Cinnamon Kiss (24 page)

“Don’t be. I asked you for the job and you came through for me. If I’m very lucky I’ll come out of this alive and with the money for Feather’s doctors. If I’m just plain old lucky I’ll just get the money.”

Saul nodded and turned to leave. I touched his arm.

“Why’d you want me to come out here?” I asked him. I thought I knew but I wanted to see what he had to say.

“I did Christmas a favor once. He’s the kind of guy that takes a debt seriously. I wanted you to know him if you got into a bind. He’ll do whatever it takes to make things right.”

IT WAS LATE on the highway ride home. After my accident and two near misses I was paying close attention to the road and the speedometer. Mouse and I smoked with the windows down and the chilly breezes whipping around us.

After quite a while I asked, “So what’s that Christmas Black’s story?”

“What you mean?” Mouse asked. He understood my question; he was just naturally cagey.

“Is that his real name?”

“I think it is. All the kids in his family named after holidays. I think that’s what he told me once.”

“What’s his story?” I asked again.

“He a terror,” Mouse said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He kilt a whole town once.”

“A what?”

“Whole town. Men, women, chirren. All of ’em. Every last one.” Mouse sneered thinking about it. “He kilt the dogs and the water buffaloes an’ burnt down all the houses an’ half the trees an’ crops. Mothahfuckah kilt every last thing ’cept a couple’a chickens an’ one baby girl.”

“In Vietnam?”

“I guess it was. He didn’t give the town a name. Maybe it was Cambodia or Laos maybe. Shit, the way he tell it, it could’a been anywhere. They just put that boy in a plane an’ give him a parachute an’ a duffel bag full’a guns an’ bombs. Wherever he land people had to die.”

“How do you know him?”

“Met once down in Compton. There was some guys thought they was bad messin’ wit’ a friend’a his. The dudes called themselves my friends an’ so I looked into it. When I fount out what they was doin’ I jes’ smiled at Christmas. He taught ’em a lesson an’ we went out to eat sour pork an’ rice.”

I was sure that there was more to the story but Raymond didn’t brag about his crimes much anymore.

“So he left the army after killin’ that village?”

“Yeah. I guess if you do sumpin’ like that it’s a li’l hard to live wit’. For him.”

“You wouldn’t take it hard if you had to kill like that?”

“I wouldn’t never have to kill like that, Easy. I ain’t never gonna be in no mothahfuckah’s army, jumpin’ out no plane, killin’ li’l brown folk. If I kill a town it’a be for me. An’ if it’s for me then I’ma be fine wit’ it.”

I rolled up my window then, the chill of Raymond’s words being enough for me.

For a long while I remained silent, even in my mind.

When we got to L.A. I asked Raymond where he was going.

“Home,” he said.

“With Etta and LaMarque?”

“What other home you evah hear me talk about?”

That was how I learned that his exile was over.

“You know what to do at Mike’s?”

“What, now I’m stupid too?”

“Come on, Ray. You know how serious I am about this.”

“Sure I know what to do. When you get there we gonna be ready for Mr. Lee.”

I dropped him off at maybe three in the morning. He gave me the keys for his place on Denker. I went there, scaled the stairs, and climbed into bed, fully dressed. The sheets smelled of Georgette. I inhaled her tomato garden bouquet and was suddenly awake. Not the wakefulness of a man aroused by the memory of a woman. Georgette’s scent had aroused me but I had Christmas Black’s story in my mind.

I was so close to death at that time that my senses were attuned to its intricacies. My country was sending out lone killers to murder women and children in far-flung nations. While I slept in the security of Mouse’s hideaway innocent people were dying. And the taxes I paid on my cigarettes and the taxes they took out of my paycheck were buying the bullets and gassing up the bombers.

It was a state of mind, sure, but that didn’t mean that I was wrong. All those years our people had struggled and prayed for freedom and now a man like Christmas, who came from a whole line of heroes, was just another killer like all those white men had been for us.

Is that what we labored for all those years? Was it just to have the right to step on some other poor soul’s neck? Were we any better than the white men who lynched us in the night if we killed Easter Dawn’s mother and father, sister and brother, cousins and friends? If we could kill like that, everything that we fought for would be called into question. If we became the white men we hated and who hated us, then we were nowhere, nowhere at all.

The sorrow in my heart finally came to rest on Feather. I thought about her dying and so I picked up the phone and called the long-distance operator.

“Allo?” Bonnie said in the French accent that came out whenever she was on the job in either Europe or Africa.

“It’s me.”

“Oh …hi, baby.”

“Hey …how’s Feather doin’?”

“The doctors say that she’s very, very sick.” She paused for a moment to hold back the grief. I took in a great gulp of air. “But they believe that with the proper transfusions and herbs, they can arrest the infection. And you don’t have to worry about the money for a few months. They’ll wait that long.”

“Thank Mr. Cham for that,” I said with hardly any bitterness in the words.

“Easy.”

“Yeah?”

“We have to talk, honey.”

“Yes. Yes we do. But right now I got my hands full with tryin’ to get Feather’s hospital bills paid without havin’ medical bills of my own.”

“I, I got your message,” she said, not identifying the man who answered the phone. “Is everything okay?”

“All you got to do is call EttaMae before you come back to the house. There’s a man I got to talk to first.”

“It’s been hard on me too, Easy. I had to do what I’ve done just to get —”

“Is Feather there?”

“No. She’s in the hospital, in a room with three other children.”

“There a phone in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have the number?”

“Easy.”

“The number, Bonnie. Whatever we feelin’ it cain’t touch what’s goin’ on with her.”

“HELLO?”

“It’s your daddy, sugar,” I said.

“Daddy! Daddy! Where are you?”

“At Uncle Raymond’s. How are you, baby?”

“The nurses are so nice, Daddy. And the other girls with me are very sick, sicker than me. And they don’t speak English but I’m learning French ’cause they’re just too tired to learn a new language. One girl is named Antoinette like the queen and one is Julia…”

She sounded so happy but after a short while she was tired again.

“HELLO?”

“It’s me, Jackson.”

“Easy, do you know what time it is?”

It was four forty-seven by my watch.

“Were you asleep?” I asked. Jackson Blue was a night owl. He’d party until near dawn and then read Voltaire for breakfast.

“No, but Jewelle is.”

“Sorry. You made any progress on those bonds?”

“I put the numbers through a telex in the foreign department. They good to go, man. Good to go.”

“How much?”

“The one you told me about is eight thousand four hunnert eighty-two dollars and thirty-nine cent. That’s before fees.”

A hundred thousand dollars, maybe a little more. I couldn’t see Haffernon putting his life on the line for money like that. So it had to be the letter.

“Jackson.”

“Yeah, Ease?”

“You ever hear of a guy name of Joe Cicero? They call him Chickpea.”

“Never heard of him but he got to be a literate son of a bitch.”

“Why you say that?”

“’Cause the first Cicero, the Roman statesman, was called Chickpea. That’s what Cicero means, only in the old Latin they had hard
c
’s so you called it ‘Kikero.’”

“Yeah. He got a kick all right.”

I
dreamed that I was a dead man in a coffin underground. Down there nobody could get to me but I could see everything. Feather was playing in the yard, Jesus and Benny had a child that looked like me. Bonnie lived with Joguye Cham on a mountaintop in Switzerland that somehow overlooked the continent of Africa. Across the street from the cemetery there was a jail and in it were all the people, living and dead, who had ever tried to harm my loved ones.

I’d fallen asleep on my back with my hands on my thighs. I woke up in the same position. I was completely rested and happy that Mouse’s dreams infected mine.

It was after two. I had no job so the calendar and the clock lost meaning to me. It was like when I was a youngblood, running the streets hunting down love and the rent.

My passion had cooled in that imagined grave. The cold earth had leached out the pain and rage in my heart. Feather had a chance and I had a hundred thousand dollars in pay-on-demand bonds. Maybe I’d lost my woman. But, I reasoned, that was like if a man had come awake after a bad accident. The doctors tell him that he’s lost an arm. It’s a bad thing. It hurts and maybe he sheds tears. But the arm is gone and he’s still there. That’s some kind of luck.

MIKE’S BAR was in a large building occupying what had once been a mortuary. It had one large room and four smaller ones for private parties and meetings. In the old days, before I ever moved to L.A., the undertakers had a speakeasy behind their coffin repository. Mourners would come in grieving and leave with new hope.

Mouse knew about the old-time club because people liked talking to him. So we took the private room that used to store coffins and he secreted himself behind the hidden door. From there he could spy on the meeting with Lee.

This plan had a few points to recommend it. First, if Lee got hinky Mouse could shoot him through the wall. Also Mouse had a good ear. Maybe Lee would say something that he understood better than I. But the best thing was to have Mouse at that meeting without Lee seeing him; there might come a day when Raymond would have to get close to Lee without being recognized.

I got to the bar at six-twenty, ten minutes before the meeting was to take place. Sam Cooke was singing on the jukebox about the chain gang. Mike, a terra-cotta-colored man, stood statuelike behind his marble-top bar.

“Easy,” he called as I came in the door.

I looked around for enemies but all I saw were men and women hunched over small tables, drinking and talking under a haze of tobacco smoke.

“He in there,” Mike told me when I settled at the bar.

“He say anything?”

“Nope. Just that you was comin’ an’ that a tiny little white man was comin’ too. Told me that there might be another white guy in snakeskin, that if I saw him to give him a sign.”

“When the little white guy gets here make sure he’s alone,” I said. “If he is then send him in.”

“I know the drill,” Mike said.

Mouse had done the bartender a favor some years before. Mike once told me that he was living on borrowed time because of what Raymond had done.

“Any favor he ask I gotta do,” Mike had said. “You got to die one day.”

I remembered those last words as I walked into the small room that had once held a few dozen coffins.

IT WAS A BRIGHT ROOM with a square pine table that had been treated with oak stain. The chairs were all of one general style, but if you looked closely you could see they weren’t an exact match. Mouse was bunged up in the back wall, behind white plasterboard. I wondered if Lee would appreciate the poetry of our deception. He had watched me from behind a similar wall in his own house.

Raymond didn’t talk to me. This was business.

I lit a cigarette and let it burn between my fingers while searching the room for living things. There were no plants in the sunless chamber, of course. But neither was there a solitary fly or mosquito, roach or black ant. The only visible, audible life in that room was me. It was more solitary than a coffin because at least in the ground you had gnawing worms for company.

There came a knock and before I could reply the door swung open. Red-skinned Mike stuck his head in and said, “He’s cool, Easy.” Then he moved back and Robert E. Lee entered.

Lee wore a big mohair overcoat and a black, short-brimmed Stetson. He looked from side to side and then stepped up to the table. His footsteps were loud for such a small man.

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Where’s Saul?”

“Hiding.”

“From you?”

I shook my head. “Me’n Saul are friends. He’s hiding from our enemies.”

“Saul told me that he’d be here.”

“You’re here, man. Have a seat and let’s talk some business.”

He knew he would have to hear me out. But the white man hesitated, pretending that he was weighing the pros and cons of my request.

“All right,” he said finally. Then he pulled out the chair opposite me and perched on the edge.

“I got the bonds,” I said. “Bowers is most likely dead. So’s Haffernon.”

“Haffernon was my employer,” Lee told me. “Turn over what you’ve got and we’ll both walk away.”

“What about my ten thousand?”

“I have no more employer,” he said by way of explanation.

“Then neither do I.”

“What do you want from me, Rawlins?”

“To make a deal. I get a piece of the action and you call Cicero off my ass.”

“Cicero? Joe Cicero?”

The honesty of his fear made me understand that the situation was far more complex than I thought.

“I’d never do business with a man like that,” Lee said with incantatory emphasis, like he was warding off an evil spell I’d cast.

“How do you know the guy if you don’t work with him?” I asked. “I mean he’s not in the kind of business that advertises.”

“I know of him from the newspapers and some of my friends in the prosecutor’s office. He was tried for the torture and murder of a young socialite from Sausalito. Fremont. Patrick Fremont.”

“Well he’s been runnin’ around lookin’ for that briefcase you hired me to find. He told me that he killed Haffernon and Axel and that me and my family are the next ones on his list.”