The Empress File

CHAPTER 4

LuEllen spent the night on the sofa. When I wandered through the living room the next morning, she was still asleep. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts for a top and a pair of pink underpants. She had twisted her blanket into a coil and wrapped her arms and legs around it, like a kid climbing a rope. I stepped over to wake her, but at the last minute, with my hand already at her shoulder, I stopped, eased myself into an overstuffed chair, and just looked at her.

She was a burglar. A good one. She stole cash, mostly, because it couldn't be traced. I'd done some work in the same line, though I'd taken something even harder to trace than cash. Trade secrets – ideas, if you will. At first I thought there was a difference; later I wasn't so sure.

When she wasn't working, LuEllen wore hand-stitched ostrich-skin cowboy boots and too-tight jeans. Her shirts had piping on the back and little arrows at the corners of the breast pockets, unless she was wearing one of those little puffy white baby doll numbers that let the black bra show through.

She knew nothing about painting or computers, never made it out of high school. But she was intensely intelligent, a friend, and more than a friend. Sometimes we were in bed together; sometimes not. We tended to develop outside relationships, and we told each other that it was OK.

Maybe I believed it. But in the post-Chaminade tristesse, I was glad to have her back. Her legs looked great, not to mention her ass, and I eventually sneaked out of my chair, got a sketch pad, and started to draw. I laid out her body shape in a half dozen lines, blocked in her hair mass with charcoal, laid out the shadow beneath her waist, and stopped. I'd done this before, caught a sleeping woman unawares with a sketch pad. Sure. Maggie Kahn. Lying in the sunlight, on the bed in the Washington apartment, before the world started to come apart.

I was sitting there, staring at nothing, when LuEllen woke up. She woke like a cat, all at once, and spotted me.

"You've been drawing my ass, Kidd."

"I confess," I said. She rolled off the sofa and walked around my chair to look over my shoulder.

"Pretty good. But what I want to know is, Would you love me without the ass?"

It was a throwaway line. We dealt with each other with a careful sarcasm, with metaphorical pokes and winks. But with Chaminade taking a walk, and the hollow she left behind, with the flashback to Bloody Maggie, I was seized with an instant of what felt like honesty. I looked up and said, "Yeah. I would."

Our eyes hooked up for a moment. Her grin slowly faded, and a tear started down her cheek. "Fucking men," she said. She turned away, banged into the bathroom, and stayed there for half an hour.

When she came back out, we both were struggling to get back to normal.

"So what do you want me to do?" she asked brightly.

"I've got to pound on the computers. Bobby's shipping me more data than I can handle. While I do that, I want you to start looking for a boat. Something we can rent for a month or so."

"A boat?"

"Yeah. You know, one of those white plastic things with a pointed end? They hold out the water when you-"

"OK, OK," she said, waving me off. "What kind of boat? How big? What are we going to do with it?"

"A houseboat. Good-size. Air-conditioned. Something you'd tend to notice."

"You're going to live on it?" LuEllen has an oval face with dark hair, big, interesting eyes, and a few freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.

"We're going to live on it."

"Down in Longstreet?"

"Yeah. Down in Longstreet."

I spent two weeks compiling Bobby's raw data into economic and psychological profiles of the individual city council members – the same kind of work I often do for politicians. Hill, the dogcatcher-enforcer, was a gambler and probably a loser. Dessusdelit and Ballem, though, were hoarders. I couldn't yet tell how much money they were taking out of Longstreet, but it was substantial. They couldn't invest it legally, because then they'd have to explain where they got it; none of it showed up on their IRS returns. Neither Dessusdelit nor Ballem had a passport, so they weren't personally taking it out of the country. They had to be stashing it.

Marvel talked to a man who worked for Ballem's lawn service and heard a story that Ballem collected stamps and maybe coins. Dessusdelit had been seen by another man in a Memphis jewelry store, and she'd been looking at unset stones.

"Stamps are great inflation hedges," LuEllen said. "Coins are not so good, but they're OK. Gold sucks, but it gives you some protection. Stones aren't so good either. But all of it stores value, and all of it is easy to move."

She knows what she's talking about.

Besides the research, I put in three hard hours at the Ramsey County Law Library. Every night I talked to John, Bobby, or Marvel.

"How much clout do you have with the black caucus of the state Democratic party down there?" I asked Marvel.

"Me? Not much. But Harold does."

"We may need their help. I'll get back to you. For now I just needed to know if you had any clout with them. Have you made any progress on finding the machine's books?"

"No, but we think you're right; there must be some. We have Xerox copies of letters on the sewer scam, and there's information in them that must be based on other letters, or files, or books. You know what I mean? You can infer the existence of the books from what these letters contain."

"Gotcha," I said. "When will I get the letters?"

"I gave them to John this morning. He was going back to Memphis, and he said Bobby would scan them in and ship them to you, whatever that means."

"I read an article in the Longstreet paper about the bridge. You mentioned it when I was down there. Tell me again."

She told me about the bridge. The bridge, she said, was the only reason the town hadn't blown away fifty years earlier. Now that it was gone, the city might go with it.

"Sounds serious."

"For people down here, it's desperate."

LuEllen caught me staring at the ceiling that night, chewing the eraser off a pencil.

"You have something?"

"What?"

"A plan?"

"Yeah. Maybe. An edge of one."

LuEllen found a thirty-six-foot Samson houseboat docked on the St. Croix River and took me down to see it.

"It's a fucking tub." I paced off its length along the dock. A huge tub, a shiny white, plastic behemoth, ugly, ungainly, and slow. Just what we'd need to catch the eye of a small river town. A diminutive American flag hung dispiritedly from a bent stainless steel rod on the peak of the cabin, to one side of a radar antenna. I looked under the stern and found the name Fanny inscribed in gold paint.

"Wait till you see the bedroom," LuEllen said.

"The sleeping cabin," I said, correcting her.

"Uh-uh." She shook her head. "I mean the bedroom. The guy who rents it said you don't use nautical terms for a houseboat. It's bedroom and kitchen and bathroom, instead of cabin and galley and head."

"Why's that?"

"Marketing," she said wisely. Everything she knew about marketing you could have written on the back of a postage stamp with a Magic Marker. "They didn't want houseboats to sound like submarines. They don't want the customers to think about sinking."

"Where's the owner?"

"Skiing. In Chile. He won't be back before the first of September."

We went aboard. The forward six feet of the lower deck were open, with a rail to keep drunken passengers from going overboard. Inside, the cabin was divided into halves. The front half was the general living area, with built-in bench seats along the walls, a television cabinet with a stereo, and a general-purpose dining- and work-table. At the very front was a set of boat controls with a pilot's chair, looking out through windows over the bow.

The back half of the cabin was a warren of small rooms and storage cubbyholes. The galley had everything most kitchens have, and it all fitted into a space the size of a closet. There was a minimal bath, with a shower, a fold-down sink, and a head. But the main attraction was the bedroom.

"It looks like a whorehouse," I said when I saw it. I was awestruck; the owner's taste was. unique. "That's the only purple-flocked wallpaper I've ever seen – I mean, done in plastic like that."

"How about the smoked mirrors?" LuEllen asked. Mirrors covered two walls and the ceiling. "And notice the electric swivel mount for the video camera. We can make our own movies."

The aft six feet of the deck, like the forward six feet, were open. The engine housing was back there, and the access ladder to the cabin's roof, which served as an upper deck. There was another set of controls on the upper deck, along with mounts for a couple of chairs, a bench seat, and a sunbathing well with removable privacy panels.

"All right, I admit it," I said finally. "It's perfect. Where do we sign?"

The agent was a stocky woman who wore what appeared to be a wrought-iron girdle. She asked a lot of questions, took some bank references, and two days later showed us a contract. She also showed us her husband, a grizzled cigar-smoking river rat named Fred. We spent the next three days pushing the Fanny up and down the St. Croix under Fred's watchful eye.

On the third day we nosed out into the Mississippi, took it through Lock and Dam No. 2 at Hastings, and fooled around in the current below St. Paul.

"I guess you can handle her," Fred grudgingly allowed at the end of the day. We were standing on the dock, and he handed me the keys. "When are you leaving?"

"Couple of days."

"Good luck. You take care in that Chain-of-Rocks Canal." He glanced at LuEllen on the upper deck. "And try not to wear out them mirrors."

The phone lines were burning up. John to Bobby to me to Marvel, out into her network, and back to John. I was piling up detail. Names. Leverage. John called that night. He was in Longstreet.

"We've got the Reverend Mr. Dodge by the balls. And we got him separate from the rest of the council."

"How'd you do it?" We'd decided to keep Dodge on the council while we dumped the rest of it. Since he was tied to the machine, that might not be easy.

"Remember how Marvel said he's been trying to get into her pants since she was a kid? She got to thinking, maybe he's been doing that with other kids. And he has. We got two, so far, young girls. Marvel's gonna have a talk with him."

"Don't push him too hard," I warned. "Don't ask too much. He's a Baptist, and if he thinks he's a sinner, he might decide a public confession is the only way to go. That'd fuck us, along with him."

"She'll handle it," John said confidently.

"All right. I hope you're staying out of sight," I said.

"I'm down here only a couple of hours at a time and only at night," he said. "We never go anyplace in town."

"It's gotta be that way," I said. "Have you got your costume?"

"Yeah. And the motherfuckin' hairpiece looks great, man. I look like Fred Hampton. How about you guys?"

We were getting it together. A crystal for LuEllen, dangling from a gold chain. Her tools, and a small but outrageously expensive Leitz photo enlarger, some basic darkroom gear, and her Nikon F4. She sometimes takes photographs of places and things that she wouldn't want a photo lab to get curious about.

We'd fallen back in bed together, though it took a while. After my spasm of honesty on the morning I drew her sleeping, she'd been walking circles around me. I let it go. There was something new in our relationship, but I wasn't sure what it was or if I wanted it.

Three days before we left, LuEllen made a quiet trip down to Longstreet, flying into Memphis, then rolling down the river road in a rented car. She was carrying a fairly expensive piece of electronic equipment from a friend on the West Coast. She got back late that night and checked back onto the couch.

Then, the day before we left, I hauled a carload of personal stuff and computer printouts down to the boat and stowed it. With nothing much left to do, we rented a movie – Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford – and sat on my couch with a bowl of popcorn between us. About the time the Indians started hunting Jeremiah around the mountains, she picked up the bowl, moved it to the other side, said, "Fuck it," and plopped her ass down beside me.

I couldn't think of anything to say, and she said, "Don't say anything clever."

So I didn't. We sat on the couch, watched the end of the movie, and then fell to necking like kids. Later we moved into the bedroom. LuEllen usually made love the way she wore clothes: like a cowgirl. Lots of enthusiasm, not much finesse. This time she seemed small. Fragile. When we went to sleep, I had my arm around her, and when I woke, eight hours later, we were still like that. She felt too good to move, but the little man in the back of my head was getting nervous: What the fuck is going on here, Kidd?

We left in the early afternoon, still not talking much. LuEllen took the Fanny out, while I got a gin and tonic from the bar, put my feet up, and watched Wisconsin go by. It was a fine day, with sailboats batting around Lake St. Croix, China blue sky with mare's tails trailing across it, and just enough breeze to ruffle the Fanny's dispirited pennant.

The St. Croix enters the Mississippi below St. Paul, at river mile 811.5. From there it was six days to Memphis. One of the days was a hot, unpleasant transit of the Chain-of-Rocks Canal around St. Louis. We were wedged between two river tows, bathed in the fumes of their oversize diesels.

The other five days were as good as days get. The sun was shining from clear pale dawns to rose madder dusks. I painted or tinkered with a little junk shop laser while LuEllen ran the boat, or I ran the boat while LuEllen read or sunbathed. LuEllen would peel off her bathing suit in the most provocative possible manner, warn me to mind my own business, and then roll around nude on the white foam sunbathing pad. Her browning body would relax and open and build a shiny patina of perspiration under the brilliant river sun. I'd keep one eye on the water as we chugged along, another on LuEllen. When I couldn't stand it, I'd drop the anchor and jump in with her. We went along that way until the bad day at Chain-of-Rocks Canal and picked up again on the other side.

Fifty or sixty river miles south of St. Louis, beautiful white sand beaches stretch along the Illinois side of the Mississippi. They are cut off from land access by the marshes along levees and so are virtually untouched by humans. We stopped at a bar on the fifth afternoon, and LuEllen jogged naked along the water's edge, a small woman with a gymnast's body running in a shimmer of heat and sand. She stopped here to look at a piece of driftwood, there to examine the desiccated remnants of a fish or animal that had washed up on the beach.

On her way back to the Fanny, a river tow rounded the bend below us. Rather than duck through the screening willows, LuEllen ran gaily along the edge of the water. The boatmen stood transfixed along the edge of their cabin and the points of the barges as the apparition jogged by in all her glory. As they passed, the tow let out a long, appreciative moan on the whistle, and LuEllen threw back her head and laughed.

And we did business.

I had two computers on the boat. One was a big top-of-the-line 486 with enough hard-disk space to store the complete denials of Richard M. Nixon. That machine ran off a portable generator. I also carried a laptop with built-in hard-disk and telephone modem. Every day, at some point, we'd pass a town where we could walk over the levee and call Bobby for another data dump. In the evenings we'd sift through the new stuff scrolling up the screen.

On the sixth day, late in the afternoon, we motored into Memphis and tied up at the docks below the city front. As I paid the slip rental, John Smith walked down the levee wall.

He politely checked out LuEllen – most of her was visible under a ridiculously small two-piece bathing suit – and said, "Ooo."

"How's Marvel?" I asked. He grinned sheepishly, and I introduced LuEllen.

"I got us rooms in a hotel just over the levee," he said. "Marvel called an hour ago and said she and Harold would be here" – he looked at his watch – "just about now."

"Fine," I said. I glanced at LuEllen. "Why don't you get some clothes on? We'll go up and introduce you to the others."

While we waited for her to change, John said, "Byron Lund came down to see me."

I nodded. Lund was my Chicago dealer. "He said he would, but I haven't heard from him. Is he interested?"

"He's talking about a fall show. He took a bunch of stuff with him." A shyness crept over his face.

"Hey. Congratulations."

"Yeah. You know, I wanted to tell you." He looked as though he were going to dig his toe into the deck. "You know, thanks, motherfucker."

LuEllen and I were sitting on the hotel bed, and John was in a side chair, when Marvel and Harold arrived. John let them in.

"Whoa," LuEllen muttered. Marvel was wearing a V neck T-shirt and pleated black slacks. The whole outfit probably cost twenty dollars. On her it looked like a thousand-dollar Rodeo Drive production. She was carrying a white paper bag.

"Isn't she-" I started.

"She sure is," LuEllen said under her breath.

Harold was right behind Marvel, uncomfortable in a brown suit, white shirt, and brown-striped polyester tie. He looked like a magazine salesman assigned to the proletariat.

"Marvel, Harold," John said. "You know Kidd. That's LuEllen on the bed."

"LuEllen what?" Marvel asked, looking her over.

"Uh, just LuEllen," John said.

Marvel nodded. "All right," she said, and turned to me. "Did you figure something out?"

I'd told them bits and pieces on the telephone but saved the overall proposal for the Memphis meeting. If they turned me down, I'd take the Fanny to New Orleans with no regrets. Because whether or not they wanted the whole thing, they were going to get at least part of it.

"I think we can take them," I said.

Marvel walked over to the countertop that held the sink and dumped the bag. A two-quart carton of strawberry ice cream tumbled out with a box of plastic spoons. She picked up one of the half dozen hotel water glasses that were stacked on the counter, pulled off its cellophane wrapper, and opened the ice cream.

"How we gonna do it?" asked Marvel as she dished the strawberry into the first of the glasses.

"With superstition," I said. "Superstition, an old-time con game, and a little help from the governor."

We talked for two hours. When we were done, Marvel shook her head. "That's the most cynical thing I ever heard," she said. She got up and took a turn around the room. "Do something like that. how do you square it with any kind of ethical position?"

Harold was smiling in a nasty sort of way. "Fuck ethics," he said. "I like it."

Marvel looked at him in surprise, then took another turn around the room before she finally nodded.

"All right. I guess we're in. When do you start?"

I glanced at LuEllen and told them the first lie.