Ancient history, Chuck Belmont had called it.
To a generation which found nothing distressing in swastikas, iron crosses, or Nazi helmets, it probably was. Certainly Curt’s three years in the British military were something he seldom recalled himself, these days. The desert war in 1942, the clandestine landings in Sicily, these seemed to belong to a different Curtis Halstead.
He turned left onto Linda Vista Road, putting the bug through its sprightly gears. Just five weeks until finals; then, the book. No summer classes this year, nothing whatsoever to interfere.
He passed Longacres Avenue Extension, glancing off to his right across the dark expanse of golf course. Pity he didn’t play, living where he did. Perhaps this Sunday he and Paula, who used tennis to stay in condition, could start taking a bit of a hike again. He hadn’t taken a ramble through the heavily wooden strip beyond Linda Vista, which marked the meanderings of San Luisa Creek, for over two years.
Curt braked, swung into his drive, made the switchback and sent the VW chuffing up the grade in second to the darkness below the porch. He sat in the car for a few moments after killing the engine, listening to the creak of cooling metal and the chorus of frogs from the ditch by the golf course. Shirley Meier had brought the past drifting back to him in shreds and tatters. Not a bad thing, actually. Dealing habitually with students, it was easy to forget the past’s validity: for youth always saw its current problems as unique in man’s history, and thus as susceptible only to newly formulated solutions.
Curt checked his watch — nearly midnight — sighed, fumbled out his keys, and climbed to the porch. In the deserted living room, an unopened bottle of dago red waited on the coffee table for his disapproving head-shake. Paula was becoming a nuisance about his evening glass of wine. He crossed to the hall, stuck his head into the reading room, where the overhead light still glowed. The couch was rumpled, the throw pillows bashed out of shape. He had reached for the rheostat control before he saw the rag rug bunched up in accordion pleats as if a runner had used it as a starting block, and the Swiss milking stool on its side in the center of the room.
Well, now, that was damned odd. What...
Curt whirled and went to the foot of the stairs, moving silently on the balls of his feet, before he stopped. Reflexes honed a quarter-century before apparently were not totally forgotten. But really, now, tire rug and stool would have a perfectly simple explanation; and meanwhile, he was glad Paula hadn’t witnessed his ludicrous thirty seconds as an overweight James Bond creeping about his own home on tiptoe.
He clumped stolidly up the stairs and into their bedroom. Paula was at her dressing table, just in the act of bending over to pick up a fallen bottle of hand cream.
“What the devil happened downstairs? What...”
Blood. Ten pints of blood in a woman Paula’s size, and half of it on the floor. More blood, it seemed, than a human being possibly could hold.
Curt was across the room in three strides to lift her by the shoulders away from the dressing table. Her body was still warm, but her head flopped back inertly against his supporting arm. Her lower jaw gaped idiotically. One front tooth was dripped, and there was a puddle of saliva on the starred glass where her face had rested.
Very slowly and gently Curt laid her down again. The eyes had not been Paula’s eyes; they had been those of a corpse. His one-time long familiarity with death had taught him that “mortal remains” is a very precise concept: with the act of dying, every shred of glory flees from every human corpse.
He put his hands over his face and rubbed them slowly up and down, feeling it now like a gunshot wound when the air gets at it.
How? Why?
Curt turned back, raised Paula’s flaccid forearm and twisted it so the wrist was up. He regarded the rubber-lipped gash for a long moment. That was how. A ragged sob torn from his chest surprised him. But why? Would he ever come to any understanding of why?
He turned away without even seeing the note taped to the mirror, and went stiffly down the stairs again without any awareness of making bloody footprints in the hall and on the risers. In the living room, his hand closed over the phone receiver, blotting out the prints left by Rick while phoning Debbie in the booth across Linda Vista Road.
Curt dialed the operator to ask for the sheriff’s office.
Chapter 6
The room where the actual killing took place was slippery with blood. Flies buzzed everywhere, and the hot North African air seemed almost septic. The goats were sent crowding and bleating down a wooden ramp to the gate which was raised to let one animal through at a time. The goats had no other direction in which to go.
“Show one more time,” promised the head slaughterer. He was an Arab with a seamed, gentle, knowing face.
He seized the goat’s topknot with his left hand and twisted the hard bony head up and to the left. This presented the jugular to the view of the half-dozen uniformed men who were his audience. The goat returned their gaze with totally expressionless eyes.
“The throat... so,” he said. “Then the knife... so!”
The broad, double-edged knife flashed once, the animal gave a convulsive start; its hoofs drummed briefly on the floor. The Arab stepped hack with the slightest suggestion of a flourish, extending the knife handle-first to his audience. The goat’s eyes had not changed, yet somehow now they were dead eyes, unspeakably so.
No one moved to take the knife. The lieutenant, like the rest of them heavily sweat-splotched under the arms of his uniform jersey, cleared his throat. His voice was too high-pitched for effective command. “Cutting a man’s throat is the quickest way of finishing him. We’ve all been extremely, ah, efficient in practice; this is a good opportunity to... um... for the real thing, actually.”
The enlisted men remained silent; only the flies responded. Something gurgled dismally inside the dead goat. Curt, at seventeen the youngest of the lot, made a sudden impatient gesture. It couldn’t be all that bad; the effing wog did it for an effing living, didn’t he?
“Give me the knife.”
Another goat was led into the enclosure. Curt looked into its calmly omniscient eyes, and looked quickly away. He seized the rough top-knot, twisting up and to the left as the Arab had done.
“Good... good...” murmured the slaughterer in approval.
Curt slashed. The goat, its throat half severed, tore from Curt’s grasp to whirl about like the Rifiya dervishes they had seen in the meidan at Alexandria. Blood from the gushing jugular splashed over all of them, and a hot salty spray of it hit Curt in the mouth.
The goat stopped and stiffened, head lowered, legs braced against the unseen foe which sought to upset it. Then it began a burring noise, which seemed to issue from the gaping throat rather than its mouth...
Curt moaned and rolled over and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. He was soaked with sweat. His eyes opened and were staring at the old-fashioned beamed ceiling of his study.
The goat’s burring began again, only now it was the doorbell. Thank God. He hadn’t dreamed about the war in years. Why didn’t Paula answer the damned door? Why didn’t...
It all rushed back.
He swung his legs off the rumpled couch and sat up, gripping the edge fiercely with his hands until the urge to throw up had passed. His shoe skidded an empty wine bottle across the floor, bringing the rest of it back. Drinking steadily all day; must have passed out finally.