Black Hornet lg-3

by James Sallis

  Chapter Six

  The woman loving and feeling my care those days was LaVerne. And while I generally made a point of not calling her at work, sometimes an exception shouldered its way in.

  I knew her schedule pretty well by then, and got her at the third place I tried. The bartender said just a minute and set the phone down. I listened to what sounded like at least three distinct parties going on in the distance.

  “Lewis! Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “I know what happened last night. Someone said they thought the police still had you. You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah. They let me go a few hours ago, thanks to a friend.”

  “Friend?”

  “Tell you when I see you. Right now I’m about as dragged out as a man can get.”

  “So you’re at home?”

  “Home and heading for Dreamland. How’s work?”

  “Slow.”

  “Doesn’t sound slow.”

  “Well. Mostly drinkers. You know. Things’ll pick up once lunch’s over.”

  “Come by after while?”

  “If I do, honey, it’s going to be real late.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Don’t wait up for me.”

  “Real funny, Verne.”

  I heard a sharp crack, like a shot, in the background. For a moment, everything at that end grew quiet.

  “Verne: you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Sal just broke his baseball bat across some guy’s head that was getting out of hand.”

  I knew where she was and had to wonder what constituted getting out of hand there. A narrow line, at best. The ruckus had already started up again, louder than before.

  “You going to be okay there?”

  “I don’t know. Hold on, let me check.”

  She turned away, said something, was back.

  “We’re in luck, Lew. Sal says it’s okay, he has another bat.”

  We laughed, said good-bye and hung up. I poured half a jelly glass of bourbon from a gallon of K amp;B. Dragged a chair over by the window and sat with my feet on the sill. The huge old oak tree out there in the yard had been around at least a hundred years. It had seen grand buildings and neighborhoods come and go, seen the city under rule of three different nations. Now it was dying. Birds avoided it. If you touched it, chunks of dry, weightless wood came away, crumbling into your hand, smelling of soil. Soon a hurricane or just a strong wind, or eventually nothing much at all, would bring it crashing down.

  I was reading a lot of science fiction back then. I’d drop by a newsstand, pick up a half dozen books and read them all in a couple of days. As that morning edged over into afternoon, I sat by the window sipping bourbon and looking out at the ancient, doomed oak. The big house’s back door creaked open and shut as workers hurried home for lunch, students to and from classes. And I found myself thinking about a book I’d read not long ago. Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell.

  Burrowing in at the lowest levels, a lone man infiltrates a distant world’s corrupt society. Through various ruses, surfacing momentarily here and there-an irritant, a catalyst, a wasp-he brings about discord in the governed and invisibly guides them toward revolution.

  That seemed a fairly constant theme in the science fiction I read. One man would know what was right, and in the face of great opposition-imprisonment, exile, threats of death, reconditioning-he would change the world. No one seemed to notice that every time one of these far-flung worlds changed, it changed to the very one we were living in. Same values, same taboos, same stratifications.

  Americans once believed a single man might change the world. That was what our frontier myths, our stories about rugged individualists, our rough-edged heroes, cowboys, private eyes, were all about. America believed it could change the world. Believed this was its destiny.

  Now we were ass over head in a war no one could win and after twenty years of waiting for the Big Red Boogie Man to gobble us up at any moment, we’d begun destroying ourselves instead.

  No one believed anymore that a single man could change things. Maybe, just maybe, in mass they could. Civil-rights marchers. NAACP, SNCC, SDS. Panthers, Muslims, the Black Hand.

  No.

  No, I was wrong.

  At least one American still truly believed that a single man might change the world.

  Last night he had waited in darkness on a roof-for how long? And when Esme Dupuy and I walked out into the street, he had expressed that belief, given it substance, in sudden action.

  Chapter Seven

  I slept ten hours straight and awoke to darkness, disoriented, in a kind of free fall. Esme Dupuy’s face kept receding from me, floating down, away, in absolute silence, blackness closing like water over it. Meanwhile I made my way through a landscape where everything was blurred and indistinct-bushes, trees, the swell of ground, boulders, a pond-and took on form only as I approached. I had all the while a sure sense that someone stood behind me, pacing me precisely, turning as I turned, using my eyes, my consciousness, as one might use a camera.

  I lay there listening to traffic pass along Washington, unable to throw off that sense of doubleness even after the rest of the dream had unraveled and spun away.

  I reached down to turn on the lamp on the floor by my bed and found a note propped against it.

  Lew-

  I was here about 9. You were sleeping so hard I just couldn’t stand to wake you up. But I made a pot of coffee and drank a cup of it. The rest of it’s for you. Drink it and think about me and I’ll talk to you in the morning.

  V.

  I did both, thought of her and drank the coffee, without milk since what was in the icebox was well on its way to cottage cheesedom.

  I thought of the first time I saw her, in a diner one morning around four. I’d just been fired-again-and had woke up with jangled nerves and a pounding thirst from a day-long drunk. She came in wearing a tight blue dress and heels and sat by me and told me she liked my suit. After that, I was there every night. And once a couple of weeks had gone by I asked her to have dinner with me. You mean, like a date? she said.

  I finished the coffee and decided to go out to Binx’s for a drink.

  A forties movie was on the TV over the bar, everything black and dull silver. Both pool tables were being ridden hard. Papa sat at his usual place halfway along the bar. He nodded to me as I sat beside him.

  “Lewis. Lost one, I hear.” And at my glance went on: “Miss Dupuy. Man getting shot out from beside you, that’s not something you forget. Doesn’t matter it’s in France or your backyard, soldier or civilian.”

  I nodded. Binx brought me a bourbon and when I pointed at Papa’s glass, hit him again too. It wasn’t the kind of place they often bothered serving up new glasses. Binx just grabbed the bottle by the neck and poured what looked to be about the right amount into Papa’s glass.

  “Generous thanks to both you excellent gentlemen,” Papa said.

  “That’s kind of what I have to wonder, too.”

  Papa took a sip of vodka. I thought about bees at the mouths of flowers. “What is?”

  “Whether he’s a civilian or a soldier.”

  “The shooter, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of rig he using?”

  “Paper says a.308-caliber, some special load they don’t identify.”

  “Or can’t. Well, that’s a pro gun, for sure. Wouldn’t be one of the regulars. Not what they’re into at all, no profit in it. But strays do wander into the herd. You want, I could ask around.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Papa.”

  Before he retired, Papa had spent more than forty years hiring and training mercenaries and funneling them in and out of Latin American countries. What he couldn’t find out, no one knew.

  I’d met him through a guy named Doo-Wop who made a career of cadging drinks in bars all over town. Doo-Wop was always talking about how he’d been a Navy SEAL or rustled Arabians for a stabl
e over in Waco or once played with Joe Oliver, and for a long time I’d assumed that what he told me about Papa was as made up as all the rest of it. But slowly I’d come to realize that those stories weren’t made up. They were appropriated from various people Doo-Wop drank with and processed for redistribution. The stories became his stock, his product: he traded them for drinks. And as he told them, Doo-Wop in some way believed they were real about himself. Eventually a group of Mexicans I spent a weekend drinking with at La Casa put me on to Papa’s being the genuine article.

  Binx was standing at the end of the bar. When he caught my eye, I nodded. He grabbed a bourbon and a vodka bottle, brought them over.

  “Fill it up, my good man,” Papa said. “Doesn’t happen often, but I feel young tonight.”

  Binx glanced my way. I nodded again.

  “You won’t be feeling much anything very long, you keep putting this stuff away like that, Papa.”

  “Seize the moment, my young friend. Seize the moment.”

  “Seize away, Papa. But then what the fuck you gonna do with it, once you caught it?”

  Business taken care of, Binx returned like a good fighter to his corner.

  “Give me a few days, Lewis. You want to come by and check with me, I guess. Since you don’t seem to live anywhere, near as anyone can tell.”

  “That be okay?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  I left enough on the bar for another couple of doubles, threw back the rest of my bourbon and stood.

  “You ever hear Big Joe Williams, Lewis?”

  “Yeah. Man couldn’t tune up a guitar to save his life.”

  “Once said how all these youngsters, white kids of course, are always asking him how to get inside the blues. You heard this before?”

  I shook my head.

  “Said the whole point was to get outside. Outside the sixteen to eighteen hours you have to work every day-if you can find work at all. Outside where you have to live and what you and your children have to look forward to. Outside the blue devils that are everywhere you go, that are in everything you do, and aren’t ever going to leave you alone.”

  Papa turned back around on his stool. He took another gentle sip at his vodka. I remembered what Esme Dupuy had said about O’Carolan and his beloved Irish whiskey kissing one last time.

  “You want a man hurts as bad as this one, Lewis, you don’t look for him down here with the rest of us. He’s been hurting so much for so long that he doesn’t think anyone else can hurt that bad, or ever has. So he’s already set himself apart from us. Outside. He’s gone on to some other level, one where maybe hurt doesn’t have anything to do with it any longer. You want to find him, you look up.”

  I stood there a moment.

  Then I said, “Thank you, Papa.”

  Chapter Eight

  I stopped by the apartment to pick up the.38 I carried sometimes back then, before I learned better. A manila envelope was stuffed halfway into the mailbox by my front door. Hosie Straughter’s name and address had been marked off and LEW scrawled above in what looked like crayon. Inside was a book, The Stranger, and a note in pencil on a piece of paper torn from a grocery sack.

  Thanks again, Griffin. This is one of my

  favorites-by way of appreciation. This

  copy’s been mine a long time. Now it’s yours.

  Since Claiborne was closest, I went there first. Not the smartest thing for a black man to do, start climbing around on roofs at 12:30 in the morning: I’ll give you that.

  A fire escape began about eight feet up the back of the building, really little more than a steel ladder set sideways and bolted into the bricks. I jumped, caught a rung and scrambled up.

  Business was still brisk at the Chick’n Shack half a block uptown. Mostly groups of three or four young men and singles coming home from work, from the look of it. A few cars, but most of them on foot.

  Just downtown I could see the Holy Evangelical Church, a single-story brown-brick structure with a stubby spire of multicolored plastic squares and rectangles. The church’s windows were painted over black, as were those of Honest Abe’s pawnshop (yellow cinderblock) and Lucky Pierre’s FaSTop (bare cypress). This was back before the city had bars on every door and window.

  Up here, you got a good view of the whole expanse, from Louisiana down at least to Terpsichore, just before the tangle of overpasses and dogleg streets leading into downtown New Orleans. It was the tallest building in the stretch; no one was going to spot you. Downtown buildings might as well be in another state. And you had a choice of flight paths: back down the fire escape or onto one of the adjoining roofs.

  He’d chosen the spot carefully.

  I squatted at the roof’s edge and sighted along an imaginary rifle. He’d have had the strap wound about his right arm for stability, maybe even a small folding tripod. High-resolution scope. Instead of tracking, he’d extrapolate the movement of his subject and sight in on where the subject would be, waiting for him to step into place. Hold his breath instinctively when that happened. Squeeze. Breathe out.

  I caught the merest glimmer of what it must have been like, a momentary connection far more emotional than intellectual, then it was gone. So much for blinding insight, for sudden epiphanies that change your life.

  Starting back down the fire escape, I heard voices below. Two men about my age stood by my car, one of those Galaxies with the bat-wing rear ends. The taller guy held a strip of flexible metal with a notch at the end. The shorter one held a brick. They were in conference.

  “You gentlemen manage on your own, or you need help?”

  “Keep on walking, man.” The tall one.

  “None of yo’ business.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Unmistakable mark of the amateur. Never willing to take advantage of the resources available. Always has to do things the hard way.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll ama yo’ teur.”

  “Man, what the fuck you-”

  He stopped because I’d stepped in and slammed my fist into his gut and he just couldn’t bring himself to go on. He went down instead. I grabbed the homemade Slim Jim as it went by and whacked it against the other one’s head. It made a singing sound. The short guy’s brick skidded into the street where a White Fleet Cab lurched over it. Something, possibly an elbow, cracked as he went down.

  I transferred funds, a couple hundred, from their pockets to my wallet, then unlocked the Ford, got in and fired it up, heading for Jefferson Avenue.

  Half the apartment complex there dated from the early fifties, textured stucco, French windows and medallions everywhere. The rest, a lower structure of interconnected wooden bungalowlike apartments, had been tacked on more recently: a kind of fanciful sidecar. All of it according to The Times-Picayune had been shut down for almost a year now. Funding had run out with renovation well under way. Balconies and entryways drooped in disrepair, bare two-by-fours showed in cavities where facades had been hammered partly through, piles of old lumber, flooring and plasterboard lay moldering in the yard and parking lot.

  On the right, an empty double lot stretched to the street corner. The other side looked down on a row of shotgun cottages. Across the street a small park with swing sets and picnic tables fronted a wooden fence and a line of identical condos each painted a different pastel.

  No easy access this time. I climbed a young elm and dropped onto a tarpaper roof awash in detritus. Beer bottles, scraps of roofing, remains of packing crates and take-out meals, bits of cast-off vegetation, clothing, cardboard, bits of cast-off lives. Near the back, however, in a kind of corridor formed by a sealed chimney and heating vent, all was in order. Against one end where these met, someone had propped a massive old door. Over it, a slab of plywood served as roof. Beneath were a legless chair, burned-down candles in coffee cans, scorched saucepans, a huddle of sheets and thin curtains torn into rags. A square of bricks stacked two deep, ash and chunks of wood burned to a weightless white heap within.

  Nothing to connect it wit
h the sniper, of course. The city was full of such desperate islands. Abandoned houses, boarded-up cafes and corner grocery stores, the culverts of open canals. Obviously the police didn’t think there was any direct connection. If they had, these things would have been carted off as evidence.

  All the same, it definitely looked as though someone had been living here. And while I kept telling myself it could have been anyone, myself wasn’t paying much attention to me.

  I climbed down a drainpipe at the building’s street-side corner, then sat in the car a while going over what I had learned.

  The reason it took so long was that I hadn’t learned anything, so I just kept going over it all again and again. But when you’re stuck, it doesn’t much matter how hard you rev the engine and spin the wheels. You have to find something solid. A board, a branch. Jam it in there, hit the gas once more, and you’re moving.

  Maybe myself had the board and was just keeping it out of sight.

  In which case I couldn’t do much besides wait him out-so I might as well get on with business.

  Having little inclination to revisit Dryades just yet, I drove down LaSalle to Loyola and headed on into downtown New Orleans. Parked in front of the telephone office on Poydras and walked up to Baronne. Not much traffic except for cabs. And while the Quarter would still be bustling, things this side of Canal were pretty much deserted. The few people I encountered strode purposefully along, staying well out on the sidewalk, keeping watch about them.

  I looked up. Toward the top of a mock-gothic office building, The Stanhope, with brass-clad revolving door and tiled, bright lobby at street level. Toward the crest of an art deco hotel hashed (judging from signs on windows) into a copy shop, dance studio, commercial photographer, credit union, tailor. It had to be one of those two buildings. But after half an hour of searching I couldn’t find any way of getting up either of them.