by Peter Corris
To tell the truth, I considered a daytime crossing but my brother dissuaded me from it. He called it folly and spoke of my pride. I spoke of courage. He talked of wisdom and unreeled scientific (about the minerals) and anecdotal (about those who had perished here) data which I allowed to convince me. Privately, I had my doubts about the perished—they sounded like a collection of mongrel Spaniards and Mexicans rather than sound men, but a wise leader knows when to yield.
Even at night, under a full moon, the crossing was bad enough. The rock retained the heat of the day to an extraordinary degree and there was something about being caught between the cold moon and the hot earth that sapped the spirit. The mineral structure affects the air, giving it a harsh, leaden taste and intensifying the thirst.
The greatest problem, however, is the mirages. Incredibly, these persist at night and they take the form, not of shimmering pools of water, though such would be seductive enough, but apparently easier ways of going. The surface of the Silver Plate is a treacherous, rock-strewn wilderness; the only vegetation is a spiky cactus; the only fauna creatures which can live underground for most of the time—hard, scaly lizards which prey on equally hard ants, spiders and beetles. The mirages present an entirely different image—marked trails with fringes of bush and grass leading to stands of trees. Times without number I had to chase after one or another member of our party and lead him back onto the correct course. And I own that I understood the temptation to follow one of those soft, beckoning paths.
After travelling for eight hours we still had several miles to go when the sun came up. Its effect on the landscape was amazing and terrible. Every rock, stone and grain of sand appeared to draw heat and light from the sun and throw it in our faces. The sweat that broke out on my body when I ordered the pace to be increased dried immediately and the salt on my face began to burn like acid. I could feel the fluid in my eyeballs drying and the horses, no doubt experiencing something similar, began to display signs of madness. We raced for a clump of cottonwood trees. Had I been a religious man I would have been praying every step that the trees were not a part of some last mockery of a mirage.
They were not. We passed from that terrible place into the meagre shade of the trees and no grand hotel or luxury liner could have been more welcome.
Our crossing of the Silver Plate was far less dramatic. I got Danny to bring the plane down low enough for me to see the details of the country. It was certainly dry and bleached, almost colourless except for the glint of sunlight on the rocks. Seen from above, these glints had flashes of colour in them, but the effect was hard and jewel-like, not comforting.
We flew on, over the hills where Pedro Cordobes had scavenged, sticking to the rain shadow of the Sierra Madre. Danny commented on the barrenness of the route and the way it avoided such pockets of better country as existed. I told him about Craft's ideas on exploration.
'Man was a masochist,' Danny said.
I chewed on that for a while. Was he? He talked a lot about pleasure in his book but never seemed to have any worth recording. Or perhaps it was too dangerous to record. From what I knew of him he had caused others a great deal of pain. Did that make him a pain-lover in general? Was there a word for it? This kind of thinking led me to consideration of his brother. The evidence on Richard Craft was contradictory. He seemed to be a check on Basil's most destructive impulses and in at least two instances to have tried to tidy up after his brother's cruelties. But Devendish had named him as a 'twin in depravity'. He had stood by ready to shoot Yhurr, the Mongolian, and he apparently never attempted to restrain Basil from violating people, especially women.
We crossed the Rio Grande, a thin brown line with accompanying strips of vegetation that gave way rapidly on both sides to the desert. Up through Arizona, skirting centres like Tucson and Phoenix, keeping the mountains to the left and the arid zone below. Danny made and received radio calls at infrequent intervals. We saw few other planes in the clear skies. The route was as little travelled in the air as on the ground. At various points we went lower and circled briefly while I looked for points of interest, such as the silver mine where Craft had been forced to stop while he doctored a lame horse and dealt with a man named Diaz who had smuggled some pulque into his kit and got roaring drunk. Craft, though a heavy drinker himself at times, usually forbade alcohol to be carried on expeditions. He punished Diaz by making him swallow sand so that he became violently ill. Another place I trained the binoculars was a peculiar, twisting gully where Craft claimed to have shot an iguana that was ten feet in length. He skinned the beast and occupied himself at night making a multi-thonged whip from its hide. I'd combed through Craft's book, making notes on his erratic identifications of valleys and mesas. I read these references off to Danny who cursed and denounced 'Goddamn footsloggers', but still managed to locate many of the features.
After eleven hours in the air a great blue-grey smear appeared on the horizon ahead. 'Hoover Dam,' Danny said. 'Your boy couldn't pretend he was Lawrence of Arabia from here on in. Dados's a bit to the north-east. Man, am I dry.'
Danny's remark set me off thinking again. Who had Craft admired? Lawrence, certainly, and Burton. Nutters, both. Who else? Leichhardt? Bourke? I couldn't remember. Something to check.
Danny landed at the domestic terminal and we rode into Los Dados in a Hertz Camaro. I checked into the El Toro, a low-rent hotel a couple of blocks off the strip. Danny watched me register, then shook my hand. 'I'll draw up a bill tonight, Vic, and get it to you tomorrow.'
'Where're you going to stay?'
'I know a place.'
I hefted my bag. 'I've got the tequila. I thought we were going to howl.'
Danny slapped my arm. 'Vic, when you get up to your room take a look in the mirror, if there is one. You don't look like a man who's about to howl, buddy. Tomorrow. Not early.'
He turned away and walked out, stumping a little as if the feel of solid earth under his feet was something to get used to. I carried my bag and the computer up two flights of stairs to my room. It was small, with a narrow bed, a battered dresser and closet and a square-metre bathroom that somehow contained a shower, handbasin and toilet. There was a yellowish stained mirror over the basin. I looked in it and saw what Danny meant. I had a long stubble and tired, strained eyes. My face was sweat-stained and grimy. My breath stank.
I unpacked, had a shower and a shave and scoured my teeth. I stood at the window with a towel wrapped around me looking out at this particular little sliver of the Los Dados night. There wasn't much to see—an alley, parked cars, dark windows. Here, the famous garish neon was just a glow. I wondered what the place had been like when the Crafts arrived. Walking Across the World gave few details apart from those gleaned from Basil's descriptions of his triumphs in the casinos and his reference to his sexual samplings. In that post-war period, with the economy still booming and the atomic testing beginning to get underway in the desert to the north, there must have been a lot of activity. Marijuana, bebop and convertibles; rock'n'roll and Elvis just around the corner. Now, post-Reagan, with cutbacks and glasnost, heroin and AIDS, it had to be very different. I didn't have any lemon or salt, but I uncorked the tequila, had a shot, sat down on the bed and fell asleep.
22
Craft Project—Journal (continued)
One dubious advantage of the El Toro over the flasher places would be that in the morning you taste the desert air (filtered through a few car exhausts, but still), rather than the air-conditioning. I woke up reasonably clear-headed and with a fairly well worked-out plan of action in my head. The plan must have been born in my sleeping mind. I was certainly not conscious of having thought it out. Check the addresses Craft had stayed at (long shot—Los Dados had undergone a lot of development), check the local historical society for any holdings on the Craft expedition; check the Los Dados newspapers for items on Basil and his doings. Simple. Legs and wheels needed, hardly any brains.
I went down to the greasy Breakfast Nook and managed to eat some hash
browns and sluice down three surprisingly good cups of coffee. The El Toro was a transients' hotel, a building full of private people with private problems. I gathered that the basic clientele was gamblers on a losing streak, wives awaiting divorces and would-be showgirls, would-be croupiers, would-be car-park attendants. My enquiries about the town as it was forty years ago brought blank stares. In Los Dados they live for the big score which happens, by definition, tomorrow, not yesterday.
Still, I gleaned enough to set off with notepad, camera and tape-recorder. The computer I concealed behind a pile of paperbacks, magazines and newspapers. I work on the assumption that crooks don't like reading. It's crude but it gives me some comfort. The hiding place felt safer than entrusting the computer to the desk clerk. As a reflex action before leaving I reached for the phone to call Marty. Then I remembered that she was in Zurich, poking into one of the most mysterious parts of Basil Craft's life, and a small buzz of worry went with me down the stairs and out onto the sunlit street. The temperature gauge on the top of the Nevada hotel was showing a pleasant 72 degrees.
Basil Craft and party had stayed at a motor court on Anita Street when they'd first come out of the desert. Craft had hired a series of cabins close to the road with their own semi-private entrances and conducted what he called 'orientation sessions' with members of the expedition whom he did not name. All very mysterious. I drove to the address and found that the motor court site had been swept up into a giant shopping mall.
After leaving the motor court, the Crafts had rented a house on lower Fremont Street which was then a racy but semi-respectable district where actual showgirls, croupiers and even pit bosses lived. Not any more. The area had become a Hispanic ghetto, a barrio almost. The big stucco houses had obviously been divided into apartments; the California-style verandahs had been boarded in to make extra rooms and everywhere around were signs of population pressure—decayed cars, corpses of refrigerators and washing machines, crazily strung lines with faded shirts, grey underwear and Levis hanging limply, hillocks of plastic garbage bags.
I drove on. There would be no memories of Basil Craft with his immaculate sports clothes and tinted-windowed Cadillac, driven by Richard, here. Things changed somewhat where Fremont met First Street. There was a casino on the corner and a lot of upmarket office space, but many of the offices were for lease. Maybe the poverty of Lower Fremont was creeping up.
I drew another blank at the Historical Society. Located in an adobe house on Sahara Boulevard, shortly before close settlement gave way to ranch fences, the organisation was represented by a man named Smith who claimed to know everything about the history of the town but was prepared to divulge nothing. I sat opposite him in a small room that served as his office. He sat behind a small desk and rubbed his bald head as I said my piece. When I stopped talking he began to tug at his goatee beard.
'So I wondered if you had any records relating to the expedition—photographs, artefacts, recollections?'
'Don't believe we do,' Smith said. 'Mostly frontier stuff here—outlaws, Indians, railroad men, that sort of thing. Then there's a lot on the atomic testing, of course.'
'Of course. Have you ever heard of the expedition?'
'Can't say that I have. You claim he wrote a book, this Craft?'
'Yes. But it was suppressed.'
The word seemed to galvanise him. He stopped touching himself and leaned forward across the desk. 'Suppressed, you say. Political?'
'Not as far as I know.'
'Never touch anything political.'
'I see. Well, he was here for several weeks.'
'Doing what?'
'I don't know.'
'Likely nothing. Likely no reason for us to have anything about him.'
'Christ! He'd walked here from Mexico!'
'No need for the profanity, sir.'
'I'm sorry. But . . .'
Smith bared yellow, wolfish teeth and began patting his bald head again. I realised that the tooth-baring was a smile. 'Nothing remarkable about that. Mexicans do it all the time. I suggest you try the Public Library.'
The Public Library was on Maria Street, a big, white-pillared building with imposing front steps. I parked in an almost empty parking lot—a very rare thing in Dados—behind the building and showed some press credentials to a bored-looking attendant who was 'reading' a girlie magazine.
'No need for that here, sir,' he said. 'Library's open to anyone wearin' shoes and clean clothes.'
I went into the reading room which contained banks of old-fashioned card catalogue drawers, some trestle tables with straight-backed chairs and a U-shaped counter with electronic devices on it. There were newspaper and magazine racks around the walls but no books. The half dozen or so people sitting at the tables were reading newspapers. In a way I wished I was there to ask for something different—like Proust. A good-looking Indian woman behind the counter stopped running an electronic pencil over bar codes inside a stack of magazines and asked if she could help me.
'Yes,' I said. 'I want to look at some newspapers for late 1949.'
'We have the L.A. Times, New York Times, Chicago—'
'No, I mean Los Dados newspapers.'
She frowned. 'Dados papers?'
'That's right. I'd like issues for September to December 1949. As many papers as you have.'
'Let me check.' She switched on one of the machines and began tapping a keyboard. Information scrolled across the screen. 'Examiner, Clarion, News Daily, no, that closed down in '48.'
'The other two would be fine. Do I have to fill in a form or something?'
'We only have them on microfilm here. The originals are in Carson City, that's the state capital.'
I said, 'Microfilm it is, then,' although it's something I avoid whenever I can.
She pulled a printed form towards her. 'Are you a Nevada resident, sir?'
'No. The attendant told me the library was available to everyone.'
Back went the form. 'That's true for the open-access materials. For special collections you have to be a taxpayer.'
I shook my head. 'I pay tax in Britain and in Australia.'
'I'm sorry, sir.'
'What about the newspaper offices themselves? They must have archives.'
She was becoming impatient, her magazine stack was waiting, but she glanced at the screen again. 'The Examiner closed ten years ago. I don't know what would have happened to their records. The Clarion building burnt down in 1987. I doubt
A voice at my elbow said, 'Torch job. Insurance scam. But don't quote me.'
I turned to see a small man, jockey-sized, in shirt sleeves, bow tie and braces. He was bald and wore a green eyeshade. The Indian woman deliberately turned back to her magazines after switching off the VDU. End of help from that quarter.
'Couldn't help overhearing you. Name's Frank Button. Here's my card.'
He gave me a business card which had his name and a string of letters after it, none of which meant anything to me. But the words 'Private Enquiries Agent' did mean something. We shook hands and I told him my name.
'You know a lot about Los Dados history, Mr Button?'
'Damn all, Vic. But I know Sam Peck torched his building to collect the insurance and had a heart attack and keeled over dead when he found out how little money he was going to get. Damn fool, insurance is the greatest racket in the world and you have to be a better crook than the insurance guys to win out over them. I should know.'
'Please don't conduct a conversation here, Mr Button.' the librarian said. 'You'll disturb the readers.'
'Yes, ma'am,' Button said. 'Vic, you want to step outside? I figure we might do a little business.'
Button collected his jacket from the back of a chair and I followed him out of the library. He squatted on a bench under a ragged palm tree near the steps and lit a cigarette. 'Carson City's a shithole,' he said. 'You go there, maybe you get to see the papers, maybe you don't. Either way it's going to cost you money and time. Talk to me. Maybe I can take some money off
you but save you some time, which is money, too. Right? Los Dados history, you said. Means this's where you want to be. You hit a blank wall here. I figure you gotta talk to me.'
'Maybe I will, if you ever stop talking yourself.'
He drew on his cigarette and laughed at the same time. He choked and his tanned, bald skull turned purple. I belted his back until he got another flow of air which he immediately filled with smoke. 'Right, right. One of my few failings. As of now, I'm silent. I'm listening. Also I'm charging.'
I looked past him at the traffic-filled street. I couldn't see the temperature gauge from here but it must have climbed a few notches. Thinking things like that made me realise how out of ideas I was. I shared Frank Button's patch of shade and gave him an abbreviated, heavily edited version of the Craft story, emphasising the mysteries of the Los Dados episode. I kept the whole thing very low-key and in my wind-up tried to make it sound almost like a private piece of research.
'Horseshit,' Button said. 'Sounds like a movie deal to me.'
Dealing with Frank Button was going to be tricky. Still, he was smart, and smart is what you want for your money. 'Okay,' I said. 'It is. But a doco, low budget, independent. Don't look to carve yourself a big chunk. What're your fees as a private detective?'
'For you, a hundred and fifty a day. I'll bearthe expenses.'
'Not for me. For anyone.'
'Hundred a day plus expenses.'
'I'll pay that. I'll need an agreement, receipts and so on.'
'You got 'em. Leave it with me, Vic. My number and my place of business're on the card. Where you staying?'
I told him.
'Holy shit! I see what you mean about low budget.'
I reached for my wallet and showed him $200. 'I know you're working an angle here, Frank. I expect that. I'm not new to the information-buying business. Let's go along to your office and I'll swap the money for some of your paperwork.'