The Empress File (3 page)

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.

"It's a green house with a porch and some potted flowers hanging from the eaves," he said, half to himself. We rolled another hundred feet down the street. "There it is."

The house was a concrete-block rambler with an overhanging roof, a small porch, and a picture window. Our headlights picked out a couple of pink metal lawn chairs crouched on the porch. John eased the car into a graveled parking strip. "You wait here. I'll go up and ask," he said.

He climbed out of the car, stretched, walked up to the porch, and knocked. The door opened immediately. John said a few words, nodded, and walked back to the car. I'd cracked the window. "This is it," he said. I climbed out into air that felt as if you could grab a piece, wring it out, and get water. As we walked to the door, John said quietly, "Wait'll you see her."

Marvel Atkins was Hollywood-beautiful, beautiful like you don't see walking about in the streets. Her black eyes were tilted and large as the moon, her face a perfect oval. She was five-five or five-six and moved like a dancer. She was wearing a thin olive-colored blouse of crumply cotton with epaulets, the kind fashion people think the Israeli Army might wear. She stepped back when she saw me, startled, and turned to John.

"Who is he?"

"Bobby's friend," John said. She kept backing up, looking from John to me and back to John.

"He's white," she said.

"You Commies really got it taped," John said wryly.

"I'm a social democrat," Marvel said, momentarily distracted.

"That's what I said," John answered, showing some teeth.

"Maybe we don't need you," she said. She was in her early thirties and wore round gold-rimmed glasses like John's. You hardly saw the glasses because of the eyes.

"You've been sitting here for a month. There's been nothing but talk and whining and bullshit and more bullshit," John said. "If you think it'll ever be more than that, we'll get back in the car and let you handle it. But I think you need us. You need something..."

Their eyes locked as she considered him, and John watched her with the gravity of a Jesuit. After a few seconds of the deadlock a man eased out of a back room into the living room behind Marvel. He was short, thick, and looked as if he could break bricks with his face. He stepped close behind her and muttered something. She nodded.

"We'll talk," she said. "Then we'll see."

We talked until four in the morning. John stated the proposition as baldly as he'd given it to me: We'd wreck the machine and the town administration. If possible, we'd leave it permanently in the hands of Marvel and her friends.

"A pipe dream," Marvel said flatly.

"That's why Kidd is here. He knows about politics, and he knows about wrecking things. He'll do us a plan," John said.

I tried to look modest.

"I'll believe it when I see it." She deliberately looked me up and down again, not impressed, and John grinned. The thick man, whose name was Harold, watched me impassively.

"He's a technician," John said, letting the grin die. "If you called somebody to fix your telephone, you wouldn't care if the repairman was white as long as he fixed your phone."

"I'd rather he be black, even to fix the phone," Marvel said.

John said, "Right on, sister," and gave her a sarcastic black power salute.

Marvel waved him off. "OK." Then she looked at me and asked, "Why don't you say something?"

" 'Cause you're pissing me off." It came with an edge, and Marvel glanced away, embarrassed. She'd been rude to a guest, a cardinal sin anywhere in the South.

"I try to be civil," she said. "But I can't help wondering what outsiders can do..."

"The town is corrupt," I said. "John says it's in the hands of a voting minority. If that's right, there may be some way to take it."

"How?"

"I don't know yet. I have to know about the place to figure that out. I have to know about the people who run it. What they're up to."

"We can tell you that, all right," Marvel said. She was looking straight at me with those incredible liquid eyes, and I thought of the Empress card in the tarot. "Anything you want to know. The question is, If you wreck the machine, who runs things afterward?"

I shrugged. "Not me."

"I've got a job and an... organization... in Memphis," John said. "I don't have any interest in moving in."

She pursed her lips. "I heard about your organization. Bunch of old lame-ass ex-Panthers, is what I hear."

"Maybe our asses are lame, but they're not getting kicked by a bunch of Delta peckerwoods," John snarled. I was thinking uh-oh. They were knocking sparks off each other, in the angry, confrontational way that tends to lead directly to the bedroom. Harold felt it, too, and was looking back and forth between them.

"How about this?" Marvel suggested, turning to me. "You figure something out. A plan. If we don't like it, we can get out anytime."

John looked at me, and I shook my head. "We can't have key people bail out at a critical moment. That could kill us."

"How do we handle it?" he asked.

"We lay out a proposal," I said, turning to Marvel. "If you like it, you're in. If you don't, we go home. But you tell us up front."

She thought about it for a moment, then said, "I've got to talk with Harold." She led the thick man into a back room and shut the door.

"The problem with Commies is double crosses are built into their system," John said when the door had closed behind them. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. "It's all hobby politics. They never have to deal with anything real. They just fuck with each other. We got to think about that."

"Maybe you should hold down the Commie bullshit," I said. "At least until we decide something. And stop talking to her tits, for Christ's sake."

"Was I?"

"Yeah, you were."

Marvel and her friend spent ten minutes in the back. When they came out, she plopped down on a couch, and the thick man moved behind her. They both looked us over. "We're in for now," she said. "What do you want to know?"

I opened the portable and said, "Notes."

"It's still not easy for black folks to get decent city jobs," Marvel said, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees. I'd asked where she got her inside information on the machine. "There are a few black cops and clerks, but most of the blacks who work for the city have menial jobs. Nobody pays any attention to them; it's a hangover from segregation, when a nigger was less than nothing. You wouldn't hide anything from a nigger cleaning lady any more than you'd hide it from her mop. So there are still a lot of invisible people around - cleaning ladies, janitors, garbagemen. Some of them are pretty smart. And we talk. There's not much that gets past us."