Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 38

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 k.n.o.b in front of their settlement. A stupid position and easily outflanked. When night falls, we will have them." A pause. "I a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumption 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. G.o.d 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sure you."

The woman leaned forward in her chair, leaned and came much closer to Lucy than the geometries of ordinary s.p.a.ce 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 emba.s.sy 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 gla.s.ses 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."

"G.o.d bless you, Uncle," she called after him. She sat on the chair, her mind quite blank. But the crus.h.i.+ng 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.

"h.e.l.l, it ain't my siege, it's the d.a.m.n 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. Morissey'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, f.u.c.k!" 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 pa.s.sing 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, squas.h.i.+ng a lot of young corn, surrounded by generator trucks, pole lights, and enough antennae and electronics to launch the s.p.a.ce shuttle. Ahead, on the road proper, an army-green armored bulldozer was making slow progress clearing boulders off the road.

Morissey 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 h.e.l.l did they get in there? On little fairy wings? That whole mountain is sealed up tight as a bank vault."

"My wife is very resourceful," said Karp.

"You're suggesting that she's conspiring to commit murders?"

"I have no knowledge of any murders. Nor do you. I'm reporting my suspicions to you as officer in charge of this operation, which is my duty as a citizen and an officer of the court. The main thing I want to avoid is any more people getting hurt."

"That's very good of you, Karp. Your federal government appreciates it. What you really have up there, in my opinion, is an Asian drug gang transporting dope. Or trying to. They got stuck up there when we locked the mountain down. Now, if you'll excuse me . . ."

Outside the command post, Hendricks said, "Nice fella. What do you think?"

"Of his theory? I liked the one about fairy wings better. Look, I'm going to hang around here for a while. If you've got stuff to do . . ."

"I got some sandwiches and c.o.kes in a cooler. Why don't we sit on that rock over there and have us a picnic. Maybe we can learn something watching how the big boys do it."

They sat and ate as men in FBI jackets and SWAT attire and combat-dressed National Guardsmen strode or rode by. Pole lights were emplaced in the woods and along the road, giving the scene an air of carnival. They watched the bulldozer for a while, then went back to the car. Karp dozed. He awakened to gunfire.

"Sounds like something's going on," said Hendricks. "Sounds like a firefight. Those just now were machine guns, I think. d.a.m.n! That's artillery. Mortar fire."

"Yes, all your drug gangs have mortars nowadays. Let's go see what the FBI has to say about all this."

When they found Morissey, he seemed a good deal less confident than he had been, and nearly glad to see Karp's face again.

"I may owe you an apology," he said into his shoulder. "One of our people picked up a kid wandering along Highway 712 in his Skivvies. We just got finished interrogating him. He says he's Bo Cade. He says your daughter's up there in some old mine buildings along with the whole Vietcong. According to him, she's best buddies with the chief Commie in charge. You know anything about this?"

"Not a thing," said Karp with his stomach up around his throat. "They never tell me anything. Did he say whether she was okay?"

"She was alive and well when she helped him escape. We'll need to talk about this at some length, but not now. First light I intend to send a couple of teams up through those woods. Then we'll find out what the holy h.e.l.l is going on here."

When she heard the firing and explosions die down, Lucy let herself out of the strong room and moved among the buildings. The moon was nearly full and she hardly needed the flashlight. She found a place near the wreck of the coal tipple where she could climb onto the roof of a machine shed and lie down on her belly. Some hours pa.s.sed. She dozed and was brought to full attention by the sound of men moving through brush. There was a line of them, not as many as there had been, some of them carrying stretchers, some in groups of four struggling with heavy chests. So they had the gold. She strained her eyes to see whether Tran was among them, but the distance was too far to make out anything but silhouettes. She heard the sound of the lift motor and the squeal of its gearing.

She slipped off the roof and went north, using the flashlight now, until she came to a nearly dry creekbed and began walking along it. After ten minutes, she found her first corpse, one of the Lost Boys. She didn't know his name. A little farther there was an older Vietnamese, Vo, who had kept the house in Bridgeport, and who had survived fifteen years of the French War and then the American War, only to die in his enemy's country. She said a prayer for the repose of his soul. Farther on, at just the place she would have chosen, her flashlight picked up a thick carpet of bra.s.s. This was where they had placed one of the flanking machine guns. Beyond that, she found the Cades, in small groups or individually, looking like dreamers in the moonlight, or smashed beyond humanity, like props from a horror movie. She pa.s.sed a place where the ground was torn and bushes were uprooted, and where she had to walk carefully to keep from stepping on viscera and chunks of former people. This was the kill sack. The Cades had been pushed from both flanks back to what looked like a good defensive position, and then the mortar bombs had started to fall on them. Some, she found, had run and been cut down by automatic fire, probably from a squad that had infiltrated to their rear. There was another black-clad corpse, but his head had been so smashed she could not tell who it was. She rolled it over with her foot. There was no Stechkin holster and her heart lifted a little.

It was growing lighter in the east, a hint of dawn. She found a rutted road and walked down it, smelling smoke. As she walked, the smoke grew thicker and more acrid, mingling unpleasantly with the morning mist. A figure came toward her out of the fog, stumbling, a girl in a pink nightgown. Her face was smudged with ash and she was barefoot and grossly pregnant. She looked about fourteen.

She stopped when she saw Lucy. "Everything burnt up. I'm lookin' fer Ollie. Have you seen him anywheres?"

"No. But there's no one alive in that direction." Lucy grabbed the girl gently by the shoulders and turned her around on the road. "Is Ollie your husband?"

The girl was pale, with a wandering in one of her close-set, slaty eyes; there was something subtly wrong with the proportions of her face. "My brother," she said. "Papaw ain't give me no husband yet."

"Papaw?"

"The Cade. I have to carry the first fruits of the Father afore I get me a husband. But it's all burnt up now. The h.e.l.l devils took it all away." This last syllable rose into a cry. "He has prophesied the end and the end has come!"

And more of that as they walked along, the idiot fragments of an insane faith. Like most such, the main part of it was that the old guys got to f.u.c.k all the young girls. The girl said that there were a good number of babies who were cursed by G.o.d. The girl hoped that hers would be one of the keepers, as she called them.

After some minutes, they came to a large clearing. On either side were fenced fields decorated by dead cattle and one white horse on its back with one leg in the air. There were mortar craters all around. Ahead, a large wooden structure was burning. Clumps of women and children stood around in nightclothes, wailing around the corpses of men. It looked to Lucy like a scene from Bosnia or Chechnya or Guatemala, someplace far from West Virginia, at any rate. The girl ran to one of the groups of women. Lucy sat down on a stump. She found that her head was still completely empty, all volition gone. A time to wait, then. She watched the dawn start to burn away the mists.

Then it seemed that men in black uniforms appeared as if by magic, poking warily into the smaller houses and mobile homes scattered around, collecting the women and kids. Then vehicles appeared, ambulances, trucks, and vans. A fire engine rolled in and firemen began putting out the fire. A man with a submachine gun told her to come along and she did, and joined the wailing women and children sitting on the ground in a circle, being guarded by black-uniformed men.

Lucy dropped to her knees and said, "Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing dismay thee, all things pa.s.s, G.o.d never changes, patience attains all that is strived for, she who has G.o.d finds she lacks nothing." And repeated, over and over, St. Teresa of Avila's own prayer, not the sort of thing that was ever voiced in the maniac religion that Ben Cade had established on Burnt Peak, but after a time she became aware in a distant way that the wailing had stopped and even the children had grown quiet. All the women sank to their knees, surrounding Lucy as she prayed. Thus her father found her as the sun poked over the edge of the mountains.

The hospital had arranged for beds to be brought into Giancarlo's room, so that his brother and a parent could sleep there. Nothing was too much trouble for their most famous patient. When Lucy and her father arrived there, morning sun was lighting the windows. Zak was asleep and Marlene was sitting on the edge of her bed, fully dressed, her head in her hands.

"What's wrong?" Karp said.

"You keep asking that. You should say, 'Anything more wrong?' I would reply, "Still the same amount of wrong, Butch.'" Marlene rubbed her face and looked at them. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

"They killed forty-two people, Marlene, your guys did, plus losing three of their own."

"What are you talking about?"

Karp raised his voice. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, tell me you're not going to compound this by pretending innocence! You brought a bunch of murderers down here for a G.o.dd.a.m.n vendetta. The FBI already knows about it."

"You told them? You ratted me out?"

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake! You thought you could conceal it? You didn't think anyone would suspect? Are you completely out of your f.u.c.king mind?"

"Oh, f.u.c.k you! They murder your son and you fart around with your clever legal tricks . . . what the f.u.c.k kind of man are you?"

"How could you, Mom?" said Lucy. "Forget the Cades, how could you do that to Tran?"

Now Zak was up, a look of dismay on his face. "Stop shouting," he shouted. His parents continued to scream at each other, joined occasionally by Lucy.