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“Unless you give back my son, I’ll follow you and this man to the grave.”
The whites of Maggie’s eyes were threaded with tiny broken blood vessels, as though she were on the verge of crying. Ruby walked out the door onto the landing. She thought it was over. Then she heard Maggie behind her.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Maggie said.
“Then tell me.”
“He has Ishmael. With a snap of his fingers, he can turn your son’s life into the death of a thousand cuts.”
THE REO BROKE down twice on the way to San Antonio, and it was evening before Hackberry and Andre arrived at the city limits.
“Where do you want me to drive Miss Beatrice’s destroyed motorcar now?” Andre asked.
Hackberry gave Andre the directions to Ruby’s hotel. Hackberry went inside and was told that Miss Dansen was not in her room and had not left a message. He got back in the motorcar and tried to think clearly. “Do you know where Beckman lives?”
“Out by one of the old missions,” Andre replied. “I don’t think it is advisable to go there.”
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“Because you do not go into your enemy’s lair. You catch him when he is outside it. Then you isolate him and do what you wish.”
Hackberry studied Andre’s profile against the sunset. “Sometimes you can give a fellow a chill.”
“Members of the army came to our village and told me to close my church and the school I helped build. I told them I would not. So they stole my children. These men were whoremongers and did not have families and cared nothing about innocent children who did not understand the nature of evil and thought all men were good.”
Hackberry looked through the windshield at the men in unironed clothes on the sidewalk and a fire burning in a trash barrel and the lights coming on in the cafés and bars along the street. A Salvation Army band was playing on the corner. “Go on,” he said.
“They would not give my children back. One night I caught three of the kidnappers. I trussed them with rope and gagged them and hid them in a cart, under the feces of my pigs and cattle, and took them into the jungle. By sunrise, they had given up their former way of life. There was no good deed they would not grant me, no information they would not gladly share. I was no longer a priest then, except for the love and sorrow I carried in my heart for my children. No one can understand the nature of loss until he has lost a child. But the loss is far worse when others have stolen your children and done things that even they will never tell anyone.”
“What did you do to them?”
“I showed them that it was possible for them to become children again. They reached a point where nothing of the adult remained. The adult had died during the night. They looked shrunken, even in size. They made mewing sounds rather than words.”
“What happened to your children?”
“I don’t know. The three kidnappers had given them to others. The villagers said they were eaten by the Tonton Macoute. This is not true. I am certain they are in heaven, and sometimes I think they speak to me. But I do not know the manner in which they died, and I am filled with a great sadness when I imagine what may have been their fate.”
It took Hackberry a moment to speak. “Go by Beckman’s place.”
“I think this is a bad choice,” Andre said.
“It’s not up for a vote.”
THEY DROVE UP a dirt road lined with poplars, then saw a building that was dark except for one light in an upstairs window. Andre pulled the REO into the deep shade of the poplars and cut the engine. “Once or twice a week he has visitors about this time of the evening.”
“What kind of visitors?”
“A procurer delivers Mexican girls. The procurer is also a trafficker in opium. He works for a Cantonese man associated with the Tongs in San Francisco.”
“Beckman has only Mexican girls brought to him?”
“They are the ones who are most available. The supplier of girls may be more than a procurer and vendor of opium.”
“Would you please just spit it out?”
“He hangs up the girls on a hook in a doorway and puts on a pair of tight yellow gloves that he keeps in a special drawer. The bodies of Mexican girls have been found in the garbage dump, badly beaten.”
“Who told you this?”
