Bloodstained Kings

  “Search the Jessups’ place, their home. Somewhere in there you’ll find a collection of medications. It’s important. Bring them all.”

  Faroe thought: the Jessups. He’d kicked the corpse of Woodrow in the head, twice, where it had lain on the ground. The feeling had been intense. The killing of Harvill had been even better. But he’d allowed emotion to bury his thinking. The preparations had to be made now for his smooth return to power.

  “Bring Woodrow Jessup’s body too,” said Faroe. “I want both of them preserved.”

  Atwater smiled nervously.

  “Preserved?” said Atwater.

  It was clear that Atwater doubted his sanity.

  “Put them in the freezer. When you come back I’ll want a full rundown of the state of things. I’ve been out of touch, Mr. Atwater.” Faroe smiled. “I’m assuming you are the man I need to talk to.”

  The doubt evaporated. Atwater grinned. “Yes, sir. I am your man.”

  “Good,” said Faroe. “I want to hear more about Captain Jefferson. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  He was giving orders again. The power of it filled him. There would be more orders, thousands, great and small. This was what he needed, not fresh air and lilac blossoms. This was what he was born to. He put a hand on Atwater’s shoulder.

  Faroe repeated, “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Atwater beamed. “We’re ready and waiting, Mr. Faroe.”

  “These men”—he nodded at the Latinos behind Atwater—“where did you get them?”

  “Jack Seed recruited them through a man called Herrera, was some kind of colonel in the Cuban air force. They’re safe, see, like illegal immigrants.”

  Faroe was pleased. He had had many business dealings with the Latin American military. Being unburdened by the tepid ethics of democracy, they possessed the admirable quality, in contrast to their American counterparts, that once they were bought they stayed bought.

  “Get Herrera on the phone. I want to speak to him in person.”

  Atwater bobbed his head.

  “The lilac tree where you found me,” said Faroe. “You remember it?”

  Atwater, puzzled this time, nodded again.

  “I want it uprooted and burned. Not cut down: uprooted. Is that clear?”

  “Clear as day, Mr. Faroe,” said Atwater.

  Faroe nodded. “Good. Now let’s all be about our business.”

  THIRTEEN

  LENNA PARILLAUD’S family boasted that their name had been a mercantile presence in New Orleans since the days of Louis Napoleon. Their original wealth had been founded on the importation of slaves. After they were ruined during the Civil War the family had started importing furniture and furnishings instead of captive flesh. This had allowed them to regain a toehold on the fringe of wealthy so ciety from which to bow and scrape a sycophantic but comfortable living. By Lenna’s father’s time the Louisiana oil boom had given the family business a boost, and he expanded into a large warehouse and an elegant showroom on three floors in the Garden District.

  When Filmore Faroe had officially “died,” one of Lenna’s first acts on succeeding to his wealth had been anonymously to purchase her father’s business and all rights in perpetuity to any use of the company name, at almost twice the market price. This was not motivated by benevolence. After the deal was signed, Lenna had burned every stick of furniture, every wall hanging, every carpet in the company’s inventory. She’d had both sites bulldozed to dust and turned into gardens, which she donated to the city, and the family name was never seen again on the masthead of any public enterprise. She’d paid them a visit then, her father and mother, and listened to their outrage and complaints: to her mother’s mealy-mouthed cooing about “the way things were these days” and about disrespect for property and beauty, and to her father’s bitter and vainglorious boast that if only he had known then what was going to happen no amount of money could have bought him out. Lenna told them who the true buyer was and watched the pain and incomprehension on their faces. Then she left them to grow old with their “Why?” forever unanswered. She hadn’t seen or spoken to either of them since. It was one of the debts that Lenna had felt compelled to pay in full.

  When she was seven years old her parents had sent her to an exclusive Catholic convent for her education. There she was schooled in the many complex and exquisite hypocrisies whose mastery was deemed important for those destined to represent the flower of Southern Catholic womanhood. To her later, adult, shame she never rebelled against either her family or the swollen, cawing and loathsome celibates who had instructed her. While some, at least, of her classmates had masturbated and smoked pot, Lenna had been a good girl; the perfect daughter. She had achieved all that had been asked of her. And when, without any thought for her, her socially starstruck parents had promoted her marriage to Filmore Faroe—with frantic urgings that brushed aside her teenage doubts and fears unheard—she had lacked the conviction to resist that too.

  Those men for whom money was a true passion—a discipline, a commitment, an inevitability—and for whom the trappings and spending of it were therefore by-products of meager significance, were rare, as were all true men; but Filmore Faroe was one of them. For Faroe, as for many of his kind, socializing was at best an occasional and tedious necessity. Any conversation not spent in the service of the deal he considered a triviality. His business often took him abroad, to Latin America and Africa, where moderately generous bribes secured immoderately profitable returns. He was a racist, though no more com-mittedly so than most men of his wealth and generation. His father had been active in the Klan but Filmore didn’t have the time, though he made regular contributions.

  While Faroe pursued his passion, Lenna found herself trapped in the splendid incarceration of Arcadia. Faroe didn’t want her to go to college and so she didn’t go; he didn’t want her to work so she didn’t; he didn’t want her to go into the City alone and so she stayed on the plantation and rode horses and read books and ran the house and its staff. When she tried to discuss these things with her mother, she was reminded that her sworn duty was to love, honor and obey in the same way that she had done. She was married to one of the finest men in Louisiana: what more could she ask for? After two years of what had come to feel solitary confinement, Lenna found the lure of suicide stalking her mind.

  •••

  Grimes listened without interrupting and without asking any questions. Lenna made no excuses for herself; in fact she was careful to tell her story in a way that made clear the contempt she felt for her fidelity to the rules of her upbringing, her lack of spirit, her cowardice. Grimes knew better than to underestimate the psychological power ofthat elite socialization. The Louisiana governing class she’d inhabited was small, unto itself and—not just twenty years ago but to this day—deeply anachronistic. Grimes recalled one youngster who, on the occasion of his family’s lavish annual garden party, had appeared in the branches of a tree and blown his brains out in front of the guests. The gossip columnists had drooled with glee. And Grimes had known others who had plunged into addiction and other vengeful self-mutilations. The payoff for conformity had lost its value; and Lenna, like the others, had felt betrayed. Her own act of rebellion was poignantly banal—the desire to walk a busy street and feel its heartbeat, just for once—but it set in motion a tragedy that couldn’t be stopped.

  On the evening of her twenty-first birthday Lenna finally broke out. She threw twenty-one red roses and a new emerald necklace into the trash can. She dressed in her tightest jeans and T-shirt and a denim jacket. Then she took herself off to the City. In her pocket was a telegram from Zaire—from Faroe—wishing her much love and a happy day.

  The journey to town charged her with intense excitement, with forbidden and unknown possibility. She had no idea where she was going or what she would do when she got there. During those few miles alone at the wheel, a lifetime’s eagerness to please was left behind; as it turned out, forever. She’d flipped the coin of an unbroken conformit
y and discovered on its hidden face a defiance she hadn’t imagined was there. The defiance took her over with the force of a drug, a liberating spell that could only be denied at a price she’d spend the rest of her days repaying.

  When she reached the City she wandered on foot: through a smoky, sighing dusk and down languidly teeming streets whose names she did not know; past blowsy women in hot pants and heels and the brassy exteriors of neon-lit bars. It was scary and forbidden and she almost went home. But his music called her in. No, both less than music and more: a single last note, aching and impossibly held in the hazy night until it spiraled away into silence. Lenna stepped down from the sidewalk into the applause of a basement jazz club.

  He stood, loose and lean and without acknowledging the applause, at the front of a five-piece band. In his hands he held the trumpet whose sound had drawn her down. He looked up and across the room and she saw his eyes. She couldn’t tell if he could see hers; but with a quickening in her stomach she hoped he could. Then he turned his face away and began another ballad. He didn’t look her way again, not a single glance. Lenna took a table and drank white wine. She watched him while he played and even while he didn’t; while the others took their solos, she watched him still. His big hands and long limbs, his strong chin and broad mouth. Lenna stayed for the second set and again, as far as she could tell, she didn’t exist for him. When the encore had been played and the patrons drifted home, Lenna came to as if from a trance. She wondered if she was sober enough to drive home. Just as she concluded that she didn’t care, he appeared from nowhere, and smiled, and invited her for a drink with the band.

  She saw, in his eyes, that he knew it would be as easy as that. The fact that he knew—that that was the way he saw her—made her weak with raw excitement. A voice in her head that she’d never let herself hear before said, You’re going to be fucked. And she shouted back. Yes, Vm going to be fucked. I want to be fucked. I want him. And I don’t have to answer to anyone. When she said, “Sure,” and he said, “Cool,” Lenna trembled.

  His name was Wes Clay.

  Jammed in the back of a taxi, surrounded by jokes she couldn’t catch but that she laughed at just the same, Lenna smoked her first joint. The streets of the City glided past the windows and she soared, she felt right, she was where she wanted to be and doing what she wanted to do. At a second club they slapped hands with other musicians and drank and smoked some more. Now Wes Clay looked at her all the time and she turned to liquid in the darkness of his gaze. He asked her what she thought about this and that and when she answered he listened. He was beautiful. And when he learned that she’d studied piano, he made her play and they taught her some things, and they jammed and fooled around until dawn. Then Wes Clay took her home with him and they made love. And it was making love, and not being fucked, because by then Lenna was in love with him and Wes was in love with her.

  •••

  Grimes remembered the feeling he’d picked up in Lenna earlier on that night: of youth frozen in time. Now, watching her face, he saw it thaw and come alive, saw the vitality and sweetness, the wonder and the passion, the many fragile treasures that she’d locked away and held on ice lest they should die. Though he didn’t yet know why, though the joy of her long-ago love was right there in front of him—in the unguarded shine of her eyes and the sudden flash of her smiles—Grimes felt an unbearable sadness creep up inside him. He listened on.

  Sex with Filmore Faroe had been unremarkable. It hadn’t been traumatic, as she’d been led to believe, but neither was it a transport of delight. Faroe was considerate but conventional and she imagined she was much the same for him. If he hadn’t wanted more, then neither had she. Wes Clay wanted her flesh—her juice, her sounds. He wanted her nude and she stripped off her clothes. He wanted her tongue and she sucked his mouth. He wanted her skin and she gave herself to his hands, his fingers gliding, snaring her wrist to her ankle, pulling her face down, splaying her open as he bit her shoulder and whispered “Baby” in her ear. And for a million reasons or none at all—drunk or stoned or crazy out of her mind—she trusted him to want something good and whatever that good was she wanted it too. She asked him to be inside her. She felt his cock part her and push against that initial resistance that she couldn’t control and that dizzied her and through which she wanted him to break. He retreated, exquisitely, then pushed again and almost entered and could have but didn’t, he waited, he pulled back. She heard his voice—“Baby”—and she made a noise. She lifted her hips hard and this time he slid into her and after that she remembered nothing: of what she uttered or what she did. Just the weight of his maleness, wrapping her around and pinning her down and filling her pelvis, her throat, her face with a liquid rhythm that smothered her from inside and pounded her from out, and in which she would have drowned and died if she could.

  Afterward, with her head in his arm and squeezing on his come inside her, she stroked his chest while he slept. Then she slept too and dreamed of things she would never recall.

  When she awoke and realized where she was she wanted to roar until the building fell down and snarl at the world so they’d know she was here: here and unrepentant, a hundred feet tall and stronger than the sea. Wes was still sleeping, sprawled on the sheet with a shaft of sunlight on his face. From the street below came the clatter of traffic and the working day. Lenna knew now what it was she wanted: all that she wasn’t meant to want. The wasn’t-meant-to-want was a fluid in her muscles and veins, a pleasure thick as oil and sweetly nauseous on her tongue. She closed her eyes and pulled her fingers through her hair and arched her back. She looked at him, breathing quietly in the morning light. She brushed her cheek down his ribs, his flank, across his thigh. His tight curled hair touched her face. His skin was sleek and warm. She licked his belly, tasted salt and perhaps herself. She watched his cock grow hard and swallowed the oil in her throat and the sweetness of it sent a spin to her skull. She licked his thigh, then his balls. He stirred. She didn’t look at this face. She didn’t want to. She wanted this to herself. She didn’t want to know his thoughts, she didn’t care if she pleased him. She knelt—not looking at his face—then bent and closed her eyes and sucked his cock. She moved in a spiraling dark, just her and her taking and giving. His fingers entered her cunt and she reached back and guided his fingers. She got there quicker than she imagined possible and waited and hovered, balancing on a wire taut and thin. Then he came in her mouth and she let herself fall, drinking and spasming as she dropped. As she lay there caked and wet she heard him say “Baby.”

  Lenna stayed with him for three days. They ate from bags and cartons in his room, and sometimes in cafés. In a bar they watched a fight on TV and drank shots of Jack Daniel’s without ice. At nights she watched him play. In the dawns and afternoons and early evenings they made love. She didn’t tell him that she loved him, because she knew it was so, and because all that she was loved and all that she did loved. She was fearless and cool and out on a limb and the words were for those who were scared. She didn’t even know whether he treated her badly or well, or her him. She had no maps or markers. Those too were for the scared. Nothing existed out there for Lenna to be scared of. There was only him and her and what they did from one moment to the next and she had no care or thought for how it might end.

  On the fourth night it did end. By then there was a statewide hunt for her, missing, presumed kidnapped, concentrated on the City, where they finally found her car. Faroe was on an early plane home and waiting for a ransom demand. Her name was on the news channels she hadn’t watched and in the papers she hadn’t read.

  A black street cop found her in the club, sitting with her wine at her table. The cop went over and spoke to Wes. Lenna immediately understood the score. Wes just came over to her and smiled. He wouldn’t let his heart break here and neither would she. They were too fearless. They were too cool. Wes said, “You have to go now, Baby.” They were too cool to kiss each other goodbye. It was right, she knew. Then Wes walked back to the
stage and played for her one last time.

  It was the cop whose face contained such fear.

  “Don’t ever tell anyone his name, you understand?” he told her. “You never met him, you were never here.”

  As he led her up to the street she heard it again: the aching note, impossibly held, as the cop car drove her away.

  Grimes tried to picture Wes Clay in his mind. Beyond a certain point it was difficult. Lenna had known him for four glorious days. Her memory of him was the idealized image that any lover constructs of the beloved in the early days. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a real image—he didn’t question the truth of their love—merely that it was difficult for a third party like Grimes to put much flesh on those radiant bones. Yet it occurred to him that the brief and flawless bliss of her affair had doomed Lenna to the memory of a perfection that she could never regain. She hadn’t known Wes Clay long enough to discover his failings, as small or as large as they might have been; she never saw him tainted by anger or bad habit or by any of the petty and manifold weaknesses that afflict all men. Even if Wes had demonstrated such inadequacies in the time she had known him, they would have been either invisible to her or merely further proof of his charm. For he was her beloved and therefore perfect for that while.

  When she got back to Arcadia, Lenna lied and excused herself and was understood, and maybe even believed, for there were no marks on her body to tell the tale and Wes Clay did not exist. She was sent to a psychiatrist, to whom she also lied, and was pronounced depressed, neglected and confused. Lenna didn’t have a very clear memory of Faroe’s reaction to all this, partiy because she didn’t care, partly because she was indeed depressed and confused. Within two weeks her body began to feel something else—vague but pervasive—and by three weeks after that she was a month late.

  Lenna thought about an abortion and knew it was the only option for anyone in their right mind. In all truth she didn’t know who the father was; as far as she could calculate he could have been either Wes or Faroe. If it was Wes she was doomed to scandal; if Faroe she was doomed to a life’s connection to him that she no longer wanted. If she ran away again they would catch her. She was an adult and in principle she was free to go and do whatever she might choose; but she knew without any doubt that Faroe would have her brought back.