by John Dunning
“They broke his jaw. His face was all wired up and he couldn’t talk. Looks like they broke some of his fingers and his collarbone. He’s in a lot of pain. He got pretty agitated when he saw me, and the nurse asked me to leave.”
“I wonder what the motive was.”
“With Archer, who needs a motive?”
“Yeah, but he’s been a jerk for a long time, why beat him up now? I’m wondering if they just found out about his book. And if they did, whether they took it from him.”
“I don’t know. That was on my list of things to ask.”
We sat at the curb for a while and I watched the traffic fore and aft. A cooling breeze blew through the open car and there was no real incentive to move, no rush to get anywhere. It was just noon and I was trying to figure out what we’d do and how. For some reason Dean’s words kept playing in my head, interrupting my thought pattern. I began playing the What-If Game, something I had done many times as a cop. The game had only one rule: you throw stuff at a mental wall and nothing is sacred; no crazy notion is too crazy to consider.
“Looks like another great day of solitaire coming up,” Koko said. “Whoop-de-do.”
I heard her words but I was only listening with half a brain. She and Erin began talking about tomorrow and Fort Sumter. “We’ve still got sleeping bags to buy,” Koko said. “We’ll need three now.” Absently I nodded yes, we would need three, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dean Treadwell and his strange lifelong friendship with the man everybody loved to hate.
Only later did I begin pondering our escape from Charleston. That afternoon we drove in an apparently aimless circle around greater Charleston till I spotted what I wanted—a sporting goods store in the north area, with parking lots on both sides of the building. I didn’t stop but I noted the landmarks as I drove past. I made a slow loop and headed back downtown.
CHAPTER 35
How do you give people the slip when you don’t know where they are, when you’re not even sure they’re really there and you have no idea how many they might be or what they look like? Sitting in Erin’s room that night, we considered and rejected everything three times over. Go to the police? “With what?” I asked. “Some cock-and-bull story about a Baltimore gangster who we think might have followed us here?” Tell the cops about Archer? “Tell them what?” I said. “That these thugs who beat Archer half to death, we think, are coming after us next?” This might not be half-bad if Archer would corroborate our story; maybe then we could get some police protection long enough to blend into the Southern landscape and give them the slip. Maybe we could get on that boat for Fort Sumter without being seen, return the next day and get out of town. Once we were on the road, we could disappear upstate.
We settled on this: Tomorrow afternoon we would drive to that sporting goods store, leave the rental in the east parking lot, go in and buy three sleeping bags, then exit the opposite door, where a cab would be waiting to take us to the marina. There we would buy our tickets and after that it was a crapshoot. We’d have to wait in the open line, where anybody could see us, until we were inside the boat and under way. As a plan this did not rank with the wooden horse that defeated the Trojans, but it was what we had, what we would do.
We had Pizza Hut send in supper for two. I paid at the door and scanned the lot and what I could see of the street. Nothing. Erin and I ate the pizza while Koko feasted on nuts and seeds and scoops of yummy-looking gray stuff from a plastic bag. We watched the depressing TV fare and later the ladies played more cards. They both left at nine, and for a long time I stood at the window of my room watching the courtyard and saw nothing suspicious.
None of us slept well. When I saw them in the morning they looked haggard and weary.
Another long morning waiting. Gradually we took our suitcases out to the car, watching everything around us. At noon I called a cab company and left an order for a taxi in the south parking lot of the sporting goods place for exactly one-fifteen. I gave them a credit card number and told the dispatcher that the cabbie must be on time and I would pay him double, including time spent waiting, with an extra fifty bucks when we were delivered to the marina at two o’clock.
We didn’t bother to check out: the motel had my credit card number and I’d call them later and have them bill me. We were out of the room and in the car in ten seconds flat. I eased into Meeting Street and turned right toward North Charleston.
It all went like clockwork. I kept an eye peeled, watching my mirrors constantly, and nowhere behind me did I see anything that even hinted of a watcher, a tailgater, or a spook. If Dante or any of his elves were back there, they were mighty good at this.
At the store I watched the crowd while Erin bought the three bags; at the last minute I bought a flashlight and some batteries, and we hustled out the opposite door. The cab was there with its meter running. Koko and Erin got in the back and I rode up front. We drove into town the way we had come up, and the cabbie deposited us at the fort sumter tours sign with time to spare. “Just wait with us,” I told him, and we all sat there for fifteen minutes. I paid him, gave him the half-C, and told him he was a gentleman and a scholar. We scrambled up the dock with only a few minutes to spare.
The boat eased away and the pilot began telling us about the sights we were seeing. Erin came close and took my hand. “Looks like we beat him,” she said. But as I watched the receding buildings, one man in the crowd caught my eye. I saw him for just a second before he disappeared beyond the ticket shack. From that distance I couldn’t quite make him out. But he did remind me of someone, and I wasn’t so sure we beat him after all.
This time Libby was waiting on the dock to greet us. A brilliant smile lit up her face, as if she’d been waiting there for three days doubting our return. Now we had come as budding friends. The ice had been broken and it didn’t seem to matter that we had known each other less than half an hour; we had a common cause. Libby made light of Erin’s unexpected arrival. They were roughly the same age and they chatted easily as we walked up the long pier and turned into the fort. “Luke’s giving the tour again,” she said. “We usually alternate. I do it every other day when time permits, but he’s catching double-duty now that my studies are piling up. Let’s stash your bags and I’ll show you around.”
She gave us a private mini-tour in a low voice as we walked into the shadows under the wall. “This is the sally port. For you laymen, that means the passage in and out. The name comes from the military term sally, to attack and repel invaders. The old sally port was over there.” She pointed to a low place in the wall to our right. “That’s the gorge wall. This is the left flank we just came through. Straight across the fort, on the other side of the battery, is the right flank. The other two walls are the right face and the left face. I will quiz you later, so take notes. You don’t get any supper unless you get a passing grade.”
“In case the enemy attacks us tonight,” Erin said.
“Exactly,” she said, deadpan. “It wouldn’t do if I yelled, ‘Reinforcements to the left flank!’ and all of you fell into the harbor looking for it.”
Erin laughed. “I can see we’re going to get along fine.”
“Speaking of supper,” Libby said. “I hope you’re not finicky eaters. The menu here is not our strong point.”
We stared at each other, somewhat shamefaced. None of us had given food a thought.
“Don’t worry about it. All I’m hoping is that you’re not too put off by TV dinners.”
“We can eat anything,” I said. “Right, Koko?”
“Absolutely,” said Koko. “I’m ready to tear into a raw shark.”
“Can’t help you there,” Libby said. “Maybe I can scare up some canned squid.”
She made a shhh motion as we went past Luke, who stood above a crowd giving the same speech we had heard on Saturday. She moved us down under the left flank wall and continued her lecture in a low monotone.
“Imagine this whole structure two and three levels high. Above us was
another tier of casemates—gun rooms—and the enlisted men’s barracks were three stories high on both flanks, with guns on top of each wall.”
We skirted the left face. “This was a formidable fort then,” she said. “That’s all gone, pounded to smithereens in the Union siege. After they shelled that little band of Yankees out, the Confederates held this rock for almost four years, living in rubble much of that time. For two years they were battered by gunboats and by big guns from Morris Island, which we’ll see in a minute. Historians say seven million pounds of iron were fired in here. The Yanks thought they could take anything if they shelled the bejesus out of it long enough. But this old baby was tough, and the more they reduced it, the tougher it became. In the end there was nothing here but piles of bricks and whatever was buried under them—these walls you see and those ruins over there, the remains of a proud old fort. By then the Confederates had replaced their artillery forces with infantry, and the Union still couldn’t take it.”
She gestured at the guns as we walked past. “Some of these cannons were used against the fort by Union forces on Morris Island— moved over here years later.”
We went up to her little apartment in the battery. “Just throw your stuff down anywhere,” she said, and we went out again. She led us along the right flank and we stood facing the sea. “So anyway,” she said, “this is what I call home.”
Koko asked how long they had been here.
“A year. They’ll rotate us; they say it keeps us from going stir crazy, but I’m going to miss this terribly when I leave. I think about it even now, how quickly we move past things, sometimes without ever seeing them. There’s so much here that’s of the past, and soon it will all be part of my own past. Maybe Luke and I will come back years from now as tourists and I’ll think of these days. But I’ll never again be part of it, so I make the most of every day I do have.”
She pointed to a long, sandy beach across the channel, facing the sea to our right. “That’s Morris Island. Fort Wagner sat near the end, just where it hooks in toward the city. Union forces tried their best to take it in the summer of 1863. Get Wagner, get Sumter—that’s how they figured it; get Sumter, get Charleston. Get Charleston and they could close down the whole Southern seaboard. But they never did any of that, not till the Confederates pulled out and left it to them in 1865.”
We stood on the point, the right gorge angle she called it, and looked where she looked. “That narrow beach on Morris Island is where the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry was butchered trying to dislodge the Confederates. Not to take anything away from those black warriors, you’ve got to admire the Southern fighting man. You don’t have to like his cause to know he and his pals were a tough, valiant bunch.”
We stood there for a while. The day was almost perfect, the sun warm, the harbor full of sailboats. Closer in, smaller, power-driven craft skimmed across the water. Libby walked to the right gorge and shaded her eyes, peering out toward the long, flat island. “Lots of ghosts out there,” she said. “Over here too. I just felt a breath tickling my cheek.”
“My gosh, I felt it too,” Koko said. “That wasn’t the breeze I felt.”
Libby put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, they won’t bother you. They are ghosts of a time when women were put on pedestals and cherished. You must be sensitive to spirits.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“That doesn’t happen to everybody but I feel it all the time. I’ll be out here on the wall and suddenly I’ll get a feeling someone’s here with me…as if he’s just touched me or tried to whisper some mysterious thing in my ear. What about you two? You feel anything just then?”
Erin shook her head and Libby gave me a penetrating look. “I never feel anything,” I said. “I never think, I barely believe in people, and I let ghosts alone.”
“Shame on you. If there are spirits anywhere, how could they not be here? I feel a constant connection with the men who died here…Here comes Luke, you’re saved by the bell. I was about to break into lecturitis profundis of a kind that’s not covered on the tour.”
He came toward us from the left face, walking briskly along the edge of the wall. All his reticence from Saturday seemed gone and he greeted us warmly. “Good to see you,” he said, shaking hands. “Libby’s been awaiting your arrival nervously, to say the least.”
“Oh, stop. That’s not nerves, I’m just overworked. Too much to do, too little time.”
I introduced Erin and Luke shook her hand. “Glad you’re here. The more the merrier.”
“I’ve got to go down for a while,” Libby said. “Got a little housekeeping to do and a few last fs to cross before I turn in my paper tomorrow. Luke will show you around, give you the lay of the land. Pay attention, people, it gets dark here when the sun goes down.”
“It gets very dark, even on a clear night,” Luke said. “I’ve got a hunch tonight’ll be cloudy again. In any case, watch where you step. We don’t want any broken legs.”
He walked us around the ruin as the afternoon waned. We went through dark catacombs under the walls, and he told us what each of them had been. When we climbed back to the top, the tour boat was well out in the harbor.
“There she goes,” he said. “You’re officially stuck here till tomorrow.”
Luke suggested a look through the museum while he did a few chores. “That’s probably where you’ll throw down your bags tonight. Last summer we had a fellow who was writing a book and that’s where he slept, on the ramp in front of the original battle flag.”
We spent the next two hours playing tourist, looking at old uniforms and muskets, minie bullets and bayonets, reading exhibit plaques. When we emerged the sky was dark gray in the east, with a thin streak of purple just above the western horizon. The setting sun broke over James Island, casting the harbor in a kind of eerie velvet light. Most of the boats had gone in now, and far away the church spires of the city were barely visible. I figured we still had some twilight time, and while I could see I walked off and made my own tour of the walls and the ruins around them. I walked along the gorge wall and stood where the original sally port had been. The wall dropped to a height of a dozen feet; below was a tiny beachhead, and straight ahead water flowed through the channel to the sea as the tide went out. A lone boat was still out on the water, cutting across the harbor in a slow arc maybe half a mile away: a skiff under power, with a canopy covering and three or four shadowy people on board. The sun cast its last orange rays across the water and I saw a glint from something—maybe a smoke being lit, maybe a light being tested or a tool being used on some sudden trouble. Maybe binoculars. I didn’t know what it was, but I stood still and just watched it.
After a while Koko came up beside me and we tried to find the city, all but invisible in the deepening dusk. “So,” she said. “What are we going to do and how are we going to do it?”
I watched the boat turn in toward the city and I made a few gruntlike thinking noises. At last I said, “My hunch is we’ll have to level with them. Mrs. R. may have some information but she’s like you, she’s cautious about who gets it.”
“I can’t speak for her, but for once I shall try to behave myself.”
“That would be good. I don’t want you clobbering me before we get on an even keel with her. We’ve got a few things on our side if we play it right.”
“Give me a for instance and maybe I’ll feel better.”
“She knows that we know about Charlie but she may not know much more than his name,” I said. “She was fishing pretty hard. She wants what we’ve got.”
“Whatever that is. But you’re still just guessing, and if she doesn’t know anything more than that, what good will she do us?”
“It may help a lot if she’ll tell us where she got that name. Maybe what she knows makes sense only when you put it with what we know. I think she’s got a hunch, just like me. That’s why she saved the Charlie card till the very end on Saturday, and that’s why she was standing on the pi
er waiting for us. She acts self-confident but I think she’d have been heartbroken if we hadn’t been there.”
“You’re reading way more into her than I would. I still don’t know how much we need to tell her.”
“You get what you give, Koko. I think we should level with her— tell her who Charlie was and where he came from, how Josephine turned up in your life and later in mine. If she asks us a question, answer it. Don’t dangle carrots in front of her, let’s just tell her what we know and try to establish some camaraderie.”
“That’s giving away a lot on a wing and a prayer.”
“But she can’t do anything with it without us, and without her we’re back on first base. She strikes me as a straight shooter.”
“All right, I’ll shut up and follow your lead. Your track record with her so far has been a lot better than mine.”
The boat in the harbor had come to a dead stop, drifting now with no obvious destination. “What’re you looking at so hard?” Koko said, and I told her I was just wondering if those people were in any kind of trouble. Impulsively I put an arm over her shoulder and hugged her hard, as if I could squeeze all the pain out of her unhappy life. I felt her tremble and she looked away, shunning any kind of sentiment as always. I said, “How ya doin‘ these days, Koke?” and I squeezed her hand. She said, “I’m fine, you fool, why wouldn’t I be?” I hugged her again and she laughed up at me. “I’m fine, dammit, go away, leave me alone.” I followed her around the point, pestering. “Talk to me,” I said, and she gave in with a sigh. “What do you want me to say, how glad I am to know you? I’m glad I know both of you, okay? Does that make you happy? No matter how it all turns out, I’m not sorry it happened. Is that good enough?” I hugged her again and said, “Yeah, Koko, that’s good enough for today.”
She walked away and I lingered for a moment, watching the boat in the harbor. There was no real need to worry about those guys, whoever they were, but I worried anyway, in a distant, passive kind of way.
