The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “Oh my God,” LuEllen said, goggling at the TV.

  I was already rolling across the bed. I picked up my cell phone and dialed John. He came on, sounding sleepy, and I asked, “Have you seen it?”

  “What?”

  I told him, not using the name Bobby, and he said, softly, “Oh, no. The guy’s working the machine, whoever he is.”

  “Yeah. And I’ll tell you what-I’m coming up empty on the DVDs. There’s not a thing about who might have the laptop. I’ll tell you what else: the big guys don’t know, either.”

  “You got in, uh…”

  “Yeah. And they don’t know.”

  After a long moment of silence, he said, “I’ve been thinking…”

  “You’re gonna retire to Guam.”

  “No, I’m serious. Our friend was crazy about his security. There are only three ways somebody could have gotten to him. One: the asshole knew who our friend was, and where he lived, because our friend knew him and trusted him. Two: the asshole tracked him somehow, by computer. Three: it was purely local and purely random, done for money or something we don’t know about-something that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

  He was using the “our friend” circumlocution because we’d shared an earlier difficulty involving Bobby and had learned about the government’s ability to intercept and sort meaningful phone conversations from billions of words of garbage.

  “That last one’s out,” I said.

  “It is now. That leaves the other two. But who knew our friend better than we did? That leaves the computer. If they tracked him by computer…”

  “I know one guy who knew him better than we did,” I said. “I was looking at some information from the big guys. There’s a memo that says he had a caretaker. The caretaker lives in Jackson. I’ve got his name.”

  More silence, and I heard a woman’s voice-Marvel, John’s wife-in the background saying, “It’s on right now,” and then John said, “I’m looking at the tape. We’ve got to talk to the guy in Jackson. Personally.”

  “Hate to go back there,” I said.

  “No choice-unless you can figure out how the asshole tracked him over the computer.”

  “I can’t figure it out,” I said. “I tried a couple of times, really carefully, and I’m pretty good at it. Our friend called me up and told me to knock it off. I tripped some alarms I never saw. I think he was amused-he seemed amused. I bet everybody on the ring, except you, went looking for him at one time or another.”

  “So either the guy who found him is a lot better than you ring guys are, or it’s somebody who knew him.”

  “That would be it-and I don’t think it’s somebody who’s better than us. That’s not vanity, it’s just that there are a limited number of ways that you can track somebody online, and there’s no way to know whether you’re stepping into a trap unless you step in it. In other words, if somebody was tracking him, even if it’s like… the really big guys… they’d still set off his alarms.”

  “Maybe some technological thing not having to do with computers?”

  “And somehow it falls into the hands of a fruitcake who uses it to cut up government bigshots? John…”

  “I know, I know. Can you get up here?”

  “If we had to,” I said.

  “Come on up, bag out here. You and I can go down to Jackson and talk to this friend.”

  “Ah, man.”

  “No choice.” Then he laughed. “I’m looking at this blackface thing. They are gonna stick this movie so far up the guy’s ass he’s gonna have videotape coming out of his nose.”

  “Hang on.” I turned to LuEllen, who was sitting on the end of the bed, watching the TV, and told her what John had suggested.

  She shrugged. “Always happy to see those guys.”

  I put the phone back to my ear. “We’ll be up,” I said. “Call you on the way.”

  WE packed up in a half hour and I carried the luggage down to the car. A quick check of the e-mail turned up nothing. As LuEllen was shoving the last of her stuff into a bag, she said, “Before you zip up your briefcase, why don’t you try the cards?”

  “Cards won’t help us,” I said.

  “Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”

  “Or you’ll worry more,” I said.

  “Just try them.”

  There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s nudnik. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”

  SO I got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist-I was trained as an engineer-but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck is useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.

  Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, when used as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.

  Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and that the group you were dealing with, the opposition, consisted of six members, five men and a woman. You begin doing tarot spreads and see a number of indications of female influence.

  This does not mean that the deck correctly predicts female influence in the transaction, but suggests that you should sit back and think about the woman on the other side, who might otherwise seem to be just another functionary. Why is she there? What specific influences does she have? Is there some way to approach her that would help with your deal?

  This has nothing to do with the supernatural-it’s simply a human way, and a fairly subtle way, to game a problem.

  LuEllen doesn’t believe that. She believes that I’m tapped into the Other Side. At one time she’d hassle me for a daily reading, until finally she asked me to do a spread on how long she’d live. I did a spread, and came up with ninety-four years.

  “That’s not bad,” she’d said.

  “Yeah, but this card”-I’d tapped the Tower, I believe-“suggests that the last fifty years will be in the high security unit at the Valley State Prison in California.”

  “Kidd,” she’d sputtered, “you, you gotta, what are you talking…”

  “Made you look,” I said. She didn’t bother me so much after that.

  I CARRY a deck with me, in an old wooden box, wrapped in a piece of silk, just like the gypsies tell you to do. Because LuEllen showed signs of slipping into a nudnik state, I did two quick tarot spreads on the motel room telephone table.

  Like most tarot spreads, the results were complicated. What should have been a clear outcome in both spreads, the final resolution card, was, in both cases, self-contradictory.

  “The Hanged Man,” LuEllen said, tapping the card with an index finger. She knows the cards well enough to pick out the major arcana. “The Hanged Man comes up twice, as the final resolution, and you’re saying that you don’t know what it means?”

  “It’s not a very useful outcome for gaming,” I said.

  “You’re not lying to me?” She looked at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to die together in an automobile accident on the way to Jackson?”

  “No.” I pulled the cards together, wrapped them in the silk cloth, and put them back in the box. “The Hanged Man indicates a kind of suspended animation, a suspense between two states-a waiting state. Transition, maybe. Okay, so Bobby’s dead and everything is in transition. Well, duh. We already know that.”

  “It doesn’t even hint at what’s going to happen?”

  “LuEllen, the cards do not predict anything.”
/>   “Yeah.” She crossed her arms, looked at me with exasperation. “You always say that, then it turns out that they always do.”

  “There have been some coincidences, but that’s all they were.”

  “Coincidences, my ass. Let’s go. You can tell me more about this Hanged Man on the way to Longstreet.”

  LONGSTREET is on the Mississippi River northwest of Jackson. There isn’t much there, but there is one critical thing: a bridge. That by itself gives the town a regional importance. Bridges are uncommon on the lower Mississippi. People can go their entire lives never seeing towns that might be only a mile away, across the river, but fifty miles away by road.

  Longstreet was a tough place to get to from Beaumont. The trip took most of the day, even cooking along in the Olds. LuEllen’s a good driver, and she’d rather drive than ride, so she spent most of her time behind the wheel. I plugged in the laptop and continued to dig through the DVDs.

  “The pattern is, he encrypted everything but inconsequential stuff,” I said. “If the same pattern holds with the laptop, then we’re good.”

  “That cheers me up. But even if he does have some stuff, it’d hardly be on me, do you think?” She was paranoid about personal security. She’d led a long life as a thief, including some fairly outrageous episodes, and had never done time, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted.

  “Not unless…”

  “What?”

  “Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”

  “You think?”

  “No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man-I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know… Bobby may have some details on them, too.”

  “Political stuff.”

  “Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think, If there was only some way to make them go away. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”

  “You mean, kill them?”

  “That’s a harsh word, kill.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  WE ALSO had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe… but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider all attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.

  I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.

  I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the human race, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.

  LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.

  “It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”

  “I was not barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman… not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew six months ago that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”

  “That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”

  “You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.

  “I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids…”

  “You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word…”

  Nudnik.

  Chapter Seven

  LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.

  The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi -not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the river. The oldest part of town, closest to the river, is mostly red and yellow brick, with pastel colors popping up in residential areas farther from the river, along the narrow treelined tar streets.

  “Maybe I’ll move here someday,” LuEllen said as we came over the last hill above the town.

  “And every single person would know every single thing you did, every day,” I said.

  “I’d call myself Daisy, and plant poppies in my backyard garden, and then invite the village women to come over and quilt, and drink my special tea,” she said. “When I died, everybody would say I was a witch.”

  “I already say that,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with that Frank, the liquor dealer with the Porsche?”

  She was prim. “No histories; that’s always been the agreement,” she said.

  “That’s not history. I introduced you to the guy.”

  “Try to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”

  WHEN I concentrate on Longstreet, on the picture in my head, I see flop-eared yellow dogs snoozing on a summer sidewalk, pickup trucks and bumper stickers (“when it’s pried from my cold dead fingers”) and the bridge. The bridge is a white-concrete span, the concrete glowing with the colors of the sky and the Mississippi, as the river turns through a sweeping bend to the east. Across the water, you can see the yellow sand beaches along the water, and every night, wild turkeys come out to dance along the sand.

  We came in from the Longstreet side of the river, so we didn’t actually cross the bridge. We dropped down from the high ground, stopped at an E-Z Way convenience store and got a Diet Coke and a box of Popsicles from the strange fat man who worked behind the counter, and threaded our way through town to John’s place, a tan rambler on the black side of town.

  John and Marvel had kids bumping around the house. The kids stood with their mouths open when Mom, laughing, jumped on me and gave me a kiss, and LuEllen gave John a big hug. Black people didn’t kiss and hug white people in Longstreet, not in the kids’ experience, anyway. I found it pleasant enough. Marvel was beautiful, a woman with tilted black eyes and a perfect oval face, a woman who naturally moved like a dancer.

  The kids were shy-they knew us a bit, from earlier visits-but loosened up when I produced the Popsicles. Marvel handed them out and told them to go outside so they wouldn’t drip on the furniture. In the resulting silence, after they went, slamming through the screen door, Marvel said, “You guys are looking great,” and John said, skipping the niceties, “You can stick a fork in Bole. He’s all done.”

  “They fired him?”

  “He’s gonna quit tonight,” John said. He had his hands in his pockets, almost apologetically. “He tried to say that it was all college high spirits, they had a couple of bla
ck guys in whiteface, but the media pack is howling after him, and the only thing you can actually see is that film loop. And we-you and me-probably are the ones that made it impossible for him to defend himself.”

  “How?” LuEllen asked, looking from me to John.

  “That burning cross,” John said. “We got the FBI into Jackson, all right, but then the Administration, the press secretary, made that big deal about how racism is indefensible in the New South and blah-blah-blah… and then the next day this comes along. Bole is toast. He’s gonna talk to the President tonight.”

  “So he did it to himself,” LuEllen said. “He’s the one who did the blackface.”

  “That’s what I say,” said Marvel.

  John, the radical, said, “He was a college kid when he did it and it was a joke. And he doesn’t have anything to do with race. He had to do with missiles. There are a thousand guys we’d be better off without, before him.”

  “So you get who you can,” Marvel said.

  “Fuckin’ commie,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s not right and it’s not fair and we’ve got to start worrying about that.”

  “You’re getting old and conservative,” Marvel said. “Your hair is gonna turn white and woolly and you’ll go on one of those religious shows and start talking about Jesus.”

  “Not fair,” John said. He did sound a little like a preacher; and he had a point.

  WHILE LuEllen and Marvel went off and caught up with each other, I showed John the FBI files on Thomas Baird, Bobby’s caretaker. John read them carefully, then made calls to two different people in Jackson. One of them knew Baird-knew who he was, anyway-but didn’t know anything of substance. He volunteered to ask around, but John declined the offer.