All the Devil's Creatures (28 page)

“It’s a lie. You set her up.” Geoff wondered if Dalia had received cryptic messages from this man, had done his bidding under false pretenses. Had helped him betray his fellows. It had somehow gone awry, so the Prince now tried to play Geoff the same way.

“And Eileen knew the truth so you bastards killed her too.”

The Prince took a long drag on his cigarette. Then, through a cloud of smoke, he said: “My hands are clean, Mr. Waltz—”

“The hell they are.”

“Ms. Bordelon made her grand discovery on her own. How she did it is beyond me. No matter. Once she had the product, as we call it, I saw a chance to expose Operation Moth Wing. So my intentions were noble, just as my intentions in helping you learn the truth are noble, Mr. Waltz. Because, you see, Congressman Duchamp and the people he works for are on track to execute a new holocaust that would dwarf anything Adolph Hitler could have imagined.”

Geoff laughed and turned away and said over his shoulder, “Right. And I’m George Patton.” He walked toward the warehouse exit. “I’m calling a cab.”

“I’m taking about the annihilation of the human race, Mr. Waltz, except for a chosen few—”

“Bullshit. This is about bringing Robert Duchamp to justice and nothing more, and your nut job fantasies aren’t going to help me with that. “

“Don’t be a fool, Waltz. Duchamp may well be dead before you get home tonight. And the people behind the deaths of Dr. Kim and the others—”

Geoff paused with hand on the cheap spherical aluminum doorknob beneath the glowing red exit sign. “Don’t talk to me about Eileen.”

“—and Ms. Bordelon, the people behind it all will be in their dens with their brandy snifters. And whether you believe they’ll be watching the end of the world unfold or merely having a laugh, the fact is they will not pay for their crimes. They are men of the sort who seldom do.”

Geoff turned and took six steps toward the Prince, and the sound of those steps on the concrete floor was like a snare drum in a vast and pregnant hall setting the beat for a new and strange and dissonant symphony.

“Then why don’t you stop them if you know so much, you tailored prick?”

“My position is much too tentative. But Ms. Bordelon found a way in. If you can retrace her steps, you’ll find evidence of the evil—”

“Evil? Give it a rest. Marisol saw the thing in the beaker. It’s what, some kind of underground cloning program? It’s underground science, used to bad effect. Big whoop—you don’t think this shit’s not going on all over the world? So spare me the end of days crap and give me some facts to take Duchamp down, along with whoever he’s working with in this so-called Operation Moth Wing.”

“More than mere cloning, Mr. Waltz. The work of the Group—the men and women behind Moth Wing—spans seventy years, and it is culminating with the creation of a master race, a race destined to arise and replace humanity. Certainly you’re familiar with Josef Mengele?”

“Of course. The Nazi doctor of death. What are you saying—he’s still alive and, what, continuing his work at the Texronco refinery?” Geoff barked a bitter laugh. “Give me a break.”

“No. Mengele was, by all accounts, an arrogant, pompous young fool. I use him merely as an example. He was hardly the most, for lack of a better term,
effective
of the Nazi state’s biological researchers.”

The Prince pulled out an engraved silver cigarette case, making a show of offering an unfiltered cigarette to Geoff before lighting one for himself off the butt smoldering between his elegant fingers.

Despite himself, the history buff in Geoff perked up. “All right Prince, I’ll bite. For now.”

“As with Operation Paperclip’s rocket scientists, your American defense department brought Germany’s top researchers in the biological sciences to the U.S. The research these scientists carried out under the aegis of besting the Soviet Union—research begun in Nazi Germany and carried out for decades in hidden labs throughout the rural United States—was too heinous to ever be made public.”

Geoff stood before the Prince with his hands on his hips and his face thrust forward. He had a headache and he wanted coffee. He thought of T-Jacques, spewing conspiratorial nonsense in a New Orleans bar. But maybe a sliver of hard truth could be found among the delusions.

“Keep talking.”

“Our grandfathers were among the original financiers of the project, beginning in the 1930’s. At first, their goal was to merely make money off Germany’s rapid militarization after the Nazis came to power. Recall that Preston Robert Duchamp I, as senator from Maine, was one of the leaders of the America First Committee, opposed to Roosevelt’s efforts to aid Britain against Germany prior to Pearl Harbor. The Committee had as its backbone heartland reactionaries sympathetic to Hitler. But it’s fair to say Duchamp was driven by profit more than ideology.”

The history lesson continued to draw Geoff in. Walking to a nearby stack of crates and leaned against it with his arms crossed, he said, “Okay.”

“Of course, contact with the Nazi regime was severed during the war. But when hostilities ended, Duchamp Pere and a few others, the predecessors to the current Group, were instrumental in allowing key members of the Nazi bio-military complex to escape the war crimes tribunals.

“And by the way, Duchamp the elder, never shying from an opportunity to profit, ensured that the Defense Department constructed Operation Moth Wing’s research facilities at an industrial site controlled by Duchamp family interests.”

“The old Texronco refinery. The site that’s the subject of my lawsuit. And these people were engaged in genetic engineering—are you saying that explains all the strange animal sightings on those bayous over the decades?”

The Prince laughed. “Oh yes, ‘all the devil’s creatures,’ as one of the lead scientists used to call them. Many of these poor beasts were created on a lark in the early days, just to prove it could be done. Over the years, a few have escaped and thrived in that ecosystem. But simian-rodent hybrids and phosphorescent dragon flies are just a relatively innocent incarnation of the work of these scientists, Mr. Waltz.”

“Nazi scientists, who you say worked for the U.S. government. You’ve got to give me more. Who’s continuing their work?”

The Prince dropped his cigarette to the floor, exhaled a thin stream of smoke, and squinted at Geoff as he stomped it out. “Jimmy Carter discovered what Moth Wing was doing and officially shut down the project thirty years ago. He even extradited a few old men to Israel, men he thought were Nazi war criminals. In fact, they were decoys. The young Duchamp, P. Robert Duchamp III, and his lot have continued the work of Moth Wing in secret, relying on a network of rogue scientists from around the world—South Africans, Argentines, and more recently a contingent of impoverished but brilliant bio-weapons engineers from the former Soviet bloc. Indeed, the Group has taken the project into an apocalyptic realm beyond even Hitler’s final solution.”

“Yeah, okay. The master race and the global holocaust and the world domination, you’ve been over that. Let’s say you’re not a lunatic. For the sake of argument. You still haven’t answered my question. You’re part of this ‘Group,’ as you call it. Why don’t you expose these bastards?”

“Because these men have spent six decades mastering the art of obfuscation and cover-up. We need evidence, Mr. Waltz. And right now, I feel you are in the best position to gather it.”

•

Marisol looked from the angry, frightened face of Kathleen Duchamp to the barrel of the little gun—a housewife’s piece, designed to be spirited away in a handbag, small enough for an elegant wrist to handle the recoil but no less deadly for that at this range.

“Drop what you’ve taken and put your hands up.”

Her aim steady, Kathleen was already moving toward her husband’s desk and the telephone. Marisol seized upon the fear she sensed. She had already placed the congressman’s secret cell phone deep within her pocket. She did not drop the ledger books.

“Do you know what these are, Ms. Duchamp?”

“They’re mine is what they are, and I said drop them.” She had reached the desk. With her eyes on Marisol, her long, manicured fingers felt for the desk phone. “I’m calling the police.”

“These are evidence of your husband’s involvement in at least two murders, not to mention the corruption he was trying to cover up, and maybe the attempted assassination of an East Texas preacher, and I’ve already taken pictures of the pages with my phone and emailed enough of them to my associate to put the congressman away for a damn long time. So you have some options: shoot me or call the cops and go away yourself as an accomplice. Or lower your weapon and talk to me and maybe we can work something out.”

Kathleen’s ruby lips twitched and her aim faltered enough that Marisol knew her bluff had worked. She stepped toward the congressman’s wife and noticed that, but for the woman’s heels, they would be the same height. She was pretty in a merely conventional way but Marisol thought she saw something more interesting in her wide blue eyes. A hidden strength, a long repressed desire. She met that gaze and brought her hand to Kathleen’s porcelain wrist and, as if maneuvering a delicate piece of machinery, moved the weapon’s aim to the floor.

“You don’t want to be mixed up in your husband’s hell any longer, do you Ms. Duchamp?”

T
he long gray Cadillac pulled away from the hospital loading zone and onto Main Street, the Interstate overpass at its back, rolling toward the square. People clumped together and lined the route. They waved and wept and called out (“
Praise be!
”
You the man!
” “
We love you, Rev!
”), like they were watching a parade, or a triumphant march.

Tasha Carter drove. Her uncle sat beside her bandaged and scarred, wearing a thick eye patch of gauze and tape, his cane between his knees. His condition had improved such over the weekend that he managed to resist the entreaties of his doctors that he remain in their sterile hospital for another night. He would convalesce at home.

The Reverend lowered his window and waved back to the crowd, showing them his battered face with pride, as if to demonstrate his willingness to martyr himself for his people.

Tasha circled the square in the one-way rotation to make her way onto the westbound street and over the railroad tracks and into the neighborhood and her uncle’s home and church, into the community named Sunset because it lay on the west side of town, but which many still called colored-town.

A contingent of men of the Nation of Islam still gathered on the courthouse square in their dark suits and bow ties and sunglasses. Standing still as well-trained soldiers, they saluted with raised fists as the Reverend’s Cadillac passed. They had vowed to remain until the until the court handed down convictions. But their mood was calm and patient—the Tatum twins awaited trial. Texas Rangers stood at the ready should the crowd turn unruly.

And as Tasha drove past Steptoe’s Hardware, she saw but gave no thought to a cluster of five white youths standing on the sidewalk before the store’s plate glass window and its display of lawnmowers and decorative garden supplies. They wore black jeans and black hooded sweatshirts. Tasha could not have known that they were college dropouts from Portland who fancied themselves anarchists. They shunned employment except for the occasional temporary gig at a college-town coffee house, though many had family money which they resented but spent. They belonged to a cyber-network of likeminded souls who traveled the country with battered backpacks by Greyhound or old communal vehicles emblazoned with anti-establishmentarian decals. One of the young men had bloodied a police officer’s nose during the WTO protests in Seattle and had his own arm broken during a scuffle with security outside the Republican Nation Convention in New York two summers before. He wore his blond hair in dreadlocks as if in solidarity with an island people opposite from him in every way. That man raised a metal trash can over his head and made to smash it through Steptoe’s window. Perhaps he was frustrated with the calm of this backwater in the wake of what he perceived as a coordinated attack on the town’s black underclass. Or perhaps the sight of old man Steptoe in his store, sitting before his counter with shotgun at bay day after day, enraged him. But before he could bring down the can, an elderly black woman standing nearby placed her hand on his forearm, looked him in the eye, and whispered,
no
. The young man, who came from an upper-middle class Midwestern family, blushed and set the can back on the sidewalk.

•

Tasha had no trouble convincing the judge that the Tatum twins needed a lawyer a piece.

“Your honor, where there is a conflict of interest between two defendants, the court must disqualify counsel who purports to represent both defendants. In this case, there exists not only a potential conflict, but a clearly established conflict in fact.”

The judge said, “Explain please, Ms. Carter.”

Though she had driven her uncle home that morning, Tasha felt well prepared for this hearing; she had spent the past week researching and practicing her argument. The judge sat high on the bench in a small but well-appointed auxiliary courtroom on the ground floor of the courthouse, three floors below Tasha’s little cubby in the district attorney’s office. Flags flanked him. Sunlight streamed from a narrow, vaulted east-facing window. Dust motes danced.

Tasha said, “Wayne and Duane Tatum are identical twins, so their DNA is identical. The DNA of either or both Wayne and Duane was found at the crime scene, implicating at least one of them in the murder and sexual assault of Ms. Bordelon.”

“Objection, your honor.” The Tatums’ lawyer remained slouched in his chair as he spoke. “My clients have not been given an opportunity to review the State’s evidence—”

The judge ruled without Tasha needing to respond. “Counselor, we’re not debating guilt or innocence here. The question before this court is whether, given the nature of the charges against the defendants and their respective pleas, your representation of both defendants raises a potential conflict of interest. To establish that, we need to understand a bit about the State’s case against your clients, wouldn’t you agree?”