House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (48 page)

“I’ll send him over,” she said. “He’s driving my new motorcar. As you are aware, my REO is undergoing massive repairs.”

“I hope they do a good job on that,” he replied. “I hear there are some right good mechanics here’bouts.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Holland. You never fail to distinguish yourself. I thought I had met every kind of man. I didn’t realize how vain I was.”

Before he could reply, she hung up.

He called Willard Posey in Kerrville. “It’s Hack. I need Deputy Pickins to bring a certain item to my hotel room in San Antonio.”

“The Kerr County Sheriff’s Department is running a delivery service to San Antonio?”

“Don’t be light about this.”

“How could I be light about it? Are you talking about the item I think you’re talking about? I cain’t take any more of this craziness, Hack.”

“I think that cup is the real thing.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“What do you care?”

“One of two things is going on here,” Willard said. “Either you’ve lost your mind, or you have in your possession an object a baptized person is going to have to think very seriously about.”

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do. But if I don’t do something pretty soon, I’m going to lose my boy. What would you do in my stead? He’s in the hands of people who are worse than the convicts in Huntsville.”

“You never ease up, Hack. You could squeeze blood from a rock.”

“Get off the pot.”

“I won’t forget that.”

“I hope you don’t,” Hackberry said.

“Tell me where the cup is and give me the directions to where you’re at.”

A
HALF HOUR LATER,
a different desk clerk called Hackberry’s room. “There’s a peculiar nigger down here. He says you told him to come to the hotel.”

“What’s his name?”

“He didn’t give it.”

“Then ask him.”

The clerk went away from the phone and came back. “He says his name is Andre.”

“Send him up.”

“We cain’t do that, sir.”

Hackberry took the elevator down to the lobby. Andre was standing by the side door, his hat in his hand, water dripping off his coat on the marble floor. Hackberry went to the desk. “I need the use of your office.”

“The office is restricted to employees,” the clerk said.

He was sorting the mail and didn’t look up when he spoke. Hackberry stared at him, but the clerk didn’t notice. He was tall and had slicked hair and a high, shiny forehead and wore a silver and red necktie and a white shirt with garters on the sleeves.

“This man is my friend and associate,” Hackberry said. “I don’t like the way you’ve treated him. We’ll be using your office. If you don’t like it, call the owners. In the meantime, don’t disturb us.”

He motioned for Andre to follow him into the office and closed the door behind them. The desk clerk was staring at them through the glass, his jaw flexing. Hackberry pointed a finger as he would a pistol. The clerk began stuffing mail into the key boxes, glancing back over his shoulder.

“You are always very candid in your dealings with people, Mr. Holland,” Andre said. “I’m not sure that is necessarily wise.”

“Rude pipsqueaks are rude pipsqueaks. So you treat them as pipsqueaks. The police knocked you around?”

“They have done much worse to others. Miss Beatrice said I should talk with you. She also said you might make unreasonable demands of me and that I must use my own judgment in dealing with you.”

“She tell you anything else?”

“She said you have concrete for brains.”

“I saw her at Arnold Beckman’s office in the brothel district. Another man was driving her.”

“She knows what I think of Mr. Beckman. My feelings about him are not positive ones.”

“If a rusty drainpipe could talk, I know what it would sound like,” Hackberry said.

“I told you about the men who abducted my children and the fate that was theirs as a result,” Andre said. He had not sat down. He wiped the dampness from his face with a handkerchief. “I told you how I took these wicked men into the jungle at night and by dawn had relieved them of the evil presences blocking the light from their eyes. I think you want to know the details of an event that should be left in the jungle, except you are afraid to ask.”

“What you tell me is up to you,” Hackberry said.

“The trees and the foliage do not have eyes or ears, but men do. People in my village heard the sounds that came out of the jungle that night. Later, some of the villagers would not look into my eyes when we passed on the street. They no longer wanted to be my friend or my neighbor. They were ashamed that I had ever been a priest in their church. I do not want that to happen to us, Mr. Holland. I do not want to lose you as my friend.”

“Would you be willing to do to Beckman the same things you did to your children’s kidnappers?” Hackberry said.

“That is not an honest question.”

“I don’t
comprendo
.”

“The question is whether
you
are willing to do these things, Mr. Holland. I think you are not. And for that reason, I cannot do them for you.”

“I’ll do what it takes to get my son back.”

“You will not be the same later.”

“I fired my revolver into a cattle car loaded with Mexican peasants, including women and children.”

“You did this deliberately?”

“No, I fired inside the smoke and dust. Then I saw what I had done. I wouldn’t deliberately kill a woman or a child.”

“That is the difference between us. That is why my voice is the way it is. On the night I delivered up these men from their evil deeds, I felt a bird fly out of my breast. It was as white as snow, and it glided over the ocean and died inside the darkness, and I was not the same when the sun rose in the morning.”

“Do you want Beckman to end up with the cup?” Hackberry said.

Andre didn’t reply.

“What are you looking at?” Hackberry said.

“We have made an enemy we did not need,” Andre replied.

Hackberry turned around. The desk clerk was on the telephone, his back to them, hunched over, the receiver held tightly against his ear, as though his posture could hide the nature of his conversation.

“Maybe he’s calling his wife,” Hackberry said.

“Evil men are all born of the same seed and carry it with them wherever they go,” Andre said. “That is why many of them resemble gargoyles.”

“You’ll never make a humanist, Andre.”

F
ROM HIS WINDOW,
Hackberry saw Deputy Darl Pickins park a Kerr County Sheriff’s Department motorcar in front of the hotel and run inside, an object wrapped in a slicker held against his chest. In less than two minutes, he was at Hackberry’s door, out of breath.

“You must have put the spurs to it,” Hackberry said.

“Elevator was broke.”

“I meant between here and Kerrville.”

“I went to the cave like Sheriff Posey said and—”

Hackberry reached through the doorway and pulled Darl inside. “We don’t need to be advertising our business.”

“The sheriff give me that sense. Where you want me to put it?”

“On the bed is fine.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Maybe I better not.”

“Your pistol and your bowie knife are on the bed, Mr. Holland. I also heard some of what the sheriff said to you on the telephone. I’m off duty today.”

“I don’t think you can he’p on this one.”

“I ain’t stupid, sir. Sheriff Posey don’t get upset often. You got to him. Has this got something to do with the church?”

“Indirectly, I guess. Which church you mean?”

“For me, one is just the same as the other. If we’re Christians, ain’t we supposed to he’p out each other?”

Hackberry wasn’t listening. “It was you wrapped it with twine?”

“I didn’t want it to fall loose.”

“You didn’t look inside?”

“I wouldn’t do that. Not without asking.”

Hackberry opened his pocketknife and cut the twine. He lifted the cup from the bed and placed it on the nightstand, under a lamp.

“What is it?” Darl said.

“Probably depends on who you talk to. The gold and the jewels are most likely from medieval times. The two onyx goblets fused together might go back a bit farther.”

“What are we talking about here, Mr. Holland?”

“A lady who used to run a brothel and a Haitian who was a pagan priest say it was used by Jesus at the Last Supper. I found it in a hearse that was carrying a load of ordnance down in Mexico. That was right before I burned the hearse. The ordnance belonged to Arnold Beckman.”

Darl was staring at the two goblets, fused end to end, one acting as the base. “So the gold cup set in the top was drank out of by Jesus?”

“I don’t think a carpenter would be using gold dishware. The onyx cup is another matter.”

“This makes me feel a little uneasy, Mr. Holland.”

“Why?”

“It’s not exactly your ordinary day-to-day experience,” Darl replied.

“Beckman has got his hands on my son.”

“That’s why you’ve got your revolver and bowie knife and ammunition laid out on the bed?”

“I wish it was that simple.”

“How’d Mr. Beckman get holt of your son?”

“My ex-wife betrayed me.”

“The one people say was hooked up with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?”

“That’s the lady.”

“Sounds to me like her butt ought to be sitting in a jail cell.”

A strand of Darl’s red hair was hanging in his face; his thin frame and wide shoulders had the angularity and stiffness of coat hangers. The blue kerchief tied around his neck was embroidered with tiny white stars.

“I changed my mind,” Hackberry said.

“Sir?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to hang around.”

M
AGGIE PACED THE
floor in her living room, her nails biting into her palms, a habit she couldn’t rid herself of any more than she could get the cold out of her bones. Dr. Romulus Atwood, who had actually been to veterinary school, had told her that a thyroid disorder was responsible for her subnormal body temperature, and it could most likely be cured by the mineral baths at Hot Springs, Arkansas, a resort for criminals of every stripe. Once they arrived there, he set about fleecing anyone he could at the card tables, using her as his shill.

And that was what she had been, a shill for everyone: pimps, madams, opium den operators, cardsharps, and the worst of the lot, the mercenary contractors who sent passenger-car loads of gunmen to kill and terrorize the sodbusters during the Johnson County War. And now an international arms dealer. Top that.

She put another log in the fireplace. When it didn’t catch right away, she jabbed it with the poker and stacked another one on top of the first and poked at the green bark on both of them, not raising the temperature one degree.

When would it stop raining? She could not remember seeing a darker day. The sky was black upon black, relieved only by the fog rising from the river or a silvery quivering in the clouds that briefly illuminated the countryside, like the flickering scenes of a newsreel filmed in the trenches.

She mustn’t think of the trenches or the war, she thought. That was all she had heard about for years. First it was the sinking of the passenger ships by the submarines, the stories about the survivors crawling like lines of ants along the hull, slipping helplessly into space, finally succumbing to the coldness of the depths. Then there were the photos of the disfigured, the amputees, and those who sported glass eyes and prosthetic faces so others would not see what they really looked like. War was bad. Who could argue with that? Why did everybody have to keep talking about it?

But her depression and angst and guilt were not about the war or having to hear about it. She wadded up more paper and stuffed it between the logs, trying to shut down her thoughts before they got out of hand. Then she gave up and allowed herself a moment of clarity, the kind she usually avoided, and thought about the telegram and letter from Ruby Dansen to Hackberry that she had burned in the fireplace at their home on the Guadalupe.

With forethought and design, she had destroyed any chance of Hackberry and Ruby reuniting; she had inculcated suspicion and animosity in each of them that had lasted for years. She had created a masterpiece of deceit that had ruined a large part of their lives.

She stared wanly out the window at the hills. She could see bare trees silhouetted against the sky, like stick figures hooked together in a medieval painting depicting doomsday. No, she mustn’t think like that. As bad as her deeds were, they were understandable. She was fighting to save her home. She was Hackberry’s wife; Ruby Dansen was not. What woman wouldn’t do the same? Who were they to judge her?

The answer was no one. And that was because no one else knew what she had done.

The thought was not a comforting one. By the river, she witnessed a phenomenon she had heard of but never seen. A streak of lightning struck a hill, and instead of disappearing inside the darkness with a clap of thunder, it rolled in a yellow ball across a meadow and exploded at the base of a tree with the rippling brilliance of a Klansman setting fire to a kerosene-soaked cross, burning brightly in the great blackness that seemed to cover the land.

She stepped back from the window, swallowing, waiting for the thunder. But none came. Instead, a motorcar pulled up in front, one wheel sinking into her lawn, and two men got out, grinning, even though the rain was blowing in their faces. She felt her stomach curdle and her buttocks constrict.

T
HEY COMPRISED HALF
of the group Arnold referred to as his J Boys. What were their names? It didn’t matter. They represented a group that had been poured into a single mold from the same mix, like primeval ooze that had been separated from the rest of the gene pool and couldn’t be disposed of in any other fashion.

She opened the door, the wind blowing inside. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Mr. Beckman wants you protected,” one of them said.

“From what?”

“Someone who might hurt you. Like they done to Jessie.”

“I can’t begin to understand your English.”

“He got a hat pin rammed in his mouth and out his cheek. Right now he’s spitting blood and whiskey in a pail. He’s not having a lot of laughs about it. We’ll just step inside, if you don’t mind.”