The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (16 page)

    "Friend of yours?" I said, returning his brilliant smile with one of my own as I gauged the speed I could draw the Luger and pump lead into that hairy torso. Clementine slithered over and caressed my shoulders and kissed my neck. Her husband had been a merchant marine during the Big One, had lain in Davey Jones's Locker since 1918. Her nipples were hard as she pressed against my back.

    Blackwood kept right on smiling. "Friend is a powerful word, cousin. Almost as powerful as a true name. It's more proper to say Mr. Paxton and I have a pact. Keepin' the peace so we can all conduct our nefarious trades, well that's a sacred duty."

    "I understand why you'd like things to stay peaceful," I said.

    "No, cousin, you
don't
understand. The Hollow is far from peaceful. We do surely love our bloodlettin', make no mistake. Children go missin' from their beds and tender maidens are ravished by Black Bill of the Wood," he winked at slack-jawed and insensate Abigail who lay against Bly, "and just the other day the good constable Jarred Brown discovered the severed head of his best deputy floatin' in Belson Creek. Alas, poor Ned Smedley. I knew him, Johnny! Peaceful, this territory ain't. On the other hand, we've avoided full scale battle since that machine gun incident at the Luster court house in 1910. This fragile balance between big predators is oh so delicately strung. And along come you Gatlin-totin' hard-asses from the big town to upset everything. What shall I do with you, cousin, oh what?"

    "Jesus, these are swell flapjacks, Mr. Blackwood," Bly said. His rummy eyes were glazed as a stuffed dog's.

    "Why, thank you, sirrah. At the risk of soundin' trite, it's an old family recipe. Wheat flour, salt, sugar, eggs from a black speckled virgin hen, dust from the bones of a Pinkerton, a few drops of his heart blood. Awful decadent, I'll be so gauche as to agree."

    None of us said anything until Clementine muttered into my good ear, "Relax, baby. You ain't a lawman, are you? You finer than frog's hair." She nipped me.

    "Yes, it is true," Blackwood said. "Our faithful government employees have a tendency to get short shrift. The Hollow voted and decided we'd be best off if such folk weren't allowed to bear tales. This summer a couple government rats, Pinkerton men, came sniffin' round for moonshine stills and such. Leto, Brutus and Candy, you've met 'em, dragged those two agents into the bog and buried 'em chest deep in the mud. My lads took turns batterin' out their brains with those thumpers they carry on their belts. I imagine it took a while. Boys play rough. Candy worked in a stockyard. He brained the cattle when they came through the chute. Got a taste for it." He glanced at the trap door when he said this.

    "Powerful glad I'm no Pinkerton," I said.

    He opened his hand and reached across the space between us as if he meant to grasp my neck, and at the last moment he flinched and withdrew and his smile faded and the beast in him came near the surface. "You've been to see those bitches."

    "The Corning ladies? Come to think of it, yes, I had a drink with the sisters. Now I'm having breakfast with you. Don't be jealous, Dan." I remained perfectly still and as poised as one can be with sweat in his eyes, a hard-on in progress, and consumed by rolling waves of blue-black pain. My own beast was growling and slamming its Stone Age muzzle against the bars. It wanted blood to quench its terror, wanted loose. "What do

    you have against old ladies. They didn't mention you."

    "Our business interests lie at cross-purposes. I don't relish no competition. Wait. Wait a minute… Did you see the child?" Blackwood asked this in a hushed tone, and his face smoothed into a false calmness, probably a mirror of my own. Oh, we were trying very hard not to slaughter one another. He cocked his head and whispered, "John, did you see the child?"

    That surely spooked me, and the teary light in his eyes spooked me too, but not half so much as the recollection of the cries in the dim room at the Corning bungalow. "No. I didn't."

    He watched me for a while, watched me until even Dick and Bly began to rouse from their reveries to straighten and cast puzzled looks between us. Blackwood kept flexing his hand, clenching and tearing at an invisible throat, perhaps. "All right. That's hunkum-bunkum." His smile returned. "The crones don't have no children."

    I wiped my palms to dry the sweat and lighted a cigarette and smoked it to cover my expression. After a few moments I said, "Does Paxton know I'm here?"

    "Yes. Of course. The forest has eyes, the swamp ears. Why you've come to give him the buzz is the mystery."

    "Hell with that. Some say he's at the root of trouble with my kin. Then there's the goons he sent my way. I didn't start this. Going to end it, though."

    "Mighty enterprising, aren't you? A real dyed in the wool bad man."

    "What is this pact? I wager it involves plenty of cabbage."

    "An alliance, bad man. He and I versus the damnable crones and that rotgut they try to pass off as whiskey. Little Lord Paxton is moneyed up real good. He inherited well. In any event, he keeps palms greased at the Governor's mansion and in turn, I watch his back. Been that way for a while. It's not perfect; I don't cotton to bowing and scraping. Man does what man must."

    "Who funds the sisters?"

    "Some say they buried a fortune in mason jars. Gold ingots from the Old World. Maybe, after they're gone, me and the lads will go treasure hunting on their land."

    So, I'd well and truly fallen from fry pan to fire. Paxton wanted me dead, or captured, thus far the jury remained out on that detail, and here I'd skipped into the grasp of his chief enforcer. "Hell, I made it easy for you lugs, eh? Walked right into the box." I nodded and decided that this was the end of the line and prepared to draw my pistol and go pay Saint Peter my respects with an empty clip. "Don't think I'll go quietly. We Copes die real hard."

    "Hold on a second," Bly said, sobering in a hurry. I didn't think the Bly clan had a similar tradition.

    Blackwood patted him on the head. "No need for heroics, gents. We've broken bread, haven't we? You can hop on Shank's Mare and head for the tall timber anytime you like. Nobody here's gonna try to stop you. On the other paw, I was kind of hoping you might stick around the Hollow, see this affair through."

    I sat there and gaped, thunderstruck. "We can walk out of here." My senses strained, alert for the snare that must lurk within his affable offer. "What do you want, Dan?"

    "Me and the boys recently were proposed a deal by…Well, that's none of your concern. A certain party has entered the picture, is enough to say. We been offered terms that trump our arrangement with Paxton. Trump it in spades. Problem is, I've sworn an oath to do him no harm, so that ties my hands."

    "That's where I come in."

    "You've said a mouthful, and no need to say more. We'll let it ride, see how far it takes us."

    "And if I want to cash in and take my leave?"

    He shrugged and left me to dangle in the wind. I started to ask another question, and thought better of it and sat quietly, my mind off to the races. Dan's smile got even wider. "Candy will squire you back to the Sycamore. There's a garden party and dinner. All the pretty folk will be there tying one on. Dress accordingly, eh?"

***

    Candy returned us to the hotel where my entourage collapsed, semiclothed and pawing one another, into a couple of piles on the beds. Dawn leaked through the curtains and I was queerly energized despite heavy drinking and nagging wounds, so I visited the nearby cafe as the first customer. I drank bad coffee in a corner booth as locals staggered in and ordered plates of hash and eggs and muttered and glowered at one another; beasts awakened too soon from hibernation. I fished in my pocket and retrieved the cocoon Carling had given me and lay it on the edge of the saucer. It resembled a slug withered by salt and dried in the hot sun. I wondered if my father, a solid, yet philosophically ambiguous, Catholic, ever carried a good luck charm. What else was a crucifix or a rosary?

    "You know you're playing the fool." I said this aloud, barely a mutter, just enough to clear the air between my passions and my higher faculties. Possibly I thought giving voice to the suspicion would formalize matters, break the spell and justify turning the boat around and sailing home, or making tracks for sunny Mexico and a few days encamping on a beach with a bottle of whiskey and a couple of
senoritas
who didn't habla ingles. At that moment a goose waddled over my grave and the light reflecting from the waitress's coffee pot bent strangely and the back of my neck went cold. I looked down the aisle through the doorway glass and spotted a couple of the Blackwood Boys loitering in the bushes of a vacant lot across the way. One was the big fiddler, the other wore overalls and a coonskin cap. The fiddler rested his weight on the handle of what at first I took for a shovel. When he raised the object and laid it across his shoulder I recognized it as a sword, one of those Scottish claymores.

    A party and in my finest suit and tie it would be. Goddamn, if they were going to be this way about it I'd go see the barber after breakfast and have a haircut and a shave.

***

    It was as Blackwood promised. We drove over to the mansion in a Cadillac I rented from the night clerk at the hotel. Even if the guys hadn't scoped the joint out previously, we would've easily found our way by following a small parade of fancy vehicles bound for the estate. Bly rolled through the hoary, moss-encrusted gates and the mansion loomed like a castle on the horizon. He eased around the side and parked in the back. We came through the servants' entrance. Dick and Bly packing shotguns, me with the Thompson slung under my arm. Men in livery were frantically arranging matters for the weekly estate hoedown and the ugly mugs with the guns made themselves scarce.

    Conrad Paxton was on the veranda. He didn't seem at all surprised when I barged in and introduced myself. He smiled a thin, deadly smile and waved to an empty seat. "
Et tu
Daniel?" he said to himself, and chuckled. "Please, have a drink. Reynolds," he snapped his fingers at a bland older man wearing a dated suit, "fetch, would you? And, John, please, tell your comrades to take a walk. Time for the men to chat."

    Dick and Bly waited. I gave the sign and they put the iron away under their trench coats and scrammed. A minute or two later, they reappeared on the lawn amid the hubbub and stood where they could watch us. Everybody ignored them.

    I leaned the Thompson against the railing and sat across from my host. We regarded each other for a while as more guests arrived and the party got underway.

    Finally, he said, "This moment was inevitable. One can only contend with the likes of Blackwood and his ilk for a finite period before they turn on one like the wild animals they are. I'd considered moving overseas, somewhere with a more hospitable clime. No use, my enemies will never cease to pursue, and I'd rather die in my home. Well, Eadweard's, technically." Conrad Paxton's face was long and narrow. His fingers were slender. He smoked fancy European cigarettes with a filter and an ivory cigarette holder. Too effete for cigars, I imagined. Well, me too, chum, me too.

    "Maybe if you hadn't done me and mine dirt you'd be adding candles to your cake for a spell yet."

    "Ah,
done you dirt.
I can only imagine what poppycock you've been told to set you upon me. My father knew your father. Now the sons meet. Too bad it's not a social call-I'm hell with social calls. You have the look of a soldier."

    "Did my bit."

    "What did you do in the war, John?"

    "I shot people."

    "Ha. So did my father, albeit with a camera. As for me, I do nothing of consequence except drink my inheritance, collect moldy tomes, and also the envy of those who'd love to appropriate what I safeguard in this place. You may think of me as a lonely, rich caretaker."

    "Sounds miserable," I said.

    Afternoon light was dimming to red through the trees that walled in the unkempt concourses of green lawn. Some twenty minutes after our arrival, and still more Model Ts, Packards and Studebakers formed a shiny black and white procession along the crushed gravel drive, assembling around the central fountain, a twelve-foot-tall marble faun gone slightly green around the gills from decades of mold. Oh, the feather boas and peacock feather hats, homburgs and stovepipes! Ponderously loaded tables of
hors d'oeuvres
, including a splendid tiered cake, and pails of frosty cold punch, liberally dosed with rum, were arrayed beneath fluttering silk pavilions. Servants darted among the gathering throng and unpacked orchestral instruments on a nearby dais. Several others worked the polo fields, hoisting buckets as they bent to reapply chalk lines, or smooth divots, or whatever.

    Dick and Bly, resigned to their fate, loitered next to the punch, faces gray and pained even at this hour, following the legendary excesses of the previous evening. Both had cups in hand and were tipping them regularly. As for Paxton's goons, those gents continued to maintain a low profile, confined to the fancy bunkhouse at the edge of the property, although doubtless a few of them lurked in the shrubbery or behind the trees. My fingers were crossed that Blackwood meant to keep his bargain. Best plan I had.

    A bluff man with a pretty young girl stuck on his arm waved to us. Paxton indolently returned the gesture. He inserted the filter between his lips and dragged exaggeratedly. "That would be the mayor. Best friend of whores and moonshiners in the entire county."

    "I like that in a politician," I said. "Let's talk about you."

    "My story is rather dreary. Father bundled me off to the orphanage then disappeared into Central America for several years. Another of his many expeditions. None of them made him famous. He became
famous
for murdering that colonel and driving Mother into an early grave. I also have his slide collection and his money." Paxton didn't sound too angry for someone with such a petulant mouth. I supposed the fortune he'd inherited when his father died sweetened life's bitter pills.