Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  I looked, but found no sign of a surgeon packed in salt. Blackthorne had missed a step there.

  A pattern was emerging; one I didn’t like half so much as the one in the carpet, which had come halfway across the world to settle on a portable floor in Old Mexico.

  I investigated further. The stock car had straw and sacks of oats sufficient to feed a string, let alone one thoroughbred. The caboose was a cozy affair, equipped with a bentwood rocker, a ticking mattress on an iron frame, and a rolltop desk, with several decks of cards and a bandbox-new checker set in the drawers.

  From food to artillery to medical supplies to diversions, the train was stocked halfway toward the twentieth century.

  I made a mental note to bring along The Odyssey for entertainment; it might last me to the last stop, if I read it in the original Greek and played a few thousand games of checkers.

  I thought I’d snookered the old man out of a case of Scotch whisky and two hundred dollars in gold, but by the time the thing was through I figured I’d be lucky to clear a nickel an hour, not counting doctor’s bills, with nothing left to drink but warm beer distilled through the bowels of a burro.

  The Honorable Harlan Blackthorne always had the last word. I fancy I hear it whenever I lay flowers on his grave.

  FIVE

  If I’d learned nothing else during my time with him, I knew better than to expect explanations once I’d accepted an assignment. He’d only give me one of those toothless tight-lipped cat’s smiles and say no intelligence was as useful as the kind I found out on my own; Washington jargon for what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. Which was a bald-faced lie, as I’d found out on my own more times than I could count.

  So I went over his head, literally: straight to the attic.

  Blackthorne had lost patience while the local, territorial, and federal authorities were arguing the details of constructing a courthouse, and had set up shop in the headquarters of the Herald building, arranging recesses to coincide with when the presses in the basement began their daily rumble. He’d had the attic cleared of stacks of old numbers of the newspaper to make room for records and evidence, turning it into a combination file room and Black Museum. Trial transcripts rolled and bound with cord stuck out like ancient scrolls from floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes, clamshell boxes stood cheek-by-jowl on freestanding shelves open on both sides, and wooden cases contained case files in leather folders amidst a thicket of edged and percussion weapons hung up like heraldic arms. The collection bore nightmare tales of beheadings, back-shootings, and duels fought at such close range the combatants’ shirts caught fire; these, too, dangled from pegs, singed and stiff with old blood, reeking of stale smoke and charred flesh. It all added up to some ten thousand years at hard labor and a potters’ field of necks broken on the scaffold.

  The curator and headmistress of all this sat at a student desk, her erect back supported by whalebone wrapped in black bombazine and a rimless monocle behind which swam a brown eye swollen all out of proportion, like a fish in a bowl. Just where Electra Highbinder spent the hours of darkness added color to the conversation in Chicago Joe’s. Depending on which story you bought, she slept on a cot among the stained broadaxes and jars of poisoned livers or sipped green tea from a translucent cup in a room above the Gans and Klein Clothing Store at Main and Broadway furnished in the Federal style, all carved mahogany eagles and rich leather bindings inside blown-glass presses; this on the authority of the man who’d delivered her four-poster bed from Montgomery Ward.

  I followed protocol: Took off my hat, called her Mrs. Highbinder, and stated my request. I had no evidence that she actually refused access to those who got it out of sequence, but the ghost of a husband last seen at the bottom of a shaft in Last Chance Gulch hung about her like tuberose and there was nothing to be gained by stirring him.

  “Childress?” She off-loaded one of her plat-book-size ledgers from the stack on the floor by her knee onto the desk, splayed it open, and ran the fletch of her old-fashioned quill down the crowded columns, stopping near the bottom of the page. The quill rose from the sheet, pointing across the room. “CH-17.”

  I found it among the clamshell boxes on a shelf and started to leave with it tucked under my arm. A rapid clicking noise brought me back around to where she sat tapping the nib of her pen against tea-stained teeth. Again she reversed the quill, lining it up with a writing table standing in a pool of milky sunlight leaking through a fan-shaped window across from her station. The meaning was clear: I could leave, but the box stayed.

  The split-bottom chair found every saddlesore I’d accumulated since I’d left Helena the last time, but I opened the box and spilled its contents onto the table. They were in a bundle, tied with more cord. I tugged loose the knot, set aside a ragged stack of newspaper clippings, and began reading a neat clerkly hand on foolscap sheets, identified at the top as a transcription from the decoded report wired by the Pinkerton who’d vanished in Mexico.

  His name was DeBeauclair, but he’d walked the length of the Sierra Madre posing as a Portuguese sailor who called himself Salazar, and who’d had his fill of the sea and had pledged to hike through all the uncivilized places of the earth until some vision told him what direction his life should take.

  The story was just lunatic enough to satisfy the most suspicious observer. In reality, DeBeauclair/Salazar was working for U.S. banking interests, tracking bandits who’d been raiding the border for months, looking for names and evidence for warrants to extradite. Along the way, he’d picked up on the rumors of Oscar Childress’ activities in the interior.

  The agent had been sufficiently intrigued to take time out from his original assignment and report what he’d heard through the Western Union office in the anonymous fishing village in Cabo Falso, but according to a letter accompanying the notes, all attempts to reach him afterward had failed. That letter, written on heavy rag bond and addressed to U.S. Attorney General Augustus Garland, bore the disturbing all-seeing eye and “We Never Sleep” pledge of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and the signature of Robert A. Pinkerton himself, son of its legendary founder, and every bit the miserable son of a bitch his father had been. He demanded federal intervention. An addendum scribbled in a different hand suggested that the matter “be taken under advisement.”

  Which explained the letter’s presence in Judge Blackthorne’s files.

  It was dated five months ago, which was standard procedure regarding stories of conspiracy against the Union. They were as cyclical as the tides, and few of them attracted more notice than it took to file them away; but whenever one managed to creep so far north from its origin, the president had to be consulted, and Grover Cleveland was not a man to dismiss such things lightly only four years after the Garfield assassination.

  DeBeauclair’s report, if it had been disencrypted faithfully, was practical, offering no assumptions beyond what he’d overheard in cantinas and peso-a-week flophouses in coastal villages and witnessed firsthand. The rumors passed without comment; some of them were fantastic on their face, stories of cannibalism and human sacrifice. But he’d read flyers offering top wages for experienced soldiers, preferably without family, seen wagonloads of grim-faced men bound for the Sierras wearing bandoleers of ammunition, rifles and carbines slung from their shoulders, and while passing through a filthy storeroom on his way to an outhouse, staggering convincingly, had lifted the canvas cover off a stack of crates stenciled CUIDADO, and leant down far enough to catch a whiff of sulphur and potassium, the principal ingredients of dynamite. As there was no mining or railroad-building taking place within a hundred miles of the ginhouse, he’d seen fit to include the discovery in his report. Under all these eavesdroppings and observations had run a theme, whispered in disease-ridden brothels, sung in urine-soaked alleys, and spoken in opium trances: “El General Childress.”

  It had taken him almost a quarter-century to overcome his demotion from Union colonel to captain of the Confederacy and promote himself to general.


  I turned from the report to the yellowed cuttings, sliced from crumbling copies of The Charleston Mercury and The New York Times, the leading journalistic voices of the War Between the States. The Mercury, a rebel sheet, trumpeted the victories of Childress’ volunteers at First and Second Manassas, Chickamauga, and Cold Harbor, while the Times made scant reference to an obscure band of southern mercenaries until its commander leapt into its lead column in April 1863:

  ATROCITY IN SPRINGFIELD.

  Rebel Guerrillas Stop Civilian Train.

  Open Fire on Defenseless Passengers.

  Eighteen, Including Women and Children, Blasted into Eternity in as Many Seconds.

  Accompanying it was a woodcut illustration of a uniformed firing squad with rifles raised, spitting smoke and lead at a reeling line of men in bowlers, women in ankle-length dresses, and children in hair bows and knickers withering before the blast.

  Ten minutes later I found a corresponding report in the Charleston rag, headed SKIRMISH IN SPRINGFIELD. This was a brief account of a battle involving Childress’ volunteers and passengers aboard a federal troop train, who had opened fire on the Confederates from onboard. The editors had not elected to provide an illustration.

  I’d fought in that war, and had learned, when newspapers were available (usually wrapped around a slab of greasy catfish), that what I’d experienced and what I read about later might have been separate engagements. Throw the Times’s massacre and the Mercury’s armed encounter into a bushel basket, shake it, draw out your own interpretation, and you might have something approaching the truth. Personally I had trouble singling out a specific act of malice from the general hell of war: The worse it got, the better, if anyone who might wind up in charge had learned anything from it. I was more interested in Cold Harbor, and whether one of the faces I’d looked into across the crossroads that long day, black with powder and striped from sweat, had belonged to Oscar Childress. By that fourth year of fighting, officers’ insignia were practically nonexistent among the gray and butternut; their uniforms had gone the way of all shoddy, replaced by Union castoff and motley snatched off clotheslines. I remembered a burly party in a dirty lace camisole and a raddled straw hat with holes cut for an ass’s ears, turning back a flank attack with a saber stained crimson to the hilt. He might have been a general.

  Cold Harbor, Virginia: Fifteen thousand dead or wounded on the side of the Army of the Potomac, as opposed to two thousand on the other. Of all the forgotten battlefields I had no intention of revisiting, that intersection of twin ruts leading nowhere in particular came in dead last.

  The Mercury ceased publication when Charleston fell in February 1865, and no mention of Childress had been preserved from the Times after Crook’s cavalry set fire to a barn his men had deserted during the retreat from Winchester; two hogs and a goat lost their lives in that action, and their affiliation remained undetermined. The last item, therefore, belonged to a publication with a different typeface whose name wasn’t included with the clipping. It was two inches only, and read:

  Readers of this journal will be relieved to learn that Captain O. Childress, author of the infamous slaughter at Springfield, Missouri, has decamped to Mexico with the remains of his command, and is believed to have thrown in with Emperor Maximilian in defense against revolutionists loyal to former President Benito Juarez. May God in His mercy protect the women and children of New Spain.

  Unless the reporter got things backward, Childress had started out hoping to change his luck by siding with established authority, then turned coat and fought once again with the rebels, this time with better results. If so, his mental prowess lived up to its reputation; but it hadn’t outlived the nickname he’d acquired during those eighteen seconds in Missouri.

  SIX

  Something slid out as I was sorting what I’d read from what I hadn’t into separate bundles and landed on the table with a plink. Electra Highbinder glanced up, then returned to the column she was filling in one of her ledgers.

  I looked at the wrinkled orange tintype of a callow youth in the tunic of a West Point plebe, fastened at the throat: Faded ink on the back identified the model as Cadet O. Childress. Useless to compare that face, unstamped by time and experience, with the man I’d been sent to investigate, and possibly to eliminate: eyes slightly wolfish over a nose thin as crystal and prim slit of a mouth, the whole supporting a bulbous cranium already pushing through the fine pale hairs that covered it. He’d be bald by now, and an ideal specimen for phrenology considering the size of his brain case. I put the image on the pile of deadwood.

  I finished the rest of the material and started packing it up to return to the box. A sheet of onionskin was stuck to the back of one clipping. I peeled it away carefully; it was as thin as a postage stamp and as fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

  The text started in the middle of a sentence; clearly it belonged to a longer tract. The script was written in red ink, the hand coarse, like something in an exercise book kept by someone who was learning his letters, but the language was fine, as if it had been transcribed into formal English from classical Latin, with the occasional foray into the local dialect; a symptom common to an extended stay in a foreign land. The phrasing was elegant, but by the time I came to the end of each carefully crafted sentence I knew no more about its meaning than I had at the beginning. Like Emerson, it fascinated and at the same time left me lost.

  A technical term here and there suggested this was a leaf from Childress’ own notes, laying out his theories on exploiting Mexican peasants’ awe of us Norteamericanos in the national interest: The existing seeds had only to be planted, was what I made of it. In a less distracted frame of mind, I might have been persuaded to accept his argument, except for the cold finger that touched my spine when I took a closer look at matear (to plant seeds) and realized what he’d actually written was matar (to kill).

  I wasn’t the only one who’d been taken in by the scrawled Spanish: Judge Blackthorne had said the authorities had been impressed with the proposal to turn the peons’ awe of our civilization to national advantage, never suspecting he was recommending their extermination. The word, it was true, was all jagged angles, the t uncrossed and the a’s open at the top, and smudged by too much handling. It was easy to imagine some bureaucrat, inclined to hope for the best, interpreting it as a harmless reference to growth. For all I knew it was just that, and my own traffic with brutish humanity had tainted my outlook; but I’d never gotten in trouble for thinking the worst.

  That brought me to Blackthorne’s motive. Had he removed the report from the file in order not to alarm me, and overlooked the last page? He overlooked nothing. Had he left it, probably the most revealing passage of all, as a warning to take care? Not for concerns about myself. He was possessive in regard to all the tools at his disposal, and loath to train a replacement.

  The paper smelled of pinon smoke and something bittersweet I could place only by bringing it close to my face and breathing deep: nightshade. Childress had picked berries and crushed them to make the ink.

  That provided a picture more vivid than the outdated tintype. I saw him sitting cross-legged in a mud hut, filling page upon page with his fevered scratches, pausing only to dip his pen—a cactus needle or a porcupine quill—in scarlet paste in an earthenware dish. He wore only a loincloth, native headdress, and a snailshell necklace. He’d have gone heathen.

  How else explain a man who proposed wholesale massacre as a step toward progress? I had to meet him.

  * * *

  You needed to run a thousand head of cattle minimum to qualify for membership in the Montana Stock-Growers Association, but Harlan A. Blackthorne had never gotten closer than a rare steak in the dining room of the Magnolia Hotel. He’d been granted honorary standing for his legal efforts to defend the open range from an army of lawyers determined to cut it up for the real estate interests back East. Although he had no love for cattle barons, nor they for him—he often ruled in favor of small ranchers in disputes o
ver property lines—he agreed that the grassland was designed by God for grazing and that to plow it under would expose the subsoil to harsh winds and brutal sun, inviting drought. No less an authority than Chester Alan Arthur had tried to intervene on behalf of the New York lobbyists who had kept him in the White House, but like several presidents before him he’d dashed himself to splinters against that rocky shore.

  The house had been built by a silver magnate who’d put a ball through his head when his wife left him, taking their daughter and son with her back to New Hampshire. Its turrets and gables, copied from a castle in Sweden, had appealed to another sort of pioneer, and the molded plaster ceilings and cedar paneling were dark with old cigar exhaust and soaked with the sickly sweet stench of Levi Garrett’s. The association’s founders had turned the old ballroom into a gallery of Remington prints, bought the works of Shakespeare and De Quincey by the pound, and interred them in glazed presses that were opened only by the servants who dusted the uncracked leather spines: The slyest man under that roof could cheat a Vanderbilt, but he couldn’t read or write his own name.

  The doddering veteran of the War of 1812 who’d kept the registration book in the pink marble lobby had passed finally, and been replaced by an erect young Negro with a British accent and a white eye, who informed me that the Judge was in the gymnasium.

  “The bar, you mean,” I said.

  “No, sir. End of the hall.”

  I studied his face, planed flat at every angle like the head atop a totem pole. “Didn’t you cost me a bundle in the Blessing fight?”

  “Blessing made it back. He bet against himself. Not that he didn’t try to lose it.” He touched the corner of the dead eye.

  The gymnasium smelled of good spirits squeezed through sweaty pores. A pair of swollen bellies in padded gear was fencing in the middle of the floor, but neither of them belonged to the Judge. He watched the battle from an oaken bench, both hands wrapped around a silver-plated flask.