Natchez said.
“Percy takes care of it,” Tom said, and a door creaked open, and a bearded mountain in a leather apron lumbered out, squinting into the dirty light.
Tom led David Natchez through the arched passageway into the First Court, saying, “I came here to see a nurse named Nancy Vetiver, who got suspended for taking care of Mike Mendenhall too well to please Dr. Milton. He was afraid of what Mendenhall would say, and he said a lot—that’s how I really learned about you.”
“Don’t go so fast,” Natchez said in the musty darkness.
They came out into the visual chaos of bars and lodging houses around the First Court. Cold moisture and a faint smell of sewage tainted the air, and a hum of voices came from the passages that led deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven, FREDO’S sign flickered on and off. “Fulton Bishop and his sister grew up in the Third Court. My grandfather built this place—it was his first big project. He’d know it was a perfect place to hide.”
“Do you remember how to get to the Second Court?” Natchez wandered out into the center of the court and looked down at the brass plaque that named Glendenning Upshaw and Maxwell Redwing.
“I think so.” Tom looked doubtfully around the square. Half a dozen crooked lanes led away into a sprawl of half-visible streets. The same laundry seemed to droop on lines between windows above them, and the same ragged men passed a different bottle back and forth in front of a lighted doorway. Flies clustered over a muddy stain a few feet from the plaque. Tom turned toward a narrow brick opening beneath an overhanging wooden room, and walked toward it until he saw the white lettering in the brick: Edgewater Trail. “This is it.”
They came out into a cobbled lane between black wooden walls that he remembered. A woman huddled against the wall when she saw them, and a child ran past screaming. The stench of excrement grew stronger. Tom pointed to a wooden flight of steps on the other side of the sluggish stream that ran down the middle of the lane. He went up to the edge of the stream and jumped across. Natchez followed him up the stairs and through echoing darkness until they emerged at the top of the matching steps that led down into the Second Court.
Wooden balconies lay across the front of the buildings on all sides, and at every corner steps went downward into arcades and intersecting narrow streets. “When I was here,” Tom said, the atmosphere of the place making him whisper, “I saw Bishop pass through. He came down these steps and went straight across the Court to that corner.”
Natchez and Tom descended the stairs and walked across the court. A few men eased out of the shadows on the walkways and watched them go. Tom paused at the top of the steps at the corner of the building where Nancy Vetiver had grown up, and went down.
He came out on a flat concrete bridge over a muddy stream. To his left, the bridge ended in steps leading down to a row of hunched brick buildings built along the low banks of the stream. An enormous black rat darted up out of a hole in the concrete and slithered over the top of the bank to disappear between two of the buildings. At the right end of the bridge, the concrete flooring became the beginning of a lane that twisted past a wooden tenement. Footsteps sounded behind them. Tom turned right.
The buildings huddled closer together. The lane divided, and Tom took the left-hand fork because the right sloped downward into a dead end where murky lodging houses loomed over an empty yard.
They walked past a barred and empty shop on the ground floor of a tenement. Women leaned out of windows and watched them pass beneath. Tom had the feeling they were circling around beneath the Second Court, and only the occasional glimpse of sky above the leaning buildings let him know that they were instead following the slope of the hill down toward the old slave quarter.
Abruptly the lane widened, and the concrete turned to brick cobbles. A broken cart leaned against a wall, which leaned against a leaning building. Two men who had been talking beside the cart vanished into a doorway. “That’s what happens when they see a cop in a place like this,” Natchez said. “I guess this must be the Third Court.”
It was a combination of the first two: wooden walkways and exterior staircases clung to the sides of the four-story tenements. Straw and broken bottles lay across the concrete before them. A peaked wooden roof covered the entire court, intensifying the gloom and the thudding of rock and roll from a basement bar with a hand-painted sign in a window at ground level that read BEER-WHISKEY. Footsteps coming toward them from the concrete lane slowed, then stopped. Natchez backed under a walkway, stood against the wall of the rear tenement, took out a pistol with a long barrel, and peered around the side of the building. Then he shook his head and shoved the pistol back into his holster. “I just want to point out,” he said in a quiet voice, “that we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble by walking around to the other side of this place.”
“How?” Tom asked.
“Because that’s where we are.” He nodded at an arched passageway like a tunnel that ran down the side of the building across from them. On the other end of the tunnel, diminished as if by a telescope looked through backwards, a car rolled downhill in bright unreal daylight. Tom sagged against the tenement wall.
They were standing far back in the shadow of one of the walkways. Both of them looked up at the bleak dark walls on the opposite side of the court. The smells of sewage and stale beer, of unwashed skin and blocked toilets, mingled with the low sounds of voices and clashing radios. In one room a girl cried out; from another Joe Ruddler bawled baseball scores. Tom felt the blood beating in his temples. His eyes stung.
“Well, you have any brilliant ideas?” Tom asked.
“I don’t exactly feel like knocking on a hundred doors,” Natchez said. “We want something that will get him out of her rooms, if that’s where he is.”
“Oh, he’s here. He’s up there somewhere, hating every second he has to be in this place.” And this, he felt with an overwhelming certainty, was true: a kind of inspiration had caused Tom to make David Natchez bring him to this place, but now that he was here, he knew that there was no other place on the island where Glendenning Upshaw would have gone. He flew by the seat of his pants, and he relied on women to solve his leftover problems. He had no friends, only people who owed him services. Tom thought that maybe Carmen Bishop was the only person in all of his grandfather’s life who had understood him.
“So let’s get him out,” Natchez said.
“Right,” Tom said. “If we just stand here shouting his name, he’ll never move. What we want is something that only my grandfather will respond to—something that wouldn’t mean anything special to everybody else up there, but that’ll make him feel like he’s being stung by a thousand bees.”
Natchez frowned and turned to Tom in the darkness beneath the walkway.
Tom smiled, though it was almost too dark for Natchez to see it. “Two thousand bees,” he said.
“Well?”
“He had von Heilitz killed because he thought nobody else could have sent him copies of Jeanine Thielman’s notes. They meant that von Heilitz had finally worked out what really happened to her.”
He felt more than saw Natchez nodding.
“So let’s convince him that someone else knew about those notes. He might recognize my voice, but he wouldn’t know yours. How do you feel about stepping out there and shouting ‘This has gone on too long’?”
Natchez said, “I’ll try anything once.” He moved out from beneath the dark shadow on the walkway, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG!” He moved back—the radios still bleated and chattered, but all other voices had fallen silent. “Well, they heard me,” Natchez whispered.
Tom told him what to say next, and Natchez came out from under the walkway and yelled, “YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN!”
Someone pushed up a window, but the only other sounds were of radios, suddenly louder in the quiet. Jeanine Thielman’s words bounced off the wooden roof and echoed on the tenement walls. Tom imagined the words rolling through all of Maxwell’s Heaven, freezing the rats in their holes and waking babies, stopping the bottles in their passage from hand to hand.
“I know what you are,” Tom whispered, so softly he might have been talking to himself.
Natchez ducked out again. “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”
Someone above them threw down an empty bottle of Pforzheimer beer, and it exploded against the brick cobbles. “Go away!” yelled a fuzzy male voice, and another suggested that they fuck themselves.
