Power in the Blood (109 page)

“Bills of large denomination only, thank you, since I have only one hand to carry it with.”

“This unnecessary disguise, Mrs. Brannan … I don’t understand.”

Omie was removing her hat. Mr. Blye stared at the half-blue face revealed as the veil was set aside. He had heard about Brannan’s daughter and her birthmark, but there was more to the child’s face that disturbed him than the simple fact of her blemish. Under her intense stare he felt sweat beginning to trickle from his armpits, and the woman’s voice came to him as if she spoke from a great distance, through a thickly swirling mist. When she produced from inside her sling a heavy-caliber Smith & Wesson he could not even be afraid of it, or her, so great was the power of the girl’s eyes; everything beyond the eyes was blurred, every sound faintly echoing. Mr. Blye experienced sudden pain in the forehead and stomach, and hoped he would not be sick.

“Proceed as directed, Mr. Blye. I say again, you will not discuss the money with your staff beyond telling them to assemble the cash. Is that clear?”

“Yes …”

Mr. Blye attempted to strike the bell on his desk to summon his secretary, but was unable to move his arms. Amazingly, the bell rang anyway, without human assistance. Mr. Blye began to wonder if what he was undergoing was some strange and discomforting dream; had he eaten too much lobster the night before?

“Yes, sir?”

The secretary had entered, and Mrs. Brannan’s pistol was shoved inside her sling.

“Begin counting out the balance of the special Brannan account,” droned Mr. Blye. “Large bills only.”

“The entire balance, sir?”

“Put two tellers onto it right away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And …”

“Sir?”

“Soda,” gasped Mr. Blye.

“Soda; yes, sir. For three?”

“One …”

“Very good, sir.”

The secretary departed. Mr. Blye felt quite faint. He had not wanted a soda, but the girl did, and he did not know how he knew, any more than he could fathom the unseen hand that rang the bell. It was almost certainly a dream. Zoe Brannan, or Dugan, or whatever she was calling herself since Leo Brannan threw her out, would certainly not have had the gall to walk into Denver National Bank and Trust coolly to withdraw the money he had been instructed to hold against the revelation of her whereabouts. This could not be happening.
It is too happening!
came a shrill voice inside his head, and Mr. Blye grew frightened; what if it was not a dream, but madness of some kind.

His secretary knocked and entered, bearing a soda bottle on a tray. “I’ve organized everything, sir,” he said, setting the bottle down before Mr. Blye.

“Oh, good,” said Mr. Blye. It was not his usual mode of address at all, and the secretary studied him briefly. Blye was red in the face, his eyes unfocused.

“Are you unwell, sir?”

“Feeling fine, thank you,” Mr. Blye assured him. The secretary went out again, and as the door was closed behind him, the soda bottle slid across Mr. Blye’s desk and was snatched up by Omie, who began taking greedy swallows from it. Interestingly, Mr. Blye could taste it also—sarsaparilla, a flavor he detested.

As he waited for the dream or fit of madness to pass, Mr. Blye reminded himself of the obligation he would have been betraying if the events in his office were real. Leo Brannan would be very angry to learn of the unanticipated withdrawal. Mr. Blye was a member of Big Circle, a fact that Leo Brannan knew; he was also a Praetorian, which Leo also knew. What Leo did not know was that Mr. Blye was a spy for Mr. Jones of The Six. If the dream was reality, Mr. Jones would have to be told, along with Leo Brannan, but since it could not possibly be real, Mr. Blye did not worry much about the consequences. He would not even tell his wife. The taste of sarsaparilla was clogging his throat with its cloying sweetness. He wished the girl would hurry up and finish drinking the damned thing. He wished the money would arrive so his unusual customers could leave; perhaps then the dream could end, and he could treat himself to a shot of the fine bourbon he kept in the cabinet by the window. Oddly, the cabinet door swung open as he thought of it, and the decanter rattled on its silver tray; then the door swung shut again, then open, then shut, then open.…

“Omie, stop that,” said Mrs. Brannan.

Mr. Blye closed his eyes. No more lobster—ever. Behind his eyelids there formed an interesting series of pictures, tableaux that moved, but slowly, much slower than in life: a woman with a long knife (yet somehow this was a man; how interesting, thought Mr. Blye); a mountain view as seen from the window of a train; a tall man in a long coat, his face pierced by holes; a sailing ship of the old-fashioned kind; a burial at sea; robbers taking valuables from train passengers; a huge stone house overlooking a valley blackened by mining and smelting; the face of Leo Brannan, a barely recognizable caricature of the man, with devilish horns sprouting from his skull; himself, sitting straight as a poker behind his desk, eyes closed, mustaches quivering.…

The door opened at the same instant as his eyes. The money was carried in, tightly bundled, tenderly cradled in the hands of his secretary, and set down on the desk.

“Sir, the head teller is anxious. He’s unsure we can conduct business in the usual manner with so large and sudden a depletion of bills.”

“Plenty more where that came from!” Mr. Blye assured him breezily, and the secretary departed once more.

Zoe scooped the money into her bag and stood up.

“Is there a private entrance?” she asked.

Before Mr. Blye could answer, the mother was following her daughter toward a concealed door in the oak paneling through which Mr. Blye took the pretty thing who visited him on Wednesday afternoons while the office door remained locked. The door led to a windowless private chamber, and from there to the street. The girl turned once before they passed through it, and the liquor cabinet danced on its legs like a thing come alive, spilling out the bourbon decanter. Mr. Blye watched its precious contents empty onto his Persian carpet with a melancholy glugging sound. There was nothing he could do about it.

“The thing is,” said Smith, pouring himself another drink, “if your first Injun goes to the dogs, you get yourself another one.”

The opening date for public revelation of the Sleeping Savage was already a week overdue. Since they had paid rent on the store until the end of the month, Smith and Nevis simply placed a card in the window that read:
DISPLAY POSTPONED DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES
.

“Another one? I don’t understand.”

“What I mean is, we dig up someone out of the ground and dress him up in Injun rig and put him under the glass and who’s to know the difference?”

“Us,” said Nevis, with some alarm. “We would. That’s an outrageous proposal, Smith.”

“Sounds practical,” offered Winnie. “How much money did you sink into this already?”

“Too damn much. This way we can get it back.”

“It’s dishonest,” protested Nevis. “Are you both pretending it isn’t?”

“I’m all for pretending,” Smith said, “especially pretending the new feller we dig up is the Injun. It could work if we did it right, but we need to work fast.”

“Those fellers that stole him,” Winnie said, “won’t they open their mouths when they see a new one laid out?”

“Not if they don’t want to get arrested for thieving the first one.”

“Stop! This is absurd!”

“No it ain’t.”

“And just where do you expect to find a newly deceased corpse? Will you have us become grave robbers? I refuse!”

Smith was used by now to such outbursts from Nevis. The shock of having been betrayed by a woman had come down hard on him, and a certain lack of reasonableness was to be expected.

“Doc Pfenning’s place,” explained Smith.

“Pfenning? He’s no doctor.”

“Used to be, but anyway, you don’t need to cure folks to run a funeral business. Good doctors are bad for Doc Pfenning’s business now, I figure!”

“Sure,” said Winnie. “He could tell you where a nice fresh one’s been buried recent.”

She was becoming excited over the scheme for a bogus Indian. The original investment in a genuinely ancient body had never struck her as worthwhile, but deliberate deception of the public contained just enough risk to make her blood run a little faster. Writing the letter of denunciation to Leo Brannan had excited her, but was not enough; she wished to see Lovey Doll’s attempted sabotage turned upside down.

“I don’t know.” Nevis sighed. “I really don’t.”

“What’s there to lose if we don’t? We already lost everything, pretty near.”

“Nonsense. The ice and sewage businesses will support us for some time yet, until Brannan kills them off.”

“Dunnigan, sometimes you strike me as fainthearted.”

“I certainly am not!”

“Then shake on it and we’ll take ourselves down to see Doc Pfenning.”

Nevis hesitated. “Go on,” urged Winnie.

Pfenning’s Mortuary and Funeral Parlor was located two blocks west of Brannan Boulevard, in an area not known for its excellence in architecture or the sophistication of its inhabitants. Pfenning buried miners, for the most part, and terminal drunks and sickly children. Himself an alcoholic, Pfenning was able to show a steady hand at all times to his clients, and paint the faces of their dead with expert skill, “so as to render the deceased as they were in life, joyously present among us,” as his sign declared. There hung about him in equal measure the sharp reekings of whiskey and formaldehyde, and many who saw the permanent despoliation of his waistcoat were unable to determine the precise nature of the greasy film that clung there; was it merely the spilled meals of yesterday, or was it the grim exudations of the departed?

Long since removed from the ranks of legitimate M.D.s for his role in the deaths of Philadelphia women sent to him for abortions, Pfenning tended to view all representatives of higher authority as a bunch of upstarts in cahoots, a cabal of manipulators who had ruined him out of personal hatred for his reckless nature and nonconformist ways. He was, therefore, more than interested to be offered inclusion in the scheme Smith and Nevis brought to him. Pfenning saw the reborn Savage as an apt symbol for all forms of commercial enterprise, including his own; doctors pretended to know what they were doing, but very often knew nothing; he himself pretended to embalm the bodies brought to him so they might lie beneath the ground in a state of permanent incorruptibility, but he pumped only as much formaldehyde into them as would keep them fresh until church services were over and the deceased safely buried beyond the reach of their loved ones’ noses.

“A capital idea, gentlemen, deliciously inventive, and a rare challenge to boot. There is, though, an insoluble problem inherent in the plan.”

“What problem?”

“The nature of mortal flesh is your enemy. The Indian as you’ve described him to me seems indeed to have been a frozen remnant of the long ago, and his appearance will be impossible to duplicate in a body of more recent vintage.”

“So we can’t just use a dead man dressed Injun style?”

“I regret, you cannot.”

“Damn! We were kind of counting on you, Doc.”

“And I appreciate your trust. Fortunately all is not lost with regard to this proposed venture. There is one way that presents itself, but the chances for success are slim indeed, I fear.”

“Trot it out.”

Pfenning took from a shelf along the wall a large can, and handed it to Smith, who deciphered its label.

“‘Carlson’s Pat … Patented Mort … Morterary …’”

“‘Mortuary Putty,’” Nevis said, reading over his shoulder.

“What is it?” Smith asked, wishing Nevis had allowed him to finish unaided.

“In essence, a means of filling in the holes created by accident and disease. Marvelous stuff! I had a fellow the other week, complete syphilitic, no nose at all to speak of, like something from a leper colony, you know, and I gave him a nose the Duke of Wellington would have been proud to own.”

“It’s modeling clay?” asked Nevis.

“Of a highly specialized kind. With this, a sculptor of great talent might fashion a figure in replication of your Indian, were he familiar with its characteristics, alas now gone.”

“A sculptor,” said Smith. “That’s a feller as makes statues?”

“The same.”

“And one of them fellers, he’d be called an artist, I guess.”

“Assuredly.”

Smith was eyeing Nevis. “Dunnigan, you listening to this?”

“I won’t,” said Nevis. “I won’t profane the gift that was once held precious by me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Are you of artistic inclination, Mr. Dunnigan?” asked Pfenning.

“You bet he is,” assured Smith. “Why, he done a picture of a lady friend you could see right off was her. Oh, he’s artistical, all right, you bet—aren’t you, Nevis?”

“I refuse. This will not happen.”

“It’d work if you done the Injun in this morterary clay. He’ll be under glass, all sealed off. Won’t be any way someone can touch him and see it’s a cheat.”

“I will not cooperate.”

“Winnie, she’d be all for something like this.”

“Smith, you can’t possibly ask this of me. The past is gone beyond retrieval, and with it my artistic aspirations. I will not revive so personal a side of myself for fraudulent purposes. I absolutely will not.”

“Aaaww, now that’s no way to be thinking. Doc here, he’ll supply the stuff, and you can just shape it into the Injun all over again. You studied him enough when we had him to do the job blindfold. You don’t have to put your name on it or nothing, just make the Injun over again so we can put him in the case where he belongs, so folks can see him.”

“No.”

“Hey now, don’t you think it’d make a certain party as did you wrong go all white around the lips to see us open up the Sleeping Savage like she never intended should happen? Know who I mean? Don’t that make it worthwhile? She’d be the loser, see, and you’d be the one had the last laugh, by God, don’t you think?”

Smith and Pfenning waited for Nevis to make up his mind.

Leo surprised himself by being unable to stay away from Lovey Doll Pines, despite knowing of her past. He hated her for the ease with which she had inserted herself into his life, and for the relentless pressure she had applied to make him send his wife away and propose marriage to Lovey Doll instead, and for inveigling him into ordering for her a life-sized golden elk to be placed on the front lawn of what she assumed would soon be her house.