The Knights of the Cornerstone (26 page)

Jump,
Calvin thought, and he walked backward up the gravel beach in his wet shoes, signaling to Shirley and pointing toward where the Harvester sat at the edge of Beamon’s yard. Shirley nodded and started back along the dock, but just then Donna sat down in the pilot’s seat, and Calvin heard the engine turn over and roar to life, and within seconds she whipped the boat around in a tight, bubbling circle and ran it upriver to the dock.

It took both Calvin and Shirley to lever the wheelbarrow sideways and roll Lymon down onto the cushions on the long bench seat. He grunted, opening his eyes and
staring, and then closing them again, moaning a little bit Calvin wondered whether he knew what was going on, or whether he was already mostly gone, drifting out across his own river. But there was no time to chat. Calvin pushed the empty wheelbarrow off the edge of the dock and then climbed into the
Painted Lady
and hunkered down in the passenger seat next to Donna. She kept the speed down for Lymon’s sake, but even so the trip seemed to take a quarter of the time that it had taken this morning on the fireboat. The wind blew warm and dry, and he could smell the river and the desert, and there was already some warmth in the morning. The sheer wall of the Dead Mountains loomed up on the port side, and he could see New Cyprus now in the distance, lit up by the rising sun. There was another barge-like boat on the river up ahead, probably moored off the island. “What’s that?” he shouted.

“Film crew’s my guess,” Shirley shouted back at him.

And just then Calvin spotted a clump of cottonwoods on the Nevada side where there was a little camp set up in a clearing, with canvas awnings and catering tables and men milling around. There were a couple of boats tied up to willows, fast-looking outboards maybe sixteen feet long. Two men sat in one of them, and one of the men waved in their direction, then did a double take and stood up, shouting at his partner, who went to work on the line that tethered them to the willows. It was Pat Yorkmint and the small man—Defferson. Obviously Yorkmint had recognized the
Painted Lady
before he realized who was in it. The big boat angled out into the river in a wide arc as if to cut them off, although it was unclear how they meant to do it without simply ramming them.

“They’re after us!” he shouted at Donna, just as Defferson answered Calvin’s question by half standing up and
leveling a rifle across the windscreen. “Down!” Calvin shouted to Shirley, but she had already seen the rifle and had slid off the seat onto the deck. The pursuing boat hit their wake and Defferson sat down hard, lurching sideways, the barrel of the rifle apparently cracking Yorkmint on the side of the head. Their boat slewed atop the water as he let go of the wheel and grabbed his ear.

Donna glanced back and yelled, “Hold on!” and Calvin was slammed back against the cushions as the boat shot forward, the bow rising up out of the water, the long, smooth jet stream shooting away behind them as Donna ran them dangerously close to shore, the willows whipping past so close that Calvin could have grabbed a branch. He looked over the side, horrified to see that they were skimming along in what appeared to be less than a foot of water. The big outboard kept well out into the river as Defferson scrambled to his knees and tried to get some kind of steady aim over the seats.

There was the crack of a gunshot, and then another, but Calvin didn’t look back, because the
Painted Lady
swerved out into mid-river again and bore straight down on the camera boat. He braced himself against the dash, his feet pinned to the floorboards. The outboard behind them was gaining fast, although the rifle had disappeared now that the camera boat was dead in front of them. Donna’s hair blew straight back out behind her, and she had a wild, happy look on her face, as if she had lost her mind.

“Shit!” Calvin yelled, watching the sudden panicked scramble on the camera boat when they figured out Donna was serious. He braced for the collision, glancing back at his uncle. Somewhere along the line Shirley had slipped an orange life preserver around him, and she had one arm across his chest, holding on to him. The gap between the
boats closed as two people dove off the camera boat into the river and swam hard toward the opposite shore. The camera boat itself heaved around in reverse suddenly, camera gear toppling, the pilot trying desperately to get out of the way as the
Painted Lady
shot past, skimming the bow within inches. Calvin locked eyes for a split second with a terrified man who couldn’t have been more than two feet away, and then they were decelerating, angling in toward the Temple Bar. The boat pursuing them turned wide toward the Arizona shore, and Calvin watched as it slowed down to pick up the men in the water. A sandbag fortification had been thrown up along the river side of the island, head high, atop a long rampart of sand and rock that hid most of the Temple from view.

Several small Bobcat tractors were pushing more sand and rock around, and twenty or so men were heaving sandbags, fire-brigade-style, off the flatbeds of a line of Pullman carts heading over the bridge, incoming carts alternating with empty carts going back after more sandbags. The
Painted Lady
swept past underneath the bridge, aiming toward Taber’s dock, where a half dozen people waited for them.

I
t was your call,” Taber said to Calvin. “It’s damn well sure we won’t see Mifflin again this side of Hell. He won’t come back out here, not with Postum’s money in his pocket. If you’d have left him tied up in Beamon’s yard he probably
would
be here. As far as I’m concerned, we’d be a long chalk better off if they
all
ran off to Idaho to take care of their family. What he told you was right on the nose, although we already knew some of it because of that script Postum so kindly sent to us. He overreached himself there.”

They walked along one of the dimly lit passages, the air smelling of cool, dry stone. Taber had something that he wanted Calvin to see, now that Calvin was a Knight—what Taber referred to as the
Mint.

“So it’s true that this was a silver mine, like Mifflin said?” Calvin asked. “I thought they used the tracks to run carloads of cut stone down from the quarry.”

“They did, among other things. The Knights found the silver ore when they were tunneling out the passage up to the quarry, and from that time on they killed two birds with one stone. Blankfort said it was divine intervention, and I wouldn’t argue with the man. That little bit of intervention assayed out at over three thousand dollars a ton. Most of the mines out in this part of the desert played out pretty quickly. Someone would find silver ore, there’d be a lot of excitement, and then after a couple of months or a year it would dry up. What the Knights found here was different, though.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of silver rush?” Calvin asked. “Like with the other strikes out here?”

“Not much of a rush, not like when they found the Corn-stock Lode or the Panamint strike. Silver fever had faded out forty years earlier. And New Cyprus was what you might call a closed society. There was no way for a man to stay ten minutes if he wasn’t wanted, and if you weren’t a Knight, you weren’t wanted. James Morris started poking around, taking photos and asking questions down at the smelter. When he wrote his pamphlet, he got so much right by guesswork that the Knights bought out the stock and swore him to secrecy. He didn’t have to work for a living after that, and neither did Lamar, when he came along. That bookstore of theirs has always been a hobby.”

“And all of this led to his being murdered?”

“Years later. He was honorable enough to keep the secret, and he told the wrong people to go to hell.”

Two men appeared farther up the tunnel, stepping out of yet another passage and into the glow of one of the hanging bulbs. They were apparently flesh and blood. When they drew near, Calvin recognized one of them as Jake Purcel, who had been one of the two boarders this morning—the one who hadn’t been mauled by the dog. “All set up,” Purcel said.

“No problems, then?” Taber asked.

“Pretty much cut and dried, given that we’re right about where they’ll set up. One funny thing, though, was that someone chalked the wall on up the way.”

“Chalked it?”

“Like they were marking it—back where the passages branch off into town. It looked like maybe someone came in from that direction and wanted to find the right turning on the way back. It’s hard to say when it was done, though. Might have been a month ago.”

“Could you follow the marks?”

“No, it was just the one mark as far as we could see. Just enough to navigate the passage where it gets complicated there.”

The two men headed away down the passage again, leaving Calvin and Taber alone. “So what does that mean?” Calvin asked. “Who would have chalked the passage?”

A tunnel opened on the right, and Taber headed down it, going steeply downhill now. “Could be a Knight,” Taber said. “Could be a skunk. One mark’s not enough to go on, though. It’d take hours to search the tunnels, and we don’t have hours.”

“How about the cameras?”

“That’s our best bet, although aside from in the
catacombs and the mint, we don’t have much surveillance. Some places it’s taboo.”

Taber stopped now, and within the silence of the dead air, Calvin could hear what sounded like rushing water, although it might as easily have been the sound of blood in his own veins. In front of them stood a door built of rough-hewn cypress beams, which began to be hauled upward now, although Calvin hadn’t seen Taber do anything to make it happen. The door was counterweighted with solid globes of what must have been silver, and as it rose out of sight above it revealed a dim cavern, apparently sizable, although the ceiling was only a couple of feet overhead. There was the smell of river water and wet stone now, and a metallic smell, like old coins in a sack. The sound of water was more pronounced, and he realized that they must be very near the river itself, perhaps in the upper reaches of New Cyprus or beyond, where the river swept deep and fast along the cliffs of the Dead Mountains.

Nearly lost in the twilight, in the downward-sloping end of the room, lay a pool of water that appeared to have leaked beneath three other wooden doors, their heavy, water-darkened planks cleated with silver bands and fitted into square-cut holes in the stone wall, as if the doors shut out the river itself. Lamplight glinted on flecks of quartzite and on jagged veins of silver that appeared and disappeared in the hewn granite walls of the cavern. On the stone floor, and stacked on stone tables cut into the walls, stood wooden casks and crates, some fixed with lids, some open, revealing thousands of silver coins of varying sizes. Broken casks on the floor had spilled coins into silver deltas that flowed out around pyramids of ingots the size of decks of playing cards. Other pyramids were built out of what might have been globular, two-pound fishing weights
if the metal had been lead rather than silver. Farther back in the recesses of the cavern, bar silver lay in piles four or five feet high, stacked back and forth like bricks on a pallet, the stacks making a wall that partially screened further casks of coin and heaps of ingots and silver bricks that would have been almost too heavy to lift.

Bob Postum suddenly made perfect sense to Calvin. Simple greed explained him—it was the only sort of “belief that he needed. That hadn’t been clear when Calvin was talking to Mifflin that morning, but it was clear as a bell now that he saw the silver lying before him like moonlit dunes.

“The coin is stamped with the Knight’s crest,” Taber said, stepping into the cavern and motioning Calvin in after him. “You’ll see it advertised in coin collectors’ catalogues now and then. A coin fetches a pretty good price, too, although if all of this were dumped onto the market it wouldn’t be worth more than the weight of the silver. How much weight do we have here? I have no earthly idea. We move some pallets of these bricks to a man out in Vegas now and then, which keeps us in chips, but in my years here I can’t tell that the pile has gone down much at all. And there’s more silver in the mines. Who knows how much? Bob Postum’s got no idea what he’s going to find. It’ll be a
hell
of a memorable moment for him when he walks in through this door.”

Calvin followed him back out into the passage again, glancing upward toward the high ceiling, where he saw a pinpoint of light glowing off a small circle of glass—another camera lens. “So we’re just leaving the door open like this?” Calvin asked.

“Like a dare,” Taber said.

C
alvin stood in the shade at the foot of Taber’s dock, where he looked out over the river through a pair of binoculars. The camera boat was securely anchored from all four corners now, and aside from what looked like legitimate film-shoot activity, the day was quiet and waiting. On the water they had put out a line of fat red buoys, routing pleasure boats along the Arizona side and cordoning off New Cyprus from the rest of the world, and there was a man in uniform on the ferry dock, evidently a sheriff, now and then shouting things and gesturing. When the trouble started, according to what Taber had told him earlier, they’d shut the river down entirely, opening it back up now and then to let boats through and then closing it again. That is, if the battle lasted long enough to make that necessary.