Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“Nice to see you again, sir,” the bellman at the Four Seasons said. Faking it, figuring he couldn’t lose even if he was wrong.

I carried my own bag.

The smartly dressed young man behind the front desk didn’t blink at my field jacket and two-day growth—people in the movie industry are special, right? He found the reservation in a minute.

“You’ll be with us three nights, is that right, Mr. Jones?”

“That’s right.”

“Great! Now, if we could just have your credit card for an imprint …”

“It should all be direct-billed.”

“Let me see.… So it is! We have a lovely large room for you, sir. On the sixth floor, overlooking the back gardens. Will you be needing any help with your luggage?”

“I can manage,” I said, taking the white paper folder with the key, patiently waiting while he explained about the honor bar, the gym, my choice of newspaper in the morning.…

The room was fresh and clean. I was tired. And down in minutes.

When the phone rang in the morning, I picked it up without saying anything.

“Everything all right, honey?”

“Perfect,” I told Michelle. “That corporate-credit-card thing worked like a charm.”

“I charm everything I touch, baby.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Are you okay?”

“Didn’t you already ask me that?”

“What if I did? A real answer would be nice.”

“I don’t know anything yet. I’m going up to Vancouver tomorrow, if I can hook up with …”

“I spoke with him. He says anytime you want. Anything you want.”

“He’s got a good memory.”

“So do I, sweet boy. Be careful.”

“Don’t worry. I know I’m working blind.”

“Is it really you?” the tall, slender man with the cream-in-coffee complexion asked. I knew he was a few years past my age, but he looked twenty years younger.

“It’s me, Byron.”

“Sounds like … you. Mind talking some more, just so I can be sure?”

“When’s the last time you flew a four-engine Connie?”

His face didn’t twitch, but his eyes flashed. Flashed back . To the tiny airstrip on the Portuguese island of São Tomé. To a big plane loaded to the brim with stockfish from Iceland—the maximum amount of nourishment for its space and weight. Then the frantic run over black water and even darker jungle, hoping the Nigerian jets with their hired-killer pilots wouldn’t get lucky. No parachutes on board. Everybody riding had their own reason for risking death, but none of them was willing to risk being taken alive.

It was the tail end of 1969, just before the breakaway country of Biafra fell to Nigeria’s overwhelming military superiority. Already at least a million dead. Mostly kids. Mostly from starvation.

Biafra was nothing more than a dream for whoever was left then, a tiny jagged piece of jungle, as vulnerable as a crippled cat in a dog pound. By that time, it was fully landlocked. Their leader had fled to the Ivory Coast. A Red Cross plane had been shot down. Even the media was gone.

Tribalism on full amok. If the Biafrans kept fighting, actual genocide was a real possibility. No point running guns in there anymore, but without food nobody would live long enough to surrender. For a landing field, there was only a dirt track cut into the jungle. We came in, guided by a radio until we got close. Then they fired the string of flares on the ground. A thirty-second window.

Byron set the big plane down softly. Before he could shut off the engine, people charged out of the jungle, desperate the way only starvation can make you. One man ran right into one of the still-whirling propellers. At least his terror died, too.

In a short while, the plane took off. I stayed on the ground.

It was maybe ten days later—I think I already had malaria by then, and things were fuzzy—when it happened. Byron was standing off to the side of the plane, watching the unloading, anxious to get back into the sky. But there were enemy planes in that sky. Huge chunks of ground blew up all around us from whatever they were sending down. No point in running—the blasts were completely random. And nobody ever used that foul tunnel they called a bomb shelter twice.

Suddenly, Byron went down, a piece of shrapnel in his thigh, blood flowing, not spurting. The rest of the crew ran for the plane. “We’ll pick you up on the return!” one of them shouted.

Byron knew what that meant. He started crawling to the plane, pulling himself forward with his arms, the useless leg dragging behind him, holding him back. I ran ahead of him to the cargo door of the plane, pulling the .45 out of my field jacket.

“Hold it!” I yelled at the two men in the bay.

“We got to go!” one of them shouted back over the roar of the engine. “The sky’s filling up!”

“Go get him!” I yelled, pointing with my empty hand at where Byron was still crawling.

“No way, man. He’ll leave us!”

I knew who they meant. The copilot. The pilot now. I gestured them to step back, boarded the plane. “No, he won’t,” I told them. “The faster you get back, the faster you can leave.”

They jumped out to get Byron while I went forward to explain things to the guy at the helm. I stood there explaining things until I heard them come back into the plane. Then I put up the pistol, ran right past Byron and his “rescuers,” jumped down, and headed for the deeper jungle. The plane took off.

I wasn’t sure Byron had made it until a few years later. A group of hijackers I knew were trying to put together a team for a job at a private airport, and his name came up as a candidate. The guy who recommended him said he’d worked with Byron a couple of times and he was solid.

We never did that job, but Byron had come to one of the meetings. It was … awkward. He didn’t know what to say, and neither did I.

And now we had another chance.

“You know,” he said, “I never asked you …”

“What?”

“Why you did it.”

“I don’t know,” I told him, truthfully. I was nineteen years old when it happened. I couldn’t have told you why I was in that jungle, in that war, much less why I …

“I think that’s a problem with people,” he said softly. “Who cares about the ‘why’? I don’t. Sorry I asked.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, what’s on the agenda?”

“I need to check something out. In Vancouver, that’s just—”

“—over the border from Portland,” he finished for me.

“Yeah. Look, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I’m supposed to be dead. So I need a way to go in under the radar.”

“Who better than me?” He smiled. “I live there.”

Byron’s ride was a restored-to-new oxblood Jaguar XKE coupe. He drove it like it was a real car, though.

“You’re doing well for yourself,” I said.

“Wait till you see the plane.”

It turned out to be one of those baby jets, with a custom cabin designed for luxury, not space utilization.

“Yours?” I asked, as I settled in next to him.

“Right!” He laughed. “It belongs to the studio. That’s my job, flying very important people around to very important places.”

“And you can just …?”

“Borrow it? Sure. They bought this sucker in the glory days, back in the late eighties, when money was gushing. Today, the smart boys rent—like time-shares: use it when they need it, pay by the hour. But this one’s all theirs. Nobody pays attention. They wouldn’t know what a flight log was. And they never check on fuel and maintenance. Only risk is if one of the big shots gets a sudden whim, decides he needs to go to Vegas or something.”

“That’d cost you your job.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, unconcerned.