Dead I Well May Be (38 page)

Calm down, he said, backing off but keeping his hand there.

I looked at him and thought for a second about trying it on, going for him, but I didn’t.

I was exhausted.

We held the pose for half a minute.

Get out of my house. I don’t know what you fucking want from me. You’re a vampire. That’s what you are. And don’t send Cuba over either, I said.

Michael, really, I don’t know how you got so upset, if I said any—

Are you deaf? Get the fuck out, I said wearily.

Ramón opened the door and went out and closed it gently behind him.

Bastards, I said, and for a while I kneeled there, expecting tears, but even when I forced it, none came.

I stayed in bed the next day and most of the next. No one came to see me. Cuba didn’t bring his chicken. I didn’t read. I didn’t do anything. I drank brown water from the tap.

Finally I got up and went to a restaurant on Broadway and 189th Street. The menu was entirely in Spanish, and I ordered something that seemed like a stew and when it came it was tripe soup with bits of what looked like embryo in it. I couldn’t start on it and left the cash and got up, but the waiter was affronted and wanted to give me something I would like, and since I was the only customer the cook came out, urged me to try the soup. I tried to explain the biblical prohibitions, but he was unfamiliar with them and any form of English I could recognize, so things went badly. The guys were only being nice and wanted to feed me, but I was a wanker and pissed them off and the
word
puta
got raised and I left and on the way home picked up some Dominican cakes instead.

That night I got a six-pack of Corona and plugged the TV in and flipped through the channels. There wasn’t anything good, really, if you discounted cable access. I saw somewhere that there was trouble in Ireland, but that hardly counted as news.

I went to bed and got up the next morning and decided to go for a walk. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and a sweater and a black raincoat. I walked to the George Washington Bridge and found myself crossing over to the other side. About the middle I stopped and took a look down the Hudson towards the bottom of Manhattan. There was no one else crossing, although traffic was heavy coming over from New Jersey. I wondered what the time was and could only guess at about seven or eight. Had the clocks been put back yet? Did they do that here? They put them forward in the spring, so I suppose they went back in the autumn.

The area on the far side of the GWB was dreary and uninteresting. I explored it for a little while, and at a bakery I got some choux pastry stuffed with custard. It was quite good. They did coffee there too, so I had a cup, but it was so weak and nasty that it wiped out the taste of the good custard thing.

I wandered back in the direction of the bridge and found myself trying to figure out how you got down to the wooded area that I’d looked at so many times from my apartment window. I took a few turns and found a tiny sign pointing to Palisades Park, which seemed to be the spot I was looking for. From my side of the river it seemed an interesting and perhaps beautiful place, with cliffs and trees tumbling down to the water. Of course, now the trees had given up much of their cover, but perhaps it would still be nice. I took a road that was wending its way downward, and before I really knew it, I was in the middle of the forest and deep somewhere under the bridge. It was like that story of the troll and the Billy Goats Gruff.

The men had been tailing me since at least the bakery and probably all the way over from Manhattan. They had been in a blue car but now they’d parked it up the road and were on foot. They were keeping well behind, but I could tell there were two of them, both pretty heavy guys. I imagine they’d picked me up outside the apartment building
and followed me onto the bridge, but because of the traffic, they couldn’t have gone at walking pace, so they must have made the decision to drive over and wait for me; hoping, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to stop halfway and turn back. If I had at rush hour, I would have lost them, but they’d gotten lucky and they were now behind me on the road, a good bit back, so it wasn’t life and death just yet.

It puzzled me. If they knew where I lived, why hadn’t they just come in the morning and got me? The building had some security, but nothing a professional couldn’t get around. My door, too. It would have been easy pickings. They couldn’t be following me to see where I was going, because once I’d gone down into the Palisades, the only way back out was the way I’d come. The thing to do would have been to have one man wait back at the car and the other slip down the road after me, to see if I was meeting anyone, or picking up a drop, or whatever. But they weren’t doing that. They had parked the car, and both of them were coming down the hill after me. It was an odd thing to do, for if I started walking back up and past them, it would then be pretty fucking obvious if they turned and began following me again. Whereas if there’s only one of you tailing the suspect, you just keep walking along if you see him double-back, and then the other guy follows him from the car. But both were coming, and I was pretty sure that the car had had only two occupants. They couldn’t have got to a phone, so, unfortunately, the only reason both of them could possibly be coming down this hill at this time was to intercept me and then probably kill me. Nothing else would quite make sense.

This, though, again begged the question as to why they hadn’t killed me in the apartment this morning when I was asleep. I thought about it. Perhaps they’d been watching one of a couple of buildings and didn’t know which one I was actually in. Maybe they roughly knew where I lived but not exactly. Perhaps they’d just got lucky again, cruising Broadway, knowing that I lived around there somewhere and then spotting me. If they’d reacted fast, they could have got me on the street, but maybe it was too late by then, maybe by then I was up at the George Washington Bridge and up there there’d been half a dozen traffic cops. Even in Washington Heights you couldn’t plug somebody in broad daylight in front of six cops and hope to get away with it.

It must have been very exciting for them. There they were chugging
along, Sunshine’s voice ringing in their ears. He lives in the 180s near Broadway, I’ve had reports, spies. Just keep driving around and if you see him at all, fucking shoot him first, ask questions later. But don’t be stupid. And then suddenly one of them spots me. There he is. There’s the bastard over there, look. Look, isn’t that him? Tell me if it isn’t him. Longer hair, beard, but that’s our boy, isn’t it? Let me see the picture. Where’s that union ID photo? Aye. That’s him. Where’s he going? Shite, he’s crossing the fucking bridge. All right, be cool, don’t get crazy, just go over.

Yeah, they’d be all excited. Driving over here, cleaning their pieces, wondering if an opportunity would present itself. And there I was, going down into some park in the middle of nowhere with no one around. Jesus, half the population of New Jersey is going over the bridge above us, but down here it’s all quiet, peaceful, no witnesses at all.

I was slightly disgusted with them. I couldn’t really believe that both of them would just come plodding down after me, hoping that I wouldn’t hear, but then a thought occurred to me. Maybe there was more than one car. Maybe they’d be calling in backup. Four men would be a lot to handle, or perhaps the whole entire bloody crew would show up to give me a once-over before putting one behind my neck.

I’d have to be smart. They, of course, had guns, and I, stupidly, did not.

Use the head. Have to remember. I was lucky, though, because I had experience, I’d been through the mill in Belfast, I’d been through the mill in Mexico, and maybe most important, in the army I’d done those two very useful courses. The recon course on Saint Helena, where I punched the guy and got chucked off and out, and a corporals’ course back in Blighty, which I managed to fail, but really there was no shame in that. I mean, you hear a lot about standards these days. They tell you that the Army Rangers is a really hard outfit, except that the pass rate for army basic training is about 95 percent. They don’t tell you that the Navy SEALs pass half of their candidates, desperate for manpower. Honestly. So there’s tough, and there’s tough. Anyway, I did that course in the West of Jock and I redded it, but by way of
excuse let me say that the corporals’ course of the British Army is one of the hardest bitches in the world. See, the Brits consider corporals the backbone of the whole organization: corporals and sergeants run everything, so you have to be good. You learn exponentially. In four days, you get months, years of distilled experience. It’s like the wisdom of the
I Ching
.

Now one of the things I did on the course was a night foot patrol through a forest. There’s another foot patrol looking for you and if they find and “kill” you, you lose. In the patrol, it’s creepy, and you’re approaching a mock village from different parts of the wood, and, believe me, you learn to slow down, to halt your boys, to listen, to hear. People don’t know how to listen these days, but anybody can do it.

In that moment on that hill, in New Jersey, after all my slagging off the army, I remembered all of this in an instant and tried finally to do what they told me. Listen, unclog your ears of bog, you Paddy fuck. Try. Listen. Come on.

I stopped, crouched, and cupped my hands behind my ears. Took my hands away, got in a better position. You could barely hear them at all, but if you listened for a minute and sorted the sounds and deciphered them and filtered out birds and traffic and riverboats and ambience, you could tell that first, they weren’t running; second, they were walking but their footsteps were not regular, not normal; third, they were walking but they were treading lightly, carefully, they were actually trying not to make too much noise. They were confident, but not cocky. This told me two further things: one, they were dumb enough to think that I hadn’t heard them in the first place, which Helen Keller could have done a mile away with a Walkman on; and two, there was probably no backup coming. It was just them, and they, in their half-arsed, crappy way, were trying to be careful. So the two of them and the one of me.

I stood up and started walking again, following the path along the leaf-strewn road, all the way down almost to the river. It was really quite striking. The naked trees with huge branches twisted and gnarled. Underfoot, golden leaves carpeting everything, and in the distance, fleeting glimpses of the Hudson and a mammoth weird city perched precariously on an island.

At the next turning, you approached the water and there was a bit of a grassy meadow and a stony beach. It had to be either at this turning or the previous one. I decided on the previous one because the cover was better. I ran up to the last meander of the road and got in behind a bush just above the path. I hid there and pulled my raincoat close and waited. I was glad I’d been wearing dark colors. The boys were going a wee bit faster now, still careful, but nervous, sensing their big moment was coming up.

If I’d had two functioning feet, the ideal play would have been to let them go past, jump, drop-kick one of them in the back and head (with separate feet), and as he’s going down at least try and get a swipe at the other bastard. But with my left foot unreliable, I decided against this. Instead, I’d jump the bigger of the two guys and try and bowl him over into the other and hope somehow that it all worked out.

I waited for the boys, breathed, kept calm, and remembered that I’d actually failed that corporals’ course on the very first night. Jesus. Who was I kidding? Distilled experience, my arse. I-fucking-Ching. Knowing me, I was almost certainly blitzed that night too. Any U.S. Army week-two reject was probably better than me.

It was in the midst of this period of self-doubt that finally they came. One big and fat, one big and thin. They were both smoking, which was ridiculous. I could have smelled it. I didn’t, but I could have. The big and fat one I recognized as Boris Karloff from the tail on Bridget. The other I’d never seen in my life. He was sallow-faced and skinheaded and probably another import from Erin. I wonder if Darkey made him sing bloody “Danny Boy” to see if he was the business. They were both walking fast and neither had his weapon out, which suited me just fine.

The trail was narrow. The Thin Man was on the inside, so I had to go for him first. It would all have to be very quick and very hard. Hesitation would be the death of me. I held my breath, tensed, poised, and then when they were just past, I jumped the bugger. I took off on my good foot and landed on the Thin Man’s back. I got my knee into his spine and knocked all the air out of him. My right hand was already under his neck and pulling his head back. He staggered and fell into Boris. The fall helped me, and I twisted his neck hard and tight. By the time all three of us were sprawled in a heap on the ground, the Thin
Man’s neck was broken and I’d scrabbled up his gun, a little six-shot revolver of unknown caliber. Boris was fumbling for his weapon somewhere on the ground in front of him. I took a couple of breaths and pointed the revolver at him. I clicked back the firing pin.