Up in Honey's Room cw-2

by Elmore Leonard

Walter’s cutters would arrive after dark and set to work on the cows and the heifer, have sides of beef hanging before morning. Darcy would arrive in his snub-nosed refrigerated van he’d bought at auction, and get the sides out of here before any government inspectors showed up with their meat stamps. He’d take the load to Walter’s market where they’d hang and chill for twenty-four hours before Walter dressed them out. There were sides usually hanging in the barn’s chill room, from cattle bought at legal sales for inspectors who dropped by unannounced.

  “That’s what they do,” Darcy said, “sneak up while you’re trying to make a living.”

  Jurgen had never met anyone like Darcy Deal, a former convict-they had imprisonment in common-who worked now as a cattle rustler and looked the part in his sweaty cowboy hat and run-down boots with spurs. Darcy had a hard, stringy build and seemed to prefer looking mean. Jurgen was hesitant the first time he approached him.

  “Do you ride a horse?”

  “You askin’ if I can?”

  “When you rustle the cattle.”

  “I work afoot. Shake out a rope on the cow, put a feed bag on her and lead her to the truck, if I don’t use a trailer.”

  “Then why do you wear spurs?”

  “I walk in a bar, they hear my spurs jingle jangle jingle they know who I am.” Darcy grinned, three or four days’ growth on his face. “My boots are about worn through, but I never once had these can openers off ’em.”

  Jurgen said, “I like the sound they make, that ching... ching, with each step you take.”

  “You hear it,” Darcy said, “look out. They’s a cowboy come in the bar.”

  Jurgen smiled. “Instilling fear in the hearts of the customers, uh?”

  Darcy said, “Somethin’ like that.”

  Jurgen asked him, “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re one of the Kraut prisoners broke out of somewhere. Walter says you stole a truck and drove out the front gate in it.” Darcy said, “I never tried to escape. I looked at gettin’ out in two years and I did, got paroled, but then busted my foreman’s jaw- we’re workin’ down in a mine and he give me some lip-so I was thrown back in to finish my time. This prison’s on a hill, two thousand yards from the Cumberland River, if you ever got a chance to see it from inside. Eddyville, named for a Civil War general.”

  Jurgen was thinking, General Eddie Vill?

  “General H. B. Lyon,” Darcy said. “Eddyville’s where he was from.”

  Jurgen said, “Well, we both know what it’s like to be a prisoner, don’t we?”

  Darcy said, “You don’t hardly have any accent.”

  “I try to improve my English.”

  “What’d you do in the war?”

  “I commanded a tank in the desert of North Africa, sat in the turret with field glasses and directed fire. Our sixty-millimeter gun could destroy a British Stuart at more than a thousand meters. Other times I flew a single-engine reconnaissance aircraft, looking for British tanks they would try to conceal, covering them with Bedouin tents.”

  “Is that right?” Darcy said, sounding interested, though Jurgen doubted the cowboy knew what he was talking about.

  Darcy said, “You must’ve killed some people.”

  Jurgen said, “Well, when we hit a tank it would often go up in flames. Sometimes one or two of the crew would get out.” He paused and said, “We would machine-gun them,” and paused again. “But not always.”

  “I been shot at,” Darcy said. “Haulin’ ass out of a pasture. I pick up steers from growers that set their price of beef high and wait for buyers who don’t mind payin’ it.”

  Jurgen had to think about this. He said, “The butcher is told how much he can charge for a pound of meat. But the grower, or the feeder, can ask any price he wants?”

  “That’s how she works.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Don’t knock it, it’s why we’re in the black market business makin’ a good buck.”

  “I’m surprised Walter has the nerve.”

  “You kiddin’? Walter’s fuckin’ the United States government, breakin’ the law in the name of Adolf Hitler, ’cause Walter’s a hunnert percent Kraut.”

  “You don’t care he’s your enemy?”

  “Walter? The enemy’s over across the ocean, Walter’s my partner.”

  “So you don’t care you’re breaking the law.”

  Darcy looked surprised. “It’s what I do. How I make my livin’. I round up cows in the dark of night. It don’t have nothin’ to do with the government, my gettin’ back at ’em for puttin’ me in jail. Man, I’m an outlaw. I been one since I was a kid. I stole cars, I sold moonshine, I hit guys and the fuckin’ court’d call it ‘assault to do great bodily harm.’ Damn right, guy gives me lip, I’m suppose to take it?”

  Jurgen was nodding. “Yes, of course, you’re an outlaw. You don’t need motivation to steal cows in the dead of night, other than it makes money for you.”

  “So I can eat,” Darcy said. “Listen, take a ride with me in my truck. I’ll show you how to rope a cow and put her in the trailer.

  Tell you what to say to her she won’t start mooin’ at you. You’re keepin’ an eye on the house, light showin’ in a window upstairs. You’re not nervous, but you wonder what the hell they’re doin’ they’re not in bed asleep.”

  “Or they’re in bed,” Jurgen said, “and enjoy to become intimate with the light on.”

  “My favorite place to screw Muriel,” Darcy said, “was on the squeaky glider on the front porch of her mom’s house. Was before we’re married. You ever met Honey?”

  Jurgen shook his head.

  “You ought to meet her. She’s the smartest girl I ever knew and she’s my sister. No, she use to be the smartest till she married Walter. He hasn’t told you about her?”

  Jurgen shook his head again. “You’re married?”

  “Sorta. I hardly ever see Muriel.”

  “Children?”

  “Listen, I spent every night of a year trying to knock Muriel up. It must be a female thing she can’t have children. But if you want to go out with me some night, become the world’s first Kraut rustler, lemme know.”

  Jurgen said, “I don’t have a cowboy hat.”

  Darcy said, “I got hats, partner. What size you wear?”

  Darcy stopped at a bar in Farmington and had a few shots with beer chasers thinking about his sister, wanting to know what she was up to visiting Walter. And who the guy was with her. Darcy hadn’t called Honey since he’d come up here, he was still getting around to it. He said, Shit, go on over there and introduce yourself to your sister and see if the guy’s with the law.

  It was dark by the time he left the bar and drove past the house, pulling his trailer.

  The car Honey’d been in wasn’t in the driveway. He cut through the field to the barn lot. The only cars here belonged to Walter’s Kraut meat cutters. Shit. He could say to Walter, “My sister come to visit you, huh?” Get him to tell what was going on. He’d take a leak and stop in the barn first. See how the cutters were doing and kid with ’em. Those old guys and their six-inch blades they kept sharpenin’, they could take the coat off a cow, Jesus, like it was buttoned on. There was only one area of their dressing down a cow where he disagreed with them. How they killed it.

  Jurgen was watching the guy acting as the stunner this evening, holding a .22-caliber rifle in one hand he pointed at the cow’s forehead, no more than a few inches from the end of the barrel, and shot it and the cow buckled in the chute, not dead but stunned, knocked cold.

  Coming up behind Jurgen, Darcy said, “You see the cow lookin’ up at the stunner? She’s thinkin’, The fuck you doin’ with a .22? Use a man’s gun. You want to kill me, fuckin’ kill me, man. Get her done.”

  Darcy, still talking, moved up next to Jurgen.

  “Cruelty to Animals says you got to stun the girl, so she won’t feel it when you hoist her up head-down and slice through her arteries and look out, take a quick
step back. You aren’t wearin’ that rubber apron ’cause it’s rainin’ out. Split her down the middle from asshole to brisket, pull out her tummies, her bladder, her kidneys. Pull the esophagus up through her diaphragm and it frees the organs hooked on to come loose. Take out all the nasty stuff-”

  “The offal,” Jurgen said.

  “That’s correct, what she was gonna make cow pies out of. Hell,” Darcy said, “all the time you spend in here watchin’, it tells me you’re thinkin’ of becomin’ a butcher once you’re free.”

  “I’m free now,” Jurgen said. “What I want to do is go out West and be a cowboy.”

  Walter came in while they were talking about going out on a dark night, what Darcy called “the owl hoot trail,” Jurgen serious, wanting to know if they could ride horses, do it as they did out West. Jurgen serious but sounding like he was kidding.

  He saw Walter approaching, Walter looking excited for a change, telling them, “Honig was here.”

  Jurgen said, “The girl in the car,” to Walter, “your former wife?”

  Walter said, “Yes, Honig,” and said to Darcy, “Did you see her?”

  “Out there on the road,” Darcy said, “but I wasn’t sure it was her.”

  “They came in the back,” Jurgen said, seeing the Pontiac again, “and turned around.”

  “My sis,” Darcy said. “I told you about her, Miss Sunshine? Use to be Walter’s old lady.” He said to Walter, “What’d she want, see if you become American yet? I didn’t recognize that guy she had with her.”

  “He’s a federal officer,” Walter said, “but is not with the Federal Bureau.” Walter’s hand went into his pocket as he turned to Jurgen. “He’s looking for you and Otto.”

  “He told you his name?”

  Walter’s hand came out of the pocket holding Carl’s card with the gold star engraved on it.

  Jurgen could feel it between his fingers, taking the card and seeing deputy u.s. marshal carlos huntington webster and thinking, You’ve found me.

  He would be seeing Carl again and liked the idea of it, talking to him, smiling at things he said, but didn’t want to go back to Oklahoma, not until the war was over and he could look up that marshal who had worked with Carl Webster, the one who’d been a bull rider in the rodeo before he became a marshal. Spend time with guys like that, and Carl Webster. Watch them and learn how to spit. There was a lot of spitting involved with chewing tobacco.

  “He didn’t want to search the house, the grounds?”

  “It was time for supper,” Walter said. “He was hungry, so he left . . . with Honig.”

  Jurgen thought he was going to say “with my Honey.”

  “But he’s coming back,” Jurgen said.

  “We have to believe that,” Walter said. “He knows you. You must have told him you lived here at one time and of course have friends here?”

  Jurgen nodded.

  “Yes, he’ll come back. I’m going to speak to Helmut,” Walter said, looking at the three cutters. They stood by the cow now hanging head-down, all three of them sharpening their knives. “Helmut, Reinhard and Artur, excellent men. Helmut will take you with him when he leaves.”

  Jurgen said, “I’m going to live with Helmut?”

  “No, you’re going to stay with the countess, Vera Mezwa. Helmut will deliver you. I’ll drive into Farmington to call her on a pay phone, tell her you’re coming. I think she won’t mind taking care of you, have something to do for Germany at this depressing time, something that will please her.”

  “It sounds like you’re giving me to her as a gift, something to cheer her up.” He thought Walter was smiling but couldn’t be sure. “Is she really a countess?”

  “She’s Ukrainian. Married a Polish count.”

  “Killed in the war.”

  “Yes, a hero. They sent his wife here, trained in military intelligence. Vera Mezwa was the most important German agent in America.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know. Older than you.”

  “Is she attractive?”

  “What difference does it make what she looks like? She’s going to hide you.”

  Jurgen believed a woman with the name Vera Mezwa, a countess, a German espionage agent, could not be as boring as Walter. He was ready to move on.

  Fourteen

  Vera Mezwa’s eyes and Jurgen’s eyes met on the same level. She took his hand, stepped close and kissed him on one cheek and then the other, Jurgen feeling her lips brush his skin and they were eye to eye again, Jurgen knowing she was glad to have him here but not making a show of it. He could tell by the way she took his arm saying, “Come, let’s sit down and be comfortable,” her English bearing the hint of a Slovak sound. He had known Ukrainians in Hamtramck, a part of Detroit, who spoke English trying to sound American. She said, “Tell me what you like to drink.”

  Her manner confident, the leader of a spy ring, but with a wonderful scent that softened her before his eyes. He saw her lying on a bed naked and imagined muscle beneath the curves of her body, but with the breasts of a bodybuilder, and could tell she dyed her hair, preferring the raw tint of henna and a deep-red lip rouge, quite startling against her pale, powdered features. She was a handsome woman in the style of Central Europe and he liked her immediately.

  “Whatever you’re having,” Jurgen said, confident it would be a drink with alcohol.

  Her heels brought her eye to eye with him, her age would be somewhere in her late thirties, perhaps forty. Her age didn’t matter to either of them. The living room furniture was formal, dull. Jurgen imagined it already here when she moved in. They took cigarettes from a silver dish, Vera lighting them with her Ronson, Vera sitting with him on the sofa, Vera facing him, her legs drawn up in a wool skirt, a shade of rose that matched the sweater she wore and was loose on her body, nothing beneath the sweater, pearls displayed in the open neck. Her head raised and she was looking past Jurgen.

  He turned enough to see a young man wearing a white apron over his T-shirt and red neckerchief standing in the room waiting, his hands on his hips, shoulders somewhat slumped, a slim young fellow standing relaxed as he waited.

  Vera said, “Bo, the vodka in the refrigerator, please.”

  Jurgen watched him turn without a word and go off through the dining room. He believed the young man wore his full head of blond hair in bangs and over his ears in the style of Buster Brown.

  “Bo’s my houseman,” Vera said, “Bohdan Kravchenko. He was my husband’s steward aboard ship when my husband, Fadey, was running the blockade during the siege of Odessa, June to October 1941. Perhaps you know already Fadey’s ship was sunk and he went down with it. Bo was in my employ when Odessa fell to the Romanians you pushed ahead of your troops. An Einsatzgruppen, one of your death squads, found him and put him in a labor camp with Jews, Communists, Romas, and made him wear a pink triangle that identified Bo as a homosexual. The Jews’ color was yellow.”

  Jurgen said, “He escaped?”

  “Finally,” Vera said. “But first Bohdan gave all his food each day for ten consecutive days to an inmate, a man who somehow was in possession of a butter knife and didn’t know what to do with it. Bo honed the small knife on a stone until he had the edge he wanted. He cut the throat of a guard who made him kneel down and open his mouth and the SS thug would try to piss in it from two meters away. Bo crept into the guards’ barracks, found the pisser sleeping and sliced open his throat, and two more while he was at it, without making a sound. He would have been shot whether they found he killed the brutes or not, they were shooting everybody. We left Odessa-I brought Bo with me to Budapest dressed as a woman and finally to America as part of the agreement I made with the German espionage service.”

  Vera stubbed out her cigarette and lighted another.

  “Listen to this. One night at the Brass Rail, downtown, he tells the sissies he’s getting drunk with he works for a German spy. The Federal Bureau hears of it. They ask Bohdan would he like to work for them, become an
agent of the United States and spy on me. Or, be locked up as an enemy alien and sent back to the Ukraine after the war. Bo hopes someday to become a citizen of the USA and he said yes, of course, and asked how much they would pay him. They asked him how much he valued his freedom. That was his pay. He tells me about it, he’s going to spy on me. I asked him, ‘What are they giving you, a medal?’ No, nothing. I said, ‘Why don’t you become a double agent and spy on them for me?’ I said, ‘Don’t we have a good time together? Don’t I let you wear my jewelry?’ It’s all costume. We make up things he gives them that sound to be true, so they’ll keep him in their employ. But they already knew things about me. That I was recruited by Miss Gestapo herself, Sally D’Handt, a famous agent for the Germans. That I went to spy school in Budapest and was accepted into Division One of Abwehr, the Intelligence Section. How could the Federal Bureau know all this about me? I was impressed.”

  Bohdan came to them with a frosted bottle of Smirnoff and aperitif glasses with stems he carried upright between his fingers.

  “Bo, I’m telling Jurgen what you do for the Federal Bureau.”

  Bo places the glasses on the cocktail table.

  “We love making up stories to tell them. How I overhear Vera talking on the phone about saboteurs planning to blow up the tunnel to Canada.”

  “And the Ambassador Bridge,” Vera said.

  Bo filled the three glasses and sat across the cocktail table from Vera and Jurgen, close enough to pick up a vodka, drink it off and pour himself another.

  Vera said, “Tell Jurgen what you’d do if you were Walter.”

  “If I had to go through life looking like Himmler? I’d cut my own throat. With a butter knife I have, a keepsake.” He winked at Jurgen.

  “Be nice,” Vera said. “Captain Schrenk is to be held in respect.” She said to Jurgen, “If Bo turns the music on and asks you to dance, tell him thank you but you’d rather not. Bo sometimes is impulsive.”

  “With the kind of impulses she likes,” Bo said.

  Jurgen watched Vera drink a shot of vodka, refill the glass and turn to him. “What are you waiting for?”