“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me what it costs.”
“Since it’s not for you, tell whoever it’s for to come and pay for it.”
Kamp shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Emma. You’ll never change.”
AS HE MADE HIS WAY from the drugstore to the town hall, it occurred to him that had he not just finished butchering a pig and stepped out of the slaughterhouse, he wouldn’t have seen Daniel Knecht running up the road, nor would he have seen Detective John Heist raise his pistol. If he hadn’t seen that, he wouldn’t have cracked Knecht with a shpawd, wouldn’t have had to walk to Bethlehem, to talk to the High Constable John Druckenmiller or to the Druggist, E. Wyles. Kamp saw a long iron chain of contingencies reaching straight from a butchered hog to the door of the Big Judge.
The door itself bore a brass sign at eye level that read “Strictly No Admittance.” Kamp turned the doorknob and went straight in without knocking. The Judge sat where he’d been the last time Kamp saw him, sitting in the exact same position. Blended tobacco smoke twisted slowly from the Judge’s pipe made of briar wood, held in the man’s right hand. The Judge sat looking out the window through wooden blinds, the last orange rays of afternoon slanting down to the Persian rug, itself an explosion of geometric shapes and patterns working outward from a single triangle within a circle. His black court robes hung on the wall. The Judge spoke without changing his position or even looking at him.
“Wendell, Wendell. Good to see you. Close the door.”
“What do you need, Judge?”
“Need? Nothing.” The Judge took a long pull on his pipe and exhaled slowly. “The problem is that we already don’t need anything. We’re suffering from the need of need.” Everything Tate Cain said sounded like a pronouncement and a last word, as if emanating from the void and then returning to it.
Kamp shifted impatiently. “You just wanted to say hello then?”
“Why the bad mood, Wendell? Long day?” The Judge turned to face him.
Tate Cain wore a Victorian dress the color of sapphire and a full gray beard that flowed over the ornate collar fashioned out of white lace. Atop the beard sat a wide, wide triangular nose and above that, two eyes that always seemed to him to be lit by blue flame. Beneath the dress, Kamp saw that the Judge was wearing black leather lace-up boots, also in the Victorian style.
Growing up, he'd often seen the Judge dressed in women’s clothing, so while he knew it wasn’t the norm and that it shouldn’t be mentioned in public, he also accepted it without needing to analyze. Besides, Kamp had an aunt and uncle who were twins. No, the Judge’s dress didn’t faze him, although a number of other things about him did. For as long as he could remember, Tate Cain always held all the cards.
“There is only one need, Wendell.”
Kamp sighed, realizing that he’d walked into yet another elliptical, obtuse, one-way dialogue with the Judge.
“What’s that, Judge?”
“While you were at the university, did you study the writings of this man, Charles Darwin?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did you learn about him?”
“What do you want, Judge?”
“Wendell, what did you learn about Darwin?”
“When he was a child, he liked to collect beetles.”
The Judge looked back out the window, refilled his pipe, struck a match, and lit it. “Yes, the child mind. I understand young Charles didn’t want to be a physician, didn’t care to be respectable. And if he wouldn’t become a physician, his father wanted him to be a religious, an Anglican priest. And he tried, he tried. But it wasn’t in Darwin’s nature. When he sought, he found something he didn’t need. He didn’t need faith. In the process he found the secret, Wendell, he found what everyone, what every living thing needs. What you need.”
“I need to leave.”
The Judge took a deep pull on the pipe. Smoke cascaded from his mouth as he spoke.
“Your father wanted you to be a physician, too, as I recall. He wanted you to be respectable, wanted something more for you than a life spent with your lungs packed with coal dust or up to your elbows in pig guts. But you didn’t want to be a physician, either. You wanted something different, always something different.”
“What’s that?”
“You wanted to see for yourself, naturally, to know, to understand. That’s what you wanted. But that’s not what you need. What you need is the same as what everyone else needs. You don’t need what’s in that bag, though at times, you think you do. No, what you need is simply to survive. To survive. And you need your child to survive.”
“What’s your point, Judge?” In these moments, Kamp always felt as if he were caught in a vortex, swirling down.
“You need to make a living. The world is evolving, Wendell. Look around. Look out the window. Everything is changing. You must change with it, in spite of the past, in spite of yourself. Your family will need more from you than you can provide butchering hogs or chopping firewood, especially with winter coming. You have a fine mind and a great strength within you, Wendell. I can put it to good use.”
Kamp stared at the patterns in the rug.
“Now just listen, Wendell. The police need—”
“The police?”
“Well, the city needs someone like you, someone with your powers of observation not to mention your physical skills and your ability with a gun. They need a detective. Even better, a war hero detective. I’m seeing to it that they hire one.”
“What do you think needs detecting?”
“See for yourself, Wendell. Wrongdoers. The criminal element. That roustabout you brought into the station isn’t what I mean, either. I’m talking about serious malefactors, real villains. The parasites evolve right along with the beasts of the field. The more this town grows, the more of them there will be. I want you to investigate the crimes, collect the facts, make the connections and help bring the wrongdoers to justice. I want you to be a police detective, Wendell.”
“Christ, no.”
“You’ll be paid a good wage, you won’t need to wear any kind of uniform.”
“Get someone else.”
“You can do the job whatever way you please. You won’t be chained to another man’s timetable. You won’t have to answer to anyone.”
“Except you.”
“You’ll investigate crimes and report your findings to the prosecutor. I won’t be involved until the prosecutor makes his case in my courtroom. You won’t owe me anything for giving you the opportunity.”
“Sure, sure.”
The Judge placed his pipe in an ashtray and folded his hands across his belly. As usual, Kamp thought, the Judge knew all the details, all the angles and exactly where to apply the pressure. The Judge even held the deed to his farm.
He rubbed his right temple. The Judge opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk toward Kamp.
“This is a contract. Sign it, and you can start working.”
“No, thanks.”
The Judge took the paper back, folded it neatly and placed it in an envelope. He stood up to his full height, six foot three, six five with the heels. He handed the envelope to Kamp.
“Think about it, and let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
Kamp put on his hat, picked up the envelope and walked out the door. He stepped out of the building into the fading light and heard the heavy click-clack of train wheels on their rails. Kamp saw the smoke billowing from the stacks of the ironworks. Indeed, he thought, there had already been great changes to the town, an evolution barely begun. He took the morphine back to the police station and made Druckenmiller promise that he’d give it to Knecht upon his release. He further instructed the High Constable to make sure that Knecht paid the Druggist, E. Wyles in full. After calling him a “damn fool” and a “nitwit,” Druckenmiller shoved the morphine back in Kamp’s hand. He walked out of town that day with a heavier burd
en but a clearer conscience.
And as for the Judge’s comment that he was a war hero, he realized that although many people saw him that way, he himself had long since dispensed with the idea that anything he’d ever done rose to the level of heroism. He pondered the new complexities introduced into his life by his visit to town, then let it all go. He savored the fact that, for the moment, the warring factions in his mind had ceased hostilities. Kamp walked the miles back to his home and as the daylight gave out, he watched each star flicker into view, at first faintly, then brighter, and just before slipping footfall after footfall into bliss delirium, he wished that life meant more than bare survival.
He walked with the stars above and the dirt road under his feet, and his thoughts returned. He thought about how little he’d needed until now, how when he’d been in the war, he’d needed almost nothing. But now, Kamp knew he’d need more. He had no money in the bank and little stored away in barns. He still didn’t believe he needed a job. He knew a job would be nothing more than a way to forestall something inevitable, though he could not imagine what. As he rounded the last bend toward home, he saw a candle burning in a downstairs window and another one upstairs. He thought she would have been asleep by now.
Bounding up the front steps, he noticed that the candle in the front window had melted down so far that the wick floated in a red puddle of wax, most of which had already dripped off the sill to the floor. He ran up the stairs and found her in bed with the blankets in a heap next to her. She thrashed from side to side. Kamp went to her and took her by the shoulders to calm her.
He said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” Her nightgown was soaked through with perspiration, her long, straight hair matted to her forehead and cheeks. She was gasping for breath, though the fever had broken.
“It was a nightmare.” She gasped for air between the words. “I had a nightmare about you.”
He cradled her the way he’d been held on the battlefield when they thought he was finished.
She twisted her head to look up at him and said, “Don’t let them do it.”
“I won’t.”
He felt her body go rigid. She said, “No, don’t let them do it to you!”
It wasn’t uncommon for her to suffer fevers as well as troubling dreams and visions. But they unnerved him all the same. And now that she was carrying their child, he feared for them both, and for himself. When he pulled her against him, he felt forces mustering in him and resolving into devotion. He cradled her for a long time, until he felt the tension drain from her body and saw the steady beats of her heart entrain with the lights of the last fireflies of summer.
KAMP DIDN’T SLEEP. He sat in a chair by their bed, watching the rise and fall of her breathing and letting moments from the day float in his mind. The mass of sensory information in his memory swirled together and then straightened out in a sequence that he could sift through and examine in the quiet darkness, and on the basis of his examination determine how he felt about each matter and possibly make a decision or two about how to proceed. For instance, he retraced the chain of events that carried him from his farm to Bethlehem and back again. In the night calm, he questioned why he’d seized upon the notion of getting medicine for the brother of the dope fiend Knecht. He also questioned why he’d gone to see the Judge, why the Judge wanted him to be a detective and why he’d immediately rejected the notion. And beyond that, he wondered what force impelled him to keep asking these kinds of questions, night after night, instead of sleeping.
Kamp let the words of all the questions form a sphere before his mind’s eye. The sphere spun faster and faster until the questions blurred together and produced lights of intense color. Eventually, the sphere began to slow down, the colors fading away and the black letters of the words coming back into plain view. By the time it stopped, he could clearly see that the questions had been replaced by answers, each one sufficient. He didn't remember having to do this as a child but neither did he remember his life having been this complex.
THREE
HE HEARD DAWN in the murmuring of birds. She wasn’t moving, apart from the easy rise and fall of her chest. Sound asleep. Kamp knew if he wanted to hop the train, he’d need to hurry. He hustled down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he pulled on his boots and sailed out the back door. He grabbed two eggs from the henhouse, cracking the first one, tilting his head back, and dropping the contents into his mouth. Still warm. He did the same with the second egg. He heard the train whistle wail in the far distance and figured he had roughly five minutes to cover the half mile down to the place he liked to catch out. By the time he hit the footpath to the tracks, he heard the click-clack and the screech of the wheels as the train began its curve that would bring it parallel to the road to his farm. In order to get to the tracks, he had to cross Shawnee Creek in the dark. He knew where to step by heart, landing nimbly on each round rock in the creek and hopping to the next one, guided only by the memory stored in his body. Kamp clambered up the bank and onto the gravel by the tracks just as the headlight of the 2-8-0 locomotive came into view. The Black Diamond Unlimited was right on time.
The speed of the train varied depending on the weather, and when the tracks were wet, the train was slow enough that he could trot alongside and climb aboard without much effort. On a morning such as this, clear and dry, the train would surely be moving faster, maybe even eight to ten miles an hour. He let car after car pass, hoppers loaded with coal that glinted above him in the moonlight. The boxcars would follow the hoppers, and Kamp would need a head of steam if he had any chance of making it. The trick was to get into an even stride while making sure not to trip over the railroad ties, and to do that he ran two ties at a time, a feat that required nearly perfect balance and agility. At the same time, he needed to turn to look left at the passing cars. Boxcars began to pass him, and he started his run.
Kamp bounded along the ties, swiveling his head like a sideways metronome, lungs starting to burn. An open car pulled alongside him, and he readied himself. A mistake here would cost everything, though the train took no notice. He looked directly into the blackness in the boxcar and made his leap. In a single motion he caught the iron door latch with both hands and swung his right leg toward the open door in a kind of pirouette. He’d always heard that you’re not supposed to let go of the latch until your body is completely inside the car, but he’d done it so many times that he knew precisely where he was and that he’d land on the hard boards inside the car. The momentum of his leap carried him all the way. Upon landing his fingers found cracks in the floor and held them tight so that if the car lurched he wouldn’t be thrown out. Guys in the army told him that you’re only supposed to hit a rolling boxcar as a last resort, but Kamp figured if you really know how to do something, you can do it as much as you want.
JONAS BAUER SURVEYED THE LANDSCAPE from where he stood, amid the tall trees in his front yard down to the road, across the creek to the railroad tracks and beyond to land newly cleared for cornfields and even farther than that to the mountains. Since the year before his first daughter was born, sixteen years already, Jonas Bauer had arisen each day to hack and scrape at the bottom of a hole, to chip coal from the earth and cart it to the surface so that it could be hauled away and burned up straightaway. For all those years, Bauer thought, he’d labored for the sake of a hope for a future for his family and for himself. In truth, though, in the stark, silent moments down the shaft, a whisper told him the single reason he mined coal was to survive. He and every man and boy alongside him fought to survive the cave-ins and the blowouts, the routine catastrophes that stole limbs from the miners, robbed wives of husbands and threatened to rob Jonas Bauer of his own present and future.
Even in the past week, six men had perished in an explosion with an unknown cause. All Jonas Bauer knew was that one moment he was shoveling loose coal from the floor, and the next he was laid out flat and looking into the blue eyes of his friend Roy Kunkle, already dead. Bauer couldn’t see th
e rest of Kunkle’s body and thought it must have been obscured by smoke and coal dust, but he noticed that in fact it was no longer attached to Kunkle’s head. Bauer also realized that it wasn’t just men killed in the explosion. A boy of twelve was found face-down in the shaft, covered by a thin coal dust shroud. Once Bauer returned fully to his senses, he and the other surviving miners placed the dead as carefully as they could in a coal cart. Bauer knew they’d lost their lives through no fault of their own, no fault of anyone’s as far as he could tell. Jonas Bauer carried his friend Roy Kunkle’s head out of the mine and handed it to the undertaker, already on the scene.
Bauer had worked back and forth over that moment a thousand times already, the moment immediately preceding the explosion. Bauer reviewed it in his mind again and again to discern whether he could have prevented the blast. And he wanted to memorize every detail so that if the same situation arose again, he would recognize it and clear everyone out before it blew. But Bauer knew there was nothing more to learn and that he’d never find the bottom of it or anything it might have meant. He knew that death’s hand was invisible before it struck and that remembering it over and over amounted to nothing more than waves rippling out from the explosion itself.
But on this morning, Jacob Bauer pulled in as much clean cold morning air as his lungs could hold, and he thought not of survival, but of increase. He and his wife had been harvesting green beans, carrots, cabbage and potatoes from the garden beside the house, and his girls were picking apples from the orchard, piece-way up the hill. Not only wouldn’t his family freeze this winter, but they’d be well-fed and warm. The firewood was already stacked high in the cellar. And Jonas Bauer had been able to save money, too, a little and a little more each year. Someday, even just a year or two from now, he’d be able to buy his house and the land around it outright. He dreamed of the day he’d go to the courthouse and pay his landlord, the Honorable Tate Cain, in full. And then the judge would hand over the deed and Bauer would be free of one burden, at least. Bauer and his wife Rachel agreed that there was one more way they could make extra money each month. They could take in a boarder. As always, on this particular Sunday morning Jonas Bauer was ready for church before Rachel and the girls. So he went to the shed behind the house and found a block of wood, a can of paint and a brush. Jonas Bauer painted “Room for Rent” on the wood and placed it on the sill of a window in the front of the house.
Ax & Spade: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 1) Page 2
