"All along, I've been telling those
idiot Ribbonmen that I didn't want to get involved in their queer
politics," Cleburne said, sotto voce. "And
here I am mixed up in them anyway, thanks to you."
"It wasn't my idea, I assure you."
Stewart pitched his voice equally low. "What do you think? A successful
reconnaissance? I count two asleep on the floor in the main room, and the door
at back is definitely not bolted."
"Two? I only saw one."
"The other's under a table near the
back," Stewart said. "That, or someone left a pair of boots under the
table, toes-up."
"In we go, then."
Stewart drew the knife Cleburne had given him
when they’d met shortly after sun-up. I hope the knife’s enough,
he thought. I don't want to have to use the
revolver. Have a hard time explaining that to the Canadians.
He'd had a hard enough time explaining
himself to Magruder last night. The general was most reluctant to extend
Stewart's twenty-four hours, and at first not even Stewart's exaggerated
promise that he was on the verge of solving Patton's disappearance had been
enough to persuade. Technically, Magruder hadn't in fact given Stewart
permission to keep looking. He simply hadn't forbidden it, promising instead to
discuss the matter further "later," which Stewart had decided to
interpret as "after you've found out where Patton's gone."
The two men moved cautiously around the
building again to the bar's rear entrance. The Harp was a derelict,
one-and-a-half storey wooden structure that looked as though it had gone to
sleep standing up. The best that could be said for it was that there were
buildings on its block in worse shape. With the blade of his knife, Stewart
reached into the crack between door and frame, and lifted the latch. Cleburne
nudged the door and it opened, its hinges protesting drowsily. “Wish we’d
brought some oil,” Cleburne muttered. Then he stepped through into the
sour-smelling gloom. Stewart followed, into the familiar barracks stink of
unwashed men and bad beer.
There were, indeed, two men passed out on the
floor of the main room, their ragged snoring suggesting a one-armed drummer
trying to muster the roll. Stewart was alarmed, once his eyes had accustomed
themselves to the poor light, to see that both were huge, with forearms bigger
around than Pauline’s waist. Please Lord let them sleep,
he prayed. Cleburne nodded in the direction of a rickety staircase; Stewart
tip-toed to it and began, carefully, to climb.
He was on the penultimate step when the wood
groaned out a warning that could probably be heard from the middle of Lake
Ponchartrain. Stewart, one foot at the top stairs and the other in mid-air,
froze; looking over his shoulder he saw Cleburne, wincing, motionless halfway
up. From under his table one of the unconscious giants stirred, mumbling
blasphemies. Stewart waited, realized that he’d stopped breathing and carefully,
silently drew air into his lungs. At the same moment the snoring resumed
downstairs. With an inward prayer of thanks, Stewart set his foot down on the
top step and waited while Cleburne stepped over the treacherous step and joined
him.
“Do you think our boy’s awake?” Cleburne
asked in a barely audible rumble.
Stewart made no reply, shrugging his
shoulders instead. I hope not, he thought. But
there isn’t anything I can do to put him back to sleep if he is awake, so let’s
just get on with it. He crept along the short landing, toward the
door at its end. Whatever else was behind that door, so was his objective.
“Finn, is that you?” a wracked and wretched
voice croaked from the other side of the door. “God damn it, man, I told you
not to be bothering me.”
Cleburne looked at Stewart and raised his
eyebrows. “Sorry,” he said—whether it was to him or to the man on the other
side of the door, Stewart couldn’t tell—and then drove his shoulder into the
thin, old wood.
The splintering of the door wasn’t quite loud
enough to drown out the blasphemies shouted by the man in the bed just beyond
the doorway. Stewart had a hurried impression of vast, dusty space extending
behind the crude bed-chamber; a naked, burly man rolling across the bed to a
low table on which rested a pepper-box pistol; and one of Cleburne’s pistols
exploding like the crack of judgment day. Then the man was sprawling across the
floor, his curses uninterrupted but now coming in a higher pitch. Stewart saw
blood on the table and floor. “Best draw yours, son,” Cleburne shouted over his
shoulder, shifting the loaded pistol to his right hand. “No time for subtlety
now.” Cleburne reached the table as the wounded man got up; a single swipe with
the empty pistol cracked his skull and he collapsed to the floor like a sack of
potatoes. Cleburne picked up the fallen pepperbox and tucked it into the
waistband of his trousers, then began loading his pistol.
Shouts from downstairs confirmed to Stewart
that the giants were unconscious no longer. “Did you have to?” he asked.
“Did you want to be shot?” Cleburne didn’t
wait for a reply. “I’d love to have been able to take him quietly, Captain. The
fact is, that option wasn’t ours once we woke him.”
Stewart cocked his revolver. “We’ll probably
have to kill those two, or at least seriously wound them,” he said. “What kind
of trouble will that put us into?”
"You want my honest opinion?"
Cleburne finished loading the pistol, capped and cocked it. "Right now I
don't care a damn either way."
"A good point." Stewart heard the
rumble of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. "We should take cover
behind some of those boxes back there." He tucked his revolver into the
waist-band of his trousers and gripped O'Driscoll under the unconscious man's
arms.
"Leave him," Cleburne said,
dropping down behind a crate toward the far end of the attic. "There isn't
time. Aim well and we won't have to worry about them getting O'Driscoll."
Stewart dropped O'Driscoll and moved to a
position that would allow him to provide covering fire for Cleburne, should
that prove necessary. He hoped it wouldn't. They were nearly ten yards from
O'Driscoll's bed, Stewart guessed, easing a finger into the trigger-guard. If
he and Cleburne were lucky enough to be facing men armed with smoothbore
pistols like O'Driscoll's pepper-box, they'd have a significant accuracy
advantage.
The giants from downstairs were brawlers, not
fighters. They didn't bother checking to see what might await them, but simply
burst through the shattered doorway, weapons drawn. One man carried a modern
revolver, to Stewart's disgust. The other wielded a blade that was big enough
to be a cutlass.
The sight of the revolver was apparently
enough for Cleburne, who fired as soon as both men had entered the room. The
man with the revolver straightened up, grunting like a pole-axed bullock.
Prompted by the deafening report, Stewart aimed at the other man's chest and
squeezed the trigger of his Colt.
It was the first time he'd fired a weapon
since Harper's Ferry, and the shock of the recoil and the sound of the powder
exploding plunged him, for a moment, into the strange, isolated universe of
battle. Deafened by the shot and blinded by smoke, he was alone and viscerally
aware of the vulnerability of the human body.
Then the smoke cleared.
"Jesus!" one of the giants shouted.
"Sweet Jesus!"
It was the man who'd been holding the
revolver. He wasn't any more; his right arm hung uselessly by his side, a red
stain growing around the shoulder.
Then the man's head snapped back and forth as
though he had been told he was dead and was acknowledging the truth of the
statement. At the same instant Stewart heard Cleburne's second shot. As the man
fell, Stewart realized that he'd seen a red spray burst from the back of the
brute's head as the ball hit him. Good shooting, he
thought.
"We've got maybe a couple of
minutes," Cleburne said; Stewart heard the Irishman push his crate out of
the way as he stood up. "We'd best be waking Mr. O'Driscoll." Stewart
got to his feet. He couldn't help staring at the bodies at the other end of the
room. Cleburne's victim sprawled in ungainly fashion, pillowed on an expanding,
bright-red pool. The hole in the man's face was obscenely fascinating; the ball
had gone in just under the left eye, making the dead man's visage look lop-sided.
Stewart's victim wasn't dead—not yet. He lay
on his side, curled up like a sleeping baby, hands clutched to his belly. An
eerie, low moan issued more or less constantly from his pursed lips. Stewart
realized with a cold, sinking feeling that he had never actually killed anyone
face-to-face before. In retrospect, the action at Harper’s Ferry didn't seem
like such a tremendous experience. He'd seen a few men shot, but only one at
close range—and he realized with some shame that he couldn't remember the man's
name now. Plus, he'd been unconscious for much of the aftermath of battle, when
his men would have been looking out for their dead and wounded. I
really haven't seen all that much, he decided. And
I'm sorry I had to see this.
"Come on, Stewart." Cleburne
grunted as he tugged O'Driscoll into a sitting position. "We don't have
time to admire our handiwork."
Stewart remembered Patton in the hands of men
like these, and forced himself back to the moment. A sputtering, followed by a
high-pitched whine, announced that O'Driscoll was conscious. Striding over to
where Cleburne knelt beside the bartender, Stewart pressed the barrel of his
revolver into the man's forehead.
"You have one minute to tell me what I
want to know, or you'll be joining your dead friends over there."
"I haven't done nothing,"
O'Driscoll complained. "You shot me."
"That was just to get your attention,
boyo." Cleburne smiled, showing his teeth.
"What did you do with the Confederate
officer?" Stewart pressed harder on the pistol. The sight on the end of
the barrel began to cut into O'Driscoll's flesh. "Tell me where he is and
you may live."
"I don't know what you're talking
about!"
Stewart slapped the end of the barrel against
the side of O'Driscoll's head. "I don't have time to waste on you,"
he said. "I know about the tall Yankee. If you don't tell me where he is,
I'll just have to waste some more of my time finding him. And you'll be dead,
O'Driscoll. What good will your Ribbonmen friends—your Garda
friends—be to you then?" He’d guessed at which society was involved, and
was gratified to see O’Driscoll’s eyes widen.
"They'll kill me if I tell you!"
"They won't have to know," Cleburne
said. "We don't care a good goddamn about the Garda,
O'Driscoll. We just want the Confederate for ourselves."
"Now talk," Stewart said.
"Before I lose my patience."
O'Driscoll's eyes narrowed; Stewart could see
the calculation happening behind them. "I been getting tired of New
Orleans anyway," he said. "Time to go to Mobile, I guess." If
they'll have you, thought Stewart. "The man's name is Brown. I
think he's in the Federal Army. He didn't tell me why he wanted the whore, and
I didn't ask. But the first time I was took to meet him, it was uptown, near
the fancy places in New Town."
"The U.S. legation is in one of the
houses in New Town," Cleburne said.
"How did they know to come to you for
help?" Stewart asked.
"Friends of mine," O'Driscoll said.
"You don't need to know any more than that, and you aren't going to learn
any more than that from me.”
Stewart cocked the pistol. “I think that I
am.”
O’Driscoll shook his head violently, and for
a second Stewart was afraid he’d accidentally pull the trigger. “If I don't get
out of town by nightfall, what I've said already will be enough to put me in
the water."
“One more name,” Stewart said. “If this Brown
person has the Confederate, then I’ll forget everything you’ve told me. If he
doesn’t, I’ll need to talk with your friends in the Garda.”
“I can’t”—O’Driscoll began, but when
Stewart pressed the revolver barrel hard against the man’s temple, O’Driscoll
sagged, then said, “Oh, hell. It’s not as if the man isn’t God’s own arsehole,
anyway. He never told me he was going to kill the girl.” He looked directly
into Stewart’s eyes. “You promise to let me go?” Stewart nodded. “Fine. His
name’s Boy McConnell. He works for a man named Macartey, a big wheel in the Garda
here. I don’t know anything more, I swear.”
"You say McConnell killed the
woman?" Stewart asked. "Or was it Brown?"
"I don't think it matters,"
Cleburne said. "We should probably all leave this place before someone
comes around to investigate those shots."
Stewart wanted to disagree, wanted to let
this piece of filth know what happened to the sort of coward who cut a woman
and watched her bleed before slitting her throat. But a voice in his head,
sounding oddly like his father's, reminded him that saving Patton and
protecting the expedition was more important. "Let's go, then," he
said, "before I do something I probably wouldn't regret a bit."
There was no one in the alley behind the
Harp, nor was there any traffic in the street. This was obviously the sort of
neighborhood where the occasional gunshot was just a part of the fabric of
daily life. "Do you think he's going to cause us any trouble?"
Stewart asked, jerking a thumb in the Harp's direction as Cleburne flicked the
reins to start the carriage in motion.
"My guess is he won't," Cleburne
said. "His first thought will be to get himself out of town before the Garda
hear that he's spilled his guts. We can be grateful that he's more afraid of
them than he is of us. We should move quickly, though. Just in case he doesn't
make it out of town as fast as he wants to."
No comments:
Post a Comment