O’Banion would be coming soon. But where and how? The truck stop and motel employed servicepeople who came and went at odd hours. O’Banion was a legend when it came to disguises and deception. Wearing surgical garb, he had walked into an OR in Tampa and popped a confidential informant on the operating table. In horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed suit and a wig that fit his head like a football helmet, he’d followed a Mississippi judge into the men’s room of the county courthouse, exchanged pleasantries with him at the urinal, then, on his way out, casually blown the judge’s brains all over the mirror. He also used disposable backup, usually junkies and black gangsters who thought they were about to make the big score and ended up in a Dumpster.
Smiley took a breath. What was the smart thing to do? Easy answer. Let Purcel worry about himself and catch O’Banion down the road with one of his women on his arm, out in public. Yes, stipple his vest with tiny red flowers and look into O’Banion’s eyes while he did it.
Yes, yes, yes.
Smiley twisted the key in the ignition and felt the pickup’s engine jump to life. He saw a black man enter the side door of the motel, pulling a laundry cart behind him. A woman with a vacuum followed. A man in a delivery uniform was smoking a cigarette in front of the main entrance; he flipped it in a high arc and went inside the building. A couple got out of a cab, laughing, walking unsteadily, and also went inside.
Smiley cut the engine, his head pounding. It wasn’t fair. He was being given a choice between abandoning his entire ethos or abandoning Purcel. The only person whose advice he had ever sought and depended upon was the girl in the orphanage in Mexico. But he had killed her and her lover, and now he had only the voice of Wonder Woman to guide him.
What should I do?
Use your imagination, she said.
Go inside?
Pretend you have my magic bracelets and golden lariat.
Those are for women.
Don’t make sexist remarks.
I’m sorry.
I was teasing. I love you, Smiley. I’ll always be with you. These are evil people. You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?
I didn’t like not calling on the locals to help Clete. But I also trusted his intuition. He was the bane of the Mob, cops who extorted freebies from hookers, racists, misogynists, people who abused animals, slumlords, and child molesters. I knew insurance executives who probably would have him killed if they could get away with it. Clete was a one-man wrecking ball with steel spikes. He’d obliterated a mobster’s home with an earth grader on Lake Pontchartrain, thrown two pimps off a three-story roof through a pecan tree, dropped a Teamster out of a hotel window into a dry swimming pool, poured sand or sugar or both into the fuel tanks of a plane loaded with wiseguys, lodged the head of a New Orleans vice cop in a toilet bowl, taken out his flopper in the parking lot of the Southern Yacht Club and hosed down the upholstery in the car of Bobby Earl (Louisiana’s most infamous racist) where Bobby was about to get it on with his new socialite girlfriend.
The stories were endless. He was the bravest and most generous man I ever knew, and the most self-destructive. His most valued possession was his code of honor, and he would die rather than compromise it, and for that reason I never argued with him when he put principle ahead of safety.
I clamped an emergency light onto the roof of my pickup and kept the accelerator to the floor until I reached the truck stop and motel forty miles from the Texas line. The stars had started to fade, the darkness draining from the sky in the east. Outside the headlights, I could see the slash pines along the highway, puffing in a balmy breeze that should have marked the beginning of another fine day.
Up ahead, emergency vehicles were pulling into the truck stop, all of them lit up like kaleidoscopes. I saw a fat woman in a bathrobe wailing as she ran from the motel, her eyes as big as half dollars, her hands raised to the heavens.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The security camera on the second floor of the motel showed a man wearing gloves and a mask getting on a chair and extending a spray can toward the lens. The mask was made of hard plastic, shiny purplish white, and cast to imitate a weeping spirit in a Greek tragedy. Nothing came out of the spray can. The man shook it and tried again. Still nothing. He looked over his shoulder. No one else was in the hallway. He dropped the spray can into a trash receptacle just as the elevator door opened and a couple who appeared drunk got out. A woman with a vacuum entered the hallway from the fire exit.
There were now four people inside the lens of the camera. The man who had disposed of the can did not take off his mask. The woman with the vacuum removed a small pistol from a pocket in her dress and let it hang from her hand. She was thick-bodied and muscular and had blond hair that hung like dirty string in her face. She hunched her shoulders as though asking a question. The man in the mask pointed at a room a few feet away.
The woman stared at the security camera. The man in the mask pointed again at the room, obviously agitated. The woman’s companion had a lean discolored face, and scar tissue in his eyebrows, and the lithe flat-chested physique of a prizefighter. He also seemed to be staring at the camera. He spoke in sign language to the man in the mask. The woman with the vacuum was short and plump and dark-skinned, perhaps Hispanic. She, too, looked at the camera, then went to the trash receptacle and retrieved the spray can. Her breasts were visibly rising and falling. None of the four people spoke. The man in the mask began to speak in sign language that, later, a police technician would translate as “I’ll shoot it when we leave.”
Clete lay asleep on his stomach in his skivvies, his face flat against the mattress, his arm hanging over the edge, his knuckles touching his piece on the floor. He was dreaming about the Asian woman who died at the hands of the Vietcong because she had taken a shanty Irish grunt into her heart. He never remembered her in an impure fashion or even what others would call an erotic one; instead, she remained with him as a spiritual immersion into the damp flowers he saw in his mind when he entered her, subsumed by the sweetness of her breath and the protective grace of her thighs and the way she pressed his face between her breasts and combed the back of his head with her nails after she came.
But his dreams about her always ended with terror. He saw the automatic weapons blaze from jungle blackness high up on the shore, and the rounds dance across the water, ripping into the sides of the sampan. She had been on top of him when the AK round struck her between the shoulder blades and exited from her chest. She’d fallen forward, dead, her hair tangled across his face.
Now Clete sat up in bed, his hands covering his eyes as though he could shield them from the screen inside his head. He beat his fists on the mattress at the irreversible nature of his loss, and stamped one foot on the carpet. It was the red-black rage he had never been able to leave in Vietnam, the one that sought a victim who had no idea of the danger he had just tapped into.
Clete washed his face in the bathroom and lay back down. In minutes he drifted off in a haze that was as warm and pink as morphine; he hoped the sun was about to rise on a new day, one that contained the gifts of both heaven and earth.
Smiley’s favorite line from a song was one by Hank Williams: I’ll never get out of this world alive. That was the way to think. Why fret yourself over what you can’t change?