Arc D'X (45 page)

Watching from his carriage window the president saw bonfires on the knolls, cotton fields completely uprooted and cleared away for training grounds, free blacks and former slaves with guns and what had once been the plantation slave quarters converted to barracks, food bins and munitions sheds. A white flag flew from the president's carriage top. Another white flag was draped across his chest, though whether it provided a better target than sanctuary became a joke that traveled so quickly among the slavesoldiers that James Hemings had already heard it by the time the president reached the door of the house.

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The house was utterly dilapidated. Doors hung on their hinges and shutters from the windows. Vines from the growth outside slid through the guest chambers like snakes. The ballroom had been gutted to become a strategy room, with a huge topography of the countryside laid out on a table and a flurry of markers depicting lines of attack so ominous the president averted his eyes, afraid he'd see something that jeopardized his life. "Doesn't matter, Mr.

President," James assured him, "nothing there your white ass would understand anyway." James led the president deeper into the house until they came to a back room where two armed sen-tries stepped aside to let them pass.

The dead smell of the room was overpowering. The president stood in the dark long enough to believe his eyes would never adjust to it. A dim form finally began to appear on the other side of the room. "Could you please light a candle?" came a familiar whisper to the form of a second guard, who lit a candle to reveal the form of yet a third guard. The white flag on the president's chest soaked up the candlelight like a sponge, glowing back.

"Hello, John," the man seated on the other side of the room whispered.

The president stepped forward. "My God, Thomas," he answered.

"How's the country these days?" Thomas didn't look directly at the president but shielded his eyes from the dull throb of the pinpoint of candlelight.

"The headaches," John surmised, remembering.

"It's not even a headache anymore, John. There are rare moments when the pain actually goes away, I mean moments, ten or fifteen seconds, and you know what I think when that happens?

For those ten or fifteen seconds I'm afraid I've died, because it's the only thing I can imagine taking away the pain. It's become the kind of pain that reminds me I'm alive."

"The country is damned terrified, to answer your question. Are you planning to take over with your slaves? You never fooled me about your appetite for power, Thomas. The others, Abigail, well, she's always been irrationally fond of you, with a preternatural faith in that part of you that was always so good at being all things to all men. But you resent it that I'm president, I know that. It's been like this between us ever since we've been friends. You re-STEVE E R 1 C K S O N • 289

sent it deeply." He whined, "I deserve to be president." He stepped closer. "What the hell has happened to you?"

The tawny circle of the candlelight widened now to reach Thomas' brow, and it was with a shock that John then saw the other man was naked.

"Thomas," he croaked, his throat becoming thick, to which Thomas raised his hand to his eyes once more and John heard the clanking of the chains and saw the shackles on his wrists. "Oh no,"

he said. He looked at the two armed guards standing to each side of the naked white man. "Oh no, Thomas." He looked around him for James Hemings, unsure whether he was still in the dark of the room by the door. Vehemently he cried at the two guards, "This is an abomination. This is an outrage." He lunged at Thomas as though to rip him free of the chains, but Thomas raised his hand just a half a second behind the guards raising their guns; whether Thomas was signaling John to stop in his tracks or the guards to refrain from shooting John wasn't clear, perhaps even to Thomas.

"Please, John. My head hurts badly enough. No one has taken me prisoner. I sold myself."

"What?" said the president.

"It was all above board. As legal as a transaction can be." He turned to one of the guards. "Is there any wine?" he said. "Would you like some wine, John?" The guards didn't move or answer. "I can't take this light anymore, please snuff the candle." The guard on Thomas' left leaned forward and, with a quick puff, blew the room back into darkness. Instinctively the other white man recoiled. "It's the final resolution of the dilemma of power," he heard Thomas say in the dark, "to be at once both king and slave. To at once lead an army and be its waterboy. To command every man and woman within miles, and be subject to the whim of any little colored child who wanders in and orders me to dance like a pup-pet, or make a funny face, or wear something silly on my head such as the peel of an orange or an animal turd. Sometimes I just wish for a woman, is all. Sometimes I wish for just one, who in turn may ride me chained through the hallways of the house like a beast of burden. I wish there was just one woman who could come into the dark and arouse me, and drain the pain from my head to my loins through her lips. But there's no woman who A R C D'X • 290

can do that anymore, try though I might, beautiful though one might be."

"You're mad," John's voice cracked.

"You haven't even asked what my price was," Thomas sulked.

"Ask me what my price was."

"You're insane."

"The first price was too high, of course. The first price was too impossible. It was her, naturally: she was the price. When they refused that, I would have settled for a single night with her, and when they refused that I would have settled for an hour. But she simply wasn't part of the bargain, was she? They couldn't have sold her to me even if they wanted because, you know, it's a funny thing, but she had entirely other ideas about it. So finally I settled on a bottle of wine. It was a good bottle of wine. You should make that clear to others when you go back, it was a good bottle of wine.

You should make sure they understand it was a bottle of French vintage that James brought back from Paris. I drank it in an hour.

While I drank," he said, "I saw her face and touched her hand, and it was hours before she left me again, before the edges of her began to dissipate in the dark until she was just a small black pool on the floor next to my bed."

"It was that girl in London," John said.

There was a pause that seemed momentous to John only because it was so dark, and then he heard Thomas say, "I can't see your white flag anymore, John."

"It was that girl in London, who brought over your daughter.

And Abigail said, She shouldn't go to Paris; and I was a fool, not because I didn't believe her but because I knew she was right and I wouldn't admit it. She shouldn't go to Paris, Abigail said. If you had come to get your daughter in London as had been planned, everything would have been different. You would have gotten your daughter in London as planned and taken her back to Paris with you, and that girl would have been on the first ship back to America."

"I can't see your white flag anymore so I think you better go. If you stay longer, no one will be able to see your white flag. Nothing stays white here very long."

John turned, stumbling in the dark toward the door. He grappled for it so frantically that the white flag ripped from his chest. He ran STEVE E R I C K S O N • 291

from the room clutching it in his hand; he ran down the hall of the house past the armed slaves and through the house's entryway. He virtually leapt into the waiting carriage, jarring it so hard the horses took the impact as a signal to lurch down the road in full gallop. Half of Virginia was behind them before they stopped.

Thomas' army moved that night. Thomas rode with James in his black carriage, chains around his wrists and clothed in an Indian blanket; the president's militia reached the plantation in time to find squealing pigs and lingering mules as its new custodians. The slave army alternately lumbered and darted across the American countryside, disbanding in one hamlet to reassemble in another valley, engulfed by skirmishes from Virginia to Ohio to Pennsylva-nia and New York, back down to Maryland through the fall and into winter, never quite deciding whether to try to seize the country or leave it. Every once in a while Thomas would emerge after sundown from his carriage or tent. He would walk through the camp, directing his army's maneuvers on their march west to the Louisiana territories while the autumn wind blew his tall frail body and tattered rags and his masters ordered him to feed the horses and clean the rifles. When the campaign's climactic battle decimated the forces so disastrously even retreat wasn't feasible, when America washed itself in a tide of slave blood, James chained Thomas to the carriage seat and they made their escape into a country that had no name but west. Eventually they came to an Indian village.

The village stood high on a mesa that overlooked the world for as far as Thomas could see. Abandoning the carriage James unlocked Thomas' chains and the two men made their way by foot up the path- alongside the mesa, where they were greeted by the natives, into whose arms Thomas collapsed. Two Indians carried him across a narrow stone bridge that connected the main mesa to a smaller one, so high above the ground that Thomas was overcome with the fatalistic calm of having placed his life utterly in the hands of others. He was taken into an empty adobe house, where he was set on blankets with a bowl of water beside him. When he lay down, his head hurt even more; and so for some time after the natives left he sat upright, soothing the pounding at the back of his skull against the coolness of the dirt wall. He was thirsty for some wine. He kept thinking he should drink the water in the bowl but A R C D'X • 292

he hadn't the energy to lift it to his mouth, and a few moments later he regretted not having taken the opportunity when he woke in the hotel room to find the water gone, displaced by the long-forgotten scent of someone sleeping in the bed several feet away, the strange bald boy with the pictures on his body coming through the door.

Sixteen years after the murder of the unknown man in the Downtown hotel, the police arrested Gann Hurley not far from the peripheral highway where he'd been sighted for the past two months staring out at the lava fields. As it happened Polly was just crossing the fields with her two dogs on her way back to the city, and was just on the other side of the highway, when she saw the officers swoop down on Hurley and drag him to the car.

She cried so desperately as she ran alongside the car that all the way back to headquarters the cops shot sullen, reproachful glances at their boss; at headquarters the girl begged them to let her see her father, until she collapsed in the hallway. The boss was unim-pressed, unless one counted sheer satisfaction. Even the scar of his face appeared content.

Most of these years Mallory hadn't really cared much about the unsolved murder, his attention entirely absorbed by Wade's apprehension in the bowels of the Arboretum. But now the Hurley arrest represented for Mallory the final closure of an obsession that began in earnest the afternoon his face was peeled from the front of his head onto an alley wall. There were still loose ends in the matter, which Mallory might have spent the rest of his life tying up if he seriously believed there was a point; but even Mallory accepted that no one was likely ever to know exactly who the dead man in the hotel had been or what had happened between him and Sally Hemings, though whatever had transpired was presumed motivating enough for Hurley to kill him. The evidence was slim but, thought Mallory to himself, fuck evidence. It was a process of STEVE E R I C K S O N • 293

elimination, and when everyone else was eliminated Hurley was left, and his throat was as good for ramming a murder down as anyone's. Mallory had been so relentless in his pursuits for so long he didn't know how to stop, and he had half a mind to arrest the daughter as some sort of accomplice, if at the time of the incident she hadn't been two years old.

Forty-eight hours after Hurley's arrest, however, Mallory knew something was amiss. The directive came down from Primacy to move Hurley not to the penal colony, where Mallory expected to send him, but the train station. "What bullshit is this?" Mallory asked whoever was within asking range. Hurley was put back in a car and taken to Vagary Junction, where not only a train was waiting but also, on the platform, a flock of white-robed priests, more of them in one place than Mallory had ever seen at one time.

Standing in the doorway of the train was Hurley's daughter and her dogs. The rosary was removed from Hurley's wrists and now Mallory definitely had this queasy feeling in his stomach. As he became more and more furious his face began to bleed, small red rivulets trickling into the lines and wrinkles.

His daughter threw her arms around him as Hurley got on the train, and Mallory could see them through the windows as they made their way down the aisle of the car. The priests signaled the conductor and the train responded with a lurch, and a minute later obsession's final sweet resolution was irrevocably beyond Mallory's reach; all that was left was the volcano in the distance and the steel rails gleaming in the Vog and the man on the other side of the track with the red books in his arms and the blue eyes floating in his glasses like crystal balls. Like Mallory, Etcher stood watching the disappearing train for as long as it was in sight, and then stepped over the rail and up the steps to the platform, where he delivered the books into the possession of the priests, and the rosary that Hurley had worn was snapped around his wrists and he was put in the police car. He was driven down the highway to the penal colony south of the city. Within the colony's gray walls he was given a gray prisoner's robe and placed in a large black cell with no windows, for which the sound of the sea in the distance, Etcher told himself, was soothing compensation.

He had his own mattress and was allowed one small bag of A R C D'X • 294

personal possessions as long as they didn't include reading material. He had been in the cell an hour before he realized he shared it with other prisoners, some of them lying so still in the shadows they might have been dead. He was taken to a yard where the ground was littered with forbidden artifacts that had been seized during altar searches; on the rocks of the yard, under the watch of armed priests in black robes, the prisoners smashed the artifacts with dull mallets. Iconic carvings and blasphemous jewelry and children's books were hammered and pulverized into pulp. First the sensual quality of the object was disfigured and then its meaning, and then its form; and when the object had been pounded into a misshapen lump of wood or mineral or paper, the remains were then beaten into the rock itself until the whole ground throbbed with heresy. Since new artifacts were being delivered every day, this work never ended. The prisoners had no conversation among themselves and gave what they were destroying no special attention.