1975 - Night of the Juggler (30 page)

She was too frightened and too shrewd to fall into traps. “No, I know nobody,” Mrs. Schultz said, and went away from him with her shuffling walk in the direction of Columbus Circle.

She was praying again for the poor strange man she had been told to take care of, but she was praying in her own old language now, not hard like the English they had made her learn, not hard like this country could be to some of its people.

“
Gegrusset eist du Maria
,” she said, whispering the words into the night, “
full der Gnade der ist mit dir du bist Gebenedeit under den
weibern und gehendeit ist die frucht deines libes, Gesus.

“Heilige Maria Mutter Gottes bitt fur uns sinners jetzt und in die
stundes unser todes. Amen.”

Luther Boyd carried his daughter through clearings that would eventually bring them to pathways flanking the East Drive. Her arms were tight about his neck, and her face was buried against the warmth of his chest and shoulders. He held her in the crook of his left arm, while his right hand gently massaged her back and shoulders.

Words would be of no comfort as yet, Boyd knew from long experience at field hospitals. Soldiers needed letters from home and security foods and the mothering of nurses, but Boyd had never known a wounded soldier to take initial solace from discussing the impact of the bullet, the splintering of bones and the pain and nausea that followed.

Talk might help later, perhaps with doctors. And the two of them might take a long skiing vacation at Tahoe-Donner. Two of them, not three, he thought with bitter resignation.

“Daddy?”

“What, baby?”

She was silent and still in his arms. Then she said so softly that he could barely hear the words, “I told him you’d help.”

“Told who, Katie?”

She was silent, pressing her cheek hard against his shoulder.

“You told the man, is that it?”

She nodded slowly.

“I know he killed Harry Lauder,” she said. “But I meant it when I said you’d help him. You could, Daddy. . . .”

Her strength and compassion almost brought tears to his eyes. And he realized with pride, but with a sense of loss, that the humanity of this child had been bred into her by her mother, not only by Colonel Luther Boyd.

“He scared me, and he tied me up, but he didn’t do anything else to me,” she said. “He wanted to talk to me. I could tell.”

This might explain the Juggler’s splintered, rambling talk of dates and chocolate and boat rides. Perhaps Kate had seen something in that dreadfully flawed unit of humanity that he, Luther Boyd, could never have seen. In her own terror, she might have had the detachment to feel some sort of compassion for him. Was it that mercy which had allowed her to survive her agonizing ordeal? Kate, with childish wisdom, had been generous to him, had promised him his help. And that might have deflected his monstrous needs, providing the lead time for Luther Boyd to save her life.

“We can talk about it later,” he said, and to his relief saw that she had been distracted by the sight of the red dome lights of police squad cars coming toward them through the trees.

“Is Mommy here?” she asked him.

“Yes, baby.”

When Kate saw her mother step from one of the cars, she slipped from her father’s arms and ran across the meadow, her footsteps stumbling and uncertain, crying for the first time since her father had found her.

Barbara hugged her daughter as tightly as was physically possible and whispered her name over and over again as if this were some guarantee that this warm, living presence in her arms was not a cruel, figmented twist of her imagination.

Other figures stepped from the police squad cars: Detectives Jim Taylor and Ray Karp, Crescent Holloway and Rudi Zahn.

Crescent Holloway slipped her arm through Rudi Zahn’s and hugged it tightly and looked at him with shining eyes. His jaw was swollen and discolored, and there were bandages on his forehead and his cheeks.

“I’m a disaster area,” he said.

“No, you look positively gorgeous,” she said.

Kate Boyd turned from her mother and looked up at Rudi Zahn.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“Well, I tried,” he said, and while Crescent Holloway hugged his arm even more tightly, he touched Kate Boyd’s cheek with the back of his hand. “It turned out all right,” he said. “We can be grateful for that.”

It was all right, Zahn thought, true and right, and he could say
Auf
Wiedersehen
now with poignancy but without regret to the name that had haunted him so long and so endlessly, forever, the face that had blazed in his mind through all those weary years: the name and face of Ilana.

And watching the faint smile on his lips and seeing that Kate was holding his hand against her face, Crescent Holloway realized that in some fashion Rudi Zahn was free.

Barbara Boyd stared at her husband. There was a longing question in her eyes, and she desperately needed an answer to it.

Chapter 28

The Boyd family was driven home in a police squad car by Detective Carmine Garbalotto, who let them out at the entrance to their apartment building.

Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli parked his unmarked sedan on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue and turned off his motor. He intended to wait until the little girl and her parents were safe in their own home before returning to his precinct to begin the massive paperwork that would be generated by this night’s events.

Detective Garbalotto waved a good-bye to the Boyds and drove south down Fifth Avenue.

The revolving doors of the building spun and glittered in the darkness, and John Brennan came through them, and Kate was swept with a blend of confusing emotions when she saw the small kitten cradled in his hands. She took it from him and felt it warm and purring against her body. Poor Harry Lauder, she thought, stroking the silky white star on the kitten’s forehead. If he hadn’t been so jaunty and brave, he’d still be alive. But her little Scottie had to be what he was.

Luther Boyd looked at Barbara. The night’s ordeal had marked her face; shadows like bruises lay beneath her eyes, and her lips, even without makeup, were livid against the masklike pallor of her features.

“When we get Katie to sleep, we can talk about what you want to do, Barbara.”

“I’m home, Luther,” she said. Her body trembled as if an electric current had passed through it. There was a sudden, bright shine of tears in her eyes as she asked the question she so desperately needed an answer to. “Is that all right?”

“All right? It’s perfect,” Boyd said, and put an arm tightly around her shoulders.

They went into the lobby with Kate holding the kitten in her arms and Mr. Brennan leading them to the elevators. Boyd said, “You take Kate up. I won’t be a minute.”

He walked back the length of the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors and looked across the street at Gypsy Tounelli.

For what seemed an attenuated interval the two men stared at each other, and then Luther Boyd sighed and said, “Can we agree we both did what we had to do tonight? That we really had no choice in the matter?”

“Let’s just agree it’s over,” Tonnelli said wearily. “No loose ends. They even got a couple of tranquillizer bullets into the lion. Damn cat was sound asleep in a toolshed at Seventy-third Street.”

Boyd smiled faintly. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a bottle of twenty-eight-year-old bourbon upstairs,” he said. “How about a drink?”

But the mood was wrong for it, and he wasn’t surprised when the lieutenant shook his head with slow finality.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a ton of paperwork to do, Colonel,” Tonnelli said, raising his voice above the sounds of intermittent traffic.

“Paperwork is for clerks, Lieutenant,” Boyd said. “We’re field-grade soldiers. And we’ve got something to celebrate.”

Tonnelli turned his face in profile to Boyd and drew a thumbnail slowly down his disfiguring scar, and Luther Boyd, who understood men, guessed at the significance of that gesture and the direction of Lieutenant Tonnelli’s thoughts.

Yes, Boyd had something to celebrate. But what of the others?

The white princess was back in her electronically guarded castle, the Gypsy was thinking. That’s what they would drink to, that’s what they would celebrate.

But who would raise a glass to Manolo and the dead men at the boathouse and the Arsenal? And what did Samantha and Babe Fritzel and Rusty Boyle, with fire in his leg and ribs, what did they have to celebrate?

Could you say that John Ransom had got a break, rotting with cancer and a pair of slugs in his face? That’s what he’d bought tonight. And even the human animal killed, he had to matter. The whole city mattered. Or should anyway.

He snapped on his sedan’s red dome light and turned and looked at Luther Boyd. The men stared at each other for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Some other time,” Tonnelli said.

“I understand, Lieutenant,” Luther Boyd said, and gave him a soft salute.

Maybe he does at that, Tonnelli thought, maybe he does, as he shifted into drive, his car rolling smoothly away from the curb.

Luther Boyd stood on the sidewalk and watched the red dome light of Tonnelli’s car as it flowed away from him into the darkness, turning out of sight at last into Fifty-ninth Street, where the mighty equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman stood in its full arrogant glory on the Grand Army Plaza.

The irony suggested by that statue was a familiar one to Luther Boyd and perhaps to all professional soldiers. The general, an awesome, idealized figure astride a magnificent horse, was being escorted into heaven by a winged angel holding aloft the palm of peace. But while the general’s tasseled sword was sheathed, his boots were spurred to charge, and he was headed south, forever south toward Georgia.

Standing alone on the sidewalk, Luther Boyd experienced the emptiness that always beset him after battle. Even in victory there was a sense of loss, the dissolution of that inevitable but spurious fraternity generated among combat troops.

He realized then how very much he had wanted to have that drink with Lieutenant Tonnelli.

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Night of the Juggler

Copyright © 1975 by William P. McGivern

Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright

© 2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC

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For information address [email protected] First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN 0-7953-0212-6