The Empress File Page 2

  " Beale Street," I suggested.

  "Last time I was in Memphis " – she rolled her eyes up and thought about it – "must have been ten or eleven years ago."

  "A mere child."

  She ignored me. "I went over to Beale Street, you know, because of the blues. I'd been listening to a Memphis Slim tape; it had this great piece called 'He Flew the Coop.'. I don't know. Anyway, I went over to Beale, and the whole street was boarded up for urban renewal. I found a big goddamned statue of? Who? Guess."

  "W. C. Handy?"

  "Nope. Elvis. Right there at the top of Beale. They had a bust of Handy stuck away in a little park. Those Memphis folks got style." She popped the last bite of muffin into her mouth, licked her fingers, split another muffin in half, and popped it into the toaster.

  "I don't know the place very well. Seems kind of trashy, in a likable way. The food's good," I said.

  I pass through Memphis twice a year, eat a pile of ribs, and move on. From St. Paul to St. Louis is a brutal day's drive. From there you can make it to New Orleans in another day if you don't fool around in Memphis.

  When the muffins popped up, Chaminade spread a gob of butter on them, not looking at me. "When you get back."

  "Yeah?" But I knew what was coming. I'd been brooding about it for a couple of weeks.

  "I'll be out of here." She said it in such a conversational way that we might have been talking about grocery shopping or new wallpaper.

  "We were getting along," I said tentatively.

  "We were. Wonderfully. Up to a point. Then it stopped. The problem is, I'm something between number four and six on your list of priorities. The way I see it, there's not much prospect of moving up."

  "If you could wait until I get back."

  "You could go to Memphis some other time."

  "I've got to go today."

  She shrugged. "See?"

  "Obligations. A friend," I said defensively.

  "I'm a friend, too," she said.

  "You don't need help."

  "See?"

  Chaminade looked down the room at the cat, who was daintily picking his way across a radiator to a window. He saw us watching and posed, as cats do, one front foot frozen in midair. Sunlight rippled across his orange coat; there was a potted geranium sitting on a board at the end of the radiator, and the orange fur against the green leaves, all framed by the window, made a nice composition. Beyond the cat, through the window out on the river, a towboat pushed a rust red barge full of coal upstream toward the power plant. Pigeons wheeled overhead, little impressionist smudges against the faultless blue sky. It was quiet and beautiful.

  "I'll miss the cat," she said sadly. "And the river."

  I carry a small wooden box from Poland in my overnight bag. On the flight between St. Paul and Memphis, I got it out. Inside, wrapped in a square of rough silk, were seventy-eight cards, the Waite-Rider tarot deck. I did a couple of spreads. The Empress dominated both of them.

  There's nothing supernatural about the tarot. Not the way I use it, as a gaming system. Formal game systems, the kind developed by the military, were intended to force planners out of habitual modes of thinking and to test new theories. The tarot is less structured than the formal systems, but it still forces you outside your preconceptions.

  So I had the Empress dominating two separate spreads. In my interpretive system the Empress represents women, new enterprises, new creations, new movements. There's an overtone of politics and a suggestion of sex. That's roughly parallel to the "magic" interpretation, but I don't believe in that superstitious shit.

  I sat back and thought about it as the river unwound two thousand feet below. The Empress.

  Chaminade? Or someone I hadn't yet met?

  Memphis from the air looks like any other city from the air, except greener. Just before we landed, the pilot said the ground temperature was ninety-three and the humidity was 87 percent. A Turkish bath.

  When I came through the gate carrying an overnight bag and a portable computer, a tall, balding black guy, forty or so, was leaning on the railing that separated the passenger and waiting areas. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, thin face, and high cheekbones, he might have looked like Gandhi. He didn't. He brought to mind a mercenary who had been blinded by a white phosphorus grenade in Biafra, a long time ago and far, far away. This guy wasn't blind, though. He was looking the passengers over, one by one, and finally picked on me.

  "You Kidd?" he asked. His voice was tough, abrupt.

  "Yeah. Who are you?" He was already walking away, and I trailed behind with my bags.

  "John," he said over his shoulder. "You got a suitcase? Besides that stuff?"

  "No. John what?"

  He thought it over, but not very hard. "Smith."

  If he didn't want to talk, I wasn't going to worry about it. He led the way to a two-year-old Chevrolet, one of the bigger models in a nondescript green. We were halfway downtown, sitting at a red light, before Smith said another word.

  "I'm not sure we need you." He was staring straight out over the steering wheel.

  "I don't know if I want to join up," I said.

  "Bobby says you're some kind of complicated computer crook." He still wouldn't face me. "You don't look like a computer crook. You look like a boxer."

  "I'm a painter," I said. "I've been hit in the nose a couple of times. The docs never got it quite right."

  Now he turned, vertical lines crinkling the space between his eyebrows. "A painter? That's not what Bobby said."

  "I do computer work to make a living. That's the only way Bobby knows me."

  "Huh." The light changed, and we were rolling again. "Can't make a living at painting?"

  "Not yet. Maybe in five years."

  "You paint ducks?"

  "No. I don't paint ducks, barns, sailboats, lighthouses, pheasants, rusty farm machinery, sunsets, jumping fish, birch trees, or any kind of hunting dogs. And I don't put a little pink glow of the setting sun between groups of warm nineteenth-century farmhouses with hay sticking out of the lofts of the barns in back."

  "Eakins painted hunters. Homer painted fish."

  "Damn well, too."

  "So who do you like? Artists?"

  "Rembrandt. Ingres. Degas. Egon Schiele. Like that. Guys who could draw. People who like color. Gauguin. Living guys, maybe Jim Dine. Wolf Kahn. A couple of personal friends. Why?"

  "I do some. art." He said it reluctantly, almost as a confession.

  "Painting?"

  "No, no." He slowed for a moment, letting a woman in an old canary yellow Ford Pinto squeeze in front of us. Traffic in Memphis is usually tangled, especially when you get close to the water. The heat didn't help, and the people who weren't sealed in air-conditioned cars were driving with an air of desperation. "I make things. Out of wood and glass and rocks and clay, from down along the river."

  "Sell it?"

  "Shit," he said in disgust.

  "I'd like to see it."

  He looked over at me for a moment. "Maybe."

  We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later we were on a narrow two-lane highway lined with recapped tire joints and motels with signs that said TRUCKERS WELCOME. Memphis was disappearing in the rearview mirror.

  "Where're we going?" I asked.

  "Downstream," he said. We were running along the river in the gathering evening twilight. "It'll take a while. Town of Longstreet."

  "What's in Longstreet?"

  He didn't answer. Instead, he braked and turned into a roadside convenience store. When we'd stopped, he said, "I want to get Cokes and ice. I've got a cooler in the trunk."

  "Get a six-pack of beer, too," I said. I took a five-dollar bill out of my pocket, passed it to him, and asked again, "What's in Longstreet?"

  "A problem. Maybe some trouble. A lot of hate."

  "A garden spot," I said.

  "It's in the fuckin' Delta," he said, as if that explained everything. "There could be some money in it."

  "That sounds interesting," I said.

  "Yeah. Bobby thought it might."

  While he was in the store, I considered the possibility that Bobby had dipped into my IRS files. I hadn't decided one way or the other when John returned. He stashed the cooler on the backseat, and we each popped a can of Coke. It was a small piece of camaraderie and seemed to loosen him up. He started answering questions.

  "Where's Bobby?" I asked, as John barely beat a tractor-trailer onto the highway. "In Longstreet?"

  "I don't know. I never met him," John said, sounding a little puzzled. "I thought you'd know."

  "No. I've never met him face-to-face."

  "Huh. I wonder if anybody's ever met him face-to-face."

  "Somebody must have. He's got to eat. You're a computer jock?"

  "No. I work for a legal services company, investigations. The company's got a computer system, with electronic mail. One day I got a piece of mail from Bobby. About a case I was working on – he'd read about it in the papers, developed some information from data bases. He gave me a number to call on the computer gizmo-"

  "Modem."

  "Yeah. I called, and we've been going back and forth ever since. Five years. I even got my own computer so I could talk to him. privately. He can get anything. Crime reports, credit records, secret research you'd never see. I don't know where he gets it, but it's always right."

  "Data bases," I said. "He's a genius with them. But that still doesn't tell me about Longstreet."

  There'd been a kid named Darrell Clark, John said, fourteen and computer smart. A friend of Bobby's. Knew his math. Knew his logic. At least, that's what Bobby said. Bobby sent him a book called A Primer for the C Language along with a pirated copy of a C compiler. Darrell came back three days later with a sophisticated Mac II program.
Sent him Assembly Language for the Mac II. Talked to him in a month and got back an assembler program of breathtaking complexity.

  "The kid was smarter than Bobby. That's what Bobby says."

  "You keep saying was," I said. "What happened to him?"

  "Longstreet cops killed him." John tipped his head for a mouthful of Coke. "They say Darrell came at one of them with a knife and the other one had to shoot. Everybody knows it's bullshit. What really happened was, they thought Darrell was a purse snatcher and they shot him by mistake. In the back. With a machine gun."

  "Jesus. A mistake?"

  "They had this new toy, this machine gun. The cop had to try it out. Blew the kid all over the railroad tracks."

  "So what happened to the cop?"

  "Nothing. That's why we're going down there," John said. He glanced over at me. "Darrell Clark won't get justice. His family won't. The town is sewn up tight by an old-time political machine. The cops are near the center of it, and they won't let their man get taken down."

  We lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be waiting for a comment, but I had none to offer. The problem with dead people is simple enough. They're dead. There's no point in getting revenge for a dead man because the dead man won't know and can't care.

  John was waiting, though, so I eventually gave him a question. "What do you want me to do?"

  He was driving easily, one-handed. "We needed somebody who knows about politics, about information, and about security. Bobby says you've done a lot of computer work for politicians, that you're good at planning, and you know about security."

  "So you want me to figure out how to get these cops? Why don't you find an NAACP lawyer, get the kid exhumed, and file a federal suit?"

  "Because we don't want the cops," John said. "Fuck the cops."

  "What do you want?"

  "We want the machine. In fact, we want the town," he said, his voice gone low and tight. "That's what we want you to do, Kidd. We want you to take down the whole fuckin' town."

  CHAPTER 2

  We were driving down the river in the long twilight of the summer solstice, a pale witches' moon hung in front of us. Every few minutes we'd go through a raft of river air, cool, damp, smelling of mud and dead carp and decaying vegetation. I watched the moon ghosting through the evening clouds as John laid it out, simply and clearly. They wanted me to destroy the town's political machine, any way I could do it, and leave it in the hands of their friends. Then I asked him another hard question, and he answered that one, too.

  When he stopped talking, I cranked back the car seat and closed my eyes, half in contemplation, half in dream.

  A long time ago I'd been an idealist of sorts. Somewhere along the line-Vietnam is the conventional answer, but I'm not even sure that's right anymore – the idealism scraped off. After I'd asked him the first hard question, "What do you want me to do?," I'd asked the second: "Why should I do it?" Why should I take any risks for a dead kid I never knew?

  "Revenge," John said. He hadn't hesitated. He and Bobby had seen the questions coming and had rehearsed the answers. "Bobby said he was one of you – computer freaks."

  "That's not enough," I said. "Good people die all the time."

  "Friendship," said John, checking the second item on a mental list. "Bobby's your friend, and he needs your help. He'll do something whether you're there or not. He really doesn't know how. He could fuck himself up."

  I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I can't put my ass on the line for something as thin as that. Bobby's a friend, but only on the wires. If he wanted me to do some computer code, illegal code, that'd be one thing-"

  "Money," John interrupted. "Lots of it. The town is papered with corruption cash. You could probably figure out a way to grab some of it. And since nobody can talk about where they got it. there'd be no comebacks."

  "Money," I said, looking out the window, maybe a little bitter. "Everybody's reason."

  "To tell you the truth, it bothers me to think you'd do it just for money," he said. "Mercenaries tend to be. unreliable." He sounded as if he knew.

  "I wouldn't do it just to have money, but in this country, today, money is freedom. Anybody who tells you different is bullshitting you," I said, looking over at him. "Freedom's worth chasing."

  He nodded. "So you'll do it?"

  "Lots of money?"

  "Could be," he said.

  "I'll talk about it," I said.

  The uneasy half dream was shattered when we bounced across a set of railroad tracks. I opened my eyes on a dark town of unpainted shacks, huddled in a grove of dense, overbearing pin oaks. Here and there the ghostly moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves, etching web forms on the shacks, like the work of an enormous spider. We were through the place in less than a minute. If I hadn't later gone through it in daylight – REZIN, POP. 240 – I might have remembered the town as a hallucination, a dreamed remembrance of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

  "Nightmare place, probably red-eyed incestuous children with crosses carved on their foreheads, creeping through the cotton with choppin' knives," John said, echoing my thoughts. He'd seen me come awake.

  "Yeah." I looked back at the town, a dark hole with a ribbon of moonlighted concrete running into it. Then we were around a curve, and it was gone, just another piece of the Delta. I turned to the front and ran my tongue over my teeth. Moss had sprouted during the nap. When I couldn't dislodge it with my tongue, I leaned over the seat for a beer. I'd kill it with alcohol.

  "You want one?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Another Coke."

  I popped the top off a Coke and a beer, handed him the Coke, and said, "So tell me about Longstreet."

  Twenty thousand people lived in the town, he said. Nine thousand were white; eleven thousand were black. The city council districts had been drawn to put three whites and one black on the council.

  "They fixed the districts so there'd be five thousand people in each one – one man, one vote, just like it's laid down by the law," John said. "One district covers the heart of the black side of town, five thousand people. Hardly a white among them. That district will always elect a black councilman. But when you take out those five thousand black votes, in one bloc, the whites are a majority in all the rest of the districts. There's about two thousand whites in each, and about fifteen hundred blacks."

  "That's common enough," I said.

  "It's still a son of a bitch," John said.

  "These friends in Longstreet. are they reliable?"

  "I don't know," John said carefully. "I've got solid recommendations, but I've never met them myself. Our main contact is a woman, name of Marvel. She's a Marxist, I hear. That means she's probably got her own agenda."

  "I thought Marxism was out of style," I said.

  John threw back his head and roared. "In the fuckin' Delta? Listen, even when Marxism was in style, you could get lynched for laughing at Groucho and Zeppo, much less believing in Karl."

  We rolled into Longstreet after midnight, past a Holiday Inn, a Taco Bell, and a Dairy Queen, a row of white grain elevators, a few dark stores, and a lot of empty streets.

  The Mississippi had been a presence all through the trip. We could sense it and sometimes smell it, but with the levee between the highway and the water, we couldn't see it. Longstreet, though, was built on higher ground. As we came to the center of town, to the first traffic light, we climbed above the levee, and the river opened out below. A ramshackle marina, with a few bare white bulbs flickering on an overhead grid, sat at the bottom of the river-bank. A couple of runabouts, a dozen olive drab jon boats, and an aging houseboat swung off the T-shaped pier.

  "You know where we're going?" I asked.

  "I've got directions," he said, turning at the light. We crossed the business district, passed a well-lit town square with an equestrian statue at its center, and bumped across another set of railroad tracks. On the other side was a convenience store that looked like a collision between a chicken coop and a billboard. A hand-painted sign on the side of the store, red block letters on white, said E-Z WAY. Three tall light poles, the kind used to illuminate tennis courts and Little League baseball fields, lit up the parking lot. Every bug between Helena and Greenville swarmed around them.

  "That's where the kid bought the ice cream before he got shot," John said. Through the open doors we could see a fat white man sitting on a dinette chair. He was mopping his face with a rag. John took a left around the E-Z Way and drove another six blocks on a potholed road past a clapboard Baptist church. Then he slowed and peered out the windshield toward the passenger side.