There was no internet connection in their apartment. A computer was kept in an office rented by one of Louis’s many shell companies, which they used on occasion for more delicate searches, but often a cyber café was sufficient for their needs. They avoided email, although when required they employed Hushmail to send encrypted messages, or embedded codes in seemingly innocuous communications.
Wherever possible, they used cash, not credit cards. They were part of no loyalty programs, and they bought Metrocards for the subway as they needed them, disposing of them when they were exhausted and replacing them with new ones instead of recharging the originals. Utilities were paid for through a lawyer’s office. They had learned the best routes to take on foot and by car to avoid security cameras, and the lights that illuminated the license plates on the vehicles they used all contained infrared bulbs designed to flood video cameras operating at near infrared frequency.
There were also other, more unusual, protections in place. The basement and first floor of their building were rented by an elderly lady named Mrs. Evelyn Bondarchuk, who kept Pomeranians and appeared to have cornered the market in chintz and bone china. There had once been a Mr. Bondarchuk, but he was taken from his young bride at a tragically early age, a consequence of a misunderstanding between Mr. Bondarchuk and a passing train, Mr. Bondarchuk being drunk at the time and having mistaken the track for a public urinal. Mrs. Bondarchuk had never married again, in part because no one could ever have taken the place of her much-loved, if dissolute, husband, but also because anyone who did would, by definition, have been equally or significantly more dissolute than his predecessor, and Mrs. Bondarchuk did not need such aggravation in her life. Thus a corner of her living room remained a slightly dusty shrine to the memory of her departed husband, and Mrs. Bondarchuk lavished her affection instead on generations of Pomeranians, who are not generally considered to be dissolute animals.
Mrs. Bondarchuk’s apartment was rent controlled. She paid a laughably small monthly sum to a company called Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., that appeared to be little more than a box number in Lower Manhattan. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had bought the building in the early eighties, and Mrs. Bondarchuk had feared for a time that her tenancy might be affected by the sale, but instead she was assured, by letter, that all would remain as it had been and she was welcome to see out her days, surrounded by Pomeranians, in the apartment in which she had dwelt for the best part of thirty years. In fact, she was even permitted to expand her fiefdom into the basement below as well, which had been unoccupied since its previous tenant died some years earlier. Such things were unheard of in the city, Mrs. Bondarchuk knew, and she did her best to ensure that, as far as she was concerned, they remained so. She did not tell anyone of her good fortune, apart from her good friend Mrs. Naughtie, and then only after swearing her to silence. Mrs. Bondarchuk was a clever woman. She understood that something unusual was happening in her building, but as it did not appear to be hampering her existence and was instead improving it significantly, she behaved sensibly and allowed matters to take their course.
The only significant change occurred when the couple upstairs, who were both accountants, eventually retired and moved to a house in Vermont, and their place was taken by a quiet, beautifully dressed black man and a smaller, noticeably less well-dressed individual who looked like he might have come to steal her jewelry, which, had fate not introduced him to his current partner, might well have been the case. Still, they were very polite gentlemen. Mrs. Bondarchuk suspected that they were gay. It gave her quite a frisson for, by the standards of the city, she led a very sheltered life.
If any problems arose with her apartment, Mrs. Bondarchuk left a message with a delightful young woman named Amy, who answered the phone for Leroy Frank Properties, Inc. Actually, Amy answered the phone for a great many businesses, none of which needed or wanted an actual physical presence in the city. Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., owned a number of premises in New York, of which the one on the Upper West Side was the sole residential property. Amy was under explicit instructions to deal with Mrs. Bondarchuk’s problems promptly, at the very latest by close of business on the day the call was received. A premium was to be paid to the relevant plumber, electrician, carpenter, or other professional to ensure that this was the case. A list of approved individuals was kept in a file in Amy’s desk, all of whom were aware of the particular needs of Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., in relation to this building.
Mrs. Bondarchuk knew the first names of the two men who lived above her, and referred to them, respectively, as “Mr. Louis” and “Mr. Angel,” but she had never connected the black man, Louis, to Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., even though “Leroy Frank” was not a million miles removed from “Le Roi Français” and, while there had been a great many French kings, the name most commonly found among them was, of course, Louis. No, Mrs. Bondarchuk made no such connection, for it was none of Mrs. Bondarchuk’s business to think about such matters, and her life was, for her, quite idyllic, so she had no desire to go poking her nose into dark corners. She had enough money on which to live quite comfortably; she had quiet neighbors; and the soundtrack to her life was the yapping of happy Pomeranians and the soothing strings of the Mantovani Orchestra, which, she had discovered, could provide an album for every occasion. And because she valued her situation so highly, Mrs. Bondarchuk guarded every facet of it very closely indeed. When the tradesmen came to fix a leak or change a light bulb, they did so under the unflinching stare of Mrs. Bondarchuk and assorted small dogs. The mailman never got beyond the doorstep. Likewise delivery men, salesmen, small children at Halloween, large children at any time, and any adult who was not her old friend and fellow widow, Mrs. Naughtie, with whom she played an often bad-tempered series of backgammon games, fueled by cheap sherry, every Thursday night.
Leroy Frank Properties, Inc., had installed an expensive and complicated alarm system when it had taken over the ownership of the building, and Mrs. Bondarchuk understood the workings of that system intimately. Mrs. Bondarchuk did not know it but, in her way, she was as essential to the security and peace of mind of the two men who lived above her as the guns that they occasionally carried in the course of their work. She was the Cerberus at the gates of their underworld.
Now, as she lay in her bed and listened to “Swedish Rhapsody” on the little CD player that Mr. Angel and Mr. Louis had given her for Christmas that year (Mrs. Bondarchuk preferred to go to bed late and wake up late: she had never been a morning person); she heard them enter, heard the soft weeping of the alarm before they silenced it with the code, and then a final single beep as the door closed and they reset the system.
“Night, night, Mrs. Bondarchuk,” called Mr. Angel from the hallway.
She did not reply, but merely smiled as she stopped the music and turned off her light. They were home, and she always slept better when they were around.
For some reason that she could not quite fathom, they made her feel very safe indeed.
That night, Louis lay awake while Angel slept. He thought about his past, and the hidden nature of the world. He thought about lives taken and lives lost, about his momma and the women who had raised him. He thought about Bliss. He followed the threads in the patterns of his life, pausing where they overlapped, where one connected with another.
And then he closed his eyes, and waited for the Burning Man to come.
It was a small town, a sundown town. That term meant something for the boy and those like him. True, there was no longer a sign advertising that fact at the town limits, which counted as progress in some small way, although there might just as well have been, since most everyone beyond the age of seven could recall where it had stood, just below the gate to Virgil Jellicote’s farm. Old Virgil had made sure that the sign wasn’t obscured by dirt or, as had once occurred during the period of unrest that followed the killing of Errol Rich, by the judicious application of some black paint, so that the sign was transformed from “Nigger, Don’t Let The
Sun Set On You In This Town” to “White Folks, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town.” Old Virgil had been mightily troubled by that act of vandalism; other people, too, and not all of them white. What was done to Errol Rich was wrong, but riling the cops and the town council by screwing with their beloved sign was just plain dumb, although when the police came asking who might have been responsible for the damage, they were greeted only with silence. Being dumb wasn’t a crime, not yet, and the law had plenty of other ways in which it could punish people of color without another being added to the list.
The town wasn’t even unusual in its overt exclusion of the black population. It was one of thousands of such towns across the United States, and even whole counties had turned sundown when their county seat did. Half of all the towns in Oregon, Ohio, Indiana, the Cumber-lands, and the Ozarks were, at one point, sundown towns. God help the black man who found himself in, say, Jonesboro, Illinois, after dark, or nearby Anna (which was known, to both whites and blacks, as “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” and would continue to have signs to that effect on Highway 127 as late as the 1970s), or Appleton, Wisconsin, or suburbs like Levittown on Long Island; Livonia, Michigan; or Cedar Key, Florida. And, hey, that goes for your Jews, your Chinese, your Mexicans, and your Native Americans, too. Be on your way now, son. Time’s a killin’…
The thing about the boy’s hometown was that it was a pretty place. It was clean, and there wasn’t much cussing, not in public. Main Street belonged on a postcard, and the flowers growing in its pots were always appropriate to the season. It was small, though. In fact, it was so small that it barely qualified as a town by any reasonable reckoning, but no- body in those parts referred to anywhere as a village. The place in which you lived was a town or it was nothing at all. There was something substantial about a town. A town meant neighbors, and laws, and order on the streets. A town meant sidewalks, and barbershops, and church on Sundays. To call somewhere a town was to recognize a certain standard of living, of behavior. Sure, folk might go off the rails now and again, but what was important was that everyone knew where those rails were. All derailments were purely temporary. That train kept on running, and all good people made sure they were on board for the whole of the journey, allowing for some unforeseen stops along the way.
But, for the boy, it had never really been a town, not for him. True, it had all the characteristics of a town, however small a space they might have occupied. There were stores, and a movie theater, and a couple of churches, although none for the Catholics, who had to drive eight miles east to Maylersville or twelve miles south to Ludlow if they wanted to worship their own misguided version of the Lord. There were houses, too, with well-kept front lawns and white picket fences and sprinklers that hissed unthreateningly on hot summer days. There were lawyers, and doctors, and florists, and undertakers. If you looked at it the right way, the town had everything necessary to ensure a perfectly adequate degree of service for those who chose to call it home.
The problem, as the boy saw it, was that all of those people were white. The town was built for white people and run by white people. The people behind the counters of the stores were white, and the people on the other side of the counters were mostly white, too. The lawyers were white and the cops were white and the florists were white. Black people could be seen in town, but they were always moving: carrying, delivering, lifting, hauling. Only white people were allowed to stand still. Black people did what they had to do, then left. After nightfall, there were only white folk on the streets.
It wasn’t that anyone was cruel to the coloreds as a rule, or vicious, or intemperate in manner. It was simply understood by both sides that this was the way things worked. Blacks had their own stores, their own juke joints, their own places of worship, their own ways of doing things. They had their own town, in a sense, although it was one that did not trouble the planners or figure on any census. By and large, white folks didn’t interfere with them, as long as nobody caused any trouble. The blacks lived out in the woods and the swamps, and some of them had pretty nice houses, too, all things considered. No one begrudged them what they had built for themselves. Hell, it wasn’t unknown for white men to give some of these black businesses a little custom now and then, especially when those businesses facilitated the provision of exotic flesh for discerning gentlemen whose tastes ran in that direction, so it wasn’t like the two races never mingled, or the twain never met. The twain met more often than many people liked to think, and there was good money to be made from those encounters.
But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.
The boy understood all of this instintively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His momma hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.
And that was why the boy was so troubling to the policeman who watched him through the two-way mirror on the wall. The mirror was one of the few concessions to modernity in the town’s little police department. There was no a/c, even though the units had been installed. The problem with the units was that they kept blowing all of the fuses in the building on account of how the wiring was no good, or so the local electrician had explained. For the a/c to work properly, the whole building would have to be gutted and rewired, and that was going to be an expensive job in a structure this old. The town fathers were reluctant to sanction this expenditure, not if its sole purpose was to ensure that Chief Wooster didn’t break a sweat during the hot summer months. Truth was, there were those who felt that it wouldn’t do the chief the least bit of harm to break some sweat now and again, the chief being, according to the general consensus, a lard-ass with a heart that was seriously overworked, and not due to his general affection for humanity.
So the little room from which the chief was observing the boy was cooled only by a desk fan, and the desk fan wasn’t worth a gnat’s fart in the enclosed space. The chief’s uniform was pasted to his body so that even the outline of his belly button was clearly visible through the tan cotton, and the sweat was running down his face in rivulets, near blinding him sometimes if he failed to judge properly the sweep of his handkerchief across his forehead.
And yet he did not move. Instead, he stared curiously at the boy, willing him to break. Chief Wooster might have been a lard-ass, and his view of his fellow men and women was certainly colored by a cynicism bordering on misanthropy, but he was no fool. The boy interested him. The boy had managed to kill his mother’s lover, a man named Deber, without laying a finger on him, of that the chief was certain, and Deber had been nobody’s idea of an easy mark. Deber had himself done time for a murder committed when he was barely thirteen, and there had been others since then, even if no one had been able to pin them on him. One of the killings of which Deber was suspected was the murder of a pretty young black woman down in the city. The son of that pretty young black woman was now sitting on the other side of the mirror being interrogated by two detectives from the state police. They weren’t getting any further with the boy than the chief’s own men had, and the chief’s men had been far less gentle than the detectives. The bruises to the boy’s face and the swelling beneath his right eye were testament to that. Clark, one of the men in question, told the chief that the boy had pissed blood when they had taken him down to the bathroom to clean him up. The chief had told th
em to ease up on the boy after that. He wanted a confession, not a corpse.
It had taken the state cops a day to organize themselves sufficiently to make the journey north. During that twenty-four-hour period, the chief’s men had worked the boy pretty hard. They’d started with beatings, then threats against the boy’s family, who had provided him with an alibi. The cops had fed him soda spiked with Ex-Lax, then tied him to the chair and left him there. The chief had watched the boy fight against the urge to void himself, his mouth trembling with the effort, his nostrils flaring, his hands clasped into fists. When he was certain that the boy could take the pain no longer, he’d sent Clark in to make him an offer: confess to the Deber killing and they’d haul him straight to the bathroom. Otherwise, they’d let nature take its course and leave him to sit in what resulted. The boy simply shook his head. The chief almost admired his resilience, except it was making him look bad. He instructed Clark to accompany the boy to the men’s room before he burst, as he didn’t want him stinking up the building’s only interrogation room. Clark had acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Afterward, he had taken the boy out to the yard and hosed him off on the ground, his trousers around his ankles and the other cops jeering as the water jetted painfully against his privates.
Threats against his family hadn’t worked either. He came from a house full of women. Wooster knew them. They were good people. Wooster wasn’t a racist. There were good blacks and bad blacks, just like there were good whites and bad whites. It wouldn’t be true to say that the chief treated them all equally. Had he tried, even if he’d had the inclination, he wouldn’t have lasted a week in his current position, let alone ten years. Instead, he treated blacks and poor whites pretty much the same. Wealthy whites required more careful handling. Wealthy blacks he didn’t have to worry about, because he didn’t know any.
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