James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hackberry said.

Dowling lifted his glass and drank and set the glass down again, his words steadying in his throat. “Years ago, when you were going across the border, my father had you surveilled and photographed. And buddy, did he get you photographed. Through windows and doorways, in every position and compromising moment a man and woman can put themselves in. You used three cathouses and three cathouses only. Am I right?”

“I don’t know. I had blackouts back then.”

“Trust me, if my father said you did, you did. Nobody in the history of the planet was better at cooking up a witches’ brew to destroy people than he was. He drove my mother mad and ruined his enemies financially and politically. In your case, he planned to blackmail you after you went to Congress. Except you married the union lady and got reborn with the proletariat and left the campaign.”

“Why give me the photos?”

“I wanted to show you we’re on the same side.”

“We’re not.”

Dowling drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, his cheeks blooming as though his soul had taken on new life. “Look, I don’t have illusions about your feelings toward me. You think I’m a degenerate, and maybe I am. But I’m going to do something for you that nobody else can. You’ve made statements to people about your trips to Mexican whorehouses and the possibility that you screwed some underage girls. You were a whoremonger, all right, but not with young girls. If you had been, the photos would be in that file.” Dowling pushed the folder toward Hackberry. “They’re yours,” he said.

“What about the negatives?”

“They’re in there.”

“And how about other prints?”

“There aren’t any. I don’t have any reason to lie. You may not like me, but I’m not my father.”

“No, you’re not,” Hackberry said ambiguously.

“There’s a barbecue grill on the patio out back. A little charcoal lighter and one match, and you can feed your mistakes to the flames.”

“I tell you what,” Hackberry said, sliding the folder back toward Dowling. “I’ll provide you several phone numbers. You can give these photos to the San Antonio newspapers and my political opponents or ship them off to Screw magazine. Or you can thumbtack them to corkboards in Laundromats around town or glue them on the walls of washrooms and the sides of trucks. The Internet is another possibility.”

“I thought I was doing the decent thing. I thought I’d put my own indiscretions in Mexico behind us. I thought you might hold me in a little higher regard.”

“You profit off of war and people’s misery, Mr. Dowling. My opinion about you has no weight in the matter. You’re a maker of orphans and widows, just as your father was. You send others to fight wars that you yourselves will never serve in. Like a slug, your kind stays under a log, white and corpulent, and fears the sunlight and the cawing of jays. You have many peers, so don’t take my comments on too personal a basis.”

Dowling sat down in a straight-back chair, his hands cupped like dough balls. He was breathing through his mouth, looking upward, as though all the blood had drained out of his head. “You’re a cruel, unforgiving man,” he said.

“No, just a guy who has a long memory and doesn’t allow himself to get bit by the same snake twice.”

Pam Tibbs opened the front door without knocking and leaned inside. “Better come out here, Hack,” she said. “R.C. talked to a caddie who saw a guy prowling around Mr. Dowling’s SUV. R.C. is getting under it now.”

The rain had stopped and the sky had started to clear and water was dripping off the fronds of the banana plants and palm trees and the roof of the shed on the driving range as they walked to the parking lot, Dowling’s security men trailing behind them. In the waning of the sunset, they saw R.C. emerge from under the SUV, his uniform streaked with mud, one hand holding a serrated steel object. “It’s either Chicom or Russian-made,” he said. “The pin was wired to the wheel. One revolution would have pulled the pin and released the spoon.”

“Where was it?” Dowling asked.

“This one was under the front seat,” R.C. said.

“This one?” Dowling repeated.

“I thought I saw something back by the gas tank. I’ll get a better light and check,” R.C. said.

It took only two hours of worry and fear and the darker processes of the imagination to put Temple Dowling at Hackberry’s front door.

“It’s a little late,” Hackberry said, a book in his hand.

“I’ll tell you what I know, and you can do what you please with it. But you will not accuse me of being a murderer again.”

“I didn’t say that. I said you profited from it.”

“Same thing.”

“Do you want to come in or get off my property?”

Dowling sat in a chair by the front wall, away from the window, hands on the armrests like a man awaiting electrocution. He had showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, but his face looked parboiled, his jaw disjointed, as though his mouth could not form the words he had to say. “I was a business partner with Josef Sholokoff,” he said.

“In making and vending porn?”

“In entertainment. I didn’t ask for details. It’s a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry.”

“What is?”

“Pornography. It’s big business.”

“You just said… Never mind. What about weapons?”

“I’m a defense contractor, but no, I don’t work with Sholokoff. He does things off the computer with agencies that want anonymity. He’s not the only one.”

“Why does Sholokoff have it in for you?”

“He stiffed me on a deal, and I initiated an IRS investigation into his taxes. That’s why he wants to get his hands on Noie Barnum. Josef will turn him over to Al Qaeda.”

“What does he have to gain?”

“I hired Barnum. I thought he was a brilliant young engineer with a great future in weapons design. If Josef can compromise our drone program, I’ll never get a defense contract again.”

“You think Barnum would give military secrets to Islamic terrorists?”

“Of course. He’s a pacifist and a flake or a bleeding heart, I don’t know which. You don’t think his kind want to flush this country down the drain? They want to feel good about themselves at somebody else’s expense. What do you know about Barnum, anyway?”

Hackberry was sitting on the couch, half of his face lit by the reading lamp. He kept his expression blank, his eyes empty. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“No, you’re hiding something,” Dowling said.

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure.” Dowling leaned forward. “You set me up.”

“In what way?”

“At the country club. My father always said your best pitch was a slider. Son of a bitch. You took me good, didn’t you?”

Hackberry shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Mr. Dowling.”

“The grenade under my vehicle, the laser dot on my clothes. I must be the dumbest white person I ever met.” Dowling waited. “You just gonna sit there and not say anything?”

Through the front window, Hackberry could see the hills and the stars and the arid coarseness of the land and the wispy intangibility of the trees in the arroyos and the glow of the town in the clouds. For what purpose had a divine hand or the long evolutionary patterns of ancient seas and volcanic eruption and the gradual wearing away of sedimentary rock created this strange and special place on the earth? Was it meant to be a magical playground for nomadic Indians who camped on its streams and viewed its buttes and mesas as altars on which they stood and stared at the western sun until they were almost blind? Or a blood-soaked expanse where colonials and their descendants had slain one another for four hundred years, where narco-armies waited on the other side of the Rio Grande, armed with weapons shipped from the United States, the same country that provided the market for the weed and coke and skag that went north on a daily basis? As Hackberry stared out the window, he thought he heard the rattle of distant machine-gun fire, a tank with a busted tread trying to dislodge itself from a ditch, the boiling sound napalm made when it danced across a snowfield. What did soldiers call it now? Snake and nape? What was the language of the killing fields today?