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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?
This time the situation was
different. He was making choices that were not part of the program. Wonder Woman told him what to do and when to do it. But when he strayed from the program, her voice turned to static, then disappeared in the wind. That meant one thing: He was on his own. For Smiley, being alone guaranteed a return to his childhood status in Mexico City and a predatory world other people couldn’t imagine in their worst nightmares.
The personality that lived within him at the orphanage had been a victim, a pathetic child who took control of his life by burning himself with cigarettes. Wonder Woman freed him and gave him license to kill and a libidinous joy in the work he did, cleansing the earth of cruel men who had no right to the air they breathed. That was how Smiley saw it.
The only restrictions in the program had to do with conflicts about the targets and self-interest. He didn’t do hits for money alone; the target had to deserve his fate. Occasionally, Smiley worked pro bono. Why not? A Jewish friend of his once told him that a good deed by a Cossack was still a good deed. Smiley couldn’t quite figure out what that meant, but he knew it had something to do with the importance of good deeds.
The second restriction—putting himself at risk on behalf of others—could become an ethical quagmire. A button man in Key West who claimed he had killed forty-five men and seven women had told Smiley, “You got a lot of talent, kid. You’ll probably go a long way. Don’t screw it up.”
Years later, he saw the killer on a television interview inside a maximum-security federal prison. The man’s eyes had the brightness of obsidian, his face the color and expression of cardboard. When asked if he ever felt remorse over the people he’d killed, he said, “I didn’t know none of them.” When the journalist asked about the damage he had done to the victims’ families, the killer said, “I didn’t know none of them either.”
Smiley could not fathom the man’s thinking. How could not knowing somebody make killing acceptable? Was Smiley made different in the womb, like the button man? Or was he the sword of justice? If the latter was true, he had to give up all thoughts of himself. That could be a rough go.
There was still time to leave Purcel to his own fate. Don’t screw it up. Those words may have come from the mouth of a man who stank of salami and red wine and hair tonic, but they were hard to argue with.
Smiley felt like someone had hammered a nail between his eyes. He drove the stolen pickup in a wide circle around the back of the motel. Eighteen-wheelers were passing on the four-lane, headed for Big D or Little Rock or Baton Rouge or New Orleans. All Smiley had to do was join them. Then he would be back inside the program, safe, taking care of himself again, having a little fun once in a while.
Just when he thought he had established a moment of serenity in his head, Wonder Woman’s words came back like a slap.
You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?
• • •
A DOOR FAR DOWN the hall on the motel’s second floor opened, and a man pulling a suitcase on wheels came out and walked to the elevator. The four people standing by the security camera walked in separate directions, as though returning to their rooms or duties. The man in the mask stepped inside the fire exit, then returned when the elevator closed. The blond woman got a step ladder from a broom closet and tried to unload the camera but had no success. Six minutes had elapsed since the four people had assembled.
They approached the door that the man in the mask had pointed at. Then the elevator cables rattled and the wall shook as the elevator stopped on the second floor; the doors slid open. The four people in the hallway stood frozen on either side of the targeted room. No one exited the elevator. The dark-skinned woman who may have been Hispanic walked toward the elevator door, dragging her vacuum behind her. She turned to the others and shook her head. The man in the mask slipped a key card through the lock on the targeted room. The lock made a dry clicking sound. The man in the mask leaned against the door, prepared to burst into the room, his weapon cocked.
• • •
