Klein let go of him and watched with his heart in his throat as his friend took three unsteady paces towards the rising sun. As Coley took a fourth his leg gave way beneath him and his big, lumbering frame crumpled into the ground. Klein and Devlin rushed over.
‘Sit me up,’ wheezed Coley.
They lifted him up between them. Coley buckled with pain. He was panting now, barely conscious. His eyes struggled to focus on Devlin. He raised the journal still clutched in his fist and pressed it into her hand. Its pages were bloody.
‘Like mah fam’ly t’ know, I ain’t just a . . .’ He broke off as he threw up a mouthful of blood and shuddered and heaved for air.
Tears tumbled unchecked down Devlin’s face. ‘I’ll find them,’ she said, ‘I promise.’
Coley looked at her and smiled and nodded. Devlin glanced at Klein. Then she bent forward and kissed Coley on his bloody lips and stood up and walked back towards the gates. Klein and Coley were left alone, looking at the sun.
‘Pea Vine Special callin’ all aboard,’ said Coley.
He grabbed Klein’s hand and squeezed.
‘Glad we both of us catchin’ it th’ same day,’ he said.
Coley’s face grew misty before him and Klein nodded. He couldn’t speak. His jaws ached with clenching them. Coley’s yellow, bloodshot eyes blinked their long slow blink for the last time. He took a great breath through flared nostrils.
‘Damn, smells good,’ he said.
Then the great black rock that was his head fell forward and the Frogman was dead.
When the sounds in Klein’s chest grew quiet and still he laid Coley out on the ground and stood up. A convoy of vehicles was rumbling up the road towards the prison. National Guard units. Klein didn’t much care any more. He looked down at Coley, the craggy face restful in death, then he turned away and went back through the gates.
Devlin was waiting for him.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She nodded. The tunnel was swarming with guards, yelling at them and at each other as the National Guard trucks roared towards the gates. They walked back into the chaotic reception hall and Reuben Wilson grabbed Klein’s arm. Behind Wilson stood Victor Galindez.
‘Cletus is sendin’ the army in, man.’ Wilson held one arm across his midriff and stood slightly bent forward. There was blood clotted into his hair.
Klein looked at Galindez. ‘Cletus? Where’s Hobbes?’
‘Relieved of duties,’ said Galindez. ‘Ill health.’
‘Great. Why the army?’
‘Stokely Johnson got Agry and fifty or sixty his diehards bottled up in D block. They gettin’ ready burn ’em down. I know Stoke.’ Wilson tapped a finger to his temple. ‘Ain’t nothin’ up there but smoke. He’ll do it.’
‘If I tried really hard,’ said Klein. ‘I could probably care less. Just.’
‘Agry has taken all the hostages in there with him,’ said Galindez. ‘Twelve men.’
‘Then I’m sorry for them,’ said Klein.
‘Johnson won’t back down ’less Agry does,’ said Wilson, ‘and even then only maybe. That muthafucker did some things.’
‘I know,’ said Klein. ‘I was there.’
Galindez said, ‘If Johnson burns down D block Cletus will have no choice. He’ll have to send in the guard.’
‘Be a bloodbath, man,’ said Wilson.
Klein said, ‘What’s this got to do with me?’
‘I can maybe talk Stoke down,’ said Wilson, ‘but only if Agry surrenders first.’
‘You’re not going back in there,’ said Klein.
Wilson looked at him. ‘My people, Klein.’ He glanced at Devlin. ‘Or maybe they just scumbags.’
Klein didn’t speak. As he realised what was coming he looked at Devlin for moral support. She stared back at him with fear then turned to Galindez and Wilson.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Agry has no more reason to listen to Klein than he does to either of you.’
Wilson read the distress in her eyes and nodded. ‘Guess you’re right.’ He glanced at Klein.
As the meaning of the legacy Earl Coley had unwittingly bequeathed him dawned on Klein’s brain he knew that Wilson saw it in his face. And he knew that there was no way out.
‘That’s not strictly true,’ said Klein. ‘I don’t know if I ever told you this, but Coley was a fucking old woman.’
Devlin looked at him with dread. Klein nodded to Wilson.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’
Wilson glanced at Devlin. Guilt flitted across his features as he saw the anguish in her face. He and Galindez left.
‘You really think you can make a difference?’
‘Before he died Coley told me that Agry is HIV positive.’
Klein sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. The raw nerve-ends in his palms no longer registered. His ribs and back were a blurred mass of pain. The knife wound in his calf had turned stiff and tight. And he was tired.
He said, ‘If Agry’s people knew about that I don’t think they’d be so keen to go down with him.’
Devlin touched his face and she was with him. She was with him. Looking at her bloodshot eyes and dirty, knife-scarred face Klein reckoned she’d never looked more beautiful.
‘Don’t speak,’ he said.
She kissed him and he kissed her back. After a moment he found himself grinning stupidly and she pulled back and looked at him.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You just gave me a hard-on,’ he said.
And Devlin grinned too. ‘Bring it back in one piece. Even if you don’t bring anything else.’
Then Klein collected Reuben Wilson and they walked out through the giant wooden gates and back across the yard towards the prison.
THIRTY-THREE
AS HE AND Wilson limped towards the entrance to General Purposes, Klein saw three white cons hanging by their necks from the upper bars of the gate. Closer still, Klein saw that one of them was naked from the waist down and had had his cock and balls hacked off. Wilson avoided Klein’s eyes. They entered the wing.
This time the lights were on and had Klein chosen to inspect the carnage and detritus, he could have done so more closely than the last time he made the walk, with Hank Crawford on his back. But he did not so choose. He kept his eyes straight ahead and Wilson at his left shoulder. They passed a bunch of blacks and Latinos squabbling dangerously with each other. As Wilson walked by some of them murmured his name. At the far end of the corridor a mass of men milled around the central watchtower. As Wilson and Klein got closer the frenzied, excited yells of the men sounded familiar to Klein’s ears. Since the previous afternoon the identities of the men had changed and so had the colour of their skins, but the impulses remained the same. Klein remembered Boltzmann’s Constant: disorder always increases in a closed system. He wondered what the converse was. Now that total disorder had triumphed, what was next?
As more and more men recognised Wilson and the word spread ahead of them there was a ripple of fresh excitement. Faces grinned, called out greetings, fists were raised in salute. Where Klein caught a man’s eyes, and he tried not to, he found anger and suspicion directed against him. They reached the atrium and the crowd parted to form a passage for them. Above their head arced the glass dome and its encircling balcony. The lights in the atrium weren’t working but the wasted light falling from the gates of the six radiating blocks provided illumination. There was a strong smell of fuel. A few yards from the sallyport to D block were several drums, buckets of heavy dark liquid, one of the stainless steel cooking vats from the kitchen: all full of fuel oil. Throughout the crowd, here and there, men were smoking joints and cigarettes. If they didn’t incinerate themselves first, they were going to pay Agry’s men back in their own coin. The gate to D block itself was shut and behind it Agry’s crew had heaped mattresses up to chest height against the bars. As Klein watched he saw the men inside flinging water onto the mattresses by the cup and bowl and bucket. Their faces were
pinched with the resolution of the doomed.
‘Stoke!’
Klein turned at Wilson’s shout. A space opened in the crowd. Sitting on a swivel chair lashed in place on the back of a laundry trolley in the gateway to B block was Stokely Johnson. His nose and face around the bullet wound were hideously swollen. Above the swelling his eyes glittered with malice. He saw Wilson and the malice moderated, but not by much. Klein stopped at the edge of the circle and Stokely looked at him briefly without reacting. Wilson held out his hand. Stokely nodded and gave it a short hard squeeze.
‘Got the muthafuckas on their knees, Stoke,’ said Wilson.
Stokely nodded again. He opened his mouth and spoke slowly.
‘Back gate D is sealed. They got nowhere to run.’
‘Where’d you get the gas?’
‘Tank in the generator shed.’
‘You done good, man.’
Stokely nodded. There was a pause. The men in the crowd watched expectantly. Wilson took a step back from the trolley. ‘I want you to let ’em go, Stoke,’ said Wilson.
The crowd muttered. They waited. Stokely shook his head.
‘We got most of the ofays stuck in A, shittin’ out their lives. I gave ’em a chance to come out and stand trial. That’s mo’ than they gave us. Only muthafuckas left in D is them that wants to die.’
There was a bellow of support from the mob. Klein felt the hairs on his arms prickling. Wilson waited for the noise to die down.
‘They got the National Guard out there.’
‘Fuck the National Guard.’
‘You try burn down the screws Agry got hostage in there they’ll ice our guys on the rear gate like that.’ Wilson made a brief jerking-off gesture with a hollowed fist. ‘They’ll spring Agry’s people to save the hostages, then they’ll come in here and put the fire out with our blood. Ain’t a single peckerwood in them army trucks out there who ain’t spent his whole life dreamin’ ’bout this. Niggers in a barrel and a reason to kill.’
Stokely Johnson raised his voice: ‘We ain’t scared of dyin’! But ’less we make a stand now, no one ever know who we are!’
Wilson walked to the edge of the mob and grabbed a razor from someone’s hand. He slashed the tape around his belly and ripped it open with both hands. He displayed the huge scar running from his sternum to his crotch.
‘Thisis who I am!’ said Wilson.
There were a number of gasps and exclamations.
‘You all know where I come from.’
Murmurs of assent.
‘Those muthafuckas burned us down. They beat us down. They pissed in our faces when we was chained on our fuckin’ knees. And they’ll do it again tomorrow, and nex’ week, and nex’ year and the year after. I know. I know it better than you all. But they’re only men. We just gotta be more men than they are.’
He turned back to Stokely.
‘That’s who we are.’
Stokely’s eyes scanned the men’s faces around him. They came to rest on Klein. This time a grudging recognition flickered in them. Klein looked back.
‘You gonna send the Doc in there?’ said Stokely.
‘He can get Agry’s guys to surrender. To us. They started this. We finish it. We finish it right, the way they don’t expect us to. The way they don’t know how to. We let ’em walk out.’
Wilson paused and looked around the circle of faces. They were his again. He nodded to Stokely.
‘You want to go in later and cut off Agry’s dick I’ll come and hold him down for you.’
It was enough. Stokely nodded. And Klein found the faces turning towards him. Thanks, guys. He glanced over to D block. White heads were craning over the barricade, trying to listen. He turned back.
‘Pull your people off the rear sallyport,’ said Klein.
Wilson nodded and beckoned someone over, gave him instructions. Klein walked over to D block.
A tall, rangy face in wire-rimmed glasses appeared over the piled mattresses. If it was possible to be pleased at all at that moment Klein was pleased to see Tony Shockner. Maybe he wouldn’t have to talk to Agry at all, or about his fucking infection. Shockner looked anxious but pleased to see him too.
‘Tony.’
‘Klein,’ said Shockner. ‘What’s the score, man?’
‘You’re about to get wiped out in the fourth quarter.’
Shockner nodded. ‘I reckon. We got any plays left?’
‘Concede,’ said Klein. ‘Wilson will let you through, screws first.’
‘We trust him?’
‘You trusted Agry,’ said Klein. ‘Can’t do any worse.’
Shockner looked at him through the bars for a long time and Klein saw the debate raging in the younger man’s head.
‘Semper fi,’ Shockner said.
Klein thought of his father and Agry’s perversion of the Marine Corps motto suddenly angered him.
‘Semper fi my balls,’ said Klein. ‘Agry fucked you all. He doesn’t give a shit for you or Claude or anyone else.’
‘Nev’s a hard ass and maybe he was wrong ’bout this, but he’s a right guy. He’d take a fall for any of us.’
‘Agry’s dying,’ said Klein.
Shockner looked stunned.
‘You understand?’ said Klein. ‘He’s gonna die anyway. Soon. That’s why he doesn’t give a shit.’
‘What’s he dyin’ of?’ asked Shockner.
‘Does it matter?’ said Klein.
‘Cancer?’ said Shockner.
Looking at his face Klein realised how much Shockner needed to preserve just a little of the loyalty and admiration he’d invested in Agry. If Agry’s brutish charisma had willed and battered Claude into being his wife, then Shockner was his son. Klein didn’t really care what Shockner needed or believed. He just wanted to go home. He nodded.
‘Yeah, the Big C. One too many Luckies,’ he said. ‘But remember, Semper fi’s supposed to work both ways. He owes you.’ Klein nodded at the pinch-faced figures hovering behind Shockner’s back. ‘And you owe them.’
The balance swung in Shockner’s mind. He stepped back from the bars and called instructions to his men.
Klein leaned his forearms agaisnt the gate and his forehead on his arms and listened to his pulse beating through all the holes and bruises in his body. Then he thought: it’s over. He could walk away and no one would stop him, not even his fucking conscience, and all of a sudden he was bone weary. He heard the damp mattresses being dragged away from the gate. He would’ve liked to lie down on one right then, damp or not, and sleep. Just for a while. The main gates were a long way away. His legs were too weak to walk. A little power nap and he’d be right.
He jerked awake, dazed, as the gate was wrenched open. For a few minutes or seconds he’d been out on his feet. He moved over, resting his back to the bars, as a line of ragged, bloodstained khaki uniforms emerged from D block. Grierson, Burroughs, Sandoval, Wilbur, the other hostages, glancing at him uncertainly, still fearful. Then Agry’s crew started out in furtive ones and twos. They looked even more fearful, knuckles white on their weapons as they defiled towards the narrow passage that had opened through the mass of angry black faces. Klein dug his fingers into his eyes, still gritty with gas and smoke and bacteria and God knew what other shit, and rubbed them. He could do it, fuck, he’d come this far. He was the shotokan warrior. He could walk back to the main gates before collapsing into a coma. If he did it over there Devlin would be on hand to soothe him. Yeah. She’d had a tough day too but he’d had to travel farther than she had, over rougher terrain, so that was kind of fair enough. He just needed to snap out of it and start putting one foot in front of the other.
There was a gunshot.
Even that didn’t make him jump. But he was awake enough for his gut to clench with nausea.
‘Klein!’ Agry’s voice, belligerent with drink. ‘Let me see you, you cocksucker!’
There was a flurry of diving bodies all around him. Klein wasn’t up to that stuff any more. And it wouldn’t
have helped. He turned slowly and looked through the bars. Shockner’s body was sprawled face down in the walkway. There was a bullet wound in his back. Klein stepped out into the gateway and held onto the frame on either side with his hands. He wanted to keep standing at least until Agry shot him.
‘What’s wrong, Nev? Run out of faggots to kill?’
Agry stood facing him thirty feet down the walkway. In his right hand, pointing casually at Klein, he held a heavy-looking, short barrelled automatic. Klein didn’t recognise the make. In one of those stupid reveries that crossed his mind at inappropriate moments he told himself he should look into that sort of thing when he got home. Yeah. He could become a gun freak.
‘Still got your little piece, Doc?’ called Agry.
‘No,’ said Klein. ‘I gave it back to Grauerholz.’
‘Yeah? How is Hector?’
‘It hasn’t been his day. How ’bout you?’
‘Me?’ Agry laughed, his drunken voice echoing up into the vault. ‘Well you know, Doc? I have had me a ball.’
‘Enchantment strange as the blue up above,’ said Klein.
Agry’s face sobered. ‘Yeah. I guess it was at that.’
His hand holding the automatic fell to his side. He beckoned with his other arm. ‘Come on in, Doc. I’ll buy you a drink.’
Before Klein could compute that he had no choice anyway he found himself walking as steadily as he could down the walkway of the wrecked cellblock. A good holocaust was just what it needed to finish the job. Agry threw his arm across Klein’s shoulders. Klein managed not to fall. They strolled towards Agry’s cell.
‘Christ, man, you really look like you need it.’ Agry’s breath was saturated with bourbon.
‘Thanks, Nev,’ said Klein. ‘It was good of you to let me get fucked up like this.’
Agry bellowed with laughter. ‘You should be on stage, Klein. Say that’s some kind of a kike name, ain’t it?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I like the kikes. All the best comedians are Jewish. Make damn good doctors too.’
Klein, the shotokan warrior, lover and hero of the Great Infirmary Siege, suddenly felt a profound depression. Agry had reduced him down to a bag of abominable clichés. From the door of Agry’s cell Claude Toussaint, in red underwear, suspender belt, the works, peered out towards them.