William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Bastard’s been at my eggs,” Cavanaugh-Crabbe said. “I knew it.”

He went off and drove a very dusty black car with wide running boards out of a barn, into the yard. I wrote him out a receipt for the car and signed it on behalf of General Patch, CO of the Seventh Army.

“I’ll drive,” I said to Two Dogs. “You cover him in the back.”

Two Dogs prodded the soldier — Azerbaijani, I guessed — into the back of the car.

“If you follow that track there between the fields”—Cavanaugh-Crabbe pointed out the route—“you’ll hit the Le Muy — Fréjus road after five minutes or so. Then turn left.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Thanks very much,” Cavanaugh-Crabbe said. “And could you tell the medicos to come and pick up the dead chappies? They’ve been out in the sun a couple of days now and they’re beginning to hum a bit.”

“Certainly.”

“Much obliged,” he said. “By the way, what’s your name? Very grateful.”

“Todd,” I said. “John James Todd.”

He looked inquiringly at Two Dogs.

“Two Dogs Running.”

“Say again?”

“Two Dogs Running.”

“Oh yes?… Well, jolly good.”

I got into the front of the car. Two Dogs slid into the back beside the Azerbaijani. There was a powerful smell of chicken shit.

I waved good-bye to our host and bumped off down the cart track in the direction he had indicated.

“You’d pay a lot for a vacation like this,” I said to Two Dogs.

It took twenty minutes to reach the Le Muy-Fréjus road, much longer than Cavanaugh-Crabbe had estimated. I stopped the car thirty yards short of the junction. I was worried that we had got lost somehow. I got out and looked round. It was still very hot. The dust that had risen behind us hung in the air. I looked at my watch: four-fifteen — it had been a long day.

There was a scuffle in the backseat. Two Dogs shoved the Azerbaijani out of the car.

“Look at this guy’s pockets, Mr. Todd. Something’s bothering me.”

The soldier stood there, his hands half-raised. The two hip pockets of his tunic were dark with old blood. They were buttoned down and bulging.

“Is he wounded?”

“No. Look at his wrists.”

The man wore two wristwatches on each wrist. I told him in German to empty his pockets. He didn’t seem to understand. I reached to undo the flap on one and to my astonishment he slapped my hands away.

“ Nein ,” he said, taking a pace backwards. He looked nervous, worried. Then, suddenly, he turned and ran into the vineyard.

With a shout Two Dogs was after him. I followed. Two Dogs ran down the aisle of vines, gaining on the soldier easily. He caught up with him on the edge of a small copse of cork oaks and, holding the barrel, he swung his carbine like a club in a wide arc. The butt glanced heavily off the soldier’s head. When I arrived Two Dogs stood over him, gun leveled. The soldier was trying to get up on his knees but kept falling over like a concussed boxer. Two Dogs pushed him flat with a boot. This time the soldier gave up and lay there, flat.

“Check his pockets, Mr. Todd.”

I was out of breath. Dusty sunbeams slanted through the leaves of the cork oaks. The Azerbaijani had a bad gash above his right ear. His eyes were shut, his face was covered in dust and he was moaning slightly. Carefully, with bilious foreboding, I unbuttoned his pocket and reached in. My fingers felt something.

I thought: saveloys, thin German sausages, Azerbaijani biltong.

I pulled out five severed fingers, women’s fingers, old and young fingers, all with rings on them.

I did not scream. I gave a kind of audible shudder, as one does when shocked by sudden cold.

“Jesus Christ,” Two Dogs said.

The man had fourteen ring fingers in his hip pockets. His breast pockets were full of jewelry and more watches. By now I was feeling sick. He was still lying down, moaning slightly.

“What’ll we do?” I asked.

“Maybe we should—”

Two Dogs put the muzzle of his carbine in the man’s left ear and pulled the trigger. The man’s head gave a little jump and then seemed to half-deflate. Then Two Dogs stepped back and fired three shots into his body. Puffs of dust rose from his tunic.

“We’ll say he tried to escape, OK, Mr. Todd?”

“What? Yes, fine. Absolutely.”

We didn’t touch anything. We left the fingers — a small pile of human kindling — beside the body. We walked silently back through the vineyard towards the car. Two of its doors stood wide open. All around us were woods, hills, small fields, vineyards. Some birds soared above in the pale blue sky. Cicadas screeched in the grass at our feet.

Two Dogs patted me on the shoulder.

“Best thing to do. I think we had to do that.”

“What a day,” I said.

“Shall I drive?”

“No, no. Let me. It’ll take my mind off things.”

We got into the car and I started the engine. We bumped down onto what we hoped was the Le Muy-Fréjus road and turned left as instructed. We had gone, I suppose, about four hundred yards when the first bullet shattered the windscreen and there was a metallic punching sound down the side of the car. I felt as though I had been kicked in the thigh and my right foot instinctively drove the accelerator down to the floor. We swerved, plunged off the road into an irrigation ditch. I banged my head and lost focus. My brain was a mist. I felt Two Dogs helping me out.

I stood on the road somehow. Two Dogs kept asking, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I was aware of a damp heat about my torso. Before I fell over I saw the paratroopers advancing on us and I heard the clear accents of my native country.

“Sorry, Yank. We thought youse was Jerries inna fuckin’ Mercedes. Onyboady hurt?”

VILLA LUXE, June 27, 1972

I set off for the beach today longing for a swim. But I turned back after five minutes. My leg was aching slightly.

If we hadn’t shot the Azerbaijani … if I hadn’t volunteered to drive …

Two Dogs had bruised his elbow. I had taken a bullet through my chest, high up on the right side. It smashed a rib, passed through my right lung and ricocheted off my shoulderblade. The big rectus femoris muscle on my left thigh was almost severed, as if by a butcher’s knife. The two lasting consequences of this accident were a limp, when I was tired, and the ruination of my fine first serve at tennis.

Anyway, that sort of “if only” digression is futile. To indulge in it is to place a blind obeisance in the laws of cause and effect. The cause of my bullet wounds was a trigger-happy Scottish para. Any attempt to trace the line further back is doomed. Could we say that my being shot was the result of Leo Druce’s smear campaign in the English press? In one sense that would be entirely accurate. In another it’s perfectly absurd. It was bad luck. Happenstance. The quantum state breaking into one human life. I bear that soldier no grudge.

I convalesced in a large naval hospital near Washington, D.C. I was well looked after — Eddie saw to that. Fresh flowers every day, the best food. The Equalizer , as Two Dogs had told me, had been a considerable success. I had made some money. Lone Star was buoyant, as was its owner. Eddie had great plans, he told me: next we would make Jesse James , then Kit Carson . We could run the gamut of Western folk heroes. When I left the hospital he invited me to come and stay with him in Los Angeles, but I saw out the rest of the war in Ramón Dusenberry’s San Diego home, slowly and steadily regaining my health. I seemed to function surprisingly well on one lung. I wondered why nature had bothered to double up that organ — perhaps in case you got a bullet through the first.