The Empress File Read Free Page B

“magic” interpretation, but I don’t believe in that superstitious shit.
    I sat back and thought about it as the river unwound two thousand feet below. The Empress.
    Chaminade? Or someone I hadn’t yet met?
    M EMPHIS FROM the air looks like any other city from the air, except greener. Just before we landed, the pilot said the ground temperature was ninety-three and the humidity was 87 percent. A Turkish bath.
    When I came through the gate carrying an overnight bag and a portable computer, a tall, balding black guy, forty or so, was leaning on the railing that separated the passenger and waiting areas. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, thin face, and high cheekbones, he might have looked like Gandhi. He didn’t. He brought to mind a mercenary who had been blinded by a white phosphorus grenade in Biafra, a long time agoand far, far away. This guy wasn’t blind, though. He was looking the passengers over, one by one, and finally picked on me.
    “You Kidd?” he asked. His voice was tough, abrupt.
    “Yeah. Who are you?” He was already walking away, and I trailed behind with my bags.
    “John,” he said over his shoulder. “You got a suitcase? Besides that stuff?”
    “No. John what?”
    He thought it over, but not very hard. “Smith.”
    If he didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to worry about it. He led the way to a two-year-old Chevrolet, one of the bigger models in a nondescript green. We were halfway downtown, sitting at a red light, before Smith said another word.
    “I’m not sure we need you.” He was staring straight out over the steering wheel.
    “I don’t know if I want to join up,” I said.
    “Bobby says you’re some kind of complicated computer crook.” He still wouldn’t face me. “You don’t look like a computer crook. You look like a boxer.”
    “I’m a painter,” I said. “I’ve been hit in the nose a couple of times. The docs never got it quite right.”
    Now he turned, vertical lines crinkling the space between his eyebrows. “A painter? That’s not what Bobby said.”
    “I do computer work to make a living. That’s the only way Bobby knows me.”
    “Huh.” The light changed, and we were rolling again. “Can’t make a living at painting?”
    “Not yet. Maybe in five years.”
    “You paint ducks?”
    “No. I don’t paint ducks, barns, sailboats, lighthouses, pheasants, rusty farm machinery, sunsets, jumping fish, birch trees, or any kind of hunting dogs. And I don’t put a little pink glow of the setting sun between groups of warm nineteenth-century farmhouses with hay sticking out of the lofts of the barns in back.”
    “Eakins painted hunters. Homer painted fish.”
    “Damn well, too.”
    “So who do you like? Artists?”
    “Rembrandt. Ingres. Degas. Egon Schiele. Like that. Guys who could draw. People who like color. Gauguin. Living guys, maybe Jim Dine. Wolf Kahn. A couple of personal friends. Why?”
    “I do some… art.” He said it reluctantly, almost as a confession.
    “Painting?”
    “No, no.” He slowed for a moment, letting a woman in an old canary yellow Ford Pinto squeeze in front of us. Traffic in Memphis is usually tangled, especially when you get close to the water. The heat didn’t help, and the people who weren’t sealed in air-conditioned cars were drivingwith an air of desperation. “I make things. Out of wood and glass and rocks and clay, from down along the river.”
    “Sell it?”
    “Shit,” he said in disgust.
    “I’d like to see it.”
    He looked over at me for a moment. “Maybe.”
    We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later we were on a narrow two-lane highway lined with recapped tire joints and motels with signs that said TRUCKERS WELCOME . Memphis was disappearing in the rearview mirror.
    “Where’re we going?” I asked.
    “Downstream,” he said. We were running along the river in the gathering evening twilight. “It’ll take a while. Town of Longstreet.”
    “What’s in Longstreet?”
    He didn’t