The Bookman's Promise (33 page)

Inside, we planned our next move. Erin and Koko had put their bags near the bottom of the museum ramp. Koko had hung her clothes over the rail and crawled into her bag, and she watched us sleepily from the floor, occasionally piping in with an opinion while the two of us stood there and talked. We all hated to quit Charleston with Burton’s journal still in limbo. Erin wanted another try at Archer on her way out of town, but that struck me as risky with little to be gained. “Something might well be gained,” she said, “if Archer told us what happened to the journal.” At this point I had to doubt if Archer had ever planned to produce Burton’s journal, no matter how much money Lee was able to throw at him—he had come up empty, with new conditions or half-baked reasons to stall, every time. Erin couldn’t believe that. “Lee has done nothing but defend Archer and praise him to the rooftops. What would Archer gain by taunting his oldest friend? What would be the point if he’s not going to sell us the book anyway? Now he’s alienated Lee, they can’t even speak to each other, and what good does that do him?”

Well, Archer was a prick: at least we could all agree on that. “Maybe he’s secretly hated Lee all these years for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I said. There were plenty of precedents both in history and literature for such unholy relationships. One party is undercut and sabotaged for years without ever dreaming that his so-called friend is behind it all. If that were true, the only mystery, aside from the enigmas of a black heart, was why Archer would let his secret out now instead of any other time. Koko said, “Maybe Lee found out what Archer really thinks and Archer no longer had any reason to hide it.” Erin shook her head. “No, I’m sure Lee would’ve told me that.” Since we were into wild ideas, it was also possible that Archer had never had the book at all, or maybe Dante had taken it from him if he had. But if Dante now had it, he’d probably have been on the first flight back to Baltimore. He’d want to dispose of the goods first, get what money there was to get, and settle old scores later. So I thought, with no facts to go on, but at that point I wasn’t sure enough to bet on anything.

Erin hated to give up on Archer. “I’ll do it your way but I don’t want to forget why I was sent here. I would still feel better if I could see him once more, even if he doesn’t do anything but have me thrown out again.” What worried me about this was that the hospital was such an obvious place for someone to set up a watch and catch us coming or going. I had plans for Dante, but I wanted them to unfold on my timetable, not his: I needed to live long enough to put them in motion and see how they went. In the end we were all just talking. Always in the back of my mind was the possibility that Dante knew exactly where we were, and whatever was going to happen would be on his schedule after all.

Our only hard decision was that we were done with Charleston: there was nothing more for us to find here. If things went well and we could get away in the morning without being seen, I had at least some reason for optimism. We’d retrieve my rental car and head north to Florence; from there to Charlotte, and on to Denver. Koko didn’t see why she needed to go to Denver. “We’ve got to stick together for now,” I said, and Denver was my home base. “You can stay with me,” Erin said, “as long as you need to.” “Good,” I said. If we made it that far, I had to feel good about our prospects. Then I could go on offense. We left it at that and I went back up to the entryway where I had stashed my sleeping bag.

The sight of it gave me no craving for sleep. I was in one of those dark moods, bone-tired but still wide awake, and for a long time I sat outside on the edge of the battery with my legs dangling, watching the sky and listening to the air. I thought of Libby and I under-stood how she could come to love this place. Ultimately it would get on my nerves—I am too much a product of my time and this is undoubtedly one of my failings, among many. I can go like Erin on long sabbaticals in the mountains, but at some point cabin fever sets in and I need to hunker down in civilization’s dirty places, go book hunting around the fringes of Denver, talk to someone, mix it up with crazies, go to a party of book lovers at Miranda’s, or just sit in a bar with an old pal. My life went from the nearest pockets of the sublime to the most distant reaches of the ridiculous, and I didn’t know if that was my ideal or if I could even guess what an ideal was. But in any other time, in limited doses, I would love it here.

A rumble of thunder sounded far away in the east, but soon it got quiet again, with only the wind and the sea in my ears. I closed my eyes and at some point I found myself thinking of Vince Mar-ranzino. Vinnie: that told me how long ago our mutual history had been. He didn’t seem like a Vinnie to me. That sounded too much like a gangster’s nickname, and no matter how much I had learned about him via newspapers and our own departmental intelligence, I still thought of him as a kid named Vince, not a Vinnie-hood. I heard his voice out there with the ghosts of Battery Wagner:
How do ya really like this book racket of yours, Cliffie
? Just a wisp of him there in the harbor, then he was gone. A whisper to the wisp: that’s all it would take and a man would die in Baltimore.

I took out my notebook and wrote a short message:
Hey Vince. Go see a man named Dante in Baltimore and we are all squared up in the hereafter
. Vince would understand, and I could die knowing that if I had to.

I folded the sheet and wrote his name on the outside. I put in his Osage Street address and put the paper in my shoe. Once the probes and the postmortems were over, the cops would see that he got the message.

If Dante got to me, he’d be killing himself.

“Now it’s real,” I said to nobody.

I lay in my sleeping bag outside the museum door and stared at that crack in the sky. It was beginning to fuzz over now as the cloud cover fattened and spread. I felt a drop of rain, thought I should move inside, but I only moved deeper into my bag. Sleep was impossible but that didn’t matter. Once we were in the car heading north, Erin could drive and I’d catch up then.

I thought these things and the time was heavy. At some point I fell asleep, but not for long. I am good with time and I opened my eyes knowing it was somewhere near three o’clock. I wiggled out of my bag and sat up straight. Some noise, some fleeting thing out there where the wind blew, had wafted around my head. It had shifted from an easterly blow to southwesterly, and suddenly I felt an alarm go off under my heart. I told myself it was nothing but that hunch; not even the sound I thought I had heard had any true substance or source in this black world. My practical nature said I had been dreaming, that’s all it was, I had come out of the dream thinking of Dante and those guys in the boat, there was no reason to make that connection, it was just a case of nerves. But it wouldn’t go away, and now I got completely out of the bag and stood on my tiptoes looking out toward Morris Island.

Dante. I saw his face swirling through the dark in various shades of clarity. He was certainly insane, and that, combined with his other charms, made him far more dangerous than any thug I had ever faced as a cop. I had humiliated him in front of his men—that was another part of the case against me—and I had done a lot of damage to his face. His bruises would look worse day by day until they began to get better, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore. After a week of staring at his own black-and-blue face in the mirror, who could tell how crazy he’d be? He would have a score to settle and in his mind there could be none bigger, ever, and the longer it went unresolved the angrier and more dangerous he would be. This was strictly a guess: How reckless could he be? What was he going to do, scale the wall and kill everyone on this island just to get me? That would be the act of a real madman, but it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. It depended on the depth of his hate versus the degree of his own survival instinct. I fiddled with a mathematical formula—Dead Janeway equals Perp’s Survival over Perp’s Hate squared. Maybe by now his hate would be at the fourth or fifth power, or the fiftieth power, all but obliterating even his instinct for self-preservation. In that case, anything could happen. Madmen have been known to walk into certain death to get at the object of their loathing. Dante would have covered himself as well as possible, and maybe that would be enough. Who else knew of his connection to us? There would be half a dozen cronies back in Baltimore who’d line up and swear that he had never left town, he had been there among them, having dinner in full view of a dozen witnesses, at the very moment when this strange carnage began, six or seven hundred miles away.
I had nothing to do with it
, he would say, and the cops would have the job of proving that he had. But they wouldn’t have to prove it to Vinnie Marranzino, and in death I’d have my victory. A damned hollow one, but I was glad, on this side of death, that I had it.

I thought of Luke and Libby. It had never occurred to any of us that we might be putting them in danger. This is how different things can be at three o’clock in the morning.

None of this was at all likely. To be out there in a boat now would mean he had known or anticipated our every move: that he had gotten the boat and made his plans, and all this had been done from the time the Fort Sumter tour boat had arrived back at the marina in the late afternoon without us on it. Not likely, but not impossible either. Thugs like Dante know people like themselves in many towns. He may have lined up some local pal two days ago, and in this town a boat was easy to get.

I looked at the sky and saw nothing. If he was coming at all, it would be now.

I felt the uneasiness filling up my soul. I began to pace along the front of the battery, looking for something I couldn’t see and listening for a sound that wasn’t there.

I stood at the top of the stairs and waited.

At some point I started down. I followed my light around the battery and up to the old wall. There was a wooden barrier at the lowest point; they would have to scale it at the higher wall and come into the fort from there. I was beginning to know the way now, and I moved easily out toward the edge, keeping my light down at my feet and shaded by my hand, so it couldn’t be seen from the water. Fifty yards from the gorge, I stopped and turned off the light.

I saw a soft glow out there, at the base of the wall.

Something moved. Some bump in the night. The squeak of an oar, maybe…

Then I heard a voice. They were out there. They had defied the odds.

I shucked my way out of my coat and got out my gun. Got down on my knees and crawled along a rough surface to the edge.

The rain began. I barely felt it.

I peeped over the edge. They were there on the little beachhead below. Four of them, and Dante had been the first to step out on land. There was no mistaking that overgrown palooka: I had his number even in the dark. He stood outlined against a dim light, then he spoke. “Come on, let’s get that ladder out here, we ain’t got all fuckin‘ day.” No mistaking that nasty baritone: it was packed with authority and gave orders like other men breathe. I heard a brief metallic sound, and by the same dim light I saw an aluminum ladder being slipped hand to hand over the bow of the boat.

I could’ve killed them all then; they were like four fat fish in a barrel just waiting to be shot. I had the gun in my hand, why didn’t I just do it? I could still get all four before any of them could clear their own guns; I had been that fast and my gut told me I still was. I could get them now. I could get them all. Their asses were mine. But at the last second, God knows why, I stayed my hand.

I knew why. I had never shot a man that way. I could kill him, but not that way.

I shrank back from the edge as the ladder bumped against the wall. Who would come over the top first? If Dante came up, my job would be easier. But my hunch told me it would be someone local, a pathfinder who could lead them across the treacherous parade ground to the place where, they thought, we’d all be happily asleep. I heard the ladder shake, saw it move in the dim glow from the boat far below. I slid back on my belly with the gun in my hand, getting very still as a head came over the edge. I had been right, it wasn’t Dante. But I was sure he’d be the next one: it wasn’t in his nature to take up the rear. The pathfinder came head and shoulders over the wall, a little penlight in his teeth, and in that moment I knew how it was going to go. If I was lucky, it would be a replay of Baltimore.

He turned his head and his light went right over my back. He looked down and nodded, then he came over the wall and stood up, waiting.

Again he nodded his head.
Coast is clear, boys
.

My heart was pumping like a war drum, I could feel my gun hand trembling, I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. The ladder moved: Dante was on the way up. I felt cold one second, giddy the next. I almost laughed out loud, these guys were such schmucks, in their own dumb way as stupid as those kids I had faced down on the street so long ago. I knew what was going to happen ten seconds before each move. The pathfinder would reach down and give the man a respectful hand, leaving them both vulnerable for that moment. I could push them both off the wall: I could easily get close enough to kick them out into space. It probably wouldn’t be a lethal fall unless Dante landed on his ass, but it was high enough to do some real damage and at least they’d be stunned for a moment. Then perhaps they’d come up shooting, and that was my kind of action; I could kill them all then and sleep just fine tomorrow. And in the heat of that moment, I found myself actually craving it, savoring what might come.

I saw Dante clear the wall. A Confederate defender with a Whit-worth rifle could’ve popped his thick head from a bunker a mile away on Morris Island, that’s what a target he made. There was a moment: I hung back, waiting for some defining motion to egg me on. The ladder bumped again. I knew it was the third man, on his way up, and that was something I couldn’t wait around for.

I stepped up beside them, still a foot back in the shadow. Both were looking over the edge: neither had a gun out and that gave me a huge advantage. I cocked my gun and even in the wind it sounded like the clap of doom. I saw them stiffen. “Don’t move,” I said. “I will kill you both right where you stand.”