Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  But not even that had calmed Frank down. When they’d driven into town yesterday for cigarettes, he’d used a pay phone to call some buddies and ask about national coverage. He came back to the car saying Cronkite wouldn’t shut up about the “national scandal” and all the big-city papers were riding the story hard. All weekend, Sonny had sensed that Frank was coming to some kind of decision. And if he was . . . that meant changes for them all.

  Even Morehouse seemed unsettled by the anger that seethed through Frank’s pores like sour sweat. Sonny studied the two men with clinical detachment. The gentle giant had done his share of killing during the war, but Morehouse had quickly grown soft in civilian life, putting on eighty pounds of new fat. He stood with his thumbs hooked behind the straps of his overalls and masticated a blade of grass as though it required all his concentration. By contrast, Frank Knox still had a washboard stomach, ropy muscles with pipeline veins running along them, and eyes that Sonny had never seen more relaxed than when behind the sights of a .30-caliber machine gun.

  Sonny didn’t push Frank for more information; whatever was coming would arrive in its own time. Keeping Morehouse’s body between himself and the sinking sun, Sonny sipped the Jax and watched Frank’s teenage son spray rooster tails out in the reddish-brown river behind his father’s souped-up bass boat.

  “There’s reporters crawling all over Neshoba County,” Frank said, basting the gator meat with his special sauce. “Whole damn country’s stirred up, and it’s gonna get worse.”

  Sonny took a bent Camel from his shirt pocket and lit it with a Zippo. “I heard they had navy divers up there, helping search for those corpses. You believe that?”

  “Navy pukes,” Frank muttered, reaching out to turn up the volume on a GE transistor radio. Marty Robbins was singing “Girl from Spanish Town.” Whenever Frank saw a Japanese radio, he’d slam it into the nearest wall, and no one ever protested. “But it wasn’t any navy diver found them bodies,” he said.

  “Who found ’em, then?” asked Morehouse.

  “It ain’t who, Mountain. It’s how.”

  Morehouse still looked lost, but Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “He’s saying they got rats up there just like we do down here.”

  Frank nodded. “Federal informants, they call ’em. Paid Judases is what they are. Feds never would have found them bodies without help.”

  “I heard the reward was twenty-five thousand dollars,” Morehouse said in an awestruck voice. “That’s enough money to buy a house and a truck and a boat besides.”

  Frank speared him with a glare. “Would you sell out your ancestors for twenty-five grand, Glenn?”

  Morehouse’s eyes bugged, and his cheeks filled with blood. “Hell, no! You know that, Frank.”

  “My wife told me something weird this morning,” Sonny said thoughtfully. “Her sister lives up in Kemper County, and she heard some Italian bastard was going around Neshoba threatening people. She heard he beat up a Klansman, pulled down his drawers, shoved a pistol up his butt, and asked for the burial location. She said some Klan boys thought he was a mob button man.”

  “When exactly did she tell you this?” Frank asked.

  “This morning, in the camper. She talked to her sister just before we pulled out of town Friday.”

  While Frank considered this rumor, Jim Reeves began singing “He’ll Have to Go.” “Gentleman Jim” had died in a plane crash near Nashville only nine days ago, and disc jockeys had been playing his records practically nonstop ever since.

  “Bullshit,” Frank decided at length. “Not that the FBI hasn’t cozied up to the mob some, ’cause I know they did during the Cuba mess. Half the guns coming into our training camps in sixty-one were being supplied by Carlos Marcello’s people, and Trafficante’s Havana contacts were providing our intel for the invasion. Hoover knew all about that. The CIA ran the South Florida camps, but I met FBI agents down there, too. J. Edgar wouldn’t use a wop on something like this, though. If he wants a gun stuck up some Klansman’s ass, he’s got field agents who’ll do it for him. The Bureau’s got some hard boys, same as us.”

  “Yeah,” said Morehouse. “They got southern boys in the FBI.”

  Frank laughed bitterly. “You think there ain’t no tough Yankees? Have you forgotten that Irishman, McClaren, on Guadalcanal? He killed more Japs than I ever did, and he was from Boston, just like the Kennedys. Fighting alongside that crazy bastard showed me how we lost at Gettysburg.”

  Sonny watched Frank like an interrogator waiting for a prisoner to crack. He knew his old sergeant had something to tell them. But hell could freeze over before Frank Knox would show you his hole card. After Sonny’s curiosity got the best of him, he said, “Come on, Top. You ain’t gonna let this Neshoba County thing pass unanswered, I know.”

  Frank’s eyes shone with menace, like the glow of a tire fire in a dump, which could burn for fifteen years. “That’s a fact, Son. Today is a red-letter day. One you boys ain’t ever gonna forget.”

  “How come?” asked Morehouse.

  “Because today we’re leaving the Klan.”

  Glenn gasped, and Sonny choked on the smoke in his lungs.

  “Don’t know why you’re surprised,” Frank said. “The Klan we got now’s about as dangerous as the Garden Club. Every goddamn klavern in the state’s eaten up with informants. The whole organization’s useless. Worse than useless.”

  Morehouse looked like a Cub Scout whose father had told him they were renouncing American citizenship. “But—but—” he stammered.

  “But nothing,” Frank snapped. “We’re splitting off, and that’s it.”

  “We can’t quit,” Sonny said. “You know that. Once in, never out.”

  Frank laughed. “We’re not telling anybody we’re quitting. We’ll keep going through the motions, wearing the stupid robes and masks, kowtowing to the Dragons and Kleagles and Wizards and all that other Halloween bullshit. But that ain’t nothing but cover now. You follow? I’m forming a special unit. An action squad. A wrecking crew.”

  “Our own wrecking crew,” Morehouse echoed, savoring the words on his tongue.

  “Sounds good to me,” Sonny said. “I never liked hiding my face anyway. When you stand up for what’s right, you do it in the open. That’s the main reason Daddy never joined the Klan. He said with all the robes and rituals, the KKK looked as silly as the pope and his cardinals. Seems like a pitiful damn joke sometimes.”

  “It is a joke,” Frank agreed. “But not for us. The FBI’s camped over in the Holiday Inn right now, having a victory party. But we’re gonna shut those bastards up. Hoover, too, long as he keeps dancin’ to Bobby Kennedy’s tune.”

  “That Harvard pissant,” Morehouse muttered. “Catholic pissant.”

  “We’re not gonna have to worry about raising money or any of that nonsense, either,” Frank said. “Brody Royal’s gonna bankroll our whole operation.”

  Sonny whistled. “How’d you set that up?”

  “Brody liked the way we handled the Norris thing, and how we didn’t let that Wilson boy get away. Hell, I’ve known Brody since before I was training the cadres down at Morgan City. He paid for the C-4 we’ve been blowing all weekend.”

  “I’ll be danged,” Morehouse marveled.

  “All we have to do in return is a favor here and there,” Frank added, “when Brody needs one.”

  So Royal liked the way we handled the Norris thing, Sonny thought, remembering Albert Norris flaming in the dark, like that guy in the Fantastic Four comic books. And how we didn’t let that Wilson boy get away. Sonny had witnessed horrific brutality on the Pacific Islands during the war—atrocities committed by both sides—but he’d never seen anything like the way Pooky Wilson had died under Snake Knox’s hands.

  “I can imagine what kind of favors Brody’ll be needing,” Sonny muttered.

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” Frank said, carefully dipping his basting brush in the pungent sauce bowl. “Now, listen up. We’re gonna keep our crew small. Half a do
zen good men to start. Only hard-core guys get in. Guys we grew up with.”

  “Makes sense,” Sonny reflected. “But how about Jared Leach? He’s from Shreveport, but he’s mean as a stepped-on copperhead. He was a marine. How about making an exception for vets, Frank? Vets only, maybe.”

  “Combat vets,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Guys who know about killin’.”

  “Killin’ up close,” Sonny agreed. “Jared’s solid as a rock. He was in the ETO, but he saw some shit, now. The Bulge, for one thing.”

  “We’ll give him a chance to prove it.”

  Sonny nodded, a bracing excitement building in his chest. “Who else you askin’?”

  “I’ll let you know. Don’t get antsy. We’re gonna be methodical about this, like cleaning out machine gun nests. You don’t charge in blind like Audie fuckin’ Murphy. You flank ’em one at a time, then pour in the lead and grenades. Hold out your hand, Son.”

  Sonny extended his hand gingerly, half expecting to be cut for a blood oath or branded with some secret insignia. But Frank dropped something heavy and cool into his palm. Sonny saw the flash of gold.

  “What the hell?” he asked, recognizing the coin. “Is that a twenty-dollar gold piece?”

  “That it is,” said Frank. “A Double Eagle.”

  Sonny whistled with awe. “Haven’t seen one of these since my granddaddy showed me one.”

  “Look at the year it was minted.”

  He squinted at the coin. “Nineteen twenty-eight?”

  “Can you think of anything special about that year?”

  “The year of the big flood?” Morehouse guessed, blinking at the gleaming coin.

  Frank snorted with contempt. “The flood was in twenty-seven, lug nut.”

  “I was born in twenty-eight,” Sonny said, realizing Frank’s intent.

  Frank nodded. “That’s your dog tag now. Everybody in the unit’s gonna carry one. No robes, no masks, no bullshit—just a gold piece. Your gold piece.” He fished in his pocket, then held out a second Double Eagle to Morehouse.

  The giant took the gold coin almost greedily, then held it up in the sun and eyed it like a child examining a rare marble. “Nineteen twenty-seven,” he confirmed, grinning. “Damn, that’s neat.”

  “They stopped minting these a long time back, didn’t they?” asked Sonny.

  “Nineteen thirty-three,” Frank replied.

  “So nobody younger than . . . Bucky Jarrett gets in?”

  “That’s right. Except for my little brother. Snake wasn’t born until thirty-four, but we need that crazy son of a bitch. There’s times when crazy is just what the doctor ordered.”

  Frank’s younger brother had volunteered for Korea at seventeen, lying about his age to get early enlistment. Snake had been in the thick of the fighting for most of the war, and he’d learned a lot. Sonny had a feeling that whatever Snake was doing down at the Chevy was designed to prove that to them.

  “What are we gonna do first?” Morehouse asked.

  “I know what we ain’t gonna do,” Sonny muttered. “We ain’t gonna do a lot of gabblin’ and then go home drunk like a bunch of broke-dicks.”

  “That’s a stone-cold fact,” Frank said, his voice crackling like a live wire.

  “We gonna waste somebody?” Sonny asked.

  Frank nodded.

  “Who?” asked Morehouse. “How ’bout that biggity nigger who works out at Armstrong, that George Metcalfe? Sonny says he’s gonna be president of the Natchez NAACP.”

  Frank shook his head. “We’re not going to waste time killing tire builders and handymen. That’s for the clowns in the white hoods, if they ever get their nerve up.”

  “Who, then?” asked Sonny, trying to think like Frank. As soon as he did, a revelation struck him. “Jesus. You’re thinking about wasting white guys. Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Frank conceded, his eyes twinkling.

  “What?” Morehouse asked.

  “Informants,” Sonny explained. “Like Jerry Dugan, out at the plant.”

  Frank smiled at Sonny’s deduction, but once more he shook his head. “It may come to killing Jerry one day, but right now he’s off-limits. I want him feeding the FBI a steady stream of bullshit on the regular White Knights. We want Hoover’s boys thinking they have their finger on the pulse around here.”

  “Then who?” Sonny asked, genuinely stumped.

  Frank grabbed two wooden paddles and shoveled the alligator steak off the grill. One venison tenderloin remained on the hot iron mesh, cut from a doe poached off the International Paper woodlands last night. After fishing a fresh Jax from the cooler, Frank swallowed half the beer in the can, then leveled his gunner’s eyes at them.

  “If I dropped each of you in a hole with three rattlesnakes and gave you a machete, what would you do?”

  “Shit my pants!” Morehouse cried. “And jump right back out.”

  “You can’t get out, Mountain. You’re stuck in the hole. So what would you do? Start flailing around at everything that moved? Chopping snakes left and right?”

  “No,” said Sonny, trying to visualize the situation. “That’s how you get bit.”

  “Okay, Corporal. So, what do you do?”

  Sonny thought about it. “Stand still, take my time . . . and when the moment’s right, chop off their heads. Closest one first.”

  Frank grinned. “Outstanding.”

  “What the heck is this about?” Morehouse asked.

  “Killing leaders,” Sonny thought aloud. “Killing the guys who matter. You kill the head, the body dies.”

  “De-capitation operation,” Frank said with a savage grin.

  “What leaders?” Morehouse asked. “You talking about the head of the Deacons for Defense or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sonny said, a strange thrumming in his chest.

  Frank picked up a long barbecue fork and drew three letters in the sand at their feet: KKK.

  “What the hell?” asked Morehouse. “You don’t mean kill Klan leaders!”

  Frank scrubbed out the letters with his boot, then redrew them as corners of an equilateral triangle.

  “I still don’t get it,” Sonny said.

  Frank smiled, then reached into his back pocket and unfolded a page torn from a magazine. A photograph filled the top right quarter. In it, Attorney General Robert Kennedy stood beside Martin Luther King, while Lyndon Johnson towered above Kennedy to his left. An old black man Sonny didn’t know stood to the right of King. Bobby Kennedy was smiling in the picture, but King looked troubled, even afraid. Red crayon circles had been drawn around the heads of King and Kennedy. The caption said the photo had been taken in the Rose Garden of the White House.

  Morehouse asked Frank something, but Sonny missed it because blood was pounding in his ears. He knew without asking what those red circles meant; he only wondered who had drawn them.

  “What you think, Son?” Frank asked softly.

  Sonny swallowed and tried to formulate an answer. Frank Knox was no deluded redneck with grandiose fantasies. Though largely self-educated, he was a tactical genius. He’d led successful assaults on Japanese positions that Marine officers had declared impregnable, and he had the medals to prove it. With Sonny and Glenn working under him, Frank had carried on a lucrative trade in Japanese trophy skulls right under the noses of the MPs—and he was his own supplier. If Frank was thinking about killing Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, those men were already in mortal danger.

  While Morehouse jabbered in bewilderment, Frank took the long barbecue fork and added letters before each of the K’s in the sand. JFK. MLK. RFK. Then he drew an X over JFK, looked up, and said, “One down, two to go.”

  After Sonny remembered to breathe, he cleared his throat. “How do you propose we get those guys, Top? We going to Atlanta and D.C.?”

  Frank gave him a serene smile. “No need. We’re gonna do it the same way the Jap snipers killed us on the islands. Think about it. They never shot to kill with their firs
t round. They always wounded somebody. They let him lie out there yelling in agony until somebody decided to save him. Then the sniper shot that poor son of a bitch. And on and on until we finally pinpointed his position and called in the arty on his ass.”

  Sonny instantly grasped the elegance of this plan, and its real possibility of success. Morehouse, of course, still looked mystified.

  Frank gave the big man the look of forbearance he’d give a slow child and said, “Imagine it’s 1936, Glenn. You want to assassinate Hitler. You don’t try to kill him in his bunker, do you? You get him out in the open.”

  “I hear you. But how, though?”

  Frank sighed wearily. “I don’t know . . . maybe you run over Max Schmeling in a car. Schmeling has just beaten Joe Louis on American soil, so Goebbels organizes a state funeral. Hitler’s gotta show, right? And that’s where you’re set up, waiting with a long rifle.”

  “Sweet,” said Sonny, as understanding finally dawned in Glenn’s eyes. “We bring the targets to us. But who’s going to be our Max Schmeling?”

  Frank clucked his tongue. “I been studying on that. There’s no rush. Mississippi’s gonna be popping for the next couple of years, and I guarantee you’ll see both King and Kennedy sticking their noses in here before long.”

  “Just like JFK did at Ole Miss in sixty-two,” Sonny said.

  “Hell, that was mostly Bobby, even then.”

  “Is Brody Royal up for this kind of thing?”

  Frank snorted. “Brody’s about making money, brother. But let me tell you something: he’s tied in with Carlos Marcello on all kinds of deals. And nobody hates Bobby Kennedy like Carlos. Not even Hoffa. Three years ago, Kennedy had the CIA kidnap Carlos, strap a parachute on him, and toss him out of a C-130 over Guatemala. ‘Unofficial deportation.’ Talk about stupid. That’s half the reason John Kennedy died, right there. Those CIA boys should have chucked Carlos out without a chute, ’cause that Sicilian bastard don’t forgive, and he damn sure don’t forget.”