The Count of the Sahara (20 page)

“So why’s an archaeologist keep muscle around? I mean does he really need a big guy like you to watch a few rocks and projectors?”

He thought I was the muscle. He was not just scary, but out of his ever-loving gourd. “I’m n-n-not… I just run the p-p-projector and help with the lectures.”

His tiny eyes never left my face, and I knew he could see every bright red capillary and drop of sweat on it. I wondered if I could make a break down the hall, but he slid his foot over a few inches and pressed it hard against mine, pushing it back against the wall, pinning me in place. If he wasn’t a cop now, he had been once.

“Okay, let’s try this. I’m going to ask you some questions, and then I’ll leave you alone. I really don’t want to get you in Dutch with the boss.” He took my terrified silence for assent. “Have you ever seen him with anything really valuable? Anything he’s trying to keep hid?”

“N-n-nope, nothing like that.”

“A lot of people don’t believe that.” The calmer his voice got, the scarier he was.

“Like who?”

“People. Some here, some in other countries. They think he has something that don’t belong to him, and they’d like to get it back. No questions asked, you see, but the sooner the better. The longer it takes, the more trouble he’s in. You sure he ain’t hiding something?”

I shook my head.

He leaned in even closer and I could smell the cheap cigar on his breath. “You sure? You’d tell, me, right?”

“I said no, Goddammit.” Just to give myself a little breathing room, I shoved him away. It was nothing much but he bounced off the wall behind him, and his eyes widened.

When you’re my size, people can confuse blind panic with aggression. Sometimes that works to my advantage. Sometimes. Havlicek was trying to decide which this was. If he guessed that I really had no idea how to fight, I was in a world of hurt.

“What’s going on?” a familiar voice echoed down the hall. The Count and the porter stood there with a rolling metal cart.

“Nuttin’ at all. Just having a word with Mr. Braun here. Pleasure to meet ya. I’m Joe Havlicek.” He stuck his paw out but the Count declined the offer. “Okay, we can do it that way. I represent some people who are looking for stolen property. They seem to think you know where it is.”

I’d never heard de Prorok’s voice sound so icy calm. “What is it I am supposed to have taken?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“I don’t have it. Never have.” His voice was flatter and calmer than before.

“You know they won’t believe you. What am I supposed to tell them?”

I heard a clock tick. An elevator dinged somewhere behind the wall. De Prorok’s answer was almost as quiet, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have it.” He gestured from the porter to the gear. “Percy, let’s get this loaded if you please. Brown, are you coming?”

“Yes sir.” I stepped over Havlicek’s foot and ignored the little voice telling me to step on it just for grins. The Pinkerton just stood and watched, then shrugged and put his hat on, adjusting it carefully.

“We’ll talk again soon, I’m sure.” He opened the door and a blinding shaft of sunlight and bitterly cold air burst into the dark hallway. “You know where to find me, kid.” Then he was gone.

Not another word was spoken as we loaded the gear onto the cart, wheeled it to an elevator, rode to the seventh floor, and Jasper opened the door to 706. Once inside, the Count tipped him fifty cents. “Thank you, Percy.”

“Thank you, sir. You gentlemen have a pleasant day,” he said with the same smile he doled out a hundred times a day. The door closed behind him with a quiet snick. I waited for de Prorok to say something—anything—but it was awfully quiet for the longest time.

The Count just stood looking out the window. The bright winter sunshine lit up the room, but left him a solitary, lean shadow, staring out at the tarred rooftops of downtown Milwaukee and the star encrusted surface of Lake Michigan. He lit his pipe and blew a long, slow cloud of smoke before he finally turned to me.

“Pinkerton?”

“What? Uh, yeah. Havlicek… Joseph Havlicek.” That got a nod out of him, but it was a completely insufficient answer. “What’s g-g-going on? What are they looking f-f-f-or?”

“Treasure, Brown. They think I have some of the Tin Hinan treasure. I’m not sure what they think I have. Jewels, precious metals, maybe the Holy bloody Grail. Christ, I don’t know what all.”

“And you don’t?” The disappointed look he gave me stabbed me in the gut.

“Willy, I may be… I am…a lot of things, but a thief is not one of them. Yes?”

The best I could choke out was, “Yeah, sure. Of course. Will he come back?”

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised.” He took another long look out the window, then turned to me. His face had transformed back to his usual peppy self. Clapping his hands together and rubbing them vigorously, he gestured to the pile of gear. “Do you know I didn’t have a single competent assistant while you were gone? Just dreadful.”

He opened the box of slides, and I saw them all jumbled together. He waved his hand vaguely in that direction. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, I’m afraid. But you are on the clock.”

That thought made me smile, and I threw my coat on the bed, eager to get back to work. Then I saw the cloth bag. “Oh, I made something…” Oh God, what if he hated it? “It’s n-n-not very g-g-good, but I…” Finally, I reached in and took the sword by the blade, holding it out to him like a dead fish.

“What’s this?” His long fingers reached around the hilt, grasped it and then took an exploratory swipe across his body. “Oh, Brown. This is quite marvelous…” He took a step back, then went into the bent-knee pose the jokers in his films struck before dancing. He beamed happily, hopping forward a few steps then back, waving the sword like a maniac.

He clipped the lampshade, and I had to make a diving catch, but he didn’t notice. He just kept humming merrily to himself, completely oblivious to the trappings of the hotel room or anything else.

“You made this yourself, Brown? I’m gobsmacked. It’s perfect. The weight is a bit wrong, of course, but then this is… tin is it?” I nodded, feeling a warm and very unfamiliar swell of pride. “Clever. They’ll never know from the stage. Especially when you’re all…” He waved his arms to indicate my being dressed up like a big pale idiot.

“You know where this will look especially good? Under the lights at Carnegie Hall.” He must have seen the shock on my face because he plopped his keister on the bed and slapped his palms on his knees. “I was going to save the surprise, but what the hell. It’s not official of course, but I have officially signed with a booking agent. Lee Keedick—you’ve heard me mention him—and he says we are penciled in for a lecture there in June. Imagine, Brown, we could be doing all this at Carnegie Hall.”

He went on and on, but I was fixated on the “we.” Grinning, he leapt to his feet. “Yes, we have engagements all the way through the end of the spring, before I have to go back to Paris, and then Algeria again. How’d you like to stay on through the end of the tour? St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia… the people at the Smithsonian haven’t confirmed yet, but Washington’s a given…”

All those names buzzed around in my head. It was really happening. The big cities back East might as well have been Budapest or Timbuktu, and I was going to see them. But what happened after that?

The happy buzzing was replaced by a nagging question. “What happens after that? When you’re gone?”

He stopped sucking on his pipe long enough to wave it at me. “Damn it Brown, are you always this negative? This is good news, man. We’ll figure out the details. These things always work themselves out.”

That sure hadn’t been my experience, but I just bit my lip, gave him a nod and turned back to the box of jumbled lantern slides. If I was back on the clock, I’d best hop to it.

“Tomorrow I won’t need you, but Monday of course is our lecture at Marquette. Then Tuesday we’re off to Chicago.” “We” were leaving Milwaukee for good on Tuesday.

Sunday morning I took Mama to church. It was the first time in ages, and we both knew it would be the last for a long time. I let her wheedle a completely empty promise out of me that I’d go once in a while, just to stay on God’s good side. She also tearfully demanded to know when I’d be back, and I was vague enough to comfort her but no one could accuse me of lying in church, either. I wasn’t much of a believer, but I never stepped on cracks in the sidewalk.

It took a lot of time on Saturday to get everything in proper order but it was worth it. Monday’s lecture was the usual rip-roaring success. The sword was a big hit, although it was heavier than I thought and I almost de-nostril-ed the Count when he attempted to get me to dance. I guess both the audience and the speaker caught a whiff of danger, because it got a bigger laugh than ever.

The only thing different was the question period. The questions were mostly the same, but the way people asked them sounded, I don’t know, more hostile. An older guy from the Sentinel asked, “The papers say you might still have some of the jewels. Can we see them?”

I didn’t hear the answer, because I was scanning the crowd to see if Havlicek had put him up to that, and if I could spot him. I looked for a familiar hat, and I saw one, but not the hat I was expecting. This was wasn’t brown. It was red and black checked wool. It didn’t belong to Joe Havlicek. It belonged to my Old Man, and he was heading my way.

I could feel the coals in my cheeks blaze brighter. I stood there half dressed in my desert warrior costume, with my white overalls showing. I wished the floor would cave me in and carry me away to a quick, if messy death, but I didn’t have that kind of luck.

He came to within three paces of me, then gave me a very slow once-over. “Nice get up.”

I had no response. I knew exactly how ridiculous I must look to him. Up until this moment I’d managed not to think about it.

“Brown, who’s this?” I cringed, and didn’t turn around. I could feel de Prorok over my shoulder. My father raised an eyebrow at the “Brown” but said nothing.

“It’s my father. G-g-g-gerhardt Braun, Count B-b-byron de P-prorok.” I think I remembered to make a vague gesture of introduction.

The Old Man started to remove his cap, but remembering his role as representative of the proletariat, he pulled it further down on his head. The Count held out a perfectly manicured hand, and my father waited just long enough to reciprocate to send a message of extreme disapproval.

“
Herr Braun, Sie haben einen feinen Sohn.
” His German was flawless, of course as he complimented my father on his fine son. It also had enough of a Prussian undertone to it I knew it would irritate the hell out of the Old Man.

“My English is perfectly good, Herr de Prorok.” In all his years of embarrassing me, this was going to be the worst yet. It was like watching two cars speed towards each other, but unable to do anything except watch and hope for survivors.

“Indeed it is. You must be very proud of your son. I’ve not found anyone else like him.” My father ceded a small shrug. At least he didn’t argue the point. With one more clap on the shoulder, he nodded to the Old Man. “Well, I’ll leave you two. Willy, let’s get packed up, please. I’d like to get back to the hotel as soon as possible.”

I nodded, then turned back to the full brunt of my father’s most severe over-the-glasses glare. He held it until I was sure it left a mark. I could feel my back stiffen and I stood as tall as I could. That gave me about three inches on him, and I needed every one of them. Hopefully he couldn’t hear my knees knock through the robes.

“This is the job you want?” He flicked the robes with his fingertips. “This is a good job for an honest man?” The disappointment dripped from his lips like acid.

“Yeah. Yes it is.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe for good.” That got a contemptuous snort from him.

“He’ll work you like a mule then dump you soon as he’s done. Probably in the middle of nowhere. Then what will you do?”

“F-f-find another job. Isn’t that what you always do?” He actually flinched at that, but it was all the satisfaction he’d give me. It might have been enough.

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow. Chicago.”

“Does Mama know?” I nodded, not breaking eye contact. “If you go, you’re gone for good.”

I nodded my head, as confidently as the swelling lump in my throat allowed. He gave a single nod and turned away. I waited a moment, realized he wasn’t going to look back, then went back to packing up film cans and straightening pictures.

Chapter 14

Chicago, Illinois

February 23, 1926

It was only a hundred miles as the crow flies from 13th and Keefe to Union Station in Chicago. I wasn’t a crow, and it may as well have been a million miles. The moment my feet hit the sidewalk on Canal Street, I felt I’d really left Milwaukee for good.

To a nineteen year old lunkhead, Chicago was something out of a movie—maybe Safety Last with Harold Lloyd. I remember watching him hanging from that clock tower high above Los Angeles and not being able to feel my feet. I felt the exact same tingle just looking up at the skyline around me. We had tall buildings in Milwaukee, but only a few, spaced out over a few blocks downtown. People really worked up there every day. Not people like me, of course, but people.

Count de Prorok was in no mood for my open-mouthed hick act. He hailed a cab while I stood looking around generally being a serious navigation hazard to the hundreds of other people on the sidewalk. When the hack driver opened the trunk, he grabbed me by the arm. “You are joining me, Brown?” I turned beet red, mumbled an apology and squeezed in between the cases and trunks as he directed the cabbie to the Allerton, at Michigan and Huron.

The Count laid his head back on the seat and stared at the ceiling, just like he’d done the whole train ride down. That left me to take the bullet and make nice with the cabbie. His babble interfered with my gawking, but he was relentless.

“This is the year, I swear to God. Seventeen years the Cubs have stunk but this is their year, don’tcha think?”

“Yeah, probably.” I knew anything I said was irrelevant, it just gave him a chance to reload.

“I mean, dey got Hack Wilson, for Chrissakes. If you can’t win a World Series with Hack by-god Wilson, what do ya gotta do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seventeen years. You’d think they’d win one soon just by accident.”

It was like that all the way to the Allerton. We arrived and, just like at the Pfister, I was dropped off in the alley with our stuff. I had a few uncomfortable moments alone with the luggage looking around frantically for brown hats that weren’t there, then a few more when I realized I was surrounded by more black faces than I’d seen in my whole life. The porters and kitchen help took their smoke breaks by the loading dock, apparently. Still, Arthur the porter, once he got over the surprise of being asked his name, was a good guy and got our gear up to 803 without incident.

We knocked, but the Count didn’t answer. I stood there for a moment like a moron, not sure what to do, even after Arthur used his passkey to crack the door and extended his palm. I had never tipped anyone at a hotel before, and had no idea how much was enough. I reached into my pocket and found two quarters and a paperclip.

Fifty cents must have been pretty generous, because he gave me a gap-toothed smile and an enthusiastic offer of girls or booze, whatever the boss or I might be looking for. I gave him a smile that I hoped was worldly and amused, rather than horrified, and declined his kind offer, but yes, I knew where to find him if I changed my mind. It seemed a lot of people at the Allerton changed their minds after a lonely night or two.

The Count stood at the window, looking south towards the river and the Loop. Pipe smoke formed a blue halo around his head that renewed itself every minute or so with another silent puff. He seemed oblivious to my banging around as I stacked the cases in the corner, and put my one flaking brown suitcase at the foot of my cot. Not a word was said, the gurgling and sputtering of the radiator and faint footsteps out in the hall, muffled by carpeting, were the only sounds.

Just to make myself useful, I snapped open the case with most of his artifacts in it. “What will you need tonight?” I asked, hoping like hell that list didn’t include me. He had dinner plans with several of the money people from the Oriental Institute, and I wanted no part of those shenanigans.

One thing I’d learned in our time together, I was Gerhardt’s son enough to feel a discomfort bordering on loathing around rich people and college eggheads. The primary function of the Institute was to play matchmaker between both those groups. Throw in some wrinkly nun school teachers and it was my idea of hell on earth.

Without giving me his full attention, he pointed vaguely at the case. “The makeup pot. The Venus is good. I just need enough for a quick show and tell… And you may as well give me my helmet, too.”

“It’s snowing out. You’re really wearing this?”

He laughed. “No, but I’ll bring it. What is it with people? No matter how much money they have, or how powerful they are, they all act like children and want to try on my pith helmet?” I knew why. I’d tried it on myself the first time he left me alone with it. I wanted to see how I looked as a famous explorer. One look in the mirror cured me. I immediately realized I no more resembled a dashing desert explorer than I did a Tuareg king.

“Because they want to imagine what it’s like to be you.”

“They can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to be me,” he snapped. Then, realizing how petulant he sounded, he added, “They don’t know how lucky they are not to get lice from that damned hat.”

I scratched my head as I asked, “You’ve had lice?” For some reason, the idea struck me as ludicrous, even though almost everyone I knew had them at one time or another, and in springtime half our school had smelled like kerosene and Life Buoy. On the other hand, if I were a pest, that head of wavy dark hair was prime real estate, and with a penthouse view.

“Live in the desert long enough, you’ll catch everything but the clap. Live in the city long enough, you’ll probably catch that, too.” He managed the first real smile I’d seen in days. “You’ll have to watch yourself in New York, Willy. You barely got out of Moline with your virtue intact.” The idea of getting out to see Chicago was far more exciting than arguing whether my virtue was technically intact or not, so I chose to focus there.

“So you won’t need me tonight?”

“No, go out and explore the Windy City. Try not to get yourself machine gunned. We have that luncheon tomorrow before we head to Rockford, so don’t be too late.”

“Yes, Mama.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “
Und keine madchen nach hause bringen,”
he squawked in an old woman’s voice.

“You don’t bring any girls home either, young man,” I smarted off before I realized what a crappy thing it was to say. Despite his shameless flirting, there was only one girl he wanted to bring to this room, and she was a long way from Chicago.

He let it slide with a quiet, “I’ll try to control my baser urges.”

After the obligatory but completely hollow offer to stay with him til he left for his appointment, I jammed two dollars in my pocket. The rest of my savings I shoved in a sock, rolled it up tightly and squished it to the bottom of my suitcase with the rest of my worldly goods, then under the rollaway bed flush against the wall.

One advantage of being broke most of the time is you learn to kill time creatively. The two best ways to do that; street cars and movie theaters. Back home I’d often just pick a line and ride it from one to the other, watching the neighborhoods change like the seasons. Dirty cramped tenements to bungalows to mansions, then inevitably back downscale as the lines petered out just like winter to spring, to summer, to fall. All for a dime.

Even in Cedar Rapids, I was intimately familiar with the Sixth Street South West and Third Street North East lines as they ran through downtown. Here my destination was the Clark-Wentworth line, which ran an unfathomably long way through the city. My goal was to ride it as north as made sense, and as far south as I dared, which according to Arthur, wouldn’t be far.

I wandered up Michigan Avenue to Chicago, then across to Clark. It was late afternoon, and the Magnificent Mile was alive with the lady shoppers in furs, and professional men in suits, ties and thick wool overcoats. I must have looked like one of the servants, just gaping and staring, and not a particularly bright or useful one.

Once on the streetcar, though, I fit right in. Working our way north, I was amazed to hear the languages around me change abruptly. Downtown it was English, of course, in a variety of accents and volumes but eventually it would switch to mostly Swedish, then a mix of Bohunk languages, even Syrian and Yiddish, then back to English as the tram chugged and clanged north towards the better suburbs.

The neighborhoods bewildered me. At home, there might be a block or so where people clung to the Old Country—which ever country that happened to be—but here it went for what seemed miles in any direction. A dizzying array of restaurants, stores, and signs in strange script beckoned and repelled me at the same time. Would I even know what to order in a Chinese restaurant, or a Syrian place? The Count would know, but he wasn’t here to guide me. If I wasn’t going to starve, I’d best learn to feed myself. I took it as a challenge to try something exotic and foreign-sounding.

Left to my own devices, I finally chickened out and found a German place where at least I knew what I was ordering. I was disappointed to find out that, besides being the most expensive meal I’d ever ordered, the food was no better than I’d find on Keefe Street, or even in my own Mama’s kitchen. It left me feeling cheated, and determined to be braver in my food choices from then on. At least as much as possible. I heard Orientals ate cats, and sometimes served them to unsuspecting Americans. That much adventure I wasn’t up for.

Losing track of time, I rode north, then south again, farther than Arthur suggested was wise, I was proud to note, then high-tailed it back downtown. I found a movie house playing “The Sea Beast,” with John Barrymore and Dolores Costello. Turns out, it was really Moby Dick, but it was still pretty good. I don’t remember any women when I read it in high school, but then I usually enjoyed the movies more than the books.

I sat in the dark, feeling awfully smug when the projectionist messed up a reel change, and I joined with the audience hooting and hollering when the whale appeared on the screen. I thought about how Ahab wouldn’t stop til he found that creature, and he risked everything for the girl, Esther. I never much liked Barrymore, or any of the pretty boy actors for that matter, because they didn’t look or act like anyone I knew. But watching, I recognized the look of wild enthusiasm when he spoke about that whale. It was the same look I’d seen on de Prorok’s mug when he talked about Carnegie Hall, or “digging rights,” or “making the world forget Howard Carter ever existed.”

I wondered if Countess Alice had long hair like Dolores Costello. I’d seen her picture but I couldn’t remember. That was something else I thought about alone in the dark. The good girls—Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Dolores Costello in this picture—all had long hair in ribbons. Maria Iaccobucci had hair like that: thick Italian tresses that my chewed-up knackwurst fingers would never get to run through. The bad girls—Theda Bara, Vilma Bánky, heck even Jacqueline from Moline—had their hair bobbed. The movies told us we were supposed to like the good girls, and in the movies I did. What wasn’t to like? They were sweet, and nice and usually gave their all for their man without complaint. That was the movies. In real life they scared the bejeezus out of me.

In real life, I liked the bad girls. Or at least they seemed to like me. They were either bad or the maids, telephone operators and garment workers in my neighborhood who just wore their hair short because it was easier to manage when you had real work to do. Surely long hair would get all tangled in an operator’s headset, and when you had to be at work at the crack of dawn, did you really have all day to brush it out? Most of them, in my admittedly limited experience, weren’t bad. Just practical.

The movie let out about eleven, and I stepped out onto Halsted Street. Traffic was light, mostly taxis running north and south. Small, dry flakes of snow spiraled to the ground. It wasn’t really cold for February, just a little breeze blowing east towards the lake, which made it almost balmy. I decided to walk back to the hotel, although I could have gotten a cab.

I smiled at the very idea. I could get a cab. Hell, I could do anything I wanted. Here I was in a big city, money in my pocket, no one sitting at home waiting for me. I could get rip roaring drunk if I wanted, which I didn’t. I could see another movie, or walk back to the hotel, or grab a cab and head for the fleshpots of Calumet City. I wouldn’t, of course, and whether that was my upbringing, just good sense, or a lack of cash wasn’t really the point. I could do it if I chose. I had a choice.

Walking down the street, I whistled an old German tune Mama taught me, but that didn’t seem right, so I switched to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which gave me a beat to walk to and quickened my pace as well as my pulse. It sounded so much more Chicago, and more modern. And a whole lot like me, which made me indescribably happy.

This was uncharted territory, being responsible to no one by myself. I was in the second biggest city in the country, where I only knew one person, and he was a stranger here himself. I could have been in Cairo, or Marrakesh and someday I might be. Even the familiar seemed exotic and alien. Maybe I should be the one wearing a pith helmet, I thought. I actually laughed out loud from sheer joy, but no one heard and neither I nor they would have cared if they did.

About a block from the Allerton, I saw a newsstand, and stood there scanning the headlines. According to the Daily Herald, there were immigration raids on Dago neighborhoods after another body was found in Cicero. Forty one bodies, they said, including this guy Orazio. Mama said the Italians would never amount to anything, but the ones I knew were alright. Some, like Maria Iaccobucci, could redeem the entire race single handed.