From the Heart of Darkness (6 page)

“Neither of you will leave!” snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.

Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag. “Know what this is, honey?” he asked conversationally.

Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain's body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.

He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

THE AUTOMATIC RIFLEMAN
*

Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door.

“Where's the goddam light?” Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.

Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. “Move your—” she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, “George, look out!”

“Too late,” said Coster with a bailiff's smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. “But we're all friends here,” Coster went on, his grin broadening.

“Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters,” said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson's right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.

“Sure,” said Coster, nodding, “but stay bunched in that corner, if you will.” His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. “Until you're convinced of my good intentions, you'll be tempted to—put yourselves in danger. We don't want that.”

“Who the hell are you?” Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.

“My name's Coster,” the rifleman said. “Agfield told me where I'd find you.”

Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. “I told you not to trust that bastard!” she said. “Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it—”

“Dee, that's enough,” the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.

“He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind,” Coster amplified. “We're what you need.”

“We?” asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.

“Me,” said Coster, “and him.” His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle's angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.

Calmly, Kerr said, “Agfield doesn't know what we have in mind.” His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.

“Sure he does,” said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. “Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I'm here to make sure you get him.”

For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs. He said earnestly, “Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of … us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after—the evidence is
on
you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you've still got the gun, don't you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?”

Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.

“But we're friends,” Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.

“Friends,” said Kerr. “Then we should get comfortable.” He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.

Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.

Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. “Penske, why don't you bring things in from the van,” he said.

The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. “I'll knock when I want you to open,” he said as he left the room.

Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder. “You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun,” the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly-shaped rifle. “But I don't know that I'd care to make plans based on something … suppositious.”

Coster's tongue clicked in amusement. “Do you want references? Somebody who saw us put away Kennedy? Or King?”

Davidson snorted a puff of smoke. “You don't look like a fool,” Kerr said.

“I'm not—not any longer,” the rifleman replied. He shook his head as if to clear something from his hair. He went on, “What we've done doesn't matter. You won't believe me, and it doesn't matter. But if you have some place for a demonstration, we'll—demonstrate.”

Kerr nodded. “That would be best,” he said neutrally.

Coster suddenly turned and lowered the rifle again toward the door. “Speaking of fools,” he said, “your Mr Penske—”

There was no knock. The door slammed back. “All right you—” Penske shouted before he realized that the fat muzzle of the automatic rifle was centered on his breastbone. The swarthy man held a carbine waist high, his left hand locked on the curving 30-round magazine.

Obviously furious but with no more sound than his chair made clattering on the floor, Kerr strode toward the disconcerted Penske. With his left hand the black gripped the carbine and tugged the smaller man back within the room. Then his right hand slapped Penske's head against the wall. He stepped away, holding the carbine muzzle-down. “And if you'd used it, you damned fool?” the big man demanded. “If you'd brought the police down on us here, what chance would our plans have had then?
What chance?
”

“You didn't have to hit me,” Penske said, not quite meeting Kerr's eyes.

Contemptuously, the black unloaded the carbine, tossing the magazine onto a stuffed chair and ejecting the round in the chamber. It winked against the carpet. “Get the things out of the van,” he said.

*   *   *

Kerr had rented the furnished apartment a month before, but that was as far as preparations had gone. The can-opener beside the sink was broken and Penske, grumbling, had to hack their dinners open with his heavy-bladed dagger.

“If you were a real Green Beret, you could bite the lids off,” Davidson gibed.

“Shut the hell up!” the short man snarled. He caught Coster eying him as the rifleman spread baked beans one-handed on a slice of bread. “I'd a' made it, no goddam doubt,” Penske said defensively. “Only they had us doing sprints up and down the company street with sand in our packs. Some wise-ass clerk thinks it's funny to laugh at me. I knocked his teeth out, and the bastard's goddam lucky they hadn't issued us ammo. But the goddam government don't want anybody that'll really fight, so they busted me out.”

“Makes a good story,” Davidson said. “
I
think they caught him with his—”

“Dee!” Kerr said.

Penske's eyes unglazed and he slowly lowered his knife back onto the can of spaghetti. He hammered the hilt down with his palm, splashing the red sauce onto the table.

Despite their hostility, Davidson and Penske settled down to a desultory game of cribbage after dinner. Kerr sat in the living room across from the rifleman. “I don't play games that you have to score,” the big black said. “When
I
win, the whole world will know it. When I win, there won't be any polite Orientals pumping mercury into the sea because poisoning children is cheaper than not. There won't be any blue-shirted gestapo beating in their brothers' heads because the bankers say to. There won't be any more nuclear powerplants pouring out their deadliness for a quarter million years.”

The rifleman smiled. He held a jelly glass he had filled with whiskey and had not diluted. “There won't be any three-year-olds orphaned in La Prensa because their daddy was too slow emptying his money drawer.”

“What are you here for?” Kerr demanded.

Coster's free hand played with his rifle. “Now? To kill a Japanese politician in America discussing import quotas.” He swigged his drink.

Kerr leaned forward. “To show the rich that there is justice for the people?” he pressed.

“Human society's a funny thing,” said the rifleman, staring at the reflection of the overhead light in his whiskey. “Very complex. But if it gets enough little thrusts, all in the same direction … lots of people hate lots of other people anyway. Someday enough people are going to hate enough other people that one of them is going to push the button. Then it all stops.”

Kerr's lips tightened. “Bad as things are, I don't believe they've come to that pass yet. Nobody would gain by that.”

“Right. Nobody would gain.”

Penske and Davidson were arguing about the count. The dinette was blurry with cigarette smoke. Kerr stared for a moment at the ex-soldier, then said to Coster, “There'll be bodyguards, you know. Secret Service men.”

“Bodyguards,” Coster snorted. “Like Huey Long had? It was one of his guards who killed him, you know, a bullet ricochetting in the marble hallway. And when King Alexander was killed in Marseilles, the gunman ran right through a line of mounted gendarmes.”

“I suppose you shot him, too?” Kerr said acidly. “Like Kennedy?”

Coster looked at the heavier man with an odd expression. “I wasn't there,” he said. “That was in 1934. The man who did it used a pistol, yes, but there was an automatic rifle backing him up. If it had been needed.” He finished his drink with a long swallow and said, “A push here, a push there.…”

Kerr stood abruptly. “It's been a long day for us,” he said. “Now that I've stopped seeing pavement, I'll go to bed. You can carry your things into the smaller bedroom, Coster. Penske fits the couch better, I think.”

Coster nodded. “I don't have much,” he said, toeing a canvas AWOL bag.

In the dinette, Davidson threw in her hand without a word. She followed Kerr into the larger bedroom, slamming the door behind them.

The rifleman walked over to the table, his weapon muzzle-down in his left hand. He poured a drink and raised it in an ironic salute. “Cheers,” he said to the brooding Penske. He drank and walked into the remaining bedroom without bothering to take his bag.

*   *   *

Penske drove with Davidson on the front seat beside him. Her short hair was dark except at the roots where it was growing in blond. Kerr and Coster looked at each other from side benches in the windowless back of the van.

Over his shoulder Penske said, “Ah, George … the guy who owns the farm, Jesse, I met him when I was at Bragg, see? Could be he won't be around and he's not gonna care what we're shooting, choppers, grenades, whatever. Only maybe you better stay in the back, you know? It'd be better if Jesse didn't, you know.…”

“Jesse doesn't like his black brothers, is that it?” Kerr said easily. His face worked and he added, “Don't have much use fer a nigger 'cept to kick his black butt, that is.”

“Well, George…,” the short man mumbled. “We just needed a place to range in the guns.…”

“That's all right, it's no fault of yours,” Kerr said. “Or your friend's.” He looked over at the rifleman. “You see what they do, splitting natural allies so that they'd rather tear each others' throats out than both tear at their oppressors. Turning humans into beasts.”

“Humans are beasts, of course,” Coster said without emphasis. “Whether or not Darwin was right, he was convincing on that score. I think that's why the concept of werebeasts is so much less terrifying today than it was in the Fifteenth Century. We're all basically convinced that man-beasts are normal reality. Hieronymous Bosch and his constructs of part flesh, part metal … that I don't think we've outgrown. Yet.”

“Is that all injustice means to you?” Davidson asked sharply. “That we're all beasts, so what? Did you just get out of your flying saucer or something?”

Coster looked at her, his fingers toying with the selector switch below his rifle's gunsight. “Viewpoint, I suppose,” he said. “But no, I'm human. Funny, I used to wonder what aliens … creatures from space, that is … would look like. I thought they might look just like you and me.” He began to laugh brittlely.

No one in the van spoke again during the remainder of the drive.

After nearly an hour on the road, Penske pulled off on a farm track. A gate stopped the van immediately. The swarthy man jumped down, unhooked the chain, and tugged the sagging frame out of the way. As he got back in and slipped the van into gear, he explained, “Jesse said he'd loop it for me, not run it through the bars.”