The inner office door opened and the man from the desk came out first. He was followed by an older gentleman with a long and dour face, who held the bill of lading. He did not bother to introduce himself.
'How did you get this?' he asked.
Rawbone gave no answer.
'The drivers?'
Rawbone crossed himself.
The men in the room took on the mood of a hunting party. Simic instructed one of the men to lock the door. As he did Rawbone opened his suit coat and reached for a handkerchief that happened to be in the same pocket where the black handle of an automatic protruded for anyone to see.
'Who are you?' Simic asked.
'Think of me,' said Rawbone, 'as ... Tom, the bootblack. Ah, you're not familiar . . . Horatio Alger's hero, educated at the hard school of poverty. Who with a smile and good cheer overcomes the hardships of existence to acquire ... a comfortable fortune.' His grin of sarcasm disappeared. 'Now, let's put our cards and our pure hearts on the table.'
JOHN LOURDES CROSSED the street in front of the Mills Building. On that day in the year of our Lord, he was twenty-five years old. He stood under the shade of a great elder at the entrance to San Jacinto Park from where he could watch the lobby and wait on justice Knox. That reviled gusano of a father had walked right out of the scarred regions of memory and straight into the daylight, all suited up like a gent and with the cool arrogance of one who believes himself beyond the trappings of right and order.
But today, there would be a reckoning.
Then something, call it superstition if you will, took hold of John Lourdes. He glanced back into the park down a shadowy walkway. He had come here many times as a boy with his father. There was a pond with a stone wall around it where lived half a dozen alligators. How they'd come to be there was uncertain. But one winter night his father had persuaded a few drunken wilds to go down to the park and sack up those creatures and get them out of the cold to keep them from freezing.
So there he'd been watching as his father and a band of drunks wrestled one prehistoric monstrosity after another into canvas gunnies. They carried them back to that dingy saloon and kept them warm by the stove while the boy sat on the bar cross-legged and watched his old man resting in a chair amongst them. He had a cigarette in one hand and with the other flicked mescal from a bottle onto each sacked gator.
'I baptize you,' he said, 'in the name of the father and the son . .
John Lourdes needed to remember, nothing was beyond his father's unpredictability.
Justice Knox arrived with another agent named Howell. Knox was a plain, soft-spoken man. He had poor vision and wore spectacles and was singularly obsessed with the security represented by the bureaucracy. His core belief: People's central need and desire was for bureaucracy, not freedom, not rebellion, not individuality. Man longed for effective bureaucracy, and its ultimate expression was order.
Knox was never swayed by anger or revenge. He was in that respect heartless, and it made him, in turn, beyond the reach of sympathy or compassion. He had no personal attachment to his agents, no interest in their private welfare, and he demanded their attitude toward the job be precisely the same as his.
'The girl?' he asked.
'She's still up in 509.'
Knox put his hands on his hips and looked at the building, and while he considered a plan John Lourdes gathered himself and said, 'Sir, there's something else-'
WHEN RAWBONE LEFT the Mills Building he crossed the street and cut straight through San Jacinto Park. His hands were in his pant pockets and he wore the derby at a cocky angle. Yet he was wary enough to keep glancing back.
At the pond tourists leaned their kids over the stone wall to see the alligators moving through the still and mosquito-laden waters. He was not much beyond it when the memory of a winter night back in '92 washed over him. He could see the boy there in that grimy saloon, the kerosene lamp above him curtained with smoke. His son ... he'd just turned seven.
There was no time now; the present had the upper hand. He jumped a trolley. He rode it half a dozen blocks till he came to an empty lot where he'd parked Burr's Cadillac. He geared it up and gunned it and said goodbye to downtown in a sweep of dust.
Rawbone drank and loosed his tie as he explained to Burr his hour with that jury of strangers in the fifth-floor office. One thing Burr would swear to about his friend, he could elevate a simple act of criminality
