Eighteen

The manager of the Remington Arms was a thin, ascetic-looking fellow with long hair and a thin beard. He was about thirty. What was going on in his apartment, however, was not ascetic at all. There were about six each of young women and men, the record player was going full blast, and every table and counter top was covered with empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. Mulheisen thought he smelled marijuana, but he didn't say anything about it. He cheerfully accepted a can of beer and tried to talk to the amiable manager, R. Lasater, over the din of Z.Z. Top.

Mulheisen finally gave up trying to outshout the record player and flashed his badge, inviting Lasater outside. Lasater didn't seem concerned; he smiled dreamily and came out into the hall. The relative silence was a palpable relief for Mulheisen.

“Don't the other tenants complain? It's four in the morning,” Mulheisen said.

“These are the tenants,” Lasater explained. “We're just celebrating the release from jail of O. Dzelo.”

“Who is O. Dzelo?” Mulheisen asked skeptically.

“He's a great thinker and leader,” Lasater said cheerfully. “He was just released from jail in Maracaibo, after three years. He's the leader of a worldwide revolution of the mind.”

Mulheisen wondered if he was being put on, but he knew from experience that it didn't pay to react negatively. “Far out,” he said, smiling. “Can I help?”

“You are helping,” Lasater smiled back.

“I take it this isn't an armed revolution,” Mulheisen said.

“Oh, no, man. O. Dzelo isn't into petty arms,” Lasater assured him.

Mulheisen assumed that O. Dzelo also eschewed non-petty arms, from Lasater's tone. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “You don't have any literature on the movement, do you?”

“O. Dzelo isn't into books,” Lasater said. “He says, ‘Don't codify me.’ “

“Far out,” Mulheisen said. “Say, what about one of your other tenants, Leonard DenBoer? Is he into O. Dzelo, too?”

Lasater shook his head sorrowfully. “ ‘Fraid not, man. I talked to him about it, and he came to a couple of our meetings. He seemed to enjoy the exercises, but I don't think he really tried to develop the techniques. I think he really just wanted to meet the chicks. In fact, a couple of them said he was hassling them. So he doesn't come around much anymore. Talk about arms, he was always into arms. We call him Generalissimo—all in good fun, of course.”

“Of course,” Mulheisen said. “Did you ever see any of his friends here—South American types?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lasater said. “Nice guys. One of them, Heitor, knows all about O. Dzelo. He said he even saw him once in Valparaiso. Yeah, they used to come by quite often. Haven't seen them lately, though. Haven't seen the Generalissimo, either.”

“Unh-hunh,” Mulheisen grunted. “Well, the problem is, Mr. Lasater—”

“Just call me Rick.”

“Right, Rick. Nobody's seen DenBoer for a couple of days and his family is kind of worried. I rang his doorbell but there was no answer, and he doesn't answer his phone, either.”

“Well, I'm pretty sure he isn't home,” Rick said. “He hasn't been around for days.”

“Maybe we could go up and take a look, eh?” Mulheisen said.

“I don't know, man. Aren't you supposed to have a warrant or something?”

“Not if I have reason to believe that something has happened to the man,” Mulheisen said.

“Well, look, man, I've got this party going and everything, and . . . hey, you look like an all-right guy, and uh . . . okay, I guess I better go up with you.”

Mulheisen followed him up the stairs to the next floor. It was a modern apartment building, flimsily built out of dry-wall and almost nothing else. The music from the basement apartment was highly audible throughout the building. At the door Lasater turned and looked Mulheisen right in the eye in a very sincere way. “I just want to know one thing, man,” he said. “Are you a narc?”

“No way,” Mulheisen said, shaking his head. “I'm just trying to find DenBoer.”

Lasater watched Mulheisen's face carefully, then nodded, apparently satisfied. “All right, then.” He opened the door.

It was a very ordinary apartment. A living room with drapes drawn across the picture window. A kitchen with a dining area, a bathroom and a bedroom. The furniture was cheap modern and the floors were carpeted with shag, except for the kitchen, which had vinyl tile.

The bedroom was considerably more interesting than the other rooms. For one thing, it was painted a solid, flat black.

“Far out, eh?” Lasater said.

Mulheisen nodded distractedly and went directly to the cluttered desk near the bed.

“Uh, hey, man, the Generalissimo isn't here,” Lasater noted. “How about you look around and I'll trip on back downstairs, okay?”

“Sure,” Mulheisen said. “I'll stop to see you on my way out.”

Lasater said that was fine and left, closing the door behind him. The din of the music was hardly diminished.

In the bedroom there were bookcases full of paperbacks—mostly on war, especially World War II—and more books were stacked on the floor. Among them were Mein Kampf, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Warren Report and a pictorial series on great generals of World War II. There were other, more interesting items, to Mulheisen's mind, such as a pamphlet reprinted from an article originally published in Guns & Ammo: The Stoner 63 Weapons System.

The bed was rumpled and unmade, and littered with old copies of Shooter's Bible and Military Small Arms of the Twentieth Century, along with well-thumbed copies of Guns & Ammo.

The desk was a mess, awash with jumbled papers and magazine articles, maps and duplicated drawings. The drawers were open and papers spilled out of them. It looked as though it had been hurriedly rifled. Mulheisen squatted down and leafed through the debris. Much of it was duplicated material. It included diagrams of wooden crates containing rifles, with notations on size and weight.

Mulheisen hunched closer. The jumbled mess was a veritable gold mine, he realized. In short order he found duplicated lists of names, including DeJesus, Morazon and Casabianca. Another duplicated list grouped the names into three-and five-man teams, labeled “A,” “B,” and “C.”

Best of all, however, was a little stack of duplicated sections of a Detroit street map. The area included a sizeable portion of the East Side, with the marking “A” superimposed next to the Vernor tower, “B” next to the Cadillac Gage Company and “C” at Gethsemane Cemetery.

Mulheisen stood up, smiling. It was all here. The whole plan. All he needed now was a dispersal diagram. He knelt and rummaged through the debris again, methodically separating the different material into piles. It took at least twenty minutes, and when he was through he had found no escape route. He emptied all the drawers and organized that material into stacks, without finding anything useful.

At last he turned back to the original map and scanned it closely. There were the superimposed letters which corresponded to the team letters, but that was it. And then he saw a small “1,” lost in a more or less blank spot on the map, behind the Detroit Terminal Railway lines. At first he had taken it to be an original part of the map. Now he found a tiny “2,” near the City Airport, and a “3” on the Edsel Ford Expressway.

Mulheisen felt that the “2” was obvious—it indicated the escape route of the aircraft flown by DeJesus. Evidently, from what the ATF had been able to find out, DeJesus had taken at least two others with him, probably one or more of the other leaders, Morazon and Casabianca. There was a chance, of course, that he had taken Mandy Cecil, or even DenBoer, but Mulheisen couldn't think of any good reason why he would.

As leaders of a movement, it wasn't unreasonable for DeJesus or Morazon or Casabianca to leave the country as soon as their part in the raid was over. But, surely, all of them wouldn't leave, Mulheisen thought. One of them must stay with the guns. The guns were all-important. That made them number “1” on the map, he guessed. And “3” would indicate an escape route for the others, the “soldiers.”

Looking at it this way, Mulheisen was fairly certain that the guns, and at least one of the leaders, would be where the “1” was. But the blank area on the map was quite large, a district of several blocks. As far as he could remember, that was just a vast jumble of factories, some of them still operating, but most of them shut down and abandoned. It would be damn near impossible to find anyone in there, he thought.

He noticed, however, that the “1” was located almost on a line with the end of Canfield, the street on which DenBoer had been brought up, and near where Vanni, Mandy and DenBoer had played as children. Mulheisen reached for the telephone.

The duty agent at ATF was excited, but not by Mulheisen's call. Three of the Cuban hijackers, the “soldiers,” had been spotted in Chicago and arrested. Phelps was on his way to the airport at the moment, to fly there and interrogate them.

“You better stop him,” Mulheisen said. He quickly explained what he'd found. The agent agreed that he had better stop Phelps and hung up.

Mulheisen sat back on his heels and looked about the black bedroom again. There was a pile of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on the floor to one side of the bed, which was covered with black satin sheets. Mulheisen tried to figure out what it all meant. A womb? Some kind of negation of life? He didn't know. The guy likes black, is all he could come up with. It wasn't necessary to know DenBoer—he had only to know that something was wrong.

Mulheisen walked downstairs. The party was still rocking along in the upper decibels. “This place is going to be crawling with cops in a few minutes,” he told Lasater, “including federal agents. If I were you, I'd wind it up. Sorry, Ace, but that's the way it bounces. Oh yeah, I'd flush that pot, too.”

He went out to his old Checker and drove off. He knew he should wait for Phelps, but he just couldn't see it. The idea that kept hammering at him was that Mandy Cecil was in trouble; possibly every minute was crucial.

Every city has industrial areas that have been abandoned. At night they have all the gloomy and forbidding ambience of a Victorian London slum, with their myriad lanes and barricades, passageways that end in a pile of fallen brick and plaster, their sudden and empty courtyards echoing with one's footsteps. When the original industry moves out, the successors are invariably poorer, temporary, and they don't maintain the premises. Sometimes demolition is started, then halted. Hippies move in, paint up after a fashion and open obscure enterprises that are soon abandoned.

In this complex all of these things had happened at one time or another, but now it was dark and deserted again. Mulheisen drove along trying to figure out where someone could enter the complex. There were blocks and blocks of buildings, with a tall heavy mesh fence surmounted by barbed wire. All the gates were securely locked. He knew that the neighborhood children must have a dozen “rabbit holes” into the place, but what he was looking for was an access for vehicles.

He drove down several streets that dead-ended against the fence. Then he found a dirt lane that slipped past a corner of the fence and dwindled into a track that skirted an abandoned spur of the Detroit Terminal Railway. It was a kind of service drive, he supposed, now long out of use.

It was very dark back here. No streetlights, just the distant glow of the city. The track ran into an area completely surrounded by hulking shadows of derelict factories. Once, obviously, machines had hummed and crashed and men with lunch pails had hurried along these oil-soaked loading docks. But now it was silent. A habitation for rats and owls.

He stopped the car and got out, taking a large six-celled flashlight with him. The dirt lane was littered with pieces of sodden paper and half overgrown with weeds. By the light of the flash, however, he thought that he could discern recent tracks. Perhaps not. He switched off the light and stood still.

A faint wind caused something to creak, high up in one of the buildings. There was a rustle of trash blown against weeds. Something flapped, a piece of torn tarpaper, perhaps. He could see a little better now. It was an hour before dawn, at least, but the general night glow of the city beyond the silent walls faintly illumined the decayed brick walls. He looked straight up and saw stars, not a common sight in the city.

He took a few steps down the lane and his feet seemed to make an ungodly noise on the gravelly dirt. He paused a moment, then walked on, occasionally flashing the light to see if there were any tire marks.

He wandered into dozens of courtyards, their pavement broken and grass growing in the cracks. He went down narrow and pitch-dark lanes, stumbling over a piece of forgotten machinery or an empty oil can. Occasionally he scared a rat and the rat scared him. He walked on. The courtyards led into more courtyards, more loading docks. There were culs-de-sac littered with bales of wire and scraps of sheet metal. There seemed to be puddles everywhere, but he didn't recall that it had rained in the past week.

Finally, he knew that he was lost. This did not bother him especially. Soon it would be daylight and he would find his way out. But a great and terrible loneliness began to oppress him, wandering in this Stygian maze. He began to feel a little crazy.

Why had he come here? What had he hoped to find? A gang of Cubans standing guard over a pile of guns? The body of Mandy Cecil? He didn't know anymore. He felt an edge of panic and suppressed it. He wanted to shout, but he knew that it was impossible to yell. The sound would merely be lost, as he was, and that would be too horrible to know.

He blundered down another lane and into yet another courtyard. Steel steps went up onto a loading dock. He mounted the steps and walked quietly along one side of a warehouse, next to several sliding doors, some of which were open. And then he stopped. There was some kind of vehicle backed up to the dock.

It was a shiny black hearse, looking not at all out of place here. Mulheisen stood very still. His mind was clear now. No more confusing panic and vague fears, no more craziness. He listened for a long time. He heard an owl flap into some lofty window. The buildings creaked and groaned. But mostly he heard the steady, gentle rush of the city that lay away beyond the walls of the deserted industrial citadel. The sound was quite distant, like a great river far off.

At last he moved slowly and cautiously along the dock toward the hearse. He carried the flashlight in his left hand and slipped the .38 out of its holster with his right. The giant doors to the warehouse were pulled wide open, but it was so dark that he could not distinguish between the outside and the inside. At the edge of the door he waited and listened, holding his breath.

Not a sound, but for the creaking of the building. He strained his eyes, peering inside, but all he got was a sensation of space and emptiness, as of a great hall. He took a deep breath and switched on the flashlight.

He was blinded by the light at first, but quickly adjusted. What he was faced with was a great hall, a stockroom with twenty-foot ceilings. That was not what caught his eye, however. What did were the bodies. The minute he saw them he smelled them, as if the one sense had triggered the other.

There were three of them, lying in a tangle in the middle of the floor. By the flashlight he could see that they had been dead a day or more. They had been shot, and shot a lot. There was a lake of dried blood, and in it the footprints of small animals—rats. On closer examination, it appeared that parts of the fingers had been gnawed, and even parts of faces.

It looked to Mulheisen as if the three men had run into a sudden hailstorm of bullets. He supposed that someone had shot them with a Stoner rifle. Thinking of that, he flashed the light around. There was no sign of the stolen guns.

The three men were Cubans. He recognized them from the night at Brandywine's. Young ones, the laughing soldiers.

There was a metal stairway up one side of the room. He clambered up that and found the loft where they had all stayed. It was nicely provisioned: cots, a CB radio, a Coleman camp stove, Army-surplus mess kits, boxes of canned goods, even a case of Stroh's beer. There was also a table with benches, and sprawled on the floor next to it was Francisco Morazon, with a bayonet in his back.

Mulheisen went back out onto the loading dock. It was getting light now. Pretty soon he could start picking his way out of the labyrinth. He felt as if he should have a ball of yarn, to tie one end to the doornail and roll it out so as to find his way back again.

He jumped down to the cracked paving of the courtyard and looked the hearse over. Mud had splashed and dried on the shiny finish, he noticed. And then he noticed something else: someone had traced a name in the dried dirt on the side of the hearse. The name was “MUL.”