Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (31 page)

           
Now! my five triggers are together
at last, and now all they have to do is find the path I have cleared for them,
and the game is over.

           
I will miss them, Fm afraid, miss
all of it, miss the Earth and the humans and even contesting my will against
that fiend. The long doze of my life will be as comfortable in the future as it
has always been, I know that, and the joy of doing His service will remain
untarnished. But still, when I look back, from eons away, at this augenblick in
my existence, this speck of time, this brief instant of vivid color and vivid
emotion, I will remember it with fondness.

           
Susan Carrigan.

           
Well, yes. I have made a study of
this problem, while my players have been ricocheting toward one another, and I
have proved to my own satisfaction that Susan Carrigan is
nothing special
. There are millions of such young women scattered
over the globe, unmarried as yet, doing small things with clean neat fingers,
whether in banks like Susan, or in clothing mills, or in lawyer’s offices, or
in computer assembly plants, and they are
all
the same.

           
That’s the point. Such minor
differences as occur in the appearance of these young women is as momentous as,
to a human, the differences between two collies. Such shadings and gradations
of personality as they provide within their basic nature as wholehearted
servants are of even less moment. There is nothing to distinguish one from the
other.

           
The human males, of course, devote
much of their lives to discovering the minutiae of whatever differences do
exist in these young women, and make their lifetime choices on the basis of
such highly emotional and transitory distinctions as they profess to find. But
I am not a human male, though I have enjoyed playing at the part.

           
Susan Carrigan was the first of them
I met, that’s all. Nothing more.

           
I may drop in to see her again, once
or twice, while the plotters work out the planet’s destruction in the house in,
Stockbridge,
Massachusetts
, but that will mosdy be because I enjoy being Andy. Oh, well, I’ll miss
it all, and her, too. I’ve said as much.

           
Regardless, it won’t be long now.

           
Pami!

           
I found it, didn’t I? The center of
the scheme, the very cockroach nest of that servile fog, the cluster of god’s
dunces all in one place. And what a crew!

           
We have kept him under observation,
that blanched tool, that truckling toady. My winged allies, my fellow spirits
of the air, they have viewed him unseen as he has to’d-and-fro’d on his
lickspitde rounds. And why has he now caused a minor traffic incident to occur
to an automobile on a side road in
New York
State
? A blown-out tire, not very artfully
arranged; but he is not an artist, is he, that bumble-fingered marplot? No, no,
but no; truth doesn’t
need
artistry,
does it? (Thus the immemorial motto of the ham-handed.)

           
I had kept not far from Susan Carrigan,
which is to say, I had been keeping not far from murderous boredom. But when
the word came that heaven’s stooge had made this upstate incursion into the
quotidian, I fled from her—gratefully—and observed the two in the disabled car.
They could give me aesthetic pleasure on their own, of course—what fortitude,
in the face of what sorrow! hah!—but what did
he
want with them? Then the second car arrived, and
there was Pamil

           
Oh, HA HA HA! I’ve got them now! I
can destroy them at any instant, any instant at all. And once I discover Susan
Carrigan’s role in Armageddon, I
shall
destroy them. Not as lingeringly as they deserve, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my
best. I’ll give them as much attention as I can spare.

           
But not yet. Susan Carrigan is
somehow central, but is not present with this gallery of the agonized. Why not?
What is her role? Until I understand her function, I will not understand that
vaporous firefly's plot. I have to learn what he’s scheming before I can be
sure the scheme has been as permanently doused and trampled as a cookfire in
dry timber country.

           
I told you you could trust me. I
told you I would save you.

           
Frank carried Grigor into the house,
seating him in a soft armchair in the living room, where his view ranged from
the TV set on the left to the picture window and
Wilton Road
on the right. Kwan made his own way into
the house, and collapsed onto the sofa, breathing with his mouth open.

           
Maria Elena took Pami to the kitchen
to help put together some sort of dinner for everybody, but Pami knew nothing
about kitchens and preparing food; it was embarrassing for them both. So Pami
soon left and went back to the living room.

           
By the time Frank returned from the
ground-floor half-bath, where he’d been washing the tire-changing grime off his
hands, Pami and Grigor were deep in medical conversation and Kwan seemed to be
asleep, so he went off to the kitchen, where he found a beer in the
refrigerator, then sat at the kitchen table and watched Maria Elena work.

           
He had about forty thousand left,
out of the
East
St. Louis
money; almost a third gone already, on nothing at all. But it was an
easy way to live, not nervous, not hustling all the time, not just barely
scraping along. Frank hadn’t broken into a house or a store for almost a month
now, and he didn’t miss the experience a bit.

           
Mary Ann Kelleny’s advice came back
to him: don’t do constant litde hits all the time, exposing yourself to risk
over and over, but do it all at once, in one big major haul. The five-million-dollar
hit. Well, fifty-seven grand wasn’t exactly five million, but it showed the
principle was sound.

           
Sitting there at the kitchen table,
watching Maria Elena at her domestic work, Frank felt as though he was at some
sort of watershed moment of his life. Already he could see that this was the
place to turn himself back into a loner; Maria Elena would be happy to take
Pami and Kwan off his hands. She
liked
worrying
about fucked-up sick people, you could see that. Then from here, alone, Frank
could maybe drive on up to
Boston
, hole in somewhere, try to think about that five-million-dollar hit.

           
People pulled jobs like that in the
movies all the time, right? So what did they do, what kind of thing? Break into
Fort
Knox
. Steal
The
Love Boat
and hold it for ransom. All these make-believe capers pulled by
platoons
of good buddies, as
well-drilled as the Green Berets.

           
Is that what the five-mil hit is
supposed to look like? Then forget it, because it isn’t realistic. Unless
there’s five million dollars lying in a room somewhere that
one man
can get into and grab and get
out again, there’s no such thing as the five-mil hit. No such thing.

           
So what was realistic? If a man got
tired of exposing himself to the risks a hundred times a year for shit-poor
returns, what could he do instead? Where was there even a fifty-seven-grand
hit, three or four times a year? (Without any weak-hearted old man in it,
please.) Money isn’t cash any more, not usually, it’s electronic impulses
between banks, it’s charge cards and pieces of paper and phone calls.

           
Frank would leave all that stuff to
another generation to figure out how to loot; what he needed was tangibles.
Money, or for second best, jewelry. And the greater the concentration of money
or jewelry into one place, the tighter the security.

           
Maria Elena broke into Frank’s
thoughts when she put a bowl of carrots onto the table and said, “Excuse me.
Would you do these carrots?”

           
Frank looked at them, overflowing
the bowl, their long green fernlike tops still on, the carrots themselves large
and thick and hairy. He had no idea what she wanted from him. “Do?”

           
She put a wooden chopping block on
the table in front of him, with a small sharp knife and a scraper. “Cut the
ends off each one,” she said, “and scrape the skin off.”

           
“Well, I’ll try it,” Frank said.

           
She was amused by him, but in a
low-key way, as though she hadn’t known she could be amused by anything. Moving
back over toward the sink, she said, “Have you never had a wife to ask you to
do these things?”

           
“Never,” Frank told her. “And in
diners they pretty much do it themselves.”

           
“It is very easy to learn,” she
assured him.

           
“I’ll give it a whack,” Frank said,
and did just that, decapitating one of the carrots. The knife was good and
sharp. He nicked off the narrow end of the carrot, feeling pretty much on top
of this job, and then had a hell of a time getting the scraper to work. It kept
turning around on him, rubbing along the hairy skin of the carrot without
accomplishing anything. “Bugs Bunny eats it with the hair still on,” he pointed
out, but she ignored him.

           
Once he got the hang of the scraper,
Frank finished off the carrots with no trouble at all, and then Maria Elena
gave him a bowl of potatoes to work the scraper magic on. “I gotta have another
beer if it’s gonna go on like this,” he complained, and she brought him one.

           
Weird place to be. In the living
room, Pami and Grigor had turned on the TV, and the sounds of music and voices
came from there. The warm kitchen was beginning to smell very good. Frank sat
at the table, sipping his beer and peeling the potatoes. The
five-million-dollar hit, he thought. Where’s the five-million-dollar hit?

*
 
*
 
*

           
The dining room table seated twelve;
plenty of room to spread out. They ate roast lamb and two kinds of sausage and
boiled potatoes and three kinds of vegetables and a salad.

           
All except Kwan, that is. Since he
couldn’t swallow any solid food, Maria Elena had made for him various drinks in
the Cuisinart, giving him also a mixture of honey and warm water (known long
ago as melicrate) to help soothe his throat between sips of the other liquids.

           
Since Kwan was sitting with the
others, at their insistence, but couldn’t eat, Maria Elena gave him a pen and
yellow pad and pushed him to let them all know who and what he was. His despair
was such (he was trying to figure out how to die without interference from all
these unlikely do-gooders) that she had to press a lot, but finally he gave in
and wrote as few words as possible, sketching his brief history.

           
That’s how Frank learned he wasn’t a
Jap after all, but was a Chinese named Li Kwan. And Grigor, who was reading
Kwan’s notes aloud, suddenly recognized Kwan when
Tiananmen Square
was mentioned: “I saw your photo. With the,
the...” Frustrated, Grigor held his cupped hand in front of his mouth.

           
“Bullhorn”
Kwan wrote, and finished his biography, and went away to sit in the living
room, where they couldn’t question him any more.

           
They did come in with him later on,
but not to pester him. There was a general desire to watch the
eleven o’clock
news. Maria Elena closed the sliding drapes
over the living room’s picture window and the possible eyes of neighbors, they
all found places to sit, and the sound-bites of news started: litde digestible
chunks of events. A chunk from
Russia
, a chunk from
Washington
, a chunk from
Alaska
, a chunk from
Berlin
.

           
The first chunk after the first
commercial break was about the strike and demonstration at the Green Meadow III
Nuclear Power Plant. Pickets and police surged in a confused scrum, and a
yellow school bus with some difficulty made the turn and drove through the
gate. Within its windows could be seen embarrassed-looking middle-aged men and
women. Then the neutral, the lobotomized, the castrated off-camera voice told
the viewers that the plant was being kept on active status by managers and
supervisors, who kept a skeleton staff in the mostly automated plant
twenty-four hours a day. The disputed research continued, safely. Dutchess and
Columbia
county citizens were assured that power
outages would not occur.

           
“Outage,” Grigor said. “What a word
that is.”

           
“They are very good, officials,”
Maria Elena said, “at finding the words that put the people to sleep.”

           
“The people want to sleep,” Grigor
said, and Kwan nodded emphatically at him.

           
“I don’t care about that stuff,”
Frank said, unconsciously confirming Grigor’s point. “I just wanna make it
through
my
life.”

           
Pami said, “So do I.”

           
Repeating what he’d said to Maria
Elena the other day, Grigor nodded at the television set, which was now showing
an anti-racist demonstration in Brooklyn at which four pickpockets had been
arrested, and said, “I’d like to get into that plant, for just one day.”

           
Frank looked at him. “Why?”

           
“I’d play a joke,” Grigor answered,
with the same cold smile as when he’d said the same thing to Maria Elena.

           
“Big deal,” Frank said, not really
getting it. Nodding at the television set, as Grigor had, he said, “Easy to get
in there, if that’s what you want.”

           
Grigor shook his head. “How could it
be easy? They have such security. You saw it just now for yourself. Fences, and
guards, and television monitors. And there must be other things as well.”

           
Frank grinned; they were on his
subject now. “Grigor,” he said, “getting into places is what I
do.
That isn’t security there, that’s
Swiss cheese.”

           
Maria Elena said, “It doesn’t seem
that way to me.”

           
“There’s a dozen ways in,” Frank
said. “You saw the school bus?”

           
They’d all seen the school bus.

           
“On day number one,” Frank
explained, “you follow the school bus around. It’s picking up all those managers
and whatever they are at their houses, bringing them in. You take the night
shift,
midnight
or
whenever, and you follow it around. Day number two, you go to the last house on
the route and you wait. When the school bus comes by, you climb aboard, you show
everybody your MAC-11s, you—”

           
Maria Elena said, “I’m sorry, your
what?”

           
“It’s a gun,” Frank told her. “Not
my kinda thing, I don’t use guns, but this is just a for-instance. So, for
instance, you get on the bus, you show these guns, you say everybody just sit
nice and quiet. You get to that plant there, the security guards wave you right
through the gate. They
protea
your
route into the place.” Frank grinned. “My kinda security,” he said. But then he
shook his head and said to Grigor, “But what’s the point? You’re inside.
You
can play your joke, whatever that’s
supposed to mean. But what’s in it for the rest of us? There’s nothing in
there.” “Plutonium,” Grigor said.

           
“Yeah? What’ll a fence give me for
that?”

           
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” Then Grigor
smiled and said, “And I must admit, even with a gun in my hand, I doubt I’d be
very intimidating to all the people on that school bus.”

           
“So there you are,” Frank said.
“Now, you find me a
jewelry store
where you wanna do a joke, could be we’re in business.”

*
 
*
 
*

           
Exhaustion settled on Grigor and
Pami and Kwan after the news. Grigor would sleep on the living room sofa, as
originally planned, with Kwan on the living room floor on a pallet made of
cushions from the armchairs. Pami would sleep upstairs on the sofa in the den/sewing
room. Maria Elena would sleep in her own bed, and Frank in the next room in
Jack’s bed.