Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [36]
The hotel had been built by a notorious wildcatter who sometimes came into the Shamrock Room and got into brawls with his own patrons, wrecking the premises and adding to a mythos that told all of its adherents they, too, could become denizens of the magic kingdom, if only the dice toppled out of the cup in the right fashion. In forty-five minutes Hackberry was to address a banquet hall filled with campaign donors who could buy third-world countries with their credit cards. When he was in their midst, he sometimes had glimpses in his mind of a high school baseball pitcher who resembled him and who took a Mexican girl to a drive-in theater in 1947, knowing that as soon as he went into the restroom, he would be beaten senseless. But Hackberry did not like to remember the person he used to be. Instead, he had made a religion out of self-destruction and surrounded himself with people he secretly loathed.
On that balcony high above the pool, he had not heard the senator walk up behind him. The senator had cupped his palm around the back of Hackberry’s neck, massaging the muscles as a father might do to his son. “Are you nervous?” the senator had said.
“Should I be?”
“Only if you plan to tell them the truth.”
“What is the truth, Senator?”
“That the world we live in is a sweet, sweet sewer. That most of them would drink out of a spittoon rather than give up their access to the wealth and power you see across the boulevard. That they want to own you now so they don’t have to rent you later.”
Hackberry had drunk from the tumbler, the ice cubes clattering against the glass, the palm fronds moving in the breeze down below, the warmth of the whiskey slowing his heart like an old friend reassuring him that the race was not to the swift. “Telling the truth would be my greatest sin? That’s an odd way of looking at public service, don’t you think?”
“There’s a far graver sin.”
“What would that be?”
“You already know the answer to that one, Hack.”
“A worse sin would be disloyalty to someone who has reached out and anointed me with a single touch of his finger on my brow?” Hackberry had said.
“That’s beautifully put. Your wife said you bedded a Mexican whore in Uvalde last night.”
“That’s not true. It was in San Antonio.”
“Oh, that’s good. I have to remember that one. But no more local excursions. There will be time enough for that when you get to Washington. Believe it or not, it will be there in such abundance that you’ll eventually grow bored with it, if you haven’t already. Usually, when a man of your background screws down, he’s not seriously committed to infidelity. It’s usually an act of anger rather than lust. A bit of trouble at home, that sort of thing. It beats getting drunk. Is that the case with the girl in San Antonio?”
Hackberry had not answered.
“Fair enough. There’s no shame in having a vice. It’s what makes us human,” the senator had said. Then he had patted Hackberry gingerly on the back of the head, after first leaning over the rail and spitting, even though people were eating at poolside tables directly below.
Those moments on the balcony and the touch of the senator’s hand on his head had remained with Hackberry like a perverted form of stigmata for over four decades.
An hour after tearing up the message left by Temple Dowling, Hackberry glanced through the front window and saw a man park a BMW at the gate and walk up the flagstones to the gallery. The visitor had thick silver-and-black hair and lips that were too large for his mouth. He was carrying an