Diablerie

by Walter Mosley

  "I don't know why you want to talk to me like this," she said. "I don't deserve it, and I have no lovers."

  "No?"

  I glanced at her vanity in the corner. There, right out on top, was the little leather satchel. I walked over to it. The abruptness of my movement made her jump backward. I took two steps toward the bag, opened it up, and brought out the package of condoms.

  "What's this?" I asked her, holding the box in an open palm.

  The look on Mona's face reminded me of why I married her. It was a look both calculating and transparent. She saw that she was caught in a lie and a tryst. But a box of condoms, she reasoned, visibly, was certainly no conviction.

  "I haven't used them," she said.

  "Come on, Moan, don't be like that now," I was talking in a way that I had so long ago that I hardly remembered. "That man been in your pussy like a gopher down his own hole."

  I said it perfectly, even curled my upper lip in a disparaging sneer.

  "You bastard," she said.

  "Then stand out of the way and let me leave."

  Mona saw through the ploy. She realized that I had used words to anger her enough to let me go. But did she also know that I wanted her to see through me, that I wanted to find out what she was up to with Harvard Rollins and his looking into my past.

  "I'm not going to let you bait me, Ben," she said. "I want to know what's going on with you, why you're acting so strange."

  "Me? You're the one who went to your mother's and didn't even call. And she's not sick either. I doubt if she's even in town."

  Again Mona needed time to regroup her defenses. She didn't know how much I knew. I had the key to her mom's place. I could have come by. I knew about the condoms. I at least suspected Harvard Rollins of being her lover.

  I let her stew in these fears for a moment and then said, "Why don't we go in the living room and talk this out like adults?"

  She sat on the sofa and I on my chair. She held her legs at a slant, knees together. I sat spread-legged, hands out to the side.

  "What?" Mona asked, her eyes moist, her voice taut.

  "I've only had one lover since we've been together,'' I said, speaking lightly, feeling the liberation of truth. "I know you've had at least three, the last of which is this Rollins guy. I don't blame you. I can only hope that on the off chance that we make love, that you have made sure he's . . . healthy."

  Mona was frozen. Her eyes did not know me. The way I was sitting, the words I spoke; I was another man for her—the way I was, but not who I was, for Svetlana. If she would have spoken honestly at that moment, Mona would have said that I had never paid such close attention to her. She would have said that she felt stripped naked and that she didn't like it—not one bit.

  "So you admit having a lover?'' she said finally.

  "Come on, Mona. I won't use the words but you've been doing it too. You've been doing it a lot. And I don't blame you.''

  "You don't?"

  "Baby, listen to me," I said, my own words in my ear. "For years, all the years that you've known me, I've been like a cold-water fish at the bottom of the lake. I haven't done a thing for you except to give you Seela. I don't know how to fuck—excuse me, how to make love. My job is more boring than fungus growing in the dark. I know. You haven't said anything and I just went on. And so now it's out. You got a man who makes you want to carry condoms around in your bag. And me . . . I just need to get back into therapy and figure out what it is that made me into such a, such a blank space."

  Every word I said rang true and clear but it was all a cover for what I really wanted from my just-now-estranged wife.

  "You don't care if I have a lover?" she asked.

  "I care, babe," I said. "It's just that I understand why you would need one. Your life is Med with excitement and sexy people. I've done the same thing every day almost without exception for twenty-two years."

  It's odd being so hyperaware of your own words and intentions. I had lived an extraordinarily humdrum life. I ate the same kind of doughnut—chocolate, chocolate glaze—every day for twelve years. Then I switched to strawberry yogurt. I loved my job but it was as dry as sawdust, as plain as brown wrapping paper. Mona would be better off with some arty guy with less security and more character.

  But all that was over now. I wasn't the same man I had been. Mona was as good as gone. But I needed to know what she was talking about in that bed with Harvard. I needed to know what they knew about me.

  "Are you leaving me?" Mona asked.

  "I'm gonna move out for a while," I said. "Maybe we'll get back together, but I can't see why you'd want to. I mean, I'm just a lump—that's all I'm ever gonna be."

  "What's going on with you, Ben?" Mona asked.

  I could tell by her voice that she had accepted my lover and was admitting to her own &airs. She didn't argue about Harvard. She wasn't going to try to keep me home.

  I felt a twinge of jealousy, realizing that she'd run out of the house tonight to be in her new lover's arms. But I had no time to worry about that. There was something else happening, something more important than all the last twenty-plus years of gray days and lightless nights.

  "That's what I wanted to ask you, Mona."

  "What, what do you mean?"

  "Am I in some kind of trouble, baby?"

  "Trouble? What kind of trouble?"

  "Why didn't you come home?" I asked simply. "I mean, if you just wanted to be with a lover, you could have met him in the daytime or pretended to be at some event at night."

  "My mother—"

  "No, honey. Your mother's not sick and we both know it. You were afraid of something, &aid of me."

  "The way you, the way you made love to me," she said.

  "No. That's not it. You were upset about . . . me. You asked me to go to therapy, you joked about divorce . . . Are you afraid of me? Is there something you're not telling me?"

  "No," she said, shaking her head the way she always did when she was hiding something.

  I knew then that I wouldn't get any more out of her. She wouldn't break down. The only thing I could hope for was that she was looking for ammunition in the divorce.

  She was looking down while I peered over her head at Queens.

  Then the phone rang and I got up to answer.

  "Hello," I said, remembering Sergei.

  "Hey, bro, what you know?"

  "Hey, Cass. What's happenin', man?"

  "You, my brother, you."

  "What's up?"

  "We got to have some words, man," the security expert said. "When?"

  "Meet me at the Steak House at five. We don't need a reservation there."

  I hung up and turned to Mona.

  "I gotta go, honey," I said. "I'll call you later."

  "We aren't finished talking."

  "For now we are," I said. "Call your boyfriend. Talk to him."

  She took a deep breath with which she intended to deny my accusation. But looking into my face she saw that it was useless. Her body went slack on the couch. I got my bag and went toward the door.

  "Ben," she called at my back.

  "Yeah?"

  "Dr. Shriver called. He said that he has an opening tomorrow morning at seven seen."

  I went out the door, closing it softly as I left.

  The Steak House at Park and Forty-sixth was owned by one of Cassius Copeland's old friends from the intelligence branch of the military police. As long as Cassius ate at the bar, he didn't have to pay for food or wine. And so I was waiting there after checking into the Reynard for a two-week stay.

  I had a lot of money in the bank, well over a hundred thousand dollars. I never spent anything, and when Mona took vacations, she liked to stay home because she traveled so much for her job. I could pay for the Reynard and first-class airfare to any destination in the world.

  Sitting at the bar I thought that Hong Kong would be a good place to lose myself, or maybe Ghana. I could pack up and be gone before Mona knew what had happened. Cass would he
lp me. He'd been a captain in military intelligence. He'd told me many stories about ways that men could disappear.

  "Hey, bro," he said from behind me.

  "Cass, we got to stop meeting like this, man."

  "You the only Negro I ever met gets to the appointment before me," he said.

  I looked at the clock above the bar; it read 4:46.

  "Yeah. I got a lotta time on my hands," I said.

  Cassius's expression turned sour. He took a seat on the stool next to me.

  "Yeah. Uh-huh. That's why we got to talk."

  "Mr. Copeland," a very big white man bellowed from the other end of the bar.

  "Joey," Cassius replied.

  Joey Bondhauser, owner of the Steak House and half a dozen other popular restaurants, was taller than most men and fatter than anyone I had ever known personally. His blue suit was perfectly tailored, however, and his hands and voice gave the impression of great strength.

  Joseph Bondhauser had been a senior communications officer for Army Intelligence in western Europe. Though Cass never told me anything particular about his one-time boss, he implied that all Joey had to do was frown and a man could die anywhere in the world.

  "This is my friend Ben Dibbuk, Joey."

  "Pleased to meet you," the big man said.

  I'd seen Bondhauser before but we had never been introduced.

  His handshake was powerful. I had the feeling he could have snapped my bones if he wanted to.

  "Ben and I got a little business so I brought him here."

  "Why don't you take a table in back?" the restaurateur asked.

  "Using my Joey-get-a-steak-free card," Cass said with a smile.

  "AW, don't be like that, Cassius," Joey said. "You were one'a my best men. Somebody I could trust. Magda. Magda, come over here."

  A very attractive brunette wearing the sheerest of blue gowns came over to us. She was twenty-five, no older and, upon closer examination, quite beautiful.

  "Yes, Mr. Bondhauser?"

  "You know my friend Cass."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Give him my private dining room. Everything on the house."

  "Yes, sir," she said.

  I could see the awe and appreciation in Magda's eyes. She beheld in Joey's huge form power and potential in whose wake she was happily drawn.

  "Cass, you ready to take a real job somewhere?" Joey asked then.

  "I gotta job, man."

  "That make-believe, antiterrorist bullshit?"

  "Everything's make-believe, Colonel," Cassius Copeland said. "Nothin's for real."

  Deep pleasure infused the fat man's face. He nodded and beamed at my friend.

  "You are a dangerous man, Cassius Copeland. You see the truth before anyone else. Magda."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Give him everything he wants."

  "As you say."

  "See you later, Cass," Joey said, shaking the security officer's hand. "Nice meeting you, Ben."

  Watching him walk away from us, I was thinking about the words As you say. They seemed to imbue the restaurant owner with great power. It struck me as odd that the one obeying was also the person who articulated the degree of Joey's influence. This seemed very important to me at the time.

  Magda led us through the dining room and up a slender flight of dark-wood stairs. On the second floor there was a long, narrow hallway that had doors on either side in staggered fashion, so that first there would be a door on the right and then a few paces later there'd be one on the left. At the end of the hall was a double door hewn from solid oak.

  Magda took out a key and unlocked the left-hand side. She pushed this open and ushered us in.

  The light came on automatically as we entered. There was a large round table attended by four wooden chairs with red velvet seat cushions.

  "I'll send up Felix with your menus," Magda said when we were seated.

  "I want you to take our orders," Cass said, "but don't bring up anything for fifteen minutes."

  Magda smiled and nodded. If the hostess resented the request, she did not show it. She left without another word.

  After she was gone, Cass sat back in his chair and stared at me. He did this long enough for me to start to feel uncomfortable.

  "What?" I asked at last.

  "We got to talk," he said. "But first I'll tell you something about me, something that no one in my everyday life, my real life, knows."

  This sudden honesty made me anxious. One of the things about our relationship was that we never talked about our lives at all. Everything was light, impersonal, noncontroversial. I had known for some time that I was probably Cass's only confidant at Our Bank, but even there he was never very forthcoming.

  "I'm a man, right?" Cass asked.

  "Yes."

  "Don't be worried, Ben. Ain't nuthin' wrong here. I'm just tellin' you that when people look at me, they see somethin'. I'm big and strong, tough-minded, and the kinda guy who likes sports. Right?"

  "Yeah. I guess that's why I always wondered why you ever even talked to me. I mean, I don't know the first thing about any sport."

  "Yeah," he said. "You don't know a baseball from a hockey puck."

  We both laughed, though I'm sure neither one of us felt the least bit happy.

  "When you told me about the magazines your wife worked on, I went out an' bought some," he continued. "I read her articles. Damn, I read the whole magazines.

  "Those are the kind of publications that call a faggot a homosexual, right?"

  I had never heard Cass use either word. It seemed odd that he used them then, but I nodded, admitting the truth to his claim.

  "My friends, Joey and a hundred like him, say faggot. They laugh at 'em. Some of 'em might kick one's ass if he's in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  I was lost by now. What could any of this have to do with me?

  "You see, Ben," Cass said then. "The one thing, the only thing, I never tell anybody is that I'm a faggot too.''

  I stared at my work friend of five years, feeling blunted and senseless. I shook my head and crinkled my nose.

  "I ain't a girly man," Cass said. "I don't wash the dishes or want a relationship. I'm a man's man, a real man. I fight and fart and wear clothes until they fall apart. Everything about me is man. Everything."

  "But what about Joany Winters?" I asked.

  It was rumored that there had been a passionate affair between Winters, who was married, and Cassius during his first two years on the job. Secretaries gossiped about how Cass would go into her office for an hour at a time and that she would come out with her hair a mess and her clothes all rumpled.

  "I fucked that woman so hard that she had to have two abortions," he said. "There wasn't no way she could explain a black baby to her English hubby."

  "But you say you're gay."

  "No. I said I'm a faggot. It's your wife's magazines use 'gay' and 'homosexual.' Whenever I get anyplace, I find a girl like Joany and do her for a while. I don't mind havin' sex with a woman; it's just that's not my deepest thing. If you come into a place like Our Bank and get that pussy right off, ain't nobody gonna question you after that. They just see you talkin' to a woman and they know you gettin' somethin'."

  I had too many problems on my mind to worry about Cass's sexuality. I don't know if I would have worried about it anyway. What did I care?

  "I know this don't mean nuthin' to you, Ben," Cass said, as if he were reading my thoughts. "That's why I'm friends with you. I know that if you knew all about me that it wouldn't make you no nevermind. You don't care. You don't care about nuthin'. That's what I like about you."

  "Okay," I said. "You're right. But why are you telling me this after five years? Does it matter?"

  "A man named Harvard Rollins came to my office this morning," Cass said, and I went cold. "He told me that he had information about you and that his magazine was doing an article based on this information. He didn't want to embarrass the bank and so he was giving me the chance to help him and limi
t the effect on the company."

  "What did he want to know?"

  "Did we have any information about any criminal investigation against you? And if we didn't, could we help his magazine, Diablerie, I think, in asking for Colorado records."

  "Did he say why they were doing this or what they were looking for?" I spoke deliberately, softly.

  "He wouldn't tell me, not exactly, but he did say that it was a crime that they were looking into, a serious felony, he said."

  I sat back in my chair thinking about Mona, about her asking Harvard Rollins what he was going to do about me. She wouldn't even tell me. After all those years of marriage she wouldn't even warn me about some chance that I'd be arrested.

  "Did you rob a bank or kill somebody?" Cass asked.

  "No."

  "What did you do?"

  "I don't know. I mean . . . when I lived in Colorado, I was a drinker. Every night I did in a bottle of something—whiskey, brandy, gin. A lot of those nights I just don't remember."

  "You'd black out?"

  I nodded.

  "And you wouldn't remember a thing?"

  "Sometimes I did. Most times I'd have a general notion of where I'd been, but people would still tell me things that I had no recollection of whatsoever."

  "Shit," Cass Copeland said. "Well, you didn't rob any bank during a blackout. How about cars? Did you ever get into a fight when you were drunk?"

  "A couple of times I showed up at home beat-up or bruised with some cuts, but I don't remember anything serious. Except one."

  "What was that?"

  "I ran off the road once. I was drunk."

  "That doesn't seem newsworthy," my friend said.

  Cass sat across from me, staring into my eyes, shaking his head.

  "How long ago did you leave Colorado?"

  Twenty-four years."

  "And you've never been back?"

  "No."

  "Then why all of a sudden would they get on you?"

  I stared into Cassius's eyes, wondering if I should share what I knew with him.