House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (54 page)

He went out the door and turned right, back toward the basement and the half-sunken window that gave onto low hills and the Spanish ruins near the river.

Where are you, Big Bud? My legs are weak, my race almost done, whether I agree that this is the end of the line or not.

Then he realized that he was no longer rational and had returned to the Marne and the cacophony of no-man’s-land and the frame of reference that, once branded on the unconscious, could never be removed from one’s memory. The admonitions were many:
Don’t silhouette on a ridge. Get rid of civilian jewelry. Turn into a stick and look at the ground when trip flares pop overhead. Remove your officer’s bars. Don’t be the third man on the match unless you want to eat a sniper’s round. Zigzag and never run in a straight line. Tape your gear on patrol and don’t let Fritz hear you clink. If you’re about to be overrun, throw away the souvenir belt buckle, the pornographic pictures of dollhouse girls, the machine pistol that sold for fifty dollars in Paris, the warm German greatcoat that means an immediate death sentence.

What did all this wisdom mean? Nothing. They were killed just the same, often by shells fired from guns fifteen miles away.

Was he losing his mind? Probably. But the sane man accepted the world and, in so doing, became part of it; the irrational and unbalanced man rejected and overcame it, and it was from him that others learned. Ishmael thought he heard machine-gun fire but couldn’t be sure, any more than he could be sure about the sounds of footsteps across wood floors overhead and the jiggling of electric bulbs on the tunnel roof that created multiple shadows on the walls. Then he heard a new sound, one that was different from the rest, like mountain-climbing cleats scraping on stone, clicking methodically toward him.

He entered the basement. Maybe there was a door that opened on a stairwell. Or maybe he could climb onto a chair or a stool and knock the glass out of the window. He heard a single shot, one that was high-powered, followed by a man’s scream. Then the entire building was silent, except for the clicking of cleats or hobnailed boots on the stone.

H
ACKBERRY AND ANDRE
found a service door at the rear of the building. The door was made of oak and dead-bolted in at least two places, the knob key-locked, the small glass panes overlaid with iron grillework.

“There’s a window on the other side of the building,” Hackberry said. “You may have to lift me up.”

“Why not go through the door?” Andre replied.

“Because it might as well be made of steel.”

“Stand back, please,” Andre said.

“What are you doing?”

Andre didn’t reply. He balanced himself on his injured leg and drove his good one into the door, cracking one of the panels. Then he began cracking one panel after another. He gripped the grille and tore it out of the frame as though ripping apart a packing crate. He reached inside and unlocked the dead bolts and kicked what was left of the door onto the floor. “There,” he said. He stepped back to let Hackberry walk in first.

“They know we’re inside, Andre. Legally, they can kill both of us. Stay behind me.”

“Should you have brought the cup, Mr. Holland? What if we die here? What will happen to it?”

“I got enough on my mind. If you please, don’t add to my grief.”

“How is it that I am adding to your grief?”

Hackberry closed his eyes and opened them again, as though falling down an elevator shaft.

They walked down a carpeted, unlit corridor and went up a half flight of stairs to what was probably the first floor. Through an open door, Hackberry could see a room in which the rug had been rolled back and a trapdoor opened to a lower level, and he realized it was the same room he had glimpsed earlier, the one where a pale square of light had radiated from the floor. His pistol was holstered, the twine-wrapped, bundled slicker hanging from his left hand. He turned and touched his finger to his lips and let Andre descend the stairs first while he kept his eyes on the door that faced the front of the building. The trapdoor and the springs and the steps screeched with Andre’s weight.

The man who came through the door may or may not have heard the noise. He held a cut-down pump shotgun with a stock that had been wood-rasped down to a pistol grip. His face was as blank as a pie pan, his eyes cavernous. Hackberry drew the Peacemaker and cocked the hammer in the same motion and fired only one round. The room was small, and the sound of the discharge left his right ear ringing. The round tore through the man’s shoulder and splattered the doorjamb. He crumpled to his knees, his hand pressed to his wound, his fingers glistening. Hackberry went down the steps into a tunnel, the smell rising up like the odor of a storm sewer. He picked up the trapdoor with both hands and pushed it up until the springs carried it the rest of the way, slamming it shut.

Two men came around a bend in the tunnel, their boots and trouser cuffs dark with water. One of them carried a baseball bat. The other man looked like a Mexican or an Indian and wore black braids and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt with a shoulder holster strapped across it, the butt of a German machine pistol sticking out of the holster.

“We just want to talk,” the white man said.

The man in braids was more ambitious. His teeth were white against his dark skin, his face lit with the same malevolence Hackberry had seen in the faces of the Mexican soldiers he had shot behind Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Mexico. The man had just touched the grips of the machine pistol when Hackberry hit him with the butt of the Peacemaker, then clubbed him again and kicked his head into the wall.

Andre ripped the bat away from the white man and slung it down the tunnel, then pinned him against the wall by the throat. “Where is Mr. Holland’s son?”

Spittle was draining off the man’s chin. He stabbed his finger at the air, toward the far end of the tunnel. Andre grabbed him by the shirt and coat and swung him in a circle, as he would a sack of feed, then slammed him into the wall. “Do not move. Do not talk. Do not think until I come back and give you permission.”

“He’s unconscious,” Hackberry said.

“Sometimes they are bluffing. I will make sure.”

“He’s done. Now slow your motor down,” Hackberry said, pulling the machine pistol from the shoulder holster of the man with braids.

Hackberry looked down the tunnel and saw a pool of water, one that was dull green, the light from an adjacent room reflecting on its surface. There was a bend in the tunnel, and he could not see inside the room. He handed the machine pistol to Andre. “Don’t argue with me. If we get into serious trouble, push this little button and pull the trigger. It’ll do the rest.”

W
HAT ARE THE
limits of courage?
Ishmael wondered. Certainly they existed. There were moments and situations for which no one had a cure. On a battlefield, a soldier died in hot blood. He also died with his comrades at his side, in Ishmael’s case with the men of color he had come to love. To have to choose between honor and duty and irreparable suffering at the hands of a sadist was another matter.

Could he do it? He would have traded the worst artillery barrage the Germans could throw for the situation he was now in, his wrists manacled to his sides, sitting on his buttocks, the walls of the room sweating with humidity, Beckman squatting next to him in alpine climbing boots, pressing the tip of a screwdriver just below Ishmael’s right eye.

“That’s a good boy,” Beckman whispered. “Daddy will be here in a minute. Who knows? By the end of the evening, you might be back in the arms of Her Majesty Maggie Bassett. Have you ever tried to count up the many ways she’s fucked you?”

There was a sound like someone stepping in a pool of water down the tunnel. Beckman stopped talking and stared at the door, listening. He leaned close to Ishmael’s ear, his breath like a line of wet ants crawling across Ishmael’s skin. “Not a peep, sweet boy.”

Beckman again pressed the tip of the screwdriver just below Ishmael’s eye.
He won’t do it,
Ishmael thought. There were some things no man would do. Then he remembered what he had seen Legionnaires do when they captured a German carrying a sawtooth bayonet. Beckman began to breathe more heavily, working his knee into Ishmael’s ribs, knotting Ishmael’s hair in his fingers for better purchase.

Ishmael now had no doubt Beckman was going to blind him. And he would enjoy every second of it, in spite of the price he might pay.

Ishmael squeezed both eyes shut, his vulnerable eye watering uncontrollably. “Don’t come in, Big Bud!” he shouted.

Then he tried to bury his head between his knees while Beckman hit him again and again in the head with the butt of the screwdriver, his face twisted like an angry child’s.

H
ACKBERRY STEPPED THROUGH
the doorway, the Peacemaker held at an upward angle. Beckman was standing above Ishmael, a small nickel-plated revolver pointed into the top of his skull. “Do you believe I will shoot your son, Mr. Holland?”

“Yes, sir, I truly do.”

“Your weapons. First you, then the nigger.”

Hackberry leaned down and laid his Peacemaker on the floor. Andre set the machine pistol next to it. Beckman screwed the small revolver into Ishmael’s neck.

“What did you do to my son?” Hackberry asked.

“Nothing. I took care of him. Which you didn’t.” Beckman’s gaze wandered to the bundle hanging from Hackberry’s left hand. “Did you bring me something?”

“I guess that’s the way it worked out.” Hackberry looked at Jeff, on the floor, his face turned toward the wall. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I asked him to cook your son breakfast. He must not like brains and eggs. Is that my artifact you have there?”

“What about it?”

“It’s my artifact.”

“It’s not an artifact. It’s a cup that has special meaning for many people. I don’t think it was ever yours.”

“You stole it from me. Along with my candleholders and some rare coins. Where are they?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you want your son to live?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then give me my artifact.”

“Take it.”

“No, set it down. Then remove the string and unwrap the cup from the raincoat. Also tell your nigger to stop looking me directly in the face.”

“You shouldn’t call him by that name.”

“The term is a mispronunciation of the word ‘Niger,’ as in Niger Valley. That’s where many of the slaves came from. Tell him to stop staring in my face. I won’t abide insolence.”

“You’re looking at
him
, Beckman, not the other way around. Does Andre bother you for some reason?”

“Unwrap my artifact.”

Hackberry did as he was told and set the cup on top of the stove. He could smell the odor of ash and partially burned newspaper under the stove lids. Beckman stared at the jewel-encrusted gold bands and the gold inlay inside the onyx cup. His expression bordered on the lascivious.

“Tell your darky to step back,” Beckman said.

“You tell him.”

“Do you remember where you saw me before, Mr. Beckman?” Andre said.

“In the restaurant. You’re Beatrice DeMolay’s driver.”

“Before that,” Andre said.

“No, I never saw you until today.”

“Many, many years ago,” Andre said. “Two men were tied to a stake.”

“You save that rot for the gullible and the naive.”

“Look into my eyes and tell me what you see there,” Andre said.

“You’ll have a dead nigger on the floor unless you shut him up,” Beckman said.

“I think you’ve got a problem, Beckman. It’s not Andre, and it’s not me. So what is it?”

“Hand me the cup,” Beckman said.

“Pick it up yourself, you son of a bitch.”

“Step back, the pair of you,” Beckman said. He inched forward, the revolver still aimed at the crown of Ishmael’s head, his other hand reaching for the cup. He wet his lips, the blood draining from around his mouth. He closed his hand around the cup’s gold framework, gingerly, like someone entering water that was too cold or too hot. Then his face blanched; he dropped the cup into the middle of the slicker’s rubberized folds.

He stared at his hand as though it were stricken or had been severed from the rest of his body. He had lost all concentration and dropped the revolver to the floor. Hackberry picked up his Peacemaker and pointed it at him, then realized he had no need for his firearm.

“It burned me,” Beckman said. “It was heated by the stove. That’s why you put it there.”

Hackberry let his hand hover over a stove lid, then placed his hand on it. “There’s no heat.”

“You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie? Here, I’ll press your face down on it,” Hackberry said.

Beckman’s mouth twitched.

“I’m kidding,” Hackberry said. He reached down and helped his son to his feet. “Let’s get those manacles off you. Somebody might think you’re a convict, old pal of mine.”

“I saw you in a dream, Big Bud.”

Beckman had backed against the wall, holding his right wrist. “I’m so glad we’re all reunited here,” he said. “But here’s the reality, Mr. Holland. You’ve invaded my home. You’ve either wounded or killed people here. We were keeping your son to cure him of his addictions. You’re a drunkard and have no credibility.”

“Andre, I think I would really like to go ahead and kill this man,” Hackberry said. “What do you think about it?”

“That is not necessary,” Andre replied. “It will get him.”

“Somebody else said that to me,” Hackberry replied. “A man in the desert, down in Mexico. What is ‘it’?”

“‘It’ is it. You’ll see. Look at Mr. Beckman. Have you ever seen greater fear in a man’s eyes?”

But Hackberry Holland was no longer interested in linguistic nuances or metaphysical mysteries. As he and Andre walked out into the night, each of them holding one of Ishmael’s arms over his shoulder, they heard a screeching sound like a corrugated roof being ripped in half.

They rounded the front of the building and saw Willard Posey getting out of his motorcar, the one whose entire roof had been hacksawed off the car body.

“Glad you dropped by,” Hackberry said.