by James Philip
One on each side of his torso…
The bastards had kicked him when he was on the ground!
The man smiled, crookedly, at Henrietta.
The Governor’s daughter introduced Melody.
“They told me about Sarah,” he said without ado. “I knew she was a fraud; not CSS, you understand. I just assumed she was another of Pa’s little games. He was always playing somebody off against somebody else, that’s what he does. That’s why we’re all where we are.”
“And presumably, that’s why you decided to check out of ‘the game’?” Melody re-joined as the man and the two women pulled up chairs.
“Maybe.”
“Are you okay to talk. Henrietta says they gave you a pretty good working over up at Oswegatchie?”
“I’d have taken some of them with me if I hadn’t had my hands cuffed behind my back at the time,” the man retorted dryly.
Melody recognised more than a hint of inner steel in the tall, angular young man. His hair was long, almost on his shoulders, a little tousled and there was a small tattoo on his left wrist, something Mohawk that would match a mirror mark somewhere on his spouse’s body. He may have been a pilot in Ontario, a doctor-healer connected to the modern world; but he had also lived as an Indian. His sun-burnished face was almost…native. Only his stature – six feet and perhaps, an inch or so – would have marked him out from the other young bloods in the Iroquois lands.
“Is it true that you are a fluent Mohawk speaker, Mister Fielding?”
The man nodded.
“You can call me ‘Abe’,” he murmured, parsing a half-smile in Henrietta’s direction. “I owe you ladies after last night.”
Henrietta De L’Isle lowered her eyes.
“Mohawk is only a linguistic sub-tradition of a wider, inter-mingled mix of traditional languages across the continental north-east,” Abe Fielding explained. “Kate and I speak a New York, Mohawk Valley dialect that sounds strange to the ears of our brothers and sisters in Canada but, as yet, remains idiomatically comprehensible at least in Ontario.”
Melody had opened her notebook.
Okay, this is one bright guy!
“You are going to ask me why I did not come back sooner?” He prompted.
Melody shook her head.
“No. I don’t think you’d have come back at all unless your father-in-law had put himself in harm’s way.”
Abe Fielding raised an eyebrow.
He looked to Henrietta.
“I recognised you from the TV pictures last year,” he remarked idly.
Melody almost giggled.
This guy is good!
“When did you discover that Isaac was not your father?” Melody asked without preamble.
The man was unfazed.
“People joked I looked like a Mohawk when we were up in the Valley when I was a kid. I figured something was not quite right when I was eleven or twelve. I finally worked out what it was when I was fourteen. My Ma was a nurse back in the day. She had some old text books lying around. Vicky, Alex and Bill had different eyes to me; and I was…other, not like them. Even before I got to be taller than them and my ‘dad’ by the time I was fifteen. Can’t say any of that mattered while Ma was still around. Isaac was never my father but he was always my Pa. Kids stop talking to their parents when they get into their teens, isn’t that what they say? I stopped talking to Isaac ten years ago and never really got to talking again. When you’re with somebody who treats life as one great big game it’s fun when you’re young, but not so great later. I stopped playing his games when I was sixteen; not that he noticed.”
Henrietta could not stop herself interjecting: “Do you know the identity of your biological father, Abraham?”
“I didn’t until last year.”
Melody bit her tongue, waiting to hear what further confessions would spill from the lips of the bruised, calmly sanguine man.
Instead, he branched off at a tangent.
“You must understand that the Iroquois Nation had no part in what happened last year. The Spanish have attempted to seduce the people many times in the past. Their promises have always rung hollow,” he quirked a rueful grin, “at least we understand where we are with the First Thirteen, safe from Catholic liturgy and the tender mercies of the latter-day Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición.”
Melody shrugged, initially unimpressed, suspecting this might be a distracting, throwaway remark.
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the so-called Spanish Inquisition, had long ago been subsumed into the land-owning, commercial state within a state that the Catholic Church had become in the mother country’s vast overseas dominions…
She reconsidered.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
From his quizzical expression Melody inferred that the man thought she ought to know exactly which question she actually wanted answered.
She held up a hand.
“You’re not making this easy for me,” she observed dryly.
“Sorry. The people – the so-called Spaniards – among the visiting students who coalesced around ‘my father’ were all religious. They didn’t mix with the ex-patriot or the older Hispanic communities of Long Island. They were exactly the sort of people the Spanish down in Cuba or Mexico would not send up to the First Thirteen because they all stood out like sore thumbs. Forget twenty-twenty hindsight, I didn’t know what was going on; I didn’t care. My plan was to finish my medical training then I was out of the colony, out of the First Thirteen. Kate and me got married under tribal rites when we were eighteen; all that mattered was that we could go someplace where we could be married under colonial law as soon as I was qualified as a healer. We planned to head out West, disappear, never come back but then Pa and the others were arrested after the Empire Day attacks and,” he shrugged, “everything changed.” A whimsical half-smile: “And nothing changed, if you know what I mean. We crossed the river into Ontario last August and never got any farther than Kempton.”
Melody had so many questions.
She asked none of them.
“They needed pilots at Kempton,” the man explained, “and to tell the truth we didn’t want to be on the run the rest of our lives. Sure, I didn’t plan coming back this way any time soon, if ever but I figured I’d maybe run into Alex somewhere down the line; the others,” he shrugged, “well, they’d stopped being family when Ma died. You have to understand I wasn’t around much at home in Gravesend the last two or three years. I was studying in Albany. Getting to find time to be with Kate was the only thing I worried about in between terms at Med School, I talked every two or three months on the phone to Pa, Isaac but that was about it apart from picking up stuff I’d stored at home. I reckon Pa had his ‘friends’ sleeping over a lot because my room was always different each time I got back, something else would be missing, sometimes there would be books or shirts I’d never seen. The last time we met face to face Pa wanted to talk about me and Kate,” he shook his head, “honestly, like I cared!”
Melody said nothing.
“I couldn’t swear to it on oath that I didn’t think something funny was going on ‘back home in Gravesend’, or even to what I figured out later. Pa always had oddballs round the house, I remember him and Ma having cat fights over how he’d never tell her where he was or when he was coming back, or who he was bringing home. I didn’t know about the other women in those days. When Sarah moved in I reckoned she was his latest ‘squeeze’. Weird really, Pa’s been twisting people round his little finger all his grown years and then one day, somebody does it to him and he gets left with a ticking time bomb chained to his leg. I bet he still doesn’t know what happened last year. Thinking about it after the event, he gave the ‘Spaniards’, or whoever the Hell they were somewhere to meet, a place to leave messages, and made the introductions that enabled them to form networks, cells, whatever.” He had another thought: “You found traces of explosives at the house in Gravesend, r
ight?”
Melody nodded.
“In the basement, two of the bedrooms including your’s, and the attic, not to mention in your father’s, Isaac’s, car.”
“Figures,” the tall young man with the bruised face nodded. “Like I said, it would never have occurred to him that he was being played like a fish on a long line. Bill too, probably…”
It was Melody’s turn to shake her head.
“No, Bill had troubles of his own. Like you he thought something was not quite right; and like you he only figured it out later. If the CSS wanted to prosecute him on grounds of wilfully withholding information about terrorist activities he’d have a hard time wriggling out of it but you’re not coming out of this white as snow, either.”
Abraham moved straight past this last barb.
“You’re telling me Bill was clean on this one too?”
“In my opinion, yes,” Melody confirmed. “A jury might think differently.”
“I knew Alex was innocent. Now you’re telling me Bill had nothing to do with the Empire Day atrocities?”
“Yes. That’s the bizarre thing about all this. If your father had actually been the criminal mastermind behind the sabotage at the Admiralty Dockyards at Wallabout Bay and the attacks on the Fleet in the Upper Bay, he would have known that his sons, all of you, not to mention his son-in-law, John Watson who was shot and killed in error by a gang of bungling CSS contractors, were blameless in this affair. He could have exonerated you all the day afterwards!”
“And,” Henrietta De L’Isle suggested in a small, angry voice, “we would have spent the last year looking for the real murderers!”
Chapter 29
Saturday 29th July
New Temple Gardens, Albany
The Hunter kept a count of the number of women he had killed. Eight. He had stopped counting men down on the Border; that he had left to his spotters until one by one, his Spanish counterparts had picked them off.
After that he had always operated alone; learned that if he was to function as the perfect predator he must take rests, wash death from his head, periodically return to ancestral lands to purify his soul and to rebuild his health, strength and to repair the slow, insidious wounds to his psyche. Bar a five-year gap – an interregnum from death - two decades ago that had been the rhythm of his life for over forty years regardless of loyalties lost, betrayals and the accommodations he had been forced to make to survive.
Once he had believed he was fighting for his people’s survival; now he knew that was like trying to stop the finest grains of sand running out between one’s fingers in a storm. Even here in the supposedly ‘civilised’, English First Thirteen, separate development was no more than the turning of the pages of the history of the final extinction of the native cultures which had lived in harmony with the wilderness for thousands of years. In the West the process of assimilation into - and the eradication of the traditional ways – by the irresistible ongoing European settlement was less subtle, no longer a creeping blight upon the lands either side of the Mississippi but a rampant tide of irrevocable change which would surely swallow up the last of the hunting grounds within less than a generation. In the Dakotan fastness his Lakota brothers and sisters still survived but only because they had been temporarily bypassed by the white invaders. Forty or fifty years ago the chieftains of the seven tribes of the Lakota, the Teton Sioux were still the masters of the Great Plains, now their tribes were corralled and diminished, disease-stunted shadows of their forebearers. The remnants of the seven tribes - the Sičháŋǧu, Oglála, Itázipčho, Húŋkpapȟa, Mnikȟówožu, Sihásapa and the Oóhenu – eked out a humiliating subsistence in their own country. Trapped in grounds the white man called ‘the Badlands’, his people lived in unspoken shame at their fall from grace, the young men migrated to the European towns, melted into the wilderness and filled the prisons of the conquerors.
His was the Sihásapa clan, therefore, to the white man he was, albeit a half-breed, Blackfoot, a member of a tribe that was a stone age relic of a past the English neither understood nor respected, a despised underclass tolerated in its submission, ruthlessly stamped upon if it dared to assert its ancient rights.
When he had come back from the Border all those years ago his own people had shunned him. While he had yearned to return to the old ways, to live life in the tradition of his people as a hunter on the plain the uniform he had worn in California, New Mexico and West Texas had turned a half-breed ‘brother’ into a half-white ‘outlander’ whom no woman of honour would marry and no family would welcome into its camp.
All that was so long ago; many, many more summers than he cared to count. He and his long rifle and scalping knife had travelled untold miles in the years since and he had grown old, stiff and tired, no longer the agile master backwoodsman to whom the ever-shrinking desert wildernesses of the South West and the forests of New England had been impenetrable, impregnable hideaways, places of meditation and perfect solitude.
The English called driving railways and roads through the sacred hunting grounds ‘progress’, even in the farthest West the process had begun many years before his birth with the opening of the first tracks of the Great Western Railway connecting Boston and New York to Vancouver in the Pacific North West. Since then New England had been tied together by more and more infernal transcontinental highways.
Even down in the remotest of the contested Border areas no matter how many battalions the Spanish had thrown at the English – who were always outnumbered – the network of railways and roads behind the fronts quickly, efficiently shifted men and guns to where they were most needed.
In war as in peace the English were too often as brutally efficient as they were coldly ruthless; yet it was only here in the First Thirteen where they were truly the lords of all they surveyed that they permitted their precious ‘democracy’ to raise its two-faced head. Ironically, it was here in the East that the English feared the stirrings of an ‘American’ voice. Their soldiers still march in their peacock red coats or paraded on their well-schooled, gelded ponies, their polished steel breastplates gleaming with the arrogance of latter-day Conquistadors…
The Hunter sat on the bench in the raggedy, dusty, stinking clothes he had recovered from a bin two days ago, smoking a roll-up, unshaven, much of his face hidden beneath the drooping rim of his battered hat. Nobody wanted to know an indigent, a hobo who looked and smelled as if he was sleeping rough on the city’s streets. People hurried on by, gave him room. That worked well when he was studying his hunting ground, fixing ranges and angles in his head, and methodically determining how many of the available shooting positions were actually viable.
The large, grassy mostly open space in the heart of the city was surrounded by the great departments of the colony and the offices – ‘chambers’ – of the parasitic lawyers who clung like leeches to the bloated torso of the body politic. Several of the windows of the upper storeys of the row of buildings directly opposite the mighty Crown Court Building, the engorged greater intestine of the colony’s legal class, were marked internally with fading white crosses – as required by city ordinances of all business-registered premises claiming an ‘empty rebate’ from the District Council - denoting that those ‘chambers’ at least, were unoccupied.
In his youth this square had been enclosed by mighty trees planted by the city’s fathers in generations past; in recent years old stands had been culled and never replaced. More trees had been felled when the new Crown Court Building had been constructed in the 1950s, a structure said to mimic and gratuitously exceed, in true colonial hubris, the mother court of the Empire in London in both scale and ornamentation. Beneath its towering dome and colonnaded grand entrance atop twenty wide marble steps, the Central Court of the Commonwealth of the Colony of New York, dwarfed even the baroque splendour of the Colonial Legislature Building which in comparison was lost in the urban landscape just a quarter-of-a-mile to the north west.
The hunter gazed thoughtfully at the steps.
There were several entrances to the building but lawyers were strutting coyotes and their public expected them to dance and sometimes, deign to speak to mortal men upon those steps as flash bulbs exploded and TV cameras rolled. The public, the great unwashed were permitted but fleeting glimpses of what went on inside; however, on those steps the vultures preened their bloodstained feathers and proclaimed their lies with the conviction of men reading from the scriptures of false prophets.
He turned, craned his neck to study the windows bearing their fading, sun-bleached tax exemption crosses. He looked around the square, at the families enjoying picnics, the children playing, the older couples taking the air and cyclists circling the weekend traffic-free streets, freewheeling.
Angles…
Lines of sight…
The way the breeze plucked at the leaves and branches of the trees…
This time his task was uncomplicated by contingency.
He had almost missed the kill at Fort Hamilton; hesitated a moment as the young woman’s face had hovered in the cross-hairs of his long Martini-Henry. There had been that heart-stopping moment when he saw another face, a face that haunted him yet and had once tormented him with what might and could never have been all those years ago.
Something had reached into his soul and touched the man he used to be; the man she and she alone had seen, understood and…loved.
That woman framed in the window whose face and head had exploded in a misty red spray of blood and bone fragments could have been her.
In his dreams she condemned him.
He had killed the wrong woman at Fort Hamilton.
He had known it the moment the bullet had left the muzzle of his long rifle but of course, by then, it had been an eternity too late to do anything to right the wrong.