The Creed of Violence (4 page)

The girl appeared, then as usual started up Santa Fe. John Lourdes
set off to follow. She hadn't gone but a few yards when a man slipped
through the crowd and took hold of her arm.

He was very tall and quite lean. He was much older and wore
pleated pants and a vest. He had a long, dour face and said nothing to
the girl.

A trolley slowed and the man pressed the girl to board. John
Lourdes swung toward the rear steps, and as the girl was being led
to a seat, she noticed him. She stared so that the man with her turned
to find out what had caught her attention. John Lourdes eased back
into a faceless wall of passengers. They rode the line as far as the park
at Oregon and Mesa. They entered the Mills Building. John Lourdes
followed them and others into the elevator. The girl made sure not
to look at him. She was trembling so. They took the grated elevator
to the fifth floor. They went in one direction down the hallway, John
Lourdes the other. The office they entered was numbered 509. The
downstairs directory read: sIMIC SHIPPING-IMPORTS AND EXPORTS,
ROOM 509.

There was a tobacconist in the lobby beside the entrance to the
Modern Cafe. It was from there John Lourdes called in. Just across
the park was the Hotel Angelus, which headquartered the BOI. John
Lourdes was told justice Knox and an operative were on their way
from northern El Paso. He bought cigarettes and waited by the Cafe
doors. He detailed everything in his pocket notebook.

He was slipping the notebook back into his coat pocket and starting outside for a touch of sunlight and air when he walked right into a
gentleman entering the lobby. John Lourdes looked up to excuse himself but could only stare.

"Now looking down as you walk along may score you a lot of
loose change," said the man, "but you've got to keep those gunsights at
eye level if you really mean to make something of yourself."

And with that his father offered an offhanded grin, then was on
his way.

AWBONE SAUNTERED INTO the Simic Import And Export of_ _ fices. A half-dozen men were grouped in private conversation
around a desk. They grew silent with his entry. He stood there waiting
in his tailored suit and crisp derby.

"May we help you in some way?" said the one sitting at the desk.

"It's the right question, for sure," said Rawbone, "but the wrong
man is asking it."

He approached the desk and handed over the bill of lading from
the truck. The man studied it with quiet regard as the others looked
over his shoulder. His expression tightened further as he glanced up
at Rawbone. He stood and walked to a door to a private office and
knocked. "Mr. Simic," he said. "I need a moment."

The door opened slightly and the man entered. Through the opening Rawbone glimpsed a young girl wrapped in a blanket sitting in the
corner on the floor.

While he waited, Rawbone sat back on the wood railing that demarked the office entry. He took on the men's stares by disinterestedly
fanning himself with the derby.

The inner office door opened and the man from the desk came out
first. He was followed by an older gentleman with a long and dour face,
who held the bill of lading. He did not bother to introduce himself.

"How did you get this?" he asked.

Rawbone gave no answer.

"The drivers?"

Rawbone crossed himself.

The men in the room took on the mood of a hunting party. Simic
instructed one of the men to lock the door. As he did Rawbone opened
his suit coat and reached for a handkerchief that happened to be in the
same pocket where the black handle of an automatic protruded for
anyone to see.

"Who are you?" Simic asked.

"Think of me," said Rawbone, "as ... Tom, the bootblack. Ah,
you're not familiar . . . Horatio Alger's hero, educated at the hard
school of poverty. Who with a smile and good cheer overcomes the
hardships of existence to acquire ... a comfortable fortune." His grin
of sarcasm disappeared. "Now, let's put our cards and our pure hearts
on the table."

JOHN LOURDES CROSSED the street in front of the Mills Building. On
that day in the year of our Lord, he was twenty-five years old. He stood
under the shade of a great elder at the entrance to San Jacinto Park
from where he could watch the lobby and wait on justice Knox. That
reviled gusano of a father had walked right out of the scarred regions of memory and straight into the daylight, all suited up like a gent and
with the cool arrogance of one who believes himself beyond the trappings of right and order.

But today, there would be a reckoning.

Then something, call it superstition if you will, took hold of John
Lourdes. He glanced back into the park down a shadowy walkway.
He had come here many times as a boy with his father. There was a
pond with a stone wall around it where lived half a dozen alligators.
How they'd come to be there was uncertain. But one winter night his
father had persuaded a few drunken wilds to go down to the park and
sack up those creatures and get them out of the cold to keep them from
freezing.

So there he'd been watching as his father and a band of drunks
wrestled one prehistoric monstrosity after another into canvas gunnies.
They carried them back to that dingy saloon and kept them warm by
the stove while the boy sat on the bar cross-legged and watched his
old man resting in a chair amongst them. He had a cigarette in one
hand and with the other flicked mescal from a bottle onto each sacked
gator.

"I baptize you," he said, "in the name of the father and the son . .

John Lourdes needed to remember, nothing was beyond his father's unpredictability.

Justice Knox arrived with another agent named Howell. Knox was
a plain, soft-spoken man. He had poor vision and wore spectacles and
was singularly obsessed with the security represented by the bureaucracy. His core belief: People's central need and desire was for bureaucracy, not freedom, not rebellion, not individuality. Man longed for
effective bureaucracy, and its ultimate expression was order.

Knox was never swayed by anger or revenge. He was in that respect
heartless, and it made him, in turn, beyond the reach of sympathy or
compassion. He had no personal attachment to his agents, no interest in their private welfare, and he demanded their attitude toward the job
be precisely the same as his.

"The girl?" he asked.

"She's still up in 509."

Knox put his hands on his hips and looked at the building, and
while he considered a plan John Lourdes gathered himself and said,
"Sir, there's something else-"

WHEN RAWBONE LEFT the Mills Building he crossed the street and cut
straight through San Jacinto Park. His hands were in his pant pockets
and he wore the derby at a cocky angle. Yet he was wary enough to
keep glancing back.

At the pond tourists leaned their kids over the stone wall to see the
alligators moving through the still and mosquito-laden waters. He was
not much beyond it when the memory of a winter night back in '92
washed over him. He could see the boy there in that grimy saloon, the
kerosene lamp above him curtained with smoke. His son ... he'd just
turned seven.

There was no time now; the present had the upper hand. He jumped
a trolley. He rode it half a dozen blocks till he came to an empty lot
where he'd parked Burr's Cadillac. He geared it up and gunned it and
said goodbye to downtown in a sweep of dust.

Rawbone drank and loosed his tie as he explained to Burr his hour
with that jury of strangers in the fifth-floor office. One thing Burr would
swear to about his friend, he could elevate a simple act of criminality
into a moment of personal splendor.

He told Burr he was jacking it out of El Paso that night. Then, as
he toasted the air and said, "Mexico or bust," Burr saw him hesitate,
saw those agate eyes pare away everything around him except the halfcaught sound of tires breaking in front of the house, then the scruff
cutting of boots across gravel. He had the curtain open quick and saw Justice Knox and two men sprinting up the walkway and spreading
around the house with weapons drawn.

"Goddamn," he said, scrambling across the den past Burr and
through the kitchen, frightening the cook so she gasped, only to be met
by gunfire as he made the screened-in porch.

He dropped down to the floor, gun drawn, and huddled up behind
the porch wall. He sat there out of breath, and as he was ordered to
surrender he yelled back, "You're either good Christians or bad shots.
Either way it doesn't speak well of you."

Then Rawbone heard scattershot voices moving through the house.
He could make out justice Knox shouting to his men, who answered
they had him pinned down on the porch. He pulled his legs up and
rested his arms on his knees.

Justice Knox called to him from rooms away, "Give it up
peacefully!"

Rawbone banged the back of his head against the porch wall in
anger. "I'm up some well-digger's ass who's at the bottom of a hole."
He shouted, "What says my attorney?"

"Give it up peacefully," Burr answered.

"Is that your best legal advice?"

"I'm saving that for later. So take heed."

He rose up in the sandy light, arms first, and was surrounded there
on the porch steps. John Lourdes watched how he took his capture as a
boring and peremptory ceremony. And as they manhandled and cuffed
him, Rawbone noticed one of the agents was the young man he'd spoken to in the building lobby. "Well," he said, "I see you took my advice
and got those gunsights up."

T HAD HAPPENED too fast and not near with the force John Lourdes
had always imagined. He'd hoped some physical law of existence
would be affected. There had been no suffering and no acknowledgment from that dusky figure that he would now face his end. John
Lourdes felt barren and empty, as if the dust of everything that had
been his life blew through the whetted bones of his chest.

John Lourdes rode with justice Knox and another agent in a poor
excuse for a touring car. Agent Howell had been ordered to follow the
girl from the Mills Building and stop her at the border. She was now
being held incommunicado in a basement room at Immigration.

When Knox and his agents arrived, the girl was bundled up on the
floor behind some filing cabinets. She was a pathetic sight rocking back
and forth while keeping her face hidden behind her hands.

"What's going on here?" asked Knox.

Howell pointed at the girl, "She's an imbecile."

Lourdes walked past the agent, saying, "I told you she was deaf."

"She may be deaf, but she's an imbecile."

Knox rebuked Howell with a look. "She has information we
need."

"She's an imbecile."

Lourdes knelt down. The girl clenched up at being touched, but
by proceeding gently he managed to get her hands away from her face.
When she finally saw who it was, she seemed to ease a bit, even as she
stared at the strange men in this hostile setting. He coaxed her to stand
and then to sit at a table. The room had brick walls and no windows.
There was a single electric light that hung from the ceiling. It was a dire
kind of place, unlikely to put one's fears at rest, but he tried by placing
a hand to his heart and then touching her shoulder.

He turned to his commanding officer. "Sir?"

"Does anyone have an idea how we deal with her?"

No one did. Only John Lourdes offered, "May I try something, sir?"

"She seems to be at ease with you."

He sat at the table opposite her. He had been turning over in his
head ways to try and reach her during the ride to Immigration. He took
out his pocket notepad and pencil. He began to write.

"She's an imbecile," said Howell.

Lourdes did not answer that.

"And besides, she's Mex."

"I'm writing in Spanish."

"Oh," said Howell. "I forgot. You're one of them."

Lourdes turned and looked up at Howell. "That's enough," said
Justice Knox.

When he was done, John Lourdes passed the notepad across the
table to the girl and pointed to what he'd written: C 1, you read-wr4e?
Do you unders4an2