Ли Чайлд - "Этаж смерти" with W_cat
[888] “I want to take you to lunch,” I said. “Kind of a thank-you thing.”
[889] She thought about it for a quarter mile and then smiled across at me.
[890] “OK,” she said.
[891] She jinked the right turn onto the county road and accelerated south toward Margrave. Drove past Eno’s shiny new place and headed down to town.
9
[892] I GOT HER TO DUCK IN AT THE STATION HOUSE AND BRING me out the property bag with my money in it. Then we drove on and she dropped me in the center of Margrave and I arranged to meet her up at the station house in a couple of hours. I stood on the sidewalk in the fierce Sunday morning heat and waved her off. I felt a whole lot better. I was back in motion. I was going to check out the Blind Blake story, then take Roscoe to lunch, then get the hell out of Georgia and never come back.
[893] So I spent a while wandering around looking at the town, doing the things I should have been doing on Friday afternoon. There wasn’t really much to the place. The old county road ran straight through, north to south, and for about four blocks it was labeled Main Street. Those four blocks had small stores and offices facing each other across the width of the road, separated by little service alleys which ran around to the back of the buildings. I saw a small grocery, a barbershop, an outfitter’s, a doctor’s office, a lawyer’s office and a dentist’s office. In back of the commercial buildings was parkland with white picket fences and ornamental trees. On the street, the stores and offices had awnings over wide sidewalks. There were benches set on the sidewalks, but they were empty. The whole place was deserted. Sunday morning, miles from anywhere.
[894] Main Street ran north, straight as a die, past a few hundred yards of more parkland up to the station house and the firehouse, and a half mile farther on than that was Eno’s diner. A few miles beyond Eno’s was the turn west out to Warburton where the prison was. North of that junction there was nothing on the county road until you reached the warehouses and the highway cloverleaf, fourteen empty miles from where I stood.
[895] On the south edge of town I could see a little village green with a bronze statue and a residential street running away to the west. I strolled down there and saw a discreet green sign which read: Beckman Drive. Hubble’s street. I couldn’t see any real distance down it because pretty much straight away it looped left and right around a wide grass square with a big white wooden church set on it. The church was ringed by cherry trees and the lawn was circled by cars with clean quiet paint parked in neat lines. I could just about make out the growl of the organ and the sound of the people singing.
[896] The statue on the village green was of a guy called Caspar Teale who’d done something or other about a hundred years ago. More or less opposite Beckman Drive on the other side of the green was another residential street, running east, with a convenience store standing alone on the corner. And that was it. Not much of a town. Not much going on. Took me less than thirty minutes to look over everything the place had to offer.
[897] But it was the most immaculate town I had ever seen. It was amazing. Every single building was either brand-new or recently refurbished. The roads were smooth as glass, and the sidewalks were flat and clean. No potholes, no cracks, no heave. The little offices and stores looked like they got repainted every week. The lawns and the plantings and the trees were clipped to perfection. The bronze statue of old Caspar Teale looked like somebody licked it clean every morning. The paint on the church was so bright it hurt my eyes. Flags flew everywhere, sparkling white and glowing red and blue in the sun. The whole place was so tidy it could make you nervous to walk around in case you left a dirty footprint somewhere.
[898] THE CONVENIENCE STORE ON THE SOUTHEASTERN CORNER was selling the sort of stuff that gave it a good enough excuse to be open on a Sunday morning. Open, but not busy. There was nobody in there except the guy behind the register. But he had coffee. I sat up at the little counter and ordered a big mug and bought a Sunday newspaper.
[899] The president was still on the front page. Now he was in California. He was explaining to defense contractors why their gravy train was grinding to a halt after fifty glorious years. The aftershock from his Pensacola announcement about the Coast Guard was still rumbling on. Their boats were returning to their harbors on Saturday night. They wouldn’t go out again without new funding. The paper’s editorial guys were all stirred up about it.
[900] I stopped reading and glanced up when I heard the door open. A woman came in. She took a stool at the opposite end of the counter. She was older than me, maybe forty. Dark hair, very slender, expensively dressed in black. She had very pale skin. So pale, it was almost luminous. She moved with a kind of nervous tension. I could see tendons like slim ropes in her wrists. I could see some kind of an appalling strain in her face. The counter guy slid over to her and she ordered coffee in a voice so quiet I could barely hear it, even though she was pretty close by and it was a silent room.
[901] She didn’t stay long. She got through half her coffee, watching the window all the time. Then a big black pickup truck pulled up outside and she shivered. It was a brand-new truck and obviously it had never hauled anything worth hauling. I caught a glimpse of the driver as he leaned over inside to spring the door. He was a tough-looking guy. Pretty tall. Broad shoulders and a thick neck. Black hair. Black hair all over long knotted arms. Maybe thirty years old. The pale woman slid off her stool like a ghost and stood up. Swallowed once. As she opened the shop door I heard the burble of a big motor idling. The woman got into the truck, but it didn’t move away. Just sat there at the curb. I swiveled on my stool to face the counter guy.
[902] “Who is that?” I asked him.
[903] The guy looked at me like I was from another planet.
“That’s Mrs. Kliner,” he said. “You don’t know the Kliners?”
[904] “I heard about them,” I said. “I’m a stranger in town. Kliner owns the warehouses up near the highway, right?”
[905] “Right,” he said. “And a whole lot more besides. Big deal round here, Mr. Kliner.”
[906] “He is?” I said.
[907] “Sure,” the guy said. “You heard about the Foundation?”
[908] I shook my head. Finished my coffee and pushed the mug over for a refill.
[909] “Kliner set up the Kliner Foundation,” the guy said. “Benefits the town in a lot of ways. Came here five years ago, been like Christmas ever since.”
[910] I nodded.
[911] “Is Mrs. Kliner OK?” I asked him.
[912] He shook his head as he filled my mug.
[913] “She’s a sick woman,” he said. “Very sick. Very pale, right? A very sick woman. Could be tuberculosis. I seen tuberculosis do that to folks. She used to be a fine-looking woman, but now she looks like something grown in a closet, right? A very sick woman, that’s for damn sure.”
[914] “Who’s the guy in the truck?” I said.
[915] “Stepson,” he said. “Kliner’s kid by his first wife. Mrs. Kliner’s his second. I’ve heard she don’t get along so good with the kid.”
[916] He gave me the sort of nod that terminates casual conversations. Moved away to wipe off some kind of a chromium machine behind the other end of the counter. The black pickup was still waiting outside. I agreed with the guy that the woman looked like something grown in a closet. She looked like some kind of a rare orchid starved of light and sustenance. But I didn’t agree with him that she looked sick. I didn’t think she had tuberculosis. I thought she was suffering from something else. Something I’d seen once or twice before. I thought she was suffering from sheer terror. Terror of what, I didn’t know. Terror of what, I didn’t want to know. Not my problem. I stood up and dropped a five on the counter. The guy made change all in coins. He had no dollar bills. The pickup was still there, stationary at the curb. The driver was leaning up, chest against the wheel, looking sideways across his stepmother, staring in straight at me.
[917] There was a mirror opposite me behind the counter. I looked exactly like a guy who’d been on an all-night bus and then spent two days in jail. I figured I needed to get cleaned up before I took Roscoe to lunch. The counter guy saw me figuring.
[918] “Try the barbershop,” he said.
[919] “On a Sunday?” I said.
[920] The guy shrugged.
[921] “They’re always in there,” he said. “Never exactly closed. Never exactly open, either.”
[922] I nodded and pushed out through the door. I saw a small crowd of people coming out of the church and chatting on the lawns and getting into their cars. The rest of the town was still deserted. But the black pickup was still at the curb, right outside the convenience store. The driver was still staring at me.
[923] I walked north in the sun and the pickup moved slowly alongside, keeping pace. The guy was still hunched forward, staring sideways. I stretched out a couple of steps and the truck sped up to keep station. Then I stopped dead and he overshot. I stood there. The guy evidently decided backing up wasn’t on his agenda. He floored it and took off with a roar. I shrugged and carried on. Reached the barbershop. Ducked under the striped awning and tried the door. Unlocked. I went in.
[924] LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN MARGRAVE, THE BARBERSHOP looked wonderful. It gleamed with ancient chairs and fittings lovingly polished and maintained. It had the kind of barbershop gear everybody tore out thirty years ago. Now everybody wants it back. They pay a fortune for it because it re-creates the way people want America to look. The way they think it used to look. It’s certainly the way I thought it used to look. I would sit in some schoolyard in Manila or Munich and imagine green lawns and trees and flags and a gleaming chrome barbershop like this one.
[925] It was run by two old black guys. They were just hanging out there. Not really open for business, not really closed. But they indicated they would serve me. Like they were there, and I was there, so why not? And I guess I looked like an urgent case. I asked them for the works. A shave, a haircut, a hot towel and a shoe shine. There were framed newspaper front pages here and there on the walls. Big headlines. Roosevelt dies, VJ Day, JFK assassinated, Martin Luther King murdered. There was an old mahogany table radio thumping warmly away. The new Sunday paper was crisply folded on a bench in the window.
[926] The old guys mixed up soapy lather in a bowl, stropped a straight razor, rinsed a shaving brush. They shrouded me with towels and got to work. One guy shaved me with the old straight razor. The other guy stood around doing not much of anything. I figured maybe he came into play later. The busy guy started chatting away, like barbers do. Told me the history of his business. The two of them had been buddies since childhood. Always lived here in Margrave since way back. Started out as barbers way before the World War Two. Apprenticed in Atlanta. Opened a shop together as young men. Moved it to this location when the old neighborhood was razed. He told me the history of the county from a barber’s perspective. Listed the personalities who’d been in and out of these old chairs. Told me about all kinds of people.
[927] “So tell me about the Kliners,” I said.
[928] He was a chatty guy, but that question shut him up. He stopped work and thought about it.
[929] “Can’t help you with that inquiry, that’s for sure,” he said. “That’s a subject we prefer not to discuss in here. Best if you ask me about somebody else altogether.”
[930] I shrugged under the shroud of towels.
[931] “OK,” I said. “You ever heard of Blind Blake?”
[932] “Him I heard of, that’s for sure,” the old man said. “That’s a guy we can discuss, no problem at all.”
[933] “Great,” I said. “So what can you tell me?”
[934] “He was here, time to time, way back,” he said. “Born in Jacksonville, Florida, they say, just over the state line. Used to kind of trek on up from there, you know, through here, through Atlanta, all the way up north to Chicago, and then trek all the way back down again. Back through Atlanta, back through here, back home. Very different then, you know. No highway, no automobiles, at least not for a poor black man and his friends. All walking or riding on the freight cars.”
[935] “You ever hear him play?” I asked him.
[936] He stopped work again and looked at me.
[937] “Man, I’m seventy-four years old,” he said. “This was back when I was just a little boy. We’re talking about Blind Blake here. Guys like that played in bars. Never was in no bars when I was a little boy, you understand. I would have got my behind whupped real good if I had been. You should talk to my partner here. He’s a whole lot older than I am. He may have heard him play, only he may not remember it because he don’t remember much. Not even what he ate for breakfast. Am I right? Hey, my old friend, what you eat for breakfast?”
[938] The other old guy creaked over and leaned up on the next sink to mine. He was a gnarled old fellow the color of the mahogany radio.
[939] “I don’t know what I ate for breakfast,” he said. “Don’t even know if I ate any breakfast at all. But listen up. I may be an old guy, but the truth is old guys remember stuff real well. Not recent things, you understand, but old things. You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it’s filled up with old stuff there ain’t no way to get new stuff in. No way at all, you understand? So I don’t remember any new stuff because my old bucket is all filled up with old stuff that happened way back. You understand what I’m saying here?”
