House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (45 page)

H
ACKBERRY FELT LIKE
a beggar at her door. As the taxi drove away and he mounted the steps to her apartment, he tried to repress his resentment for her condemnation of him. Before he could tap on the door, it opened. She was wearing a dark green dress with a white collar, almost like a Victorian affectation, her hair in a bun, her face pale, free of makeup. “Andre is in jail,” she said. “My attorney is there now. He was struck in the head by a policeman.”

“What for?”

“The police say he tried to strangle an officer.”

“Did he?”

“Probably.”

“They’ll put him away.”

“No, they will not. Do you want to come in?”

“Thank you. How will you stop them?”

She didn’t reply, her eyes lingering on his.

“You have something on them?” he said.

“What do you think?”

“Sorry way to run a railroad,” he said.

“I see, you subscribe to a higher morality?”

“No, I don’t have any moral authority in anything,” he replied.

He looked at the rows of books on her living room shelves, the ornate furniture, the thick drapes, a big brass clock on the mantel, a log burning in the fireplace. Her home was a study in stability, the kind that was personal and seemed to have no antecedent and was not cultural or inherited. He rubbed his hand on his mouth. He would have cut off his fingers with tin snips for a drink. “I hung up on you because you hurt my feelings. The truth is, I’m short on friends, and I fear that my ineptitude is going to get my boy killed.”

“What do you plan to do, Mr. Holland?”

“Take it to them. Under a black flag.”

“Try to listen to me. Arnold Beckman wants the cup. He won’t rest until he gets his hands on it. You have to use your wits. Odysseus used his intelligence to defeat his enemies. You have to do the same.”

“I should put a Trojan horse in Beckman’s backyard?”

“Don’t mock me.”

“What if I told him I’d give him the cup? What if I told him he could have me with it?”

“He would take the cup and then kill you. I suspect he would not do it all at once, either.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“And you’d put yourself in his power anyway?”

“If it would get my boy back. Ishmael could be released to you. You’re a good diplomat. You could work it out.”

“You know better, Mr. Holland.”

“That cup was supposedly used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. If that’s the case, why aren’t I getting any he’p from Upstairs? What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m going to meet my attorney at the jail, then take Andre to a hospital. Do you want to come?”

“No, I have to find Ishmael’s mother.”

“Let me ask you a personal question. When this is over, do you plan to be around?”

“Around where?”

“San Antonio. Kerrville. Wherever.”

“I’m not keen on travel.” He waited for her to reply, but she didn’t. “What kind of question is that?” he said.

“I was just curious. You’re an unusual man, Mr. Holland.”

“Can you call me Hack?”

“Formality has its purpose,” she said.

He tried to see into her eyes, but she tied on her hat and didn’t look directly into his face again.

H
E TOOK A
cab to Ruby’s hotel. At first he did not recognize the woman retrieving her room key at the desk. From the back, she looked like a countrywoman whose hat was on crooked and whose hair had come loose and fallen in long wisps on one cheek, as though she were too tired to push it back in place. Then she turned around and looked straight at him, even though there were other people in the lobby. “Hack?” she said.

“How you doin’, Ruby?”

“I just got your message.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“At Beckman’s. Out at the army base, too. I talked to a colonel. I thought they might help us.”

“What’d he say?”

“They have their own problems. Can we sit down?”

“You went to Beckman’s on your own?”

“I’ll tell you about it. I really need to sit down first.”

He was disconcerted by her eyes. He had forgotten how beautiful and mysterious they were, deep-set like a Viking’s, the color of violets.

“Did someone drive you? Did you take a taxi?” he said.

“No, I walked. It’s all right, Hack.”

“No, it isn’t.”

He looked for a place to sit. The lobby had retained a gloomy form of elegance with its floor-standing ashtrays and potted palms and musty sofas and newspapers scattered on an oak table lit by a lamp that had a big rose-colored glass bubble for a shade. He put his hand on her elbow and walked her to a tasseled sofa by the window. She seemed to take no notice of his touch.

“You were at Beckman’s apartment?”

“I hit him with an iron skillet. Several times. I wanted to kill him. If Maggie Bassett hadn’t intervened, I probably would have.”

“Then you just walked away?”

“Beckman wasn’t in any condition to stop me. I forgot to mention something. Earlier I hit Maggie in the face with my fist.”

“We need to move you away from this hotel.”

“Why?”

“Beckman sent a man to throw acid in Beatrice DeMolay’s eyes. What do you think he’d do to you?”

“It’s Ishmael I’m worried about. Maggie warned me. I acted stupidly.”

“Maggie did? After you hit her?”

“She’s a jack-in-the-box.”

“You were always heck on wheels. Remember when you threw the cherry pie in the congressman’s face?”

“I did that?”

“In the hotel restaurant in Galveston. That’s how we met.”

“I’m really tired, Hack. I think I’m going to pass out.”

“I need to tell you something. Ishmael came to me in a dream just this evening. It was a strange moonrise. The moon looked like a broken wafer. The moonlight was in the dream, like it was part of what was happening to Ishmael. He was a little boy again, dressed in his Easter suit, with a rabbit in a basket. He was trying to tell me where he was. I think I’ll see him again and he’ll tell me where he is. Maybe in a dream tonight.”

She gazed at him woodenly, her lips moving as though she’d misunderstood his words.

A
FTER THE SECOND
bucket of water had been poured incrementally on the towel, Ishmael felt his lungs turn to fire and his heart swell to the size of a cantaloupe; he saw a great pink balloon inflate inside his head and suddenly pop as though it had been touched with a hot cigarette.

When he woke, someone was blotting his face with a towel. “Who are you?” Ishmael said.

“My name is Jeff. You’re a tough guy.”

“What happened to Jessie?”

“I sent him to make a snack. He was a little rough on you?”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

“I’m going to unhook one of your hands and walk you to the water closet across the room. You don’t want to take the pads off your eyes. You know why, too. We’re in agreement on that?”

“I understand.”

“I’ll be up the stairs. All the doors are locked. You cain’t go nowhere. Don’t get ideas.”

Ishmael nodded to show he understood.

“This doesn’t have to end in a bad way, buddy,” Jeff said. “Just don’t give the wrong guy trouble. Come on, get up. Easy does it. There you go.”

Jeff fitted his hand under Ishmael’s left arm and walked him across a floor that felt paved with bricks, then left him inside a wood cubicle that had a door with a latch on it. “The chain is on the left-hand side of the box. Pull it when you’re through,” he said. “There’s a roll of paper on the floor. Sorry about all this.”

Then why are you doing it to me?

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Ishmael said. “Thank you for your consideration.”

He sat on the toilet and felt in front of him to ensure that the door was shut. He peeled one eye pad partially back with his thumb and realized he was sitting in darkness. Through a crack in the wall, he could see water seeping through the stones below a ground-level window, and he guessed his basement prison was located close to a river or a lake. A solitary palm tree was silhouetted against the moon, its fronds straightening in the wind. Low in the sky, perhaps on the western horizon, a lake of electricity seemed to be flaring inside a storm bank. From somewhere above, he could hear the voice of the man who had almost drowned him: “The guy doesn’t know anything. If he did, I would have gotten it out of him.”

“Who told you to question him?” Jeff’s voice said.

“Mr. Beckman wants something from the guy’s father. I was helping out.”

“Listen, Jessie, we’re paid to do what Mr. Beckman tells us. Right now that means we find the soldier’s mother.”

“What for?”

“She beat the living shit out of Mr. Beckman. With a frying pan.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Tell him that.”

“Where is she now?” Jessie asked.

“That’s what we have to find out.”

“Then what?”

“You get to enjoy yourself.”

“Like you don’t want to have a crack at her?”

“I hear she’s a looker, all right.”

“Why’s our hero taking so long?” Jessie said.

Ishmael pulled the chain on the water box, sending a torrent through the pipe into the toilet bowl.

H
ACKBERRY RENTED SEPARATE
rooms on the top floor of a ten-story hotel on Alamo Plaza. While the bellhop put Ruby’s suitcase on the luggage stand, Hackberry opened the French doors to the balcony and gazed down on the gazebo and wooded park in the center of the plaza and at the streetcars and colonnades over the sidewalks and the headlights of the motorcars wending their way into neighborhoods that were covered with trees. “Come look, Ruby,” he said. “Isn’t it grand? Look at the carousel.”

She stood next to him, motionless, staring down at the plaza, her shoulder barely touching his. “We took Ishmael there on his first birthday,” she said.

“I sat on the wood horse with him. He pointed at you every time we went around. Then he kept looking backward at you.”

“I want to sleep now, Hack. In the morning we’ll start out fresh.”

He couldn’t take his mind off the memories the carousel brought back, and he said nothing in reply.

“No one in Kerrville would help you?” she said.

“The law isn’t there for individuals. It’s there for people as a whole, or at least for chosen groups. Most of the time it serves the general good, but often at the expense of individuals. It’s the secret nobody talks about.”

“I don’t care about any of that. I want to kill Arnold Beckman. Or hire someone to do it.”

“That’s not like you.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Better go to sleep, Ruby,” he said, his reverie broken. “Thinking at night isn’t good for anybody. I’m three doors down.”

I
N HIS ROOM,
he sat on the side of the bed and called Beatrice DeMolay. “I didn’t know if you’d be home,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I just returned from the jail with Andre,” she said. “He wouldn’t go to the hospital. I got a call from your friend Sheriff Posey. He seems worried about you.”

“Willard called?”

“He thinks you’re angry at him.”

“I knew Willard would come around. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. Where are you?”

He told her the name of his hotel and his room number.

“I’m going to see Arnold Beckman in the morning,” she said.

“This is the man who tried to blind you, Miss Beatrice. Stay away from him. Ruby already tore him up with an iron skillet. I suspect he’s not in a good mood.”

“She attacked Beckman? You’d better get her out of town.”

“When we get our son back.”

“You have to trust me, Mr. Holland.”

“Tell Andre I’m glad he’s doing okay.”

“He’s not okay. They treated him worse than they would an animal.”

“Miss Beatrice, you cain’t negotiate with Beckman. His kind only understand force.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “His kind understand money. That’s their weakness.”

“When I first came by the cup, I got drunk in a cantina and passed out in a pole shed full of manure. You came to me in a dream. You stroked my forehead and kissed me on the mouth. You told me I was chosen. You called me ‘
mi amor.
’ You put me in a state of arousal. But I was just flattering myself. You were telling me I’d been given an obligation of appreciable significance, one I probably wasn’t going to like.”

“That’s more detail than we need to hear, Mr. Holland.”

“It’s what happened,” he said.

“There’s a historical fact I think you have a right to know. It’s not meant to upset you or to indicate I necessarily believe it’s anything more than coincidence. In a small museum in Paris, there is a painting of Jacques de Molay’s death by fire in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. Standing in the crowd is a man who looks exactly like Arnold Beckman.”

“Miz DeMolay, you’re a nice lady, but the wingspan of a moth is the wingspan of a moth. I’m going to bed now. Take care of yourself and Andre. Check with you later.”

He quietly hung up the receiver and lay down on top of the covers and went to sleep with his clothes on, his fingers folded on his chest, the light burning, hoping Ishmael would speak to him again.

B
UT HE HEARD
no voices during the night and saw no images in his dreams. When he woke in the morning, he was not sure where he was. He sat on the side of the bed, the covers slipping off his legs, and tried to reconcile the sun shining on the balcony and the ornate normalcy of the room with the prospects the world offered him on that particular day. He had no legal authority and was powerless against the forces that had taken his son. He felt as though fate had imposed upon him a role he had seen many hapless individuals play when one day they discovered that they were absolutely alone, that no one believed their story or understood the nature of their loss and the depth of their grief. They may have had only one eye in the kingdom of the blind, but they did have one eye. Unfortunately, no one could have cared less.