Clete could not explain the affliction that had spread through his body since the afternoon. It had begun with violent spasms he associated with food poisoning, an aggregate of intestinal pain worse than his wounds in Vietnam, coupled with the fever and chills that went with the malaria he had picked up in El Sal. He was curled in a ball under the bedcovers in the motel, his teeth clicking, the buzz of nonexistent mosquitoes in his ears, when he realized he was not alone.
A lamp burned on a table by the wall. A shadowy figure was pouring soup out of a can into a pot by a hot plate. Clete tried to raise himself and fell back on the pillow. “What are you doing here?”
“A bad man knows where you are,” Smiley said. “His name is Jaime O’Banion. You know him?”
Yes, Clete thought, but he was too weak to say the word. The night chain on the door had been snipped in half, the electric lock probably opened with a key card from a compliant desk clerk. Clete closed his eyes and breathed slowly in and out, his forehead sweating, cold as ice water.
“I need to get you away from here,” Smiley said.
“No,” Clete said.
“Yes. Do not argue.”
“Don’t talk to me that way,” Clete said.
Smiley didn’t reply. Clete could smell the soup heating in the pan; then he heard Smiley take the pan off the hot plate and pour it into the cup of an army-surplus mess kit. Smiley pulled up a chair next to the bed and filled a spoon with the soup.
“Eat.”
“No.”
“If you don’t eat, your liver will be hurt.”
“It’s already a football.”
“Open.”
Clete got up on one elbow and took the spoon out of Smiley’s hand and drank the soup off the spoon. He fell back on the pillow. “Where’s O’Banion?”
“He’s gone now. But he’ll be back about an hour after the bars close.”
Clete didn’t try to answer. Smiley knew the culture: The pavement princesses and the truckers on the prowl and anyone hooking up late would be doing the dirty bop by three a.m.
“Have some more,” Smiley said. He held out the aluminum cup so Clete could dip the soup from it. Clete dropped the spoon onto the rug. Smiley washed it in the sink. Clete reached for the drawer of the nightstand.
“What are you doing?” Smiley said.
“My piece is in there.”
“Not now, it isn’t.”
Clete lay back on the pillow, his arm over his eyes. “You need to go. I’ll call 911 for an ambulance.”
“He’s close by. He may be in the next room.”
“I’d rather be dead than have whatever is inside me.”
The room was quiet a long time. The pain was like glass twisting inside him. Then, when he thought he could stand it no longer, a strange transformation happened in his metabolism. The pincers that seemed to be tearing his intestines apart turned to snowmelt flooding his body. His head sagged as though his spinal cord has been severed; he felt himself drifting into a dark, safe place beneath the earth. Someone cupped his forehead, taking his temperature, and then the same person folded Clete’s .38 in his hand and placed his hand and weapon on his chest as though arranging a corpse in a coffin. Clete heard the door open and click shut, then he fell asleep.
When he woke, the room was completely dark, and his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow. He fumbled for his cell phone and hit the speed dial. Come on, Streak, answer your phone.
“Clete?” a voice said.
“Yeah,” he rasped. “Mayday.”
“What?”
“I feel like I died. Remember when I told you we might be living among dead people?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Smiley Wimple was here. He said Jaime O’Banion is here, too. Don’t call the locals.”
“Why not?”
“They hate my guts. They’ll put me in the can. Or worse.”
“Where are you?”
Clete said the name of the truck stop and town and passed out again, the cell phone bouncing on the carpet.
Smiley was not equipped to understand a phrase like “intimations of mortality.” But he understood its smell. The smell was in the ditches behind the cantinas where the prostitutes poured their buckets at sunrise, and in the slums where the poor raked rotting food with their bare hands from a smoldering garbage dump, and under a bridge outside Torreón where the narco-gangsters hung their trophies from wire loops and left them for bats to eat.
Smiley never thought about what lay on the other side of death, but he knew one thing for sure — people killed other people all the time. They just did it in a different way. With bombs from an airplane. With drones or rockets. That way the images were reduced to a neat and tidy satellite video, one that had no sound.
Smiley was not one to argue. Nor did he brood upon the ways human beings conducted themselves. The issue for those at the bottom of the pile was simple: Don’t be drawn in by lies, and don’t let others use you. The only people who dismissed the importance of power were those who possessed it or those who liked their roles as human poodles.
The only true friend he ever had was a girl a little older than he in the orphanage. She loved him and washed his body in the morning and hid his wet sheets so he wouldn’t be punished, and sometimes read poetry to him. He understood little of the meaning, but occasionally a line stuck with him that somehow defined a central mystery in his life. He remembered one line in particular. It came at the end of what she called a sonnet, one written by a young man named John Keats: On the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Did that mean we were on our own, and that love and fame were of no value, and that neither the earth nor the crowd provided reward or succor? Did our only victory lie in survival, in solitude, far from the distant crowd? Or was the poet saying it was better to be the giver of death than its recipient?
Smiley chose to believe the latter. But now he was undoing his own ethos, helping the man named Purcel instead of taking care of business first, which in this instance meant dealing with Jaime O’Banion, known as the cruelest and smartest mechanic on the East Coast. The choice of O’Banion as the hitter meant the Mob was going to make an object lesson of Smiley, old-style, the way they did Tommy Fig in the Irish Channel years ago when they freeze-wrapped his parts and strung them from a wood-bladed ceiling fan in his own butcher shop.
Smiley’s problem with O’Banion wasn’t simply professional. They had run into each other at Disney World and at the track in Hialeah and also at the Jazz Festival in New Orleans. O’Banion wore white suits and silk shirts and tight vests and two-tone shoes and a Panama hat, and he had a coarse Irish face that reminded Smiley of a twisted squash. Sometimes a prostitute was glued to his arm. An entourage of sycophants usually followed him. O’Banion called Smiley gusano (worm) to his face; he once said to his friends as Smiley walked by, “Here comes queer-bait. Grab your cocks, boys.”
The sycophants snickered openly, safe in O’Banion’s presence.
Now Smiley was parked behind a truck stop in a stolen pickup, the stars bright, dawn one hour away, wondering how O’Banion would make his play. He reached inside his tool bag and retrieved a long-barreled, silenced, 22-magnum semi-auto, one of two that he had custom-made. He loved to touch the barrel and trace his fingertips up and down the coldness of the steel, his eyes closed, his wee-wee stiffening inside his pants. He could hear himself breathing inside the truck cab, his heart slipping into overdrive. He set down the pistol until his arousal went away, then swallowed and cupped his mouth, longing for the release his work gave him.