Thunder in the Blood (19 page)

I chose the obvious. ‘You’re saying I’m in some kind of danger?’

‘I’m saying you should keep your eyes open,’ he smiled, ‘and your powder dry.’

‘But tell me …’ I hesitated, only too aware of the rules of this curious game, nothing obvious, nothing attributable, just a handful of dust drifting innocently in the wind. Priddy was inspecting me from a distance, his fingers drumming some rhythm on the table top. The concern on his face looked close to genuine, and for a second or two I thought there was a real chance I might prise a little more from him.

‘Listen.’ I leaned forward. ‘I’m not trying to tie you down but—’ I broke off, staring at him. ‘What’s the matter?’

He was laughing out loud now, rocking in the chair. Finally, he mopped his eyes with a handkerchief and reached across the table, his hand covering mine.

‘You tried that before,’ he said at last, ‘and I’m not sure it was entirely successful.’

In the lobby, saying goodbye, I thanked him for his hospitality. It had been a genuinely pleasant evening, and to my relief he’d not tried to end it in bed. He kissed me on the cheek and then began to shepherd me towards the waiting cab. By the door, he paused.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t mention tomorrow.’ I looked blank. Tomorrow was Saturday. I was hoping for a little sunshine and an hour or so by some pool.

‘What about it?’ I said.

‘I’m going out of town. To a barbecue. I thought you might be interested.’

‘Why?’

He looked down at me, smiling. As ever, he’d saved the best line until last.

‘Little place called Fairwater,’ he said, ‘Harold Beckermann’s spread.’

When I finally coaxed Wesley to the phone, it was past midnight. I was back at the motel, a map spread beside me on the bed. Fairwater was down to the south. Priddy would pick me up at nine.

‘Wesley,’ I said, ‘it’s Sarah.’

‘Hi,’ he said drily. ‘I thought we had an agreement.’

‘We do. I need to talk to you.’

‘That may be a problem.’

‘Why?’

‘Can’t say. Not on this line.’

I smiled. ‘Is that the problem?’

‘Of course it fucking is.’

‘Too bad.’ I paused. ‘There’s a man called Beckermann. You obviously know who he is. I don’t want details. I just want a one word answer. How much do we need to know about him?’

‘Lots.’

‘So how hard should I try?’

‘Very.’

‘Thanks.’ I was still looking at the map. ‘How are you, by the way?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Classified?’ I said. ‘Or just bloody?’

‘Bloody.’ He paused. ‘You get hold of our friend in DC?’

‘Where?’

‘Washington. D fucking C.’

‘No.’ I smiled again. ‘He’s next on the list.’

I sealed the conversation with a big, wet kiss and rang off. Wesley was probably right to believe that his calls were being monitored. Even Curzon House would have the wit to order a tap, though after Priddy’s veiled asides about Stollmann, I’d begun to wonder quite what was happening. Stollmann was a high flyer. Of that I was certain. He was shrewd, painstaking and immensely dogged. But brave? Or foolish? I shook my head, still unable to find a place to file the comment, folding the map, beginning to wonder again about Beckermann.

Priddy had hired a car of his own. Typically, it was twice the size of mine, a big Cadillac with deep-stitched leather and tinted windows. Next morning we purred south at a steady fifty-five miles an hour, Otis Redding on the eight-speaker sound system,
Priddy at the wheel in jeans and a plain white shirt. For the second time in twelve hours, he took me by surprise: relaxed, cheerful and glad – he said – to have slipped the parliamentary leash for at least a day. Beckermann’s barbecue was evidently a private affair, a few old buddies plus his nice new friend from England. There’d be plenty to eat, plus a bucket or two of ice-cold beers, and a little something to keep the boys amused. When I enquired about the latter, Priddy shrugged.

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I only met the man on Monday.’

For miles, we drove on across the flat, parched landscape, views that reminded me of the duller parts of South America. Finally, in the distance, I saw a white fence, miles of it, enclosing paddocks. There were horses grazing. There were trees beside a modest creek. And in the middle of it, there was a sprawl of buildings: a silo of some kind, a couple of barns, and a big L-shaped house, wooden, newly painted, the clapboard a brilliant white against the surrounding browns and greens.

We turned into a working drive, the big Cadillac soaking up the ruts and bumps. Outside the house, beside a line of sturdy four-wheel-drive runabouts, Priddy pulled the car to a halt. It was a hot day, hotter than Dallas, with a fitful wind eddying up from the creek. The wind smelled rich, of mud and silage. I paused by one of the four-wheel drives. It was white, a Cherokee Chief, brand new, with huge knobbly tyres and bull bars at the front. The windows at the back were curtained and it was impossible to see in, but there was something moving inside. On the back window, there was a tattered Reagan/Bush sticker, the colours bleached by the sun. The sticker must have been infinitely older than the Chief, a treasured relic from the elections of 1984.

I glanced across at Priddy, meaning to point it out, but he was already half-way to the house. There were steps at the front of the house, up to a long wooden stoop, and I recognized the figure standing there. He must have been six foot six, the big spare frame barely touched by his sixty-five years. He was wearing an old pair of jeans and a denim shirt, and the cowboy boots reached half-way to his knee. His eyes were narrowed against the sun and he had a spent match dangling from the corner of his mouth. Priddy was climbing the steps now, his hand already out, the working politician again.

‘Harold,’ he was saying, ‘nice to see you.’

We had coffee and muffins inside the house, a big open kitchen, a gaggle of men around the table, not a woman in sight. The men were, by and large, Beckermann’s age. They were loud, brash, and self-confident. They danced a kind of ceaseless attention around the brooding figure of Beckermann, quietening when he grunted some remark or other, laughing when he made a rare joke. Beckermann’s voice was extraordinary, a low growl, part Hollywood, part hillbilly. When I first heard him, shaking his hand, trying to make sense of his gruff welcome, I thought he was sending me up, playing Lee Marvin to my Julie Andrews, but as the morning wore on I began to suspect that he really did believe this brutal, tough-guy persona. The way he moved, just crossing the room, was all part of the act, the slow cowboy lope, stooping to top up the big enamel mugs with fresh coffee, distributing dollops of maple syrup for the hot muffins.

His conversation was mostly body-language, too, the words few and far between, the eyes fixing on yours, a curious yellow. He had a face that belonged to another age, wind-burned, heartless, deeply seamed, a face I’d seen in half a dozen Hollywood Westerns, the guy who rides in from nowhere and throws his weight around, and an hour of his company was quite enough to understand his appeal. If you happened to be Grant Wallace, hero-starved and barely out of the egg, Beckermann would be truly awesome. If, like me, you belonged to the rest of the human race, he was weird and rather frightening. The bullwhip, I thought, as I watched him toying with Priddy, quarts of Jack Daniels appearing on the table, the laughter growing more coarse.

At noon, two young men appeared from the depths of the house. They were overdressed for the weather, heavy working jeans and thick sweatshirts, and one of them had leather chaps of some kind strapped to his forearms. They picked their way through the guests and one of them had a quiet word in Beckermann’s ear. I was back with Priddy at this point, who was busy putting names to the faces around the big kitchen table. They were all, it seemed, from the upper reaches of the Dallas business world, weekend cowboys with Timberland boots and flabby, downtown faces. One of them headed a big insurance conglomerate. Another was vice-president of an oil company. A third owned
huge swathes of Fort Worth real estate. Between them, Priddy confided, we were looking at a gross worth of not less than three hundred million dollars.

The money came out a few minutes later, hundred-dollar bills tossed on to the table, Beckermann up one end, licking the stub of a pencil, drawing careful lines on the back of a feed catalogue. As the pile of money grew, he went round the table, asking each man for a name, scribbling it down, making a note of the size of the wager. There were three or four names. One of them, as far as I could judge, was Mogul. The others I didn’t catch. When he got to us, Priddy’s hand was already in the back of his jeans, but when he produced his wallet, Beckermann waved it away.

‘Guests go free,’ he said. ‘House rules.’

Priddy nodded, ever the gentleman, pocketing his wallet again. When Beckermann moved on to the next man at the table, I nudged him lightly on the knee.

He glanced across at me. ‘No pay, no play,’ he murmured. ‘Thank God.’

‘What’s that mean? You understand any of this?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I do.’

He leaned forward, confecting a laugh at some joke or other. The Jack Daniels was going round again, hand to hand, and Beckermann was hauling in the money. There must have been at least five thousand dollars on the table, probably more.

I looked at Priddy again. ‘Give me a clue?’ I said. ‘Just one?’

The men were on their feet now, heading for the door, and Priddy was getting up, too. He had one hand on my shoulder. He gave it a squeeze.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

18

We walked down from the house to the creek. It was very hot by now, the kind of heat you associate with high summer, and the ground was bone-hard beneath our feet. The men sauntered down the dirt path. They formed a kind of loose cohort around Beckermann, joshing with each other, belly laughs at one-line jokes I never quite caught. Beckermann towered above them, grim-faced, oblivious, his face shadowed by a large stetson.

I was still with Priddy, hanging back a little. He’d managed to liberate one of the bottles of Jack Daniels from the kitchen table. Still half full, it hung from his hand. From time to time, he took a swig, offering me the bottle afterwards. I’m not over-keen on bourbon but I swallowed it just the same which, in view of what followed, was probably just as well.

When we got to the creek, the two youths I’d seen earlier were already there. They were both wearing the protective chaps now, with thick gauntlets and high rubber waders as well, and one of them was bent over a wooden crate. There was something in the crate, but I couldn’t see what it was. The creek was barely ten yards wide, the sluggish brown water drifting slowly past. On our side, a crude chain-link fence had been erected around a shallow pit. The fence was chest height, and the pit was maybe two feet deep, old spadework, the sloping sides baked hard by the sun.

Peering in through the fence, I could see scuff marks in the loose soil at the bottom of the pit, and for the first time I began to suspect what we were in for. Priddy’s phrase had been exact. Something to amuse the boys. I straightened up, reaching for the bottle, slipping it from Priddy’s fingers. I took a long, scalding pull, then another, and when I’d finished I offered it back to him,
but he shook his head. There was a strange look in his eye, a certain gleam, and it was a second or two before I realized what it was. The man was excited. Just like everyone else.

One of Beckermann’s guests ambled over. He was lightly drunk, sweating in the hot sun. He beamed at me.

‘Y’all from England?’

I nodded, dizzy already, glad of the intervention, glad of a chance to talk about something else.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Ya got this kinda thing over there?’

I looked at Priddy, helpless. Priddy smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if you know where to look.’

‘Anything like Mogul? Ya got anything like him? Ya ever
seen
anything like him?’

Priddy shook his head. ‘I understand he’s unbeaten?’

‘Right.’ The man leaned forward, one fat finger in the middle of Priddy’s chest. ‘Ya never saw anything that could live with that dog. Believe me, I know.’ He nodded. ‘Believe me.’

He turned on his heel, howling with laughter, his thumb going back over his shoulder, pointing at us. I watched him rejoining his friends. They thought it was pretty funny, too. Priddy looked briefly uncomfortable.

‘What’s Mogul?’ I asked him.

He shrugged, nodding at the wooden crate, now being carried towards the pit. ‘Look in there,’ he said, ‘and you’ll see.’

The youth with the crate put it down beside me. I shuffled instinctively aside, still watching. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Another crate had appeared, too, on the other side of the pit. The men were gathering round, squatting on their haunches, spitting in the dust, acting tough. Beckermann was amongst them, his back against a stunted tree, the position of honour, top dog.

The youth beside me opened the cage. Inside, I assumed, was Mogul. A clever arrangement with a leash meant that the youth retained control when the dog threw himself out. The dog was a pit-bull terrier. I recognized it from a couple I’d seen back in Devon: the huge chest, the squat body, the thick neck, the long square snout. The youth beside me was restraining it on the leash, but only just. I looked at him.

‘Mogul?’ I queried.

The youth shook his head and muttered something I didn’t quite catch. I looked at Priddy. ‘Orders?’

Priddy offered me a thin smile. ‘Hors-d’oeuvres,’ he said. ‘I think it’s some kind of joke. The other one’s Mogul, the one over in the other crate. There are obviously a number of fights. This is the first,’ he smiled again, ‘the appetizer.’

The dog was in the pit now, off the leash. It circled the enclosure, nose in the air, stopping from time to time to paw the ground. One of Beckermann’s pals, drunker than the rest, had put his fingers through the fence, and I found myself looking at the dog, hoping he’d bite them off, one brief moment of glory before Mogul emerged from the other crate and tore his throat out.

I looked at Priddy. ‘This is sick,’ I said, my voice over-loud.

Priddy didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring at the other cage. The youth in charge had one eye on Beckermann, waiting for some kind of signal. Priddy stirred, acknowledging me at last.

‘This is supposed to be an honour,’ he said, ‘given to few. So we might as well enjoy it.’

‘
Enjoy
it?’

A roar went up from the crowd. Across the pit, Mogul was straining at the leash. If anything, he was slightly smaller than the other dog, but he’d seen him now and he was up on his haunches, pulling and pulling, his teeth bared, his whole body quivering. His teeth were yellow, and every time he barked, flecks of saliva flew off into nowhere. The other dog was ready, plumb centre in the very middle of the enclosure, holding his ground. In a moment, the youth would lift the fence and slip the leash, and several generations of careful inbreeding would do the rest. I’d no idea how long these things took, but I didn’t blame the dogs. Around the pit, the big sweaty faces were pressed to the wire, the eyes wide, the mouths open, animal voices howling for blood.

I shuddered, watching the youth stoop to the fence, lift it, then release Mogul. The other dog, in the middle of the ring, threw himself at the oncoming pit-bull. The two dogs met, and for a while it looked evenly matched, both animals snarling, lunging, tussling for advantage. Then, abruptly, blood began to gush from the flank of the bigger dog. The sight of it, or its smell, seemed to drive Mogul to greater frenzy, and he threw himself at the other dog’s neck, his jaws clamping on to a fold of flesh, the huge
shoulders tearing left and right until the wound was raw and open, exposing the other dog’s windpipe. The other dog stumbled, lost his footing, fell on his side, and then Mogul was standing over him, the jaws sinking ever deeper, the flesh tearing apart, the loose dirt wet with blood.

The other dog was dying now, gasping for breath, each new heave of the lungs making the blood bubble and froth around the gaping wound. There was a sudden movement in the crowd, and then Beckermann was inside the enclosure, hauling Mogul off, forcing a stick of some kind between his jaws, kicking him in the flank, sending him back towards his handler. Then he bent to the other dog, scooping him up, like so much litter, glancing in the direction of the youth we’d seen earlier.

‘Here,’ he grunted.

He tossed the dog’s body at the advancing youth, and the boy caught it, staggering backwards with the weight. The dog was limp now, and he held it out, away from himself, trying to avoid the blood still oozing from what was left of its throat. He pushed through the crowd of watching men, down towards the creek, and as he did so I thought I saw the dog twitch. The men closed around him, and I still had the bottle of Jack Daniels to my lips when the youth disappeared behind a low bluff.

I looked at Beckermann. He was standing by the wire, surrounded by his friends. He’d taken a wad of notes from the back pocket of his jeans and he was peeling off the bills, pressing them into outstretched palms, settling the wagers made earlier. I watched for a moment. Some of the notes were wet with blood from Beckermann’s hands. I saw one or two of the men showing each other, pulling faces, laughing, pocketing the sticky bills. Across by the Cherokee, another crate had appeared. More livestock. Another throat for Mogul to tear apart.

I shook my head, numbed by the heat and the dust and the hot animal smells, and far too much bourbon. The last dog was still alive. I knew it. I looked at Priddy, giving him the bottle.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘take it.’

‘Where are you going?’

He half turned, trying to restrain me, but I was running now, back towards the house. In the kitchen, where we’d met Beckermann, there were guns. I’d seen them, a rack of three rifles, in
the far corner. With luck, I’d find ammunition. With luck, I’d make it back to the creek in time to put the poor bloody animal out of its misery. It wouldn’t begin to make amends, but it was something.

Looking back, it was a daft thing to do, adolescent and hysterical, and not at all in keeping with my Curzon House brief. But even now, I believe I had no choice. Given the same circumstances, I know I’d do exactly the same thing again. In the face of evil, as Wesley once said, you must act.

The house was a quarter of a mile up the hill from the creek. By the time I got there, I was beginning to suffer. My lungs felt like sandpaper, and every breath tasted of Jack Daniels. I pushed inside the house. The door clattered shut behind me. I stood absolutely still for a moment. In from the sun, the house was cool and dark. I felt my pulse begin to slow.

The kitchen lay at the end of the hall. I walked towards it, aware for the first time of a voice. Someone was having a conversation, maybe upstairs, I couldn’t be sure. It was a man’s voice, English rather than American. He must have been on the phone because there were gaps in the conversation when nothing happened. I paused for a moment, wondering what to do, then the rage and the frustration came flooding back, and I slipped through the door at the end of the hall and into the kitchen.

The kitchen was empty. The guns lay against the far wall. One of them was a bolt-action Ruger 77, a good, solid weapon, easy to use. It had a Redfield telescopic sight, 4 × 40, and a scuffed leather sling. I began to look for shells. In the third drawer I opened, I found a box of fifty, 7 mm, soft-nose game rounds. Perfect. I took a handful and lifted the rifle from the rack. Hearing the door open behind me, I turned round.

A young man was smiling at me from the hall. He was wearing slacks and a blazer. He was tallish with curly blond hair, neatly cut. He had the face of a male model, with regular features and wonderful teeth. He must have been my age, maybe slightly older. There was a dog beside him, a spaniel/collie cross, friendly, domesticated, intact. With his dog and his blazer, he looked like a full-page spread from
Country Life.
Even the voice was perfect, nicely modulated, discreet public school accent, very definitely English.

‘Can I help at all?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re English? Over from the UK?’

‘Yes.’

‘You wouldn’t be a friend of Harold’s, by any chance?’

I shook my head again. ‘Friend of a friend,’ I said. ‘Come to share the fun.’

He gazed at me a moment, speculative, picking up the irony.

‘I called by on the offchance,’ he said at last. ‘Am I missing something?’

‘No.’ I looked at the dog. ‘Quite the reverse.’

‘What’s going on then?’ He glanced over at the table, still littered with empty bottles of Jack Daniels. ‘Harold having some kind of party?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘I suppose that covers it.’

‘I see.’ He pulled a face, then shrugged. ‘Just my luck to miss it I guess.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, slipping the rifle over my shoulder, pushing past him, out into the bright sunlight.

I began to run again, glancing back towards the house. There was no sign of the young man with the dog, but for the first time I saw the car amongst the untidy line of four-wheel drives. It was a Jaguar saloon, low-slung, dark blue, left-hand drive with tinted windows. It definitely hadn’t been there when we’d left for the creek.

The path dipped to the right and I lost sight of the house. Ahead of me, already, I could see the men pushing up against the enclosure fence, urging on the dogs, another fight in progress. Beckermann was clearly visible, head and shoulders above the rest, but Priddy I couldn’t see.

I left the path and began to track through the low scrub, hurrying on, trying to avoid the low clumps of thornbush and the termite mounds. Ahead, I could see a thin line of trees. There were crows in the trees and other birds I didn’t recognize. The men were baying now, a deep animal roar. I paused a moment. The enclosure was hidden by a small bluff. I hesitated a moment longer, knowing that finding the creek offered the best route to where the dog probably lay. By the trees, I’d find the water.

A minute later, I was there. The creek was wider here, the muddy water dimpled with flies and midges. There were animal bones on the baked earth by the water’s edge, bleached white by the sun, and further upstream I could see the empty skull of what must once have been a cow. I peered at the water, wondering whether the dog might have been thrown in, but there was nothing. I began to walk slowly back towards the enclosure, still hidden from the men, my eyes quartering the water, the way they’d taught me to do it at Hereford. Top left. Top right. Bottom left. Bottom right. I stopped again, the rifle cradled in my arms. The sun was hotter than ever. I could feel the heat bubbling up from the ground beneath my feet and the slow trickle of sweat down the middle of my back. The fight, much longer than before, was definitely coming to some kind of climax.

I began to climb the bluff, keeping my body low, advancing at a half-crouch. The top of the bluff was dotted with thornbushes. I chose the biggest of them, and for the last ten yards or so, I crawled forward on my elbows and knees, oblivious now of the thorns tearing at my shirt. Flat on my belly, hidden by the thornbush, I peered down through the coarse yellow grass. The enclosure was perhaps a hundred yards away, the men pressed to the wire, a blur of bodies snarling and yapping in the pit. It was too far away to judge where the contest had got to, so I put the rifle to my shoulder, bending to the telescopic sight, adjusting the lens to my eye.

Mogul was once again the smaller of the two dogs. His head and shoulders were covered in blood and he had the other dog on the ground. Belly up, the other dog was using its hind legs to try and prise Mogul away, but Mogul’s jaws were buried in its throat and he wasn’t letting go. From time to time, he’d back across the pit, pulling the other dog after him, then shake his head, ripping left and right, more blood.