Get Thee Behind Me...

Chapter 4 Time Sensations

Cooper hid his head and his chin was wet with spittle. He could hear no more laughter. When he looked up he saw that Rocko was gone and he was alone with the body. He had never felt a deeper shame, even in childhood when shame can be the crudest weapon. He tried the door. It was locked on the outside. Unlike his room, the windows were steel casement type; the portions that opened were too small to squeeze through.

The grotesqueness of her position bothered him. He gently untangled the heel, lowered her leg to the floor. He straightened her body out, covered it with the spread. She had bled very little. He heard a distant shout of laughter and he could not recognize the voice. He went into the small bath and sat on the flat edge of the diagonal tub and smoked three cigarettes.

Getting out of this alive no longer seemed so important. He knew that if through some miracle he could escape at this moment, it would do him no good. He would have to carry within himself the sharp memory of the way Kadma had broken him. It didn’t help to blame what had happened during the war years. He knew that wasn’t good enough. And he would have to live with himself in the future. There could be no return to the quiet years. Not after this.

Thus it had to be considered a turning point. To yell cop would be too simple. The credentials were there, taped under the car hood, to prove it. Even Rocko wouldn’t be insane enough to kill him once he knew that he was an impostor.

No, this hand was going to have to be played with Farat’s cards, poor as they were. He knew that it was a crazy, foolhardy decision. But he could see no other way to regain his own self respect.

Farat or Cooper, either one, would have to find a way to get out of the room. That was the first problem. He went back into the bedroom and tried not to glance at the body on the floor, silent under the spread. But he had to look. One strand of the taffy hair was visible under the edge of the spread where it rested on the floor near her head.

He took a cardboard match and pushed it into the keyhole. It struck the key, still in the lock. He began to search through Alice’s things to find tools for the next step. Finally, in the bureau drawer, he found a pair of eyebrow tweezers. When he tried to get a purchase on the key they slipped off. But when he wound adhesive tape around the gripping surfaces, he found that he could make them work. He turned the key slowly. Luckily it was a new lock, well oiled, and it worked smoothly.

He heard the tumbler click over and he tried the door. It opened. He shut it silently and re-locked the door from the inside by the same method. It would be better to have a plan. And a weapon. The weapon was not hard to devise. One nylon stocking with a thick glass jar of deoderant cream in the toe. He swung it against the pillow, testing it. It would crack a skull with the greatest of ease.

He put the improvised sap in his pocket, with the top of the stocking hanging out. He felt as though he had gone beyond fear, had arrived in some new place where there was only a cold and objective calm.

As he started to review the floor-plan of the house, he heard the faint rattle of the key. He stepped quickly to the wall and flattened himself out beside the door, the improvised sap in his hand. The door opened and Carla Hutcheon slid through. She gasped as she saw him, then held her fingers meaningfully to her lips and closed the door.

“Alice?” she whispered.

“Dead.”

“I thought he’d done that. You’re next, you know. So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t help me.”

“Why do you want my help?”

“It’s Barbara. I’d only begun to tell her when I saw the blinker light. I told Rocko about her. I pleaded with him. He said he’d have to have a look at her first. He insisted on talking to her alone. I couldn’t stop him. Now I don’t know what he’s done to her. She does anything he says. They’re out there now, making her take one drink after another. I can’t trust Billy and Susler to help me. I can trust my help and the guards.”

“How many came with Rocko?”

“Five besides Rocko. In a big seagoing launch. She’s moored in my basin near the causeway.”

“What are they like?”

“Tough, competent, silent. They act like military people. They talk together in their own language. One of them is older. He speaks English. Very good English. He seems to be in charge, and he seems to be a little sore at Rocko. I think Rocko took orders from him until they came ashore and now Rocko won’t listen to him. Anyway, that’s my hunch.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Help me get Barbara out of here. I don’t care what happens to me. I’ve got to have somebody drive the car she goes in. The way she acts, she won’t go willingly. You’ll have to make her go.”

“That sounds like a good trick.”

“Shut up and listen. They’re on guard, but I think I can smuggle you out of the house. Here are the keys to your car. I took them out of your room. Go around and get into the car and get down on the floor. I’ve fixed it so my gate guard will let you through. When I’m certain you’re all set, I’m going to go in there and get Barbara away from them. Even if I have to kill somebody, I’m going to get her out of that situation.”

“What time is it now?”

“After two in the morning.”

“How are you going to—”

“Do as I told you. Now don’t make a sound. Follow me.”

She looked out at the hallway, beckoned and slipped out. He followed her. She went quickly into the room she had originally given him. He followed her in. She closed the door and leaned against it. He could hear the shallowness of her breathing.

“So far, so good,” she said.

The floodlights were still on. The room was lighted by the reflected glow. She went across the room and opened the window. “Stay close to the side of the building, Farat. The shadows will be thicker there. Go around in back and get in the car and keep your head down. Go on.”

He climbed out, wondering if he might be making a mistake not to get the gun he had hidden in the room.

“All clear,” she whispered. He kept to the deep shadows. When he reached the corner of the house and looked around, he saw that the parking apron was also lighted. The long car glinted in the light. He held the keys tightly to prevent them making any sound. A man was walking slowly across the apron toward the back of the house. When he was silhouetted against the light, Cooper recognized Susler’s battered profile, heavy shoulders.

Susler had the look of a man taking an evening stroll. He stopped and cracked a light from a kitchen match with his thumbnail. The flare lit up his face for a moment. He shook the match out and threw it aside. He stood for a moment, and then walked directly toward the corner where Cooper hid. Cooper pulled his head back and stood up. He knew that as soon as Susler rounded the corner, he’d see his outline against the floodlighted sand of the beach. He stifled an impulse to run and waited, barely breathing.

Susler’s measured step grew closer, his heels audible above the muted crash of the waves a hundred yards away. Cooper moved away from the house to give himself room to swing. He shortened his grip on the weighted nylon. Susler rounded the corner, made a grunt of sudden surprise which mingled with the hard thud of the heavy jar striking the top of his head. Susler staggered, put one hand out against the corner of the house, and straightened like a man with a heavy load on his back.

Cooper struck again, harder than before. Again Susler caught himself by grasping the corner of the house. Cooper had the nightmare feeling that he could not strike hard enough to batter the man down. He took a half step back, held the nylon at the very end and swung it in a whistling arc. Susler went down with all the shocking speed of a window shade pulled loose from the roller.

Cooper knelt and touched the man’s head. He felt the nauseating looseness of shattered bone under the scalp. He wiped his fingers on Susler’s jacket, and noted that Susler’s feet were still out in the light. He got the heavy man by the wrists and pulled him back into deep shadow. He searched the man twice before convincing himself that Susler was unarmed. The fallen man’s breathing grew sharper and more shallow and then faded off into a whistling sigh that was lost in the sound of the waves. Cooper could find no pulse.

Once again he looked around the edge of the building. Three cars stood silent under the light. He ran to the convertible, crouching as he ran. He opened the door and crawled in onto the floor beside the driver’s seat. He dared not shut the door behind him. By sense of touch he located the keyhole and the ignition key. He inserted it and turned it.

His nostrils were filled with the smell of leather upholstery, floor dust and rubber matting. He crouched in the darkness like a wary animal and tried to still his breathing.

He waited in the shadowed darkness until his legs grew cramped. She had failed. She was not coming. He slid up onto the seat and over behind the wheel. The gate man had been prepared by Carla. He would let the car go through. And that was all he had to know.

He put his thumb on the starter button, without pushing it, and measured the turn-around space with his eye. Yes, he could make it in one fast swing. Then, even if the guard didn’t open the gate, the car was big enough to smash through it and sturdy enough to keep running. If the impact stopped it, he could leap out and run across the short causeway and lose himself in the swamps on the other side.

Cooper sat rigidly for a long time. He took his thumb from the starter, and put his hand on the door button. He opened the door and stepped out. The breeze stirred his hair and cooled the sweat on his forehand. He went back the way he had come, stepping over Susler’s invisible body, sliding down along the shadows to the window. Carla hadn’t closed it. He grasped the sill, pulled himself up and slid over onto the floor of the room. The closet was four steps away. He found the grill in the darkness, stuck the fingers of both hands through the holes in the grill and wrenched hard. One screw pulled loose. He bent it down, reached up, found the cold metal of the gun.

Time moved on parallel tracks and at this moment he had reached a point of intersection. In one time he stood in the closet of Carla Hutcheon’s house, and in another time he stood on the jungle floor in the heavy gloom, motionless, a gun cool in his hand while ten feet away on the trail he heard the sucking sound of the boot-steps of the patrol in the yellow clay, the clink and jangle of equipment, the flat song of the commands. In both time tracks the sweat prickled in the stubble of hair on his neck.

When, long ago, the patrol had passed, he had slipped into a mindlessness that cancelled memory until, weeks later, he started to recover in the ward of the general hospital in Calcutta. And now, due to that flaw he could sense in himself, he stood on the edge of the same pit of darkness. He was like a man who concealed from others a mortal wound.

He walked with no attempt at stealth to the door, opened it and went into the corridor. At the end of the corridor he could see the gold-hued lamplight of the main room of the house, hear the murmur of voices.

The corridor seemed without end. He walked down the corridor and came out into the lounge and stopped, the gun held rigidly in front of him with the awkwardness of a child who plays with a cap gun for the first time.