James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Grammar was never my strong suit.”

“Literary terms have nothing to do with grammar,” Jack said. “If you’re going to speak your native language, why don’t you invest some time in the public library? It’s free. In the meantime, don’t go around using terms you don’t know the meaning of.” Jack stuffed the keys to his Trans Am into the man’s pocket, on top of the bills. “Drive it to San Antone and park it at the airport. Wear gloves, but don’t wipe it down. Leave the keys on the dashboard and the parking stub in the ashtray.”

“Somebody will boost it.”

“Nobody slips one past you.”

“The guy who boosts it will get pinched, and the cops won’t know if he’s lying to them or not-about where he got it, I mean. You’re doing a mind-fuck on them?”

“Don’t use that kind of language in my presence,” Jack said.

“I’ll never figure you out, Preacher.”

“Get out of my sight.”

An hour later, he drove his new car to within one block of Sheriff Holland’s jail and, wearing a hat and round steel-rimmed sunglasses that were as black as welder’s goggles, went into a cafe and ordered a to-go box of scrambled eggs, ham, grits, and toast and a cup of scalding black coffee. He returned to his car and spread his food on the dashboard and ate with a plastic fork and spoon without seasoning of any kind or even seeming to taste it, as though consuming chaff swept up from a granary floor. His windows were down, and the air was cool and smelled of rain, and the storm clouds above the hills were so thick and swollen that he could not tell when the sun broke the horizon. In moments like these, Jack felt a strange sense of peace, as though the travels of the sun and moon had been set into abeyance, as though time had stopped and the denouement of his life, one that he secretly feared, had been postponed indefinitely.

Jack picked up his coffee. It was still so hot, the steam rose into his hat brim and scorched his forehead. But his gaze, which was fastened on the jail, never wavered, nor did his mouth twitch when he drank the cup to the bottom.

The electric light was burning in the sheriff’s office. When the front door opened, Jack saw the sheriff walk to the silver pole by the sidewalk and clip the American flag to the chain and raise it flapping in the wind. At the same moment, Jack’s cell phone vibrated on the seat. The call was from the morphine-addicted reference librarian in Houston.

“I may have found your Russian,” she said. “He owns a place down in Mexico, one with a helipad on it. It’s a horse breeding farm. A French magazine did an article on it about five years back.”

“Can you find out if he’s there?”

“I’ll work on it. I found three game farms he owns in Texas and a place in Phoenix. You want me to check them out, too?”

“No, concentrate on Mexico.”

“I found something else. Sholokoff’s name came up a couple of times with a guy by the name of Temple Dowling. You know him?”

“Dowling was running whores with Sholokoff.”

“I did a search on Dowling and found the name of a security service he uses. I hacked into it and discovered Dowling just went missing in Santa Fe. You think there’s a connection?”

Jack stared at the front of the jail and at the flag ballooning and popping against the charcoal-blue darkness of the sky. “You there, Preacher?” she asked.

“Yeah, Sholokoff’s people probably grabbed him. No one else would have motivation.”

“You doing all this to get the Chinese woman back?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because there’s this story I don’t believe. About these Thai prostitutes who were murdered. They had heroin balloons in their stomachs. Sholokoff was using them as hookers and mules at the same time. Some people say you did the hit. At some place called Chapala Crossing. But I never believed that.”

Jack could hear the wind blowing in the street, the traffic light at the intersection swinging on its support cables, the tin roof on a mechanic’s shed swelling against the joists.

“You’re serious about your work, but you’d never hurt a woman,” she said. “That’s what I told them. That’s right, isn’t it, Preacher?”

He closed the cell phone in his palm, his hand shaking, his throat as dry and thick as rust.

Krill had never given much thought to the mercenaries he had known. To him, they existed in a separate world, one in which men did not serve a cause or even fight out of necessity. They were simply uniformed employees without depth or ideology, with no desire to know either the enemies they were paid to kill or the civilians they were paid to defend or the countrymen like Krill they were paid to fight alongside.

When Krill thought about them at all, it was in terms of their physicality and their access to North American goods and to fine weapons of international manufacture. Mercenaries were almost always barbered and clean. When they sweated, they smelled of deodorant rather than the glands. They were inoculated against all the diseases of the third world. Their bodies were hard, their stomachs flat, their shoulders and arms of the kind that could carry ninety pounds of supplies and weapons and take the shock of a parachute opening, sometimes crashing through a jungle canopy in the dark, jolting inside their harnesses with enough force to break the back of a cow.

He mostly thought of them in terms of what they were not. They were not haunted by the specters that trailed behind Krill everywhere he went. They did not fear their sleep or need to drink themselves into a stupor when the light went out of the sky and the wind was filled with the sounds of people crying in a village while their huts burned and belts of cached ammunition began popping in the heat. The mercenaries opened their tinned food with a tiny can opener they called a P-38, their eyes fixed on the task with the quiet intensity of a watchmaker at his craft. The deeds they had just committed, no more than a kilometer away, had already disappeared from their lives. Why should it be otherwise? They were not moralists; they were advisers and oversight personnel and not makers of policy. They came and went, as shadows did. Empires fell apart and died and new nations were born. A footprint in a jungle was as transient as the life span of an insect. The porous stone altars of the Mayans still contained the blood of the innocents who had been sacrificed by pagan priests centuries ago. What were the lives of a few more Indians? Krill believed this was how the mercenaries thought when they thought at all. In truth, he had never really cared about these men one way or another. Not until now.

His cell had a domed ceiling and seemed to bloom with a cool, fecund odor that was like water in the bottom of a dark well or mouse droppings inside a cave that dripped with moisture. There was another odor, too, one that was like mushrooms someone had trodden upon in a forest that never saw sunlight. It was like the smell in the disinterred bodies of his children. It was an odor that only a grave produced.

Krill propped his arms against the bars on the door and watched the mercenary the others called Frank. “You took off your mask,” Krill said.

“We’re all family here,” Frank said.

“You’re a nice-looking guy, man. Why are you a hump for a man like the Russian?”

“Sometime we’ll have a beer and I’ll fill you in.”

“I don’t have illusions about my situation. But I think you do,” Krill said.

Frank grinned. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt scissored off just below the nipples and a pair of black cargo trousers with big snap pockets stitched on the thighs. He had the clean, chiseled features and freshly scrubbed look of a 1930s leading man. “Just out of curiosity, what were you doing with the zip?” he asked. “Don’t give me that seeking-forgiveness crap, either.”