Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (25 page)

“That’s the way I’d do it,” said Tony.
 
“Now tell the part about how come you guys don’t lie down an shut up when ya die.”

She hesitated, looked down at her feet.
 
It was stupid, she’d come this far, there was no way she was gonna not tell him, all three of them knew that, and still she hesitated: that was how reluctant she was to say it.
 
Finally Willard put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
 
Somehow that enabled her to look up and answer.
 
“The first time Henry came to Florida, in 1878, he
hated
it.
 
His first wife Mary Harkness was dying of tuberculosis, and the doctors said she needed to be warm in winter, so he brought her to Jacksonville.
 
He loathed it there so much that after a few weeks he went back to New York, even though he knew she wouldn’t stay without him.
 
She died in New York in 1881.”

Tony made a growling noise.
 
“I’m gettin bored.”

“I was one of her nurses.
 
Henry and I were married in the summer of 1883.
 
But by the time he could get away from business it was midwinter.
 
So I persuaded him we should honeymoon in Florida—only this time we went to St. Augustine.
 
It was there that everything changed.”

“He liked it dis time,” Tony suggested, in a let’s-make-this-move voice.

“That’s what it says in the history books,” she agreed.
 
“He’d looked at Jacksonville and seen a backwater; now he looked at St. Augustine and saw infinite potential, saw an entire state waiting to be carved out of the swamp and sold to gullible Northerners.
 
They never explain what the difference was, why St. Augustine was so much more inspiring.”

“But you will,” said Tony.
 
“Very soon.”

Willard spoke up.
 
“Columbus never saw America, spent all his time island-hopping around the Caribbean.
 
St. Augustine is the spot where the very first European stepped ashore onto the continent of North America, and because it was Palm Sunday, and the Spanish for that is Pascua Florida, the Feast of the Flowers, he named the place Florida.
 
Same guy that discovered Puerto Rico, as it happens.
 
Ask me his name.”

“Am I not makin it plain,” asked Tony, “that I’m gettin pissed off?”

“His name was Don Juan Ponce de Leon,” Ida said quickly, and waited.

For a couple of seconds Tony coasted in neutral, staring out the windshield, and then the fog lifted.
 
He had read that name once, on a restaurant placemat.
 
“Wait a minute—wait a minute, you mean Pounce Dee
Lee
-on?”

Willard had a brief coughing fit.
 
When it was done, Ida said, “That’s right, Tony.
 
Pounce Dee Lee On.
 
When my rotten husband Henry brought me to St. Augustine, three hundred and seventy years later, he rediscovered what Pounce had found there long before—”

“Holy shit,” murmured Tony.
 
“Da Fount’n A Ute!”

8

Burying the hook

When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big.
 
But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal.
 
No more medicine.

—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

“That is correct, the Fountain of Youth, Mr.—what
is
your name?”

Tony was so bemused he answered, truthfully.
 
“Donnazio, Tony Donnazio.”

“He found the secret of Eternal Youth, Mr. Donnazio, rediscovered what, uh, Pounce had found four centuries earlier.
 
We stumbled on it together, on our belated honeymoon, while looking for a discreet place to…to be alone in Nature.
 
I don’t think anyone else but Henry would ever even have thought to try such an unlikely, uninviting spot, much less persist as long as he did.
 
He was a man of remarkable stubbornness.
 
I was becoming quite put out with him.
 
And then suddenly there it was.
 
A natural spring, whose water happens to have passed through just the right rare mineral deposits in just the right amounts in just the right sequence while underground.
 
The effect was immediate and unmistakable; we never did get around to…what we had come there for that day.
 
We had to find ways to hide from the servants and staff for the next day or two, until we learned how to convincingly make ourselves look as old as we were supposed to be, again.
 
Henry said we mustn’t let the secret of the spring slip out until we’d had time to think through how to handle it properly.

“When I finally understood he meant us to keep the secret
forever
, so that forever we could be not merely immortal but the
only
immortals, I realized what a monster I had married.
 
I resolved to break with him, and reveal the secret to the world.
 
But I had underestimated Henry’s power and ruthlessness.
 
Like a fool I allowed him to guess my intentions.
 
The next thing I knew I was officially a hopeless lunatic, and Henry had forced the Florida legislature to make lunacy grounds for divorce just long enough to end our marriage, and he was remarried to Mary Kenan, a tramp who’d been his mistress for the past decade.
 
My only consolation is that he never breathed a word about the Fount to Mary, never let her suspect his own aging was only cosmetic, and skipped out on her when he was ready to fake his own death.
 
Three years later she married a fellow named Bingham, and I think he may have murdered her; in any case she died mysteriously within a year.”

Tony had seen people wrinkle their foreheads when they thought; he tried it now, and it didn’t seem to help any.
 
But the little thinking he did get done made him wrinkle up his forehead even more.
 
“Where’s he now, this Henry?”

The teenybopper hag shrugged, and gestured toward the door.
 
“Out there, somewhere.
 
Invisible.
 
Transparent to most radar.
 
He’s had more than a century in which to insulate himself from the
 
official world.
 
He has no address, no phone number, no e-mail address.
 
He has no legal identity, and as many phony ones as he likes.
 
He pays no taxes.
 
His fingerprints aren’t on file anywhere.
 
He probably doesn’t have a reflection in the mirror any more, or show up on satellite photos.
 
And he has more money than the Fortune 500, nearly as much as the United States of America, all of it off the books.”

The fundamental absurdities and contradictions of the story troubled Tony not at all.
 
He admired this Fagola’s technique.
 
That was the way Tony woulda done it, in his shoes.
 
The guy was as mean as Tony, as tough as Tony, richer than Tony had ever fantasized being—richer than the Five Old Men put together!—and he’d had something like a century and a half to get himself dug in, to erase his tracks from anywhere cops could see.
 
He was way too dangerous to live, and one day would have to be hunted—
carefully
—and exterminated.
 
The sole flaw in his program, so far as Tony could see, had been sentimentally allowing his wife to remain alive as a mental patient.
 
Well, correcting other people’s mistakes was one of Tony’s best things.
 
Just as soon as little Mrs. Ida Alice Shourds Flagler had told him the only useful thing she seemed to know, admittedly a very useful thing—

“Where’s it at, this Fount’n A Ute?
 
Exackly.”

She squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye.
 
She had obviously been expecting this.
 
“I will—”

“Ida,
no
,” Willard groaned.

She shrugged him off.
 
“I will sell you that information for ten million dollars.
 
Cash.
 
No more than half of it in hundreds.”

*
 
*
 
*

Tony stared at her.

“Yes, I know,” she said.
 
“It is worth incalculably more than that.
 
The sum is ludicrously small.
 
But my back is to the wall: I will settle for ten million—with one condition.”

“Yeah?”

“You agree that once you have taken possession of the Fount, you will supply Willard and myself with five gallons apiece of its water.
 
We will take that and the money and go away, and that’ll be the last you’ll see or hear of either of us for at least a thousand years.
 
We’re quiet people, Mr. Donnazio; there should be plenty of room on the planet for all of us.”

Tony chose not to debate the point at that time.
 
“Ten mil is a big piece of money.”

“It is the absolute minimum I will consider, for two reasons.”

“Gimme the first one first.”

“You travel in different circles than Willard and I, Mr. Donnazio.
 
Just from what I’ve seen of you in the last few days, I’m sure you have a quite considerable reputation locally, and perhaps in more distant quarters as well.
 
But we have no way to evaluate that—and we
must
be absolutely sure you’re the right man for this job.
 
The Fount is so hard to stumble across by accident that only one man seems to manage it every four or five hundred years.
 
If you come for the Fount, Henry will know someone must have told you about it.
 
There is no one but me who could have told you.
 
So he will know that I’m alive.”

This was getting complicated for Tony.
 
“So?”

“Mr. Donaz—”

“Call me Tony.”

“Tony, my former husband is probably the richest, most powerful, most dangerous man alive.
 
First he will try to destroy you.
 
If he succeeds, eventually he will come for me, and Willard.
 
If I’m to send you up against Henry, I must be confident that you have a reasonable chance of defeating him.
 
You understand?”

He was following the individual sentences, but didn’t quite see how they added up to ten mil.
 
“Maybe.”

“Willard?”

Willard interpreted, using extravagant hand gestures.
 
“If you fuck up, it’s our ass, Tony.
 
Flagler has so much juice, if you’re not the kind of guy who can come up with ten mil in a day or two, if you’re just muscle, then you’re just not in his league, and we’d be crazy to tell you dick.
 
Plus which if he takes you out, we’ll need ten mil just to stay out of his way.
 
Cabeesh?”

Much better.
 
“Gotcha,” Tony said.
 
“Okay, how about this?
 
How about I start snappin parts offa ya, start out wit little bits, and keep snappin stuff until you tell me dick no matter
how
crazy it is?”

Willard turned pale, but Ida stood her ground.
 
“Do you think I’m more afraid of you than I am of Henry Flagler, Tony?”

“You oughta be.”

“Perhaps so, but I’m not.
 
I made up my mind seventy years ago: I will
never
permit Henry to lock me away again.
 
The tools they have for mind control these days are just too good.
 
So I took steps to see that the means of painless suicide are always with me.
 
You can’t frighten me with torture, or with death.
 
And Willard honestly doesn’t know just where the Fountain is.”

Tony believed her on both counts.
 
She’d have been crazy to trust Willard.
 
He could kill her, but he couldn’t scare her.
 
And if he killed her he had no fountain.
 
“What’s the
second
reason you want ten mil?”

“The only reason Willard and I are both still young,” Ida told him, “is that once—once—in the past, we were able to arrange secret access to the Fount, for just long enough to spirit away a few precious quarts undetected.
 
Once you and Henry tangle, that will become infinitely more difficult, for decades to come, whichever of you wins…and vastly more expensive, when a chance finally does arrive.
 
Ten million dollars is cutting it very close, I think.”

Privately Tony saw her point.
 
“That ain’t
my
problem, kid.
 
I still like snappin stuff.
 
Maybe I can’t frighten you, but I bet I can frighten Willard.”

“You lose,” said Willard at once.

“No, Tony,” said Ida, very firmly, and Tony was quite surprised to notice himself move about half an inch further away from Willard.
 
“Willard is the only person on this planet I care a damn about.
 
I owe him everything.
 
My life, my sanity, my dignity—he gave me all those back, when I was dead and worse than dead.
 
He has more courage than anyone I know: you could ‘snap things,’ as you put it, all afternoon and he would tell you nothing.
 
But we’re not going to prove that, because if you lay a hand on him I’ll be out of here faster than you can stop me, and I’ll run straight to the Naval Air Station and tell them all about the Fount.
 
Or maybe I’ll run over to Greene Street and discuss the matter with Mel Fisher, the world-famous treasure hunter.”