The Blackbird

Twenty-Five

“Here,” she whispered, and handed Grofield his machine gun.

“Thanks.”

“Where is he?”

Grofield motioned the machine gun at the shape lying half covered by snow. She looked at it, then frowned at Grofield. “You killed him?”

“Naturally. Come on.”

She hesitated a second or two, then followed him, and the two of them trudged through the soft snow against the building wall. The guard’s path was inviting out there, five or six feet from the wall, but it went directly through all the illumination. In here they were in shadow, and they could stoop under the windows, whose sills were a good five feet off the ground.

Grofield led the way to the rear door he remembered from yesterday afternoon. It was unlocked, and the hall inside was empty. He opened the door and stepped in, she came in quickly after him, and he shut the door again.

There were half a dozen side doors down the length of the hall, three on each side, but Grofield ignored them. The four Americans were unlikely to be anywhere without a guard on the door. If he didn’t find them elsewhere in here, he’d come back. Right now, though, he went directly to the far end of the hall and the door that led to the library. It was closed, and when he put his ear against it he heard murmurs of conversation from inside. He stepped away, leaned close to Vivian, whispered, “We’re going in there. Show them the gun, but don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.”

She nodded. She looked a little shaky, strained and tense around the eyes, but her mouth was determined.

He asked, “You going to be all right?”

She nodded, not saying anything.

He patted her shoulder, and reached out to the doorknob. He shoved the door open and stepped quickly in and to the left, so the people inside would see Vivian right away and know there were two guns to contend with.

There were four men in the room, broad-faced Caucasians with heavy shoulders and brown or black hair. They’d been sitting around a table playing some sort of card game, but now they dropped their cards and pushed their chairs back from the table with squealing noises of chair legs on the wooden floor. Their faces looked startled, but not frightened.

“Not a sound,” Grofield said, and gestured with the machine gun because he wasn’t sure they would understand English.

They understood the gun. There was a long tense instant when nothing happened, nobody moved, nothing had been decided one way or the other, and then one of them slowly lifted his hands up over his head. The others glanced at him, and did the same thing.

Not taking his eyes off them, Grofield said, “Vivian, put your gun down where none of them can reach it. Circle around behind them, without getting between me and them. Then get their guns.”

“Yes,” she said. He didn’t dare look over at her, but her voice sounded strong and capable.

He kept watching the four cardplayers, seeing Vivian in motion out of the corner of his eye. She did it right, circling around behind them, frisking them without giving any of them a chance to get hold of her and use her for a shield. Two of them had pistols inside their coats, the other two were clean.

Vivian looked around, then pointed at a far corner. “They have guns over there.”

“All right.” Grofield gestured at them with the gun again. “Lie down,” he said.

They looked blank.

Grofield held the gun in one hand and pointed at the floor with the other. “Down,” he said. He made a spread-out-flat gesture, palm down.

The one who’d been the first to raise his hands now was the first to move again. A questioning look on his face, is this right? he lowered himself to one knee, his hands still raised over his head.

Grofield nodded.

Tentatively, the other lowered his hands, then lay down on his stomach. The others hesitated, but Grofield made angry gestures with the gun and they followed suit. Then Grofield said, “Vivian, use their shoelaces to tie their wrists and ankles. Rip up their shirttails for gags.”

“Woman’s work is never done,” she said, and got to it, with Grofield standing on. She did the tying first, and then Grofield could put the gun down and help her with the gagging.

The guns leaning against the wall in the far corner were Brens, like the one the guard outside had carried. Originally a British fight machine gun with an open metal stock, the design had been copied everywhere, and Bren guns now came from Yugoslavia, from Israel, from all over the world. So that wouldn’t tell anything about where these people came from.

Grofield went over to where they were lying on the floor, frisked one of them, and found a passport. The name of the country would be on the front, of course, and so it was: SHQIPENIJA.

Oh for Christ’s sake. Grofield leafed through the passport, saw that passport photos were just as badly done in Shqipenija as in the United States, and learned that the owner of the passport was named Gjul Enver Shkumbi and he’d been born in Shkodër, Shqipenija, on the twenty-second of some incomprehensible month in 1928.

Vivian came over, saying, “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out where these people come from,” he said, and handed her the passport. “That make any sense to you?”

She glanced at it. “Albania,” she said, and handed it back.

“Albania?” He frowned at the passport again. “If it’s Albania, why doesn’t it say Albania?”

She said, “Because they don’t speak English in Albania, they speak Shqyp.” She pronounced it shkyip. “And in Shqyp,” she went on, “Albania is Shqipenija. That means eagle country.”

“Oh does it.” Grofield shook his head, and dropped the passport on its owner. “Albania,” he said. “That means they’re working for Russia, huh?”

“Probably not,” she said.

Grofield frowned at her. “Aren’t they Communists?”

“I keep forgetting how nonpolitical you are,” she said. “Albania tends to be more in the Chinese camp than the Russian. The Chinese often use Albanian agents in parts of the world where Chinese agents would be too obvious.”

“These people are working for China?”

“Probably. But Albania is a Warsaw Treaty member, so it is possible they’re working for the Russians, but the Russians prefer to use their own people. They could even be working for Yugoslavia, though I doubt it.”

“Oh, shut up,” Grofield said. “You know, my buddy Ken told me some of the Free Quebec outfits were Maoist, with Communist Chinese connections. Would that make sense? The Chinese found out there was something going on, sent in their Albanian friends and had them link up with one of the wilder Free Quebec groups for local assistance. How does that sound?”

“It sounds right,” she said. “And I think we definitely don’t want the Chinese to get those canisters. They’re not afraid of anything, those people, they’d shoot off a toe to get rid of a corn.”

“That’s graphic,” Grofield said. “All right, let’s get on with it.” He went over to the opposite door and slowly turned the knob. The door opened inward, and he cracked it just an inch, peering through the slit at the main room.

It didn’t look much changed. Some of the furniture was knocked over, and a couple of windows were broken, but they were the only signs of the battle that had raged here earlier tonight. As it had been when Grofield had first come here, the middle area of the room was empty, the occupants clustered around the fireplaces at both ends. With the broken windows, they had even more reason for that now. And the result, from Grofield’s point of view, was a positive good, since it meant there was no one at all near this door.

He opened the door a little wider, and studied the people down at the far end of the room. He recognized Marba down there, but no one else, and it was clear who were the prisoners and who were the guards. The prisoners, seven or eight of them, sat in a morose huddle near the fire, with the three guards on chairs a little farther away, guns resting on their laps. There didn’t seem to be any conversation going on down there at all.

Grofield moved back from the door and motioned Vivian over, whispering, “Look down to the left. Any of our four down there?”

She stood against the wall and peered through the opening, taking her time, but finally stepping back and shaking her head.

Grofield gently pushed the door closed again and said, “It’s going to be trickier looking the other way. You wouldn’t have a mirror on you, would you?”

“Of course I have. A girl doesn’t travel without her compact.”

“She doesn’t?”

She took a round compact from her jacket pocket, and held it up. “She doesn’t.”

“Good. What you do, when I open the door again you hold that out just far enough so you can see the people at the other end. Try to make it as fast as you can, and try not to move the mirror around very much. We don’t want anybody’s eye attracted by glints and reflections.”

She nodded. “I’ll do it fast,” she promised.

They got into position, and Grofield opened the door again, just enough for her to extend the open compact through. She closed one eye and squinted the other, studying the reflection in the mirror, turning it slightly twice, then bringing it back in again. Grofield shut the door, and Vivian shook her head, saying, “Not there either.”

“They have to make it tough,” Grofield commented. “They’ve probably got them locked away upstairs someplace for safekeeping. I wish I knew how much these people knew.”

“From the way they act,” she said, “they know everything except where the canisters are.”

“So they’d know to keep the four Americans separate and under heavy guard. All right, let’s go see how many ways there are to get upstairs.”

They crossed the room to the door they’d come in, and Grofield was just reaching for the knob when Vivian grabbed his arm and whispered, “Listen!”

He listened, and heard the sounds of boots on stairs. Ba-thump, ba-thump, and the sounds of people talking. A group coming down a flight of stairs, then coming right by this door and going on down the hall toward the rear exit.

“Damn!” Grofield muttered.

She said, “What is it?”

“Relief,” Grofield told her. “They’re on their way outside to take over guard duty.”

“That’s bad,” she said.

“I couldn’t agree more.” He stood leaning his head against the door, listening, and as soon as he heard the outer door open he yanked the knob and hurried out to the hall, moving so fast he saw the last of the relief guards going out down at the farther end of the hall.

The hall was L-shaped, the bottom leg going off briefly to the right, ending at a flight of stairs leading upward. Grofield said, “From now on we have to move very fast and not worry about noise. Come on.”

They raced up the stairs, Grofield taking them three at a time, up nine steps to a landing, then reverse and up six more to the second floor, entering on the top left of a T-shaped hall. There was no one in sight along the top bar, but when he reached the middle and looked down the long hallway to his right he saw three men with Bren guns sitting on chairs in front of a closed door midway down on the left. He braced his feet and fired a burst from the machine gun, spraying them, and they flipped over all at once, like a sand castle demolished by an invisible tide.

Grofield ran forward, and out of a room on the right came two startled men, guns in their hands. Grofield fired hastily at them, and one fell but the other ducked back out of sight. Grofield ran past that doorway, seeing a dozen more of them in there, and shouted back to Vivian, just rounding the turn back there, “Keep them bottled up!” He pointed the machine gun at the doorway he meant. “Stay there and keep them bottled up!”

“I will!”

He ran on to the doorway guarded by the three dead men and tried the knob. It was locked. He kicked the door, and it held firm.

Someone inside shouted, “Watch it, there’s two in here!”

Vivian’s gun chattered, and Grofield looked down the hall in time to see somebody ducking back into the squad room. He shouted, “Vivian, for Christ’s sake, no warning shots! If you get a chance at them, kill them!”

“I’ve never done it!”

“You’ll never get a better chance!” Grofield shouted, and the squad-room door slammed shut. An unexpected blessing. Grofield gestured wildly at Vivian to come to him, and held his finger to his lips. She nodded, and hurried silently down the hall, and Grofield told her, “Stand beside the door, and shoot when you see something to shoot at.”

“All right.” She was on the edge of hysteria, but was keeping it fiercely under control.

Grofield stood to the other side of the door and fired a burst at the lock. He could hear commotion downstairs now, knew they’d be coming up soon. Keeping clear of the doorway, he kicked the door open.

Gunfire chattered inside, and plaster flew from the opposite wall. The same voice that had shouted the warning before now yelled, “They’re behind the sofa!”

Grofield said, “Vivian. Fire into the room. Don’t show yourself, just stick the barrel around the door and start shooting.”

She nodded shakily and did so. Grofield counted to three, and dove through the doorway under the line of her fire. He hit the floor rolling, kept rolling until he hit a piece of furniture, found it to be an overstuffed chair, and clambered quickly behind it, feeling it shiver as bullets thudded into it.

Vivian screamed, and yelled, “They’re coming up!”

“Hold them!” Grofield yelled, and stuck his gun around the other side of the sofa and pulled the trigger. He followed the gun around, saw the overturned sofa in the middle of the room, broadside to the door, saw that the angle he’d gotten to made the sofa poor protection for the two white men behind it, saw the four black men lying self-protectively on the floor against the far wall, and kept firing. One of the white men screamed and fell back, and the other one ran for a safer piece of furniture. Grofield cut him down in mid-stride and yelled, “Vivian, come in!”

She backed in, looking terrified and hysterical. “They’re all over out there!”

Grofield shouted, “Is this them?” and pointed at the four black men getting to their feet.

She looked in panicky distraction at them and said, “Yes, yes.”

“All four?”

“Yes! That’s them, Grofield, for God’s sake that’s them!”

One of the four said to Grofield, “I don’t know where you came from, man, but you’re beautiful.” All four of them were grinning in relief.

Grofield said, “Did you tell anybody where the canisters are?”

“Are you crazy? That’s what’s kept us alive.”

“Nobody at all?” Grofield insisted.

“Not even the chaplain,” the spokesman said.

“That’s good,” Grofield said, and pointed the machine gun at them, and pulled the trigger.