House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (53 page)

Hackberry realized his palm was sweating on the grips of the Peacemaker.
Think,
he told himself.
Don’t mess this one up. Pay any price, sustain any injury, any disfigurement, eat your pain, willingly give your life without regret, get your son back, and if you cannot get him back, make the men who did this suffer the torment of the damned.

He was breathing so hard that he was starting to hyperventilate. He felt along the line of stacked boxes and found a knob on the next door. As he eased it open, he looked into the face of a man almost his height, wearing a coat and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, a man with wide shoulders and a white shirt and an odor like sweat and detergent that had dried in his clothes. Hackberry swung the barrel and cylinder of the Colt .45 across the side of the man’s head, then hit him again, this time raking it across his nose. The man went down hard, trying to hold on to Hackberry’s slicker. Hackberry kicked at him and heard him cry out as he struck a piece of furniture in the dark.

Hackberry knelt beside him and felt for his face, then inserted the point of his bowie knife in one of the man’s nostrils. “Where’s Ishmael Holland?” he said. “Where is my son?”

The man on the floor didn’t respond.

“I’ll make a slit-nose out of you,” Hackberry said. “The way the Indians did it. You’ll never want to look in a mirror again.” He pushed the knife deeper. The tall man didn’t move. Hackberry set down the knife and grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Did you hear me?”

He fished in his coat pocket for a box of matches and scratched one across the striker and held it aloft. One of the man’s eyes was almost shut; the other had eight-balled. A single rivulet of blood ran from a triangular-shaped wound in his temple where he had probably struck the corner of a desk. Hackberry had seen the man’s face before. It belonged to one of the three who had put Ishmael in the geek cage at the carnival. Hackberry dropped the dead match on the man’s face.

He got to his feet and walked to the next door. It was partially open, and he could see light glowing from under a rug on the floor. He stood outside the door with his back against the wall, the Colt Peacemaker hanging from his hand. “Can you hear me, Beckman?”

Hackberry’s breath was coming hard in his chest, his eyes stinging with moisture, his nose itching miserably. He counted to five and felt his heart quiet, his breathing slow. “Your telephone lines are cut. We have all your exits covered. We control the access to your road. If the right things don’t happen here, I’ll set fire to the building and make sure you don’t get out. You don’t have to speak. If you’re hearing me, just tap twice on a hard surface.”

In the silence that followed, Hackberry pulled off his slicker as quietly as he could. “Turn to stone? I figured as much,” he said. “For a rich man, you don’t seem to have much smarts. Like maybe you were taking a leak behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. You’re going to give my boy back or you’re going to die, and maybe in pieces. I’ve got a Haitian out there who scares the doo-doo out of me.”

There was no reply.

Hackberry felt for a lamp on a desk and pushed the door open with his boot and threw the lamp into the room. He heard the lamp break apart.

“I guess I’ll have to come in after you,” he said. “I hate to do that. You don’t want to catch a ball from a Peacemaker. How about it? Let’s shut this whole business down and get a drink.”

He thought he could hear sounds under the floor, a door opening and shutting, a muffled voice. He hung his slicker on the tip of his pistol and extended it past the opening in the door, rustling its folds. Three rounds popped in the darkness like small firecrackers, from either a .22 or a .32, flapping the slicker. Just as Hackberry jumped back from the frame, flinging the slicker off his gun barrel, someone kicked the door shut and bolted it, and he realized there was more than one man in the room. Maybe the whole building was a beehive.

Then he heard a sound like a great mechanical weight crashing loose from its fastenings and slamming into a hard surface beneath the building, shaking the walls. Someone shouted down a stairway. He tried to picture what was happening but couldn’t.

He looked back over his shoulder through the series of doors he had opened, and saw that the moon had broken out of the clouds and was shining on the front yard and the motorcar. He worked his way back toward Beckman’s office and thought he saw Darl in the shadows of the live oak, trying to position himself, aiming one of his blue-black double-action revolvers. What or whom had he seen?

Hackberry had not anticipated the next few moments. But neither had the young men of Europe and Great Britain the first time they went over the top and charged into an invention that operated as efficiently and thoroughly as a scythe cutting wheat, nubbing it down to the dirt with one clean sweep.

T
HE FIRST BURSTS
came from a downstairs window, the tracer rounds floating like strips of molten steel across the landscape. But either the angle was bad or the shooter’s position was vulnerable or the shooter decided to take the high ground and command the entire area. Hackberry heard him run up a stairway and cross the floor and begin firing from a window in front, the rounds whanging into the motorcar, blowing the glass out of the windows and headlights, stenciling the radiator, exploding the tires on the rims. When the shooter released the trigger, the motorcar was pocked with holes as bright as newly minted quarters.

Hackberry pressed his back against the side wall of Beckman’s office and tried to see around the window frame. Had Andre and Darl taken cover behind the motorcar or inside it? Were they wounded or dead? The shooter began firing again from a window that was not directly overhead but somewhere close to it, the empty casings bouncing and rolling across the floor. He was obviously trying to divide his fire between the live oak and the motorcar, the tracer rounds burning inside the tree trunk. The rate of fire was too rapid and too long to be a Browning. It had to be a Lewis. What was the rate of fire? Five hundred rounds a minute? Hackberry couldn’t remember. Where were Darl and Andre? And what about the cup? Had it been blown apart after almost two thousand years of wandering?

He moved across Beckman’s office and positioned himself against the side wall, staring up at the ceiling, holding the Colt with both hands, the hammer cocked. When the shooter let off his next burst, Hackberry began shooting through the floor, cocking the hammer with his thumb as fast as he could, the recoil jerking both his elbows like a jackhammer. Plaster and paint and bits of wood drifted down into his face; his right ear felt like cement had been poured in it.

He shucked his spent shells out of the cylinder with the ejector rod and reloaded. There was no sound from upstairs. He went to the outside door and pushed it open with his foot. He saw Darl under the live oak, a .38 revolver in each hand. Andre was nowhere in sight. How many feet was it to the motorcar? Maybe seventy. The night air was as dank as a cistern, the oak tree dripping, the moon little more than vapor, the blue patch on the horizon now purple with rain. A cup was just a cup. It was made of smelted minerals or carved stone. You didn’t lose your life for a drinking vessel. The Creator would not require that of him. But what if Andre had gone after it and lost his life? Could Hackberry do less? What was the value of honor if it could be negotiated? What value was life if you surrendered your beliefs in order to sustain it?
Make your choice, Holland,
he told himself.
Take the easy way, then see how you like living with it.

He who dies this year is quit for the next,
he thought. He opened the French doors. “Pour it on, Darl!”

“Yes, sir, you got it!” Darl said.

Darl began firing with both revolvers at the shooter’s window. Hackberry ran for the motorcar. He heard one burst from the machine gun and saw the rounds blow leaves out of the branches and chew into the trunk; he saw the streaks of flame from Darl’s revolvers and heard the rounds smack against the building and break glass above his head. He felt shards of glass hit his hat and shoulders; his face was sweaty and cold at the same time, his breath as ragged as a broken razor blade in his windpipe. Then he was out of the building’s lee, in the open and within the shooter’s angle of fire.

The Lewis was momentarily silent, then the shooter shifted his position, forcing Darl to shift his, and zeroed in on Hackberry.

Hackberry saw the rounds hitting the ground in front of him and realized the shooter was leading him, now in full command of the situation, the burst of .303 rounds almost seamless. Hackberry had no cover. He leaped over a garden hose, a broken ceramic pot that contained a root-bound Spanish dagger plant, and splashed through puddles of water thick with yellow and black leaves. A spray of rounds hit the motorcar’s bumper and tore the headlights out of their sockets, and in an instant, the back of Hackberry’s head felt as bare and cold and soggy with sweat as that of a French convict waiting for the guillotine’s blade to roar down on his neck.

So this is how it ends,
he thought.
One more burst from the Lewis and your back will be tunneled with holes, your breath ripped from your lungs, your brainpan emptied on your shirt. All of it for naught.

Except it didn’t happen. The upstairs went silent. Hackberry turned and fired his Colt at the window. The sky flickered with electricity, and he saw the aluminum cooling tube of the Lewis and the flash suppressor on the barrel and the pistol-grip stock and the ammunition drum and the hand of the shooter frantically trying to clear the bolt.

The Lewis had jammed, even though Lewis guns never jammed, even in sandstorms or when they were caked with mud or snow or had been fired so long the rifling was eaten out and the barrel was so hot it was almost translucent.

Hackberry dove into the back of the motorcar while Darl opened up on the shooter again. Hackberry grabbed the cup, still bundled in the slicker, and ran for the far side of the building, where he saw Andre waiting for him, smiling ear to ear, blood leaking from a rip in his trousers across the top of his thigh.

Behind him, the motorcar erupted in flame.

Y
OU RETRIEVED THE
cup,” Andre said. “In spite of the machine-gun fire you had to run through. Miss Beatrice said you would not fail us.”

“I didn’t get the sense she was all that confident,” Hackberry said. He was holding the cup under his arm, looking up at the windows on the second story. “How bad is your leg?”

“The wound is clean. I have no broken bones. There is no bullet inside. It is a nice night. I feel very happy.”

“How many men do you think are inside?” Hackberry said. He could see Darl reloading his revolvers behind the live oak.

“I have seen two in the upstairs windows and three downstairs. Briefly, I saw lights in a basement window that was half-buried in the earth.”

“Tell me about this barracoon.”

“The slaves were brought up the river after their importation was banned. A great deal of money was made on the sale of these poor souls. Your hero James Bowie was one of those who defied the ban and became rich off my people’s suffering.”

“We’re going to leave Darl out front. You and I will go through the back. I’m going to ask him to give you one of his revolvers.”

“I don’t know how to use one. I do not like firearms.”

“Bad time to tell me.”

Andre held out his hands. “Do you know what these have done? Where they have been?”

“We may not come out of this building, Andre. You know that, don’t you?”

“Look at the night, hear the rumbling like horses’ hooves in the clouds. Smell the river and the odor that is like fish. There are worse places to die.”

“You want to carry the cup?”

“No, it is yours. I was never meant to have it.”

“That’s the last talk of that kind I want to hear,” Hackberry said.

“The machine gun jammed. Is that coincidence?”

“I don’t know. Neither do you.”

Darl finished loading his revolvers and moved from the live oak’s shadow to the corner of the building and tried to give one of the revolvers to Andre.

“As I have explained to Mr. Holland, I do not want one,” Andre said.

Darl looked at Hackberry, who said, “It’s his choice. Stay out here unless there’s shooting inside the building. If it starts, come in through the front and shoot anything wearing pants, except Andre and me and my boy, who looks a lot like me.”

“That don’t sound good, Mr. Holland.”

“Darl, would you stop examining every word I use? You have to think in a metaphorical fashion. Got it?”

“Yes, I have absolutely got it. Want me to go for he’p if y’all don’t come out?” Darl said.

“No, burn the place,” Hackberry replied.

“That’s not a metaphor?” Darl asked.

“It’s a literal statement.”

“Burn it down? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Who wants to be a good loser?” Hackberry said.

“They must have done it a lot different in your day.”

“I’m about to hit you, Darl.”

I
SHMAEL STOOD IN
the doorway of the room with the plastered walls and the wood cookstove. Jeff lay on the floor, his tongue blue, his eyes like drops of mercury. The manacles on Ishmael’s wrists were old-style, connected with a length of chain that was threaded through the steel rings on the restraint belt, and the rings on the belt were placed so his fingers could not reach the buckle. To get the key off Jeff’s body—if he carried one—Ishmael would have to get to his knees and try to search Jeff’s pockets with almost no mobility in his hands, all the while dealing with the pain in his legs. In the meantime, Beckman might be coming down the tunnel while Ishmael wasted time trying to figure his way out of an impossible problem.