The Bookman's Promise (34 page)

In almost the same breath the third guy began to clear the wall. He still didn’t know anything had happened and his moment of clarity came slowly. He said, “Hey,” and that was it, his sudden awareness in a nutshell as I kicked him in the head. He tumbled into space, clawing wildly for something to grab. I heard him hit the sand and the ladder crash over on top of him. All this time I kept my light in Dante’s eyes. “You don’t learn very good, do you, stupid?”

The pathfinder started to back up, away from the edge. “Wrong way, fuck-knuckle,” I said, and I lifted my foot and shoved him off. He screamed, going down like I’d just pushed him off a thousand-foot cliff.

Dante and I stared at each other, primal, mortal enemies. He looked at my gun, then at me. I taunted him. I wanted him to try something.

“Come on, fatso, you’re such a tough guy, come take my gun away from me.”

“You’d like that. You need that excuse. You haven’t got the balls to just do it.”

That was his only try at bravado. I leaned into the light and said, “Is that what you think?” and in that moment I became one with the killer: whatever difference I thought had existed between us was gone now. I was going to kill him, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind, and in that second he knew it too. I saw it in his face: the born intimidator who had spent his life watching people cringe had never once faced the possibility of his own death. He saw it now.

The flesh began to sag around his mouth, under his eyes. He tried to recoil but I grabbed him by the shirt and heaved him around. “You lose, asshole,” I said, and I banged him in the mouth with the barrel of the gun. He let out a little cry and tried to back away, he stumbled and fell. Again I shoved the gun into that gaping mouth, bloody now where two teeth had broken off. My hand trembled: any little movement might’ve set it off and I didn’t care.

“Wait,” he said.

I rammed the gun down to his tonsils. “Wait for what?”

He gurgled out something that sounded like, “Just wait.”

I leaned down close to his face. “Wait for what, asshole? Wait for what? You got something to say, say it now.” I jerked the gun out of his face. “Say it now. Say it. What’ve you possibly got to say that I would care about?”

“We could make a deal.”

“Don’t make me laugh. What’ve you got that I want? I’ve got your nuts in my pocket, Dante, what can you give me for that? Give me Burton’s notebook for starters. Maybe then I’ll let you live another five minutes.”

Suddenly he looked like a gored weasel, a rat trapped in a flooding sewer. His eyes had the same dead look as Little Caesar, who couldn’t believe he was dying even in death. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico? Same dead eyes. Same incredulous face. I put the gun to his eyes and he shivered in what he must have expected to be his last minute on this earth.

“Are you scared, Dante?”

Even then he couldn’t say it.

“Are you scared?”

His lower lip trembled. His head scrunched down between his shoulders and he closed his eyes.

“What’s going on in that pea brain of yours? Is it fear? Are you scared?”

Go on, stop talking, I thought. Kill him.

For Christ’s sake, stop playing around and just do it. The hell with history and notebooks, just do it
. I took a deep breath. “So long, stupid…”

Then he cracked. It came out of him as a pathetic, whimpering sound. “Please…don’t do this…” “Please? Did you say
please
?”

I put the gun to his ear, he groaned out a “No…please…” and for the second time I backed away.

I stuck the gun in my belt. He could’ve made a grab for it: he didn’t dare. He had never made a move for his own gun, which I now frisked away from him and threw into the sea.

I gripped his shirt and balled it up in my fist, drawing him close. “You got one last chance to live, Dante. Here’s what’s gonna happen. Later this morning you will get your fat ass on a plane back to Baltimore. There you will wait for further instructions. It might take a week or a month, but at some point a friend of mine will come visit. He will make damn sure you understand me this time. You are going to hurt for a long time after he sees you, but if you resist, or if you surround yourself with bodyguards and armor, it will be much, much worse. You had better listen to what he says because there won’t be any more chances. I’m telling you the truth now and you’d better believe it. He will tell you what to do and he’ll tell you in a way you’ll never forget. You’ll be told what you must do to stay alive. That’s your choice, asshole. Agree or die right now.”

I took out the gun and cocked it and he whimpered out a watery “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“…Whatever…whatever you say.”

“You got that right, Dante. Now get the hell off my fort.”

I rolled him to the edge and pushed him off. He flailed away at the air and I heard him hit the ground with a mighty grunt. He rolled over desperately sucking air, all the wind knocked out of him, maybe some bones broken; I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I sat in the dark, cross-legged and invisible, and after a while I did peer over and I saw them loading Dante onto the boat. He looked hurt bad. They pushed away, the oar squeaking, the boat fading slowly in the early morning. They slipped out into the water and disappeared. A few minutes later I heard the motor start as they turned back toward Charleston.

I was still sitting there when the sun cracked over the sea. The harbor was empty at dawn, a couple of sailboats just heading out from the marina. Erin came out. I was facing the wrong way to see her, but I heard her climbing up to the wall and I knew who it was. She picked up my balled-up coat and sat beside me.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. But I looked in her face and I knew I couldn’t sell that and I’d better not try. “They came for us during the night. Three of them got thrown off the wall. Dante might be hurt pretty bad.”

She sat down beside me. “Well,” she said, and that was all for a moment.

“If this didn’t discourage him…” I shrugged.

“Wish I could’ve helped you.” She put an arm over my shoulder. “I slept like a baby.”

“That’s good.”

“Cliff?”

“Yeah?”

“About us…”

“What about us?”

“I don’t know.”

We sat watching the sun, listening to the waves lap against the fort.

“What now?” she said.

“Now we go into Charleston and get our car.”

“Are we still looking over our shoulders?”

“In the long run, who knows? You can never know with a guy like that.” I shrugged. “I think we’re safe for today at least.”

“What about Archer?”

“Whatever you want. If you want to go by the hospital, fine.”

She leaned against me. “That must’ve been some fight.”

“It could’ve been better. I had the terrain on my side.”

“Like the Confederates.”

“Yeah. This old fort is still a tough place to take.”

Luke came out and put up the flags. Libby watched pensively from the window.

We ate a simple breakfast with the Robinsons. I left my coat off now and I rolled up my sleeves and put the gun in my bedroll. The three of us made a final tour of Sumter, I promised Libby we’d keep in touch, and we took the morning boat back to the city.

We had the cab drop us at Roper Hospital. All of us went up together. I wasn’t surprised to find Dean Treadwell sitting in the visitor’s chair.

“If you’ve come to see Archer, he still can’t talk. He’s doped up and hurting pretty bad.”

“I just came by to say we’re leaving,” Erin said. “See if anything’s changed.”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. He’s gonna give you the book.”

Her first reaction was no reaction at all. As the moment stretched, she finally said, “Really?” but she was unflappable even when news was sensational.

“Some things just ain’t worth the grief, no matter how much money’s involved,” Dean said. “Naturally, we’re hoping the judge’s offer is still on the table.”

“I’m sure it is. I’ll call him and give you something in writing if you want.”

“He doesn’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“Tell him not to worry, then. Lee will do the right thing.”

“Let’s just go get it,” Dean said. “We want to be rid of it.”

It was like Poe’s gold bug, buried in the sand on Sullivan’s Island. Archer had triple-wrapped it in plastic, put it in a metal box, stuffed the box with plastic bags, and buried it in the dry sand under his back steps.

“He had a hunch,” Dean said. “Sooner or later that bozo would come after us.”

I wondered why now.

“It wasn’t the book. They were lookin‘ for you. Archer made a mistake, said the wrong thing. You know how he can be, sometimes he pops off. This time he never got a chance to say I’m sorry. They never even asked about the book.”

“What if they’d killed him? Nobody’d ever know where it was.”

“At that point, what did he care?”

We looked at each other in the hot noonday sun, two bookmen from different worlds, pulled together briefly by the same quest. Dean lit a smoke and I found a clumsy way of apologizing for the razzing I had given him back in town. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“I said a lot. Sometimes I say too much.”

“I’ve been thinking about one particular thing.”

I didn’t have to tell him, he knew what it was. “Hal Archer’s never told me a lie of any kind, not that I’m aware of. How many friends have you had that you can say that about?”

Not many, I thought. Maybe none.

He shuffled uneasily. “If that’s all, let’s get out of here.”

Fifteen minutes later we were across the Cooper River, heading for North Charleston. None of us said a word the whole way across.

My rental was still where I’d parked it. Dean didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. He drove out of the lot and turned back toward Charleston and a moment later we went the other way, north to Florence.

There were towns along every road now. There was sprawl that had never been part of any town at all. There were long fingers of commerce and drugstores and housing developments where only forests and swamps and farmlands had been in that earlier time. Then there had been occasional outposts to comfort a traveler in the wilderness; now there were motels and gas stations, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings, Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie supermarkets and antiques malls. There were X-rated magazine stands and gunsmiths and temples of any god a man wanted to pray to. There were places to stop and get quietly drunk or get a car fixed after a sudden breakdown. No one would ever go hungry or thirsty, get horny or spiritually deprived for more than a few minutes in any direction. What had then been a two-day trek in 1860 was two hours now in air-conditioned ease. But there were still stretches of wilderness where the pines grew thick and the way resembled nothing more than a tunnel with sky. Imagine this on a dirt road at night, I thought: imagine 120 miles of it. As we traveled upcountry I followed the odyssey of Richard Francis Burton and Charles Edward Warren in my head. As I slumped in the backseat reading Burton’s words, I could almost see them coming down from the north, and I could still get some faint, faraway sense of what it had been.

We reached Florence in the early afternoon. From then on our journey was charmed. If anything, it was too easy.

A librarian knew right away what we were looking for. That junction where the roads had intersected was still called Wheeler’s Crossing. It was out of town a stretch and there was nothing there now. A roadside sign would show us where it had been.

The library had a number of Wheeler papers: letters, some of the old man’s ledgers, even a few menus in Marion’s hand. The Wheelers had all been buried in an old graveyard near the crossroad. Marion Wheeler’s mother had been put there before her; her father, who had outlived them both, died in 1881. “Look at this,” Koko said. “She died in childbirth, just like her mother…exactly nine months after Burton and Charlie would’ve been there. Her father made no attempt to cover it up.”

Her son had lived. Her father had honored her deathbed wish, named him Richard, and raised him as his own.

Richard Wheeler. One sketchy account existed of his youth: no more than a few lines in a letter written near the end of the old man’s life. His schooling, three years in a classroom, was probably average for the time. He was fair with numbers but brilliant with language. He had learned Latin on his own, becoming fluent in six months, and had been studying Spanish. He was a good and energetic dancer and girls loved him. In that passage he was described as tall and dark with a keen sense of honor.

A lady killer.

He went to sea at sixteen and that was all that was known of him.

We arrived at the site of Wheeler’s inn late that afternoon. It was a bend in the road now, marked by a simple state highway sign that said wheeler’s crossing. The graveyard was on a dirt road not far away. It was dusk when we found the Wheeler plots: the father and mother side by side, Marion a few feet away. The simple stone said,
here lies marion wheeler, beloved daughter, who departed this earth january 30, l86l, aged twenty-four years, eleven months, fourteen days.
Koko took notes and in the waning light tried desperately to take pictures.

I had to pry her away.

Now for the first time she asked my opinion of Burton’s journal. It looked real, I said. By then I didn’t need to add the line about my own lack of expertise. Most impressive were the scores of Negro spirituals and slave songs that Burton had written down, word for word, in dialect, as he and Charlie had traveled through the South. He had rilled page after page with them, adding extensive notes on where he had heard them and what he suspected their African roots might be.

There was a full account of Burton’s first meeting with Charlie. It jibed with what we knew and added color to Charlie’s tale. There was a detailed description of the day they went walking in Charleston. Burton had made a sketch of Fort Sumter from the Battery, and had written with fond amusement of Charlie’s outrage at the slave auction. Best of all, he told of having their picture taken outside a dentist’s office on East Bay Street.

We headed west into the night.

At Camden we turned north, picking up Interstate
77
. From there it was a straight shot into Charlotte, but we stopped in Rock Hill, taking two rooms in a motel overlooking a river. Erin called Lee in Denver and told him the news. She called my room and suggested that we meet downstairs for a drink.

“Lee is ecstatic,” she said.

“That’s good,” I said flatly.

“What’s wrong with you? In case you hadn’t noticed, we won.”

I made the obvious excuse: I was tired after last night. But there was something else and she sensed it.

“It’s Denise, isn’t it? She’s been forgotten in all this fuss.”

“Not by me.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know yet. Something.”

“You had your chance at Dante and let him go. Is that what’s bothering you?”

“No. I told you, I’m just tired.”

But it was more than that.

We turned in but I still couldn’t sleep. At midnight I thought of Dean Treadwell, and for the hundredth time about his strange friendship with Archer. Again I thought the unthinkable, pushing it away at once, but it was there now and it kept me awake. I must’ve slept at least a few hours because I opened my eyes suddenly and knew I had been dreaming. I had dreamed of Archer and his mother Betts, and it took me a while to remember that Betts hadn’t been Archer’s mother at all.

In the morning we had a quiet breakfast in the cafe. Lee had already called Erin and they had discussed air passage. “We can get a flight to Atlanta at seven o’clock tonight. It’ll be tight, but we should just make the connecting flight to Denver. Lee wants me to put all three fares on my credit card and he’ll reimburse me.”

“No,” I said. “You cover your own, I’ll take care of Koko and me.”

She insisted. “Cliff, he wants to do this.”

“Well, he can’t.”

We went into Charlotte and found Orrin Wilcox. Libby had been painfully accurate in her description of the ghoulish old bookscout and the incredible clutter of his store. He gave the impression of a guy who didn’t give much of a damn about anything, but he responded eagerly enough to the sight of my money.

“I believe you quoted Mrs. Robinson a thousand dollars,” I said.

“She should’ve taken it then. It’s fifteen hundred now. I got overhead, y’know.”

“Two prints,” I said.

“Two-fifty for the second print. Plus lab expenses.”

We went to a studio not far from his store. I wanted my continuity unbroken; I needed to keep that glass plate in my sight and see the prints being made. The photographer liked the color of my money and I stood at his side in the darkroom and watched Burton and Charlie come to life in the soup. Slowly Burton materialized…first the vague shape of him, then the street and a tree and some kids beyond them. Burton’s scars appeared suddenly like two cuts slashed on the paper. Then came the hat, then the eyes…and there was Charlie beside him, the man I had never seen but had always imagined looking just about like that. The contrasts were stark, the clarity superb. They stood on the street enjoying a day long vanished but now immortalized, the affection between them almost palpable. Burton had a look of amused tolerance, Charlie one of happy friendship. Two black children stood near the palmetto tree on the walk, gawking at the photographer and his strange apparatus, and half a block away a dog was crossing the street. In the distance a horse was pulling a wagon toward us, and people were coming and going, in and out of the Exchange Building. I saw all this but my eyes kept coming back to Burton. His face was as clear as if it had been photographed only yesterday. And in his hand, draped over Charlie’s shoulder, was the notebook I had just been reading.

I put one of the prints in an envelope and addressed it to Libby Robinson at Fort Sumter. A few hours later we dropped off our rental car, I paid the extra tariff, and we caught a plane for Atlanta, hoping to get on a 9:38 flight to Denver.