The Day Before Midnight (35 page)

Whoo-eee. No going back, no way, no how, no sir. The collapse of the tunnel, in whose rubble he had been loosely buried, completely sealed him off. His beam flashed across the wreckage, revealing only a new and glistening wall of coal and dirt. He was cooked, he now saw.

Dead, he thought. Dead, dead, dead.

He turned to explore what little remained of the sarcophagus. Blank walls greeted his search in the bright circle of light. It was the same end of story they had discovered before the tunnel fight. It was like the door in his cell.
Fuck Niggers.

Walls laughed.

You die slow, not fast, he thought. Them white boys have their way with your nigger ass anyhows.

But still, the smell. He winced. The odor of corruption he recognized instantly, having encountered it so many times in the long months underground back in the ’Nam, when the gooks could not get their dead out of the tunnels and so left them buried in the walls, where occasionally, after a fight or a detonation, they fell out, or rather pieces of them did, and with them came this same terrible odor.

Man, how could it smell so? It only your old pal death.

Yet as he pieced the situation together, his curiosity was also aroused. For the smell had to come from somewhere. It could not come from nowhere and it had not been there before the explosion.

He began to sniff through the chamber for that spot where the odor was at its most absolutely unendurable. Led by his nose, his fingers searched the crevices in the walls. It didn’t take long.

Shit, all right. Yes, sir, here it was. Walls found it. A kind of crack in the wall, and from the crack, which was low off the floor, there came a kind of breeze and from the breeze the moist, dank, terrible stench.

Walls searched his belt. Yes, dammit, he still had it, a goddamned entrenching tool. He remembered now that the damned thing had banged against his legs in the long tunnel fight. Removing it, he quickly unfolded the blade, locked it into place, and with strong, hard movements began to smash at the wall, scraping and plunging. The air filled with more dust, and his eyes began to sting, but still he kept at it, thrusting and banging away, amazed at how swiftly it went. With a final crack the wall before him heaved and collapsed. He stepped back. The dust swirled in his single beam of light, but yes, yes, there it was, a tunnel.

A way out.

Or no, maybe not out. But to somewhere.

Faces. The world had become faces.

“Now, these are American military, Mrs. Thiokol. We
put this file together rather hurriedly, but these are the faces of men who possess the skill necessary to plan and execute the sort of operation we’re dealing with at South Mountain.”

She was amazed by how much she despised soldiers. These were exactly the kind of men she was never attracted to, that made her yawn and mope. If she had seen any of these bland, uncomplicated serious faces at a party, she would have run in the opposite direction. They looked like insurance agents, with their little haircuts all so neat, their eyes all so unclouded, their square, jowly heads atop their square, strong shoulders, over neatly pressed uniform lapels, with great mosaics of decoration on their square, manly chests. They looked so boring. Their business was supposed to be death, but they looked like IBM salesmen. They looked grim and task-oriented and hideously self-important and dull.

Still, now and then there’d be one a little more interesting than the others—with, say, a little pain in his eyes or a faraway look or a peculiar haunted look. Or maybe even the suggestion of evil, as if the owner enjoyed the power of death that was his profession.

“This one.”

“This one. You know this one?”

“No. No, I’m just curious. He looks as if he’s had an interesting life.”

One of the men breathed heavily, almost a sigh.

“He was a colonel in the Special Forces. He was in Vietnam for seven straight years and spent a long time out there in what they called Indian country.”

She couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant.

“But, yes, he has had an interesting life. He’s now in Bangkok, Thailand, where he runs a very proficient private army that protects a heroin merchant. Could we go on, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“I’m not being very much help, am I?”

“Don’t worry about pleasing us, Mrs. Thiokol. Pleasing us has no meaning. Finding the man or men behind all this, that has some meaning. Fred, would you get me another cup of coffee?”

She went on. But none of them bore the faintest resemblance
to that charming, forceful man in the Israeli consulate that morning.

“I’m sorry. They’re beginning to blur together. I’ve been looking at them for hours now. I don’t think he’s here.” Somehow she suspected he wouldn’t be.

“You’ve been looking at them for about half an hour. It doesn’t appear to me that you’ve been concentrating.”

This irritated her.

“I
have
been concentrating. I have a visual imagination, and that man’s face is in it. I
know
that face. I can call it up even now, I can remember it. Do you want me to go through it again?”

“No.”

“Maybe if you had one of those police sketch artists I could
describe
him, and then the computer could help you find him.”

“We’ve found that’s a very long shot. Statistically, it almost never works out.”

“Maybe I could draw him. I mean, I’m—”

They looked at one another as though they really were Three Dumb Men. You could fly a plane through those open mouths. It seemed so elementary to her.

“An artist, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Yes, goddammit. Why the hell didn’t we think of that sooner?”

“It’s my fault, I should have—”

“Don’t worry about that now. Fred, get her some paper and a—is a pen all right?”

“A pen is fine.”

She took the Bic, a fineline, and faced the blank sheet in front of her.

“All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. She hadn’t drawn in years. She felt the pen in her hands grow heavy and then, experimentally, she drew a line, which seemed to lead her to another and then another and then … suddenly, she was in a frenzy of drawing, she didn’t want ever to stop drawing. And as she worked, she felt the details pouring back into her mind. She remembered the curious formality to the man, and yet his cheer and his sense of command. You just knew this was a man who got things done. Then she reminded
herself that at the time she had thought he was a Jew, a hero of Israel. How could she have been so wrong? Still she felt herself drawing a hero of Israel, a Jew. So there was something in him that she responded to, that was genuine even under the cleverly constructed fiction and the guile that had gone into constructing the fiction. She decided then that he really
was
a hero, of sorts, and that he was probably as brave as any Israeli hero, and she tried to draw that, too—his courage. She decided that he was a special man, and she tried to draw that. She tried to draw his charisma, which was the hardest. Is it in the eyes, some steely glint, some inner fortitude? Is it in the jut of the chin, the set of the mouth, the firmness of posture, the clarity of vision, the forthrightness in the way he turns his whole face toward you and never gives you the half-and three-quarter looks so much a part of the repertoire of the people who like to think themselves “charming”? She tried to draw that.

But a face was emerging from all this thought, and her fingers hurt where she had pressed down upon the pen. Somehow, through her illusions, her eyes and her hands had not lied.

She looked at him. Yes, that was him. Yes, forget the bullshit, that’s him. Maybe his vitality obscured his age and his bright eyes obscured the tension deep inside him, but that was him. Maybe the hair wasn’t right, because she tended not to notice hair. But that was him.

She felt them crowding around, watching.

“There,” she finally said. “Does that look like anything?”

They were very quiet. Then, one by one, they spoke.

“No. It’s real good. You really made him come alive. But no, no, that’s not anybody I’ve looked at today,” said the first Dumb Man.

“Just for a second,” said the second Dumb Man, “it was shaping up like a SAC colonel who got the ax seven years back when he got involved in some crooked real estate deal. He was a leading candidate early this afternoon, until they found him in Butte, Montana, teaching junior high.”

The long seconds passed, and then it became extremely obvious that the third Dumb Man, who was the youngest,
the one who did the phone calling and got the coffee, had not vet spoken.

‘“Fred?”

Finally, Fred said, “I think you better get the Agency.”

Then he walked over to the table, where four or five more huge volumes of photos lurked. He read the words on their binders, selected one, and as he brought it to her, she could hear their breaths
come in
harshly. She could
not see
what the book was, but he opened it quickly, found a certain page.

There, before her, were about a half dozen men, all in uniform. But it was not an American uniform, as had been the case with all the others she had looked at. It was a tunic-collared uniform, with off-colored shoulder boards and lots of decorations. The faces were flinty, pouchy, grim, official.

She put her finger out, touching one.

He was heavier here by several pounds, and he wasn’t smiling. He had no charisma, only power. But it was the same, the white-blond hair, the wise cosmopolitan eyes, the sureness of self and purpose, and the wit that lurked in him. It was all there, though in latent form.

“That’s him,” she said.

“You’re sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“Leo, look for yourself. That’s the face she drew! That’s it!”

But Leo didn’t want to believe it.

“You’re absolutely sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“Leo, look at the picture!”

“Fuck the picture,” Leo said. “Mrs. Thiokol? Megan, look at me. Look at me. This
is
the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life. Look at me, and tell me this is the man you met in what you thought was the Israeli consulate in New York City.”

“She drew the picture from
memory,”
Fred said. “She couldn’t have known.”

“Yes, it’s him.”

“Leo,” said Fred, “I should know, I spent nine years in counterintel. He was one of our big bad bogeymen. We
tracked him all over New York back when he was operational. He was a hell of a pro, I’ll say that.”

Leo just said, “You better call the White House. And the people at South Mountain.”

“Who is he?” asked Megan, and nobody would look her in the eye until finally Leo, the oldest of the Three Dumb Men, turned to her and said, “You’ve just identified the lieutenant general who
is
the head of the First Directorate of the Soviet GRU, Mrs. Thiokol. Head of Russian Military Intelligence.”

She didn’t believe him.

“I—” she started, then stopped.

Finally, she said, “His name. Tell me his name, just so I know it.”

“His name is Arkady Pashin.”

The dust floated up through the hole in the wall, drifted in layers through the flickering beam of Walls’s light. Cool air, dense and almost gaggingly sweet with corruption, raced through his., nose. He fell back, vomited, retched himself empty in a series of dry, shivering spasms. At last he stood.

Man, he thought, I don’t wanna go in there, no, sir.

You gotta, boy. No other place to go. You maybe find something in there. You go on forward now, boy.

Shit.

Stop your cursing. You go forward, black and proud, or you die. Same as the streets, motherfucker, same as any tunnel ever made. Man stand up, man be black and proud, man go ahead. No one gonna raise up against you, not down here.

Black and proud, he thought, black and
proud!

Ducking, he willed himself through the space into some farther chamber. He was braced for what he saw, yet still the power of it, when the circle of light fell upon it, was shattering.

Black and proud, he said to himself, holding himself together, yes, sir, black and
proud!

It was the face of death. He’d seen it a jillion times, of course, from cartoon pirate flags and Halloween masks and scary movies and even cereal boxes, jokey and funny—but
not jokey here: the leering skull’s face, its splayed grin hideous and total, the face from beyond the Great Divide. Yet its power still shocked him—that, and the fact that flesh, rotted and filthy, still clung wormlike to the clean white bone of the skull. The eyes were gone—or were they merely swollen grotesquely, so they no longer looked like eyes? The hair hung in stiff hunks down across the face, and atop the head, which was at the crazy angle of uncaring, was a metal miner’s helmet, its little light long since spent. The spindly creature’s hands, frail and bony-looking, held a pick that had fallen across and joined the dead man’s chest, sinking through its blackened corruption, joining the slithery lungs—things moved in there as the beam disturbed them. Quickly, he flashed the beam about, and everywhere the bright circle prowled it revealed the same: dead men, commingled with their still-hard equipment, now in the process of rejoining the elements, sinking into the maggoty forever. He had the horrified sense of not being alone: other small living things, grown fat on this feast, moved and shook their scaly tails at him as the light prodded them.

Walls fell back. He had an image of the world gone to death: the world, like this desperate chamber, filled up with corpses, heaped and rotting.

Black and
proud!
he told himself.

Again he vomited, not even having the strength to lean forward to avoid befouling himself. But there was nothing left to puke. His lungs and chest seemed to rupture in the effort of expulsion, but nothing remained to expel. Shakily, he stood, wondering if he could step forward blindly, did, felt something beneath him fight just a split-second, then yield to the impact of his boot.

He was in something.

He shook his boot off, staggered forward. Everywhere the maggoty, glistening bodies Jay, beyond color, beyond everything except their own disintegration. He stumbled ahead, finding himself in a larger chamber, then saw the drama of it. His beam flicked backward in confirmation, and there revealed the fallen tunnel, a hopeless no-exit of collapsed coal. These men, what? fifty or so? had been trapped back here in
the coffin. They’d known they hadn’t the strength or the time to tunnel back out through the fallen chamber, and had thought therefore to dig laterally, from their tunnel—Cathy, wasn’t it? something beginning with a C—into his tunnel, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, that bitch, that white bitch, had betrayed them as she had betrayed him. She had been just inches away before exhaustion and airlessness had overcome the last of them, and they’d died in a frenzy of effort.