Lester did a good job saving our hides from that Bozley Park cop, but I’m not done with him yet. He may not want to see me, but more of my money means more of his time.
“Second floor,” I tell Lester once we are inside.
Lester bounds the steps with silent speed. I lag behind, punctuating each step with a squeak from my brace. I resent my dependence upon Lester. He steals my lady, causes tension between Count and me, and now I have to rely on his talents to gain the advantage over Mathis and Strobe. My only solace is that it’s temporary.
The differences between us are obvious. I must appear to be his gimp, and I must be taking too long, because Lester comes back down the stairs to where I am at, puts his arm around my waist, and begins to walk me up the steps. He supports me with only one arm, yet I feel weightless. But that weightlessness quickly gives way to a feeling of helplessness. I think back for a moment to the young me, that child recently crippled by polio, and the first time I climbed a set of stairs without the help of an orderly. When I made it to the top, breathless, my lungs hurt more than my leg. I looked down a floor below at my father. He wasn’t smiling. “Well, you finally made it,” he said. “It took a while, but you did it yourself. Remember that. Always remember that.”
I doubt Lester has ever experienced the pain of physical limitations. I admit that I’m jealous of him, but my envy has already begun to evaporate as I wield the flashlight while Lester works the lock like a virtuoso with his pocketknife and an unfurled paperclip and opens the door of the agents’ office. “Got it,” he whispers.
I enter first and he follows. As we pass the threshold, Lester pushes me up against the wall. It’s dark, but the whites of his eyes are disturbingly visible.
“When this is over,” says Lester, “You and me are even.” He only has his finger poking my chest, but I feel as if I’m glued to the wall. “Okay?”
I don’t say anything. I’m afraid, but I feel a certain amount of relief. The big, dumb, and innocent act was getting old.
“Okay?” he repeats.
“Sure, Lester . . . even.”
“Good,” he says smiling, but I still don’t move. “What you want me to do, Mr. Estem?”
I watch his face. The rage he tapped into starts to dissipate slowly. Eventually, that fog, dense and benign, makes its return.
“Watch the hall, Lester,” I say as I take the flashlight and walk over to the file cabinet in the corner. Surprisingly, it isn’t locked. I open the drawer. There are photographs of an old guitar taken from different angles, a cluttered room with Civil War–era daguerreotypes, and the schematics of a house with four red stickers, each with the phrase “Mic Here” written on them. I also see a file on Count—Reginald “Count” Glover, that is. It details his whole operation, the gambling, the sex, everything. I almost feel guilty for bringing this kind of scrutiny upon him. He ran a successful illegal enterprise for years without incident. Then I came along with my friends from the government.
There’s a great deal of information in this cabinet, but I begin to doubt if I have enough time to find something useful—and then I see it. Yes, inside the drawer, there are many files. However, one intrigues me in particular: the file labeled JEST-0468. I pull out the folder to reveal its contents, which include memoranda and photos. At first, I do not pay much attention to them. I assume they are of random individuals whose importance is only known to Mathis and Strobe. It’s still dark in here—only my flashlight offers some brightness. But then I look closer at the photos and realize that they are pictures of me. Pictures of me walking into Count’s, talking in a phone booth, driving my new Cadillac off the lot. But it’s the last photo that is the most telling. It is a picture of me in front of the bank where I foolishly cashed that SCLC check. But this picture was taken before I cashed the check. They were watching me from the beginning:
BUREAU BRIEFING: After an exhaustive search for a cooperative individual within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), we have secured SCLC accountant John Estem.
Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Stokely Carmichael were initially considered. However, the potential for rejection and exposure posed too great a risk.
While not an influential member in the SCLC, John Estem possesses the appropriate psychological profile suitable for information-gathering duties that require a great capacity for duplicity:
1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
3. Impulsivity in the areas of spending and sexual relations
This will hurt later, I know it. But I can’t stop reading, like it’s some torrid piece of Hollywood gossip—only this time, I’m the subject.
In a traditional context, these attributes would be barriers. However, given that these characteristics of his personality have, to some extent, marginalized him at the SCLC, it creates the opportunity to foster in him a certain degree of loyalty to the Bureau.
Among the other files, I see the letter sent to Martin, the one that caused such dread that day at the office:
King,
In view of your low grade I will not dignify your name with either a Reverend or Mr. or a doctor and your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as King Henry VIII.
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own. And I am sure they do not have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat, you are a colossal fraud and an evil vicious one at that. You could not believe in God, clearly you do not believe in any personal moral principle.
King, like all frauds, your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader, but a dissolute, abnormal, immoral imbecile. You will now have to depend on our older leaders, like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done.
Your honorary degrees, your Nobel Prize—what a grim farce—and other awards, will not save you.
King, I repeat, you are done. No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. I repeat, no person can argue successfully against facts.
You are finished.
And some of them pretend to be the ministers of the Gospel, Satan could not be more? What incredible evilness! King, you are done. The American public, the church organizations that have been helping, Protestants and Catholics and Jews, will know you for what you are, an evil abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do, you know what it is.
There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
Long before I broke into his office, the agents crept into my mind. I cringe knowing that I failed to hear their footsteps as they surveyed my thoughts. Martin would also blanch at how much they know. They think that they’ve summed us up and figured us out. It’s strange how they’ve handed down two divergent verdicts for the same offense: What they condemn in him they acquit in me. My only solace is that I know him better than they do. They’ve said nothing worse than what he has already said to himself. His embrace of the movement’s most dangerous demands and his personal insistence on being a public ascetic are evidence of a desire for absolution—forgiveness through suffering. In his selfless contribution to this country, we are witnessing a grand display of self-flagellation. But the pain that follows can only be quelled by an amorous salve. This letter won’t end with the result they seek. It will only encourage the behavior they so cravenly rebuke and so eagerly record.
I’m done here. I’ve had enough. I take pictures with my miniature camera of what I’ve seen, and then I tell Lester it’s time to wrap it up.
Voices. One male, the other female. They exchange tho
se loud whispers that are amplified by alcohol. The office across the hall softly brightens with a dim light, followed by loud, over-the-top laughter. I’ve never seen anyone in here before except Mathis and Strobe and the old janitor. Lester stands in the shadows, big and silent, like a tree in the forest at night. “Let’s go,” he whispers.
“Wait a minute,” I respond.
The laughter diminishes to giggles, then to sighs, and finally to fairly consistent moaning, accompanied by the sound of furniture being scooted across the room inch by inch.
“Now,” I say.
We walk out of the office leaving everything as we’ve found it. Of course, Lester is at the bottom of the steps very quickly. Me, I have to take my time. I time my steps to each passionate thrust coming from the other office, until I reach the last step and head out the door.
Lester doesn’t say anything when we get into the cab, and neither do I. He seems smarter to me all of a sudden. He made some foolish and dangerous associates back in LA, and I am just one more. But he’s already learning. He knew enough to draw the line and say what he would and would not tolerate before he got in too deep. I do not have his wisdom.
He drives me home, and I get out of the car without offering any parting words. I walk in and don’t even bother turning on the lights. I just lie on my bed fully dressed, thinking about all that I’ve seen in the agents’ office, trying to make sense of it. The money . . . all this time I thought it was the money that had pushed me into the agents’ line of sight, but it was no such thing. Mathis and Strobe knew the choices I would make even before I did. For them, it was only a matter of time before I did something that would allow them to gain leverage over me. The mole thrives in darkness and secrecy; they saw it in my personality. Samantha saw it too—it was there early on, before Martin, before Gant, before Count. He sees it too. This is not new—it’s only new to me. And here I thought being handicapped and Negro was a procryptic combination. Now, as I burrow deeper, blindly creating a hidden labyrinth in which only I am lost, how obvious is it? Like oracles in the temple, the agents anticipated my actions before I’d made them; as they set their gaze upon the glistening viscera, what does it reveal of me now?
Layer by layer, my true self was revealed to me in that dark office, and it has left me excoriated. Now, at work, I feel vulnerable and exposed. Even more so than before, I characterize the looks my coworkers send my way as silent judgments and the space between us as calculated attempts at distance. Despite the many times I may have disparaged them quietly, there are no fools at the SCLC—or so I thought.
Gant taps on my door, pokes his head in, and asks to see me in his office, thankfully saving me from being alone with myself.
“Make sure it’s locked,” he says as I close the office door.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Gant?”
“Estem, I’m going to tell you something, and it’s very important that you keep it between the two of us. Can you keep a secret, Estem?”
“Of course I can.”
“I received this letter today.”
I open it, making sure to impose a shocked and horrified look on my face. I could do the right thing, tell him to ignore it and let Count think all is well. Yes, I could do that, but as I reach the end of the letter, I see that the bottom has been torn off—the part that contained the threat of exposing Gant as a homosexual entangled with Martin. Gant has obviously removed it. He didn’t want me to see it.
“What has Martin said about this?” I ask, handing the letter back to him.
“He hasn’t seen it. No one’s seen it except you. It was sent directly to me.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” he says. For the first time since I’ve known him, he appears ashamed of himself. “Maybe they figured that since I handled the money I could persuade Martin to pay.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about it . . .”
“But you seem hesitant.”
“He doesn’t need the pressure, especially with everything that’s going on.”
“Well, what’s going on, sir?”
“The Negro and the white woman that were killed. . . . Young feels it time for Martin to say something publicly about it and criticize the FBI more aggressively for their lax protection of civil rights workers. He’s making some statements to the press this afternoon. I don’t want to add to the scrutiny he’s already placing himself under.”
“I see. I hadn’t heard about any planned statements.”
“Of course you haven’t. Why would you? I only found out moments ago myself. Why should I burden him? I think I should handle the situation independently. I mean these crackpots are getting crazier by the day. Maybe it’s best to send a little cash their way and see if that doesn’t make them disappear.”
“Maybe. Or you could send a little taste their way, and it could just make them hungrier.”
“It could Estem, it could. My, don’t you sound savvy . . .”
“Sometimes I can be, sir. It depends on the situation and the circumstances.”
“I see. And in these circumstances, what would you suggest?”
“In this situation, sir, I would suggest that you follow your instincts—your gut. This isn’t an intellectual exercise.”
“No, it isn’t. So you think I should convince Young and Abernathy to pay?”
“I’m not saying that . . .”
“Are you saying that I should use some of the surplus money to pay this?”
“I haven’t said that either, sir.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“Well, I guess I’m saying that you should do what you think is best, and that you should be confident that whatever decision you make, you made it in the best interest of Martin and the SCLC.”
“So if I tell Abernathy and Young . . .”
“They’ll probably tell you to ignore it.”
“And being ignored might just infuriate this crackpot, and he’ll come back with something even more horrific.”
“Yes, that’s possible.”
“Or I could pay, and just hope that he goes away.”
“You could.”
“And if he doesn’t? If he doesn’t, Estem? What then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you find out who he is and make certain he goes away.”
Gant turns around and looks at the shelf behind his chair. There’s a photo of Ralph Bunche and him shaking hands. Placing the photo facedown, he reveals a silver flask hidden behind it. He takes two hard swallows that make him wince. He doesn’t offer me any.
“The question is if I were to do it, how could I get the money out of here without anyone knowing?”
“Without who knowing, sir?”
“Anyone! Everyone!”
“Are you worried about them finding out about a transaction you might make?”
“Yes, goddamnit. Keep your voice down.”
“I don’t know, sir. How’d they find out about payments to the property manager, and the chartering companies, and the printer?”
“I told them, of course.”
“Yes, sir, you told them.”
“I see . . .” Gant takes another sip from his flask and then leans in. “I can’t just put my name on a check, now, can I?” he whispers.
“No. Of course not, sir. That would be stupid.”
“Yes, that would be.”
“If only there were some way that the SCLC could make a legitimate payment to someone or some other entity that you had access to. . . . It might all make sense.”
“Yes. I guess it would.”
“But since you don’t have access to those sorts of things, you might have to tell them—or at least think about it.”
“Yes, I guess I will.” He takes another sip from his flask. “Thank you, Estem. That will be all.”
I don’t know what move Gant will make, but it’s surprising that he would want to hide something from m
e—as if my opinion matters to him. I’ve always wanted to be in a position where I was giving him advice and he was the attentive student, but not in this way. Gant and I have arrived at the masquerade. How many others will be attending? I’m just glad that I’m not alone—and that matters more now than ever.
I pour myself a glass of scotch and lie in bed. More Macallan. LA made me develop a taste for the good stuff. It’s funny how the first sip is always the sweetest; the second offers clarity and brings the hidden remedies for your ailing life into clear view. Of course, it’s the subsequent sips that dummy up your mind; but now, somewhere in the middle, I allow myself to think of Candy, to miss her and the little game we played. I thought I was retired from it, but I just needed to sit on the bench for a while. I gulp the drink and a flare shoots up my chest, but I know it’s her, not the scotch. I’m not ready to miss her yet. There she is being blanketed in Lester’s dark muscles, cringing at the secrets he whispers to her about me. As far as her appearance is concerned, I hope she’s fading fast and spreading wide—she’s too cruel to deserve that beauty.
I pour another . . .
And another . . .
Until my drink decides to drift into song, somehow becoming a guitar, and my bed a car driven by a white woman. She’s attractive in a very plain and conventional sort of way. She smiles at me, “Play,” she says. “Play more.” I go back to work, plucking and strumming a blues song I’ve never heard, but her smile disappears when she looks in the rearview mirror. I look behind us and see a pickup truck gaining on us very fast. We’re on a desolate stretch of road, just us and trees and the truck.
She looks at me with dread in her eyes, “Don’t stop playing,” she says.
I continue, even as the truck pulls up alongside us and reveals its occupants. Strobe drives with both hands at the wheel, never taking his eyes off the road, while Mathis aims his shotgun at us. When he pulls the trigger, I spill what’s left of the scotch in my lap.
Our Man in the Dark Page 18