Nothing Lasts Forever (23 page)

"Blow it out your ass," Taco Bill said.

"I think he was saying he was going to throw it out the window," Leland said.

"Yes, indeed," Tony said. "At noon. Do you have any objections, Mr. Policeman?"

Leland was thinking of something else, the remark Judy had made about him looking like one of them. Leland was above the thirty-seventh floor, going slowly. He was going to be two weeks in the hospital. All he had to do was live. "Tony, you have an odd sense of social justice. I don't think you'd be as thrilled with the idea of redistributing the wealth if you weren't involved. You'd probably be looking for a secret motive, wondering if somebody was getting a bigger cut than you. That's the way you are — most people listening to you know that already. You made a point before of telling us that you weren't stupid. The most stupid thing people like you do is believe you understand the rest of us. You're not selling revolution, you're just trying to grab a piece of the action for yourself, on your own terms. No sale."

Leland was still thinking of Judy's remark. Tony rarely had been off the thirty-second floor. In the glimpse of him Leland had had moments ago, he had looked reasonably clean, even groomed. Leland looked like one of them? None that he had killed, not Tony, and not the girl who was still alive.

Karl. Karl was the one downstairs. Maybe he had lived through the elevator explosion. He was some tough son of a bitch.

Leland opened the stairwell door slowly. He was on the east side, still believing in Billy Gibbs's advice. He wanted to tell Tony that he hadn't known about Klaxon's — and his daughter's — involvement in the clandestine arms trade. But he knew about the arms trade itself, and everything Tony had said about it was true. Anything that was possible, some human beings were willing to try, apparently including Stephanie. He would be able to explain her behavior when someone was able to explain humanity to him.

Leland got down on his hands and right knee, and pulled himself toward the windows of the east side of the building. The Browning, as big as it was, taped up high between his shoulder blades, gave no sign of coming loose.

Leland and his daughter lived on opposite ends of the continent and saw each other once a year or so. They talked on the telephone every month, when they remembered, or when he was in a hotel room somewhere alone. In Atlanta or Boston, with the day already over in the East, he could call Santa Monica where it was still early evening, and say hello to everybody. He knew Steffie loved him, and knew, too, that sometimes she grew tired of him. Whether he wanted to believe it or not, the passage of time had made him old-fashioned. She had not had an easy life, and in some measure he was responsible — but how much responsibility did he bear for an Ellis in her life, or the compromises she had made with herself to get so involved in this?

Leland wasn't thinking about guilt, he was thinking about distance, the distance between people. In spite of his success, money, and privilege, Leland could be in Atlanta or Boston at the end of a day as lonely as a bum sleeping in the park. When people knew who he was, what he had done, and where he had been in the world, they
envied
him — without ever bothering to inquire about his interior life. What was true for him was true for millions of others. Face-to-face, Taco Bill, whoever he really was, probably couldn't sustain a conversation for more than five minutes, unless it was about radios — or drugs, sex, or rock and roll. Over the air, though, why, this was living!

"Mr. Leland," Tony cooed, "I thought you were going to meet with me."

Leland had the volume low. "I'm still on the stairs."

"I know, I know. You're not so talkative."

"I've talked to killers before. You have nothing to teach me."

"There you go again. Rivers was an international criminal. A crime is being committed here, Mr. Policeman — don't I have the obligation of a citizen to try to stop it? Do you claim that what you have done is morally different from, or superior to, trying to alert the world that another of your great multinationals is up to its elbows with human blood? And as for your daughter, what can a trained dog sire but a blood-thirsty bitch?"

Tony meant to kill her, too. Leland was moving along the east side of the building, still even with the elevator banks. He had been sure that Tony would be between them, but if that had been true, by now Leland would have picked up his voice in the room. Leland pressed the "Talk" button.

"You're getting scared, Tony. You were all right when you were in control, but now you're losing your grip." Leland was still moving. "What makes that, do you think? You ought to have more confidence, figuring how right you are. Or maybe it's because I'm so close to you now. You told me to come up here unarmed and then you blast the elevator you thought I was riding in. You're hiding behind my daughter with a machine pistol and you're shaking in your boots. Where's the Walther you shot Rivers with? That's all anybody needs to know about this. You're the one who brought the machine guns into the building. We were unarmed."

"Are you unarmed?"

"That's what you wanted."

"Well, then, stand up, please. I can hear you without the radio. Turn it off."

Leland turned it off before Taco Bill — or anyone else — could protest. He still didn't know Tony's location. It didn't matter — not yet, anyway: Leland wanted to be sure Stephanie was well clear before he went for the Browning.

"I'm standing up!"

"Hands in the air!"

As Leland raised his arms, slowly, making a show of the pain he really felt, Little Tony emerged from behind the desks on the Wilshire Boulevard side. Leland took a step; he wanted Tony to see him dragging his leg. Tony motioned Stephanie to her feet. She reacted when she saw her father, and Tony grabbed her arm.

"I'm all right, honey," Leland called.

"Very noble, Mr. Leland," Tony said. "Over here, please. You look like a corpse already. Come on. What is the matter with your leg?"

Leland didn't answer. He was making a show of it, listing heavily to the right, which tilted his hand a bit closer to his head. Tony and Steffie were eight to ten feet from the windows, with Leland still too far away to be any kind of shot with the thing Tony carried, still too far to be an easy shot with Leland's Browning. He had always been an excellent marksman; there was some psychological theory about it, having to do with one's sense of self. Stephanie was watching him, but not because she expected him to do something. She started to break down. The last time she had seen him, he had looked human.

"I'm sorry I did this to you, Daddy!"

"The avenger," Little Tony snorted. "Implacable. Your father is a man of infinite illusions. He has a pistol in his collar. The policeman tried to make believe he was unarmed, and now he thinks he is going to be able to save you. He's such a fool. Why should he want to?"

"Out of the way, Steffie!"

"It will give me pleasure to kill both of you," Tony said.

Steffie did not pull away; she threw herself against Tony. It gave Leland the chance to hop forward a few feet more. He wanted her to get clear. This was his job.
"Out of the way!"
He still had the sun behind him. The pistol came out of position just as he'd planned, tape swirling around it. Tony had his eyes on him as he struggled against Steffie. Leland was close enough. He turned and offered his profile, shooting the way he had been taught decades ago, the old-fashioned way, bringing his arm down smoothly, aligned, a piece of machinery. The first shot was the one most pure, unaffected by recoil, and Leland wanted to hit Tony amidships, where the impact would do the most good.

"Kill him, Daddy! Kill him!"
She swung at Tony, hitting him in the face. He was turning the machine pistol toward her when Leland fired, hitting him in the right nipple. He looked at Leland incredulously as Leland's second shot hit him in the shoulder, wrenching him back. Stephanie swung at him again.

"Get clear, baby! I got him and he knows it! "
Tony shot her once in the lower abdomen, not letting go of her wrist. She turned to Leland as Tony tried to aim the machine pistol at him.

"Shoot him! He told me he was going to do this!"
She pushed against Tony again. Leland shot a third time and missed. Eight left. Tony backed up, holding Stephanie. Leland reset himself and started shooting again. The first hit Tony in the stomach, three inches above the navel. Leland squeezed another, driving Tony back against the glass. The third shot was between the other two, and went clean through him, turning the window white. Tony was still clinging to Stephanie, falling backward. Leland fired three more times, not missing, almost cutting him in half.

Tony fell against the window, pushing it out with his back, holding onto Stephanie by her wrist, then hooking her wristwatch with a ringer, falling out, pulling her out with him. He was already dead; Leland heard Stephanie scream all the way down.

Outside, people shouted and cheered. Leland screamed, too, holding Stephanie's cry long after it would have disappeared from the earth forever.

And he kept screaming, staring at the open window, at the brilliant sky beyond. He turned the gun around and looked into the barrel, screaming — if she had done what he had told her to do, she would be alive, unharmed.

She should have trusted him.

She hadn't even listened to him. "Shoot him, Daddy," she had yelled.

"Steffie!"
What did he do now? What was expected of him, the trained dog? The crowd was still shouting, yelling. What did they have on their minds? Did they want more blood — or money?

Were they angry because they thought they weren't going to get the money? He did not want to go to the window. He did not want to see what had happened down below — but just as much, he did not see the necessity for letting anyone know he had survived.

He did not know that he had. He did not know if he cared. He did not know if caring mattered.

He had not moved. He recognized what he was feeling. He had felt it when his mother had died, when his marriage had broken up, and again when Karen had died, the feeling that it was time to quit, that he would be better off dead. It was on him all over again, as if it had never gone really far away after all. Something in us always wanted to die. No forgiveness — never any forgiveness in life. What did it say of a man, if he outlived all the women who had ever loved him? A man like him, with a gun in his hand? What did a gun mean, except death?

He shuffled back to the east side of the building and picked up the radio.

"...inside. Joe, if you can hear me, repeating, we are inside and some of the hostages are beginning to reach us."

He decided to leave the radio on. From the street came a voice calling for the money. What did they used to call those guys at the ballpark? Leather lungs. Six million dollars. For arms. Guns.
Shoot him, Daddy.
Millions for a bridge. Millions upon millions as if there were some use at all to the money madness and the hoarding up of treasure. As if it could add a day to your life. As if you could eat more than two eggs in the morning, Steinbeck once said, which was all you needed to know about the limits of life. What had Stephanie been looking for? What lessons in life had made her believe in it? What had made Little Tony believe in revolution?

Six million dollars. The president of Klaxon was down in the street, looking at the ruin of his corporate headquarters and wondering if his insurer was going to bug out on him. Leland had worked for an insurance company, so he knew it was damned well going to try. Insurrection? Act of war? No, the arms deal itself, which, because it was outside the law, voided Klaxon's coverage. It made Leland smile. How much pain can you inflict on an oil company? How much could it absorb, before the stockholders insisted on people going to jail? He had two rounds left in the Browning, all he needed.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
He started up the stairs again, crying like a child.

In her childhood, he and Steffie played checkers and Monopoly. She'd been born at the start of the war, and he had seen little of her the first four years of her life, one separation lasting almost two years. When he came home, he and Karen tried to make it up to her, sensing that she had been damaged by the war as much as them, but in ways no one could see. They tried to make it up to her... What you don't know in all your worry and concern is that later in your life the memories that matter most are of ordinary life. Checkers and Monopoly. Their relationship had fallen apart again while he'd been drinking, but when she had come to recognize that he'd stopped for good, it had grown better. He hadn't liked her husband, Gennaro.

She would be alive now if he'd surrendered and functioned as an observer or made his way out of the building to call the police. No, he couldn't be sure. He couldn't remember why he had done so many things through the night. In all, it would have been better for him if he had missed the plane in St. Louis. The accident outside the airport could have stopped him. It would have, if he had surrendered to fate. No, he had pulled a gun to keep to his schedule. He should have paid attention to what something had been trying to tell him. It was as if he had been rushing to see his daughter die.

Any cop would tell you, sooner or later you were aware of every mistake you had ever made. He made mistakes under pressure all his life. The mistakes were as much a part of human nature as the situations that created them. Maybe Little Tony had had the time to realize what he had done wrong. Tony had known about the gun behind Leland's neck, but had died anyway. It was Steffie who had made it possible for Leland to put one bullet after another into him. She had been sorry for what had happened to her father. She had held herself responsible. No one had thought of that.

Leland didn't know what would have happened if he had gone for a head shot. He might have hit her. If she had gotten clear, Leland would have tried to empty the Browning into Tony. It might have worked. It might have killed Leland in the process, but that would have been better than this.