You got to look at the overview to see my problem. It’s in a cup of mountains, with nobody to see what’s going on. That can be a big temptation. In the center of the ville is this stucco church with three little bell towers on it. The priest looks like a pool of black paint poured down the steps. The streets run off in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and the guys did the priest are scared and start popping anybody in sight. Before I know it, they’re down all the spokes, deep in the ville, the circus tent’s on fire and I’m one fucking guy.
Geese and chickens are exploding out of the yards, pigs squealing, women screaming, people getting pulled into the street by their hair. She comes around a corner, like she’s walking against a wind and it takes everything in her to keep walking toward the sounds that make most people cover their ears and hide. I ain’t ever going to forget the look in her face, she had these ice blue eyes and hair like white corn silk and blood on her blouse, like it was thrown from an ink pen, but she saw it all, man, just like that whole street and the dead people in it zoomed right through her eyes onto a piece of film. The problem got made right there.
I pushed her hard. She had bones like a bird, you could hold her up against a candle and count them with your finger, I bet, and her face was a little pale triangle and I knew why she was a religious woman and I shoved her again. “This is an accident. It’s ending now. You haul your butt out of here, Dutchie,” I said.
I squeezed her arm, twisted her in the other direction, scraped her against the wall and saw the pain jump in her face. But they’re hard to handle when they’re light; they don’t have any weight you can use against them. She pulled out of my hands, slipped past me, even cut me with her nails so she could keep looking at the things she wasn’t supposed to see, that were going to mess all of us up. Her lips moved but I couldn’t understand the words, the air between the buildings was sliced with muzzle flashes, like red scratches against the dark, and you could see empty shell casings shuttering across the lamplight in the windows. Then I heard the blades on the Huey before I felt the downdraft wash over us, and I watched it set down in a field at the end of this stone street and the two officers from the special school at Benning waiting for me, their cigars glowing inside the door, and I didn’t have any doubt how it was going to go.
They said it in Spanish, then in English. Then in Spanish and English together. “It is sad, truly. But this one from Holland is communista.
She is also very serio with friends in the left-wing press. Entiende, Señor Pogue?”
It wasn’t a new kind of gig. You throw a dozen bodies out at high altitudes. Sometimes they come right through a roof. Maybe it saves lives down the line. But she was alive when they brought her onboard. Look, chief, I wasn’t controlling any of it. My choices were I finish the mission, clean up these guys’ shit and not think about what’s down below, because the sun was over the ridges now and you could see the tile roof of the church and the body of the labor organizer hanging against the wall and Indians running around like an ants’ nest that’s been stepped on, or stay behind and wait for some seriously pissed-off rebels to come back into the ville and see what we’d done.
Two guys tried to lift her up and throw her out, but she fought with them. So they started hitting her, both of them, then kicking her with their boots. I couldn’t take it, man. It was like somebody opened a furnace door next to my head. This stuff had to end. She knew it, too, she saw it in my eyes even before I picked her up by her shoulders, almost like I was saving her, her hands resting on my cheeks, all the while staring into my eyes, even while I was carrying her to the door, even when she was framed against the sky, like she was inside a painting, her hair whipping in the wind, her face jerking back toward the valley floor and what was waiting for her, no stopping any of it now, chief, and I could see white lines in her scalp and taste the dryness and fear on her breath, but her lips were moving again while I squeezed her arms tighter and moved her farther out into a place where nobody had to make decisions anymore, her eyes like holes full of blue sky, and this time I didn’t need to hear the words, I could read them on her mouth, they hung there in front of me even while the wind tore her out of my hands and she became just a speck racing toward the earth: You must change your way.
Chapter 27
Clete and I had breakfast the next morning at Victor’s on Main. It was cool inside, and the overhead fans made shadows on the stamped tin ceiling.
“What’d he do then?” Clete said.
“Got in his car and drove away.”
“He confesses to a murder, tells you he sees flames burning under the water, then just drives away?”
“No, he repeated the Mennonite woman’s words, then said, “How’s that for a mind-fuck, chief?”
The restaurant was almost empty, and a black woman was putting fresh flowers on the tables. Clete folded and unfolded his palms, bit down on the corner of his lip.
“You think Sonny’s back?” I asked.
“Back from what? You don’t come back. You’re either alive or you’re dead.”
“What set you off?”
“Nothing.”
“Look, somebody took a shot at Patsy Dap. Maybe with a nine-millimeter. Pogue says it didn’t come from Johnny Carp,” I said.
His green eyes lingered on mine.
“You didn’t?”
I said. “You said it a long time ago. They’re all head cases The object is to point them at each other,” he said. “You can’t orchestrate the behavior of psychopaths. What’s the matter with you?”
“I did it when I had a few beers. I told you, nobody fucks my podjo.” He rolled his fork back and forth on the tablecloth, clicking it hard into the wood.
“What’s worrying you?” I said.
“Pogue’s a pro, he’s got ice water in his veins. When’s the last time a guy like that told you a dead man’s trying to cap him?”
I went to a noon AA meeting and tried to turn over my problems to my Higher Power. I wasn’t doing a good job of it. I had stomped and degraded Johnny Giacano in front of his crew, his friends and family. Were I still a police officer, I would have a marginal chance of getting away with it. But because of my new status, there was no question about the choices Johnny had before him. He would either redeem himself in an unmistakable, dramatic way or be cannibalized by his underlings.
As assassins, the Mafia has no peer. Their experience and sophistication go back to the Napoleonic wars; the level of physical violence imposed on their victims is usually grotesque and far beyond any practical need; the conviction rate of their button men is a joke.
The hit itself almost always comes about in an insidious fashion. The assassin is trusted, always has access, extends an invitation for a quiet dinner with friends, an evening at the track, a fishing trip out on the salt. The victim never suspects the gravity of his situation until, in the blink of an eye, he’s looking into a face that’s branded with an ageless design, lighted with energies that are not easily satiated.