1MR. JONES
Everything about the messenger seemed smart, from the peaked cap squared across his brow to the polished toes of his boots, right down to the smug cast of his mouth. Rawlings signed for the package he brought and handed back the clipboard; and bless the man if he didn’t snap him a salute. He shut the door on the pink clean-shaven face and went to his desk for the knife that was too big for its purpose.
The cord severed, he removed two layers of brown paper and looked at the book. A phantom pain struck his side.
The book was standard octavo size but heavy as a brick, coarse brittle pages bound in green cloth with a surplus of stamping on cover and spine and the kind of lettering one found in soap advertisements. A balloon legend at the top descended in graded diminuendo until the second-to-last line, which was set out boldly in copper leaf:
THE IRON STAR
Being a Memoir of IRONS ST. JOHN
Deputy U.S. Marshal
Peace Officer
Railroad Detective
Trail-blazer
And
CANDIDATE FOR U.S. CONGRESS
by Himself
The educated reader might have added Reformed Outlaw to the list of sobriquets—with a Christian nod to the “Reformed”—but the object of the tome had been to elect, not repent. In fact it had managed to do neither, thus setting in motion the cosmic chain of events that had pulled Rawlings into his orbit.
Another stab came when he opened to the frontispiece, a three-quarter photographic portrait of a man past his middle years. It was contemporary to his experience of the original, although the developers’ art had tightened the sagging lines of the chin: a rectangular face set off by cheekbones that threatened to pierce the flesh and a thick moustache whose points reached nearly to the corners of the jaw. The eyes had been retouched as well, but less to flatter the subject than to keep them from washing out in the glare from the flashpan; irises that particular shade of sunned steel did not reproduce. The hair was cut to the shape of the skull and swept across the forehead; that feature, Rawlings thought, had not been tampered with. In all the weeks he’d spent with the man—seldom more than six feet away—he could barely recall having seen him with his hat off: Cavalry campaign issue, it was, stained black around the base of the dimpled crown, with the tassel missing a toggle.
It was like finding an old ogre of a dead uncle standing on his doorstep.
The book carried a 1906 copyright date and the name of a St. Louis publisher. He touched the page, as if feeling the figures pressed into paper would contradict the evidence of sight, and also of scent; the leaves smelled of dust and decomposition.
Twenty years.
He was fifty, the same age St. John had been then, when the man had seemed as weatherworn as the Red Wall of Wyoming.
The old humbug.
But, no; that was unfair. You didn’t mark down a man’s accomplishments just because he never missed an opportunity to remind you of them. He’d been a politician after all, however briefly and unsuccessfully, and that wound had yet to heal. Was he so easily dismissed as less than advertised? Truth to tell, constant exposure for nearly a month to any fellow creature outdoors in all extremes of weather would turn an Ivanhoe into a Uriah Heep. There were no heroes in a cold camp.
He turned to the first page of the editor’s preface. (“Nothing in little Ike’s childhood bore witness to the man he would become.”) Tucked in the seam between the sawtooth sheets was a cardboard rectangle, glaringly white against the ivory pulp, with glossy black embossed printing in eleven-point type:
CHARLES GEBHARDT, ESQ.
The card contained neither address nor telephone number: a proper gentleman’s calling card, an anomaly there, amidst the oat and barley fields of southeastern Minnesota.
Likewise there was no return address on the wrapper, and no postmark, since it had been sent by private messenger; nothing to explain its origin apart from the unfamiliar name on the card, which may have been nothing other than a bookmark employed by a former owner. The book was sufficiently shopworn to have passed from hand to hand, eventually to settle in a clearance bin, the last stop before the pulp mill. No provenance, and not an inkling as to purpose.
But he was still enough of a detective not to waste time pursuing a line of reasoning that offered no beginning and promised no end. He laid aside the book and took a seat in the wooden armchair that had come with the room, at the leftward-listing rolltop that had come with it, and turned back a cuff to measure his pulse against his watch.
After fifteen seconds he took his fingers from his wrist, replaced the cuff, fixed the stud, and entered the figure in the notebook he kept in a pigeonhole.
Not too rapid, considering; but on the other hand his heart wasn’t likely to finish out of the money at the Olmsted County Fair. He snapped shut the face of the watch, glancing from habit at the engraving but without reading: TO EMMETT FORCE RAWLINGS, IN GRATEFUL, ETC., ROBT. PINKERTON II, and returned it to his waistcoat pocket, where the weight of the gold plate tugged the unbuttoned garment uncomfortably off-center. He fastened the buttons.
From the right drawer he lifted a stack of yellow paper and reread what he’d written in the same small, precise hand he’d employed while waiting out his retirement in the records room in San Francisco. He reread it from the beginning as always, scratching out passages that struck him as prosy and inserting additional information in the margins, which he’d left wide for the purpose. The Chief had often said that if he ever tired of the field he could apply for a post in bookkeeping; after the Buckner debacle the remark had seemed not so much a compliment as a threat.
He caught himself stroking his chin; there’d been no beard there for years. That blasted book had sidetracked him. One of the reasons he’d started this comprehensive history of the Agency was to expel the nattering memories of his past, as well as to audit the account.
The Wild West: No grand exposition, that: rather a roadside carnival. Hundreds of hacks had squandered tons of paper and gallons of ink on midnight rides and gunplay; which, if one were to lift them from the record, would have no effect on how it had come out. Dakota would have been divided, the Indian question resolved, and the frontier closed regardless of which
side emerged intact from the O.K. Corral fight, whether William Bonney was slain from ambush or escaped to old Mexico, or if Buffalo Bill had chosen black tie and tails over feathers and buckskin. Washington was the big top, Tombstone and Deadwood a sideshow at best. Historians were crows, hopping over treasure to snatch up bright scraps of tin and deposit them at the feet of spectators who—thanks to them—would never know the difference.
His face ached; the scowl might have set permanently but for the interruption of a tap on his door. He shoved himself away from the desk and got up to answer it.
“A gentleman to see you, sir.” Mrs. Balfour, his landlady, extended a card in a large hand with veins on the back as thick as a man’s. She was a tall Scot who held her hair fast with glittering pins and kept snuff in a hinged locket around her neck.
He took the card, read again the name Charles Gebhardt, Esq. “I don’t suppose he said what he wants.”
“No, sir, and it wasn’t my business to ask.”
In truth he couldn’t imagine what circumstances would lead this woman to ask any sort of question, including whether she should allow the man up. They exchanged meaningless nods and she went back downstairs.
He remained in the doorway while the visitor ascended the last flight. At the top they stood not quite face to face; the man was two inches shorter and thicker in the torso, with a nose straight as a plumb and big ears that stuck out like spread clamshells. His smile was broad as well, overabundantly friendly, and furnished with teeth too white and even for trust: a salesman’s smile. Larger-than-life features on a larger-than-life head. They belonged on a billboard.
The hat was wrong: a tweed motoring cap, worn at an angle after the current fashion, taking up too little space in relation to the head; and now that Rawlings had identified the problem, he realized where he’d seen the man, or at least his image, painted in crude brush strokes reproduced in lithograph: a muscular frame in blue denim, plaid flannel, and yellow kerchief, dangling from the face of a cliff or a railroad boxcar plummeting down a steep grade with no train attached. Perhaps both. Wearing the hat, too big just to provide shade and too small for a fire pit.
“Mr. Rawlings?” A pleasant enough voice, a tenor, with a hint of the stage.
“Mr.—Gebhardt?” The name was as unlikely a fit as the headgear.
The smile flickered. “Yes; but that’s just between you, me, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Professionally it’s Buck Jones, and I’ve come all this way from Los Angeles to ask if you’d consider making a movie with me.”
2PIG’S FEET AND A PROPOSITION
That settled the point. The man looked larger than life because he was: His image was projected across the country (and, for all Rawlings knew, around the world) on screens the size of tennis courts, every pore on that impossibly straight nose visible to the eye, and every bit in proportion to the preposterous hat, one that no stunt—a leap from a balcony, a barroom brawl, a horseback plunge down a perpendicular cliff—could dislodge.
“Mr. Jones—”
The visitor wasn’t listening. His glance around the room was not so much contemptuous as angry; as if a figure so eminent as the former Pinkerton should be so overlooked by providence in his golden years. His unwilling host was suddenly conscious of the condition of his rug, of the bed that swung up into the wall when he bothered to make it.
Jones brightened. “Eaten yet? I’ve been living on hamburger sandwiches and canned corned beef for three days. They tell me the German food in this part’s good. I grew up on Schnitzel and dumplings. My treat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Then you can watch me, and I’ll buy the drinks. What’s the dry situation here?”
Rawlings laughed.
The house was a Queen Anne, built by a lumber baron and cut up into apartments after his death; under Mrs. Balfour’s ownership, the variegated colors of the siding had vanished beneath coats of leaden-gray paint. A great ferry boat of an automobile had come aground against the curb in front, enameled in brown and cream, chromium-trimmed, with white sidewalls, all reduced to a uniform tan by the dust of six states. Rawlings stopped short at the sight. “Your car?”
“Borrowed it from Tom Mix,” Jones said. “Damned decent of him, considering Bill Fox only hired me to club down his salary. I think he wants to put some miles on it before he trades it in for something more grand; an ocean liner, I guess.”
The seat that wrapped itself around the passenger’s back and hips was upholstered in cowhide, with the hair still on. The dashboard was padded in brown leather and a pair of handstraps shaped like stirrups dangled from the roof.
Jones followed the course of his guest’s eyes. “Think that’s bad? I stopped overnight in Reno to get the steer horns taken off the hood and put in the trunk. The president’s train draws less attention.” He stepped on the starter. The motor cleared its throat twice and settled into a mumbling throb. “You’re the navigator, Captain. Where to?”
Rawlings winced. That title—“Cap’n,” actually—was the exclusive property of a man long dead. “St. Paul; there’s nothing decent around here. I usually take the train, but I think I know where to tell you to turn.”
“You don’t drive?”
“I’m off automobiles. I had a bad experience once.”
They followed the Mississippi north and crossed the bridge.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, settled by German immigrants whose descendants were still very much in evidence, supported three Old Heidelbergs, each independently owned. The one Rawlings selected overlooked the two-hundred-foot gorge separating the Twin Cities, bleeding red iron in streaks down its gray face. Inside the Tudor construction, the beamed ceiling hung low over heavy oak wainscoting and high-backed booths, but there were no ornamental steins on shelves or Black Forest hunting prints on the walls. Jones commented on this.
“A band of patriots with
flat feet set fire to the place during the war,” Rawlings said. “They took issue with Sauerkraut on the menu instead of Liberty Cabbage. You can see some of the wood’s still charred. The management got rid of the decorations, but kept the Kraut. I took you at your word when you said you wanted authentic German. Even the Original Old Heidelberg across the river serves chicken cacciatore; calling it Hünchen Bismarck doesn’t fool anyone.”
“Did you serve in the war?”
“No.”
When nothing else was forthcoming, Jones said, “You didn’t miss anything. I was in that mess in the Philippines; took a Moro slug in the leg. Last time out I broke horses in Chicago for the army. Goddamn waste of good horseflesh, that one.”
“If you say so. I haven’t ridden in years.”
A bullet-headed waiter came to take their orders: pickled pig’s feet with plenty of ketchup for Jones, Rawlings a plain turkey breast. The smells from the kitchen had stirred his appetite.
“And a set-up for me.” Jones slapped his chest, striking something solid—plainly a flask—in an inside pocket. “Driving’s thirsty work. You?”
“I don’t drink.”
The waiter cleared his throat and leaned close to the actor’s ear. His breath smelled of vinegar. “We have a fine selection of beers and liquors, and the best wine cellar east of San Francisco.”
“It’s a wide-open town,” Rawlings told his companion. “Courtesy of Police Chief O’Connor. In St. Paul, you step aside to give a highbinder the street.”
“In that case, bring me a Lager dark enough to blot out the sun.” Jones handed back his menu.
Rawlings did the same. “Mineral water.”
“Ulcers?” asked Jones when they were alone.
“No.”
“Hold ’em close to the chin, don’t you?”
“You said something about making a movie. I assume that’s the same thing as a photoplay.”
“It is and I did. Seen many?”
“As a matter of fact I saw my first one last month, when my publisher was in town. I couldn’t very well get out of it. A pirate slid down a mainsail on the end of a sword. I fell asleep before he broke any bones.”
“I heard you were writing a book. That’s why I thought of you.”
“Where could you possibly have heard that? I don’t have a contract yet. It’s held up waiting for permission from Pinkerton’s. They’re afraid I’ll sell trade secrets.”
“You don’t know Hollywood. It gobbles up ideas like a whale plowing through minnows and still it’s hungry. Any time something breaks the surface that sounds like it’d make a pitch, the studios are on it like buzzards. My bet is Zukor will know the decision before you do. That’s why I came all this way, to sew you up before someone beats me to the finish.”
The waiter returned carrying a tray high above his head. He set a plate of glistening pig’s feet in front of Jones, homemade ketchup in a small crock, and a
steaming bowl of Sauerkraut. Rawlings’ turkey breast came divided into even slices with a sprig of parsley. A sudden stab of greedy hunger annoyed him; his system could not abide Kraut, but the smell of it always stirred his digestive juices.
A heavy glass mug contained liquid as black as pine pitch with a head of crackling foam. At a nod from Jones, the waiter scraped a half-inch off the top with a butter knife. He placed a glass of water in front of Rawlings and left with a bow; did it come with just the slightest hint of a heel click? All the man needed was a Pökelsticher helmet and puttees. It was a lesson in history how quickly a war could be forgotten.
The man from Hollywood spooned ketchup generously over his meal. “The frontier’s in demand,” he said. “The Iron Horse put Fox back on the map after Theda Bara fell on her face, and the old man’s been buying up desert land like it’s New York City real estate for location shooting. Famous Players is starring Bill Hart in The Virginian, and I guess I don’t have to tell you what Riders of the Purple Sage did for Tom Mix.”
“Yet you do. I’ve been up to my chin in old case files for months, and Mix isn’t in any of them.” Rawlings was busy cutting his turkey into bite-size cubes.
“Well, it did plenty. The studio turned right around and starred him in the sequel. Zane Grey’s rolling in it; he could sell ’em a pair of socks out of that trunk of his and they’d never know the difference.”
“My congratulations to Mr. Grey. I don’t see what any of this has to do with me. I don’t write fiction.”
“That’s just what I’m coming to. The way things are going, the business will run out of made-up stories. Meanwhile the real thing’s just laying there waiting for somebody to break ground. Mark my words; six months from now you won’t be able to kick a can across any lot in L.A. without hitting some actor got up like Billy the Kid or Jesse James or any of the Daltons.”
“I’m not surprised. Oscar Wilde said Americans always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”
“Maybe so, but there are only so many bandits and killers. When that bucket’s empty they’re going to have to go to the other side of the badge. I’m getting together my own production company, and we mean to beat the studios to the trough. I’ve got Bob Steele on board, and Hoot Gibson says he’s interested. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t; because I don’t know most of these names you’re throwing around.”
“Hear me out.” Jones put aside his knife and fork and leaned forward to cup his hands around his beer. “I found The Iron Star on the ten-cent table in a shop in Long Beach; ...
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