When Huey backed away, the Reverend hung his head and said, “Please accept my apologies. I forgot myself. I bow to your more Christian instincts.”
“And don’t you fuckin’ forget it,” Huey muttered, moving on.
Two holes later, Smith and Huey were alone again. After Huey swung-and his mood was brightened by another two-hundred-yard-plus drive-the ass-kissing Reverend politely asked if he could discuss business for a moment.
“What kind of bizness, Rev?”
“Share the Wealth Club. I merely wanted to suggest that we charge our members a nominal ten cents in dues….”
“No.”
From his expression, you’d think Smith had been struck a blow. “But with eight million members at ten cents a month each, think what that would bring us!”
Huey looked like he was going to spit out a seed. But all he spit out were words: “We’re lookin’ for support, not money, Rev. The money’ll come. It’ll come. Now…what’s this about you bein’ against tellin’ our members about my thirty-dollar-a-month old-age pension plan?”
The Reverend lowered his voice to the timbre of a very special prayer. “Dr. Townsend is promising his followers two hundred dollars a month…so I suggest we just put in the word ‘adequate’ and let every man name his own figure….”
Huey roared with laughter. He slapped his spiritual adviser on the back.
“The Lord broke the mold when he made you, Rev,” Huey said. I couldn’t tell if that was spoken in admiration or contempt, or maybe half-and-half.
Finally, Huey and I found ourselves alone, with both Smith and Weiss off chasing their balls, so to speak. I filled the Kingfish in on my visits to the three names he provided me from his “son-of-bitch” book. I did it quickly, but in detail, and he took it all in with eyes that were hard and focused.
“I’ve made myself available,” I said, “and easy to find. I was at the Heidelberg most of the time, as you know, but the night I called on Dandy Phil, I stayed in New Orleans. And nobody’s contacted me, or approached me, about anything.”
“You think you gave ’em enough time?”
I shrugged. “I think if anything was afoot, from these quarters, we’d know. Remember, I talked to Hamilton and LeSage on Tuesday, and Dandy Phil on Wednesday. Your old pal Diamond Jim sends his regards, by the way.”
Huey shook his head. “God, I miss his spaghetti and meatballs.” We had reached his ball and he began to address it, then turned to me with a frown of thought and said, “You know, that tip I got said I wouldn’t live through the special session.”
“How long did you say the session would take, again?”
“By Monday, we’ll have them thirty-one bills rammed through. Would ya mind stickin’ aroun’ till then? I can use another good man at my side.”
I stepped back while he took a swing and raised a healthy divot.
“Practice swing,” I said.
“Goes without sayin’,” the Kingfish said, and waled at the thing. It went flying over the hill, just like my ten-grand advance had flown.
But another few days at $250 per wasn’t a bad consolation prize.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
“I thought you might,” he said jovially. “Considerin’ how you and Alice Jean done hit it off….”
He went on up and over the hill while I stood there with my mouth open.
“What’s wrong?” Murph asked, as he came down over the slope behind me.
I swallowed thickly. “I think the Kingfish knows I’m bangin’ his sweetie.”
“Hell, Nate,” Murphy said, moving on past me with a soft chuckle, “everybody in this damn circus knows that.”
11
The midnight blue Caddy shot down the Air-Line Highway like a well-aimed bullet-no blowouts or broken windshields, this trip. Not on a hard stretch of Kingfish concrete that might have been designed for breaking speed limits; and what Louisiana traffic cop was fool enough to stop the car that bore license plate Number 1?
Murphy Roden was a no-nonsense driver: his foot was heavy, sure ’nuff, but his eye was steady and ever on the road. Affable as he was, Murph indulged in little small talk on the drive. I was in the front seat with him, and the Kingfish was by himself in back. Seymour Weiss had remained in New Orleans. It was a hot, sunny day, and the only wind was the one we stirred up; the windows in front were down.
It was the closest I ever came to seeing the Kingfish at repose, and the only time I had evidence that he ever slept. He napped briefly, and read various newspapers and sheafs of correspondence, occasionally scribbled some notes or something, for the rest of the ninety-minute trip. The gregarious, motormouth bear was in near-hibernation.
Suddenly, a gray-granite rocketship, poised to launch into the heavens, rose above the mud flats, before my astounded eyes: Huey’s skyscraper state-house. The tapering spire of the thirty-four-story capitol was like a mirage of the future, an apparition of civilization in a world of swamps and bayous.
“Some buildin’, huh?”
It gave me a start: the Kingfish hadn’t spoken the whole trip, and now, when I glanced over, his shining moon face was next to me, as he sat forward, leaning on my seat, staring ahead at his art deco monument to himself.
“Some building,” I agreed.
“Brother Earl calls it my ‘silo.’ Jealous, as usual. Only cost five millions, and I had the sucker finished within a year of the day we laid the cornerstone.” Then, with no irony and not a twinge of conscience, he added, “Woulda cost fifty millions in New York or Washin’ton, what with their crooked brand of politics.”
If an Empire State Building ascending from marshlands had seemed jarring, the capitol grounds dispelled that sense. As the Caddy glided through a formal, landscaped park-flower beds bursting with color, magnolias and poplars mingling with ghostlike, ancient, moss-hung oaks-the towering stone structure achieved an eerie dignity, like a single massive gravestone in a vast perfect cemetery.
Murphy turned down Capitol Drive, where parking places awaited Huey and the bodyguard car that trailed us (bearing McCracken, Messina and two other Cossacks). These were among the few reserved spaces that weren’t taken: the special session began today, and Louisiana’s pro-Long legislators knew the Kingfish expected their presence, and the anti-Longs weren’t about to give him the satisfaction of no opposition.
The Kingfish was forgoing his private parking place in back, where he could enter the statehouse unobtrusively-but right now, with the session looming, Huey wanted to be seen. It was a time for grand entrances.
To reach the entrance of the 450-foot inverted? that was Huey’s capitol-the Senate and the House of Representatives were in first-floor wings at left and right, respectively-you climbed forty-nine steps, each but the last inscribed with the name of a state. The granite stairway was flanked by somber, imposing statues of explorers, pioneers, settlers and Indians. The majesty of all this, and that of the looming monolithic capitol itself with its historical and patriotic friezes, was undermined by the all-pervasive presence of Huey’s state police.
In their helmets and khakis and boots, strapped with gun-and bullet-belts, they were not a police guard, but a military encampment, standing watch along the perimeter, perched on the edges of the somber statuary, stationed on the landings of the stairway. Their presence only made Huey smile, and he said, “Hello, boys,” half a dozen times along the way; their disciplined lack of response tickled him all the more, as he strutted up the granite stairway followed by Murphy and me, as well as Messina, McCracken (with his deadly grocery sack), and other assorted hooligans.
We followed the Kingfish through the glass doors into a claustrophobic bronze-and-marble entryway, and on into the grandiose main lobby known as Memorial Hall. Our footsteps echoed across the polished lava floors and up to the ornate four-story ceiling; Huey’s voice echoed the same way, as he jauntily greeted legislators and tourists and tour guides.