1975 - Night of the Juggler (24 page)

Ransom shouted a warning at Boyle, and that sound caused Gus Soltik to change aim. Instead of cutting down the red-haired man who had tried to hurt him in a dark basement, Soltik swung his gun left and squeezed off two shots, which struck John Ransom in the face and killed him instantly.

Instantly in a temporal sense, but in a different calibration of time, there was a unit of eternity in which John Ransom had a last memory of his daughter, a moment to realize he had given her this final gift, and thus that last memory was free of guilt or shame, charged instead with shimmering pride.

Instinctively, Boyle had gone to the ground at the first shot, rolling over twice, then swinging his gun rapidly toward the towering figure above him, the butt locked tightly in both of his big hands. But before he could squeeze off a round, Soltik fired two more shots, one of which went cleanly through Boyle’s left thigh and a second which drew a scalding line of pain across his rib cage, smashing through his radio, finally spending itself in earth already darkening with his blood.

Gus Soltik pulled the trigger again, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber. With a sob of fear, he threw the gun aside and ran toward the shallow cave where he had left Kate Boyd, gagged and helplessly bound, but now mercifully insensate from the enduring terrors of her ordeal.

. . . didn’t get one shot off, Rusty Boyle thought, fighting down his nausea but feeling the dizzying surge of blood through his veins. Not one shot. Turning with an effort, he looked at the body of John Ransom. Poor bastard, he thought. No, this was what he wanted.

Curtains. It wrapped everything up for him. College, his wife, a certain honor. But, Christ, I’ll bet he wouldn’t have wanted it at my expense.

He wouldn’t have wanted to take me with him.

Fighting back gasps of pain, Rusty Boyle pushed himself to a sitting position, bracing his back against a tree trunk. Blood was pumping evenly and rhythmically from the wound in his thigh. His head felt light.

His thoughts were already blurred. Even if he could use the broken radio, it probably wouldn’t help. He was close to shock now. Losing too much blood. They hadn’t shared that steak and wine and made love tonight. And now they never would.

While he was thinking of Joyce, resigned to never knowing her beauty and grace again, he heard a single word, an urgent whisper against the dark silence. One word.

“Bullet!”

For an instant, Rusty Boyle didn’t believe it. Then, relief choking his voice, he gave the countersign to Luther Boyd. Again one word.

“Trigger.”

Triage, from the French, is a word defining the process of grading marketable produce. The word is also used on the battlefield and defines a similar process, except it involves the grading of wounds inflicted on human beings rather than foodstuffs destined for the marketplace. Thus, the dead are ignored as dysfunctional; the grievously wounded receive a low priority; terminally wounded soldiers are given the lowest rating of all; those with superficial wounds are treated first because they can be swiftly returned to their units or to battlefronts.

Thus, when Luther Boyd hurried through the trees toward Sergeant Boyle, he noted Ransom’s body but dismissed it with that single, disinterested glance. The man was dead, but Sergeant Boyle was alive, and in the process of triage that earned him a top priority.

“Where are you hit?” Boyd asked as he knelt beside the big sergeant.

“Left leg, up high.”

Boyd cradled the sergeant in his arms and gently stretched him full length on the ground. Then he unsnapped the small leather medical kit from his belt, removed a slender pair of scissors, and cut the blood-soaked fabric of Boyle’s trousers away from the gaping wound. Breaking open the plastic cover of a surgical bandage, he placed the thick antiseptic wad on the bullet hole in Boyle’s thigh, fixing it in place with adhesive tape. Boyd took off his belt and buckled it loosely around the sergeant’s thigh above the wound. He found a fallen tree limb from which he broke off a foot-long branch to use as a lever for the tourniquet.

“Hang on now,” he said while he eased the thick piece of wood beneath the belt circling the sergeant’s leg.

Boyd twisted the wood in a circular motion until Boyle said, softly, “That’s about it, Mr. Boyd.” Boyd took the sergeant’s hands and placed them on the piece of wood that had driven the belt deep into the muscles of Boyle’s thigh.

“Can you hold onto it? Maintain the pressure?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Boyd searched gently through the sergeant’s pockets and found the smashed two-way radio and realized there was no way he could report the sergeant’s condition and position to the CP.

“I’ll try to get aid to you,” he said.

“Listen. I just saw him, not your daughter. And unless he’s got another gun, he’s out of ammo. Don’t worry about me. Go get the bastard.”

Luther Boyd gave the sergeant a soft pat on the shoulder and then sprang to his feet and ran swiftly into the shadows of the trees beside the massive wall of rock.

Chapter 21

They traveled south on Central Park West in the long green Cadillac, Samantha and Coke Roosevelt in a leather cocoon of luxury in the rear seat with Samantha’s chauffeur, Doc Logan, at the wheel.

Samantha put her head back and closed her eyes and rested her legs on one of the jump seats. She wore purple suede boots, a darker purple suede pants suit, with a jacket which flared at the hips and whose color was in brilliant contrast with her flaming red cashmere sweater.

Coke put a hand on the back of her shoulders and neck and began to massage her muscles, which under his probing fingers felt stiff as boards. She sat silently with her eyes closed, but he could feel some of the tension easing in her body.

“What else you prescribe, Coke?”

Coke fished a pillbox from the pocket of his leather jacket, opened it with a flick of his thumb, and held it out to Samantha.

“Come on,” he said, and removed a flask from an inner pocket of his jacket. She opened her eyes and looked down at the box of pills.

“Pop a couple of these and have a taste,” he said.

“Think that’s all I need?” But she took two of the pills and swallowed them with a sip of whiskey. Then she said, “Where’s Manolo and them black kids now?”

“Biggie collected them twenty minutes ago; they’re probably at that circus the cops are staging for the boob-tube set. What’s in this for us, Sam? She’s a white kid. Snow-white, the magic princess. What’s that got to do with our brothers and sisters?”

“I told the Gypsy I’d help him,” Samantha said, and winced as needles of pain pierced her temples.

“You need more than pills and booze to stop those ice picks punching your eardrums,” Coke said, looking at her clenched jaws and flaring nostrils. “You’re rippin’ yourself off, Sam, helping Whitey. And what’s worse, helpin’ honkie cops.”

“You’re a dumb nigger,” she said. “How come you’re talking like a headshrink?”

“Don’t take an Einstein to dig it. Look. You and me travel first-class. But most of the brothers have to kiss white-fuzz ass, grin, and bob their heads at ‘em, hoping, just hoping, they won’t ram their nightsticks up their butts. So when you help cops who do that to your people, then you put your head in a vise and crank the handle to hurt yourself as bad as you can.”

Samantha sighed and looked down at the backs of her hands. They were a nice color, she thought. There were places in the world men would write poetry about them. Places she could take Manolo.

“Lemme say something, Coke,” she said. “I can’t help the way I feel. I wish I could. God, how I wish I could! But something inside me won’t let me hate like you do.”

Coke smiled and took a swig of whiskey. “Let’s keep that our secret, Sam,” he said.

Her mother did not think that white people were devils. Neither did her grandmother. Nor had Emma and Missoura, who from faded photographs she knew as large, cowlike girls, her great-great-aunts and the daughters of slaves. They all had kind words for white folks, because a white man had once been kind to Emma and Missoura at a time when kindness to blacks had a high price tag on it.

But what a cruel kindness it had been, Samantha thought.

Emma and Missoura had worked for a white family, the Meltons, in the twenties in Mobile, Alabama. They lived in the black community on the outskirts of town, without heat, light, or plumbing facilities on meadows that were churned frequently into nightmarish quagmires by seasonal rains and hurricanes that swept across them from the Florida coastlines. But Emma and Missoura shared a comparative comfort with their elderly mother, subsisting on toting privileges and what money the Meltons paid them.

It had been on one of those rainy nights when Mr. Melton committed that act of kindness which sang down the filaments of time and caused Samantha’s throbbing headaches when the Gypsy asked her for official favors.

One night Mr. Melton had told his black chauffeur, Abraham, to drive the girls home during a rainstorm. Abraham had been frightened and had made some excuse. No chauffeur drove dumb black maids around in those days. So Mr. Melton drove the girls home himself. He had done the same thing on numerous other occasions. He had been warned by white friends that he was making a mistake; he was ridiculed for it. And he was threatened because of it.

But Mr. Melton hadn’t budged, had driven the girls home whenever the weather was too bad for the five-mile walk. If he’d done it just once, Samantha thought, she could write it off as just plain damn foolishness. But he had done it for the three and a half years the girls had worked for the Melton family.

The stories of Mr. Melton, sagas more like it, had come down to Maybelle Cooper like tales from King Arthur’s Court.

On one occasion when a pack of red-neck white trash had circled the shanty town, screaming filth at Mr. Melton and the coloreds huddling in their cold shacks, Mr. Melton had leaped from his car and had shouted songs of freedom and glory at them in a fine, vigorous voice and the red-neck pack had slunk off into the shadows.

When she was a little girl, it had amused Samantha to hear her grandmother talk about Mr. Melton and croak off-key phrases from songs like “The West’s Awake” and “Kelly, the Boy from Killan,” and to listen to her re-create the picture of that big Irishman standing in driving rains and chasing away yellow bastards with his powerful voice and songs of freedom. When Samantha went to school in New York, she found some of the songs in an old sheet-music shop and had picked out the tunes with one finger on an upright piano in the school gym.

One line she had never forgot: “The harp he loved, ne’er spoke again, for he tore its chords asunder. And said ‘No chains shall sully thee, the soul of love and liberty. Thy songs were made for the pure and free, they shall never sound in slavery.’”

During her adolescence, Samantha had tried to convince herself that Mr. Melton had done only what any decent man would do; he had done what only a courageous, sensitive, and feeling man would have done, and the worm in Samantha’s soul was that she hated him for it.

Mrs. Schultz stood behind the police lines, so swaddled in sweaters under her bulky cloth coat that she looked almost as wide as she was tall. Mrs. Schultz had asked the policeman if she could go into the park. In her worried old head was the thought that she might find Gus and talk some sense to him before he hurt the girl. But when the policeman asked her why, she didn’t tell him because that would only lead to other questions. About Gus and other nights. And why their family had no records when they came from Canada into the United States.

She told him she wanted to use a toilet, and he told her there was one off the lobby of the Plaza. She nodded and went off into the crowd.

Imagine her in the Plaza in her old cotton stockings and worn coat.

She watched a tall man approach the police line, accompanied by a slim girl with a scarf knotted about her blond hair. She heard him say to a policeman, “Wayne, the New York
Times
. This is Crescent Holloway. She’s with me.”

The patrolman nodded and waved them past the barriers into the park.

Watch him, his mother had said, Mrs. Schultz thought bitterly and wearily, but how could she help him if no one would let her? Her lips moved in prayer. In her halting English she said, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and forever . . . amen.”

Barbara Boyd was alone in the rear of a police squad when Paul Wayne stopped beside the car and spoke to her.

“Mrs. Boyd? Paul Wayne, the
Times
.”

“Yes,” she said.

A strikingly beautiful girl stood with Paul Wayne, and her face was vaguely familiar to Barbara.

“Crescent Holloway, Mrs. Boyd. She’s a friend of Rudi Zahn’s.”

What did they want from her? Barbara wondered, because she could see questions in their eyes, in their expressions. But she couldn’t help them. She couldn’t think of anything but a desperate black terror that was like a physical presence inside her body. She sat hugging her arms across her breasts, numb and isolated in the orderly turmoil of the command post. This concentration of equipment and manpower didn’t touch Barbara Boyd; nothing existed for her but the terrible certainty that her daughter was dead. Not taken away with a merciful illness, not dying in a split-second fall from a horse, but taken away—Christ, no! she pleaded silently, but the dreadful thought could not be exorcised—taken away by a sadistic monster who would torture and terrify her before finally killing her.

Her only hope was contained in a cruel paradox. The facets of her husband’s character that she hadn’t understood, that she had been critical of were the only strengths that might save their daughter’s life tonight. She wasn’t afraid for him, but she longed to be with him.

“I’m really terribly sorry, Mrs. Boyd,” Crescent Holloway said. “Words are pretty stupid now. I’ll just say some prayers.”

“Thank you,” Barbara said.

“Mrs. Boyd, do you know where Mr. Zahn is?” Wayne asked her.

“He was so brave,” Barbara said. “He tried to save my child.”