Jake Maroc - Shan Part 38

Her calm tone, perhaps, had some effect on him. She realized that he enjoyed baiting her to get her visibly upset. In this way he could continue to throw up to her her inherent weakness as a female of the species.

"All right, all right," he said in a more normal tone of voice. "I concede that Jake Maroc is not the normal objective. But on the other hand he is not invincible, Comrade General. No one is. He must have a vulnerable spot and it is up to you to find it, exploit it, and terminate him with all due dispatch. Is this clear?"

"Perfectly," Daniella said, despising him more than she had despised anyone in her life.

McKenna drew his Magnum .357 and shot them each once through the center of their foreheads. They pitched forward, covering the steer they had so recently slit open.

That was how he thought about the incident now, even how he dreamed it, sometimes. But that was not how it had happened.

Bundooma. The Northern Territories of Australia. McKenna and Deak Jones on the trail of the trio of abos who had stolen six head of steer. The trail had led into the Simpson Desert.

The Simpson in January. It was a bleak, G.o.dforsaken place at the best of times. But in the height of summer it was something else again.

It was true that Deak had argued against going after them: Not in there, mate. Let the b.u.g.g.e.rs go. They II fry anyway in there. Squinting against the unrelenting sunlight reflecting in intense waves off the desert floor. They were starving. They stole in order to live.

But McKenna was the senior in rank and time of service. If he said, Go, they would.

It's our job, Deak, m'lad. If we don't have that, we don't have a b.l.o.o.d.y thing.

And afterward, Deak Jones had asked for a transfer. He could no longer bear to look at McKenna's face. Because McKenna had shot three thieving abos? Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely.

Sometimes, when McKenna dreamed of the incident, he dreamt the truth: It took them two days to get the scent and overtake the abos. Near dusk they topped a rise and found the trio and what was left of the cattle. By then they had been in the Simpson for close to fifty hours and it had taken its toll. Toiling mile after mile of scrub and thornbush, dry-backed lizards, piles of rocks like cairns, marking the resting places of those unfortunates who had traveled this path before.

Let's take them, Deak said through crusted lips. McKenna had headed down the slope, silent as a dog.

The aborigines looked up at the policeman's approach. As McKenna had predicted, they had slaughtered a steer. Its blood was pooled at its open belly.

Nothing was said. The aborigines made no move; there was no animosity on their faces, no remorse even. This inflamed McKenna. If they had sinnedand he was convinced that they hadthey should be made to feel remorse for their crime. Their absolute placidity filled him with unspeakable rage.

At other times, in other dreams, the trio was composed of three men. This was a function of McKenna's superego imposing itself on his id. The fact was that the trio was a family unit: a father, a mother and their eleven-year-old boy.

It was the boy who was holding the knife. The steer's blood dripped from its keen edge to the thirsty ground. The father, McKenna supposed, had been teaching his son how to survive in times of drought, All right, Deak said. He had pulled out his pistol and was aiming in the direction of the family of abos. They said nothing. None of them looked directly at the weapon. It was as if it did not exist forthem. He crouched in the universal marksman's stance. Both hands were white around the Magnum's grip. But he did not move. It was as if he were waiting for the abos to move first, or that he was afraid to get closer to them.

For McKenna's part, he saw only the boy. He crept closer, his hand on his bolstered Magnum. He blinked the rolling sweat away from his eyes. His gaze swept the face of the boy, certain now that this was the one. McKenna had seen him in Bundooma several times. But ever since the first glimpse, that face had haunted him until, eventually, sleep was but a memory for McKenna.

This was what had brought him into the Simpson in January. The criminal act was but a secondary thought. What was one more criminal act among many?

It wasn't until McKenna touched the boy that any emotion registered on the father's face. The man leapt up, c.o.c.king his arm to strike McKenna. That was what McKenna had been waiting for. He drew his Magnum and shot the father once through the center of his forehead.

The abo's mouth made an odd, clacking sound. Reflexive motion caused him to bite off the tip of his tongue, though he was beyond pain, beyond knowing.

His body leapt into the air, dancing a jig in the air, crashed to earth, head first onto the carca.s.s of the steer.

His wife screamed, her eyes opened wide with horror and fear, but McKenna showed her the working end of the Magnum and she shut up. Her hands trembled in her lap.

It seemed as if Deak were shouting directly into his ear. Christ Jesus! We were meant to take them back. Alive, mate. Ableedinglive!

Shut up, McKenna said, without turning around. Just shut up. If you cant take it, you shouldn't've come into the Simpson in the first place.

I didn't bleeding want to come. If you remember.

Now you're here, make the best of it. Who knows? Maybe you'll get a medal out of it. McKenna had laughed at that. He had not taken his eyes off the boy and, in the process, he had grown hard. Keep your gun trained on the woman, he said with a thick voice.

Christ, why? Deak said. What d'you think she's gonna do, jump two policemen with drawn Magnums?

Just do as you're f.u.c.king told, mate! McKenna said, swinging around and training the muzzle of his gun on Deak. Then he swung back, bolstered the gun. His hold on the boy tightened. He half-walked, half-dragged him away from the fire's flickering circle of light.

Where you taking him?

McKenna ignored Deak. In the semidarkness, he could hear the chittering of the desert insects. There was nothing else in the world. The bowl of the sky was enormous, containing all things and nothing at all. McKenna felt liberated, free of the fires churning inside him. He began to laugh.

Then he opened the buckle of his belt, unzipped his pants. They fell away from him, pooling around his ankles. With a fierce jerk, he turned the boy until he was facing away from him.

Takedown your pants, McKenna said in English. When he repeated it in dialect, the boy complied.

His heart bursting, McKenna stared down at the bare b.u.t.tocks. They seemed white, virginal, full of promise.

WhatIHis flesh lurched forward as if of its own volition.

in the name of bleedin' Christ are you doing!

He closed his eyes. The desert breeze fanning his cheeks. He began to pant.

Something slammed into him. He took one stumbling step, his big hand on the boy's shoulder. Half-turned and lifted the Magnum, shot the boy's screaming, clawing mother once through the center of her forehead.

When he was done, the shudders going on and on like echoes through his body, he pushed the boy roughly away from him. He felt nothing but revulsion for the eleven-year-old. He was dirty, polluted.

The boy sat where he had landed. He stared up at McKenna and stillstill!nothing registered on his face. It was as placid as it had been when McKenna had come upon it.

React! McKenna screamed, and shot the boy once through the center of his forehead.

Have you gone stark staring bonkers? Deak cried, McKenna said nothing, pulled up his trousers, buckled his belt.

Answer me, you b.l.o.o.d.y pig! Deak screamed.

We got what we came for, McKenna said as he went past him to where the rest of the steers were waiting with bovine patience a Was it any wonder that Deak Jones had asked for a transfer the moment they got back to civilization? That he did not want to look at McKenna's face ever again?

But that was hardly the worst of it. Though the incident itself would be enough for a haunting, there was more. There was the image of the great green-headed fly, bloated with blood, crawling across the boy's open eye. There were the nights in Bundooma when he could see the fires flung like giant eyes across the face of the Simpson, skysc.r.a.pers of sparks shooting upward into the black, starless sky.

And the chanting of the tribes. He could hear the chanting even in his bed, even with the curtains pulled, the covers over his head. The chanting had a power that could not be interfered with.

Because, McKenna knew, the chanting was directed at him. For what he had done on the bleak back of the Simpson. The aborigines possessed a kind of primitive magic. McKenna had seen it at work, though he had never believed in it. Not really. He had thought of it, rather, as clever illusion, a prestidigitator's trickery.

Until the chanting had come, infiltrating his nights, making him start, gasp, sit up in bed covered in sweat. Thinking of that fly with the metallic green head, crawling over the milky arc.

What right had creatures little more than animals to do this to him? Rage and terror battled for supremacy within him. He wanted to commandeer a jeep and race out into the Simpson, pump them all full of lead. He had seen the "Mad Max" films.

He would do no such thing.

And in the end he left his command; left Bundooma, the edge of the brooding horror-filled Simpson, the Northern Territories, Australia itself. Came to Hong Kong to make a new life for himself. But here he was amid the b.l.o.o.d.y wogs again.

And the chanting had followed him all this way. He had to stop the chanting. He had to do something or go completely mad.

McKenna rose, pale as a corpse, and hunted through his beaten footlocker. Dressed in the clothes he had worn in the Outback, neatly folded, stowed away for, perhaps, just such a time.

Picked up his Magnum .357 and checked the action. Slowly, methodically, he loaded the chambers. Then he went out the door of his apartment.

He was looking to kill or be killed. He did not know which.

Imagine! They would have gone to the ends of the earth for you. They sold their souls for you.

Daniella before the mirror that was part of a ma.s.sive oak armoire that dominated the bedroom a.s.signed to her at Maluta's dacha. It had a beautifully beveled edge but here and there dark patches like oilstains on limpid water bespoke the wear to which it had been subjected.

The black Dior gown that Yuri Lantin had bought her dropped to the carpet. Daniella stood, watching herself immobile in the mirror. It was almost as if, for this interminable instant, she were gazing at a sepia-toned photograph, her own daughter or granddaughter, perhaps, flipping through the family alb.u.m, coming upon the image of Daniella Alexandrova Vorkuta.

It was at this instant that, in the same manner a flash of lightning will illuminate a nightscape, she saw how distorted and unpleasant her life had become. Why, she realized, there is nothing at all normal about it.

Perhaps it was the thought of a daughtera child she might never bearor the granddaughter who would never exist. She had, in fact, no personal life whatsoever. She belonged to the sluzhba body and soul. Even the small pleasure she derived from being with Carelin was illicit, forever consigned to clandestine shadows, laced with the bitter taste of fear: that Maluta would expose them, or that someone else within the sluzhba or the Politburo would find out and use the information to suborn or destroy them.

For years she had been far too busy constructing a career on the back of her stretching ambition to think about what it was she was sacrificing on this terrible altar.

Mother of G.o.d, she thought, if someone had mentioned children to me even three years ago I would have laughed in her face. Children? For someone whose ambition was limitless?

For the first time in her life, Daniella contemplated the hollowness of power. Locked within her hideous psychological struggle with Oleg Maluta, she felt nothing but fear and loathing. Should she by some miracle defeat him, she knew that she would feel no sense of triumph.

Bowed their heads before you, conferred to you on bended knee all that made them powerful.

It was true what Maluta had told her that frigid night by the bank of the Moskva. She had been greedy for power. Like a vampire, she had feasted off it and then killed them all, all the men in her life who had tried to use her and had, in return, been used by her. They trooped through her mind like beloved actors asked to take a curtain call by their admiring audience.

Now, staring into her own cool gray eyes, those same eyes that had bewitched so many powerful men, she stumbled upon an astounding notion. She found what would make her happy. It was not the defeat of Oleg Maluta; it was not an elevation to head of the KGB or evento the head of her country. It was, simply, to feel Mikhail Carelin's seed flower inside her. She wanted his baby more than she wanted anything.

She lost her balance for a moment, falling into her own image, their lips meeting in cold gesture. When she pushed back, there was a dead spot on the mirror where her perspiration occluded the reflection.

In a moment, Daniella bent to pick up her Dior gown. It was all wrong for this evening. Putting aside the dress, she looked at herself in the mirror one more time. Her uniform with the blue shoulder-boards was holding its press well. There was nothing wrong with her, she decided, the way she was.

There was even the possibility that this was the correct way to go about it.

She had never seen Maluta drinkthat is, seriously drink. In Moscow, he drank an occasional shot of zubrovka at dinner. That was all. But here in the dacha, he swallowed ryabinovkathe vodka flavored with ashberriesas if he owned a piece of the business.

He was already well into the vodka when she came downstairs, where caviar and hot blini were waiting, piled on a chased silver salver. Before going in to dinner, he opened another bottle, bringing it in with them. Someone had obviously spent a great deal of time in the kitchen but it was Maluta himself who served the meal. If anyone else was in the dacha Daniella failed to see him.

The meal began with kulebiakabaked salmon surrounded by a multilayered wrapping of flaky pastry. Then ra.s.solnika steaming, rich soup made with a variety of pickled vegetables, many not readily available in the beginning of spring. The main course was an excellent chicken Kiev that shot a geyser of melted b.u.t.ter across its golden flank when Daniella pierced it with her knife.

For dessert, they feasted on vareniky, sweet dumplings filled with a delectable cherry conserve.

Over chai, Daniella said, "Do you always eat this well, Comrade?"

Maluta, who was busy sugaring his tea, said nothing. He placed three cubes in his gla.s.s at once, using the curved end of his spoon to tap at them until they broke apart. He'd stir the tea a bit, then add three more lumps and repeat the process.

At length, he said, "My wife was an exceptional cook." But his tone told her that he was speaking more to himself. "At home, I am used to eating in a certain manner. Some things should never change."

Abruptly, he got up and went out of the dining room. Daniella spent a moment stirring her tea until she saw the sugar dissolve. Then she rose and followed him out.

He stood by one of the great paned windows in the living room that looked out on the Moskva far below. He sipped his tea absently, his free hand behind his back. He seemed uncommonly melancholy tonight, a side of him Daniella had never before witnessed. She had seen him calm and almost hysterically angry but never withdrawn and brooding.

"The Moskva survives," he said, and again she had the eerie sensation that he was not talking to her at all, perhaps not even to himself but to some unseen presence. "The mountains endure. But life must ebb and flow."

He turned around to face her. "Isn't that so, Daniella Alexandrova?"

She nodded. "It is a law of nature, is it not?"

His dark eyes watched her from the shadows cast by the heavy brocaded curtains. "Perhaps, yes. And we should know, eh? We who concern ourselves during each waking moment with the law. Is it man who makes the laws in this world, Daniella Alexandrova? Or is it, as you have said, nature?" He lifted his gla.s.s of chai, sipped at it without taking his eyes from hers. "Is nature, I wonder, another name for G.o.d?"

The short hairs at the nape of Daniella's neck began to stir. Oleg Maluta talking of G.o.d? It seemed an impossibility for such a rigidly pragmatic believer in the Party. She did not understand the territory to which he had brought them, so she said nothing.

"Who made the world, Daniella Alexandrova? Was it created in a burst of incendiary star-matter? A trillion-year swirl of cosmic detritus? Or can you observe a divine hand in the molding of virgin clay?"

"Are you asking my opinion?" Daniella asked. "Or merely listing options?"

He came away from the shadows of the brocaded curtains. "I am curious about what you believe in." They stood not a meter apart. "I am curious to know if you see a, what shall we say, a higher intelligence at workat the beginning of all things."

"Yes," she said without hesitation. "And G.o.d was a Communist."

He did not laugh as she expected he would. Instead he frowned. "I am serious, Daniella Alexandrova." She wondered what he was getting at; what new trap he was about to spring on her. "I want to know if you believe. You know what I mean. I want to knowif you do whether this belief affords you any measure of solace."

"I was lying before," she said. "G.o.d doesn't understand Communism."

He moved closer. "Then you do believe."

"I am a Communist," she said. "G.o.d doesn't understand me either."

Now he did laugh. "If He exists, which I doubt, I can't imagine that He'd understand any of us." In a moment, his gaze broke away from hers. He stared down at the russet surface of his tea. The melancholy had returned, shrouding him. "Daniella Alexandrova, I must ask you this. Did anything happen in your life that you could not explain a that you did not fully understand."

"I'm not certain that I follow you, Comrade."

Maluta lifted his head and his eyes grabbed hers again. "I am speaking now about tragedy."

And in a flash, Daniella knew what he was alluding to: his wife's appalling death. And because she knew he wanted a certain answer from her, she lied. "Yes."

"And?"

"Yes, and?"

"Did you" He broke off, perhaps embarra.s.sed. "Did you witness the hand of G.o.d in thistragedy?"

"If you believe, Comrade, then the hand of G.o.d touches everything a and everyone."

"Then how is the inexplicable a the tragedy of a lifetime explained."