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“I admire her because she possesses some of the qualities you have in abundance, Ruby.”
“What are the other things you wanted to tell me?”
“I’m going to get the cup, then I’m going to Beckman’s. I’m either coming back with Ishmael or I’m not coming back. I may do some things today I’ve never done before, but I’ll do them if I have to.”
“What did Beckman say about Ishmael?”
“He made threats.”
“What kind?”
“He’s a coward. He tries to transfer his fear to others.”
“What kind of threats?”
“If I kill him, Ishmael will be left to death by starvation and thirst.”
“I want to go with you.”
He squeezed her hand. “Stay here. We can be a family again. I mean, if it’s what you want.”
“You’re going to beat it out of him? That’s why the Haitian is with you?”
“Sometimes it’s not good to look around the corner in your own mind. Sometimes you have to let things happen,” he said.
“I don’t care what you do to him. No matter how this works out, I think I’m going to kill Arnold Beckman.”
“You’re not the killing kind, Ruby.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I feel very strange. For the first time in my life, I understand the violence that has always lived in you. I’m going with you.”
But he was out the door before she was finished speaking.
HACKBERRY CROSSED THE street to the park, without stopping at the motorcar where Darl and Andre were waiting for him. He followed a concrete walkway through the trees, past a set of swings and seesaws and a wading pool crosshatched with floating leaves. Someone had tried to cover the carousel with canvas, but it had pulled loose and was flapping in the wind. He stepped up on the floor and worked his way through the wooden horses and the ornate pewlike benches to the center of the carousel and the panel behind which he had hidden the cup. The mirrors on the panels were oblong and wavy and reflected his image as though it had been scissored into parts, and he wondered if he was not one man but many, and he wondered if this was not the reflection every man experienced at the close of his life. The last chapter, even the last page in the book describing
one’s days, did not give unity or understanding to one’s life; at best, the narrative sorted out the chaff and allowed a man to step over a line with a lighter load and mount a fresh horse for a journey that hopefully had no end.
At least that was what he wanted to believe.
He pulled away the panel and lifted the cup from inside. He had rewrapped it in the slicker Darl had brought it in and retied the twine. He put his fingers between the rubberized folds and touched the rim of the cup, his eyes closing. Here we go, Lord. He’p me take it to them. And you know what I mean by “it.”
To his dying days, with his hand on the Testament, he would swear he heard a voice that rang as clear as a spoon striking a crystal glass. The cheat was he didn’t know what the words meant, as simple as they were: Are you sure about that, partner?
For what shall it profit a man if he gains the world and never figures out a solitary thing coming down the pike?
ISHMAEL LAY IN the darkness, both hands manacled to an iron ring in the wall, and listened to the sounds coming from the tunnel. He could hear two men talking while they pulled a heavy weight across a hard surface, and he suspected they were removing the body of the man Beckman had killed with a shotgun. He also heard the sounds of mops and pails, and water being sloshed against a wall or the floor of the tunnel, and later, the sound of someone laboring with a saw, pausing to retch and then curse under his breath.
Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive. How did a man know when it was his time? The answer was simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs. That’s when you know the hands on the clock have frozen on the hour and the minute and the second that were appointed as your time, and nothing you do will restart them. That’s how you know now and forever that your time has not only come but has already ended, and oddly enough, the realization is not all bad.
Ishmael wondered how they would do it to him. Since they bore him no personal grudge, they would probably carry out his execution in a pragmatic fashion, one that would make the least work for them. In all probability, they would use guile rather than force in his final moments. They would tell him they were taking him to a more comfortable setting, perhaps a hospital. Or they would remove the pads from his eyes and offer him wine and a hot meal. While he sat at a table or in the passenger seat of a motorcar, a bullet would be fired into the back of his skull.
Acceptance of his fate did not mean he should be passive about it. For just a moment, as though he were looking through a third eye in his forehead, he saw a medieval fortress on the shores of Malta and Crusader knights in chainmail and white tunics with red Templar crosses, surrounded by their Saracen enemies. Their death was a foregone conclusion, but rather than surrender, they executed their prisoners and used catapults to fling the decapitated heads over the walls into the Saracen line and went down to the last man, their swords ringing.
Could he be as brave and defiant as they? He had gone across no-man’s-land into gas and machine guns and flamethrowers and rounds the size of boulders fired from railroad mortars, but he had been armed, and his brothers-in-arms had been at his side. Was there any challenge greater than remaining resolute while you stood unarmed and waited for your enemies to take your life and bury you in a place where no one would find you, knowing in advance that your last words would never be heard and the deed would probably never be punished?
Big Bud had to be out there somewhere, all six feet eight inches of him, armed and dangerous and capable of sowing destruction over an entire landscape, as he had probably done behind Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel down in Mexico. Could Ishmael’s thoughts reach his father? Did each see the other in his dreams? Did those Crusader knights at Malta have the same feelings as they awaited the final assault of the Saracens, their agony written on the glittering blue emptiness of the Mediterranean?
Ishmael heard footsteps in the tunnel, echoing off the walls, coming closer, splashing through a pool of water, a metal instrument scraping against stone. Then the sounds stopped. A moment later, a man was urinating loudly in the toilet cubicle. When he finished, he pulled the chain on the box tank high up on the wall, and a few seconds later, he was standing within inches of Ishmael’s face.
