The Empress File (5 page)

"Marvel?"

"She's something else," John said, and I thought again of the Empress, serving butter brickie ice cream.

"She knows where the bodies are buried," I agreed.

"Ethics." John laughed. "Kiss my ass."

A cop car was parked at the E-Z Way. Two cops were standing over a guy in a T-shirt, who was talking up at them from the blacktop. John pulled in, down at the end, away from the action.

"I'll get it," I said. We needed caffeine for the drive back to Memphis, and the E-Z Way would be the last chance. I hopped out of the car and walked to the door. The cops were fifteen feet farther on, big guys in dark blue uniforms. One of them was dangling a nasty leather-wrapped sap on a key chain. The guy on the ground had brilliant white teeth. He was trying to smile, to placate them, and there was blood on his teeth. He was young, in his late teens or early twenties, with dirty blond hair and a beat-up face. I went inside, got the Coke, and paid the fat counterman. "What happened out there?"

"Danny Oakes, running his mouth again. Boy'll never learn," the fat man said.

"Sounds like a bad town to run your mouth in," I said. I meant it as a wisecrack, but he took it seriously.

"It surely is," he said, nodding solemnly.

At the door I put a quarter in an honor box and took a copy of the Longstreet daily. The headline said something about a hearing on a new bridge for the city. Outside, the cops were putting the blond in the backseat of the squad car.

"What'd he do?" John asked. The cop car's light bar was still bouncing red flashes off the E-Z Way's windows.

"Ran his mouth," I said. John nodded. The Delta.

We rolled along for a while, quietly. I was thinking about the blond kid and white teeth slick with blood and spit when John blurted, "You think she's fuckin' Harold?"

"I don't think so," I said when I caught up. "They didn't... vibrate that way. Maybe a long time ago."

"That's what I think," he said.

"This won't be a problem, will it?" I asked.

John said, "I fear I'm in love." He said it so formally that I didn't laugh.

"Should I... chuckle?" I asked.

"I don't think so," he said, and we drove out of town toward Memphis.

Chapter
3

When John and I got back to Memphis, the temperature was already climbing into the eighties. Instead of going straight to the airport, he took me through a section of narrow streets of small houses with dusty turnouts in front. The children in the yards were all black.

"Your plane doesn't leave for two hours," John said when I asked where we were going. "I want to show you something."

We stopped at a gray clapboard house with a deep green lawn inside a quadrangle of carefully trimmed hedge. "Come on in," he said, and I followed him through the heat up the sidewalk. He opened the front door with a key and turned on the air-conditioning as we stepped through. The walls were eggshell white, and the floors were blond hardwood. Art prints dotted the walls. I didn't know the artists' names, but all were competent, and some were excellent. The strongest color came from handmade rag rugs spotted through the rooms.

A back bedroom had been converted to a study, with racks of books along the walls. Most of them, judged from their size and color, were histories and political texts. An IBM clone sat on a desk, with a modem and a mouse. Past the bedroom we dropped down a set of stairs into the basement.

"This is my workroom, you know, like a studio," he said as he pulled the strings on a half dozen overhead light bulbs. "I don't bring many people down here."

"You can't work in public," I said. "You get shitty art from committees."

A kiln sat behind the stairs, next to a furnace and water heater. To one side was a workbench made of four-by-four timbers, with a rack of wood and stoneworking tools above it. Welding tanks, along with a torch and mask, were stacked next to the bench. The whole area smelled of hot metal and glass and the pleasantly sharp odor of ceramic glazes.

At the far end of the room a long table was covered with masks. Some were stone; some were baked clay; some were wood. One was glass, apparently made out of melted Coke bottles. You could still see some of the molded-in words. A couple of the objects were in an almost natural state, cut out of dead trees, truncated boles and knots forming lips and eyes...

"Not too good, huh?"

That was patently false modesty. It was better than good; it was exceptional. A pea green ceramic head was fixed on a copper stand made out of some kind of electrical strut. The head might have been Othello's death mask.

"Why this stuff?" I asked, picking up the Othello. "How'd you get started?"

"I saw an exhibit of African masks back in Chicago, in the bad old days. The politicians were afraid the niggers were planning to burn down the city, and they were all running around looking for something to cool us out. Since we were Afro-Americans at the time, they figured we'd get pissed if they handed out sliced watermelon. So they wheeled out the African art exhibit."

I looked sideways at him. "Always a skeptic in the crowd."

He shrugged. "Wasn't no big secret why they did it," he said. Then he grinned. "Funny thing is, with me it worked."

"I get fifteen hundred to two thousand for my good pieces," I said to him.

"Oh, yeah?" he said uncertainly.

"I'll give you a choice of anything I've got on hand, trade you for this mask." I tapped the pea green mask. "I've got a couple of things that'd look great in your living room."

"Bullshit," he said.

"You don't want to?"

"What are you going to do with it? The mask?"

It was my turn to shrug. "Put it on a bookshelf. Look at it. Think about it."

He looked at me for a minute and finally nodded. "Deal," he said.

"I'll get you in touch with a guy in Chicago. A dealer. He's got taste. He ought to come down and look at this."

"So you think it's all right?"

"My friend, if you can't sell this stuff, I'll personally drive you out to Graceland and kiss your bare ass on Elvis's front lawn."

I wrapped the mask in newspaper and made the airport with half an hour to spare. John dropped me off and left without a backward glance. While I waited for the plane, I got the tarot deck out of my carry-on bag. The Empress came up in the first spread. Future influences. I put the deck away.

The plane was late, and then I fell asleep on the trip back. A stewardess had to roust me out of my seat in St. Paul. I caught a taxi, growled at the cabdriver, and rode in silence along the riverside road back home. The apartment echoed with emptiness; Chaminade had erased every sign of her short occupation. I made myself busy with unpacking and transferred the notes from the portable computer to my work machine. John's mask went on a shelf in the living room, next to a museum-quality drawing by Egon Schiele. Looking at the mask made me think about buying a kiln, but I wouldn't be any good at it.

Feeling alone, tired, and a little sad, I peeled off my clothes and climbed into bed. After a couple of minutes I got up again, went out to the telephone, and called the Wee Blue Inn, a very bad bar in Duluth. Weenie answered. Weenie is the owner. He's also LuEllen's phone drop.

"This is the guy from St. Paul," I said.

"Uh-huh." Weenie didn't go in for the intellectual discourse.

"I need to talk to your girlfriend."

"Ain't seen her," he said. He said that no matter who called. LuEllen might be sitting across the bar from him.

"If you do, tell her to call me," I said.

"Business or pleasure?"

"Business."

"She got your number?"

"Yeah. She's got my number."

The next two days were beautiful. Blue skies, light, puffy clouds. I spent them on the Mississippi, in the hill country south of Red Wing, working on landscapes and thinking about Longstreet. In the evenings, back in St. Paul, I trained at the Shotokan dojo, then walked up to the center of town to an Irish bar off the main drag. A newspaper friend, who once drank too much, still hangs out in the bars, drinking Perrier lime water at two dollars a bottle. He claims bars are his metier.

"Or maybe they're my forte. Either metier or forte, I get them mixed up when I've had too many lime waters," he said, looking longingly at my bottle of Miller. "You think I ought to change to lemon waters?"

"Don't do anything hasty. You'll wind up in the gutter," I said, dabbing at my fat lip. The pure thing about Shotokan is that when you fuck up, you find out right away.

"Just a lemon water. I could handle it."

"Then it'll be orange waters, and two weeks from now you'll be shooting black tar heroin into your carotid," I said. We talked about the state income tax for a while, and then I asked him about corrupt towns.

"They're all corrupt," he said glumly, scrawling wet rings on the bar with the bottom of his bottle. With his lined and wrinkled face, he looked like an aging English setter. "But they don't think of themselves that way. That's why the politicians get so mad when a reporter goes after them. They convince themselves that the payoffs were really campaign contributions and if they used the money to buy a hat, well, that was just an accounting error. There's nobody more righteous than a guilty Lutheran with a reasonable excuse."

"Have you ever heard of a place down the Mississippi called Longstreet?"

We both looked into the mirror behind the bar. Through the bottles, my hair was looking grayer, and the crow's-feet at the corners of my eyes were cutting deeper. Too much sun probably. Too much time on the river.

"Longstreet," he said, nodding. "Yeah. Don't know much about it. You got something going down there?"

"No, no. I went through there my last time down to New Orleans," I lied. "The place looked kind of... funky. Good light, for one thing. Interesting people. I thought I might stop off the next time I go down. Do some painting. But there's an air of violence about the place."

"Hmph." He was looking at me. I don't know how much he knew or suspected about my sidelines, but it may be too much. "There's violence in all the river towns. But the southern ones are the worst. Jim Bowie and the duel of Natchez, shootin' and cuttin' on the levee. Or maybe it was a sandbar." He took another hit on his lime water. "Stay away from the dogcatcher."

"What?"

"The only thing I remember anybody ever told me about Longstreet is, stay away from the dogcatcher. I took his advice. I stayed away from the whole fuckin' town." He raised a finger to the bartender and pointed at his empty lime water bottle.

Late at night, after the days on the river and the evenings in the bars, I sat in front of a computer and went back and forth with Bobby. Bobby's strong on data bases, and there was no shortage of material.

From the federal government he got military and tax records, Small Business Administration loan reports, and criminal rap sheets. All of those are closed, of course, but with the right computer keys, anything is available.

From the state government he got more tax reports and personal driving histories. From the courts he got lawsuits and divorce proceedings. The big credit agencies had records on everybody. So did the insurance companies. He pulled credit card numbers and used them to access billing records. You can learn a lot from bills. Two of the targets, for example, made a couple of trips every year to the gambling parlors in Tahoe. The city clerk showed a whole series of shop-by-mail charges with a supplier of exotic sexual aids.

Got that stuff from Delaware.

Anything good?

The council's in up to its chin. Will transmit now.

Go.

As he pulled the information out of the bases, he shipped it to me. Most of it was junk we'd never use. But in this kind of situation you never knew what was relevant, and what was worthless, until afterward. So I printed it out, punched holes in the left-hand side of the printer paper, and bound it in loose-leaf notebooks. I work with computers all the time, but when I browse, I want paper.

In the middle of the third night after I got back from Memphis, I was making clouds in my sleep, nightmare clouds that never came out right. There's a way of making quick, beautiful clouds with watercolor. You lay down a wash of cobalt blue on a good white paper like a 240-pound cold-pressed D'Arches. While the wash is still wet, you bleed in some gray where the shadowed portions of the cloud will be. Then you crumple a paper towel and lightly press it into the wash. When you pick it up, you leave behind a perfect feathery summer cloud...

But in my sleep it wasn't working. I'd pick up the paper towel and find a face. I don't know whose face. A man's. Dead, I think. I struggled with it for a while, then felt myself being pulled up to consciousness. My eyes popped open, and I was awake and sweating.

Something was wrong. The apartment building is old and creaks and groans with temperature changes; those noises were all solidly filed in my subconscious. Something else was going on. I listened, trying to keep my breathing unchanged, and heard nothing but a deep and continuing silence. I turned my head a fraction of an inch to the left, toward the clock. Four in the morning. I'd been in bed an hour.

At the foot of the bed, and off to the right, I could barely make out the lighter rectangle of the open door. As I watched it, a dark shape seemed to slip through. For a second I thought it was my imagination. Then a narrow-beam flashlight sliced through the dark and crossed the bed before it cut out again.

I was trapped under the sheet and a light blanket. If I did a roll, I might make it off the edge of the bed between the bed and the wall, but from there I didn't know where the next move would be.

"Hey, Kidd..." The voice was soft, amused, and distinctly feminine.

I sat up, furious, the adrenaline still pumping. "Goddamn it, LuEllen, you scared the shit out of me."

"Aw, poor baby."

I punched the bed light. LuEllen was grinning at me from the foot of the bed. "What the hell are you doing here?" I asked.

"Well," she said, with a barely audible sniff, "I thought I'd probably find you in bed with that Charade person-"