All That I Have (12 page)

Driving home that evening, I thought about Addison and his Russian novels. Good old Addison, always holding a ticket you don’t have. Well, whoever these Grenada Russians were, they weren’t in no novel, and they had Addison’s attention, it looked like. He was more than a little spooked.

Or maybe it was the White Horse. I wondered whether or not I should tell Clemmie that her dad might be working the stuff a little harder than usual. Would telling her about it make anything better? I about decided no, I’d shut up. But then it didn’t matter, because when I got home, Clemmie wasn’t there.

10

THE COSSACKS

Late that Sunday night, Monday morning, the balloon went up. It went up about halfway. Errol called me at home after three to say he’d had a trouble call from Monterey for a disturbance at one of the trailers there, the Finn trailer: a fight or a party, it looked like to Errol, or, more likely, both at once. He’d gotten Deputy Keen, who was patrolling, on the radio, and Lyle had started over there. Then a couple of minutes later Errol had gotten a second call, same place, saying shots had been fired. That’s when he called me.

I got there about quarter to four. Errol must have hit every switch on his desk, because we lacked nobody at the scene except the Salvation Army. I saw state troopers, deputies of mine, medics, volunteer firemen, and two animal control officers from Brattleboro.

They had lights from the vehicles playing over the side of the trailer and over the little yard in front. You could see the door had been forced in, and you could see glass all over the ground in the yard. There was some blood on the cement-block steps at the door. I went on into the trailer.

The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi was in there surrounded by police and medics. She was a little shaky, but mainly alright. She was wearing a bathrobe and drinking a beer, sitting on the divan telling her story for the tenth time.

Deputy Keen was with her. He came over to where I waited in the trailer door and nodded toward the yard. We went out there together, and the deputy filled me in.

I have to say it was quite a story. It seems Crystal Finn was innocently asleep in her trailer around three o’clock when she heard banging and crashing and woke to find two men beating down her door. Crystal wasn’t the only one who woke up, though, and that was bad luck for the intruders, because the minute they got inside the trailer here comes Jackson, Crystal’s two-hundred-pound bull mastiff-wolf-alligator hybrid, storming full tilt out of the bedroom and right at them. They turned and ran for their car, which was parked in front, with the dog all over them and behind the dog, Crystal wearing a little black nightie and carrying an old side-by-side Ithaca. The dog grabs the hindmost fellow by the arm and commences to eat, but the fellow breaks free and makes their car, just as the quicker one fires it up and starts to roll, which is when Crystal lets go on them with the Ithaca, first one barrel, then the other. She said she thinks she got the driver, but maybe not, because they took off and kept going. She’s sure she blew out their rear window, though. A neighbor called the police, but it’s all over. Crystal’s fine. The dog’s fine.

“She’s something else, ain’t she?” said Deputy Keen.

“She is,” I said.

“They won’t get far,” said Lyle, “not wounded and with their back end all shot up.”

“Do we know who they were?”

“More Russians, Sheriff. Look here.”

The deputy and I went to one of the state police cruisers, and he opened the door. Lying on the passenger’s seat was a large, clearplastic evidence envelope with some kind of cloth or fabric inside.

“That’s part of the one fellow’s coat,” said Lyle. “Jackson ripped it away when he grabbed hold of the guy’s arm. There’s an inside pocket with a passport, French passport, in the name of Vaseline something.”

“Vaseline?”

“Vaseline, Sheriff. Russian name. Plus, there are stamps in Russian all over the inside of it, the passport. I found the coat in the yard when I got here. Gave it to the troopers. I was first on scene.”

“You find anything else with the coat?” I asked him.

“Couple of fingers.”

“Fingers?”

“Jackson had a pretty good grip on him, it looks like,” said Lyle.

“Was Sean here with the young lady, when these fellows showed up?” I asked.

“Crystal says no,” said Deputy Keen. “And that brings me back to where I’ve been right along, Sheriff: Sean Duke. Superboy. When in hell are you going to get serious about him?”

“What’s he got to do with this, here? It wasn’t Sean did this tonight.”

“It was because of him it happened,” said Lyle. “They came here to find him. He’s the reason they’re here. You know that as well as I do.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I do know that as well as you do. I also know if these fellows that were here find Sean before we do, we never will find him. There won’t be nothing left to find.”

“Suits me,” said the deputy.

“Well, it don’t suit me,” I said.

“What are you more interested in, here, Sheriff?” the deputy asked me. “Solving a crime, a crime you know was committed by Superboy, or keeping the Russians off him? Which one?”

“Both.”

“I don’t figure that, Sheriff.”

“You don’t have to figure it, Deputy,” I said. “All you have to do is follow your orders.”

“What orders?” said Lyle. “I got no orders. All I
want
is orders. All I want is for you to do your job or at least let me do mine. That means running down Superboy. Don’t it? Don’t it?”

Two of the other deputies and some of the medics who had been in the trailer had come out into the yard and were listening to Deputy Keen, who had raised his voice. I didn’t want to get into something with him in front of an audience.

“It seems to me,” I told the deputy, “that the job right now, today, is finding the two fellows who were here before they get clean back to Russia while we stand here pissing on each other’s shoes. Wouldn’t you think?”

“Whatever you say, Sheriff,” said Deputy Keen.

“Why don’t you go ahead and do that, then? You want an order? You got one. You want to do your job? Go do it.”

Deputy Keen turned and, taking all the time he needed and maybe a little more, he walked to his vehicle. He drove off. Another satisfied customer. All the others standing around in front of the Sweetheart’s trailer were looking at me. It was beginning to get light.

Believe it or not, we never found them. You’d think a pair of Russians, one of them with half his hand chewed off, the other maybe with gunshot wounds, driving a car with a blown-out rear window and its bodywork full of those big double-o buckshot holes, would tend to attract attention to themselves, wouldn’t you? I would. But nobody ever caught up with either of them — or hasn’t yet.

The one who lost his passport was traceable, of course. Lieutenant Farabaugh, my window on the world of international evildoers, ran him down the same day. The passport holder was Vassily Karataev, born Riga, Latvia, 1969. Citizenship, French. He had the same kind of sheet as the nude male except that, plus having been arrested in every city in Europe, Vassily had also done time in New Delhi, India.

The passport meant Dwight also had a line on the car the two Cossacks drove. Vassily had rented it at Kennedy Airport in New York the day before they turned up on our field. But that was as far as anybody could get with the car. It had disappeared, too. It turned up most of two years later, abandoned in a parking lot on the river in Detroit. Nobody had thought much about it out there, I guess, maybe because half the cars in Detroit are full of blood and buckshot holes, just like the Cossacks’.

11

THE SEANS OF THIS WORLD

Addison said a smart thing one time. Well, he said smart things more than once: he’s a smart fellow, as I hope I have made plain. But one time in particular I’m thinking of, when Clemmie and I found out we weren’t going to be having any kids.

That was not an easy thing. We’d been married five, six years, working it in the usual way, not exactly trying to fetch at any special time, but expecting a kid would come along. It didn’t happen. Finally Clemmie thought she’d go to the doctor, get herself checked out for fertility. She went. She aced: Clemmie’s sitting on more eggs than your granny’s Rhode Island Red.

That passed the ball to me. And sure enough, I was the problem. It turned out my sperms were a lot like the old-time hardscrabble Vermont hill farmers of my childhood: few in number, barely hanging on, and never learned to swim.

So, no kids. It took some getting used to. Looking back, it took more getting used to than either of us would have thought. There’s no better way to learn what you want than to find out you can’t have it. Things with us weren’t going to be quite the way we’d thought they’d be. Did we talk that over a lot between us, at the time? Did we get straight with each other on what it meant, on how we felt about it? I don’t remember that we did. For me, I guess I said to myself, well, that’s the deal you’ve got: it is what it is. Clemmie? It might have been tougher for Clemmie — probably was. We’re different people, ain’t we, different kinds of people? That’s what makes it interesting. That’s what makes it fun when it’s fun, but that’s also what makes it hard when it’s hard. The way I said, Clemmie can take life too seriously.