In front of Charlie, on the table, was a silenced nine-millimeter automatic. Also in front of him were six more Schlitz cans. Charlie was wearing his underwear, a sleeveless tee-shirt and gray boxer shorts. The flesh of his limbs looked as gray as the shorts, a tan that had sickened, and flaccid; his right thigh was bandaged; on his upper left arm was a tattoo of a rose, nicely done. Charlie had a new nose; it was pink, unlike the gray-tan skin surrounding it. He was sleeping.
He was, in fact, snoring, quite loudly, contentedly, even drunkenly. His head was resting on folded arms and he looked both very young and very old.
Nolan took a chair next to him at the Formica-top table. He picked up the gun and stuffed it in his belt. Charlie didn’t stir. Nolan sat and studied his old enemy, the adversary who’d given him so much hell for so many years, tried to see the maniac he’d come looking for, and saw only a frail old sleeping drunken man.
It was all disappointing somehow. An anticlimax that turned years of running, hating, fighting into an absurd, unfunny joke. He felt foolish, a little. And vaguely sad.
But this wasn’t a time for reflection; there was money to find, and Nolan grabbed the tattooed gray arm and shook the sleeping man and said, “Come on, Charlie, wake up.”
Like the curtain of a play, the lids on the close-set eyes raised slowly, and Charlie lifted head from folded arms and gradually got himself into a sitting position. He yawned. He smiled. He said, “Hello, Nolan.”
“Well, hello Charlie.”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah. We got to quit meeting like this.”
“I see you took my gun, Nolan.”
Charlie’s speech was thick but clear, each word let out after careful consideration.
Nolan shook his head. “Why’d you have to get drunk on your ass like this, Charlie?”
He shrugged, looked almost embarrassed. “A hell of a thing, I know. I guess I wanted to be numb for the goddamn bullets.”
“I won’t kill you, Charlie, not if you give my money back.”
The laughter came rumbling out of Charlie’s gut and he touched his forehead to the Formica top and cackled. When he looked up at Nolan he had tears in his eyes from laughing. “You stupid goddamn asshole, you think I’m afraid of you, afraid you’re going to kill me? Get away, get away, you silly bastard.”
“Charlie.”
“You can’t kill me, Nolan. Not you or the whole goddamn fucking Family. Nobody can kill me, I died a long time ago; don’t you read the goddamn papers? How can you kill a goddamn dead man? You tell me! I’m getting another beer.”
Charlie got up and weaved toward the refrigerator and Nolan was up and on him, latched onto his arm and dragged him out into the adjacent room.
They were in the big main room of the lodge now, a high-ceilinged hall with open beams and much dark wood and lots of doors and windows. The bulk of Eagle’s Roost was right here in this one big room, the ceiling coming down on the back third, indicating the partial second floor; everything but sleeping and cooking had been done in this hall, or so the covered furniture all around would indicate; a few pieces were uncovered, the sofas, the long dining table that was over to the left, as you faced the black-brick fireplace with its elk’s head above. In spite of the coolness of the day, it was rather warm in the hall, almost as if the fireplace had been going or the heat’d been on. Nolan dragged Charlie over to the semicircle of sofas facing the fireplace. Nolan tossed the little man onto one of the sofas, sat opposite him. Between them was a large round marble coffee table with a radio on it. Charlie had started to laugh again and was rocking side to side, holding his stomach, buckling with laughter.
Charlie’s laughter subsided and he looked at Nolan and grinned. “I won, Nolan. I beat you. For years I’ve hated your fucking guts, for months all I’ve done is think about seeing you die. And now I don’t even hate you anymore. I forgive you, Nolan. I forgive you for shooting my brother eighteen years ago and stealing my money and making a fool out of me in the Family. Yeah, that’s right, I told you before, remember? How you wrecked my goddamn life, how I never moved an inch with the Family after you killed my brother Gordon and made me look stupid. But, Nolan, I forgive you. No shit, I forgive you. I even forgive you for passing me those marked bills, and look what that did to me. I don’t hate you, anymore, Nolan, now that I’ve won. Now that I’ve won I can look at you and just not give a goddamn.”
“Where’s my money, Charlie? I’ll knock it out of you if I have to.”
Charlie waved his hands at Nolan, gave him a Bronx cheer. “No way, I’m too far gone to feel it, you’d have to knock me out before you hurt me and then what would I tell you?”
Nolan closed his eyes. Well, Nolan thought, he wants to talk, so humor him, sneak up on him that way.
“Did you kill Harry, Charlie? Did you kill Tillis?”
“Hell, no. Did you?” Charlie’s grin disappeared and he got suddenly somber. He rubbed his cheek. “I shouldn’t talk lightly of that. Harry was... he was my friend and he was my wife’s brother, you know. I liked him and he helped me. He did a lot. He’s the one who helped me get the bead on you, for one thing, he was bankrolling jobs for people like you, ripoff guys, and had the connections it took to run down your friends and the people you work with. We even knew you stayed with that guy Planner for a while, but we weren’t sure that was where you left the money, not until I heard you were going to go to Iowa to move it.”
“How did you find that out?”
“One of Felix’s boys was working for me. Right under that goddamn pimp lawyer’s nose. We knew all about you planning to switch the money to a Family bank, but you were pretty goddamn careful about telling where you were hiding it, weren’t you? Waited until the last minute to tell Felix where it was, and even then all you said was ‘Iowa,’ though it wasn’t any goddamn trick figuring out where in Iowa.” Charlie glanced slowly around the high-ceilinged hall. “Walter and me were just waiting at the lodge here to get the word where the money was, to know where to go to get it. It was good staying here with my boy, Nolan. I wish now he wasn’t involved in this, but just the same it was good being with him, in this place. This place has a lot of memories for me, a lot of my good hours were spent at the Roost, and I don’t mind ending it here, even though I always wanted to keep that part of my life outside. But you can’t do that, can you, Nolan, you can’t get away from what you are and you might as well come face to goddamn face with it.” He slammed his fist down on the marble of the coffee table in front of him. “Jesus! It was so fucking perfect, had it all worked out, just come back here with that money and hop on that goddamn plane to Mexico and fly down to Argentina like we had set up and Walter and me, we could’ve built a new life together... Walter’s so goddamn smart, I can’t believe it, you know he’s a college man... but then I got hit in the leg, that old bastard Planner hit me in the goddamn leg and made me kill him, and we got stuck in goddamn Iowa City and lost time there and messed up the flight and had to put it off till today and then Jesus, you were onto me and the Family was onto me, and then I hear on the radio they’re killing off everybody who helped me... Harry... Tillis. Jesus.”
“You think the Family killed those guys?”
“Who else? I knew they’d be on me, when that kid, that friend of yours Jon, told me back in that doctor’s office, told me you knew I was the one that took the money, told me you were coming after me. I knew about you and your new ties with the Family. That if you knew I was alive, so did they. They’re coming today, aren’t they? Are they outside now, Nolan?”