Микки Спиллейн: Together We Kill

Max Allan Collins

June 14, 2001

I avoided the street for six months; I kept the hell away from it all that time. Yet, I knew as sure as the grass grows green that the first time I set foot on it she’d be there. It wouldn’t be something that she’d plan or I’d plan, no, nothing so simple as that. It would be that evil little fate that’s followed me ever since the day I was born who would do it. Laughing, always laughing at me. A mean snicker I could hear, and my insides would go all in a knot again because there was nothing I could do about it.

Any other time I wanted to go west from Broadway I’d take some other street, but never this one. It was one block long, but only a little way off the corner was the theatre and her picture outside. Several pictures. That, and a long line of people demanding tickets for “Fair Is the Wind” and the chance to see the beauty that was Claire.

Every day she was there in magazines, newspapers, on billboards, beautiful and blonde with the loveliness of youth and maturity combined, exotically appealing and so alive with that radiance that comes only from the soul. And everybody wanted her. Hollywood screamed for her and Broadway wouldn’t let her go. There was never a moment when she wasn’t surrounded by men who fought for her smiles and who would give anything they owned for just the chance to touch her.

Claire was beauty. Claire was love. She was everything all women want to be and all men want.

But to me Claire was a memory. You see, I had Claire.

But that was seven years ago in a different world, and this was Broadway and there she was in front of me. If I hurried I knew I could catch her before she turned and went into the street level bistro, the one with the big wooden rooster hanging over the door.

But I didn’t hurry, because even the sign of the rooster was part of the joke fate was playing. The Rooster was the place we promised to meet seven years ago. Now it was noon, and the Rooster was only a few doors from Claire’s theatre and she was going there for lunch with never a thought of that last moment in France or of me. So I didn’t hurry at all. I watched her go in and kept going past the theatre.

Now that I saw her, at last, I could forget her and all she’d done to me. I could go up to see Gus Kimball who had his office up the block and tell him to skip the whole deal. It was off, finished, kaput.

Four months ago he’d called me in and said, “Joe, we’re putting that tunnel through in Bolivia. The engineer who’s to tie the job together has to be tops. That guy is you. It’s big money, and a chance to make a name for yourself, even a better one than you have now. How about it?”

That was a silly question. Does a bee want honey? I got one of those grins on my face that wouldn’t wipe off because the world was in my lap. “You bought yourself an engineer, Gus.”

He grinned back and poured a pair of shot glasses full. “We’ll drink to it then. Frankly, Joe, I was worried for fear you wouldn’t take it. It’s a lonely place to be and you’ll be there for a few years. In some respects it isn’t the dream job.”

“Nuts,” I said. “For me it’s beautiful.”

“Fine, then there’s only one other detail to iron out. You know the company policy. It may sound extreme, but we found that it works. All our company officers are required to take their wives on the job.”

My grin was hard to hold. I threw the drink down fast.

“Not that I’m worried,” he added. “Guys like you aren’t without women... not from what I’ve heard about you. Aren’t you engaged?”

“I was. Several times.”

“Lucky you,” he chuckled. “I wish I was thirty and on the brawny side again. Well, you have four months to get things settled. Stop in then and we’ll go over the details and arrange for transportation of your personal effects. A woman needs a lot of pretty things down there to keep her morale up.”

I said something I don’t remember and we shook hands. That was four months ago. Helen and Jean and Gloria and Francis ago. All beautiful, all ready to share a life with me that couldn’t be shared because Claire had been there before them and would always be there before anybody else. That was what my personal fate did to me — let me climb for the top on a ladder that was one big fat rung short.

But there was always the memory of having had her. I could reach back through the seasons to that time when St. Marie was nothing but a huddled mass of hills and houses on the ground below me, and when the moonlight filtered past the canopy of my parachute to sketch a fuzzy round shadow on the meadows...

It was a bad night for the jump. It left you a dangling target for anybody who happened to look up, but it had to be that way. The bridge had to go. The push was due in the morning; a whole army was coming through the slot that had been opened up the day before. But the push wasn’t a secret any longer and the Krauts were moving up an army that could plug the hole. It depended on me, one guy with a sackful of high explosives strapped to his back, and a bridge over a river that ran through St. Marie.

When the bridge went, the Krauts went.

There was only the faintest whisper of sound when I hit the grass. I rolled with the fall and snagged the bottom shrouds to spill the air out of my chute, snatching up the lines and the nylon so the white blob wouldn’t be there to give me away. I was tearing the sod away to bury it when the voice said, “No... m’sieu, not there!”

I went flat on my face, the .45 in my hand ready to spit when I saw her, a white face speaking to me from the folds of a cape. “You damn near died, girl,” I told her. My hand and my voice shook together.

“I die every night, m’sieu. Come with me, please. If I saw you, then perhaps others saw you, too. Quickly.”

She took my arm and led me away from the field to a footpath, then to a low stone house built into the side of the hill. I went in behind her and stood with my back to the door while she covered the windows and touched a match to the candle on the table. When she turned around she saw the gun in my hand still pointing at her stomach.

“I am not of... them!” She spit the word out.

“Maybe not, kid. It’s just that I’ve seen all kinds of traps and I’m not taking any chances.” I grinned at her because I was jumpy and didn’t want her to know that I was scared, too.

She tossed off the cape. Maybe that’s when I fell in love with her. It happened too fast, and all of a sudden I felt slippery inside and wanted to come apart at the seams. I thought a lot of things all at once, but most of all I thought what suckers war made of us, how it could make a man’s mind forget what his body never stops remembering.

She was beautiful even then. Twenty maybe, soft and beautiful, with eyes that burned holes in your soul. Hell, you don’t describe that kind of beauty. You have to think it or imagine it. Her body was the fulfillment of a dream, every movement more than a subtle invitation... a complete giving if you were the man. For anyone else it would be torture. I slid the gun back in the shoulder holster and stood there. She smiled and the room went bright.

“It is the bridge you want, is it not?”

I didn’t answer her. She sat down quickly, her fingers drumming the table.

“We have known this would come. So have they.” She spit it out again. “You will not be able to do it according to your plans, m’sieu. Only this afternoon they have brought in many men to guard the place. They are all over because the bridge is their only weak link. You see, they know.”

“We found that out,” I said.

“And your plans?”