Book of the Dead (42 page)

“I don’t see the sense in that, when Belgrade is far more dangerous than Tirana.”

“No, well, Mr. Hašek, that’s really not your province, is it, rational thought and reasoning? So I really shouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

Midgley was clearly hiding something, but as he had so rightly pointed out, it didn’t concern Hašek. The visas did.

“Look, Midgley, I want the visas and I want them now. I have the money you require.” He took out a wad of bills. “I cannot wait any longer.” He threw the money onto the desk. Midgley picked it up, flicked through the notes, and nodded.

“Yes, well, allow me just to make things look official.” He took a rubber stamp, inked it, and pressed it on the small squares of paper on his blotter. In a hurry now to conclude the business, he handed the papers to Hašek. The Czech took them and turned to go. He paused with his hand on the door handle, as if something had occurred to him.

“I don’t suppose,” he began, facing Midgley again, “you possess such a thing as a saxophone?”

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s for me. It’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

The clerk peered through large, round glasses like goggles, at the paper coming out of the machine.

“Hella Elizabeth Barton,” he read out loud. “Do you have your ID?”

“I already showed it you,” she said impatiently.

“Your ID,” said the impassive clerk.

She searched in her pockets and finally produced the right card.

“Thank you,” he said. “You may take these.” He handed her the replicated visas and a detailed note from Hašek.

She left the replication unit and marched briskly down Franklin Strasse to Ernst-Reuter-Platz, where she boarded a U-bahn train to Hallesches Tor. She studied the visas. They authorized her to cross over the Wall to East Berlin and thence to travel through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary to Yugoslavia. The return journey was not to begin later than twenty-four hours after the outward trip.

Referring to her map, she saw that she would probably pass through Cheb in Czechoslovakia, very close to the borders with East and West Germany, where Hašek, then a member of the Czech Jazz Section, had triggered the start of the war by escaping to the West. Czech guards fired after him, missed, and got two West German guards, whose colleagues retaliated. The rest was history, with Eastwood sanctioning the deployment and use of stockpiled chemical weapons, and Britain, France, Austria, and West Germany lining up behind him.

Barton’s train crossed under the Wall and trundled through the ghost stations on its way to Friedrichstrasse, where she would make the official crossing.

As her train rattled across the bridge over the Danube, in its final approach to the Beograd-Dunav Station, the strange feeling that had hung over her all the way from Germany sank down, becoming increasingly palpable. In Belgrade, she was not going to find quite what she had been expecting.

Apart from this, she had been suffering from asthma since descending from the Moravian Heights, and it got worse the farther south she came. She cursed her stupidity in not having her insufflator with her at all times—she hadn’t thought of it as she rushed, without going home first, from the replication unit to the Wall to start her journey. As well as the presumed effect of the spores and dust, which Trefzger had mentioned, her asthma was further aggravated by the anxiety she felt.

She got up and went to the bathroom to see if a drink of water would improve her condition. It didn’t. She looked at herself in the broken mirror and searched for the beauty she had been told was there. Yes, it was, but only to someone who saw her face and remembered what it had looked like before. They could kid themselves that the ravages of war and stress left only temporary scars. She could kid herself, in her less pessimistic moments. She swept her long hair back, tugging her fingers through the knots.

There was no soap. The water ran in rivulets away from the oil in her skin. She was at least able to poke the little bits of dirt out of the corners of her eyes.

She left the bathroom, her breathing more labored.

He waited in the room where he, Varnov, and Jensen had surprised the Americans and Czechs.

He sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room and mimed “Just You Just Me” on the tenor saxophone he’d bought after leaving the replication unit. He’d retained enough money from the sale of the organs to cover the cost of the instrument, possibly the only one on sale in Belgrade.

He lacked only one thing now: that which Barton would give him—breath to sound the notes.

He could almost hear “Now’s the Time” as he worked it out on the keys. What he didn’t hear was the door opening. She was suddenly there, on the threshold, panting and wheezing with obvious pain. Behind her a small form lingered.

Hašek rose to his feet, placing his saxophone on the chair.

“Hella…” he said flatly. “Is it asthma?” He was incapable of expressing concern he didn’t feel.

“Yes,” she wheezed. “But how can you talk?”

“Just using the air that gets into the body. It’s enough for speech but not enough for what I want to do… Your asthma is bad.”

“Yes. It’s all… the shit in the air and… and finding him… here in Belgrade…” Whereupon, she brought out from behind her a young boy, whose eyes stared dully. His face looked tight and bluish gray, suggesting death by asphyxiation. Hašek and the boy looked at each other, neither face registering anything.

Hašek spoke: “Hella, come here. You know what I want.”

“No, I can’t,” she said.

“Hella. You don’t have to worry. I just want to breathe again. You will go freely and I will never seek you out. My oath.”

“I believe you, Hašek… but it changes nothing… I can’t… The boy…”

“But I asked you to come. You came. Please. One minute. Then you can go.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I want to breathe,” he shouted. “I want to play music. Breathe into me. Kiss me!”

“No.” She shook her head, as her chest continued to heave for gulps of air. “The boy, Hašek… Look at him… He’s ours.”

Hašek looked, saw nothing. He needed the woman’s breath. Music mattered. Nothing else was important, until he actually blew a note.

“I’ve spent the whole day… agonizing… But if my asthma will allow me… to resurrect anyone… it must be Alex, our son.”

A car drew up outside the building and doors slammed.

“I’m sorry, Hašek,” she said, kneeling down to eye-level with the boy and taking his head in her hands. She placed her mouth over his passive lips, pinched his nostrils together, took a deep breath, and blew. Steps echoed hollowly on the stairs. She repeated the process and almost lost consciousness, so acute was her own breathing difficulty. She gave a final push and at the same time the doorway yielded two intruders, Varnov and Jensen.

Whether they’d come back for him or for fresh bodies to plunder, Hašek didn’t know.

Barton looked up, startled then horrified. The boy fell from her grasp. Before she could reach him again, Varnov’s club struck her jaw, smashing it and embedding her lower teeth into her upper gums, firmly scotching any hopes of further resuscitation.

Over by the wall, the boy twitched.

Jensen swung a spiked, macelike weapon and advanced on Hašek. The Czech searched his person for a weapon; he found a small knife, which he stuck out in front of him like a straw before a tornado. The mace crunched into the hand that held the knife and its swing severed the weakened wrist, carrying the hand away on its spikes like a trophy.

One instinct defeated the other, and Hašek grabbed the saxophone with his remaining hand. He mastered the awkward balance and brandished the instrument. Jensen made a pass and missed as Hašek ducked and swung low, scoring a hit and shattering the woman’s tibia, but losing his improvised weapon in the process. The saxophone spun on the floor and Jensen kicked it away as she fell.

Hašek reached for the saxophone, but Jensen, no less formidable an opponent on the ground, had swung her mace and caught his elbow, snapping the joint and thrusting bone up through the skin.

Virtually defenseless now, Hašek glanced around, saw Barton desperately trying to fend off Varnov’s killing blow. He saw also, in the instant before Jensen’s spikes relieved him of that facility, the boy who was apparently his son, slipping otherwise unnoticed through the open doorway.

BY JOE R. LANSDALE

(
For David Schow, a story of The Bad Guys and The Bad Guys
)

[1]

After a month’s chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita’s. It wasn’t that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn’t worried. He’d killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn’t concern him.

The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire—one mean, mama—three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.

Wayne stepped out of his ’57 Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shells out of there. He already had a .38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita’s it was best to have plenty of backup.

Wayne put a handful of shotgun shells in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed
ROSALITA’S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING
, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.

He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.

He spotted Calhoun’s stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl’s handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shirt, faded and left a patch of wetness.

For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun’s sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacterium that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man’s wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: “Damn, that’s tough about ole Betty Sue, but she’s dead as hoot-owl shit and ain’t gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she’s just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I’ll just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire roll haul her across the border and sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonks for dancing.

“It’s a sad thing to sell one of your own, but shit, them’s the breaks. I’ll just stay out of the tonks until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won’t go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewey-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal.”

This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.

The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn’t grab, ran screws threw their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn’t bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.

Tonk owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, started music, and men paid five dollars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which muzzled and handless, they could not do.

If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and do some business. Didn’t have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.

As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn’t keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a fella’s dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.

Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred fifty pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.

But, there wasn’t anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.