"How many?"
"Three, maybe more, maybe one dead."
"What's happening in there now? What was that explosion?"
"Tony can tell you as well as I can. Talk to him yourself."
"No, Mr. Leland, it's you to whom I will talk." You could hear the crackle of the elevator motor in his transmission. "What have you done here tonight but perpetrate the most bloody, unspeakable crimes?"
"You killed Rivers first. I saw you shoot him in cold blood."
"History will be the judge of that," Tony said.
Leland was moving as he listened, crossing the building to Steffie's office. "Mr. Leland, how many people have you killed tonight?"
"For a little while longer, Tony, that will stay classified."
"You're not ashamed of yourself, are you?"
"Nah." Steffie's office had been ransacked. It took him a while to recognize his jacket, but not because of the mess surrounding it. His pants were no longer the same color. He went into the bathroom.
"The world should know what a savage you are," Tony shouted. "You broke a boy's neck. You threw a man off the roof."
"Listen, you jive-ass son of a bitch!" Taco Bill roared. "Let go of that man's daughter!"
"Stay out of it, Bill," Leland said.
"The man's daughter, as you call her, is an adult largely responsible for seeing that one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world remains armed and in control of millions of helpless peasants. Are you listening, Mr. Leland? What are you doing, Mr. Leland?"
"Taking a couple of aspirins. I have a headache."
He had already done that. He had decided not to try to wash his face again, for he was liable to get something in his eyes. He was coated with grease, soot, and brown, dried blood from the top of his head down to the blackened, encrusted towels on his feet. He could scrape grease and dried blood out of his hair like cream cheese from a slice of bread. He opened the medicine cabinet again, trying to think ahead. Something was nagging him, something added. He took off the harness.
"Mr. Leland, for whom do you work?"
"I'm self-employed." He was hefting the Browning. The dirtier he was, the better. He had eleven shots. "Look, Tony, you've turned this around on me. Let's do a deal, you and I. A straight trade. You need a hostage. Take me instead of my daughter."
"Of course. You read my mind."
Leland practiced the move for the first time. Terrific — it was going to work. "Now, how do you want to do this?"
He heard gunfire below. That was right: one below, number two was Tony, three was defending the roof. Three left, including a woman. It took Leland a moment to remember how he knew that: the voice on the radio reading the words and numbers. He practiced the move again. Adhesive tape wasn't going to bother him.
"You know where I am," Tony said. "I want you to take the elevator here, unarmed. When you present yourself, your daughter can enter the elevator, free to do as she wishes."
"Sounds swell."
"Don't go for it, Joe."
"Bill, this has been what I've been working for all night."
"Joe, we're entering the bottom of the building," Al Powell said. "We want you to use your head."
"You tell me when you're inside. In the meantime, I've got to play ball with this guy. What choice do I have?"
"Joe," Bill said, "according to the TV, the cops aren't in the building yet. In fact, somebody's really pouring it on."
"Let me tell him," Al Powell said. "They have fortified positions on the third floor that give them fields of fire to the north and south, which is all they need."
Leland was quiet. Was Tony upstairs with Steffie alone?Leland didn't think whoever just blew the safe could get downstairs that quickly. Either way was all right. Tony and Leland were wise to each other. Tony wanted him thinking he was on the fortieth floor. What Leland did not like was the idea that Tony was trying to pull on Leland a stunt Leland had tried — unsuccessfully — on the gang. You get in an elevator, you don't know where it's going to stop next. It was too simple. He picked up the radio.
"Al, you've got seventy-five people coming down the stairs. You've got to occupy the bottom of the building now."
A helicopter swung in on the building, which rung with the sound of returning heavy automatic fire. There was still one upstairs. He wondered how long it was going to take the police to get wise to the situation down below, one guy running back and forth between two positions.
"I want it known that we still have the weapons to knock the helicopters out of the sky!" Tony screamed. "The people on the staircases will be permitted to descend to street level. We want no further bloodshed. Mr. Leland, are you ready?"
Leland was already climbing the stairs. "What do you want me to do?" One down, one up, and Tony — he couldn't have been able to fire at the helicopter and maintain a hold on Steffie at the same time.
"Get in the elevator."
"I'm starting from my daughter's office, and my feet are cut."
"I understand."
"It's a bad deal, Joe," Bill said.
"I want him to talk. Let him have his say."
"What we were going to do, Mr. Leland, if you had not interfered and caused all this bloodshed, was demonstrate to the world that your daughter and her partners, Rivers and Ellis, were doing what your own government now expressly forbids, that is, selling arms to Chile. One of the mistakes made by the capitalist press is the perpetuation of the idea that we are stupid people. We are not stupid people."
Leland was on the thirty-fourth floor. He thought he could go one more before he had to call an elevator. He didn't give a shit about Rivers or Ellis or their guns. Smart guys. Assholes. Stephanie hadn't even been sure of her bonus. They'd kept her tied in knots. How smart were they now, on their way to the autopsy room? He thought of what he had done to Rivers's body — more bad luck. If you could not wear a dead man's shoes, you could not mutilate his body, either. He thought of his daughter again and had to wonder what kind of a human being she had become. He wondered if all this would even make a difference to her, a difference in the way she thought of life.
Tony was on the air again, talking to the world.
"We have been aware for a long time of the secret elements of the contract just concluded between Klaxon Oil and the murderous regime in Chile. Under the terms of the contract made public, for one hundred fifty million dollars, almost all of it borrowed from the United States and its puppet international lending agencies, Klaxon Oil is to build a bridge in Chile. One hundred and fifty million for a single, unimportant bridge in a country where millions live in unimaginable squalor. That itself would be bad enough, but there's more. For the next seven years, Klaxon has promised to supply the Chilean fascist, military regime with millions upon millions in arms. Arms with which to hold their illegal power, power that they seized through well-documented American intervention."
Leland was on the thirty-fifth floor, hailing an elevator. Tony was not so in love with the sound of his own voice that he would not recognize the starts and stops of the elevator for what they were — evidence that Leland was coming after him. What Leland had in his favor was the fact that Tony was on the air. If he tried to punish Stephanie for what Leland was doing, Tony would lose whatever audience sympathy he was trying to develop. He knew it. Leland had no doubt that everything Tony was saying was true. Tony's tragedy was that he didn't see that he was as much a factor — a result — of the problem as the woman he was threatening with a gun.