We follow him, and when he drops the girl off near Bozley Park, I tell Lester to stay put. I want to know more about the girl—where she lives, what her family and friends are like, what attracts her to Mathis.
I get my camera ready for more pictures. “Okay, Lester. Almost ready. I’ll make it quick,” I tell him, but a policeman has tapped his baton on Lester’s window.
“What you boys doin’ out here?” asks the officer, a middle-aged man with a hard, swollen red face.
I am too nervous to speak. I look at Lester, but he is already formulating an excuse.
“Oh, nothing,’ boss,” says Lester. “We just had a call for a cab, and we just waitin’ is all.”
“Call, huh?”
“Yessuh.”
“Who’s your friend there? And what’s with the monkey suit?”
“Oh, that’s my supavisuh, is all.”
“Supervisor. . . . What house you say you waitin’ on?”
“That one over yonder,” says Lester pointing to small white house on the corner.
“So if I go over there, somebody’s gonna say they called a cab?”
“Yessuh.”
He looks at Lester hard. Even though he’s outside, his glare mimics the harsh light of the interrogation room. The officer looks at me again. “What’s with the camera?” he asks.
I don’t say anything and neither does Lester.
The officer looks where Mathis and the girl were, but Mathis has driven off, and the girl is already gone. He looks back at Lester. “Why don’t you boys get out of the car,” he says.
Lester doesn’t move, and neither do I.
“I said out!”
A strange look comes over Lester’s face. He’s not as scared as I am, but it’s a look that I can only describe as focused desperation. Lester mumbles something that sounds like it would be offensive if it were said clearly.
It must hit the mark, because the officer responds with, “What’d you say, nigger?”
Lester mumbles again.
“Speak up, boy!” He places his head inside the cab, a few inches from Lester’s face, not enough time to avoid Lester’s right fist.
The officer’s chin hits the door as he slides out and begins his nap on the sidewalk. Calmly, Lester starts the car and drives away.
I have blackened out my windows. Only blood-red light fills my apartment, but soon I will see them in vivid detail. The baptism has begun. A small wave washes over them. I remove them from their chemical bath and let them dry. The halide does its magic, and slowly, like conjured spirits, Mathis and the girl appear in my home. The solution stings my nose a little, but I expected that. I bought a book on photography development to guide me through this. I can’t have too many eyes on these photos, only the ones I intend.
I have decided to send Mrs. Mathis a bit of entertainment that will double as informational material. Photographs. Shaky, mind you, not quite as crisp as the photos taken by the good fellows at the FBI. I’ve never been formally trained. Since Mathis has sent recordings of Martin to Coretta, I think, as Martin’s friend, I am entitled to employ the same line of attack on Mrs. Mathis. Let’s see what kind of man he is. I try to think of this as less like revenge and more like a social experiment. When Mrs. Mathis views that incriminating material, how will he react? Will he cower, or will he be man enough to embrace his actions and his feelings?
I catch myself after thinking that way. I know what I’m doing is risky. I might as well begin chiseling my own name into a gravestone. I offer bluster, but I am afraid. But the fear doesn’t dilute my desire to seek a twisted sort of justice.
Right on cue, Mathis calls me after I have developed the pictures. He wants me to meet him. He doesn’t tell me why. The fear seeps in quickly; my bravado evaporates. I’ve gotten too close to him too fast. Has he spotted me? Have I blown my cover? I look around my place, and think of Lester and the cab, all the foolish mistakes I made trying to tail Mathis. I look at the pictures I developed—I see them less as trophies and more as evidence implicating me. I almost panic, consider hiding all of this or getting rid of it. But then I think better of it. This is something else, nothing to do with what I’ve seen of Mathis. If he knew what I’ve done, if he knew what I know, he wouldn’t call first: he’d come silently and without warning.
When I arrive at the agents’ office, I’m greeted by a confusing smell: cinnamon, lavender, tobacco . . . and fried chicken. The smell triggers my adventurous spirit—though I’ve never been, this is what I imagine Cuba to smell like. Mathis, with his sleeves rolled up and napkin tucked into his collar, dives into a golden thigh. He gives me a greasy smile.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit across from him while moving my eyes between him and the chicken.
“Dig in,” he insists, pointing to a white box beginning to darken from oil.
I look at the box and that confident rooster in boots and spurs. It’s from the Pick Rick. I’ve never eaten there because its owner refuses to serve Negroes. He even threatened a black man with an axe handle when he tried to eat there.
“I figured you’ve never had it, considering the owner’s . . . beliefs. But I just had to share this with you. This is damn good chicken.”
I eye him steadily, considering what kind of self-righteous stand I can make over fried chicken. But I remember that I am an FBI informant and the damage has been done. So I grab a piece and take a bite, and—segregation be damned—it’s good.
Mathis cleans his bone, wipes his mouth and hands, then takes a drag off one of those cigarettes, sending a cloud of perfumed smoke in my direction.
“What are you smoking?” I ask him.
“Smell great, don’t they? Try one.”
I eagerly do as I’m told. There’s no writing on the package, only a gold griffin embossed in a signet that could have been used in the Middle Ages.
“Got them off a guy we turned when I was back in New York. A Russian grifter who specialized in forgeries of all kinds—art, checks, antiques. All of his work had this distinct smell. He was addicted to them. Smoked them all the time. I can see why.”
So here we are, cigarettes, chicken, and fake civility.
“What’s going on, Mathis? Do you want to trade high school football stories? Sorry, I don’t have any.”
“It’s a peace offering, John.”
“Go on . . .”
“I want to apologize for how I acted the other day. I was out of line and should have handled the situation differently. I want to make amends for it.”
“I see. Well, this is a very kind gesture, and I appreciate all of it. But let’s be honest. We don’t have the kind of relationship where apologies are necessary—from either of us.”
“I felt misunderstood and disrespected. I didn’t handle it properly. Then I realized that we just had a communication problem.”
“Again, that isn’t the nature of our relationship, Mathis.” I take another languid draw from the cigarette. “From what I remember, you said you wanted it that way.”
“Well,” he says, getting comfortable in his chair, “things change.”
“Yes, they do.”
We sit in silence, the smoke becoming a third being in the room, and then Mathis says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something ever since I met you. Why’d you do it?”
Again, that panic and fear that he knows something kicks in like a built-in reflex. “Why did I do what?”
“Why did you take the money?”
When I try to remember the lie I told myself, only the truth comes to mind. The girl, Gant, power, respect, because I could. But then I remember. “I thought our services were needed in Chicago, but they felt otherwise. We had the money—more than enough. I figured I could get something started up there myself since we had a surplus and all.”
“But you didn’t go to Chicago . . .”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“You’ve never been to Chicago.”
“So?”
“Of course it is, so what? I can say that since we’re friends now.”
“I’m just trying to have a conversation with you. Man to man.”
I don’t know if it’s Mathis’s interrogation, my full stomach, or these damn cigarettes, but suddenly I feel honest. “I was tired of being the joke that everyone’s in on. I was tired of feeling insignificant and powerless. I mean this is America, and the quickest way to remedy those feelings is to get your hands on some money. But that’s my job, isn’t it? My hands are on money all day, but the effect never seemed to wear off on me. So there it was, and I took it, because I could, and no one would ever expect I was capable of it.”
I’m embarrassed by my impassioned confession, so I try to change the subject. “Where’s Strobe at?”
“Just me and you today.”
I take another draw from my cigarette—it’s down to a nub. I want another, but I’m afraid of what I’d have to concede in order to get one. Now that our bond’s been fortified, what type of devil’s bargain would it be? I grind out the butt in the ashtray, freeing a small dying cloud that carries a new note of ginger and tea.
“Are we done here?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Mathis,” I say over my shoulder as I leave the office.
“Don’t mention it,” I hear once I’m down the hall.
I’m still thinking of those damned cigarettes when Count calls me after I get home. I don’t like being jerked around and made to jump at his every beck and call. But what can I do about it, especially in this situation? There’s no turning the tables on Count. Trying to find the dirt on him is a pointless exercise—he’s covered in it.
Now here I am, still at Count’s, sitting at the bar hunched over my bourbon, while the music of the wailing bluesman behind me taps at my shoulder like a persistent stranger. I look at the door to Count’s office. I’m still not sure what went on in there, but I am certain that he’s reveling in it.
I just know that I breezed past Claudel and Otis and entered Count’s office.
“I just want to let you know we’re going ahead with it,” Count said.
“With what?”
Count tossed me a letter across his desk:
WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP TO. WE KNOW ABOUT ALL THE WOMEN AND THE HOTELS AND ALL THE SNEAKING AROUND. WE HAVE PROOF AND WE’RE GOING TO EMBARRASS YOU. UNLESS YOU GIVE US $10,000 TO MAKE US GO AWAY.
WE KNOW ABOUT THE QUEER WORKING FOR YOU. WE’LL SAY YOU’RE SCREWING THE QUEER. WE’LL TELL EVERYBODY. UNLESS YOU GIVE US THE MONEY.
What disturbed me the most about it was not its crudeness, in all aspects, but the obvious sense of entitlement that was conveyed in so few lines. It might as well have ended with “Can you blame us?”
So, it looks like I will have to protect Martin from Count as well. FBI agents are hard enough, but a gangster?
“He won’t pay you, Count,” I said.
“That’s where you come in, little man—to see that he does. Besides, I don’t know how careful you read, but this letter ain’t for the preacher.”
“It’s not?”
“Nah. It’s for that boss of yours—the queer one you told me about. I figure we get the letter directly to him and you can persuade him to pay up.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“I expect you to do your best. Haven’t I been good to you? Just once, I want to see you do right by me.”
I was sick of his presence, but I decided to see if the bartender had the right medicine, and after my fourth dose, I can say that the tincture he’s peddling works just as good as my mama’s chicken soup. But nothing changes the fact that I’m Count’s errand boy, no matter how many agents I follow or scandalous pictures I take. Nothing.
“How much they get you for?”
I hear him say it but I’m not sure he’s talking to me, so I ignore him and take another trip to my whiskey glass.
“How much they hit you for?” This time I look at him—an old man, older than my father even, in a baggy dark brown suit that once fitted him properly when he was a younger, more muscular man. His wide silk tie has a gold tiepin, dead center, which winks at me in the darkness. I look at the old man’s wrinkled face under his porkpie hat; his eyes tell me that tonight he’s young again.
“Excuse me?” I respond to his previous question.
“How much they charge you?” His voice is a delighted liquor-soaked rasp.
“For the drink?”
“Nah, man. You don’t remember me, do you?”
I try my best to place him. A volunteer with Martin? Friend of my father’s? Nothing.
“Yeah, man,” he says. “I saw you a few days ago with those white men at that insurance office.”
I can hear my heart thumping its own loud rhythm over the howling blues.
“Were you lookin’ for a job there or somethin’?” he asks in response to my blank stare. “Even that day, I felt I recognized you, but I just couldn’t place where I’d seen you before. But then, I see you tonight, and that’s when it sank in. Here, man, let me buy you a drink. Tonight’s pay day and I’m here to spend money.” He motions for the bartender to repeat our remedy and fills the once empty stool that stood between us. “You work for those white men?”
“Something like that.”
“How much does a job like that pay?”
That’s when it dawns on me—he’s the janitor who stumbled into the agents’ office with his bucket and mop and was introduced to their anxious pistols. This man has access to the building, and no one knows how he comes or goes or even cares. He can slip in and out like a shadow. At this moment, he’s the most powerful man I know.
I tell him the drinks are on me and, after a while, he loosens up, telling me stories and lies about women and war, and the weight of being a black man in a white man’s world. I indulge him through eight songs before I decide to see how well the old man can dance.
“How much money you make in a year?” I ask him.
“What kind of fuckin’ question is that?” he draws his arm back, drink still in hand, and spills some of it on the bar.
“Just making conversation. How much would you say? Give or take . . .”
“I ain’t never made more than two grand in one year outta all my years,” he confesses to his tumbler before gulping it down.
“I want to give you three thousand dollars.”
His stare is cold stone. He didn’t get this old by being a fool. The money sounds sweet to him, I can tell, but he’s wise enough to resist his initial temptation.
“What the fuck for, man?”
“I need to get into that building. Those white men you saw me with have some information I have to get my hands on.”
“You want to pay me to get the information?”
“No. I want to pay you to switch places.”
“The hell you mean?”
“I want to see what it’s like to be a janitor for a night. You got the keys to the building, don’t you?”
“Of course, man.”
“Good. You can just take the night off and let me borrow them. Maybe a couple of months off.”
“Man, if somethin’ happens in there and I’m gone, they gonna look at me ’cause I got the keys.”
“That’s why you’ll make copies. Tell your boss that you’re going on vacation. Leave the master keys with him, and give me the copies.”
He lets the idea soak in his drink before looking at me from the corner of his eye. “Those white men must really got somethin’ on you. . . . What’s stoppin’ me from tellin’ them your little plan and seein’ if they offer some kinda reward?”
I feel cornered—but it lasts only for a moment. “You can do that if you want to,” I say, smiling into my drink, “but you know better than me what kind of offices are in that building. Just because those glass doors say ‘Dentist’ and ‘Insurance’ doesn’t guarantee that your teeth or your life are in good hands.”
&
nbsp; We sit shoulder to shoulder in silence for a while, as the bluesman on stage and the crowd both grow weary. Finally, he takes a gulp of his drink that makes him wince, then signals to the bartender for a refill. He turns to me and extends his hand. “No need for names,” he says as we shake. “I’ll just tell you when and where.”
A few days later, I met the janitor in the Buttermilk Bottom, the tenement slum at the edge of the city. Was it so named ironically—buttermilk for cornbread or hotcakes is a luxury they seldom see—or was it the sour smell in the air, the foulness coming from the piles of refuse and puddles of waste? The dirt path, the wooden hovels crowded with desperate souls and their vacant yet calculating eyes transported me to the days of bondage. From the metal of my brace, I heard the rattling chains of the slave block; from the leather straps, I felt the master’s whip.
When the janitor saw me, he descended a wooden porch and led me to a place where we could make our exchange. The approval his presence granted was enough for those lost spirits that watched me—the stranger or savior, the mark or prey—and they retreated slowly into their dark dwellings like feral animals.
He gave me the keys as promised, and my money followed. It was more than a year’s salary for him. He’s probably long gone by now. He didn’t even look like he’d make it another six months.
I’m just glad to be away from that slum, and anxious to see if these keys work. It’s late enough—no lights or signs of movement are visible in the agents’ or the other offices. I make my way behind the building to the door that guards the stairwell. I turn the key and think Open, sesame as the bolt abandons the plate. Up the stairs, slowly, dark and silent, I only hear my brace and my breathing. As I approach the agents’ office, I see that someone has installed a shiny new lock on their door. None of the janitor’s keys work. If I had any real courage, I’d go to him and shake him up a bit, tell him to give me my money back; but I have no desire to ever return to the Bottom. I’m gratefully rid of that place. I’ve made it this far . . . I just need to come up with a new plan.
Our Man in the Dark Page 17