GATLING HAD BEEN to Galveston just once.
That was back when he still worked for the Richard Jordan Gatling Company. Richard J., a whimsical man, had hired Gatling because he was amused by the idea that he might be related to this tall, tough half-breed who had been an armorer’s assistant in the U.S. Cavalry and knew a great deal about weapons.
Gatling was no half-breed—he was of old Scotch and English stock, from Mississippi—but he had been raised by the Zunis in New Mexico, and because of that and the fact that he was somewhat dark-skinned, people who didn’t know him always assumed that he had Indian blood, an assumption that he did nothing to discourage.
There were times when he wished he had gone back to the Zuni pueblo. But he knew he had stayed too long in the white man’s world. It was just too late.
Now he was heading for Galveston, the town where a customer had tried to kill him. Other men had tried to do him in, but until then—no customers. An ambitious revolutionary named Ruiz had ordered a large shipment of rapid-fire guns and his ship, an old sailing vessel, anchored off Galveston, was waiting to take them to Mexico.
Gatling’s deal with Ruiz called for full cash payment, U.S. currency or Mexican double eagles, before a single weapon was loaded aboard. American green or Mexican gold, nothing else. Ruiz, a man of great pride, was so insulted he tried to stick Gatling like a pig. Gatling killed him with a broken beer bottle. It was not a satisfactory deal for Ruiz, but Gatling lost nothing. He upped the price of the guns and sold them to another revolutionary two days later. He didn’t see much of the town because he took off fast when he heard the U.S. Attorney was thinking of prosecuting him for violating the Neutrality Act.
Now he was heading back to a town he didn’t know. He had ridden a Pullman most of the way after bribing the head porter to let him stay in his berth even when the other sleepers were up and around. His recently injured back would hurt like hell if he sat up for any length of time. The porter was very nice about it and recommended a special brand of liniment. What about a bottle or a woman? the porter asked. Very refined ladies rode the train and a little of that, the exercise, might be good for his back. Gatling thanked him but said no: The doctor was very strict about booze and women.
Gatling slept a lot and read newspapers from all the stops along the line. Nothing about Frisco or Tijuana. He shaved and washed late at night. A dull trip, but better than being spotted.
One morning when the train was less than a hundred miles from Galveston the porter brought the papers. Gatling pulled back the curtains and found a Remington .44 pointing at his face. The porter wasn’t there, but Gatling heard him hurrying away.
“Hold still now,” a pock-faced man said, holding the Remington steady. He had a pair of handcuffs in his other hand. “Slip these on.”
“Who the hell are you?” There was nothing Gatling could do but put on the handcuffs.
The pock-faced man sneered at the question. “I’m the kind of a feller that wonders why another feller reads so many papers. You been reading every paper up and down the line. It’s like you want to know what they’re saying about you. I did have a little help from the black porter.”
“You’re a pimp?”
“Nothing wrong with that, friend. Now, sir, first off, what’s your name?”
Gatling wondered how much of a chance he had of taking the gun away from the mack. Not much. He was big and burly and hadn’t always been a flesh-peddler. Some sergeants went in for pimping as well as money-lending.
“Forget the name,” Gatling said. “Why don’t we talk about money?”
“I can beat the name out of you. I can kill you.”
“On the train? I can holler pretty good. People aren’t deaf.”
“They won’t hear you in the baggage car. I do business on this line. The superintendent on down, I do business. Look here now, I can beat you or kill you. Only, Murrill wouldn’t like that. He’s got money out on you, but he doesn’t want you dead. Murrill will pay twenty-five for you dead, fifty thousand alive. How much money you got on you?”
“About four thousand,” Gatling said. “But I got forty thousand more in a New York bank. We don’t have to go there to get it. I have a special account number. They’ll send it.”
The train passed over a trestle.
The pock-faced man dressed like a pimp and he smelled like one too. He would have been handsome if not for the pocked face. Taking a torn piece of newspaper from his pocket, he held it up. “This drawing,” he said. “Don’t tell me that isn’t you.”
It was a very poor bit of artwork. “It doesn’t look like me,” Gatling said. “But suppose it is, we can still talk money. You’ve got me, so you’ve got the money. This man Murrill, how do you know you can trust him to pay up?”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s an evil bastard.”
“You’re pretty bad yourself. Tell me something. How come you’re short of money if you work for the Government?”
This was something Gatling hadn’t expected. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m no Government man.”
The pimp pulled his earlobe with his free hand. “Mister, I don’t rightly know what you are. But Senator Harnett seems to think you been sent out to get Murrill. Senator was on this train the other day. Drunk as an Irish skunk. Got him a nice girl and later we had a drink together. I had a paper and we got to talking about you, and he winked and said to the best of his knowledge you were a special Government man. Hinted he had something to do with hiring you. I have heard about Murrill organizing the gangs.”
“What about the money?” Gatling repeated.
“Can’t do it,” the pimp said. “It’s a temptation to turn you loose—money in the hand—but then I’d have Murrill after me. Where could I hide? If he has his hooks into the big-time gangs, where could I hide.” Gatling knew he wasn’t about to be turned loose. The pimp was just needling him with a lot of questions, looking for answers that might advance his dirty career.
“Who would know?” Gatling asked, thinking it would be a hell of a thing to be taken down by a whore-bully.
“Henry the porter would know,” the pimp said. “And you know how blacks talk and brag. Henry’s expecting a nice little reward and he’s probably told every other black on the train. Now what we’re going to do is get on down to the baggage car where you can be tied up good. In the meantime, my friend Henry will send a telegraph at the next stop. A certain party, naturally not Murrill himself—who knows where he is—will be waiting to pick you up. I think Murrill will pay up. You can’t stay long in the crook business if you don’t keep your word.”
The pimp backed away so Gatling could climb down from the berth. Then he turned Gatling and took the two pistols. Hefting the Borchardt, he said, “What kind of a thing is this? What’s in the case? Answer up or I’ll smash your face.”
Gatling told him about the Borchardt and the Skoda. The pimp whistled. “These ought to fetch a good price.”
The pimp rapped on the door of the baggage car and the attendant opened it. A darker black than Henry, he was startled by the pimp’s revolver.
“No need for alarm, Albert,” the pimp said. “Just caught me a much-wanted man. Murder, anything you can name, he’s done it. Now you find Henry and tell him I want a telegraph sent from the next stop. The name is Russell Gowdy, Gowdy’s Palace Saloon, Galveston, Texas. You want me to write that down?”
Albert shook his head. “I got it straight, Mr. Malley.” He repeated the name and address.
“Fetch a bottle while you’re at it,” Malley said.
The baggage car attendant came back with the bottle. “Henry’s going to tend to it,” he said. “What’s this gentleman done, Mr. Malley? I mean, what’s his name?”
Malley flipped a silver dollar to Albert. “No need for you to know. Get on down to the end there and find something to do. I’ll mention to Mr. Todhunter what a big help you been.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Malley,” Albert said.
“Mr. Todhunter is the division superintendent,” Malley told Gatling, who didn’t answer.
Malley uncorked the bottle with his teeth. “Want a drink?”
Gatling shook his head. If there was any drinking to be done, he wanted the pimp to do it. But the man had the look of a seasoned drinker; the chances of jumping him were next to nothing.
Malley swigged from the bottle, sitting on a crate a good ten feet from Gatling. “Better you don’t drink,” he said. “You might get wild and then I’d have to shoot you. Of course that don’t mean I’d have to kill you. Don’t get wild. A few bullets in the legs and you’d be on crutches as long as you live. Which won’t be all that long, the way I hear it.”
Gatling said nothing.
Down at the end of the car, Albert was whistling nervously. Malley told him to shut up. To Gatling he said, “Maybe I’ll beat you and maybe I won’t. I been figuring maybe Murrill wants you in Grade A shape when old Russ Gowdy delivers you. What do you think of them apples?”
“I think you’re right,” Gatling said.
Gatling didn’t know what to expect with this cologne-smelling animal. It was obvious that he got a lot of enjoyment out of hurting people. He kept staring at Gatling as he tilted the bottle. By the time the bottle was half gone, he was ready to be meaner than he had been.
“I’ll bet you’re a hell of a fella with the girls,” he said. “I’ll be they wet their drawers when you walk down the street. I don’t get much of a tumble from the girls on account of my face. Well, sir, I’m as good as you any day of the week. You got nothing to say, do you?”
“What do you want me to say, Malley?”
“Mister Malley.”
“All right, Mister Malley. What do you want me to say?” Gatling knew there was nothing to be gained by being hard-nosed about it. There was a lot of pain and misery in this brute, and he was just aching to take it out on somebody.
“I don’t want you to say a thing. You’re being polite ’cause you don’t want the shit kicked out of you. I hate a man that feels he has to kiss hind-end to keep from getting a few lumps. You scared of a few lumps?”
“Why go looking for them?”
Malley drank from the bottle. “You’re scared, all right. You make me sick, you and your fancy guns. When I was fighting Indians I didn’t need your kind of goddamned foreign guns. Single-shot Springfields were all the Army needed. Tell me this, mister. Would you be half the man if you didn’t have those goddamned guns? Damn right you wouldn’t. What you need is a good taking down, sonny boy, and I’m the man to do it.” Gatling knew he might very well kill him if he got started, but maybe it was a chance worth taking. Albert was taking all this in, and he was nervous. Not much chance that the black man would interfere. He was just a poor man working for a few dollars a week. Malley was no friend of his, and he knew it.
“You’re no man,” Gatling said. “You’re just a lousy pimp.”
Malley stood up fast for a man who was half drunk. He blinked at Gatling as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Swinging his huge fists, he closed in on Gatling, cursing and laughing at the same time. Gatling was tied but he tried to butt the big man in the stomach. It didn’t work. Malley got him with a vicious upper-cut that knocked him to the floor. Malley kicked him in the side of the head, then in the groin.
He didn’t feel the second kick.
When Gatling woke up he was in a closed cab clattering along the Galveston waterfront. He smelled the sea, the sound of gulls. Malley was on one side of him, a sour-faced man with ginger hair on the other. Malley stank of whiskey and was telling the other man that he wanted his money now.
“That means now,” he said.
The other man seemed to know him. “Who in blazes keeps fifty thousand lying around? I told you you should have stayed on the train and you’d get your money. All in good time, I told you. You know the big man is good for it. That tough talk you been spouting won’t do you no good. Turn this man loose? I’d like to see you try it.”
Malley hiccupped. “But you listened, Gowdy.”
“Sure I listened,” Gowdy said. “What else could I do? You’re lucky you’re here instead of dead.”
Gatling squinted at his weapons on the floor of the cab. But he was still trussed up with the rope and the handcuffs. The pain in his head made him want to vomit.
Gatling closed his eyes. The more he heard, the more he was ahead. Like hell he’d be ahead! He was tied like a hog at slaughter time and headed for a man who would try to make him scream. He wished Malley had killed him because now he’d be nothing but dead.
Gowdy said, “The big man won’t like you coming to him drunk. If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t have talked to me so foolish. I’ll have to tell him what you said.”
“Tell him what you like,” Malley said.
“Good for you, or bad for you,” Gowdy said in the deaconish tone that seemed natural to him.
“Why is everybody so afraid of him?”
Gatling didn’t dare lift his head, but he knew they were crossing a long bridge. The wheels of the cab made a hollow, rumbling sound. A ship’s bell rang; the sea smell grew stronger.
“You don’t know much if you have to ask that,” Gowdy said. “The big man is making changes. Big changes all round. The big-business crooks are going to see some changes before the big man gets through. Plain, ordinary crooks are out to get their share of the pie. A big man steals millions and gets away with it. The rest of us, if they catch us, get sent to jail. But no more, you betcha.”
“The hell with the big man,” Malley sneered.
“Tell him that yourself,” Gowdy said. “See what it gets you.”
“All I want is my money.”
“You’ll get something, all right. My guess is you’ll get it sooner than you expect. But you dealt your own hand. Let’s see where it gets you.”
The cab stopped and Gatling was lifted out of it. “This bastard is playing dead,” Malley said, and slapped Gatling in the face. “Wake up, friend, you’re going to meet the big man everybody’s scared of. Your plums hurt, do they? I’ll try to find a nice girl to make them well.”
“No more of that stuff,” Gowdy snapped, holding Gatling upright. Gowdy was surprisingly strong for a man of such slight build. He smelled of snuff.
“I can walk,” Gatling told him. He knew Gowdy was a much more dangerous man than Malley. Malley was full of old hurts; with Gowdy killing a man was just business.
Gowdy pulled the bell set into the side of the door. Above the door was a sign, GULFPORT HOTEL, and the building itself was big and white, with a wide veranda with rocking chairs on it. On a sea-bleached lawn peacocks walked with their tattered tails sweeping behind them. Above the building the flags of the United States and the Confederacy fluttered in the breeze from the sea. An ancient Negro, with a bucket and brush, looked at them before he hurried away.
The Italian that Gatling had followed from the Western Union office, in San Diego, opened the door. He held the door open until they were inside, then he bolted it, looking at Malley as if he had a bad smell. Malley looked back at him and said, “Fucking spaghetti-bender,” but the Italian ignored him.
Gowdy spoke to the Italian, apparently asking where Murrill was, but the Italian shook his head and said it was not possible to see him just yet. He was resting and could not be disturbed. The Italian looked at Gatling as he talked to Gowdy.
“We’ll wait,” Gowdy said.
They waited in a room the size of a barn. Gowdy sat Gatling in a leather armchair as big as a throne and got him a drink of brandy. The Italian killer had disappeared. Malley walked around with a drink in his hand and looked at the paintings on the walls. Finally he threw himself down on the sofa.
“Where is this bird?” he said.
“You have to wait,” Gowdy told him.
Brandy made Gatling feel better, but he wanted to do some nice things for Malley, who had done some nice things to him. And he was thinking that when Murrill came down the stairs with his face covered by a bandage. The man Gatling had been sent to kill, to destroy his criminal organization, didn’t look as ominous as he expected him to be. He was thinner than his Louisiana prison file had described him. In fact, he looked frail; there was something almost pitiful about him, as if all the good things in life had been taken away from him.
No longer thin, his face was cadaverous; his skull bulged as if it had too many brains for one ordinary man. He said to Gatling, “So you were taken by a drunken pimp?”
Malley jumped up to protest, but he stopped when the Italian came down the stairs and stood silently at Murrill’s side.
“I got a reward coming, fifty thousand,” Malley said, but he sat down when Gowdy pointed to his chair.
“Shut your mouth,” Gowdy warned.
“What happened to your face?” Malley asked Murrill, too drunk to heed Gowdy’s warning. “Got kicked by a mule, did you?”
“Take that man downstairs,” Murrill ordered, no longer looking at the pimp.
Sensing real danger for the first time, Malley tried to draw his pistol. The Italian’s gun came out fast, cocked and ready to kill. Then he came over and took Malley’s gun. Gatling’s pistols and the cased Skoda were on the floor.
“You move now,” the Italian said, smooth as a snake and just as deadly.
“This man won’t give his name,” Gowdy told Murrill. He pointed. “That’s a machine gun.”
“What make is it?” Murrill asked Gatling.
“A Skoda. The long-barreled pistol is an autoloader. A Borchardt.”
The Italian came back and Murrill told him to untie Gatling, but to leave the handcuffs in place. “Take the guns away,” Murrill said. “I’ll look at them later.” Murrill sat down facing Gatling; the Italian stood behind his chair when he returned. The Italian had an expressionless face, and his crow-black hair was parted in the middle. His mustache was neatly trimmed.
“Why won’t you give your name?” Murrill said. His Creole accent was faint, more an intonation than a real accent.
“You’ll have to beat it out of me.”
“There are other methods besides beating. Carlo here knows most of them, but we’ll let that go for the moment.”
Murrill turned to Gowdy and said, “You can leave now, Russell. You handled this very nicely.”
Gowdy got up to go. “What about that fool downstairs? You know I had to bring him here.”
“Of course. Don’t give him another thought. I’ll decide what to do with him.”
Gatling knew a death sentence when he heard one.
Malley would probably be weighted with chains and taken out to sea.
Gowdy left and Carlo bolted the door behind him. Then he came back and stood behind Murrill, though there were plenty of chairs in the huge room. He was like Murrill’s shadow, dark, silent, watchful.
Murrill sat very straight in his high-backed chair. If he had any expression on his ruined face, it was concealed by the bandages. Gatling wondered if he always remained calm or was doing it for effect.
He pointed to the cased Skoda. “You used that to kill Margate and the others. The police report said it must have been a rapid-fire weapon. Tell me about it.” Gatling explained how the Skoda worked, where it was made. He said nothing about Colonel Pritchett or the Maxim Company.
The Italian opened the case and Murrill examined the gun. “You are expert with weapons?” he asked. “This weapon and many others?”
Gatling said he was, wondering how long it would be before Murrill stopped being polite and handed him over to Carlo. A lot of men had probably screamed their way to death under his tender mercies. Gatling knew the best he could hope for was to provoke the Italian into a killing rage.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Murrill went on, calm as before. “You have rare skills and are a valuable man. In certain circumstances you could be of great use to me.”
“Killing people?”
“Killing people who are very hard to kill. Impossible to kill, they like to think. If, say, a powerful man ignores or defies me, is surrounded by bodyguards, thinks himself untouchable, well, then, I could send you to kill him. The Gold Street Massacre, as they call it, was an impressive piece of work.”
“It was worth doing,” Gatling said.
“Would killing me be worth it?” Murrill asked. “Give me an honest answer. What happens to you will have nothing to do with how you answer.”
Gatling dared to be honest; he had nothing to lose. “Killing you would have been worth all the others put together.”
Murrill made some sort of sound, and he might have been laughing. “Spoken like a truly reckless man. But what is so special about me? The world is filled with tyrants, dictators, criminals of every stripe. Why have you chosen me?”
Gatling didn’t answer and Murrill made that sound again. “You haven’t chosen me,” he said. “I was chosen by someone else. You were to be the instrument of my destruction. You must tell me who sent you. Tell me and I will deal with him.”
Gatling was no great admirer of Colonel Pritchett, but he didn’t want to see him killed, even if it meant saving his own life. He knew what he was facing when he went to work for the colonel. This wasn’t the time for second thoughts. If Murrill got the colonel’s name, he would find a way to kill him.
“Tell me,” Murrill repeated.