House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“I got enough on my mind. If you please, don’t add to my grief.”

“How is it that I am adding to your grief?”

Hackberry closed his eyes and opened them again, as though falling down an elevator shaft.

They walked down a carpeted, unlit corridor and went up a half flight of stairs to what was probably the first floor. Through an open door, Hackberry could see a room in which the rug had been rolled back and a trapdoor opened to a lower level, and he realized it was the same room he had glimpsed earlier, the one where a pale square of light had radiated from the floor. His pistol was holstered, the twine-wrapped, bundled slicker hanging from his left hand. He turned and touched his finger to his lips and let Andre descend the stairs first while he kept his eyes on the door that faced the front of the building. The trapdoor and the springs and the steps screeched with Andre’s weight.

The man who came through the door may or may not have heard the noise. He held a cut-down pump shotgun with a stock that had been wood-rasped down to

a pistol grip. His face was as blank as a pie pan, his eyes cavernous. Hackberry drew the Peacemaker and cocked the hammer in the same motion and fired only one round. The room was small, and the sound of the discharge left his right ear ringing. The round tore through the man’s shoulder and splattered the doorjamb. He crumpled to his knees, his hand pressed to his wound, his fingers glistening. Hackberry went down the steps into a tunnel, the smell rising up like the odor of a storm sewer. He picked up the trapdoor with both hands and pushed it up until the springs carried it the rest of the way, slamming it shut.

Two men came around a bend in the tunnel, their boots and trouser cuffs dark with water. One of them carried a baseball bat. The other man looked like a Mexican or an Indian and wore black braids and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt with a shoulder holster strapped across it, the butt of a German machine pistol sticking out of the holster.

“We just want to talk,” the white man said.

The man in braids was more ambitious. His teeth were white against his dark skin, his face lit with the same malevolence Hackberry had seen in the faces of the Mexican soldiers he had shot behind Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Mexico. The man had just touched the grips of the machine pistol when Hackberry hit him with the butt of the Peacemaker, then clubbed him again and kicked his head into the wall.

Andre ripped the bat away from the white man and slung it down the tunnel, then pinned him against the wall by the throat. “Where is Mr. Holland’s son?”

Spittle was draining off the man’s chin. He stabbed his finger at the air, toward the far end of the tunnel. Andre grabbed him by the shirt and coat and swung him in a circle, as he would a sack of feed, then slammed him into the wall. “Do not move. Do not talk. Do not think until I come back and give you permission.”

“He’s unconscious,” Hackberry said.

“Sometimes they are bluffing. I will make sure.”

“He’s done. Now slow your motor down,” Hackberry said, pulling the machine pistol from the shoulder holster of the man with braids.

Hackberry looked down the tunnel and saw a pool of water, one that was dull green, the light from an adjacent room reflecting on its surface. There was a bend in the tunnel, and he could not see inside the room. He handed the machine pistol to Andre. “Don’t argue with me. If we get into serious trouble, push this little button and pull the trigger. It’ll do the rest.”

WHAT ARE THE limits of courage? Ishmael wondered. Certainly they existed. There were moments and situations for which no one had a cure. On a battlefield, a soldier died in hot blood. He also died with his comrades at his side, in Ishmael’s case with the men of color he had come to love. To have to choose between honor and duty and irreparable suffering at the hands of a sadist was another matter.

Could he do it? He would have traded the worst artillery barrage the Germans could throw for the situation he was now in, his wrists manacled to his sides, sitting on his buttocks, the walls of the room sweating with humidity, Beckman squatting next to him in alpine climbing boots, pressing the tip of a screwdriver just below Ishmael’s right eye.

“That’s a good boy,” Beckman whispered. “Daddy will be here in a minute. Who knows? By the end of the evening, you might be back in the arms of Her Majesty Maggie Bassett. Have you ever tried to count up the many ways she’s fucked you?”

There was a sound like someone stepping in a pool of water down the tunnel. Beckman stopped talking and stared at the door, listening. He leaned close to Ishmael’s ear, his breath like a line of wet ants crawling across Ishmael’s skin. “Not a peep, sweet boy.”

Beckman again pressed the tip of the screwdriver just below Ishmael’s eye. He won’t do it, Ishmael thought. There were some things no man would do. Then he remembered what he had seen Legionnaires do when they captured a German carrying a sawtooth bayonet. Beckman began to breathe more heavily, working his knee into Ishmael’s ribs, knotting Ishmael’s hair in his fingers for better purchase.

Ishmael now had no doubt Beckman was going to blind him. And he would enjoy every second of it, in spite of the price he might pay.

Ishmael squeezed both eyes shut, his vulnerable eye watering uncontrollably. “Don’t come in, Big Bud!” he shouted.

Then he tried to bury his head between his knees while Beckman hit him again and again in the head with the butt of the screwdriver, his face twisted like an angry child’s.

HACKBERRY STEPPED THROUGH the doorway, the Peacemaker held at an upward angle. Beckman was standing above Ishmael, a small nickel-plated revolver pointed into the top of his skull. “Do you believe I will shoot your son, Mr. Holland?”

“Yes, sir, I truly do.”

“Your weapons. First you, then the nigger.”

Hackberry leaned down and laid his Peacemaker on the floor. Andre set the machine pistol next to it. Beckman screwed the small revolver into Ishmael’s neck.

“What did you do to my son?” Hackberry asked.

“Nothing. I took care of him. Which you didn’t.” Beckman’s gaze wandered to the bundle hanging from Hackberry’s left hand. “Did you bring me something?”

“I guess that’s the way it worked out.” Hackberry looked at Jeff, on the floor, his face turned toward the wall. “What’s wrong with him?”