“Very well,” Plante said. He nodded at Chico and Chico produced a hunting knife with a six-inch blade from behind his back. He held it with the flat of the blade parallel to the ground and the cutting edge turned in. “Take the knife away from Chico.”
Chico grinned a little and crouched slightly and I kicked him in the groin. Chico gasped, doubled up, fell forward on the ground, the knife dropped from his limp hand, and I leaned over and picked it up by the blade. I handed it to Plante.
“We get the job?” I said. Chico was moaning on the ground. Plante looked a little startled.
“He wasn’t ready,” said Plante.
“It’s mostly being ready,” Hawk said.
“You want to give him another chance,” I said. “You want another go, Cheeks?”
“No mas, ” Chico gasped.
I said to Plante, “You want to trot out another one, or do we get the job?”
“What about him,” Plante said, nodding at Hawk.
“You got the knife,” I said. “Give him a try.”
Hawk grinned a friendly neutral grin. Plante leaned back slightly, caught himself, frowned and dropped the knife beside Chico on the ground.
“No need,” he said. “If he can’t cut it we’ll know soon enough.”
“I told you they’d be good, Mr. Plante,” Red said.
“Maybe you were right,” Plante said. “Get Chico squared away.” He looked at us. “You men come this way, we’ll sign you on.” We followed him into the administration building.
We gave Plante phony names, and when he asked for ID we smiled enigmatically and he nodded. We signed contracts including the pledge never to discuss the operations of Transpan. Plante walked over to one of the near barracks with us and showed us our quarters. Then a driver took us back to town where we picked up our stuff and checked out of the Pequod House. By ten that night we were in the employ of Jerry Costigan, and, if we were right, I was about two hundred yards from Susan.
CHAPTER 32
THE WORK WAS EASY. WE DID FOUR TRAINING sessions a day, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. We wore our Transpan fatigues. We ate lunch in the cadre dining room in the administration building where the help was Filipino men in white mess jackets.
Most of the training force were mercenaries like Red who already knew all they wanted to learn about hand- to-hand combat, and walked through the practice routines in good-natured boredom. Some of the kids were a pain in the ass. There was a straw-blond kid from Georgia who went at the training with the single-minded intensity of a Hindu penitent. His goal in life was to beat one of the instructors. Each time he failed only increased his determination in the next exercise. He volunteered for every demonstration.
“Tate,” I said to him on our third day in camp, “there’s a time to quit.”
“Quitters never win,” he said. “And winners never quit.”
I shook my head. “Life’s going to be hard for you,” I said.
There was also a squat moon-faced kid from Brooklyn named Russo who was so intent on proving how bad he was that Hawk finally broke his arm on the fourth day of training.
It had a calming effect on Tate.
Each evening after supper we strolled the grounds, circling past the big white colonial with its screen of forsythia and lilacs. On the second night we heard sounds of splashing from the pool. Security people in blue jump suits patrolled the picket fence, and nearer the house occasionally we could see men in civilian clothes strolling about wearing side arms.
The workers’ compound was next to the factory. There were six Quonset huts, three on each side of a dirt strip that in the army would have been called the company street. At the head of the street was a seventh Quonset with a sign over the door that said COMMISSARY. Past that a common latrine made of unpainted pine boards. There were tarpaulins stretched between the Quonsets, and shelter tops made of plywood. Small cook fires flickered at all hours of day or night. Most of the workers were Vietnamese, and when they weren’t on shift they squatted flatfooted beside the cook fires and played cards for cigarettes and whiskey. A small contingent of Latin workers kept an area near the last Quonset and intermingled not at all with the Asians. In the Hispanic section someone had fashioned a weight bench out of two-by-fours, and several men worked out regularly with an old set of barbells and cast-iron plates.
There were no fences around the workers’ compound but it was separated from the rest of the facility as if by measureless oceans of space.
Each shift went to work under the leadership of a blue security type, and a couple of security people were always visible at the perimeter of the compound.
“Stay out of there,” Red told me. “Motherfuckers will cut your throat for a pack of Luckies.”
“Have much trouble with them?” I said.
“Naw. Security keeps them under control. Plus there’s all of us. Long as you don’t go in there alone at night, they can’t do you much harm.”
“Doesn’t look like a step on the executive ladder,” I said.
Red laughed. “Shit no,” he said. “It’s goddamned slave labor, what it amounts to. They buy stuff at the commissary on credit. It gets deducted from their wages and each month they’re farther behind.”
“I owe my soul to the company store,” I said.
