Payback (10 page)

And then it moved too.

He froze like a tree. It was six feet of undulating salivating snake. An Asian Two-Step. Bites you and two steps later you're a corpse. He fumbled for his pistol and thought about the long-range clamor of a shot. What he needed was a stick. (On an island of grass.) He could settle for a rock.

What he had was a knife.

The snake moved forward, edging his boot tip, and Catlin drew his breath in and plummeted the blade. Snake blood squirted him. He'd got the little fucker in the band around its neck. The rear of it boogied for a time and then quit.

Cleaning the knife he felt a wave of revulsion, a fury, a loathing, a desire to take the knife and just plunge it into mud—kill the fucking island, kill the fucking earth, kill everything. He wanted to yowl in frustration. He did not want to die here; he did not want to die in this mother-fucking pit.

And then he saw Mack, sprawled out lazy like it might've been a long dull picnic at the beach. Afternoon torpor. Snoozing in the sun. Catlin went over, said, “Mack, don't be dead.” For a time he just stood there, staring at the face-down body in the mud, not moving, not wanting any messages confirmed though the messages were written very clearly on the ground.

The punji stick had gone neatly through his hand. He'd pulled the thing out of him and tried to make a tourniquet by winding up his belt. He'd taken his shirt off and wrapped it on his hand but the shirt was so bloodstained that nothing must have worked.

Catlin turned him over. His face was mud-streaked but otherwise bleached, waxy, like the color had been sucked from within. Catlin kept groping on the chest for a heartbeat; he felt for a breath. He fumbled for a pulse. Nothing. He pried up the eyelids. Nothing. He slapped at the face. He pounded on the chest. He tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but nothing came back at him.

He sat in the mud, under the dark unpromising sky, surrounded by the weeds and lit a cigarette. He knew he was crying and he just let the tears keep running down his face; they weren't in his way. He sat for a long time, not moving. He was so very tired. He was so frightened; he was so tired of being frightened. He couldn't go on.

He pulled at the cigarette, staring at the meaningless patterns of the smoke.

And it suddenly struck him with a fine, exquisitely abrasive detachment, that he
hadn't
gone on. The war had killed him. The person he'd inhabited was already dead, but the flesh he was sitting in—dumb warm body—still wanted to survive.

Amazing, he thought. Totally amazing.

He looked up at Mack. He could never remember how the thought took its shape. It arrived full-born, parentless, squalling for attention in the ripe afternoon.

Mack would have finished with the army in a week.

If Mack were alive … with an ankle that'll take about a month to get well … I'd be out of here tomorrow.

It started like that. Idly at first. Or pretended to be idle. He was never really sure.

Mack was taller but nobody measured the dimensions of a corpse. Both of them were blond, that would be enough.…

And then there was the interesting coincidence of names—the reason why a postcard for Robert R. Mitchell went to Mitchell R. Catlin. Symbols and portents. Predictions of Things. The fates wanted Mitchell R. Catlin for a corpse? he could give it to them, couldn't he. Here. Right now. Throw death off the scent.

Jesus. He was getting into something very weird. Half superstition and half pure logic.

Whatever works out
.

The enormity hit him when he took off his dogtags and bounced them in his hand. If later there were parts of it he cursed and regretted, he couldn't ever claim that, at least for that moment, he hadn't thought it out.

It occurred to him there, on that island in the mud, that it wasn't only Mitchell Catlin he'd be ditching but a
series
of identities: Citizen. Grunt. Colorado State Intermediate Champion of 1967. Patriot. Man. Honorable man.

But all of it paled against one very simple, very elemental thought:

Listen, you asshole, you'll DIE either way
.

Later, as he walked off, heading for the jungle, with Bob Mitchell's rifle hanging from his shoulder and Bob Mitchell's dogtags swinging from his neck, certain he was walking into imminent death, he felt himself finally in tune with the system, a man who was totally plugged into entropy and playing by the rules.

He fought in that jungle, one against twenty, bagged seventeen, and was choppered into Tokyo with most of his right leg shredded to the bone, though the ankle wasn't broken—it was lacerated, sprained.

He was decorated, adulated, lionized, stuck.

He was Robert R. Mitchell.

Mitchell R. Catlin was officially accounted for as MIA.

***

He was staring at the card.

Standing at his dresser, dressed in a dark business suit, ready for dark business and interpreting the facts:

Somebody offering his Catlin dogtags for half a million dollars.

The family jewels.

The cheap piece of tin with the personal engraving that he'd left on the body of a very dead man. In a very sick jungle.

He could think about Who.

He could think about How, but it would come back to Who. Find out Who and the rest would come after. What he needed, it occurred to him quickly, was a plan. He had no clear thoughts about what he ought to do. Or if what he ought to do and exactly what he would do would be the same thing. But looking in the mirror, for a fraction of a second he could almost feel relief; he could almost feel free. He could even look back, because whatever it was that was gaining on him—figure it was already here.

9

Joanna, in the back row of the crowded auditorium, scribbled in her notebook:

Tate Meets the Press—Tate Factory Bldg—Noon (so they say)

She looked at her watch now: 11:58 and the meeting room was jammed. Twenty-two rows seating fourteen across. Three hundred people and the one right in front of her would have to be the one who was wider than a truck.

She doodled a gun, its muzzle-end pointed at the middle of his back. She fingered the trigger.

Bang!

It was Richard's fault she was late and had barely got a seat. She'd arrived here in time. Richard had spotted her coming down the corridor and fixed her with a look—a really terrible look, all tight and appalled, like she'd walked into the locker room just before the game.

He said furiously, “What are you doing here, Joanna?”

She told him, a story.

He said, “What a joke. Don't tell me what you're doing here, I
know
what you're doing.”

She said, “My goodness, Richard, what am I doing?” and he pulled her down the hall—literally pulled her, by the hand, like a kid—and then out to a terrace. “Well?” she said. “What?”

Richard paced around. She decided, that moment, he reminded her of Nixon. A martyred bulldog.

“Come on, Richard. Talk.”

He'd have to talk fast and she found herself interested in what he might say. The truth would be that Richard didn't like to be witnessed. Anywhere. Either in the john or in bed. A witness could testify, go before the court, interpret reality a very different way, could even be encouraged to abet the prosecution. It occurred to her that living, for Richard, was a trial; so of course he'd be a lawyer.

What he said was, “It's difficult to say this, Joanna, but you're trying to exploit me. You used a position of advantage this morning and you're trying to abuse my connections with the firm. So let's get it down. If you're imagining I'll help you get an interview with Mitchell—”

“Did I ask you to?”

“Implicitly.”

“Oh,” Joanna said.

“And further,” Richard told her, “I wouldn't have to
guess
that you'd been rifling my files.”

“Well, there you have it, Your Honor. Case rests.”

“So.” Richard nodded.

Joanna shook her head. “I don't believe this,” she said. “I really don't believe this. Whatever's in your
files
is in the library, Richard. Christ, I could've gone to the library, Richard.”

“But you didn't. That's the point.”

She said nothing for a second. Then she said, “Boy, you really lost me there, Richard. I mean figuratively too. I don't know what you're talking about. Point of what? Point of honor? Point of order? Point of departure?
Deci
mal point? What the fuck are you
talk
ing about, Richard? The
point
is it's absolutely pointless, is the point. So why don't I come over and pack what I've got there and leave you with the keys.”

He looked at her grimly. “It's a shame, Joanna.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

Her last shot of Richard: he was standing there nodding philosophically at air; looking less like a lover who'd been losing his lover than a lawyer who'd fucked up a thorny little case.

And oh Joanna, she'd been thinking as she turned, you mustn't do this again. You should just go gently into those bad nights—get a cat, read a book, do some macrame, jog; give it up. You're not even any heroine here. Richard was Richard. He was always Richard and you knew it from the start.

She looked at her watch again: twelve on the nose.

A man at the microphone was testing for a level.

Richard was standing at the back, on the aisle, his head bent forward as he listened intently to a natty-looking fellow in a tan worsted suit.

Leo Blackburn
, she wrote in her notebook.
Hollywood's answer to questionable acts
. Leo had handled the public relations for David Begelman and Stacy Keach. So judging it correlatively, why not for this? Everything was show business, wasn't it? she thought. There was no business that wasn't show business. No tragedy or damage that couldn't be interpreted with hard-driven patter and a soft-focus lens. Wink, talk fast, throw sequins in their eyes.

Richard and Leo were moving down the aisle.

***

A reporter was asking, “… what you know about the poison. They're saying it's a legal synthetic narcotic. Is it anything you make?”

Mitchell peered out: Preppy-looking kid, twenty-two, twenty-three. He angled his head. “What paper're you with?”

“Why?” the kid said. “Does it make any difference?”

“No, I'm just figuring it wasn't
High Times, Rolling Stone
, like that,” Mitchell said. “The drug here's a variant of TMF—that's tri-methyl-fentanyl. Synthetic heroin. It isn't made from poppies, it's made out of greed, but the technical difference makes it technically legal. What you've got here's a question of It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it cooks, flies and dies like a duck, but it isn't a duck because its molecules are different. So much for that. If it doesn't make sense to you, complain to your congressman.

“Now. What I know. It's unbelievably potent. You want to know
how
potent? If one bad chemist worked eight hours straight, he could make enough to fly every addict in America for twenty-four hours. You turn that around and you can kill fifty people with whatever you can feed them from the head of a pin. The addicts who shoot it call it Russian Roulette. It can take you on a moon-trip or scramble your brain cells or freeze you like a pillar or kill you like a shot. So in answer to your question, kid—no, we don't make it.—The lady in the hat.”

“Thank you. The stock market closed in New York and the story is your stock was down nine and a quarter. Have you got any comment?”

Mitchell said nothing; then he said, “I do, but I don't think you'd print it.”

The answer got a quick tension-breaking laugh.

***

The man right in front of her listed to the right and Joanna got a good open picture of the stage. She liked the way Mitchell was reacting to the laugh, unassuming but aware. She liked the way he stood there, not quite relaxed, in his sober single-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, blue eyes. She liked the way he looked …

(… only, wait a second, wait a second. How could you know about the color of his eyes …?)

She stared at the stage again, squinting through the distance, and suddenly she knew about everything there was. Exactly how his hair grew closely on his neck and the funny little mole in the center of his palm. His face seemed to come at her from two ways at once, from outside and in, and the absolute punch of it brought her to her feet.

***

A TV reporter was telling him, “Police think it happened at the plant. If it did, do you believe that the product could survive?”

Mitchell took a breath. Then he said, “I think I stopped beating my wife on September twenty-second.” He shrugged. “What the hell. That's the kind of question you're asking me, isn't it? Because first of all I don't think it happened at the plant, which doesn't mean I'm closing my mind to the subject. We're working as closely as we can with the police but I think they'll find nothing. I think within a week they'll find the packets were jimmied. But again—we've been launching our own investigation and we're helping the police.”

Mitchell looked around. He drank a little water and knuckled at his jaw. “I don't know. Kind of looks like a duck, though, doesn't it. Listen—” He paused, lifting his shoulders, pacing, having no idea what he was doing.

“Okay. If it happened at the factory,” he said, “then, one: We wouldn't know it with an ordinary test. What we're talking here is basically a microdot amount. It's a microdot in twelve out of six million packets. The only way you'd find it, you could open every packet, you could test it specifically for TMF. Scientific equivalent of opening the barn door every two seconds to be certain that the horses hadn't turned into pigs. It's one of those things you wouldn't think of till after.”