Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (42 page)

           
HAAA HA HA HA HA!

           
HA HAAAAAAAAAA! Oh, HA HA HA HA HA
HA HA! Come into my arms! Come into my arms! Come into my arms! I have
saved
you, my darlings, come into my
arms, let us dance!

           
How we’ll dance.

           
They walked through the parkland,
silent at first, separate at first, just happening to walk more or less
together in the same direction. They went for five minutes up the long gradual
slope, past ornamental shrubs, specimen trees, small neat groves. A slight
breeze rusded through leaves and pine needles above their heads. Birdsong
established territory, called like to like, praised insects and worms.

           
They reached the top of a long
ridge, and started down the other side, just as gradual, just as neady cared
for. After a minute, Maria Elena stopped and looked back and said, “You can’t
see it any more.”

           
Frank turned and it was true; the
slope blocked all view of the plant. “Good,” he said. “Ugly thing anyway.”

           
Turning in a slow circle, Maria
Elena said, “You can’t see anything from here, except that radio tower. Nothing
else human. No buildings, nothing.”

           
“Pretty good,” Frank agreed. The air
smelled sweet, like fresh corn you bring home from a farmstand.

           
“It’s like the beginning of the
world,” Maria Elena said.

           
Suddenly remembering, Frank said,
“Listen, Maria, it’ll be the
end
of
the world for us if we don’t get to that fence pretty soon.”

           
“Yes, of course.”

           
She reached out her hand, and he
took it, and they started walking again, picking up the pace. Soon, Maria Elena
began to sing, in a clear strong voice, to the rhythm of their walking, the
melody rising up into the trees, spreading out over the shaggy park all around
them.

           
“Nice,” Frank said, as she smiled at
him and went on singing. He didn’t understand the words, they were in some
foreign language, but he understood the song.

           
Ahead, the fence.

           
The car was not there when Frank and
Maria Elena reached the county road. My powers had been removed from me by
then. But I’d already distracted the national guardsmen, so they made their
escape anyway, in the five hours before Grigor collapsed in the control section
and Philpott phoned for assistance.

           
Frank’s and Maria Elena’s
fingerprints were not found among those brought up by the police technicians in
the control section and the lab. The various witnesses’ descriptions of the two
missing terrorists were so confused, with so many uncertainties and
contradictions, as to be useless. When Kwan died in the hospital the day after
the siege ended, and Grigor followed two days later, neither having given a
statement, the last link to the missing terrorists was broken.

           
At home in Stockbridge, once she and
Frank had made their way there, Maria Elena found on her answering machine a
message from the local police. Fearing the worst, and with Frank already
packing, she telephoned and was told that her husband, John, had been fatally
shot two days before by a distraught woman named Kate Monroe, with whom he had
apparendy at one time had a relationship, but which he had recently ended. (I
didn’t do that; it was Kate’s idea.) John’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar
insurance policy paid double indemnity; not the five-mil hit, but enough to
keep Frank out of trouble.

           
Frank did spend one long frustrating
day trying to find Mary Ann Kelleny’s business card, which seemed to have
disappeared from his wallet. (While he was talking to her on the phone, in
fact.) Then he tried to find a lawyer named Mary Ann Kelleny through
Omaha
directory assistance. Then he gave it up.
(You must understand, by then I had neither the time nor the inclination to try
to cover my tracks. I simply had to get the job undone, and fast.)

           
Susan and I hurtle through our days.
It doesn’t seem to her that time literally flies, but I
know
it does.

           
Ah, but how I’m enjoying this brief
life! And how bittersweet that paradox: the more you enjoy it, the faster it’s
gone.

           
I don’t know what’s happening
otherwise; I mean with
His
plan. I
might as well have always been human; except for the trailing tendrils of my
scheme as it unraveled, I have no access at all, no link to that other sphere
except my memories.

           
I wonder sometimes if my defection
might have piqued His interest, might have made Him a little less bored with
this particular Lego set, so that He will decide to keep it around a little
longer. If not, there is undoubtedly another of my former fellows afoot in the
land right now, gathering his people, planning his strategy. One chosen more
carefully, one less sentimental and susceptible than I.

           
Is that messenger, that effectuator,
unlikely to find another group who can stand in for us all
—us
all!—and who can be brought to believe that the end of everyone
is the best solution to their own problems? Are there no disaffected people in
this world?

           
And will the new holy one not find
another catalyst, something perhaps to reduce the globe not to a ball bearing
but to a burned-out clinker, endlessly revolving around the sun? Are there not
yet great destructive forces to be found?

           
I don’t know. I cannot say for sure
what will happen, or what might happen, or when. I only know this: He doesn’t
give up easily.