“Thank you, sir.” Was his voice always this quiet? “And thank you again for hiring me.”
Douglasson nodded without speaking and did not offer to shake Weston’s hand. Weston looked at him a final time before walking out.
Inside an empty elevator, he opened the envelope, which contained a check for just under a week’s pay. Also nestled inside was a business card. It was another of Agent Delaney’s.
Outside, because apparently nothing of interest had transpired in the past twenty-four hours, the news seller was still hollering about Weston’s brothers.
XVIII.
Darcy had noticed clinking glasses and the smell of booze over the past few days. The men were arguing, worse than before. So many voices down there. Perhaps that meant …
She reached for her goggles, but Rufus scolded her. “Don’t, miss.”
She was still under surveillance. His voice echoed oddly—he must have been watching her room from the hallway. She wondered if they even bothered to turn her light out at night.
An exterior door slammed, a car stuttered into alertness.
“Rufus, what’s happening?”
“Nothing’s wrong, miss. Go back to sleep.”
“Don’t lie, Rufus, it doesn’t become you. I haven’t been asleep—I heard all that.”
The floor informed her of Rufus’s entrance into the room.
“What’s happening? Why hasn’t this ended yet?”
“Just go to sleep.”
“Your voice is dry and you sound like you’ve seen a ghost. Tell me why you sound even more worried than me.”
He was so close now that she could practically feel him, his presence a palpable thing, the air around her growing thick.
“I’m gonna ask you a question now, miss, and you gotta tell me the truth.”
“I haven’t lied to you yet, Rufus, and I don’t see any reason to start now.”
The whispering of a shirt collar, as if he was looking behind him to ensure that they were alone. He was crouching before her. “Are the Firefly Brothers still alive?”
Her lips quivered in anticipation of her answer, but her throat grew too thick.
“Guys are concerned,” he continued, “because, uh, there’s some rumors that the Firefly Brothers aren’t dead after all.”
She was breathing more loudly than she meant to, her throat tighter and tighter still.
“We didn’t believe it at first, figured it was just stories and all, but now there’s word they might be … looking for us. I mean, for you.”
Tears were seeping through her clamped eyelids.
“So I need to know,” Rufus said. “Is it true? Are they really alive?”
Her windpipe was a champagne bottle. Pure joy, combined with the compressed tension of too many days and too many bad dreams, finally opened it so her voice could escape. “Yes, they’re alive.”
She wanted to say something more but couldn’t, not yet. She gave a half laugh of euphoria and relief, her voice and her face seeming to crumple upon themselves.
“How?” he asked. “I saw the pictures in the paper. For Chrissake, there’s no way that could’ve been bogus. What’d they do, pay off the reporters?”
“I can’t explain it all to you, Rufus.” Her throat still hurt, her voice hoarse. “Even I don’t understand everything.”
“Goddamnit!” His voice grew softer as he paced into the corner of the room, then boomeranged as he returned. “Goddamnit. Knew this was a bad idea. Never shoulda played the snatch game.”
“Talk to me, Rufus, not to yourself. Why does this matter to you?”
“Well, miss, I don’t mind a bunch of cops looking for me. I can handle cops—been handling ’em all my life. But Jason and Whit Fireson—well, that’s something else.”
Darcy was familiar with the brothers’ aura. The fact that someone as gentle and kind as Jason could elicit such fear in others was a source of wonder for her, though she was never shy about using it to her advantage. And she sensed an advantage.
“How did they fake their death?” Rufus whined.
“It seems you don’t know as much about the Firesons as I thought you did, Rufus.”
“What do you mean?”
“All right.” She sighed dramatically, her emotions cooling as she played her new hand. “You’ve been good enough to open up to me, so I’ll tell you a secret of my own. I’d be lying if I said I understood it, but … the Firesons aren’t regular men. They have these … abilities.”
She could almost hear him swallow. “I heard about this.”
“Yes, you know the time they were surrounded at some restaurant in Toledo? What was it, a dozen federal agents, watching the building for two days? They see Jason walk in, they storm the place … and he’s gone. How do you explain that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“He knows what’s coming before anyone else does. He’s driving with a target in mind, then he sees a message in the clouds and he realizes his destination is being watched, so he turns around, hits a different bank instead.”
“How? How can he do all that?”
“He walks through walls. He can change faces, slip through stakeouts.” She knew she was pushing it now, but she couldn’t resist. “Bullets pass through him, Rufus. I wash the man’s clothes, and there have been times, after he’s robbed a bank, when I’ve noticed bullet holes in his jacket, in his shirt. Bullet holes, but no blood. How do you explain that?”
“Jesus …”
“I may share a bed with the man, but I can’t say I fully understand him. I don’t think anyone can.” She was speaking quietly now, as if frightened herself. “Rufus, there are times when he’s read my mind. Where he tracked me down without my knowing how. The Chicago police took me in for questioning once”—a lie, but she was rolling now—“and they were grilling me in some dark room; I didn’t even know where I was. It wasn’t even a police station, just some warehouse where crooked cops drag witnesses they need to break. They’d been interrogating me, threatening me, when suddenly Jason and Whit showed up, spraying the room with bullets.”
“Jesus.”
“Jason hadn’t tailed anyone, hadn’t any clues to go on. He just knew where I was. And that gunfight—my God, I was terrified. It’s a miracle I wasn’t shot in the middle of it. But it wasn’t a miracle, Rufus, it was him.”
“How come I never heard about that?”
“The Chicago police do have their pride. They didn’t tell a soul. Why do you think I’ve lived in Chicago all this time without being bothered again? The police may have their hands full with the likes of Frank Nitti, but Jason Fireson they fear. And Jason only causes trouble for bankers and the law, crooked folks. But now, Rufus, you and your associates have made the mistake of crossing him. And I’m sure he’s watching over me now just as he was then. I’m sure he’s driving here, with all his men, and planning the most ruthless way to—”
“I don’t want to hear about this.”
She waited a moment for his fear to steep. “I like you, Rufus. You’ve shown yourself to be several steps above these Neanderthals you surround yourself with. But you need to understand that once the Firesons get here, once the shooting starts, there’s no way I’ll be able to stop it. Jason can become quite bloodthirsty, particularly when my safety is involved. He’s rather chivalrous that way,” and she smiled, enjoying the feel of these fictions on her lips. Then she pursed the smile away. “But also rather frightening. The only way to save yourself is to—”
“Stop, stop. I just gotta think. Lie back down, miss. I gotta think.”
“Rufus—”
Her entreaties for him to return went unanswered as his footsteps whispered themselves silent. How could she be expected to sleep after this revelation about Jason’s being alive? Or re-revelation, perhaps. What do you call it when a truth is covered in lies but then shines through them?
She made a move to reach for her goggles, as Rufus didn’t seem to be watching her anymore.
Don’t. It was back.
Darcy waited a beat, refusing to wither again. “My, this gang is rather efficient at relieving one another. One of you wanders off and the next one immediately—”
Do we have to keep going over this? Rufus may wander off, but I don’t. Never can. I may lie low from time to time, but I’m always here.
She still didn’t want to admit that there was a voice in her head. She’d had them before, but she was so much better now, wasn’t she? She hoped again that it was one of the kidnappers, that she could jibe him into confessing his ruse.
“Whatever makes you happy, sir. So, isn’t it interesting that these kidnappers seem so terrified of the allegedly deceased Firefly Brothers? They certainly don’t seem the bravest of criminals, do they?”
Criminals aren’t necessarily brave. You’ve noticed that yourself. Half the men Jason and Whit surrounded themselves with were cowards. They only went through with their deeds out of pressure from their friends, and isn’t that the greatest of cowardice?
“Oh, how I’ve missed your philosophical musings. So what do you think will happen next? Will the foolish kidnappers negotiate with the old duffer a bit more quickly now that they know my beloved is hot on their trail?”
I wouldn’t be so sure. They aren’t all as frightened as your Rufus. Some of them may actually be looking forward to Jason and Whit showing up.
“Ah, I insulted you. I’m so sorry.”
Why would I be insulted?
“Because you’re one of them, for heaven’s sake, and you know, quite well, as Rufus said, that having them on your trail is quite a bit different from some incompetent police dusting ransom notes for prints.”
But I’m inside you. Not something you see. Like indigestion, or a stuttering problem, or alcoholism. Or the death of a loved one. Something you have to live with. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be when the end comes.
“‘The end.’ How cinematic. Am I supposed to be shivering now?”
Footsteps returning to the room. “Who are you talking to?” Rufus asked.
She had no idea how to respond.
XIX.
After an all-day drive in which Whit posited various theories for why they were still alive and Jason shook his head at every last one, they reached Dubuque. Flipping through a pay-phone directory outside a shuttered filling station, Jason found the address for Brickbat Sanders’s mother. Ten minutes later, with the help of a map that Jason tore from the directory, they found her house, a small clapboard A-frame. They drove by the house twice before stopping.
His clothes nearly bursting with concealed weapons, Jason knocked on the front door as Whit waited four paces behind. It was dark and deathly silent, as if even the cicadas were out of work.
An old troll opened the door, wrapped in something green. “Hullo?”
“Hello, Mrs. Sanders, my name’s Mr. Johnson. I’m the parole officer for your son and I was hoping to ask a few quick questions about him.”
He looked past her and scanned what he could of the house. No big angry men, no sign of liquor or guns. No Darcy. Tellingly, the crone wasn’t holding the door half closed or trying to block his view, not that she’d pose much of an obstacle.
“My son don’t have a parole officer—he busted out a while ago. I ain’t that dumb, sonny. And I ain’t that blind, neither—you’re Jason Fireson.”
All those normal folks who looked at him and didn’t make the connection, and this old bat took barely two sentences.
“Jason Fireson’s dead, ma’am.”
“So they say. But you look all right to me.”
“People say I look like him, I know, but my name’s Theo Johnson and I’m your son’s—”
“I said I ain’t dumb enough to fall for whatever you’re trying to pull.”
“Okay, I’m Jason’s ghost, I admit it. Are you dumb enough to believe in ghosts?”
“Who isn’t?” Though he hadn’t seen any bottles, he was close enough to smell spirits on her breath.
“All right, then. I’m Jason’s ghost, and Jason owes Brick—er, Bernard, a favor, so I’d like to find him.” In the background, radio voices were dramatically accusing each other of adultery, assorted misdeeds, and a general failure to love. “Any idea where he might be?”
“Up to no good, probably. And it’s all your fault. He was a good boy until he fell in with the wrong crowd. Serves you right to get killed.” Jason didn’t believe Brickbat had ever been a good boy. He’d no doubt tortured puppies and abused his siblings when he was still in short pants.
“And you ain’t no ghost,” she added.
“You got me again. I’m alive and well, which I’m admitting only because I’m sure no one will believe you.”
“It ain’t very nice, you pretending to be dead when you ain’t.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am, I’m sure I’ll be dead soon enough.”
After another minute, he learned that her other son was back in jail. The guy’s wife and kid had tried to hold on to their farm in Sedalia, Missouri, but were having trouble, the old lady said.
Jason said he was sorry to hear that, thanked her for her time, and walked off with his brother shadowing him.
An empty farmhouse tied up in probate would be a perfect place to wait out a ransom. Back in the car, they took out their maps and plotted the drive south.
Wherever they looked, things were crumbling. The bricks in old factory walls exhaled a fine powder of mortar. Abandoned porches sagged beneath invisible weight. Grass didn’t see much point in growing. Dirt sneezed itself from one side of the road to the next. Street signs had trouble maintaining appropriate posture, their arrows pointing to heaven or hell.
As they passed another empty factory, Whit found himself remembering his time as a Lincoln City tire worker. While Jason had been out bootlegging, and then doing time, and back and forth again, Whit had played by the rules, but after more than two years he’d had nothing to show for it. Eventually he’d moved into a small apartment with some radically minded co-workers. They lent him their treatises and missives, the material so dangerous he was told to pass on whatever he read as soon as he finished it. As with so many of his fellow Americans, he wasn’t sure whether it was socialism or communism or anarchism that made the most sense. Maybe the best answer was simply to admit that the current way had failed and wipe it off the face of the earth, then step back to see what would rise up to take its place. When his roommates told him they wanted to blow up the factory, he readily signed on.
His father was dead. He thought of that later, how perhaps he had used Pop’s death as an excuse to get involved in something so dangerous. And, of course, there was the situation with Veronica. She’d told him her news a few weeks earlier, and he had been alternately bitter, terrified, and overwhelmed. He’d first met her when visiting recently laid-off friends who’d landed at the Hooverville, and, despite the squalor, he’d courted her in his unorthodox way, taking her for walks out of the destroyed park, buying her dinner, talking politics, and making irrational promises to one day help her family. He had been lonely, and confused, and desperately needed something to hold on to, something to make him forget and feel less fatalistic about this life, something positive and pure. And now he’d fouled it.
Planning the factory bombing was something new to cling to. The night before he and his roommates were to enact their plot, Whit had held one of the bombs in his hand, turning it over, marveling at the power contained in that small, awkwardly sized package. He laughed—not in happiness, not yet, but surely that would come. He would be so happy, tomorrow, to see the factory’s roof drop to the earth.
But there was no tomorrow. How stupid of him to have expected one, to have believed in such a thing. Whit and his buddies were supposed to blow the place the next night—his job was to be one of the lookouts as they planted the devices—but by noon that day the others had been arrested.
He’d been out running errands that morning, and on the
streetcar home he saw the cops all down the block. His heart doing double time, he rode the car past his stop. Where to go? Not to the apartment, and not to his job on Monday. Surely his name would be on lists. Surely the other guys—whichever of them hadn’t been police plants to begin with—were coughing up his identity between bloody mouthfuls of teeth. He put up at a few friends’, then slept in a few alleys, and eventually laid his head at the Hooverville, where the cops would soon come for him.
So although he never did get the satisfaction of blowing up the factory, he told himself that robbing banks served the same purpose. Jason could shake his head at Whit’s insistence on finding meaning in their strange existence, but that wouldn’t stop his search. There had to be meaning, didn’t there? Otherwise it was just pain, as pointless as it was ceaseless. Whit had seen too many men who did not dare look for meaning for fear that such a search would only reveal a great absence, a void swallowing them and their families. Yet people need their lives to have meaning, need their stories to make sense. People tell their stories to place themselves somewhere solid in this great swirl that they can’t otherwise understand. The stories define what is possible, what the tellers yearn for, what they believe they deserve. The self-made man, the American dream. Capitalism, socialism, religion—all those narratives that try to contain everyone’s desires and fears within their neat lines. Different tales, different obstacles, but the hero is always us, and the ending has us attaining what we’ve always wished for.
We believe that we shall succeed where others have failed, thought Whit. The odds are against us, of course, but we will be the exceptions to the litany of misery that surrounds us. Surely we are not on this earth to suffer the same fates as those others.
Whit therefore did not share his brother’s ambivalence at the many legends their adventures had spawned; he loved them. Reporters seized upon the occasional comments Whit made during their endeavors, chastising the bankers for their foreclosures and their interest rates. Jason was always telling him to stop with the goddamned lectures while they were on the clock. But it gave meaning to this madness; it made them better than mere thieves. And the people loved it! For every anti-Fireson screed penned by some starched-shirt columnist, the newspapers grudgingly printed half a dozen letters from the oppressed, praising the brothers’ efforts.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 26