The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  “That I have read and loved Isak Dinesen,” she said, “doesn’t mean I have any desire to follow in her footsteps.”

  Though Evelyn hadn’t spoken cruelly, she offered no room for rebuttal, and he would not debase himself to try. Though he wasn’t above simple nostalgia, and so he crossed the room to her bed. He sat upon it while staring beyond the window into trees whose branches he had watched before, in the afterglow, these sentinels who had seen a crippled passion play out upon this bed, and kept it secret. Nor did they judge. Nor did they laugh.

  He had chosen life’s pursuits that demanded, by their very nature, an abstruse solitude. Pleasures could be had, and they could be feverishly intense, but all were destined to be fleeting. For in the end he was left with dedication that went beyond even the monastic. Merchant of death, pupil of shadowed deities — these were roads wide enough only for one.

  But regrets were few. He would choose the same path if he had it to do all over again.

  Eel rose from the bed, gripped her hand; her return squeeze was firm, and honest. Her head lowered to his shoulder, while his remained unbowed, content to look down on the tight, backswept lines of her hair. It was all the intimacy either could afford.

  “You’ll be fine,” he whispered, and released her hand. Eel did not look back until his hand was on the doorknob, and she spoke his name. He turned, waited, while she stood framed by the window, by the outer world.

  “I knew what you were, all along I knew,” Evelyn said. “Maybe not down to every last detail. But I had the general idea.”

  “Why tell me now?”

  She took one step toward the door, then stopped herself, and he supposed he would always wonder what might have happened had he done likewise. If one step might have turned to two, and so on.

  “I just didn’t want you to leave here thinking that that was my reason. I wanted you to know that.”

  He nodded. “It wouldn’t have mattered.” He let that take the place of any true goodbye, and softly shut the door behind him, let his footsteps lose themselves down the hall. Knowing with absolute certainty that they’d done the proper thing.

  And that he would feel its thorn for a long time to come.

  His final stop was downstairs, the study of Andrew Jackson Mullavey. Double doors locked, and had they had brackets inside, no doubt they would have been barred. Eel knocked until the man relented.

  It hit Eel in the face immediately: As large as the room was, and filled with millions of old pages Mullavey would never read, musty trophies from hunts on which Mullavey had never been, as many cigars as had been smoked within its walls and logs burned in its fireplace … this day the study was nevertheless permeated with the malignant reek of a man whose sweat had turned to poison.

  “Oh. It’s you.” Mullavey faced him in the doorway, then loosely gestured that Eel should enter.

  Eel followed him to the far end, opposite the granite fireplace and the polished antique shotguns and newer rifles mounted above the mantel. Mullavey settled behind the desk that seemed to take up most of one wall. In shirtsleeves — one rolled, the other unbuttoned and flapping — and stocking feet, he looked as though he’d been distracted while halfway dressed this morning. He kicked his feet up and had Eel sit before the desk as if this were to be an informal chat.

  Mullavey poured freely into a snifter from a cut-glass bottle of brandy; asked Eel with a raise of eyebrows if he wanted some as well; the answer was no. Everything he did he did with his right hand, the left encased in a cast of pristine white. Supposedly he had shut the hand in a car door, though the story rang false. Given Mullavey’s reliance on his drivers, Eel didn’t think he’d seen the man touch a car door in years.

  “Some kind of godawful mess, isn’t it?” Mullavey said, and sighed, shook his head, muttered, “Well, shit,” and drained his glass. “Kathleen says you told her my brother’s all right.”

  Eel nodded. “He’s safe.”

  “God’s honest truth, is that, now?”

  “I don’t have anything to gain from lying.”

  Mullavey nodded and poured a refill. “What, you got him stashed down in that smelly little hidey-hole, with the rest of the building falling down on top of it?”

  “It seemed the safest place at the time. Still does. The way I understand it, Michael Daudet’s got a hard-on to see Nathan either dead or in prison, he’s not particular. But I have to assume he’d prefer dead.”

  Mullavey gazed for a moment at the ceiling, lips pursed at the rim of the snifter. “Well, now, you know, I don’t see as how much of that applies to me. In any sort of binding, legal way, you understand. Least, that’s what my lawyers tell me.” Swirling the snifter, taking another gulp. “Does he need money? Cash, I mean?”

  Eel nearly told him no, then reconsidered; tried not to laugh in Mullavey’s face. Some coup this would be. “Access to his own reserves, you know, he’s limited in what he can get to.”

  Nodding, “I understand, I understand. Think twenty thousand’d be enough?”

  “Or twenty-five.”

  “Maybe it would be best for him to get away, lay low for a good long while.” Mullavey strolled out from behind his desk, over to a stretch of one wall where hung a gauntlet of portraits; his own at the right end, while four more preceded him, including that of his and Nathan’s father. The regression of years was charted in the rise and fall of fashions and grooming; sartorial archaeology; here muttonchop sideburns, there a goatee.

  “Because since last night,” he went on, “Nathan has been hit three ways, no mistaking that: hard, fast, and continuously.”

  Mullavey released the catch of one of the portraits, then swung it back on a hinge to expose a recessed wall safe. Dialed the combination, eased open the thick case steel door, and reached inside for bound stacks of currency.

  “What the hell,” he said, “let’s make it thirty,” and tossed the stacks toward the desk, where they slapped with pleasantly substantial weight. Eel slipped them into various pockets, then watched as Mullavey relocked the safe and took a few steps back to admire his patriarchal gallery.

  “You know,” he said, and appeared mischievous, the confession of a lad beyond reproach, “the only forefather I ever knew what he looked like, was my daddy.” Then he laughed. “These same damn portraits, I got them hanging uptown in my offices, and not one fool soul knows any better. They all think it’s family.” He settled once more behind his desk, his fortress, and poured more brandy. “Sometimes, the way things look … hell of a lot more important than the way they are.”

  Well done, Eel thought. You even had me fooled.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  Mullavey shrugged it off. “Hell if I know. I came across their pictures in a book, and just hired some kid to paint them.” He chuckled. “I made up stories to go along with every one of them. Dear Lord, what some people will believe. It’ll definitely convince you that P. T. Barnum was right. Anyway. My brother.”

  Mullavey went for more brandy, but apparently thought better of it, reeled in his seat a moment, then pushed the snifter aside.

  “Nathan was in charge of various factions of this city because he looked like he was. This morning, doesn’t look much that way at all. So tell me this: What are his plans? He’s not planning to try turning it into a two-sided war this late in the game, is he?”

  “He doesn’t know how bad things are yet.”

  “Then I’d say he’s in for a very rude awakening.” Mullavey smiled, above it all. “I do indeed hope he decides to just cut his losses and fade away. He had a good reign while it lasted, though, I’ll give it that.” He drew back sharply, raised a finger. “Not that I’m worried for myself, I hope you understand that. I’m not worried that Daudet would try to hit me and mine, here, or uptown. Wouldn’t look right. I’m a beloved man, that’d cause him too many problems. Because I’m not the one who gets his name in the paper every so often, charged with racketeering and what all. That’s not me. No…” He leaned forward
, voice dropping. “I’m the one who stands up for the son of a bitch.”

  Eel wondered when and where the concepts of brotherly love and brother’s keeper had gasped their last between these two. If ever they had breathed at all. Neither man had been given to talking about their childhoods, about which Eel knew next to nothing. He pictured them as sly little rivals from the start, racing to see who could beat the other out of the womb, and who had gone their own ways ever since, each continually checking over his shoulder for sight of the other. And each, perhaps, wondering what might have happened had he chosen the path of the other.

  “I’ll give him your opinion,” Eel said.

  “Don’t bother. Mine is the last he’d consider anyway, he’s more apt to decide that way if he doesn’t think it was my idea.” Mullavey looked Eel over as if noticing his slung arm for the first time. “Given the degree of your association with him, I’d think your own safety would be in grave jeopardy today.”

  “Let’s say I’ve wisely kept a low profile.” Smiling thinly through the painful throb of his shoulder. “When I leave, though, I want to take somebody with me. To watch my back.”

  “Sure, sure, won’t compromise my safety.”

  “Say, Hogarth?”

  “Whoever you want.”

  Eel smiled his thin and bloodless way once more, and Mullavey would never know why. Hogarth was the last of an inner circle of ritual and ceremonial commitment. The rest, as of last night, were dead. Hogarth and Mullavey were the last of those even aware of his subterranean chamber.

  Mullavey’s gazed drifted to the windows overlooking the sloping landscape of his backyard, and the lengthening shadows that crept ever closer toward the house. He drank brandy from the bottle and waxed philosophical about the fall of empires, and the dust of their passing. Eel sat through a minute of it, then two, and decided it was time to leave, he would collect Hogarth and they would be on their way—

  When a thumping crash from somewhere in the house seized the attention of them both.

  “Well, shit on toast, what next?” Mullavey said, rising, and in the instant, Eel saw his vulnerability surface. The fear that perhaps his stronghold of respectability might be breached after all. Eel’s hand dropped to the butt of his pistol, and they went moving for the door, a tandem beast with four legs and only two good arms between them.

  Eel’s pulse was the first to steady; with every step was the greater the likelihood that this was no emergency. There had been no cries of alarm, no gunshots … but he followed as Mullavey strutted with the exaggerated pretense to cold sobriety that only the drunken could affect.

  When they rounded a corner into the grand hall, they stood upon the runner, beneath the wrought iron chandeliers … and saw Evelyn Mullavey supervise the carryout of her luggage. Like some queen, newly deposed, her stoic pride unbending.

  Eel’s mouth ticked into a wry grin, then flattened. This should prove interesting.

  Mullavey uttered a pair of guttural croaks, shuffled forward in his stocking feet while a trio of Haitian groundskeepers jostled with suitcases. Apparently a piece or two had tumbled down from midway up the stairs.

  “Evie?” said Mullavey, so soft, so wounded. “Evie. What are you doing?”

  From near the front door, she stood her ground and looked at him with general disdain. “You have a great many instincts, Drew, now why don’t you use them and figure out the obvious.”

  The comings and goings in the hall had come to a standstill. Mullavey had spent many years in the public eye, through moments triumphant and stressful, and Eel could feel for him, he really could. Here was a moment that screamed for privacy, and still he had none. The groundskeepers, guards, domestic staff, and Kathleen Forrest … all watching as if this were a soap opera.

  Mullavey had questions, broken and half-formed — was she afraid, was she just leaving until things quieted down, was it something he’d said, or done…? She answered all, and Eel felt oblique pride as he watched her deflate him without once stooping to petty accusation. While watching Mullavey was like watching some broken supplicant debased by the rejection of a goddess he’d spent years showering with devotion by rote.

  Evelyn motioned the groundskeepers forward, “Come on, please, keep it moving,” and they started in again.

  “Don’t you dare!” Mullavey cried, turning from her to these men he had brought across a sea to do his bidding. “Don’t you … even … think … about moving those for her. Not one fucking step, you boys understand? My house, my land, and my say.”

  Standoff, with frozen muscles and watchful eyes, faces both white and black waiting to see who would make the first move.

  “Fine,” said Evelyn. “I’ll carry them to the car myself.”

  When Mullavey turned to confront her once more, gone was the pious wretch. He squeezed out a bitter laugh. “You really mean to do this, don’t you?”

  “It’s no bluff, if that’s what you think it is.”

  Mullavey shuffled, chewing at his lower lip, and he at last relented, frowned at the groundskeepers and irritably kicked at the nearest suitcase.

  “Go on, then, go on,” he said, glaring. “Get this shit out of my sight.” Waiting, as they began to clear the hallway floor, while Eel began to sense within Mullavey a terrible reconstruction of presence. A casting aside of fundamentals, or a revealing of everything Mullavey had wanted to be and never allowed of himself, for her sake. From the squaring of his shoulders to the deepening lines in his face, he seemed taller, newer—

  He looked as if he were trying to become Nathan, actually. He reached for her, with a slow hand. Reached for Evelyn’s face, her steepening slope of eyebrows gone heavy with the weight of sterile memories, dead futures; all things great and small, planned for and never been. Eel wondering why, upstairs, she couldn’t have gazed upon him with such unbridled sorrow—

  While Mullavey turned hand to fist, and punched her.

  Evelyn’s head snapped into the heavy doorframe. Mullavey’s fist drew back again, and Eel was moving before he even realized impulse had taken over. Out came the pistol, so sleek, and when he spoke it was with the voice that could freeze every last hope of the condemned

  Three low words: “Look at me.”

  Mullavey turned, saw the gun aimed at his forehead, and lowered his fist. That was all, no more, and he regarded Eel not with the expected cowering but defiant curiosity.

  “Mr. Fletcher,” his voice soft, with mild surprise, “what is this sudden interest in my home life?”

  Eel said nothing, simply stared at him over gunsights, while behind Mullavey, Evelyn straightened. She bled, but she would not weep; she might swell, but she hadn’t lost her smile. And how cruelly superior it had turned. She held a whip and knew it.

  Don’t say it, Eel willed her. Just walk out that door.

  “There’s nothing sudden about it, Drew,” she said. “Unlike you, he’s not afraid to lie in the same bed with me.”

  Mullavey froze, but everything about him seemed acrawl. Skin and mouth and eyes, reddened by the dawn of loathing.

  “You might have noticed that,” she went on, “if you were half as observant of the things that go on under this roof as I’ve been.” She wiped her nose and glanced among the staff of maids, who peered from doorways, out of the line of fire. Settling her gaze upon one young face, framed with feral hair. “So enjoy your mistress, Drew. You’ve earned her.”

  She left, then, to await the rest of the suitcases outside. And Eel decided she was the lucky one; she’d been far nearer the door than he. Between himself and the door stood five other armed men, his own, but each subject to a technicality that would surely not be overlooked.

  “Put away the gun, Mr. Fletcher,” said Mullavey, facing him head-on, the nervy bastard presenting a full target, “or I’ll be forced to have somebody else in this room open fire.” Glancing around at them; the inner debate of loyalty was reflected on every face. “And they will do it once they remember whose brother it is that authori
zes their payroll.”

  Eel tucked away the pistol. Time for him to take Hogarth, and take his leave, while Mullavey watched with the triumph of a newly crowned emperor. Never had any door seemed so distant. Really quite remarkable, though, his self-control, down to one hand and all it wanted to do was retrieve the pistol and, come what may, put a couple into Mullavey’s head.

  Another time, perhaps.

  When properly motivated, he possessed the patience of saints.

  Eel left the driving to Hogarth, had him run a number of errands that kept them rolling well past nightfall. Shopping, mostly, sending Hogarth after plastic bottles of juices, plus nuts, grains, berries, other foods that would keep well in a cool environment for days, perhaps weeks.

  Money was no object, not with thirty thousand of Mullavey’s dollars. During the last of Hogarth’s stops, Eel opened the glove box and to the pocketed money added a small, heavy item. A sap, thick rubber on the outside, weighty lead within.

  The provisions secured, Eel directed Hogarth to drive into the neighborhoods just up from Basin, near the St. Louis Cemetery. Low-rent housing here, an aged warehouse there. The next block looked reasonably deserted; it would do. The French Quarter was only blocks away, and a world distant.

  “Okay, okay, pull over here,” said Eel, motioning.

  Hogarth looked out the windshield with a sneer, very bad neighborhood. “Who do we know around here?”

  Eel pulled out a fistful of cash. “I’m supposed to make a payoff, all right?” He waved the crisp sheaf of bills under Hogarth’s nose. “What, you think we’re going to pull allies together by appealing to a sense of fair play?”

  Hogarth wheeled over to the curb, shut off the headlights, left the engine running. Eel twiddled with the radio dial, found a news station, kept it there. Glanced up and down the street every now and then, with sighs of controlled impatience.

  “What are you carrying?” Eel asked him. “I think we can trust this guy, but you never know.”