waited. Nothing. I waited. Across the stadium, I saw a figure rise cautiously from an entrance near the goal line. I looked below. There was another figure on this side. There were at least two of them. In the gentle moonlight, it was hard to say for sure, but neither of them looked like Harvey, which meant he was somewhere else in the stadium. They wouldn't have sent anyone else, not after I had been to the Czernak home. Not after I'd actually spoken to Bunny. The men below were now fully out of their stairwells, crouching as they came. Both had shotguns. Swell. At the closed end of the stadium, behind the goalposts at the other end of the field, a third figure emerged from the stairwell. Even from where I was, I knew it was Harvey. I stayed where I was. The three men stood still now and slowly surveyed the stadium. Then they moved up a few steps and did it again.
I realized why they had been so long in coming. First they had swept the space under the stands, starting at either end and driving anyone there toward the middle, where Harvey waited. Now they were doing it in the stadium, working their way up, and if they found no one by the time they got to the top, they would move along the arcade toward the center, pushing anyone up there toward the center, where Harvey waited. It would not be good to let them do that. The guy across the way was a long shot with a handgun, probably one hundred yards. The guy near me would be duck soup. I cocked the Browning and stood in the shadow of one of the support posts. I rested my elbows on the top of the wall, and, holding the gun in both hands, I centered in so that the middle of the far man's body sat on top of the little gun sight at the front of the barrel. I centered the front sight in the V of the back sight and leveled it off. I took in some air and let it out and stopped breathing. I squeezed the trigger slowly and kept squeezing, firing five rounds. One of them got him, maybe more than one. He twisted suddenly and dropped the shotgun and fell forward. I didn't see him hit. I was on my feet, firing at the second man, close to me. He had no place to go. He sank to a knee between the seats and raised the shotgun and fell backward, and the shotgun fell on top of him. I looked for Harvey. He was gone. My ears rang. The silence of the stadium after the eruption of gunfire was almost more assaultive than the gunshots.
I was alone with Harvey now, in the thin moonlit darkness, to play another kind of game in the big arena. Fight fiercely, Harvard. He couldn't run. He couldn't go back to Sonny and say I'd killed the other two and chased him off. He'd played this game before and never lost. He thought he could kill me. I had four rounds left in the Browning and five in the Chiefs Special on my hip. I thought I could kill him.
I stood motionless and didn't breathe and listened. There were faint occasional traffic sounds from Soldier's Field Road. There was a barely discemable breeze. There might have been a hint of river smell in it. There was no sound or scent or sight of Harvey. What would I do if I were he? He knew where I was, or where I had been when I shot his pals. He'd have run toward me. He'd be in the arcade. I put the Browning on the edge of the wall and took out the.38 and cocked it and transferred it to my left hand. Shooting left-handed, I couldn't hit the ocean from a boat, but if Harvey were close enough. I picked up the Browning again. He'd expect me to stay against the back wall of the arcade so I wouldn't get shot from the stadium. I stayed instead against the front wall. He'd expect me to stay where I was. Instead, I moved in a crouch, keeping my head below the wall.
The stadium smelled like stadiums always smell-of peanuts, or popped corn, or both. I speculated that the Roman Coliseum had probably smelled of peanuts, or popped corn, or both. I moved slowly and very carefully, sliding each foot silently along, feeling for anything that might crunch underfoot and give me away. There was nothing. My compliments to Harvard Facilities Maintenance. I moved this way past two stair openings, with the Browning held straight out in front of me ready to shoot. If he had gone up where I'd last seen him and started carefully toward where he'd last seen me, we would meet pretty soon.
I was breathing through my open mouth as quietly as I could. I was listening and looking. The effort to perceive was physical. If I were not where he was expecting me, if only for a moment, that distraction would be my edge. Or not. I could hear small murmuring pigeon sounds and realized that they were nesting under the rim of the arcade. Somewhere one of the pigeons fluttered a little as if he were turning over in bed, and there was Harvey, crouching as I was, against the front wall, his gun half pointed toward the back wall. He turned the muzzle toward me and I shot him in the middle of the mass with the four bullets left in the Browning.
It had been enough edge.
56
Alone in my apartment on Marlborough Street, I sat at my kitchen counter with a tall Scotch and soda and cleaned the Browning. I had just killed three men, two of whom I didn't even know. What kind of business was I in, where I had to kill three men on a pleasant moonlit night in an Ivy League football stadium. Hope tomorrow isn't parents' day. There had been two people at Taft awhile ago. If I shot anyone else on a college campus, I'd probably be eligible for tenure. I drank half my drink.
Sometimes the work helped people. But who was getting helped this time? Did Daryl want to know what I had learned? Would it help her? Was I the one to decide that? Several people had died so far in pursuit of information that no one might wish to acquire. They hadn't been good people. But I had known I'd have to kill them when I led them to the stadium, where I knew the layout and they didn't. I hadn't known there'd be backup. But I hadn't known there wouldn't be. Did I stick at it because I was curious? Because I was a nosy guy who wanted to know what everyone had been covering up? Now I knew. Or at least I knew most of it. Was it worth a lot of dead guys? I did this work because I could. And maybe because I couldn't do any other. I'd never been good at working for someone. At least this work let me live life on my terms.
I ran the swab through the barrel of the Browning, and it came out clean. I looked down the barrel. Spotless. I wiped the gun off with a cloth and let the receiver forward, let the hammer down, and had more Scotch. The nearly full half gallon on the counter gleamed reassuringly in the light from under my kitchen cabinets. I fed cartridges into the magazine of the Browning. They went in economically, each one taking no more space than it needed to. Nice- looking things, bullets. Compact. Bright brass casing, copper coating on the slug, leaving some gray lead exposed at the blunt nose. When it was loaded, I slid the magazine into the pistol butt.
My glass was empty. I made another drink and took it to the front window and looked out at Marlborough Street at 2:15 A.M. The brick and brownstone faces of the buildings were blank. No windows were lighted. The cars parked on the street seemed abandoned in their stillness, and the bleak street lamps made the street look lonelier than I knew it was.
I was doing this because I had started out to do this, and if you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them. What was that line from Hemingway? What's right is what feels good after? That didn't help. I took a long drink of Scotch and soda. There was that line from who, Auden? Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. I could see my face reflected in the window glass. It was the face of a guy who used to box-the nose especially, and a little scarring around the eyes.
I went back to the counter and sat and looked at the Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol as it lay there. As an artifact, it was nice-looking. Well-made. Precise. Nice balance to it. Blued finish. Black handle. Everything it should be and no more than that. Form follows function. The magazine was full and in place. But there was no round in the chamber. As it lay on my countertop, it was less dangerous than a sixteen-ounce hammer.
Maybe Harvey lived life on his own terms, too. And maybe he was faithful to the terms. Maybe that was why he'd kept coming in the dark unknown stadium when both his backup were gone. What would he be doing tonight if he'd won? Was that the only difference? That it maybe bothered me more than it would have bothered him?
