Tornado Pratt (21 page)

So, you ask, why did I team up with them? Because by that time, I was desperate. I was fifty thousand bucks in the red and I
hadn’t planted anything good since before the depression. It began to seem to me that I might wind up in stir. Horace, I was just an echo of what I had been, just a breeze rippling the corn compared to the Tornado devouring the plain. I had a worried look. Boy, in the left-hand pocket of my blue leather case with the tooled gold monogram—not the new blue one I bought in Honolulu but the old blue one—there’s a packet of old photographs with a rubber band round it. One of them shows me by a swimming pool round about that time, say nineteen thirty-five. When you look at that picture, boy, you’re still looking at a man, with shoulders like wings if also with a touch of pot-belly. But you study the
face
and it will speak to you of worry. There are lines, boy, on the face of Tornado Pratt and his eyes have shrunk back to hide their woe. There are no eyes in that photo, Horace, but only black pits of doubt. I only keep that picture to contrast it with the one of me by the pool in Okinawa, ten years later and once again a Tarzan.

It was in a town called Guayaquil or was it Quechaquil or—I can’t remember. But it was superb. It was in the Andean foothills and behind it the mountains soared up like white cathedrals. Opposite, the ground planed away, lit by orchards and meadows, down to the distant sea. The houses were dusted pink and blue and green and they had fancy ironwork on the windows. Behind their high walls were courtyards and some folk had fountains in them powered by mountain streams. Llamas stalked through the streets with girls lightly beating their rumps. The girls wore crimson aprons and gold earings and their tawny breasts swayed beneath loose blouses. The old men smoked long clay pipes on the rooves and in the taverns and they were very fit. I’ve seen eighty-years-olds jogging for miles, long white beards floating in the Andean stream. The children, wrapped in rust-and-black blankets, posed in little groups on the street corners, following everything with their liquid, black eyes. I’ll never forget those silent kids of—what was that paradise called, Horace? Oh, and the condors that sailed like winged
scarecrows
down from the crests of the Andes and wheeled above the town.

That was where we set up our base, Horace, and, as you might guess, we had one hell of a time finding staff. There was just one girl that could type and she did this at about the speed a faucet drips. But she loved typing. It made her laugh. Because of the steep terracing of the town, the window behind her desk was on
the same level as a church steeple. If you entered her room in the early morning she seemed to be wearing a golden spire on her head. Such glories glow still in the waning mind of Tornado Pratt. But, you ask—or do you? Ask away, boy, and I’ll tell you straight.

You suggest that in view of the subject it would be more suitable if I was to think crooked? That’s a smart gag, Horace, and you were always a—what were you, Horace? Anyhow, I have to think crooked, as you imply, but don’t get the notion, son, that we were the Mafia or something. No way! What we had—in the Andes—hoo—what we had—we had the kid and—guess that’s it, boy, guess I’m trying to wipe that incident from my memory but now I got it again in sharp focus. So I’ll come right out and state: Ulysses Perkins shot him with a forty-five calibre, army-issue automatic pistol. Course, I can’t prove he did! I didn’t actually
watch
him do it. I wasn’t standing near that gully when the kid went limping past and nor did I hear the spat of the big gun above the chuckle of the stream. I didn’t see the scrawny kid pause and cough and I didn’t observe his guts shoot out through his back. I never beheld him clutch at the rent in his belly, double up, sway forwards over the bluff and finally plop down into the baby rapids where they found him.
Limping
past? Oh sure—didn’t I mention that? Some guys have all the luck. I mean, that kid, with his other great advantages in life, like being hungry, being an idiot, having no family, why that over-privileged kid was also a cripple. But what would all those blessings have been
without
his crowning stroke of good fortune? What was that? Give the man a cigar! Yeah, it seems young Luis met Ulysses Perkins on the bluff that day and good old Ulysses had his pistol handy, so—

Horace, a hundred times I have torn at my own guts, with clawed hands, moaning and choking about that kid because—I could have stopped it. I have to tell you, I knew the Perkins were going to do it.

Bullshit, Pratt, you may have suspected it but you didn’t know. You couldn’t have done.

Then why didn’t I say something? I could have said—Christ, anything—like: that’s a chance we’ll have to take, because there’s nothing we can do about it.

But I didn’t. And when Sam Perkins said:

“Hell, if he tells anyone—but
anyone!
—we’ll lose our trading licence.”

I replied feebly:

“Yeah, but who’s he going to tell? He’s half-witted.”

“That makes it worse. We can’t bribe him to be silent. We can never be sure he won’t spill the beans—any time. Hell, why did you have to hire the only kid in town who speaks English? How the hell does he come to speak English anyhow?”

“Father was American—kid spent first ten years in New Mexico.”

“Well, we’ll have to make sure he doesn’t talk.”

“I don’t see how we can.”

“There are ways, Tornado. There are always ways.”

And I knew! Goddamm it, I knew what he meant! Don’t tell me I didn’t. What kind of lousy conscience, are you, Horace?
Certainly
, I knew. I knew like an Arab knows that it’s time for prayers when the muezzin wails from the minaret. I saw the message clear as if it had been flashed on the sky in letters ten miles high. He meant to kill the kid. And I said nothing. Not a word, not a squeak, not even a little
tisk
of protest. And why? Because the accountant who lives in my brain began murmuring that it was vital to be solvent and that the consequences would be catastrophic if our trading licence was revoked. You know something, Horace, he made such a long analysis of the fiscal situation that by the time he’d finished Sam Perkins had gone to launch his torpedo-brother and, goddamm it, though I searched for those two hyenas for the next two hours, I couldn’t find them—and then I heard, the next morning, that Luis had been blasted at the bluff!

So then there was this hassle with me drunk in Lima for a week and then drifting north into Ecuador with three British
archaeologists
in their truck.

It was in Quito that Sam Perkins caught up with me. I’d had fantasies of mashing him and, even more so, Ulysses into red pulp but the minute I saw him I just wanted to be sick. And you know why, Horace? Not because I couldn’t bear the proximity of a skunk. But because I knew he was going to lead me back. Sure I’d sent them my resignation. I’d taken off. But there was
ambiguity
there. I’d put some kind of phrase in that letter like: “for the time being” or “I don’t see how I can continue” or something that just pleaded with them to pursue me. And I’d left a trail. Hell, I could have covered my tracks. I could have been in the Orkney Islands or Honshu. I could have snatched my body away from them forever. Not they nor the law nor the outlaws nor anyone could have sniffed out Tornado Pratt if he’d really used his vast
knowledge
of earth-ball to hide himself. But all Sam had needed to do was hotel hop and here he was, as I’d secretly anticipated, oozing into my bedroom. He made a speech:

“I know what you think, Tornado. You think Ulysses blasted that kid. Well, the police let him go. They questioned him five hours and released him. They haven’t found the killer and they won’t. If you think I know who it was, you’re dead right, and if you think we had anything to do with it, you’re right again. And I don’t regret it. My three sons need to eat too. I’m sorry for the kid but he was an idiot and he had no folks. There’s never been a deal that didn’t kill, Tornado. You know that as well as I do. How many lives have you burned up in your plants? How many heart beats have you turned into bucks? Well this time it was direct. First time for Ulysses and me, although we had no direct hand in it. And you had no part in it at all. So head back with me, Tornado. We’ve torn up your resignation because we can’t pull this off without you.”

Sam Perkins had a quiff of white hair. It waved beside me in the train. It was my flag of surrender. Sam was six foot, six inches tall and he looked like a family doctor. He was pretty cute and knew I detested him. He kept Ulysses out of my way and talked to me firmly but deferentially. Until the corporation was humming along in top gear, he played me with great skill. But the Andes revenged themselves on their murdered son. One week after I’d sold the Perkins my shares for a million bucks, resigned and flown back to the States, Sam Perkins got drowned in a mountain lake. The Indian girl he was swimming with said she’d warned him it was treacherous but he just swam out into the middle and sank. It took them three days to dredge up his body. I bought some emeralds but I made a loss on those.

When I got the horrors in the fifties, I knew it was connected with the kid. Everything is connected, Horace. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in this world. They say there are galaxies so far away that it takes their light as long to reach the earth as it would take for a snail to crawl to a star. Are they connected? They’re part of the same dream, Horace, the dream of time. You know Morton Fiedler? He doesn’t write a lot these days but he was top guru in the fifties which is when I went to see him. He said I’d never really faced what I’d done and never atoned. I got a mite excited about that and mentioned the feats of heroism I’d performed in the Pacific. He said that was just trying to ransom myself. The only response to guilt, he said, was change and that’s what I hadn’t faced. I asked: you mean I should have gone into a monastery? I also asked: you mean I should have become spiritual? He said:
I don’t know what you should have done but if you’d faced it,
you
’
d
have known.

I guess everyone’s twisted. Take Harvey—he’s a dignified old gentleman with his library—okay, he was hit by a truck but for a long time he was a dignified old gentleman with a library. Looking at him you might think: a noble presence. But that noble presence once sobbed in my hearing that he was a failure. My fair Nathalie had a powerful conviction she should have been a nurse. It’s as if we all live in the field of a powerful magnet. No matter how tough our steel it warps us in the end. We’re twisted things, Horace, on this crazy ball.

So these were the thoughts I kept having as Hitler roared around in Germany. He seemed clean at first, something new, to untwist us and blow the fetid dust of ages from the world. I saw two niggers mug a housewife in Washington, DC and I thought: Hitler’s
making
a clean society. It wouldn’t happen there.

They said he was clobbering the Jews but I had that down as propaganda. They said he was building an army. Brother, he was going to
need
an army. Why, the jealous, decadent, corrupt
democracies
weren’t going to tolerate political sanity and moral health. It was a cinch that sooner or later they’d get together and invade Germany. Hitler had to be prepared to defend his new Jerusalem.

I read a lot about Germany. I built up a library of over a thousand books on Germany and housed them in a big, specially prepared room in my house in Georgetown. In that room were maps and also artefacts, coins, some moderately rare manuscripts, works of art and so on. It was a tiny German museum. I even, for a while, contemplated having a swastika emblazoned on the door and also growing one out of tulips or gladioli in the garden. One day I began to talk about this project to the gardener and it suddenly struck me that his name, Lasky, was probably a Jewish name. I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone and so I never did mention it to Mr Lasky, my gardener.

I had a mental picture of Germany as the Happy Land. I saw it full of friendly, healthy people, working in harmony. No one gave anyone orders because things were done spontaneously as soon as the need became obvious. For instance, if a village needed a new road, all the villagers spent Saturday and Sunday building it. The road connected the village with the new autobahn which swept away over the horizon to the shining towers of the Just City. There, the
sidewalks streamed with golden youth who were building the New Future. The old folk walked in superb public gardens and ate excellent food in comfortable restaurants. Tasteful new houses, schools and hospitals were erupting everywhere. In his chancellery, Hitler charted the new future that his youth was building. In the barracks, the fearless yet humane guard of the new regime drilled to preserve their heritage. Best of all there was sexual abundance. The golden frauleins gave themselves joyously to the eager laughing men, regarding the sexual act as the chief sacrament of their new religion and the generator of the New Future. Pinched puritanism had been vanquished.

This was not as clear in my mind as I’ve put it to you, Horace, and maybe at the time I wanted to keep it vague. I was not a
deadhead
but a man endowed with a perceptive and schooled brain and, under ordinary circumstances, I’d have nosed that load as shit from the first whiff as it trundled past. The way I’ve just put it to you is the way I assembled it to myself after Alexandra Wilks forced me to confront the sick truth of my romantic idealizing of Hitler and his toxic regime.

Alexandra Wilks was Greek. She was the ex-wife of a
congressman
. She was about forty when I first met her, two or three years older than me. I normally made passes at girls in their twenties but I was deeply attracted to Alexandra Wilks from the moment I set eyes on her. This was in the home of a Washington journalist
during
a party. Everyone was chattering and gulping cocktails and Alexandra Wilks was standing by a bookcase, reading a book. She wasn’t too attractive, dark and bony, and the horn-rimmed glasses didn’t help either. But as I moved about the room I kept glancing at her. So finally I drifted up beside her and asked: