Going After Cacciato (29 page)

It was the same as Wisconsin. Paul Berlin closed his eyes. It was the same. Pines, campfire smoke, walleyes frying, his father’s aftershave lotion. Big Bear and Little Bear, pals forever.

He opened his eyes and saw Cacciato working with the paperclip.

“Any luck?”

“Sucker took my bait.” Cacciato winked. “Next time though, I’ll nail him. Now that I got the right technique.”

“Be patient,” Paul Berlin said.

He walked up the slope toward Oscar’s lean-to. In the morning, he thought, he would have to eat a good breakfast. That would help. The woods were always good for the appetite.

Eddie and Oscar and Doc Peret sat around a can of Sterno, taking turns warming their hands.

“You talk to him?”

Paul Berlin put the grenade on the ground in front of them.

“You know how it is with a fisherman,” said Paul Berlin. “Mind’s a million miles away.”

They were quiet until the flame died. Then Oscar picked up the grenade and hooked it to his belt. “So,” he said. “That’s everyone.”

A
t midnight their necks were shaved for the final time. They were led at gunpoint into a concrete shower stall. Afterward they were photographed, given a supper of turkey broth and bread, then locked in a large common cell. Stink Harris wept openly. Doc and Oscar wrote letters. The lieutenant slept. Eddie Lazzutti lay face-up on a cot, hands linked behind his head, singing nursery ballads in a voice smooth like night. The long vigil began. A miracle, Paul Berlin kept thinking. It was all he wanted—a genuine miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences. He thought of his father for a time, and of his mother, and then he slept, dreaming of miracles.

In his tower by the sea Paul Berlin considered the possibilities. A miracle, he thought. An act of high imagination—daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

And so deep in the night, as the moon rose, Cacciato’s round face appeared at the window. The face seemed to float. Sarkin Aung Wan gasped and shook Paul Berlin awake. A miracle, he kept
dreaming. But he blinked and reached out to grab the M16 that came sliding through the bars. “Go,” Cacciato whispered.

And then it started—an explosion, the great iron door shattering like a shot melon, smoke, sirens, and there was time only to snatch for their clothes and boots, and then they were running. Running hard through a maze of bars and steel and floodlit hallways. Gunfire chased them, but they ran hard. There were bright yellow searchlights. Doors broke open; concrete walls seemed to blow themselves away. “Go!” Cacciato was shouting now, leading them through the breaking maze and over the walls and away. Away, scampering through twists of street and alley, over walls, through moonlit courtyards and nighttime bazaars where donkeys brayed and flares opened high over blue-tile domes, flares and starbursts, guns rattling behind them, chased, and they caught a glimpse of Cacciato running flatfooted through the cobbled streets, and they took off after him. Paul Berlin ran wildly. He squeezed Cacciato’s rifle and Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand, and he ran. Fast, a head-down sprint. It was the soldier’s greatest dream—fierce, hard, desperate full-out running. No honor. No thoughts of duty or glory or mission. Just running for the sake of running, nothing else. Like that time in the mountains, twitching, not wanting to die, twitching and cowering and imagining how far and how fast he would run if he were only able.

So now he ran. A miracle, he thought, and he closed his eyes and made it happen.

And then a getaway car—why not? It was a night of miracles, and he was a miracle man. So why not? Yes, a
car
. Cacciato pointed at it, shouted something, then disappeared.

Oscar drove. It was an Impala, 1964. Racing stripes sparkled on the body, sponge dice dangled from the rearview mirror. Fender skirts, mudflaps, chopped and channeled, leopard-skin upholstery. They piled in, and Oscar drove.

In the backseat, eyes closed, Paul Berlin could only think of miracles. Flee, fly, fled, he thought as Oscar drove fast through wee-hour Tehran. The tenses ran together, places blended; they passed
the Shah’s golden palace, through the arched gate of the old city, and then into slums and filth and streets with no direction.

It was cold. Paul Berlin huddled against Sarkin Aung Wan, still clutching Cacciato’s rifle.

They were on back streets now. Not even streets—gravel ruts. Dark buildings loomed up like jungle. A cartoon, Paul Berlin thought—garish colors and searchlights swaying through the night and a city full of sirens—just a cartoon—but he made himself believe.

Navigating, Doc directed them north through Ribiscu and Ebis, and Oscar wheeled the big car through vicious hairpin turns. No muffler, and the old Impala screamed in the night. Yellow headlights plucked out statues and frozen animals and sheets of winter ice. The sky kept opening with illumination. They were hunted now—planes and helicopters, sirens, search parties with guns and lanterns, floodlights swishing through the dark and soldiers silhouetted behind high barricades. Oscar drove fast.

Once they hit a dead end. The street simply stopped. Doc swore and jumped out and waved Oscar back with a flashlight, then pointed a new way north through chains of alleys and winding stone lanes.

Flight, Paul Berlin thought. Down the depths of Tehran, running.

He opened his eyes. The streets were wider now, the buildings better spaced. They were in the outskirts, it seemed, or in a section of the city that was mostly deserted. Fires burned in vacant lots. The sound of gunfire kept chasing them.

“Eisenhower Avenue,” Oscar said, reading from a passing green sign. “They like Ike.”

“Impossible,” Doc said, but it was Eisenhower Avenue, all right, and when the lieutenant spotted a second sign he began chanting old war ditties. Spittle dribbled down his chin.

Speed, Paul Berlin was thinking. He felt giddy. Speed, sped, spent—watching flashing lights, sponge dice jiggling on the mirror.

Eisenhower Avenue emptied into a huge traffic circle.

Suddenly, as they entered the rotary, the sky ignited. There was a booming sound overhead, then light, then heat. Parachutes held flares high over the traffic circle. An ambush, Paul Berlin knew, and Oscar said it.

“Bushed,” Oscar whispered.

He braked hard. The Impala skidded sideways into the rotary. Something exploded in the sky, a brilliant white light. Then the whole sky opened.

“Bushed,” Oscar said.

Paul Berlin huddled deep in the backseat. He heard the sound of artillery, the crash of illumination, the lieutenant’s singing.

“Bushed!” Oscar shouted.

At the center of the rotary, as at the core of a merry-go-round, a dozen tanks and APCs were coming to life. Their turrets began swiveling like tracking radar. Soldiers fired from behind the tanks—rifles and machine guns—and red tracers made pretty darts in the wind. The car bucked. There was the sudden smell of burning metal, then tearing sounds. The red darts made holes in the doors. A window crashed open and the wind sucked in.

“Bushed,” Oscar kept saying. They spun fast around the rotary. Slow motion, it seemed, but also fast.

One of the tanks fired. The traffic circle turned a funny violet color. The Impala was picked up, held for an instant, then dropped. It came down hard, still skidding around the rotary.

Stink’s door had bounced open. He was weeping, hanging on to the elbow rest, but the spinning forces were dragging him out. He screamed and clawed at the door.

“Bushed!” Oscar was shouting. “Bushed, bushed, bushed!”

A second tank fired. There was the same purple light. A gray stone building behind them lost its middle. The top floors dropped to the bottom floors. A mix of dust and smoke and bits of stone showered down.

Stink was screaming. He held desperately to the elbow rest, bawling, then a third tank fired, and a fourth. Holes kept opening in the doors and windows.

Paul Berlin tried to make it stop. “Stop,” he said, then louder—“Stop!”—but it was beyond his powers of control.

Stink’s screaming went higher. Eddie grabbed for him, caught him by the collar and held on. Stink squeezed the elbow rest. He wept and screamed, and round they went, weaving, braking hard, then speeding, and the firing continued.

Oscar hit the brakes.

“Reverse!” someone yelled, but they were already in reverse, moving backward now as the tank turrets swiveled to track them.

Then, fleeing backward, they were suddenly beyond the roadblock, outside the rotary, moving fast up a busy expressway, only backward, and Stink Harris was still bawling and clinging to the open door. The gunfire was now behind them.

A mile up the road they stopped.

“Bushed,” Oscar said softly. “I believe we been badly bushed.”

They helped Stink in, locked the doors, then turned into the expressway’s west-going traffic.

There was no talking. They rode along quietly, letting the flow of traffic carry them out of the city. Miracles, Paul Berlin thought. He watched the gentle evening traffic. Vacations ended, families going home. A smooth tar road that climbed out of Tehran, up a steep grade that finally leveled off on a plateau. Below and behind them, except for a sky still fuzzy with illumination, the city was already gone. Soon the traffic died away. A few incoming headlights, a stalled truck, and then darkness. Ahead was open road.

   So straight on through the night, flat out through quartermoon dark as in the steppes of the far Dakotas, wolf country, and the road was smooth and fast.

Paul Berlin drove now.

The others were sleeping. Sarkin Aung Wan slept with her head in his lap. Oscar slept silently, Doc slept with his nose held high, the lieutenant slept with messy wet breathing.

And Paul Berlin drove. His eyelids hung on speed. Run, rush,
recede—a rhyme to keep his eyes open, and he clutched the wheel the way he’d once clutched his rifle, unloving but fearful of losing it. The feeling of being flung over a waterfall, a landfall, spun out to the edge of the speeding dark. No control.

He thought of the sea. And for a time he was in two spots at once. He was there, speeding through zoo country, but he was also up in his sandbagged tower over the sea, where the tips of the farthest waves had turned pink like orchids and where, if he squinted to see, the coral of the shallow waters was beginning to glow the same sweet pink. Hurry, he thought. So he pressed down hard, foot to the floor, just hanging on. It was all he could do.

Out of control, and maybe it always had been. One thing leading to the next, and pretty soon there was no guiding it, and things happened out of other things. Like the time Cacciato went fishing in Lake Country. Raining like a bitch, the whole war sopped in rain, but there was old Cacciato, out fishing in Lake Country for perch and walleyes and bullheads. He remembered it. “Everybody has to touch it,” was what Oscar Johnson had said. “He’ll listen to you. Go talk to him.” So, sure, he’d gone down to the crater to talk sense to the kid. “Hopeless,” he’d said. “And it’s for your own damn good, and even if you don’t join in, even so, it’ll happen anyway, but, look, it’s for your own good.” So he’d pressed the grenade against Cacciato’s limp hand. Was it touching? Was it volition? Maybe so, maybe not. “That’s everybody,” Oscar said afterward.

And then Lieutenant Corson came to replace Lieutenant Sidney Martin. The way events led to events, and the way they got out of human control.

“A sad thing,” Cacciato had said on the day afterward.

“Accidents happen,” said Paul Berlin.

And Cacciato had shrugged, then smiled, and kept fishing in Lake Country. He fished seriously. He fished without the least show of temper or fatigue. He fished the crater from all sides, shallow and deep, and he did not give up.

A very sad thing. Cacciato was dumb, but he was right. What happened to Lieutenant Sidney Martin was a very sad thing.

Paul Berlin squeezed the wheel and hung on.

Late in the night he crossed into Turkey. The border station was deserted. For an hour afterward the land was mostly flat. Then it began climbing, and to keep himself awake he did the old counting trick. He counted mesas. He counted flattopped hills with sides dropping like the walls of skyscrapers. Buttes and summits and ridges as in Old Mexico, ravines cut by sheer cliffs, caverns, gullies and dried-up streams and land faults, lost sheep and wild dogs, dividing stripes flowing down the center of the road, howls behind him, beats of the heart, Tatars hunting him on horseback through canyoned country.

He drove hard across the moonscaped plains.

An hour before dawn he reached Ankara. The city lay in a gentle valley, sound asleep. He pulled off onto the shoulder, got out and rubbed his stiff thighs. The coming dawn was cold.

When he got back into the car Doc Peret was awake.

“Nomad land,” Doc said. He hesitated for a moment. “You all right?”

“I guess.”

“Not what you expected, is it?”

“No,” Paul Berlin said. “It never is.” He started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

It took an hour to circle the city and pick up the road to Izmir. Doc did his map reading in the hazardous light.

“Another two hours,” Doc finally said. “Maybe less if you wing it.”

So Paul Berlin winged it. Flat out through the Anatolian flatlands and down the townless, lightless country toward the sea, hellbent for water, knowing now the full meaning of desperado.

Dawn came up in the rearview mirror.

It crept up slowly, pinkish and bright. The land descended, icy streams tracing slopes toward the sea. The streams came together into a large river that paralleled the road.

Late in the morning, in a village called Salihli, they stopped to take on gas, had breakfast, then continued along the river for fifty
miles before turning south toward Izmir. The country was green again. There were farms along the road. The fields were cultivated, and goats and sheep grazed peacefully behind fences.

“Salt,” Doc said. He touched his nose.

Stink rolled down the window and put his head out and shouted. The wind was warm.