Blood Makes Noise (38 page)

Michael did as he was told. As he went to close the door, Hector grasped it with surprising strength, and now the secret policeman’s voice was quiet and stern. “Michael Suslov, within the confines of our relationship, would you say you trust me?”

“Within the confines of our relationship.”

“When I say, please drive as hard as you can, as fast as you can, and don’t stop. Not for anything.” Hector looked at Gina, behind the wheel. The engine idled beneath them. Gina nodded.

Hector withdrew from the cab and his voice was bright again. “Ah! I think I see it!” Hector drew his eyes low, to the rear tire, and walked back as if looking for something. When he had reached the four-wheel drive’s rear he opened the hatch and said evenly, “
Now
.”

With whatever strength remained in his ageless frame, Hector jumped into the four-wheel as it jerked into reverse and spun itself backward into France.

Gunfire erupted from the darkness and clattered against the truck like hail as the windshield exploded into snowing glass. Gina kept the pedal jammed in reverse, unable to see, and the truck careened over brush and rocks. Lofton, Lopez Rega, and
his two thugs, they were all in the open now, guns spitting short flames.

Alejandro drew his blood-caked machine pistol from the floor, laid it on the dash, and fired through the destroyed windshield, hot shells ejecting against Michael’s arm, till the magazine clicked. Michael had no idea if he hit anything. But the truck did—a rock—and stopped neck-wrenching dead.

Hector, flung against the rear seat, half draped over Evita, said with surprising calm to Gina, “I meant drive into
Spain
.”

Gina hit the accelerator and the four-wheel flew in rocky confusion off-road over bramble and roots. Michael had no idea what direction they were heading, the world outside blurry, wind-blown insanity.

The land dropped quickly away, a cleft rose on Gina’s side, blocking the customs station with an earthen berm, and that probably saved them. The steering wheel leapt from Gina’s hands with every bone-jarring bounce, knocking the truck to a different point on the compass. They serpentined madly across open ground like that, Gina never letting up the pedal, and when Michael made eye contact with her he wanted to shout
slow down
! or
speed up
! or
look out
! and only managed “
Un-fucking-believable!
” And Gina laughed a gulping, panicked laugh, and it was the first time Michael had ever seen her laugh—a beautiful laugh—and he knew he loved her, if only for the five or ten seconds they had left to live.

“The road!” They crashed right across it, would have missed it entirely if not for Hector’s shout. Gina fishtailed right, bounded along in a cloud of dirt, and at about the same moment the right fender tumbled away, Michael saw a surveyor marker stuck in the roadside and the language was Spanish. “Keep going…keep going…” Michael closed his eyes, and it was sandpaper. He opened them again as a fat blood bubble rose from Alejandro’s mouth and broke over his chin. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Michael said.

There was only one way out of these mountains: down. They jerked along the path, horseshoe after horseshoe. Everyone knew without speaking that the others had a vehicle, were probably just behind them, and that this was now a race to…where? The Guardia Civil weren’t a problem; one call from Hector to Franco would bring help from the next station. But if the Guardia station was too small, Lofton and Lopez Rega might be tempted to just shoot their way through to Michael. They needed a bigger town with a bigger Guardia squad. They needed luck. They needed to keep going…

But there were no towns in this part of the world—not real ones—only the road, and dawn was working it in soft purples as they tumbled from the Pyrénées into the dry plains of the Aragon Reconquista.

The land flattened, stars retreated, and the engine sprayed mists of oil through the smashed windshield.

“This thing’s finished,” Michael said.

“What do we do?” Gina asked.

The mountains had quit, but the wind had only gained enthusiasm for the treeless, dusty plain. It rocked the truck broadside so hard Michael thought it would topple. “Keep going…”

The horizon was now a pale line, and they could see clouds of orange brown clawing into the air everywhere. A dust storm. Gusts of it struck their clothes and muddied itself with engine oil.

Michael scanned the horizon and it gave up dark, silhouetted towers. “There’s a town. It looks big…”

“Yes, Michael,” Hector said from the rear. “I see it.”

Gina took a smaller dirt road toward the spires. Drifting mountains of dust played peek-a-boo with the image, and she traveled the road on faith.

They kept their scratched eyes on the three or four yards of dirt in front of them until they were stopped before an earthen
wall. Gina drove along it till she found a break. They passed through it onto what could have been cobblestones…and the truck shut down. She turned the key a few times, but Wintergreen’s four-wheel was finished.

Michael, Gina, and Hector climbed from the truck and were stung by dusty gulps of air. The wind lived here, was born here, and spun with the arrogance of someone who knew it.

“We’ve got to find a Guardia Civil station,” Hector shouted. Michael nodded. The sun was up, up for real, and lighted only swirling sand. The wind found strange eddies within the city’s walls, and the dust bunched into four-story traveling storms. One drew other strays to it and shot along the inside wall, giving Michael a brief glimpse of the town. It was old, its cathedrals and apartment blocks the color of the earth, rising from it, like a mirage, hastily thrown together and left a thousand years.

“Where is everyone?” Gina shouted.

It was dawn but the streets weren’t dawn quiet. They weren’t even dust-storm quiet.

The clouds of earth pulsated once more, an apartment block came into view, and it was a normal apartment block but for one wall completely sheared away. Orderly rooms and toilets stared at Michael like the removable wall of a dollhouse. He looked to the cathedral’s spire. It had seemed indistinct, fuzzy, and he had blamed the dust, but now, with the weak strikes of morning, he saw its fuzziness came from having been so smacked by artillery that it had lost the edges of its shape, like sandblasted glass.

“What is this place?” Gina asked.

Hector smiled his secret smile, the one irony owned, and turned to her. “
Los Martirizados
, Gina.”

“What do you mean?” Michael asked.

“The martyred ones. Civil War relics. Cities destroyed and abandoned forever. Aragon is littered with them.”

“So no one’s here?”

“Not for forty years.”

Michael hobbled back to the gap in the city’s walls. About a mile off a car was approaching. It could be any car, but Michael knew it could only be one.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Alejandro had his machine pistol, which he kept with its one remaining magazine. He wouldn’t leave the Senora, so they helped him behind a rubble pile nearby. Hector had a small derringer four-shot, nickel-plated and scrolled from another century; Michael and Gina had nothing. Michael turned to her. “Alejandro’s finished. I’m crippled. Hector’s a thousand years old.”

“And?”

“You could run.”

She stared at him a long time. “Where?”

And Michael knew there wasn’t anywhere. Not for any of them. Blowing sand crept up his back and he thought,
Don’t bury me yet.

Lofton and Lopez Rega upfront, two of Lopez’s thugs in back. They came through the gap in the wall, navigated the clouds of lashing earth, saw Wintergreen’s four-wheel at a corner as Lofton parked the Opel. They all got out, armed, and stood in the blowing dirt.

“They could be anywhere,” Lopez Rega said, an edge in his voice.

“Tell your men to fan out. Slow,” Lofton answered.

Lopez snapped at his two thugs, and the four of them began moving with caution through the orange wind.

Michael and Gina saw the car, saw briefly through the flying dust the four climb out. Michael took Gina’s hand and limped to a half-destroyed apartment block nearby. The lower apartments
had been stripped, and Michael searched them in frustration. “What are you looking for?” Gina asked.

“Anything.”

It was useless. A staircase led up. It was strewn with tumbled masonry, and the whole wall breathed with wind. “Maybe the apartments upstairs.”

Outside, twenty yards from the truck, one of Lopez Rega’s men moved along a wall. Abruptly he shredded like a red doll from machine-pistol fire.

The others dropped for cover. “Well, I recognize the gun,” Lofton said, lying on the ground beside Lopez Rega. “Is that you, Al?” he called out. There wasn’t any answer.

Lopez Rega couldn’t take his eyes off the blood-drenched wall that a moment ago framed one of his boys. “You said they were finished. That this was the end.”

“It is the end, Lopez. Right here.”

“They could kill us!”

Lofton stared at him. “No matter what happens, Lopez old boy, it’s a pleasure to know that the future of Argentine government is in such brave hands.” Lofton unscrewed his flask, shuddered a bolt, and motioned to Lopez’s remaining thug to flank Alejandro on the left. Lofton slipped the flask back into the breast pocket of his seersucker jacket, checked his gun, and rose creakily to his knees. “That boy out there, the one with no face, he’s your country’s best, Lopez. He could have saved your nation.” Lofton began moving right, flanking the opposite side. “Now let’s kill him so we can get out of here.”

Gina went first, hands and knees up the collapsed stairs, panting, reaching now past the debris and helping Michael over. His foot caught a brick and he twitched a full minute in agony as Gina held him. His senses coming back, shaking, he stood and together they
eased up the remaining steps, grasping a wall that shifted each time they touched it.

On the next floor half the roof was missing, but the rooms were less looted: rotten mattresses, ceiling fans, a crumbling chair. Michael went into what was left of the kitchen, ripped open drawer after drawer, and came up with one rusty butter knife.

“Michael…”

He turned. Gina was standing in a fragment of living room and staring down at something hidden by tumbled ceiling. He limped over.

Partly buried by debris, blown in half by whatever brought the ceiling down, were the mostly skeletal remains of a Spanish Nationalist soldier. He was clad in a ’30s dark khaki uniform, and his face showed no peace in death. He had died up here, and his fellows had clearly written MIA on his form, and Missing in Action he remained, staring at a crumbling chair—ugly even when new—bird shit running down his cheek into a clenched mouth. He held in one hand a rusted German-made Karabiner grenade launcher.

There was a clatter of fire outside from Alejandro’s machine pistol. The second battle for this town had begun.

Lofton was gone into the maze of collapsed stone immediately, leaving Lopez Rega alone, clutching his gun, looking feverishly around him. He heard two pistol reports and the return burst of machine-gun fire. He heard Lofton’s voice calling out “Al?” Blowing sand cut him like glass, and he cursed it, cursed Lofton and this godforsaken place.

Lopez Rega moved in the direction of where he thought the Opel would be. He got lost immediately, his only orientation in the orange sameness Lofton’s voice pitching around him: “Al, I don’t know what Wintergreen told you, but we’re with you, man. We’re with Her and Argentina…”

The buildings all looked the same, their destruction relentlessly anonymous, and Lopez Rega began to run, away from this town, away from Lofton’s voice…

And into another one.

“Lopez…”

Lopez Rega spun and shot from his pistol and saw only a frail shape fall behind a tumbled Moorish statue.

Michael and Gina pried the grenade launcher from the dead man’s hands and dragged it to the blown-out apartment wall. “Will it work?” Gina asked.

“Of course not.”

He blew clean as best he could the trigger mechanism, pulled what he thought was the safety, and stuck the bulbous head through a sheared part of the wall. “Keep the rusty knife,” he said.

Lopez Rega’s thug kept tossing off shots in Alejandro’s direction, and Lofton muttered at the stupid bastard. He was just shooting dust. They had to get closer. Lofton’s voice flew in every direction in this wind, but the shots didn’t. Each one announced his position, and if Alejandro had many bullets left, he wasn’t wasting them on that fool. Alejandro was the key. Mike, the girl, Hector: they were a carnival show. He had to get the kid. Could have used him in this. Where the fuck was Wintergreen?

There was just enough room around the edges of the grenade launcher for Michael to look over it and see…dust. A world of swirling orange. He knew the truck was down there somewhere, Alejandro, Lofton…His foot throbbed hard enough he felt it in his spine. He couldn’t just fire. Not without a shot. The whole building wheezed, and when he rested one hand on the wall, four bricks fell away to the street. He never heard them hit.

Lopez Rega, his gun shaking in front of him, walked slowly toward the fallen Moorish statue. It was of some feudal lord, hands on his shield, one eye squinting down at Isabel’s confidant. Lopez kept bobbing up and down, trying to see over it, but the statue was a big one to a big lord and he couldn’t glimpse the other side.

Pressed against it, Lopez Rega drew his face up its pitted, marble flanks and there were…drops of blood. Emboldened, he jerked his arm and head over the top, and all he saw was the face of a dog, silver, racing at him, puncturing his eye, and he fell back—gun jerking pointless, spasmodic shots into the sky—screaming in agony as Hector appeared over the top of the Moor’s mustache, his dog-headed cane bloody, his derringer aimed flat at Lopez Rega’s face. “Hector!” Lopez squeaked.

“Stick with horoscopes, Lopez.”

“Don’t shoot me!”

Hector came around the Moor’s head, a bloody bullet graze on one cheek, and stood above him. Lopez Rega babbled, one hand over his ruined eye, gun somewhere in the dirt. “You can’t kill me! I’m part of the government! You work for me! You can’t kill me!”