The Fire of Greed (21 page)

The clouds were dark, a menacing gray that carried the suggestion of rain. At the same time, the air too carried the dusty, pungent fragrance that told of the imminence of showers.

As the sky grew darker, the reflected flash of lightning within the clouds seemed brighter, and the rumble-mumble of thunder came closer upon the luminous heels of the white-hot flash.

“It's getting close,” commented a woman to her companion as they passed near to where Cole was sitting.

Indeed it was, Cole thought, instinctively touching his holster and sizing up the rat-faced man across the way.

Chapter 38

WEARING A VESTED SUIT AND A WARM SMILE, EZRA WALDRON ARRIVED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE NARROW STAIRCASE
leading to the second-floor apartment above the Refugio del Viajero. Nicolette de la Gravière had seen him coming. She now descended the stairs to greet him and to accept the small bouquet that he had brought.

The slightest hue of indigo in the fabric of her dress, revealed in the fading light of the day, took the edge off its blackness.

Her smile betrayed nothing of the mood of darkness that had been her cloak since her discovery earlier in the day. With the encouragement of Dr. Richardson, who had called her “composed,” she had decided on a course of action that had her behaving as though nothing had happened, as though she had not seen the damning letter.

Likewise, Waldron's smile betrayed nothing of his having discovered her discovery. Nor would his words betray any indication of the fact that he had been summoned to the home office to be fired, and that, tomorrow, he would be leaving Santa Fe forever. Tonight, he decided, would be played as though nothing had changed, and as though this night were the harbinger of all succeeding nights, nights which would involve a courtship.

As they small-talked, calling each other by first name, it seemed as though all of the earlier events were merely part of an illusory dream, like a scene from a play.

As they walked, dark clouds gathered above as not-so-distant thunder rumbled. The air smelled thick with rain, but the ground remained as dusty dry as it had been in the cloudless middle of the day.

Inside the theater, as the curtain went up on Act I, the three witches came onstage to a theatrical approximation of the gathering thunderstorm outside. Tin pans clattered offstage to suggest thunder, just as the real thunderstorm erupted outside, shaking the theater. Several people clapped, and there was a small ripple of laughter. Nicolette could see that, through her thick makeup, one of the witches had a grin on her face.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the trio said, setting up the theme of duplicity that would prevail throughout the evening. Nothing, they implied, was as it seemed.

Nicolette glanced left, and thought about the man seated next to her, who had seemed the fairest of men, only to now be seen as a man most foul. His calm, congenial manner contradicted everything she had read in that letter and caused her to doubt her own instincts.

On the stage, the bearded actor portraying Macbeth strutted and postured, so consumed with lust for power that he almost immediately turned on King Duncan, who had only just promoted him in rank. Beside her, Nicolette saw the bearded villain portraying the gentleman wishing to court her, a man so consumed with lust for wealth that he had turned on the employer who had promoted him to a position of great accountability.

In both instances, the promotions to posts of greater prominence had only increased an appetite for more. Greed is the fuel that feeds the fire of greed. For Macbeth, this culminated in Act I with his decision to murder Duncan.

The hotter the fire burns, the more likely it is to consume the finer qualities of rational thought, and to tip the greedy toward the witch's cauldron of madness. In a speech near the end of the third scene, came Macbeth's realization of this fact.

“Why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs, against the use of nature?” the actor asked. “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings: my thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of man that function is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is but what is not.”

As the words washed over him, Ezra Waldron swallowed hard. He felt his hands grow clammy. He wished that it was all a nightmare, and that, as in the theater, the curtain would go down and the lights would chase away the visions in his head.

At the act break, he wiped his hand on his vest and managed to cast a weak smile toward Nicolette.

“How are you enjoying the production?” he asked through parched lips.

“Very nice,” she said, returning the smile.

Her lips formed a smile, but there was something in the depths of her dark eyes that he could not read.

For Ezra Waldron, the action unfolding upon the stage was only a perpetuation of a nightmare striking close to home. To cover Duncan's assassination, Macbeth was compelled to murder his two bodyguards—
his
two loose ends.

Waldron cast a forced smile at Nicolette as onstage, Macbeth lamented, “Away, and mock the time with fairest show: False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

The theater company, aspiring to the pretense of sophistication, while operating in the reality of being on the doorstep of the wilderness, did the best that it could with what it had. The actors were eager, but the staging verged on the farcical. The scene in which Macbeth beheld the apparition of a bloody dagger was more amusing than frightening, but one person
not
laughing was Ezra Waldron.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” asked the man portraying Macbeth, as a ripple of giggling coursed through the audience at the sight of a man in black carrying a wooden knife across the stage. “Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

Waldron's “dagger of the mind” was not a false creation, but the sharp edge of his own conscience.

As Act III focused on Macbeth's hiring assassins to do away with Banquo, who suspected him of Duncan's murder, Waldron's mind turned to the endless, haunting succession of loose ends.

While Ezra Waldron's mind had fixated on the blood of the serial homicides, Nicolette de la Gravière's mind settled on allegories of greed and duplicity.

Nicolette projected herself into Macbeth's speech about the nature of men.

When the assassins described themselves as men, Macbeth observed that “in the catalogue ye go for men; as hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept all by the name of dogs.”

Men
, she thought,
what is it that motivates them?

However, Nicolette was quickly reminded that it was Lady Macbeth who was the prime motivator of her husband's ambitions.

“'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy,” the actress told herself.

Greed, Nicolette realized, was a
human
propensity, not an imperfection intrinsic to men alone, and in Shakespeare's telling, it was the gateway to madness. For Macbeth, this madness would be Banquo's ghost; for Lady Macbeth, the bloody spot, the “damned spot” that could not be washed away.

Chapter 39

BLADEN COLE HAD FOLLOWED THE RAT-FACED MAN AS HE
parted company with the railroad man and headed down a street leading away from the Plaza. Walking past a theater, Muriday paused. Through the window, a well-illuminated lobby could be seen, but the doors were closed. A check of his father's pocket watch compared to the time posted on the marquee, told Cole that the evening's performance of
The Tragedie of Macbeth
had begun nearly forty minutes before.

It seemed incongruous to see a man like Muriday studying the marquee of a theater, and stepping onto the boardwalk to scrutinize the posters. Cole had not taken the rat-faced man to be someone with an interest in Shakespeare.

Cole had never seen a Shakespeare play himself, although he recalled having been compelled to read one or two in school. Perhaps he would have been obliged to read more had the war not come around the time that he entered his teens. There was little room for much more than reading, writing, and 'rithmatic—if that—with a war raging within earshot of your classroom.

Cole watched Muriday linger for a long time then scurry away as a small number of people emerged for the intermission. The way that the rat-faced man eyed the crowd and the doorway told Cole that the remaining loose end was attending the theater tonight.

Some of the well-dressed men lit hand-rolled cigarettes, and everyone glanced at the sky, which was now pitch-black and still rumbling ominously. The first heavy splats of rain now began hitting the ground, and the people hastened back inside.

The doors were closed, and the rain began to pour.

Cole nestled himself into the shadow of a protected alcove and saw Muriday do the same across the street. As he watched the rat-faced man, the rat-faced man continued to watch the doors.

Who
was the loose end?

Cole wondered if it might be Ezra Waldron himself. Had the railroad learned of his association with its rival and decided to dispose of the traitor?

Alternately, was the traitor aiming to remove yet
another
impediment to his scheme? Could it be Joseph Ames?

The rain came down with furious intensity for a long while but stopped as quickly as it had begun. The roar of the torrent impacting roofs and streets was replaced with the sounds of water dripping from eaves and rushing through downspouts.

The air was suddenly filled with that freshness that always follows a desert storm.

Cole chose this moment to leave his narrow sanctuary. His goal was to circle the block, to position himself on the same side of the street as Muriday, and there to confront him.

Circling the block took longer than he'd expected, but at last he entered the narrow alley that led directly to his quarry. He could see Muriday ahead, silhouetted against the glow of kerosene lights that lined the street.

* * *

AS THE LIGHTS CAME UP AT THE END OF THE PLAY AND THE
audience moved into the reception hall for brandy and sweets, both Ezra Waldron and Nicolette de la Gravière were in somber moods. After all, as Nicolette had told her mother that afternoon,
Macbeth
is
such
a gloomy play.

“You don't look well, Ezra,” she said, imagining her own expression was not one of buoyant cheerfulness.

“A little upset in my stomach,” he admitted. “Nothing a glass of seltzer wouldn't remedy.”

“How did you find the play?” she asked as he handed her a sparkling water. “You were looking very engrossed all evening.”

“Was I?”

“You
were
,” she said, catching herself smiling at his nervousness.

“I found it a reminder of the dangerous times in which we live,” he said. “A reminder of how little society has changed since the Dark Ages.”

Waldron looked into her eyes and wished for everything else to go away. It seemed so unreal that this beautiful young woman would not live to see another sunrise. Her relaxed demeanor suggested that perhaps she
might not
have perceived the letter and the brokerage statement as an indictment—but just random business correspondence. He wished that circumstances were different, but he was single-minded in his determination that his own self-preservation trumped any other emotion or distraction. He could take no chances.

“Shall we?” Waldron said at last, and they stepped out into the New Mexico evening.

The rainstorm that had threatened earlier had come and gone, and with it went the unsettled rumbling in the clouds.

It was a clear, cool night, with that freshness that comes to the desert after a rain shower. Beyond the flickering kerosene lamps, a few stars twinkled. Beyond the area immediately surrounding the theater, few people were about on the streets.

“Lovely evening,” Nicolette said, because it seemed to be the right thing to say.

“That it is,” Waldron said nervously.

“You need to relax,” she said. “You're so tense. The play was just a play, and the play is over.”

“The play is over . . .” he repeated, letting his voice trail off.

They walked in silence for a few moments.

She
knew
the nature of his darkness, and she was growing more and more angry with herself for playing the role of a naive companion. It was, she decided, time to confirm her suspicions about the contents of the letter.

* * *

AS HE MOVED THROUGH THE ALLEY, CAREFULLY AND QUIETLY, BLADEN COLE WAS STARTLED TO HEAR VOICES OUT
on the street. The production had ended, and people were leaving the theater. His eyes were fixed on the alcove where Muriday was. Cole had
hoped
to get to him before the crowd appeared, but he would now have to make the best of the circumstances.

Closer he came.

Thirty feet.

Fifteen feet.

* * *

OUT ON THE STREET, NICOLETTE WAS READY TO SAY SOMETHING TO WALDRON, TO PROBE THE CONUNDRUM OF THE
letter, when she heard a scraping sound to her left and sensed the presence of someone emerging from the darkness.

She turned to see the most frightening of apparitions, more real and more tangible than any evil that had been conjured up within the theater.

The man's face, with its closely spaced eyes and exaggerated nose, its dreadful appearance sharpened in contrast by the shadows cast from nearby gaslights, was like a hideous, ugly mask that disappeared into his collar without a chin.

Most terrifying of all was the gun which he held.

Its muzzle was pointed straight at her face.

* * *

BLADEN COLE WAS ONE STEP AWAY FROM CALLING OUT TO
Muriday when he saw the man raise his gun and step forward.

In the lamplight beyond the silhouette of the gunman, he saw Nicolette de la Gravière on the arm of Ezra Waldron.

Cole's immediate thought was that he had been correct in his assumption that Waldron himself had become the loose end.

However, when Waldron pushed free of Nicolette's hand on his arm and scrambled away, Muriday's gun did not follow him.

Instead, it remained pointed at Nicolette's terrified face.

“
Muriday!
” Cole shouted so loud that a sharp pain stung his vocal cords.

The man turned quickly, the muzzle of his Colt now trained on Bladen Cole.

K'pow-tzing!

The sounds of the gunshot and of the bullet whisking past Cole's cheek came as one.

Cole looked into the hideous face of the rat-faced man, grotesquely distorted by the streetlights and made yet more monstrous in Cole's mind by ten years of accumulated emotions which now surged over the bounty hunter like a tidal wave.

K'pow!

The bullet caught the rat-faced man in the right shoulder, effectively rendering his gun arm useless. The orders issued by Muriday's conscious brain demanded that a finger squeeze a trigger, but the message could not get through.

The weight of 250 grains of lead knocked Muriday off balance, and he toppled to the ground.

“This,” Cole told him, as he aimed his own Colt at the man, “is for William Cole, gunned down by
you
in Silver City ten years back.”

Muriday looked up pitifully through the excruciating pain.

Cole hoped that Muriday remembered that night down in Silver City. He could not know that the memory of that gunfight was among Muriday's last thoughts, but he
could
read in the rat-faced man's narrow-spaced eyes, that he did realize
tonight's
gunfight had been his last.

Cole saw the rapidly growing pool of darkness beneath Muriday's shoulder and knew that an artery had been nicked and the man did not have long to live. Cole lowered his gun and was in the midst of holstering it when he felt himself slammed by a force that nearly knocked him off balance.

In an instant, Cole realized that he was enveloped in the embrace of Nicolette de la Gravière.

He looked down into the tears flowing from those beautiful dark eyes, and heard the lips the color of chilies tell him:

“You saved my life!”

Her arms clung to him with an urgent, almost desperate, strength. He felt that he had no choice but to wrap his own arms around her.

She closed her eyes and placed a warm, moist kiss on his cheek.

Her eyes flickered open, then quickly closed.

The lips the color of chilies met his own, and time stopped.