Going After Cacciato (3 page)

“What’s he saying?”

“Sir, I—”

“Just tell me.”

Paul Berlin watched through the glasses as Cacciato’s mouth opened and closed and opened, but there was only more thunder. And the arms kept flapping, faster now and less deliberate, wide-spanning winging motions—flying, Paul Berlin suddenly realized. Awkward, unpracticed, but still flying.

“A chicken!” Stink squealed. He pointed up the mountain. “Look it! See him?”

“Mother of Children.”

“Look it!”

“A squawking chicken, you see that? A chicken!”

The thunder came again, and Lieutenant Corson clutched himself and rocked.

“Just tell me,” he moaned. “Just tell me, what’s he saying?”

Paul Berlin could not hear. But he saw the wide wings, and the big smile, and the movement of the boy’s lips.

“Tell me.”

So Paul Berlin, watching Cacciato fly, repeated it: “Good-bye.”

   In the night the rain became fog. They camped near the top of the second mountain, and the fog and thunder lasted through the night. The lieutenant vomited. Then afterward he radioed back that he was in pursuit of the enemy.

From far off, a radio-voice asked if gunships were needed.

“Negative on gunships,” said the old lieutenant.

“Negative?” The radio-voice sounded disappointed. “Tell you what, how about some nice arty? We got—”

“Negative,” the lieutenant said. “Negative on artillery.”

“We got a real bargain going on arty this week—two for the price of one, no strings and a warranty to boot. First-class ordnance, real sweet stuff. See, we got this terrific batch of 155 in, a real shit-load of it, so we got to go heavy on volume. Keeps the prices down.”

“Negative.”

“Well, jeez.” The radio-voice paused. “Okay, Papa Two-Niner. Tell you what, I like the sound of your voice. A swell voice, really lovely. So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you a dozen nice ilium, how’s that? Can you beat it? Find a place in town that beats it and we give you a dozen more, no charge. Real boomers with genuine sparkles mixed in. A closeout sale, one time only.”

“Negative. Negative, negative, negative.”

“You’re missing out on some fine shit, Two-Niner.”

“Negative, you monster.”

“No offense—”

“Negative.”

“As you will, then.” The radio-voice buzzed. “Happy hunting.”

“Mercy,” the lieutenant said into a blaze of static.

   The night fog was worse than the rain, colder and more saddening. They lay under a sagging lean-to that seemed to catch the fog and hold it like a net. Oscar and Harold Murphy and Stink and Eddie Lazzutti slept anyway, curled around one another like lovers. They could sleep and sleep.

“I hope he keeps moving,” Paul Berlin whispered to Doc Peret. “That’s all I hope, I just hope he’s moving. He does that, we’ll never get him.”

“Sure thing.”

“That’s all I hope.”

“Then they chase him with choppers. Planes or something.”

“Not if he gets himself lost,” Paul Berlin said. His eyes were closed. “Not if he hides.”

“Yeah.” A long silence. “What time is it?”

“Two?”

“What time you got, sir?”

“Very lousy late,” said the lieutenant from the bushes.

“Come on, what—”

“Four o’clock. Zero-four-hundred. Which is to say a.m.”

“Thanks.”

“Charmed.” There was a soft warm glow where the old man squatted. After a time he grunted and stood up, buttoned his trousers, and crawled back under the lean-to. He lit a cigarette and sighed.

“Feel better, sir?”

“Smashing. Can’t you see how wonderful I feel?”

“I just hope Cacciato keeps moving,” Paul Berlin whispered. “That’s all. I hope he uses his head and keeps moving.”

“It won’t get him anywhere.”

“Get him to Paris, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Doc sighed, turning onto his side, “and where is he then?”

“In Paris.”

“Nope. I dig adventure, too, but you can’t get to Paris from here. Just can’t.”

“No?”

“No way. None of the roads lead to Paris.”

The lieutenant finished his cigarette and lay back. His breath came hard, as if the air were too heavy or thick for him, and for a long time he twisted restlessly from side to side.

“Maybe we better light a Sterno,” Doc said gently. “I’m pretty cold myself.”

“No.”

“Just for a few minutes maybe.”

“No,” the lieutenant said. “It’s still a war, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“There you have it. It’s still a lousy war.”

There was thunder. Then lightning lighted the valley deep below, then more thunder, then the rain resumed.

They lay quietly and listened.

Where was it going, where would it end? Paul Berlin was suddenly struck between the eyes by a vision of murder. Butchery, no less: Cacciato’s right temple caving inward, silence, then an enormous explosion of outward-going brains. It scared him. He sat up,
searched for his cigarettes. He wondered where the image had come from. Cacciato’s skull exploding like a bag of helium: boom. So simple, the logical circuit-stopper. No one gets away with gross stupidity forever. Not in a war. Boom, and that always ended it.

What could you do? It was sad. It was sad, and it was still a war. The old man was right about that.

Pitying Cacciato with wee-hour tenderness, pitying himself, Paul Berlin couldn’t help hoping for a miracle. The whole idea was crazy, of course, but that didn’t make it impossible. A lot of crazy things were possible. Billy Boy, for example. Dead of fright. Billy and Sidney Martin and Buff and Pederson. He was tired of it. Not scared—not just then—and not awed or overcome or crushed or defeated, just tired. He smiled, thinking of some of the nutty things Cacciato used to do. Dumb things. But brave things, too.

“Yes, He did,” he whispered. It was true. Yes … then he realized that Doc was listening. “He did. He did some pretty brave stuff. The time he dragged that dink out of her bunker, remember that?”

“Yeah.”

“And the time he shot that kid. All those teeth.”

“I remember.”

“You can’t call him a coward. You can’t say he ran out because he was scared.”

“You can say a lot of other shit, though.”

“True. But you can’t say he wasn’t brave. You can’t say that.”

Doc yawned. He sat up, unlaced his boots, threw them off, and lay back on his belly. Beside him the lieutenant slept heavily.

Paul Berlin felt himself grinning. “I wonder … You think maybe he talks French? The language, I mean. You think he knows it?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah. But, jeez, it’s something to think about, isn’t it? Old Cacciato marching off to Paris. It’s something.”

“Go to sleep,” Doc said. “Don’t forget, cowboy, you got your own health to think about. You’re not exactly a well man.”

They were in the high country.

Clean, high, unpolluted country. Quiet country. Complex country, mountains growing out of hills, valleys dropping from mountains and then sharply climbing to higher mountains. It was country far from the war, rich and peaceful country with trees and thick grass, no people and no villages and no lowland drudgery. Lush, shaggy country: huge palms and banana trees, wildflowers, waist-high grasses, vines and wet thickets and clean air. Tarzan country, Eddie Lazzutti called it. Grinning, thumping his bare chest, Eddie would howl and yodel.

They climbed with their heads down.

Two days, three days, and a single clay trail kept taking them up. The rain had mostly ended. The days were sultry and overcast, humidity bending the branches of trees, but now and again the clouds to the west showed a new brightness. So they climbed steadily, stopping when the old man needed rest, waiting out the muggiest hours of the afternoon. At times the trail would seem to end, tapering off in a tangle of weeds or rock, and they would be forced to fan out in a broad rank, picking their way forward until the trail reappeared.

For Paul Berlin, who marched last in the column, it was hard work but not unpleasant. He liked the silence. He liked the feel of motion, one leg then the next. No fears of ambush, no tapping sounds in the brush. The sky was empty. He liked this. Walking away, it was something fine to think about. Even if it had to end, there was still the pleasure of pretending it might go on forever: step by step, a mile, ten miles, two hundred, eight thousand. Was it really so impossible? Or was there a chance, even one in a million, that it might truly be done? He walked on and considered this, figuring the odds, speculating on how Cacciato might lead them through the steep country, beyond the mountains, deeper, and how in the end they might reach Paris. He smiled. It was something to think about.

They spent the fourth night in a gully beside the trail, then in the morning they continued west. There were no signs of Cacciato.

For most of the day the trail ran parallel to a small hidden stream. They could hear it, smell it, but they never saw it. Still it was soothing to climb and listen to the rush of water, imagining from the change in sounds how the stream would be breaking over rock, or curving, or slowing at a level spot, or tumbling down to a deep pool. It was wilderness now. Jagged, beautiful, lasting country. Things grew as they grew, unchanging, and there was always the next mountain.

Twice during the day there were brief, violent showers, but afterward the sky seemed to lift and lighten, and they marched without stopping. Stink Harris stayed at point, then the lieutenant, then Oscar, then Harold Murphy and Eddie, then Doc, then Paul Berlin at the rear. Sometimes Eddie would sing as he marched. It was a good, rich voice, and the songs were always familiar, and Doc and Harold Murphy would sometimes come in on the chorus. Paul Berlin just climbed. It was an anatomy lesson. The way his legs kept going, ankles and hips, the feel of a fair day’s work. A good feeling. Heart and lungs, his back strong, up the high country.

“Maybe,” he whispered, “maybe so.”

An hour before dusk the trail twisted up through a stand of dwarf pines, leveled off, then opened into a large clearing. Oscar Johnson found the second map.

The red dotted line crossed the border into Laos.

Farther ahead they found Cacciato’s armored vest and bayonet, then his ammo pouch, then his entrenching tool and ID card.

“Why?” the lieutenant muttered.

“Sir?”

“Why? Tell me why.” The old man was speaking to a small pine. “Why the clues? Why don’t he just leave the trail? Lose us, leave us behind? Tell me why.”

“A rockhead,” said Stink Harris. “That’s why.”

   Liquid and shiny, a mix of rain and clay, the trail took them higher. Out of radio range, beyond the reach of artillery.

Cacciato eluded them but he left behind the wastes of his march: empty ration cans, bits of bread, a belt of gold-cased ammo dangling from a shrub, a leaking canteen, candy wrappers, worn rope. Hints that kept them going. Luring them on, plodding along the bed of a valley; once they saw his fire on a distant hill. Straight ahead was the frontier.

“He makes it that far,” Doc said on the morning of the sixth day, pointing to the next line of mountains, “and he’s gone, we can’t touch him. He makes the border and it’s bye-bye Cacciato.”

“How far?”

Doc shrugged. “Six klicks, eight klicks. Not far.”

“Then he’s made it,” Paul Berlin said. “Maybe so.”

“By God, he has!”

“Maybe.”

“By God! Lunch at Maxim’s!”

“What?”

“A cafeteria deluxe. My old man ate there once … truffles heaped on chipped beef and toast.”

“Maybe.”

The trail narrowed, then climbed, and a half hour later Stink spotted him.

He stood at the top of a small grassy hill, two hundred meters ahead. Loose and at ease, smiling, Cacciato already had the look of a civilian. Hands in his pockets, patient, serene, not at all frightened. He might have been waiting for a bus.

Stink yelped and the lieutenant hurried forward with the glasses.

“Got him!”

“It’s—”

“Got him!” Stink was crowing and hopping. “I knew it, the ding-dong’s givin’ up the ghost. I knew it!”

The lieutenant stared through the glasses.

“Fire a shot, sir?” Stink held up his rifle and before the lieutenant could speak he squeezed off two quick rounds, one a tracer
that turned like a corkscrew through the morning haze. Cacciato waved.

“Lookie, lookie—”

“The son of a bitch.”

“Truly a predicament,” Oscar Johnson said. “I do think, ladies and gents of the jury, we got ourselves impaled on the horns of a predicament. Kindly observe—”

“Let’s move.”

“A true predicament.”

Stink Harris took the point, walking fast and chattering, and Cacciato stopped waving and watched him come, arms folded loosely and his big head cocked aside as if listening for something.

There was no avoiding it.

Stink saw the wire as he tripped it.

There were two sounds. First the sound of a zipper suddenly yanked up. Next a popping noise, the spoon releasing and primer detonating.

There was quiet. Then the sound of something dropping; then a fizzling sound.

Stink knew it as it happened. In one fuzzed motion he flung himself down and away, rolling, covering his skull, mouth open, yelping a trivial little yelp.