House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  It took about thirty seconds for everyone in the restaurant to take notice of Andre. The maître d’ came from the back in a tuxedo, walking quickly, his menus tucked under his arm. “Sir, we cain’t serve Negroes here.”

  “I’m looking for Arnold Beckman. We’re not asking to be served,” Hackberry said.

  “This man cannot come in here. Unless you’re an officer of the law, we do not allow firearms in the restaurant, either.”

  “If you’ll notice, it’s in full view. That means I’m in compliance with the law. Tell me where Arnold Beckman is, or I can just whip a knot on your head. Which would you prefer?”

  The maître d’s face was white, his finger unsteady as he pointed to a back room.

  “Thank you,” Hackberry said.

  None of the people at the tables lifted their eyes until Hackberry and Darl and Andre had walked past them. Then they spoke only in whispers.

  Beckman was seated at the head of a table with several other men in a private room. On the wall was a painting of a reclining nude. Beckman had a piece of meat pouched in his jaw as tight as a golf ball; he was speaking to an Asian man next to him, his eyes never registering Hackberry’s or Andre’s or Darl’s presence.

  “Are you feeding my boy the way you feed yourself?” Hackberry said. “Steak and spuds and fried maters and buttermilk biscuits and a bowl of sausage gravy on the side? You treat my boy as good as your own self?”

  Beckman wiped his mouth with a napkin tied in a bib over his shirt. “As usual, you don’t make very much sense, Mr. Holland. But I’ve got to hand it to you. You bring a nigger into a white man’s chophouse? They must have shit their pants out there.”

  “You want to talk here or in back or outside?”

  “I don’t want to talk with you anywhere, thank you very much.”

  “I’m going to bring you what you want.”

  Beckman shook his head as though bewildered. “Gentlemen, I’ll be right back. This man is a former Texas Ranger, and I treat him as such. Perhaps after our talk, he’ll join us for a drink. You will, won’t you, Mr. Holland?”

  Hackberry didn’t answer. He looked into the face of each man at the table, one at a time, and in turn each looked away or lowered his eyes. Beckman walked into a hallway in back. “What kind of besotted idea have you come up with now?”

  “I’ll give you the cup in a public place, in front of others.”

  “I see. That’s brilliant. So I’ll have to return it to the original owners and release your boy at the same time? Do you think I’m simpleminded?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’re an idiot, Holland. I have complete power over you. If you hurt me—or, even worse for you, if you kill me—your son will starve to death. Consider this image for just a moment: Buried alive in a box, able to hear people who can’t hear him, dependent on others for his next sip of water or morsel of food or breath of air. Think of him listening to the footfalls above his head while his thirst and hunger and fear grow by the minute and his screams remain unheard. You’ve come to bargain? Before I’m done, you’ll beg.”

  “I tried.”

  “Is your speech encrypted? Am I supposed to extrapolate great meaning from that?”

  “There’s a Rubicon I never went across. I guess that’s where I’m at now.”

  “Collect your nigger and that boy with him, and go back where you belong: a soup kitchen for bummers, a dollar-a-throw crib, the kind of place you’ll end up one day, regardless of what happens to me.”

  “Maggie Bassett ran me off in the same way. I guess it’s not my day. Did you know you got something sticky on your boot? I’d say it was blood.”

  Hackberry left Beckman staring at him, and went back outside with Darl and Andre, and got into the backseat of the motorcar. The rain had slackened, and people with umbrellas were walking to their cars or into bars and cafés, laughing, glancing at the sky, as though they had been spared an impending disaster. There was a silvery glow in the clouds; even the thunder seemed to have receded over the edge of the world.

  “Where to?” Darl said.

  “I thought I saw blood on Beckman’s foot.”

  “Whose do you reckon it is?”

  “I missed something at Maggie Bassett’s this afternoon. Beckman’s men tracked up her house. They had either green clay or horse manure on their shoes. Ruby said the man she stuck a hat pin in had green stains on his trouser cuffs.”

  Andre turned around. “There’s green clay down by the river. I saw it behind the Spanish ruins, down by the river.”

  Hackberry gazed at the clouds. “I never saw the moon rise this early. I never saw it rise in a rainstorm, either. I don’t think the world will end by fire. I think the stars will fall out of the heavens, and all the natural laws will go out the window. I think this is how the sky will look on the day the world ends.”

  Darl and Andre looked at each other but kept their thoughts to themselves.

  BACK AT THE hotel, Hackberry knocked on Ruby’s door. “I need to tell you a few things,” he said. “I don’t have long.”

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “At Maggie’s place. I also talked with Beckman.” He went to the window and looked down in the street where Darl had parked the motorcar. He could see the green arbor in the center of the plaza and, through the fog and trees, the shiny glimmer of the wooden carousel horses. He looked back at Ruby. “Maggie owned up. She destroyed the telegrams and messages you sent me from Denver. All these years I thought you didn’t want me back.”

  Ruby stared out the window. “I guess I wanted to think better of her.”

  “Maggie has her moments. Give the devil her due.”

  “You sound like you admire her.”

  “I admire her because she possesses some of the qualities you have in abundance, Ruby.”

  “What are the other things you wanted to tell me?”

  “I’m going to get the cup, then I’m going to Beckman’s. I’m either coming back with Ishmael or I’m not coming back. I may do some things today I’ve never done before, but I’ll do them if I have to.”

  “What did Beckman say about Ishmael?”

  “He made threats.”

  “What kind?”

  “He’s a coward. He tries to transfer his fear to others.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “If I kill him, Ishmael will be left to death by starvation and thirst.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Stay here. We can be a family again. I mean, if it’s what you want.”

  “You’re going to beat it out of him? That’s why the Haitian is with you?”

  “Sometimes it’s not good to look around the corner in your own mind. Sometimes you have to let things happen,” he said.

  “I don’t care what you do to him. No matter how this works out, I think I’m going to kill Arnold Beckman.”

  “You’re not the killing kind, Ruby.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “I feel very strange. For the first time in my life, I understand the violence that has always lived in you. I’m going with you.”

  But he was out the door before she was finished speaking.

  HACKBERRY CROSSED THE street to the park, without stopping at the motorcar where Darl and Andre were waiting for him. He followed a concrete walkway through the trees, past a set of swings and seesaws and a wading pool crosshatched with floating leaves. Someone had tried to cover the carousel with canvas, but it had pulled loose and was flapping in the wind. He stepped up on the floor and worked his way through the wooden horses and the ornate pewlike benches to the center of the carousel and the panel behind which he had hidden the cup. The mirrors on the panels were oblong and wavy and reflected his image as though it had been scissored into parts, and he wondered if he was not one man but many, and he wondered if this was not the reflection every man experienced at the close of his life. The last chapter, even the last page in the book describing
one’s days, did not give unity or understanding to one’s life; at best, the narrative sorted out the chaff and allowed a man to step over a line with a lighter load and mount a fresh horse for a journey that hopefully had no end.

  At least that was what he wanted to believe.

  He pulled away the panel and lifted the cup from inside. He had rewrapped it in the slicker Darl had brought it in and retied the twine. He put his fingers between the rubberized folds and touched the rim of the cup, his eyes closing. Here we go, Lord. He’p me take it to them. And you know what I mean by “it.”

  To his dying days, with his hand on the Testament, he would swear he heard a voice that rang as clear as a spoon striking a crystal glass. The cheat was he didn’t know what the words meant, as simple as they were: Are you sure about that, partner?

  For what shall it profit a man if he gains the world and never figures out a solitary thing coming down the pike?

  ISHMAEL LAY IN the darkness, both hands manacled to an iron ring in the wall, and listened to the sounds coming from the tunnel. He could hear two men talking while they pulled a heavy weight across a hard surface, and he suspected they were removing the body of the man Beckman had killed with a shotgun. He also heard the sounds of mops and pails, and water being sloshed against a wall or the floor of the tunnel, and later, the sound of someone laboring with a saw, pausing to retch and then curse under his breath.

  Hope was the light that allowed man to prevail in the worst of circumstances. But it also could become the narcotic of the self-deluded and the naive. How did a man know when it was his time? The answer was simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs. That’s when you know the hands on the clock have frozen on the hour and the minute and the second that were appointed as your time, and nothing you do will restart them. That’s how you know now and forever that your time has not only come but has already ended, and oddly enough, the realization is not all bad.

  Ishmael wondered how they would do it to him. Since they bore him no personal grudge, they would probably carry out his execution in a pragmatic fashion, one that would make the least work for them. In all probability, they would use guile rather than force in his final moments. They would tell him they were taking him to a more comfortable setting, perhaps a hospital. Or they would remove the pads from his eyes and offer him wine and a hot meal. While he sat at a table or in the passenger seat of a motorcar, a bullet would be fired into the back of his skull.

  Acceptance of his fate did not mean he should be passive about it. For just a moment, as though he were looking through a third eye in his forehead, he saw a medieval fortress on the shores of Malta and Crusader knights in chainmail and white tunics with red Templar crosses, surrounded by their Saracen enemies. Their death was a foregone conclusion, but rather than surrender, they executed their prisoners and used catapults to fling the decapitated heads over the walls into the Saracen line and went down to the last man, their swords ringing.

  Could he be as brave and defiant as they? He had gone across no-man’s-land into gas and machine guns and flamethrowers and rounds the size of boulders fired from railroad mortars, but he had been armed, and his brothers-in-arms had been at his side. Was there any challenge greater than remaining resolute while you stood unarmed and waited for your enemies to take your life and bury you in a place where no one would find you, knowing in advance that your last words would never be heard and the deed would probably never be punished?

  Big Bud had to be out there somewhere, all six feet eight inches of him, armed and dangerous and capable of sowing destruction over an entire landscape, as he had probably done behind Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel down in Mexico. Could Ishmael’s thoughts reach his father? Did each see the other in his dreams? Did those Crusader knights at Malta have the same feelings as they awaited the final assault of the Saracens, their agony written on the glittering blue emptiness of the Mediterranean?

  Ishmael heard footsteps in the tunnel, echoing off the walls, coming closer, splashing through a pool of water, a metal instrument scraping against stone. Then the sounds stopped. A moment later, a man was urinating loudly in the toilet cubicle. When he finished, he pulled the chain on the box tank high up on the wall, and a few seconds later, he was standing within inches of Ishmael’s face.

  “Who are you?” Ishmael said.

  “It’s just me.”

  “Jeff?”

  “One and the same. I got good news for you. I’m fixing a hot meal for you, too.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Jeff picked up Ishmael’s feet and cut the rope that bound his ankles. “Believe me, you’ll develop an appetite. I can rustle up a pan of brains and eggs that’ll break your heart. Come on, boy, rise and shine. Let’s get you out of this damn hole in the ground.”

  RUBY’S HEART LEAPED when she heard the knock on her hotel door. Oh, please, please, please let it be Ishmael and Hack, she prayed. She could almost see through the wood door, both of them grinning, standing side by side, their bodies filling the doorway, the men who had been the center of her life and the only real family she had ever had. She threw open the door.

  The woman standing in front of her did not smile. She wore a dark purple velvet dress and a straw hat with a pale blue ribbon and veils wrapped around the crown. She was holding a dome-shaped package wrapped in white butcher paper. Had it possessed an odor, Ruby would have thought it a Thanksgiving turkey.

  “I’m Beatrice DeMolay, Miss Dansen,” the woman said. “Perhaps Hackberry has spoken of me.”

  “I know who you are, all right,” Ruby replied. “I know how you made your money, too.”

  “I have something for Hackberry. I went to his room, but he wasn’t there. I sent my driver to protect him, but Andre hasn’t called. I’m a bit worried.”

  “We don’t need you to worry about us.”

  “Evidently, you don’t approve of me,” Beatrice DeMolay said.

  “I’ve known the young girls who end up in the kinds of places you operate.”

  “And where would they be if my places hadn’t been there?”

  “Peddle your justifications somewhere else, please.”

  “Where is Mr. Holland?”

  “None of your business.”

  “It is my business, Miss Dansen. Mr. Holland was born in another era and thinks the old ways still work. As a consequence, his enemies use his virtues against him. Where is he?”

  “He was going to Arnold Beckman’s.”

  Beatrice DeMolay’s eyes were recessed, the color of coal; the bones in her face seemed to harden inside her skin. “I knew he would do it. I also knew that no one around him would try to stop him.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Ruby said.

  “Because I entered into a situation that is very complicated and could send me to prison. I’m not going to discuss this with you in the hallway. I’m also a bit tired of dealing with the indignation of people I’m trying to help.”

  Ruby hesitated. “I don’t trust you.”

  “Then I’m going.”

  “No, come in,” Ruby said, stepping aside.

  Beatrice DeMolay walked past her to the window and looked down into the street. “You need to be aware of some things, Miss Dansen. The desk clerk downstairs works for Beckman. So do some of the police officials. There is hardly anything in this city that Beckman doesn’t control. He also owns United States senators and congressmen and state attorneys and the wardens of penitentiaries. The only thing that can undo him is to use his own corrupt system against him. What is Mr. Holland planning to do at Beckman’s?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “That is really stupid. He’s undoing everything I’ve done.”

  “What is it you’ve done? I don’t see it. All I see is an angry woman who’s been a lifelong tool of capitalists.”

  “I convinced Beckman to make a large sale of weaponry to
a consortium in Argentina. He signed all the documents. What he doesn’t know is that the weapons are being purchased for Communists in Indochina. This puts him in violation of the Sedition Act. If he doesn’t go to prison, he will spend years in court. In the meantime, most of his assets will be seized or frozen, including his warehouses.”

  Ruby felt sick. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “What do you think I’m doing now?”

  “What’s that in your hands?”

  Beatrice DeMolay set the package on the writing table and tore off the butcher paper. Encased in domed glass was a painting of a pinkish-orange sunrise, with cherubs sitting on each of the sun’s rays. “This is how the House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans came by its name. I thought Mr. Holland might like it.”

  “Why would he want something from a bordello?”

  “I had it with me in Mexico when he and I first met. I treated him shabbily. I had no idea what a brave and kind man he was. I also learned that he suffered gravely because of his accidental shooting of innocent people in a boxcar.”

  Ruby could hear the rain ticking on the balcony, the latched French doors straining against the wind. “Do you have a motorcar?”

  THE ROAD WAS washed out in two places, the countryside shrouded in mist. Darl cut the headlights on the car a hundred yards before they reached the poplar trees lining the road in front of Beckman’s building, which was dark. They could see the Spanish ruins down by the river, the crumbling walls and bell tower flickering when the remnants of the storm flared overhead. Darl parked on the road, in the shadow of the trees, but didn’t turn off the engine.

  “Where exactly did you see the green clay?” Hackberry said to Andre.

  “Behind the mission, where a coulee runs down to the river.”

  “Why would they be in the mission?” Hackberry said.

  “I only know that this is cursed ground.”

  “The mission grounds are cursed?”

  “No, the ground we stand on is,” Andre replied. “It was a barracoon.”