I MUST HAVE a dishonest face. People took me for a cop. Not everybody, just the ones I wanted to get next to. These days undercover cops go around looking filthy and smelling bad, but I don’t think going that route would have helped. My biggest problem was being a complete outsider; I didn’t have the right introductions. In New York or New Orleans or L.A. I knew people who could have fixed that. Same went for half a dozen cities on the Mainland. But Honolulu was a bust. I knew no one.
Still I had to keep trying, doing the furtive bit, hoping to connect. It was hard to work the HLA into a conversation. Bad guys who would have been glad to do any kind of business took off like bats as soon as I even hinted that there was money in it for them if they could arrange an introduction. Some of it was fear, some was honest disgust. A gun dealer I met in a bar on King Street called me a “fucking creep” and warned me to stay away from him or else his “people,” meaning the Mob, would take care of me.
This from a guy who looked as if he’d gun down Mother Teresa for five hundred dollars.
That’s how it went, day after day. The one guy who picked up on what I was laying down was a con man and not a very good one, a wiry Mainland American in his forties, with a receding hairline and a pencil mustache. Just out of the joint, or so he claimed, he said yeah, it would be hard but an introduction could be arranged if I could show some front money. I asked him how come he knew HLA people and he said he had chummed up with some of them in prison. I guess he thought the HLA was an old thing, like the SDS or the Black Liberation Army; it showed how out of touch he was, and maybe he had come out at the end of a long stretch. When his pitch collapsed he asked me for a fiver so he could get something to eat. I gave it to him.
I couldn’t get next to the students at all. My age was against me and there was nothing I could do about that. In the bars and other hangouts they were getting used to my face. But no progress was being made, not an inch.
One day about noon I was eating a sandwich and drinking beer in the Olde English place when the broad from the HLA office came in. It was four days after I had checked into the hotel. She got a sandwich at the steam counter and brought it over to my table. I looked up, a little surprised.
“Mind if I sit with you?” she said in a voice that could have been from anywhere. “Place is jammed.”
“Sure,” I said. “Want me to get you a beer?”
A vigorous shake of her head. “Beer is bad for you,” she said. “So is tap water. And don’t let them fool you. Perrier is just carbonated tap water. Imported from France, my ass! It’s imported from down the street. They just use old Perrier bottles over and over. Anyway, Perrier, Poland Spring, all the mineral waters are just as harmful as tap water. Even the underground springs are polluted with chemical wastes.”
“You feel strongly about it?” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “But it won’t get any better until the people take charge of their own lives. The chemical companies will go on poisoning us just as long as we let them.”
No vegetarian, she bit into her roast beef sandwich and chewed with vigor. Everything she did was done with vigor. She must have been vigorous in bed. Tall and rawboned, not at all bad looking in a horsy way, she looked at me as she chewed. They used to teach kids to chew so many times per bite. I think she was following that rule long after she had forgotten its origin.
She swallowed. “I see you around here a lot,” she said. “You’ve been asking questions about my people. Are you a cop or a nut or what?”
That was direct enough. “I’m definitely not a cop,” I told her. “Would a cop be so obvious?”
She said, “He might be if he thought being so obvious would fool people. But I don’t know. You really don’t look like a cop. I know about cops. I have a doctorate in copology. What are you then? A reporter? You’re wasting your time if you are. We give out press releases, never interviews. We used to talk to the press. Now we don’t. You can tell reporters the truth. They seldom print it. Are you a reporter?”
“I’m not a cop and I’m not a reporter.”
“What, then?”
“I’m a mercenary. A professional soldier. I fight for pay. I’m told the HLA are looking for guys like me.”
As soon as I said it I thought, Christ, suppose this one is a cop? If she was undercover she wouldn’t flash a badge; what she’d do was get on the phone as soon as she finished her sandwich. At the moment all she did was smile.
“You’re kidding,” she said, still smiling.
I shook my head.
“You have to be kidding. I never heard anything so crazy in my life. Where do you think you are? Zanzibar?”
I don’t know why she mentioned Zanzibar. Nothing has been going on there lately. Probably it sounded exotic, dangerous, a place of mystery.
“I’m told the HLA is paying big money. Two thousand a week is what I heard. Is it so crazy to want to make two thousand a week? Listen to me. I’ve been here for a week and I haven’t been able to connect. Maybe you can help me. My name is Jim Rainey and I have years of military experience. I’m good with explosives.”
The big smile did nice things to her horsy face. “You’re good and crazy and you’re going to get into trouble. Talk like that: I’m good with explosives. Don’t you know they just blew up a lot of kids or don’t you read the papers? They’re trying to blame it on us. They try to blame everything on us. What are you? Thirty-five? Forty? You may have been a soldier but here you’re an innocent abroad. I’m good with explosives! Such wild talk in the present situation. I’m going to have to tell my people about you.”
“Do that, will you? They may not think I’m so crazy. Your people do call themselves a liberation army.”
“That’s just intended to frighten the Establishment. I’ve been part of it for two years and have yet to see as much as a water pistol. We say we’ll fight, but that’s just a pressure thing. If they meet our political demands, there will be no fighting.”
“Then what was the paper air raid all about?”
“We didn’t do it. They did it to make us look bad.”
Jesus! What a mind! I guess she was on the level. It was too crack-brained to be anything but the truth as she saw it. “Would you fight if it came to fighting?”
“As a last resort, yes. But it won’t come to that unless they force it. Listen. I’m not here to answer questions. You don’t look like a cop, not really, but maybe that’s why you’re here. I don’t care if you are. I haven’t said anything that can get me into trouble. It’s a free country, I can say what I like. You can’t get me by entrapment. It’s been tried. You’re the one talking criminal conspiracy.”
I grinned at her. “Okay. Okay. Want another sandwich?”
She grinned back. “You can’t bribe me, but yeah. Roast beef on rye.” I got it for her.
“You’re not a cop, are you?” she said, talking with her mouth full. These people let it all hang out, even to talking with their mouths full. But she had very clean hair, even though it looked as if it had been cut with a garden shears. A dizzy broad, bright enough in her way. I hoped the creeps who ran this show wouldn’t get her blown away before this was over.
“Will you stop with the cop bullshit?” I said. “I’m what I said I am. A mercenary looking for work.”
She worried the sandwich with big white teeth. “And I say you’re asking for trouble. Go fight for the Sandinistas, don’t hang around Waialae Avenue. You keep doing that, some of my people are going to get mad at you. Well can you blame them if they do? You’re giving us a bad name with this mercenary nonsense.”
“But you’ll tell them, won’t you?”
“I’m honor bound. I have to tell them. Why don’t you split before there’s trouble? That’s my last word on the subject.” She looked at her diver’s watch and said she had to get back to the office. “You have a nice smile, Jim Rainey or whatever your name is. I wouldn’t waste my time with you if you didn’t.”
“You want to get together sometime? Hey, what’s your name? You didn’t say.”
“You don’t need my name because you won’t be seeing me again. It’s okay if you smile at me through the window. As for seeing me again, forget it. I’m gay, man.”
“Then you came in here to warn me?”
“Yes, I did. Now you’re warned. Wear it in good health.”
I thought a Chinese-looking guy with slanty eyes was watching me from the end of the bar. Could be he had been looking at the broad. Some guys like them that big, and this one did make her presence felt. He turned back to his mug of beer when I glanced his way, but there was a hunch to his shoulders that told me he was wound up about something and it didn’t have to be me.
But it was me. He followed me when I left and stayed with me for the rest of the day. I knew from his moves that he wasn’t one of Bridges’ boys. He wasn’t bad but he wasn’t good. He followed me and tried to keep from being spotted. So he wouldn’t get lost, I stayed on Waialae Avenue, visiting two more bars before I went to see two more French gangster pictures. My buddy with the slanty eyes sat in an aisle seat three rows behind.
There was no way to know if this guy belonged to the HLA. I thought he did. It seemed likely. But I had been talking money to a lot of unsavory characters and maybe this guy figured to knock me on the head as soon as it got dark.
After the movie I went up to my room and lay on the bed with the forty-five in my hand. An hour passed. Nothing happened. The Building Code inspector didn’t knock on my door. The handyman didn’t come to check a leak in the bathroom. Nobody tried to borrow a cup of sugar. No tricks, ancient of modern. I looked out the window and saw him sitting in the window of a doughnut place across the street.
It was dark when I went out again. Now he was lounging against a dead-looking palm tree, reading a newspaper by available light. He straightened up fast when he saw me coming out of the hotel. I went back to the Olde English place and got two hamburgers and a bottle of beer. He came in and stood at the bar and resumed his reading of the Honolulu Bulletin. The place was filling up, mostly with students. In back, they were throwing darts at Reagan. Most of the players, though not all, wore HLA/ALL THE WAY buttons.
Along about ten o’clock, three guys came in and joined my buddy at the bar. They made a big thing out of it, pushing and shoving and saying “Gimme five, man!” A few minutes later, two more grungy types, white guys, came in and sat at a table close to where the others were standing. I knew they were all part of the same bunch. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just knew.
That made six of them, not such great odds if it came to rough stuff. Muggers, even outlaw student muggers, don’t come in packs of six. So they had to be HLA. I had been asking for it and now it was here.
Nobody made a move until the drinkers were three deep at the bar. Then the slanty eyed guy pushed his way through the crowd and sat down at my table without being asked. He was Chinese and Hawaiian and a couple of other things. A dangerous looking bastard, nervous and self-assured at the same time. His almond eyes didn’t like me.
I looked at him. “You’ve been following me all day,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I hear you want to make a connection in the mercenary line.”
“That’s right. You want to talk business?”
“Maybe. But we can’t talk here.”
“Why not? Who’s to listen in with all this noise.”
“You want to talk here, we won’t talk at all. You want to talk, it has to be somewhere else. Make up your mind. You’re not that important to us.”
I stared back at him. “I won’t go down any dark alleys with you, chum. I have a hotel room down the street. Will that do?”
He shrugged. His smile had a sneer in it. I couldn’t see the others because of the crowd.
“It’ll do all right,” he said.
“Will all your buddies want to talk too?”
“I’ll do the talking, they’ll wait out front. Don’t let them get you rattled. They’re just here to give me protection. How the hell do I know what you are? Let’s go.”
Well I was taking one hell of a chance, but there was nothing else to do. A week of asking questions had brought me this and I had to go with it or forget the whole thing. There would be no other opportunities to get next to the HLA, not if I tried for a month of Sundays.
Outside, he waited until the others joined us. Man, you should have felt the hostility! These guys didn’t like me at all. Which was not to say that they might not be ready, even glad, to pay for my professional services.
Waialae Avenue was jammed every night of the week. It was jammed now, the still, warm night was thick with pot smoke. People were sitting on the sidewalk outside Colonel Sanders, eating quick chicken from buckets. We started down the street, all seven of us. It was three in front, three behind; I was in the middle.
They didn’t turn on me and hustle me into an alley. There were no alleys. The street they hustled me into was just a side street, narrower than the avenue but still a public street with lights and people on it. I didn’t try for the forty-five, and if that sounds stupid, you have to remember that shooting some of these guys would not have accomplished anything.
Suddenly the street was empty except for us chickens. That figured: people were afraid of these guys. Four of them grabbed me and slammed me against a wall. The slanty eyed guy balled his fists and got up close to me. So close that I could smell the beer on his breath.
“You’re a fucking nuisance, you know that,” he said, hissing out the words through badly separated teeth. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, asshole? You should have taken good advice and got the fuck away from here. Now we have to do it the hard way.”
He punched me in the stomach and I would have folded if the other guys hadn’t held me up.
“That feel good? You like that?” he wanted to know, the creepy looking shit. He hit me again in the same place and followed up with more badmouth. If this was a beating, he sure as hell was taking his time about it. “You’ve been asking questions. Stop asking. Nobody is hiring any fucking mercenaries. Get a job as a security guard in a supermarket. Guard the steaks. Bust shoplifting old ladies. Help stack the canned goods. But don’t, don’t ever come around here again asking stupid fucking questions. Nod your fucking head if you agree with me.”
He was drawing back his fist for another punch when a big guy turned the corner and yelled, “Hey, you fuckers, leave the guy alone!”
They were turning to take him on when he pulled a short-barreled P-38 from inside his coat and thumbed back the hammer. That’s all you have to do with a P-38. No need to snap a slide. After you cock it, it fires double-action.
“Come and get it, you fucks,” the big guy said. Even with the hat and sunglasses he looked familiar. His voice sure sounded as if I’d heard it before. “You want some of this?” he said, hefting the stubby semiautomatic pistol. “Scat! Get lost! Take off, you fucking cockroaches!”
They ran.
I knew him when he got close. And he knew me. “How the hell are you, Rainey? Long time no see. You keep bad company, boy.”
“Hello, Skidmore,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
George Skidmore was an army CID captain who had been cashiered from the service because a prisoner in his custody had died under “prolonged” interrogation. I knew him from the old merc days in Africa.
He holstered the PPK and adjusted his jacket to hide it. “You haven’t said thanks, soldier.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling my belly. There would be a bad bruise there in the morning. “You came along in the nick of time.”
Skidmore grinned at me, a humorous guy but a bad one. “Is that a fact now? I know it’s none of my business, but how come I find you getting thumped by a bunch of punks? Especially since you’re carrying.”
He jerked a thumb toward my belt. “If that isn’t a forty-five, then it must be a salami.”
“I didn’t have time to get it out. You want a drink?”
“I want three or four drinks. Your treat. Yeah, why don’t we hoist a few and talk about this and that?”
We went to a bar, not the Olde English joint, where the crowd wasn’t so thick, the noise wasn’t so bad. It was called Bogart’s and there were old lobby cards and movie stills to go with the name.
“You must remember this ...” Skidmore talk-sang as we went in.
Skidmore talked of hoisting a few, but he didn’t. He drank scotch and water, a double. I drank beer. Skidmore was full of good humor. He usually was, the double-dealing son of a bitch. Of course he never double dealt me because I never gave him the chance. But if I didn’t know him all that well, I knew what he was like by reputation. It wasn’t good, even for a merc. Guys who knew him in the army said he was an ace investigator before he was busted for beating up on guys who couldn’t fight back.
He knocked back his drink in two swallows, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned at me. Skidmore was big and wide, with a rock jaw, pale blue eyes and the last of the crewcuts. His hands were big even for a man as big as he was. He was my age.
He looked at the Bogey posters and said, “What’re two old mercs doing in a fag joint like this? Answer me that, Rainey?”
“It’s not a fag joint.”
“Might as well be. These kids in here are heterosexual fags, if you know what I mean. Ah well, live and let live, I always say. What I really mean is, what you are doing in this pineapple Greenwich Village? You haven’t cracked up, have you? A guy like you should be down by the waterfront biting the caps off beer bottles. Oh yeah, I forgot. These days they have twist-offs.”
I took a chance and said, “I’m here on the same business you are.”
“What business would that be, soldier?”
“Merc business. That’s the business we’re in, isn’t it?”
“I might have retired. I might be here on vacation. What might you be doing?”
I said, “Trying to make a connection with these Hawaiian Liberation Army people. The good word is they’re hiring mercs at two grand a week.”
Skidmore whistled. “Two grand a week? Pinch me, momma, I’m dreaming. Or you are. Please tell me more.”
“I figure you’re all set or you wouldn’t have come so far. I don’t have an introduction, but I’d like to get one. How’s about helping out an old friend?”
Skidmore raised his eyebrows in mock incredulity. “Gee, I didn’t know we were that old friends. Seems to me you didn’t go out of your way to be friendly back in Africa. Never mind. Never mind. Today we’re older and wiser—anyway, older—and are able to see things in their true perspective. So you think I’m here to fight for Hawaiian independence?”
“That’s what I think. How about it?”
“How about what?”
“I want to talk to these people without getting thumped.”
Skidmore laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes. “Is that what that was all about? Jesus Christ, I’ve heard of difficult job interviews. Those guys really turned you down, didn’t they? I would say there isn’t much point in re-applying for the position.”
I drank some beer and waited for him to continue. The whole thing had been a set-up and Skidmore was already working for the HLA. In spite of the few punches I took, the beating was a phony. They wanted him to check me.
“I’d still like to make that kind of money. You can fix it if you want to. Why wouldn’t you? You know what I can do.”
The waiter came and Skidmore ordered another double.
“I know what you can do,” Skidmore said. “The point is, why do you want to do it here? This isn’t your bag and don’t tell me it is. I know you better than that. You’re the merc with the conscience, right?”
I just looked at him deadpan.
“You have the reputation. It’s not phony, is it? Come clean, Rainey. Tell uncle what’s got into you? You can’t have changed that much.”
“I’m in trouble with the cops. Big trouble. A tough captain named Bridges, some special section of the HPD, is trying to tie me to the hospital bombing. Want to hear about it?”
“You bet.”
I told him.
Skidmore enjoyed the telling. “Ain’t you the sneaky one though! Me, I’d have gone for a higher rank than sergeant.”
“And get caught,” I said. “No officer goes in a place like that.”
“I was just kidding. So you just walked out of there right under their noses. What did you do then?”
“Ditched the cap and jacket and tie and kept out of sight. Come morning, I came down here and got myself a room. I didn’t know the HLA were hiring mercs till Bridges told me about it. That son of a bitch is looking all over for me. I expected an APB on me. It hasn’t happened.”
Skidmore paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Why do you think that is, I mean if he wants to nail you so bad?”
“I don’t know. Funny thing is, he really thinks I’m working for the terrorists. I tried to tell him I wasn’t. I swore up and down, but he wouldn’t believe me. That fucker is fitting me for a life sentence.”
Skidmore knocked back his double scotch and said, “Hah! Good stuff. And so you figure you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Well yeah, I can understand your reasoning,” Skidmore said. “Just the same, I don’t see you as right for the part. The HLA just blew away a few hundred kiddies. You want to be associated with people like that? Come on, Rainey, it won’t play.”
“Me in prison clothes won’t play either. We’re talking about life with no parole here. Fuck the parole! I’m not going to do time for something I didn’t do.”
The waiter brought another double for Skidmore, a bottle of Bud for me. They were showing The Roaring Twenties, a Cagney-Bogart movie, in the back of the bar. There was a lot of gunplay in that one.
“Kennedy was right,” Skidmore said. “Life isn’t fair. But I ask you: why don’t you dust yourself off and go back to the Mainland? You say this Bridges has nothing on you, nothing that will hold up in a court of law. I mean, what can the fucker do?”
“He can nail me if he wants to nail me. He said as much. Getting back to the Mainland wouldn’t be so easy. Yeah, of course I could do it, then what happens? I’m a wanted man. I’m guilty because I ran. In this case, the dead kids, no jury is going to worry about right and wrong. I’m better off staying here. Can you fix me up? You want a commission, you got it.”
Skidmore didn’t wave that thought aside. “I never say no to a drink or money, especially money. Drinks I can buy if I have money. But think about this: you come to work for the HLA, they might ask you to trash another hospital.”
“I wouldn’t do it. They’re not hiring mercs to blow up hospitals. I think they’re hiring mercs as their big guns. Fanatics may have a jittery kind of courage, but they tend to fold under fire. That’s where the mercs come in. Look, Skidmore—George—we can go on like this all night. If you don’t want to help me, for friendship or for money—why don’t you just say so?”
Skidmore grinned at me. “All right. All right,” he said, a man very much in charge of the situation. “Don’t lose your cool, brother. Maybe I can help you, after all. It depends on how you check out.”
“Then do it,” I said.
“You bet your ass I will,” Skidmore said.
Then he raised his hand above his head and the six HLA punks came in.