Galilee. Part 45

"Cadmus liked her."

"So maybe he gave her the journal? Yeah. Like I say, I'm there before you." He slid deeper into his seat, coc.o.o.ned in shadow. "But if she had it, she certainly wasn't going to tell me about it.

Even with a gun waved in her face."

"Have you searched your apartment?"

"The police already went through it, top to bottom."

"So maybe they took it."

"Yeah, maybe..." Garrison said, without much confi dence. "Cecil's trying to find out what they lifted from the place while I was locked up. But I can't see why they'd remove something like that. It's no use to them."Mitch.e.l.l sighed. "I'm so sick of this," he said.

"Sick of what?"

"All this s.h.i.t about the Barbarossas. I don't know why we don't just forget about 'em. If they were such a f.u.c.king problem, the old man would have done something about them years ago."

"He couldn't," Garrison said, sipping on his whisky. "They're too powerful."

"If they're so powerful why have I never heard of them?"

"Because they don't want you to know. They're secretive."

"So what have they got to hide? Maybe it's something we can use against them."

"I don't think so," Garrison said, very quietly. Mitch.e.l.l looked at him, expecting him to say more, but he kept his silence. Several seconds pa.s.sed. Then Garrison murmured, "The women know more than we do."

"Because they get serviced by that sonofab.i.t.c.h?"

"I think they get more than that," Garrison said.

"I want to kill the f.u.c.k," Mitch.e.l.l replied.

"I don't want you trying anything," Garrison said calmly. "Do you understand me, Mitch?"

"He f.u.c.ked my wife."

"You knew you'd have to let her go to him sooner or later."

"It's bulls.h.i.t..."

"It won't happen again," Garrison said, his voice colorless. "She was the last." He looked out at his brother from the cleft of the chair. "We're going to bring them down, Mitch. Him and all his family. That's why I don't want any personal vendettas from you. I don't want them getting twitchy. I want to know everything there is to know about them before we move against them."

"Which brings us back to the journal," Mitch.e.l.l said. He set his gla.s.s on the sill. "You know maybe I should talk to Cadmus."

Garrison didn't reply to the suggestion. He didn't even acknowledge it. Instead he drained his whisky gla.s.s, and then-his voice no more than a bruised whisper-he said: "You know what Kitty told me?"

"What?""That they're not human."

Mitch.e.l.l laughed; the sound hard and ragged.

Garrison waited until it died away, then he said: "I think she was telling the truth."

"That's f.u.c.king stupid," Mitch.e.l.l said. "I don't want to hear about it." He bared his teeth in disgust. "How could you f.u.c.king believe a thing like that?"

"I think she even took me to the Barbarossa house, when I was a baby."

"f.u.c.k the house," Mitch.e.l.l said, swatting all this irritating talk away. "I don't want to hear any more! Okay?"

"We've got to face it sooner or later."

"No," Mitch.e.l.l said, with absolute resolution. "If you're going to start talking like this, I'm going home."

"It's not something we can hide from," Garrison said mildly. "It's a fact of our lives, Mitch. It always has been. We just didn't know it."

Mitch.e.l.l paused at the door. Sluggish and befuddled with drink, he couldn't raise any coherent counter to what Garrison was saying. All he could say was: "Bull. s.h.i.t."

Garrison went on, as though Mitch hadn't spoken. "You know what?" he said. "Maybe it's for the best. We've run our course the way we are. It's time for something new." He was talking to an empty room now; Mitch had already left. Still, he finished his thought. "Something new," he said again, "or maybe something very old."

XI.

Garrison didn't sleep that night. He'd never needed more than three and a half hours' rest a night, and since Margie's death that number had gone down to two hours, sometimes just one. He was running on fumes, of course, and he knew it. He couldn't go on denying his body the rest it needed without paying a price. But with his fatigue came a strange clarity. The conversation he'd had with his brother tonight, for instance, would have been unthinkable a few weeks before: his mind would have rejected the ideas he'd espoused as surely as Mitch.e.l.l had done. But now he knew better. He was living in a world of mysteries, and out of fear he'd chosen to ignore their presence. Now it seemed to him the only way forward was to reach out and touch those mysteries; know what they were, know what they meant; let them work whatever changes they wished upon him.

Mitch.e.l.l would come to share his point of view in time. He'd have no choice. The old empire was receding into oblivion: the old powers dying, the old certainties going with them. Something had to replace those powers, and it wouldn't be a democracy of love and truth; of that Garrison wascertain. The new age, when it came, would be just as elite as the one pa.s.sing away. A chosen few-those with the will to live superior lives-would have the wherewithal to do so. The rest, as ever, would Uve and die in futility. The difference lay only in the coinage of power. The age of railroads and stockyards and timber and oil would give way to a time in which power was measured by some other means; a means which he as yet had no language to describe. He felt its imminence as he sometimes felt things in dreams; a knowledge beyond the scope of his five senses; beyond measurement or even materiality. He did not know where his appet.i.te for such possibilities came from, but he knew it had always been in him. The day Grandma Kitty had told him of the Barbarossas he'd felt some sleeping part of his nature awaken. He could remember everything about that conversation still. How she'd stared at him as she spoke, watching every nuance of his response; how she'd touched his face, her touch kindlier than he'd ever had from her before; how she'd promised to tell him secrets that would change his life forever, when the time was right. Of course she'd been the one to tell him about the journal, though he'd pretended to Mitch.e.l.l he wasn't certain this was so. There was a book, she'd said, in which the way to get into the heart of the Barbarossas' land was described; along with all that had to be endured on that road. Terrible things, she'd implied; horrors that would drive a soul to insanity if they weren't prepared. That was why it was essential to have this book: the information it contained was vital to any endeavor concerning the Barbarossas.

Oh, the nights he'd lain awake, wondering about that book! Trying to imagine how it might look, how it might feel in his hands. Was it large or small; were its pages thick or thin? Would he know the moment he read it what wisdom it was imparting, or would it be written in a code which he had to crack? Then there was the most important question of the lot: where did Cadmus keep this book? He would sometimes steal into his grandfather's study-which was a room he was strictly forbidden to enter-and stare at the shelves and cupboards (he didn't dare touch anything) wondering where it might be hidden. Was there a safe behind the books, or a secret compartment under the floor? Or was it hidden away in one of the drawers of Cadmus's antique desk, which had seemed so intimidating to him as a child that he'd had an almost superst.i.tious fear of it, as though it had a life of its own and might come after him, snorting like a bull, if he stared at it for too long?

He was never once caught in the study. He was far too clever for that. He knew how to wait and watch and plan; he knew how to lie. The one thing he couldn't do was charm; not even his own grandmother. When, after Cad-mus's recovery, he'd asked Kitty to talk about what she'd intimated to him, she bluntly refused to do so, to the point of denying that they'd ever had the conversation. He'd grown sullen, realizing that there was nothing he could say or do that would persuade her to open the subject again, and his sullenness had become thereafter his chief defining feature. In any family photograph he was the one without the smile; the glowering adolescent whom everybody treated gingerly for fear he snap like an ill-tempered dog. He didn't much like the pose, or the response it elicited, but he couldn't compete with Mitch.e.l.l's effortless charm. If he was patient, he knew, the time would come when he'd have the power to seek these secrets out for himself. Meanwhile he'd work, and play the loving grandson, watching for any dues that might inadvertently fall from Cadmus's lips; about where he might find the journal, and what it contained.

But Cadmus had let nothing slip. Though he'd encouraged Garrison in his rise to power, and countless times made it dear how much he trusted Garrison's judgment, that trust had neverextended to talking about the Barba-rossas. Nor had Garrison been able to draw Loretta into his confidence. She'd made her suspicion of him, mingled with a mild distaste, plain from the outset, and nothing he'd said or done had made her warm to him. More irksome still was the knowledge that she, though new to the Geary dynasty, had access to information that he was denied. More than information, of course. She, like Kitty and Margie and Mitch.e.l.l's wife, had taken herself off to Kaua'i more than once, to be with one ol die Barbarossa clan. Why this ritual was sanctioned Garrison had never understood; he only knew that it was a tradition that went back a long way.

He'd raised some objections to it when he'd first heard it mooted, but Cadmus had made it unequivocally clear that the matter was not up for debate. There were some things, he'd said to Garrison, that had to be accepted without challenge, however unpalatable. They were part of the way the world worked.

"Not my world," Garrison had said, working himself up into a fine fury. "I'm not allowing my wife to go off to some island and play around with a total stranger."

"Just be quiet," Cadmus had said. Then, in hushed, even tones he'd explained that Garrison would do exactly as he was told on this matter, or suffer the consequences. "If you can't behave as I wish you to behave, then you have no place in this family," he'd said.

"You wouldn't throw me out," Garrison had replied. "Not now."

"You watch me," his grandfather had said. "If you argue with me about this, you go. It's as simple as that. It's not as though you're devoted to your wife, after all. You cheat on her, don't you?"

Garrison had sulked. "Well don't you?"

"Yes."

"So let her cheat on you, if it helps the family."

"I don't see how-"

"It doesn't matter whether you see or not."

That had been the end of the conversation, and Garrison had left with not the slightest doubt as to his grandfather's sincerity. Cadmus was not a man to make idle threats. Duly warned. Garrison had kept his objections to himself thereafter. And what little faith he'd had in his grandfather's love for him died.

Now, as the first light of dawn crept into the sky, he thought of the old man, sick to death but unwilling to die, and wondered if he should have one more try at getting the truth out of him. No doubt, as Mitch.e.l.l had said, taking Cadmus's pills off him for half a day would be a torment; but it might make him talk. And even if it didn't, there'd be some satisfaction to be had from making the b.a.s.t.a.r.d beg for his painkillers. Picturing the scene, Cadmus yellow-white with agony, sobbing to have his opiates back, brought a smile to Garrison's face. But first he would see how wellMitch.e.l.l did getting the truth out of Cadmus. If his brother failed, then he'd have no choice but to play the torturer, and be thankful for the chance.

XII.

i Ink and water; water and ink.

Last night, I dreamt about Galilee. It wasn't one of the waking dreams-the visions, if you will-in which I witness the matter of these pages. It was a dream that came to me while I was asleep, but which so forcibly impressed itself upon my mind that it was still there when I woke.

This is what I dreamed. I was hovering like a bird above a churning sea, and adrift in that sea, bound to a wretched raft, and naked, was Galilee. He was covered in wounds, and his blood was running off into the water. I couldn't see any sharks, but that's not to say they weren't all around him. The sea was black, however, like the ink in my pen; it concealed its inhabitants.

As I watched, wave after dark wave struck the raft, and one by one its pieces were disengaged and swept away, so that soon Galilee's body was draped over the three or four planks that remained, his head and lower limbs submerged in the water. Now, for the first time, he seemed to realize that he was about to die, and began to struggle to work the knots free. His body glistened with sweat, and sometimes, as the scene grew more frenzied, I couldn't decide what I was seeing.

Was that black, shining form broken on the planks still my brother, or was it the breaking wave that had swept him away?

I wanted to wake now; the whole scene distressed me. I had no desire to watch my brother drown. I told myself to wake up. You don't have to endure this, I said, just open your eyes.

I started to feel the dream receding from me. But even as it did so my brother's writhings became more desperate-the wounds on his body gaping as he thrashed-and he pulled a hand free of the ropes. He hauled his head up out of the waves. When he did so the water seemed to ding around his skull, as though it had knitted a spumy crown there; his eyes were wild, his mouth was letting out a soundless scream. He tore at the binding around his other wrist, and then, sitting up on what was left of the raft, reached down into the water to free his legs.

He wasn't quick enough. The planks beneath him were sundered, and swept away. He fell backward into the water, his wounds pouring blood as he did so, and the waterlogged boards to which his feet were still tied dragged him down, down beneath waves.

And now came the most curious event in the sequence. As his dark body sank from sight, the waters into which he was disappearing forsook their negritude, as though in reverence to the flesh they'd claimed. It was not that they became translucent, like any common sea. Rather their concealing darkness became a revelatory light, which blazed so brightly it outshone the sky.

I could see my brother's body, sinking into the bright depths. I could see every living form thatswam in the sea around him, all silhouetted against the brightness of the water. Shoals of tiny fish, moving as a single ent.i.ty; vast squid-vaster than any such creature I'd seen before-watching Galilee descend toward their realm; and of course innumerable sharks, circling him as he sank, describing protective spirals around his body.

And then, as they say in books of cowardly fancy, I woke, and it was all a dream.

I don't discount the possibility that though the images I saw were not real, as I believe my visions are, they were true. That Galilee, if not already drowned, is about to be drowned.

What does that do to the story I thought I was telling? Well, to put it crudely, it pinches it off before it was fully s.h.i.t out. (I'm sorry, that's not the prettiest of metaphors, but I'm not in the prettiest of moods; and it expresses indecently well how I feel today about what I'm doing. That this whole wretched business has simply been one long, problematic excretion. One day I'm constipated, the next it runs out of me like foul water.) But now I revolt you. I'll stop.

Back to Rachel for a while. I'll let the dream sit, and revisit it in a few hours. Maybe it'll make a different kind of sense later.

ii The last we heard of Rachel she was in a cab returning to the apartment on Central Park. In her hands, the journal which Garrison had spent so many hours in his youth wondering about; imagining its size, and its weight; puzzling over what it might contain. And there in its pages she'd discovered a mystery: that there had been a man called Galilee in Charleston, in the spring of 1865. Now Nickelberry was taking Holt to meet him, promising that the encounter would help the captain heal the pain he'd endured here.

I had not witnessed such excess I was about to see, the captain wrote, since the early days of the war, when I had occasion to come into a bordello where one of my men had been murdered in a brawl. To be truthful luxury, especially in excess, has never pleased me; only in nature do I find an overabundance delightful; evidence of creation's limitless cup. It was my darling Adina who was the one who liked to have fine things in the house-vases and silks and pretty pictures. For me, as I think for most of my s.e.x, fineries are acceptable in moderation, but can quickly come to seem smothering.

So then, imagine this: two houses in the East Battery, facing the water, and so damaged by enemy fire as to seem from the outside little more than the husks of dwellings, but which, upon entering, are revealed to contain the gleanings from fifty of Charleston's finest houses, every article chosen because it speaks precociously to the senses.This was the place into which Nickelberry took me; the place he'd been brought by his.guide and advocate Olivia, who was but one of a dozen or so people who occupied this unlikely palace.

It seems Nub had accepted the bounty of the place without questioning it (such is a cook's nature, perhaps; especially during times of scarcity). I, on the other hand, began to interrogate Olivia immediately. How had all this sickly magnificence been accrued, 1 demanded to know. The woman was black, and ill-educated (she'd been a slave, though she was now dressed in a gown, and draped in jewelry, that would have been the envy of any fine woman on Meeting Street): she could not answer me coherently. I became frustrated with her, but before my agitation grew too great a white woman, much older than Olivia, appeared at my side. She introduced herself as the widow of General Walter Harris, a man under whose command I had fought in Virginia. She seemed quite happy to answer my questions. None of the luxuries in the midst of which we stood had been pirated or looted, she explained, but given freely to the man who lived here, the aforementioned Galilee. I expressed surprise at this, for besides the great treasure-house of valuables here there was also food and drink in an abundance I think no Charlestonian has seen since the beginning of the siege. I was invited by the ladies to sit and eat, and after so many months in which the best fare available was fried biscuits in bacon fat could not restrain myself. I was not alone at the table. There was a Negro boy, no more than twelve, and a young man from Alabama by the name ofMaybank and a fourth woman, very pale and elegant, whom this fellow Maybank fed with his fingers, as though he were enslaved to her. I ate gingerly at first, overwhelmed by what was before me, but my appet.i.te grew rather than diminishing, and I ate enough for ten men; was then sick to my stomach; and, having vomited, came back to the table quite refreshed, and partook again. Sweetbreads with sherry, thick slices of a baked calf's head, oysters and mushrooms, a fine she-crab soup and a brown oyster stew with benne seeds. There was a wine souffle for dessert, and huckleberry pie and conserved peaches-what we used to call peach leather when I was young-and fruit candy such as we would have for Christmas. Nickelberry, Olivia and the general's widow ate with me, while the younger woman, one Katherine Morrow, made herself very drunk with brandy, and at last took herself off in search of our host, then promptly pa.s.sed out on the floor next door. The young man Maybank declared suddenly that he wished to have congress with the woman while she was in this state, and called for the Negro boy Thaddeus to help him undress the woman.

I protested, but Nickelberry advised me to hold my tongue. They had a perfect right to pleasure themselves with the drunken Miss Morrow if they so chose, he said; such was the law of this place. Olivia confirmed the fact. If I was to intervene, she warned me, and Galilee chanced to hear of it, he would kill me...

Rachel had not noticed the journey back to the apartment; nor the trip in the elevator. Now she was sitting at the window, with the glory of New York before her, and she didn't see it. All she saw was the house in the East Battery, its rooms a catalog of excesses; and the captain, sitting at the table, gorging himself- I asked what manner of man this Galilee was, and Olivia smiled at me. You 'II see, she said. And you 'II understand, when he starts to speak to you, what kind of king he is.King? I said, of what country? Of every country, Olivia replied; of every city, of every stone.

He's black, the widow Harris said, but he was never a slave. I asked her how she knew this, and she answered, simply, that there was not a man on earth who could put Galilee in chains.

All, needless to say, strange talk; and while it was going on the sounds from the adjacent room growing louder, as Maybank and the boy violated Miss Morrow.

Nickelberry left the table, and went to watch. He called me presently to join him, and to my shame I picked up the bottle of wine I had all but emptied and went to see.

Miss Morrow was no longer incapacitated, but responding to her violations with vigor. The boy was naked by now, and straddled her, rubbing his little rod between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, while Maybank took the route between her legs, which he had made available by tearing her fine silk dress apart.

The scene was entirely b.e.s.t.i.a.l, but I will not lie: I was aroused. Fiery, in fact.

After years of sickness and corpses, I was glad to see healthy flesh sweating healthy sweat. The din of their mutual pleasuring filled the room, echoing back and forth between the bare walls so that it was as though there were not three but ten lovers before me. I began to feel giddy, my head pounding, and I turned away to find that Nickelberry was back at the table with Olivia, who had bared herself for his perusal. He looked like a greedy child, his hands plunged into plates of creamy dessert, which he then smeared upon the woman's handsome bosom. She seemed quite happy at this, and pressed his face against her, so he might lick the cream off her body.

The widow Harris now came to me, and offered her own flesh for my pleasure. I declined. She promptly told me I could not. If I was capable of giving her the pleasure of love, then I was obliged to do so. This too was the law.

I told her that I was a married man, at which she laughed, saying that in this place it mattered not at all what a man or woman had been before they entered; that all histories were forgotten here, and a person became what suited them.

Then I do not belong here, I told her. Are you so proud of what you were out there? she said to me, her face all flushed. You fled your duty; you lost your family and your house. You're less than me, out there. Imagine that! You who were so fine, less than an ugly old widow.

She angered me, and I struck her, drunk as I was, I struck her hard across her painted face. She fell back against the wall, shrieking at me now-obscenities I would not have believed she knew, except that she was spitting them at me in a vile stream. I threw down the bottle I'd been drinking from, and for a moment, thinking perhaps I meant to do her more serious harm, she ceased to shriek. But then I turned from her, and she began again, following me like a fury, berating me.

In my drunken desire to get away from the woman I became lost. The route I had supposed wouldtake me out into the street brought me instead to a darkened flight of stairs. I ascended them stumbling, and crouched in the gloom halfway up. The widow had not seen me ascend; she pa.s.sed below, cursing me.

I waited there in the darkness, shuddering. Not from fear of the widow, but from grief at what she'd said. The woman was right, I knew. I'm nothing now. Less than nothing.

And then, as if my sorrow had been spoken, a man appeared at the top of the stain and looked down at me. No, not at me; into me. I never felt such a gaze as this. I was in fear of it at first. I felt he might kill me with it, as readily as a man who reached into another's body and took hold of his heart.

But then he came down the stairs a little way, and sat there, and quietly said: "A man who is nothing has nothing to lose. I am Galilee. Welcome," and I felt as though I had a reason to live.

XIII.

i A reason to live. Rachel put the journal down and stared out across the darkened park. It was impossible that this Galilee be the same man as she'd met, but it was so easy to imagine him there on the stairs, imagine him speaking those words of welcome, imagine him being the man who'd given the captain reason to live.

Hadn't he done that for her, in a way? Hadn't he reawakened her sense of her own significance, her own power?

She set the journal down on the table, glancing at the opening of the next paragraph.

How shall I say what happened to me then?

She looked away from it. She couldn't bear to read any more, not tonight. Her head was too filled up, sickened almost the way the captain had been sickened, by the sheer excess of what she'd read. There was a change in the prose too, which was not lost on her. The earlier entries had been nicely written, but their eloquence had been that of a man striving for some distance from the horrors jn which he was immersed. But now he had begun to write like a storyteller, creating the scene and his place in it with terrible immediacy. The visions his words had put in Rachel's head still swarmed before her: the house, the food, the s.e.xual couplings.

The last time she'd felt so consumed by a story, Galilee had been the man telling it- She looked at the journal again, without touching it; at the way the words were neatly laid on the page. Too neatly perhaps. Was this the diary of a man who was living out these experiences, and hours later setting them down? Or had this all been constructed after the fact, by a man who'dbeen tutored in the art of telling a tale? Tutored by a man who loved stories; who told them as seductions.

"No..." she said to herself. No, this was not the same man; once and for all, there were two Galilees: one in the journal, the other in her memory. She looked at the teasing words again: Haw shall I say what happened to me then?

It was a clever bluff, that sentence. The writer knew exactly how he was going to say what happened to him; he had the words ready. But it made those words seem more true, didn't it, if they appeared to come from a man uncertain of his own skills? She felt a spasm of revulsion for the story, and for her own complicity in its deceits. She'd gorged on it, hadn't she? Lapped up every decadent detail, as though this other life could give her dues to her own.

So far, it had shown her nothing of any real value. Yes, it had t.i.tillated her with its Gothic nonsenses; its tales of ghost children and unearthed limbs, but these scenes in the house had gone too far. She didn't believe it any longer. It might pa.s.s itself off as history, but it was a fabrication; its excesses made it absurd.

She was still angry with herself when she went to bed, and she couldn't sleep. After an hour and a half lying in an uneasy doze she got up, popped a sleeping pill, and went back to bed to try again.