He turned to Sally Rae and the two popular girls. “Y’all are peaches.” He grinned and handed around fifty-dollar bills. “I’ma leave the evidence with you for safekeepin’.”
He leaned the tripod and camera against the wall. “Take the plate over Duval’s. These buffoons raise a stink, flash the prints to those fellers from The New York Times. You’ll find ’em in the lobby at the St. Charles. But keep it on the low.”
“Nobody keeps a secret like I do,” Sally Rae declared. “Hell, I got stuff on you that you don’t even know about.”
Higbee handed her another fifty. “You can let ’em out at sun up.”
“Thank you, my boy,” she said, tucking the money in her bosom. “Good luck to you.”
“Bye, Butch!” the girls called as the men filed back downstairs and out the front door to a Buffam Greyhound roadster idling at the curb. Higbee paid the driver and sent him packing into the wet night. The gang piled in, Higbee and one of the no-accounts in the rumble seat, Flores upfront, and the other no-account behind the wheel, and the roadster sped off down Basin Street, a plume of water rising behind it like a rooster tail.
The Matranga mob was well known in the Crescent City. They had a piece of everything from the wharves to the wholesale markets, the railyards to Storyville. But an out-of-towner could not have picked a Matranga mobster out of the rabble of stevedores, peddlers, pickpockets, dandies, vagrants, pimps, gamblers, hustlers, drunks, and adolescent ne’er-do-wells hanging around Canal Street. So when an olive-skinned slicker in a homburg and pink shirt plunked down at their table in the Oro Café, the two Treasury agents had no idea who he was. They were irritated but not alarmed. After they had been relieved of their firearms by a second pink-shirted Sicilian who had crept up behind them, they experienced real concern.
“Don’t lift a finger,” muttered the first slicker. “This ain’t a wallet in my coat pocket.”
“What the hell you think you’re doing?” demanded one of the agents.
“Preventing developments.”
The first mobster signaled to a waiter. Four espressos. It was going to be a long night. “Hope you peckerheads got strong bladders, ’cause you ain’t gonna be using the latrine anytime soon.”
The federal agents began to seethe. “Do you realize the jeopardy you boys are incurring?”
The mobster smiled. “Some well-dressed young men meeting our friends for coffee? That’s all anybody in here sees. It’s all they ever see. Now shut your damn piehole.”
At his table in the corner, the object of federal surveillance finished his own coffee. Whitaker folded his newspaper and laid it beside his cup. He had been reading a report of the Harvard-Yale football game: a bone-crusher, as usual, culminating in two Yalies drop-kicking a Harvard punt-returner, permanently damaging his ability to reason. Every year brought more fatalities, and Roosevelt had been forced to intervene again, summoning the coaches to the White House for a scolding. Walter Camp, speaking for Yale, was all for reform but denied there was any roughhousing in the game of football. The President insisted that he did not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, but c’mon, gents, nineteen dead college boys in a single season were enough to upset the members of the Republican ladies’ clubs. It was high time to legalize the forward pass and disperse the players from their murderous flying wedges.
Walter Whitaker’s alma mater had won the rivalry game 6-0, but he could not have cared less. He despised team sports. Having to share in either glory or defeat went against his nature. Where was the merit in team effort? Boxing, man to man, personal and punishing—now that was athletic.
He rose from the table and adjusted his waistcoat. He put on his derby and his topcoat. Pulled on his leather gloves. Without a glance at agents or mobsters, he navigated through the crowded café and exited into the cold, rainswept night. A Buick touring car was waiting with its engine running. He climbed in and told the driver he did not feel like talking.
The first thing Butch Higbee spied when he reached the end of the dark dock in Pass Christian was Leonard Vaught juggling three baseballs, switching from a half-box to a windmill pattern and back with practiced ease. A weather-abraded forty-two-foot yacht, the Sidonie, rocked lightly at his feet. A cold curtain of rain swept across the Gulf and gave the scene a smoked-glass quality. The yacht’s windows cast yellow trapezoids of light on the wet planks. To the east shimmered the lights of Gulfport. All else was blackness.
Higbee’s companions—the once-and-future president and the two no-account cons—followed close on his heels.
“Hiya, boys,” Vaught said and kept on juggling the baseballs, which up close proved to be hand grenades.
“What the hell ya doin’ out in the weather with them things?”
“Waitin’ fer you all. I like a rainy night. Discourages patrol boats.” Vaught caught the grenades in his big hands, one two three, and stuffed them into his coat pocket. He sucked in a lungful of night air. The air smelled like a moldy old boot.
“Where’s ever’body?”
“Down below, playin’ cards and drinkin’ whiskey.”
“Already?”
“Like you said, we got weather. When are we gonna cast off, brother? I’m chafin’ for action.” Vaught bounced up down, as if his legs were on steel springs.
“Calm the hell down, Vaught. Nothin’ happens till the boss gets here. We gotta kill time ’fore we rendezvous. That’s assumin’ the Hornet made it past Ship Island without bein’ innercepted.”
“That the president?” Vaught pointed at Terencio Flores’ stolid, rain-streaked face and snickered. “We gonna liberate a country fer that feller?”
The no-accounts muttered, but Flores’ veiled expression did not change. He could not, Higbee had discovered, understand much English.
“Jest keep yer eyes peeled for a Buick runabout,” Higbee told him. “Anybody else come by here, shoot ’em.”
Vaught grinned and whipped out a six-shooter with a twelve-inch barrel, of the kind last seen in Dodge City. He spun the cylinder.
“Don’t shoot the damn driver,” Higbee said.
The man gave him the willies.
The U.S.S. Tacoma appeared in the offing late one dismal Sunday afternoon. Geddie watched it take shape, a wavy mirage, in the haze beyond the lagoon, as he reclined on his wicker chair on the veranda. He had his feet on the rail, next to Sybil, who was enjoying a box of crackers.
Porter sat on a kitchen chair at the foot of the veranda. He had come to deliver another batch of medicine. Thanks to the elixirs, both the consul and his little monkey were feeling like a million bucks. The medicine was extraordinarily bitter—at least Geddie’s was—with a distinct taste of petroleum. The effects were swift and powerful. Geddie was shaved and combed, his clothes brushed and pressed. He could hardly believe that he had been free of pain for a fortnight. Sybil, whose bald spots were filling in with fine shiny hair, no longer needed her diaper, although she continued to faint at inconvenient times.
“So,” Porter said, idly jotting in his notebook. “What exactly is that thing out there?”
“That, my friend, is a Denver-class cruiser.”
The ship rode low in the water, as menacing as a shark fin slicing through the waves, gray steel in the gray water against a hot smooth gray slab of sky. The only spot of color in the suffocating scene was Old Glory fluttering minutely in the distance.
“She’s not here for pleasure,” Geddie said, unecessarily.
“You think anyone will put ashore?”
“I do not. What we’re witnessing out there is a blockade. Our old friend Walter Whitaker draws nigh.”
He knew from diplomatic cables that the Hornet, registered to an iron-ore merchant named Nixon, had sailed from New Orleans five days
ago. The American consul at Punta Monabique reported that she had been joined by the Emma, an oyster lugger out of Gulfport, which had picked up three-dozen heavily armed bravos at Puerto Barrios. If any ships had spotted the Hornet and the Emma since then, they had not reported the encounter. Geddie also had intelligence that the cruiser Chicago had left Hispaniola and was headed for Coralio, and that English, French, and German gunboats were lurking beyond the barrier isles, ready to protect national interests should armed rebellion break out along the coast. He had seen their fugitive flickers on the horizon for the last two days.
“I’ve been hearing rumors,” Porter said.
“Huh.”
“The crews in the waterfront joints have it, on no authority whatsoever, that the port faces a takeover by dago mobsters from New Orleans who want a piece of the banana action.”
Geddie chuckled.
“The dockworkers and mozos, every last one, believe that Vesuvius is importing a new crop of laborers from the islands to take away their jobs. The merchants see an excuse for the government to collect taxes. The politicians over at the hotel think Roosevelt’s promoting military incidents to chip away at the Neutrality Act until the entire Isthmus is under his control.”
“They must be hysterical,” Geddie said
“They are. What do you think?”
“I think it’s exactly what it looks like.”
“What about the Frenchman on the unicycle?”
Geddie laughed shortly. “He draws a lot of attention. I assume it’s intentional.”
“Maybe you could ask the commandante where he’s staying.”
“Ask him yourself,” Geddie said. “It shouldn’t be hard to catch a man on a unicycle.”
They gazed out at the Tacoma, a puissant ghost floating in the gray afternoon, and let their eyelids droop and their conversation trail off, as they drifted into dreams.
Porter sat on his bed, polishing his boots by the light of the gas lamp. Since the destruction of his Chandler & Price printing press, he had neglected his appearance. He was starting to resemble Geddie and Grieg and Jennings and the other long-termers. It was time to recapture the old glamour.
The plaza was usually filled with barefoot bootblacks who flocked around anyone who dared to appear in public wearing shoes. They beseeched and berated and sometimes dragged the victim onto one of the flaking iron benches, there to snap their strips of blackened cloth across the captive footwear. But even the pennies they demanded for their services put a crimp in Porter’s finances, and he found himself fending them off. The Associated Press, he had discovered, was quick to publish but slow to pay. Furthermore, it turned out to be exceedingly difficult to wire money to a telegraph office that had no cash in the safe—and no safe—and even more difficult to cash a bank draft in a town without a bank. As a result, his remuneration was sent as paper money in a freighter’s mail sack. Most of the time the envelope arrived at his box behind the front desk of the hotel as empty as a hangman’s heart.
There was a knock on the door, a surreptitious knuckle-rapping.
“What do you want?” Porter shouted.
A key clashed in the lock and Pierre swung open the door. He slipped into the room and eased the door closed. He shot the dead bolt—clunk—and turned to examine Porter, who had a boot in one hand and a blackened shoe-rag in the other.
“Somebody order a massage?”
“Say that again, you son of a bitch.”
“You order a massage?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“Room service?”
Porter looked at the bowlegged figure and wondered: Why? Why?
“I don’t appreciate these pointless ruses. Say what you need and get out.”
Pierre leaned against the door with his thumbs hooked in the top of his trousers, glowing redly in the gaslight. He was chewing some kind of cud. “Man come to town lookin’ for Miz Whitaker,” he said. With his tongue, he shoved whatever was in his mouth into one cheek. “I don’t know where she got to.”
“So what are you bothering me for? Go up the hill and knock on the front door.”
“Did. She ain’t home.”
“Then ask that bastard McCoy. I thought—and I quote— not much happens within fifty miles of Coralio that he doesn’t take an interest in.”
“Did that too. He prob’ly knows, but he ain’t took to me yet.”
“Imagine that.”
“By the way, you gonna accept that job he offer you?”
Porter glanced up. “How do you—?” He stopped before committing himself to another blind line of inquiry. “I think not,” he said.
“Good money, that.”
“Will you just get on with it?”
Pierre did not say anything.
“Well?” Porter demanded.
“Don’cha wanna know what I got in my mouth?”
Porter leaned over and put his boot on the floor by the bed next to the other one and laid the polishing cloth across the toes. He took a deep, mind-cleansing breath, thinking about piney forests and dewy pastures and happy picnics. “What.”
“Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewin’ gum and a red-hot pepper. You get the fruit and the fire in one shot. Hurts like hell.”
Porter refused to give him the satisfaction of stepping into another quagmire. “Innovative,” he said. “Now get out.”
“It’ll protect you against fungus,” Pierre said and shifted the wad to the other cheek.
“I know for a fact that isn’t true.”
“You some kinda doctor?”
Porter could not keep the triumph out of his voice: “Licensed pharmacist!”
“Izzat right.…”
Pierre hacked the wad of pain-inducing chewing gum into his hand and looked at it with disappointment. He put it in his pocket and pretended to gaze out the window. “So you know where Miz Whitaker at or not? Hush hush.”
“I know she’s not in here,” Porter said shortly. He picked up his boot, spat on it, and rubbed the leather vigorously with the cloth. “Check under the bed, if you want. Open the wardrobe.” He paused. “Why hush hush?”
“Come with me, I show you.”
“Come where and show me what?”
“You’re a cor’spondent, no? In addition to bein’ a druggist and a master printer and—a bank off’cer, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not in the mood, Pierre. Tuesday nights are for the singalong. You know that.”
“Still early. Pull on you boots,” Pierre insisted. “I got somethin’ you can send to the papers.”
He twisted around and opened the door, looking back over his shoulder with a glittering eye. He beckoned with one hand raised above his head, like Hermes ushering a pilgrim through the portal to the underworld. Porter felt a stir of curiosity, a tiny thrill. It was like cracking open a new deck of cards. The moment seemed to be developing into a part of the glamour-recapturing he had been polishing his boots for.
He pulled them on, levered himself upright, and hooked his jacket from the back of the chair. He patted the inside pocket. The steno pad was there.
He was sure that Pierre would not have come to Room Five if he did not have an angle. It was curiosity about his motives as much as the call of professional duty that propelled Porter out the door and down the stairs, stomping noisily as he tried to shovel his right foot all the way into his boot.
Porter was surprised to discover that there was another part of town. He thought that during his evening exercise he had hiked the beaten streets of Coralio to their deadest ends. Yet here he was, following a lantern as it bobbed and weaved along a narrow lane that plunged into the black pit of a cloud-covered night. He could hear Pierre, accompanied by the faint rattle of keys, muttering incantations in bayou French as they picked their way along, but all he could s
ee was the dim orange stub of the kerosene flame.
At one point they crossed the railroad tracks, and he sensed that they were skirting the shoreline. He could smell seaweed and raw sewage. Wood smoke. Decaying carcasses. Little waves slurped on the mud flats. The bush rustled with unknown night-rovers, and fierce trembling clouds of mosquitoes materialized around his head. He had to slap himself, constantly and hard, with his Stetson. His boots squished on gooey things that he hoped were not giant slugs.
As his pupils reached full dilation, Porter realized there were houses, dark and silent, along the lane. He could hear chickens rustling behind gates. A dog started to howl and was cut off with a yelp. Porter had the impression they were being watched by a hundred eyes.
He nearly overran Pierre, who had halted before the vague impression of a door. Pierre hoisted the lantern so that his features glowed satanically. He rapped some sort of code on the door. “Abre la puerta.”
“Qué diablos quieres, pendejo?” someone shouted from the other side. Several other voices chimed in:
“Hijo de puta!”
“Pinche chivo!”
Clearly, Pierre was known. He called: “Está aquí el gringo que conoce a Isabel Whitaker. Abre la puerta!”
There was some heated discussion on the other side. At last the door opened a few inches. Pierre slipped through the crack, motioning for Porter to follow.
In the courtyard, hunched on barrels around a table ablaze with rushlights were a half-dozen men drinking beer and playing dominoes. The bones slammed on the wooden tabletop. The men growled and snarled like a pack of dogs. They were smoking something that smelled like Texas ditchweed. In the glare of the rushlights, they all had the same beady bloodshot eyes, wide noses, and high cheekbones. He was concerned by the machetes that gleamed on their laps.
As the visitors came into the circle of light, the men one by one laid down their dominoes. They began slapping the machete blades against their thighs in unison, as if preparing for a ritual.
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