Deadman (15 page)

“To Montana?” Mulheisen arched a brow.

“Eventually. First to Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Spokane . . . and slowly, on across the Northern Plains into Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Minneapolis . . . Along the way they gobble up Missoula, Butte, Billings . . . We're small taters for these guys, but they don't overlook even the tater tots, Mul. That's the story, anyway. Heavy-duty dudes, Mul.”

Mulheisen waved an H. Upmann Petit Corona. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Oh god,” Johnny said, eyeing the cigar. “Oh sure, why not? Here, I'll open the door.” He jumped up and slid the glass door open. A cold breeze crept in. The temperature must have dropped 20 degrees from the afternoon 50s.

“That's all right,” Mulheisen said, “I'll have it later.”

“No, go ahead. Light up. I insist. Hey, I'll have one, too. I've got some around here.” He waved away Mulheisen's offer of one of his, and delved into a splendid cherrywood humidor on one of the
bookshelves lining an inner wall. He came up with a very large Havana, a Romeo y Julieta. “I have these, but I never smoke them. Joe Spalding gave me ‘em, he's the chairman of the board at the power company. Here, have some.” He grabbed a handful and stuffed them into the breast pocket of Mulheisen's sport coat, about seventy-five dollars’ worth of cigars.

When the cigars were lit and drawing well and the initial smoke had cleared, whisked out by the door and/or some kind of faintly humming air-exchange system that Johnny had turned on, Mulheisen said, “So there is a big job. Is it in your power to give?”

Johnny nodded. “Effectively. I don't have ukase muscle: ‘Listen up, guys! Mulheisen's our new head cop.’ But if I suggest you, I will certainly have already made sure that no one will seriously oppose the nomination. No prob, Mul.”

“But it'll just be a desk job,” Mulheisen said. “Organizing squads of investigators, having meetings with mayors, police chiefs, Feds of all kinds, looking at miles of organizational posters, video proposals, funding strategies . . .”

“Nah, nah,” Johnny said, waving his cigar. He set it aside and never picked it up again, only an inch or two of it tasted. “Youkin nav monkeys'll do that. Secretaries. Beautiful secretaries, maybe.” He looked hopeful, then sighed and shook his head regretfully. He raised his hand to hide his whispered comment, “Notso weasy to get beautiful seckataries anymore. Turns out everybody's beautiful is also smart.” He sat back, dropping the pretense of some confidential information. “Dunno why that is. D'you? Usetabe, beautiful was dumb. Not-nee-more. Speshly wimmen. Well, you think about it. We'll go fishin’ tomorrow. I'll pick you up at . . . oh, nine? Ten? No point in goin’ early, this time of year. Too cold in the mornin’, fish don't bite till noon. Let's have a sauna.” He pronounced it “sow-na,” in the approved manner, and sprang to his feet a little unsteadily.

They walked out along a little path in the cold night air. There were many more stars than Mulheisen could remember seeing, at least
for a long time. Perhaps there had been this many stars when he was younger, in the service and stationed in some remote comer. Yes, he thought he could vaguely remember that. But there were plenty here.

The path ran along the shoulder of a gentle declivity that ran down, as Mulheisen recalled, toward the country club. To match the stars overhead there were many thousands of lights out across the valley, but now somewhat obscured by ground fog. They came to a copse of evergreens and stepped into their aromatic embrace, and Johnny opened the door to a small wooden outbuilding that smelled even more aromatically of cedar. There was a tiny dressing anteroom, with a portentous shower stall in one corner, waiting to chill their enflamed bodies. Johnny flicked some switches and sat down to take off his shoes.

“It's heating up,” he said. “It'll be a coupla minutes. I should have brought my cigar.”

Mulheisen shed his shoes and pants. “This Northern Tier thing seems a long way off,” he said.

“No, no, no,” Johnny said. “It's starting. It's started. They're already seeing infiltration of the drug business, the gambling especially, in Washington and Oregon and Bri-ish—British Columbia. Gambling could be big here. The Indians are into gambling and they want to get in bigger—casinos. Montana has always been pretty good at keeping Mafia—traditional Mafia—out of the gambling. That's why we've kept out casino gambling . . . but it could happen. I expect the Asians will hit gambling hardest in Montana. A cop in Missoula called me a couple weeks ago. He said a major Mafia figure met with the Asians in Missoula in September. That's the word. You should talk to this guy. Fact you will, Monday mornin’. We're havin’ a little meeting. Some a the guys from Missoula are comin’ over.”

By this time they were both nude, and they gratefully eased into the hot air of the sauna. It was not a large space, two tiers of seats in a fully cedar-paneled chamber, with a powerful rock-filled heater on the floor. They had just settled and begun to relish the head-clearing
heat, when Mulheisen noticed that the heavy door trembled slightly. He didn't say anything, but a few minutes later he yelped when the door swung open and Mrs. Antoni zipped inside. Completely naked.

Mulheisen stared as she clambered onto the upper shelf across from him. She was indeed a comely woman. She took a great deep breath.

Johnny looked up. “Hi, Hon. Cal go down okay?”

“Like a light,” she said. “He's tired after a day of digging and running. Almost crashed in the tub.”

“Good, good,” Johnny murmured. He lowered his head, gratefully absorbing the heat in his lean, muscular body. Mulheisen clenched his own thighs tightly together and looked down also.

Again the door flew open and this time the stunning torso of Miss Antoni bounced in. She plunked down only a foot away from Mulheisen. He shifted away from her uneasily, trying not to look beyond those long arms framing the youthful pink-tipped breasts.

“I heard you sneaking out here,” she accused her father. “I thought you said we were using too much electricity and you wanted to cut down.”

Johnny looked at her blankly. He was feeling the heat, you could see. The moisture was pouring off him. He shook his head gently at her and lifted his gaze languorously to meet Mulheisen's panicked stare. “Finns,” he breathed thickly.

“What?” Mulheisen croaked.

“I'm surrounded by Finns,” Johnny said, tossing a dipperful of cold water onto the hot rocks. The searing steam rose into Mulheisen's nose and lungs. Johnny nodded at his wife. “Pat Juntonen. Born in Finntown.” His head swiveled slowly to his spectacular daughter. “Soo-zoolalah Antononen, that's what we should call her. They'd live in the sauna if I didn't lock it once in a while. You gettin’ hot?” he asked Mulheisen.

Mulheisen nodded. He watched in awe as the man stood up,
his penis hanging long and thick as he lumbered out. Mulheisen closed his eyes, took a deep breath and then, as nonchalantly as he had ever done, he dove for the door and whisked out.

The cold shower was running full blast. Johnny stepped out from under and grabbed for an enormous, fluffy towel hanging among others on pegs against the opposite wall. He gestured to the shower and Mulheisen gratefully plunged under. It felt magnificent. He felt magnificent. But he didn't linger. The minute he began to cool he raced for a towel and hastily dried himself, expecting the women to emerge any second. It was an agonizing process, however, as he was dead tired, and the effects of the cold shower soon gave way to the lassitudinous languor of the post-sauna syndrome: He felt good, he felt light, but he couldn't move very fast.

“Take your time, take your time,” Johnny said, his voice as soft and easy as it would ever likely be, “they'll squat in there until they turn into beets. They always do. Sometimes I have to drag them out.”

But Mulheisen didn't feel at ease until he was back out in the cold night, feeling his still-wet hair congeal frostily. A few minutes later they were in the Lincoln and cruising back uptown. Mulheisen almost fell asleep en route, and he barely made it up the elevator to his room.

Mulheisen's affection for Montana was at low ebb at about noon on the following day, when he found himself totally immersed in the Big Hole River, bouncing off jagged boulders, gasping for breath as he periodically surfaced, still clinging desperately to a fly rod from which many yards of line continued to reel out. He looked up through white froth at one point and saw Johnny's large gray rubber raft bearing down on him. Gratefully, he raised his free arm so that Johnny could save him. The water roared about him furiously and it was cold.

To his stunned surprise, Johnny merely grinned and waved
him to one side, crying “Grab the boat!” while in the front seat Judge Leahy calmly made a cast into a pocket off the main current. Almost immediately, the judge exclaimed “Yeah!” and lifted his rod, which bent deeply, indicating that he had a large fish on. At this point Johnny shipped his oars and stepped nimbly from his position in the center of the raft to stand at waist level in the raging stream. Johnny held the raft for the judge while he played the fish, and Mulheisen realized with a start that the water was only waist deep, and he staggered to his feet. They were in the slack water behind some rocks, the water clear and placid, the gravelly bottom secure and stable here. He was surprised to find that he still held the fly rod.

“Reel up and get in,” Johnny called out, grinning.

Mulheisen began to reel up the yards of line that now ran straight down the current. The judge continued to play the trout, and within a minute or two had brought it leaping and lunging to the side of the rubber boat, where Johnny deftly scooped it up with a wooden-handled net that hung from his vest. It was a huge trout, silvery with splendid reds and blues and greens shimmering along its sides like the aurora borealis.

Mulheisen had the fly line completely reeled up at last, just as the judge lifted the nearly two-foot-long trout from the net and carefully extracted the fly from its jaw, then reverently lowered the now placid trout back into the water where it flexed and instantly disappeared. He turned triumphantly to Johnny and declared, “Five pounds if it was an ounce,” his face wreathed in delight.

Mulheisen clambered glumly into the high rear seat of the boat again. His shirt was soaked but otherwise he was dry in the marvelously form-fitting blue neoprene bibbed waders. His hat had gone, but it wasn't his hat anyway, it was one of Johnny's. And now Johnny reached into the bottom of the boat, where water sloshed about, and lifted the dripping hat. He handed it to Mulheisen. It was a baseball-type hat with an emblem on it of an angler tangled in his own line and the words, “Frustrated Fishermen.” Mulheisen flapped the moisture
out of it and tugged it onto his wet hair. He felt like his teeth ought to chatter, but in the bright sunlight they just wouldn't.

“Fun, eh?” Johnny laughed and pushed the boat out from the rocks and leapt into his driver's seat as they shot down the current. A few minutes later they entered a wide and placid stretch of the river and floated calmly and gently. The judge was casting repeatedly and Mulheisen had regained his breath and composure. He gratefully accepted steaming coffee in the thermos top. Johnny handed him a pint of whiskey, saying, “Stiffen that up a bit.” Mulheisen did, with a generous dollop of Jim Beam, and he soon felt considerably better. Within ten minutes he was even casting again, though not with any distance or precision.

He was still trying to convince himself that he had almost drowned, but it was getting harder and harder to do as the intensity of the event faded in the calm sunlight. Not very many minutes earlier, he thought, leaning back comfortably in the seat, he had been innocently trying to recreate the image of Johnny's daughter Suzy, as she stepped into the sauna last night. He wasn't having much luck in this. He'd been so astounded that he'd not had time to really notice, to observe, what this teenager had looked like in the nude. He had never seen a sixteen-year-old girl naked, and so he had no stock footage, as it were, to fall back on. But he had a shadowy impression of long black hair, of youthful limbs and a dark triangle. It wasn't sexy, it was too artless to be sexy, but it was a compelling image. And then Johnny had turned the boat sideways, apparently to give the judge a good shot at a holding position behind a rock, and in doing so the stern of the rubber raft had bumped against another rock. It was just a momentary bump, but Mulheisen was not prepared for it and he was off balance, turning to look at something, a heron, and the bump had caused him to slide off the seat and into the main current. He had been swept along for perhaps a hundred feet before he willy-nilly kicked his way into the field of rocks that lay on the far edge of the current. Now, reconstructing events, he realized that Johnny had very calmly assessed
the situation, had refused to abandon the judge's position, but had adjusted so that the boat would shortly overtake Mulheisen and box him into the calm water where he could get back on his feet. It had been very masterful, almost offhandedly accomplished.

Mulheisen was grateful, but he was beginning to wonder how long this float trip would take. They had put the boat in the river at a fishing resort or camp about an hour earlier. He had been shown how to get into Jeff's waders and boots, and there had been another brief lesson in casting, which had gone a little better this time. Jeff's fishing vest, festooned with hanging implements and trout flies, was also inflatable as a life preserver. The whole outfit—inflated vest, form-fitting insulated waders, the felt-soled wading boots, wool shirt, hat—had given Mulheisen a clumsy feeling, as of a knight in plastic armor, complete with a lancelike rod of highly flexible graphite.

Their companion this morning was a district judge from Butte, Ed Leahy. He looked more like a judge than one should look: pushing seventy but hale and hearty, a well-trimmed white moustache, portly. He was in brown waders and a venerable fishing vest and canvas hat. “Glad to meet you, Mul. Heard a lot about you. I guess you'll be at the Task Force meeting on Monday?” Then he abruptly dropped any mention of business and explained to Mulheisen that the dark glasses on a flexible strap around his neck were polarized, so he could see the fish through the surface glare. They had magnifying lenses below the regular prescription lenses, so he could see to tie on the tiny flies—"The eyes gave out a long time ago,” he said.