Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

From his office window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.

“You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.

“You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”

“By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”

“‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”

“Somebody snitched us off, huh?”

“Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”

“Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”

“Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”

“I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”

“We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”

The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.

Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.

“That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”

“You abducted Temple Dowling?”

“It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had to do was get a little girl to perch her twat on a bar stool, and Mr. Dowling was in the net. Want to talk to Ms. Ling?”

Hackberry could hear his own breath against the surface of the receiver. “Yes, I would,” he said.

“You’d like that?”

“If you want to negotiate, I need to know she’s there.”

“She was with Civil Air Transport, wasn’t she? What they called the Flying Tiger Airline?”

“If that’s what she told you.”

“She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t have to. She has a tattoo of the Flying Tiger emblem on her ass. Have you ever had an opportunity to see it-I mean her ass?”

Hackberry’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering, his breath coming hard in his throat. “No matter how this plays out, I’ll be seeing you down the track. You know that, don’t you?”

“You still think I sound like a peckerwood? I’d like to hear you say that one more time.”

Hackberry swallowed, a taste like diesel oil sliding down his throat.

“No?” the voice said. “We’ll give you a little time to think over your options. Noie Barnum belongs to us, Sheriff. Want to throw away Ms. Ling’s life for an empty-headed government pissant? Do the smart thing.”

“Why does he belong to you?”

“Mr. Dowling cost my employer a great deal of money. Barnum is the payback. Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a package. Check it out and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’m gonna take personal care of Ms. Ling. Don’t worry, I won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise.”

The line went dead.

Anton Ling’s captors had placed her in a subterranean room that was cool and damp and smelled of lichen and the river stones out of which it was made. Three ground-level barred windows that resembled slits in a machine-gun bunker gave onto a scene that seemed out of place and time: a sunrise that had the bluish-red color of a bruise, a meandering milky-brown river from which the fields had been irrigated an emerald green, livestock that could have been water buffalo grazing in riparian grasses. But the people tending animals or working in the fields were not Indo-Chinese peasants; they were Mexicans who had probably eaten breakfast in the dark and gone to work with the singleness of purpose that characterized all workers whose aspirations consisted of little more than getting through the day and returning home in the evening without involving themselves in the political considerations of those who owned the land.

The floor was concrete, once covered with a carpet that had molded into a mat of black thread. Against one wall was a wooden bed with a tick mattress on it, and a toilet in the corner with a partition that partially shielded it from view. The bars in the door were sheathed in flaking orange rust, and the stones in the wall had turned black and oily with the seepage of groundwater. Someone had scratched a Christian cross on one stone; on another was a woman’s name; on another were the words Ayudame, Dios.

The screaming that had come from another part of the subterranean area had stopped about two hours ago. Briefly, Anton had seen a tall, mustached man in a suit and a soiled white shirt carrying a medical bag. He had studiously avoided looking at her, his shoulders rounded, the back of his head turned to her, his uncut hair hanging over his collar like a tangle of twigs. To someone else, he had said, “I have left you the hypodermics. That is all I will do. I have seen nothing here. I am going back to my bed.”

She heard an upstairs door open and feet descending the steps. So far, her captors had not spoken to her without their masks. The man who was approaching her did not wear a mask; he wore elevated shoes, a white sport coat, a monogrammed lavender shirt unbuttoned below the collar, and black slacks. His nose was hooked, the nostrils thick with hair, his cheeks slathered with whiskers, the exposed top of his chest gnarled with tiny bones. He unlocked the cell door with an iron key and pulled it open and came inside the room, wiping the rust off his fingers with a handkerchief. His breath smelled of decay and seemed to reach out and touch her face like wet cobweb. “Frank doesn’t like you,” he said. “He says you spat on him. He says that’s the second time you’ve done it.”

“He tried to take my clothes off.”

“He shouldn’t have done that. I’ll talk to him about it. Sit down.” When she didn’t respond, he beamed and said, “Please. Don’t make everything unpleasant. You remember me?”

“No,” she said, sitting down.

“I helped provide the AK-47s you and your friends shipped to Nicaragua.”

“I dealt with many undesirables. I suspect you were among them.”

“I’ve always wanted to talk with you on a personal level. You are quite famous. Do you want something to eat?”

“Yes.”

“I knew we could be friends.”

“You’re Josef Sholokoff. You were at my house when your men almost drowned me.”

“Maybe.”

“You killed Cody Daniels in the cruelest way a man can die.”

“The cowboy minister? He was of no importance. Why are you worried about him? You should be thinking about yourself. We’re going to put you on the phone with Sheriff Holland.” He was still grinning, his eyes so bright and intense and merry that they were impossible to read. “One way or another, you’ll get on the phone. Or you will be heard on the phone. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“No,” she replied, looking straight ahead.

“You heard the man screaming earlier this morning. He was talking on the phone to Sheriff Holland. He just didn’t know it.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He might be, if his heart didn’t give out. I’ll check and see. Do you want to meet him?”

“Where is Krill?”

“These are insignificant people. Why do you keep dwelling on them?”

“I think you’re evil. You’re not just a man who does evil. You love evil for its own sake. I’ve known a few like you. Not many, but some.”

“With the Khmer Rouge?”

“No, the Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants who were bombed by B-52s. You’re different. I suspect your cruelty is your means to hide your cowardice.”

“And you? You didn’t rain fire on people who lived in grass huts?”

“I did.”

“But I’m evil?”

“You don’t plan for me to leave here, not alive, at least. Take your lies and your deceit from the room. You’re odious in the sight of God and man, Mr. Sholokoff. I suspect your role as a pornographer allows you to feel powerful about women. But in any woman’s eyes, you would be looked upon with pity. Your fetid breath and your physical repulsiveness are simply an extension of the blackness in your heart. Any woman who is not of diminished capacity would immediately be aware of that and want to flee your presence, no matter what she might tell you. Ask the people around you and see what their response is.”

He was clearly fighting to retain the merry light in his eyes and to keep his grin in place, but his mouth twitched slightly, and his nostrils were dilating. “Do you like my farm?”

“Why should I care one way or another about your farm?” she asked.

“Because it’s yours. Your permanent home. You will be among the people, part of the soil, fertilizer for their vegetables,” he replied. “What finer fate for a martyr of your stature?”

Preacher Jack Collins didn’t like to be pushed. Nor did he like losing control of things or, worse, having control taken from him. Not only had Noie Barnum, ingrate extraordinaire, strolled off from their safe house, he had managed to get himself arrested in a convenience store and put in a county bag that usually housed drunks and check writers and wife beaters. When Noie did not return from his stroll down the highway, Jack had gotten on his cell phone and begun making calls to an informational network that he had created and maintained for two decades, a network that no one would ordinarily associate with a man who dressed in beggar’s rags and wandered the desert like a Bedouin. It included hookers from El Paso to Austin, button men from both sides of the border, Murphy artists, street dips and stalls, shylocks, coyotes, second-story creeps, drug mules, corrupt Mexican cops, safecrackers, car boosters, money washers, fences of every stripe, and a morphine-addicted retired librarian in Houston who could probably find Jimmy Hoffa’s body if the FBI would take time to retain her.

It didn’t take long to discover what had happened. Noie had gotten pinched in the convenience store by the same deputy Preacher Jack had dug up from a premature burial. How about that for ingratitude? Then a snitch just getting out of the bag had spotted Noie in custody and dropped the dime on him with Josef Sholokoff’s people. Now several Mexicans were saying that a bunch of guys in camouflage masks had landed a helicopter at the Chinese woman’s place, murdered a man in front of a child, and abducted the Chinese woman and a half-breed.

Jack had no doubt who was behind the abduction. Josef Sholokoff wanted Noie Barnum in his possession. The quickest way to him was through the sheriff, and the quickest way to the sheriff was through Anton Ling.

At four A.M. the morning after the abduction, a man who was part albino and part black and who had pink eyes and hairless skin that resembled different shades of white rubber that had been stitched together delivered a new Toyota to Preacher Jack at a cafe just north of Ojinaga. “There’s another registration and another set of plates under the seat. I got you two driver’s licenses, too,” he said. He put the keys in Jack’s hand, his eyes holding steady on Jack’s.

“Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare into somebody’s face?” Jack said.

“You’re hot.”

“You know a time when I wasn’t?”

“Not like this. I had a hard time on the driver’s licenses. Word is you popped an FBI agent.”

“He popped himself.”

“A photo guy I use says you’re the stink on shit and for me not to come back again.”

“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on me, would you, Billy?”

“Just telling you like it is.”

“You want more money?”

“I was thinking about visiting Baja. Maybe lie on the beach and cool out for a while.”

“What do you use for suntan lotion-ninety-weight motor oil?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

Jack took three hundred dollars from his wallet and folded the bills between his fingers and stuffed them in the man’s shirt pocket. “A metaphor means comparing one thing in terms of another without using the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ ‘To lie on a beach’ is not a metaphor. If I said to you, ‘Tell your parents to buy a better quality of condoms,’ I would be making an implication, but I would not be speaking metaphorically. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Grammar was never my strong suit.”

“Literary terms have nothing to do with grammar,” Jack said. “If you’re going to speak your native language, why don’t you invest some time in the public library? It’s free. In the meantime, don’t go around using terms you don’t know the meaning of.” Jack stuffed the keys to his Trans Am into the man’s pocket, on top of the bills. “Drive it to San Antone and park it at the airport. Wear gloves, but don’t wipe it down. Leave the keys on the dashboard and the parking stub in the ashtray.”

“Somebody will boost it.”

“Nobody slips one past you.”

“The guy who boosts it will get pinched, and the cops won’t know if he’s lying to them or not-about where he got it, I mean. You’re doing a mind-fuck on them?”

“Don’t use that kind of language in my presence,” Jack said.

“I’ll never figure you out, Preacher.”

“Get out of my sight.”

An hour later, he drove his new car to within one block of Sheriff Holland’s jail and, wearing a hat and round steel-rimmed sunglasses that were as black as welder’s goggles, went into a cafe and ordered a to-go box of scrambled eggs, ham, grits, and toast and a cup of scalding black coffee. He returned to his car and spread his food on the dashboard and ate with a plastic fork and spoon without seasoning of any kind or even seeming to taste it, as though consuming chaff swept up from a granary floor. His windows were down, and the air was cool and smelled of rain, and the storm clouds above the hills were so thick and swollen that he could not tell when the sun broke the horizon. In moments like these, Jack felt a strange sense of peace, as though the travels of the sun and moon had been set into abeyance, as though time had stopped and the denouement of his life, one that he secretly feared, had been postponed indefinitely.

Jack picked up his coffee. It was still so hot, the steam rose into his hat brim and scorched his forehead. But his gaze, which was fastened on the jail, never wavered, nor did his mouth twitch when he drank the cup to the bottom.

The electric light was burning in the sheriff’s office. When the front door opened, Jack saw the sheriff walk to the silver pole by the sidewalk and clip the American flag to the chain and raise it flapping in the wind. At the same moment, Jack’s cell phone vibrated on the seat. The call was from the morphine-addicted reference librarian in Houston.

“I may have found your Russian,” she said. “He owns a place down in Mexico, one with a helipad on it. It’s a horse breeding farm. A French magazine did an article on it about five years back.”

“Can you find out if he’s there?”

“I’ll work on it. I found three game farms he owns in Texas and a place in Phoenix. You want me to check them out, too?”

“No, concentrate on Mexico.”

“I found something else. Sholokoff’s name came up a couple of times with a guy by the name of Temple Dowling. You know him?”

“Dowling was running whores with Sholokoff.”

“I did a search on Dowling and found the name of a security service he uses. I hacked into it and discovered Dowling just went missing in Santa Fe. You think there’s a connection?”

Jack stared at the front of the jail and at the flag ballooning and popping against the charcoal-blue darkness of the sky. “You there, Preacher?” she asked.

“Yeah, Sholokoff’s people probably grabbed him. No one else would have motivation.”

“You doing all this to get the Chinese woman back?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because there’s this story I don’t believe. About these Thai prostitutes who were murdered. They had heroin balloons in their stomachs. Sholokoff was using them as hookers and mules at the same time. Some people say you did the hit. At some place called Chapala Crossing. But I never believed that.”

Jack could hear the wind blowing in the street, the traffic light at the intersection swinging on its support cables, the tin roof on a mechanic’s shed swelling against the joists.

“You’re serious about your work, but you’d never hurt a woman,” she said. “That’s what I told them. That’s right, isn’t it, Preacher?”

He closed the cell phone in his palm, his hand shaking, his throat as dry and thick as rust.

Krill had never given much thought to the mercenaries he had known. To him, they existed in a separate world, one in which men did not serve a cause or even fight out of necessity. They were simply uniformed employees without depth or ideology, with no desire to know either the enemies they were paid to kill or the civilians they were paid to defend or the countrymen like Krill they were paid to fight alongside.

When Krill thought about them at all, it was in terms of their physicality and their access to North American goods and to fine weapons of international manufacture. Mercenaries were almost always barbered and clean. When they sweated, they smelled of deodorant rather than the glands. They were inoculated against all the diseases of the third world. Their bodies were hard, their stomachs flat, their shoulders and arms of the kind that could carry ninety pounds of supplies and weapons and take the shock of a parachute opening, sometimes crashing through a jungle canopy in the dark, jolting inside their harnesses with enough force to break the back of a cow.

He mostly thought of them in terms of what they were not. They were not haunted by the specters that trailed behind Krill everywhere he went. They did not fear their sleep or need to drink themselves into a stupor when the light went out of the sky and the wind was filled with the sounds of people crying in a village while their huts burned and belts of cached ammunition began popping in the heat. The mercenaries opened their tinned food with a tiny can opener they called a P-38, their eyes fixed on the task with the quiet intensity of a watchmaker at his craft. The deeds they had just committed, no more than a kilometer away, had already disappeared from their lives. Why should it be otherwise? They were not moralists; they were advisers and oversight personnel and not makers of policy. They came and went, as shadows did. Empires fell apart and died and new nations were born. A footprint in a jungle was as transient as the life span of an insect. The porous stone altars of the Mayans still contained the blood of the innocents who had been sacrificed by pagan priests centuries ago. What were the lives of a few more Indians? Krill believed this was how the mercenaries thought when they thought at all. In truth, he had never really cared about these men one way or another. Not until now.

His cell had a domed ceiling and seemed to bloom with a cool, fecund odor that was like water in the bottom of a dark well or mouse droppings inside a cave that dripped with moisture. There was another odor, too, one that was like mushrooms someone had trodden upon in a forest that never saw sunlight. It was like the smell in the disinterred bodies of his children. It was an odor that only a grave produced.

Krill propped his arms against the bars on the door and watched the mercenary the others called Frank. “You took off your mask,” Krill said.

“We’re all family here,” Frank said.

“You’re a nice-looking guy, man. Why are you a hump for a man like the Russian?”

“Sometime we’ll have a beer and I’ll fill you in.”

“I don’t have illusions about my situation. But I think you do,” Krill said.

Frank grinned. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt scissored off just below the nipples and a pair of black cargo trousers with big snap pockets stitched on the thighs. He had the clean, chiseled features and freshly scrubbed look of a 1930s leading man. “Just out of curiosity, what were you doing with the zip?” he asked. “Don’t give me that seeking-forgiveness crap, either.”

“What does ‘zip’ mean?”

“As in ‘zipper-head.’ I’m talking about the Chinese broad.”

“She can absolve sins.”

“Did you know your ancestors never invented the wheel?”

“Before the Spaniards came, there were no draft animals. Why would my ancestors want a wheel when they had no animals to hitch it to? They did not spend their time on non-utile pursuits.”

“You said I’m operating under some illusions.”

“When you killed Negrito, you freed his spirit. You don’t know it yet, but you got some serious problems, man.”

“You’re inside a prison cell and I’m outside of it. But I’m in trouble? You got to clue me in here. I’m fascinated by Indian mumbo jumbo.”

“Negrito wanted to be me, to live inside my skin. The way an assassin wants to become his victim. But he was too loyal to hurt his friend. So you did it for him and let his spirit leave his body and go inside mine. Now, no matter what you do to me, Negrito is going to be waiting for you. That is very bad for you, man. You haven’t figured that out yet, but you will.”

“Can your friend’s spirit rise out of concrete? Because you’re gonna be part of the foundation in Josef’s new barn.”

“Me cago en tu puta madre. Or are you already standing in line for that?”

“What did you say?”

“‘I defecate in your mother’s womb.’ That was Negrito’s favorite expression. See, I told you, Negrito is on the loose.”

“See my friend there, carrying that bucket out? Know what’s in the bucket?”

“The waste your mother usually makes you carry out?”

“Take another guess.”

A thick-bodied man, stripped to the waist, with a buzz haircut, was walking up the cellar stairs, a bucket swinging from his left hand. The muscles in his back looked like oiled rope. In the yellow glow of the bare bulb that hung above the steps, Krill could see stringlike tendrils of blood on the man’s skin.

“The item in that bucket was donated by one of our other guests,” Frank said. “Those two guys you whacked and mutilated at Josef’s place were friends of mine. Keep shooting off your mouth, greaseball. I’ll make sure you’re a donor, too.”

At nine A.M. of the same day, an independent taxi operator parked his vehicle in front of Hackberry’s office and came inside with a package under his arm. The package was wrapped in twine and thick brown paper. “Got a delivery for you from the airport, Sheriff,” he said.

“Who’s it from?” Hackberry asked, looking up from his desk.

“I don’t know. There’s nothing written on it except your name. I got a call telling me to pick it up at the ticket counter and to keep the fifty dollars in the envelope tucked under the twine.”

“Where’s the envelope?”

“In the trash. I didn’t think it was important. What, you reckon it’s a bomb or something?”

“Leave it there.”

“It’s cold. Maybe it’s some food.”

After the taxi driver had gone, Hackberry went into the outer office. “Pam, tell Felix to go to the airport and see what he can find out about a package that was left for me at the ticket counter. Then come into my office, please.”

He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and removed a pocketknife from his desk drawer and opened the long blade on it. He placed the flat of his hand on the wrapping paper. He could feel the coldness in the box through his glove.

“Put on a vest and a face shield, Hack,” Pam said.

“Step back,” he replied, and cut the twine. He inserted his fingers under the paper and peeled it away in sections from the top of a corrugated cardboard box.

“Hack, call the FBI,” Pam said.

He pulled back a strip of tape holding the flaps on the box’s top in place and folded the flaps back against the sides. He looked down at a carefully packed layer of Ziploc bags containing dry ice. One of the bags had broken open, and the ice had slid down deeper into the box and was vaporizing against a round, compacted lump of matter wrapped inside a sheet of clear plastic. There were whorls of color pressed against the plastic that made him think of an uncured ham that had been freezer-burned in a meat locker.

“What is it?” Pam said, staring at the blankness of his expression.

He stepped back from the box, his hands at his sides. He shook his head. She stepped closer and looked down into the box. “Oh, boy,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“It was flown here?”

He nodded and cleared his throat. “Get the key to Barnum’s cell,” he said.

They went up the stairs together, Hackberry holding the box, Pam walking in front of him. She turned the key in the cell door and pulled it open. Noie Barnum was lying on his bunk, reading a magazine. He put the magazine on the floor but didn’t get up.

“Come in and close the door behind you,” Hackberry said to Pam.

“Something going on?” Barnum said.

“Yeah, sit up,” Hackberry said. “See this?”

“Yeah, a box.”

“Look inside it.”

“What for?”

Hackberry set the box on the foot of the bunk and picked up the magazine from the floor. He rolled it into a cone and slapped Barnum across the head. Then he slapped him a second time and a third. “I want to tear you up, Mr. Barnum. I don’t mean that figuratively. I want to throw you down those stairs. That’s how I feel about you.”

Barnum’s eyes were filming, his face blotched. “You don’t have the right to treat me like this.”

“Look inside that box.”

“Somebody’s head is in there?” Barnum said, his expression defiant, his eyes lifted to Hackberry’s.

Hackberry hit him again, this time tearing the cover loose from the magazine. Barnum lifted his hand to protect himself, then looked down into the box. The blood drained from his face. “Oh God,” he said.

“Tell me what you see.”

“It’s a hand and a foot.”

“Are they male or female?”

“Sir?”

“Answer the question.”

“There’s hair on the ankle. It must be a man’s.”

“Look at the hand.”

“What about it?”

“Look closer. There’s a ring on it. Look at it.”

“I’m not responsible for this.”

“That’s a University of Texas class ring. The hand and the ring belong to Temple Dowling. The people who did this to him will probably start on Anton Ling next. Right now I’d like to rip you apart. Instead of doing that, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, and you’re going to answer them. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where were you and Jack Collins hiding?”

“Just like you said earlier, right south of the border. But Jack’s gone by now.”

“Gone where?”

“That’s anybody’s guess. You see him and then he’s gone. He’s standing in one place, then in another, without seeming to move. I’ve never known anybody like him.”

“You’re just catching on to the fact that there’s something a little unusual about him?”

“I don’t know where Jack is. I don’t know where Miss Anton is, either. I feel awful about what’s happened. My sister died in the Towers. I wanted to get even with the people who killed her. I didn’t want any of these other things to happen.”

Hackberry let out his breath and felt the heat rise out of his chest like ash off a dead fire. “I want you out of here,” he said.

“Say again?”

“You heard me. Hit the road.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to. You just got eighty-sixed from my jail. It’s a first. Burn a candle the next time you’re in church.”

“Maybe I don’t want to leave.”

“Son, you’d better get a lot of gone between you and this jailhouse,” Pam said.

“Well, you’re gonna see me again,” Barnum said.

Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.

Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”

“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.

But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.