Blonde Faith (21 page)

The lie didn’t hurt Tourmaline, but it tore me up. Everything I thought I had accomplished in the past days faded, and I was once again at odds with myself.

It was very quiet in the unadorned bedroom. When the phone jangled I leaped from the bed. It rang ten times. At the start of each ring I decided to leave the house, but by the time the interval of silence returned I had lost my resolve.

I was afraid to leave Pretty Smart’s crazy, shallow home. Her life was so simple and straightforward. It was almost as if she were living in a movie set rather than a real home. There was solace in that simplicity.

There was danger outside.

I picked up the hunched pink receiver and dialed another number.

“Proxy Nine,” a woman answered.

“Jackson Blue,” I said.

“And your name is?”

“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins.”

“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No company. I’m a one-man operation.”

“And what is the purpose of your call?”

“Purpose? I want to speak to my friend.”

“Does he know you?”

The woman wasn’t stupid, I knew that. What I was experiencing was just another example of the world changing while I sat sulking in place.

“Very well,” I said. “We’ve been friends since before the war.”

“Oh.”

I could almost hear her trying to think of some other way to more closely identify me before passing the call on to Jackson. It was her job to protect the uppity-ups at Proxy Nine, the French insurer of international insurance companies and banks, and Jackson was as uppity as you could get. He was the vice president in charge of data processing.

“One moment, please,” the operator said.

There was a series of clicks and then a ring.

“Jackson Blue’s office,” another woman said.

“Easy Rawlins for him.”

“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”

It was at that moment that Jackson changed in my mind. He had
two
secretaries protecting him from outside calls. From now on our relationship would be at the whim of his largesse. Somehow the cowardly genius had managed to circumvent the machinations of racism. He had more power and access, protection and esteem, than most white men.

“Hello,” he said into my ear.

“Hey, Jackson,” I said. “I need to come by.”

“Kinda busy, blood,” he said with barely a stammer.

“Listen, Jackson. I’m sittin’ here on a bed in a woman’s house. I broke in here and now I’m afraid to leave. It’s like if I went outside there’d be an ambush just waiting.”

This was not a continuation of my confessional with Tourmaline. Jackson and I had had one foot on the criminal side of things since we were kids. Admitting to a break-in was no big thing. And fear was Jackson’s native tongue.

“Okay, brah,” he said. “All right. Come on by.”

Jackson’s words were like an incantation that served to break the spell Pretty Smart’s house had cast over me. I walked out the front door, closing it carefully as I left. I walked to my car and headed for the Proxy Nine building downtown.

THE OFFICERS OF THE COMPANY were all on the thirty-first floor. I remembered that because Jackson had called me when he found out where his desk would be situated.

“I asked ’em t’change it, Ease,” he told me at Cox Bar on a Sunday afternoon, “but they said that I gotta be there ’cause Jean-Paul wants me close at hand.”

“Jean-Paul?”

“Jean-Paul Villard. He’s the president’a the company,” Jackson said, as if he were talking about a distant cousin rather than the master of a multibillion-dollar operation. “So I’m thinkin’ I should quit.”

“Quit? Why you gonna quit over somethin’ like that?”

“Thirty-one, man,” he screeched. “Thirty-one. That’s thirteen backwards.”

It took me and Jewelle and Jewelle’s minister to keep Jackson from resigning. It was amazing to me. Jackson was the only man I knew personally who understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he was still more superstitious than a room full of four-year-olds.

AFTER THREE PHONE CALLS and four receptionists, I finally got to Jackson’s oaken door. The woman who brought me there had a French accent, brown hair, and a parsley-colored dress that clung tightly to her Jayne Mansfield-like figure. She tapped on the door, listened for something, heard a sound that I did not hear, and then stuck her head in.

When her head came out from the crack of Jackson’s door, the young woman had an impressed look on her face.

“He wants you to go right in,” she said, not believing her own words.

“Is that a surprise?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” she said. “Monsieur Villard is in there with him.”

JEAN-PAUL VILLARD was an olive-skinned man with dark eyes and a dark finely trimmed mustache. His hair was black. He was wiry but not skinny, tall, wearing black trousers and a herringbone jacket over an iridescent apple green shirt, which was open at the collar. He was lounging on one of the two yellow sofas that faced each other in front of Jackson’s huge ebony desk.

I hadn’t visited Jackson’s work since before the move. The size of his office was monumental. Fifteen-foot ceilings above a room that was at least twenty feet wide and thirty long. His picture window looked out at the mountains north of the city. On the walls were original oil paintings of famous jazz musicians.

Jackson and his boss rose to meet me.

“Jean-Paul,” Jackson said, “this here is Easy Rawlins.”

The Frenchman smirked at me and shook my hand.

“I have heard many things about you, Monsieur Rawlins.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Jackson tells me that you are the most dangerous man he knows.”

“More dangerous than Mouse?”

Villard’s eyebrows rose at the mention of the diminutive killer. I supposed that Jackson had told him so many stories laced with what had to be hyperbole that he probably thought that Mouse, and the danger he represented, had to be mostly myth.

“He said that Monsieur Mouse was… how do you call it? The most deadly, oui, yes, the most deadly man he knows.”

“He’s right about Mouse,” I said, releasing the surprisingly strong handshake. “But I don’t see how I could be more dangerous than that.”

“Raymond just take your life,” Jackson said with a deadly grin on his dark face. “Easy take your soul.”

There was an aspect of pronouncement to Jackson’s words. After a moment of semiprofound silence we sat down. I perched on a cushion next to Jackson, and Jean-Paul squatted down on the edge of the couch across from us.

On the low marble coffee table between us there was a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

“Let me get you a glass,” the French businessman offered.

“Don’t bother, man,” Jackson said. “Easy don’t imbibe.”

Man.

“Thanks anyway,” I said. Then I looked around the room. “Nice paintings.”

“My lover painted them,” Jean-Paul said with pride. “When she met Jackson she made him take them for his office.”

“Nobody had to make me,” Jackson said. “You know, Easy, Satchmo hisself sat for Bibi to do that one there. She did a whole bunch’a writers too. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes…”

This was another new experience for me. Jackson was a coward, but he wasn’t a kiss-ass. He really liked Jean-Paul and the strangely foreign paintings of American musicians. He belonged in that room.

For a while we exchanged pleasantries. The white man poured himself a glass of wine and sat back on the yellow cushions. It became apparent that he had no intention of leaving.

We had just come to the end of a brief discussion about Vietnam and how no white men, American or French, belonged there.

“So what you need, Easy?” Jackson asked.

Jackson and the Frenchman might have been friends, but he and I went way back. We hadn’t been true friends for all that time, but we could read each other in the dark. With those five words he told a whole story. Jean-Paul was fascinated by Jackson and the tales he told. He was hungry to see an America that was not broadcast on TV and the radio. He wanted to experience the Black Life that had given birth to jazz and the blues, gospel and the Watts riots. Jackson was his first real taste of what there might be under the sanguine white-American facade.

Jackson looked up to this man, wanted to impress him, and so he was asking me to allow the president of Proxy Nine some insight into how our lives went. He trusted that if I had killed somebody or found myself in serious difficulty, I’d just roll out some neutral story and come back to the real details later on when Jean-Paul had had his fill.

Every day in the late sixties was like a new day. From hippies to a war America couldn’t win. There were black people rioting for their rights and getting somewhere with it; Playboy clubs and good jobs; black sports heroes and French millionaires hobnobbing with the likes of me and Jackson Blue.

“EttaMae called me,” I said, deciding to kill two birds with one throw.

When Jackson heard Etta’s name his friendly smile paled, but I kept on talking.

“She said that the cops were looking for Mouse. They think he murdered a man named Pericles Tarr —”

“An’ you want me to go speak with ole Etta?” Jackson asked, hoping to end our conversation.

“No, no, no, no,” I said. “Hear me out, brother. Like I said, the cops think Mouse murdered this man and laid him in a shallow grave down in, uh, San Diego —”

“Did they find the body?” That was Jean-Paul. He was all the way into my story.

“That’s just it, J.P.,” I said. “No. They haven’t found a body, and the murdered man’s wife says that Mouse was playin’ loan shark and did her husband in because he couldn’t pay the note.”

“What’s this ‘loan shark’?” Villard asked.

Jackson rattled off an explanation in amazingly fluent French. Even while I was teaching him a lesson, he was showing me that being in his company was sharing the presence of brilliance.

“Oh, yes, quite right,” Jean-Paul said in English learned from an Englishman.

“So you know that this Pericles isn’t dead?” Jackson asked hopefully.

“Right…”

I laid out the story, then explained, without admitting to burglary, that I’d gotten information from the girlfriend.

“I’m bettin’ that Perry’s the kinda man slip out the back window when trouble comes to the door,” I said. “So I need you to ring the bell while I wait at the back.”

“You are going to catch him by the nose,” Villard speculated.

“And twist a little,” I added.

“May I come with you, Mr. Danger Man?” the president asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing spells trouble like a white man knocking at a black man’s door.”

S
o what did you do during the war, J.P.?” I asked on the way over to Ogden.

“My family is very rich,” he said. “They went to Switzerland and South America. A few went to our plantations in Mali and Congo.”

“And you?”

“I wanted to fight the Nazis. I was young and I wanted to kill the people who were raping my homeland.”

“Is that what you did?”

Jean-Paul was sitting shotgun, and Jackson was in the backseat. The Frenchman’s dark eyes flashed at me and he wondered. I was wondering too. Here I was speaking to a man whose family was old and rich. They owned plantations in Africa, so they had probably been slavers at one time; they might still be today.…

“I worked in a small apartment, making radio codes for the Resistance,” he said. “Our little station was across the street from the Gestapo. I never left my post. For three years I went outside only two times. Once when there was a fire in our building and we feared that the transmitter would be found, and once… once down in an alley where a German officer would go to have sex with little girls of twelve and thirteen.”

“What you do down there?” I asked, because I didn’t want the son of slavers to think I couldn’t handle his experience.

“I cut his throat and then I cut off his prick and put it in his mouth.”

I glanced up at Jackson in the rearview mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I remembered a conversation we’d had many years before. I had asked him if he thought that a black man and a white man could ever be friends.

“Hell, yeah,” he’d answered. “Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin’ ’fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an’ smell it too before he could really know a black friend.”

Jean-Paul had smelled the shit.

THE OGDEN HOUSE was a small stucco hutlike structure the color of mottled blood orange. It was perched on a raised lawn at the center of the block.

After a few minutes of deliberation, I decided to walk up the driveway as Jackson and Jean-Paul went toward the front.

They were to ring the bell while I made my way toward the back door on light and fast feet.

There might have been barriers to impede me, a locked gate or a guard dog, for instance, but I took the chance.

The backyard was small and barren. It was a paved patio under the dubious shade of a dying pomegranate tree. There were two rusting poles standing across from each other supporting a clothesline that held two shirts and about half a dozen socks.

I stood to the right of the door with my .38 in my hand. It might seem to the layman that a pistol out and at the ready would have been overkill for a situation like that. But when you enter into the occupation of ambush, you have got to go all the way or you will, sooner or later, regret it.

I didn’t have to wait long. Within sixty seconds the back door opened, allowing a short and stealthy man to step outside.

He was the color of a well-used two-year-old Lincoln penny, stubby in his build, with small, strong hands and a green cap. His pants were black and his short-sleeved shirt was brown.

“Hold it, Perry,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you dead.”

I expected to scare him, to keep him still. He went me one better by falling on his knees and putting his hands up above his head. I went around my prisoner with the gun in evidence. His head was bowed.