This time the situation was different. He was making choices that were not part of the program. Wonder Woman told him what to do and when to do it. But when he strayed from the program, her voice turned to static, then disappeared in the wind. That meant one thing: He was on his own. For Smiley, being alone guaranteed a return to his childhood status in Mexico City and a predatory world other people couldn’t imagine in their worst nightmares.
The personality that lived within him at the orphanage had been a victim, a pathetic child who took control of his life by burning himself with cigarettes. Wonder Woman freed him and gave him license to kill and a libidinous joy in the work he did, cleansing the earth of cruel men who had no right to the air they breathed. That was how Smiley saw it.
The only restrictions in the program had to do with conflicts about the targets and self-interest. He didn’t do hits for money alone; the target had to deserve his fate. Occasionally, Smiley worked pro bono. Why not? A Jewish friend of his once told him that a good deed by a Cossack was still a good deed. Smiley couldn’t quite figure out what that meant, but he knew it had something to do with the importance of good deeds.
The second restriction — putting himself at risk on behalf of others — could become an ethical quagmire. A button man in Key West who claimed he had killed forty-five men and seven women had told Smiley, “You got a lot of talent, kid. You’ll probably go a long way. Don’t screw it up.”
Years later, he saw the killer on a television interview inside a maximum-security federal prison. The man’s eyes had the brightness of obsidian, his face the color and expression of cardboard. When asked if he ever felt remorse over the people he’d killed, he said, “I didn’t know none of them.” When the journalist asked about the damage he had done to the victims’ families, the killer said, “I didn’t know none of them either.”
Smiley could not fathom the man’s thinking. How could not knowing somebody make killing acceptable? Was Smiley made different in the womb, like the button man? Or was he the sword of justice? If the latter was true, he had to give up all thoughts of himself. That could be a rough go.
There was still time to leave Purcel to his own fate. Don’t screw it up. Those words may have come from the mouth of a man who stank of salami and red wine and hair tonic, but they were hard to argue with.
Smiley felt like someone had hammered a nail between his eyes. He drove the stolen pickup in a wide circle around the back of the motel. Eighteen-wheelers were passing on the four-lane, headed for Big D or Little Rock or Baton Rouge or New Orleans. All Smiley had to do was join them. Then he would be back inside the program, safe, taking care of himself again, having a little fun once in a while.
Just when he thought he had established a moment of serenity in his head, Wonder Woman’s words came back like a slap.
You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?
A door far down the hall on the motel’s second floor opened, and a man pulling a suitcase on wheels came out and walked to the elevator. The four people standing by the security camera walked in separate directions, as though returning to their rooms or duties. The man in the mask stepped inside the fire exit, then returned when the elevator closed. The blond woman got a step ladder from a broom closet and tried to unload the camera but had no success. Six minutes had elapsed since the four people had assembled.
They approached the door that the man in the mask had pointed at. Then the elevator cables rattled and the wall shook as the elevator stopped on the second floor; the doors slid open. The four people in the hallway stood frozen on either side of the targeted room. No one exited the elevator. The dark-skinned woman who may have been Hispanic walked toward the elevator door, dragging her vacuum behind her. She turned to the others and shook her head. The man in the mask slipped a key card through the lock on the targeted room. The lock made a dry clicking sound. The man in the mask leaned against the door, prepared to burst into the room, his weapon cocked.
Smiley did not like enclosure, in part because of the closets he’d been locked in at the orphanage. Nor did he like the smell of wet towels and washcloths and sheets and pillowcases soiled with BO and people’s coupling. But any port in a storm, even though it was a smelly one. In each hand he held a custom-made .22 Magnum semi-auto. His heart was dilated with adrenaline, his wee-wee swelling, an odor as heavy as the ocean rising into his nostrils, like birth, like Creation itself.
This would be his finest hour.
For whatever reason, caution or anger at the man in the mask or simply a desire to do things differently than the others, the blond woman did not accept the inspection of the elevator and walked toward it. The man in the mask paused, his hand on the room’s doorknob. Inside the elevator was a laundry cart filled to the top with dirty linen and towels. The blond woman stared at it for a long moment, perhaps noting the bulge in the canvas on one side.
The hands of a man whose body resembled an overgrown white caterpillar rose from the piled linen, each hand gripping a blue-black semi-auto. The first round hit the blond woman in the center of the forehead. She went straight down on her knees, jarring the wig off her head and revealing the face of Jaime O’Banion.
Smiley sprang from the laundry cart into the hallway, casually firing a second shot into O’Banion’s mouth.
The man in the mask went out the fire exit. Smiley shot the dark-skinned woman and the man who looked like a prizefighter before they had any idea what was happening to them. Then he opened the fire exit and looked down the stairs. He heard an outside door open and then slam shut. He went back to O’Banion’s body. He couldn’t believe it: O’Banion was alive, his face twitching like a bowl of tapioca. At least his nerve endings were alive. Maybe he could receive messages.
“You still in there, Jaime?” Smiley said. “Better grab your cock. Queer-bait is back in town.”
Smiley fired five rounds into O’Banion’s face, zip-zip-zip-zip-zip, just like that. Smiley straightened up, a stitch in his side. Owie, he thought. He bent his body back and forth like a bowling pin rocking.
He didn’t gather up his brass; nor did he try to destroy the security camera. He limped back into the elevator, straightening his back, trying to get the stitch out of his side. He closed the doors and rode down to the first floor and walked over to the restaurant, his tool bag on his arm, wincing with each step. He ordered toast and coffee from a nice waitress who had a globe and anchor tattooed on the inside of her forearm. She didn’t write down the order.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.
Her eyes drifted away. “You’re leaking.”
Smiley put a hand under his jacket, feeling for the place the stitch had been. He looked at his palm, then bit his lip, thinking. He wadded up a handkerchief and pressed it inside his shirt. “Could I have a fried pie to go? With a scoop of ice cream in one of those cold bags?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
A plainclothes detective banged on Clete’s door with the flat of his fist. A uniformed deputy sheriff stood behind him. Clete opened the door in his skivvies. He looked at the paramedics bagging up the bodies on the floor. “Help you?”
“Yeah,” the detective said. He stared at Clete, recognition swimming into his eyes. “Are you Clete Purcel?”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? What the fuck are you doing here?”