wood, as wood was unlimbered, almost like the wood in a wooden horse four thousand years earlier. A segment of the deck slid open.
The opening of this wood yielded, however, no party of mad Itha can raiders, hell-bent on mayhem and city burning. Instead, un cranking as if from a long sleep, a more angular figure emerged, unsure, blinking, not especially confident but animated by a motivation no man could know.
He rose, replaced the wooden grating on the deck, and looked around.
Thebes dozed peacefully under the black night sky.
It was his home.
Home again, home again, home again. After all these years.
Gingerly, he slipped over the side and waded toward shore. He pulled himself from the current just south of the city dock. It all was so familiar and yet so distant, as if he were recalling not a reality but a dream.
He headed inland, toward the Big House. It was his house, after all.
It was Davis Trugood; he had a gun.
Sam was done. He had solved the mystery; he had gotten the information to Earl, at the expense of his dignity, considerably shredded when he had been kicked out of Austin by the Austin Vice Squad, once he had convinced them he meant no harm and was entirely innocent, at least until the girl began screaming, of the meaning of Treponema palhdum. It was all a mistake.
I have done what I could do, thought Sam. I have done all I have said I would, and if it helps or not, that is beyond my control. Earl even knew what Fort Dietrich was, and had explained it all to Sam, and now, at last, it made some sense.
But he could not rest yet.
He had one last call to make, and checked his wallet to find the card with Davis Trugood, Esq.'s law firm number on it. But he could not.
Who knew where it had gone? Sam lost things all the time. That was part of who he was.
But of course he recalled the august law firm's name, those hallowed syllables: Mosely, Vacannes &c Destin.
From his hotel room in Waco, where he had taken refuge after the embarrassment in Austin and the strident suggestion that he leave town and only return after the world ended or Texas declared its independence, whichever came first, he called long-distance information to get the number.
'Sir, I have no listing for that firm.'
Sam was taken aback.
Then he said, 'I may not have pronounced it correctly.' This always happened: Northern operators could not decipher the soup of what they thought was his corn-pone 'accent,' although his of course was the proper way of speaking and theirs the abomination. 'Mosely, that would be MOSE-ly, VAY-Cans and DES-tin. I can spell?'
'Sir, I have no listing like that. I don't have anything even close to it.'
'In the whole area?'
'Inallofchicagoland.' 'I see,' said Sam.
He hung up, most puzzled. His mind fulminated on this discovery. In a while he came up with something of a solution.
He had his notebook with him and quickly found the name of a federal prosecutor out of Little Rock who, if memory served, had logged much time in the parallel office in Cook County, that is, Chicago, Illinois.
Sam called, made swift contact with his old friend, and explained the peculiarity of the situation.
The man consulted his notebook and came up with a number. He told Sam to call in five minutes. Sam did, and soon got, 'Fifteenth Precinct, Detective Chicowitz.'
'Ah, Detective, believe Charlie Hayworth just called on my behalf.'
'Yes, sir. Mr. Vincent, that it?'
'Yes, sir.' 'So run it by me.' Sam explained. He gave all the relevant data, and the detective said he'd call back.
That call took seventeen minutes; that's how good this cop was.
'Well, sir, there isn't a law firm called Mosely, Vacannes and Destin.
Not in Chicago or in Evanston or Skokie or any of the outlying areas.
However, I did find a listing for Bonverite Brothers, a firm in Chicago.' 'Hmm,' said Sam. 'I don't follow. What does 'Bon?' ' 'You said your fellow's name was Trugood, right? And all this has to do with something way down in Mississippi, where it's still Frenchy and dark?'
'Yes.'
'Well, sir, the French for Trugood would be Bonverite. If you were a Cajun from down there, and you wanted to disguise your name but stay in contact with it, as many, many people changing names do, it's a pattern, then you'd come up with Trugood. See what I'm saying? That would be the closest thing in Chicago to Trugood.'
Sam was dazzled.
'Now I checked the reverse directory. Here are four numbers leased to Bonverite.'
He read them.
A litany of integers came back at Sam, woozily familiar.
'That's it!' Sam cried. 'Yes, that's it! That's the number I called!'
'Well, it's been disconnected. Just recently.'
'I see,' said Sam. 'What kind of firm is Bonverite?'
'It's an undertaking parlor. I checked with the boys. It's very prosperous. He has all the southside and uptown business. He buries a lot of people. He has a lot of money, does this Mr. Davis Bonverite.'
'I see. Is there anything else I should?'
'Yes, sir. He's probably the richest of them in Chicago. He's probably got more than a couple of million dollars. He's quite successful for one of them.'
'I don't?one of them?'
'Yes, sir. He's a Negro. Davis Bonverite runs his business at Cottage Grove and 139th on the South Side. Darktown. He's Chicago's richest colored man.'
Not much of Fish is left.
Fish has hung from the chains for five days. For those five days, with all his cunning in full force, Bigboy has worked him hard with the whip.
There's no space on the old man's skin that hasn't been shredded.
There isn't a nerve that hasn't been lashed raw. There's not a scab that hasn't tripled over, that is, scabbed, torn away, scabbed again, torn away again, and scabbed up again.
Fish hangs, his wrists broken, his hands dead crab claws, the weight of him fully on the shattered bones. His lips are cracked dry. He can't lick them because Bigboy has tied a bit between his teeth, jammed under the tongue, to prevent him from biting his tongue and drowning on his own blood to escape the pain. It's happened to Bigboy, but not recently, not since he got so smart.
Fish has tried to lose himself in the space of his own mind, to go there in madness and lose all contact with reality, and never come back. But he's too goddamned tough. He can't order himself to go mad, and his mind betrays him by refusing to break off with reality. It feels everything, it remembers everything.
'Fish, don't you die, goddamn you,' the bare-chested Bigboy whispers, breathing hard into his shredded ear from ever so close. 'You, me, we got business. You don't die till I say so. You don't die till you talk.
You think you're close? I can spin you out like this for days yet to come.'
Maybe so. Maybe not. Fish feels close to death. He knows his heart will give up of its own accord, strangled on the pain, crushed by the stench of his own shit and piss caked to him.
Besides hurting him, Bigboy has walked the other road: has offered him temptations. Bigboy always understood that Fish had the imagination to make him vulnerable to ideas of the future, to possibilities, to pleasures not palpably there.
'You can go free,' he crooned one evil night. 'You tell me, we take care of it, and you are out of here, old man. You spent your life here. This is the way out. This is the only way out, and I am the only one who can give you this. Think of it, old man. Back to N'Awleens with some jingle-jangle in the pocket. To sport with some high yellers and some slanty Chinee. Those girls know all the tricks. No tricks they don't know. You'd be at home. You'd be the old whoremaster, plump and well-fucked in his senior age.'
