The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (115 page)

Judge Arne had not seen the police chief since the El Paso lawmen’s convention. The judge had no interest in the cocktail and dinner parties in Tucson. He preferred to work with his dogs or play a little golf. The judge and the senator played golf with Max Blue on Thursday afternoons when the judge was free and the senator was in town. This week though, the police chief would join them. There had been trouble between Tucson police and Sonny Blue over a shooting. A few days later, the judge had got a call from the senator’s office about Sonny Blue and a mix-up with Customs and DEA over one of the “special planeloads.” Sonny Blue was batting zero.

After the U.S. military had been accused of smuggling drugs from Southeast Asia and Central America in military aircaft, Mr. B. and others had turned to the private sector, to independent contractors such as Max Blue and his wife, Leah. The arrangement had been for Customs and the DEA to look the other way; “authorized” aircraft were allowed to cross border radar without identifying themselves or destination. The judge had learned about the national security plan some years before. He had been approached by special Treasury agents on behalf of a convicted cocaine smuggler the judge had been about to sentence to thirty years in prison.

The judge had startled the special Treasury agents with his cooperation; they told him many judges at the federal level were reluctant to cooperate even after the national security issues had been explained.
The judge luxuriated in the praise of the special agents. They were relieved to be dealing with a man of his intelligence and sophistication. They confided that other federal judges had demanded numerous delicate telephone calls from senators and even higher before they had agreed to cooperate. Occasionally, the special agents even had to withdraw their requests from judges who refused to acknowledge the urgency of the secret strategy and agenda for national security.

The judge was sophisticated enough to understand the strategy for national security: cocaine smuggling was a lesser evil than communism. Cocaine smuggling could be tolerated for the greater good, which was the destruction of communism in Central and South America. The fight against communism was costly. A planeload of cocaine bought a planeload of dynamite, ammunition, and guns for anticommunist fighters and elite death squads in the jungles and cities of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Communism was a far greater threat to the United States than drug addiction was. Addicts did not stir up the people or start riots the way communists did. Addicts didn’t live long, and what time they had was devoted to scoring to get high or stealing money to score with.

In recent years the judge had received more and more requests from various agencies involved with issues of national security. The judge, like all dedicated conservatives, understood the greatest dangers to a nation lay within, among its own people who had become degenerate and had betrayed their Christian nation. The judge had not been fooled by the communists; he knew their secret agenda to rule the world had not been altered. All civilized nations had secret agendas known only to a select circle of government figures. Fortunes and national fates could not be left in the hands of the ignorant masses. The judge was proud to do his part against the spread of communism in the Americas.

Max Blue wanted to meet for a golf game pronto because Tucson police had roughed up Sonny Blue and Bingo pretty badly the other night and a large amount of cash had been “lost.” The judge had seen police out of control before in Tucson. One of the reasons the city council had hired the new police chief was because he had grown up in Phoenix and had no relatives in Tucson. Tucson’s last police scandal had involved police officers fencing stolen goods for family and friends involved in car-stereo thefts.

Police were useful to the secret agenda, but only as long as they were kept under control. Control and order were all that mattered; even the senator and Max Blue had agreed on that. That was why they played golf every Thursday; to keep all lines of communication open; to minimize
accidents or mistakes such as the ones Sonny Blue had made the week before. Mistakes led to disorder; accidents led to loss of control. The judge planned to ask the police chief to have lunch with him soon so he could give the chief a little “fatherly” advice. The judge would particularly have to caution the police chief about the gradual deterioration that had taken place with law enforcement in Pima County. From two or three cops stealing car stereos for extra cash, the ring of car-stereo thieves had grown until the police had been working with the largest retail car-stereo sellers in the state. The judge recalled the burglary ring might never have been detected except that the cops had devoted more and more time to stealing and fencing car CD players, and less and less time to their actual patrols and paperwork. Finally, other officers had got fed up with the extra work and someone had ratted to the local press. What had been lacking was control; the former police chief had been a lazy bastard who only wanted to collect his piece of action.

Max Blue had asked the judge to call the senator too, but the judge had persuaded Max to cool off a little, that he was upset and trying to make federal cases out of a little misunderstanding and an unfortunate mix-up. There was no need for the senator to be there when he and the police chief were coming. The matter was trivial. No one had really been hurt except a tourist, and Sonny Blue had not fired the fatal shot.

Somewhere the judge had read about a South American country, maybe Brazil or Argentina, where the police force had started by using torture to interrogate political prisoners but had soon become so addicted to torture they no longer wanted to leave work at the end of their shifts; they’d take short naps, eat, and come back for more torture. The judge blamed lax supervision; there were valuable lessons to be learned from Argentina about the necessity for control over the police.

AS THE JUDGE pulled his car into the clubhouse lot, he checked the horizon for thunderclouds. Sudden, violent storms occurred in late afternoon all summer and ruined golf games. Max Blue reputedly ignored precautions even when the lightning strikes were close. Official
policy on all municipal and resort golf courses was mandatory closure at the approach of thunderclouds, but Max was exempt from that policy. The back eighteen holes were his private course.

The old man had used thunder and lightning to terrorize Arne when he was a child. The old man said balls of lightning would bounce out of the chimney, then come bouncing up the stairs into Arne’s bed. Lightning melted zippers that burned off your balls and cock. The old man had teased him mercilessly when Arne had visited at the old man’s ratty mansion. Electricity in Tucson had not been reliable before the Second World War. Lights in the mansion blinked on and off and fuses blew out. The old man preferred candles and had left boxes of matches everywhere. “Little boys who play with matches pee their beds! Little boys who dance on tables at night make the lights go out!” The judge could still hear the old man’s voice. He blamed the old man for the nervousness he still felt about lightning.

The skies to the west were hazy blue, which might signal extra pollution drifting down Interstate 10 from Phoenix, or it might be the first traces of rain clouds drifting off the Sea of Cortés. But the judge didn’t worry about those clouds; he worried when he saw purple, big-headed clouds that billowed into anvil shapes thousands of feet high. The judge had read all about bolts from the blue; they were true occurrences, not old wives’ tales.

The police chief had not arrived yet, but the judge knew Max would already be out on the course. He took some practice drives and did some practice putting while he waited. The putting greens were parched and hard as brick. The judge did not care much about golf. Billiards was a refinement, down to the perfection of green felt instead of weeds and turf, without the worry of lightning or heatstroke. In Tucson, billiards had another advantage over golf: the green felt did not require millions of gallons of water every year. The judge had not known or cared how much water a golf course used in a year until the water rights dispute had come into his court. Water for golf courses was top priority because tourism was all the industry Arizona had left. Tucson had steadily lost population after the U.S. economy had faltered, and Arizona’s banks had all failed. The blue-chip companies such as IBM or Motorola had become more and more fearful of the political developments and upheavals in Mexico and had relocated in Denver.

Judge Arne was the last of his line, and he was glad of it. Let Tucson slide back to its rightful place in history, which was as a dusty, flyblown village of bootleggers, whores, and soldiers. Mexicans and Indians the
judge didn’t count because they had lived in Tucson so much longer and were, in any case, much different than white people. Mexicans and Indians grew connected to a place; they would not leave Tucson even after all of Arizona’s groundwater was polluted or pumped dry. He had seen the evidence, the exhibits by hydrologists, in the water rights lawsuit. Arne didn’t care; he would probably not live to see it: Tucson and Phoenix abandoned by the hundreds of thousands after all the groundwater had been consumed.

The judge had been practicing with his woods on the driving range when the police chief joined him to take warm-up swings. The police chief wore baby-blue shorts and a baby-blue polo shirt, then had the bad taste to top it off with a navy-blue baseball cap with
SWAT
in white letters across the crown. The judge chuckled as he shook the chief’s hand; the cop just couldn’t leave his
SWAT
cap home. The police chief was more nervous about the meeting than he wanted to admit.

The judge had not witnessed Max Blue betray emotion before, not even in golf games after other players made idiotic drives or talked nonsense. The judge could hardly blame Max Blue for being upset. Sonny Blue was supposed to get Tucson police protection, not Tucson police beating.

The police chief had squinted off in the distance at the Rincon Mountains while the judge talked to Max Blue. Max had been too upset to play golf. Instead, they had gone in two golf carts, followed by Max Blue’s cartload of bodyguards. They parked the golf carts under a tall mesquite tree in the rough beyond the twelfth hole. Max had been upset that the judge had not invited the senator also. The incident on the landing field near Yuma was the senator’s responsibility. Someone had been doing a sloppy job of alerting the Border Patrol radar units to let their planes and pilots through.

The judge had gently reminded Max that with only two telephone calls, the entire mix-up at the landing field had been resolved. No one knew better than the senator how important safe landings were. The senator’s reelection campaign fund depended on those shipments; other party candidates had been financed as well with the proceeds from the shipments. Max had the goods on the senator. The judge knew that. Max had saved the senator’s ass with a bundle of dynamite under the car seat of a certain Los Angeles investigative reporter who had alleged the senator’s involvement in a San Diego real estate fraud.

The judge watched the police chief: the more angry Max Blue got, the more nervous the cop got. The police chief began with an apology,
but Max had cut him off. Max held a seven iron in his hand and made gestures that worried the judge. What was the use of spending a million dollars on the Tucson police if all they did was kick your boys in the balls and steal their cash?

The police chief tried to explain that the undercover officers worked by rules of their own, and it was unfortunate that Sonny Blue and Bingo had chosen the Yaqui village for the drop. The judge listened to their voices—Max Blue’s voice was quivering with fury while the police chief’s voice was even and conciliatory. Arne was bored with their bickering. He hoped Max would get off the police and get back to the lawsuit over water for Leah Blue’s Venice development. Arne had good news. His clerk had located a number of possible legal theories and strategies to legitimize sending the water rights lawsuit back to state court where Leah Blue had already won against Indian tribes and environmentalists.

Max Blue had promised the judge a house next to the golf course Leah was planning for her Venice dream-city. Players could reach the back eighteen holes in quaint gondolas or in golf carts.

Arne, of course, would never consider leaving the home place. Mother had planned for everything. She had even removed the old tennis courts to make way for the dog runs and kennels. She had recognized immediately that Arne had no interest in coarse outdoor sports; basset hound breeding was a perfect hobby. She seemed not to have acknowledged warnings from nannies and later from teachers that her son showed “unnatural” curiosity and interest in the sexual habits of dogs. In high school, Arne had openly proclaimed to horrified classmates his preference for watching dogs fuck over watching a Chaplin comedy. Arne had always hated the mute little tramp and did not think Chaplin funny or poignant at all.

Arne had begun to regret they were not playing golf after all. Hitting the practice balls had awakened the urge to whack the little balls to kingdom come. Acting as liaison between the police and Max Blue was just one of the duties Judge Arne performed; there was also an entirely different realm of border crossings and dealings with certain local businessmen who secretly worked for the U.S. government.