“What's up with him?” one of the crap-artists asked.
“I don't know,” said another, “but I know one thing: he left the gelt.”
For a moment they simply look at the untidy pile of bills beside Bill Gelb's vacated spot. Then, quite spontaneously, the six of them begin to applaud.
April 4, 1981 Somewhere in New Jersey
Aboard the Silver Meteor
11:28 A. M.
In his seat by the window, Riddley is asleep and dreaming of other, younger days. He is dreaming, in fact, of 1961. In his dream, he and Maddy are walking to school hand in hand beneath a brilliant November sky. Together they chant their old favorite, which they made up themselves: “Whammer-jammer-Alabammer! Beetle Bailey, Katzenjammer! Gi'me back my goddam hammer! Whammer-jammer-Alabammer!” Then they giggle.
It is a good day. The Cuban stuff, which scared everybody near bout to death, is over. Rid has drawn a pitcher, and he thinks Mrs. Ellis will ask him to show it to the rest of the kinnygarden. Mrs. Ellis likes his pitchers.
Then, suddenly, Maddy stops. From the north comes a rising rumble. She looks at him solemnly. “Those are the bombers,” she says. “Hit happened. Hit's World War Three.”
“Naw,” Riddley says. “Hit's over. The Roosians backed down. Kennedy scared em honest. Bald Roosian fella told his boats to turn around and go home. Mama said so.”
“Mama's crazy,” Maddy replies. “She sleeps on the riverbank. She sleeps with the copperhaids.”
And as if to prove it, the Blackwater air-raid siren goes off, deafening him—
11:29 A. M.
Riddley straightens up and stares out at New Jersey: stares, in fact, at the exact swampy wasteland he will that night be visiting.
The man across the aisle looks up from his paperback book. “Are you all right, sir?” he asks.
Riddley cannot hear him. The air-raid siren has followed him out of his dream. It is filling his head, bursting his brains.
Then, suddenly, it cuts off. When the man across the aisle asks his question again, this time with real concern, Riddley hears him.
“Yes, thanks,” he says in a voice that's almost steady. In his head, the old rhyme beats: Whammer-jammer-Alabammer. “I'm fine.”
But some folks are not, he thinks. Some folks most definitely are not.
490 Park Avenue South 5th floor
11:29 A. M.
In 1970, a large number of American brass were celebrating at a Saigon bar and whorehouse called Haiphong Charlie's. Word had come down from Washington that the war would certainly continue for at least another year, and these career soldiers, who had gotten the ass-kicking of their lives over the last twenty months or so and wanted payback more than they wanted life itself, were raising the roof. The miracle was that something in the bomb the anonymous waiter planted was defective, and instead of spraying the whole room with nails and screws, it only sprayed those soldiers who happened to be near the stage, where it had been hidden in a flower arrangement. One of those unfortunates was Anthony Hecksler's aide-de-camp. Poor sonofabitch lost both hands and one eye while he was doing the frug or the Watusi or one of those.
Hecksler himself was on the edge of the room, talking with Westy Westmoreland, and although a number of nails flew between them—both men heard their whining passage—neither suffered so much as a nicked earlobe. But the sound of the explosion in that small room was enormous. Iron-Guts hadn't minded being spared the screams of the wounded, but it had been nine full days before his hearing began to come back. He had about given that sensation up for dead when it finally returned home (and still for a week or so every conversation had been like a transatlantic phone call in the nineteen-twenties). His ears have been sensitive to loud noises ever since.
Which is why, when Carlos yanks the pull-ring in the center of the silver thing, setting off the high-decibel siren, Iron-Guts recoils with a harsh grunt of surprise and pain—”AHHH?”—and puts his hands to his ears.
All at once the knife is pointing at the ceiling instead of at Carlos, and Carlos doesn't hesitate to take advantage. Badly hurt as he is, as surprised as he is, he's never gone more than half a step over the edge of panic. He knows there are only two ways out of this office, and that the five-story drop from the windows behind him is unacceptable. It must be the door, and that means he must deal with The General.
Near the top of the screaming gunshell, about eight inches beyond the pull-ring, is a promising red button. As The General lunges forward again, Carlos thrusts the gunshell gadget at him and pushes the button. He's hoping for acid.
A cloud of white stuff billows from the pinhole in the very tip of the gunshell and envelops the General. Hi-Pro gas isn't acid—not quite—but it isn't cotton candy, either. The General feels as if a swarm of biting insects (Gnats from Hell) had just settled on the wet and delicate surfaces of his eyes. These same insects pour up his nostrils, and the General suspends breathing at once.
Like Carlos, he keeps control. He knows he's been gassed. Even blinded, he can deal with that, has dealt with it before. It's the siren that's really screwing up his action. It's bludgeoning his brains.
He falls back toward the door, pressing his free hand against his left ear and waving the knife in front of him, creating what he hopes will be a zone of serious injury.
And then, oh praise God, the siren quits. Maybe its Taiwanese circuits are defective; maybe the nine-volt battery which powered it just ran out of juice. Hecksler doesn't give Shit One which it is. All he knows is that he can think again, and this fills his warrior's heart with gratitude.
With luck, however, the D. S. won't know he's got it back together. A little acting is in order. Hecksler staggers against the side of the door, still screaming. He allows the knife to drop. His eyes, he knows, are swelling shut. If Carlos buys his ruse—
Carlos does. The doorway is clear. The man sagging against one side of it is out of action, must be out of action after that. Carlos tries to give him another spray for good measure, but this time when he triggers the button there's nothing but an impotent phut sound and a little gasp of something like steam. No matter. Time to get while the getting is good. Carlos staggers for the office doorway, his blood-sodden pants sticking to his legs. He is already thinking, in a hysterical and unformed way, about emergency rooms and assumed names.
The General is blind and the General is deaf, but his nose hasn't swelled entirely shut and he catches that dark, peaty odor which Frank DeFelice noticed in the elevator. He straightens up and lashes out at the center of the smell. The Army-Navy hunting knife goes into Carlos's chest up to the hilt, skewering the Mad Florist's heart like a piece of beef on a shish kabob. If he had been at Cony Island with Sandra and Dina, Iron-Guts undoubtedly would have won a teddy bear.
Carlos takes two shuffling steps backward, tearing the knife out of the General's grip. He looks down at it unbelievingly and utters a single incoherent word. It sounds like Iggala (not that the General can hear it), but it's probably Abbalah. He tries to pull the knife free and cannot. His legs fold up and he drops to his knees. He is still pulling feebly at the hilt when he falls forward, pushing the tip of the blade all the way out through the back of his jacket. His heart gives a final spasm around the knife that has outraged it and then quits. Carlos feels a sensation of flying as the stained and filthy piece of laundry which is his soul finally flies off the line of his life and into whatever world there comes next.