The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Six

GETTING YOUR LIFE BACK on track, after an enthusiastic change of direction, isn’t always the easiest thing. There’s guilt, when you reflect on other relationships, and you’re not sure you want to look your partner in the eye. Once you do, you’ll be able to see both that what happened was not a mistake, not an incident, not a fantasy or a dream, but actually, you know, happened… and that there are implications.

I woke up when I felt LuEllen moving around, turned my head, cracked my eyes. I felt her stretch; and the additional weight and warmth in the bed felt pretty good, even though we’d only been in it for two hours, and it wasn’t even dark yet. Finally, as I watched out of the corner of my eye, she sat up, stretched, and yawned. She hummed. She fluffed herself up. She purred for a while. She said, “You up?”

I feigned near-sleep. “I guess,” I groaned.

“We need to get some chocolate in here.” She bounced out of bed and ran around naked, all pink and jiggly. I had the urge to draw her, as I had so many times before, but I knew where that would lead.

“Let’s do it again,” she said.

“I’m an old man,” I groaned.

“Better to wear out than to rust.”

“Let me brush my teeth… but you go first.”

We did all of that, and what seemed to be a little while later, I looked at the clock: two hours had gone somewhere. “Ah… shit.”

“What?” She was looking at her toes, wiggling them, like little piggies.

“We gotta call Washington.” I stretched and yawned. “Like right now.”

“So come on in the shower.”

“If we get in the shower together, we might not get out of the room in time to make the call,” I said.

“Naw, come on…”

WE GOT out of the room, eventually, down to the car, still a little damp from the shower, to another pay phone. LuEllen had one of those anonymous pre-paid phone cards, and I went out to Washington.

Somewhere, in what I hoped was the locked office of a high-ranking FBI bureaucrat, a computer got busy. I’ve been into the FBI any number of times, and usually you have to work the system. This time, the guy’s desktop came up, and his files were right out front. When I popped them, I found one labeled Jackson. The file had last been opened two hours earlier.

“Is that too easy?” LuEllen worried. She looked up and down the street: no black helicopters; not even a black-and-white.

“Naw. It’s what my guy said it’d be. Besides, I don’t care,” I said. “We’ll be out of here before they could snap a trap even if it is one.”

The Jackson file contained a series of memos saying that: (a) the feds hadn’t found anybody who’d seen the cross-burners; (b) Bobby had been killed at least twelve hours before the cross-burning, according to early forensic tests, but no more than fourteen hours before, because he’d been seen alive then; (c) he’d been suffering from a degenerative nerve disease since early childhood and he’d been in a wheelchair for fifteen years; (d) he made his living writing computer code; (e) he had a caretaker named Thomas Baird who had seen him alive and well at two o’clock on the afternoon he died; and (f) the cross-burning might have been an effort to shift blame for the murder.

This last memo said that the time difference between the killing and the burning seemed to suggest that they were not part of the same act, and the motive for the act may have been computer theft, since an expensive computer was known to be missing. Huh. They had at least one perceptive guy on the job.

There was also a reference to some unwashed intelligence about the local lads of the KKK, most of which was apparently canned Jackson Office file stuff.

“LET’S GO,” LuEllen said.

“Not yet,” I said. We were outside a convenience store, and a large man in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, carrying a brown shopping bag, was walking toward us. His face was obscured by a pale straw hat and big sunglasses.

“Look at this guy.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Just a minute.”

I stayed online for another five minutes-the guy in the Hawaiian shirt went on by and never looked back-saving everything to my laptop. LuEllen got increasingly nervous the longer we were hooked up. The last document was saved and I unplugged.

“All done.”

“We’re gone,” LuEllen said. She put the car in gear and turned slowly onto the street, her turn signals working. LuEllen would never be caught in a routine traffic stop. She continued up the street for a hundred yards, then pulled into a strip shopping center and parked in front of a store that sold Levolor blinds and Barrister bar stools.

“What are we doing?”

“Watching.” We sat there for ten minutes, watching the phone a block away, to see if any cops showed up. None did. She backed out and turned toward the street.

“Probably watching us by satellite,” I said.

“Funny man.” She leaned over and sniffed me. “You know, we ought to fool around more often. You really smell good.”

I won’t tell you where she’d splashed the Coco when we finally got out of the shower, but hey: when she was right, she was right. I did smell pretty good.

BACK at the motel, we read the memos again, talked about them, then, as it began to get dark, changed into some running clothes and went for a jog. We did three miles in nineteen minutes, running around the edges of a golf course. When we finished, I felt better than any time since we first walked into the Wisteria and started dropping coins in the slot machines.

We ate a quick dinner and then I went back to the DVDs; and a little more sex. And finally, after one of the longest days I’d had in a while, we crawled into bed.

“Would you like me better if I was more boobilicious?” LuEllen asked as I began to drift away.

I mumbled at her.

“What was that? What?”

I pushed myself up from the pillow. “I’m nowhere nearly stupid enough to answer that question,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

AS A news service, CNN is pretty predictable: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, weather, sports, bullshit, bullshit. The next morning, though, things were more serious. We turned on the tube a few minutes after 7:15, to a professionally cheerful guy just finishing up the sports.

The next thing up was a silent film showing a man in blackface, wearing a stovepipe hat, with an open black umbrella overhead, doing a vaudeville-style softshoe with two other guys, who were similarly dressed.

There was no commentary for a full five seconds, then one of the talking heads, speaking with his Voice of Doom, said, “You are looking at a videotape of a racially charged fraternity show in which one of the participants was National Security Advisor Lyman Bole, the man with the black umbrella. The videotape was sent to a number of news outlets this morning by a man identifying himself only as ‘Bobby,’ who said that many more such revelations would be coming in the next few weeks. CNN has learned exclusively that while Mr. Bole has yet to comment, the film is genuine, and that the fraternity party took place approximately nineteen years ago at Ohio State University, Bole’s alma mater.”

“Oh my God,” LuEllen said, goggling at the TV.

I was already rolling across the bed. I picked up my cell phone and dialed John. He came on, sounding sleepy, and I asked, “Have you seen it?”

“What?”

I told him, not using the name Bobby, and he said, softly, “Oh, no. The guy’s working the machine, whoever he is.”

“Yeah. And I’ll tell you what-I’m coming up empty on the DVDs. There’s not a thing about who might have the laptop. I’ll tell you what else: the big guys don’t know, either.”

“You got in, uh…”

“Yeah. And they don’t know.”

After a long moment of silence, he said, “I’ve been thinking…”

“You’re gonna retire to Guam.”

“No, I’m serious. Our friend was crazy about his security. There are only three ways somebody could have gotten to him. One: the asshole knew who our friend was, and where he lived, because our friend knew him and trusted him. Two: the asshole tracked him somehow, by computer. Three: it was purely local and purely random, done for money or something we don’t know about-something that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

He was using the “our friend” circumlocution because we’d shared an earlier difficulty involving Bobby and had learned about the government’s ability to intercept and sort meaningful phone conversations from billions of words of garbage.

“That last one’s out,” I said.

“It is now. That leaves the other two. But who knew our friend better than we did? That leaves the computer. If they tracked him by computer…”

“I know one guy who knew him better than we did,” I said. “I was looking at some information from the big guys. There’s a memo that says he had a caretaker. The caretaker lives in Jackson. I’ve got his name.”

More silence, and I heard a woman’s voice-Marvel, John’s wife-in the background saying, “It’s on right now,” and then John said, “I’m looking at the tape. We’ve got to talk to the guy in Jackson. Personally.”

“Hate to go back there,” I said.

“No choice-unless you can figure out how the asshole tracked him over the computer.”

“I can’t figure it out,” I said. “I tried a couple of times, really carefully, and I’m pretty good at it. Our friend called me up and told me to knock it off. I tripped some alarms I never saw. I think he was amused-he seemed amused. I bet everybody on the ring, except you, went looking for him at one time or another.”

“So either the guy who found him is a lot better than you ring guys are, or it’s somebody who knew him.”

“That would be it-and I don’t think it’s somebody who’s better than us. That’s not vanity, it’s just that there are a limited number of ways that you can track somebody online, and there’s no way to know whether you’re stepping into a trap unless you step in it. In other words, if somebody was tracking him, even if it’s like… the really big guys… they’d still set off his alarms.”

“Maybe some technological thing not having to do with computers?”

“And somehow it falls into the hands of a fruitcake who uses it to cut up government bigshots? John…”

“I know, I know. Can you get up here?”

“If we had to,” I said.

“Come on up, bag out here. You and I can go down to Jackson and talk to this friend.”

“Ah, man.”

“No choice.” Then he laughed. “I’m looking at this blackface thing. They are gonna stick this movie so far up the guy’s ass he’s gonna have videotape coming out of his nose.”

“Hang on.” I turned to LuEllen, who was sitting on the end of the bed, watching the TV, and told her what John had suggested.

She shrugged. “Always happy to see those guys.”

I put the phone back to my ear. “We’ll be up,” I said. “Call you on the way.”

WE packed up in a half hour and I carried the luggage down to the car. A quick check of the e-mail turned up nothing. As LuEllen was shoving the last of her stuff into a bag, she said, “Before you zip up your briefcase, why don’t you try the cards?”

“Cards won’t help us,” I said.

“Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”

“Or you’ll worry more,” I said.

“Just try them.”

There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s nudnik. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”

SO I got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist-I was trained as an engineer-but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck is useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.

Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, when used as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.

Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and that the group you were dealing with, the opposition, consisted of six members, five men and a woman. You begin doing tarot spreads and see a number of indications of female influence.

This does not mean that the deck correctly predicts female influence in the transaction, but suggests that you should sit back and think about the woman on the other side, who might otherwise seem to be just another functionary. Why is she there? What specific influences does she have? Is there some way to approach her that would help with your deal?

This has nothing to do with the supernatural-it’s simply a human way, and a fairly subtle way, to game a problem.

LuEllen doesn’t believe that. She believes that I’m tapped into the Other Side. At one time she’d hassle me for a daily reading, until finally she asked me to do a spread on how long she’d live. I did a spread, and came up with ninety-four years.

“That’s not bad,” she’d said.

“Yeah, but this card”-I’d tapped the Tower, I believe-“suggests that the last fifty years will be in the high security unit at the Valley State Prison in California.”

“Kidd,” she’d sputtered, “you, you gotta, what are you talking…”

“Made you look,” I said. She didn’t bother me so much after that.

I CARRY a deck with me, in an old wooden box, wrapped in a piece of silk, just like the gypsies tell you to do. Because LuEllen showed signs of slipping into a nudnik state, I did two quick tarot spreads on the motel room telephone table.

Like most tarot spreads, the results were complicated. What should have been a clear outcome in both spreads, the final resolution card, was, in both cases, self-contradictory.

“The Hanged Man,” LuEllen said, tapping the card with an index finger. She knows the cards well enough to pick out the major arcana. “The Hanged Man comes up twice, as the final resolution, and you’re saying that you don’t know what it means?”

“It’s not a very useful outcome for gaming,” I said.

“You’re not lying to me?” She looked at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to die together in an automobile accident on the way to Jackson?”

“No.” I pulled the cards together, wrapped them in the silk cloth, and put them back in the box. “The Hanged Man indicates a kind of suspended animation, a suspense between two states-a waiting state. Transition, maybe. Okay, so Bobby’s dead and everything is in transition. Well, duh. We already know that.”

“It doesn’t even hint at what’s going to happen?”

“LuEllen, the cards do not predict anything.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms, looked at me with exasperation. “You always say that, then it turns out that they always do.”

“There have been some coincidences, but that’s all they were.”

“Coincidences, my ass. Let’s go. You can tell me more about this Hanged Man on the way to Longstreet.”

LONGSTREET is on the Mississippi River northwest of Jackson. There isn’t much there, but there is one critical thing: a bridge. That by itself gives the town a regional importance. Bridges are uncommon on the lower Mississippi. People can go their entire lives never seeing towns that might be only a mile away, across the river, but fifty miles away by road.

Longstreet was a tough place to get to from Beaumont. The trip took most of the day, even cooking along in the Olds. LuEllen’s a good driver, and she’d rather drive than ride, so she spent most of her time behind the wheel. I plugged in the laptop and continued to dig through the DVDs.

“The pattern is, he encrypted everything but inconsequential stuff,” I said. “If the same pattern holds with the laptop, then we’re good.”

“That cheers me up. But even if he does have some stuff, it’d hardly be on me, do you think?” She was paranoid about personal security. She’d led a long life as a thief, including some fairly outrageous episodes, and had never done time, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted.

“Not unless…”

“What?”

“Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”

“You think?”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man-I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know… Bobby may have some details on them, too.”

“Political stuff.”

“Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think, If there was only some way to make them go away. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”

“You mean, kill them?”

“That’s a harsh word, kill.”

“Ah, jeez.”

WE ALSO had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe… but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider all attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.

I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.

I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the human race, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.

LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.

“It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”

“I was not barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman… not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew six months ago that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”

“That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”

“You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.

“I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids…”

“You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word…”

Nudnik.