Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 13: DANCE

This was the scene. This was the scene of the execution.

We were moving at less than cruising speed and there was less noise from the diesels. The wake bannered from the stern across the sea towards Miami. There was a vessel a mile off, perhaps less; it was difficult to judge distances by moonlight on a reflecting surface. The vessel was marked only by its riding lights. Two or three more stood off our port quarter, farther away, one of them with lights shining on deck and from a line of portholes below. Another looked as if it had way on, and showed both red and green lights. It was heading obliquely in our direction but wouldn't pass close, no closer than half a mile.

Water slapped below the bows; the night was peaceful.

The man Vicente was still turned towards us in the cabin, looking at Nicko. Fidel the Cuban wasn't aware of the moment; he sat humped against the bulwark nursing his pain, his eyes closed and his head on his chest. Across from him, five feet from where I was standing, Roget the black leaned in a crouch to keep the profile of the big Suzuki below the rail. He also was looking at Nicko. The fifth man was at the helm, his back to us. Above the cabin roof the radar scanner-swung, and a penant flew against the stars.

This was the scene.

Nicko pulled his gun.

'Fidel.'

Kicked the Cuban's foot to get him conscious. Fidel lifted his head and looked up into Nicko's bright little eyes, and shrank.

'Get up.'

Didn't move. He couldn't look away from the man above him. His lips began forming words that made no sound.

'Get up!'

It took a little time, a few seconds, because he was in a lot of pain; but he got to his feet and Nicko looked into his face.

Turn around.'

We rose on a crest and there was Miami again, jewel-bright in the distance, riding out the night. I wished Fidel could have turned his head and seen it, because it was so pretty. It might have reminded him of Juanita.

'Kneel. On your knees.'

Somewhere a lanyard was slapping timber to the wind of our passage, strumming in the quietness, passing the time. Flotsam drifted past, a cement bag, I think, or a life-jacket.

'Nicko. Not with the gun.' Vicente, from the cabin.

Nicko turned with a jerk. 'Jesus Christ, we're miles -'

'Not with the gun.'

The tone almost quiet, but with a lot of emphasis, a lot of authority.

Fidel didn't hear them, or didn't follow the meaning; he knelt facing the bulwark, his back to Nicko, praying softly in Spanish. There was nothing I could do for him and I don't think that in any case it would have been wise. If anything happened he would be in the way, fatally, perhaps, in the way.

'Listen, for Christ's sake, one shot won't make any -'

'Nicko. If you use a gun, Mr Toufexis is going to know. He is going to know from me. You've seen Mr Toufexis with people, Nicko. He will be like that with you. So do it now, and not with a gun.'

'Jesus Christ.' But in capitulation.

I suppose Vicente was thinking in terms of numbers, physical numbers. If he didn't want anyone to make a noise there was no point in Roget's holding the big Suzuki on me any more. He'd be better off putting it down and getting his hands ready in case I tried to do anything. Fidel wouldn't do anything: he wasn't in Vicente's reckoning. The way he was working his numbers out, there were four men against one, and that would be enough in the event of trouble.

'Do it, Nicko. Now.'

I don't think Vicente had thought about Roget and the Suzuki yet. He was too concerned with Nicko and the need to get this over soon, at once. He watched Nicko go to the chain locker and come back with a marlin spike.

'Christ sake,' he said, looking up at Vicente in the cabin. 'Think of the fucking mess.'

I thought his tone was interesting. To take a gun away from a man like this, a man who cleans it, loads it, wears it wherever he goes, is like taking his clothes off him. It feels like a different world to him, a world in which he feels exposed. And I believe there was another thing. Nicko was squeamish. To shoot another man from a distance, however short, is to enjoy the remoteness of the act, the technical sophistication of moving the safety catch off, of aiming, holding still, and moving the trigger against the spring. But to take a man's life with the bare hands or with some crude instrument as an extension of the hands is an act of intimacy, of an intimacy greater by far than the act of love, involving as it does the plundering of life itself.

He stood there, Nicko, holding the spike, not sure how he was going to do this without getting blood on his expensive khaki suit. He was holding the thing in both hands, in the horrible semblance of a golfer about to make a stroke.

'Time, Nicko,' from the cabin, 'you're wasting time. Do it.'

I thought I heard Roget's teeth chattering, on my left. Perhaps he didn't really like the act of slaughtering when it came to it; or perhaps he was excited, I don't know.

'Nicko,' I said, 'let the poor little bastard jump overboard, give him a chance to swim. He won't steal again, after this.'

Nicko turned his head to look at me, and the look was murderous, I think because I'd offered him a get-out he couldn't take.

'Fucking shuddup.'

His fat little face shone with sweat. I could smell him from where I stood. Then he looked back at the man kneeling in front of him, at the back of his head.

The timing wasn't right: I couldn't make a move. If I tried making a move the timing would have to be perfect, and I would need to use Fidel the Cuban and I would need to use him in the moment of his death.

'Nicko.' From the cabin. 'You want me to come and do it, Nicko?'

I think Vicente knew the fat man well enough to know that he would be stung by that, would feel unbrave, unable to kill a man without his gun.

Do you know how to turn?

The swell moved under us all, lifting and letting us fall as if to the rhythm of our mother's bosom, the bosom of Mother Earth, as if we were brothers, Nicko, Vicente, Roget, Fidel and the man at the helm whose name I didn't know, as if they were my brothers.

Very fast? Do you know how to turn very fast?

Which in a way I suppose they were, my brothers, born with me on this little piece of interstellar rock, to be nurtured by the same essences of water and of air, the same magnetic waves, the same vibrations, and then to die. But I was not going to think about that.

He stood there holding the marlin spike, my little fat brother, smelling of sweat, mine own executioner.

It might amuse you, my good friend, if I tell you how to make a very fast turn, in case you don't already know. It will make an interesting digression in my stream of consciousness, because I always feel a certain lightheadedness when faced with the prospect of mortality; it has happened before.

Well, then, let us to the matter. It is performed sometimes in Shotokan karate, in Heian Shodan, when one moves from zenkutsu-dachi to kokutsu-dachi, turning completely through two hundred and seventy degrees. There are six things to do, each of them making the turn faster and faster, and it doesn't make any difference whether you're in zenkutsu-dachi or standing normally, though it's better if you have one foot forward a little, say the right foot, because this will be the pivot for the turn.

The lights swing upwards into view, brightly bedecking the night's horizon over there as we fall away to a hollow in the sea.

Nicko stands tensely now. He is very tense, his knuckles white as he grips the heavy spike. Only a second has gone by since Vicente spoke to him, daring him, though it seems much longer.

The right foot, yes, will provide the pivot, and the first thing you have to do is push off with the left one, if you are turning backwards to the left. The second thing is to swing the hips in that direction, to be conscious only of the hips in this millisecond of our little game, and the third thing to do is to swing the left arm in the same direction, to lend centrifugal force, and here it is worth mentioning that the left arm and hand provide a potent weapon at the end of the turn, if, say, the hand forms a fist with the knuckles vertical and the thumb uppermost.

Fidel is praying, as he has prayed before; he kneels as if in his church, and of course appropriately, since he is about, in his mind, to meet the personification of infinity he calls God. Nicko is starting to lift the marlin spike, swinging it in an arc above his head. It is heavy. He is sweating copiously. He stinks.

Vicente is watching from the cabin, hands by his sides. He looks Italianate, as his name suggests. I think he is a cool man, confident in himself, and therefore dangerous. The other man is of course looking ahead of him across the milky moonlit sea, maintaining the diesels at something like a quarter throttle with the bows cutting the horizon. The night is warm as we sail on in brotherhood, sharing its warmth.

But that is not quite true. The night has no warmth for me, because when the fat man has split the head of the Cuban he will come for me and if I do anything to stop him they will shoot, the others, and risk calling attention.

I am not, however, forgetting you, my good friend, as you wait agog to perform this totally spectacular turn, or so my totally inexcusable degree of self-indulgence allows me to believe. The fourth thing to do, then, is to use the right arm in the same direction, again using centrifugal force, and yet again, if the right hand is formed, say, flat and with the palm upwards and the fingers closed to provide a cutting edge, it will offer an effective strike at the face or throat or clavicle, should you wish to defend yourself against attack. The two last requirements for the turn are not physical. The first is mental, the second almost spiritual. You have to think Get there, and finally you have to feel Be there.

He is lifting the heavy spike, Nicko, swinging it back and upwards, his small pink mouth puckered and the material of his expensive jacket going into folds at the shoulder, the single button pulling at the waist.

… Que Dios se acuerde lo bueno que he hecho en mi vida y se olvide lo malo…

The lips of Fidel are moving, though I don't see them from this angle; I know they are moving because I can hear the sibilants of his last prayer. Vicente is watching from the cabin; he hasn't moved. Time has slowed, as always happens when the mind, brought to a high degree of stress, becomes aware that time is a man-made artifact, and subject to contradiction by the infinite.

The marlin spike swings higher. I watch it.

The turn, yes, we must not forget the turn, the expression of my sense of lightness, of unreality as my life nears its seeming close. But you already have it all, my good friend, and you should practise each segment of the turn one after another, and you will find the speed increasing, and to the point where you are carried off balance – a sign of progress. Then you should put all those segments together, and let them happen at once, like an explosion, and in the instant of completion, tighten the abdomen to preserve the balance and land squarely at whatever degree you wish to – it doesn't have to be at two hundred and seventy, there's no magic in that number. The last requirement, to Be there, has to be made with the muscles relaxed and the mind in alpha waves, and this may not happen at the fiftieth turn of your practice, but could well happen at the hundredth.

The deck trembles a little beneath our feet. The lanyard slaps to the wind of our passage. The sibilants fall from the lips of the kneeling Cuban as the little fat man brings the marlin spike to the top of its arc and it comes fluting downwards to the Cuban's fragile skull and his executioner grunts with the effort.

It strikes. It strikes the skull.

Be there.

A whirl of lights as the city of Miami span across my vision field and the black was suddenly close to me and my right arm swung through the turn and the right hand lifted a degree to line up with his throat and even now the surprise was only just coming into his eyes and of course too late because the sword-hand was in contact with its target and beginning to bury there at the site of the thyroid gland.

What I had started to do was over now and it had taken very little more than one half-second, though the planning had taken longer. From this instant there would be chaos of a kind and there'd be no way for me to control it. There were risks, appalling risks to this desperate enterprise but it had been a question of choice, of letting myself get into a sordid little confrontation with Nicko and having to kill him an unknown number of seconds before Roget blew the heart out of my ribs with the Suzuki, or of going for this trick, getting rid of the black before anything else and taking the others on later. If I could reach the black's motor nerves fast enough and freeze them he wouldn't fire the gun and Nicko and Vicente and the man at the helm would opt to maintain silence on the boat and come for me with their hands or a knife and I might have a chance of dropping overboard before they could reach me, dropping and diving deep and turning for the long journey to the shore.

But there was nothing I could do now to control the moment. I would have to watch for a chance if ever it came and use it for what it was worth. A very great deal of data was coming in to the left hemisphere for analysis: the Cuban was collapsing onto the deck with his blood colouring the air as it flew from the site of the blow. I saw Nicko's face, saw the grimace, the mouth drawn back and the eyes widening in an expression I'd no time to interpret, though it was shock, I believe, perhaps because it was the first time the man had killed without using a gun, had killed personally, intimately, leaving blood on his hands that would not be easy to wash away.

In front of me was Roget, and he still hadn't pumped the gun, presumably because I had indeed reached his motor nerves in time. He was already dying as the blood began filling his windpipe and his body was beginning to swing back from the force of the strike. It wouldn't take more than one hand to tip his spine across the rail and send him overboard, but -

Began firing and I wasn't ready for it because I thought the moment had come and gone and all I could do was push at the barrel and he swung faster and the shots went raking across the cabin and the sound banged in the confines as glass shattered and the man at the helm was pitched across the controls and the diesels began racing at full throttle. Nicko was shouting something and I didn't know if he'd been hit. Vicente was tumbling down the three steps from the cabin with his eyes on me and his hands ready, not reaching for his gun.

Six shots, rapid fire, the last of them from a dead man's finger as Roget tilted backwards over the rail and I pushed the big Suzuki with him, stink of cordite on the warm night air and the deck keeling as the unmanned helm swung over and we began weaving across the sea with the engines still at full ahead both and then Nicko was at me and we locked together and I tried for his throat but missed because my shoes were slipping on the Cuban's blood so I tried for the solar plexus with the fist rising to get under the ribs for a direct kill but the area was thick with flesh and he only grunted and I changed the fist into a heel-palm and struck upwards but didn't do more than graze the side of his head.

'Get him.'

Vicente, as he reached us and Nicko got an arm round my neck and put pressure there until I found the thumb and broke it and he screamed and the other man came in close for me with a knife and I hadn't expected that, the glint of the blade in the glow from the cabin lights, hadn't expected it because he hadn't been reaching for anything when he'd started his run.

Tried an elbow-smash into Nicko's face but he was half-turned away from me and off-balance, going down and dragging me with him and I let him do it because there was a chance of a strike and I straightened one leg with the foot angled to make a blade and thrust hard for Vicente's groin and did some damage and felt him spin sideways and strike the deck with his head, not making a sound, a different breed from Nicko and therefore the more to be wary of.

Cordite sharp in the lungs, someone coughing, the fat man coming in again and surprisingly fast and I couldn't do anything with him until he made a mistake and left himself open and I found his face exposed and went for the eyes and reached one of them but it galvanised him and he insisted with me, an arm round my neck again and squeezing as Vicente came in with the knife and I waited until it swung up and then turned and left Nicko as the target.

I don't remember when it was that they began gaining. It took time and much had passed. Vicente was losing blood because I'd managed to turn the blade and rip into him somewhere before I lost my grip on the handle and let it go. I had injured Nicko, perhaps with one of the nerve strikes I'd been working on, but he was still surprisingly strong and very quick, vicious in his anger because he wanted his cake and he'd been looking forward to it and I was trying to take it away from him, take my death away.

They had both spent a lot of time trying to reach their guns. At first they hadn't wanted to make any more noise after the hammering boom of the Suzuki, but then they'd realised I might get them both under control and they'd stopped worrying about making a noise. I'd sent the first gun – Vicente's – over the rail without any trouble because he was so busy with the bloody thing that he forgot about the combat and left himself open and I'd gone in with an eye strike and got the gun away from him while he was protecting himself.

Nicko was more difficult and we'd fired a round with his finger on the trigger and the gun pointing nowhere, but then I'd found his throat and he'd panicked and I'd got the gun and lobbed it overboard and this worried them and they became excited. I could have killed Nicko when I'd found his throat exposed but I didn't want to. That had been Proctor he'd phoned from the cabin and I wanted the number because it had become the focus of the whole mission, the only access to Proctor we'd got.

The stars were swinging through the black reaches of the sky and when the boat heeled as it sped across the surface I began losing orientation, just momentary flashes of knowing nothing, being nowhere, momentary but critical, potentially lethal. I didn't know where the boat was taking us; we knew it was running wild, that was all, the helm free and the throttles open, and the first thing Vicente or Nicko would do if they could get clear of me would be to break for the cabin and get control. I didn't want that to happen because if we hit another vessel and didn't totally smash up I'd have a chance of getting away.

The stars swung and the bows hammered across the swell and I lurched sometimes, mentally lurched into the oblivion that was waiting for me out there, a limitless void that was there to gather the end of things, the bric-a-brac of lost endeavours, the tattered rags of hope, where – for Christ's sake stay with it don't give up stay with it yes indeed, perhaps I'd taken the blade in somewhere and was losing blood, it felt like that, the onset of lassitude, stay with it, exactly so, but they were gaining, I tell you, they were gaining on me. Twice I found an arm exposed and worked my thumb into the median nerve with force enough to produce great pain but there was no sound, no jerking to free the arm, and after a time I realised that we were locked together, these two men and I, across the body of the Cuban.

'Nicko,' his voice, Vicente's voice, sounding stifled, with not much breath to spare, 'we've got him, Nicko,' speaking perhaps to boost the fat man's morale, or not speaking to him at all but to me, knowing the value of despair if one can instill it in one's adversary.

He failed, because I knew the danger, but the thought stayed in my mind on an intellectual level, the thought that they could have got me now, they could be within seconds, shall we say, of bringing me my doom, here under the swinging stars as -

Dazzling lights swarming against us in the night, their brilliance rising in a wave, towering, the lights of the city breaking over us as the boat hit and the night exploded and I was flung headlong as the hull burst open and glass from the smashed windows in the cabin flew in a bright shower in the light from the shore, then the sensation of falling and the flat sheen of water below and I hit the surface shoulder first and the lights flared and then darkened as I went under.

Nowhere.

It wasn't dark down here, not now. They'd set up a generator and floodlights, or perhaps it was one of the fire trucks with its search lamps going. The coloured flashes of the police cars dappled the surface above me and I could hear sirens dying towards the quay. I could see sharp outlines close to me, debris turning as it sank, and blurred shapes farther off, the huge body of the boat angled bows down with the stern breaking the surface.

But he was nowhere, Nicko.

I was, yes, losing blood: I could see it now, blackish whorls forming in the water as I moved, blowing like smoke. But it couldn't be anything serious, worth surfacing for. I had already been up a dozen times to breathe, for a while floating face upwards to reorientate, having to take the risk of being seen. I didn't want to be hauled out and questioned, at least until I'd found Nicko, or they had. If they found him, I'd know: I was watching their progress every time I surfaced.

I would rather find him myself. I had something to ask him: the telephone number. The access to Proctor. It wouldn't be easy to ask him if they found him first and put him into an ambulance; I'd have to make out I needed medical attention so as to go with him, stay with him. But I would have said that the chances of finding him alive by now were thin, unless he was bobbing on the surface somewhere among the debris and they hadn't seen him yet.

Sound of a helicopter vibrating through the water, then more light came flooding down, silvering some of the bits and pieces that had been blown out of the boat. I dived lower, using the light, one hand on an anchor chain to keep my bearings, and there was Fidel below me, his arms and legs opened out, his face turning towards the light and then vanishing, the dark smoke of blood still curling from his skull. He would be going down there to wait for his little Juanita, to wait a long time for her in the limbo of the lost, his arms and legs windmilling slowly, disturbing the slime where a fish flashed in the light, then another, scenting his blood.

I surfaced again and floated, drawing flotsam around me and sighting along the surface. There was more noise here, the thin wail of the sirens piercing the boom of the chopper's rotors; the surface was ruffled by the airstream and the debris was tossed in circles. Then it rose suddenly: I suppose it had come lower to look at something, ready to deploy the salvage net. On the jetty a frogman was settling his mask and flip-flopping towards the water.

I took a final breath and went down again into the half-lit netherworld and saw him almost at once, Nicko, his arms stretched out as the Cuban's had been, the current tugging at the cloth on his little fat legs, and as I swam towards him the light was mottled with the slow drifting of leaves, rising and whirling and spreading out, some of them touching his hands, Nicko's hands, then drifting away, turning and catching the light and darkening again, hundreds of them, puzzling me until I saw they were banknotes, the suitcase on the surface somewhere among the other things, burst open and empty now.

Still losing, I was still losing blood, the muscles languid and the mind starting to wander a little, mesmerised by the whirling of the banknotes, but I went for him, scissors-kicking through the light and shadow and missing him the first time as the current turned him so that for a moment he was upright, standing there with his arms reaching to touch his windfall, to play with it, while fish darted at his face, at the hollows of his eyes. I got close to him at the second attempt, and danced with him as I caught the folds of his clothes and began searching the pockets; but the lungs were pulling for air and I had to surface and float there taking in a snatched breath and then another until I could breathe rhythmically, taking the necessary time but worrying because he could drift away, Nicko, and I might lose him.

Down again and I couldn't find him, had to go deeper, as far as the mud and the litter of cans and tyres and broken spars and then look upwards, catching his silhouette against the light and rising for him, working on the pockets again, the light troubling me now, flooding into my head and staying there when I closed my eyes, the weakness spreading from the muscles to the will, the will to go on moving instead of letting go, drifting in the shadows, dancing with my little fat friend as he – watch it - dancing among the leaves – wake up for Christ's sake – yes, no time for dancing is there, taking his keys and his wallet, drifting with him as he turned, wallet in my hand, wallet with perhaps the telephone number in it, the access to Proctor, drifting and turning in the eerie underwater light with the mind hallucinating, weaving patterns of its own, the scene swinging as I turned again and looked into the face of Kim Harvester.