Carrion Comfort

  “His Will be done!” cried Willi, pumping Sutter’s penis with strong, rapid strokes.

  “Amen!” cried Sutter. “Amen!” He opened his mouth to Willi’s questing tongue just as he climaxed, the thin white ribbons of semen swirling on the floor of the shower stall for several seconds before disappearing forever down the drain.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Melanie

  I had been having romantic thoughts about Willi. Perhaps it was the influence of Miss Sewell; she was a vital and sensuous young woman with definite needs and the capacity to enjoy fulfilling them. Now and then, when these urges distracted her from completely serving me, I allowed her a few minutes with Culley. Sometimes I eavesdropped on these brief, violent interludes of the flesh from her point of view. Sometimes from Culley’s. Once I indulged myself by experiencing it through both of them. But always it was Willi I thought of when the tides of passion flowed through them to me.

  Willi was so handsome in those halcyon days before the war— the second war. His thin, aristocrat’s face and pale blond hair proclaimed his Aryan heritage to all who saw him. Nina and I enjoyed being seen with him and I believe he took pride in sharing the company of these two attractive and playful American women— the stunning blonde with the cornflower blue eyes and the shyer, quieter, yet somehow beguiling young belle with brown curls and long lashes.

  I remember a walk in Bad Ischl— before the bad times began— when Willi had made some joke and as I laughed had taken my hand in his. The effect was immediate and electric. My laughter had stopped at once. We leaned closer, his beautiful blue eyes so aware of me, our faces close enough to reflect the other’s heat. But we did not kiss. Not then. Denial was part of the dance of courtship in those days, a sort of fasting before the gourmet meal so as to sharpen the appetite. Today’s young gluttons know nothing of such subtleties and restraint; any appetite to them is something to sate at once. No wonder that all pleasures hold the flat taste of long-opened champagne to them, all conquests the hollow core of disappointment.

  I think now that Willi would have fallen in love with me that summer if it had not been for Nina’s crass seduction. After that terrible day in Bad Ischl I refused to play our Vienna Game for more than a year, refusing even to meet them in Eu rope the following summer, and when I did resume social intercourse with both of them it was in our new and more formal relationship. I realize now that Willi’s brief affair with Nina was long over by that point. Nina’s flame burned brightly but briefly.

  During our final summers in Vienna, Willi was all but consumed by his obsession for his Party and his Führer. I remember he wore his brown shirt and ugly armband to the premiere of Das Lied von der Erde when Bruno Walter conducted it in 1934. That was the terribly hot summer that we stayed with Willi in a gloomy old house he had rented on the Hohe Warte near where that stuck-up Alma Mahler lived. The pretentious woman never invited us to any of her parties and we reciprocated. More than once I was tempted to focus my attention on her during the Game, but we did very little playing in those days because of Willi’s silly po liti cal preoccupations.

  Now, as I lay recuperating in my own bed in my own home in Charleston, I frequently recalled those days and thoughts of Willi and wondered how things might have turned out differently if, by the smallest sigh or smile or glance, I had encouraged him earlier and helped him to avoid Nina’s destructive advances.

  Perhaps these thoughts were subconscious preparation for the events soon to come. During my illness, time had come to mean less and less to me, so that perhaps by this point I had become able to roam forward through the corridor of events as easily as I had gone backward. It is hard to say.

  By May I had grown so accustomed to the ministerings of Dr. Hartman and Nurse Oldsmith, the gentle therapies of Miss Sewell, the ser vices of Howard and Nancy and Culley and the Negro boy, and the constant and tender care of young Justin, that I might have stayed in that comfortable status quo for more months or years if someone had not come knocking at the iron front gate one warm spring evening.

  It was the messenger I had met before. The one named Natalie. Nina had sent her.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Charleston Monday,

  May 4, 1981

  Later, Natalie would remember it as the three-thousand-mile dream. It began with the miracle of the truck.

  All night they had driven through the blackness of the Cleveland National Forest, backtracking and getting off the main fire road after they had seen lights ahead from a hilltop bend in the road, creeping southward along lanes little better than trails. Then the trails had given out and only the openness of that particular stretch of wooded valley had allowed them to continue onward, first following a dry streambed for four miles, the van bouncing and clattering with only its parking lights showing the way, then up and across another low ridge, striking hidden logs and rocks in the concealing grass. Hours passed. Inevitably it happened. Saul was driving by then, Natalie half asleep despite the lurching, bouncing, grinding washboard ride. The final unseen boulder was halfway up a steep slope the van was clawing at in second gear. Somehow the front axle had bounced over it, but the jagged rock tore out the oil pan, ripped loose part of the drive shaft, and left them teetering on what was left of the rear axle.

  Saul crawled under the vehicle with a flashlight and wiggled out in thirty seconds. “That’s it,” he said. “We walk.”

  Natalie was too tired to cry, too tired even to feel like crying. “What do we bring?” she asked.

  Saul played the light over the interior. “The money,” he said. “In the backpack. The map. Some of the food. The pistols, I guess.” He looked at the two rifles. “Is there any reason to bring these?”

  “Are we going to shoot at innocent police officers?” asked Natalie. “No.”

  “Then let’s leave the pistols, too.” She looked around at the starlit night and dark wall of hill and trees above them. “Do you know where we are, Saul?”

  “We were headed toward Murrietta,” he said, “but we’ve taken so many zigs and zags that I don’t have the foggiest idea anymore.”

  “Will they be able to follow us?”

  “Not in the dark,” said Saul. He glanced at his watch. It was four A.M.

  “When it’s light, they’ll find the trail we left. They’ll search the forest roads first. Sooner or later an aircraft will spot the van.”

  “Is there any use trying to camouflage it?”

  Saul looked up the hill. It was another hundred yards to the nearest trees. It would take the rest of the night to break enough pine boughs to cover the truck and to shuttle back and forth with them. “No,” he said, “let’s just get the stuff packed and go.”

  Twenty minutes later they were puffing and panting their way to the top of the hill, Natalie with the backpack and Saul carrying the heavy suitcase full of money and the dossiers he refused to leave behind. When they reached the trees, Natalie said, “Stop a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to go to the bathroom, that’s why.” She dug through the pack for Kleenex, took the flashlight, and moved off through the trees.

  Saul sighed and sat on the suitcase. He found that if he closed his eyes for even a few seconds he would begin to doze, and each time he dozed the same image would float to the surface of his mind— Richard Haines, white face and surprised eyes, mouth moving and the sound coming later, as in a poorly dubbed film. “Help me. Please.”

  “Saul!”

  He lunged awake, pulled out the Colt automatic he had brought along and ran into the screen of trees. Natalie was thirty feet in, playing her flashlight over a shiny, red Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicle built to look like a British Landrover.

  “Am I dreaming?” she asked. “If you are, we’re having the same dream,” he said. The car was so new that it seemed to belong on a showroom floor. Saul played his light on the ground; there was no road, but he could see where the vehicle had been driven in under the trees. He tried the doors and the rear hatch:
all locked.

  “Look,” said Natalie, “there’s something under the wiper blade.” She pulled a scrap of paper loose and held it under her flashlight beam. “It’s a note,” she said. “ ‘Dear Alan and Suzanne: No problems getting in. Packing two point five miles down the Little Margarita. Bring the beer. Love, Heather and Carl.’ ” She shone her flashlight through the rear window. There was a case of Coors beer on the cargo deck. “Great!” said Natalie. “Shall we hot-wire it and get out of here?”

  “Do you know how to hot-wire a car?” asked Saul, sitting on his suitcase again.

  “No, but it always looks so simple on TV.”

  “Everything is simple on TV,” said Saul. “Before we go fooling around with the ignition system— which is probably electronic and probably beyond my crude ability to outsmart— let us think a moment. How are Alan and Suzanne supposed to retrieve the beer? The doors are locked.”

  “Second set of keys?” said Natalie. “Perhaps,” said Saul, “or perhaps a prearranged hiding place for the first set?”

  They were in the second place Natalie looked— the tailpipe. The key ring was as new as the car and carried the name of the San Diego Toyota dealership. When they unlocked the door, the fresh upholstery and newcar smell brought tears to Natalie’s eyes.

  “I’m going to see if I can safely get it downhill,” said Saul. “Why?”

  “I’m going to transfer the things we need— the C-4 and detonators, the EEG equipment.”

  “You think we’ll need that again?”

  “I need it for the biofeedback work,” said Saul. He opened the door for her, but she stepped back. “Something wrong?” he said.

  “No, pick me up when you come back up the hill.”

  “Did you forget something?” asked Saul.

  Natalie squirmed. “Sort of. I forgot to go to the bathroom.”

  They encountered one roadblock. The Toyota rode smoothly even across open ground in four-wheel drive and within a mile and a half they found a crude set of ruts that became a forest road that led to a gravel county road. Sometime before dawn they realized that they had been paralleling a high wire fence for some time, and Natalie called out for Saul to stop while she looked at a sign set six feet up on the wire. “U.S. Government Property— No Trespassing— by Order of the Commandant, Camp Pendleton, USMC.”

  “We were more lost than we realized,” said Saul. “Amen,” said Natalie. “Want another beer?”

  “Not yet,” said Saul.

  They ran into the roadblock a mile onto the asphalt road just short of a small community of Fallbrook. As soon as they hit the paved road, Natalie had curled into the space between the seats and the rear deck, pulling a navy blanket over herself and trying to get comfortable on the transmission hump. “It shouldn’t be for long,” said Saul, arranging gear and the case of beer over her breathing space. “They’re looking for a young black woman and an unidentified male accomplice in a dark van. I hope that a good old boy alone in his new Toyota will throw them off. What do you think?”

  Natalie’s snore answered him.

  He woke her five minutes later when the police roadblock came into sight. A single highway patrol car sat astride the road, two sleepy-looking officers drinking coffee out of a metal Thermos as they stood near the rear of their vehicle. Saul pulled the Toyota into the narrow lane and stopped.

  One officer stayed behind the police car while the other shifted his cup to his left hand and walked slowly over to the car. “Good morning.”

  Saul nodded. “Good morning, Officer. What’s up?”

  The patrolman leaned over to look in the window. He peered at the stack of gear in back. “You coming out the National Forest?”

  “Yep,” said Saul. The tendency of the guilty, he knew, was to babble, to offer too many explanations for everything. When Saul had worked briefly with the NYPD as a consultant on the Son of Sam killings, a police lieutenant who was an expert on interrogations had told him that he always caught on to the smart guilty ones because they were too quick with the fluent, plausible stories. Innocent people tended toward guilty incoherence, the lieutenant had said.

  “Up there just one night?” asked the officer, moving back a bit to peer in the space where Natalie lay under a blanket, backpack, and stack of beer cans.

  “Two,” said Saul. He looked at the other policeman as he moved around behind his partner. “What’s going on?”

  “Camping?” asked the first officer. He took a sip of coffee. “Yes,” said Saul, “and trying out the new four-wheel drive.”

  “It’s a beauty,” said the state trooper. “Brand new?”

  Saul nodded. “Where’d you buy it?”

  Saul gave the name of the dealership embossed on the key ring. “Where do you live?” asked the officer.

  Saul hesitated a second. The false passport and driver’s license Jack Cohen had made up for him gave a New York address. “San Diego,” said Saul. “Moved there two months ago.”

  “Whereabouts in San Diego?” The officer was all amiable chattiness, but Saul noticed that his right hand rested on the wooden grip of his pistol and that the leather safety strap had been unstrapped.

  Saul had been in San Diego only once, six days earlier, when Jack Cohen had driven them through on the Interstate. His tension and travel fatigue had been so great that every sight and sound had made a profound impression on him that night. He could recall at least three exit signs. “Sherwood Estates,” he said. “1990 Spruce Drive, just off Linda Vista Road.”

  “Oh yeah,” said the officer. “My brother-in-law used to have his dentist’s office on Linda Vista. You near the university?”

  “Not too near,” said Saul. “I take it you aren’t going to tell me what’s going on.”

  The patrolman looked in the back of the Toyota as if trying to decipher what was in the boxes there. “Some trouble up toward Lake Elsinore,” he said. “Where’d you say you were camping?”

  “I didn’t say,” said Saul, “but I was on the Little Margarita. And if I don’t get home soon, my wife’s going to miss church and I’m going to be in big trouble.”

  The officer nodded. “You didn’t happen to see a blue or black van up that way, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so. Aren’t any connecting roads between here and the Coot Lake area. How ’bout folks on foot? Black woman? In her twenties? Older guy, maybe a Palestinian?”

  “A Palestinian?” said Saul. “No, I didn’t see anybody but a young white couple named Heather and Carl. They’re up there on their honeymoon. I tried to stay out of their way. Is there some sort of Mideast terrorist stuff going on?”

  “Might be,” said the trooper. “Looking for a black girl and a Palestinian, both of them carrying a real arsenal. I can’t help but notice your accent, Mr. . . .”

  “Grotzman,” said Saul. “Sol Grotzman.”

  “Hungarian?”

  “Polish,” said Saul. “But I’ve been an American citizen since just after the war.”

  “Yessir. Do those numbers mean what I think they mean?”

  Saul glanced down to where his arm rested on the window, sleeve rolled up. “It’s a Nazi concentration camp tattoo,” he said.

  The patrolman nodded slowly. “Never saw one of those. Mr. Grotzman, I’m real sorry to delay you, but I’ve got just one more important question.”

  “Yes?”

  The patrolman stepped back, set his hand back on his revolver, and looked at the back of the Toyota. “How much does one of these Jap jeeps set a fellow back, anyway?”

  Saul laughed. “According to my wife, too much, Officer. Way too much,” He nodded at both men and drove on.

  They drove through San Diego, went east on I-8, to Yuma where they parked the Toyota on a side street, and had lunch at a McDonald’s.

  “Time to get a new car,” said Saul as he sipped at his milkshake. He sometimes wondered what his kosher grandmother would say if she was watching him.

  “So soon
?” said Natalie. “Is this where we learn how to hot-wire?”

  “You can if you wish,” said Saul. “But I was thinking of an easier way.” He nodded at a used car lot across the street. “We can spare some of the thirty-thousand dollars that is burning a hole in my suitcase.”

  “All right,” said Natalie, “but let’s get something with air-conditioning. We have a lot of desert to cross in the next day or two.”

  They left Yuma in a three-year-old Chevrolet station wagon with air-conditioning, power steering, power brakes, and power windows. Saul disconcerted the salesman twice— first when he inquired whether it had power ashtrays and second when he paid the asking price with no haggling. It was good they did not spend time bargaining. When they returned to the side street where they had left the Toyota, a group of brown-skinned preteens were in the pro cess of breaking the side window with a rock. They ran away laughing and giving the finger to Saul and Natalie.

  “That would have been cute,” said Saul. “I wonder what they would have done with the plastic explosive and the M-16.”

  Natalie gave him a look. “You didn’t tell me you brought the M-16 along.”

  Saul adjusted his glasses and looked around. “We need a little more lead time than this neighborhood will give us. Follow me.”

  They drove to the nearest shopping mall where Saul transferred all of the gear and left the keys in the car with the windows rolled down. “I don’t want it vandalized,” he explained, “just stolen.”

  After the first day they traveled at night, and Natalie, who had always wanted to tour the southwestern United States, retained the images only of bright star fields above the sameness of Interstate highways, incredible desert sunrises bleeding pinks and oranges and indigos into a gray world, and the thump and throb of laboring air conditioners in the small motel rooms that smelled of old cigar smoke and disinfectant.

  Saul retreated farther into himself, allowing Natalie to do most of the driving, stopping earlier each morning so that he could spend time with his dossiers and machines. By the time they reached East Texas, Saul spent the night in the back of the station wagon, sitting cross-legged in front of the computer monitor and EEG machine connected to the battery pack he had purchased at a Radio Shack in Fort Worth. Natalie could not even play the car radio for fear of disturbing him.