“How much money was there in the box?”
“I didn’t have time to count it, but I thought it looked like about five thousand.”
“And who’s this Bardot person?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Maybe a real assassin, maybe just a con artist. Krause won’t care.”
“So that’s it, then,” said Anne. “Agent Krause gets her big bust—”
“She could use one,” said Chris.
“Oh, nasty,” I said. “Correct, but nasty.”
“She gets her big collar,” said Anne, “and the guys who killed Charlie are all dead.”
“Except for Rappolt,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Him. Did you mention him to the police?”
“No. I figured there was no point. He’s back in wherever he’s officially supposed to be by now, with a ton of plausible deniability in front of him. And no way the Army investigates a full colonel on the say so of a mere civilian.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t have enough hard data to use him in my write-up, so how much less is anybody in authority going to pursue it? Oh, well.”
“I trust it’s a usable story anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a hell of a story, Herman.”
***
Anne’s story ran two days later. The Secret Service, of course, pressured her editor about the need for secrecy in the assassination case, and he partially agreed. She was not allowed to say anything about the hit man named in the note, nor about any hit man, period. She was allowed to tell about the tunnel and the box, but only as a secret stash of money from unknown sources.
But that was enough. She wrote a very solid piece about Charlie’s and his father’s murders and their connection to the Vietnam War. It had sensational crime reporting, human interest, history, and just a hint of conspiracy, and it ran on the front page. She also did a sidebar on the lives of homeless people, with a picture of Glenda. That ran in an interior section of the same issue. She wanted to do another one on the abuses of power by the Department of Homeland Security, if only to get back at Agent Krause for stealing her video, but her editor wouldn’t buy it.
We celebrated the printing by going out to dinner at a sports bar that superficially resembled the dance hall in Eveleth. They didn’t have a band, though. For dancing and other activity, we had to go back to my townhouse. Later, we sat on the big couch in front of the fireplace, watching the gas log pretend to burn itself up and working on a bottle of my best Scotch.
“Seems like it was a long way for you to go, just for a story in one issue of the newspaper,” I said.
“Sometimes it happens that way.”
“Was it worth it?”
“False modesty does not become you, Jackson. What you mean is were you worth it. I shouldn’t have to tell you so, but yes. But the story? Of course it was. There’s always a bit of a letdown after a big story, though. It feels as if you never really quite knew as much as you would have liked before you wrote it.”
“Maybe you’d have written it the same way anyway.”
“Maybe. I’ll never know. The thing about Rappolt bothers me.”
“You mean that you couldn’t include him in the piece?”
“No, that he gets off scot-free and nobody can do a thing about it. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Actually, he didn’t quite get off. I had my hacker friend send an email to him, with a cc to his superior, telling him that his operation is blown and all his people dead.”
“So, what will happen?”
“I don’t know. His hometown is Kansas City. I thought I’d watch the local newspaper for a while at the Central Library, see if there’s anything about him.”
“You can do that online, you know.”
“You can do a lot of things online, Anne, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any better. I like tactile events. I like touching something besides a mouse.”
“I noticed.” She gave me a sly smile.
“Is that a complaint?”
“Not on your life.”
“Anyway, whatever happens with Rappolt, Charlie wouldn’t have cared, one way or the other.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
I let out a huge sigh, took my arm back from where it had been wrapped around her shoulders, and stood up. I had just made a very risky decision, one that was most unlike me.
“I’m about to give you a gift, Anne. It’s a hell of a gift, and I’m betting a lot on your not taking advantage of it.”
“You’re talking like a soap opera, Herman. What are you giving me that is so precious?”
“The truth.”
I went to my desk in the corner of the dining room, unlocked the center drawer, and took out a stained and crumpled sheet of paper. As I handed it to her, I said, “This is what was really on top of the money in Charlie’s box.”
“What was really there? But how could you have changed it? I mean, I saw you pick the other one up.”
“A lot of things are possible in a dark tunnel, Anne. Did you wonder at all why Charlie would have written the note on the back of a copy of his will?”
“I guess I didn’t think about it. Maybe that was the only paper he had.”
“Wrong. It was the only paper I had with his fingerprints on it. So that’s what I had to use for the forgery. This, however, is the McCoy.”
She put down her glass of Scotch and read:
Dear Hubert,
I figured you would find this if anybody could. That’s why I wrote that will. Once, I would have told you to take the money and use it to kill some people. A whole list of them. But I finally lived long enough to learn some things. I learned that blood feuds are no damn good. And I learned that the way that you stop them is just to stop.
I’m sick of the killing and the planning to kill and the hate. I want it to end with me. So take the money and do something good with it, okay? Maybe you can buy a bond for some homeless person.
That’s a joke.
Thanks for all your help over the years. I’m proud to have known you.
Your dead friend,
Charlie
***
“You’re right,” she said. “He wouldn’t have cared about Rappolt. In fact, it sounds as if he knew about him and still didn’t care.”
“And by not caring, he may have finally found his way out of the jungle.”
“That’s nice, Herman. I wish I could write it. What are you going to do with the money, assuming you ever get it back?”
“Actually, I didn’t wait. I gave a free bond to a guy named Vitrol Wilson, who is a guaranteed skip. The question is what are you going to do with that piece of paper?”
She looked at it again. Then she got up, walked across the room, and threw it into the fire.
“Would you like to dance, Herman?”
“I’d love to.”
***
The next day we held a memorial service for Charlie, down in Connemara Gulch. As his only heir, I had donated his remains to the med school at the University of Minnesota, but we solemnly buried his fatigue jacket and dog tags in a place by some small trees and marked the spot with a cross of baking powder. It took a while for the word to spread, but we eventually drew about twenty raggedy people for the event.
I had brought six bottles of wine with screw tops and a huge bag of White Castle hamburgers, but nobody was allowed to have anything without first standing over the grave and saying a few words. Some of them were actually quite moving. Apparently Charlie was well liked, even though he himself never admitted to liking anybody. The guy named Mingus, whose neck I had stood on only a few nights earlier, produced a harmonica and played “Amazing Grace” while each of the homeless people threw a handful of dirt into the hole and said “ashes to ashes,” or something like that. One of them actually knew the Twenty-third Psalm, which he recited with some passion. One said, “Home is the soldier, home from the sea,” and then got a loo
k of major confusion and consternation. Another said, “There’s a lot more of us laying down than there is up a-walking around.” I shot him a quick glance to see if it might have been the Prophet.
Anne, true to her word, had brought a dozen copies of the newspaper with Glenda’s picture in it. She gave them to her and showed her where to find the article.
As she looked at it, her eyes started to tear up.
“That ain’t me! Why you printing somebody else’s picture with my name? Dear, sweet suffering Jesus, I don’t look like that!”
She looked again, squinting. “I don’t, do I?”
“I’m sorry, Glenda. I thought you’d be happy to see—”
“Oh my God. I was never really beautiful, but I was at least… My God amighty. Where the hell have I got to?”
The tears were streaming freely down her face now, and soon her body was racked with sobs. Mingus put his harmonica back in his pocket and opened a bottle for her.
“Here you go, babe. Have a drink and forget about it.”
She looked at the extended bottle for a long time, her crying subsiding a bit. Finally she said, “I don’t think so.”
“Sure, you do. It’ll make everything okay. Don’t it always?”
“I gotta go,” was all she said, shaking her head vehemently. She gathered up her newspapers, clutched them to her bosom, and walked away.
I guessed it was a day for atonement and rebirth. I hoped so, anyway.
Epilogue
With Eddie Bardot snatched off the street, Wilkie was able to persuade Frank Russo to come back for his trial, after all. So the twenty-five thou I had taken out of Charlie’s box, the first time I was in the tunnel, was pure gravy. I was back to playing with the house money. I gave Agnes her back pay and a week in advance for good measure. I didn’t have the five K that the feds took, of course, but that was okay. They left town with Eddie in cuffs, just as happy as if they had good sense. He, presumably, was not so happy, and that was worth something to me.
Not long after that, there was an obituary in the Kansas City Star for a Colonel John Rappolt. Apparently he had done what a lot of self-important career officers do when they see their entire world fall apart. He had shot himself. So even though Charlie said he didn’t care, I figured that all the shadows from his personal jungle were finally gone.
I wasn’t sure if mine were, though, and I needed a detached, third party perspective to straighten out the issue. One morning, I headed north out of the Twin Cities, then crossed the St. Croix River into Wisconsin and went east on Highway Eight, across the recently harvested farmlands and into the brown and black late autumn countryside. I was going to a place that I visit seldom but think about often, all the way across Wisconsin and into Upper Michigan. Redrock Prison is its name, and it was where my uncle Fred was doing his fourth term for bookmaking.
After the usual pleasantries, I told him all about Charlie and his box and how I wasn’t sure I had done enough truly to lay him to rest.
“Lemmie tell you a story, nephew,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Back about forty years ago, there was this guy, name of Eddie Feigner, was the fast-pitch king of softball. He could throw a softball, underhand, a hundred and twenty miles an hour, so fast the ref couldn’t even see it. He was just the pure stuff, couldn’t be beat.
“He was too good to play with any regular team, so he used to play traveling exhibition games, like the Harlem Globetrotters did in basketball. He traveled with just three other guys, a catcher and two fielders. They didn’t need any basemen, see, ‘cause Eddie would strike everybody out, but they had to have four men on the team so they had enough people to bat with the bases full. They called themselves ‘The King and his Court.’”
“I seem to vaguely remember something about them.”
“Yeah, I think I might have taken you to a game once when you were little. Okay, so anyway, here’s our boy, at the end of the ninth inning in some nowhere little town. He’s up by one run and there’s two men out and he’s got two strikes on the last batter. But he don’t throw the ball. Instead, he’s pacing around on the mound, looking worried. So the catcher goes out to talk to him.
“‘Hey, man,’ he says, ‘we’re one pitch away from winning this thing. Throw it, already.’
“‘I gotta tell you,’ Feigner says, ‘I ain’t got nothing left. My arm is shot. I’m not sure I can even get the ball to the plate, much less throw a strike. I think we gotta concede the game.’
“So the catcher thinks for a while and comes up with a plan. ‘Gimmie the ball now,’ he says, ‘and I’ll hide it under my chest protector. Then I’ll go back to home plate and you pretend to throw the ball, like always. I’ll whack the ball into my glove like I just caught it, and we’ll see what the ump says.’
“So that’s what they do. Feigner fakes throwing the pitch, the catcher fakes catching it, and the ump yells, ‘Stee-rike! Yer outta here!’
“And all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose at home plate. The batter is screaming at the ump and kicking dirt on his shoes and the ump is pushing him with his chest and they’re both gesturing with their hands and getting red in the face. The catcher wants nothing to do with any of that, so he walks away and goes back out to the pitching mound.
“‘What’s going on?’ says Feigner.
“‘Ah, you know,’ says the catcher. ‘Same old, same old. The batter thinks it was low and outside.’”
I laughed. “Cute, Unc, but what’s the point?”
“It’s not done yet, okay?”
“Sorry.”
“So a year or so later, they’re playing the same team again, and the same batter comes up in the bottom of the ninth. This time Feigner’s arm is fine, but he throws the guy four balls, walks him. So the catcher goes out to the mound.
“‘What the hell are you doing?’ he says.
“‘Paying for my sins,’ says Feigner.
“‘Yeah? Gee, Eddie, that’s really nice. That’s a fine thing to do.’
“‘Thank you,’ says Eddie.
“‘You’re welcome. Don’t do it anymore.’
“And he didn’t.”
And neither did I.
Author’s Notes
Minnesotans will be quick to note that I have taken some liberties with both time and place settings. Most of the Saint Paul settings are real, including the abandoned tunnel under Kellogg Park, but anybody trying to locate Lefty’s Pool Hall or Nickel Pete’s pawnshop will find himself on a fool’s errand. The Ramsey County Jail moved from its location on the Mississippi River bluff several years ago, but in Herman Jackson’s world, it is still there and always will be. It lets him keep his office downtown. The Iron Range is largely the way it was fifteen years ago, when I used to spend a fair amount of time there. Today, there is almost no trace of the original town of Mountain Iron. The bus station in Eveleth is a real historic reference, though it, too, is now gone. I got off at that station once in May, and the piles of plowed snow were still higher than the parked cars. The VFW bar is pure fabrication.
With history, I have been more scrupulous. The events that triggered the 1967 race riots in Detroit are well documented, and I have not altered them. My scenes in Vietnam are largely composites of the many stories told to me over the years by coworkers or classmates who were there.
The characters, of course, are another matter. If they bear any resemblance to anyone living or dead, it is a matter of pure coincidence, and nobody would be more astonished to discover it than I.
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