David Morrell - The naked edge

Looking up in triumph, he frowned when he didn't receive the approving looks he expected.

"Mr. Ferguson, it appears you're a menace to society," Bowie said.

"What are you talking about? I shut off the bomb, didn't I?"

"You'd have been dead before you reached it. That guy in the white collar would have dropped you."

"The priest? Give me a break."

"He's not a priest."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"The gun in his hand."

"What gun?" Ferguson groaned when he took a closer look.

"Even if you had shot him and disabled the bomb, it wouldn't have been any consolation to the woman and baby you killed."

"That wasn't a baby! The woman had a gun in the blanket!"

"No."

"But you told me-"

"I made a mistake."

"You lied to me."

"I tested you."

"This is bullshit."

"No, Mr. Ferguson. It's an exercise in discipline and control, qualities you apparently lack."

Ferguson seemed about to raise his gun. Bowie drew his knife from his pocket.

Ferguson stared at the knife and took his hand off his pistol. "I didn't come here to get bossed like I was still in the joint."

"No, you came here for a two-thousand-dollar signing fee and three thousand a month, plus room, board, and training."

"What good is the cash if I can't spend it anywhere?"

"Would you prefer to leave, Mr. Ferguson?"

"Does it show? All these damned mosquitoes. If I stay any longer, I'll get malaria or some fucking thing."

Bowie turned from Ferguson and faced Raoul, his tone hard. "Mr. Ramirez."

Raoul was taken by surprise. "Yes, sir?"

"After your next class, report to my office."

As Raoul crossed the packed earth of the compound's parade ground, he tried not to gaze around in continuing wonder at the sun-drenched encampment. Dense bushes and trees formed the perimeter. To his left were two wooden barracks mounted on stilts. Beyond, students shot at moving vehicles or learned to storm a building. Others practiced hand-to-hand combat, while still others learned how to handle knives. Raoul had no idea where all this was headed, but he knew that he couldn't be happier. Guns, movies, video games. The only thing missing was booze and women. Almost heaven. And he was getting paid for it. The weight of the pistol on his waist, the sense that he was doing something important and doing it well-these brought a straightness to his posture, a fullness to his chest.

He heard an instructor shout, "When you catch your enemy from behind and pull back his head, don't try to slit his throat. You might cut your hand. Grab his chin and mouth so he can't scream. Yank his head back. Stab a kidney. That's the killing stroke. A kidney. Almost instant renal failure."

Pausing outside a corrugated-metal shed, Raoul heard the clang of a hammer against metal. He had no idea why Bowie wanted to see him. His elation at having done well in the shooting house was replaced by confusion about the argument between Bowie and Ferguson and what it had to do with him.

The hammer's angry clang became rapid and insistent. When Raoul mustered the resolve to knock, the noise abruptly stopped.

"Come in."

According to the Bible, Cain had many descendants, one of whom was the first to forge iron. Carl enjoyed that idea, just as he enjoyed the notion that Hephaestus, the son of Zeus, was also supposed to have been the first to forge metal: the armorer of the gods. It was an interesting parallel, for Hephaestus's skill with a hammer and an anvil had an effect as terrible and long-lasting as Cain's murder of Abel. The Greek god's most ingenious creation was an elaborately engraved metal box that contained every evil and disease. The box was given to the seductress Pandora, and when she opened it, she released war, pestilence, famine, and a host of other darknesses. Only one evil did not escape before Pandora closed the box: cruel, seductive hope.

Carl wore gloves, a canvas apron, and safety glasses. Through their dense lenses, he watched the burning coke in his forge, the thick strip of steel beginning to glow the requisite orange color while he worked the bellows. Heating the metal for exactly the right amount of time and at the necessary temperature, he used tongs to remove it from the forge and set it on his anvil. With his powerful right arm, he wielded a hammer, pounding the steel into submission, flattening, shaping. The forge's heat softened the metal, making it malleable, allowing him to impose his will upon it.

Clang!

Aaron.

Clang!

Aaron.

Bittersweet memories seized him. The rhythmic high-pitched din of the hammer on the anvil sounded to him like ricochets, like screams of pain. He pounded harder, then sensed another sound and turned toward the door, where someone had knocked.

"Come in."

The door slowly opened. Raoul stepped apprehensively into shadows that were dissipated by the glow of the forge.

"Come closer. I want to show you something," Carl said.

Raoul did what he was told.

"The knife I'm working on is named after the one the first Jim Bowie carried. You've made the connection? Bowie? The Bowie knife?"

Raoul showed that he'd absorbed one of the lessons Carl had taught him-to admit what he didn't know. "I've never heard of it."

"It's the most famous knife of all time. Bowie was a land speculator along the Mississippi. A knife fighter. An adventurer. He died with Crockett and Travis at the Alamo. In 1827, he used a knife to kill one man and wound another in what's known as the Sandbar Duel. Nobody's certain what Bowie's knife actually looked like. The one I'm making is based on a design from a movie called The Iron Mistress. Alan Ladd played Bowie. But the knife was the true star. It was later used in other movies, Walt Disney's Davy Crockett and John Wayne's The Alamo. When you see the beauty of the finished product, you won't be able to take your eyes off it. A whole generation of knife makers was inspired to take up the craft because of this knife."

Carl remembered the first time he'd seen The Iron Mistress. The old knife maker had taped it off television and lent the video to Aaron and him. The start of the movie was boring: Alan Ladd in frilly clothes trying to make Virginia Mayo fall in love with him. He and Aaron had hooted at the television. But then Ladd went to a blacksmith and showed him a wooden model of a knife he wanted made. The blacksmith got all excited and said he had a piece of a meteorite that he would melt and add to the metal. The knife would have a bit of heaven, he said, and a bit of hell. In the next scene, the knife was finished. It flew through the air and stuck into a post. It had a long, wide blade, the elegant curving lines of which made Aaron and him shout, "Cool!" The handle was black wood with a brass cap. It had Bowie's name engraved in ivory and set into the handle. It had a silver guard and a brass strip on the back of the blade. The purpose of the brass strip baffled Aaron and him until they asked the old knife maker about it, and he explained that it protected the knife's owner during a fight. Since brass was softer that steel, it snagged an attacker's blade and kept the edge from slipping down the back of the knife and cutting whoever held it.

Aaron and he watched the best parts of the movie again and again. There were all kinds of knife fights, especially one in a dark room during a lightning storm, blades flashing. A bit of heaven and a bit of hell. But then the movie itself went to hell when Alan Ladd felt guilty about all the men he'd killed and threw the Iron Mistress into the Mississippi.

Carl came back from his memory. "Pay attention," he told Raoul. "The blade has to be carefully cooled."

Raoul concentrated as Carl used tongs to set the long, wide strip into a metal container of olive oil. That had been one of the old knife maker's jokes-to use olive oil to cool metal and then pour the oil over a salad.