Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

“You wish to shoot.”

“Yeah. A lot.”

“Then I say this. We will go to a range. There I will buy more ammunition, also teach you to shoot. When we are finish, we eat. It will be for us lunch. Dinner also. You agree?”

“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely!”

“After this, you must find Rosalee, if she is still where you say you know. You must bring her to me.”

I said okay, so that is what we did. The range would have been a really stiff hike, but we got lucky and a car stopped for us. It belonged to a guy who was pretty high up in JAKA, according to Naala, although I do not think he was as high as Baldy who was probably the top man. The neat thing about it was that I got to flash my badge, the first time I had ever done it.

The sportsman’s club we were going to was out on the edge of town and about the classiest thing I saw in the whole country. The JAKA had an organizational membership according to Naala. That must have been right, because all we had to do was flash our badges and they let us right in. I got the feeling that most of the members were high up in the government, and the ones who were not, were. You know what I mean. Officially they were not, but they did a lot of favors, and got a lot of favors, too. There was a golf course, a big swimming pool, a casting pool for fishermen, a rifle range, a shotgun range, and a pistol range. All that and more besides, including a bar, a restaurant, a ballroom, and a library. Everything very posh.

Also there was a shop where you could buy various kinds of ammunition, cleaning supplies, and things like that. We rented eye protection and earmuffs, electronic ones that were unbelievably cool.

My gun was a lot simpler than I expected. There was the trigger, the magazine release, and a disassembly lever. That was it. No safety, no grip safety, no little lever in the trigger, nothing like that. Just a long pretty hard trigger pull like you were shooting a revolver double action. The semi-auto I had shot back in the States had a three-position safety lever. Up for safe, down for fire, and down farther for decock. My new JAKA gun did without all that.

That one had a staggered magazine, too, to hold more rounds. This one did not. Just a single column magazine, eight rounds. Like my dad used to say, KISS. It means Keep It Simple, Stupid.

So eight in the magazine, shove the magazine into the grip, shuck a round into the chamber, and off we go. At first I spent way too much time trying to get perfect sight alignment. And to keep it while I pulled that trigger, which was a lot harder. Naala showed me that you did not need it at practical distances. You taught yourself to hold the gun right, got your front sight on the target, and fired. You could not nail the king of hearts that way, but there was not a real good chance the king was going to pull a knife on you. What you could do was score on the chest of somebody with a knife before he got close enough to cut you. Was he going to go down? Probably not, so shoot him again.

So she shot some and I shot some and we had a lot of fun doing it. She was a lot better shot than I was when we started, and when we got finished she was still a better shot. Only just a little, not a lot. Between us we burned up four boxes of ammo, but she said that was good because you wanted to shoot at least a hundred rounds from your new gun to get it running right. Sometimes a new gun would have some problems, like maybe the slide would not close tight now and then for the first forty or fifty rounds, and then the problems would disappear because the parts had smoothed out. That did not happen with my gun, but it got easier to load and the trigger stopped feeling gritty. It still took a pretty hard pull, but the sand was out of the works.

When we got through shooting we went into the dining room and ate. Naala said there was a lot of pricey stuff on the menu, but if we stayed away from it and did not order wine it would not be too stiff. So she had tea and I had coffee and we both had spanakopita with a big salad on the side. When we were about finished, Naala showed me what she had bought for me while I was looking at gun stuff in the shop. It was a watch, not a really nice one but a hell of a lot better than no watch. So I thanked her and we kissed. You know.

After that Naala looked around for a ride home, but she could not find anyone. So we hiked. It had cooled off quite a bit by then and before long the moon rose, so it was not as bad as it sounds. We split up when we got back to the city, me going after Rosalee and Naala home to her apartment.

When I got there empty-handed, she naturally wanted to know what happened. I said, “She wasn’t there, that’s all. The shop was closed, but the lady that ran it was still inside. She let me in when I showed her my badge. I told her I knew all about Rosalee’s hiding there, I was a friend of Rosalee’s, and I wouldn’t bust her if she’d open up with me. But if she wouldn’t, she was going to headquarters. I’d have no other choice but to run her in.”

Naala nodded.

“She opened up. When she had come in that morning, Rosalee had been gone. She had left a note, but the lady couldn’t read it—some foreign language. I said probably I could read it, and she showed it to me. I read it to her, but I kept it. She didn’t mind.”

“You must read it to me also, I think,” Naala said.

So I did: “My husband is ill and needs me. I must go to him. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! If we ever get home I will repay you.” It was signed: “Rosalee Borden Rathaus.”

“This could be the best that could happen for us.” Naala was heading for the phone. A minute later I heard her telling somebody to get on the tracking device they had put on Papa Iason’s bike.

“It does not yet move,” she told me when she hung up. “Soon, I think. Someone know where is Rosalee. About Papa Iason he know, too, I think. Now I go to Papa’s house to watch. You must go to the house near the archbishop’s palace where priests stay. Find Papa Zenon. Tell him what happen and after you do this—”

The door of her apartment opened. It had been locked but not bolted, and maybe I ought to say that. It stayed open for just a second or so while somebody threw something into the room, then it shut quietly. Its quiet click has stayed with me. I still hear it about once a week, when I am almost asleep.

I went to see what had been thrown in, but Naala beat me to it, rolling it over until the face showed. It was somebody’s cut-off head. Thinking back, it seems like it was a long time between the time I realized that and the time I recognized the face. It was Butch Bobokis.

The tracer guys had been right: Papa Iason was still at home. This was even after we had spent almost an hour with five JAKA men who rushed over when Naala phoned to report that Butch’s head was on her living-room floor.

Did I know who he was? Yes, I did and I told them about him, which was a big mistake. I got about a hundred more questions after that, none of them questions that went anywhere. Naala would not even try to tell them everybody who knew where she lived. About the tenth or twentieth she told them they were wasting our time and ought to get on with the real investigation—who had been seen coming into the building, who had been seen carrying something heavy down the street, and all that—they gave up on us and we scooted. I guess it must have been about midnight by then.

Like I said, Papa Iason was at home, but he was talking to somebody else in the parlor. His housekeeper was up, too, in a moth-eaten old robe and curl papers. She got us to promise to wait in the hall. Which we did, for maybe five minutes. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Hurry! Oh, please hurry!” I recognized that voice and forgot about my promise.