Cinnamon Kiss (4 page)

“For what?” I asked, not reaching for the money.

“I put out the word after you called me. Talked to anybody who might need somebody like you on a job.”

Like you
meant a black man. At one time it might have angered me to be referred to like that but I knew Saul, he was just trying to help.

“At first no one had anything worth your while but then I heard from this cat up in Frisco. He’s a strange guy but…” Saul hunched his shoulders to finish the sentence. “This fifteen hundred is a down payment on a possible ten grand.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I don’t even know what the job is, Easy.”

“And I don’t need to know,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars will put me in shootin’ range of what I need. I might even be able to borrow the rest if it comes down to it.”

“Might.”

“That’s all I got, Saul—might.”

Saul winced and nodded. He was a good guy.

“His name is Lee,” he said. “Robert E. Lee.”

“Like the Civil War general?”

Saul nodded. “His parents were Virginia patriots.”

“That’s okay. I’d meet with the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan if this is how he says hello.” I picked up the envelope and fanned my face with it.

“I’ll be on the job too, Easy. He wants to do it with you answering to me. It’s no problem. I won’t get in your way.”

I put the envelope down and extended that hand. For a moment Saul didn’t realize that I wanted to shake with him.

“You can ride on my back if you want to, Saul. All I care about is Feather.”

I WENT HOME late that afternoon. While Bonnie made dinner I sat by Feather’s side. She was dozing on and off and I wanted to be there whenever she opened her eyes. When she did come awake she always smiled for me.

Jesus and Benny came over and had dinner with Bonnie. I didn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry. All I thought about was doing a good job for the man named after one of my enemies by descendants of my enemies in the land of my people’s enslavement. But none of that mattered. I didn’t care if he hated me and my kind. I didn’t care if I made him a million dollars by working for him. And if he wanted a black operative to undermine black people, well …I’d do that too—if I had to.

AT THREE IN THE MORNING I was still at Feather’s side. I sat there all night because Saul was coming at four to drive with me up the coast. I didn’t want to leave my little girl. I was afraid she might die in the time I was gone. The only thing I could do was sit there, hoping that my will would keep her breathing.

And it was lucky that I did stay because she started moaning and twisting around in her sleep. Her forehead was burning up. I hurried to the medicine cabinet to get one of Mama Jo’s tar balls.

When I got back Feather was sitting up and breathing hard.

“Daddy, you were gone,” she whimpered.

I sat beside her and put the tar ball in her mouth.

“Chew, baby,” I said. “You got fever.”

She hugged my arm and began to chew. She cried and chewed and tried to tell about the dream where I had disappeared. Remembering my own dream I kept from holding her too tightly.

In less than five minutes her fever was down and she was asleep again.

AT FOUR Bonnie came into the room and said, “It’s time, honey.”

Just when she said these words there was a knock at the front door. Feather sighed but did not awaken. Bonnie put her hand on my shoulder.

I felt as if every move and gesture had terrible importance. As things turned out I was right.

“I gave her some of Mama Jo’s tar,” I said. “There’s only two left.”

“It’s okay,” Bonnie assured me. “In three days we’ll be in Switzerland and Feather will be under a doctor’s care twenty-four hours a day.”

“She’s been sweating,” I said as if I had not heard Bonnie’s promise. “I haven’t changed the sheets because I didn’t want to leave her.”

Saul knocked again.

I went to the door and let him in. He was wearing brown pants and a russet sweater with a yellow shirt underneath. He had on a green cap made of sewn leather strips.

“You ready?” he asked me.

“Come on in.”

We went into the kitchen, where Saul and Bonnie kissed each other’s cheeks. Bonnie handed me my coat, a brown shopping bag filled with sandwiches, and a thermos full of coffee.

“I got some fruit in the car,” Saul said.

I looked around the house, not wanting to leave.

“Do you have any money, Easy?” Bonnie asked me.

I had given her the fifteen-hundred-dollar invitation.

“I could use a few bucks I guess.”

Bonnie took her purse from the back of the chair. She rummaged around for a minute, but she had so much stuff in there that she couldn’t locate the cash. So she spilled out the contents on our dinette table.

There was a calfskin clasp-purse but she never kept money there. She had cosmetic cases and a jewelry bag, two paperback books, and a big key ring with almost as many keys as I carried at Truth. Then came a few small cloth bags and an enameled pin or stud. The pin was the size of a quarter, decorated with the image of a white-and-red bird in flight against a bronze background.

If I wasn’t already used to the pain I might have broken down and died right then.

“Easy,” Bonnie was saying.

She proffered a fold of twenties.

I took the money and headed for the door.

“Easy,” Bonnie said again. “Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?”

I turned back and kissed her, my lips tingling as they had in the dream where the hornet was hiding in Feather’s grassy grave.

A
thin coating of freshly fallen snow hid the ruts in the road and softened the bombed-out buildings on the outskirts of Düsseldorf. The M1 rifle cradled in my arms was fully loaded and my frozen finger was on the trigger. At my right marched Jeremy Wills and Terry Bogaman, two white men that I’d only met that morning.

“Don’t get ahead, son,” Bogaman said.

Son.

“Yeah, Boots,” Wills added. “Try and keep up.”

Boots.

General Charles Bitterman had ordered forty-one small groups of men out that morning. Among them were thirteen Negroes. Bitterman didn’t want black men forming into groups together. He’d said that we didn’t have enough experience, but we all thought that he didn’t trust us among the German women we might come across.

“I’m a sergeant, Corporal,” I said to Wills.

“Sergeant Boots,” he said with a grin.

Jeremy Wills was a fair-looking lad. He had corn-fed features and blond hair, amber-colored eyes, and big white teeth. To some lucky farm girl he might have been a good catch but to me he was repulsive, uglier than the corpses we ran across on the road to America’s victory. My numb finger tightened and I gauged my chances of killing both soldiers before Bogaman, who was silently laughing at his friend’s joke, could turn and fire.

I hadn’t quite decided to let them live when a bullet lifted Wills’s helmet and split his skull in two. I saw into his brain before he hit the ground. It was only then that I became aware of the machine-gun reports. When I started firing back Bogaman screamed. He had been hit in the shoulder, chest, and stomach. I fell to the ground and rolled off the road into a ditch. Then I was scuttling on all fours, like a lizard, into the meager shelter of the leafless woods.

Machine-gun fire ripped the bark and the frozen turf around me. I had gone more than fifty yards before I realized that somewhere along the way I’d dropped my rifle. In my mind at the time (and in the dream I was having) I imagined that my hatred for those white men had brought on the German attack.

The rattling roar of their fire proved to me that the Germans were desperate. I didn’t think they could see me but they kept firing anyway.

Kids,
I thought.

I took out my government-issue .45 and crawled around to the place where I had seen the flashes from their gun. I moved through the sound-softening snow hardly feeling the cold along my belly. I had no hatred for the Germans who tried to kill me out there on the road. I didn’t feel that I had to avenge the deaths of the men who had so recently despised and disrespected me. But I knew that if I let the machine gunners live, sooner or later they might get the drop on me.

The Nazis wanted to kill me. That’s because the Nazis knew that I was an American even if Bogaman and Wills did not.

I went maybe four hundred yards more through the woods and then I slithered across the road, making it back to the clump of branches that camouflaged the nest. I jumped up without thinking and began firing my pistol, holding it with both hands. I hit the first man in the eye and the second in the gut. They were completely surprised by the attack. I noticed, even in the two short seconds it took me to kill them, that their uniforms were makeshift and their hands were wrapped in rags.

The third soldier in the nest leaped at me with a bayonet in his hand. The impact of his attack knocked the pistol from my grasp. We fell to the ground, each committed to the other’s death. I grabbed his wrist with one hand and pressed with all my might. The milky-skinned, gray-eyed youth grimaced and used all of his Aryan strength in an attempt to overwhelm me. But I was a few years older and that much more used to the logic of senseless violence. I grabbed the haft of his bayonet with my other hand while he wasted time hitting me with his free fist. By the time he realized that the tide was turning against him it was too late. He now used both hands to keep the blade from his chest but still it moved unerringly downward. As the seconds crept by, real fear appeared in the teenage soldier’s eyes. I wanted to stop but there was no stopping. There we were, two men who had never known each other, working toward that young man’s death. He spoke no English, could not beg in words I might understand. After maybe a quarter of a minute the blade passed through his coat and into his flesh, but then it got caught on one of his breastbones. I almost lost heart then but what could I do? It was him or me. I leaned forward with all my weight and the German steel broke the German’s bone and plunged deep into his heart.

The most terrible thing was his last gasp, a sudden hot gust of breath into my face. His eyes opened wide as if to see some way out of the finality in his body—and then he was dead.

I jumped up from my sleep in Saul’s Rambler. A sign at the side of the road read THE ARTICHOKE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

“Bad dream?” Saul asked me.

It was a dream, but everything in it had happened more than twenty years before. It was real. That German boy had died and there wasn’t a thing either one of us could do to stop it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a dream.”

“I guess I should tell you a little about this guy Lee,” Saul said. “He’s not known to the public at large but in certain circles he’s the most renowned private detective in the world.”

“The world?”

“Yes sir. He does work in Europe and South America and Asia too.”

I noticed that he didn’t mention Africa. People rarely did when talking about the world in those days.

“Yes sir,” Saul Lynx said again. “He has entrée to every law enforcement facility and many government offices. He’s a connoisseur of fine wines, women, and food. Speaks Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, Spanish, French, and English, which means that he can converse with at least one person in almost every town, village, or hamlet in the world. He’s extremely well read. He thinks that he is the better of every, and any, man regardless of race or rank. And that means that his racism includes the whole human race.”

“Sounds like a doozy,” I said. “What’s he look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? I thought that you’d done work for him before.”

“I have. But I never met him face-to-face. You see, Bobby Lee doesn’t like to sully himself with operatives. He has this woman named Maya Adamant who represents him to most clients and to almost all the PIs that do his legwork. She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. He spends most of his time hidden away in his mansion on Nob Hill.”

“Have you ever talked to him, in Chinese or otherwise?” I asked.

Saul shook his head.

“Have you seen his picture?”

“No.”

“How do you even know that this man exists?”

“I’ve met people who’ve met him—clients mainly. Some of them liked to talk about his talents and eccentricities.”

“You should meet with a man you work for,” I said.

“People work for Heinz Foods and Ford Motor Company and never meet them,” Saul argued.

“But they employ thousands. This dude is a small shop. He needs to at least say hello.”

“What difference would that make, Easy?” Saul asked.

“How can you work for a man don’t even have the courtesy to come out from his office and nod at you?”

“I received an envelope yesterday morning with twenty-five hundred dollars in it,” he said. “I get a thousand dollars just to deliver you your money and take a drive up to Frisco. Sometimes I work two weeks and don’t make half that.”

“Money isn’t everything, Saul.”

“It is when your daughter is at death’s door and only money can buy her back.”

I could see that Saul regretted his words as soon as they came out of his mouth. But I didn’t say anything. He was right. I didn’t have the luxury of criticizing that white man. Who cared if I ever met him? All I needed was his long green.

A
beautiful day in San Francisco is the most beautiful day on earth. The sky is blue and white, Michelangelo at his best, and the air is so crystal clear it makes you feel that you can see more detail than you ever have before. The houses are wooden and white with bay windows. There was no trash in the street and the people, at least back then, were as friendly as the citizens of some country town.

If I hadn’t had Feather, and that enameled pin, on my mind I would have enjoyed our trip through the city.