Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  Sonny looked away from Frank, realizing his old friend had probably said more than he’d intended. Frank had spent more than a year down near Morgan City, training Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and he’d gotten to know all sorts of shady characters. Sonny had visited him a couple of times, had even trained some Cubans on mortars and assorted small arms, but Frank had kept him clear of the CIA paramilitary types who ran the camp. Still, Sonny figured Frank knew more about the assassination of John Kennedy than any congressman sitting on the Warren Commission.

  When Sonny looked back at his old friend, Frank was watching him with knowing intensity. In that moment of shared intimacy, Sonny realized that Frank Knox had more than knowledge of this kind of operation: he was a veteran of them.

  “You got any ideas, Sonny?” asked Frank. “About local targets?”

  Flattered to be asked his opinion, Sonny gave the question some serious thought. “We need somebody King or Kennedy knows personally. I’m sure Reverend King knows Charles Evers. King went to Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson. And Bobby Kennedy attended Medgar’s memorial service at Arlington. I saw something about it on the TV.”

  “Charles Evers is a pimp and a bootlegger,” Frank said. “He was running whores back in the army, in the Philippines. Would King or Kennedy really come down here for a pimp’s funeral?”

  “They might,” Sonny thought aloud. “Charles claims he’s picking up where his brother left off with the civil rights work. He’s the new field secretary of the NAACP, even though the old guard didn’t want him. And Charles is a lot more street savvy than his brother was. He might actually get some things done.”

  Frank nodded slowly. “I’ll keep my eye on him, then. Who else?”

  “Locally, there’s George Metcalfe, like Glenn said, but the regular Knights will be watching him. I would have thought Albert Norris would get some attention. Everybody loved Albert.”

  “Not with those Jewboys missing in Neshoba County,” Frank said. “A Ferriday, Louisiana, music store owner don’t rate compared to white martyrs from New York.” Frank forked the tenderloin off the grill and dropped it onto a platter. “Don’t worry about it. Time’s on our side. When the moment comes, we’ll know which goat to tie to the tree.” He pointed down the shallow slope of the sandbar. “Look at Snake! He’s grinning like a barrel of possum heads!”

  Snake Knox was marching up toward them, the drunken young waitress locked under his right arm like a prisoner. His left hand held a walkie-talkie with a shining silver aerial. Sonny looked past him, down to the Chevy. There seemed to be someone sitting motionless behind the wheel.

  “Who’s that in the car?” Sonny asked anxiously, afraid of what Snake might be planning.

  “Just an old safety dummy I got from a guy at the tire plant,” Snake answered, joining them beside the grill. “You boys ready for a show?”

  “Hell, yeah,” said Frank, rubbing out his sand drawing with his boot as he finished his beer.

  Snake Knox turned toward the women sitting far back under the trees. Not one had given him the time of day since Friday—not even his mother—as all were friends of his ex-wife. But Snake waved anyway and hollered, “Keep your eyes on that Chevy, ladies!” Then he turned and yelled for the kids on the riverbank to give the car a good thirty yards of clearance. When Sonny’s wife realized what must be about to happen, she started running toward the children, but by then Snake had held up the walkie-talkie and pressed a button.

  A blinding yellow flash lit the interior of the car for a millionth of a second, whiting out an oval disk in Sonny’s field of vision. Then the kids were cheering and running toward the car, with Frank and Snake close behind. Back under the cottonwoods, a woman gave a piercing rebel yell. Turning, Sonny saw Glenn’s sister Wilma standing in a bikini, pumping her fist high in the air. The other women looked indifferent to the commotion by the water. Sonny trotted down to the knot of people while Morehouse huffed and puffed along behind him.

  The acrid stink of high explosive hurled Sonny back to the war, but the Chevy didn’t look like anything much had happened to it. The dummy was still sitting behind the wheel, though it had fallen forward like a drunk who’d passed out after pulling into his driveway. Then Snake yanked open the door with a screech of metal, and Sonny saw the result of his work.

  The dummy’s torso had been cleanly severed at the waist. Whatever kind of charge Snake had rigged under the dash, it had sliced the dummy in half as cleanly as a guillotine. Sonny had known men to survive a conventional car bomb, but no man could survive a wound like that.

  Frank whistled in admiration, and Snake preened like a cat. Sonny’s wife gave Snake a piece of her mind for pulling tricks like that with kids around, but Snake ignored her, and she stalked off in furious silence. The kids had hoped for more destruction and soon lost interest. They begged for more bottle rockets, which they’d expended on Friday night, but Frank scattered them with a curse.

  While Snake occupied himself with bomb damage assessment, Sonny stared openly at the waitress. She was trash compared to the star of his primary fantasy—the Negro nurse of Dr. Tom Cage, Triton Battery’s company doctor. Viola Turner was the most beautiful woman Sonny had seen in years; Frank himself had made several comments about her over the past months. Like his preacher father, Frank never let skin color stop him from taking whatever woman he fancied, and Sonny’s chest tightened with jealousy and resentment every time he mentioned Viola. Sonny remembered climbing onto the scale at Dr. Cage’s office to be weighed; he’d looked down and seen the perfect curve of two coffee-colored breasts disappearing under the white uniform—

  “You need some Vaseline?” Frank whispered in his ear.

  “Get off me!” Sonny snapped, shouldering Frank back and banishing the image from his mind.

  Frank’s laughter was raw and knowing, like that of a demon who has seen all human frailty laid bare.

  As the crowd drifted away from the car, Snake said, “I could wire that charge to the starter, the turn signal, even the radio. And this stuff is so stable you can fire a bullet into it without detonating it.”

  Frank slapped the waitress on the ass and said, “Why don’t you run up the hill and grab a beer, hon? We’ll join you in a minute.”

  She flushed at the unexpected contact from Frank, but she clearly didn’t mind it. Snake did, but he didn’t murmur a word of objection to his brother. Snake Knox might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Is this how you’re thinking about going after Kennedy and King?” Sonny asked skeptically.

  Frank shook his head. “Nah. Too much security. There’s only one way to take down the big game. A sniper-scout team. Preferably more than one.”

  Sonny nodded with relief. Both Frank and Snake had qualified as expert marksmen in the Marines, and Snake had done some actual sniping in Korea.

  Frank stretched his arms behind him, then popped his back with obvious pleasure. “This has been a hell of a weekend, considering. Why don’t we eat that gator, then pack this junk up and head back home?”

  Snake gave Sonny and Morehouse a cagey look. “You boys got your new dog tags yet?”

  Sonny reached into his pocket and flashed his Double Eagle gold piece. Morehouse did the same. Snake winked, then unbuttoned the top of his shirt, revealing not a gold piece, but a gleaming JFK half dollar minted in 1964. Someone had shot a bullet hole through the center of the coin, right through Kennedy’s head, and a second hole above the head allowed a leather thong to pass through it.

  “Mine ain’t from my birth year, obviously,” Snake said. “Mine’s symbolic.” He gave a conspiratorial laugh. “Good times a-comin’, boys. And not a moment too soon. This country’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket.”

  Sonny forced a smile and tried to look agreeable, but inside he wondered whether Frank had set his sights too high, considering the scale of the civil rights movement and the FBI’s involvement in the fight.

  Snake poked Sonny in the chest. “How ’bout it, So
n? You ready to bury Robert Kennedy beside his brother?”

  Sonny fought the urge to pop Snake’s eardrum with a slap. “If Frank thinks we can do it, I’m ready.”

  Snake gave him a coy look. “And Reverend King?”

  “I’ll be looking forward to that one.”

  Snake nodded, weird light dancing in his eyes. “You and me both. I got no use for a nigger preacher. Every one I ever knew had one hand in the collection plate and the other up the skirt of some sweet young thing.”

  Just like your daddy, Sonny thought. But since Snake and Frank shared the same father, Sonny gave an obligatory laugh and watched Frank’s son drive the bass boat up onto the sandbar like some movie stuntman. Frank Jr. had joined the Marines a few months back and was due to ship out soon. He didn’t have his orders yet, but he’d told Frank there was a lot of scuttlebutt about a place halfway around the world called Vietnam. Supposedly, the United States was going to take over from the French, who’d had their asses kicked by the Asian commies, same as they had by the Germans in 1940. Sonny didn’t know beans about Vietnam, but he knew about fighting slant-eyes on the other side of the world. As a pastime, he could not recommend it. But Frank didn’t seem too concerned, so Sonny resolved to quit worrying for the boy.

  Besides, it seemed like the next few years were going to be plenty hot right here in Mississippi. Sonny recalled the night he’d heard Medgar Evers had been shot in his driveway, then the day five months later when JFK had his brains blown out in Dallas. Sonny had hated both men, yet those killings had left him feeling strangely hollow, as though God had thrown away whatever rulebook came with the universe, leaving humanity to sink or swim on its own. The notion that he might soon be personally involved in that kind of assassination frightened him, and only his confidence in Frank allowed him to suppress his fear.

  “You know the only thing we’re missing out here?” Frank said expansively.

  “A half-dozen hookers?” Sonny suggested, hoping to mask his anxiety.

  Frank grinned. “Nope. We need Norman Rockwell to paint this scene for posterity, and slap it on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. This is America right here, goddamn it. The real America. And history in the making.”

  Snake rolled his eyes, but Sonny and Morehouse held their silence. You never knew when Frank was joking about this kind of thing, and it didn’t pay to make assumptions.

  “Let’s eat that gator,” Frank said, turning away and starting up the hill, his big shoulders rolling like a well-oiled machine.

  As Snake came alongside him, Sonny said, “He’s serious about killing King and Kennedy, isn’t he?”

  Snake’s eyes settled on Sonny with interest. “Why not? Both those guys already lost friends or brothers to bullets. If you step into the gap, you gotta figure you could get the same treatment. That’s war, ain’t it? We’ve all been there.”

  As Sonny walked up the sandbar toward the smoking grill, he had to admit Snake had a point. Only this wasn’t the Pacific or Korea—or even Vietnam, wherever the hell that was. This was America. Which meant Snake was talking about a civil war. As soon as this thought flashed through Sonny’s mind, everything came clear, and a feeling of peace spread through him. Appomattox hadn’t ended anything; it had merely heralded an intermission. The war itself was still raging across the country, right under the shiny plastic surface of the American Dream. Some people pretended not to notice, or made out like the Russians were the real enemy. But anybody who’d read any history knew that great civilizations always crumbled from within. And to prevent that eventuality, Sonny was willing to kill whoever Frank said needed to die.

  CHAPTER 3

  Four Years Later

  March 31, 1968

  Near Athens Point, Mississippi

  SONNY THORNFIELD STEERED the rusty green johnboat through the darkening swamp with his left hand and held a gun on Jimmy Revels with his right. After three days in Double Eagle captivity, the young Negro wasn’t much of a threat. Revels lay in the bottom of the boat, barely conscious, his hands bound behind him. The most he could do now would be to jump out of the boat and drown himself rather than be shot. Sonny had considered simply dumping him among the huge cypress trees, but there was some chance that a fisherman might find his body before the gators did, and Sonny didn’t want to take the risk.

  Sonny wasn’t sure he would survive the night himself. After four years of successful Double Eagle operations, things had finally gone about as wrong as they could go. Three days ago, they’d been on the verge of accomplishing phase one of the mission Frank Knox had outlined on the sandbar that first day back in the summer of ’64. But at 4 P.M. on Thursday, Frank had been killed, and five hours later the Eagles had been ordered to stand down. Sonny had no problem with this decision. In his opinion, the Double Eagles without Frank to lead them had no business taking on operations of national scope. But Snake had different ideas. Juiced on white lightning and stoked on speed, Snake Knox had seized upon the notion that if they didn’t go through with Frank’s original plan, then his older brother had died for nothing.

  The black boy in the bottom of the johnboat was the bait Frank had finally settled on, the bait that would lure in the big targets. They couldn’t have found a more perfect victim. A former navy cook and noted musician, Jimmy Revels had not only met Martin Luther King in person, but also had worked tirelessly to register black voters in Mississippi. He’d redoubled his efforts in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s announcement that he would run for president, which had earned him a personal phone call from Kennedy only a week ago. By an odd coincidence, Revels had also worked for Albert Norris before joining the navy. Stranger still, Revels was the younger brother of Viola Turner, Dr. Cage’s nurse, the woman Sonny had secretly lusted after for years. Sonny didn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of fate, but he felt that all these connections had somehow brought about Frank’s death and stranded them in their current predicament.

  Nothing had ever really been the same since Frank’s older son was killed in Vietnam. Sonny couldn’t remember a single day Frank spent sober after getting that news. Two years drunk. Frank functioned well enough, but he’d lost a step. When Frank had outlined his most recent plan, Sonny had worried that grief over his son might be blinding Frank to certain realities. Volunteering to carry out the will of a mob boss like Carlos Marcello was like dealing with the devil. When Sonny pointed out that almost everyone associated with the JFK assassination was now dead, Frank had told him he ought to apply for work in the ladies’ underwear section at Coles, the Jew department store downtown. Sonny had shut up after that, but he’d never felt quite right about what they were doing.

  Something had changed inside him during the past four years. The early operations back in ’64 had felt like war. But what Frank had pushed him to do to get Jimmy Revels out of hiding had left Sonny sick with shame and confusion. Like what the nips had done to the Chinese at Nanking. Sonny had never turned down a free piece of ass, but rape was something else. And raping a woman you cared about . . . that made you want to crawl in a dark hole and never come out again. But what could you do, with Frank Knox giving the order and going first?

  As he trolled the boat between the great cypresses, searching for familiar landmarks, Sonny recalled how fired up they’d been after capturing Revels and his big bodyguard, Luther Davis, who was Jimmy’s drummer and a former army infantryman. But then death had taken Frank from them, as surely and randomly as it had taken friends in the islands during the war, and Snake had gone batshit crazy. Left to his own devices, he’d have crucified Jimmy Revels on a telephone pole in the center of Natchez, then waited for the big shots to fly in for the protests and the funeral, like ducks to a decoy. But before he could, Brody Royal had sent word that the Eagles were to abort the operation. Royal wanted Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis dropped into a hole so deep that no one would ever find them, and Sonny knew why. The millionaire didn’t trust Snake to carry out the operation without landing all of them in prison. />
  The chaos that followed Royal’s decision had resulted in days of brutal torture that shook Sonny to the core. Sleep deprived and high on drugs, Snake had tried to take out his grief on the prisoners in his power. Worse, he’d ordered the kidnapping of Revels’s sister Viola, on the pretext that she’d seen their faces when they’d gang-raped her to bring her brother out of hiding. If Sonny could have bailed on that operation, he would have, but by then he was so deep in, there was no way out—only through. That meant forty-eight hours of hell in a machine shop so far out in the woods that no one could hear the screams. When deliverance arrived for Viola like divine intervention, Sonny had said a silent prayer of thanks. But Snake’s rage had only escalated, making Sonny fear he would disregard the stand-down order and doom them all.

  That was the moment he’d decided to follow Brody Royal’s order in spite of Snake’s ascension to Frank’s post as commander of the Double Eagles. Because an order from Brody Royal might actually be an order from Carlos Marcello, and nobody who disobeyed Carlos survived to tell the tale. When Snake finally crashed—three hours after his brother’s funeral—he lay snoring in a chair only feet from his chained and bleeding captives. At that point, Sonny had dragged Glenn Morehouse outside and told him they needed to follow Royal’s orders before Snake got them both killed. Morehouse hadn’t had the nerve to risk Snake’s wrath, but Sonny didn’t let that stop him. Since Luther Davis looked likely to die of his wounds anyway, Sonny had cut Jimmy Revels loose, carried him out to his pickup, and driven him to the edge of the Lusahatcha Swamp, where so many other bodies had been dumped over the years.

  Revels had stopped talking a couple of hours ago. The only words he’d spoken during the afternoon were to ask about his sister and Luther Davis. Sonny didn’t know where Viola was, but he prayed that Luther was at the bottom of the Jericho Hole in Concordia Parish, where Sonny had ordered Morehouse to dump him.