Everything was timing now. Timing and direction, the brief, seductive sounds leading the quarry into the fatal sea of green as surely as the sirens lured Ulysses. Twice more Weingrass emitted the eerie calls, and then a third that was so pronounced that the intruder rushed forward, slapping branches in front of him, his weapon leveled, his feet digging into the soft earth—toward and finally into the forest gate.
Manny pulled back on the thick, heavy limb and swung it with all his strength down and across into the head of the racing man. The face was shattered, blood spurting out of every feature, the skull a mass of broken bone and cartilage. The man was dead. Breathlessly, Weingrass walked out from behind the trunk and knelt down.
The man was an Arab.
The winds from the mountains continued their assault. Manny pulled the gun from the corpse’s still-warm hand and, even more awkwardly, far more painfully, edged his way back toward the road. The dead intruder’s companion was a wild core of misdirected energy; he kept spinning his head toward the woods, toward the road from Mesa Verde and down at his watch. The only thing he had not done was display a weapon, and that told Weingrass something else. The terrorist—and he was a terrorist; both were terrorists—was either a rank amateur or a thorough professional, nothing in between.
Feeling the pounding echo in his frail chest, Manny permitted himself a few moments to breathe, but only moments. The opportunity might not come again. He moved north, from tree trunk to tree trunk, until he was sixty feet above the anxious man, who kept glancing south. Again timing; Weingrass walked as fast as he could across the road and stood motionless, watching. The would-be killer was now close to apoplectic; twice he started into the road toward the woods, both times returning to the hedges and crouching, staring at his watch. Manny moved forward, his automatic gripped in his veined right hand. When he was within ten feet of the terrorist, he shouted.
“Jezzar!” he roared, calling the man a butcher in Arabic. “If you move, you’re dead! Fahem?”
The dark-skinned man spun around, clawing the earth as he rolled into the hedges, loose dirt flying up into the old architect’s face. Through the hurling debris, Weingrass understood why the terrorist had not displayed a weapon; it was on the ground beside him, inches from his hand. Manny fell to his left on the road as the man grabbed the gun, now lunging backward, enmeshing himself in prickly green web, and fired twice; the reports were barely heard! They were two eerily muted spits in the wind; a silencer was attached to the terrorist’s pistol. The bullets, however, were not silent; one shrieked through the air above Weingrass, the second ricocheted off the cement near his head. Manny raised his automatic and pulled the trigger, the calm of experience, despite the years, steadying his hand. The terrorist screamed through the rushing wind and collapsed forward in the hedges, his eyes wide, a rivulet of blood trickling from the base of his throat.
Hurry up, you decrepit bastard! cried Weingrass to himself, struggling to his feet. They were waiting for someone! You want to be a senile ugly duck in a gallery? Your meshugenah head blown off would serve you right. Shush! Every bone is boiling in pain! Manny lurched toward the body wedged in the hedges. He bent down, pulled the corpse forward, then gripped the man’s feet, and, grimacing, using every iota of strength that was in him, dragged the body across the road and into the woods.
He wanted only to lie on the ground and rest, to let the hammering in his chest subside and swallow air, but he knew he could not do that. He had to keep going; he had to be ready; above all, he had to take someone alive. These people were after his son! Information had to be learned … all manner of death to follow.
He heard the sound of an engine in the distance … and then the sound disappeared. Bewildered, he sidestepped slowly, cautiously, between the trees to the edge of the woods and peered out. A car was coming up the road from Mesa Verde, but it was either idling or coasting, or the wind was too strong. It was coasting, for now only the rolling tires could be heard as it approached the wall of tall hedges, barely moving, finally stopping before the first entrance to the circular drive. Two men were inside; the driver, a stocky man, not young but not much over forty, got out first and looked around, obviously expecting to be met or signaled. He squinted in the dark afternoon light and, seeing no one, crossed the road to the wooded side and started walking forward. Weingrass shoved his automatic into his belt and bent down for the second killer’s pistol with the perforated silencer attached to the barrel. It was too large for a pocket, so, like the Arab, he placed it at his feet. He stood up and stepped farther back into the overgrowth; he checked the weapon’s cylinder. There were four bullets left. The man approached; he was now directly in front of Manny.
“Yosef!” The name was suddenly carried on the wind, half shouted by the driver’s companion, who had left the car and was racing down the road, his quickening steps impeded by a pronounced limp. Manny was perplexed; Yosef was a Hebrew name, yet these killers were not Israelis.
“Be quiet, boy!” commanded the older man gruffly in Arabic as his partner stopped breathlessly in front of him. “You raise your voice like that again—anywhere—I’ll ship you back to the Baaka in a coffin!”
Weingrass watched and listened to the two men no more than twenty feet away on the edge of the road. He was mildly astonished, but now understood the use of the Arabic word, walad, or “boy.” The driver’s companion was a boy, a youngster barely sixteen or seventeen, if that.
“You’ll send me nowhere!” answered the young man angrily, a speech impediment obvious, undoubtedly a harelip. “I’ll never walk properly again because of that pig! I could have become a great martyr of our holy cause but for him!”
“Very well, very well,” said the older Arab with a Hebrew name, not without a degree of compassion. “Throw cool water on your neck or your head will explode. Now, what is it?”
“The American radio! I just heard it and I understand enough to—understand!”
“Our people at the other house?”
“No, nothing like that. The Jews! They executed old Khouri. They hanged him!”
“What did you expect, Aman? Forty years ago he was still working with the German Nazis left in northern Africa. He killed Jews; he blew up kibbutzim, even a hotel in Haifa.”
“Then we must kill the murderer, Begin, and all the old men of the Irgun and the Stern! Khouri was a symbol of greatness for us—”
“Oh, be quiet, boy. Those old men fought the British more than they did us. They, or old Khouri, have nothing to do with what we must do today. We must teach a lesson to a filthy politician who pretended to be one of us. He hid in our clothes and used our tongue and betrayed the friendship we offered him. Now, boy! Concentrate on now.”
“Where are the others? They were to come out on the road.”
“I don’t know. They may have learned something or seen something and gone inside the house. Lights are being turned on now; you can see through those high bushes. Each of us will crawl up from either side of the half-circle entrance. Go through the grass to the windows. We will probably learn that our comrades are having coffee with whoever is there before slicing their throats.”
Emmanuel Weingrass raised the silenced pistol, firming it against the trunk of a tree, moving it back and forth between the two terrorists. He wanted both alive! The words in Arabic referring to the “other house” so shocked him that in fury he might well blow both their heads away. They wanted to kill his son! If they had they would pay dearly, in agony—misguided youth or age irrelevant. Terrible pain would be the only consequence. He leveled the weapon at the pelvic region of both killers, back and forth, back and forth.…
He fired just as a sudden gust of wind swirled along the road, two rounds into the older man, one into the boy. It was as if neither could possibly comprehend. The child collapsed screaming, writhing on the ground; his elder companion was made of stronger—much stronger—stuff. He staggered to his feet, turning to the source of fire, and lurched forward, the stocky hulk a furious
monster in pain.
“Don’t come any closer, Yosef!” yelled Manny, exhausted almost beyond endurance and holding on to the tree. “I don’t want to kill you, but I will! You of the Hebrew name who kills Jews!”
“My mother!” screamed the approaching giant of a man. “She renounced all of you! You are killers of my people! You take everything that is ours and spit on us! I am half Jew, but who are the Jews to kill my father and shave the head of my mother because she loved an Arab? I will take you to hell!”
Weingrass held on to the trunk of the tree, his fingernails bleeding as he dug into the bark, his long black overcoat billowing in the wind. The broad, dark figure lunged out of the forest darkness, his enormous hands gripping the old man’s throat.
“Don’t!” screamed Manny, knowing instantly that there was no choice. He fired the last shell, the bullet penetrating the wrinkled forehead above him. Yosef fell away, his final gesture one of defiance. Trembling and gasping for breath, Weingrass leaned against the tree, staring down at the ground, at the body of a man who had been in torment over an insignificant territorial arrangement that forced humans to kill each other. In that moment, Emmanuel Weingrass came to a conclusion that had eluded him from the moment he was capable of thinking; he knew the answer now. The arrogance of blind belief led all the mendacities of human thought. It pitted man viciously against man in the pursuit of the ultimate unknowable. Who had the right?
“Yosef … Yosef,” cried the boy, rolling over in the underbrush by the edge of the road. “Where are you? I’m hit, I’m hit!”
The child did not know, thought Weingrass. From where the wounded boy lay writhing he could not see, and the wind from the mountains further muffled the muted gunshot. The maniacal young terrorist did not realize that his comrade Yosef was dead, that he alone had survived. And his survival was uppermost in Manny’s mind; there could be no new martyr for a holy cause brought on by self-inflicted death. Not here, not now; there were facts to be learned, facts that could save the life of Evan Kendrick. Especially now!
Weingrass shoved his bleeding fingers into his overcoat pocket and dropped the silenced weapon on the ground. Summoning what strength he had left, he pushed himself away from the tree and made his way as quickly as he could south through the woods, stumbling again and again, his frail arms pushing the branches from his face and body. He veered toward the road; he reached it and saw the killer’s car in the darkening distance. He had gone far enough. He turned and started back on the mercifully smooth surface—faster … faster! Move your goddamned spindly legs! That boy must not move, he must not crawl, he must not see! Manny felt the blood rushing to his head, the pounding in his rib cage deafening. There was the young Arab! He had moved—was moving, crawling into the woods. In moments he would see his dead companion! It could not happen!
“Aman!” shouted Weingrass breathlessly, remembering the name used by the half-Jew, Yosef, as if it were his own. “Ayn ent? Kaif el-ahwal?” he continued in Arabic, urgently asking the boy where he was and how he was. “Itkallem!” he roared against the wind, ordering the young terrorist to respond.
“Here, in here!” yelled the teenage Arab in his own language. “I’ve been shot! In the hip. I can’t find Yosef!” The young man rolled over on his back to greet an expected comrade. “Who are you?” he screamed, struggling to reach under his field jacket for a gun as Manny approached. “I don’t know you!”
Weingrass smashed his foot against the boy’s elbow, and as the empty hand whipped out from under the cloth he stepped on it, pinning it to the young Arab’s chest. “No more of that, you fool of a child!” said Manny, his Arabic that of a Saudi officer reprimanding a lowly recruit. “We haven’t covered you to have you cause even more trouble. Of course you were shot, and I trust you realize that you were merely wounded, not killed, which could have been easily managed!”
“What are you saying?”
“What were you doing?” shouted Manny in reply. “Running in the road, raising your voice, crawling around our objective like a thief in the night! Yosef was right, you should be shipped back to the Baaka.”
“Yosef?… Where is Yosef?”
“Up in the house with the others. Come, I’ll help you. Join them.” Afraid of falling over, Weingrass held on to the branch of a sapling as the terrorist pulled himself up, gripping Manny’s hand. “First, give me your weapon!”
“What?”
“They think you’re stupid enough. They don’t want you armed.”
“I don’t understand—”
“You don’t have to.” Weingrass slapped the bewildered young fanatic across the face and simultaneously shoved his right hand between the buttoned fold of the boy’s jacket to pull out the would-be killer’s gun. It was appropriate; it was a .22 caliber pistol. “You can shoot gnats with this,” said Manny, grabbing the teenager’s arm. “Come along. Hop on one foot if it’s easier. We’ll paste you up.”
What remained of the late afternoon sun was obscured by the swirling dark clouds of a gathering storm surging out of the mountains. The drained, exhausted old man and the wounded youngster were halfway across the road when suddenly the roar of an engine was heard and headlights of a racing automobile caught them in the beams. The car was bearing down on them, thundering up from the south out of Mesa Verde. Tires shrieking, the powerful vehicle side-slipped into a skid and pounded to a stop only yards away from Weingrass and his captive, who were lunging toward the hedges, Manny’s grip tightening on the Arab’s field jacket. A man leaped from the large black sedan as Weingrass—lurching, stumbling—reached into his overcoat pocket for his own .38 automatic. The figure rushing toward him was a blur in the old architect’s eyes; he raised his gun to fire.
“Manny!” yelled Gee-Gee Gonzalez.
Weingrass fell to the ground, his hand still gripping the wounded terrorist. “Grab him!” he ordered Gee-Gee with what seemed like the last breath in his lungs. “Don’t let him go—hold his arms. They sometimes carry cyanide!”
* * *
The young Arab was given a needle by one of the two nurses; he would be unconscious until morning. His bullet wound was bloody, not serious, the bullet itself having passed through the flesh; it was cleansed, the openings butterflied with heavy tape and the bleeding stopped. He was then carried by Gonzalez to a guest room, his arms and legs strapped to the four corners of the bed, where the nurses covered his naked body with two blankets to help prevent conceivable trauma.
“He’s so terribly young,” said the nurse placing the pillow under the teenage Arab’s head.
“He’s a killer,” responded Weingrass icily, staring at the terrorist’s face. “He’d kill you without thinking for an instant about the life he was taking—the way he wants to kill Jews. The way he will kill us if we let him live.”
“That’s revolting, Mr. Weingrass,” said the other nurse. “He’s a child.”
“Tell that to the parents of God knows how many Jewish children who were never permitted his years.” Manny left the room to rejoin Gonzalez, who had hastily gone outside to drive his all too recognizable car into a garage; he had returned and was pouring himself a large glass of whisky at the bar on the veranda.
“Help yourself,” said the architect, walking into the enclosed porch and heading for his leather armchair. “I’ll put it on your bill like you do with me.”
“You crazy old man!” spat out Gee-Gee. “Loco! You plain loco, you know that? You coulda been killed! Muerto! You comprende? Muerto, muerto—dead, dead, dead, you old fool! Maybe that I could live with, but not when you give me a heart attack! I don’t live so good with a heart attack when it’s fatal, you comprende, you know what I mean?”
“Okay, okay. So you can have that drink on the house—”
“Loco!” shouted Gonzalez again, drinking the whisky in what appeared to be a single swallow.
“You’ve made your point,” agreed Manny. “Have another. I won’t start charging until the third.”
“I don’t k
now whether to go or whether to stay!” said Gee-Gee, once more pouring a drink.
“The police?”
“Like I told you, who had time for the police? And if I called them, they’d come around in a month!… Your girl, the ama de cría—the nurse—she’s calling them. I only hope she found one of those payasos. Sometimes you gotta call Durango to get someone out here.”
The phone on the bar rang—it rang, but it was not the ring of a telephone; instead it was a steady whir-toned sound. Weingrass was so startled that he nearly fell to the floor pushing himself out of the chair.
“You want me to get it?” asked Gonzalez.
“No!” roared Manny, walking rapidly, unsteadily, toward the bar.
“Don’t bite off my cabeza.”
“Hello?” said the old man into the phone, forcing control on himself.
“Mr. Weingrass?”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Who are you?”
“We’re on a laser patch into your telephone line. My name is Mitchell Payton—”
“I know all about you,” interrupted Manny. “Is my boy all right?”
“Yes, he is. I’ve just spoken to him in the Bahamas. A military aircraft has been dispatched from Homestead Air Force Base to pick him up. He’ll be in Washington in a few hours.”
“Keep him there! Surround him with guards! Don’t let anyone near him!”
“Then it’s happened out there?… I feel so useless, so incompetent. I should have posted guards.… How many were killed?”
“Three,” said Manny.
“Oh, my God.… How much do the police know?”
“They don’t. They haven’t got here yet.”
“They haven’t.… Listen to me, Mr. Weingrass. What I’m about to say will appear strange if not insane to you, but I know what I’m talking about. For the time being, this tragic event must be contained. We’ll have a far greater chance to catch the bastards by avoiding panic and letting our own experts go to work. Can you understand that, Mr. Weingrass?”