Flying Crows: A Novel - Softcover

Lehrer, Jim

 
9780345468024: Flying Crows: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345468023 ISBN 13: 9780345468024
Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

With Flying Crows, veteran newsman and bestselling author Jim Lehrer has written his most powerful novel, a work that moves masterfully from past to present and back again to solve the mystery that is American mayhem.

In 1997, police discover an old homeless man in the Kansas City train station. “Birdie Carlucci” claims he has lived there since 1933, hiding out in the storeroom of a Harvey House restaurant. Kansas City cop Lieutenant Randy Benton decides to discover the truth behind Birdie’s tale—and finds himself on a ride that leads ever backward into our country’s bloodstained past.

Benton’s investigation reveals the story of young Birdie, incarcerated in a brutal insane asylum where the preferred method of treatment is beating with a baseball bat. In that hopeless environment, though, he’s befriended by another patient, Josh Lancaster, once dismissed as a lost cause but snatched back from the brink by a compassionate doctor. But what is the secret of Lancaster’s involvement in an infamous Civil War encounter between Confederate bushwhackers and Union soldiers? And what truly happened after Birdie escaped from the asylum on the famous Flying Crow train?

As Benton returns to the present day, he wonders: How much, if any of it, really took place? What were the true public and private traumas of these two troubled men who can’t forget what they’ve seen or merely imagined?

Inspired by real events, Flying Crows is a novel that moves as inexorably as a train in the night to a shattering conclusion—one that reveals the many meanings of imprisonment and escape, and all the eccentricities and tragedies of the American soul.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

This is JIM LEHRER’s fourteenth novel. He is the executive editor/anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and lives in Washington, D.C. He and his novelist wife, Kate, have three daughters.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

RANDY

KANSAS CITY

1997

A private security firm had already done a search of the vast, mostly deserted Union Station building. But the contractor's insurance company, in consultation with the city manager's office, insisted that there be one final, thorough inspection supervised by the Kansas City Police Department. They wanted to make absolutely sure there was nothing on the premises-particularly no person or animal, dead or alive-that could, through legal action or other means, impede the important restoration work that was about to begin.

That was why Lieutenant Randy Benton and Luke Williams, a newly hired uniformed guard for the Union Station Rebirth Corporation, found a living person named Birdie.

That happened because of Randy's curiosity. He was a forty-five-year-old detective in the KCPD's Violent Crimes Division who had volunteered to be one of the twenty-five officers involved in the daylong sweep. Randy came from a Missouri Pacific family, his father having been a railroad policeman and his grandfather a brakeman in the yards at Winston, Missouri. As a kid, Randy's idea of heaven was to go to Union Station on Saturdays and Sundays to watch the trains and have a root beer float at the Harvey House soda fountain.

Here now was a wide full-length mirror hanging a few inches off the floor in what must have once been the Harvey House's storeroom or pantry. There was a dark wooden frame around the cracked and yellowed glass of the mirror. Even though scratched and dusty, he realized from its ornate, detailed etching of Roman soldiers on horses and elegantly dressed women in carriages that the piece was many years old, a special item-an antique-probably worth quite a lot.

Why would an expensive piece like this be hanging in a restaurant storeroom?

He tried to push the mirror to one side. It wouldn't move. He noticed two or three small hinges along the left side of the frame, so he grabbed the right side. The mirror swung easily away from the wall, like a door.

There behind the mirror was another door, also closed, slightly smaller than the mirror.

The real door, made of cracked and gray wood, had a white porcelain knob. Benton put an ear to the wooden panel. After a few seconds, he grabbed his pistol from its holster and motioned for Luke Williams to stand back. Williams was a former airport rent-a-car shuttle-bus driver in his late twenties, and this was his first law-enforcement episode. Instead of moving, he froze.

"I hear something," Randy whispered. He gave Williams another nod to move. This time, Williams did.

Randy shouted into the door, "Is anyone in there? This is the police! Kansas City PD!"

He waited and listened for a count of five. On ten, Randy turned the knob and pushed. The door opened easily.

"Please . . . don't hurt me . . . please. . . ."

It was the faint, weak, slow voice of a man.

Randy spotted somebody in the corner of a room that, without the light from his and Williams's flashlights, would have been pitch black. To Randy's hampered view, the place appeared to be no larger than a small closet, windowless and cluttered with stacks of books, newspapers, and other items hard to identify in the semidarkness. Randy also caught the smell of a burnt candle plus a faint whiff of cinnamon or nutmeg-some kind of spice.

There was a man sitting on the floor, his shaking hands held over the top of his head as if braced for a blow.

The detective stuck his pistol back in the holster. Then he and Williams, each grabbing an arm, lifted the feeble creature to his feet. He was as tall as Randy, almost six feet, but light as cotton. They guided him outside into the larger storeroom.

The man was elderly, well into his seventies, at least, Randy guessed. His face was partly obscured by wild growths of white hair and was bony and drawn, as was what could be seen of his fingers and arms. He was wearing a blue workshirt and a pair of black flannel pants that were wrinkled and filthy. The garments, to Randy, had an otherworld look.

"What are you doing in here-in Union Station?" Randy asked, as they leaned the man against a wall.

"This . . . is . . . where . . . I . . . live." The man spoke precisely as if he were just learning to speak, though his voice was cracking.

"Nobody lives in a train station," Williams said.

"What's your name?" Randy asked.

"Birdie."

"Birdie what?"

"Birdie. . . . Just Birdie."

"What's your last name?" Williams asked.

"Birdie . . . just Birdie. . . . Carlucci . . . right, Carlucci. . . . Name's Birdie Carlucci."

"OK, Carlucci," said Williams. "Where you from?"

"I'm an . . . escaped . . . lunatic."

Randy gave Williams a wave. I will handle the rest of the questioning, said the signal. "What did you escape from, Mr. Carlucci?"

"The . . . Somerset . . . asylum."

"How did you get here?"

"I came . . . with Josh . . . on . . . The Flying . . . Crow." Birdie Carlucci began to slip down the side of the wall; he seemed not to have the strength to remain standing. Randy knew all about The Flying Crow. It was a streamlined passenger train of the Kansas City Southern that had gone out of business at least thirty years ago.

Randy and Williams helped the old man to sit down with his back leaning against the wall, his legs folded underneath him.

Randy crouched down to be at eye level. In twenty-one years as a cop, the detective had learned to read eyes. Birdie Carlucci's set of black ones spoke only of fear, not danger.

"Who's Josh?" Randy asked quietly.

"He's . . . my friend . . . from Centralia."

"My aunt's a librarian in Langley, not far from Centralia." Randy looked back toward the door to the smaller room. "Where's Josh now?"

"Josh . . . loves books. So do I . . . now. He . . . spent all his time . . . in the library . . . at Somerset. He's . . . cured."

"Cured of what?"

"Of . . . seeing something awful."

"When did you and Josh come here to Union Station, Mr. Carlucci?"

"Sixty-three . . . years . . . ago."

Randy exchanged a few more words with Birdie Carlucci on the slow walk up the stairs to the grand lobby, which was no longer grand at all. It was a sad, depressing mess. On the floor were puddles of water and clumps of plaster that had fallen from the once-beautiful ceiling. There was an ugly empty space where the ticket offices with their brass grilled windows had been. The paint on the walls was peeling, cracked, and dirty.

Randy badly wanted to believe the promise from city and restoration project leaders that they were going to bring this place back to life in all its former glory.

"Where are you from originally, Mr. Carlucci?" Randy asked, as he moved through the lobby alongside the shuffling, frail old man.

"Here . . . Kansas City . . . really." Birdie was still talking in fragments, but deliberately now.

"You didn't live in that little room down there for sixty-three years, did you?" Randy asked.

"No . . . no. At first . . . I moved around . . . staying different . . .

places . . . each night or two."

"What kinds of different places?"

"The waiting room . . . baggage rooms . . . down at a train shed . . . offices, stores . . . all over. This is a big, big building."

"How did you live?"

"It...

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Verlag
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345468023
ISBN 13 
9780345468024
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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