got back to my shift,” she said. “You check in on him one more time for me, and then go get yourself some rest.”

He nodded but couldn't look her in the eye. If he did, he'd be able to see contempt, or worse. She blamed him for Cal's beating.

He watched as she walked down the hallway, and when she turned the corner, he noticed the sunlight coming through the high windows and dissolving over the linoleum tiles that had just been waxed this morning, illuminating them to an almost liquid appearance.

His cigarette done, he stood up from the wooden bench and walked into the room where the blinds were drawn and a lone lamp by the bed was turned on, giving that part of the room a comforting glow. He sat in a chair by the bed and watched Cal as he slept, glanced over his still body covered in a wool blanket, and to the bandages that seemed to hold his face together.

He lit another cigarette and spoke through the gray smoke that carried in a stream from his nostrils. “We're going to get those fuckers. This ain't the end of it.”

The threat felt empty to him, so he repeated it word for word, but still without true conviction, and the words fell flat and blew away with the smoke billowing in the room. Beyond the drawn blinds there was the sound of ice pelting the glass, and he felt a chill in his bones and a tightening in his throat. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “I promise.”

_________________________

Adams Street, Lower Mills

SEVENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD PATRICK
Burgess, out for his early morning walk, and attempting to slow his heart, which banged painfully against his chest as he labored for breath in the chill air, stopped on the Adams Street Bridge in the Lower Mills section of Dorchester. He leaned over the latticed iron railings of the Baker Dam, stared out at the narrow, twisting Neponset River which wound its way through the divide between factories and homes, cascaded in a steaming froth over the low weir supplying power to the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory mill. As he worked at slowing his heart, there came a white cloud of smoke billowing from the massive orange brick chimneys of the factory, and on that smoke, a startling yeasty smell and the acrid odor of burnt cacao beans. He blinked at the chalk-colored chimneys of Diamond Chemicals & Plastics on the shallow, farther shore, and saw something caught down on the ice about twenty feet beyond the falls. Something half in and half out of the water and misshapen through the peripatetic light cast by the mist and steaming spray of the river.

After a moment of staring, Patrick realized that he was looking at what might be a person, and when he descended the stairway to the dam and crossed the wooden footbridge to get a closer look, he saw it fully: a pale, perhaps once heavily muscled torso, crude sailor's ink on both biceps. The body was bloated and swollen, a strange disjointedness to the limbs, and beneath the crushed skull a head of orange-red hair. Without these male features the thing before him might have been a man or a woman, for it had no face.

He lurched back across the footbridge, clambered up the narrow, frozen staircase to the bridge, and frantically looked about him. At this time of the morning the streets were mostly empty; a car crossed the intersection of Washington Street and was gone. Then the dreamlike sight of the number 34 bus shuddering down the hill toward Ashmont, its vacant interior illuminated by amber light, and the lone driver at the wheel staring ahead into an overcast dawn emerging above the rooftops, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, and Patrick clutched at his chest and rushed into the street to wave him down.

_________________________

Carney Hospital, Boston

EVEN IN THE
blackness there seemed to be swirling movement. Cal's eyes rolled beneath his closed eyelids, and his body twitched as if in some intense struggle. He was in the Hürtgen Forest again, and he could feel the cold, deep in his bones and so numbing he wished only to sleep. He tried to move but his limbs were too heavy.

The soldier—he looked no more than seventeen—was caught on the barbed wire and pleading with him to shoot. Heavy German voices came through the sharp-smelling cordite fog to them, then their gray shapes moving ghostlike through the mist, and the boy's eyes widened in fear. Cal raised the gun, raised it to the boy's temple, stared into his eyes.

“Kill me,” the boy said. “Please, fucking kill me, fucking kill—” and Cal pulled the trigger and shot the boy in the head. His head rocked backward as the bullet, in a spatter of gore and bone shards, exited the rear of his skull, and then his body fell forward onto the barbed wire, swayed, and then, after a moment, was still.

This was what he dreamed at times—only he hadn't shot the boy.

Instead he'd thrown himself to the ground and buried himself among the bodies of his dead comrades when the first advance cleared the fog. He watched as two Germans came and the boy hollered out, writhing and struggling, twisting frantically as the soldiers leveled their bayonets, and then screaming as they began taking turns spearing him, gutting him. Cal dug himself into the trenches of dead bodies that lay in parts across the frozen forest floor, tried to still his breath, tried not to scream, and pulling one of the corpses over himself, he waited.

He could feel the fading warmth of those bodies all around him, and with that warmth came the knowledge of how recently they had died, but time was lost here and minutes felt like hours. It seemed the boy's screams lasted forever, and Cal was never sure when they had ended, if perhaps he was only playing the boy's single scream over and over again in his mind, for long after he knew the boy must be dead, the screams continued like an echo reverberating in his ears. He couldn't breathe under all these dead bodies—they would suffocate him if he were to remain—but he also knew that to climb from beneath them would mean those same bayonets would find him. He tried to calm his breathing and listen to the sounds of the soldiers who were now talking to one another. He could feel the bodies shifting and tremoring with each bayonet thrust into them and then withdrawn. They were coming closer.

The bodies stirred around him, shifting as bayonets struck bone, hooked intestines and organs, and lifted them. He could hear the German soldiers using their feet to pry the bayonets free. They were directly above him. He opened his eyes briefly and looked into the face of a corpse: pale eyes staring from their sockets, lips pulled back from yellowed gums and frozen so that the man appeared to be leering at him.

Cal closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. He raised his sleeve to his mouth and bit down on the heavy wool. He could take a bayonet; as long as it missed his vital organs, he might live. The German voices were louder, garbled words that in some strange way he felt he understood.

The corpse above him shook and was still, shook and was still. A soldier at some distance called out and a voice sounded loudly above him, and then the corpse to his right jerked. His mouth had eased its clamp upon his coat when suddenly the bayonet speared soft flesh on the inside of his hip. He bit down as the knife twisted in his muscle, felt tendon and sinew exiting the wound as the knife was withdrawn. Warm blood came up over his groin and flowed down his pant leg. His breathing came in ragged gasps and he knew that if they speared him again, he would die.

A bayonet ripped into his thigh again and he howled madly in his head. Blood filled his mouth from where he bit into his sleeve. Pain and darkness were pressing down on him, and he knew that he must fight to stay awake. In this glimmering half consciousness his eyelids fluttered, and he opened and closed his eyes, and into this flickering space came the leering face of the dead soldier lying prostrate beside him.

He heard the voices move farther away, and in that moment thought of what would come next: Panzers bulldozing the clearing, rolling across the fight zone, giant tracks crushing the frozen dead beneath them. When he tried to move, kicking and pushing himself up through the bodies around him, burning pain shot through his hip and leg, but he rose steadily nonetheless, pushing and pulling himself to the top.

He eased his head between two bodies and tried to catch his breath. A thick gray-white fog rolled over the corpses, hid the tree line from view. Through the mist he could see the back of the soldier who had speared him. The others were spread a few yards apart from one another and had already advanced much farther, barely visible through the haze. He began to pull himself toward what he thought would be the tree line, and stopped. Another company of soldiers were coming, treading their way around blast craters and bodies and toward the line of barbed wire on which the dead soldier hung.

Cal remained still and through slitted eyes watched their advance. They moved deliberately, scanning the trees, giving only an occasional glance at the bodies strewn across the ground. The mist was separating them, elongating their shapes as they moved past. He had to stem the bleeding and make some type of tourniquet if he was going to live. He had to get to the tree line. He reached down to his waist and, with difficulty, withdrew his bayonet from its scabbard. He began to move again, crawling over corpses and parts of corpses, pausing every now and again and remaining still, hoping that in the mist he would not be detected.

But now someone else was coming. He heard a loud voice, a sudden exclamation of surprise, and a soldier was making his way back to the wire, treading slowly with his gun raised. Cal lay on his side, pressed into the body of a man who no longer had a face. The soldier swept his gun through the mist before him. There was a moment when Cal heard nothing, as if the solider had turned and moved away, but then there was the sound of splintering ice and a black boot came down a foot from Cal's ear. Cal breathed slow and deep, tightened his grip upon the bayonet. The soldier took a step forward and Cal lunged up from between the corpses, grabbed for the back of the soldier's head. His right hand found the man's mouth as he drove the bayonet up into the man's lower spine, and as his leg and hip gave out on him, his weight pulled the soldier back to the ground. The man lost his hold on his gun and flailed with his arms, scrabbled at his back frantically. Cal held him there in that strange, intimate embrace, hand clasped to his mouth, pushing the bayonet with all his force deeper into the man until his strength began to ebb and finally the soldier's struggles ended. Cal felt the man's last hot breath exhale upon his hand, and then his arms fell to the side. Cal lay beneath the body, breathing deeply, and soon got up enough strength to rotate and push to the side, where it rolled off him.

It began to snow again, soft thick flakes spilling out of the dark sky above. When he looked up into the sky, the sight of the snow mesmerized him. It was like looking though the windshield of his father's car when he was young, the many nights he'd sat in the front seat of his father's beat-up Chrysler, bent for warmth against the heating vent as a snowstorm came down, and accompanied his father to the union hall and to union rallies during the winter. He thought of that heat now, and felt sleepy and strangely content. He could smell his father's tobacco which filled the small space of the car, the pleasant odor of pomade in his freshly combed black hair, and his cologne, which he'd put on after he showered and shaved. His father was talking to him in that deep-timbred accent, a voice that was soothing and yet somehow violent at the same time. He couldn't make out what he was saying but it seemed to have something to do with his mother. The snow was rushing down from the sky into the headlights, and his father squinted at the glass, sucking on his cigarette intensely. The wipers made their squeaking sound as they moved back and forth, staggering across the glass, and it was as if he and his father were alone in the world, lost in the streets of Boston and the snow and the dark.

He didn't know how much time had passed. Snow had dusted the German soldier's body; it covered the corpses that lay about them. He had to move again, do something. He felt blood dripping around his waist and down into his crotch. He stared up into the sky and blinked. Everything was becoming blurry and indistinct. He reached into his jacket's front pocket, hands stiff and barely working, and struggled with the small packet to pop out two morphine capsules into his bloodied palm. Once he got them down his dry throat, he lay there staring up at the sky, at the snowflakes falling into his eyes.

The sound of gunfire and explosions echoed deep in the forest. Flares ignited the corners of the sky. The war was starting up again. The pain began to ebb, like little candle flames extinguished one by one in the dark cave of his skull. What warmth he'd felt had left his body, and time passed and the morphine took him away and the snow covered him and he knew that he would soon be dead.

THE EARLY LIGHT
of dawn came through the window sharp and bright, reflecting off the snow that had fallen again in the night. Wind pounded against the windowpanes. A receptionist was barking though the intercom for a doctor, and for a long while as Cal felt the sheets about him, hearing the hospital bed creak and whine as he moved, he couldn't distinguish if it was English or French the nurse spoke, and in a perplexed moment he thought that he had awoken in the French hospital again, and that he could feel the bayonet in his upper thigh, the frostbite upon his fingers and toes where they'd turned almost completely black.

Dante was sitting in a chair by the door looking haggard, his eyes sunken and sleepless, the black of his unshaven face stark against his pale skin. He was staring at him, a cigarette smoldering from between his fingers. His voice moved toward him through the smoke.

“They found the Butcher,” he said.

“What?”

“Scarletti. They found him.”

Cal shook his head in a confused manner, his eyes still adjusting to the dueling contrast of the bright light from outside and the dark shadows that gathered by the corners of the room. “Where?”

“He's here, on the third floor. They brought him in this morning. I guess he's in bad shape. I met Owen in the lobby and he told me.”

Cal pushed the blanket and sheet off his body, grasped for the bed rail so that the iron bed frame shook with a sudden, loud tremor.

Dante put out his hand, palm up, and moved forward off the chair. “You're not going anywhere.”

“He's that bad?” Cal eased himself into an upright position, inched his way down the length of the mattress. His bare legs dangled over the edge of the bed. He pressed his feet against the floor and grimaced, used the bed rail to hoist himself up, the tendons in his forearms and neck strung rigid with the effort. He pushed his feet into slippers, yanked his arms into a robe, fumbled with the ties at its front. He was already breathing hard.

Dante shook his head, mashed his cigarette out in the ashtray stand by the door, then stepped out into the hall. A moment later the door opened and he rolled a wheelchair into the room.

“What the fuck's that for?”

“For Christ's sake, just get in,” Dante muttered. “It'll be easier on the both of us.”

THE BUTCHER'S ROOM
was on the far side of the ward, the full length of the building and through a double door to a registration desk and then a dozen rooms beyond. Dante pushed the wheelchair slowly, giving the appearance of a fatigued family member suffering from both a certain kind of grief and helplessness, but when Cal tried to take control of the wheels and propel himself forward so that they might move more quickly, Dante swore under his breath, leaned over, and pushed his hand away.

Nurses and attendants bustled past, oblivious to them. Here and there a nun walked by, white face pulled taut by a white wimple. From one room a priest stepped out slowly, pulling a stole wearily from his neck. The door to the room remained partly open, and as they passed, they could see a family huddled at the end of a bed, heads bowed down in either mourning or prayer. From another room came a startling phlegm-choked wail, and a young rusty-haired attendant rushed from the nurses' station. The head nurse sat rigid, unmoving at the registration desk, and as they passed her, in machinelike fashion, she picked up the telephone ringing shrilly on the desk before her.

“Owen said it was room three thirty-seven, second to last, at the very end.”

They turned into the corridor, and at the end of the hallway Owen stood at the door to room 337 talking with Giordano and a young, pale-faced uniform to their right, trying to look purposeful and austere.

Inwardly Cal groaned; he'd been waiting for this but wasn't ready for it now. He straightened in the wheelchair and lifted his head, though it hurt to do so. The sound of his wheelchair turned their heads. Frowning, Giordano looked from Dante to Cal and his eyes paused; it took him a while to recognize him, thanks to Blackie's fists, but he must have heard what had happened. A smile came to his face.

Giordano had never been a lean man, but he had put on weight since Cal had seen him last. He wore an expensive pin-striped Italian suit beneath an overcoat that reached his ankles, to flaunt, Cal supposed, his new rank and to make him look slimmer.

“O'Brien,” he said grinning, and his jowls quivered. “I almost didn't recognize you. Jesus, look at your face. What've you been eating? Bad pussy?” His smile grew wider; his face had the flush of constant exertion particular to the obese.

“You've always been a class act, Giordano.”

“You ain't so tough now, though, are you?”