Walking Back The Cat Read online

  This time the blood seeped back into her fingernail bed with excruciating slowness.

  Robert Littell

  phone ring across the state in Houston. Haifa dozen rings later someone

  picked up the receiver. Parsifal fed quarters into the slot. "Is this ?" He

  read off the phone number of the booth.

  "You have a wrong number," a man announced, and hung up.

  Ten minutes later, the time it took for the cutout in Houston to get to a public booth, the phone under Parsifal's fingers rang. He snatched the receiver off the hook.

  "Did the deal go through?" a voice asked. It was pitched high and had a metallic sound, which meant that a speech-altering device was being used. "Did you acquire the Starr single-action 1865 percussion revolver in question?"

  "The person I negotiated with turned out to be a woman."

  "Women have been known to sell rare guns too."

  "You led me to believe the seller was American."

  "I pass on what La Gioconda tells — " The voice from Houston was drowned out by the roar of jet engines revving on the runway.

  "I lost you," Parsifal yelled into the phone.

  "What La Gioconda tells me, I pass on. How do you know the seller was not American?"

  "She spoke with an accent."

  "America is a melting pot. Lots of people speak with accents. Me, for example."

  "She had a gold tooth in her mouth. An incisor. Americans don't have gold incisors; they have porcelain incisors."

  "So she was European."

  "She was wearing a wristwatch. I recognized the mark. It was a Lake Baikal. Lake Baikals are manufactured in Russia."

  "Nowadays Lake Baikals are exported."

  "Just before we concluded the deal for the revolver, she crossed herself."

  "A lot of people turn superstitious in the presence of lethal weapons."

  "She crossed herself the way someone who is Russian Orthodox crosses herself, with three fingers of the right hand bunched to represent the Holy Trinity. Then she said something in Russian."

  "She was praying you would pay top dollar for the Starr. Not many of them turn up on the market."

  Parsifal was irritated. In the old days, when his instructions had come directly from Moscow Center, he had been trusted with the identity of his

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  targets. Now that his instructions came from Prince Igor, he seemed to have been cut out of the loop, as the Americans put it. "She wasn't praying," he remarked in a tired voice. "She spoke Russian like a native. She said, Yd by otvergalo diavola no eto ne vremya iskat vragov.' '

  There was a snicker on the other end of the phone line. Le Juif was savoring a private joke. " 'I would denounce the devil, but this isn't the time to make enemies.' Sounds as if she had a sense of humor. Get to the point, make a long story short. What do I tell La Gioconda? What does La Gio-conda tell Prince Igor? Can he add an 1865 Starr Arms Company revolver with the inspector's *D' stamped on the barrel to his collection?"

  "She was about to sign a bill of sale when she developed a medical problem. Her fingernails turned pale as death."

  "Why didn't you say so in the first place? La Gioconda will be sorry to hear it. Prince Igor will go into mourning." There was a pause. "Are you still in the market for rare guns?"

  Parsifal bristled. "What kind of a question is that?"

  "You cracked once . . ."

  "That's ancient history. I'm open to propositions."

  "Have you given any thought to the Jogger?"

  "It could be done."

  "When? Where?"

  "The governor has asked him to come to New Mexico —there's a fund-raising dinner, a police academy graduation, a groundbreaking ceremony. It's not the kind of invitation the Jogger would turn down."

  "You're our wetwork specialist. Come up with a scenario."

  The phone went dead in Parsifal's ear.

  Robert Littell

  Everybody in the pool parlor heard the bone crack. The Swede fell back, his shirt was hanging off his shoulder, he was staring down at his right hand dangling from his right wrist. He couldn't fucking believe it!"

  Finn was determined to go ahead with the flight. Of medium height, lean and hard, he wrestled the last of the four propane canisters into the old wicker gondola with The Spirit of Saint Louis painted on the thin copper plaque bolted to its side.

  His face a mask of anguish, Irish Stu turned on Finn. "For the sake of the blessed Virgin, abort the bloody launch and take what you got coming."

  "If they send me up I'll lose the Spirit."

  Finn buckled the propane canister to the gondola's aluminum frame with army surplus belts, then wrapped the twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun in newspaper and stashed it in the duffel bag lashed to the frame. He waved at the Chicano kid Jesus who dried the dishes Finn washed at Irish Stu's all-night diner. Jesus kicked the toggle, starting the giant fan that worked off the car battery. Then he held up the hooped crown the way Finn had taught him so that the fan was aimed into the hollow of the air bag.

  Its nylon skin still rippling, the balloon stirred, then lifted lazily off the ground. Cursing the sins of saints under his whiskey breath, Irish Stu fought to free two fouled lines. A sudden gust stirred up dust in the field behind the diner, pushing the envelope to a forty-five-degree angle. Finn lit off the two propane burners, worked the nozzles until they were directed at the crown and turned on the blowtorchlike flames. A bubble of hot air seeped into the balloon. It reeled drunkenly, then billowed and swung upright as the sixry-thousand-cubic-foot envelope filled with air heated a hundred degrees hotter than the outside air.

  The Spirit of Saint Louis strained against its mooring lines.

  Laughing wildly, Jesus pitched Finn's banjo into the gondola. "Hey, man, you don't wanna go to heaven wit'oud your music maker."

  To the north, the thick sullen sky closed over Seattle like a fire curtain. A soundless spark of lightning knifed through the towering thunderheads. "This is a bloody crazy way to travel," Irish Stu cried. "You'll be wanting the luck of the Irish only to clear the power lines."

  "If I can get her off the ground fast," Finn said, following his own thoughts, "I ought to stay ahead of the thunderheads and joyride the jet stream."

  Below them on the valley road a blue-and-white sheriff's cruiser came tearing up the long pitch toward Irish Stu's. The light on the cruiser's roof

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  was throbbing like a pulse, which meant the cruiser's siren must be on, though its shrill wail was lost in the whine of the wind.

  Jesus caught sight of the police car heading up the hill. "Go, go, go for it, man!" he whooped. Darting excitedly around the gondola, he slipped the mooring lines attached to stakes set in the ground.

  "Watch out for the thunderhead breathing down your neck," Irish Stu screamed into the wind. "The bastard'll suck the Spirit up to thin air. If your blood don't freeze you'll suffocate for lack of oxygen."

  Its siren shrieking, then suddenly coughing off, the police cruiser bounced across the dirt field and skidded to a stop yards from Irish Stu. Two burly deputy sheriffs vaulted from the car and leaped for the lines trailing from the wicker gondola. One of them managed to catch hold of a line, but it rope-burned through his fingers as the nylon air bag lifted off at a sharp angle, the gondola trailing after it like a pendulum jammed at one end of an oscillation. Drawing his pistol, the second deputy sighted on Finn, but Irish Stu lunged for his wrist and wrestled the weapon aside. Dancing furiously around them, the Chicano Jesus cursed in Spanish the deputy sheriffs and their mothers and the mothers of their mothers.

  From the gondola, Finn flung fragments of phrases back at the earth. ". . . to rise above the demon . . . ," he yelled. ". . . to start fresh . . ." He shouted something else about needing to find a backwater where he could put the violence behind him, but his words were drowned out by the gas sizzling in the nozzles.
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br />   Out of the corner of an eye Finn spotted the neon "Irish Stu's" atop the diner roof careening toward him. He braced for the collision, but it never came. Whipped by the wind, the gondola snapped off a television antenna, then grazed the top branches of the poplar beyond it on its way up.

  "Oh work the bloody nozzles!" Irish Stu screamed. Catching his breath, he crossed himself fiercely. As the gondola suspended from the yellow-and-black balloon skimmed over the high-tension lines, he let the air seep out of his lungs. "Holy Mother of God," he whispered hoarsely, "a man could wind up stone cold dead trying to rise above the demon."

  Behind Irish Stu, the Chicano kid Jesus scratched angrily at his pockmarked cheek as he gazed after The Spirit of Saint Louis, now a bright speck clawing like a crab across the grim sky. He was bitterly sorry he hadn't coiled one of the mooring lines around his wrist and hung on for dear life; sorry he hadn't said fuck you to gravity too.

  Walking Back the Cat

  numbness, but his fingers moved awkwardly. The few notes he produced were whisked away by the wind. He thought of lighting off the one-burner camp cooker and brewing instant coffee but decided it was too risky; his fingers were too stiff, his gestures too clumsy, he might set fire to the gondola. Crouching, he nibbled a granola bar instead and studied the National Geographic map taped to one of the canisters.

  His pocket compass showed the Spirit on a heading of one six zero magnetic. Climbing to his feet, Finn leaned out of the gondola, looking for landmarks. He was drifting over a good-sized city. He spotted another town about twenty-five miles to the southwest, and a thin sickle-shaped lake glistening in the morning sunlight beyond it. He checked the map again. The sickle-shaped lake had to be the Rye Patch Reservoir west of Mill City, which meant the city under him was Winnemucca. He made a quick calculation and discovered that he had covered roughly five hundred and fifty miles in twelve hours. He had used up two of his four propane canisters keeping the Spirit at five thousand feet so he could ride the underbelly of the jet stream. If he descended, he would find warmer air but slower winds. Since the object of the exercise was to put as much distance as he could between the Spirit and Seattle, he decided to hang out at five thousand while there was daylight. When the sun went down, he would too. He removed a glove and inspected his fingernails for the telltale blue that indicated oxygen deficiency, a bit of tradecraft he had picked up from Irish Stu. He checked the altimeter, gave the balloon a ten-second shot of hot air, then curled up on the deck of the gondola with his head on his arm, pulled a blanket over his body and dozed.

  The sun was overhead and shining in Finn's face when a sonic shock wave from a high-flying jet slammed into the balloon, jolting him awake. He checked the altimeter, saw he had lost altitude. His heading was holding, but the wind had slowed to fourteen knots. Twenty or so miles dead ahead, Kawich Peak loomed in the Spirit's flight path. Unless he could find a current, he would be sucked onto the rugged slope of the 9,400-foot mountain. He tugged on the cord that opened the maneuvering vent in the top of the envelope, letting a gulp of hot air escape, giving the balloon negative buoyancy. It descended to 4,400 feet, but the north-northwesterly gusts blowing the Spirit onto Kawich Peak held steady. Anxiously, Finn pulled on the cord again. The Spirit lost more altitude. Leveling off at 3,800 feet, he felt the breath of a different wind on his cheek. Minutes later the balloon was riding a southerly current that swept

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  it past the sun-drenched westerly slope of Kawich, which towered over the tiny balloon, its peak lost in mist.

  With the sun staining the clouds on the horizon, Finn made out the flickering tinsel of Las Vegas off to port. He dozed again, waking every hour or so to check the heading and altitude and give the envelope a shot of hot air. Over the Mojave Desert the current appeared to bottom out. The Spirit veered, drifting in an easterly direction. At first light, with the Grand Canyon rutting the earth's crust to port and the scab of Flagstaff off the starboard bow, Finn patched into his fourth propane canister. He used the nozzles sparingly, letting the Spirit settle lower and lower as it floated lazily across Arizona. Late in the afternoon, with a quarter of a canister left, ground winds carried him into New Mexico. As the sun cut through the clouds toward the horizon behind him, he pulled hard on the cord, opening the maneuvering valve. The altimeter began to unwind as the gondola settled toward the forest. Deer grazing on the flank of a hill caught sight of it and bounded off. By now the balloon was so low that quail nesting in the tops of ponderosa pines beat into the air in fright. Coyotes howled at the Spirit sailing over their heads.

  Skimming wooded hills that stretched as far as the eye could see, Finn searched desperately for a landing site. As the shadows lengthened, the needle on the pressure gauge of the last propane canister fluttered against the red danger zone. Still he could not make out a clearing in the woods. He took a quick look at the map and reckoned he was over an Indian reservation, with no sign of civilization for thirty miles. If he was forced down in the forest, the gondola and the balloon would certainly be wrecked, and he could be killed.

  With the pressure gauge showing empty, the Spirit skidded over a gushing stream that plunged in a needle-thin fall down sheer chalk cliffs into a small oval mountain lake. Beyond the lake the gondola grazed the top branches of scrub oaks jutting from a rise. Up ahead Finn noticed a trail cutting through the impenetrable forest of scrub oaks toward a murky haze hovering over the next rise. From a distance it looked like an Indian smoke signal.

  As the Spirit approached, the haze dissipated, revealing a town.

  Robert Littell

  the Sacred Lake. Eskinewah Napas must have seen it at the same time, because he stood up in the tree house and pointed. "Lookee what we got here!" he called. Victorio and Geronimo, gone to ground next to an old bathtub filled with rainwater, came out from behind their hiding place uncertainly. Victorio plucked the black feather from his hair and used the end of it to scratch at a nostril. "If this is some kind of White Eye trick ... " he started to say, and then he too spotted the smudge of color. "It's a balloon!" Doubting Thomas called, "and it's heading our way." An instant later the three Apache warriors, whooping wildly, were flying across fields planted with corn toward the footbridges over the river. Stumbling down the ladder, Eskinewah Napas set off after them. "Wait up," he yelled breathlessly. "It might be White Eyes coming to raid the reservation."

  Robert Littell

  Something in the Indian's tone riveted Finn. He peeled off his desert jacket, climbed out of the gondola and started folding the air out of the yellow-and-black envelope that lay on the ground. "The wind," he replied with a tight smile.

  An Indian with a shaved head whooped contemptuously. "If the wind brought you, the wind sure can take you away again."

  A dozen young braves, some of them smoking thick hand-rolled cigarettes, began to close in on the gondola. The one-armed Indian drew a long double-edged bone-handled knife from his waistband. "Cut into strips," he told the others, "the nylon will make great banners for our feast day."

  The shimmer of the blade caused Finn to catch his breath. The pulse throbbing in his temple sounded like the hooves of the demon kicking up silent storms of sand as it galloped past. In the pit of his stomach, the desire to ride the demon stirred again. He backed up until his back was against the gondola and reached in, feeling for the stock of the shotgun.

  A woman with dark, short-cropped hair and a fringed skirt that stirred up dust around the painted toenails of her bare feet appeared at the edge of the circle of Indians. Her head cocked, the barefoot woman took in the gondola with The Spirit of Saint Louis written on it, then eyed Finn. "Say hey, Saint Louis," she called, taunting him. "If you don't know where you're goin', why, any wind'll get you there, you bet."

  A short, stocky Indian wearing threadbare corduroys and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a beaded headband over his long steel gray hair pushed through the crowd. His bare arms and forehead were smudged
with the grease stains of a garage mechanic. He was holding the hand of a thin dark-skinned boy in cutoff jeans and streaks of black and vermilion paint on his face. "You got to be real dumb to argue with the wind," the Indian, who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, declared gravely, staring down the young braves circling the gondola. "You got to be real stupid to turn away what it brings you." He released the boy's hand and approached Finn. "The sacred winds have carried you to a time warp that goes by the name of Watershed Station," he announced.

  On the porch, a toothless old Indian thrust himself out of his wicker wheelchair. Grasping the railing with one hand, brandishing a cane with the other, he called weakly, "Don't give 'im the time of day, Skelt. Loose lips sink ships."

  'You tell 'em, Floyd," shouted the Indian woman behind his wheelchair.

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  Finn turned back to the Indian in corduroys. "I didn't see a Watershed Station on the map."

  "Watershed was a ghost town until we evicted the ghosts. It is the geographic heart of the Suma Apache Reservation. I am Eskeltsetle, the Suma headman, which is pretty much the same thing as being mayor of Watershed."

  "Name's Finn."

  "Finn what? What Finn?"

  "Just Finn."

  Eskeltsetle searched Finn's face in the fast-fading twilight. The old Indian's eyes narrowed, letting in less light and more information. He remarked the high, chiseled cheekbones, the dark eyes set slightly further apart than usual, the unwavering gaze of someone who could turn extremely violent at the crack of a dry twig.

  "You got Indian blood in you," Eskeltsetle said.

  "My father was part Navajo."

  "The Navajos and Apaches were once a single people," the Indian said. "We spoke the same Athapaskan language, we hunted the same valleys, we prayed to the same Great Spirit."

  The Suma headman dipped his thick fingertips into a small beaded buckskin pouch tied to his belt and brought out a pinch of hoddentin, a sacred powder made of pollen. Raising his fingers to his lips, he blew the hoddentin into the air. A breath of a breeze carried it toward Finn.