Delphinia swung her legs out of the bed. 'What are you talking about, Nell? Where's my baby? Answer me, damn you! Where's my little Alice?' A little unsteadily, for she was not used to walking, Delphinia tottered across the room and caught hold of the governess's shoulders and began shaking her. 'What have you done with my baby?' she screamed into Miss Godwin's face. 'Kidnapper! Child molester! I knew it would end this way, the minute I laid eyes on your black face.' She lifted a hand to slap the Negress, but the effort of rising from her bed had so over-taxed Delphinia's weakened frame, that she collapsed to the floor before she could carry out her intention.
Roderick helped his wife back to her sickbed, after which all three of them seemed sorflewhat calmer.
'What shall we do?' Roderick wanted to know.
'They warned me that you weren't to go to the police, Mr. Raleigh. They said they'd find out if you did. But I don't know what else can be done.'
'They? Who are they? You only mentioned a Negro chauffeur.'
'There was another man that drove the car that Alice went off in. I couldn't get much of a look at him.'
'Oh, my poor darling baby!' Delphinia crooned mindlessly. 'Oh my little Alice! They've taken her away; she'll be raped, she'll be murdered! The niggers have stolen my baby and they're going to enslave her innocent white body and lock her up in a bordello ...'
'Delphinia, please shut up,' Roderick said sternly. 'These fantasies of yours are embarrassing.' His wife's mounting hysteria seemed to act as a dampener to his own emotions. 'If Alice is kidnapped, we shall have to ransom her. It is as simple as that. I'll see Jason tonight. I presume they gave you instructions on how we are to get the money to them?'
Miss Godwin lit a cigarette to steady her hand. 'Yes, Mr. Raleigh, they did. And that was why I said it would probably be necessary to bring in the police. You see, the ransom they're asking is one million dollars.'
'A million dollars?' Jason's mouth fell open, and a flush overspread his hollow cheeks. 'Why, it's absurd!'
'My sentiments entirely, Uncle Jason. Of course, it's evident that they have the trust fund in mind. It was never entirely a secret that Alice had been liberally-provided for. When we contested the will, the story must have been in every newspaper from Baltimore to Atlanta.' Roderick was quite calm now. He sat with his hands resting loosely on his knees, staring fixedly at the four golden balls whose spinning powered the glass-encased clock on Jason's desk. It was ten-thirty. Only the way Roderick's jaws were clamped tight-shut betrayed the tension he was under.
'It can't be done, Roderick. It would be literally impossible to have that much money in cash by Monday evening. Alice's money is in bonds and real estate. It would take months to liquidate such a sum.'
'We have to do something.'
'Yes, yes, of course. A hundred thousand? Mightn't they content themselves with a hundred thousand?'
Roderick's hands tightened about his knees. His voice grew shrill. 'Don't ask me, for heaven's sake, Jason! How should I know what will content them? Maybe they'll be satisfied with ten thousand a year, like Delphinia and I have been. Or maybe they won't stop once they've got the million they ask for. Maybe they'll murder Alice no matter what we do. Maybe they already have. But, God damn it, Jason, I wish you wouldn't talk about this as though it were a new investment for her portfolio. Her life—and maybe her sanity—are in your hands.'
The old man lowered his gaze, as though Roderick had
touched a sore point. 'Yes, I know, but we must try to keep our wits about us. I'm Alice's lawyer, as well as her uncle, and I must regard things in both lights. As her lawyer, I may say that I have been dealing with criminals of all sizes ever since I was called to the bar, and it has been my experience that the bigger a criminal one has to deal with the less of a fool he will be. To judge only by the asking price, these are the biggest kind of criminals. Now, wouldn't it be foolish of them to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs? I'm sure the only reason for their haste is that if the whole business is concluded in less than three days, it will not necessarily be considered a Federal crime, whereas after three days it automatically becomes a matter for the F.B.I. That would account for the Monday night deadline. No, believe me, the best policy is to string them along at least one more day. After that...' Jason trailed off weakly.
Roderick's gaze was directed squarely at his brother-in-law now, and when he spoke, he seemed to be choking on his own sarcasm. 'After that? Yes, Jason, after that? What would you say the odds are she'll still be alive then? Better than fifty-fifty? How much of a gamble should we take on it? Two-to-one, in our favour? How much, Jason?'
'I'm sorry, Roderick.'
'And I'm sorry—to have troubled you. I thought you'd know better than me what to do, but I see I was mistaken.' He reached for the telephone on Jason's desk.
Jason put his hand over Roderick's preventing him lifting the receiver. 'What are you doing? Who are you calling?'
'The police, as I should have done an hour ago.'
'Shouldn't we talk about that first? I mean—is it wise, Roderick—considering? If they find out...'
'How are they to find out if only the two of us know I've called?'
'Perhaps they're watching your house. I don't know, Roderick. But we must be careful. We must consider the risk to Alice.'
'A moment ago you were cavalier enough about that?
He pulled the receiver away from Jason and dialled O. 'I want the police,' he told the operator. This is an emergency.'
'You're right, of course,' Jason mumbled. 'Of course you're right.'
Roderick described the situation succintly, twice, first to the. desk sergeant, then to his superior. After hanging up, he retrieved his hat and walking stick from the chair by the door. 'Good-bye, Uncle Jason. I must return home. The police will be there shortly.' 'If I can be of any help...
'In that case, I'm sure, the police will let you know.' He was half out the front door when Jason called out his name. 'Yes?' he asked briskly. 'Yes, what is it, Jason?'
'Nothing,' the old man replied in muffled tones. He had wanted to tell Roderick to be brave, to keep his chin up, but after all, it was advice he could more suitably have offered himself.
I'm too old, he thought, for this kind of thing.
A million dollars! Most people had no idea what an immense sum of money a million dollars was. Only if one had worked with large sums for as long as Jason Duquesne had did one have even an inkling of its magnitude. A million dollars ...
He paced the carpet in front of his desk, following a well-worn triangular path. At eleven-thirty he called the house on Gwynn River Falls Drive, but the line was busy. He took down a dusty law volume and sat at his desk to read. There had been a case some years before ... if he could but remember...
His fingers turned the pages over quietly. Sometimes he would pause a moment to scan a paragraph, but he did not find what he sought. Finally, with a sigh, he closed the book. While one hand pulled off his reading glasses, the other massaged the inner corners of his weary eyes, unconsciously rubbing dust into them.
Chapter 7
Nigger go home read the banner flapping above the head of the Exalted Cyclops, and it seemed indeed to be the entire burden of his speech.
'Because I'm telling yaw that while the whiteman was building the cathedrals of Europe and discovering America and I don't know what-all, them lazy nigras was living in grass huts and eating each other, yessir, that's what the anthro-pol-igists say. And now they're asking for Civil Rights! Civil Rights! Why, I bet they don't even know the difference between civil rights and civil lefts!'
The Exalted Cyclops paused for the laughter that was customary at this point, but there was none forthcoming. He scowled, and in the harsh glow of the automobile headlights his hawkish face resembled more than ever the rude handicraft of some benighted aborigine, hacked from a stump of wood, the abhorred and potent image to which the tribe would address its prayers.
For a moment it was so still that Owen
Gann, at the edge of the crowd of Klansmen, could hear the hum of the insects and the wind rustling the young tobacco leaves out there in the blessed darkness. Darkness and quiet, an end to this drear, too-often-declaimed speech—that was all that Owen or any of them wanted now. And yet there was a part of him, he knew, that wanted to stay here with the others and listen—and not just for the sake of duty, but because that part of Owen Gann agreed with the Exalted Cyclops.
'We have just begun, brothers, we have just begun to show them the whip—the way you got to show the whip to a mean cur, and believe you me when he sees that we mean business we shall overcome.' The Exalted Cyclops laughed—a short, predatory shree, which, like the cry of a hawk swooping down upon its prey, was modelled upon the death-scream of his intended victims. This time his audience joined in his laughter.
They were, however, wearing. The declared purpose of the meeting had been to congratulate them on their performance of the afternoon, when they had driven up and down the streets of Norfolk in partial regalia—minus only their hoodwinks, or hoods with eyeholes. But that could have been accomplished in five minutes or less, and the Exalted Cyclops had been going on the better part of an hour. He was, doubtless, electioneering.
'Now you all know who I am, and the office I'm running for, but just now I want you to think of me, not as Farron Stroud, then next sheriff of this great county, but as your Exalted Cyclops—and believe me when I say we've got our work cut out for us. We've got the whole damn Communist conspiracy to fight, because that's who's making the nigras rear up on their hindlegs and talk about Civil Rights. You don't think they'd git these notions on their own, no sir!—it's the Yankee agitators coming down here and stirring 'em to a fine froth. They say, "Hey boy, how'd you like to be just the same as white folks? How'd you like to git you some o' them white women, boy?" And let me tell you this—them black devils don't belong in this Land of the Free any more than do those Yankee Communists. The nigras was chained up and brung here and I say what's the matter with chainin' him up again and taking him back to Africa?'
The audience cheered quietly.
That day is a-comin' but we got to do certain things first. We need iron-clad lawmen, who ain't afraid to stand up for the principles this nation was founded on—One Nation Under God, yes-sir!—with white supremacy and justice for all! Now, as you probably know, I'm running for the office of sheriff. I'm not gonna abuse the privilege of my position as Exalted Cyclops to make a campaign speech, no, but I'll tell you this: there'll be no more arrests of white citizens who do their God-given duty when and if I'm elected. So if you want law and order and your rights as a white citizen protected, you'll vote for Farron Stroud. But if you want a lily-livered, niggerlovin', mammyjammin' sheriff you'll vote for my opponent. And that's about all I've got to say to you fellas tonight.'
The Exalted Cyclops stepped down from the platform, and now the Klansmen—some ninety-four strong—joined hands and repeated the Oath of Allegiance, bringing the Klonclave to an end. Every man gave the password to the inner guard, the Klarogo, and then to the outer guard, the Klaxton. They went to their cars, which had been parked in a ring so that their headlights could be used to illuminate the meeting.
Passing by a ten-year-old, copper-coloured Buick, Owen heard the closely related sounds of a car stalling and a man cursing.
'Need a shove?' Owen inquired.
That you, Owen Gann? That would be right friendly.'
Owen identified the nasal mountain voice as Peter Boggs's, a Kladd, or password boss, a recent recruit to the Den. Boggs was the only member of the Den, in fact, over whom Owen could claim seniority.
'I guess any battery could get wore down, what with ole Farron's speechifying,' Owen observed.
'Well, this one shouldn't. I haven't had it but twelve hours. Thought it was a real bargain at the time—seventy-five dollars, only. No fool like an old fool, is there?'
'Not unless he's a young one like me,' Owen said agreeably. He climbed the beer delivery truck he'd driven to the meeting and started it up. Coming up behind Boggs's Buick, he noticed that the old man had not yet bothered to get licence plates. For driving out in these country roads such things wouldn't so much matter. He pushed Boggs as far as the turnoff to County Road B, where he turned right, away from Norfolk instead of towards it.
Owen shook his head sadly. There was something about an old heap like that, the discrepancy between the wish and the fact, that made Owen Gann feel guilty, a traitor to his own people.
For that they were his people he could no longer doubt. He had grown up among them, worked at the same unrewarding jobs, known the same youthful, foolish hopes and the growing desperation of an adolescence leading nowhere, felt the acid of poverty nibbling at his character. Oh, he was one of them, there was no denying it.
That he was now an agent of the F.B.I, seemed, at times, quite beside the point.
And so the question arose whether he must resign. Could he conscientiously inform on these men, whose cause he was not entirely sure was not his own? His sympathy did run deeper than these vague stirrings of class loyalty; he agreed with them. He didn't, by and large, like niggers; they were all of them potential criminals in Gann's eyes, and their 'non-violent' demonstrations seemed to have proved it. No, he didn't like niggers, but even less did he like the Yankee agitators coming down South and stirring up all the trouble. Owen knew for a fact that the Communists were mixed up in the Civil Rights protests, and it upset him that he couldn't be set to investigating them. He just didn't understand why the niggers weren't content to leave well enough alone; he would have been. And yet...
And yet he had worked for the Bureau faithfully for four years, ever since escaping from law school with his G.I. Bill-financed degree. To leave the Bureau now would be like losing a part of his own identity, perhaps the better part. He liked the work and did it well. He had received one commendation from the Chief for his bravery in capturing a convict escaped from Leavenworth. Most of all, there was a future there for Owen Gann—and almost nowhere else. A lawyer with the double liability of being honest and having no connections might as well resign himself to driving a beer delivery truck for the rest of his days; it pays better.
He would have liked to put off the decision (as he had twice before put off decisions about marrying, with the result that he was still single), but events seemed bent on not allowing him this easy way out. A massive Civil Rights demonstration was scheduled in Norfolk for the Fourth of July. Norfolk would seem the least likely city for a large protest: it was a large Navy base, and consequently the schools had been integrated in the early 'fifties, thanks to pressure from the base Command. The coloured population of Norfolk was allowed to vote in all elections, and they could go into any restaurant they wanted to and even expect good service in most of them. So what was all the fuss about?
Whatever it was, there promised to be a lot of fireworks that Fourth of July, because the Ku Klux Klan, not quite accidentally, was scheduling its own Norfolk rally that same day. Every Klansman in the Realm of Virginia was expected to attend what the newspapers had announced as 'a day of nonviolent resistance and reprisals'. The least imaginative reader could read between those lines, but as yet Owen's knowledge of what was in fact intended in the way of 'non-violent reprisals' had not advanced beyond the stage of suspicion. Tomorrow, Tuesday, at half past four in the afternoon, he had been asked to attend a smaller meeting at the Norfolk Klavern, at which the Grand Dragon of the Realm was to be present. Then, possibly, Owen would be in a position to ...
To be a Judas? Wasn't that it?
Next morning Owen Gann spent an unusually long time making the beer delivery to the bar and grill that occupied the ground floor of a three-story brick building with the rather grandiloquent title of Camelot Mansions. There, in a minimal office above the bar and grill, he handed his typed report to Agent Madding. As long as Owen remained on the Klan assignment he did not report to the official field office down town.
Madding was a s
light, balding man with a professional attitude, which Owen envied him, of blithe anonymity. He seemed to approach his work as others would approach a crossword-puzzle—without any intention of intruding his own personality or concerns upon it. Owen admired the man's dispassion, but at times he could not help wondering what it had cost Madding—what fraction of his beliefs, his soul, his balls—to reach this present serenity. Was he as smooth within as without, all the thorny idiosyncrasies pared away so that there was nothing to snag against his duties? And if not, then was he no different from Owen? Wouldn't he perhaps strike Madding as the same sort of well-oiled automaton, rootless, ruthless, blank?
As a matter of fact, though Gann himself would never know it, such was not his superior's opinion. As he scanned the typed report, describing the uneventful week just past, Madding was engaged in his own speculation about Gann. The boy (though Gann was past thirty, he was still, by his style, a boy) wore a haggard, insomniac expression, not unsuitable for the role he played outside the walls of Camelot Mansions, but not at all the open, guileless face that had earned him, in law school and afterwards, the nickname 'Li'l Abner'. He was clothed in standard work clothes with the name of his employer stencilled on the back in a florid scrawl (not the F.B.I., but SPENGLER'S BEER). His arms and legs were too long for his overalls, but this did not make him seem gawky; rather it showed the ordinary dimensions of his uniform to be meagre. His nose was short and turned-up; his eyes, large, blue, and too close together; he could not speak without beginning to smile. Unless one had proof to the contrary, one would have supposed him to be very dumb. He was, like Madding, though in his own way, perfectly adapted to the role of an agent, but he was, in Madding's estimation, close to cracking. Madding didn't know why (motives didn't interest him); he just read the signs and thought it a pity—or, at least, a waste.
'Nothing more than this?' Madding asked, folding up the report.
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