Max Collins - Blood and Thunder

“Not that I know of.”

We were walking, again.

LeSage said, “He got fifteen senators to sign a document pledgin’ that no matter what Huey ever did, they’d never vote to impeach him; just enough votes-actually one extra-to block impeachment, no matter what the charges. He rewarded ’em with cushy jobs and patronage spoils. Like Huey says, he plays the legislature like a deck of cards.”

“You sound like you know Huey, personally.”

His laugh was barely perceptible. “Of course I do. I’m a lobbyist, Mr. Davis-I spend the majority of my time over at the capitol building, swimmin’ in that particular slough. I know Huey well. We get along just fine.” He grinned; so did the mustache. “You know where they say Huey used to hide that Round Robin document of his, for safe-keepin’?”

“Where?”

“In his girlfriend Alice Jean’s brassiere.”

Well, it wasn’t there now.

“What were the grounds of impeachment?” I asked.

“Huey tried to push through an exorbitant five-cents-a-barrel crude oil tax, in one of his ‘special sessions’ of the legislature. While obviously we didn’t get his behind tossed out of office, the fuss was enough to block the tax…for a while. Then-just last Christmas-he finally snuck it through.”

“That’s what got the Square Dealers so riled up, isn’t it?”

LeSage nodded; he gestured to the industrial landscape surrounding us. “Baton Rouge is a one-company town, Mr. Davis. We have thirty thousand inhabitants in our fair capital city-and some twenty-five thousand of them depend on Standard Oil’s payrolls. It’s not just our employees, you understand…it’s banks, retail businesses….”

“And, because of Huey’s tax, your company threatened to pull out of Baton Rouge.”

“Exactly.”

“Which led to armed insurrection in the streets of two American cities.” I shook my head. “Hard to picture, in this modern age.”

Now the cheery little man revealed a streak of cynicism.

“There’s nothing modern about the Huey Long approach, Mr. Davis,” he said. “It’s a technique that dates back to Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar. Tyrants are as old as civilization.”

“Doing something about tyrants goes way back, too.”

He stopped; frowned at me. “Doing something?…”

“For every Caesar, there’s a Brutus.”

His mouth twitched with irritation. “Mr. Davis, are you fishin’ for some provocative comment, to titillate your readers? Because I’m afraid I have to say, as a representative of Standard Oil, I would only deplore any extralegal tactics that might-”

“The only law in Louisiana, it seems to me, is Huey Long.”

Only the sounds of fluid pumping and metal wheels turning filled the silence. A whiff of sulfur drifted through; was a deal with the devil about to be struck?

“There are those,” he said, “who would agree with you.”

I shrugged with my eyes and mouth, and said, “And I would imagine your company would be favorably disposed toward a ‘repeal’ of that law.”

“Mr. Davis…”

“My name isn’t Davis.”

LeSage’s affability and confidence evaporated; he was standing out in the midst of this snarl of pipes and tanks and tubes, in a darkness broken only periodically by security lighting and billowing flames above, at a location in one of the most chaotic states of the union, in the presence of an individual who had misrepresented himself and was talking murder.

“I’m afraid I don’t under-”

“My name is Heller. Nate Heller. I’m a bodyguard for Huey Long.”

He began to back up, in more ways than one. “I never said a word against Huey! If anythin’, you were puttin’ words in my mouth!”

I caught him by the arm; he was trembling. For a lot of people in Louisiana, it seemed, fear was always nearby.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m no reporter, but I am from Chicago.”

I gave him the same spiel I’d given Hamilton, about meeting Huey in Chicago, and recently landing this job as one of Huey’s inside men, and so on.

He was getting my drift; and he was settling down. His expression was sly as he said, “You say you’re willin’ to do just about anything for money?”

“Now you got it.”

His eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. “How do I know you’re not an undercover agent for the Kingfish? He’s been known to do this very kinda thing….”

I gestured with open palms. “Hey, any meetings we have will be one-on-one-in locations like this one, that can’t be bugged with a dictagraph or whatever.”

He seemed to be considering that.

I shrugged one shoulder. “Try me out. You’re a lobbyist-one of the things you traffic in is information, right?”

He nodded slowly.

“Well, if there’s any information you need, just say the word. Or anything you need done. Anything.”

He said nothing.

“You’ll get value for your dollar,” I assured him.

He turned and, with no particular sense of urgency, headed back toward the administration building where my car awaited. I walked alongside him. Our shoes scuffed the cinders. For perhaps a minute he was silent, as if mulling over my proposition.

Then, suddenly, he stopped and faced me. “It’s an interestin’ offer, Mister…Heller was it?”

I nodded.

He nodded, too. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”

“Okay, but don’t ‘pass,’” I said. “Pass it along.”

He said nothing, studying me.

I continued: “If you, or your bosses, need anything done- anything -you can get in touch with me at the Heidelberg.”

“Really? Now that is convenient.”

“You mean, because that’s where the Kingfish stays, when he’s in town?”

The smile under the tiny mustache turned enigmatic. “No. Because that’s where I live, too…. Good evening, Mr. Davis, uh, Heller.”

He disappeared into the brick building and I returned to the Buick, wondering who had thrown who the curve.

The eighty-six paved miles of Air-Line Highway, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, would have been an arrow-straight ribbon of roadway but for a single curve that represented Huey punishing a stubborn, greedy landowner who wouldn’t accept the Kingfish’s generous price. The monotony was broken up, for this Northerner at least, by the variety of countryside-ghostly still bayous and luxuriantly overgrown swampland, predating civilization, were interspersed with old-fashioned sugar plantations and industrial sites that spoke of two very different eras of man’s intrusion, here.

Huey’s roads were concrete evidence of his good works for the Pelican State. According to Alice Jean, the Kingfish was responsible for two thousand miles of it, and that didn’t count another four thousand or so of asphalt and gravel. For all the talk of dictatorship I’d been hearing, there were plenty of dissenters delighted to live in the realm of the Kingfish, eager to brag about it to a wandering Yankee like me.

Like the gas-pump jockey who filled the Buick even as he extolled Huey’s roads and bridges and schools and hospitals. Or the busty redhead behind the counter of the roadside sandwich joint who wondered if they had free schoolbooks up North like they did in Loozyana, and in the Catholic schools, too!

Probably the biggest exponent of the Kingfish’s jovial dictatorship I encountered in the most unlikely place.

Actually, the place itself-the marble-colonnaded lobby of the sixteen-story Roosevelt Hotel, at Canal and Baronne in downtown New Orleans-wasn’t so unlikely. After all, Huey himself maintained a twelfth-floor suite here. But so did gangster “Dandy Phil” Kastel, the third of my trio of names culled from Huey’s “son-of-a-bitch book.”