“Thank you kindly,” Bill said.
She went out into the gallery, closing the door behind her. Johnny Cross and Cousin Cozzens were there, Cozzens still seated on the chair.
Mrs. Frye put her hands on her hips. “On your feet, Cozzens. Don’t you know it’s impolite to sit while a lady is standing?”
“You told me to sit here and not move, Miz Frye.”
“Ah, so you can follow instructions. Maybe there’s hope for you yet. On your feet.”
Cousin rose. Standing, he was a head taller than she, even though his head was now bowed.
“You’re lucky Damon thinks you’re lucky, Cozzens.”
“How’s that, Miz Frye?”
“You shoot a drunk in a barroom brawl and he turns out to be a fiend who’s got all North Central Dallas in a panic. So Damon thinks you’re lucky. Turns out you bring in a lot of new customers who want to take a look at the man who shot the thumb off the axe murderer.
“Damon thinks that’s lucky, too, so he wants to keep you around. That’s gamblers for you. But that’s what’s keeping me from firing your ass out of here. So maybe Damon is right and you really are lucky, who knows?”
“Uh, thank you, Miz Frye. Thanks. I really ’preciate it, thanks, thank—”
“Stop it, Cozzens.”
Cousin shut up.
“From now on you’ll stand your watches and I do mean stand,” Mrs. Frye declared. “No more chair for you till further notice. Savvy?”
“Yes, Miz Frye. Should I put the chair in another room so it’s out of the way?”
“Leave it where it is so the other guards can use it. Why should they suffer? They can use it, you can’t. Don’t you use it.”
“Yes, Miz Frye.”
“Nobody in this house lays down on the job but my girls, and for them it’s what you might call in the line of duty. Nobody, but nobody sleeps on the job.”
Mrs. Frye opened the room door and stuck her head in. Bill was drying his face with a hand towel; there was a pile of them on the bedside night table.
“You can go in now,” she said, opening the door wide.
Johnny Cross stepped inside.
“Johnny! Johnny Cross!”
Hey, Bill, long time no see.”
“Man, you’re good for sore eyes.” Bill was excited, face shining. He looked like he was ready to jump out of bed. “What I went through to see you!”
“I’ll pull up a chair and you can tell me all about it,” Johnny said.
“I’ll leave you two to get on with your man-talk,” Mrs. Frye said. “You’re probably planning a dozen or so murders.”
“At least,” Bill Longley said.
“The hell of it is, I believe you.” Mrs. Frye went out.
NINETEEN
Three gunmen were under the gun. Their names were Park Farner, Hector Sime, and Justus Pike.
Three rebels who’d gone up against the Power and lost.
Now they must face Death. Not die, necessarily, but play dice with the devil with their lives as the stake. And the name of this particular devil was—Barbaroux.
Trial by Combat, if you will.
In Moraine County on the fever-haunted swamps of the Blacksnake, Commander Rufus Barbaroux now honored the duel and pandered to his own personal prejudices by combining personal combat with an even older tradition: the absolute power of life and death over their subjects once held by the Caesars of Imperial Rome.
A power he reserved for himself as heir of the Imperium by right of mastery of his own self-created Province of the Trans-Mississippi.
Tonight he would exercise that power for the amusement and edification of his Inner Circle, the ruling cadre of the Combine, the vehicle by which he maintained his rule over much of the Blacksnake.
The arena in which the Games would be staged was the Great White Boat, a floating fortress in which Barbaroux made his headquarters. She had begun as a grand steamboat back before the war in the days when steamers were the first and last word in trans-Mississippi travel.
The riverboat had been built in the late 1840s, the heyday of the grand steamers. Christened the Sabine Queen, she was a proud member of a great fleet of such steamboats that coursed up and down the great length of the Mississippi River.
The Sabine Queen was a medium-sized specimen of its type and class. Her modest dimensions allowed her entree to tributaries and branches where larger steamers could not go. Her size was ideal for the Blacksnake River, which had a number of shallow passages and narrow channels.
It also worked to Barbaroux’s benefit, for the U.S. Navy was unable to send its warships or even lighter gunboats upriver to blast out him and his forces for fear of their vessels becoming mired or snagged to be pried open and taken apart by Combine forces.
The Blacksnake River was tight in some spots, shallow in others, both in more than a few places. The Queen’s draught was shallow enough to traverse the river.
The upper works looked like a fairy castle, its multi-decks flanked by twin black smokestacks. Recently painted, she gleamed all white and shining, but the river and the swamp worked against it constantly. Relentless humid heat rotted woodwork and rope lines, blistering the paint work and peeling it off the boards. Swamp foliage smeared her sides, streaking them with green stains.
The Sabine Queen was moored at the largest wharf at the Clinchfield docks. It was night and the boat and wharf were all lit up. This was done for two reasons: security and Barbaroux’s mania for grandeur.
The security issue was paramount. Commander Rufus Barbaroux was the most hated man on the Blacksnake, in all Moraine County.
Barbaroux had commissioned artist Dean Valentine to paint his portrait. Valentine, like the poet Lord Byron, was “too good looking to be good.” Unlike Lord B., Valentine had talent not genius.
A revealing exchange between artist and patron had taken place during their most recent sitting several days earlier, before the Night Court . . .
* * *
During one of the artist’s breaks, Barbaroux went to the window. He stood there looking out, hands clasped behind his back, rocking back and forth on his boot heels.
The window commanded a view of the wharf to which the Sabine Queen was moored. It was a typical midmorning dockside scene, bustling with activity. Work gangs loaded and unloaded cargoes. Pallets were stacked. Tarry rope lines thick as a man’s forearm were wound on windlasses.
Barbaroux kept a lot of sailors employed in the care and maintenance of the Sabine Queen. Sailors were used to hard work and the regular grind of chores.
A lesser number of pirates, mostly river rats but also some blue-water free-booters, were also part of the boat’s company. The pirates were lousy on shipboard chores but adept at the business of storming other boats, raiding ports, and conscienceless killing.
“Look at them, the swine,” Barbaroux said, turning away from the window. “They’re making more money now than they’ve ever seen, even before the war, and yet they’d cut my throat and stick my head on a pike if they dared.”
He seemed quite cheerful despite it all, or perhaps because of it.
“Is it really so bad as all that, Commander?” Valentine asked in a conversational tone.
“Worse! They don’t dare lift a finger against me. Why? Because they know that no matter what feeble plan their pea-brains might hatch out, it would effectively be destroyed by my counterstroke, whatever that might be.
“I have a contingency plan for every emergency. Their mutinous efforts would result only in a cruel and unusual death for each and every conspirator, no matter how obscure. A death, may I say, that will be memorably grotesque, to serve as an object-lesson for the rest of the men.”
“Of that I’ve no doubt, Commander—”
“‘Let them hate me, so long as they fear me,’” Barbaroux ringingly intoned. “Quick, my educated friend—who said it?”
Valentine pretended to think it over before replying. “I’m pretty sure it was one of the Caesars, but which
one? Not your illustrious ancestor Nero, it just doesn’t sound like something he’d say.”
Barbaroux claimed descent from Nero, citing the emperor’s family name “Ahenobarbi”—“bronze beard ”—with his own family name of Barbaroux, which translates as “red beard.”
He also had a chestful of ancient documents, genealogical charts, registers of the lineage of the crowned heads of Europe, their deeds, charters. Patents of nobility and whatnot. All of which added up to exactly nothing in the way of solid proof but did nothing to prevent Barbaroux from making his reckless claims.
“Titus made a lot of conquests during his reign and he was known for crushing rebellions with the upmost severity—witness his destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—so I’ll say that the source of the quote was—Titus.”
“An inspired guess, Valentine, very good—really quite good,” Barbaroux said, eyes shining. “Also quite wrong.”
“You have the better of me, Commander, as usual. I don’t pretend to have your expertise on Imperial Rome. To end the suspense, then, who said it?”
“Tiberius!” Barbaroux crowed triumphantly.
“Ah, Tiberius . . . yes, that would figure,” Valentine said, thoughtful, or seeming to be. “With your permission, Commander, may we return to the sitting? You’re usually so busy that I don’t get many chances to paint you, and I’d like to take advantage of the morning light . . .”
“Of course.” Barbaroux rubbed his palms together in a brisk hand-washing gesture before moving to take his place in the sitter’s area.
Valentine took up palette and paintbrush, hugging to himself the sure and certain knowledge that Barbaroux was wrong.
The quote was from Caligula.
* * *
The Sabine Queen this night looked something like a wedding cake set atop an upside-down cake pan. The wedding cake was the multi-story white-painted superstructure of the steamboat, that is, all her works above the deck. The cake pan was the boat’s shallow-draught hull, which allowed it to cruise upon shallow waters where other boats were unable to go.
Rufus Barbaroux’s point of origin had never been pinpointed, but the area had been pretty well narrowed to the Caribbean. One rumor circulating was that Barbaroux was a descendent of a pirate colony founded somewhere in the Caribbean by the buccaneering Lafitte brothers, Jean and Pierre, who’d helped General Andy “Old Hickory” Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans against the British back in 1814. The brothers’ freebooting ways proved obnoxious to members of the young republic who ran them and their pirate horde out of the Louisiana Territory.
Rufus Barbaroux was holding Night Court from his throne in the Grand Saloon of the steamboat Sabine Queen.
He was surrounded by members of his entourage, including Flossie and Jonquil, his favorite concubines; the painter Dean Valentine; and Malvina the Gypsy Fortune-Teller and her “niece” Tanya.
Tanya seemed like a nice girl. She was in her early teens with an oval face, wide dark eyes that were quite striking, and tawny golden skin. She was tall, thin, leggy, with wavy dark hair reaching down well past slim shoulders.
Yes she seemed like a nice youngster, quiet, soft spoken, polite, but—Too good to be true?
But then Valentine was the suspicious type. He hoped Tanya wasn’t as nice and innocent as she seemed. If so, she was in the wrong place. But then how nice and innocent could anyone be who was associated with Malvina?
Malvina was a horror who looked every inch the part.
Oddly, when Valentine had that thought about the Gypsy Witch, Malvina gave him a dirty look. Eerie coincidence, that. Unsettling, almost as if she could read his mind.
Valentine looked away, telling himself that perhaps he had been incautious enough to let his distaste for Malvina show when he’d been looking at her.
Malvina was a trickster like others of her fortune-telling ilk. No trickery about her off-putting appearance, though, she’d come by it honestly. Her face looked like an apple that had withered and dried in the sun.
Worse, she looked like she’d died and come back to haunt the living.
None of Barbaroux’s followers were allowed to stand higher on the platform than the level of his head when he was seated on the throne.
There were two exceptions . . . his favorites Flossie and Jonquil were exempt from the rule.
Two hard-faced, lithe-bodied fancy ladies, gowned, feathered, and frilled, they stood flanking Barbaroux on his high throne chair, bracketing him like bookends upholding some not-so-slender volume.
The assembled guests now crowded as close to the throne and its occupant as Barbaroux’s personal elite bodyguard would allow.
Overhead, above the area fronting the throne, a wagon wheel chandelier hung suspended on a length of chain secured to rafter beams high aloft. Big fat candles—wax candles, the most expensive kind—were set in holders regularly spaced around the rim of the wheel. Tapered glass sleeves shielded the candles from gusts of wind that might snuff out the flames.
Torches blazed in iron holders fastened along the hall’s long walls, thin spirals and snakes of smoke curling off blazing torch heads, climbing to the heights of the hall before becoming lost in the shadows.
Barbaroux motioned for a flunky, only to have five of them rush to the foot of the platform to attend to his wants.
“Bring up the prisoners,” he commanded.
All five started to dash off to obey, some already elbowing the others in their zeal to obey.
“Halt! . . . Stop! ” Barbaroux shouted.
The quintet slammed to a dead halt as if they’d hit an invisible wall.
“It doesn’t take five, just one of you go,” Barbaroux said.
“You!” he called out, stabbing the air with a pointing finger at the server he wanted, the one closest to a bulkhead door in the sidewall. “You go!”
“Yessir!” The chosen one took off like a streak, the other four glaring daggers at his back as he hastened to the exit.
The prisoners were being held below decks in the brig. It should have taken fifteen to twenty minutes for a guard detail to return, so naturally it took the better part of an hour.
The guests didn’t mind; they busied themselves with eating and drinking. Presently they began to eat less and drink more.
Finally the guard detail arrived. A door opened in the portside wall. Four guards entered the hall, marching two by two, shoulder to shoulder.
Then came the prisoners, three sorry looking individuals chained hand and foot, in manacles and fetters. Chain links rattled and dragged on the wooden floor.
Two more guards brought up the rear. Council members, Combine functionaries, and other lesser folk hurriedly got out of the way of the guards and prisoners as the former hustled the latter to the foot of the throne.
The prisoners were Park Farner, Justus Pike, and Hector Sime.
Farner, the youngest of the three, was twenty-five. He was powerfully built, a marvel of muscular development. Long thick straight brown hair fell past his broad shoulders.
Justus Pike, forty-four, stood several inches above six feet. He was raw boned and long limbed. His hair was an inky-black pompadour, streaked with gray at the temples. He looked a lot smarter than he was.
Hector Sime, midthirties, had arched high eyebrows that gave him a permanent look of surprise. A thin well-trimmed eyebrow mustache adorned his upper lip.
Their stance was none too steady; they were shaky on their feet. But then anyone might have been unsteady in their place.
Barbaroux’s invited guests gathered around the captives. A mood of wolfish expectation among the spectators began to make itself felt.
Aarn Bildad, a master of legal hocus-pocus and double-talk when such was required to slap a thin coating of legality over some Combine proceeding, addressed the throne:
“No need for a trial, Commander, it’s an open and shut case: Pike, Sime, and Farner shot and killed one of our tax collectors, Hull Chavis, and stole his weekly receipts. What’s more, to add
insult and injury to the crime, the act was committed at the Wahtonka Road tollgate.”
Barbaroux gripped the armrests of his throne, leaning forward to stare down at the three accused men. “You astonish me, Mr. Bildad.”
“I was astonished myself, Commander.”
“You mean to tell me that not only have we lost Hull Chavis, a dedicated collector for the regime brutally shot dead by daylight on Wahtonka Road, but that these marauders had the audacity, the effrontery, to commit this despicable outrage on the site of the Wahtonka tollgate station itself?”
“I blush to admit that that is the case, Commander.”
“The bloody deed was done—when? After operating hours?”
“No, sir. Hull Chavis was shot dead and his revenues robbed, as near as we can tell, at four o’clock of that weekday afternoon—”
Commander Barbaroux held his hands out from his sides in a gesture of incomprehension, as if beseeching the heavens for divine guidance.
“I don’t understand. I’m bewildered. A tollgate operator’s duties comprise more than collecting tolls; there is a basic law enforcement component here that obligates toll station operators to suppress violent crime against any user of a Moraine County toll road. This court would like to speak to the operators of the Wahtonka toll station at the time of the killing and robbery. Have you taken steps to make them available for questioning by this court?”
“Our office has taken these steps, Commander.” Aarn Bildad couldn’t help look smug when making the affirmation to Barbaroux.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the names of the toll station operators at hand, Mr. Bildad. Will you be so good as to call forward those on duty at the Wahtonka Road tollgate when Hull Chavis was shot dead and robbed?”
“Gladly, Commander.” Aarn Bildad made a show of cupping his hand, putting it to his mouth as a kind of voice amplifying megaphone and shouting:
“Call Hector Sime, Justus Pike, and Park Farner forward to the stand!”
There was a moment of bewilderment on the part of the crowd, people exchanging uncomprehending glances.
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