Natchez Burning (46 page)

He focuses in the middle distance for a few silent seconds. Then he looks at me and answers in a low, earnest voice. “I never told you about the war because you can’t
tell
anyone about war, any more than you can tell a virgin what it means to go through labor. But make no mistake: what happened here during the 1960s was a war, too. A civil war.” He thumps Shelby Foote’s thick history. “Maybe the true end of this one. And as in any war, there were casualties. Viola was one of them.”

“Viola was gang-raped in 1968. I’m thinking you already know that.”

His jaw tightens and flexes. If there’s such a thing as an offended silence, that’s what I’m listening to now. “I’m not going to discuss that,” he says. “Viola’s gone, and she’s finally out of pain. That’s all that matters now.”

I lean forward, my eyes accusing. “Is it? A lot more people who survived that era need peace just as badly as she, and preferably while they’re still alive. Many of the men who committed those crimes are still walking around. They’re still hurting people. Do you think men who gang-raped Viola twice deserve to live out their days in peace?”

Dad looks up sharply, his face pale. Then he closes his eyes, and his head sags forward. I start to go on, but he raises a hand to stop me. “Don’t say any more. I’ll answer your three questions. Then I want you to drop all this.”

“I can’t promise that.”

He sighs heavily. “Leland Robb was a good man. He was a good physician, too, and he died badly. Aircraft fires are always terrible. They called me to identify his body. I had to use X-rays.”

“I don’t think Henry knows that.”

“A month before that crash, Leland came to see me. He was upset and needed to get something off his chest. He mentioned Frank Knox being at Albert Norris’s store on the afternoon Norris died, but Frank had been dead over a year by this time. Leland wanted to tell me about another man who’d been there, but I stopped him. Something in his manner told me how explosive that information was.” Dad shakes his head and picks up his cigar. “I wish now that I’d responded differently, but at the time … Leland was truly terrified. I urged him to confide in someone who could actually do something about what he knew—the FBI, or a moderate politician—but he didn’t. After he died, I wondered whether there might have been some sort of foul play involved, but the FAA didn’t find anything suspicious about the crash. What could I do?”

The tone in my father’s voice is both alien and familiar; it’s the voice of witnesses who stood by while someone else was being robbed, beaten, or killed. “You could have told the FBI about Frank Knox threatening Albert Norris. You could have told them that the man who collided with Dr. Robb’s plane had probably murdered Norris along with his brother!”

Dad’s unblinking gaze silences me. “If I’d done that,” he says softly, “you and I might not be sitting here now. Your mother might be a widow. You don’t know what those men were capable of. It’s not very honorable, I know, but that’s the choice I made.”

I want to argue, but who am I to question my father about decisions made during a time I lived through as a little boy under his protection?

Before I can remind him of my other questions, he says, “As for saving Viola … all I did was send a request through Ray Presley to Brody Royal and Claude Devereux.”

“You knew that they had ties to the Double Eagles?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. But as for your question, I simply told them I was sure that Viola had no intention of speaking to the authorities. I think Royal or Devereux or someone up the line believed me, and they knew I understood that if she talked, Viola wouldn’t be the only one to pay a price. In any case, they let her live. That’s all I can tell you about that.”

“And this photo? With Royal and the others?”

Dad slides the image back toward me, but his eyes remain on it. “Leland took that picture. It was 1966. I don’t know how Henry Sexton got hold of it. Lee used to fly us to gun shows back in the sixties. That one was in Biloxi. You know I hate the water, but Lee had committed us to go deep-sea fishing with Royal and Devereux, who were down there on business. Dixie Mafia business, probably. Anyway, we’d run into Ray Presley at the show, so he joined us. The whole cruise only lasted five or six hours. I hadn’t known Royal at all before that. But afterward …” Dad is looking at me but seems not to see me.

“What?”

“Another man came along on that trip. A tall, lanky fellow— ex-military. At first the cruise was fun and games. We caught a few mackerel, and drank enough beer to pretend we were extras in
To Have and Have Not
. That’s when Lee shot this picture. But Royal and the lanky fellow were serious drinkers. And the more they drank, the more they talked. The more they talked, the more frightened I got. Lee, too.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Paramilitary operations, mostly. The military guy turned out to be ex-army, but on the CIA payroll. He’d worked down at a camp training Cuban expatriates for the Bay of Pigs. He knew Frank and Snake Knox from there, and I gathered that he already knew Ray, too. They talked about Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, even Eastern Europe. Coups d’état, past and present. When this guy went to the head, Brody told us he was some kind of CIA trigger man. Royal was tied in with all this somehow, politically. He was a big anticommunist, I guess. He seemed to be a link between Marcello and the CIA, anyway. I thought about all this a few minutes ago, when you said something about Royal being involved in a plot to kill Robert Kennedy.”

“Did Royal talk about Kennedy on that trip?”

Dad sighs, then answers in a reluctant voice. “Not Bobby. But Jack … yes. When the CIA guy and Royal were the drunkest—when we were finally headed back to the marina—they started talking about Dallas. That’s all the CIA guy called it:
Dallas
. But it was the way he said it that chilled me. Like he’d been there. He was furious at whoever had planned the operation, and kept saying how unprofessional it was. Now and then he’d cuss up a storm in French. When I tried to move away from them, Devereux cornered me in the bow and started trying to involve me in a personal injury lawsuit he had going.”

Dad laughs bitterly, and the result is like a painful cough. “That voyage turned into a damned nightmare. By the time we got back to Biloxi, the CIA guy was ready to fight somebody—anybody. Brody apologized and asked whether Leland or I could sedate him. He was serious. But we didn’t have any drugs with us. We got the hell off that boat as fast as we could and took off.”

“Why would Dr. Robb go into business with Royal after that?”

“Lee was already partners with Brody by that time. I think the next day he told himself he’d imagined most of what we’d heard. But I’d recognized the edge in that guy’s voice, from Korea. I’d run across a few intelligence types over there, guys nobody wanted to mess with. There’s a dark undercurrent to American power, Penn, and Royal and his friend were part of that. And since we’re showing each other old snapshots … let me show you one.”

He turns and reaches back into the bookshelf behind him and pulls out a worn copy of
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son,
by William Alexander Percy, the Mississippi soldier and poet who raised his second cousin Walker Percy. Fanning the pages, Dad pulls out a faded color photo and slides it slowly across his desk.

“I only have this because Percy’s book was in my office the year of the fire,” he says with ineffable grief. We almost never speak of the event that destroyed the priceless library my father spent most of his life amassing, or the human cost that dwarfed the loss of those treasured books. Yet on this night, when Ray Presley’s name has already been spoken, it seems more than apropos.

Examining the picture, I see a little boy who looks like me standing beside a seesaw on the now-vanished playground of St. Stephen’s grade school. Back then St. Stephen’s was still an Episcopal school, and our classes were held in an antebellum mansion downtown.

“I remember this picture,” I tell him. “I was in first grade. I thought you used it as a bookmark.”

“I did,” Dad says, his eyes hard. “For a specific reason. One week after that Gulf fishing trip, Ray Presley visited my office. He told me that Carlos Marcello had heard Brody’s CIA guest had gotten drunk and said a little too much. Marcello wanted me to know the guy was a nut job, and that nothing he said should be believed.”

“If that was true, why would Marcello bother sending Ray to tell you that?”

Dad nods slowly. “Exactly. And here’s the thing: Ray was close to Jim Garrison’s investigation of the JFK assassination in New Orleans. He said witnesses were vanishing, and some had already been murdered. Making yourself a potential witness in the investigation of the JFK assassination was the equivalent of suicide. Ray was telling me this as a favor, believe it nor not. Then he gave me that picture of you. He apologized, and he swore he hadn’t taken it himself, but the implication was clear.”

“I’ll bet Ray shot this himself.”

“I imagine so. And now you know why, when Leland Robb came to me in 1969, I didn’t want to hear his story. They’d already let me know what crossing Brody Royal or Carlos Marcello would cost me. You.”

Me?
Only a few hours ago, Henry Sexton suggested as much—though he figured it was the Double Eagles who’d threatened my life. The truth is even more disturbing. Without knowing it, I once functioned as a hostage to the Mafia, not the Ku Klux Klan, and to prevent my father from speaking out, not about the atrocities of Brody Royal but the drunken boasts of a CIA operative.

“Is there a particular reason you kept this picture in Will Percy’s book?”

Dad looks away, his jaw tight. “Perhaps. But that’s a conversation for another night.”

“So that fishing boat picture with Royal … it’s just a fluke?”

“Essentially, yes. I never had any kind of relationship with Brody Royal. If there was justice in the world, that bastard would be dying of ALS, instead of the sweet young mother I diagnosed three months ago. But that kind of justice is a child’s dream. The evil prosper, and the innocent pay the bills for them. I’ve seen it all my life, and so have you.”

“Why haven’t you told Henry Sexton any of this?”

Dad holds up both hands, as if raising an invisible wall between us once more. “I have my reasons, and I’ve said my piece. I want you to keep all this between us, Penn. I admire what Henry’s done these past years, but I’m afraid that if he continues, he’ll end up like Glenn Morehouse. I worry about you, too,” he says, his voice thickening. “Don’t start poking into the Double Eagles or Brody Royal. That’s not your war.”

Unreasonably upset, I find myself on my feet. “So that’s it? This is your cross to bear alone?”

“I’m afraid it is. I’ve got a path to walk, and there’s no turning off it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why won’t you let me walk it with you?”

“Will you be in court tomorrow if they arrest me?”

“You know I will,” I say grudgingly.

He turns up his palms. “Then I won’t be alone, will I?”

“You’re not the only one who’s going to pay for this martyr act! Annie’s scared out of her wits, and God only knows what this is doing to Mom.”

He nods, his lips tight. “I realize the next few days may be tough. But I’ve given this a lot of thought. If the state chooses to jail me for my silence, then so be it.”

I pace away from his desk, then back, trying to put my incredulity into words. “How long can you survive in jail? A week? A month?”

Dad looks to his right, where a bust of Abraham Lincoln stands beside his window. “You know, few people remember that Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee command of a Union army when the war began. Lee wanted to hold the Union together. His family’s sympathies lay with the Union. But he was a Virginian, and in the end, he couldn’t take up arms against his home state. He tried to sit out the war, and they wouldn’t let him. He knew it would end in defeat for the South, but he fought to the limit of his abilities in spite of that. He fought with honor and brilliance, despite the wrongness of his cause.”

What is he trying to tell me?
“What’s your point, Dad?”

“Fate doesn’t let men choose their wars. Or even their battles, sometimes. But one resolute man can sometimes accomplish remarkable things against overwhelming odds.”

Why is he speaking in code? Did my father commit some great evil in the past to protect our family? Or keep silent about one? Or is he doing that
now
?

“Dad … this afternoon, when I asked you about the videotape missing from the camera Henry left at Viola’s place, your reaction made me think you might have it. Or know where it is.”

He studies me in silence for a few seconds. “I don’t think anybody’s going to find that tape. I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

Jesus.
“Has somebody threatened our family? Please tell me. Is that why you’re walking willingly into this buzz saw?”

He stares at me a long time before answering. “Not overtly, no.”

“But a threat is implicit in the situation. Look, if that’s it, we can handle this. We can protect ourselves against Royal and the Eagles. Don’t let any threat dictate your actions.”

He looks at me the way I’ve looked at people who have little understanding of the true workings of the justice system. “There are only two ways to protect yourself against people like that. One is to go into witness protection—permanently. Do you want to yank your mother out of her present life? Walk away from the mayor’s office and never come home again? Do you want to pull Annie out of school and Caitlin away from her newspaper? All to live in Kansas under false names?”

He’s right about this, at least. “Of course not. What’s the second way?”

After watching me in silence for several seconds, he rolls his chair back from the desk and gets slowly to his feet. “I’ve already forgotten what I was thinking.” He gives me a forced smile. “I’m exhausted, son. It’s time for bed.”

I feel a miserably familiar emotion, one that parents have felt since time immemorial when trying to help a stubborn child. The reverse, I find, is even more excruciating. Fighting my father all day has left me spent.