The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  Mifflin was finished, and evidently he knew it. He didn’t try to get up, but held his bleeding arm to his chest and waved Calvin away. “Okay, for Pete’s sake!” he said. “Doggone it! I want to talk, is all!”

  Calvin felt most of the fight leak out of him, and for some reason he recalled Mifflin’s going on about pickles yesterday at the Gas’n’Go, and the way he had seemed polite and deferential when he’d gone out unhappily to lure Donna inside the store. What door had the man stepped through years ago that had led him, like Paige Whitney, to this strange place on the river?

  “Gimme a hand here,” Shirley called, and Calvin hurried across to the sand pile where Lymon had spilled about halfway out of the wheelbarrow. The sand had stopped him, and he was lying on his side, apparently oblivious. Calvin managed to boost him back into the wheelbarrow and to lift it upright by heaving upward on the down side of it while Shirley pulled back on the top side. He beat sand off the edge of the foam pad and dusted it from his uncle’s cheek.

  “What now?” he asked Shirley breathlessly.

  “Your call,” she said.

  Mifflin’s shirt Was torn down the front, and his arm was still oozing blood. He shivered suddenly, and looked at the dead dog. “God, I hate to hurt an animal.”

  “What goes around comes around,” Shirley said.

  “It’s coming around fast, too,” Mifflin said. “First shift’s on at seven. You three are burning daylight.”

  “Let’s tie him up and get out of here,” Donna said.

  “Can I put in a quick word?” Mifflin asked. “I’d like to negotiate.”

  “What do you have?” Calvin asked him.

  “I’ve got a place up in Idaho. Up on a lake. Three-bedroom log cabin with a Franklin stove. Big porch close enough to the water to fish off of. My daughter’s up there along with her two kids. Her no-good husband left them a couple of years back. So here’s what I’ve got to offer. I tell you what I know, and you let me walk out of here. I mean to take some tools for my trouble and head on up to Idaho. And I’ll tell you right up front that Bob keeps a couple of bundles of hundreds tied up with rubber bands hidden in his desk. I’m fixing to take the money, too, if you folks don’t. I’ll show you where it is if you want it.”

  “We don’t,” Calvin said.

  “I understand that. I’m just telling you so that you know I’m on the up-and-up. I don’t have no quarrel with you folks, and I swear to you on the grave of my dead mother that I wouldn’t have let them torch your store yesterday, Grand-maw, but I couldn’t do nothing to stop it. That was pure Bob Postum all the way. He’ll do the mean thing just because it’s mean, and he’ll make a joke about it afterward. He killed Lamar Morris at the bookstore for no reason at all—or at least that’s what Slim told me. I’ve been fed up with this outfit since he put his big plans into motion six months ago. So if I got nothing to say that interests you, then tie me up, although I’d kind of like to wash out this dog bite with peroxide first.”

  Lymon groaned in the wheelbarrow. Calvin realized that it was real daylight now. He could see the tops of the Dead Mountains glowing in the first light The breeze blew across the lot, stirring up dust. It had a barnyard smell to it, as if there were animals stabled nearby.

  “Get on with it,” he said to Mifflin.

  “All right, son, I will. Truth is, they’re going in through the passage. They traced it out with sonar. They grabbed your uncle as a diversion, and you Knights came right on out here just like Bob figured you would.”

  “How many men are there?”

  “Fifty. Armed. Desert rats and drifters from Beaumont to Panamint Flats. ‘Extras,’ Bob calls them. Some of them headed up into the hills last night, and some upriver.”

  “And they’re loyal to Bob Postum?” Shirley asked. “I can’t make any sense out of that.”

  “They’re loyal to a share of those silver ingots that came out of the Essex smelter back in the day.”

  “What silver ingots?” Calvin asked.

  Mifflin stared at him. “Well,” he said, “that’s the rumor anyway. But you’ve only been in town for a couple of days, so maybe you haven’t heard it yet. Lamar Morris’s daddy wrote a piece on it, but the Knights paid him off for it and then burned all the copies of his little book, leastways all except one, which Bob’s got. That’s how I know about it. I’ve seen it. Bob uses it as a recruiting tool, you might say. He’s got a box full of those Essex smelter ingots, too, mined in New Cyprus in the thirties. They say Bob took them off of James Morris, Lamar’s father, when he killed the man. A box full of silver ingots makes for a good-looking rumor.”

  “What else?” Calvin said.

  “They’ll only use the guns if they have to, because it tends to make a lot of noise, and it don’t resemble the Crusades a whole lot. It runs counter to the movie scam. Everyone knows you Knights beat your swords into ploughshares, which puts you one down if push comes to shove. Bob thinks you’ll hesitate, because you’ve got scruples. He doesn’t have any scruples at all.”

  “The movie scam …” Calvin said, abruptly remembering the script stuck into the box full of books. Robert P. Wolverhampton, LL.D.—Bob Postum. Of course. He thought about the script’s multiple endings and wondered whether Postum had meant them as a choice. Sending the script with Morris’s books was like leaving the trunk of the Dodge open after he had stolen the veil. Postum saw all of this as fate playing itself out, the whole thing scripted. Pride goeth, Calvin thought, repeating his uncle’s sentiment.

  “The kicker,” Mifflin said, “is what Bob likes to call his siege engines—two big catapults. He means to bombard New Cyprus from the heights.”

  “And the costumes … ?” Calvin asked. “That’s for what—a film?”

  “It’s cover,” Shirley told him. “We’ve got them, too. No one in the world is going to think there’s real trouble with everyone dressed up like the Crusades. They can keep it up all day and night.”

  “That’s right,” Mifflin said. “They plan to have some fellows with camera equipment out on a barge, keeping tourists away and passing out flyers saying it’s a film shoot. That corralled-in area you see over there?” He pointed away across the yard. “That’s for the camels—or was. Bob rented a couple of dozen of them from a big outfit that supplies the Hollywood studios. He’s going to run twenty-five armed men down the trail from the quarry on camels. Then while everything’s breaking loose topside, he means to take the silver and what-all else back up the passage and put the Knights right out of business. Once he gets set up on the heights, there’s not a lot you can do to stop him. And Bob figures that the Knights won’t call in the authorities. There’s a lot of history out here that doesn’t bear scrutiny.”

  There was the sound of a semitruck rumbling past out on the highway. Calvin realized that Donna and Shirley were watching him. “Good luck in Idaho,” he said to Mifflin, who nodded his thanks and turned around to walk away, but then stopped abruptly.

  “One more thing,” he said. “You-all have some kind of rat among the Knights. Bob’s got ahold of someone. I don’t know who it is, but I heard Bob bracing him in the office late last night. The man was pretty liquored up, it seemed to me, and Bob wasn’t happy about it, and wanted to know how he expected to do any driving. I was on my way out to get a bite to eat down at Norm’s, and when I got back they’d cleared out, although Bob’s truck was still here. It’s out there now. You folks had better watch who you trust.”

  He turned around and went on his way again, disappearing into the warehouse.

  CLEARING FOR ACTION

  Geoffrey de Charney’s houseboat wasn’t moored at the dock any longer. It lay in mid-river, a hundred yards down, swept along by the current, the cabin flaming like a funeral pyre despite the drowning Calvin had given it with the water cannon. Someone—it must have been Paige Whitney—had doused it with gasoline, because it was burning like it was built of pine boards. A chemical reek of black smoke poured into the sky where it was pulled to pi
eces by the wind and blown put over the desert. The boat swung around sideways, and the bow was close enough to the California shore to ground itself for a moment before the current pulled the bow free again and the boat drifted around a bend in the river and disappeared from sight.

  “There goes our ride,” Shirley said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Donna said, turning around and unlatching the gate again. Calvin set the wheelbarrow down and hurried after her, and together they lifted the hitch end of the Painted Lady’s trailer. Calvin was faintly surprised at how easy it was to turn it and roll it out through the gate. They angled it past the edge of the dock and down to the steep beach where it started to pick up momentum. Calvin held on, following it right into the shockingly cold water until the trailer was submerged to the top of the tires. “The key’s here somewhere,” Donna said, climbing on board. “Cast it loose.”

  Calvin unhitched the boat, pushed it deeper into the river, and let it go, setting Donna adrift and then slogging back up onto the beach where he stood at the water’s edge.

  If she couldn’t get it started, she’d have to swim for it and let the boat go. In that case, he thought, they’d put Lymon in the Harvester and call Taber on the cell phone and arrange for a boat to pick them up down at the bridge. He could see Donna rummaging behind the seats now, lifting cushions and running her hand up under the dash. The Painted Lady was thirty feet from shore, the current sweeping it away. The river ran green and flat, with swirls glinting in the early sunlight, and away downriver smoke still rose from the burning houseboat.

  Jump, Calvin thought, and he walked backward up the gravel beach in his wet shoes, signaling to Shirley and pointing toward where the Harvester sat at the edge of Beamon’s yard. Shirley nodded and started back along the dock, but just then Donna sat down in the pilot’s seat, and Calvin heard the engine turn over and roar to life, and within seconds she whipped the boat around in a tight, bubbling circle and ran it upriver to the dock.

  It took both Calvin and Shirley to lever the wheelbarrow sideways and roll Lymon down onto the cushions on the long bench seat. He grunted, opening his eyes and staring, and then closing them again, moaning a little bit Calvin wondered whether he knew what was going on, or whether he was already mostly gone, drifting out across his own river. But there was no time to chat. Calvin pushed the empty wheelbarrow off the edge of the dock and then climbed into the Painted Lady and hunkered down in the passenger seat next to Donna. She kept the speed down for Lymon’s sake, but even so the trip seemed to take a quarter of the time that it had taken this morning on the fireboat. The wind blew warm and dry, and he could smell the river and the desert, and there was already some warmth in the morning. The sheer wall of the Dead Mountains loomed up on the port side, and he could see New Cyprus now in the distance, lit up by the rising sun. There was another barge-like boat on the river up ahead, probably moored off the island. “What’s that?” he shouted.

  “Film crew’s my guess,” Shirley shouted back at him.

  And just then Calvin spotted a clump of cottonwoods on the Nevada side where there was a little camp set up in a clearing, with canvas awnings and catering tables and men milling around. There were a couple of boats tied up to willows, fast-looking outboards maybe sixteen feet long. Two men sat in one of them, and one of the men waved in their direction, then did a double take and stood up, shouting at his partner, who went to work on the line that tethered them to the willows. It was Pat Yorkmint and the small man—Defferson. Obviously Yorkmint had recognized the Painted Lady before he realized who was in it. The big boat angled out into the river in a wide arc as if to cut them off, although it was unclear how they meant to do it without simply ramming them.

  “They’re after us!” he shouted at Donna, just as Defferson answered Calvin’s question by half standing up and leveling a rifle across the windscreen. “Down!” Calvin shouted to Shirley, but she had already seen the rifle and had slid off the seat onto the deck. The pursuing boat hit their wake and Defferson sat down hard, lurching sideways, the barrel of the rifle apparently cracking Yorkmint on the side of the head. Their boat slewed atop the water as he let go of the wheel and grabbed his ear.

  Donna glanced back and yelled, “Hold on!” and Calvin was slammed back against the cushions as the boat shot forward, the bow rising up out of the water, the long, smooth jet stream shooting away behind them as Donna ran them dangerously close to shore, the willows whipping past so close that Calvin could have grabbed a branch. He looked over the side, horrified to see that they were skimming along in what appeared to be less than a foot of water. The big outboard kept well out into the river as Defferson scrambled to his knees and tried to get some kind of steady aim over the seats.

  There was the crack of a gunshot, and then another, but Calvin didn’t look back, because the Painted Lady swerved out into mid-river again and bore straight down on the camera boat. He braced himself against the dash, his feet pinned to the floorboards. The outboard behind them was gaining fast, although the rifle had disappeared now that the camera boat was dead in front of them. Donna’s hair blew straight back out behind her, and she had a wild, happy look on her face, as if she had lost her mind.

  “Shit!” Calvin yelled, watching the sudden panicked scramble on the camera boat when they figured out Donna was serious. He braced for the collision, glancing back at his uncle. Somewhere along the line Shirley had slipped an orange life preserver around him, and she had one arm across his chest, holding on to him. The gap between the boats closed as two people dove off the camera boat into the river and swam hard toward the opposite shore. The camera boat itself heaved around in reverse suddenly, camera gear toppling, the pilot trying desperately to get out of the way as the Painted Lady shot past, skimming the bow within inches. Calvin locked eyes for a split second with a terrified man who couldn’t have been more than two feet away, and then they were decelerating, angling in toward the Temple Bar. The boat pursuing them turned wide toward the Arizona shore, and Calvin watched as it slowed down to pick up the men in the water. A sandbag fortification had been thrown up along the river side of the island, head high, atop a long rampart of sand and rock that hid most of the Temple from view.

  Several small Bobcat tractors were pushing more sand and rock around, and twenty or so men were heaving sandbags, fire-brigade-style, off the flatbeds of a line of Pullman carts heading over the bridge, incoming carts alternating with empty carts going back after more sandbags. The Painted Lady swept past underneath the bridge, aiming toward Taber’s dock, where a half dozen people waited for them.

  It was your call,” Taber said to Calvin. “It’s damn well sure we won’t see Mifflin again this side of Hell. He won’t come back out here, not with Postum’s money in his pocket. If you’d have left him tied up in Beamon’s yard he probably would be here. As far as I’m concerned, we’d be a long chalk better off if they all ran off to Idaho to take care of their family. What he told you was right on the nose, although we already knew some of it because of that script Postum so kindly sent to us. He overreached himself there.”

  They walked along one of the dimly lit passages, the air smelling of cool, dry stone. Taber had something that he wanted Calvin to see, now that Calvin was a Knight—what Taber referred to as the Mint.

  “So it’s true that this was a silver mine, like Mifflin said?” Calvin asked. “I thought they used the tracks to run carloads of cut stone down from the quarry.”

  “They did, among other things. The Knights found the silver ore when they were tunneling out the passage up to the quarry, and from that time on they killed two birds with one stone. Blankfort said it was divine intervention, and I wouldn’t argue with the man. That little bit of intervention assayed out at over three thousand dollars a ton. Most of the mines out in this part of the desert played out pretty quickly. Someone would find silver ore, there’d be a lot of excitement, and then after a couple of months or a year it would dry up. What the Knights found here was different, though.” />
  “Wasn’t there some kind of silver rush?” Calvin asked. “Like with the other strikes out here?”

  “Not much of a rush, not like when they found the Corn-stock Lode or the Panamint strike. Silver fever had faded out forty years earlier. And New Cyprus was what you might call a closed society. There was no way for a man to stay ten minutes if he wasn’t wanted, and if you weren’t a Knight, you weren’t wanted. James Morris started poking around, taking photos and asking questions down at the smelter. When he wrote his pamphlet, he got so much right by guesswork that the Knights bought out the stock and swore him to secrecy. He didn’t have to work for a living after that, and neither did Lamar, when he came along. That bookstore of theirs has always been a hobby.”

  “And all of this led to his being murdered?”

  “Years later. He was honorable enough to keep the secret, and he told the wrong people to go to hell.”

  Two men appeared farther up the tunnel, stepping out of yet another passage and into the glow of one of the hanging bulbs. They were apparently flesh and blood. When they drew near, Calvin recognized one of them as Jake Purcel, who had been one of the two boarders this morning—the one who hadn’t been mauled by the dog. “All set up,” Purcel said.

  “No problems, then?” Taber asked.

  “Pretty much cut and dried, given that we’re right about where they’ll set up. One funny thing, though, was that someone chalked the wall on up the way.”

  “Chalked it?”

  “Like they were marking it—back where the passages branch off into town. It looked like maybe someone came in from that direction and wanted to find the right turning on the way back. It’s hard to say when it was done, though. Might have been a month ago.”

  “Could you follow the marks?”

  “No, it was just the one mark as far as we could see. Just enough to navigate the passage where it gets complicated there.”