The Sleepless

by Graham Masterton

  Patrice was right: it was Bertrand – an itchy, jumpy, dreadlocked figure in coal-black sunglasses and a crimson suede cowboyjacket with fringes. But Bertrand had another message. ‘Matthew Monyatta want to see you, man.’

  ‘Matthew Monyatta? What’s he doing down here?’

  ‘He was here last night, man, looking for you, excepting nobody knew where you was. He says he wants to talk about what’s going down.’

  Patrice glanced at Verna, and then back to Bertrand. ‘Where’s he at? Can’t he come up here?’

  ‘He’s waiting for you down at the Palm Diner. Says he won’t wait too long.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he come up here?’

  Bertrand didn’t reply, but both of them knew the answer. It was a question of seniority, a question of protocol. Seaver Street was Patrice Latomba’s turf, but Matthew Monyatta was the elder statesman, and Patrice had to show him respect.

  ‘How about the other brother?’ asked Patrice.

  ‘He can wait,’ Bertrand told him.

  ‘Okay, then ... let’s hit the bricks.’

  Patrice gave Verna a quick kiss, squeezed her hand to reassure her that he was going to be safe, and left the apartment. Seconds later, he unlocked the door and called, ‘Don’t forget to put on the chain! And don’t answer the door to nobody!’ He slammed the door again, but seconds later he unlocked it again, and Verna heard him cross the living-room, open the bureau drawer, and take out something which sounded metallic. She knew what it was: his .45 automatic.

  Matthew Monyatta was sitting in the back of the Palm Diner, wearing a brown velvet cap and a loose brown djellaba. The diner was dark, because all the windows had been smashed and boarded up; but there were still twenty or thirty young men playing pool, smoking and laughing, and Kenny the proprietor was still serving up barbecued ribs and Southern fried chicken, and the air still throbbed with reggae music. ‘Long time, Matthew,’ said Patrice, as he approached, holding out his hand.

  Matthew kept his arms folded. He eyed Patrice up and down with wary disapproval.

  ‘What’s the matter, man?’ Patrice wanted to know, pivoting around on his heel. ‘No need for you to get heavy on me, you know? You heard what those bastards done to my child.’

  ‘I heard, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry? You’re sorry? If you were real sorry, you wouldn’t have come on down here, running errands for no ghosts.’

  ‘Running errands?’ Matthew demanded. ‘You know me better than that. I don’t run errands for nobody, ghosts nor brothers, nobody. I work for black pride, and I work for black identity, and I work for the black man’s place in history; and what do you call this? You burn your own houses, you loot your own stores, you fuck up your own neighbourhood, and then you complain that you was put upon, that you was oppressed, that nobody never gave you no chances.

  ‘They killed your baby, man, that was a tragedy. But a tragedy like that – that’s no more than a symptom of what you’ve allowed to happen here, by your own carelessness, by your own stupidity. By your own wilful rebellion.’

  ‘You sold out, man,’ Patrice told him, dismissively. ‘You just totally sold out.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Matthew told him; but Patrice remained standing. ‘All right, then,’ said Matthew, ‘let me tell you something. I came down here yesterday to talk to you because the mayor asked me; and nobody could find you. You were running wild, weren’t you? You wanted to see some fires burning, didn’t you? You wanted to see the sky all lit up, so that everybody would know that Fly Latomba was suffering, and that Fly Latomba was wronged. Well, I saw that sky lit up, and I wasn’t impressed. But here I am again, and I want all of this burning and all of this rioting and all of this goddamned carry-on to stop; and I mean now. You’re hurt; I know that. But don’t hurt your friends and your kinfolk just to show them how badly you’ve been done by. They’re looking to you, Fly, same way they used to look to me.’

  Patrice sniffed, a dry coke-nosed sniff; and looked away.

  ‘You hear me?’ asked Matthew.

  Patrice whipped around and glared at him, his eyes wide. ‘What are you, Matthew? Some goddamned saint or something?’

  Matthew looked down at him sadly. ‘I’m a black man, Fly, that’s what I am. My soul was born in Olduvai and my body was carried here.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ sneered Patrice.

  Matthew said, ‘Listen, Fly ... I saw it in prophecy ... I saw it in the bones.’

  Bertrand began to look nervous. To him, the name of Matthew Monyatta was legendary, as it was to most young blacks, and he didn’t like the sound of African soothsaying; not so close to home.

  Patrice said, ‘Forget it, Matthew. It’s all bullshit. The only two things that will get you ahead in this world are (a) money and (b) white skin. Look at Michael Jackson, for Christ’s sake. Got the first, still working hard on the second – and which is more important?’

  Matthew said, ‘You’re tempting fate, Fly. There are people in this world who want nothing more than to see you destroy yourself. I know it.’ He touched his forehead with his fingers. ‘I know it here.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Patrice repeated.

  Matthew gave him a bulky shrug, as if he were disappointed but not surprised. ‘I’m a black man, Fly, just the same as you. But this aint the point.’

  ‘So what is the point?’ Patrice challenged him. ‘You want us to stop rioting? You want us to stop burning? You want us to be good little domesticated black people, singing sweet and low? You want us to roll with the punches, little black boy, is that it? You want us to ro – o – ooll with the punches?’

  Matthew lowered his head, saying nothing, but he was clenching his fists and his massive chest was rising and falling and Bertrand began to back away; as if he expected a major eruption.

  ‘Fly,’ said Matthew, ‘you are up against more than you even know. Why do you think those cops were here?’

  Patrice nervously sniffed. ‘Making a drug bust, that’s what I heard.’

  ‘A drug bust,’ Matthew repeated. ‘A simple, ordinary, common-or-garden drug bust?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? They killed my baby.’

  Matthew Monyatta stared at Patrice for a long, tense moment. Then he said, ‘You should call off the riot, Patrice. Tell your people, hush up, go on home. Don’t do it for the mayor; and don’t do it for me. Don’t do it for the Boston Chamber of Commerce, neither. Just call it off, for your own sake, and for all of our sakes. You aint up against white society. You aint up against whites.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Patrice challenged him. ‘If not the whites, then who?’

  ‘The whiter-than-whites,’ said Matthew, cryptically. ‘The real white ones.’

  Patrice fixed him with narrowed eyes. Bertrand was jumping and hopping and looking distinctly uneasy. ‘Come on, man, this is seriously bad karma.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you mean,’ Patrice told Matthew.

  Matthew raised a single finger. ‘You’ll find out, Fly. You’ll find out. But you won’t care for it, when you do. I warn you now.’

  ‘You trying to scare me, what?’ Patrice wanted to know.

  ‘I can’t scare you, but they will. Oh, boy ... they’ll scare you good.’

  Patrice stared at Matthew for nearly a minute, fearful, uncomprehending. Then, slowly, he backed away between the tables, through the ganja smoke and the throbbing reggae music, and Bertrand backed away with him.

  It was only when he had reached the door that he turned around and screamed at Matthew, ‘You’re crazy, you know that? You used to be my hero, you know that? And look at you now! Whiter than fucking white!’

  Matthew stood where he was, and watched Patrice go. Eventually, Deputy Mayor Kenneth Flynn came out of the shadows beside the juke-box and stood beside him with his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Nothing doing, hunh?’ asked Kenneth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Matthew. ‘He may come around.’

  ‘What was that he was shouting at you?
Whiter than effing white?’

  ‘You don’t come from the Holy Lands,’ said Matthew. ‘You never walked with Aaron.’

  With that, he scraped back his chair, and walked out of the diner. Kenneth went over to the counter and peeled off three twenty-dollar bills.

  ‘Don’t come back on your own, man,’ the proprietor warned him.

  Outside, Matthew walked back to Kenneth’s dark-blue Buick, and climbed in, so that the whole suspension bounced up and down, and waited patiently for Kenneth to drive him home.

  Kenneth stood outside the diner for a moment and watched Roxbury burning, and heard the flat rattle of semi-automatic gunfire in the middle distance, and the barber-shop quartets of ricochets. For the first time in his political career, he realized that he didn’t understand what was happening in Boston; or anywhere in America. For the first time in his life, he felt a genuine sense of fear.

  Seven

  Joe Garboden dropped the faxes onto his desk and eased himself back in his tan leather chair.

  ‘They’re pretty damned dark,’ he remarked. ‘This one here looks like midnight in a Bible factory.’

  ‘But you can make out O’Brien’s body,’ Michael insisted. ‘Look ... that’s the curve of his back ... that’s where his head should have been.’

  ‘Well, these are clues,’ Joe admitted. ‘But they’re a long way from being proof

  Michael said, ‘O’Brien’s policies with Plymouth covered him for accidental death or injury, but not for acts of war, terrorism or homicide. He had his head cut off, for Christ’s sake. What kind of an accident is that?’

  Joe said, ‘People have been known to lose their heads accidentally. Think of poor Jayne Mansfield. To think I used to have the hots for her, when I was fifteen.’

  Michael gathered up the faxes and slid them back into an envelope. ‘There’s enough here to challenge the coroner to show us the originals.’

  ‘Come on, Michael, we have to tread a little careful here. Those photographs were police evidence. I’m not so sure that you weren’t infringing the law by copying them. Let’s check with our lawyers first. We don’t want to jeopardize our case by acting illegally.’

  ‘If a Supreme Court justice has been murdered, don’t you think that everybody has a right to know about it, regardless of how that information was obtained? I mean, this is quite apart from Plymouth’s interest in it.’

  ‘Those faxes are not conclusive proof that he was murdered. Any more than the photographs you copied them from are conclusive proof that he was murdered. You say that McAllister’s severed thighs were cauterized and that Mrs O’Brien’s viscera were shrivelled ... but that’s not an expert opinion. We need to see Moorpath’s post-mortem and the FAA’s crash report before we can say for sure.’

  Joe cleared his throat, and then he said, ‘I agree with you ... it looks pretty likely that O’Brien and his family were murdered. But we can’t risk compromising Plymouth’s case or Plymouth’s reputation by screwing around with the law.’

  Michael knew that Joe was right. Judges were becoming far more critical about the lengths to which insurance companies would go to save themselves from paying out on disputed claims. Plymouth had already been humiliated once this year when an appeal judge had disallowed a tape-recording of a telephone conversation held by a woman who was supposed to have been struck dumb in an auto accident, because her phone had been tapped illegally.

  ‘Okay,’ he told Joe. ‘I’ll just keep chipping away at it.’

  There’s one thing ... ‘ said Joe. ‘Did you notice if Cecilia O’Brien appeared in any of the photographs? You know – Sissy, the daughter?’

  Michael thought about it, and then shook his head. ‘No ... she didn’t. There were only four bodies ... O’Brien, his wife, McAllister and Coward. No pictures of Cecilia.’

  ‘That’s something else that might be worth looking into,’ Joe suggested.

  Michael lifted the envelope in a wave. ‘Do you have time for a drink tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Unh-hunh. Mildred’s sister is coming over. I call her The Alien. In Brookline, nobody can hear you scream.’ ‘Goodnight, Joe,’ said Michael, and left the office.

  He pushed his way out through the smoked-glass revolving doors of the Plymouth Insurance Building and into the heat and jostle of Huntington Avenue. He felt suddenly alone. He had called Patsy before he left the office, but the phone had rung and rung and she hadn’t answered. He had tried to imagine where she could be, what she was doing, and unexpectedly he had found himself missing her – much more keenly than he had ever missed her before.

  Last night, he had stayed with Joe and Mildred on the roll-out bed at their apartment in Brookline, but Joe had already found him a single-bedroom apartment over the Cantina Napoletana on Hanover Street. He had always liked North End, with its noise and its shabbiness and its pungent little neighbourhood shops, and so he knew that he was going to feel at home. Except that Patsy and Jason weren’t with him; and he really had to work, and work hard. No more dreaming by the sea.

  He walked across Copley Place, beside the concrete flowerbeds of splashy red geraniums and the breeze-ruffled pool. Behind him soared the gleaming spires of Back Bay: the Prudential Tower and the Plymouth building and the Marriott Hotel. But ahead of him, far to the south, dark brown smoke still stained the sky, as Seaver Street and twenty blocks of surrounding suburbs were looted and burned.

  Two huge National Guard helicopters roared overhead, their twin rotors flashing in the sunlight. Michael shaded his eyes to watch them fly southward. When they had disappeared over the buildings, he turned around – and his attention was caught by a sudden movement among the neatly-planted rows of trees nearby. It looked as if somebody had seen him turn, and had quickly stepped into the shadows between the trees so that he wouldn’t be noticed.

  Michael wasn’t sure why he thought that. But there was something furtive about the way in which he had stepped out of sight, and in the way in which he hadn’t emerged from the shadows back into the sunlight, as he would have done if he had been strolling along normally. It could have been a she, of course, but it had seemed too tall for a woman.

  He paused, narrowing his eyes to try and make out who was there. Maybe it was nobody at all. Maybe the grisly images that he had seen in Dr Moorpath’s office were making him jumpy. He had dreamed once that all of the dead from the Rocky Woods crash had shambled into his yard one night, and knocked on the door, and stood in the moonlight, silent and accusing, waiting with terrible patience for him to give them their lost lives back. That dream had haunted him for nearly four months, and it had taken all of Dr Rice’s skills to put it to rest. One night he had dreamed that somebody had knocked on his door, and when he had gone to answer it, his yard had been moonlit but empty; and it was then that he had known that the victims were no longer asking him for redemption, or resurrection, or whatever it was they had wanted him to give them. But he had never shaken the feeling that the dead can follow us, begging us mutely for help.

  He walked further, occasionally glancing over his shoulder. At first he saw nothing, but as he neared the end of the flowerbeds, he thought he glimpsed the swirl of a coat behind the trees. He stopped, and waited, but nobody appeared. He stepped to one side, and then to the other, trying to catch his shadow out. But there was only the sun-dappled shadow, and the thundering and squealing and honking of the traffic, and the warm south-westerly breeze.

  He started to walk diagonally across the concrete path toward the trees. If somebody were following him, he wanted to see who it was. He climbed over the low retaining wall, and then walked faster and faster toward the trees.

  As he entered the shadow beneath the leaves and branches, he saw an old blind man in a washed-out linen jacket, tapping his way toward him. The blind man wore a beret and very black sunglasses and he was accompanied by a bored-looking black-and-white mongrel.

  There was nobody else. Michael turned this way and that, but there was no sign of anybody wearing a
coat; or anybody who might have had any reason to follow him – either real, or imaginary, or out of his nightmares.

  The blind man stopped a few paces away. ‘Have you lost something, sir?’ he asked, in a voice as dry as crushed crackers. His mongrel licked its lips.

  ‘I thought I saw somebody I knew,’ Michael lied. Then, ‘How did you know I was looking for anything?’

  ‘Hmh! The way your feet were turning – this way, then that way, then back again.’

  ‘You must have pretty sensitive hearing.’

  ‘Too darn sensitive sometimes. Occasionally, I hear things that I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Well ... thanks for your interest,’ said Michael, and turned to go.

  ‘He was here, you know,’ the blind man told him.

  Michael stopped, and turned. ‘Who was? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The man you were looking for. He was here, you know.’

  ‘How do you know? I don’t even know what he looks like myself.’

  ‘Thought you said it was somebody you knew,’ the blind man retorted.

  ‘I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘But he knew you all right. He was following you, stopping when you stopped, and keeping himself hid.’

  Michael quickly looked around. ‘So where is he now?’

  The blind man smiled. ‘There are other places to go, apart from “away”.’

  He’s mental, thought Michael. He’s not only blind, but crazy.

  There was a strange pause between them. For a moment, Michael wondered if he had accidentally spoken aloud. But then the blind man said, ‘I was hypnotized too, you know. When I had eyes. I was hypnotized six or seven times.’

  Michael didn’t answer. This had to be some kind of game; some kind of tortuous joke. How could this man possibly know that he was undergoing hypnotherapy? It wasn’t as if it showed on his face – not that this man could even see his face. It wasn’t as if it affected the tone of his voice.

  The mongrel whined in the back of its throat, anxious to be off.