The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  I would rather speak with the President in his office. Can you buzz him and ask if I can step over and have a quick word?”

  “Certainly, Colonel Redmond.” The captain came back in less than a minute. “Come on over whenever you’re ready, sir.”

  Don crossed the cobbled plaza and the street to Longview House in the gathering autumn darkness, checking in at the gate and saying hello to a different SS guard and the same GELF dog. He stepped up onto the portico of the house and was startled to feel a hand on his shoulder. Don turned, and in the yellow light from the faux ironwork gas lamp on the porch he found himself facing old Corey Nash. Nash was wearing the same threadbare blue blazer and flaccid tie it seemed he had been wearing ever since Don knew him, the dress of an alcoholic bellhop or an usher at a seedy funeral home.

  The old man’s rheumy eyes stared at him from a leathery face. “Barringer said you wanted to see John C.,” said Nash. “I know what’s going on. I know what John C. told you to do. What are you going to say to him?”

  Don looked at him. “Mr. Nash, at the time of the Ravenhill ambush you were sometimes used as a courier between the Port Townsend and Olympic Flying Columns. Do you have anything you want to tell me about that time in your life?”

  “The last time anyone asked me about that time of my life, as you put it, was when you was still trying to get into Sarah’s jeans back in Bellevue,” said Nash. “Some blokes from the FBI. They used a dentist’s drill. I didn’t tell them bugger all either.” Don was suddenly struck by the similarity between the old man’s Rhodesian accent and Hennie Nel’s.

  “I understand,” said Don, and he did. He knew that nothing on earth would force the old codger to reveal anything at all he did not wish to reveal about John Morgan, to anyone, and he could not bring himself to try. He turned to go inside, but Nash held his arm.

  “Don, you know I’ve never in my life asked anything of you,”

  began Nash tentatively in an odd, subdued voice.

  “Not only have you never asked anything of me, I think that’s the first time in over three decades you have ever even spoken my first name out loud,” said Don in amazement.

  “Yah, well, maybe that’s been a mistake on my part. I’m asking something of you now. This business you’re working on. Leave it! Tell J. C. you’ve got no idea what the bloody hell’s going on and just walk away from it. There are things in this country’s past that have been buried for most of a lifetime and they need to stay that way. Just leave it, son. Just walk away!” Nash’s voice was urgent and plaintive in supplication.

  “Someone has been just leaving it for a long time,” said Don. “But now we can’t cuff this any more, Corey. What do we do when Trudy Greiner walks across the border at Mountain Gate in less than two weeks’ time?”

  “We do what was done before,” said Nash. “I did my duty then and I can do it again. You know the drill. You grab her ass, you bring her into a room with me, and you lock the door. You go have a

  nice long smoke on one of them cigars himself gave you. When you come back, there will be no more problem.”

  “Trudy Greiner isn’t Hillary Clinton, Mr. Nash,” said Don. “She is, or was, one of us, a soldier of the Northwest Volunteer Army. She is coming here to be tried in public, before God and her country, on the charges against her. Not to be left alone in a room with you.”

  “Since when did you become so damned high and mighty?”

  growled Nash.

  “I’m not. I’ll do it the old way if I have to,” said Don. “I’ll even do it the old way if I’m ordered to. But before I do, I have to know not only that it’s necessary, but that it’s right. Now you have a choice. You can either tell me what the hell happened back then, or else I’ll keep on digging until I find out on my own. Did Corby Morgan have anything at all to do with the destruction of the Olympic Flying Column?”

  “Did…Morgan…?” said the old man slowly, disgust in his voice. “You know, son, I thought a lot about you over the past thirty-odd years, not much of it good. But until this night, I never thought you were fucking stupid. I’ve got bangers and mash on the stove, and cabbage. Stay to dinner, boy. Cabbage is brain food and you bloody well need it.” The coot turned and stumped around the corner of the porch to his kitchen.

  Don Redmond found the State President in his upstairs office with two sideburned men in 1890s collars and cuffs, stolid in pinstriped broadcloth and with gold watch chains dangling. He knocked on the door for admission. “Come on in, Don,” said Morgan. “You know Jacques Comeaux and Roland Stanford of the Revenue Commission? Gentlemen, my son in-law, Colonel Donald Redmond of the Bureau of State Security.” Don shook hands with the two bureaucrats. “Don, do you have any idea what that damned Bismarck floating fortress of Bloody Dave Leach’s is going to cost us? I tell you, the folks in this country are lucky that our Constitution forbids any form of income tax.”

  “You put a few more pence on the pint and you’re going to revive moonshining as a cottage industry!” protested Don.

  “Actually, Colonel, excise is booming. This year we’re looking at our best import-export ratio ever,” said Comeaux with a smile. “The NAR is among the last reliable manufacturers in the

  world of medicines, high tech components and machinery that actually works. The same countries that pillory us on the floor of the United Nations send us trade delegations sneaking in through Canada begging for our products.”

  “Never mind,” said Morgan. “I’m about ready for some eats. Corey’s got some of that cabbage and potatoes and sausage of his bubbling away downstairs. Are we through, gentlemen? Sure I can’t persuade you to stay for supper? If not, thanks for coming by.” After a few more pleasantries Morgan ushered the two men out the door under the care of Captain Barringer, then closed the door of the office. “What’s up, Don?” asked Morgan. Don surprised him by formally standing to attention in front of his desk.

  “Mr. President, as part of the investigation into the Greiner affair which you have assigned me, it has become necessary for me to request your permission to interview the President Emeritus of the Republic.”

  “Great jumping Jehosophat, boy, what the hell do you want to talk to him for?” demanded Morgan roughly. “You want listen to some senile old loon babble, I can call in Corey from the kitchen. Or I’ll even do in a pinch.”

  “Actually, I just had a rather interesting if somewhat cryptic conversation with Mr. Nash on the subject. It is a necessary part of the investigation,” repeated Don. He handed Morgan the piece of paper he had prepared. “I am making this request officially and formally, in writing. A copy of this request will be attached to my final report and included in the case file. If you decline to grant me permission to see him, sir, then as far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter. You are after all State President and commander in chief. Or I should say it will be the end of the matter until Trudy Greiner arrives on October 22nd, if indeed she does. But if you decline to give your permission, I would like you to so note that refusal at the bottom of my request, in writing. I don’t expect you to give your reasons, either

  in writing or verbally, if you should choose not to do so. But I want it

  on record.”

  “And why on earth do you want to nail my hide to the barn door like that?” asked Morgan, incredulous. “What the hell did I do to bring this on?”

  Don’s reply was low and even. “This has nothing to do with hides or barn doors, sir. I want your refusal in writing so that when this cluster-fuck, whatever it is, comes apart at the seams and blows up in all our faces, as I have reason to believe it will, then at least it will be on record that I didn’t pass the buck.”

  “If you see the Old Man, will you be able to prevent it from blowing up?”

  “That depends on what kind of answers I can get from him, if any. And on what kind of sense those answers make, if any. The President Emeritus is of a very advanced age.”

  Morgan pulled out an ink pencil, scrawled somethi
ng on the bottom of the paper, and handed it back to him. “All right, you can go and listen to the mummy mutter. Be out there at ten tomorrow morning. I’ll call ahead and let his honor guard know.”

  Don let himself into his front door very late, accompanied only by the silent Baskerville. He found Sarah sitting alone at the kitchen table, in the dark. “You were in battle today,” she said tonelessly. “I felt it. I always do when someone meets you with death in his heart.”

  “Yes,” he said, sitting down beside her and pulling her head onto his shoulder.

  “I also know that things aren’t right between you and my father,” she said. “How bad is this going to get?”

  “I wish I knew, Snoops,” he said softly. “I wish I knew.”

  IX.

  The Old Man’s retirement estate was a large, beetling mansion of cut gray granite and limestone on verdant Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle across the Puget Sound. It resembled a large English manor house from the Queen Anne period, sporting gabled roofs, diamond-paned windows, and ivy-covered walls, with a large artificial lake and park garden at the rear. The great house had been built in the late part of the nineteenth century by one of Seattle’s lumber barons. In the early 1920s it had been purchased and expanded by Mr. Roy Olmstead, Seattle’s primary bootlegger and the man who quenched the thirst of millions on the West Coast during Prohibition. The cellars still concealed large secret chambers where cases of liquor and mammoth hogsheads of ale smuggled down from Canada had been stored prior to shipment to points onward. In the latter part of the twentieth century the mansion had served as the love nest of a computer tycoon. Then it had been the crash pad of a rock star who blew his girlfriend’s head off with a shotgun in one of the bedrooms and then stepped into the jacuzzi where he slit his own wrists. The ghost of the rock star and the murdered groupie were alleged to walk the halls at night, wailing. “He like ze ghosts.” The two BOSS men

  stood in an office off the mansion’s vestibule with a white-uniformed, blond young nurse from Quebec. Beside her stood a tall, crew-cut SS lieutenant in dress black with silver piping as required by the formal nature of his post. The nurse was speaking. “I fear zem, but he say he finds zeir caterwauling restful. He say it reminds him of how we beat zem and destroy zeir world. He is a very strange man.”

  “He always was,” said Don.

  “But he is very much ze true gentleman,” responded the French girl. “Most old men sink zey can pinch my bottom and get away with it because they are old. This patient has treated me with nothing but courtesy and respect.”

  “Yeah, he’s kinder odd,” agreed the SS man. “‘Course, I guess you get that way at his age. Christ on a raft, you been through everything he done been through, I reckon you got a right to get a little funny in the head!”

  “Weird in what way?” asked Redmond.

  “Well now, you look at this house,” said the officer, gesturing around him. “Seventy some-odd rooms, but we use about a dozen of them. The rest of them are closed up with sheets over the furniture. The Old Man himself lives upstairs in only three rooms that used to be servants’ quarters, one bedroom and a living room and a small kitchen, with a toilet and shower down the hall. We got a cordon bleu chef here, just for him, but he insists on trying to cook his own food. Major Ferguson, the OIC here, had to get permission from the Home Office to disconnect his stove in his rooms. He might start a fire. Now he sneaks into the main kitchen at night and we’ll find him boiling a can of beans. He says living like that makes him feel at home. Really weird. They say he was from one of the richest families in North Carolina, left there and joined the American army at seventeen and he’s been living dirt poor ever since. They say he laughed when the Feds put him in his first prison cell at Florence. Said it was twice as big as his room in Earl’s Court back in London, back in the ‘80s when he was on the run from the Greensboro grand jury. He seems to have issues with animals. Keeps trying to kill all the ducks in the pond out back, sets’ traps for ‘em, tries to sneak up on ‘em and beat them to death. He has this big aquarium full of fish, and he’ll sit watching them for hours. He has two cats, and the fish drive ‘em crazy, and he thinks that’s funny as hell. He reads a lot, nothing since 1914, a lot of

  Dickens and whatnot. Like he’s trying to crawl back inside the past, when here he done made the future for all of us. I ast him about it once, and he told me he’s done what he come here to do, he ain’t interested in this world any more, and the only reward he wants is to live in the nineteenth century for the rest of his life. Says his main goal in the afterlife is to get a blowjob from Emily Brontë, wants her to wuther his heights. Not Charlotte, because she was an ugly bossy little bitch and Jane Eyre was soppy subjective hackwork, whatever the hell that means. I wouldn’t know. I’m still tryin’ to finish Moby Dick I started in seventh grade.”

  “He really enjoys it when we bring children,” said the French Canadian girl. “Ze staff’s kids, or from ze local Lebensborn. He is happiest when he is playing with zem, especially very young ones, toddlers. He helps zem build with blocks and race zeir toy cars. I made a joke with him once, I ask him if he was in his second childhood. He said ‘No, my first.’”

  “He really loves the kids but he sure hates them ducks!”

  commented the SS man.

  “Colonel, he will most certainly try to beg tobacco from you,” said the young nurse anxiously. “Ze doctors all agree, he mustn’t have it! He is still quite active for a man of his incredible age, but his body is as fragile as glass. Even something like a temporary carbon monoxide intake from smoking could kill him!”

  “How is his mind these days?” asked Redmond. “I keep hearing that he’s senile.”

  “He goes in and out,” replied the SS man. “Not so much senility, as it is he just gets crotchety and foul-mouthed and very weird.”

  “With adults, never with ze children,” said the girl. “He wants to take long walks in ze woods alone, which we can’t allow because he might get lost or hurt, and so he tries to sneak away. We wanted to put an ankle bracelet on him so we can find him if he wanders off, but ze State President said it would be too much ze indignity, since he is such a great man.”

  “We had to take his guns away, as horrible and disrespectful as that sounds in view of what he did so that we’d have the right to keep and bear arms, because he was a danger to himself and others,” said the male officer. “He kept getting drunk and shooting out his

  window at anything that moved, ducks on the lake or squirrels in the trees or birds. Or just shootin’ out other windows, laffin’ and cacklin’ like a loon.”

  “Where on earth does he get drink?” asked Nel, astonished. “I’m damned if I know!” snapped the SS lieutenant in

  exasperation. “We’ve found everything from whole beer kegs to mason jars of moonshine to vintage champagne bottles in his room. He even got hold of a big bottle of two hundred year-old Napoleon brandy once, and he wouldn’t give it to me unless I helped him drink it. I ought’ve just took it away from him, but dammit…he’s the reason there are any white people left in the world. And I got to admit, it was damned fine sippin’ liquor.”

  “I go up and find zem both drunk and singing about shipping zose niggers back,” said the nurse in exasperation.

  “Hit war a old Hatenanny song mah daddy taught me,” said the lieutenant defensively.

  “Duty is a harsh taskmaster sometimes, Lieutenant,”

  commiserated Redmond with a straight face.

  “But how does he get drink?” asked Nel again.

  “I think he has this underground network of supporters who smuggle hooch to him somehow,” said the SS man. “That’s the only way I can figger it.”

  “Well, he’d be an expert at that,” chuckled Redmond. “I recall that many years ago, long before the revolution and even before the Migration, the Old Man was famous within the Movement for being able to survive with just a few very loyal supporters. Sounds to me like he’s retained the knack.”r />
  “Yeah, well, you can laugh about it, Colonel, but you ain’t the one who’s gone have to explain to Corby Morgan how the Old Man done drunk hisself to death on mah watch!” snapped the SS lieutenant.

  “You a Carolina man yourself?” asked Redmond.

  “Uh, yes sir, Wilkes County, up towards the mountains. I’ve been Home about six years now. How’d you know?”

  “I recognized the accent. How is it back in the old country these days?”

  “Not good. War a lot of white people there once, but not no more. Nothing left ‘cept real old folks who don’t speak Spanglish. All

  Mexicans and Filipinos and gooks and Somalis now. My family, we was among the last to leave for the Homeland. That was one reason they chose me for this detail. The Old Man was from Carolina originally and maybe they figured…you say you from back home, sir?” asked the young officer.

  “I was really young when we Came Home, but yes. A place called Chapel Hill. Don’t recall much, but I remember my uncle Matt had the same speech. Way before your time.”

  “Matt Redmond?” gasped the officer. “Yeah.”

  “He was a great man, sir, Carolina’s noblest and bravest son!”

  said the officer, in awe. “It is my honor to meet you.”

  “Matt Redmond was a great man, yes. I’m Don Redmond, and

  I’m not. How was your trek Home, LT?”

  “Uh, kinder rough,” said the young man with an embarrassed smile. “Me and my brother and my sister Jenny and her man worked our way west, with whatever fake papers we could get, then when we hit the DMZ in Montana we went into the woods. We were all fairly experienced, did a lot of hunting back home, and we were almost able to make it, but I think some damned heat sensor or something tripped us up. We took the gap outside Holter Dam in the Missoula salient.” The young man’s face saddened. “We ran into a Yankee patrol lying in ambush when we were within a few hundred yards of the border, which up thar is some little creek the name of which I never got. They warn’t real Yankees, they was muds of some kind, talking some language or other. We Cullises, we all made it. Jenny’s boyfriend Kevin McNamara, a real Yankee kid from up Boston way, he didn’t. They shot him and tried to drag his body away. Goddamned animals probably wanted to eat him.”