Valley of Bones (41 page)
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
I saw my brave boys and girls casting fearful glances at me waiting for the miracle, but there was no miracle something had gone wrong with my plan I thought and so I crawled through a collapsed tunnel and arrived at the surface where I hid and waited and prayed until I heard the sound of my gun again, I saw a tank go up in flames as the tungsten darts tore into its stern and then the Somerset Light Infantry came trotting through the smoke having run forty miles with full gear in a little over ten hours.
Jammed among the ruins they had made, the GOS armor could not maneuver so our people destroyed it all with RPGs and satchel charges, and then our people poured into the tunnels
catching the enemy between us inside and safety and we hunted them through the dark, with bayonets and machetes and shovels at the very end, when we had all run out of ammunition.
So that was my little Stalingrad, my miniature ketelschlacht. My last battle. We had ninety-one killed, and two hundred wounded, and counted 488 of them killed, although Colonel al-Muwalid and his guards escaped.
The tunnels had drains down the center of their floors and these ran overflowing with blood I waded in their blood above my ankles it flowed over the tops of my French ammunition boots. As soon as I knew we were safe, I went to the hospital to see the wounded, me covered in blood, squelching it in my boots, and there Trini attacked me with vehement language, calling me monster traitor murderer maniac, and what hurt most, that Nora would have despised me for what I’d done and I said I knew but I hoped to explain it to her in heaven and she laughed hysterically saying look at you, you look like Attila the Hun. Heaven, don’t make me laugh! Now get out of my hospital!
I don’t know who betrayed me. Someone did, though, someone who knew that in the balmy days of peace I used to ride north out of Wibok along the Kongkong in the early morning and that I started doing it again after the battle. I suppose even after all the victory I had enemies among the people, what prophet doesn’t? I imagine they will weave the traitor into their songs and so he will live forever like Judas Iscariot. It happened in high Mai, just past dawn, the sky with that fragile glassy look it gets in the dry season, hardly any green showing at all and the river shrunk to a stream you could practically leap across. Dol always wanted to send some people with me, but the whole point was to be alone for a precious hour or so.
They shot my horse from the cover of a burnt forest. I twisted my ankle when we fell, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, so I was just waiting for them when they came out, guns pointing, cautious, as if I were a bomb.
I was quite harmless now, although they didn’t know that. A moment earlier I had been what I had been since the night in the smoky room, a prophet full of God’s presence, and when I hit the ground I was just Emmylou Dideroff again. He tossed me out without a word of warning like you tumble a sleeping kitten out of a sewing basket. I wonder if that happened to the real prophets after they’d done their mission maybe Jonah sold insurance in Nineveh for the rest of his life Jeremiah went into camel saddles and
Shit so little space left and here I am going on
WELL OF COURSE
they did the usual, bag over the head, beatings, abuse, gang rape and who really gives a shit it’s going on right now in a thousand places, right now as you read this and you might say oh how awful if it was brought to your attention in some compelling and artistic way and then you’d maybe write a check if you are a particularly conscientious person before going back to the usual bourgeois oblivion of the rich world. I’m sorry, being tortured gives you a bad attitude sometimes. Whoever was tortured stays tortured, Jean Amery, French resistant, died in prison, my eternal quotations. Colonel al-Muwalid did the actual torture himself, not the physical part but the interrogations. It was mainly bastinado, shredding the soles of the feet with split cables and also the very common and convenient form that I don’t know the name of where they bind your hands behind your back and hoist you off the floor and then drop you a distance, catching you just before your toes hit. It dislocates the shoulders and then they leave you there naked with your feet just touching the floor in my case since they’d flayed them to the bone thus unbearable pain either way. I say unbearable but clearly I bore it, praying continuously although to nothing I could feel. God had forsaken me as He so often does in our hours of need, playing His deep game. When I
passed out from the pain I had visions, usually little replays of my stupid life but sometimes Nora was there which was nice but she wouldn’t tell me what heaven was like or how soon I would join her I figured maybe 150,000 years in Purgatory would do it. Pretty thin stuff considering. Pathetic. I didn’t even cry why have You forsaken me, not having expected even as much as I got of grace. Well,
of course
He forsook me.
After some days of this they got bored I suppose or they were afraid I was going into shock and they took me to what I guessed was a military hospital, and I awakened in a clean bed with my veins full of painkillers, my shoulders reset and my wounds dressed. Dr. Izadi announced himself as my doc, a small, neat guy with a pepper-and-salt mustache and glinting aviator glasses, so obviously a mukhabarati that he might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with
SECRET POLICE
on it. He was very concerned about my health and informed me with much clucking concern that if they got hold of me again my body wouldn’t bear it. You will die, my dear, and that will be the end of you, you really should tell them what they want to know, or you could tell me…
And so on. It would have worked too, that’s the beauty of the technique, having been tortured once and then made comfortable and filled with dozy drugs, the thought of being violated again appears insufferably awful, the anticipation being even worse than the pain itself. But what they wanted to know I did not have to give. The colonel was convinced that Richardson had discovered a bonanza of petroleum in the Upper Sobat basin, he read me what he said were transcripts of radio messages that the oil team had sent out, predicting billions upon billions of gallons, fifty, sixty billions, dwarfing the Bahr al-Ghazal fields, and so he kept asking what did you do with the data, who are you working for, you’re not some nun, do you expect us to believe that a nun could organize and lead an army made out of slaves, who is helping you, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis? Where is the oil data? Who did you give it to?
But there was no oil, Richardson was perfectly clear about that and I can’t figure out why he would lie to me. I’m no expert, but I did claw through Seely’s Principles of Petroleum Geology while I was hosting the oil prospectors, enough to follow Richardson’s argument and read his seismic data and he was telling the truth, at least to me. If he was playing another game with his employers I don’t know, maybe lying to
them,
but al-Muwalid wouldn’t buy it. I knew he was going to kill me, by torture if I didn’t support his fantasy, and with a head shot in any case, and I made up my mind to make a break, on my hands and knees if necessary, in order to provoke a fatal encounter, foolish really, the idea of me escaping in the shape I was in, but in the event it proved unnecessary.
I awoke one night with a hand over my mouth whose owner pressed a finger to his lips drew back the covers and lifted me out of bed like a baby. He carried me from the room, down a hallway and out into the night. There were other men standing around, watching, holding short automatic weapons. I saw one body in a wide pool of blood before they had me strapped down on a litter in the back of a military ambulance. I heard a brief rattle of fire and a dull explosion and then we were off down a road. A man with a short beard was examining me with a tiny flashlight, checking my heart and pulse taking my temperature as we roared bumping along. I heard voices speaking German over the roar of the engine. Who are you? Friends, he replied. It’s better that you sleep now. He had a slight accent, but before I could ask him anything else I felt a coolness on my thigh and a pinprick and I went out.
When I next opened my eyes I started crying because I wasn’t in heaven with Nora, and the first face I saw was Peter Mulvaney’s and for a second I thought it was her. Where am I the usual question and he said Malta, we’re on Malta, in Valletta. He told me that he’d arranged the snatch, a bunch of special ops pals he’d organized on short notice, mostly Germans, came
in and took over the military hospital where I was being held. For me? I said, calculating the cost. The Society footed the bill, he said. Why? He looked a little embarrassed. We occasionally work together, he said. Mucha do about nothing, I said, and he nodded. Nora would have raised holy hell, he said, but we had a mutual interest. I brought your bag, he said, your things from Wibok, there’s not much but I thought you’d want them. Am I going back to Wibok? Do you want to?
I thought about that for a while, looking around the room, a typical hospital room with a window through which came the smell of gasoline and cooking-scented air and the rumble of a city, which I had not heard since we left Rome. No, I said, I’m finished there. Where then? Florida, I said. I want to go home.
So when I was strong enough they flew me to London on a passport made out to Emmylou Dideroff and then to Miami, where I bumped into David Packer at the airport and it turned out that he knew the Jamesons and on that basis got me my houseboat and the job at Wilson’s and I lived like a mouse, a church mouse, until the day I saw Jabir al-Muwalid on SW First Street and the river and you know the rest. I didn’t kill him.
Here it ends and don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. It’s what I remember but who knows the sources of memory? Or fate? Only God. Or as the saint says at the end of
his
confessions, What man can enable the human mind to understand this? Which angel can interpret it to an angel? What angel can help a human being to grasp it? Only You can be asked, only You can be begged, only on Your door can we knock. Yes, indeed, that is how it is received, how it is found, how the door is opened.
Emmylou Dideroff
Emily Garigeau
(late of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ)
It is not possible in a small book such as this to recount in detail the sufferings and martyrdoms of the sisters of the Blood of Christ during the Second World War, and even now the fate of many remains obscure. Of the Polish Province, only three sisters survived, out of seventy-three in 1939. (The prioress general, Sr. Dr. Ludmilla Poniowski, died during the bombing of Warsaw. She had been making a visit of inspection when war broke out and she immediately made her way to the Society’s hospital, where she treated casualties until her operating room was destroyed by a direct hit.) Many records were lost when the Mother House at Nemours was confiscated by the German occupation authorities for use as a convalescent home for the army, and most of the European leadership was murdered by various regimes. Mother General Sapenfeld was arrested in June of 1941, soon after the Gestapo obtained a secret memorandum directing her sisters to use their best efforts to rescue Jews and other innocent victims of the Nazis, since, she wrote, “The German Reich has declared war on a whole people and, since they are not combatants, they must be considered to be innocent victims and the subjects of our sacred vow of service.” She died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the winter of 1943. In February 1944, the Society was outlawed in all German-occupied territories, its priories and assets were seized, and many sisters were arrested. A total of eighty-seven sisters perished in the camps.
—FROM
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST,
BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
I
T WAS NEARLY
midnight when they arrived at the scruffy banks of the Miami River. Everything at the hospital had taken longer than expected, and Paz had not the heart to rush things. He had wanted to take Lorna home first, but she refused, and Barlow backed her up on it. He pointed out that they had no idea what they would encounter at Packer’s houseboat, and they could not arrange for police backup without implicating themselves in the escape of a dangerous felon, besides which the point of that had only been to keep Emmylou out of the hands of the feds until they had the whole thing figured out. It was entirely possible that were they to retrieve Emmylou with the help of the police, she would be delivered from their custody by warrant to the very people who had snatched her from the Barlows, or their close cousins. So Lorna sat in the rental car a block away from the water with a cell phone in her hands and strict orders to get away and raise the alarm should the two men not return within the hour, or should something untoward take place.
“Untoward?” she asked. “I’m sorry, my standards for
toward
are a little bent. What would
un
be at this point?”
Paz regretted his use of the word. “Multiple gunshots, automatic fire, huge fireballs, cars full of gangsters tearing down to the water. Like that. On the assumption that we’ll be in major trouble or dead.”
“Okay, got it, gunshots, fireballs, cars.” They stared at each other. “Don’t get killed, Jimmy.” The
L
-word floated in her glottis and
strained to push itself out, but he beat her to it, the first time she had heard it from an unrelated male of her species.
“Me too,” she said. “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you, however short. Would that be cool?”
“Don’t talk that kind of shit, Lorna. We’ll be back before you know it.”
THEY WALK OFF
into the dark. Lorna sits in the driver’s seat, trying not to think about the passage of time, time on this terrifying operation, and the Time Remaining. She feels ashamed that she is so ill prepared for the ultimate things, her long career in hypochondria has not been helpful here. Oya told her that her life was over, perfectly correct, and she notices that she has started to think that it really was the Lord of Death and not a moon-faced nurse’s aide there at the
bembé
. Perhaps a mercy, that, to accept the reality of an unseen world, maybe cowardice, but what was the point of stoic bravery, after all, whom were we trying to impress? She realizes too that whatever the second opinion says (and she is still Lorna enough to resolve to seek one), her life as it was is indeed over. She recalls now a story told to her by Betsy Newhouse. One of Betsy’s friends had developed breast cancer, and Betsy had dropped her cold. I can’t be friends with her anymore, Betsy said, she did all the right things, diet exercise, the best doctors, or so she said, but she must have done something wrong,
something….
Lorna feels a wave of self-disgust, how could she have spent so much time with a woman like that? Her precious moments listening to comments on this one’s body and that one’s sex life. She badly wants to talk to Sheryl Waits. Guilt here too, she hasn’t called her in a week, maybe more. It is late, but Sheryl is famously available twenty-four/seven. She punches the keys.
“I’m sorry, we don’t accept telephone solicitations from strangers,” says Sheryl when Lorna speaks.
“Come on, Sheryl.”
“Come on yo’self. You know how many messages I left on your voice mail? Where have you
been,
girl?”
“With Jimmy.”
“Of
course
with Jimmy. Tell me how right I was.”
“You were right.”
“Of course I was. So? Give!”
“We went to Grand Cayman,” says Lorna and converts the trip and its sequelae into a romantic idyll, provoking squeals of delight from her friend. She doesn’t say she has had a bad biopsy, that she’s dying, because she knows that Sheryl would want to come right over and hug her and hold her hand and she doesn’t want to get into the B-movie aspects of her present situation, standing lookout for a desperate venture.
“So,” says Sheryl, “this is now officially serious. Do we have the
L
-word yet? Do we have the
M
-word?”
“The former, but not the latter.”
“But it’s in the air, yes?”
“It might be. Time will tell.”
“Hey, hon, is something wrong? Your voice sounds all funny.”
There is a loud
boom
from the direction of the boat that echoes against the walls of the sheds and workshops that line the river here.
“No, I’m fine,” Lorna says with a shaking voice. “Look, I got to go now. I just wanted to say that I love you.”
A pause. “Well thank you, Lorna, I love you too. Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says and hangs up. She listens, straining her ears, and there is another boom, and then only silence and the normal night sounds of the district. Her phone buzzes. Sheryl again, but she doesn’t answer.
THEY CRAWLED LOW
on the deck of Emmylou’s old houseboat and looked across the yards of dark water at Packer’s big box-on-a-barge. The windows
were illuminated cheerily by a color
television screen, and they could see the shadow of a man moving about against that light.
“What’s that he got in there, a motorcycle?”
“Yeah, a big Harley. I guess he keeps it inside at night.”
“Smart fella. A lot of crime down by the river,” said Barlow.
“He’s got a pistol,” said Paz.
“Well, we’ll just have to take it away from him then.” Barlow reached into his pocket and brought out a pair of number one shells and slipped them into the old 16-gauge double-barrel Ithaca shotgun he was carrying. He also had a big revolver stuck in his belt. The clack of the breech closing seemed unnaturally loud to Paz. He worked the slide of his Glock.
“Now, let’s do this,” said Barlow, and in the dim sky glow Paz could see he was wearing his lynch-mob-leader face. Barlow jumped off the houseboat and started to run. Two steps on the deck of Packer’s barge and he was at the jalousied glass door, which he shattered to pieces with his boot and the stock of his weapon. He had just dodged around the Harley when he saw Packer moving, a flash of white shirt in the dim light of the TV screen. He was heading toward the bow, toward his bedroom.
Packer was just reaching under the mattress of his bed when the butt of Barlow’s shotgun cracked him hard over the ear. Then there was a knee in his back and the twin circles of steel pressing like a cookie cutter into the back of his neck. He went limp.
Barlow turned the man over and jammed the muzzle under his chin. Packer was paper pale and his eyes were rolling.
“What do you want? Money?” His voice squeaked.
“Shut up!” said Barlow. He pulled the pistol out of its hiding place, with his little finger in the muzzle and tossed it into a corner. He backed away, still pointing the shotgun, and said, “Get up!”
Packer rose and walked unsteadily to the living room of the craft. A trickle of blood flowed from the wound above his ear. The TV was still on, playing a car commercial. Barlow lifted the shotgun, pointed it at Packer’s head, and pulled a trigger, twitching the muzzle at the
last half second so that the charge fired past Packer’s ear at the television, and scored a direct hit on a cruising Honda. Packer’s face contorted and he lost control of his bladder. A pool formed at his feet. Barlow grabbed a chair from the dining area and threw it at the man.
“Sit down, you goddamn piss-baby!”
Packer sat. Without taking his eyes off him, Barlow drew a six-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt. He put the shotgun on the dining table and took a roll of duct tape from his trouser pocket. When Packer was fully trussed, arms, hands, and feet to the chair, Barlow stood in front of him and began to sharpen the hunting knife with a small stone that he took from a pocket in its sheath. He spit on the stone and drew the knife across it again and again. Packer watched the motion as if hypnotized. He cleared his throat. “Who. Who are you?”
“Well, I am the husband of the woman that your boys broke into her home and pistol-whipped this afternoon up by Clewiston. And kidnapped a woman we had as a guest.”
Snick, snick,
went the knife on the stone.
“I had nothing to do with that,” said Packer. “Clewiston? I don’t know what you’re—”
The knife flashed out, quick as a snake strike. Packer felt a bite on his forehead and yelped. Blood flowed into his eye and he blinked it away.
“I swear to God…,” Packer began, but stopped when Barlow held the tip of the knife an inch away from his eye.
“None of that,” said Barlow, “we don’t hold with taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
Snick snick snick.
“What are you going to do?” asked Packer after several minutes had passed.
“Well, what do you think? What do you think is the right thing to do to a man who would hire hoods to beat a woman who never did an unkind act in her whole life? You got any ideas?”
“Look, I have money, a lot of money…I’ll make it right. I didn’t know…I never told them to hurt anyone….”
“I don’t want your money, you terrible chunk of dog shit,” said
Barlow in a slow calm voice. “Blood’s been shed and has to be repaid in blood. I been thinking what to do driving down here and I guess I come up with something about right.”
Snick snick.
Barlow replaced the stone in its little pocket. He licked the back of his wrist and shaved off a swath of hair. He held this in front of Packer’s goggling eyes.
“Pretty sharp, huh?”
No comment from Packer. Barlow said, “What I come up with is I’m going to skin your head. That seem fair to you? My wife’s poor face, you ought to have seen it. It just broke my heart to look at her. They cracked her cheekbone, you know.”
“Oh, Jesus, oh God…”
“You hear what I said about taking the Lord’s name in vain? You don’t listen too good, Mr. Packer, that might be one of your main problems in life. My own main problem is anybody hurts my family I just go pure crazy out of control. Now I done this a bunch of times on deer, mostly when I was a kid, but I guess it’ll work the same with you. First, I’m going to cut a circle around your scalp like this….” Barlow drew the point of the knife lightly around Packer’s head, too lightly to draw blood.
“Then I can get my point under there and work your scalp off. I ought to have a skinner, but I guess this old Randall’s going to do the job good enough. It ain’t as if I’m going to mount it. Anyway, after that, I’ll cut in front of your ears, behind your jaw and on up. If I’m careful and slow about it and if you don’t buck too much, I guess I can pull the whole thing off in one piece. The eyelids are the hard part, them being so delicate. I’m going to tape up your mouth now, since you’re a goddamned coward who sends other men to beat up ladies in their own kitchens, which means you’ll probably bawl like a little girl, and I don’t want to wake up the whole town.”
Barlow applied the tape and then walked behind Packer and placed his arm under the wildly squirming man’s chin, pressing the back of his head against his own belt buckle. He placed the
knife against Packer’s forehead and began to move it slowly across.
The boat rocked and Paz burst into the room, his pistol pointing. “Goddammit, Cletis! What the
fuck
are you doing?”
“Stay out of this, Jimmy!”
“Put down that knife! What’re you, nuts?”
Barlow put his knife on the dining table but picked up his shotgun and pointed it toward Paz, who pointed his pistol right back.
“Put it down, Cletis! I mean it.”
Barlow fired the shotgun. The charge of shot hit the tank of the Harley, puncturing it in half a dozen places. The room filled with the toxic-sweet scent of gasoline.
Paz said, “Okay, Cletis, you made your point but now you got an empty shotgun there. I don’t want to have to shoot you, but I will if you don’t put the damn gun down and get the fuck off of this boat. Go out and cool off! I’ll get with you later. Go!”
After a long moment of hesitation, Barlow placed the shotgun against a bulkhead and stalked out of the room. He climbed the stairway to the overhead deck and they could hear him pacing back and forth, reciting, “Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger; the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them.”
Paz pulled the tape off Packer’s mouth. “Christ, what a mess! Are you okay?”
“What the fuck does it look like? Untie me! I’m going to put that fucking redneck maniac in jail for the rest of his life.”
“Oh, you don’t want to talk like that, Dave. You don’t want Cletis in the same jail as you. No way.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Murder, Dave,” said Paz, strolling around behind the other man and into the bedroom. A little searching found an attaché case, locked. He brought it back into the salon and set it on the table next to Barlow’s blade.
“You had a Sudanese named al-Muwalid killed by a man named Dodo Cortez, supervised by your pal Jack Wilson, and then you had
Wilson killed too, to clear the decks. You’re a thorough fellow, Dave. You couldn’t have guessed that I had a way into Ignacio Hoffmann, but I did, and he was very forthcoming, for a gangster. He said that a Floyd Mitchell had visited him along with poor old Jack. Ignacio told me how and why Dodo killed the Sudanese and described you pretty well. Floyd Mitchell is you, Dave.”
“You can’t prove any of that.”
“You’re right, I can’t. But, you know, I don’t think I’m going to have to, because you’re going to tell me the whole story, all about SRPU and the Sudan and Emmylou Dideroff and oil, every fucking detail. Or…”
“Or what?” said Packer. “You realize I’m going to have your badge for this?”
“That’s good, that’s a good movie line. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to dig my badge out of the toilet. I’m now violating a direct written order from my superior officer, Major Oliphant, to lay off this case and specifically to stay away from you. My plan is to pursue a career in food services.”