Valley of Bones (23 page)
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense
I was there two years and four months and in that time I guess I read every book in Orne’s library. There was all of Nietzsche, naturally, and near everything that anyone had ever written about him biographies and such, and some other philosophy and political science and economics, as long as it didn’t say anything good about religion or welfare or socialism. Besides that, most of the shelves were taken up with history and military history and how-to books, and reference works, so that when the world collapsed we could construct civilization again, but leave out the parts Orne didn’t like. There were no novels. Orne thought that fiction was a waste of time, and no poetry either except one book called the 500 Top Poems, some guy collecting the most anthologized poems, and Orne thought that was good enough, plus the complete works of Shakespeare. He also had a nearly complete collection of field manuals for the U.S. Army and a complete Loompanics catalog, all kinds of books on how to be a terrorist at home or change your identity and all.
Right off he taught me the business. The trade in domestic marijuana is much larger than most people think. In California it’s second only to grapes as a cash crop. I don’t know about
Virginia, but I guess we were right up there with apples. Slade County hadn’t produced so much income since the Caledonia shut down. The prime sensemilla we grew went for over $200 an ounce on the street and paid us around forty dollars or $1,280 a kilogram and we shipped between 400 and 500 kilos a month so an income of half a million per. Figure 70 percent for salaries and overhead that’s still a lot of money and all of it went into gold, because Orne didn’t want to have his money in data when all the computers went to slag. Once a month he’d go to Roanoke and hire a private jet and fly around his distribution area, collecting his take and converting it into one-ounce ingots, maple leafs, Kruger-rands and when he had enough he would bury them around the property in gallon jars. He used a mil-spec GPS receiver and took a digital photo of the burial site and then he stored the photo in encrypted form along with the GPS coordinates on his little solar-power Argonaut ruggedized laptop. I learned how to do that too.
Besides this work, my time was my own. When I got sick of reading, I walked the land with map and guidebook, learning the trees and plants, sometimes with Orne, who knew it like his own face, and sometimes alone. They had built a watchtower on the rocky crest of the Knob and we would sometimes go up there and view our eight hundred acres. From there you could see the growing blanket of the state forests and watch it turn from green to golden and red and also the blighted areas where the coal companies were carving the tops off mountains and also St. Catherine’s Priory, lodged against its own hill, Sumpter Ridge across Crickenden Hollow from Bailey’s Knob, a set of blue-gray boxes among the trees. Orne pointed it out to me and said maybe they would sack it like the Vikings did when the end came. It was in my first autumn there that I saw snow for the first time, and was also for the first time cold in a cold wind and felt what it felt like to be hugged warm by someone else.
I’m sorry, you’re not interested in my delights, although it’s the case that the devil has a whole bag of them. Not like in the
horror movies where the devil’s always obviously nasty, yellow eyes shooting flames from fingers making people fly into the walls, oh no he is as nice as pie and truly solicitous of your comfort. It is God who makes you cringe and hide your face and suffer pangs of torment, and flings you against the wall, not that I knew that then, and not that you know that now, but I pray you will learn.
What else? We played a lot of paintball, all joining in after work and on weekends, war with two teams or sometimes escape and evasion with three or four trying to get through and the others trying to keep us out. We took turns being commander. Most of the guys and some of the women had been in the service, so it was a pretty tough league and at the beginning I was usually killed fairly soon. I never got particularly good at being the commander, which is kind of strange, considering what happened later on. We did a good deal of shooting too, pistols rifles of all kinds machine guns rocket launchers. We had a 60 mm mortar and I got to shoot that and we also practiced making booby traps and blowing things up. Orne had the whole place packed with explosive devices and in case of a raid he intended to seal the mines under tons of rock, hopefully with all the narcs inside it. We tested these demo charges in unused tunnels. There is so much blasting in those hills from the mining that no one ever noticed our noise. I liked blowing things up, there is a luxurious thrill that goes through my body when I release a shot. Orne said I was a dab hand at it.
I didn’t meet Skeeter Sonnenborg until I was there for well over a year, in fact on October 10, 1989, because he had been away in some far corner of the globe, although I had heard a good deal about him from Orne and everyone else. Ol’ Skeeter. Remember that time when ol’ Skeeter run his motorcycle through that wedding in Boonetown? Or started the goat racing? Or got drunk and brought a girl back to his place having forgot he already had a girl there he just asked to marry him? Skeeter was the best buddy. On that morning I was lying in bed with Orne and about to either get up or do it again, when we heard a crackling
of gravel and then the potato-potato-potato sound of a Harley-Davidson exhaust and Orne lit up a big grin and said damn it’s Skeeter back again. We got out of bed then and I was just looking around for something to put on when the door kicked open and there was Skeeter in his riding leather and his Nazi helmet. He ran his eyes over me and said nice tits honey and then jumped on Orne and they wrestled and whooped and punched each other down on the floor until Orne got him pinned in a hold and he hollered enough.
Well there is often a problem with the girlfriend and the best buddy. With Skeeter around Orne seemed to lose about twenty points of IQ, not that Skeeter was dumb far from it. He had gone to a fancy prep school name of Andover or Hand Over Your Money Daddy as he always called it and spent some time at the University of Pennsylvania before he dropped out in ’73 and joined the marines, which is where he met up with Orne. They didn’t want to miss out on the war. He was obscure about where all he came from, allowing only that his daddy was a plutocrat and he didn’t have much to do with his people. That was strange to me, since among Orne’s kind you just didn’t leave your kin no matter what kind of low dogs they were but there were a lot of rules that didn’t seem to apply to Skeeter, including him making fun of Orne’s philosophical ideas. Skeeter didn’t believe in getting ready for the End of the World, nor strictly speaking did he believe in getting ready for the day after tomorrow. Or that’s how it seemed, although in fact he was a perfectly competent businessman. What he did was sell weapons. He lived in Kelso, Virginia, which was about fourteen miles away on the other side of Sumpter Ridge, where he ran an outfit called The Gun Nut. This was not just selling Remingtons and Colts to the locals. He was an arms dealer on a fair scale, and he traveled all over the world buying and selling lethal hardware. He was the first person who ever talked to me about Africa, but I have run out of pages so here ends the third book.
Shortly before the surrender of Metz to the Prussians, a frantic Georges de Berville shipped his daughter eastward to what he imagined would be the safety of Paris. Marie-Ange arrived in the capital on the second day of September, but within three weeks the city was besieged by the enemy. She lodged with her Aunt Aurore at first but soon gained admission to the Institute of Bon Secours as a postulant. Called
gardes malades
, these women were devoted to the care of the sick, both rich and poor, in their own homes. All through the terrible winter of 1870 Marie-Ange worked ceaselessly in the poorer quarters of the Left Bank, bringing food, coal, and medicine when she could, bought from her own pocket at siege prices, and toward the end, when there was nothing to be had at any price, she brought a cheerful face and a comforting word.
Paris capitulated in January, but the agonies of the city were far from over. In March, the people of Paris revolted, and the revolutionary movement known as the Commune took over the city. During this time, Marie-Ange was working in Neuilly, which had been heavily bombarded by government forces. When the Commune began to arrest priests and religious, she merely changed her clothes, dropping the habit of Bon Secours and resuming the costume that had served her well in the Battle of Gravelotte.
That spring, the government forces advanced irresistibly, and the Communards were pushed back to a few heavily defended bastions. In the last week in May, Marie-Ange found herself in a wine cellar in Monmartre, where she had established a dressing station with no medicines but wine and no bandages but old sacking and the torn-up garments of the dead, washed in vinegar. By May 23, surrounded on all sides, subject to a ferocious cannonade, the Communards in the strongpoints of Monmartre lost heart and began to drift away. Her companions urged Marie-Ange to flee as well, for she could do nothing for the dying men and women in her charge, besides which, the attacking troops were shooting every rebel they encountered. She had almost been convinced of the futility of her plight when, as she later wrote, “all at once I became aware of a Figure at my side, the
Blessed Virgin, who said to me, ‘As I did not desert my Son at the foot of the cross, remain faithful to your charges, for these too are beloved of Christ.’ So I composed myself for death with a good heart, although I was saddened that I would never more see my dear papa or my brothers short of our glorious reunion in paradise.”
Then she heard a final fusilade and the door crashed down. The soldiers made to bayonet the helpless wounded, but Marie-Ange threw her frail body in their way, and cried, “Soldiers of France! Are you not Christian men? In the name of Christ and his Blessed Mother, have mercy!” Despite this plea, it is likely that Marie-Ange de Berville would have been killed in that vile cellar, had not the Providence of God brought Lieutenant Auguste Letoque to the spot at that very moment. This young officer was a close friend of Jean-Pierre de Berville and had often been entertained at Bois Fleury. Striking the rifles away with his saber, he shouted, “Fools! Would you slay an angel!”
—FROM
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST,
BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
T
HEY DROVE NORTH
and then east for hours into a part of Florida where Lorna had never been. When they left the highway they seemed to enter a different world, one that had nothing to do with the jaunty vacationland image the state tried to project. Driving on two-lane blacktop bordered by murky canals they passed burning fields of sugarcane stubble and slowed often behind mesh-sided trailers piled high with cut cane. Once they passed a stake-bed truck full of standing cutters, men and a few women, scarfed against the dust that covered their clothes, that whitened their plum-black skin.
“My fate,” said Paz as they drove by, “although these are Jamaicans, not Cubans. They fly them in for the cutting season. Americans won’t cut cane.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“About Americans not cutting cane? It’s a national scandal.”
“No, about escaping your fate.”
“Duh, I feel good, I guess,” said Paz.
Lorna felt herself blush. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but he cut her off. “No, that’s okay, but I have to admit that once in a while I grab my machete and chop an acre or two just to keep in practice, in case you all decide equal rights was a bad idea. How about you? Did you escape your fate?”
“No, I’m solidly in the groove. My daddy designed me to be
a bright little thing and accumulate academic honors and gain a respectable profession requiring a Ph.D. and do the
Times
Sunday crossword puzzle in less than twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes is pretty good,” said Paz. “I do it in about three.”
“You don’t!”
“Yeah, I just leave it for a week and then they show you how to fill it in. It takes no time at all.”
“Laugh if you want to,” she said, laughing, “but it’s an important part of my pathetic teacup of self-respect. My brother, Bert, feels like you do about the sacred puzzle, though. He escaped
his
fate.”
“Oh, yeah? What was he supposed to be?”
“A famous research scientist M.D. discovering the cure for cancer. It turned out he liked girls and money instead. He’s in bonds in New York, does fairly well, I think: nice apartment, a place in the Hamptons. He’s on his third wife, because I guess the first two were not quite vapid enough to suit his refined tastes. Fortunately, Daddy had a spare child. Unfortunately, a girl. Fortunately, much more academic talent than Bert. Unfortunately, not enough to get into medical school. Fortunately, just enough to snag an Ivy League Ph.D., so she can be introduced as my daughter, Dr. Wise.”
“So the cancer cure is pretty much out?”
“Afraid so. My sad story. What a stench! What
is
that?”
“Sugar refineries. Like a herd of brontosaurs got drunk on rum and puked up. We’ll be out of it soon. Here’s a point: as sad as your story is, you don’t have to breathe this in every day.”
“I’m not going to get any sympathy at all from you, am I?”
“No, although if I contract cancer I might be fairly pissed off at you. And your brother. Speaking of fate, this guy we’re going to see, totally designed by nature to be a police detective. Mozart, Michael Jordan, that level. Probably cleared more felonies than anyone else in the history of the Miami PD. And because of a situation outside his control he gets the boot.”
“What happened to him?”
Paz told her the story, the official one, about how Cletis had been
driven crazy by African-style witch doctor drugs, and then she wanted to know more about the famous Voodoo Killer case, and he supplied more of the official version.
She said, “Why does your voice go all funny when you talk about this? It’s like you’re one of those brainwashed Korean War POWs talking about how they did germ warfare.”
“You detect prevarication.”
“My stock-in-trade. What really happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. There’s a tribe in Africa that can do real sorcery. They can give you dreams, become invisible, create zombies. They can create psychedelic drugs in their own bodies and make you see anything they want you to see. An African-American went over there and became a witch, and then came back here and started eviscerating pregnant women to get the power he needed to destroy America and we couldn’t stop him worth a damn. And the spirits exist.”
She laughed. “No, really.”
“See? I rest my case.” Then he changed the subject to Cletis Barlow in his prime, his amazing feats, his peculiar beliefs, his kindness to Paz. “I’d still be, as the saying goes in the department, chasing niggers up Second Avenue if he hadn’t dragged me into the detectives. I had a couple of nice collars, but no one was looking to promote me to detective. The ethnic politics of the Miami PD are a little weird. So I owe him a lot.”
“A father figure.”
“You could say that.”
“And the actual father? Not on the scene?”
A long pause here. Lorna thought that Paz was ignoring the question and she felt a small pang of regret for having asked it. They drove out of the sugar regions and into a pleasanter country, green pastures occupied by humped white cattle staring stupidly from behind wire fencing.
“The short version,” said Paz, after clearing his throat, “is he’s a
rich white Cuban. He loaned my mom the money to get her started in catering, and used her ass as collateral. I was the product. He does not have paternal feelings. When I got a little famous around that case and was on local TV a lot, he took his family on a world tour, lest anyone make the connection.”
“That’s really sad. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. But,
amor fati
.”
“Pardon…?”
“
Amor fati
. Love your fate. A friend of mine used to say that. The secret of happiness.”
Lorna did not respond to this, as she did not wish to explore the source of the Latin tag, whom she suspected was on the staff of the University of Girl. She looked out the window. Soon they turned off the blacktop onto a gravel road and off that onto a narrow dirt track between rows of dusty pines, past a sign reading
BARLOW
Registered Charolais, and into a yard containing a red-painted, tin-roofed farmhouse with a wide screen porch, a barn, some outbuildings, and a tall, rangy woman in her early sixties, wearing a tattered straw hat and an apron.
Paz got out of the car and into this woman’s warm embrace.
Introductions then: Dr. Wise, Edna Barlow, Paz slipping the doctor in there, Lorna wondering why. She shook the woman’s hand, which was hard and strong, and looked into her face, which was plain, strong, seamed, tanned, a stranger to the spa, obviously, and equipped with sharp blue eyes. Lorna wore her formal face, as she did with people who might be offended by advanced ideas. She felt like she had walked into a 1930s movie.
They sat on the porch, which Mrs. Barlow called a veranda, and drank sweet iced tea from clunky glasses. Paz and Mrs. Barlow chatted about what he’d been doing and what they’d been doing, and the doings of the three junior Barlows (college, the marines, high school basketball), and although Mrs. B. attempted to bring her into the conversation, it was awkward, leaving Lorna wondering what she
was doing here. She caught Edna looking searchingly at her several times and wondered what that was about.
A white Dodge pickup came dusting into the yard, and proved to hold Cletis Barlow and his sixteen-year-old son, James. More greetings, but apparently men didn’t hug chez Barlow. Lorna thought Cletis Barlow had the meanest face she ever saw on a man, the face of the leader of a lynch mob from central casting, except there was a nice person living inside it by mistake. It was all scars, lumps, bad teeth, and wrong angles, and the eyes were the color of a washboard.
They got a tour of the rancho then, the two guests in borrowed rubber boots moving gingerly among the big cattle in the barn, swatting, but not too obviously, at the many flies. Paz was trying to sense the mental status of his former partner; Lorna felt like she was on a school trip, a feeling enhanced by James, who seemed fascinated by her, although he called her ma’am and told her more about Charolais cattle than she wanted to know.
AN EARLY SUPPER
is the custom here. Through a manipulation that is proof against all of Lorna’s psych skills and feminist principles, she finds herself in the kitchen with Edna, preparing snap beans and tomatoes from their garden and peeling potatoes. Lorna realizes that she has never actually peeled a potato. At home she was an honorary boy, the children were called in to a laden board, the mother never requesting her daughter’s help. Message: This girl is for higher things, Dad things, feminism clearly not applying to Mom, although Dad talks a good game, and just as clearly she has fallen into a time warp here in south-central Fla. Who peels potatoes? Lorna’s entertainments are infrequent, and at those few that involve spuds, she bakes them, and while they bake she dispenses wit in the living room.
Edna is watching, incredulous. Finally, she speaks. “Honey, I believe you haven’t peeled many potatoes.”
“Not even one,” admits Lorna, and now she can put down the peeler and apply paper toweling to her wounds.
“Well, sit yourself down then. I only asked you to be sociable,” says Edna, who now stands by the sink and with rapid flicks of the instrument causes the skins to practically leap off the pesky tubers.
Lorna feels obliged to compliment the woman on this skill, which she does and then feels unutterably patronizing, so adds a personal slamette. “I’m not very domestic, I guess.”
“Well, you being a doctor and all, I figured you had enough to be doing. I just drug you in here so the boys could talk by themselves.”
“Are they telling secrets?”
“I don’t know, but they do like to get off alone. The two of them’re real close, and Cletis has missed it something awful, although he’d never say a word. Anyway, I can’t abide a man in the kitchen. It gets me all nervous.”
“But if you feel that way, you get stuck with all the cooking and serving. And the cleaning up.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘stuck,’ exactly,” says Edna. “There’s enough work to do in the world and I don’t see why it can’t be divided up so’s we all know what we’re supposed to do and get good at it. I believe the Lord intended it that way. I’ve changed truck oil, and greased bearings, and run farm machinery, and hauled feed. Who d’you think ran this place while Cletis was off being a policeman down south?” She holds up the peeler. “Honey, if you think this is hard, you try castrating a bull calf. No, thank you! Which is why I thank the good Lord for men. Although they can be a trial. How long have you known our Jimmy?”
The unexpected out-of-context question of the skilled interrogator. Lorna feels suddenly off balance. “Not long at all. We’re working on a case together.”
Edna seems a little disappointed in this answer, so Lorna adds, “He seems very good at what he does.”
Here Edna turns on her an unexpectedly radiant smile. “Oh, my, yes, he is. Oh, but we think the world of Jimmy Paz. He’s just the sweetest thing!”
THE SWEETEST THING
was at that moment in a sagging wicker chair on the porch vaguely wishing that Cletis had not added total abstinence to his skein of virtues. Paz wanted a drink and a cigar. He had told Cletis what Lorna had told him about the events in the locked ward, and was now relating what he knew about the Muwalid murder; it was tough going, Paz fearing that any moment Cletis would interrupt with a question about whether Paz had performed some action that might have broken open the case, which Paz had forgotten to do, and now it was too late. But when Cletis did stop him, it was about a detail from the first interrogation of Emmylou Dideroff.
“She said
what
?”
“She said it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus.”
“Well, well. If that don’t beat all! I’d sure like to meet this woman.”
“Yeah, the two of you’d get along real well, putting the pope to one side for a while.”
“You think she was serious?”
“I guess. That was the saint part talking, though. There’s another part in there that’s not so nice.”
“That don’t signify,” said Barlow dismissively. “There’s demons in us all. Go ahead, what happened then?”
Paz finished his tale, adding the business about Wilson and Packer and Cortez and the material from the first volume of the diaries. After that, Barlow thought for a while, leaning his ladderback chair up against the side of his house and chewing on a toothpick, staring into space. Paz knew better than to interrupt him at this juncture.
They were called to supper.
Barlow let his chair go forward with a thump. “It don’t work, Jimmy,” he said. “I can’t say for sure without seeing this girl, but she didn’t do it. The frame’s too obvious and sloppy. I think she was telling the plain truth. She was set up and she just walked into that room like she said. They knew you’d be up, and they knew you’d find her, and the murder weapon, and they knew you’d believe she
was crazy. Uh-huh, I see you’re confused. That’s cause we always look at the victim, why was he killed, who were his enemies, what was he doing in the twenty-four hours before he died and so forth.”