Mary held Kim in high regard.
"Hello," she said. "Heard you was back in town."
Kim brought out a pint of sour-mash bourbon and Mary put two tumblers on the table. They each drank half a tumbler in one swallow.
"The Kid is down on his luck," she said. "Stay away. It rubs off."
"He should quit," Kim said. "He should quit and sell something."
"He won't."
No, Kim thought, not with that mark on him he won't.
"I hear Smiler went down."
She drained the tumbler and nodded.
"Young thieves like that think they have a license to steal. Then they get a sickener. Scares a lot of them straight. What did he draw?"
"A dime."
"That's a sickener all right."
They drank in silence for ten minutes.
"Joe Varland is dead...Railroad cop tagged him..."
"Well," Kim said, "the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away..."
"What could be fairer'n that?"
They finished the whiskey. She put a plate of pork and beans with homemade bread on the table. Kim would later taste superb bean casseroles in Marseilles and Montreal but none of them could touch Salt Chunk Mary's.
They were drinking coffee out of chipped blue mugs.
"Got something for you." Kim laid out six diamonds on the table. Mary looked at each stone with her jeweler's glass.
"Twenty-eight hundred."
Kim knew he could probably do better in New York but he needed the money right then and Mary's goodwill counted for a lot.
"Done."
She got the money out of the cookie jar and handed it to him, wrapped up the diamonds and put them in her pocket.
"Who's over at the Cemetery?" Kim asked.
Kim called his rooming house "the Cemetery" because the manager was a character known as Joe the Dead. Kim's place was a hideout for Johnsons with an impeccable reputation, most of them recommended by Salt Chunk Mary...con men bank robbers...jewel thieves...high class of people.
Kim didn't take much risk, since Denver at the time was a "closed city." You only operate with police protection and payoffs. Kim paid so much a month. He threw some weight in Denver. He knew some politicians and a few cops. The cops called him "the Professor" since Kim's knowledge of weapons was encyclopedic. He could always tune into any cop.
"Jones was there last week."
Jones was a bank robber. He was a short, rather plump waxy-faced man with a mustache, who looked like the groom on a wedding cake. He would walk into a bank with his gang, a ninety-pound Liz known as Sawed-off Annie with a twelve-gauge sawed-off, and two French-Canadian kids, and say his piece.
"Everybody please put your hands up high."
It was the sweetest voice any cashier ever heard. He became known as "the Bandit with the Sweet Voice." But when he said "Hands up high," you better believe it.
Jones confided in Kim that when he killed someone he got "a terrible gloating feeling." Said with that sugary voice of his, it gave Kim a chill. It's a feeling in the back of the neck, rather pleasant actually, accompanied by a drop in temperature that always gives notice of a strong psychic presence. Jones was creepy but he paid well...
The last thing that Kim could ever do in this life or any other was con. He held con men and politicians in the same basic lack of esteem. So the news that the Morning Glory Kid was currently staying at the Cemetery elicited from him an unenthusiastic grunt. The Morning Glory Kid worried him a bit. He knew that big-time con artists like that often keep some piece of information up their sleeves to buy their way out. Of course the Kid had nothing on Kim except Kim renting him a room, but watch that fucker, he thought.
Kim remembered the first time he hit Salt Chunk Mary. Ten years ago.
"Smiler sent me."
She gave him a long cool appraising look.
"Come in, kid."
She put a plate of salt chunk on the table with bread. Kim ate like a hungry cat. She brought two mugs of coffee. "What you got for me, kid?"
He laid the rings and pendants out on the table. It was a good score for a kid.
She named a fair price.
He said "Done" and she paid him.
Mary looked over Kim's slim willowy young good looks.
"You'd have a tough time in stir, kid."
"Don't aim to go there."
She nodded..."It happens. Some people just aren't meant to do time. Usually they quit and do well legitimate."
"That's what I aim to do."
And now he was doing it. They both knew this was the last time Kim would ever lay any ice on Mary's kitchen table. "Stop by anytime you're in town."
While waiting for Councillor Graywood to arrive from New York, Kim renewed his contacts with the Johnson Family. He was already a well-known and respected figure. He ran the Cemetery and he also ran a country place outside Saint Louis where favored Johnsons could rest, hide out and outfit themselves.
Kim was clean. Just that one shot in Black Hawk for the past six months. So he could enjoy kicking the gong around. If you've got a needle habit or an eating habit you can smoke all day and never get fixed. A very small amount of morphine passes over with the smoke. Most of it stays in the ash. So you have to come to the pipe clean. Kim liked the ritual—the peanut-oil lamp, the deft fingers of the young Chinese as he toasts the pill, rolling it against the pipe bowl, the black smoke pulled deep into the lungs with no rasp to it soothes you all the way down as the junk feeling comes on slow with the third pipe.
Kim didn't need a bodyguard but he needed good backup. He selected two of the best. Boy Jones had worked with Jones the bank robber. Thin and lithe as a cat, with a deadly dazzling smile. He could use any weapon like an extension of his arm. He was a juggler and he could toss knives and saps around, and was a sleight-of-hand artist. He could pull a rabbit out of a hat and shoot through it. And what he could do with nunchakus and weighted chains was like a sorcerer's apprentice. You couldn't believe one person was doing it.
Marbles was a trick shot with a carnival. He could put out a candle, split cards, and get six shots in a playing card at fifteen feet in two-fifths of a second and he could really throw a knife. Kim had been impressed by the tremendous force of a thrown knife—it will go two inches into oak, and a strong man thrusting with all his might could hardly do a half-inch. But you have to estimate the distance on the overhand throw. Marbles could do it at any distance. He had such a smooth way of doing things. Smoothest draw Kim ever saw, like flexible marble. Marbles was a Greek statue come to life, with golden curls forming a tight casque around his head, eyes pale as alabaster, with glinting black pupils...
Kim put them right on his payroll and outfitted them with conservative dark clothes, like young executives. They made a rather unnerving trio and passed themselves off as brothers.
Guy Graywood arrived from New York. He had found just the place. A bank building on the Bowery. Maps rolled out on the table. Graywood is a tall slim ash-blond man with a cool, incisive manner. He is a lawyer and an accountant, occupying much the same position in the Johnson Family as a Mafia consigliere. He is in charge of all business and legal arrangements and is consulted on all plans including assassinations. He is himself an expert assassin, having taken the Carsons Weapons course, but he doesn't make a big thing of it.
It is time to check out the Cemetery accounts. Joe the Dead, who runs the Cemetery, owes his life to Kim.
Kim's Uncle Waring once told him that if you have saved someone's life he will try to kill you. Hmmm. Kim was sure of Joe's loyalty and honesty. Joe wouldn't steal a dime and Kim knew it...
Well he'd saved Joe's life in his professional capacity and that made a difference. It was shortly after Kim got his license from the correspondence school and set himself up in the practice of medicine. He specialized in police bullets and such illegal injuries. When they brought Joe in, his left hand was gone at the wrist, the clothing burned off the left side of his body above the waist, and third
-degree burns on the upper torso and neck. The left eye was luckily intact...The tourniquet had slipped and he was bleeding heavily. The numbness that follows trauma is just wearing off and the groans starting, pushed out from the stomach, a totally inhuman sound, once you hear it you will remember that sound and what it means.
The same rock-steady hands, cool nerve, and timing that made Kim deadly in a gunfight also make him an excellent practicing surgeon. In one glance he has established a priority of moves...Morphine first or the other moves might be too late. He draws off three quarter-grains into a syringe from a bottle with rubber top and injects it. As he puts down the syringe he is already reaching for the tourniquet to tighten it...Quickly puts some ligatures on the larger veins...then makes a massive saline injection into the vein of the right arm...cleans the burned area with disinfecting solutions and applies a thick paste of tea leaves...It was touch and go. At one point Joe's vital signs were zero, and Kim massaged the heart. Finally the heart pumps again...One wrong move in the series and it wouldn't have started again.
The deciding factor was Kim's decision to administer morphine before stopping the hemorrhage...another split second of that pain would have meant shock, circulatory collapse, and death.
Joe recovered but he could never look at nitro again. He had brought back strange powers from the frontiers of death. He could often foretell events. He had a stump on his left wrist that could accommodate various tools and weapons.
His precognitive gift stands him and his in good stead. Once a stranger walks into the hotel...Joe takes one look, comes up with a sawed-off, and blows the stranger's face off. Stranger was on the way to kill Joe and Kim...
"I didn't like his face," Joe said.
"Missed your calling," Kim told him. "Should have been a plastic surgeon."
Joe the Dead was saved from death by morphine, and morphine remained the only thing holding him to life. It was as if Joe's entire body, his being, had been amputated and reduced to a receptacle for pain. Hideously scarred, blind in one eye, he gave off a dry, scorched smell, like burnt plastic and rotten oranges. He had constructed and installed an artificial nose, with gold wires connected to his odor centers, and a radio set for smell-waves, with a range of several hundred yards. Not only was his sense of smell acute, it was also selective. He could smell smells that no one else had ever dreamed, and these smells had a logic, a meaning, a language. He could smell death on others, and could predict the time and manner of death. Death casts many shadows, and they all have their special smells.
Joe had indeed brought back strange powers and knowledge from the grave, but without the one thing he had not brought back, his knowledge was of little use.
Of course, Kim thought. When you save someone's life, you cheat Death, and he has to even the score. Kim was aware of the danger from Joe the Dead, but he chose to ignore it. Joe never left the Cemetery, and Kim was an infrequent visitor there. Besides, vigilance was the medium in which Kim lived. The sensors at the back of his neck would warn him of a hand reaching for a knife, or other weapon.
Joe's only diversions were checkers and tinkering. He was a natural mechanic, and Kim worked with him on a number of weapons models which Kim conceived, leaving the details to Joe. Oh yes, leave the details to Joe. That's right, just point your finger and say: "Bang, you're dead"—and leave the details to Joe.
3
Saint Louis Return...
Union Station...smell of iron and steam and soot...Kim walks through clouds of steam flanked by Marbles and Boy, a safari of porters behind him. They check into the Station Hotel, change clothes, and select suitably inconspicuous weapons. Then Kim hires a carriage and directs the driver to his old homesite on Olive Street. Kim sets up a camera and takes a few pictures. The owner rushes out and asks him what he is doing.
"I used to live here...Sentimental considerations, you understand...Hope you don't mind..."
The man looks at Kim and Marbles and Boy and decides he doesn't mind. Kim packs the camera, puts it back in the carriage and they drive away...
"Where to now?"
"Tony Faustus's Restaurant..."
They are all impeccably dressed in dark expensive suits. Kim has a large opal set in gold on the ring finger of his left hand. Opals are bad luck, someone told him. Kim raised an eyebrow and said, "Really? Whose?"
"Do you have a reservation, sir?"
"Certainly."
With an expert palm-down gesture Boy slips the headwaiter a ten-dollar bill and the man bows them to a table.
You've come a long way from Saint Louis, Kim tells himself as he settles into a padded chair with mahogany armrests.
He orders dry martinis all around and studies the menu...
"Oysters?"
"Not for me," Boy says...
"An acquired taste...You'll grow into it..."
Kim orders walleyed pike, perhaps the most toothsome freshwater fish in the world...Far better than trout. Venison steak and wood pigeon...The waiter brings the wine list...Kim selects a dry white wine for the fish and oysters, a heavy Burgundy for the venison...They finish with baked Alaska, champagne, and Napoleon brandy...
"My God, there's Jed Farris with a fat gut at thirty..."
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot..."
In many cases, yes...
"That's a bad neighborhood, sir..."
"Oh I think we'll manage..."
The driver shrugs.
The old Chinese puts on gold-rimmed bifocals and studies the letter Kim hands him. He nods, folds the letter, and hands it back, and they pass through a heavy padded door. Thieves and sharpers lounge about smoking opium, exchanging jokes and stories in a relaxed, quietly convivial ambiance.
After six pipes on top of the heavy meal they feel comfortably drowsy and take a carriage back to the hotel.
Saint Albans... Village of Illusion...
The depot is five miles from Saint Albans and Kim aims to keep it that way. He now owns six thousand acres along the river and inland as far as the town.
As soon as Kim started organizing the Johnson Family, he realized how basically subversive such an organization would appear to the people who run America. So the Johnson Family must not appear to these people as an organized unit. The Johnson Family must go underground. If you wish to conceal something it is simply necessary to create disinterest in the area where it is hidden. He planned towns, areas, communities, owned and occupied by Johnsons, that would appear to outsiders as boringly ordinary or disagreeable, that would leave no questions unanswered. Each place would be carefully camouflaged and provided with a particular reputation. Saint Albans was largely rural. Reputation: Moonshiner country. Good place to stay out of and no reason for anyone going there.
In some of our towns the folks is so nice and so dull you just can't stand it. Not for long. Towns and areas stocked with Johnson actors, accommodations reciprocal. Ten actors leave Saint Albans for New York, leaving ten vacancies in the Saint Albans Hotel.
Saint Albans is used as a rest home and hideout for agents who have been on difficult missions. It is a permanent home for old retainers and a training ground for young initiates. The houses and loading sheds along the river have been converted into comfortable living places.
Fish and game are plentiful. The local cannabis is of a high quality owing to the long hot summers. The retainers and trainees pay off in work and produce and surveillance. You have to be on the alert for infiltrators, especially journalists. In any case there was nothing to see on the surface.
Bill Anderson, who runs the gun store, is now Sheriff. Arch Ellisor is the Mayor and Doc White is the Coroner.
Johnsons in good standing, rod-riding yeggs and thieves know they can stop off at Saint Albans. They also know that it is very unhealthy to abuse Saint Albans hospitality. Troublemakers and bullies get short shrift here. We get them out of Saint Albans is all. In one piece, if they are lucky. If not, Doc White signs a death certificate. Authority is swift, informal and incisive.
&nbs
p; October's Bright Blue Weather
When the frost is on the pumpkin
And the corn is in the shock
And you leave the house bare-headed
And go out to feed the stock
(Someone else can feed the fuckers.)
October's bright blue weather is at its best in the Ozarks. The road from the depot winds through heavy woods. It's like driving into an impressionist painting, splashes of sepia and red and russet and orange peeling off and blowing away, dead leaves swirling around their feet. They are sitting on benches in an open buckboard. As they draw near the town they get a whiff of burning leaves.
Saint Albans is built along a river crisscrossed by stone bridges. The outskirts of the town present the dilapidated appearance of a stranded carnival, or military encampment, with tents and covered wagons and improvised dwellings. There is a large open market surrounded by baths and lodging houses, bars, restaurants, opium dens, anything you want, Meester. In the market, besides game fish and produce, weapons of all description are for sale. Here is a lead weight on a heavy elastic...
"It looks dangerous," Kim decides.
Boy, who has been a circus juggler, is into these weapons that require prestidigitational dexterity, like Ku Budo, the nunchaku, chains with weights on both ends and this elastic monster, Kim could just feel it jumping back and hitting him right on the bridge of the nose.
Moving on to an older part of the town, solid houses of brick and stone with gardens. The hotel stands back from the street in a grove of oak and maple, a red brick four-story building with the ornate brickwork and recessed windows of the 1880s. Kim shakes hands with some old hands. None of that Lord of the Manor shit. Kim is just another Johnson. He introduces himself to some new kids on staff duty.