Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  “It would be just like that old bastard, after all these years, to turn himself into some kind of national hero, wouldn’t it, pal?”

  Gul rolled his eyes up toward him without moving his head. Grimes snipped the ends of the last suture and put the forceps down. He examined his handiwork.

  “Goddamn if you don’t look handsome,” said Grimes. “Come here.”

  He opened his arms and Gul clambered up onto his lap and licked his face. Grimes rubbed his flanks, shocked at how good it made him feel.

  “You are an asshole,” said Grimes, to cover his embarrassment in front of himself. “But at least you are now a handsome asshole.”

  “I guess that makes two of you,” said Lenna.

  Grimes looked up. Lenna was standing in the doorway wrapped in a white bathrobe down to her ankles. Her hair was wet and combed. The glassiness had gone from her eyes; instead Grimes detected a penetrating melancholy. She smiled but the melancholy didn’t go away

  To Gul, Grimes said, “Down, pal.”

  He stood up, went over to the counter and opened a second pack of raw steak. He threw a slab of meat at Gul’s feet.

  “Eat,” he said, roughly. “And be good.”

  “That was neat, what you did to the dog.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lenna walked over to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee from the percolator.

  “I was thinking, in the shower,” she said. “That car contraption you’ve got outside is easy to spot, and Atwater knows about it.”

  “That little turd can’t use the cops any more than we can.”

  Lenna said, “It’s not that little turd I’m worried about.”

  “Who then?”

  “My husband. Filmore Faroe.”

  The name triggered Grimes’s recollection of what his father had said about Faroe. A line that deserved to end. Klansmen, union-breakers and fascists. Maybe Grimes remembered wrong—he hadn’t been paying that much attention—but he thought George had said, or implied, that Filmore Faroe was dead.

  “I thought he was dead,” said Grimes.

  “Officially he is. But Fil’s alive and well. And probably very angry with us.”

  “What did we do?”

  Lenna took her coffee over to the sofa and sat down.

  “Look, I don’t want you to be my doctor anymore, you understand? Otherwise this will be impossible for me. I don’t want to have to deal with all that phony empathy bullshit.”

  “Suits me,” said Grimes.

  “You lied to me about Clarence Jefferson.”

  Grimes decided to take her at her word.

  “In retrospect,” he said, “that didn’t do me much good. But I didn’t ask you to invite Rufus Atwater into my life, or for my seventy-three -year-old father to have to gun down two of his men and go on the lam. I don’t apologize.”

  “I don’t expect you to. But you did know Clarence Jefferson.”

  “Clarence Jefferson was the Devil who always demanded his due. And always got it.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  Grimes opened a dry pack of Pall Malls and sat down on the chair and lit up. Gul padded over and pushed his face into Grimes’s crotch. Grimes put a hand on his shoulder and pushed gently.

  “Get down, pal.”

  Gul obeyed. With the clothes dryer droning in the background, the rain drumming on the roof, Lenna curled on the sofa with her coffee and the dog yawning at his feet, Grimes was struck by a surreal sense of domesticity. Before he could get to liking it, he thought about Lenna’s question. It wasn’t easy to answer.

  “I only ever spent twenty-four hours with Jefferson,” said Grimes, “in a place he called Bad City. The why and the wherefore aren’t important, at least not to you. To cut a long story short, he tried to kill me, and I killed him.”

  “You?” she said. “You killed Clarence Jefferson?”

  For the first time since he’d met her, Lenna’s face gaped with naked shock.

  “I didn’t mean to make it sound easy,” Grimes said. “I stabbed him in the gut and left him inside a building that I watched burn to the ground. I guess I just got lucky.”

  “Luck didn’t happen to Jefferson. He didn’t allow it.”

  “Luck happens to everybody, especially a player of games. He wrote me a letter, a to-be-opened-in-the-event-of-my-death kind of deal. I got it this morning. Seems you got one too.”

  As calmly as she could Lenna said, “What did his letter say?”

  Grimes observed the desperation graven on her face. It puzzled him. Why should a woman like her need Jefferson’s corpus delicti! There no longer seemed to be any reason not to tell her.

  Grimes said, “I presume you’re aware of this bunch of evidence he stashed away.”

  Lenna nodded.

  “His letter told me how to find it.”

  Lenna didn’t even blink.

  Grimes went on. “He said it would make life difficult for a lot of important people. And that some of those people—heavy people—would be looking for it. Jefferson wanted me to take his stash to the media. He suggested The Washington Post.”

  “And?”

  “The idea didn’t hold much appeal for me but I was stupid enough to tell my father, George, and he thought different. He stole the letter from my coat and now he’s disappeared to find the stash himself.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “Look, if I had the letter you could have the goddamn thing. You cannot imagine how small a shit I give for Clarence’s fucking evidence or for anything you or anyone else might do with it. If we can find it before George—which I doubt, since I don’t know where it is—it’s yours, okay? I just don’t want to see my dad being worked over by the likes of your Rufus Atwater.”

  The desperation on Lenna’s face became more intense. Grimes felt as if he wasn’t getting through. He tried to lay it out.

  “We’re going to Georgia to find the man who delivered me the letter, Holden Daggett, a lawyer. I’m gambling that Daggett knows where ‘the Old Place’ is, even if he doesn’t know what’s hidden there. With luck, Jefferson’s stash of goodies will be yours. Then you can fight off your husband and make yourself another billion and I can forget I ever met you and go back to my life, which, I must tell you, was sweeter than I ever realized.”

  Grimes got up and paced. He stopped by the window and stood with his back to her. Anger was a waste of energy. He smoked.

  “Dr. Grimes,” she said behind him. “I care as little for Jefferson’s stash as you do, believe me. But he said that you knew everything. I need to know. Everything.”

  He turned. The desperation in her eyes was as frantic as ever, only now it moved him to pity. He didn’t know why. Beneath the strained steadiness of her voice he could hear a muted sob. Grimes went to the chair and sat down.

  “You must forgive me,” said Lenna. “I can’t tell you all I know. Not yet. Even though I’d love to.” She clenched her eyes shut. “I’d love to.”

  She collected herself, looked at him. “But I can’t trust you. It’s too important. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Lenna,” said Grimes. “The reason I found you in the cage is I was coming back to Arcadia to ask your help—to find my dad, goddamn him. I’m as fucked up by this business as you are.”

  “No you’re not,” she said. “With respect, you can’t be.”

  And, with a chill, Grimes saw something terrible in her eyes and believed her.

  He ran Jefferson’s letter through his mind: the anvil of justice, the great apocalypse, the Old Place, the girl who knew where it was, the combination to the safe, the Post. He wasn’t mistaken. Daggett was the only lead they had.

  Grimes shrugged and said, “Jefferson didn’t tell me where this Old Place’ was. He meant for a girl to take me there.”

  “A girl?” Lenna put a hand to her chest.

  “A young black woman. But my father got to her before I could. Jefferson said the girl was ‘part of him.’ I too
k that to mean she’s his daughter, I assume illegitimate.”

  Very softly, Lenna said, “Did he tell you her name?”

  “Ella MacDaniels,” said Grimes.

  More softly still, Lenna said, “Ella.”

  “She’s nineteen years old. She’s a singer.”

  Lenna turned her face away and seemed to struggle within herself for a long time. Then she looked up at him.

  “She isn’t Clarence Jefferson’s daughter.” Lenna said it as if the idea made her sick.

  Grimes didn’t answer. The chill returned to his blood.

  Lenna looked upward and away: at some inner picture far, far distant in space and time. Grimes saw there were tears in her eyes. He waited. Lenna blinked the tears away and took a deep breath.

  “When I met Filmore Faroe he was thirty-six, good-looking, charismatic, rich. And I believed, and I still believe, that in as far as he had it in him, he was in love with me. I’d blushed my way through the debutantes’ balls, and I’d had a few dates with gawking boys, but I’d never had a lover before. I married him without really knowing why”

  She paused and swallowed: and suddenly Grimes knew why she was so desperate.

  Lenna said, “I was nineteen years old too.”

  ELEVEN

  ELLA MACDANIELS drew back the hammer of the Colt .45 with her thumb and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped down with a dry click. She’d performed the action about fifty times now and her hand was starting to ache. She put the gun down in her lap and massaged her index finger and the web of her thumb. George glanced sideways at her from behind the wheel.

  “Maybe you should rest that awhile,” he said. “Blisters come up easier than you think.”

  They’d crossed Mississippi and had just cleared the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, driving north on 1-65. For a moment George’s face was washed with ghosdy light as a roaring semi hauled past them heading south, then his features fell into shadow again.

  “Okay,” said Ella.

  She put her hand on the gun again, so the feel of it would become natural, but she didn’t dry-fire it anymore. She’d never handled a gun before and the pleasure of it had disturbed her, though not badly enough to take the pleasure away. The Colt was beautifully made and beautifully imagined by whoever it was had designed it; she could see that; but the pleasure lay in something more than just its beauty. She’d touched other beautiful things in the world and none of them had felt like this, like this heavy black steel Colt. Now she understood why they were an evil and why people with sense wanted to control them, for the pleasure was forbidden and lay in the evil itself: in the evil of the power and in the power of the evil. Ella lifted the Colt and rolled her wrist back and forth to feel its weight. She thought about it some more.

  She believed in opening her soul to the things she felt, in her heart and her gut and her body, without backing away from them. She didn’t expect that all the things she might feel would be good things. She was a singer, and a true singer too, and anyone who sang the song truly felt the feeling inside it for what it was. If you didn’t, you were a false singer, which was to say no singer at all. The music she thought of as hers wasn’t all love and sex and sweet hearts broken and crying. It was mostly those things, sure, but she’d sung mean songs too, with hurt and hatred and spite in them, with the wish in the words and the music that someone would get hurt. And because she was a true singer and respected the song, she’d felt that meanness in her bones and she’d wanted someone hurt, not anyone in particular, but the million some-ones for whom the song was meant. Or maybe it was meant for no one at all, she didn’t know, she just knew that the point was to feel it.

  And so she opened herself to the song in the gun and it was one of the mean songs. That was its truth and that was the way she understood what she felt when she turned the Colt in her hand. Like the sounds she could make with her chest and throat it was partly in her and partly in the music and always in both; each one had some power over the other. She looked down at the Colt, blue-black, oily, dense and gorgeous in her fist. It made her hand look slender; she couldn’t think of anything else that did. The Colt had given her slender hands she’d never had before. It was dancing with her. It was like the bad-ass guys she’d seen at the club and had wanted to fuck in an instant but hadn’t because they were bad; woman-haters and crackheads and pimps, with girls stretching out before them to eternity, a stand-in-line-here for the previously-fucked-who-wanted-to-be-fucked-up-more. That wasn’t her bag. She didn’t have the time to be someone else’s fool. The Colt was bad-ass all the way. If she hadn’t been in the place she was in, she would have told the gun, No thanks, Slim, and never picked it up again. As it was, she would dance with it as far as she had to and no more. She wouldn’t let it scare her off, but she wouldn’t let it spirit her away.

  She looked at George and the Colt didn’t seem like such a bad-ass anymore. George was a dancer, she’d decided. For the first two hours of this drive through the night he’d tangled up her mind. She hadn’t known where the fuck he was coming from. Then she’d realized that unlike just about everybody else she ran into he wasn’t coming from anywhere except where he was. It had taken her that long to see that he was treating her like she was on the highest level he knew: his own. He told her straight, he let her make her mind up, and once she did he didn’t try to persuade her otherwise. It was so right—it was so true—it was weird.

  Like the gun, for instance: she’d asked him about it and he’d told her; then she’d asked him for it and he’d unloaded it and given it to her and explained what she needed to know. Was he irresponsible and crazy? she’d wondered. Then as she’d cocked the hammer to squeeze the trigger for the first time George had said, “The only reason on this wide earth for holding on to that thing is if you know deep down in your gut—I mean right down, below that ring you’re wearing, not high in the stomach—that when the moment comes to kill a man you can do it right there and then without a quiver or a qualm. That’s something you can know—and must know—before that moment comes. If not, you’re a hell of a lot safer not to carry it at all. So you think on it for a while.”

  Now, as she looked at him, his skull gaunt and shadowy in the light bouncing back from their headlights on the road, he turned to her and said, “Well? Can you do it?”

  Ella knew that if she lied to him George would know.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can do it.”

  “Good,” said George. “We stop over at Mitch’s maybe he’ll let us loose off a few rounds so you can get the feel of the back kick.”

  “Who’s Mitch?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” said George. “I been turning things over in my head, thought I’d told you. Mitch is an old union buddy, lives up the road a piece towards Greenville. Back in the sixties him and me organized a canning factory together was paying segregated wages, no safety standards worth a damn, the usual stuff. Under Reagan they kicked the union out again—same all over—but at least by then they couldn’t go all the way back to the way things were.”

  George seemed to drift off for a moment, then caught himself and came back.

  “Anyhow, I figure the cops aren’t looking for us—that’s thanks to you—and Georgia’ll still be there come morning, so we may as well rest up a few hours. I need it even if you don’t. Mitch’ll give us a new car too. No point taking chances on someone tracing this one.”

  Ella filtered half of what he said through the gauze of what she knew to be her own ignorance. No one she’d ever spent time with had made her feel that she knew so little about the world, or at least its past. She knew her world well enough. But Tarawa, unions, segregation? Even Reagan was a just dimly remembered comic figure from her childhood. She wasn’t ashamed not to know these things, she was just excited to curiosity by the conviction with which George spoke of them.

  “It’s the middle of the night. Won’t Mitch be surprised?” she said.

  George laughed from his belly. “Hell yes, but not so he’ll let us kno
w it. I’ve tried to surprise him before.”

  “I have to ask you something,” said Ella.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you enjoy killing those two men tonight?”

  “That’s a good question.” George thought about it for a long time.

  Then he said, “Ella, I haven’t done anything—or anything that felt like anything—in a long time. In almost as long a time as you’ve been alive.” George rolled his shoulders. “Now I’m doing something again and that feels good. You can’t know how good. Killing those guys back there was part ofthat. Made me think I can still cut the mustard. That’s a dangerous feeling. But I didn’t ask those scumbags to follow me, make threats to you, throw down on us like they did. They took their life in their own hands. I guess their dying gave me more of a feeling of life, I admit, but I didn’t enjoy the killing in itself. I didn’t have time to hate them enough for that. It was just something I decided needed doing and I don’t apologize for having done it.”

  He kept his eyes on the road ahead. He said, “You think that’s cold?”

  Ella thought about her own reaction to the deaths. It was as George said: the men had been there, and they’d meant them harm, and then they were gone.

  “I don’t feel sorry for them,” she said. “Maybe I should, I don’t know. Taking someone’s life’s not a good thing to do, I mean as a basic principle, but I guess it’s all relative.”

  “Lot of folk these days talk about good and bad being ‘relative,’ as if they were telling us something new. That’s why you’re confused.” He shrugged. “Seems to me good and bad’ve always been relative out there in the world, but they’re not relative inside your own self, and that’s the place it matters. You look inside and you draw your line, then you stand on one side or the other and you pay the price. Those guys died for money.” He glanced at her face and body. “Or worse. Let their families feel sorry for them.”

  “What if your good is different to mine?” said Ella. “What if your good is my bad?”

  “Then, up to a point, you live and let live,” said George. “Beyond that you talk. Talking was my job, negotiating. I’ll talk with the Devil himself to avoid a fight. But if you pull a gun on me you’d better know that I’m readier than you are: readier to die or go to a hospital or prison or anywhere else you want to lie down and be in pain. That’s the difference that counts. They think life and limb’s worth more than it really is. Their life, my life, whoever’s. That’s what makes them weak. That’s why they’re dead and I’m not.”