“Let’s get Buster out of here now, Redtop,” I said quietly. “We’ll deep-six him and leave Baby to keep an eye on things until I can take her to her father.”
Redtop nodded, still in a daze. We wet down horse towels and bandages and cleaned up every speck of blood we saw and then I tied cloths around Buster’s head to staunch the bleeding and put him back inside the burlap sack. I checked the stable walls and floor for traces of a bullet hole or fragments and didn’t see any. Redtop and I dragged Buster to her car and stuffed him into the trunk. I put some ropes and a blacksmith’s anvil into the sack with him and then tied it up tightly. My blood-covered hands were trembling violently.
I knew that the best way to make Buster disappear for good was to cast him into the waters of the Seine at Argenteuil, where the river reaches its widest and deepest point. I had always had a hunch that Buster was heading for a bad place, but I never thought that I would be the one who put him there. I had killed before, too many times, but I had never killed someone I knew.
We opened the other burlap sack to check on Daphne, who was still unconscious. Baby Langston was on his feet, and he nodded to us that he was all right. He looked scared when we told him that Buster was dead and stuffed inside the trunk of Redtop’s Hispano for burial. I told Baby that Redtop and I had cleaned Buster’s blood up as best we could but asked him to go over the place again to make sure there were no traces of blood or struggle anywhere. Baby fell to it with mop and pail. By the time we were ready to leave, he was scrubbing the floor as if he were back at La Belle Princesse, making the place spick and span for showtime.
We looked over at Daphne’s inert form again. She had not moved a muscle. We took Baby outside and whispered to him that if she came to and wanted some water, he should first put on the Balaclava hood and gloves he had been supplied with so that she could not recognize his face or his color. He was not to utter a word to her. The success of Stanley’s fake abduction depended on Daphne’s being sure that the Corsican Twins and their accomplices alone had snatched her and Buster.
Redtop told Baby not to say a word about Buster’s death to his uncle or anyone else, and he swore not to. We knew that Baby would keep his mouth shut about it, if he swore he would. The only danger was that he might write a poem about Buster’s death someday, turning him into some kind of tragic hero.
When I came to Daphne’s rescue in a few hours, nothing that she could say to her father or the police could implicate Stanley or me or any of the others, because the only people she had seen or heard speaking during captivity were the Corsicans.
If everything had gone according to plan, I would, at some time in the afternoon, have had my revenge on Robinson III for passing me funny money to track down Daphne and Buster. Stanley would have negotiated a big payout from our fake abduction of his daughter. The Corsicans would have warned Buster to keep his trap shut about the snatch before he had a chance to start shooting his mouth off to the Count about what had happened at the rehearsal at La Belle Princesse.
But with Buster dead, the problems were beginning to pile up. When Buster didn’t appear, the Count was going to fix his suspicions on me. I had roughed up the Count’s main storm trooper, Pierre, real badly when I left his headquarters. Still, that hadn’t stopped the Count from letting Buster show up for the rehearsal because I had convinced him that Buster was the musician Stanley wanted for the gig. I saw only one way out of keeping the Count from going after me: to make him think that Buster was ransoming Daphne to feed the hungry monkey on his back. When Buster’s scheme had failed, he had evaporated into thin air. Still, I felt guilty about killing Buster. If I hadn’t been so angry at Robinson III, he’d still be alive.
Yet, Buster had to take the fall, now that he was dead. The problem was getting the Count to believe us because he had said that Buster was like a son to him, and that meant he must have seen something useful in him somewhere.
I was hoping that the Corsicans were as tight with Hambone Gaylord as he said they were and could help us to face down the Count and his men if we couldn’t make Buster take the fall. And would Daphne go along with it? She had seen Buster’s fear and known that he wasn’t playacting. Daphne could make the whole thing unravel if she wanted to.
On the drive to Argenteuil, I kept thinking about Buster. He would have killed Redtop and me and Baby without a second thought because he needed another high from his drugs. In the end, that was all he was, a need that could never be filled. But I had known Buster when there was a glimmer of hope that he might turn out to be better. Now, I had taken from him the only thing that had kept that hope alive—his life.
Lights swirled past the car window as Redtop raced toward Argenteuil along deserted roads. My eyes kept closing, and then I fell asleep and remembered how Buster was a long time ago:
The police car stops outside St. Vincent’s, and the Irish policeman unlocks my door and leads me straight to Father Gohegan’s office. He knocks on the door and stands at attention, making me do the same.
“Come in!” Father Gohegan shouts. When we walk in, he is standing behind his desk, all smiles at the policeman. I stare at the worn oak floor not raising my eyes.
“Good morning, Father. We’ve found him for you,” he says.
“Usual place?” Father Gohegan asks.
“Yes, Father. Sitting on the same bench, looking at the same riverboats. Been sitting there all night, he said.”
“At least we always know where to find him. How’s the family, Patrick?”
“Everybody’s fine. We miss you at mass, though. The diocese is wasting you here, Father, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I’m doing the Lord’s work, Patrick. But it sure is hard to fathom what He has in mind sometimes.” They both chuckle. Father Gohegan makes the sign of the cross, and the policeman crosses himself and leaves the office, with a wave at the door.
I keep my head down, staring at the floor. Father Gohegan goes to the door and shouts, “Buster!”
I hear the sound of bare feet slapping on the floor of the corridor, and then Buster comes into the office, a smile of anticipation on his face. Father Gohegan takes a small leather whip out of the top drawer of his desk. Buster grabs it eagerly, flicking it on his palm.
“Five, Buster, and mind that you strike only his left hand.”
Buster sneers at this command and marches me into the small adjoining room, where punishments are meted out.
“Hold her out, boy, ” Buster says.
I hold out my left hand and watch Buster brace himself on his legs as if ready to take a swing at batting practice. Then he brings the whip down hard three times. He wants to keep going, but Father Gohegan has had second thoughts, and he rushes into the room and pulls the whip away from Buster.
Buster looks surprised. “Father, if you too easy on him, he just gone run away again.”
“Three is enough for now, ” Father says, irritated that Buster is challenging his authority. Then, with a dismissive gesture, he says to us, “Go, both of you. Urby, you run away again, and I’m going to take Buster’s advice.”
Buster shoves me along the corridor into the small passageway leading toward our dormitory. I’m catching up to him in height and muscle, having put on a spurt of growth over the last few months.
I feel that the time has come to put an end to Buster’s bullying, once and for all, while he is disarmed inside the home.
“Why you hit me so hard?” I ask, feeling my rage turn to flame.
“Hard?” Buster says. “Me, I got worst when I run away. I caught ten. On this here right hand. Father G hisself whupped me, and you got to believe that hurt. But ’cause you the Clarinet Man, he ease you up, like you a little girl.”
“You better ease up the next time, boy.”
He is so amazed at me talking back to him that he falls silent for an instant. Then he sticks his face into mine, his yellow-green eyes full of menace. “Me ease you up? Sheeit! Next time, you dead, whitey. What you gone do then, s
ick your mama on me?”
I look away and bow my head as if giving up, but then I quickly spin around and head-butt him on his breastbone so hard that Buster is propelled backward as if blasted by a cannonball. His head bounces on the floor. He tries to stand but sprawls face down, unconscious, arms outstretched.
“Don’t never mouth me again, you bastard! I’m gone kill you, you mess with me, you hear? I’m gone kill you, you bastard!” Then I slam my foot down hard on Buster’s right leg. I keep on kicking him in the leg until Strawberry hears the ruckus and comes racing out of the dormitory to drag me away.
My talk of killing Buster was just a frightened street-fighter’s dreams, shouted out loud to scare a dangerous opponent, that was all. Except that they’d become a nightmare for Buster early this morning, and he was dead for good and forever, not just badly hurt. I tried to sleep despite the roar of the Hispano-Suiza’s engine, but I was sure that I’d never know dreamless sleep again. Like him or not, I knew Buster too well to kill him.
PART II
CHAPTER 9
Paris, Early Saturday Morning, February 10, 1934
Baby Langston saw flashes of light like fireflies. His head hadn’t stopped hurting since Buster Thigpen had broken free and walloped him with the tire iron. He’d felt all right when Urby and Redtop had left the stables. They’d asked him to clean up all traces of Buster’s blood, and he’d done it eagerly to clear his aching head. The girl lay still in the gunny sack. He was beginning to worry that she might be dead.
Baby Langston put on his Balaclava hood and gloves and opened the girl’s sack. In the dim light from the kerosene lamp, she looked paler than when he had first seen her at La Belle Princesse. Baby pulled the sack off, removed his hood and gloves and put his ear against her heart. He heard it beating, but contact with her breast made his head ache badly again.
He wondered why the girl had gotten mixed up with that “no-count Buster,” as his Uncle Hambone called him. She had everything that Buster didn’t. She was beautiful, rich, and well-educated. But what attracted Baby Langston to her most, from the moment he heard her speak at La Belle Princesse, was her breathy voice and her precise use of language. As a poet, Baby Langston appreciated people who spoke English elegantly.
Even in the dim light in the stables, beauty glowed from her flawless face. Her long, white-blonde hair, which spread across the burlap, gleamed like platinum. Baby Langston’s head throbbed even worse as he tried to recall the lines written by his favorite poet, Keats, in his ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
To make sure that she was still breathing, Baby Langston put his head against Daphne’s breast again. Though it was soft and inviting, he pulled his head away as if scalded. Baby Langston had been born in Nashville, Tennessee. He had heard so many stories about colored men being lynched for only making eye contact with a white woman that touching Daphne seemed fraught with danger. He wanted her to be comfortable, though, so he loosened the rope that the Corsicans had tied around her wrists. It had left welts on her skin. Suddenly, he felt an urge to free her. More words from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seeped from his memory:
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four . . .
He tried to remember the rest of the poem. Exhaustion gripped him, but he had to stay awake until Stanley Bontemps or Urby Brown told him what to do next. He hoped he would get the word early in the morning because he didn’t feel that he could stand much more pain.
Staggering over to the watering trough, Baby turned on the faucet and let the cold water splash over his head. He heard a sudden swish of cloth and turned his sore head slowly. He stared into the girl’s wild eyes and saw her upraised arms. Was she an angel spreading her wings to fly away to heaven? Those were Baby Langston’s last living thoughts as Daphne connected solidly to his head with the tire iron, putting all of her considerable strength into the blow.
Daphne had been conscious from the moment the “burglars” had abducted Buster and her from La Belle Princesse, except when they had put them under ether because of Buster’s whinings. She had bided her time when she came to because she knew the power that her beauty held over men. Because of it, they would make mistakes, and she had to be ready to seize her chance.
When Urby Brown had shot Buster, she felt as if a powerful charge of electricity passed through her. She was excited because she knew that Buster had served her purposes and would only stand in her way from now on. Urby, the man her father had hired to track them down—she remembered his strange first name from her father’s telegram—would be her man now because he had felled Buster. She wanted to make love to him as soon as possible to bind him to her.
Buster had needed little convincing to go along with her scheme to stage a false kidnapping of herself and to arrange for her father to pay a large ransom for her return. Central to its success was luring her father to Paris by cabling him that she needed to be rescued from the colored jazz musician named Buster Thigpen. She had asked her father to stay at the Ritz Hotel because she needed an easy address for forwarding ransom demands. She had puzzled over how to deal with the private eye her father had hired to track her and Buster down, but now that Urby had killed Buster, more possibilities had opened up for her scheme to succeed.
She had thought at first that the men who had taken them from La Belle Princesse were Buster’s friends and that he had come up with a clever ploy to make their kidnapping look genuine. But, once again, she had let her sexual attraction to Buster blind her to his stupidity. He could never have come up with a neat idea like hiring fake kidnappers to make things more plausible to her father. She realized when the Frenchmen tied her wrists so tightly that they were real kidnappers who could derail her scheme. They must have been working for the owner of La Belle Princesse, she thought, the man Buster introduced to her as Hambone Gaylord. Why else would that nephew of his, the man they called Baby Langston, be standing watch over her when she came to from the Corsicans’ ether?
Urby Brown must have somehow gotten wind of where the kidnappers were hiding them and had come to free her. Buster would be alive now if he hadn’t panicked and tried to shoot the woman Urby called Redtop. Urby had killed Buster to save her.
She had to get away in case the two French kidnappers reappeared, but she was paralyzed with fear whenever she looked at the huge man, Baby Langston, dead on the ground, blood still oozing from his mangled head.
She wondered what her father would think if he knew that she had now become a killer to achieve her goal of serving the Fatherland. He was a weak man who could have been strong had he, as she had, heeded the call of his mother’s aristocratic Prussian blood, “Die Stimme des Blutes,” the voice of the blood. Her grandmother had told her that “the voice” was calling all true Germans to return to the Fatherland now to help the new Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler restore Germany to its rightful place as the first among nations. Daphne had her own vision of how to help him.
During laborious sessions, Daphne had dictated and spelled out the ransom note to Buster, which he had transliterated in the scrawl of the near-illiterate that he was. She was demanding a ransom of one hundred thousand dollars, a drop in the bucket for her father and only twice the amount that the kidnappers had demanded for the return of the baby son of their New Jersey neighbor, Charles Lindbergh. Daphne looked down on “America’s hero,” whom she considered to be an uncouth, lanky grease monkey with pilot’s wings. His only saving grace, in her eyes, was that he was an Aryan type who seemed to be an admirer of Germany.
One hundred thousand dollars might be pocket money for her father to obtain her “freedom” from her fictitious kidnappers, but Daphne considered that it would suffice, for now, to make he
r independent to travel to the Fatherland. Her father would not dare to follow her himself into Germany if he realized he had been duped.
She would be free to fulfill her vision: to marry Adolf Hitler and help him to make Germany the most powerful nation on earth and him the most powerful man. But as his beloved Aryan bride and the mother of his children and of the renewed Aryan race, she herself would have ultimate power.
She had met Adolf Hitler with her father and grandmother in Berlin when she was sixteen. He had been very complimentary about their Aryan qualities, but he had singled her out for praise because of her beauty. After asking her father’s permission, he had his chauffeur drive the two of them to Berlin’s Tiergarten, or Garden of the Wild Beasts.
They had stopped near a leafy glade and walked in silence in the dappled light. He had briefly held her hand, and they stopped and looked deeply into each other’s eyes. He was over twenty years older than she was, but electricity passed between them; she was sure of it. He stammered that she was beautiful and then turned abruptly on his heels and marched back to his limousine with her trailing in his wake.
Since that moment, her greatest desire had been to be left alone with him, and she dreamt of arousing him to shouting out his desire for her in his stentorian voice. Buster had taught her every art of arousing men to heights of sexual frenzy. She had served her apprenticeship with Buster and had been his whore, accepting humiliation and his unnatural desires; now, she was confident that she could conquer any man.
If everything went according to plan, her father would be receiving the ransom note in a few hours. One of Buster’s most trusted friends in the Count’s Oriflamme du Roi group would use a contact at the Ritz Hotel to slide it under her father’s door.
Daphne had used up a lot of her own money keeping Buster drugged up enough to go through with her scheme. She had promised Buster one half of the ransom but had no intention of keeping her part of the bargain. By killing him, Urby Brown had spared her the trouble of ridding herself of Buster. But with Buster dead, she had to find a new ally to help her collect the ransom and protect her from the Frenchmen who were now trying to kidnap her. Hambone’s people, she thought to herself. Could she turn Urby into that ally? She was sure that she could because she sensed that he had fallen under her spell.
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