James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“About what?” he said.

“Everything.”

“Did you talk to the FBI yet?”

“I reported the homicide and the kidnapping. I didn’t mention our boy in isolation,” she said.

“You’re uncomfortable with that?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing, Hack. I don’t know what the plan is.”

“They’re going to call.”

“The abductors are?”

“You bet.”

“Then what?”

“We’ve got what they want. As long as Barnum stays in our hands, Anton Ling will be kept alive.”

“Hack, they wouldn’t have grabbed her if we hadn’t locked up Barnum.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To take a nap,” he said.

He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.

In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.

“Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.

“What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.

“You must have been having a terrible dream.”

“What’d I say?”

“Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”

“Pam, tell me what I said.”

“‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”

The telephone call came in one hour later.

From his office window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.

“You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.

“You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”

“By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”

“‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”

“Somebody snitched us off, huh?”

“Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”

“Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”

“Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”

“I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”

“We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”

The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.

Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.

“That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”

“You abducted Temple Dowling?”

“It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had to do was get a little girl to perch her twat on a bar stool, and Mr. Dowling was in the net. Want to talk to Ms. Ling?”

Hackberry could hear his own breath against the surface of the receiver. “Yes, I would,” he said.

“You’d like that?”

“If you want to negotiate, I need to know she’s there.”

“She was with Civil Air Transport, wasn’t she? What they called the Flying Tiger Airline?”

“If that’s what she told you.”

“She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t have to. She has a tattoo of the Flying Tiger emblem on her ass. Have you ever had an opportunity to see it-I mean her ass?”

Hackberry’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering, his breath coming hard in his throat. “No matter how this plays out, I’ll be seeing you down the track. You know that, don’t you?”

“You still think I sound like a peckerwood? I’d like to hear you say that one more time.”

Hackberry swallowed, a taste like diesel oil sliding down his throat.

“No?” the voice said. “We’ll give you a little time to think over your options. Noie Barnum belongs to us, Sheriff. Want to throw away Ms. Ling’s life for an empty-headed government pissant? Do the smart thing.”

“Why does he belong to you?”

“Mr. Dowling cost my employer a great deal of money. Barnum is the payback. Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a package. Check it out and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’m gonna take personal care of Ms. Ling. Don’t worry, I won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise.”

The line went dead.

Anton Ling’s captors had placed her in a subterranean room that was cool and damp and smelled of lichen and the river stones out of which it was made. Three ground-level barred windows that resembled slits in a machine-gun bunker gave onto a scene that seemed out of place and time: a sunrise that had the bluish-red color of a bruise, a meandering milky-brown river from which the fields had been irrigated an emerald green, livestock that could have been water buffalo grazing in riparian grasses. But the people tending animals or working in the fields were not Indo-Chinese peasants; they were Mexicans who had probably eaten breakfast in the dark and gone to work with the singleness of purpose that characterized all workers whose aspirations consisted of little more than getting through the day and returning home in the evening without involving themselves in the political considerations of those who owned the land.

The floor was concrete, once covered with a carpet that had molded into a mat of black thread. Against one wall was a wooden bed with a tick mattress on it, and a toilet in the corner with a partition that partially shielded it from view. The bars in the door were sheathed in flaking orange rust, and the stones in the wall had turned black and oily with the seepage of groundwater. Someone had scratched a Christian cross on one stone; on another was a woman’s name; on another were the words Ayudame, Dios.