dim light of the screen, all of it flickering as Jose pounds away on Carmen. He has to close. He knows this.
He slides down an aisle and it annoys him to crawl so he climbs to his feet, begins a slow creep until he reaches the halfway point, then hears the scuffle of a determined man. I have you! he thinks with a spurt of pleasure so intense it is almost sexual. He leaps up to shoot and drills a runner. The only problem: that running man is not his enemy. Then a strange thing happens. Suddenly he is pinned in light. He is blinded in radiance. It is as though God were addressing him. Ramon, God seems to be saying, time to consider your sins and plan confession.
However it's not God. Possibly it's a trick arranged by that sly bitch Odudua. It seems she has planned things so that the porno reel has run out and no one has stayed in the projection booth to change it, and so the pure beam of light, unfiltered by blasphemous imagery, hits him in his beautiful eyes, and he turns, blinded, and can only barely recognize the form rising from the seats just beyond his, like some creature crawling from a fresh sea. Would this be God?
No, it's Odudua. Next to her, the white guy with the gun, that one is Earl, who shoots him twice in the chest. He slides down, instantly numb. He feels no pain, only immense laziness. As a predator, he feels no fear. Men such as him do not, in any practical sense, experience fear. He feels…wonder. How did it come to this?
Earl leans over, presses the gun muzzle against Latavistada's left eye, feels it sink a little under the pressure, and shoots through it into the brain.
Then Earl rises. Somewhere sirens are beginning to wail. Someone begs him to get a doctor. Someone calls for Maria and another for Roselita and one for Mabel-Louise. That one seems to be from Kansas City.
But Earl turns, slips out, for he has no time for the dying. Not any more. He has a boat to catch.
Chapter 60
At dawn a mist came in. The Day's End cruised back and forth just off the Malecon. It was clear that whatever Earl had wrought, it was significant.
The sirens had been blaring for an hour. Ambulances hustled in both directions up and down the Malecon, their flashing lights penetrating the mist that lay heavily on the land and sea.
'By the number of them,' Orlov said in Russian, 'you'd have to say quite a lot of damage was done. This American, he seems to have a special gift for mayhem.'
'It may have cost him his life, however. I see him fighting till his last pint of blood is gone and then, without a pulse, shooting and killing his last enemy before he dies.'
'Possibly you romanticize him, sir. You make him sound like one of their ridiculous cowboys or some legendary cossack. He's a killer, that's all.'
'Orlov, you are very young. I allow myself one illusion per decade. It keeps the world amusing. The true enemy isn't western capitalism, it's boredom. Anyhow, go listen on the radio and tell me.'
The young officer disappeared for a few minutes, leaving Speshnev alone, floating in a netherworld. The mist rolled everywhere, dense and clinging; he felt like a subject in some terrible avant-garde painting, symbolizing existential nothingness, universal ennui, the desolation of the soul.
But then the young man returned.
'Some kind of massacre. Many shot. A high-ranking police officer assassinated. The policia are beside themselves. It's quite amusing.'
'But no word on the American?'
'They said some Americans had died and some others been wounded. It's hard to tell. It doesn't sound as if he got away.'
'No.'
'We had better go, Speshnev. At any moment the Coastal Police could come out of the mist and demand that we heave to. We have no business here and I don't want to be nabbed in Cuban territorial waters with this much secret gear aboard. The American intelligence people would have a field day. My career, you know, is not as glorious as yours, but it would die such a death.'
'Just a minute or so longer.'
'Speshnev, you know he's dead. He fought I don't know how many. Clearly he did much killing. But he's gone, he?'
Then they saw him.
He emerged from the mist with his coat tightly wrapped about him. His face was grim and sunken, his eyes bleak and dark. He needed a shave. There was no lightness at all to his step.
'Well, he is a cowboy, after all,' said Orlov. 'I give you that.'
Speshnev expected him to falter, to fall and, as in a movie scene, let his coat spread open to reveal the fatal wound, the gush of blood from a shot gut.
But it never happened. Orlov brought the boat in close, and there was not even a need to tie up. The American just sloshed out into the shallow waters until he reached the gunwale, and two negroes pulled him up. Orlov gave the command and they sailed off, into the mist.
An hour passed and then another, and all the while the American brooded alone in the bow. At one point, Speshnev directed one of the negroes to bring him a cup of coffee, which he drank while smoking a Camel. Finally the mist broke and revealed them to be alone on an empty blue sea, under a bright sun in an empty blue sky.
The American seemed to relax a bit; he took off his wet coat, rolled up his sleeves, then peeled off the shoulder holster with the old Colt in it. He seemed to contemplate it a bit and then, almost with a sadness in his limbs, he tossed it over the side. In two handfuls, he dispensed with the remaining shells from his pockets
Speshnev approached.
The American looked over to him.
'Hated to do that. A gun gets you through a fight, you feel something for it. Stupid, ain't it? Just a gun. Not like it's a damn dog or anything.'
'I'm certain it went to gun Valhalla, Swagger, where it will drink grog in a great hall filled with wenches.'
'Ain't that a pretty picture.'
'We heard on the radio. They're calling it a guerilla attack. El Presidente will use it as an excuse to crack down on the radical left. Eleven men are dead and twenty-two more seriously wounded. A heroic police officer lost his life.'
'I blew his fucking brains out. Felt damn good too, you know?'
'Yes, I know. It always does. So you succeeded?'
'I got both of 'em. Killed 'em deader than shit. Ain't I a peach? Too bad about them other guys.'
'Don't be upset at the excess, my friend. Progress is made by chaos and tragedy, not by polite chatter. Justice came last night to Cuba, if only for a little while. Possibly it will come again.'
'Maybe so. Now I just want to sleep for a year. How soon can this tub get me home?'
'Swagger, don't go back. They have you marked.'
'It ain't like that's a choice. I've got a job to do. I am the law on Route 71 between Blue Eye and Fort Smith in west Arkansas.'
'You know how it has to end. Not this year, maybe the next. You know what they have to do.'
'No, I don't know nothing about them. I only know what I've got to do. That's the only goddamned thing I have a say in.'
Both men turned. The horizon was flat, the wind strong, the sea empty. In a few hours, America would appear on the horizon.
Chapter 61
The old men were pleased. Really, there was no bad news, except of course for the tragedy of Frankie Carbine, but Frankie, that boy had always been a hothead, and it was in the cards that sooner or later, someone
