In quiet Slovenian, Chicken said to Sextant, "Call it off. You can't let this happen."
Sextant said nothing. Still kneeling on the floor, his head was down and he was sunk in thought.
Go for it, thought Chicken. Go for it all the way. In English, he shouted, "Okay, boys, it's party time. Come and get her, she's all yours."
Sextant's head snapped up. "What are you doing?"
"It's what you want, isn't it?"
The three men rushed to the bed. Beer-gut ripped the ties from Lila's legs, and the other two tore at her clothing. Her hands were still bound, but she fought with her feet, kicking out as Richie tugged at her ski pants. She screamed, but with the gag in her mouth it sounded like a muffled moan. She twisted from side to side until Beer-gut pinned her shoulders.
"Get those God damn pants off," he grunted.
"Lie still, bitch."
Sextant, still on his knees, watched without moving. He seemed turned to stone.
"Well," Chicken whispered, "is this really what you want?"
No answer.
"Why don't you take the gag out of her mouth? That way you can hear her scream."
No movement.
"Just the way your mother screamed."
Still stone.
Richie had Lila's pants down around her knees. Phil had cut the ties on her hands, and was trying to get her sweater over her head. Beer-gut leaned over her, trying to kiss her.
"Still the good little soldier?" asked Chicken. "Still following orders?"
No answer.
"That's about what I expected. The last time you hid under a pile of goatskins."
Sextant finally looked at him. In the plaintive voice of a little boy, he said, "I was only six years old."
"Yes, and how old are you now?"
"Damn you," whispered Sextant. "Damn you."
Sextant came up off the floor in a single fluid motion. He plucked Richie off Lila and flung him against the wall. He caught the back of Phil's neck with the edge of his palm, and Phil crumpled to the floor. Beer-gut yelped, and backed away from the bed. Sextant hit him once, almost casually, in the belly, and he doubled over, retching.
Sextant turned back to Chicken. The knife was in his hand again. He cut the ties on Chicken's hands and feet.
"Get her dressed, and get her out of here," he said. His face was wet with tears. For the second time in forty years, Vlado Priol was crying.
18
OF the four agents that David Ogden chose to carry out his last requests, Gemstone was the one least motivated by a blind loyalty or by the money involved. True, she was loyal to Ogden and indebted to him, and true, she welcomed the sizable sum that had been deposited into her Zurich account, but Gemstone would have done the job for virtually anyone, and for nothing, if necessary. She would have burned down your barn for five bucks and the cost of the kerosene, and she would have burned down an orphanage just for the hell of it. Gemstone, whose name was Louise Abruzzi, was a firebug, a torch, a pyromaniac, and burning things down was more than just a job to her. It was her food, her drink, and her love life rolled into one.
She came into Glen Grove on the twenty-fifth of February, three days before the beginning of the time frame, and she spent those three days observing the Southern Manor from a room in a similar establishment directly across the street. By the end of the third day she knew exactly how she was going to do the job, and she spent the next day assembling the equipment she would need. With that accomplished, she left the rooming house and checked into a decent hotel on the other side of town. She was ready to roll on the job, but she was safe in the time frame and she could afford to give herself a day to let the anticipation and the excitement build inside of her. The anticipation was part of it for her, and she relished every minute of it.
Whenever time allowed, her routine for the day before a job was unvarying. She made it a time of complete relaxation as she drifted into a dreamlike state, thinking about the fire the next day, and of all the fires that had sparked her life over the years. This time was no exception. She started with a dip in the hotel pool, pleased that at her age she was still able to wear the most radical of bathing suits without embarrassing herself, then a light breakfast, and then she stretched out in the sun beside the pool to drift and dream. As usual, she let her thoughts wander back to when it all had begun. She no longer wondered why she was the way she was, but she still found it odd that she had been twenty-eight years old before she had become aware of the fires that were burning inside her head.
The year was 1970, and she was stationed at the Third Surgical Hospital at Binh Thuy, which was not a good place for an Army nurse to be that year. It wasn't the shelling so much. They were rarely shelled closely at Binh Thuy, the Air Force unit a few miles away drew most of the incoming, but they were operating around the clock and the strain was heavy. It wasn't just the wounded, either, not the legitimate wounded. There was a lot of dope going down at that time, medics coming to work stoned on horse, shooting up in the bathrooms, shooting up the patients who could pay for it. And the other kind of shooting, the gunfights. Guys coming into the hospital full of holes that the VC never put there. Gunfights among themselves almost every night, and always when the town was off-limits and the guys couldn't get in to see the girls. Stoned MPs and stoned GIs shooting it out in the compound; it was scary, and later, after she had set the fire, they tried to make a case that she had cracked under the strain. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it can happen to anybody, they told her, and she finally went along with it although she knew it wasn't so. She said, yeah, that must have been it, I must have flipped, because she wasn't going to tell them what really had happened, and she had to say something.
What she did was burn down the supply building at Binh Thuy. She did it in the middle of the night, and she did it by pouring gasoline around the base of the structure and setting it off with a homemade Molotov cocktail. It was an amateurish way to do it, but she didn't know anything about setting fires then. The foundation was cement block and the roof was tin, but the rest of it was wood, and it cooked up quickly. By the time that the fire squad arrived the roof was glowing pink; there was nothing to be saved, and later the CID investigators told her that she had roasted a half-million dollars worth of government issue.
She didn't try to deny it. She told them exactly what she had done, but when they asked her why she had done it, she went silent. She wasn't going to tell them that at the moment it had seemed like the most satisfying, pleasurable thing in the world to do, and so she had done it. She wasn't going to tell them that she had done it the way she would have eaten an apple if she had been hungry, or taken a drink if she had been thirsty. She wasn't going to tell them how she had felt when the flames went up.
"What's going to happen to me?" she had asked. There were two of them, a major and a captain, and both had been civilian cops.
"All we do is file the report," said the major. " Saigon makes the charges."
"How bad could it get?"
"You could pull some time. Why did you do it?"
It was perhaps the tenth time they had asked the question. As she had all the other times, she shook her head silently. The major nodded to the captain, who got up and left the room. When he was gone, the major said, "I'm old enough to be your father."
"No, you're not."
"Maybe an older brother. You want to tell me, just me, why you did it?"
She shook her head.
He shrugged. "I'm going to put down in my report that you cracked under the strain. Otherwise, you're looking at some heavy time."
"What strain?"
"You joking? All the wounded, all the shit that goes down here? You cracked, that's all."
"I've been a nurse for seven years. I don't crack."
"Suit yourself."
"If I say that I cracked, that makes me a nut case. They put me in a psycho."
"Not necessarily. What do you say we stop horsing around. You want to tell me what it felt like?"