Dear Friends,
We share the final chapter of Henchman. Thank you to everyone who has made it this far! And thank you once again to Megan Gafford for the astonishing illustrations. Chapter XX is here. The full manuscript is here — and will be available shortly on Amazon.
Banx Mulvaney and his friend Sod Job have, after many betrayals and misadventures, reached the end of the rainbow — the Grand Cayman School for Higher Villainy — where, unfortunately, their program of study has been interrupted by an attack from the supergroup of James Bond, Indiana Jones, and John Wick. After some missteps by Banx and wavering allegiance by Sod, the two of them are now, however, in pursuit of the pursuers.
Best,
Sam
XXI
I go up into the air vent first and pull Sod after me. It’s very tight and, really, very dank in there, but even though we get stuck once or twice with our big bodies we manage to push through. Jones seems to be taking a very humane approach. He’s rounded up a whole group of Tomb Raiders and they’re having a discussion about the dark side of archeology as he lassos them together. But, as I’ve discovered to my grief, having gentle, thoughtful discussions can blind one to an assassin creeping through the ventilation system. I poke my head out and open up the Uzi at Jones. It’s a little sad to see that handsome face of his, and the trademark hat, riddled with automatic fire, but not really. He’s fed god knows how many of my colleagues to the crocodiles and fiery ants. To be honest, a simple burst of automatic fire seems long overdue.
The question with John Wick is whether the bounty is still out and, if so, if it’s in the ten million range or has crossed over into the twenties. Either way, that’s a lot of floor space for Lana and me, but I am far enough along in my henchman career to not be overly distracted with a thought like that. Staying calm and clinical is the way to be in small-arms fighting, and I follow the deceptively muffled sound of the Sig Sauer MPX to where Wick is, in a less-than-humane way, finishing off the remnants of Syndication.
They’re nerds mostly, a lot of bright kids from the outer boroughs of New York City, and mostly keep to themselves. But I’ve gotten to know them pretty well, and it hurts, in the moment I slip through the door and there’s a light from the hallway interrupting the pitch-dark, to see them lining the floor of their study hall.
“Wick,” I say, hiding behind my pillar. “Why don’t you pick on someone who knows how to fight back?”
That brings the gunfire to a temporary stop. “Is that the asshole who killed my wife?” a voice says in an oddly stilted, affectless way.
“Maybe,” I admit. “I have no idea, to tell you the truth. I thought everything you were doing was for your dog.”
“My wife was gunned down too,” Wick says.
“I had no idea. I’m sorry to hear.”
“I think you were one of the ones who shot her.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was beautiful. With dark hair. A smile like the very ray of sunshine at the dawn of day.”
That does sound compelling, and I have a shudder of a thought thinking of Lana and her own interactions with sunlight in the late afternoon. But I search my memory and come up with no one fitting that exact description.
“I’ve been on a lot of hit squads and I’ve shot a lot of women, John,” I say. “I’m a professional, just like you’re a professional. I know it hurts, but I don’t understand why what happened to you should matter more than anything that happened to, for instance, me.”
“I’m not interested in the comparative ethics of it,” Wick says in a somehow very wooden way. “I just know how it felt and I know I have to take my revenge.”
“By killing everyone in Syndication?”
“For starters,” he says.
We have been maneuvering around our respective pillars as we speak, and I’m the first to catch sight of movement and unload my Uzi at a shadow on the back wall. I do know what he’s talking about — there’s a particular pit in the stomach that is assuaged only by mass killing — but, as Wick himself has put it, this is no time for comparative ethics. His return volley is so powerful that it rips apart the pillar and sends bits of ornate stone carving — really beautiful work actually — cascading all around me. I hit the floor and have to pivot very fast in case Wick is closing on me.
Usually the way to kill these heroic super agent types is to remember their signature and then to play into that, but Wick, it seems to me, is kind of a pedestrian figure actually. He’s just very well-rounded, an accurate shot, good with a whole variety of firearms, and in close combat as well, and the thing to do is just to be as disciplined as he is. At the end of the day, there is nothing he does that I can’t do as well. He has gone silent for a long time, which is a bit unnerving. He clearly knows my position and I’ve lost track of where his is. The last groans of the murdered Syndication students subside, and now it’s just the two of us in the dark study hall. It’s the moment when the slightest sound makes the difference between life and death, and Wick, I know, is listening for the sound of my breath, as I am listening for his, and so the trick, just as it was when I was underwater and diving away from Dr. Jacoby’s gunmen, is to not breathe for as long as possible.
It’s very tedious doing that, and my thoughts wander as they tend to do. This is unfortunate. Wick, as a man of focus, commitment, and sheer will is likely doing nothing but listening for the slightest tremor of my breath and maybe leopard crawling across the floor while somehow not making any sound. But my thoughts can’t help but drift to all the things that have happened to me — to Blofeld’s lair and to Mongo and to Aunt Gloria’s and even to all the things that haven’t happened yet, to the new operation that Sod and I will set up, and then to the house I’ll buy, whether it’s with the money I claim off Wick’s bounty or from the honest profit that Sod and I take. It’s very interesting how it all blends together, fact and fantasy — and what a surprise it would be if it should all come to an end just now, because of one errant breath, one wandering thought. What’s particularly interesting is how, in a moment like this, there seems to be no good or bad, how it doesn’t matter especially if I’m the one pushing Captain Torch into the Bottomless Pit or if I’m the one diving off the pier, it all seems like one intact memory, like a single dream, and the only shame in all of it would be if I don’t get to share it with anyone, don’t get to, let’s say, sit with Lana Lynx on a lazy afternoon in New Jersey with the record playing and tell each other all of this, at which point, no matter who betrayed who and who tied each other to a rock when, it will all play out as it does in my mind at this second, as one single amusing incident.
Just as I am struck by the wonder and splendor of all of it, I run out of oxygen and have to breathe, and as I do, I jerk backwards and a cascade of automatic fire rips through the spot where I just was. Wick seems to be very close to me and I fire right into the spot where the bullets came from. There’s a groan, which gives me just enough time to process that my Uzi is out of ammunition but that I have a chance of closing the distance before he can recover from his wound and fire again. I leap out and, in the pitch dark, get hold of a live body and the two of us go writhing around on the carpeted floor every so often bumping into either a study hall desk or one of the bodies of the Syndication students. Wick, to give him his due, is phenomenally strong and any time I am able to inch my hands up his collar he gets ahold of my wrist or any grip I give him, and all that time I have spent working out in lair gyms and pumping iron in the immense downtime we have in the henchman business is still not really enough, and Wick manages to get on top of me and, not only that, but to hold me down with one hand while he reaches somewhere for what, judging by the sound of the hammer cocking, seems to be a Glock 34 9mm pistol.
“This is for my wife,” he says rather affectlessly, but in the time it takes him to say that he makes the mistake I have made so many times and overexplains the situation to an adversary. He brings his face close to mine in a way that allows him to spit contemptuously on me as he speaks but also puts him in range of my signature headbutt, and even though I am against the floor and can’t swing backwards I have practiced this enough, not least against Lieutenant Thong at the edge of the Bottomless Pit, that I am able to catch my forehead against his and send him reeling, and even though my vision is completely clouded with stars, I have practiced for this too, spring to my feet and, even unable to see, point the Glock in his direction.
“This is for my school,” I say. The first couple of shots only cause Wick to wriggle around a bit on the floor, but after the last two he is still, and, even though my eyes have still not adjusted to the dark or the stars dancing in front of me, I am able to make my way out and reach the fluorescent light of the hallways.
That leaves Bond. Bond, I know from bitter experience, is a wily and formidable adversary. And, unlike Wick, who usually just goes around shooting everything in sight, there usually is a system, and wit, to Bond’s way of working through a lair. Often what that means is finding the prettiest girl there and chit-chatting with her, and I shudder to think what else, while everybody else is running around and fighting. In our male-dominated campus, that can only mean Professor de Vil in Oratory and, carefully, never stinting on my tactical training, the textbook ways of taking entranceways and corners, I work my way through the labyrinthine passageways, the flickering lights, pausing from time to time to check the bodies of my fellow students just in case they’ve been booby-trapped or are some goodie in a cunning disguise.
The careful movements of my tactical training are good also for thinking, for rehearsing what I might say to Bond when I catch him. My Speech was rudely cut off but I feel like I said most of what I wanted to get off my chest. I suppose I don’t really have anything against him, it’s not really his fault that his tuxedo fits him so well or that the legions of henchmen always seem to step out from behind their cover when they shoot at him or go charging pell-mell and present easy targets. It’s just that everything’s gone his way for a long time and I’m tired of it and want it to go my way for a change. Yes, I suppose that’s what I should have said. That’s a Speech that Bond would have understood. Now that that’s settled, I spend the rest of the time working my way to the Oratory department thinking of puns and bons mots. “Double oh severed,” that kind of thing. When fighting with Bond, you usually want to have a few of them just in case you get lucky and kill him before he kills you and gets off his quip. Unfortunately, this kind of word play isn’t really my specialty. I’m trying to come up with something along the lines of “shaken and stirred,” but, really, it’s a relief when I get to the Oratory department and Professor de Vil is shivering over to the side of the room, in déshabillé and covering herself up, and Bond is sitting in the wrought iron throne that de Vil uses for her lectures with his handsome face largely unaffected but the back of his head smashed in like a cantaloupe. Sod Job is standing over him.
“Nicely done Sod,” I say. “Just out of curiosity, what line did you use?”
“Line?”
“This is Commander James Bond of the Royal Navy, double oh seven of MI6, you’re supposed to have some clever line if you kill him.”
Sod thinks about that. “I don’t really know,” he says. “You know, it’s hard work crushing somebody’s skull with your bare hands. It’s harder than a golf ball actually.”
“I would imagine.”
“Should we think of a line now?”
We both look at Bond. Somehow the splattered brains have entirely missed his suit. “I think it has to be done in the moment,” I say.
“Sorry, I didn’t think of that.”
“No, it’s alright,” I tell him. “The main thing is that it’s done. Your father is avenged?”
Sod looks at Bond. “Yes,” he says, “avenged.”
“And there was a point I was trying to make when I was talking to Bond — ”
“Something about the brotherhood of henchmen,” Sod says.
“Yes. I think we got that point across.”
We have the usual moment of satisfied silence and slight panic when a mission is finished. The school is, obviously, annihilated. Wherever we go next, it won’t be the end of the rainbow.
“What about her?” says Sod nodding towards Professor de Vil.
As one of very few women in the place, I would be lying if I hadn’t, in my lonely bunk, spent some time fantasizing about her. And there is something very fetching about the black-and-white boa she has pulled around herself to guard against our glances and to shield herself from the scene surrounding her.
“Forget her,” I say. “There is only one woman for me.”
***
There is no hard currency in the comptroller’s office, but there are enough IOUs and various financial instruments that we are able to present them to the guys at the dock and get our impounded Bathosub back. The Wall Street Journal that I grabbed from Boorstin’s office is still on the dashboard, and it’s a good reminder, I suppose, of how little anything ever changes. It’s a year out of date, but I don’t think that matters much. US Steel is doing well, and so is Lexcorp, even if its founder is now buried within a vast cave expanse. It’s always the rich getting richer, and everybody else sinking a bit, unless Sod and I can do anything about it.
We are very quiet on our journey across the Caribbean. We just have a few technical matters to settle. “50/50 split right down the middle on everything,” I say. “First thing we do, we create a Board of Directors, appoint ourselves to it. Any dispute we have, we settle it by a vote.”
“We’re an even number,” Sod points out.
“We’ll need a neutral third party to arbitrate if it comes to that.”
“Maybe Winston Scott?” Sod suggests.
“That’s a great idea. Anything we can’t settle ourself, we’ll relay to the Continental in New York. I’ll take security — I know just how to train everyone. Anything specialized, anything external, assassinations, that kind of thing, that’s all you.”
Sod nods sagely. “You know, we’re a higher pay grade now,” he says. “You should think about delegating security.”
“I don’t know if there’s anyone I trust is the thing.”
“Think about anyone you’ve worked with.”
“I think they’re mostly dead by now. I know,” I say. “There was that talented young German with the great laugh. What was his name?”
“Hans Fuchs,” Sod says. “He did have a great laugh. But I shot him when he was holding you up on the docks.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t worry about it too much,” Sod says. “We’ll have plenty of time to think all these things through.”
Yes, he’s right. As I’ve discovered at the Academy, a large multinational criminal enterprise is a bewildering array of different components, of shell companies hiding other shell companies, of leveraged risk and double-crosses, of dastardly plots that are really distractions from other quieter but more profitable plots, of really ceaseless worry from traitors in your own midst and vigilante agents who may drop through the ventilation system at any time, of schemes that are constantly hedged against other schemes and always, always, insurance bought and bankruptcy lawyers on hand to turn rags to riches any time a scheme falls apart. But every multinational enterprise, however complex and convoluted, always starts with a couple of ambitious guys in a Bathosub and every one just goes a day at a time, putting one step in front of the other.
And, at the moment, the step that’s in front of us is to massacre everybody in a senior position at Blofeld’s — which is now Boorstin’s. And we do do that. We park the Bathosub in a secret cove.
We move rock-to-rock through the over-water portion of the lair. The outer perimeter guys are of course just chatting with each other next to their weapons and don’t notice a thing. We wait for a coffee break. A busboy comes out of the hatch with refreshment for the guys on sentry duty, and Sod shoots him with a silencer as he’s distracted pushing the hatch open with one hand and holding the tray with the other. I grab the body and tray together to hold it all upright and keep from clattering. And then Sod and I slide in together and we have ourselves a little shooting party.
Boorstin has never been noted for his fashion sense and it’s a bit of a surprise to see the entirety of the inner perimeter crew in Charles Tyrwhitt tuxedos with red cummerbunds and my heart stops a little when I realize that it must be Lana who’s in charge of wardrobe — that anybody who had Lana as their deputy would have a base just as stylish as this one. But they are not, it must be said, very disciplined or well-trained. They are all outfitted with silencers, which looks great but makes no sense for inner perimeter work and badly reduces their accuracy. Sod and I with, respectively, our Vityaz and Uzi have no such hang-ups and we’re able to take out four or five of them in a round as they go charging pell-mell out of their barracks and then toppling over a railing into the pit below.
It always bothers me to shoot up people I know, and that, fortunately, is not the case here. Sod and I have already killed most of our shared acquaintances on our earlier escape from the lair, and these all seem to be trainees, recent graduates from some of the vocational schools, or just a bunch of Slav roughnecks looking for a better life. In any case, we gun our way through the defenses very fast. Sod swings to Boorstin’s office and, on a hunch, I head for the Bathosub docking station where a valet is just craning it into position. I shoot him and then it’s me and Boorstin. He’s in a brown suit with a copy of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He fixes me with his lazy eye.
“Banx,” he says. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know either,” I tell him honestly.
“I guess there’s no overestimating adversity, a careful mentor putting obstacles in your path, teaching you — the hard way — to trust no one, to listen only to yourself, and that inner fire of vengeance. I’ve had different mentees over the years, but usually they fall for one of my traps. I have to say that you’ve exceeded all my expectations. I have to say that — I’m proud of you.”
He has his hands up. He makes a gesture meaning do I mind if he moves one hand a bit to adjust the glasses that have fallen down his nose. I nod meaning that that’s acceptable.
“Ready?” I say.
“Just one small thing,” he adds. “I don’t doubt that you’ll make a great supervillain. Really. I think you’ve put it together and you have all the qualifications. But even the very greatest of supervillains, they all need an accountant. It’s not easy stuff, handling bankruptcies, figuring out brokers who will buy up all the debt that you’re going to take on.”
“That’s it? Those are the last words?”
“Yes,” Boorstin says. “I don’t want to plead for my life or anything like that. We’re practical men. Let’s talk practicalities. You need an accountant. I’m a great accountant. Let’s make a deal.”
I’ve switched to a pistol with a silencer in better keeping with one-on-one shooting, and I put two slugs right through his heart. “I can balance my own books. Thank you very much,” I say.
It takes a little while to find Lana. Sod already has all the survivors lined up and he’s shooting every fifth one to send a message and getting all the others to swear an oath of loyalty to the two of us. He doesn’t need any help from me.
Lana turns out to be hiding in a cabinet in the main office stroking Blofeld’s Persian cat. She is wearing a lamé dress designed by Alexander Wang. She looks, I have to say, better than I’ve ever seen her. It seems hard to believe that it would be Boorstin who would bring it out in her but that seems to be the case. She’s using less makeup than before and that accentuates a natural glow that she has. Her hair is less fiery than before — it’s striking to me that I missed how much dye she was using — but her natural black hair is lustrous in its own right and catches the desk lamps of the well-appointed office very nicely.
“Banx,” she says. “I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me.”
I shake my head.
“Well,” she says, “would you at least be interested in understanding?”
“Only if it won’t take too long.”
“It’s really pretty simple,” she says. “We have our wants and, in this world, our wants matter more than anything else. And the only want that really matters is for a woman to choose what man she wants to be with. You do see that, don’t you?”
“I do,” I tell her. I have to admit that, in all the time we’ve been around each other, I’ve never really heard Lana give her worldview before, and there’s something nice about it, something refreshing. I feel like I could listen to it for hours.
“Everything else — all the running around, all the shooting, it’s just a distraction from that, from the choosing. And I can only really choose somebody who’s worthy of me, don’t you think?”
“And you didn’t think I was worthy of you?”
“I was sure of it Banx. I don’t think I was ever so sure of anything. And that’s the deepest truth, the deepest justice there is — I had to listen to what my body was telling me, and my body was telling me it wasn’t you. I’m not saying that that’s kind or that that’s fair, but can you really expect me to argue with that?”
“And now? After everything I’ve done, after everything I’ve been through, after all the ways I’ve proved myself, are you prepared to admit you were wrong?”
Lana looks at me in that particular way of hers that means she’s inspecting my jug ears — and then looking through to the layer of me where all my weaknesses and foibles congregate.
“I could give it a try, Banx,” she says very gently. “You?”
This is one of these moments that I have very frequently where time seems to slow down. I’m holding a Smith & Wesson M&P with the silencer outfitted and whoever I’m talking to can do nothing but stand there with their hands above their heads and wait for me to work through my thoughts. And my thoughts are very far-ranging indeed. They take in Lana at Blofeld’s, the first time I was there, when we’d steal moments just to chit-chat, when she told me once that I was “like the brother she never had,” and they take in when we were on Jacoby’s island and somewhere between flipping through Kevin Costner’s wedding and Natalie Portman’s transformation she told me that she would run away with me, and made me, for about six hours until Jacoby’s gunmen came to murder me, as happy a person as any person can possibly be, and they take in the time I was on Mongo and friendly, chunky Captain Torch was strolling ahead of me towards the Z-O ship and I came up behind and pushed him towards the Bottomless Pit and found a side of myself that I didn’t know existed but, once I’d met it, recognized as I think the deepest, truest side of me; and they take in Aunt Gloria, who has been crowding my thoughts a great deal recently, who gave one of these winding, impromptu monologues once when we were watching television together. She was smoking her Winston-Salems and chewing the cinnabuns with her mouth open in a way that I found difficult to look at, and she wasn’t making very much sense but every so often she did. “Everything that happens matters,” she said. “Banx, are you listening to me?” she said, and I was forced to turn from the television where we were watching a space opera and to look at her and the bit of cinnabun hanging out the side of her mouth. “Nothing goes to waste,” she said. “Everything comes back around.”
Lana seems to be impatient with my winding thoughts. “Banx,” she says, “let’s cut the charade. I know you would never shoot me. I know how the canteen debates play out about shooting women, and I know that it’s beyond the pale. And I know the fantasies you’ve had — about Montclair and Patty Cline. I know you’ve thought about it so many times that it’s become a fact, that it’s become a reality for you — and it can be, it actually can be. We can live in this lair and I can outfit the inner perimeter guys really smartly or we can give it all up and move to Montclair and spend whole rain-soaked afternoons just listening to the same record again and again. What do you think Banx? You would give all that up just because of a little treachery? You’ve understood that by now, haven’t you? — everybody is treacherous to one another, that’s how it all works. You’re never going to find someone who isn’t.”
It’s a very good speech and I’m sure she’s right. My Lana, so beautiful, so fashionable — I don’t think I’d ever realized quite how smart she was either, how easy it was for her to wrap me around some line of her reasoning.
“Ok Banx,” she says. “I’m getting tired of holding my hands over my head. I’m going to put them down now. I know you, and I know you don’t have it in you to shoot me, so I think we can cut the crap now.”
She does put her hands down and very demurely covers her belly. Almost everything she has said could be a starting-point for further reflection, and I would like to cover every one of them in detail, but a decision seems to be called for at this moment, and, as reluctant as I am to decide, it seems like an iron law of nature, or something, to not miss the moment.
“Ordinarily,” I say, and there’s a great heaviness in my voice that I’ve never heard before. “Ordinarily, you would be right, and I’m not really disputing anything you’re saying — I’ll regret this always, I’m sure I’ll never find anyone else again — but I’ve been going through a number of changes recently and what they’ve shown me in the end, in the end, is that I’m just not willing to accept things the way they are,” I say and I shoot her twice, very humanely, right in the heart and she dies almost immediately. Or so I assume. I’m not able to watch this.
I turn away just after the bullets have hit home and I go to join Sod Job who is out on the main deck giving everybody their new assignments, and he rewards me with a little smile as I slide in next to him. I think about how much I’ve been missing out in all the time Sod has been silent and focused on avenging his father. His voice is loud and authoritative without pushing it. He’ll make a great leader, and I will too. We’ve both made so many mistakes, so many wrong turnings, and we’ve paid the price for them in so many different ways, but as we survey our lair and all the men looking obediently up to us, that seems not to matter at all. Our real life starts now. We intend to be fair but firm and to treat them exactly as we would have wished our bosses had treated us. We intend to do it right.
THE END
You carried me along the whole way. Thanks for a fun ride!
Well done. 😁👏