Cape Hell (20 page)

A plain tin mirror hung on a nail above a washstand next to the window. Leaving my shirt open, I filled the basin and scraped off the growth of weeks, the Spanish steel blade gliding through the coarse stubble like a scythe through corn silk. After rinsing off, I slapped on bay rum from a flask on the stand and stared at the stranger in the mirror. I'd begun to resemble Childress' creatures, but shiny-faced and clean-smelling in my best clothes I might pass muster in the drawing-room of a Forty-Niner; if he hadn't become so rich he'd forgotten his time grubbing in gulches and riverbeds and sharing his tent with lice and rats the size of cocker spaniels.

I went into the study, but it was deserted. Retracing our path to the front porch, I found my host seated in a spring buggy with a sleek rubber top hitched to a deep-bellied black with one white stocking and blinders, a rig straight out of Montgomery Ward. He wore an ankle-length duster over his indoor clothes and a milk-white straw planter's hat with a wagon-wheel brim and a black silk band. Outside the shelter of the porch roof, his face was dishwater gray, the black's reins wrapped around wrists thin as drawn gold. In those surroundings he might have passed for a missionary with an unmentionable disease, exiled to the wilderness to die.

He'd stopped beside the blue enamel mounting-block, but although it glistened from a fresh scrubbing I avoided it as I stepped aboard and sat beside him on the upholstered leather seat.

“How far are we going?”

“No more than a thousand yards; but as it's all uphill I wouldn't recommend it for strolling. Every month or so one of the poor idiots stumbles and drops off the edge.” He shook the reins and we started forward.

A ledge wound around the mountain nearest the house like the screw on a printer's press, railed with stretches of pine on the outside. Where there wasn't a horizontal surface sufficient to support them, the land fell nearly perpendicular from the edge. In places the path was just wide enough for the wheels to maintain a purchase, with pebbles and broken shards squirting out from under them and caroming down the mountainside. It had in the solider patches a finished look of black stone, not at all the rough fluting caused by centuries of erosion. I said it looked like a proper road.

“It's a road; though I'd hesitate to apply the honorific. We started with dynamite, but we had to conserve it for more practical use, as the supply lines are long and the merchants are vultures. Also, there's brittle shale tucked in between the veins of granite. I lost a fine engineer to a landslide. When the creatures came along I was able to free the men of skill for worthier work.”

As he said it, we passed a crew of his creatures dismantling a cairn of fallen stone with picks and spades. Stripped to the waist, they were all bunched raw muscle, indistinguishable from the mountain itself until they moved or the sun glistened off their sweat. At sight of the buggy, they shouldered their tools and flattened themselves against the rock while we passed within inches, sending a shower of dislodged mountain tumbling. I gripped the vehicle's white-ash frame tight enough to split the skin of my knuckles, leaning against the driver like an infatuated maiden out for a turn in the park.

“The brutes are good for something,” he said. “What they lack in brain power they more than make up for in animal strength, and they can survive for a week trapped under a ton of rubble.”

“How frequent are the slides?”

“Constant. Most of them are minor, but there are days when I'm unable to visit the plantation. The Sierras never miss an opportunity to reclaim what's been taken from them.”

At length the ground leveled off, until we came to a plane several acres large, so flat it seemed something had lopped off the top of the mountain the way the machete had decapitated the poor creature before the house. Long buildings of log resembled military barracks, and there were two large constructions of stone standing against a curtain of cane, the stalks growing as high as ten feet, with half-naked creatures plowing aisles through the thick growth with truncated blades, swinging them like sickles. Others gathered the mown stalks and threw them into the beds of wagons hitched to mules and oxen. The crunch of the falling cane and the swish of the bundles as they were piled into heaps sounded like an eighty-mile-an-hour wind leveling a forest.

We alighted from the buggy, and Childress' place was taken by a white man in a butternut uniform, patched and darned all over, who saluted him smartly. He was the first probable member of the major's original command I'd seen apart from Captain McCready. He drove the buggy around the corner of one of the stone buildings.

“I was told so many times that sugar won't grow at this altitude I began to believe it.” Childress was shouting over the din. “I've since formed the opinion that the big interests had their eye on the place and sought to discourage competition. As a rule, cane grows to eight feet, sometimes nine; but as you can see, the climate and conditions are ideal, and possibly unique. I provide most of the sugar sold in Acapulco, and since I began marketing in Mexico City, the Cuban interests have petitioned the government to enjoin any United States citizen from participating in the trade. Since I'm the only one in the business, I find that complimentary in the extreme.”

“Why would a rich man want to conquer a nation?”

When he scowled, the paper-thin skin plastered to his skull broke into a myriad of wrinkles.

“Money is only a means to power. Any man who would settle for the first is no better than a carpetbagger.”

He pulled open a heavy door, gripping the iron handle with both hands, and we entered one of the stone buildings. When he shut the door behind us, the cacophony outside ceased. The interior was as big as a warehouse on the docks of San Francisco, lit by sunlight canting through mullioned windows just under the rafters, fifteen feet above our heads. Plank catwalks suspended by thick ropes circled the walls and bisected one another in tiers, with more laborers stripped to the waist standing and walking along them, supporting themselves on the hemp rails.

The top tier was occupied entirely by men in Confederate uniform carrying rifles. He saw me looking at them.

“No, they're not enforced labor. They're fed, sheltered, and all their medical needs are addressed, far better than when they were trying to survive on their own. Their tempers are quicker than their powers of reason: An accidental collision is seldom shrugged off, and once engaged, they fight to the death unless someone stops them.”

“Shoots them, you mean.”

“It rarely comes to that. As I said, their senses are unnaturally acute. The report alone is agony to their ears, and a near-miss is sufficient to distract them. Their ability to maintain their purpose is almost nonexistent. They literally forget what sparked the fight, or that they were fighting at all. Repetitive work like cutting cane and pulling ropes is more suited to them than anything they might attempt through any will of their own.

“I won't show you the other building,” he said; “to do so would be redundant, and the heat is miserable. There the cane is mashed into a pulp, boiled in copper cauldrons, and distilled. It liquefies at a temperature of one hundred sixty degrees. I don't know how the brutes stand it. Before I discovered them, the men I employed had to work in shifts no longer than fifteen minutes. We lost three in one month when they weakened and fell into the cauldrons, ruining half a day's output. Here is where the final refinement process takes place.”

A waterfall of golden syrupy liquid gushed from a wooden vat tilted on ropes and pulleys into a larger container, filled nearly to the top with black ash and erected on a platform in the center of the hardpack floor. A sluice, wooden also, slanted down from the base of the larger vat into another on the floor, where the liquid came out as clear as water. The air was filled with a stench like scorched hair and the heavier, almost seductive smell of molasses.

“Charcoal.” Childress pointed to the contents of the larger vat. “We fire it in kilns from bone, grind it fine in revolving barrels, much like gunpowder, and pour the juice through it, leaving the impurities behind.”

I made no response, knowing the source of the bone.

“We let the liquid cool and crystallize in clay vessels. What moisture remains is then spun out of it in more rotating barrels by centrifugal force. The pulverizing itself is by mortar and pestle, albeit it on a grander scale than ordinary.”

He turned to face me. “And that, Marshal, is how you manage to take the bitterness out of your coffee.”

We went back outside, where the noise of cutting and stacking was as loud as before. Strolling toward the stalks of cane, I peered between the rows.

Childress missed nothing. “Don't strain your eyes looking for the poppies. They're indistinguishable from common weeds when they're not in bloom. In any case I'm phasing out the trade in opium. The refining process is even more elaborate than sugar and the market is limited to those who can afford it. I can move the legitimate product in much greater volume, without fear of confiscation except by the locals, who are cheap to bribe.

“You wouldn't credit it,” he said, “but the world's addiction to sugar far surpasses all the others. Any country practitioner can furnish you with laudanum, but men have slain each other over a peppermint stick. If I'd never touched a gram of opium, I doubt you'd have been sent here. A rebellion without financing is only the pipe-dream of a lunatic, but more governments have been overturned on traffic in harmless indulgences than drugs; but try running for re-election on bananas and tobacco.”

“What's in the other buildings, besides the barracks and infirmary?”

“The women's quarters; brothel, seraglio, call it what you will. Simple creatures require simple pleasures. The brutes fight over them as much as over anything else, but if I'd left them behind they'd be buggering each other all the time, and I can't have that. Whatever else you may think of me, I am a southern gentleman.”

Two flags flew atop the nearest barracks, the stars-and-bars of the Confederacy and the other bearing the visored and laurel-encircled head of the Knights of the Golden Circle. A stable had been built onto the end of the structure, as long as the barracks itself and lined with stalls on both sides. Here one of Childress' creatures was at work shoveling manure into a great pile outside the back entrance, and more well-tended mounts, each branded CSA, blew and twitched their tails at flies. My bay occupied a stall at the end, looking no worse the wear for its journey in the stock car.

Childress' horse and buggy waited for us outside the stable, with the soldier who'd driven it holding it by the bit. He saluted as his commander grasped the frame and started to pull himself into the driver's seat.

His hand lost its grip and he folded slowly to the ground, like a barn collapsing. The soldier lunged forward and stooped to help him up, but he was as limp as the dead creature the others had slung onto the bonepile, his face even grayer than before. Major Oscar Childress, the southern gentleman who owned slaves, sold poison, ran whores, and conspired in treason, was close to death.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

Childress, I decided
, was never far outside the scrutiny of his subordinates. No sooner had the soldier lifted him from the ground than Captain McCready appeared, straddling his fine sorrel, and swung down from the saddle in one fluid movement. He took the fallen man by the shoulders, the other by the ankles, and together they carried him to the next barracks over. I followed, leaving Childress' straw hat where it had landed.

The room they took him to was small and separated from the rest of the building with a pine partition, scoured white and stinking of carbolic. A hospital bed erected on a system of cranks and wheels stood in the center of the room, made up in fresh linen, with two down pillows and a thick cotton blanket rolled up at the foot in a topsheet. In seconds they had the patient laid out with the covers drawn to his chin. Dismissed, the soldier evaporated; there's no better way to describe how quickly he made himself absent.

There was an evil smell about the place I knew all too well, apart from the carbolic: the thick air of ether, old blood, rotting flesh, and alcohol; gallons of the last, splashed about like water on a raging fire, and over it all the gaseous residue of human organs exposed to the air. It brought me back to a place and a time I'd hoped was long behind me; of a mildewed tent in a farmer's decimated field packed with sweating, cursing orderlies, frantic surgeons, and grown men screaming for their mothers. The farther you got away from a thing the closer you came back to it.

“Lift his head.”

There being no one else present, I slid a hand behind Childress' head and raised it while the captain opened a shallow drawer in a cabinet with a zinc top and took out a red morocco case the thickness of a deck of cards but twice as long. Tipping back the lid, he drew a steel syringe from its form-fitted depression, a squat brown bottle from another, shook the bottle, drew the cork, and filled the syringe with a sucking sound. He restopped and replaced the bottle, tapped the barrel of the syringe, depressed the plunger, squirting an arc of liquid from the end of the hollow needle, and in a series of deft motions wetted a wad of cotton from another container he'd taken from the drawer, tipped something from another bottle into the wad, and cocked an elbow, pointing at his superior's near arm with an unmistakable gesture.

Unmistakable for only a few.

How he knew I'd filled in for a stricken orderly at Cold Harbor I never learned; either he'd studied my record or expected me to understand what must have been an automatic action. Whichever was the case, he'd judged correctly. I rolled back Childress' sleeve and watched as he daubed the inside of the major's elbow with the cotton swab, filling the room with the sharp stench of alcohol, cast the swab to the floor, pierced the vein he knew was there, and made the injection.