He had just completed a rather pleasant duty; the settling of the estate of a recently widowed Italian woman of uncommon beauty. The woman had fallen under the care of an enigmatic American industrialist of some sort, who was not present, but had provided a promissory note for the covering of the debts incurred by her late Husband Don Sylvestre, who had apparently been betrayed by his partner—some scoundrel from the Tyrol—and led to an untimely death out on the pampas in search of gold. The woman was all grace, as were Blunt and Burton, such men in diplomatic circles being ever willing to come to the aid of a European woman in distress among barbarians. The woman had been settled in a comfortable hacienda provided by the American—no saint I wager, just a man with a critical eye for finery cloaked in flesh—with her servants.
Burton’s duty done, he had returned to his favorite haunt, the dockside cantina at the base of the European Colony’s slightly raised retreat, with Blunt of course tagging along.
Yes man, you were every bit as noble as he today. Poor sniveling Wilfrid has seen the humane English aristocrat—an oxymoron if ever there was one—in you and follows along hoping to see another glimmer of humanity.
It is now up to you to contrive a brutal disappointment—perhaps clitoral infibulation among the Abyssinians? Yes, stroke that forked beard you devil!
Burton took his usual seat and awaited the usual delivery of his port at the hands of the cantina owner’s lovely young morsel of a daughter—yes, if only I were still a young man and unmarried, what a time we should have.
However, much to Burton’s irritation and Blunt’s fearful shock, dear little Andrea was interrupted by a tall menacing figure without a hair on the head beneath his Western American gunfighter’s hat. The man placed some gold in the girl’s hand and relieved her of the decanter and glasses. The dark menacing figure then regarded the two seated Englishmen from beneath the rim of his black hat and sauntered across the board flooring with a sinister jangle of spurs.
Burton, momentarily offended by this apparition, was now intrigued. This was the very type of mythic slayer that he had searched for among the barbarians of America on his stagecoach journey from Kansas to San Francisco. But, all he had found were drunken no-accounts and back-shooting murderers. This man appeared to be the genuine article, of obvious Confederate extraction. The great range coat barely concealed the tied-down arsenal of the professional gunfighter, and knife handles bristled from his boot-tops as well.
Yes, man, you shall handle this brute, shall master him with your hypnotic powers.
The man turned the third chair about with one wicked boot, straddled the seat, and placed two glasses: one before Burton; one before himself, and gave Blunt an unsettling side-glance. With this unfriendly act Blunt hurriedly excused himself over some domestic pretense having to do with his good wife, and was off.
And so the Queen hangs her head in shame once again my dear sissy Wilfrid! With men like that amongst us how are we ever to hold onto this vast empire we have acquired?
The strange American—he somehow knew this though the man had yet to speak—set aside his hat, poured a half-glass of port for each, and then reached inside of his coat and produced a stainless-steel pint, and duly spiked the dark wine with a clear liquid.
Yes, an imbiber after my own heart.
The man had a well-formed skull and was perhaps forty. The top portion of some sort of tattoo showed on his neck just above the collar of his flannel shirt as he screwed the top back onto his spirits and replaced it in his coat pocket. He then raised his glass to toast Burton in a raspy voice, “The compliments of my boss, Mister Stevenson. May you, Captain Burton, live long in the Light of Krishna, my Lord and Eternal Protector.”
Burton was caught off guard—a rare occurrence in his life—at the invocation of a Hindu deity by some rude American.
What can they even know of such things?
They do not even have an inkling of the beliefs held by their Indian enemies.
Despite the question in his mind Burton acknowledged the toast, “Hear, hear.”
It is now time to guide the conversation. This man cannot possibly be a match for you—not in words at least.
Just as Burton noticed the four notches recently carved into the butt of the pistol holstered over the man’s heart inside of his open coat, he momentarily understood Blunt and his sissy impulses. Being a man of iron will, Burton immediately pushed aside the unmanly impulse to flinch in the presence of a killer, and began his inquiry. “So Sir, you are the bodyguard of the American who has so kindly taken an interest in the Donessa’s well-being?”
“I am.”
The man is steady and keeps his words close. Draw him out.
“Your name Sir?”
“Randy Bracken.”
The man reflexively took a swallow of port.
Yes, you have him, one of the lower orders—of Irish decent at that—not proud of his station or origins and committed to the fateful course of violent action to redeem his lowly ancestors.
“The son of Irish immigrants in service to the son of Swedish immigrants; it must rankle I know, your race being a combative one. On what side did you find yourself in your young nation’s recent and unfortunate quarrel?”
The man’s eyes darted like those of a just wakened predator. “I hate the Federal Government as much as the plantation owners. I’m a hillbilly. My Pap’s family was the descendents of escaped White slaves. You might say I’ve picked over the battlefield.”
He sees himself at war with the world, a dangerous, desperate fellow.
Burton drained his glass as Randy did likewise, and took it upon himself to refill them even as he steered the conversation away from the volatile American’s clannish sympathies. “Mister Bracken, what is it that I might do for you and your employer?”
The man then laid out a pouch on the table and shook a handful of gold nuggets onto its top, and continued in his raspy voice, a husky note that Burton had often heard echoed about the water-pipes of his hashish smoking Sufi colleagues in Sind, “We would like to speak to you of lost cities and a unique opportunity to explore the past.”
Burton was intrigued, as he always was, about the prospect of rediscovering some lost Eldorado and burning his name indelibly into history. “You know of such a place on this continent?”
“It is called Machu Picchu, a secret religious center of the Incas abandoned when the Spics—does he use some type of abbreviated derogatory term for the Spanish?—invaded. It is in a jungle-covered portion of the Andes, and it will not be discovered until Nineteen-eleven, unless we get there first.”
Nineteen-eleven, he deigns to predict the future?
Perhaps this man is a member of an apocalyptic American denomination?
“Mister Bracken, do you mean to represent yourself—obviously a gunfighter by trade—as a clairvoyant?”
The man began to brush the nuggets back into his pouch, leaving only one on the table, which he silently pushed across the wine-stained wood with one long tattooed finger. It was then that Burton noticed that the first knuckles of the left hand were tattooed with the Cyrillic letters that spelled WHITE, while the knuckles of this hand were similarly tattooed with the letters that spelled POWER.
This man is a mystery, a walking contradiction. He also appears educated despite his low origin.
The gold nugget continued to glide across the tabletop powered by the long sinister trigger-finger the knuckle of which was tattooed with the Cyrillic ‘P’.
He is pressuring you into a rash decision. Regain control of the conversation.
Burton placed his open hand before the nugget in the attitude of the command to halt. With that the American stopped pushing the nugget forward and tapped it once with his index finger to punctuate each wry word that slipped between the crease of his increasingly crooked smile, “Agree, now, to, avoid, disappointment, and, future, regret.”
What capitalist hack composed that God-awful slogan?
Speak as an American to rattle his composure, just as his Hindoo references stabbed so deeply into your mind.
Burton sat up straight and expanded his chest, which he knew to be an impressive action as he was renowned for his brawn. “Well goddamn Mister Bracken I thought we would just get liquored-up tonight and speak business tomorrow.”
“Right you are Captain Burton. But here, please accept this nugget as a token of my boss’s gratitude for settling the widow’s affairs. I heard you came up dry panning for gold in the Sierras. Consider this a gift, with no strings attached.”
The brute has me.
What am I to do?
Concede, but take this intercourse onto intellectual grounds that you shall dominate.
“Yaas, I do prefer gold to all other minerals. I once dabbled in alchemy in fact. I thank you Mister Bracken. Will I have the opportunity to show my gratitude to Mister Stevenson?”
“Right on Rick—can I call you Rick? I realize that the snobs and women in your life call you Dick. But me and my people, back in West Virginia, we would call a man named Richard Rick. It is a more faithful endearment by reduction than Dick. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, who ever heard of ‘Dick the Lion-hearted’?”
Language means something to this man. Rick is more masculine, even regal compared to Dick.
“Why certainly Mister Bracken; I have been honored by many sobriquets in my time and this one is to my liking. I see that we are likeminded in the importance of language as the human currency. What are your linguistic interests?”
The man lit up like a child asked to show off his prized treasures. “I have studied language in secret. My countrymen—particularly the members of, well, the associates I have had—do not understand the power of language. I speak Spanish fluently. But I dislike it as a language of the mud races.”
Mud races? What kind of amateur ethnographic undercurrents flow through the Anglo-American mind that you neglected to uncover during your sojourn among that rabble?
Randy continued with his disturbing elucidation of his linguistic interests and prejudices, “I speak German, but not fluently, and can manage some Korean—picked up from whores—and have tried my hand at translating some Sanskrit. My Hindustani is limited to simple religious observations, as I have just recently converted to the veneration of Lord Krishna. I have avoided Latin—I’ve had some bad dealings with some goddamn Italian motherfuckers.”
He hates Italians as he does Spaniards and uses abusive black slave-terms to deride them—yet he hates plantation owners and sees blacks as his rivals. How does this man even compose a concordant thought?
He could use a mentor. His education is a self-imposed bric-a-brac.
“Mister Bracken, I find your appreciation of language intriguing, and am quite accomplished in this field. Might I offer myself as a tutor, particularly as regards your Hindustani and Sanskrit pursuits?”
The man beamed—darkly albeit, but still a radiance of a dark sort—and let go a crooked smile, accompanied by what Burton would soon come to appreciate as one of Randy’s comic expressions, “Yez Mazder, yez!”
He does not mock you. He mocks his station in society, and society itself.
I like this man, a man even more disturbingly haunted than myself.
