Mindfield, p.23
Mindfield, page 23
As Mario struggled through the snow to the restaurant, he heard shouts from inside, then boos and applause. He’d almost reached the car lot when a cruiser pulled in; Mario recognized it as the kind his dad used to drive. The driver got out and checked to see if the doors were locked. Mario ran toward him.
Meyers straightened, tried to stand tall despite his discomfort. His smile was gone.
“It was approved by some very senior people, Hugh.”
“They’re more circumspect than you. Brainwashing agents we can weather.” McVeigh knelt and picked up the knife. “This we can’t. Sorry, my man.”
Meyers’s smile returned. The twenty-first and final precept taught by his master was simple: Die bravely.
“He was a nigger-loving Commie cocksucker,” he said.
Tuesday, two-sixteen a.m.
“I saw him lead her away from the phone and grab her,” Comacho said, talking low, urgently cooperating.
Kellen’s heart froze. He was still behind Comacho, his gun to his man’s spine.
“Where are they now?”
“Somewhere below. I’ll go state’s witness, amigo, you name the terms. The whole story, from the top.”
“Where’s the guy with the rifle?”
“One floor up. Want me to call him? You can take him down when he comes into the light.”
Mick Crowder was by now across a plank and onto the steel hexahedrons, climbing down, his rifle strapped behind him. He’d heard their soft voices, and now as he crawled lower he could see their legs, and now hips, now chests, Eddie and someone behind him, and Eddie was talking.
Kellen decided: ask more question later; Sarah, first. Walk this guy down, deal with the one up there later.
“I’m going to be tight in behind you. Go fast, downstairs.” He prodded Comacho in the back with his submachine gun.
As Comacho stepped forward, Kellen sensed movement in the far darkness. And just as he made out a human form on the dome’s skeleton in front of him, a gun cracked, the bullet piercing Comacho’s breast and exiting from the back with such velocity that Kellen felt the slug’s impact against his flak jacket, and staggered back, stumbled against the stairway, as two more bullets came, popping and splintering off the concrete a foot from his chest.
Kellen slid flat onto his stomach near Comacho’s jerking, dying form, and he braced his submachine gun and ripped off a fusillade, sweeping left to right, bullets clanging against tubing.
Crowder slid slowly onto a horizontal bar, and hung there like a Raggedy Ann doll for almost a second, then his weight carried his legs up and he went down headfirst toward concrete.
Kellen was already racing down the stairs, screaming, “Meyers, let her go! Let her go or I’ll kill you!” Six flights, five flights, four.
He saw the doors of the restaurant open, people pour out.
Then he saw her, Sarah, standing alone, her hands to her mouth.
Two flights, one. And across the concrete walkway.
He stopped.
Around the wall, forty feet in front of him: Meyers’s body was crumpled against a fence, head lolling. A black man in the shadows beside him, stuffing a pipe. He saw Kellen and nodded.
“It’s all over, O’Reilly,” McVeigh said.
“Over for you, pal.” A familiar voice.
Kellen looked to his right, and first saw Mario Basutti, near the wire fence, and then saw Borko, a little closer, thirty feet away, down on one knee, his service revolver braced expertly on his left wrist.
McVeigh had taken his lighter from his pocket and he’d whirled at the sound of Borko’s voice, the pipe in his other hand.
Kellen, when he thought about it later, figured Eugene must have mistaken the pipe for a gun. The captain nailed McVeigh with a marksman’s shot through his temples.
Cops were running toward the fence, some with guns out, some shouting.
Borko slowly rose to his full six-six. “Is that the last of them, Kel?”
He came forward and bent to his victim’s body. “Jeez, this is that FBI . . .”
Kellen looked over at Sarah; she was weeping; someone was comforting her. He looked at Mario, who was motionless, staring. They were within a perimeter of silent cops. Kellen turned sadly back to Borko.
“I’ll tell the Chief it was a tricky call, Eugene.”
Victoria Day, two p.m.
Spring had lasted its regulation two weeks. The snows had clung on into May under the conifers and in dirty roadside patches, and now suddenly were gone. Today offered birdsong and buzzing flies and blue skies, the hot crunch of coming summer.
Wally’s oldest, Nickie, was romping with Mario — whom Kellen had brought along — on air mattresses in the limpid waters of Lac Echo, a sparkling clear and lifeless lake. Acid rain.
The cottage of Wally and Louise Mandelbaum was in the Laurentian highlands; they’d bought it two years ago, along with its kitsch furniture and its velvet paintings and Popeye lamp and banana telephone. The sign at the mailbox said Snugglers’ Cove. The place was true camp, therefore high art, Wally insisted, secretly knowing better, rationalizing, too cheap to pay for taste.
The Mandelbaums and Kellen and Sarah Paradis were on the verandah, playing Trivial Pursuit, a game Wally hated with a feeling akin to passion. Eight years of university, and he was bringing up the rear, sports and science his only slices of pie. Kellen O’Reilly, supposedly brain-damaged, was ahead, a lucky man whom Lady Fortune favored with easy questions.
To make matters worse, the Expos were down to the Mets six-two in the fifth — Louise had forced compromise upon Wally; he could listen to the ball game as long as he played the board game.
Kellen, beside him, was chuckling into the banana phone, talking to Margot.
“Sure, but you’re supposed to look pregnant. It comes with the deal. You can’t look like a pogo stick and be pregnant.”
“Geography,” said Louise. “‘Name the five countries bordering Switzerland.’ Forget it.”
“Germany, Italy, France,” said Wally.
“Austria?” said Sarah. “There are no more.”
“Trick question,” Kellen said. “Liechtenstein.”
“This game has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence,” Wally announced. “The truly great minds don’t wander around with their heads stuffed full of useless information. Einstein would wipe out.”
Wallach fanned, stranding two. Wally heard popping noises across the lake — firecrackers.
Queen Victoria’s birthday. He remembered going to riot parties with Kellen in Irish Point St. Charles — a Jew joining joyfully in the general damning of the English. The holiday had a sense of revolution about it, fireworks at night.
But there’d be no such fun at Snugglers’ Cove this night. “No fireworks,” he’d told the kids. “Kellen is coming.”
“It’s just the pregnancy blahs, Margot. You’ll perk up. Ciao.”
When he hung up, Sarah gave Wally a bland, patient expression. “Isn’t he adorable? Do you think that marriage will ever be over?”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty sick relationship,” Wally said.
Kellen grinned, Sarah sighed. From Marcel’s frying pan into Kellen’s fire: she loved him, perhaps, too eagerly. A much-changed man, most of whose dark rooms were now filled with light. Others, however, seemed too full of Margot.
Irrational jealousy. She should be thankful he was whole and well. The flashbacks had stopped. He’d spent many days and nights poring over the back issues of newspapers, reading about his father. He’d had a session with Wally, and had handled his father’s death with astonishing ease. He had knitted together, but Sarah could see a twitch of his facial muscles when firecrackers echoed across the lake.
He hasn’t much talked about that wintry night of terror three months ago, but would if pushed, and had done so at the inquiry. He was still amnesic for the seven to eight hours before he escaped from Coldhaven, but forensics had filled in the gaps. They had taken swabs from his forehead: electroshock jelly; and had recovered samples of his hair and blood on the ECT table.
His evidence and Mario’s, before the special inquirer, exonerating Eugene Borko. The shooting death of Hugh McVeigh was ruled to be a tragic but understandable error of judgment on the captain’s part. Kellen had testified to everything he could remember of that day and night; he had described the film that he and his partner viewed.
Headlines. COP ALLEGES CIA KILL-TESTING. Another scandal rocks Washington.
The FBI denied any knowledge of McVeigh. The CIA maintained its policy of refusing to confirm or deny whether he or any of the dead men had ever been on staff; although they leaked a story that Meyers was an agent gone bad who’d been fired. They’d frankly not heard of Meyers’s associates, said the official leaker.
Kellen had been joined as a plaintiff in Sarah’s suit. The defendants were already preparing their slanders against him, and demanding an independent psychiatric assessment. But he hasn’t seemed perturbed. He has taken leave from murders, was working full-time for the Brotherhood, helping Sarah prepare submissions for the binding arbitration the government had forced upon them.
Sarah would be making these submissions all next week. The work never ends. But the Halcion days, thank God, are gone.
Wally picked up the dice. A six and a one. Entertainment. Louise read the card: “‘Which is the only one of the Seven Dwarfs with a beard?’”
Wally thought. “Snoopy.”
Kellen and Sarah roared.
“Dopey, dear,” Louise said.
“Dopey, Pokey, Sleazy, Guppie, Yuppie, who gives a shit?”
Martinez gave up a shot through the middle for a double and a run in.
Kellen rolled the dice. “History.”
“This fills his pie,” Wally groaned.
Another screamer and Buck Rogers was going to the mound to fetch Martinez to safety.
Louise read Kellen’s question. “‘Who murdered John F. Kennedy?’”
“Didn’t I say?” Wally threw up his hands. “He always gets the easy ones . . . Kel — you okay?”
You’re sallow green in a halo of computer glow, and evil suffuses and poisons the air, and a voice comes haunting and distant from across the room. “You failed the psychic driving, Kellen. The rebel in you wouldn’t die.”
Copyright © William Deverell, 2006
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Deverell, William, 1937-
Mindfield / William Deverell.
First published: Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-551-1
Also issued as: 978-1-77090-552-8 (PDF); 978-1-55022-696-6 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8557.E8775M55 2005 C813’.54 C2005-904298-2
Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan
With the publication of Mindfield ECW Press acknowledges the generous financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, for our publishing activities.
William Deverell, Mindfield
