Richmond Noir (12 page)
“You come here at night to see him, don’t you?” he said. “You still sleeping with him?”
From down the hill, a single cry, and then a burst of fire. She could smell Bobby, his sweat an acrid mix of sex and fear, next to her.
“If you know so much—” she started to say.
“Where’s the fucking SWAT team?” someone yelled behind her. From down the hill, silence.
“You’ve been following me,” she said. A woodpecker drilling the tree above them, the whirring of wings.
“Nah, I just wanted to know where he lived. In case he gave you any trouble.”
“What were you planning to do, pay him a visit?”
“Something like that.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Bobby: yeah, good in bed, quick with a joke, but what else? All the hours spent together bored on stakeouts, riding around the city, busting poor jerks for running stop signs. Had she been paying attention to anything these last months? She had spent all those hours looking out the window, letting the sights of the city entertain her like it was TV.
I’ve got your back
, he was always telling her. Whatever that meant.
Bobby peered behind the van’s rear bumper. “That blond girl? She’s the one he’s fucking.”
“Like I’m supposed to care.” Squabbles: high school again. Nothing from the bottom of the hill, then the sound of cop cars squealing to a halt down there. “Can’t we talk about this later?” Smelling herself now, that familiar sharp odor stronger than any of the spring flowers and damp earth. Who the hell was she kidding?
She looked past the splattered bumper of the van. On the left, quick low motion through the leaves. She turned fast, weapon at the ready: a black cat.
Bobby saying, “Surprised you didn’t know that, all the time you been spending here.” Sweating, urgent. In the side mirror of the van was a face framed in a glass transom, staring out, too dim to see. Rachel kept looking, hearing the rustling of a squirrel rushing through thick leaves and up a tree, her eyes adjusting. It was the girl with the blond ponytail, staring out through her door. Behind the girl, a man approaching. Vaughn. So why hadn’t his car been on the street? Was the Mercedes in the shop again? Situational awareness. It meant being right here, right now, the daily noise of life stripped away. Rachel wanted Vaughn to open the door, just so she could scream at him to get the fuck down, enjoy the startled expression on his face.
The window of the minivan shattered, and a shower of glittering fragments fell to the street. Absurdly, Rachel thought of her wedding day, holding hands with Vaughn, ducking their heads and laughing as they ran beneath a cascade of rice. In the mirror, she could see Vaughn staring out. She wanted him to stay there, forever stuck behind glass, watching. She wanted to be away from him, not caring. From the bottom of the hill, another gunshot exploded.
“I’m going down there.” Already on her belly, inching forward.
“Rachel, they’re drug dealers, who cares, the guys’ve got it covered.” She could picture the dark shapes moving through the cinder-block buildings down there, shadows. Picture herself closer now, uniform ripping on the thorny underbrush, her own breathing quiet, feeling alive, time slowed to that single moment. All those nights wasted up here, peering out at the lights of the city. Hip bones grinding against Bobby’s, his rough neck against her face, their muffled exclamations. That wasn’t wasted. She glanced back at him leaning toward her, looking hurt. She had liked it that he never asked, but now he was going to start. And there was so much, really, she just didn’t want to talk about. In the morning, she knew, she would call her recruiter.
“Jesus, Rachel, get back here.” His hand gripping her arm, a surge of feeling coming through her body. For a moment she paused, hesitated. She couldn’t afford to look back.
Then she pulled away and was moving again, already halfway across the street, her knees scraping against the gravel, heading for the impenetrable tangle of weeds ahead.
Based (loosely) on a true story
1807
I
t was a tobacco-stain of an August night in Shockoe Slip, so humid a body seemed to drizzle when it moved. Stench from the outhouses on the canal bank behind the hotels and shop fronts and the sweet fug of flue-cured leaf tarred the air. Inside the Eagle Tavern, bourbon whiskey and rouged cheeks shimmering in smoky lantern light raised a man’s threshold for swelter.
The General was down to his last few dollars. He held only a pair of deuces and a single bullet in his hand now. However, his eclipse had been a long time in the making. That it should happen here was ironic. He had been in many worse places.
An army officer since his youth, he had long understood he might perish of thirst in a deep Texas oak thicket or be pierced by an arrow on some damned buffalo plain. Many times over, he could have been gut-shot on the dunes of North Africa. By contrast, no matter how loudly the falls clattered, the bustling banks of the James, in the bosom of Southern plantation hospitality, did not seem an obvious threat. He was forty-three. His weaknesses included whiskey, women, and cards, but even more a liberal constitution, a vivid imagination, and not just a lack but an absolute rejection of caution. These last had once made him a force of nature and a charmer—a man who could lead a horse to water and make it beg for a drink.
The General’s aide-de-camp, Mustafa, sat across the room, measuring the crowd and meditating on the gold medal recently awarded to the General. It hung just out of sight around his neck, like a cursed scarab. Mustafa had followed the General to the United States from Egypt. As the General’s fortunes languished, he watched his behavior grow more erratic. The General, fearless at the worst of times, now drank as if to extinguish a fire and gambled as if to obliterate the past.
Mustafa understood what was eating at him, a man who had battled the longest of odds in the Barbary War and won. He had been biding his time, waiting for the General to figure out a way to set things right again. So abysmal were circumstances at the moment that Mustafa had begun to crave the scorch of bourbon too, a betrayal of his religion and a thing unheard of in his family.
The trial of Aaron Burr had gathered an impressive group of politicians, salesmen, gossipers, and whoremongers to the Virginia capital, at the fall lines of the James. Above the miasma, on Shockoe Hill, not far from Patrick Henry’s church, rose the state’s neo-Roman capitol, designed by President Jefferson. It was both a symbol of the city’s vanity and a beacon of hope to its Episcopal citizenry, who still enjoyed the full cornucopia of humanity’s sins.
In the Eagle, just down from Shockoe Hill, the din of pressmen, gentlemen farmers, lawmakers, slave traders, merchants, and unattached ladies was considerable. Their prosperous city of 6,000 souls had recently received its first bank charter, and a public library had opened. Their talk ranged from the price of tobacco leaf and the prospects of rain to the European war, but most of all to the trial being presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall and of particular interest to President Jefferson.
The General was a player in the drama. Prior to his exploits in North Africa, he had entertained a proposal from Burr involving the territories stretching west of the Mississippi and down into Mexico. The scheme—to hew a new kingdom out of this wilderness—had collapsed, and now the General was called to bear witness against Burr on charges of treason.
The General had testified that day. As he sat in the stand, a military hero, in a place, at last, where that seemed to matter, his luster had returned. That evening, when he took his seat at a gaming table in the Eagle, he felt fresh again, his battered confidence restored.
Across from the General, the gentleman from Shirley Plantation, a broad raw-boned man who was the largest property owner and slaveholder in the state, dealt, his massive fingers barely able to distinguish the cards. To the General’s left sat the principal of Southside Plantation, a man whose bald forehead was speckled red by the sun and whose teeth approached in color his few strands of brown hair. To the General’s right, a legislator from Maryland, a smart silver chain dangling from the fob of his waistcoat, observed the table with darting eyes.
“So you were the hero of Derna?” the legislator asked rhetorically, looking at his hand, an eyebrow raised. The General, still in possession of his instincts, instantly sensed this man to be a threat.
“The Marines were instrumental,” he replied, not looking up. “But it was my notion, so I received the shiny medal to show for it.” Any man who read the newspapers knew that he had, in fact, orchestrated the coup of a particularly inimical pasha, recruiting an army of cutthroats in Egypt, marching across Libya, and taking the Mediterranean port. The sudden and extraordinary blow had shocked the piratical Barbary dictators, who had immediately treated for peace. The General had effectively won the Barbary War.
“I raise a glass to you, sir,” said the Shirley man, with earnest admiration.
The others raised theirs, filled with Thorp’s corn liquor—bourbon—invented by an Episcopal priest at Berkeley, well before Kentucky was chipped off her mother state. “The Gen’ral,” they said.
The General neither smiled nor reacted. The twirl of a dress in the glint of lantern light had caught his eye. His mind leaped the sea. The pasha’s older brother, the rightful ruler of Derna, whom the General had found in Egypt and installed in place of his usurping younger sibling, had just as quickly been abandoned by the U.S. government, deposed, and beheaded. The General had used his persuasive arts to induce the man to risk his life in the cause of another man’s nation. Then he had walked out on him at the insistence of that nation. A lifelong soldier, the General still struggled to swallow his indignation. Though outwardly sure, he had come to despise himself.
The General laid down knaves over deuces, a lady high. Looking away, he gathered in the pot as if it meant nothing. He was a virtual chameleon when he wanted to be—having once, it was sworn to by good and sober U.S. Army officers, learned a certain Indian language, stained his skin to infiltrate the tribe’s village, and returned with intelligence that caused its destruction.
The General’s aide-de-camp sat in a dark corner.
“Do you know what they’d do to you?” Rosy O’Sharon said, when his eyes met hers.
“I am not a black man,” he countered in his bass voice. “My name is Mustafa. I am an Arab.” Rose’s head tilted a notch. He was tall, over six feet, square-shouldered, café au lait.
“Liar,” she spat. “A-rabs don’t drink.”
“They do not dwell in the devil’s lair either,” he responded flatly, eyeing the Marylander, who he noted wore a blade in his boot and a carefully concealed shoulder holster.
“Well, I seen slaves lighter’n you, doll,” she warmed, “but none as handsome.”
Mustafa watched her feet as she walked away. “Can you dance?” he called to her.
“I’m Irish,” she answered.
“Can your friends?”
The youngest brother of the feuding pashas, Mustafa had crossed Libya with the General and fought at Derna in his ragtag army, which numbered a dozen Americans, forty-odd Greeks and Italians, and some five hundred Turks, Mam-luks, and Arabs. When the General requested that Mustafa continue in his personal employ, he had considered it an honor.
The General returned to the U.S. to great fanfare. In Washington, Mustafa had stood proudly in the background in his flowing white haik and a black turban. He took in his new country with glowing eyes, as he would a sumptuous meal of camel.
In New England, the General’s wife, however, received his two aides-de-camp—one Arab, one Italian—coolly. “William, with all due respect to your men,” she had stated, “they shall bed down elsewhere.”
“But, my darling, I need them nearby,” the General insisted, though with nothing of his usual force. “Gilo is a superb amanuensis. You can use his services.”
“That may be so, but they will be comfortable enough in the barn.”
As the weeks wore on, the two men had begun to realize that the daring leader they knew in Libya was not the same in this cold place. Over time, as the General’s plans stalled, the Arab and the Italian came to despise one another Gilo mostly smoked and sneered. Mustafa furtively courted the servant of a neighboring farm, meeting her at night in the woods to soothe her fears with cold fingers.
“You will only ruin her,” Gilo had chastised Mustafa.
When the General’s wife asked her husband to leave, Mustafa found that Gilo had been right about the girl. It wounded him far more than she knew when he revealed that he was leaving, far more than the elbow she delivered to his jaw, which chipped a tooth.
Gilo had found ways to twist the knife. “I won’t be missing nothing here. How about you, Mufti?” he prodded as they set out with the General. “No, this place is like a punch in the mouth.” When they reached New York City, Gilo, who served as the General’s purser, deserted them, taking along a good deal of the General’s cash.
A man with two tankards in his hands teetered up to the card game. “You shoulda seen the Gen’l today,” he crowed, slamming a pint down and sloshing it on the table. “For you, sir, a real hero, not one of them quill scratchers. Damn fine testimony today.” The Hall of the House of Delegates had been filled to capacity. The prosecution’s first witness, the General had slipped back into character, a field commander again, not to be toyed with by legal men. He described a conversation with Burr in Washington during the winter of ’05–’06. “I listened to Colonel Burr’s mode of indemnity,” he declared, “and as I had by this time begun to suspect that the expedition he had afoot was unlawful, I permitted him to believe myself resigned to his influence that I might understand the extent and motive of his arrangements.” The General, who had admired the scale of the former vice president’s ambition, if little else, paused for effect. “Colonel Burr laid open his project of revolutionizing the territory west of the Allegheny, establishing an independent empire there; New Orleans to be the capital, and he himself to be the chief.” The courtroom had been transfixed.
The General quaffed the tankard in two large gulps and chased it with a shot of sailor’s rum from another admirer, delivered by a plump lass with wet lips. As the Eagle filled with smoke, the General regaled the men at his table with stories of his military affairs. The Shirley and Westover men listened intently, he noticed, while playing cautiously. When the stakes started to rise, they folded. They attended to their pipes while the General and the Maryland sharp traded financial blows. At length the Shirley and Southside men were replaced at the table by new money, Willcox—“two Ls, sirs”—of Belle Air Plantation and Wilcox—“single barrel, my friends”—who had married an heiress and restored Flowerdew Hundred.
As the hour grew late and the smoke and din intensified, the fortunes of the General and the Marylander seesawed back and forth. For the Marylander, this was sport—or was it? The General wondered. He had every penny he owned on the table. He felt a sudden sense of doom, a keen feeling in the pit of his stomach that he had been played. He had enemies in high places, he knew, in Washington, where he had browbeaten more than one feckless politician. The medal he wore under his vest bore the tarnish of those who had betrayed their allies in Derna.
The presence of working women had slowly increased as they trickled in through the back door at intervals. They caught the General’s eye, like flashes of fish striking flies in the afternoon light. The pressmen huddled together at the bar The merchants and plantation owners mingled, clapping backs, laughing heartily, drinking, and puffing their long pipes. Some furtively pawed the women with leathery hands, maneuvering toward dark recesses. Others watched the card game. After several hours, it was winding to its conclusion, tension high as the final pot rose. The Marylander seemed to be forcing the bids. First Willcox swallowed his bourbon, shook his head, and folded. Then the single-barreled Wilcox threw down his cards in disgust.
The General eyed the pot with apparent serenity. It could keep him for weeks. If he lost, he would not be able to pay for his room the next day.
As if on cue, the back door crashed open. In danced a mulatta in bedouin robes, her face covered, her hands and hips swaying rhythmically to the strings pining in the back corner. A hush spread across the room, as the glassy-eyed dancer twisted and spun through the haze toward the card table.
The woman sashayed over to the General, whose fondest conquest had come in Rabat, where he had learned Arabic and donned robes, going native in every discernible way. She beckoned to him, and he rose as if in a trance, with a thin smile. She swayed around him, and he bit his lip. His eyelids sagged while he became lost in the music of her body. The men, clinging to their mugs and pipes, were mesmerized. The women, gathering up their tips, looked on, whooping encouragement. The dancer stroked the General’s collar When she popped free a button on his coat, a cry of encouragement went up from the crowd. She allowed her robe to fall open until the men could see nearly her entire breast. The General leered. The crowd clamored, circling inward around the pair. The General was back in his element, the center of attention, the commander. He maneuvered behind the dancer, swaying, his hands groping.
