Brass Go-Between (25 page)

“It’s not that I don’t like your lecture, Colonel, but just what are we going to do when we get to Henry Hill? You know, where Jackson was first called Stonewall.”

Mbwato turned in his seat to look out the rear window. “They seem to be gaining, don’t they?”

“I was watching during your lecture.”

“At Henry Hill we rendezvous with Captain Ulado.”

“I take it you chose the spot.”

“Yes. It’s only about twelve air miles from Dulles International.”

“How far by road?”

“We don’t have to worry about that, Mr. St. Ives. Captain Ulado is meeting us with a helicopter.”

I nodded, keeping my surprise to myself, and glanced in the rear-view mirror. The two cars behind us were maintaining their distance. The closer one was approximately a hundred feet behind the Ford. At the junction of Highway 29 and 211 I barely paused and then skidded the car into a left turn. I pressed the gas pedal down hard and when I next looked at the speedometer the needle was bounding off ninety-five.

“This is as fast as it’ll go,” I shouted at Mbwato above the engine and wind noise. He nodded, half turned in the front seat, the muzzle of the sub-machine gun resting on the seat’s back.

Traffic was light and it got even lighter when most of the cars and trucks veered off to the right to take Interstate 66 rather than the slower 29 and 211. The two pursuing cars remained leeched to our rear, neither closer nor farther away. A mile past the cutoff to 66 they made their move. The lead car, a black monster that I thought to be an Oldsmobile, drew up effortlessly alongside us. The second car, another Oldsmobile, took up a position ten feet to the rear of the Ford’s bumper. I was boxed. The car on the left swerved toward me and I had to hit the shoulder to avoid a sideswipe. I got the Ford back on the road. I didn’t have the speed to move ahead. I couldn’t slam on the brakes, so I decided to go after the car on the left, but he dropped back too quickly for me to make my move.

“Don’t try it again,” Mbwato yelled. “Just wait for him to draw alongside.”

He clambered over the seat into the rear, taking the sub-machine gun with him. The lead Oldsmobile pulled up alongside me again and the machine gun went off in my ear.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.

“Shooting at him. I believe I got the bugger.”

I looked in my rear-view mirror. Both cars had dropped back, but not much. The man next to the driver in the lead car was talking over a telephone, probably to the car back of him about how they could head us off at the pass.

“You didn’t hit anything,” I yelled at Mbwato.

“What time is it?” he screamed in my ear. He had to scream because the sub-machine gun had made both my ears ring. I looked at my watch. “Eight-forty.”

“Can’t you go any faster?”

“No. How far?” I yelled.

“Five minutes.”

I concentrated on my driving. Mbwato crawled back into the front seat and produced his map which he studied by the light of the open glove compartment. It was growing dark, not quite dusk yet. I decided that the attempt to wreck us made sense. At least to Spencer. When a car goes out of control at ninety-five, few of its passengers walk away. We could be accidentally killed, his guards could retrieve the shield, even if it were somewhat damaged, and Spencer could go drilling for oil in Komporeen. A car wreck would be simple and safer than a bullet in his well-appointed house. No messy bodies to dispose of. No one to wonder what happened to that itinerant go-between and the spade colonel with the funny name. They just died in a car wreck.

“That stone house ahead,” Mbwato yelled. “Take a right.”

I took a right, barely missing a stone pillar as the car slewed on its mushy springs. An asphalt road led up a hill. “Now where?”

Mbwato studied his map. “Next left; take the next left,” he said.

I took the next left onto an even smaller road, the tires shuddering and squealing in protest. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was now only one car following.

The road ended abruptly near a white frame house. “Wrong road,” Mbwato muttered. “Wrong goddamned road. Not your fault though. Mine. Never could read a map.”

The black Oldsmobile had stopped fifty feet behind us, its two occupants wary of Mbwato’s sub-machine gun. “What do we do now?” I said. “Make St. Ives’ last stand?”

“Run for it,” Mbwato said, jerking his door open.

“Where?”

“Up there,” he said, pointing to a hill where I could see the outline of a statue of a man on a horse. “Henry Hill.”

It was three hundred yards away, all uphill. Mbwato opened the rear door and snatched out the shield. He slipped it over his left forearm and waved the sub-machine gun at me. “Make a run for it.”

There was a shot and the sound indicated that it came from near the parked Oldsmobile. The Ford’s rear window cob-webbed around a hole. I snatched up the automatic from the seat and ran around the car. Mbwato stood at the edge of the road and fired two bursts at the Oldsmobile. There was an answering shot. And then another.

“Let’s go,” he said, and started running up gently sloping Henry Hill which boasted not a rock, not a tree, not a bush. I ran after him. I had no place else to go. We were a third of the way up the hill when I heard the helicopter. It came in low, barely skirted a forest of trees to the left and settled gently to the ground near the statue of what I assumed to be a horse and General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who once had stood like a stone wall and later was carried across a river and into some trees to die at thirty-nine.

There were two more shots. They came from behind us. Mbwato stopped and turned. He held the sixty-eight-pound shield out at his left side and fired the machine gun from his right hip. A long burst. Then a short one. I turned to see a man in a gray uniform fall to his knees and then sprawl forward on the grass. The second man in a gray uniform flopped to his belly. He carried a rifle and he seemed to be taking careful aim from the prone position. He fired once; then twice. Mbwato’s machine gun let off a burst and I turned. He stood there for a moment, a big, black man in a blue silk jacket, an African brass shield on one arm, a Swedish sub-machine gun cradled in the other. He stood there and lifted his face up to the sky and roared a long terrible cry. Then he fell backward onto the grass that sloped gently up to the top of Henry Hill where the helicopter and Stonewall Jackson waited for the black colonel who had a sneaking sympathy for the Confederacy.

I turned to face the man with the rifle. He was up on one knee and I lifted the automatic and squeezed the trigger twice, then three times, then four. It was luck. You shouldn’t hit anything at that distance with an automatic, but the third or the fourth bullet caught him and he dropped the rifle and clutched his stomach and then bent slowly forward to the ground.

I ran to Mbwato who lay face up on the grass. There were two small red stains, about the size of dimes, on his white shirt, just to the right of its buttons. He breathed harshly and his breath bubbled in his throat.

“Take it,” he said.

“Take what?” I said.

“The shield, you fool.”

“How bad?” I said. “How bad is it?”

“The shield, damn it,” he said, and lifted it up, all sixty-eight pounds of it, with his left arm. I tugged it off and put it on the grass.

“Take it to Ulado,” he said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me with those curiously gentle dark eyes, the man they called “The Rope,” and then he smiled that come-to-glory smile. “You have been, Mr. St. Ives, most gracious,” he said, and then he died.

I knelt there in the grass beside him just staring, and then there was a shout from the helicopter. I stuffed the automatic into my coat pocket, picked up the shield with both hands, and started toward the helicopter. I couldn’t see anything. The shield was in front of my eyes. I heard a shot. And then there was another and something twanged off the shield, knocking me backward. I dropped the shield. Two men in gray were coming down the hill from the right. Both held rifles and both of them were aimed at me. I pulled the automatic out of my pocket and fired blindly, but the two men continued to advance slowly, one careful pace at a time. They were still fifty feet away when I threw the automatic at them and bent down for the shield. As I straightened, one of them put his rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim. There was a sudden burst of fire from the helicopter and both of the gray-clad men dropped to the grass. I couldn’t tell whether they were hit. I didn’t care. I ran toward the helicopter. It wasn’t much of a run, not carrying sixty-eight pounds of brass uphill. A child could have caught me, a toddler. It was almost dark now and I guided myself by the sound of the helicopter and the light in its plastic-domed nose.

Hands reached out and took the shield from me. “Inside, Mr. St. Ives,” a voice said, and I recognized it as belonging to Mr. Ulado, who lifted the shield into the rear of the four-place machine. When it was stowed away he picked up a sub-machine gun that was the twin of the one that Mbwato had had and in a casual, practiced way loosed another burst at the two men with rifles.

“They must have circled around,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Get in,” Ulado said. “Where’s Mr. Mbwato?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “Halfway up Henry Hill.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Get in.”

I climbed into the back. Ulado got in the seat next to the pilot, a slim young Negro who wore a green velour shirt and a coconut straw hat with a plain black band. “Dulles,” Ulado barked at him, and the young Negro nodded and shot the helicopter up.

Ulado turned around in his seat to face me. “The pilot,” he yelled. “Trained in Vietnam.” I nodded and sank back in the hard canvas seat. It was a short hop, not more than ten minutes, if that. The pilot talked over his radio to the tower and set the copter down not far from the main terminal. Ulado got out and I crawled after him. He reached into the cockpit of the machine and wrestled the shield out.

“Mbwato said you’d know what to do with it,” I said.

Captain Ulado nodded gravely. “I do, Mr. St. Ives. May I thank you for all your help. We say good-by here. I have a plane standing by on the runway.” He put the shield down so that it rested against his left leg and held out his right hand. I shook it.

“You’ll never know how much we appreciate your efforts,” he said, picked up the shield, turned, and walked off into the dark. I started to call after him, to tell him that he’d forgotten his sub-machine gun, but perhaps he didn’t need it any more.

I walked toward the terminal, found my way up to the main lobby, and then located someone who could tell me what I wanted to know. “You have a chartered plane leaving here in a few minutes with a friend of mine on board,” I said. “I think it’s a prop job.”

The man in blue uniform flipped through some cards on the counter. “Yes,” he said. “A Constellation. Chartered by a Mr. Mbwato—I think that’s how you pronounce it.” He turned and looked at the clock on the wall behind him. “It should be departing any moment now.”

“Could you tell me its destination?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Rotterdam.”

A
T EIGHT O’CLOCK THE
next morning I was lying in a bed in the room at the Madison, staring up at the ceiling, and waiting for someone to come and take me away when the telephone rang. It was a Miss Schulte who said that she worked for Hertz.

“The car that you reported stolen has been found in Silver Spring, Mr. St. Ives. That’s in Maryland. It was undamaged except for the rear window, which apparently has a bullet hole in it.”

“I wonder how that got there?” I said.

She said that she didn’t know but that the insurance would take care of it. Then she asked whether I would like to come down to pay for the rental or would I like her to bill me. I told her to bill me and she said that would be fine.

“And the next time you need a car, Mr. St. Ives, be sure to call Hertz.” I promised that I would and hung up.

I hadn’t reported the car as being either missing or stolen so I assumed that Spencer’s gray-clad private troopers had tidied things up when they got through shooting at me. I also assumed that they had collected the bodies, picked up the spent shell cases, and even policed the area for old cigarette butts before driving the rented Ford to Silver Spring and dumping it there. I wondered what they had done with Mbwato and whether anyone would ever come looking for him, but a billion dollars could hide almost anything, even a dead body as large as that of the colonel from Komporeen who, when alive, may have been the world’s most accomplished liar. I spent a few moments speculating about how much the Dutch-British combine would pay Captain Ulado for the shield in Rotterdam and whether he would spend some of it in Corfu or Acapulco, and if, while spending it, he would ever think about the children with distended bellies who went around eating mud, straw, twigs, and chalk. I felt that if he did think about it, it wouldn’t bother him much, no more than it would have bothered Colonel Mbwato.

I called down for some breakfast and
The Washington Post
and when they came I read a brief story about how the caretaker at the Manassas National Battlefield Park last night had reported hearing a series of gunshots near the statue of Stonewall Jackson, but after investigating, police said that they had found nothing. I was pouring my third cup of coffee when someone knocked at the door. It was Lieutenant Demeter wearing a green sport shirt and light gray slacks.

“My day off,” he said as he came in the room, looked around with his cop’s eyes, and selected a comfortable chair.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Sure. Black.”

I handed him a cup and then went back to my chair. “Haven’t found it yet,” Demeter said, and sipped at his coffee.

“What?”

“The shield.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem much interested, St. Ives.”

“I’m not any more. The Coulter Museum has decided that it no longer needs my services, such as they are.”

Demeter nodded and placed his cup and saucer on a table. “That’s what the Wingo woman told me last night. I gave her a call because I was trying to find you. She was kind of shook up, said that you gave her a rough time—almost accused her of being in on the whole thing.”