by Peter Bowen
Alys stared, too.
“Masoud must have hired him,” says Digby.
“Why?” I says. “Mulligan is fine where he belongs, I can’t see an earthly purpose for him here.”
“He’s coming to supper,” says Digby. “You could ask him then.”
I was gratified to see Stefano and Libretta carrying cages off toward the tents. I hoped them dogs was in one of them.
I stepped out the French doors and went down the flag steps and made my way across the lawn toward where I’d seen Mulligan, and when I got past the screen of yews there he was, on that big white A-rab horse looking like a monkey playing cowboy. The A-rab horse was flighty as they is—too much fire and nerves for me, I like my horses tough and calm—but them A-rabs go like the wind and you ride ’em right they cover more damn ground than you’d believe.
Mulligan spotted me and he come over, that horse dancing, and he slipped down with the reins and he dropped them and damned if the big horse didn’t just sort of dance in place.
“What the hell you doing here?” I says, not wasting time on pleasantries.
Mulligan grinned, showing his brown stumps of teeth.
I was able to comb out the fact that he was here because Masoud had offered him a lot of money to come.
“I figured that,” I says. “But why here?”
“Blue Fox,” says Mulligan. “Them Krauts didn’t get him.”
My thought, too.
I says then it was him killed Sir Henry, and I described how we found the lord in the boxes, one neat little hole in the back of his head.
Mulligan nodded.
“You know how he is,” says Mulligan. “He’ll kill you last, after he kills the lady and whoever else comes to mind.”
Cold worms twisted in my gut. There was no damned way that bastard could have lived through the barrage that them Krauts laid on the top of his rock.
But he had.
“But why Masoud?” I says.
“He done told me he feels responsible,” says Mulligan, “since his gunners was the ones guaranteed Blue Fox was dead. He’s got spies, too, and one of them reported seein’ Blue Fox, just for a moment in the window of a passing train. His face was scarred bad, but it was him.”
The soldier I had nodded to on the platform.
Sir Henry wouldn’t have paid no mind to a cripple in uniform.
“He wouldn’t come here,” I says, mostly hopeful.
“He ain’t supposed to even be alive,” says Mulligan, “so I expect he’ll go where he likes.”
I seen Masoud stride out of his tent, followed by the huge guards, and they headed for us.
“I’ll have to tell her,” I says, thinking of the man I wounded when we were up in the mountains. He must have barely got up to walk, and he’d come for us, and failed, but he lived, and he would come again.
“We got to kill him,” I says.
Mulligan nods.
“That we purely have to do,” he says.
We’d damn sure been trying. Blue Fox was more ghost than man. But he was lethal.
And he could slide around the East and not stick out that much, there was tens of thousands of wounded veterans and they wandered all over. No one would find Blue Fox unusual, and his scars would make folks sympathetic.
“This is the godddamnedest business I ever seen,” says Mulligan. “But we’re in it and there ain’t no way out but to kill him.”
No, I thought, there wasn’t.
Masoud got to us and we spoke a few words and then all of us headed for the orangerie to talk it over with Alys and Digby.
36
EVEN WITH ALL OF the room in Digby’s mansion, them goddamned little sausage dogs hunted me with insane glee. I could be in the damned dining room and get up to load some more bacon off the sideboard, and there would be a couple happy yelps and they would be clamped on my ankles again.
The pepper sauce worked good on the boots but it worked so good it shriveled and cracked the leather.
I was setting in the orangerie with Digby and Alys one afternoon having a nice drink when the little bastards shot out of a pile of trimmings the gardener had piled by the door and something in me snapped. I picked up the machete the gardener had left and I tore after the dogs, hollering war cries and determined to behead them before doing more serious damage.
“Bruto!” hollered Libretta, as she took a well-aimed swing at my forehead with a hand-carved pick handle and laid me out cold on the parquet.
I awoke with black shimmers in my eyes to see her cooing at them damned dogs, whilst clutching them to her breast. She looked a lot like paintings of the Madonna, with a couple of demented sausage dogs standing in for the infant Jesus.
Time I struggled up to my elbows Alys and Digby was there.
“I am going to kill them,” I says. “I will not rest till I have both their miserable hides. I have had enough.”
Libretta wailed like a grieving mother.
“We need to go to Philadelphia,” says Alys. “Maybe the dogs will find a new best friend while we’re gone.”
I was helped off to bed and cold compresses were applied to the goose egg rising on my skull.
“You can’t kill the dogs,” says Digby. “It would cause no end of trouble.”
“Yes,” I says.
“They’re dear people,” says Digby. “A little eccentric.”
“Eccentric,” I says.
I fished one of my belly guns out of the dresser drawer and checked the loads.
“I’ll see what I can do,” says Digby, noticing the insane gleam in my eyes.
Anyway, I did not see the damn dogs again and we got ready and loaded up the private car for the trip to Philadelphia. Digby had a day’s worth of business in Washington, and we was to go to that festering goddamned swamp before Philadelphia.
I knew a lot of folks in Washington and did not trust any government run by my friends. Knew ’em too well, you see.
“Grant’s in the White House,” I says. “And Kelly’s not been seen.” The last damn thing I wanted was a private commission to go off and poke around at risk of my precious neck to give good old U.S. a report. He was a funny, sandy red man, not tall, not wide, and looking at him he’d pass for a harness-maker, which is what he’d been after he left the Army. He didn’t talk a lot and he was much misjudged, not having much flash and swagger.
But one of our neighbors up in Oneida had been with Grant at Vicksburg and then with him after Lincoln appointed him to lead all the Union forces.
Both times, our neighbor said, about a day after Grant took command everything started to tighten up. Officers did their jobs or they was sent packing. The troops was well supplied.
The feller told me this was in the fortifications built to defend Washington, and he was on guard duty one night when Grant and Lincoln his own self come walking along the firestep.
“The South is the Army of Northern Virginia,” says Grant. “And I will take every soldier I can muster and go and destroy that army.”
Which he did.
He was shrewd and tough and I really dearly wanted to avoid him, along with about forty other folks seemed to know an uncomfortable amount of my history.*
“Matter of fact,” I says, “why don’t I just stay maybe in New York and meet you on the way back.”
“Several reasons,” says Alys, “beginning with New York has ever so many whorehouses ever so much nicer than Rosie’s.”
A man’s worst nightmare is havin’ all his friends understand him so good.
Digby had made the arrangements with the railroad, and the sheer ease and speed with which we made it to Washington should have set alarm bells off in Mrs. Kelly’s boy Luther’s mind, but I was being fucked to a standstill every damn night by my lovely and voracious companion and about half-drunk all day with Digby’s fine old cognac. I was used to sleeping light and having a gun to hand out where my worst worry was some Indians working off their boredom but it was a lot more dangerous here and I kne
w that but forgot.
I was sound asleep when we come to a stop in the capital, my dreams perfumed by Alys, and all warm and comfortable in the bed and my ankles hadn’t had a dog attach itself to them for two whole days.
Alys shook me awake and said a couple of Digby’s friends was coming for breakfast and wanted to meet the famed scout, by which I supposed she meant me. There was several messes of tripe purporting to tell the tale of my heroic life (one spent fleeing by preference, and I took solid pride in the fact that my scars was almost all on my backside) with a lot of flowery speeches and even the Indians soundin’ like they gone to good private schools and was fine British gentlemen bound by honor and good manners and all that crap, which was an interesting way to present folks didn’t think like us at all. Hell, I even didn’t think like us—it was why I was still alive.
All innocence I shaved and got dressed and flicked a few bits of lint off my lapels and I sauntered on out to breakfast and I should have lurked in the passageway a little and paid careful attention to the voices.
But I didn’t. When I come out there was two absolute horrors just a-settin’ there and I gave off a yelp and turned to flee but Alys was blocking my retreat.
“Luther,” says John Hay, “how nice to see you again.” Hay was one of them fellers destined for great things, and he had been Lincoln’s secretary whilst in his mid-twenties and now was doin’ God Knew What here, but I could be sure it meant no good to me.
The other was General George Crook. Crook was an honest and brave man and therefore dangerous. Once when he was asked by some congressman what was the worst thing about fighting Indians he had replied that the worst thing was making war on people that were utterly in the right, while we were utterly in the wrong. This was not the reply the congressman was expecting, and Crook found himself posted to a fort someplace well past the ass end of nowhere in jig time.
“Who,” I says, “was fool enough to let you come back to Washington?”
“Grant,” says Crook.
I done a quick sum and the total looked extremely bad for Luther Sage Kelly.
“Nice to see you boys,” I says. “I am suffering from a bad and festering wound. My mind is broke from years of terror and suffering in the service of my country. I get fits time to time and begin shooting at good friends, cause I think they are plottin’ to get me killed. I got plenty of money and I don’t want no more medals. My doctor assures me that only a life of luxury in a nice safe place will save me from the madhouse. I have become addicted to opium and whiskey and ...”
Hay fishes out his wallet and counts out some bills and hands them to Crook, who tucks them in his pocket without counting them.
“Alys,” I says, “these bastards is going to try and get me killed and you must help. Try a bribe, quick.”
“Luther,” says Crook, “you sure disappointed me. You forgot to mention you are the sole support and comfort of your aging mother and orphaned nieces and nephews.”
“That, too,” I says.
Alys is having fits of the giggles, of course.
“I resign my commission,” I says.
“As an attorney,” says Hay, “I would advise you not to threaten to resign a secret commission, because the mere mention of it is a traitorous act and hanging the penalty.”
I thought a moment about how much I hated lawyers.
Crook laughed his generous and booming laugh.
“In a world of tricks,” he says, “I can always count on Luther.”
“No,” I says.
Alys is leaking tears. Her and Hay.
“We but bear a message,” says Crook.
“Let me guess,” I says, “that it comes from some sawed-off drunk used to have a batch of stars on his shoulders but has moved up in life.”
“Your old friend the president merely wants to have a drink with you,” says Hay.
“Digby is at the bottom of this,” I says.
“Of course,” says Alys.
*See Kelly Blue
37
NOTHING MUCH HAD CHANGED at the White House since I’d been here a year ago with Sitting Bull and Gall and Red Shirt and Spotted Tail and the others, though it seemed longer. I suppose it does when life is so very interesting.
Grant was a simple soldier at heart, and he hated pomp and all the efforts of them wanted to make the presidency more royal. When he was a general he wore a private’s uniform with his stars stuck on here and there, and officers hadn’t ever met him would walk right past him, figuring some underling all sashes and gold braid had to be him. He was truly modest and seemed to take on his tasks with fierce single-mindedness. He was also utterly honest, which is not all that much use in Washington. Most folks here would have apoplexy if they told the truth, it was that unnatural.
I remembered him asking Sitting Bull what had impressed him most about the wonders of white civilization, after the chiefs had been taken on a tour.
“Little children working,” says Sitting Bull. Grant nodded. He didn’t blush about things he couldn’t change, but Sitting Bull was right, in more ways than he knew.
Digby was already there, tricked out in a colonel’s uniform, and like Grant he wore a simple private’s government-issue woolens. This on a man who had the finest tailors in England for his everyday wear.
The privates, case you was wondering, was the ones did almost all the dying. Few officers take that enough to heart.
Hay, Crook, Grant, and Digby all knew each other well and they had a quiet ripple of jokes run around and through the conversation, and since I was fresh meat most of them was at my expense. Alys had got left, much to her annoyance, even though Digby explained there was matters of State to discuss and protocols demanded only them as ranked could hear it.
“Since I’m so junior to everyone,” I says, being a mere captain, “why don’t I go and get a newspaper or see the hogs been fed proper?”
“Luther,” says the president, “knowing your objections to anything I might want of you, and your skill at vanishing, you may find NO in these words with a modest effort.”
“I’m wounded,” I says. “Just a little walk outside and I will be, anyway.”
“Your concern for the carpets is admirable,” says Grant. “Now shut up and listen.”
Hay trucks on over to an easel got something on it, like a big map, and I did have a slight fit of the curious as to just where these bastards was going to send me so I could get killed next.
Hay flips off the fancy bedsheet covering the map and it’s of Central America.
“No Spanish,” I says. “Can’t hardly manage a word of it and so obviously you’ll need someone else.”
This heartfelt observation was ignored. Hay stuck a pointer on a big lake in Nicaragua.
“We will soon require a canal through Central America,” says Hay. “And one possible place is through Lake Nicaragua and so on through the mountains—very low here—to the Atlantic.”
“So dig the son of a bitch and when you’re done I’ll go and have a look-see,” I says. That canal had been an idea for a long damned time and for my own money one malarial swamp is a lot like another.
“The shortest distance is through Panama,” says Hay, “but may be costlier. In any case we must forestall the British from insinuating themselves into Central America.”
I was feeling relieved. There had to be about two thousand other fellers they could blackmail into this. Surely I was not the only man fit for this job.
“So the expedition seeking the fossils in these limestone mountains would be our best possible means of surveying the route.”
Foss-iles. A dim and vicious light came on in my little mind.
“Digby,” I says, “do I smell a fine, lovely, and perfumed hand in all of this?”
“Eau de Montreux,” says Digby. “It’s all she wears.”
“How could you?” I says, looking terribly pained.
“Luther,” says Digby, “men generally have a weak character, and so Alys is merely
providing one of better mettle to you.”
That did it. I started into cussing and give off a long and extensive aria covering all the treacherous backhanded dishonest and etc. of present company and absent wench.
I referred to certain dismal events in which I had part, none of them anything I wanted anything to do with whatever. I damned the Army, officers, and ended by roaring that I purely hated the government, any government, and I was prepared to ...
“Hang?” says President Ulysses S. Grant.
Damn him, he cut right to the argument and won it, like always.
“Nicaragua in the winter,” says Digby. “It ain’t so hot.”
I could be a long ways away by winter.
I could be in goddamned Mongolia by winter.
“But we still need to take Alys back to Wyoming,” Digby goes on. “She’s very much wanting to introduce me to Washakie.”
Even Grant perked up at the mention of the old monster’s name.
“A fine feller, I hear,” he says, looking wistful. They was mighty scarce here in the capital, for sure.
This was no good at all. Blue Fox, for some insane reason, was determined to kill me after he’d killed Alys, and there he’d have a much better chance. Digby and me had had a quiet talk and there was hard-eyed fellers in the shrubbery after that, and other places.
“You’re ordered to Wyoming and Nicaragua,” says Grant, “and Colonel MacMahon is your commanding officer.” He looked at Digby, and he looked at me.
“Feel free to hang him if it suits you,” says Grant, looking satisfied. “It would please so many of my constituents.”
Hay hustled us out, there was a delegation of fat senators coming down the hall bent on some chicanery.
“We’ve one other feller to see,” says Hay. “He heard you were in town and asked if you might drop by and he wanted to meet Digby as well.”
Now what?
Hay had a carriage waiting and we got in and the driver took off without orders and he pulled up to this dismal redbrick building, the sort of place has government writ all over it. We got out and Hay led us in past some secretaries and he nodded to a man at a desk in front of a large double door and he knocked once.