So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  “Focusing on the hotel?”

  “Nope. All the historical attention paid to this place has revolved around the hotels and Taggart and Sinclair, but there’s a strong black history, too. Joe Louis came down here all the time, used to train here before big fights, thought there was some sort of magic to the springs. Swore he never lost a fight after leaving the place. He didn’t stay in this hotel, though—stayed at a place called the Waddy that was for blacks. And they had a baseball team made up of porters and cooks and groundskeepers from the hotels who played with the major-league clubs that came down here for spring training. Played well with them, is the way it’s told, beat the Pirates once. The black teams they had down here could’ve played with anybody.”

  Eric finally had the camera in the bag. It took him a few seconds to realize that Kellen Cage had stopped talking and was waiting on a response.

  “I read some about Louis,” Eric said. “Didn’t know the baseball stuff.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of more important elements to it, but I always catch myself telling the sports side first. Most of what I’m doing is focused around that Waddy Hotel. It’s important to bring these two hotels back to life. I just want to make sure the Waddy doesn’t get forgotten.”

  Eric slid the camera bag over his shoulder, then went to pick up the tripod, dropped it, and nearly lost the camera bag when he bent over to pick it up. Kellen Cage reached down and took the tripod.

  “You want to go on to the hotel and grab that drink as planned?” he said. “No offense, my man, but you look like you need one.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Yeah, I could definitely use a drink.”

  9

  HE DIDN’T GO UP to the room, choosing instead to bring the camera along with him as they walked across the atrium, Kellen explaining something about the bar’s hours and Eric hardly hearing him.

  Don’t overthink it, Eric, the way you did with the Harrelson tape. The way you did in that valley in the Bear Paws. In fact, those aren’t fair comparisons. There might have been some sort of a tug, those times. Some sort of intuition. But this thing? That train was in your imagination, brother. Nothing else.

  Eric was actually pleased to have Kellen Cage walking alongside him now. Cage promised something valuable—a distraction. Talk to him, have a few drinks, forget this moment. Forget this trembling in the gut, this foolish, ominous sense.

  “What’re you having?” Cage said when they reached the bar.

  “Grey Goose on the rocks with a lemon.”

  Cage turned and spoke to the bartender and Eric eased onto the stool, turned and looked back at the sprawling atrium and took a deep breath. He just needed to relax. This thing, well, it wasn’t anything, really. Not even worth analyzing. Just forget it.

  “So, I’m truly happy to hear you’re interested in Campbell Bradford,” Kellen said, “because he’s one of the biggest question marks I’ve got left. The old boy just disappeared when he left town.”

  “Made a pile of money after he went,” Eric said. “His daughter-in-law’s the one who hired me. Said he’s worth two hundred million or somewhere in that neighborhood.”

  “You mean he was worth that much,” Kellen said. “Not is. Was. Has to be dead.”

  “No, but he’s close.”

  Kellen tilted his head back and arched an eyebrow. “The man is alive?”

  “He was when I left Chicago, at least.”

  Kellen shook his head. “No way. Not the same Campbell.”

  Eric frowned. “His daughter-in-law told me he’d grown up here and then ran away as a kid.”

  “The Campbell Bradford I know of ran away from town, too. But he was a grown man, left a wife and kid behind. And he was born in eighteen ninety-two, which would put him at, what, one hundred and sixteen now? Your man can’t be that old, right?”

  “He’s ninety-five.”

  “Then he ain’t the same guy.”

  “Well, must be two people with that name. Maybe my guy is your guy’s son?”

  “He had a son named William who stayed in town.” Kellen’s face was tinged with disappointment. “Hell, you’re not going to be able to help me. We got two different people.”

  “They have to be connected,” Eric said. “Name like that, town like this? Have to be related somehow.”

  Kellen took a drink, then said, “The Campbell I know of, he was a dark man.”

  “How so?”

  “There was a time this area was a gambler’s paradise, back in the twenties. Bunch of money poured in, bunch of debts piled up, and Campbell Bradford was the man who saw to balancing the scales.”

  “Some sort of enforcer?” Eric said.

  “You got it. He was the muscle, the debt collector. People were terrified of the man. Thought he was evil. The story I’m interested in, the way this guy intersects with my own project, is that there’s a legend he murdered Shadrach Hunter after the stock market collapsed in 1929, just as this town dried up. It’s unreal how fast this place emptied out after Black Tuesday. One day this was among the world’s elite resorts, a year later it’s empty and on its way to being a ruin. Pretty damn fast change, you know?”

  “Who was Shadrach Hunter?”

  “Ran the black casino,” Kellen said. “And, yes, there was such a thing. Started out as a small poker game in a shitty back room, and grew. There were so many blacks down here working at the hotels, but they couldn’t socialize there, so they threw dice and played cards down at Shadrach’s. Before long, though, the thing grew some legs. Campbell Bradford was helping control all the gaming in the valley for white people—working with Ed Ballard, who owned this hotel, only Campbell was a lot dirtier than Ballard, who was far from clean himself—but he didn’t have anything to do with Shad’s game. According to the legend, Shad was a miser, skimmed money from every game and saved it, just stockpiled. Always wore a gun in his belt and had a couple big guys running with him at all times, bodyguards.

  “Well, after the market crashed, this whole town shut down and the cash flow vanished. ’Round that time, Shadrach Hunter was murdered, and Campbell Bradford disappeared, leaving his family penniless.” Kellen spread his hands. “So, you can see where the myth developed. I’ve got some great stories about it but damn few facts. Was hoping you could offer some.”

  “All I’ve got is a dying old millionaire in Chicago who goes by the same name.”

  “No way it can be the same guy?”

  “He’s old, but he’s not a hundred and sixteen.”

  “Well, I’ll put you in touch with a man named Edgar Hastings tomorrow,” Kellen said. “I’ll be interested to see what he thinks. He knew the family, is one of the last people alive in this town who has clear memories of Campbell Bradford. Campbell’s got a great-grandson left in the area, too, but I won’t put you in touch with him.”

  There was a dry smile on his lips. Eric said, “What’s his deal?”

  “Oh, a bit on the surly side. Edgar warned me, said it would be best not to talk to him, but I ignored that advice and went to his house. Took about two minutes for him to run me off the place. Threw a beer bottle at my car as I was leaving.”

  “Charming.”

  “Hospitable, no question. But assuming he isn’t going to be more helpful with you than he was with me, Edgar’s all I have to offer.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, how’d you get into this business?” Kellen said. “Want to be a filmmaker all along, or was it a hobby that turned professional, or…?”

  He let his voice trail off, waiting, the question asked in absolute innocence, but Eric was feeling anger bleed through him. I was a filmmaker, he wanted to shout, and if a few breaks had gone my way and a few assholes had stayed out of it, you’d be asking me for an autograph right now.

  “I went to film school,” he said, trying to keep his voice loose. “And then I worked out in California for a while. I was a director of photography on some stuff.”

  “Things I’d know?”

  Yes,
things he would know. But if he named those, he saw the inevitable follow-up question—What films have you worked on recently? And what would Eric say to that? Why, you mean you haven’t seen the Anderson wedding video? Or the Harrelson funeral piece? What, you live in a cave, man?

  “Probably not,” he said. “I couldn’t stick it out there, so I came back to Chicago and started doing my own thing.”

  Kellen nodded. “‘Director of photography’—what’s that mean, exactly?”

  “You run the cameras and the lighting crew. The director’s in charge of the film as a whole, obviously, but the DP is in charge of the images.”

  “Getting the ones the director wants?”

  Eric gave a small smile. “Getting the ones he needs. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they aren’t.”

  Kellen’s face was showing genuine interest, but Eric didn’t want to step any deeper into this conversation. He said, “You know, I’d actually like to get a few shots in here,” basically just to buy some silence.

  “You got plenty to work with,” Kellen said. “Check out the fireplace.”

  Eric turned to look at the fireplace near the bar. It, like the hotel, was both beautiful and massive. The facade was built out of river stones, with a mural painted across their surfaces. The mural depicted swirling blue waters and lush green fields, a small image of the hotel set back and to the left, behind a buckeye tree. In the upper-right corner, perched above the tumbling water, was Sprudel—the West Baden companion to French Lick’s Pluto, god of the underworld. He looked more like a gnome than a devil, but it was enough to remind Eric of the black train, and that sent a dark flourish through him. He had seen the train. No doubt about it. So what the hell did that mean? Was he losing his damn mind?

  “Was a time they burned fourteen-foot logs in there,” Kellen said. “Imagine that, right? Like cutting telephone poles in half and tossing them into the fireplace. You ought to get a shot of it.”

  Eric nodded, got the camera out but didn’t put it on the tripod, just stood and held it up to his shoulder, turned and focused on the mural and watched the Sprudel figure fill the lens.

  There was a piano not far from the bar, a full-size grand, and a man in a tuxedo was playing it. Eric swiveled to catch a shot of it, and the piano player saw him, looked back at the camera and winked. For some reason that made Eric turn away immediately, lower the camera and click it off and put it back in the bag. When he straightened from the bag he was dizzy, and squares of light floated in front of his eyes when he faced the rows of bottles behind the bar.

  “Did that quick,” Kellen said.

  “Light’s wrong,” Eric muttered, reaching for his drink. He took a long swallow and blinked a few times, waiting for steadiness to return. It didn’t.

  The size of the rotunda was getting to him now, giving him a strange sense of vertigo even though he was standing at the bottom of it, feet firm on the floor. The place was just too damn open and too damn big. He and Kellen were standing at the short length of bar that extended into the atrium, but opposite them the bar was enclosed, secluded in a small room with wood paneling and dim lights. He suddenly wanted to get in there. Into the tighter space, into the dark.

  But Kellen Cage was still talking, going on about the Waddy Hotel and a Negro League baseball team called the Plutos, so Eric put one hand on the bar and one foot on the brass rail to steady himself, had another long pull of the Grey Goose. Let the guy talk, don’t freak out. There was no problem here. Everything was fine.

  His mouth was dry despite the drink, and Kellen Cage’s voice seemed to be coming from far away, with a trace of an echo to it. The lights in the atrium were growing brighter, slowly but obviously, as if someone had a hand on a dimmer switch and was rotating it gently, turning up the wattage. The headache was back, a faint throb down at the base of his skull, and that too-large buffet dinner was shifting in his stomach.

  He put both hands on the bar, leaning onto the cold granite top, and was about to interrupt Kellen Cage to say he needed to step outside and get some air, when a new sound replaced that strange, echoing conversation around him. Music, a clear melody, pure and beautiful. Strings. A cello in the background, maybe, but at the forefront was a violin, a violin played as sweetly as anything Eric had ever heard. It was a soothing sound, a caress, and he felt the trapped air leave his lungs and the headache fade and his stomach settle. The cello hit on a low, long note and then the violin came back in over the top, soaring now, exuberant, and Eric was in awe of the beauty of it, turned to look for the source. It had to be live; he’d been around a lot of recording equipment and was certain they had yet to invent something that could capture sound this well.

  The atrium was empty except for a few people in chairs, no band in sight, nothing but the piano player. He turned to look at him again then as the violin music dipped away, the song sad and sweet again. The piano player had his head bowed, and his hands were flying along, their motions completely out of sync with the strings. But the violin piece was coming from the piano. There wasn’t any doubt about it. The thing was no more than thirty feet away and Eric, blessed with good ears and better vision, knew without question that the violin music was coming from beneath the lid of that grand piano.

  “You dig the music, huh?” Kellen Cage said.

  Eric was still staring, waiting for something that showed him he was wrong but finding nothing—the piano, somehow, was playing a strings melody. The most beautiful strings melody he’d ever heard. But the hands didn’t match. The hands were not playing this song.

  “What’s this song?” he said. His voice was a rasp.

  “Huh?” Cage said, leaning closer, smelling of cologne.

  “What’s the name of this song?”

  Kellen Cage pulled his head back and gave Eric a curious smile. “You kidding me? It’s the thing from Casablanca, man. Everybody knows this one. ‘As Time Goes By.’”

  That wasn’t the song Eric was hearing, but he could tell that Kellen was right from the way the piano player’s hands moved, locked in that gentle, familiar rhythm.

  “I mean the violin thing,” Eric said.

  “Violin?” Kellen said, and then the piano player’s tuxedo was gone and in its place he wore a rumpled suit and a bowler hat, and if Kellen said anything else, Eric did not hear it. He was staring at the piano player, whose face was hidden by the angle and by the bowler hat. Just over his shoulder, standing not five feet away, was a tall, thin boy with a violin at his shoulder, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He wore ill-fitting clothes, his bony forearms protruding from the shirtsleeves and several inches of socks exposed. His blond hair had not been cut in many weeks. There was an open violin case at his feet with scattered bills and coins tossed inside.

  For a moment they just played on in that soft duet, the boy always with eyes shut, and then the man at the piano looked up. He lifted his head and looked Eric full in the face and smiled wide, and when he did, the beautiful, haunting strings melody shattered once again into a violent, urgent sawing, the notes frenzied and terrifying.

  Eric opened his hand and the glass fell from it and hit the edge of the bar before dropping to the tile floor and breaking, sending splinters of glass sliding in all directions. The moment the glass broke, the music vanished. Cut off in midnote, like somebody had jerked out a stereo power cord. With it went the boy with the violin and the man in the bowler hat, replaced by the first piano player, who frowned but didn’t stop playing, bowed his head again, and now Eric could hear the song—“You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss…”

  “As Time Goes By.” Made famous by Casablanca. Kellen was right, everybody knew this one.

  “Uh-oh, going to need a mop if you want to finish that drink,” the bartender said, smiling, jocular. Eric felt Kellen’s hand on his arm, the grip strong.

  “You okay? Eric? You all right?”

  He was now. On one level, at least. On another…

  “You mind if we go somewhere else?” Eric sa
id. “There’s gotta be someplace to get a drink that isn’t in this hotel.”

  Kellen Cage was watching him with raised eyebrows, but he gave a slow nod and set his drink down and released Eric’s arm.

  “Sure, man. There’s places.”

  He felt better as soon as they were outside. It was still warm, had to be close to eighty, but some of the humidity had left with the sun, and the air outside the hotel was fresh and fragrant, pushed by a mild breeze.

  “You didn’t look so good back there,” Kellen said as they went around the building and up toward the parking lot.

  “Got a little dizzy,” Eric said.

  “What were you talking about with the violins, though?”

  “Just confused.”

  Logical thing to do was shake Kellen’s hand, tell him it had been good talking, and then go up to the room and get some sleep. Something seemed to be tugging him elsewhere, though. He wanted to be away from the hotel.

  “Head up to the casino?” Kellen asked as they approached the parking lot.

  Eric shook his head. “No, I’d rather find someplace”—without so many lights—“quieter. Smaller.”

  Kellen pursed his lips, thinking. “Be honest with you, there aren’t many places around here. There’s a little bar up the road that’s decent, though. Called Rooster’s. Went in there a couple times for lunch. Friendly woman behind the bar, if nothing else.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Kellen lifted his hand and punched a button on his key chain and the lights of a car in front of them flicked on. A black Porsche Cayenne that looked brand-new.

  “They must pay students better than they did when I was in school,” Eric said.

  “Nah, I bought this with my side venture. Sling a little bit of that crack.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Kellen smiled. “One of these days I’m going to get a white guy to believe that.”

  “Matter of time,” Eric agreed, walking around to the passenger side, opening the door, and sliding into the leather seat. “It is a damn nice car, though.”