Bloodstained Kings Read online

  “Well, Jack? Are you willing?”

  “What if it ain’t Jefferson in there?” said Seed.

  “You reckon it is.”

  “I know, but what if it ain’t?”

  Atwater said the first thing that came into his head.

  “Then we’ll leave not a trace behind us.”

  It was only after he’d closed his mouth that he understood what he’d said. He was a prosecuting attorney, solemnly pledged to defend the law. Now he was suggesting murder, at the very least of Paril-laud’s hayseeds. Suddenly it was real: a line he’d never dreamt of crossing before. Inwardly he gulped. Once, back in high school, he’d climbed to the top of an Olympic diving board and gotten as far as standing on the edge. He hadn’t looked down at the water far below. He hadn’t needed to: it had filled him from top to toe with a shimmering terror. It had been all he could do to climb back down the ladder—to the jeers of his buddies—without throwing up. That was how he felt now: he didn’t want to look down. He was about to backtrack and qualify what he’d just said when his eyes focused on Seed’s face: Jack was looking at him like he was Vito Corleone. Atwater closed his mouth.

  Then Jack said, quietly, “I’ll need some boys.”

  And with that Atwater felt a zing go down his spine and spiral up through his belly He felt light-headed. This was it, man, this was what it felt like to go from marijuana to heroin. All his anxieties dissipated in the rush of power and daring. He, Rufus Atwater, was a fucking nightmare on wheels. He had the law’s steel gauntlet on his fist and his fingers in that rich bitch’s cunt. For the first time he understood where Jefferson had been coming from: his word meant life or death. Goddamn. And shit. Dead or alive, the Captain was yesterday’s man. Now Rufus Atwater was in the catbird seat. Atwater suppressed the urge to take a deep breath. Instead he smiled, thinly, at Jack.

  “Cash is no problem,” he said. “One way or the other I’ll square it. Just get me whatever it takes.”

  Seed started the engine and pulled away from the house.

  “But no mob guys,” added Atwater. “Independents.”

  Jack Seed sniffed and ran the back of a finger across his nostrils.

  “Two hayseeds and four dogs,” mused Seed. “Two extra guys?”

  “Make it four. I want to be sure. Guys who won’t be missed if we take casualties.”

  Atwater barely knew where his words were coming from, but he liked it.

  “I know some Cubans,” said Jack. “Ex-army. Got pissed off with Castro.”

  “Good. I want to go tonight.”

  Seed nodded. “I guess if we waited till morning we’d realize just how far out of our fuckin’ minds we are.”

  They were racing now toward the tunnel of oak trees that would take them to the wrought-iron gates. Atwater’s heart raced too. He looked out through the window. To the west across the manicured lawn the sun was one half of a dull yellow disc and the sky was shot with red.

  Seed said, “What’s the deal with the shrink?”

  Atwater turned. “What’s that?”

  “The shrink, Grimes.”

  Jack was right, thought Atwater. Now more than ever he couldn’t afford to neglect a single detail. Anything could mean anything. The car darkened as they barreled under the moss-hung trees.

  “You just get those Cubans lined up,” said Atwater. “Dr. Grimes I can deal with myself.”

  FOUR

  CICERO GRIMES looked at his father, George, across the polished aluminum tabletop, and in spite of himself, and of all that was dire upon his mind, he smiled. They were sitting in a diner built in an old railroad car that served basic French and American food without the obsequious bullshit usually attendant on eating out. Grimes smiled because he liked the way his father attacked his steak, slaking it down in big chunks with too much mustard and too little mastication. It wasn’t something funny, or something that anyone else would likely have smiled at, it was just something that Grimes liked seeing. George leaned back to wipe his mouth on his napkin and glanced at Grimes’s plate, its own steak abandoned half-eaten.

  “You look like hell, Gene,” said George. “Oughta get the rest ofthat beef inside you.”

  His father had named him after Eugene Debs, the man who ran for the U.S. presidency from his jail cell. Cicero was a kind of nickname Grimes had picked up as a kid, not for any quickness of mind or skill in oratory, but because Cicero Grimes had been the name of the villain in a Paul Newman western. Personally, he liked Cicero but he also thought it was kind of foolish. With most people he used his given name.

  “I’m fine, Dad,” said Grimes.

  George grunted. He had dressed up to come out in a dark blue poplin suit, a white shirt and a red Slim Jim tie. He had a full head of iron-gray hair, shorn, as it had been for over half a century, in a no-holds-barred marine’s crop. His eyes were as gray as his hair, and deep set in a wide, big-boned face. His hands, which gripped his knife and fork as if they were crowbars, sported knuckles like walnuts and were bound across their backs with thick tendons and heavy veins. Grimes’s hands were built along similar lines, but his fingers seemed only half the diameter of his father’s. George had spent decades hauling meat carcasses and stacking crates, and even now took work down on the docks when he could get it. The thousands of tons of dead weight he’d gripped and lifted over the years lived on in the dense forearms and the hunched bulk of his shoulders as he leaned across his plate.

  “You’ve been lying low, then,” said George.

  “That’s right,” said Grimes.

  “Sure you haven’t been sick?”

  What was he supposed to say? Yeah, Dad, I’ve been contemplating suicide for six months but I was too fucked up to get it together.

  Grimes said, “Doctors don’t get sick.”

  George let it go. He nodded.

  “Mind if I smoke?” asked Grimes.

  “They’re your lungs.”

  Grimes lit a Pall Mall. George finished his steak, mopped up the blood and gravy with a piece of bread and washed the bread down with a mouthful of Dos Equis. He looked around the restaurant. It was early evening and the place was only half full, mainly with youngsters practicing their cool, guys in T-shirts and tattoos, girls wearing lots of Lycra and nose studs.

  “This place has changed,” said George. “Used to be a regular working man’s diner.”

  “It’s okay,” said Grimes. “It would’ve closed for good if they hadn’t taken a step upmarket.”

  “I ain’t saying I don’t like it.” George raised one eyebrow. “It’s expensive for my money but the women’re a hell of an improvement, I’ll say that much.” He nodded from Grimes’s suit and tie to his own. “Must think we’re a coupla stiffs, though.”

  “What, us?” said Grimes. “Harvey Keitel and Robert Mitchum?”

  George laughed. “That’s Luther talking.”

  Grimes grinned and nodded. The sadness in his chest was reflected in his father’s eyes. Luther, Grimes’s eldest brother and George’s eldest son, had died six months ago. Grimes had been there. Some of the best moments in Grimes’s life had been when the three of them had sat in a movie theater together, or around a TV, and watched hard men with gende eyes perform feats of derring-do. But that was when they’d all been much, much younger.

  “Luther loved them movies,” said George.

  Grimes looked away, his throat constricted. Luther’s death was the main part of his having spent the last months lying on the floor. Grimes looked back as he felt thick fingers squeezing his arm.

  “Hey,” said George. “Luther wouldn’t make any apologies for himself if he was still around. Neither should we for us.”

  The constriction got worse.

  “Yeah,” managed Grimes.

  George, realizing this wasn’t the time to get into it, flicked his eyes across the aisle at a woman in a short dress made of fake silver chains and not much else. Under the dress she wore a snowy-white bra and pants. George looked back at Grimes.

>   “The great thing about being my age,” said George, “is you can look and enjoy without feeling pain.” He smiled. “God, the grief it caused me. Don’t imagine I would’ve missed it, though, not for a gold clock.”

  Grimes was grateful for the change of subject.

  “I believe Aristode said something along the same lines.”

  George pounced. “Socrates,” he said.

  “Socrates, then,” said Grimes.

  George leaned forward, his eyes bright and his index finger raised, as if he were imparting a secret of great value. Grimes knew the gesture well.

  “ ‘Men do not become tyrants in order not to suffer from the cold.’ “ George smiled grimly. He paused to let the aphorism sink in.

  The pause was unnecessary. Grimes was already uncomfortably aware of the letter in his inside pocket. It was as if his father had picked up on its contents, on Jefferson’s “men of power,” on the ghost of Jefferson himself hovering over Grimes’s shoulder.

  “That’s Aristotle for you,” said George. “ The Politics. Those old boys knew a thing or two.”

  Grimes felt willing to accept advice from any quarter.

  “Did they ever work out what to do about it?”

  George rolled his shoulders with gusto. This was his life.

  “Why, fight the bastards toe to toe, what else? That’s the history of the world, ain’t it? And history’s a long way from over no matter what they try to tell us in The New York goddamn Times.”

  Grimes felt his heart sinking. He was insane to have come to his father hoping for help with this matter. The best he was likely to do was to make himself look feeble and, if his luck held, avoid a violent argument. He felt like a middleweight climbing through the ropes with John L. Sullivan. He’d outboxed him before but the victories were always Pyrrhic, which is to say that George, battered into the canvas though he might be, always won the moral high ground. George’s psyche was dominated by the fight for universal justice, as he saw it. He hadn’t officially won a war since 1945 but he didn’t seem to mind losing as long as he left some blood on the floor. Blood wasn’t what Grimes wanted.

  “You’re right, Dad,” he said.

  He decided not to show him the letter and felt better; but the scorpion Jefferson had slipped into his pocket was still scutding around: “Give my regards to your daddy.” What the fuck had he meant by that? Had he written to George too? Was the Aristotle a signal rather than telepathic coincidence? George wasn’t usually that subtle.

  “Dad,” said Grimes. “Has anything out of the ordinary happened these past couple of days?”

  “You mean besides you taking me out for dinner?”

  “Yes. Anything. Telephone repair guys, door-to-door Bible salesmen, stray cats …”

  George thought about it. “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  George grunted and gave him a look. Grimes ignored it.

  “I was planning to go away for a while,” said Grimes. “Overseas. Wondered if you’d like to come with me.”

  George stared at him while picking a piece of meat from between his teeth. Grimes found himself floundering in the gray steel-trap gaze.

  “I thought maybe South America.” Grimes started to go under. “Or Europe.”

  George pried the meat loose and swallowed it.

  “I don’t have a passport,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Grimes. “How about we drive somewhere then? Wyoming, maybe. Or the old town, Chicago.”

  “Why, you want me to catch pneumonia?”

  Grimes sighed, swamped by the awareness of his own incompetence. “You never were big on vacations, were you, Dad?”

  “I never could see the point of traveling a thousand miles in order to do nothing.”

  A brief picture flashed into Grimes’s mind, of a younger George, standing, shirtsleeves rolled, fists leaned on the kitchen table while he told a bunch of union guys what they had to do to stop the strike from crumbling, infecting them with his conviction that the only way to do the right thing was his way. Grimes turned away and tried to catch the eye of the waitress. He wanted the check. He felt the clasp of the veiny hand again. Grimes looked back into the trap.

  “Just tell me the score, son,” said George. “And I’ll give you my best advice.”

  Grimes looked at George for what felt like a long time. The busy sounds of the diner faded into silence. The gray eyes looking back at him had suffered, gready; enjoyed, greatly. With a sense of burden heavier than his own worst fears and more precious than his best lost dreams, Grimes felt the vast magnitude of his father’s care for him. Yet he saw more than just that, something dangerous and inspiring, the source of Grimes’s awe. He saw, and did not doubt, that behind and beyond that immeasurable care there stood a higher court, and it was to this authority that George Grimes submitted his soul, and not to love. It was to his conscience alone—that which knew with himself—that George was fatefully, perhaps helplessly, fidelitous—whatever it was that his conscience might know and whether or not another court should judge it right or wrong. It was this, Grimes knew, that made him a rare and dangerous man. George lived alone in a drafty shotgun house, wore a thrift shop suit and a Slim Jim tie and was seventy-three years old. It had been a long time since he’d issued an order, and longer still since anyone had obeyed him, Grimes included. Destiny, and time, had made him weak. Yet to Grimes he was, still, a king; a king from an age when giants strode a wider earth than this.

  Grimes reached into his pocket and pulled out two sheets of paper and handed them to George. While George put his glasses on, Grimes put out his cigarette and lit a second and watched as his father read with a concentration so complete it took him close to radiance. With rapid small shifts of his head, back and forth, George absorbed the words and flicked to the second page. Halfway down he paused, showed the page to Grimes and pointed out a phrase with his finger.

  “What’s that say?” he said.

  “Corpus delicti,” said Grimes. “It means the body of facts relating to a crime.”

  “I know what it means. Just couldn’t read it.”

  George read on. When he got to the bottom of the page he looked over the rim of his glasses at Grimes.

  “Where’s the rest of it?”

  The last page, the one containing Jefferson’s instructions as to where to find his suitcases, was still in the envelope in Grimes’s pocket. He’d separated it from the others before leaving his apartment.

  “The rest you don’t need to see,” said Grimes.

  In the pause that followed he prepared himself for George’s reaction.

  “I never thought I’d have cause to call my own son a sneaking bastard.” There was no humor in George’s voice; rather, it simmered with imminent rage. “But that’s what you are.”

  “You said you’d give me your best advice.”

  “Then I’ll need to read the goddamn rest of it.”

  Heads turned, including the waitress’s. Grimes waved her over. He looked at George: age had mellowed him, considerably, but from a starting point of such hard-wired belligerence that it sometimes didn’t seem that way.

  “We’ll talk on the way home,” said Grimes.

  George glared at him, read a stubbornness the equal of his own and folded the pages back in three. He handed them back as if he’d rather ram them down Grimes’s throat, then took off his glasses. The waitress arrived.

  “Everything okay?” she said, uncertainly.

  “Terrific,” said Grimes. “We’d like the check, please.”

  As she went to get it George stood up and said, “I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll see you outside.”

  After the air-conditioning the atmosphere in the street was muggy and close. Grimes, waiting, took off his jacket and draped it over his shoulder. The street lights were on, the mid-evening traffic a steady drone. The old Ward 15 district had improved a lot in the last decade as interesting people who didn’t have any dough, followed by less interest
ing people who did, had colonized the neighborhood. Grimes couldn’t see the harm in a few craft shops and restaurants. He looked up at the sky and saw clouds and wondered if it would rain later. Then his father stepped down from the railroad car behind him and they started on the four blocks back to the shotgun house where George lived.

  The first two blocks passed in silence. As they moved away from the main drag, the traffic got quieter. They were close enough here to smell the river. Grimes felt his father smoldering as he stomped along at his shoulder.

  “Gene,” said his father at last. “I know you haven’t got the …” A fleeting sensitivity to Grimes’s feelings caused him to hesitate; then, as expected, he pressed on anyway. “I mean, I can understand why you wouldn’t have the stomach for a thing like this.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Grimes.

  “You’re a young guy, a professional man after all. You got a life.” He added, belatedly, “Dammit, there’s no shame in that way of thinking.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” said Grimes. “I’m just worried. I don’t want to be tortured by psychopaths.”

  Grimes felt that the fact he’d been tortured before, by his late benefactor Clarence Jefferson, gave him the right to come out against the pastime. Of that experience—that utter humiliation—he was indeed ashamed, irrationally so. He’d spoken of it to no one, and intended never to do so.

  Grimes added, “And I don’t want to die.”

  George was silent for several paces, then attacked from a different angle.

  “This here is a great country,” he said. “You know why?”

  Grimes didn’t answer.

  “Because we’ve always had the guts to take the truth.”

  “I can’t believe this,” said Grimes. “You’ve spent most of your life telling anyone who’ll listen that we live in the corrupt kingdom.”

  “Exactly. Am I in prison for that? No. You think I think the guy who don’t agree with me should be? No. Let him fight his corner and may the best man win. But the scumbags who put their hands in our pockets every day and fuck us with their lies and hypocrisy? You bet I want to see ‘em in chains. The reason we’re bleeding from open wounds is people look around and see a bunch of assholes they wouldn’t put in charge of a hot-dog stand running their fucking lives for them. It’s like it’s not their country. In the old days it was even worse, even easier for the scumbags to hide under the rocks of their phony prestige. Now we can drag their asses in front of the world and make them drop their pants. We can show ‘em that maybe—just maybe—this is our country after all.”