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“Outside with Gretchen.”
“What are they waiting on?”
“I don’t know, Clete. What are they supposed to do? Spray the basement through the window?”
“Maybe the guy upstairs was trying to tell me something. Maybe he didn’t understand what I said to him. I started shooting and couldn’t stop.”
“Listen to me. The program is simple. We get all the innocent people out of here, and we dust the rest. That’s it.”
“I think we blew it. I think this one is coming apart on us.”
“Wrong.”
Either Alafair or Gretchen broke the glass and the taped vinyl leaf bag out of the basement window, sending all of it crashing to the floor.
“I’m going down,” Clete said. “I’m going to take out these fuckers or lose it here.”
And that’s what he did.
I FOLLOWED HIM DOWN the steps into the darkness. The air was damp and smelled of burned gunpowder and water that had stagnated in a drain. There was another odor, too, the one I had smelled outside the cave behind Albert’s house. Again and again, even moments ago, I had denied to others the possibility that Asa Surrette was larger than the sum of his parts. His grandiose rhetoric was pirated from the Bible and even from Percy Shelley. His arrogance and narcissism reminded me of Freud’s statement about the practicing alcoholic: “Ah, yes, his highness the child.” Yet I could not explain the fecal stench exuding from his glands; the level of cruelty he imposed on others; the fact that he murdered children in cold blood and felt no remorse; and finally, his ability to recruit others to his cause, convincing them they could profit by the association and walk away from it unscathed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and André Schwarz-Bart, the French-Jewish writer who lost his family at Auschwitz, had all asked the same question and never found an answer, or at least one I knew of. Could I expect more of myself? I wanted to forget Surrette and think of Shakespeare’s famous words in The Tempest. How does the passage go? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. The poignancy of the line calls up compassion and humility. The words of Surrette suggest a dark complexity that befouls the mind as soon as we try to address it. I think that is where his power came from. We undid ourselves in trying to fathom a mystery that was not a mystery at all.
As I descended into the basement, into its rank odor of sweat and urine and human torment, I realized that the die was cast for all of us, and speculation was of little value in dealing with evil. We try to protect the innocent and punish the wicked and don’t do a very good job of either. Ultimately, we adopt the methods of our adversaries and grease them off the earth and change nothing.
These were the same thoughts I had when I went down a night trail salted with Chinese toe-poppers almost fifty years ago. If my old friend the line sergeant were still alive, I wondered what he would have to say. I suspected he would tell me that the biggest illusion in our lives is the belief that we have control over anything.
We reached the bottom of the stairs without a shot being fired. Clete and I were crouched low, shell casings and powdered brick and concrete and broken glass from the lightbulbs crunching under our shoes. I could make out a stooped figure to our right, close to the wall. “Albert, is that you?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. He was working the wire loose from Molly’s wrists. He waved one hand at me, gesturing for me to approach. I worked my way across the basement and propped the M-1 against the wall, then got down on my knees and unwrapped the rest of the wire from Molly’s wrists. I hugged her head against my chest and pressed my face against her hair. Both of her hands were squeezed tight on my forearm. I could feel the heat in her body and the hardness in her back and the hum of her blood when I touched the nape of her neck.
“At least one of them went up a ladder,” Albert whispered. “Maybe two of them did.”
“How many were down here?” I asked.
“Surrette, Boyd, and a guy named Terry,” he said. “Boyd is the weak sister. Terry is the guy who opened up on y’all.”
“You saw no one else?”
“We heard Surrette talking to somebody upstairs, somebody whose voice was impaired,” Albert said. “Surrette was yelling at him.”
“What about Caspian?” I said.
“He’s not here,” Albert said.
“The girls are in a cage, Dave,” Molly said. “The ladder is on the other side of the cage.”
“Where’s Felicity Louviere?”
“On a bed against the far wall,” Albert said.
“Is she alive?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “She was in a lot of pain.”
“He did terrible things to her, Dave,” Molly said. “This man isn’t human.”
I got to my feet and picked up the M-1. I tried to think what Surrette would do under the present circumstances. He was a survivor of the most cynical kind. If a plane were going down and there was only one parachute on board, Surrette would have it strapped on his back. I suspected that Boyd and Terry and the impaired man Clete killed had never guessed that Surrette probably used countless people just like them, flicking them away as he would a hangnail once they served their purpose.
