The Devil's Only Friend (32 page)

The first gate I came to was manned by a couple of army men, and they braced me as I got close. There wasn't any use in trying to blow past them.

“Watch out, now,” I said. “Trouble on the other side.”

“Says who?”

“Jesus, brother, look at you. There's a medic set up—”

“He's got a gold badge.”

“There's a medic set up over in the glass plant. They're bringing everybody there.”

“No, no—I don't have time to talk,” I said. “Did you see a little fat bald guy with a—with a sort of mustache come through here?”

“Nobody came through here except going out.”

“Listen,” I said, dodging my head to look at the crowd. “If you see anybody—listen—” I got between the two of them and lowered my voice further. “They think it might be the Germans. If you see anybody—anybody—comes through here after me—”

“Nobody goes,” said the first.

“Watch who you talk to,” I said.

“Ain't you Pete Caudill?” the second soldier said.

I cocked my eye and squared him up. It was Gino Pastore, a local boy who had joined the Detroit police force a few years after I started.

“I got drafted,” he said.

“You got the easy duty, Gino.”

“You look like you been put through the winger, Pete. I heard you was.”

It let me catch my breath for a moment. I slapped him on the shoulder a couple of times with my good hand. “Listen, Gino, don't let anybody through here.”

I slipped past the pair of them and cursed them for being stupid enough to let a bloody one-eyed murderer waltz through their post on a night when an explosion had taken out the power for one of the most important war production plants in the world.

Crews of mechanics swarmed all along the rolling mill, some of them wearing helmets with lamps, as if they were miners. Thousands of tiny panes of glass lined the top of the south wall, but it wasn't enough light to let me see through to the other end. I followed along the safety railing that separated the work floor from the electrified railcars that ran below, transporting ingots and bars of hot steel away from the river. As I made it to the end of the building close to the furnaces, the fresher ingots still glowed from within, dull orange.

There was an unguarded gangway between the rolling mill and the furnaces, and I walked across it without looking up toward the splash of timid stars. I could hear voices down by the cool river, hearth men enjoying a rare night of ease and fresh air. Inside the furnace, it was quiet except for a deep hum, almost a vibration. It made me tremble and want to piss. Since there was still no power, I thought that the hum might have been caused by the slowly cooling ladles of steel that hung from the giant craneway. The biggest of the ladles held seventy-five tons of metal, and without electricity there was no way to pour out the ready steel into ingot molds.

I had never been in the furnaces, and I had to stop to orient myself. Panels of windows in the roof were made to rise up and down to vent the superheated air from the place as needed, and this allowed some light to pour down. Some of the ladles cast up a glow, too, and I could see outlines and shadows well enough to get a picture of the place.

There was a metallic clanking that came irregularly from down below, but I could not say if it was a workman or if it came from ingots shrinking as they cooled. To my eye there was not another man in the building, and I wondered idly if it was because of the danger of an explosion.

There atop the catwalk across the very center of the building I could see a white figure pacing. For many years my eye had not been sharp enough to see at any distance, but I knew it had to be Federle.

The staircase leading up to the catwalk turned and turned like a fire escape, four sets of stairs that led to a walkway all down the length of the building and across the open space at intervals. Federle had placed himself as far from the walls as he could, and he continued to pace as I crept toward him. The heated steel made a wind that went straight up to the roof, and the draft fluttered up the tattered legs of my trousers.

Federle had pulled off his clothes and shoes, and now prowled in bare feet over the waffled steel of the catwalk. As I drew near, I could see that he still carried the pistol.

“Ray.”

He seemed impossibly tall and slender, and the orange glow from the ladle below could not warm the unbearable whiteness of his skin. I saw what the fire had done to the lower part of his body.

“Come on, Ray.”

He turned toward me and made a couple of halting steps my way.

“Stop, now.”

From his ankles to his waist the scars swirled like the flames that had made them. In the dim light, I could see how black his eyes had become. At his crotch, though, I could see that the flames had not touched him; his balls hung low but they had not been burned. His prick was gone. Just a nub remained, but I could see that it had not been burned away.

“Why would you, Pete?”

“What?”

“Why would you go on living if you were in my kind of shape?”

I didn't move any closer to him. I would have backed up if he had come any closer to me.

“You can see, can't you?” he said.

“I see, Ray.”

“There's your buddies.” He gestured to the floor below with the pistol.

I saw something, maybe a pair of figures, maybe John and Mike, the two smaller thugs.

“I was sorry to have to lie to you, Pete,” said Federle. “Sometimes you have to lie. You know it as well as anyone.”

“It's all right.”

“They cut my pecker off.”

“Don't worry about it now.”

“Come on, Pete! Can't I tell you?”

I could make out the woman's arm Federle had carried with him from Charles Hardiman's office. It lay over the pile he had made of his clothes on the floor of the catwalk.

“I strangled a whore in Hawaii—after I got burned—that's the kind of man I am. I strangled her. She wouldn't look at me. She laughed! It was a lie I told you about the fire burning my pecker off. Her men came in and found her, and they cut me short. If it wasn't for the MPs—they got me out of the mess but it wasn't something that could be—”

He stopped abruptly and went back to pick up the arm. He pushed it up over the side fence of the catwalk and it fell to the center of the open ladle below us. For a moment it lay on the thin crust over the molten steel, and then a whitish flame came up and seemed to pull the arm down.

“I wanted to help you, Pete. That's all there was.”

He scooped up his clothes without taking his awful eyes off me, and hoisted them up and over, too. After a few seconds they burst into flame and made a puff of smoke that rose and blew away through the roof.

“I hope it isn't too late for Eileen,” he said, leaning against the woven metal fence. “I couldn't find her.”

“She's all right, Ray.”

John and Mike had come up on either side of us and now stood some distance off. I could see John's head bobbing at the far end of the gently bowed catwalk.

“What a thing to do, Ray. What a thing to do.”

“It's not the same for you,” he said. “You're not the same as me.”

He flipped the pistol over the fence, and I heard the crack it made as it hit the crust of hardening steel in the ladle. Then he put his hands to the top of the fence and pulled himself over in one smooth motion. I was fast enough to get a grip on his ankle, and I held fast as his weight pulled him down with enough force to snap the joint of his knee at the top of the fence.

He gritted his white teeth and looked at me fiercely through the fence. His hands braced off the fence and he arched himself away. The scarred flesh of his ankle was smooth and slippery, but I thought I could get the other hand on him and maybe come up on the fence to get him back over.

“No, Pete,” he said. “I had to find you. I had to see if I could help you.”

“Ray.”

His face went softer. “Now we're square.”

I stared hard into his eyes and let him go.

The surface of the hot steel was maybe twenty feet below, and Federle landed flat on his back. It didn't seem to hurt him.

“Find your family, Pete,” he said.

The metal cracked slowly from his weight, and flakes of the surface tipped to let him slide down a bit as he melted away. The steel was too heavy to allow him to sink into it, but it was still hot enough to pop and spit as the watery parts of Ray Federle came out from his scarred skin. I watched him as long as I could and wondered if my own end would be so unbearable.

“Your woman is all right,” John said at my elbow.

“The coppers have her.”

“It's too bad about your friend, Caudill.”

Mike said, “You can't have enough friends in this world, Caudill.”

I was too empty. I could not tell how to answer them. Even if it had been possible, I don't think I wanted to throw them over the fence. I didn't want to go over myself anymore.

“Caudill, I'll tell you just the one thing,” said John. “From what I knew about your brother Tommy, I could see he was a good Joe.”

I looked at him closely and thought I could see something human in him, despite what he had done to me. It was clear to me that the pair of them would fall back into the vaudeville routine if I tried to get anything more out of them, so I just turned away.

They let me go, thumping and dragging my numb feet across the catwalk and down the winding staircase to the regular world.

CHAPTER 30

I held on to the badge that gave me access to any Lloyd plant, though I could not be sure it would continue to hold the same sway for long. They let Walker and me through to Lloyd's castle a couple of weeks after the explosion, just as the last of the operations went back up. General Motors and Chrysler had sent over men and a number of smaller generators to cobble a working system into place until the main power plant could be repaired or replaced. The transformers that had blown out in almost every facility had been in need of replacement all along, and the Lloyd Motor Company made use of generous government money to do so. I could not hope to understand what deals had been made to secure the money, what control would be given up, or what new monster had been created.

Walker had dressed up in his Sunday best for the visit, and he sat next to me in the Chrysler without much comment. He had purchased a new hat, I saw, to match his older jacket and trousers, and had put a smooth shine on his shoes. Everything I wore reeked as new, even the patch over my eye. I had wanted to make a fresh start, and the poor condition of everything that had touched my grimy flesh made me want to burn it. Walker retained his thrift, though, and his steady nature. He had not thought of changing himself, only of continuing the most sober course he could see ahead.

Though old Lloyd was not yet dead, the air in the house and the attitude of the servants told me that soon enough there would be a funeral. Of course there was no trace of the tussle we had with the goons inside the doorway, and the goons themselves had slipped away just as mysteriously as they had come. Pickett, the old parking guard, had worn himself down with worry, and kept vigil over his beloved boss in an armless leather chair at the end of the hall that led to Lloyd's chamber.

“Okay, fellas,” Pickett said. “You came through it all right, then.”

“We're just fine, Mr. Pickett,” Walker said. “We trust that things will work out for the best. It's the only way.”

“My old wife passed,” he said. “That same night.”

“My condolences,” Walker said.

“That's too bad, Pickett.”

“It was her time, anyway.”

“How's the Old Man?”

Pickett looked up at me pathetically. “They've got him fixed up pretty good. He's—” Pickett's gnarled hands had worn through the racing form he held with his fingertips. “He's lived through his years, hasn't he?”

“He's earned his rest,” Walker said.

I knew I couldn't say anything hopeful, and so I just nodded to Pickett.

“You fellas can go on through. James is up there by the door.”

“Take care of yourself, Mr. Pickett.”

The hall was wide and lined with stone. The vaulted ceiling was marked along its length with fancy plaster carvings, the sort of thing that you wouldn't care about after you'd lived with it for a while. There were paintings, too, and photographs along the walls, each with a little lamp that drooped light down onto its face. I might have stopped to look over the pieces because I knew that I would likely not have cause to walk the hall again. But I kept shoulder to shoulder with Walker until the secretary moved from his office outside Lloyd's suite.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “It's good of you to come.”

“It's an honor to come,” Walker said. “A pleasure.”

“He called us over, and we came,” I said.

“You can go in,” said James. “Mr. Caudill, if you'll stop by to see me after you're finished.”

“Sure.”

He pushed the tall door open for us, and we went in. It was a regular church inside, with flowers making a powerful stink and ceilings I judged to reach fourteen feet. Tall, narrow windows covered with gauzy drapes let gray light filter in from the cloudy sky. Lloyd's bed was not tucked away in a private corner or behind a screen, but had been placed to one side of the great room with space left at the head for an assortment of medical machines. Walker and I stepped over the antique rug toward the bed.

Estelle Hardiman sat primly beside the bed in a chair that looked French to me. Her posture was impeccable and—from some distance—she seemed radiantly beautiful. It was a trick of the light and of her own art as a woman. As I came close, I saw what a wreck she had become.

“Mr. Caudill,” she said, “you're doing well.”

“Better.”

“Jasper has been asking for you. He's been restless all along.”