The Second Saladin

28

They could see a Ford parked outside the shack.

“That’s it,” cried Roberto. “That’s their car.”

Trewitt grunted uncomfortably.

“Now go shoot those guys,” said Miguel.

“Just a minute,” said Trewitt. He looked about in the twilight and saw nothing, no policía, no other humans. It was the quiet hour in this slum. Usually there were chickens about and goats and children and old ladies and tough young men. But up and down the crooked little lane he could see nothing.

“Use that gun.” coached the younster. “You got a fifty-dollar gun. Go up there and shoot those cocksuckers.”

This kid was really beginning to get on Trewitt’s nerves. Sure, use the gun. Who do you think I am, kid, G. Gordon Liddy? An immense bitterness settled over Trewitt. His options were so bleak. It was not fair.

“Sure,” the older boy now, “go on, shoot those shitheads.”

“You just don’t go shooting people,” Trewitt instructed. But his thoughts were beginning to focus on the pistol, for there seemed no other place to focus them. He sure wasn’t going up there without it. A crappy little Beretta, probably fifty years old, older than he was, a veteran of the Abyssinian campaign, where he was a veteran of nothing beyond several libraries.

“You better do something fast, mister.”

“I know, I know,” said Trewitt, who did not want to do anything at all, much less anything fast. “Maybe we ought to wait,” he said, through a sudden accumulation of phlegm in his throat.

Both boys looked at him. How did he ever get stuck in this anyhow, with an ancient pistol and two kids?

“Okay, okay,” he said.

The sun, a huge orange ball, a grapefruit, rotting and opulent, descended behind a line of sleazy blue and gray hovels.

“You better do something, mister,” Roberto said.

A scream rose from the house. They could just barely hear it.

Trewitt reached for the pistol, and found that it had worked its way around until it was almost in the small of his back. He plucked it out of his pants with two fingers. He looked dumbly at the thing, oily and ugly and squat. He couldn’t remember if it were cocked or not. His mind was empty.

“I think somebody just got killed,” said Roberto.

Trewitt finally remembered the principle of the automatic pistol and threw the slide with an oily klack, ramming back the hammer. A perfectly fine cartridge spun out of the breach. Goddamn, it had been cocked. Roberto handed him the bullet.

Trewitt popped the magazine out of the handle and reinserted the slug. He slid the mag back up until it locked. He got out of the car and stood for a second on shaky legs, trying to devise a plan. Yet the more he thought, the more nervous he became and in the end he simply ran up toward the shack, keeping exactly in line with the corner, out of view therefore of the windows. He ran low, as he’d seen it done in the movies, and his Weejuns kept slipping in the mud. He made it to the house and paused for a second at the door. He heard muffled sounds of agony. Somebody was getting punched around pretty bad. Yet he could not move, was frozen to the earth, his tasseled loafers sinking into the very planet itself. The two boys had left the car also and were watching him.

At last Trewitt tested the door with his shoulder. It would not budge. He leaned again, harder — nothing. He heard somebody hitting somebody.

Oh, fuck it all, he thought.

These words seemed to liberate him. They filled him with violence and courage. He leaned back on one leg and with the other leg drove his Weejun against the door, blasting it open.

There were two of them, as Roberto had said. It did not occur to Trewitt that he had fired his pistol — he had no sensation of recoil, heard no report — but indeed he must have, for one sat down with a sudden terrified oafishness, mouth open, eyes open, hands flying to midsection. The second man recovered swiftly from the shock of the flying yellow apparition that was Trewitt and struggled to free a pistol from his own belt. But Trewitt had the small automatic pointed at him from a range of about four feet and was shouting “Stick ’em up” insanely, his eyes bulging, his veins swelling, and something of his abject horror must have communicated itself to the man, for he threw his hands up.

“Don’t move. Don’t you move,” Trewitt commanded. But the man moved. He smiled and waved his hands to show that they were empty and walked over to his friend.

“Don’t you move. Freeze, goddammit,” Trewitt shouted. “I mean it, I’ll shoot.” Trewitt could imagine the bullet plunking into the man’s neck.

The man smiled, still waving his hands to prove his harmlessness and bent to pry his dyspeptic partner from the floor.

“Kill him,” somebody yelled.

“Don’t move. Goddammit, don’t move,” Trewitt shouted.

The two began edging toward the door. “Kill them. Shoot them!”

Trewitt could see the white face just above the dark blur of his pistol. The range was less than five feet. The man wore a white shirt inside a dirty seersucker coat. He needed a shave. He had veins in his throat. One of his teeth was brown.

“Kill him. Kill them,” came the command. “Shoot!”

“Freeze,” Trewitt ordered. “Goddammit, I’ll—”

He fired — into the ceiling — to show he meant business.

The unwounded man just looked at him numbly — he was terrified too, Trewitt could see, pupils dilated like dimes, his lips smiling a lunatic’s grin — but he just kept shoving his friend toward the door. Until he reached it.

Trewitt aimed at the fleeing figures as they ambled down the hill and off into an alley. He still had not decided not to shoot. It still occurred to him that shooting was a possibility. Yet he could not fire. They disappeared.

“Yeeeeeeee-Owwwwww,” howled a fat, mad Mexican, corkscrewing from a chair even though his hands and feet were bound and hopping about like a toad. “You should have killed them, Mother of Jesus, you had them, you should have shot them bang right in the face.”

“I did shoot one,” Trewitt protested.

“You should have killed those cocksuckers,” Miguel said.

“Well,” Trewitt began to explain. But his eyes hooked on the woman.

The pool of blood — blackish and thick — in which she lay had almost soaked her clothes strawberry. So much? He was astonished. She lay like a doll, terribly, totally dead, deader than he could ever imagine anyone being, if only because a woman, if only because innocent of this whole business and slain for random cruelty, if only because defiled by the pints of her own blood soaking her, its vaguely menstrual associations troubling his brain. Her face lay in it, tilted, one nostril half under the surface of the pool. Her eyes were mercifully closed. The wound in her throat had drained and was clean. Her mouth was partially open and he could see teeth and tongue. Her dress had collected around her waist and her thighs were bubbly with cellulite — Trewitt, the Beretta still in his hand, was mesmerized by these details — and her calves and shins badly needed a shave.

“Mother of Jesus,” the fat man was saying in Spanish, “you hear her scream? She wake the dead.” Somebody had untied him. His face was swollen from the beating he had so recently absorbed and he was rubbing his sore wrists. He gave a little chuckle of astonishment. “She sure was loud,” he said again. “Old Madonna, squawking till the end. Old ugly lady. Mother of Jesus. Jesus.” He laughed again. “Hey, mister, how come you didn’t shoot those two bastards? This could be big trouble. I don’t think you did much damage with that little gun. You have given that one a stomachache, but they’ll be back. If you have an advantage in these things, you should always use it. It’s a hard lesson, but you’ve got to be strong if you want people to respect you.”

Trewitt puked chicken tortilla and Carta Blanca all over himself, all over his yellow polyester suit, his tassels, his Beretta. He went to his knees, broken and helpless by the rebellion of his gastrointestinal system, and felt it all come up, all over everything.

“Hey, what’s with him?” asked Ramirez.

“Patrón, I don’t know,” said Roberto. “Maybe the food don’t sit good in his belly.”

“That’s a very bad mess, mister. It’s going to smell something terrible.”

“Oh, God,” Trewitt moaned. Would no one comfort him? No. He took off his jacket and wiped his face and hands with an unsoiled section of sleeve, then chucked it into the corner.

“We better get out of here, patrón,” Roberto said.

“Who is this crazy American anyhow?”

“He just showed up one night. Asking questions. His friend got killed. At your place. Oscar’s place, now. He fired me. He fired all your old people. He’s a big man.”

“I’ll throw him in the sewer one day, you’ll see.”

“Can’t you shut up? I mean,” Trewitt bellowed in moral outrage, “just shut up!” in English.

Ramirez looked over at the trembling American, then at Miguel.

“Who’s this kid?” he asked.

“Just some little snotnose with the American.”

“We better get out of here,” said Miguel.

“At least he’s making some sense,” said Ramirez. “You got a car, Roberto?”

“Yes, patrón. The gringo’s. How do you feel?”

“Those whoresons hit my face pretty hard. And my chest is on fire. But I don’t feel as bad as the Madonna. Jesus,” he called to the corpse, “Ugly Woman, you saved my life.” He turned back to Roberto. “I never seen such an ugly woman. Ohhhh! Ugly!”

Roberto led Trewitt to the car. Trewitt sat in back, groggily. He still held the pistol in his hand.

“Somebody better take that pistol,” Ramirez said, “before the American shoots somebody else.”

The gun was pried from Trewitt’s fingers.

They all got in and Roberto began to drive down the twisting hilly road. Twice he hit garbage cans and he killed a chicken and just missed some kids.

“Where to?” Roberto asked.

“Ask the American patrón here, the American boss,” said Ramirez.

“Oh, Christ,” said Trewitt, whose mind was too fogged to bother with the Spanish, “don’t ask me.”