Amerikan Eagle

Nine hours later, Sam was back at the Rockingham Hotel, his notebook filled with scribbled notations of what the FBI was looking for—traffic control spots, restaurants to feed the arriving masses of federal agents, and rooming houses to lodge them all—but to his surprise, LaCouture and Groebke were gone. At the front desk, the harried clerk—working on a switchboard that wouldn’t stop ringing—pulled out a note and said, “Oh, Inspector Miller. Agent LaCouture said to meet him… let’s see here, meet him by the hobo encampment off Maplewood. He said you’d know where that was.”

Ten minutes later, Sam was right back where this had all started, walking up the railroad track past the Fish Shanty, past the spot where his tattooed John Doe—no, Peter Wotan!—had been found, and up to the hobo camp, the place where Lou Purdue and the others lived, the place where—

Smoke was billowing up from where the camp had been.

Sam quickened his pace, heard the low growl of diesel engines, saw black clouds billowing up. Two bulldozers from the Portsmouth Public Works Department scraped the charred ground into a burning pile, moving the crumpled boards and shingles of what been people’s homes. LaCouture was standing by a polished black Pierce-Arrow, watching the action. Groebke stood closer to the flames, talking to a Long’s Legionnaire.

LaCouture turned to Sam, looking satisfied underneath the brim of his wide black hat. His pin-striped suit was immaculate, as always. Even his shoes were unscathed. “Inspector. So glad you could join us.”

“What’s going on?”

“A little cleanup, what do you think?”

The bulldozers growled, and he watched a bureau, a chair, a child’s doll get shoved into the flames. Smoke kept billowing up, oily and stinking. “What’s the point?”

LaCouture laughed. “What the hell do you think, boy? In a week, the President hisself is going to be coming up these railroad tracks. Do you really think we’re gonna want him and the press to see a bunch of bums and their filthy shacks?”

Sam watched the orange flames do their work. A bulldozer grumbled by, scooping up trash, some dirt. Riding the top of the dirt was a Roadmaster bicycle, just like the one Toby had. Sam stared at the bicycle, willed it to fall to the side, safe, unharmed, but then the bulldozer bucked and the bicycle fell under the treads, was crumpled, chewed up, destroyed. His chest ached. What kind of place was he living in?

“There’s not enough bulldozers in this country to clean up all the places like this,” he said.

“Don’t matter none,” LaCouture said. “So long as it’s clean around here, that’s all I care about.”

“What about the people? What happened to them?”

“Trespassers all,” LaCouture said. “Those Long boys took care of ’em. Sent off to some transit camps, far away from the newsreel boys come summit day.”

Sam’s witness, Lou Purdue, had lived here, but he knew that wouldn’t get any sympathy from LaCouture. To the FBI, that matter was done.

LaCouture said, “All right, then, tell me what you got for me today.”

Sam took out his notebook, flipped through the pages, started telling LaCouture what he had learned. After a minute, LaCouture held up a hand and said, “All right, all right, type up your notes and pass it along. We’ll deal with it later.”

Sam closed the notebook. The smoke and the flames were finally dying down. The bulldozers and their operators had moved off to the side, the diesel engines softly rumbling. Talking with the Long’s Legionnaire, Groebke laughed, tossed his cigarette into the smoldering embers.

LaCouture leaned back on the fender. “You don’t like me, do you, Miller?”

“I don’t know about that,” Sam said. “You’re here, I’m working for you. Why don’t we leave it at that?”

“You know, I don’t give a bird’s fart if you didn’t vote for the Kingfish, but he is my President and yours, too, no matter if you don’t like him or me. Just so you know, I grew up in Winn Parish, down in Louisiana. You know Winn Parish?”

“That’s where Long came from.”

“Yep,” the FBI agent said. “That’s where he came from, and man, he never forgets that. I grew up in Winn Parish, too, barefoot, poor, Momma dead, and Daddy, he never finished grammar school. Could barely read and write. Worked as a sharecropper, barely makin’ it year to year. And that was gonna be my life, Inspector, until the Kingfish came to power.”

“You were lucky, then.”

“Yeah, you can call it luck if you’d like, but when Long became governor, he started taxin’ Standard Oil and the other fat cat companies, and he got me and my brothers free schoolbooks, built hospitals and roads. You got good roads up here. Down home, it was dirt tracks that became mud troughs every time it rained. When the Kingfish became our governor, there weren’t more than three hundred miles of paved road in the entire state, and when he became senator, that had changed to more than two thousand miles. He took care of his folks in Winn Parish, he took care of the great state of Louisiana, and believe you me, he’s takin’ care of this great country.”