Thirteen: The Crash of Guns
“I was.” “Say who I was….”
Why did he have to say such a thing, put the idea into the mind of God, of Fate, of whoever was controlling tonight? One should never send out black thoughts. They live on, like sound-waves, and get into the stream of consciousness in which we all swim. If God, Fate, happened to be listening in, at that moment, on that particular wavelength, it might be made to happen. The hint of a death-thought might be misunderstood. It might be read as a request!
So I mustn’t think these thoughts either, or I would be adding my weight to the dark waves of destiny! What nonsense! I had learned this sort of stuff from Kurt. He had always been full of “cosmic chain reactions,” “cryptograms of the life-force,” and other Germanic magical double-talk that I had avidly lapped up as if, as he had sometimes hinted, he himself had been the “Central Dynamic,” or at least part of it, who controlled all these things.
Of course James Bond had said that flippantly, in a cross-my-fingers way, like the skiers I had known in Europe who said “Hals und Beinbruch!” to their friends before they took off on the slalom or the downhill race. To wish them “Break your neck and your leg” before the off was to avert accidents, to invoke the opposite of the evil eye. James Bond was just being “British”—using a throwaway phrase to buck me up. Well, I wished he hadn’t. The crash of guns, gangsters, attempted murders, were part of his job, his life. They weren’t part of mine, and I blamed him for not being more sensitive, more human.
Where was he now? Working his way through the shadows, using the light of the flames as cover, pricking up his senses for danger? And what were the enemy doing? Were they waiting for him in ambush? Would there suddenly be a roar of gunfire? Then screams?
I got to the carport of Number 3 cabin and, brushing along the rough-cast stone wall, felt my way through the darkness. I cautiously inched the last few feet and looked round the corner toward the dancing flames and shadows of the other cabins and of the lobby block.
There was no one to be seen, no movement except the flames at which the wind tugged intermittently to keep the blaze alive. Now some of the bordering trees behind the cabins were almost catching and sparks were blowing from their drying branches away into the darkness. If it hadn’t been for the storm, surely a forest fire would have been started and then the coshed girl with her broken lamp would indeed have left her mark on the United States of America! How far would it have gone with the wind to help it? Ten miles? Twenty? How many trees and birds and animals would the little dead girl from Quebec have destroyed?
Another cabin roof fell in, and there was the same great shower of orange sparks. And now the gimcrack timbered roof of the lobby block was going. It caved slowly inward and then collapsed like a badly cooked soufflé, and more showers of sparks went up gaily and burned themselves out as they briefly drifted away on the wind. The extra burst of flame showed up the two cars beside the road, the gray Thunderbird and the shining black sedan. But there was still no sign of the gangsters and none of James Bond.
I suddenly realized that I had forgotten all about time. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. So it was only five hours since all this had begun! It could have been weeks. My former life seemed almost years away. Even last evening, when I had sat and thought about that life, was difficult to remember. Everything had suddenly been erased. Fear and pain and danger had taken over. It was like being in a shipwreck, an airplane or a train crash, an earthquake or a hurricane. When these things happen to you, it must be just the same. The black wings of emergency blot out the sky, and there is no past and no future. You live through each minute, survive each second, as though it is your last. There is no other time, no other place but now and here.