The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (116 page)

Max had refused to let go of the police beating once he had started ranting and raving about the undercover cops. Here was where Arne’s role as liaison got tedious. The police chief said payment did not buy protection for transactions occurring in “no-man’s-land”—the term Tucson police had given to those parts of town where they feared to go even in force. The Yaqui village fit the police chief’s definition of noman’s-land,
at least no-
white
-man’s-land; only undercover police dare enter no-man’s-land. “Then why were your men there?” Max Blue had asked. The police chief seemed to shrink inside his baby-blue golf shirt and shorts; the judge noticed how thin the chief’s thighs were. What a disappointment at the crotch! The cop was hung like a canary! The judge enjoyed watching other men argue and struggle as if the world itself depended on them, and all the while the judge already knew who would win and who would lose.

The undercover cops could have the cocaine, but Max demanded the return of the cash. The police chief shook his head. In the confusion of the shooting, the bag full of cash had been lost. Sonny was at fault for choosing a Yaqui village for his rendezvous with the New York buyers.

Now the police chief and Max were sitting in Max’s golf cart hunched over a notebook comparing calculations and figures. The judge saw Max’s face had relaxed, and he knew the little tempest had passed. But off to the southeast and southwest the judge could see big puffy, white clouds hugging the shoulders of the high blue mountains. There was no sign of lightning yet; the clouds were still silver-white. He had learned to keep an eye on the clouds when he was a boy riding his horse alone on the old man’s ranch. Gradually over the next few hours, the clouds would swell and darken purplish blue until thick bolts of lightning and their thunder shook the ground. The old man had taught Arne that sunshine and blue sky over his head were no protection. If there was a big thunderstorm across the valley, distance was no guarantee, the old man used to cackle. Because lightning might travel diagonally for twenty or twenty-five miles, before the bolt struck the ground.

The judge took no chances with lightning. He would keep an eye on the cloud mass above the mountain peaks. He had certain rules regarding lightning that he had followed since he was a boy riding his horse. At the first clustering of purplish, big-bellied clouds, Arne used to spur his horse home. The judge did not care if Max and the young police chief were discussing the matter of the “national security” shipments; at the first rumble of thunder, the judge was going to excuse himself and take cover in the clubhouse.

After Max Blue and the chief had concluded their business, Max had called over his walkie-talkie, and a golf cart approached slowly. Arne saw a waiter had ridden down from the clubhouse with a picnic basket and ice chest. They ate sitting in the golf carts parked under a grove of mesquite trees near the back boundary fence of the golf course.
Arne had heard rumors that Max Blue had armed guards who secured the desert area outside the golf course fence; and if a small aircraft circled from time to time, it was part of Max Blue’s security against assassination attempts from the air. Max did not worry about reprisals from the victims’ families; he worried about former clients and his own associates. Max had made “arrangements” to solve “problems” for a great many interest groups including the “family,” foreign governments, even the U.S. CIA. Max had the goods on everyone, and that was dangerous.

The judge ate his club sandwich and potato salad. Max Blue always served the same lunch. If Max wanted to make a deal, plenty of champagne and beer would be served; if Max was chewing a new asshole for someone, such as the police chief, then there would only be ice water or ice tea. They ate without small talk. Cicadas droned in the trees, and there were the sounds of chewing and potato chips; for an instant there had been no city sounds, no jets or cars, no dogs barking or voices. The judge watched as the clouds began to darken over the mountains; he heard the first rumble of thunder. Max Blue had heard the thunder too and he grinned at Arne. Max and the judge had a private joke about Arne’s dislike of lightning and thunder.

The judge started to speak, but Max had cut in, “I know, I know—your grandfather showed you corpses of sheepherders split in half by lightning!”

“And stone walls four feet thick reduced to shattered rock by a single lightning bolt,” Arne himself had continued.

“You’d never know what hit you,” the police chief said. “It beats the gas chamber.”

“How do you know?” Max Blue said, looking sharply at the police chief. Max always forgot how dull-witted police were until he spent a few hours with a cop.

ARNE COULD HEAR the thunder from the storm over the Rincon Mountains quite distinctly now. He was tired of sitting in a golf cart in the heat. The misunderstanding had been resolved, and Arne had given Max the good news: Leah Blue could begin to pump water from her deep wells at her Venice, Arizona, development whenever she wanted. The judge wanted to go home. They left Max preparing to tee off on the fourteenth hole. The police chief drove the golf cart as fast as it would go.

Arne much preferred the company of his bassets to the company of humans. His grandfather had felt the same; more than once the old man had declared that his dog’s mouth was cleaner than a human’s mouth. Arne only wanted to go home and recover from the heat and the sun. But the young police chief wanted to talk about the “national security” shipments. Others in the department had been complaining they got no cut off the “national security” shipments. Suddenly the judge had not been able to restrain himself. Something about the little-boy cowlick on the police chief’s head infuriated him; stupidity passing for innocence. “Greed is so ugly in the police,” the judge said, “and really, it is quite useless to talk about law and order if you can’t control greedy ‘pigs.’ ” Arne was delighted with the police chief’s shocked expression at his use of the term
pigs
in the conversation. Arne had continued, “The French call the police
vaches
—‘cows.’ All I can picture are the milk cows on the old man’s ranch with bright green shit smeared all over their asses.” The judge wanted to make a point clear to the young cop: they had hired him out of Phoenix to work for them.

Arne waited for some response, but the police chief had been too stunned by the attack. “Get too greedy and see what happens,” the judge said. “I’ve been on the federal bench for twenty-five years. There’s only so much pie to go around. Get out of line too often and the feds will call secret grand juries and flush you down the crapper like they did your predecessor.” The young police chief nodded soberly. The judge put a hand on the chief’s arm. “No hard feelings, Sean,” Judge Arne
said, “I only tell you this for your own good. Clean house the first chance you get.” The young police chief nodded solemnly; the judge saw big circles of sweat under both the cop’s arms. “The men call what they take ‘combat pay’ and ‘fringe benefits,’ ” the police chief said hopefully, but the judge had turned away abruptly, leaving the police chief in midsentence. Arne was in no mood to argue about police salaries or Arizona’s brain-dead economy. Arizona had been sliding toward the financial abyss for years. One disaster had followed another. Arizona’s tax revenues had plunged. Hughes, Motorola, IBM—the list ran on and on; like rats off a sinking ship they had relocated to Denver or Las Vegas.

The judge did not bother to look back or wave to the police chief. The senator had let the cat out of the bag the other night at the Thursday Club. The senator had been too drunk to stand up or focus his eyes, but he had delivered one of his spontaneous sermons, this time in front of the big urinal in the downstairs bathroom. “Things are looking up! Things are looking up,” the senator said, all the while letting his limp cock droop in his hand and piss on his own shoes. The judge had stayed close by to be sure the senator did not let too many cats out of the bag. The senator had just finished briefings about top-secret U.S. border policy. Yes, Arizona’s economy would certainly look up if suddenly, overnight, Tucson became command headquarters for all U.S. military forces assembled along the Mexican border.

Judge Arne eased the Mercedes onto the dirt road to the home place. He was thinking about Max Blue’s wife, Leah, the real estate tycoon. She had spent millions drilling the deepest water wells in North America. The water from her deep wells had been salty, but all the better for her “canals of Venice.” Leah Blue was a gambler. Even the most expensive spas and resorts for the rich in Tucson had lost money, but that did not discourage Leah about her dream city in the desert. Leah Blue was lucky. Thanks to the judge’s directed verdict, she had all the water she wanted without interference from environmentalists or Indian tribes. If U.S. troops were sent into Mexico to restore order at the request of the Mexican president, then Tucson and all the border states would be booming again, and Leah Blue would be rich beyond imagination. Beside her, Max Blue would be a minor league player even with his assassination franchise.

It was always a relief to come home to his basset hounds after a day in the courtroom. The judge had the maid and cook leave each night by six because he wanted to enjoy his privacy. The judge rather liked
how fierce the badger hunters were with their huge basset heads, and thick dirt-digging claws; and yet bassets were nearly helpless without human assistance during mating. Bassets and basset-breeding weren’t for everyone; how many people wanted to guide a wet, pink, banana-size basset-hound prick into a bitch in heat? The judge certainly didn’t mind, but he knew he was not like others. Basset-breeding had required the utmost dedication for hundreds of years, by European nobles who had selectively bred the dogs for badger hunting.

The judge poured himself a martini from the chilled shaker the cook always prepared and refrigerated before she went home. He went outside to sit on the patio where he could watch the kennel runs and his bassets, all barking their greetings to him. He closed his eyes, took a sip, and settled back on his chaise lounge. The martini warmed his veins and he began to relax. It was always a mistake to work with the dogs if he was tense or had had a difficult day. More and more he enjoyed being alone with only his dogs for companionship. During his sexually active years he had always preferred prostitutes of either sex. He did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another. Now at the Thursday Club, Arne found he was far more excited by watching the antics of the other club members or the sex videos on the club’s big-screen TV. Even the two or three words one had to speak to a whore were too many words to waste on such creatures. Sex had always been filthy and deadly even before the outbreak of AIDS.

How much better the old man’s methods had been—how casually the old man had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers, then slipped his hard dick into the milk cow’s heifer tied and hobbled in the barn. Arne had watched his grandfather speechlessly. The heifer did not seem to mind. The old man’s dick was long and rather thin like a bull’s pizzle anyway. Afterward the old man had talked about the Greeks and their gods and the offspring of the gods who were part man and part horse or part man and part bull. Even as a young boy, Arne had not been confused. He knew there could be no such thing as minotaurs or centaurs. But even then, Arne had understood the old man’s urge to fantasize that he was no longer a man, but a bull.

The bassets were pure and noble. They waited their turns with him one by one; it was their ritual, their excited barking in anticipation; then, after martinis, he had sex with the four bitches. His basset stud was a good sport. The bitches were receptive to the dog only twice a year, but they had been trained to accept their master from behind
anytime. The stud dog smelled what went on in the bedroom off the patio; by the time it was his turn, the basset stud had performed gloriously on Arne, who lay belly down on Mother’s carved mahogany bed. Nothing was as deliriously potent as the orgasms that seized Arne when he fucked his basset hounds.

LEAH BLUE was already late for her meeting with Trigg, but she stopped her Mercedes anyway to look at the site of her dream city. Grayish gravel and yellowish creosote bushes were all that were there now, but since Judge Arne had thrown out the last motions for an injunction, Blue Water Development Corporation could begin construction on the hundreds of miles of canals that would crisscross the entire development. She imagined how stunned, then proud, her father and her brothers would be when they saw all the maps and blueprints. The water wasn’t just decoration either; the sight of foundations and canals everywhere was reassuring to newcomers in the desert. Surveys showed both residential and commercial buyers responded most strongly to property with flowing water; in the absence of a bubbling stream, fountains or canals greatly enhanced chances for quick sales. Leah closed her eyes and could see it all—sapphire water in canals weaving between brilliant white walls of palazzos and villas bordered with lawns that ran into fairways and greens. No vulgar wire fencing or asphalt parking lots in Venice, Arizona.