by Tim Willocks
“So what’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing. Seed’s sitting out in the van. Atwater’s grinning at the camera.”
She felt a sudden impatience. “Let them in then.”
“I should’ve gotten some guys.”
“Bobby, it’s Rufus Atwater, for Christ’s sake. Open the door.”
Lenna started down the steps. Frechette patted his back again and opened the door with his left hand.
As gunfire exploded through the widening gap Lenna kept on walking, as if in a trance.
The Beretta appeared in Bobby’s hand as he tried to slam the door shut, but the bullets lifted him backward and threw him in a bloody slither across the marble floor. As he hit the tiles the Beretta clattered from his fingers.
Rufus Atwater came through the door with an automatic gripped in both hands.
Lenna’s immediate reaction was a gut pain at how bad Bobby would feel: not at having bullets in his body but at the knowledge of his having failed her.
Bobby Frechette spun on his back and slid through the blood toward his gun as Atwater bore down on him.
“Atwater!”
Her voice was big enough to fill the hall with echoes but it wasn’t a scream. It was an order. It was enough to stop Atwater squeezing the trigger again but not enough for Bobby. Bobby kept going.
This time she did scream: “Bobby!”
But Bobby kept going still. When he was a foot short of the Beretta, Atwater started shooting again, pumping frantic point-blank rounds. Bobby Frechette took the bullets. He took them. Even as the slugs pushed him further and further across the blood-greased marble and Rufus Atwater pursued him, Bobby Frechette snatched up the Beretta. He turned. Above the gunfire she heard a sound that cracked her heart.
“Lenna!”
Bobby, his long, ravaged limbs wheeling convulsively, fired once.
The bullet shattered harmlessly through the stained glass dome.
Atwater cringed, then bent and pressed his automatic against the side of Bobby’s head and fired. Two shots slammed.
The automatic snapped empty.
Bobby Frechette finally lay still.
Lenna couldn’t see his face.
She found herself at the foot of the stairs staring into the barrel of Atwater’s empty pistol. She didn’t know how she’d gotten there. Atwater was staring at her with glazed, bewildered eyes. The pistol in his hand trembled. Heavy steps pounded up the staircase beyond the door. Jack Seed blundered into the hallway and stopped. He leveled a shotgun at the ragged body on the floor. His mouth opened.
“Jesus Christ,” said Jack Seed.
He looked at Atwater. Atwater blinked. Sweat dripped from his nose. As if snapping out of a trance, he ejected the clip from his gun. It clattered to the tiles. Seed looked from the empty clip to Bobby Frechette’s body.
“Fuck, man,” said Seed. “That was a seventeen-round mag.”
Atwater, trying to insert a fresh clip with shaking hands, didn’t answer. In the doorway behind Seed appeared two Latinos. They also carried shotguns. For a moment there was an extraordinary stillness. And Lenna knew that whatever their business was, they wouldn’t dare kill her.
Lenna walked across the hall, her pumps sticky in the shambles, and knelt down beside Bobby’s body. He was crumpled facedown. She couldn’t tell how many times he’d been hit. One side of his skull gaped open. She didn’t turn away. Gently, she rolled his face toward her. It was splashed with blood but undamaged. His eyes were shut. She put her palm of her hand against one high-planed cheek. It was still warm with the fire that had burned inside him, the fire that had burned for her and for all that he’d stood for. Lenna shut her eyes too. She didn’t cry. She wouldn’t, not in front of these men who stood around her. Instead she felt the last ofthat dying fire; and hoped that it might find its way inside her.
Time passed. Then she heard a voice and opened her eyes. Suddenly she could see nothing, not even the blood on her hands. For a moment she was blind.
The voice said: “Get that black sack of shit out of my home.”
Lenna stood up. Her vision swam back. She turned toward the door.
Filmore Faroe, his arms supported on either side by a third and fourth Latino, stood nodding at her with his bloated gray skull. His eyes shone.
“Hello, Magdalena,” said Faroe.
Lenna didn’t answer. She felt nothing: neither fear nor hatred nor grief. But she closed her right hand: to keep alive what she’d taken of Bobby’s fire.
Faroe stretched the moment for as long as it lasted, then turned to the first pair of Latinos.
“Bring him in,” he said.
The two men disappeared outside. Faroe stared at her again.
“You know, Magdalena, I thought about this moment many times. Many times. I thought of all the things I would say to you. Now that it’s arrived, there’s nothing that I want you to know. Not a thing. Isn’t that remarkable?”
Again, Lenna didn’t answer.
“But there’s one thing I would like to know.”
Faroe paused and the shine in his eyes grew blurred.
“How long was I in there?”
Without emotion, Lenna said, “Thirteen years.”
Faroe blinked once, as if presented with a mystery beyond his comprehension. His mouth trembled. He took a deep breath and looked up into the grand vault of the hall. He composed himself. When he was ready he looked at her again.
“Thank you,” he said.
Scuffling sounds, and muffled whimpers, came from the portico steps. The Latinos reappeared. Between them they manhandled Harvill Jessup. HarvilPs mouth was covered with gray masking tape and his wrists were handcuffed behind him. There was a bullet wound in his left leg. Above the masking tape his eyes rolled. Faroe jerked his head and Harvill was kicked to his knees.
“Mr. Atwater?” said Faroe.
Atwater almost ran across the hall toward him.
“Mr. Faroe, sir?”
Faroe shook off one of the arms supporting him and took the pistol from Atwater’s hand.
“Remove the tape, please.”
Atwater ripped the gray tape from HarvilPs mouth. Harvill spluttered and looked at Lenna with naked terror.
“They killed the dogs, Miss Par-low! Miss Parillaud? They killed ‘em all!”
Without any appearance of pleasure, Faroe shot him in the head.
Faroe handed the gun back to Atwater.
“I’ll be in my study.”
Faroe walked unaided toward the corridor.
“Mr. Faroe?” Atwater coughed. “What do we do with your, I mean, with Miss … ?”
He ran out of words as Faroe stopped halfway across the hall and looked back at him. Faroe didn’t look at Lenna at all.
Faroe said, “Why, take her to the Stone House, Mr. Atwater.”
“I’m sorry, sir?” said Atwater. “You mean the hangar? The concrete hangar?”
Lenna had never found his eagerness to please quite so repulsive before.
“The Stone House is what my wife calls it, and thus it shall be known. She can direct you there if you get lost. Do anything you feel inclined to that doesn’t endanger her life. Anything. Do you understand?”
Atwater’s mouth gaped a little.
Jack Seed said, “Anything at all?”
“I’m not used to repeating myself, Mr. …” Faroe turned to Atwa-ter. “What was that name?”
“Seed,” said Atwater.
“Mr. Seed,” said Faroe.
Seed nodded.
Faroe stole a glance at Lenna’s face. What it told him, she didn’t know. She didn’t know what was in her to tell. Faroe turned away and continued into the corridor. He disappeared from sight. Lenna found the one called Jack Seed staring at her breasts. With a stubby finger and thumb he tugged twice on his fat, mustached lip.
“Well?” said Seed. “What are we waiting for?”
Atwater looked at her. Lenna stared back at him without feeling anything for him at all.
Her right hand was still closed, still warm. Though Bobby Frechette was dead, his fire guarded her still. Let these animals do as they would.
Atwater said, “Take her to the Stone House, like Mr. Faroe said.”
Seed came and stood in front of her. Lenna smelled his breath as he snapped a single handcuff bracelet around her left wrist.
“You handle her alone?” asked Atwater.
“Oh, I think so.” Seed smiled. He patted himself on the belly.
“Good. I need your guys to clean up here. Leave the van. Take the lady’s Mercedes.” Atwater straightened his tie. “I’ve got some arrangements to talk over with Mr. Faroe.”
Seed raised his eyebrows.
“You mean you don’t want a piece of this?”
Atwater looked Lenna up and down, and curled his thin lips.
“I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. ‘Bye, Miss Parillaud.”
The bracelet jerked tight against Lenna’s wristbones.
Jack Seed pulled her across the hallway and down the portico steps toward the awaiting blackness and—within that blackness—the Stone House.
NINE
DARK WAS the night and threatening rain as Cicero Grimes swung off Route 51 past the sign declaring PRIVATE ROAD—NO ACCESS and urged his Olds onward into the heart of Arcadia. During Grimes’s childhood his father, with that special passion and daring that belongs to the formally uneducated, had read ferociously of the great texts. Grimes remembered his teenage amazement when George had found him reading The Sound and the Fury and declared it “a good book” and recommended he try Light in August too. Grimes had also felt a pang of shame at his amazement, for it implied that he thought such works were beyond the grasp of a working man. George could no doubt have taken advantage of the GI Bill and gone to college himself, but he’d gotten caught up in the union movement and decided that that was work of greater moment: or maybe of more “noble note.” In contrast, Luther’s taste had leaned toward Guns and Ammo and Mickey Spillane, but he’d become a soldier and to the war had gone, so in the end George had been appeased by them both.
The upshot of this was that Grimes possessed some vague notion of what the first Arcadia had meant to the Ancients. A rural paradise of mountain, forest and pasture where the pleasures of the flesh were innocent and many, and where the goat god Pan had ruled. Pan, it seemed, was later reincarnated as the Devil, but that was Christianity for you.
Lenna Parillaud’s modern Arcadia would have been a disappointment to the Greeks and probably to Pan as well. Slap in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, it had never seen a mountain, or even a hill, and if it had ever known forests, they’d long since been cleared with ax and spade. The moon was only just on the wane and when it slipped out from between the clouds it cast an eerie light over great silver undulations of marsh grass, waltzing with the wind for as far as his eye could see. Grimes was no farmer but this land had to be prime; it was the whole reason for the state’s original prosperity; yet he saw no sign that the soil was being exploited for profit. Maybe Lenna Parillaud was an eco-nut. If so, marsh grass was a strange species to protect. Or maybe the land was like the paintings on her walls and the fact of its possession was the only crop it was required to yield.
As Grimes hurtled along the narrow strip of blacktop, he wondered where his father was now and what he could do about it. A dialogue bounced back and forth in his head. Do everyone a favor, Grimes: go on home and leave George to have his last mad fling. He doesn’t need a seeond-rater like you trying to save him. But he just gunned down two men on the street and kidnapped a nineteen-year-old girl. He’s lost it. Then call the eops and turn him in; that’s the only sensible thing to do. No one eould say you were wrong. But it’s my fault he’s in this. He’s an old man, I don’t want him to die. He made his choice, you make yours. What was that phrase? “Run like a gelded dog”?
Grimes laughed. If he could have known his own mind as well as George knew his, he would have … Grimes found he couldn’t think of what he would have done. But the world just didn’t run for him along the straight iron tracks that it traveled for George. George might not like who was driving the train but he knew he was on one. Grimes felt more like a blind beggar wandering a land he could not see. In an absurd world the only rational option was an absurd life.
Then a quieter voice told him that at the rock root bottom of the matter it was none of these things, and simpler than them all. It was a deep thing, bred in his gut and his bone, and it was old—as old, perhaps, as this silver-drenched and whispering Delta—and thus begged no rhyme or reason, and it was this: if George Grimes was going to die, be it in a rage of guns or drooling spit in a bathchair, he—Eugene Grimes, his son—wanted to be there with him at the end. He wanted to be there to feel his spirit passing by and to hear the music in his dying breath; for somehow he knew in his inmost heart that the music would be sweet, and worth the listening.
And that was all.
And Grimes at last had something that he wanted.
With the wanting, his sense of urgency became greater, and he leaned on the gas. He was on his way to ask Lenna Parillaud—to whom he had lied—for help. He no longer even had anything to offer her in return: except that it was George who now had the information she needed. Parillaud had the resources to track George down. She could hire men and helicopters and spy planes and whatever else was necessary. It was even possible she knew where the Old Place was; there was no telling what had been in the letter Jefferson had sent her. He suddenly remembered that George had shot two men working for Atwater and that Atwater was working for Parillaud. His head spun. Maybe, yet again, he was doing the wrong thing. Bobby Frechette’s face came to him. He had Frechette’s word that she meant him no ill. For Grimes, that was word enough.
The moon above was smothered by a blanket of cloud and the landscape turned as black as ink. He couldn’t see more of the road than his lights revealed and he slowed down. An intersection came into view, another plain black strip at right angles to the one he was traveling. He slowed almost to a halt and checked his memory. He’d followed Atwater on autopilot, it would’ve been easy to make a turn without registering it; but he decided that the route lay straight ahead. As he picked up speed across the intersection he saw, in the thick darkness a mile or more ahead, a white light moving in his direction. Before he’d worked out why, he’d switched off his headlights and hit the brakes.
As his tires smoked to a halt Grimes realized he was thinking like his father without even knowing it: he was now invisible. He hoped he’d seen the other driver’s headlights first. The light ahead resolved into two bright dots and kept coming. It was past one in the morning; this was a barely used private road; Grimes didn’t belong here. The chances were no one else did either. And the other car was moving fast. If Grimes didn’t put his own lights back on, or move, there’d shortly be a loud bang and all his cares would be behind him. He jammed the stick shift into reverse and plowed back toward the intersection. Left or right? The other guy’s blind side: left. Grimes spun the wheel counterclockwise and swung around into the left arm of the crossroad, straightened up, pulled back a dozen yards and switched everything off.
The other car approached, the roar of a performance engine. Cones of light. As the beams flooded the crossroads there was a squealing of brakes. A black sedan—a Mercedes—slowed to a halt at the center of the X. Grimes put his hand to the ignition key. Had he been seen? The Mercedes reversed back three yards and it was then that Grimes saw her.
The passenger windows front and rear were rolled down. Sitting in the seat, with her arms handcuffed around the doorpost between the windows, was a woman. At first Grimes didn’t recognize her. Her hair was tangled and hung limply over her face. Across her mouth was a wide strip of tape. His first thought was that this was the girl, Ella Mac-Daniels, that they’d gotten to her and his father before him, and his father was dead. Then he recalled the poster at the club: Ella MacDaniels was black. In the driver’s seat on the woman’s
far side he caught a glimpse of a man’s face, a salacious mouth puckering beneath a heavy mustache. Then, as the Mercedes turned and accelerated into the opposite arm of the crossroad, the woman’s head jerked back, and with it her hair, and Grimes saw that it was Lenna Parillaud.
Grimes sat and stared at the red glow of the taillights streaking away from him.
So. Goodbye to all that. Helicopters, spy planes and everything else. Grimes had been apprehensive enough about tangling with her and the forces she could draw on. Who the fuck, then, had the will and the means to do this to her? His fingers turned white on the steering wheel: Bobby Frechette was dead. He had to be. Frechette was not ronin: only death would have prevented him from allowing this to happen to her. Grimes turned the ignition key and the engine of the Olds grumbled to life. The red glow was just visible in the distance.
He told himself: you’re not ronin either; not anymore.
Grimes drove across the intersection in pursuit of Lenna Parillaud.
As he was running without lights, all his concentration was absorbed by the task of not wrecking himself. The Mercedes itself was pushing the danger limit but at least its driver could see where he was going. Grimes rolled down the window to get a better impression of the road. The blacktop was fringed by a deep flood ditch on either side. Six inches out and he’d be tipped into it. He tried to gain on the red glow but without success. Several miles passed. The red glow didn’t change; then it started to get closer. Grimes was gaining. Gaining still. He started to slow down. Up ahead the brake lights flared on in an added efflorescence; then the glow disappeared completely.
The Mercedes had turned off the road.
Grimes followed at a steady thirty, peeling his eyes for the cutoff. The darkness mocked his sense of distance. He must be close. There: an apron of shale leading into a dirt road. Grimes nosed into the turn. He could see nothing up ahead. He stopped, switched off the engine and listened.
Total silence.