Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“But if it looks as if she’s going to be cleared, Sam?”

They could see the lighted pool beyond a corner of the building. Sam watched The Chunk race off the high board, kicking and yelping on the way down, a rangy boy in close pursuit.

“I’m not as civilized an animal as I thought I was,” Sam said. “The instinct is to find a way to move in on her and let her think she’s conning me. Simple Sam Boylston. Crissy baby, this has been a wretched experience for both of us. I’d like to lease a boat and go back over there and take a look at the area where it actually happened. Keep me company, Crissy baby. Just the two of us. Raoul, that water is so fantastically clear. I can’t reach Staniker. He left the party. She’s the last one left now. That water is too beautiful to drown in. But Leila is down there somewhere. I dreamed about the Muñeca last night, or rather this morning after I got back here. I was in a little boat in the sunshine. I had one of those glass bottom buckets they use. I was looking straight down. It was all lighted up. I saw every one of them down there. They walked around in that slow funny way of people underwater. Carolyn’s hair and Leila’s hair floated. I could see their mouths move but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I knew my boat was drifting away from the spot, and looking down at them was like saying goodby because I knew somehow I could never find that exact same spot again, or tell anyone how to find it. I made some kind of noise that woke me up. I was sweaty.”

“My friend. My good friend...”

“Very, very nice, I think, to let her get her hands on the money. She should have that thrill. Then do you know the best way to do it? What you do is hit her right on the button. Nice short little right hand punch, just slightly overhand. Then you wire her ankles together. You find about ten feet of water. When she wakes up, you talk about the nice money and you talk about how smart she is, and then you roll her off the boat into the pretty water. She’d last a long time I think. If it was going to be over too soon, you could give a little assist with a boat hook. You could watch it all.”

“Could you?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part I don’t know. I talked about the money to Staniker in the hospital. He’d tell her I visited him. What I’ll do is give you enough running room, then I’ll go in and do some dickering. Accept the Francisca tapes as is, boys, and I’ll play you some other tapes.”

“Information you withheld?”

“Because, boys, there wasn’t enough motive to make sense. Does a man who wants to shed his wife take five other people along?”

“More than that, on airplanes.”

“But the bomb is remote. It’s almost abstract. The nut doesn’t know the names, see the faces, let the eyes see him. The nut is in a bed someplace with his heart pumping and the radio on. Boys, it was just today I heard there was a fat basket of cash on that boat, so I came running. And damned if I know what’s on the Francisca tape because my Spanish isn’t that good.”

“Kayd is on there. So why didn’t I come running?”

“That’s one you won’t have to answer. But you and I know the answer. Better roll it, Raoul Kelly.”

Before Kelly got in, Sam bent and looked across at the girl beyond the steering wheel. “Bien viaje. Buena suerte,” he said.

“Mil gracias,” she answered, smiling. “Adios, Señor.”

He turned to shake hands with Raoul, but received instead the gruffly sentimental abrazo of the semi-Americanized latino.

“I will tell Mrs. Boylston you are a remarkable man.”

They backed out. The girl waved. The car waited at the mouth of the drive until a traffic gap large enough to accommodate it came along. Moments later they were lost in the anonymous patterns of all the east-bound flow of red tail lights.

He stood in the night shadows watching the traffic. He had an awareness of all the weight of the night city around him, of all the animal tensions of this single moment in time in this place, a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea. The night was weighted with derelicts and dancers, terminal breathing in wards, clenched fists of women as they pushed each time the pains came, chips in perfect alignment on green felt as men thumbed up the corners of the hole cars just enough to read the news, giggling young men in a chickenwire apartment painting the body of one of their chums a lovely gold, ambulances and tow trucks moving away in separate directions with a load of torn flesh or a load of ripped metal, thousands and thousands of picture tubes all telling the same jokes at the same instant to a hundred thousand living rooms, frantic rumps ram-packing the beach sand under the spread toweling, the simultaneous squirts of red tomato and yellow mustard in a hundred different places to disguise the flannelly taste of fried meat, a thousand simultaneous sobbings, thrashings, swallowings, vomitings, ejaculations, coughings, scratchings, cursings, shy touchings, whisperings, kickings...

He had never considered himself particularly imaginative. Never before had he felt this way about a city, and he knew that it could only be possible in a strange city, and at a time when grief and uncertainty and introspection had sharpened and heightened awareness.

This great Gold Coast became a gigantic cruise ship moving through time rather than space, constantly assimilating the foods, the newborn, the gadgetry, spewing aft the unending tonnage of garbage and waste and dead bodies and broken toys, rolling imperceptibly in the slow tides of history, the passengers unaware that no city is forever, that it will end one day and the eternality of time will cover it in a silence of dust, sand and vines. Each passenger, whether first class or steerage, was compelled to accept the constants of pain and time, greed and need, joy and love, fear and lust, and the iron paradox of self-awareness.

Each passenger knew beyond doubt that he was the only one aboard who could truly experience the ultimates of love and loss, that he was the only one with a secret destiny which would be made manifest to him some day, and that on that day everyone would come to understand what should have been evident to them all along.

So I am an impertinence, he thought. The weight of the night city is the weight of indifference, because they are busy with their own changings of bandages, their own cautious reachings to find out if, after all, there is anyone near enough to touch.

And using my life to buy better accommodations aboard ship is only another way to keep from thinking too often how short the journey is for each passenger. Bix Kayd and Carolyn, Roger and Stella, Staniker and his wife, Leila and Oliver Akard, they are back there in the darkness left forever at that exact moment when they left the big cruise, and we go wallowing along toward one as yet unmarked minute in time, one for me, one for Lyd, one for Boy-Sam, one for Cristen Harkinson, one for Nurse Theyma Chappie, one for The Chunk.

There was a concept, a justification, almost within reach. It was like awakening in the night from a dream, knowing you have The Answer to Everything.

Like the old joke, he thought. Okay, so life isn’t a grain of rice. Get a box, lawyer. Go yell the word from a park somewhere. Become one of those incredible people who have one simplified credo and try to make it fit every wrong in the world. Organic food. Communist conspiracy. Early rising. Do unto others. THINK. Balanced diet. Zen tennis. Auto-hypnosis. Rosicrucianism. Fasting.

Step right up to the cave of mysteries and yell your solution at the audio-lock. Somebody is going to yell the right word some day, and when the door swings open and suddenly we all know the answer to that primary question — Why? — we may find it unendurable to live with that answer.