Dear Friends,
We continue with Chapter XI of Henchman. Chapter X is here. The full manuscript (later chapters for paid subscribers only) is here.
Banx Mulvaney and his silent friend Sod Job have made a home for themselves on the island of Dr. Eric Jacoby. Unfortunately, Dr. Jacoby has just been betrayed and murdered, along with most of his men, by his evil twin brother Dr. Julius Jacoby who is in cahoots with Milagros, Banx’s chief subordinate. Banx has escaped by climbing through the air vents and is making his way to the beach.
Thank you to A. A. Kostas for the following: “If you like: a) James Bond, b) slightly silly spy films, c) villains with a troubled conscience and theological questions, and/or d) humour, I am insisting that you read Sam Kahn’s very good very fun serialised novel ‘Henchman’.”
Best,
Sam
XI
I’m halfway there when a familiar itch comes over me. The itch usually manifests, as it does here, in an image of white lace curtains floating in front of my line of vision and, in the middle of them, amidst the interplay of afternoon sun and high-thread count sheets and the general tangle of sheets on a bed, a woman of staggering beauty in a chiffon slip and with bright red hair that turns almost to flame in the sun.
“Dammit,” I say.
I retrace my steps back up the secret dirt path, into the chute — using my unusual body strength to do so — and then through the air vents to drop into Dr. Jacoby’s quarters. In a bed looking extraordinarily like my mental image of it, Lana is dog-earring Us Weekly.
“Jacoby is dead,” I say. “All his loyalists are being executed. You are in danger but I can save you.”
One of Lana’s most extraordinary qualities is her utter unflappability. She can retain the same disapproving pout, flip through the same magazines, no matter how many people are popping into her room, no matter how many palace coups are going on around her.
“Banx,” she says. “Don’t you think you should have knocked?”
“Lana, I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just that the hallways are full of goons shooting down everything that moves.”
She wobbles the lower part of her head like maybe that’s somewhat acceptable. The pictures she’s dog-earring have to do with Natalie Portman trying out a new look.
“There’s a new Dr. Jacoby,” I say, “and he is pure evil. He has a mesh metal mask of a face and his eyes are like freshly-rolled paint, if you know what I mean.”
Lana flips to an interview with Portman’s cosmetologist, who is discussing a particular skin tone product.
“He killed his brother, killed Ivan Drax, killed Ivan Drax’s whole squad, and Gallego’s, they shot at me while I was just settling down to my starter salad.”
There’s a before and after photo of Portman’s face as a child star and then in the Star Wars movie and it’s hard to see, but, yes, you can make out a certain additional glow to her skin — it’s the kind of thing that I never would have noticed but then Lana started pointing it out to me.
“Lana,” I say. There have been many rough drafts of this speech, but this is the one that comes out. “I know you need a lot, I know you need helicopters and yachts and diamonds and bracelets and a card that allows you to put whatever you want on it, I know you need that and you deserve that — more than anyone else in the world, it’s you who deserves that — and I know that I can’t give you all of those things, maybe, on the outside, a helicopter, certainly a house, but I just want you to know that all of those things, they come with a cost. The people who get them, they tend to have mesh metal masks of faces and a hard gleam in their eyes and they shoot their twin brothers down in cold blood and sooner or later they’ll do it to you, not just do it, but order someone else to do it, which, on balance, is worse, and they’ll do it for any reason or no reason at all, just because they’ve met someone else on a shopping expedition to the mainland or because that skin cream isn’t working as well as it used to, or just, just because it’s their nature. There’s a parable, ok, and the parable goes like — there’s a scorpion and a frog standing at the edge of a river — ”
Lana is still dog-earring pages but absent-mindedly, her fingertips hitting the corners of random pages while she gazes towards the lace curtains and the view of the jungle.
“What I can give isn’t that,” I say. “It’s a home — Montclair, I think, is ideal, but I’m certainly open to other suggestions, and then all the money I’ve been socking away, saving up for years, and a set of skills that can get more anytime really, whether it’s banks or a hostage situation or whatever you want, but the main thing is that I will never get tired of you no matter how many of your creams fade out, I will never go on a shipping trip to the mainland and find some Slavic babe with expensive tastes and a sadistic streak, and I will never tie you down to the rocks and wait for the tide to drown you — well, you know, not deliberately, not if I have any alternative at all, or think I won’t be fed to the shark if I refuse.”
The entire Us Weekly is rolled up and put on the bedside table, joining the neat cylinders of the other magazines.
“I am a good person, Lana,” I say, “I have heart and I have integrity. That counts for a lot — it has to — and I am also a stone-cold grade-A killer, and you will need that if you want proper protection.” That seems to be the end of The Speech as it unspools in my head, but something about the way it comes out doesn’t leave a fully-satisfying pause at the end and The Speech rattles forward again. “And I love you,” I say. “I can’t imagine anyone else I want to be with, anything else I want to live for. This profession — it’s dog-eat-dog, it’s sooner or later get fed to the shark or machine-gunned while eating a Caesar salad, and I need it to be for something higher, I do, for something more. This is what I need. I need it to be you.”
The architect with the square glasses, the one I thought was really the most talented of the group and who I ended up executing myself just as he was proposing a new renovation, made an interesting decision of putting Jacoby’s room right up against the view of the jungle as opposed to the other side with the open grounds of the compound and the sloping path leading towards the sea. And Lana stares for a while at the foliage, very dense even this close to the compound. Something seems to be moving in the undergrowth; I’m not exactly sure but I think it may be a macaque.
“Ok,” she says at last. “I’ll go with you.”
Her hands fold together and her eyes drop demurely.
“Wonderful,” I say. “Here’s what you need to do. Pack a very small handbag, no more than about yay big — ” I spread my hands out to show her. “Maybe the Chanel. Fill it out only with the things you absolutely need. As soon as you’ve done that, I’ll give you a lift up into the air vent and then we’ll take the chute and then the secret path down to the coast and I’ll figure it out from there.”
If there has been a moment of a different kind of Lana, head down, moist eyes glancing pensively towards hands, she seems to have recovered herself. “That’s not really how I do things, Banx,” she says. “I’m not an air vent crawler, and I don’t have to be. These goons aren’t going to shoot me — I don’t care how bloodthirsty they are. I’ll wait for things to settle down and then I’ll say I’m taking a stroll and I’ll meet you there. It’s how women manage their escapes.”
“Alright,” I say. “Fine by me.”
“Where will you be?”
“Coco’s cantina. When you come down, just walk out onto the long pier and I’ll meet you there.”
“Alright,” she says. “See you soon.”
This would seem to be the moment to kiss, but there really is a lot going on, and I seem to already be in motion towards the air vent.
“Banx,” she says as I’m vaulting upwards. “You will close that behind you, won’t you? I won’t know how to explain it if anyone sees the grate hanging open.”
“I always carry a Phillips,” I say.
***
The next few hours are very perturbatious. Coco is his usual friendly, garrulous self. I hide within some crates in the kitchen. Coco gives me a play-by-play of what’s happening outside — some of Julius Jacoby’s goons have wandered down, thinking to close or shoot-up the place in keeping with villainy best practices, but they’ve stayed for Coco’s papaya juice and then for his bacon and egg sandwich and they’re pretty sure they can convince the boss to leave the cantina open. When there’s a real break in the action he hands me a papaya juice through a gap in the crate and chit-chats with me.
“Where you going next?” he says in his lovely, rolling accent.
“I was thinking Montclair. It’s close to the city but it has nature as well. You can shoot guns, shoot arrows, do whatever you want there. I think Lana will like it a lot too.”
I can’t see Coco but I’m pretty sure he’s making the face scrunching gesture. “I’ve never really gotten it with Montclair,” he says. “To me it’s just Jersey but with all these Brooklyn refugees.”
“I can see that,” I say, “but Jersey isn’t just Jersey, that’s a common misconception. The thing about Jersey is it’s all kinds of different communities, different micro-worlds.”
“Well, what will you do there?” says Coco after a pause in which he thinks he’s heard a noise and pokes his head into the seating area to check it out.
“There’s a lot of henchman work in Jersey, all kinds of stuff.”
“I never really heard about it,” says Coco with, presumably, the same scrunched-face gesture.
“Well, there’s Mafia for one thing.”
“Don’t you have to be made or some shit for that?” he says. “I thought you need Italian blood all the way back to Sicily.”
“That’s just some outfits. There are a lot of crews that don’t ask for that, it’s more just you do a trial heist or something and you’re in.”
Coco shakes his head and probably sniffs the air. He’s always very well-informed but some of his information is a bit out of date. “Listen,” he says, and with that accent I would take in every syllable of whatever’s on his mind, “I tink I can help you out. I’ve got some contacts different places. I know you’re a good henchman, loyal, a good inner perimeter man — ”
“I was Head of Security for the whole base,” I say.
“As soon as we hit the mainland I can put in a word for you. A couple tings I heard of recently. I know there’s an archeologist digging up crystal skulls or some shit. I tink he need a guard for his detail.”
I give that some thought. Archeology isn’t really my thing, and guard duty doesn’t sound like much.
“It’s just light work, jungle dig, take a break from all this lair shit, all the politics that come with that.”
He has a point about the politics. And it could be nice. A jungle, open skies, sun on my back, maybe some buried treasure to look forward to. But then there’s Lana. There’s only a small chance that Lana could be talked into Montclair; none, I think, for some Andean treasure hunt. Maybe, maybe if she were in a litter being carried along, but I’d have to be the head of my own crew for that.
I tell Coco the concern. “Well,” he says, “it’s just a thought. The women,” he agrees, “they do tie you down.”
Now it’s Vyacheslav himself coming to try out the bacon and egg sandwich and Coco goes out to serve him and to stand hands folded by the bar while two of the henchmen point their submachine guns at him.
At the end of it Vyacheslav pronounces himself satisfied and asks for a papaya juice to wash it down. Coco, I think, was never in any real danger, but it takes awhile, and it’s well after dark when Vyacheslav finally leaves, first helping himself to a bit of Coco’s cash register.
I find this kind of waiting very difficult. There’s the peeing problem, which is finally resolved sort of how you might imagine, and then there’s just the matter of running out of fresh thoughts. The thoughts I have seem to run on a loop like a very short trolley line. There’s the lace curtains in the middle of the afternoon and there’s the signing in Montclair — my locker in Key West cleared out, every one of my crumbled, bloody bills handed over to the realtor — and then there’s this other thought, like the yard at the end of a trolley line, this thought that Lana did seem less than fully emotive when she agreed to run off with me, that women in my experience are chock-a-block with different excuses, and in the way that she might have some phony phone number memorized for a guy she meets on a shopping expedition she may also have the ace-in-the-hole card to play of telling a long-time colleague that she’ll run off with them and then sending them off somewhere to wait for her.
It's not a nice thought and not, I think, a very likely scenario, but, running out of other fodder, my brain does keep returning to it whenever the details of the house-signing start to get hazy.
It must be 11pm or so, Coco doing his clean-up. When he passes by, he says, “Sah, you have a visitor.”
“Where?”
“On the long pier.”
I crawl out, toss the bottles with my urine in them, take a moment after stepping through the patio lights for my eyes to adjust to the dark. There is a human-like shape on the end of the pier. And it is wearing a long yellow dress and has a small, and what looks to be Chanel-shaped bag on its arm, and has auburn hair that even in this diminished light looks as if it could easily catch on fire.
“You came,” I say when I’m standing next to her.
“Of course I came,” she says.
It’s a lovely night, the way that they can make them only in the Caribbean. It’s very easy to forget about Jacoby under the table, the birthday cake, the Caesar salads, the whole thing. Sometimes — and this business, actually, is a very good reminder of that — life can be vanishingly simple. You survive the massacre. You live another day. It helps you to appreciate the nights like this.
As if on a string, I glide in towards Lana. My lips are on a downward trajectory hovering just over hers.
“There will be plenty of time for that,” she says. “What’s the plan?”
“Coco will give us a ride,” I say. “You ready?”
She holds up the bag, which isn’t zipped all the way. There are a couple of dresses tossed in it, some undergarments that almost make my heart stop to see, two or three of the cylindrical magazines.
“Let’s go,” she says.
We walk back, not hand-in-hand, but side-by-side, to the base of the jetty. “Coco,” I say, but from behind the cantina bar step a trio of men. There’s Milagros in his hunting hat, and his camouflaged jacket with the top two buttons fashionably down. There’s Hans Fuchs, he of the wonderful laugh, looking, I would say, particularly Germanic with his lips clenched and his jowls — this was the word I was looking for earlier — tightened. Both are holding Vityaz SN 9mm submachine guns. And standing slightly behind them, in the same Canali suit, blood-spattered in places and a bit wrinkled but no less fashionable, is Julius Jacoby himself.
“Where are you off to, Mr. Mulvaney?” he says in his velvety voice with his lovely elocution.
“I enjoyed the starter course but didn’t think I could stay for the full meal,” I tell him.
“You can’t miss out on the cake,” he says. “And, even in Bronxville or wherever it is you’re from, it’s considered very rude, I should think, to run off with the lady of the banquet.”
“She’s under my protection,” I say. “I’ll never get tired of her, no matter how ugly she gets, never tie her to the rocks no matter how mad I am with her. She understands that — that’s why she chose to come down here.”
“That’s a matter of interpretation,” says Jacoby. “There are those who would say she came down here more to rid herself of a tiresome pest who keeps dropping in on her when she’s just trying to read her magazines.”
Lana has, by this time, stepped smoothly away from my side and is now standing with the trio of men. Without glancing in her direction, Jacoby places his arm snugly around her shoulder.
“We agree to disagree,” I say. “Lana may be materially driven, but there is love in the cockles of her heart. She knows who really loves her and who treats her as disposable.”
“We don’t agree to disagree,” says Jacoby. “Kill him.”
There’s a very particular way that Germans look when they’re holding machine guns. I don’t know how to describe it — it’s different from the way anybody else looks holding a machine gun. It’s a combination, I would say, of craftsmanship and sadism, Hans glancing over the gleaming weapon checking for any flaws in it and taking a real owner’s pride in the way it smoothly sprays out its bullets without any need to reload. That seems to be the last thought I have — preferable, I would say, actually, to thinking about Lana going to all the trouble to come down to the docks just to betray me — but then Hans’ face switches expressions to something else, something that is, I would say, more universal — the perplexed, somewhat vacant look of somebody who has, without expecting it, just had their brains shot straight out of their skull. I’ve seen that look somewhat recently, I think, and that reminds me of the original Dr. Jacoby’s baboon and its surprise and confusion as it tried to sink its teeth into Sod Job only to have its skull crushed — and that reminds me in turn of Sod, who is at this moment dressed in ninja black and advancing with deliberate steps towards our group.
He has been deadly accurate with Hans Fuchs, but misses on Milagros, who spin-moves out of the way, and now Milagros half-cowers, half-races to a spot behind the bar and sprays machine gun fire in Sod’s direction but only succeeds in shooting up a set of Coco’s newly-imported deck chairs. Dr. Jacoby and Lana seem to have disappeared.
I have my pistol out, Sod and I are taking cover each behind a separate pillar at the different corners of the bar. Sod makes the flick of his eyebrows that means he’ll stick his gun out just far enough to draw Milagros’ fire and then it’ll be on me to dive over the bar and catch Milagros, and that’s what we do — exactly as we practiced this one time when we were doing small-arms training at SMERSH, or SPECTRE or whatever. Milagros is pumping out fire but only succeeds in hitting Sod’s Heckler & Koch, likely breaking it, while I dive onto the bar long enough to hit Milagros with two bullets in his upper torso, disabling his shooting arm and sending his heart into the start of cardiac arrest, and then, using my same momentum, I spin off, landing on my feet and, like a soccer player both receiving the ball and passing it off again with a single touch, I unload two more shots into the gut, which isn’t the most glamorous place to shoot someone but is effective, particularly since Milagros has both hands up covering his face.
As interested as I have always been in the death speech, it’s more fascinating still to hear the last words of a master, someone who knows the ways of the birds and of the entirety of nature, someone who has heard so many confessions much like this one, whether at banks or lair shoot-outs or what have you. This would be the time to ask a great many things, about whether at a moment like this it all comes together or fragments, whether he thinks about Jama, or if his thoughts spiral back to his mother, maybe back to the dawn of consciousness itself, if the sense is of leaving an unfortunate fragment of reality and rejoining the whole or if it’s more that he spirals into bitterness, the sort of ghost that will never cease haunting Coco’s place. Normally I blow it in these circumstances by asking too many questions, by talking too much. Now — and partly through Milagros’ own example — I am all ears, even ready to cradle him in my arms if that’s not too much, but, unfortunately, through no fault of my own, Dr. Jacoby now releases a shrill whistle and with hard-to-believe speed a whole posse of men in balaclavas rush out from some reserve location and begin peppering the bar with automatic fire.
In spite of how elegant they look in their matching balaclavas, Dr. Jacoby’s men, I feel, could have used a bit more small-arms training. They are standing in a semi-circle and, as far as I can tell, shooting completely at random, mostly filling Coco’s bar counter with bullet holes. Sod, from behind his post, and I share the look that means he’ll take the three on the left and I’ll take the three on the right. My Beretta is down to two bullets and, gingerly, I lift Milagros’ submachine gun off his shoulder. “Mama, I’m so sorry,” he says in his lovely accent, which is, I would say, an interesting piece of the existential puzzle, and then Sod and I nod again and the two of us stand tall and fire with the murderous accuracy that always seems to desert us whenever Bond shows up but is achievable in these henchmen v. henchmen intramural situations. My three guys stagger and fall in three distinctly different patterns, one corkscrewing to the ground, one simply tipping backwards, one clutching his belly and crab-shuffling to the side. This is Vyachaslav the knife-thrower and something special seems to be called for, so I switch to the beretta as I advance in even steps towards him and then put one of my last two bullets straight through his brain.
Sod and I make the expression to gather up as many cartridges as possible and to be ready for the next round of reserves, and they do show up — far more, it seems to me, than were on Dr. Jacoby’s original helicopter, but that’s only of academic interest — and they seem to have Coco’s surrounded and charge in pell-mell from all directions. Sod and I divide our attention, with my covering our right his covering the left and the henchmen are good enough to arrive in a staggered formation so that usually we are able to take aim at them individually as they slide into position before the next one shows up, and as we move, by common consent, to the long pier, we fall into an agreed-upon rhythm of Sod shooting into the ranks of the henchmen as I reload and then just as soon as I’ve finished emptying my clip it’s his turn.
But, even so, we exhaust our magazines in this way, and the henchmen who have come onto the pier are now getting into more professional stances, one sinking to a knee while the other loads up behind him. Dr. Jacoby has appeared from somewhere and is standing over them whispering encouragement and giving pointers. I’m out of ammunition on the Vityaz, lift it over my shoulder and toss it into the water. The Beretta has one bullet left. It’s a difficult shot from here, but there is a natural target. I cock it vertically over my head and then point it straight. Dr. Jacoby locks eyes with me for a moment from his freshly-painted coat of a face. I can’t be faulted for the shot, which is right on target, I would say, for the bridge of his nose, but with a light, surprisingly dainty gesture, Dr. Jacoby reaches to one side and grabs a figure — my eyes still haven’t one hundred percent adjusted to the dark, but, from the dreadlocks and the slightly loaferish way he has of moving seems to be Jama, and that figure, whoever it is, takes the shell right to the cheekbone.
Sod, meanwhile, has emptied the last of the Heckler & Koch into one of the kneeling sharpshooters, and he and I exchange the ‘nothing else for it’ look and dive headfirst into the dark water off the edge of the pier.
A great set piece!