James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Not really.”

“I’ll try again. On the bottom of it were the initials N.B. For ‘Noie Barnum.’ On the top was a K. The fed didn’t know what that meant. I told him it was K for ‘king.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, it must have rolled behind the door.’ So I went into the bedroom and found another one, except this one was wedged in the side of the dresser. That whole place was broom-sweep clean, Sheriff. The second checker, the one stuck in the dresser, wasn’t left there by mistake. When I showed the fed what I’d found, he looked pretty confused.”

“Noie Barnum isn’t a willing companion of Jack Collins?” Hackberry said.

“Or he’s covering his ass,” R.C. replied.

Or he has his own agenda, Hackberry thought. “You did a fine job, bud. Come on in,” he said.

Minutes later, he called both Maydeen and Pam into his office.

“Is this about my language?” Maydeen said. “If it is, I’m sor-”

“Forget your language. The feds have treated us like dipshits. Find out everything you can about Noie Barnum,” he said.

Krill squatted down on a bare piece of ground a few feet from the common grave where he had buried his three children. The grave was marked by a Styrofoam cross wrapped with a string of multicolored plastic flowers. He upended an unlabeled bottle of mescal and drank from it against the sunset, the light turning to fire inside the glass. A copy of the San Antonio Express-News was weighted down on the ground with rocks he had placed on each corner of the front page, the paper riffling with wind. Krill drank again from the bottle, then pressed a cork into the neck with his thumb and gazed at the sun descending into a red blaze behind the hills.

Negrito squatted next to him, his greasy leather hat flattening the hair on his forehead. “Don’t pay no attention to what’s in that newspaper,” he said.

“They’re gonna put it on us, hombre. It means trouble.”

“ That means trouble? What do you call killing a DEA agent?”

“He wasn’t an agent. He was an informant and a corrupt Mexican cop. Nobody cares what we did to him. Reverend Cody was a minister.”

“We didn’t do it to him, man.”

“But our prints are there, estupido.”

“That ain’t what’s bothering you, Krill. It’s something else, ain’t it?”

“He baptized my children. Nobody else would do that. Not even La Magdalena. To treat him with disrespect now is to treat my children with disrespect.”

“That don’t make sense.”

“Where’s your brain? He had the power to set my children free from limbo. Should I tell them I care nothing for the man who did this for them? Can’t you think? What is wrong with you?”

“You are making me confused. It makes my head hurt.”

“Because you are stupid and self-centered. Go get the others and meet me at the car.”

“Where are we going?”

“To get the men who did this to the minister.”

“No, no, this is a bad idea. Listen to me, Krill. I’m your friend, the only one you got.”

“Then follow me or go into the desert. Or to your whores in Durango.”

“You’re going after Noie Barnum. Some of the others might think you’re gonna sell him and maybe forget to share the money.”

Krill stood up to his full height and pulled Negrito’s hat off his head. Then he slapped him with it, hard, the leather chin cord biting into the scalp. He waited a few seconds and hit him again. “We’re going after the Russian. He should have been killed a long time ago. Don’t ever accuse me of treachery again.”

“How you know he did it?” Negrito asked, his eyes watering, his nostrils widening as he ate his pain and humiliation at being whipped by Krill.

“Because he hates God, stupid one.”

“I hear this from the killer of a Jesuit priest?”

“They told us he and the others were Communists. There were five of them. I shot one, and the others shot the rest. It was in a garden outside the house where they lived. We killed the housekeeper, too. I dream of them often.”

“Everybody dies. Why feel guilt over what has to happen to all of us?”

“You say these things because you are incapable of thought. So I don’t hold your words or deeds against you.”

“You hit me, jefe. You would not do that to an animal, but you would do it to me? You hurt me deep inside.”

“I’m sorry. You are a handicapped man, and I must treat you as such.”

“I do not like what is happening here. All this makes my head throb, like I have a great sickness inside it. Why do you make me feel like this, jefe?”

“It is not me. You are one of the benighted, Negrito. Your problems are in your confused blood and your tangled thoughts. For that reason I must be kind to you.”

“I will forget you said that to me, ’cause you are a mestizo, just like me. I say we return to Durango. I say we get drunk and bathe in puta and be the friends we used to be.”

“Then you must go and pursue your lower nature.”

“No, I’ll never leave you, man,” Negrito said. “What does ‘benighted’ mean?”

Krill gestured toward the hills in the west, where the sun had become a red melt below the horizon and the darkness was spreading up into the sky. “It means the dying of the light,” he said. “The benighted place is out there where the coyotes and carrion birds and Gila monsters live and the spirits wander without hope of ever seeing the light.”

At ten the next morning Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb of Hackberry’s office. She had a yellow legal pad in her hand. “This is what we’ve found out about Noie Barnum so far,” she said. “There’re a couple of holes in it. You want to hear it now or wait till Maydeen gets off the phone?”

“Who’s she talking to?”

“The state attorney’s office in Alabama.”

“Sit down,” Hackberry said.

“Barnum grew up in a small town on the Tennessee line and was an honor student in high school. His father died when he was three, and his mother worked at a hardware store and raised him and his half sister by herself. He was never an athlete or a class officer or a joiner of any kind. He won a scholarship to MIT and went to work for the government when he graduated. As far as anybody knew, he was always religious. When it came to girls and social activities, he was as plain as white bread and just about as forgettable. The exception came when he was seventeen. A three-year-old boy wandered away from the neighborhood, and the whole town organized search parties and went looking for him. Barnum found him in a well. He crawled in after him and got bitten in the face by a copperhead but carried the kid on his back four miles to a highway. By all odds, he should have died.”

“What happened to the mother and the half sister?”

“The mother passed away while Barnum was at MIT. The half sister moved to New York and went to work for a catering service. Some stories came back about her, but no one is sure of the truth. She wasn’t looked upon favorably in her hometown. She had been arrested in high school for possession of marijuana and was believed to sleep around. This is where it becomes cloudy.”

“What does?”

“She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”

When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.

“What is it?” Hackberry said.

“The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”