“Yep, I’m plumb wore out. You didn’t happen to bring any sandwiches or coffee, did you?”
Andre stared at Hackberry in disbelief.
“You’re a mighty nice fellow,” Hackberry said. “But let’s face it, you definitely have a strange side to you. You were a voodoo priest?”
“Why do you bring up the subject of voodoo at this particular time?”
“I have to read up on it. From time to time I develop an abnormal bent myself. We might make a good team.”
RUBY DANSEN COULD not untangle her thoughts as she walked up the road in the shade of the poplar trees to the building owned by Arnold Beckman. She was too tired, too hungry, and too forlorn to think in a rational way. Besides, what good did it do? She had learned long ago that orderly procedure and the world of courts and legality and collective reasoning, if there was ever such a thing, had little meaning when it came to the application of justice. The courts were the sanctuary of the rich and the bane of the poor. The radicals sometimes won in the streets but never in the courts. Patience was an illusion, faith in the process the equivalent of a Chinese opium pipe.
She had been to the sheriff’s office and the city police department. At best, they were no help. At worst, they were in the employ of Arnold Beckman. Her son had been abducted from a public clinic, in front of witnesses, and had disappeared into a black hole. No one knew where he was, and no one cared. She stepped out of the shade into the sunlight, her eyes red, her skin chafed by the wind and dry as paper, her chest constricted as though her breath had been vacuumed from her lungs. She was glad she didn’t have a pistol in her purse, because there was a very good chance she would use it.
She entered the breezeway. The doors to all the offices were locked. At the head of the stairway was a heavy door with a brass knocker. She mounted the steps and lifted the knocker and beat it as hard as she could against the steel plate. Maggie Bassett opened the door, her mouth swollen, dried blood on one nostril. “Here to attack me again?” she said.
“Where is he?”
Maggie turned her head, her hand still on the door. “Arnold, I think Miss Dansen wants to speak with you.”
Ruby brushed past her. Then something happened that Ruby wasn’t expecting: Maggie’s fingers fumbled at her wrist. “Be careful, girl,” Maggie whispered.
“Say that again?”
“Nothing,” Maggie said, her face pointed down.
Ruby walked into the living room, the rug deep under her shoes. Through a half-opened door, she saw a man rising from a floor-level bathtub, working a robe over his shoulders. His body was almost hairless and striped with scars that could have been inflicted with a lash or a knife or both; his thighs were thick and shaped like a satyr’s. He closed his robe and tied a laminated golden cord snugly around his hips. “You’re who?” he said.
“Ishmael Holland’s mother. What have you done with him?”
“Nothing. I offered him a job.”
“You’re well known to us. You’re a liar and a union buster and a tool of the warmongers.”
“Really, now? Who is ‘us’?”
“The Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.”
“Are the Molly Maguires in there?”
“You’d better wipe that smirk off your face.”
“You would rather Captain Holland not work for me because I’m a capitalistic warmonger? I fought against the forces of Kaiser Bill, just like your son, even though I’m Austrian by birth. How many profiteers went up the slopes at Gallipoli, madam? How many were with Lawrence in the Arabian Desert?”
“You tell me where my son is, or I’m going to do something extreme.”
“No, what you will do is turn your twat around and take it out of here.”
“I’ve checked you out, Buster Brown. You’re a fraud. You got your scars in a Malaysian prison. You were a pimp.”
Maggie looked at Beckman. “What’s she saying?”
“I have no idea. Ask her,” he replied.
“Where did you get your information, Ruby?” Maggie said. “Arnold has been in several wars.”
“So have carrion birds,” Ruby said.
“Arnold, you were at Flanders fields. Tell her.”