Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  Dad laughs bitterly, and the result is like a painful cough. “That voyage turned into a damned nightmare. By the time we got back to Biloxi, the CIA guy was ready to fight somebody—anybody. Brody apologized and asked whether Leland or I could sedate him. He was serious. But we didn’t have any drugs with us. We got the hell off that boat as fast as we could and took off.”

  “Why would Dr. Robb go into business with Royal after that?”

  “Lee was already partners with Brody by that time. I think the next day he told himself he’d imagined most of what we’d heard. But I’d recognized the edge in that guy’s voice, from Korea. I’d run across a few intelligence types over there, guys nobody wanted to mess with. There’s a dark undercurrent to American power, Penn, and Royal and his friend were part of that. And since we’re showing each other old snapshots … let me show you one.”

  He turns and reaches back into the bookshelf behind him and pulls out a worn copy of Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, by William Alexander Percy, the Mississippi soldier and poet who raised his second cousin Walker Percy. Fanning the pages, Dad pulls out a faded color photo and slides it slowly across his desk.

  “I only have this because Percy’s book was in my office the year of the fire,” he says with ineffable grief. We almost never speak of the event that destroyed the priceless library my father spent most of his life amassing, or the human cost that dwarfed the loss of those treasured books. Yet on this night, when Ray Presley’s name has already been spoken, it seems more than apropos.

  Examining the picture, I see a little boy who looks like me standing beside a seesaw on the now-vanished playground of St. Stephen’s grade school. Back then St. Stephen’s was still an Episcopal school, and our classes were held in an antebellum mansion downtown.

  “I remember this picture,” I tell him. “I was in first grade. I thought you used it as a bookmark.”

  “I did,” Dad says, his eyes hard. “For a specific reason. One week after that Gulf fishing trip, Ray Presley visited my office. He told me that Carlos Marcello had heard Brody’s CIA guest had gotten drunk and said a little too much. Marcello wanted me to know the guy was a nut job, and that nothing he said should be believed.”

  “If that was true, why would Marcello bother sending Ray to tell you that?”

  Dad nods slowly. “Exactly. And here’s the thing: Ray was close to Jim Garrison’s investigation of the JFK assassination in New Orleans. He said witnesses were vanishing, and some had already been murdered. Making yourself a potential witness in the investigation of the JFK assassination was the equivalent of suicide. Ray was telling me this as a favor, believe it nor not. Then he gave me that picture of you. He apologized, and he swore he hadn’t taken it himself, but the implication was clear.”

  “I’ll bet Ray shot this himself.”

  “I imagine so. And now you know why, when Leland Robb came to me in 1969, I didn’t want to hear his story. They’d already let me know what crossing Brody Royal or Carlos Marcello would cost me. You.”

  Me? Only a few hours ago, Henry Sexton suggested as much—though he figured it was the Double Eagles who’d threatened my life. The truth is even more disturbing. Without knowing it, I once functioned as a hostage to the Mafia, not the Ku Klux Klan, and to prevent my father from speaking out, not about the atrocities of Brody Royal but the drunken boasts of a CIA operative.

  “Is there a particular reason you kept this picture in Will Percy’s book?”

  Dad looks away, his jaw tight. “Perhaps. But that’s a conversation for another night.”

  “So that fishing boat picture with Royal … it’s just a fluke?”

  “Essentially, yes. I never had any kind of relationship with Brody Royal. If there was justice in the world, that bastard would be dying of ALS, instead of the sweet young mother I diagnosed three months ago. But that kind of justice is a child’s dream. The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them. I’ve seen it all my life, and so have you.”

  “Why haven’t you told Henry Sexton any of this?”

  Dad holds up both hands, as if raising an invisible wall between us once more. “I have my reasons, and I’ve said my piece. I want you to keep all this between us, Penn. I admire what Henry’s done these past years, but I’m afraid that if he continues, he’ll end up like Glenn Morehouse. I worry about you, too,” he says, his voice thickening. “Don’t start poking into the Double Eagles or Brody Royal. That’s not your war.”

  Unreasonably upset, I find myself on my feet. “So that’s it? This is your cross to bear alone?”

  “I’m afraid it is. I’ve got a path to walk, and there’s no turning off it. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Why won’t you let me walk it with you?”

  “Will you be in court tomorrow if they arrest me?”

  “You know I will,” I say grudgingly.

  He turns up his palms. “Then I won’t be alone, will I?”

  “You’re not the only one who’s going to pay for this martyr act! Annie’s scared out of her wits, and God only knows what this is doing to Mom.”

  He nods, his lips tight. “I realize the next few days may be tough. But I’ve given this a lot of thought. If the state chooses to jail me for my silence, then so be it.”

  I pace away from his desk, then back, trying to put my incredulity into words. “How long can you survive in jail? A week? A month?”

  Dad looks to his right, where a bust of Abraham Lincoln stands beside his window. “You know, few people remember that Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee command of a Union army when the war began. Lee wanted to hold the Union together. His family’s sympathies lay with the Union. But he was a Virginian, and in the end, he couldn’t take up arms against his home state. He tried to sit out the war, and they wouldn’t let him. He knew it would end in defeat for the South, but he fought to the limit of his abilities in spite of that. He fought with honor and brilliance, despite the wrongness of his cause.”

  What is he trying to tell me? “What’s your point, Dad?”

  “Fate doesn’t let men choose their wars. Or even their battles, sometimes. But one resolute man can sometimes accomplish remarkable things against overwhelming odds.”

  Why is he speaking in code? Did my father commit some great evil in the past to protect our family? Or keep silent about one? Or is he doing that now?

  “Dad … this afternoon, when I asked you about the videotape missing from the camera Henry left at Viola’s place, your reaction made me think you might have it. Or know where it is.”

  He studies me in silence for a few seconds. “I don’t think anybody’s going to find that tape. I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

  Jesus. “Has somebody threatened our family? Please tell me. Is that why you’re walking willingly into this buzz saw?”

  He stares at me a long time before answering. “Not overtly, no.”

  “But a threat is implicit in the situation. Look, if that’s it, we can handle this. We can protect ourselves against Royal and the Eagles. Don’t let any threat dictate your actions.”

  He looks at me the way I’ve looked at people who have little understanding of the true workings of the justice system. “There are only two ways to protect yourself against people like that. One is to go into witness protection—permanently. Do you want to yank your mother out of her present life? Walk away from the mayor’s office and never come home again? Do you want to pull Annie out of school and Caitlin away from her newspaper? All to live in Kansas under false names?”

  He’s right about this, at least. “Of course not. What’s the second way?”

  After watching me in silence for several seconds, he rolls his chair back from the desk and gets slowly to his feet. “I’ve already forgotten what I was thinking.” He gives me a forced smile. “I’m exhausted, son. It’s time for bed.”

  I feel a miserably familiar emotion, one that parents have felt since time immemorial when trying to help a stubborn child. The r
everse, I find, is even more excruciating. Fighting my father all day has left me spent.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he says, taking his cigar from the edge of the desk and getting to his feet with a cartilaginous creak. Then he leads me up the hall with a shuffling gait that’s painful to watch. When we reach the door to the garage, he squeezes my arm.

  “I know you don’t understand my actions, but that’s only natural. More of my friends are dead than alive. You’re in a different stage of life. Don’t forget what I said about Royal and the Knoxes. That’s not your war.”

  “How much danger do you think there is?”

  “That depends on what you do over the next few days. If you’re really going to drag the Jericho Hole, maybe you ought to get some protection. Have you thought about calling in Daniel Kelly on this?”

  “I tried to reach him earlier. He hired on with another security firm, and he’s back in Afghanistan.”

  “Well … then arm yourself and keep your eyes open. I’d put a guard on Henry, too. They say the Lord watches over little children and fools, but I think Henry’s about used up his allotment of grace.”

  Without quite meaning to, I reach out and hug my father, tight. “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night. I hope I haven’t disappointed you too much.”

  I want to tell him I love him, but the lump in my throat prevents it. My mind spins with memories of Will Percy, a Mississippian of legendary accomplishments. A hero of the Great War, a Princeton-educated poet, a graduate of Harvard Law School and founder of the Yale Younger Poets, Will Percy represented everything that was best in an educated southerner. Yet in the crucible of the Great Flood of 1927, after being placed in charge of flood relief for Washington County, this man of honor had utterly failed the black population he hoped to save and done irreparable damage to race relations in Mississippi. Does my father see himself in Will Percy? Were the 1960s my father’s Great Flood? I seem to remember that Will Percy’s greatest mistake was failing to stand up to his own father when it mattered most. I can’t afford to make the same mistake.

  As I turn away from him and make my way back to my car, I realize that I don’t know much more than I did before I arrived. But I do know this: today Shadrach Johnson, Sheriff Billy Byrd, and Lincoln Turner declared war on my family.

  The first casualty of that war will be Shad Johnson.

  CHAPTER 31

  TOM LAY IN bed beside his wife, who until a few minutes ago had been reading a novel whose plot she would forget in a week. Peggy Cage read more than two hundred books a year, her way of coping with the troubling transition from wakefulness to sleep, an insomnia that worsened a little each year. Now she snored softly beside him as she had for more than fifty years.

  After Penn left, Tom had stood in the darkness for several minutes, smoking silently. He suspected that Partagas might be the last he would smoke for a long time, maybe forever. Strangely, this didn’t concern him much. Lying to his son had altered something inside him, and not for the better. The moment he’d denied being Viola’s lover, he’d felt as though some deep part of him had generated malignant cells that would proliferate until they killed him. Yet how could he answer such questions? Did he have a duty to confess to his son every last sin of his life? He didn’t think so. Penn would learn the most painful of laws in his own time: If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

  Tom stuffed a pillow between his arthritic knees, then turned on his side and listened to Peggy snore. Her regular breathing comforted him. Viola’s death had shaken him so profoundly that he felt detached from the material world, like an astronaut drifting away from his mother ship. This sense of dislocation reminded him of those sleepless weeks forty years ago, when he and Viola had stolen every private moment they could. But he was no longer the man he’d been then. A quarter century ago, surgeons had cut vessels from his legs and grafted them into his coronary arteries, allowing him to survive into his late fifties. Since then, various stents had been inserted to keep him alive, and they’d held up pretty well. But now his heart itself was failing. He sometimes had to take seven or eight nitroglycerine tablets simply to get through the day. If tomorrow morning brought the sheriff to his door … what then?

  He’d always known it would come to this. As Penn had said, the past was fighting its way to the surface, like a sunken corpse filling with the gases of decay. Knowing what tomorrow might bring, Tom had allowed himself two shots of bourbon along with his evening cigar, then sat up reading The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Tonight he had reread the order, given at Gettysburg, that had placed the “University Greys” of Ole Miss—Penn’s alma mater—in the first wave of Pickett’s Charge. Lee’s fatal mistake had doomed every last boy in that unit, and the Confederacy with them. To Lee’s everlasting credit, after he was beaten, he had forbidden any guerrilla activity that would extend the conflict, and had supported Reconstruction.

  Tom thought about the Lost Cause myth, and how Jim Crow had grown out of Reconstruction as surely as World War II had grown out of Versailles. In so many ways, the primary issue of the Civil War had never truly been settled, and both North and South were complicit in this tragedy. A hundred years after the dreadful sacrifice at Antietam, President Kennedy had been forced to call out the National Guard to get a single black man admitted to Ole Miss. Kennedy’s assassination a year later had set LBJ on the road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which opened the way for black leaders to carry their struggle onto Main Street, USA. And God, how white America had fought back—both North and South.

  Tom’s life was inextricably bound up with the tumultuous events of that era. His seven-week affair with Viola had begun two days after they had patched up Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, and the Double Eagles after that highway brawl, and it had ended—truly ended—on the day Frank Knox died. One day prior, Viola had asked Dr. Lucas to switch her to Dr. Ross, leaving Tom crazed with longing and emotionally adrift. When he arrived at the clinic the next morning, he’d been thinking only of himself, with no idea what fate had in store for him. Within sixty minutes, Viola Turner would teach him just how blind a man could be to the world around him, and even to those he loved.

  As per Dr. Lucas’s orders, Viola began that day working under Dr. Ross, who was elated by the new arrangement. Tom got Anna Mae Nugent, an older white nurse, as a substitute. He went through the motions with his first five or six patients, then told Anna Mae that he needed to make some calls from his office. He’d just closed the door and removed his stethoscope when he heard a shout from up near reception. A moment later, Anna Mae came barreling up the hall.

  “They just brought a man in from Triton Battery!” she cried. “A pallet of batteries fell on him. He’s tore up bad, Doc. Looks like a hospital case, but he was already here, so I told them to put him in the surgery.”

  Tom grabbed his stethoscope and walked calmly toward the surgery, his grief over Viola easing with every step. Dr. Lucas was performing an appendectomy at the Jefferson Davis Hospital, but even if he’d been in the clinic, Lucas would have expected Tom to take this case. Dr. Lucas liked nice, clean surgeries scheduled far in advance. Surprise traumas weren’t to his taste. The upshot of all this was that Tom wouldn’t even have to ask for Viola; it was understood that she assisted on all trauma cases that came to the clinic.

  “Do you need help, Tom?” Jim Ross asked from a doorway to his right. “Anna Mae said the guy looks bad.”

  “No, I’m fine,” Tom said quickly. “I’m just going to stabilize him, then get him transported to the emergency room. I’d appreciate it if you’d call an ambulance for me.”

  “Done.”

  “Anna Mae?” Tom called. “Pull the man’s record.”

  “I’ll have it down there in a second.”

  Tom turned the corner and almost plowed
into Viola, who was hurrying up the hall from the direction of the surgery.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Who’s with the patient?”

  “Two of his friends.”

  “No nurse?”

  “No.” Viola’s face was taut, her eyes dead. “I’m not treating him.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’m not treating that man.”

  “Who is it?” Tom asked, stunned by her defiant tone.

  “Frank Knox.”

  Suddenly Tom thought he understood. It was Knox and two Klan buddies who had assaulted Jimmy and Luther seven weeks earlier. It was only natural for Viola to hate the man. But refusing to treat him was unacceptable.

  “Viola, you have to get in there.”

  Her eyes flashed fury. “Anna Mae can do it.”

  “How badly is he hurt?”

  “Bad enough. Head injury. Cracked ribs, maybe a pneumothorax.”

  “Anna Mae can’t handle that! I need you.”

  Viola closed her eyes, and he saw then that she’d probably slept as little as he—maybe less.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you don’t have a choice. I don’t, either. Get back there.”

  She averted her eyes and muttered something that sounded like curses in French. Then she set her jaw and looked him dead in the eye. “I won’t work with his friends in there,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Kick them out, then! Hell, I’ll do it.”

  After another moment, Viola turned and hurried back toward the surgery. Tom was starting after her when Anna Mae tapped him on the shoulder and passed him a manila file labeled BENJAMIN FRANKLIN KNOX. The label had a blue border, indicating the patient was an employee of the Triton Battery Corporation. Tom flipped open the file and walked slowly back toward the surgery.