by Ed McBain
“Feel better?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s go then.”
We retraced every step I’d taken through the station. Me sticking close to the slick policeman and him leading the way. Nobody stopped us, nobody questioned our passing.
We went to a ’98 Le Sabre parked out in front of the station and Delgado drove us up further into Harlem.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“Up on One Fifty-sixth,” he said.
“I’d like to go home.”
“No you wouldn’t. Take my word on that.”
“What’s going on, Captain?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, son.”
We stopped in front of a large stone apartment building on 156th Street. Even though it was late there were young men and women hanging out around the front stoop.
“Eight twenty-one,” Delgado said.
“What?”
“Apartment eight twenty-one. That’s where you’re going.”
“I want to go home.”
“Get out.”
“Are you coming?”
“No.”
I had never felt more vulnerable in my life.
I opened the door and all the faces from the stoop turned toward me.
“Who’s up there?” I asked Delgado.
He pulled my door shut and drove off.
______
“You a cop, man?” a young man asked me.
He had climbed down from his seat on the top step of the stoop.
“No. No. He just gave me a ride.”
My inquisitor was probably a year or two younger than I. His skin was very dark. Even though the air was chilly he wore only a T-shirt. His arms were slender but knotty with muscle.
“You fuckin’ wit’ me, man?”
“No. I’m supposed to go to an apartment upstairs.”
Two other angry looking youths climbed down from the stoop. They flanked my interlocutor, searching me with their eyes.
“What for?” the youth asked.
“They told me that the man who had me released is up there.”
I started walking. I had to go around my three new friends. Up the stoop I went and into the dark corridor of the first floor.
There was no light and I could almost feel the young men they followed me so closely. As we climbed the stairs they spoke to me.
“You with the cops you ain’t gonna get outta here, mothah-fuckah,” one of them said.
“We should take him now, Durkey,” another suggested.
“Let’s see where he go,” Durkey, the first one who had approached me, said. “Let’s check it out.”
I was breathing hard by the time I got to the eighth floor landing. Most of the journey was made through semi-darkness. Along the way there was some light from open apartment doors. Silent sentinels came to mark our passing: children, old people, women, and some men. But no one asked Durkey and his henchmen why they were following me.
I had been in places like this before, in the Ninth Ward, New Orleans. But I was always under the protection of my aunt Alberta and her boyfriends. Being from a light-skinned family of the upper crust of colored society I was always seen as an outsider.
I knocked on the door to apartment eight twenty-one and waited—and prayed.
“Nobody there,” Durkey said.
He put a hand on my shoulder.
The door opened flooding the hallway with powerful light. I winced. Durkey’s hand fled my shoulder.
Archibald Lawless appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Madison,” he said loudly. “I see that you’ve accompanied my guest upstairs.”
“Hey, Lawless,” Durkey said with deference. “I didn’t know he was your boy.”
“Uh-huh,” the anarchist said. “You can go now.”
My retinue of toughs backed away. My recent, and ex, boss smiled.
“Come on in, Felix. You’ve had a busy day.”
9
It was an opulent room. The floors were covered in thick, rose-colored carpets. On the walls hung a dozen eighteenth century paintings of countrysides and beautiful young men and women of all races. There was a fireplace with a gas blaze raging and a large dark-wood table set with cheeses, meats, fruits, and bottles of wine.
“Have a seat,” Lawless said.
There was a big backless couch upholstered with the rough fur of bear or maybe beaver.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know. I threw up at the police station.”
“Wine then,” Archibald said. He took a dark green bottle and a slender water glass from the table. He filled the glass halfway with the dark red liquid and handed it to me.
It was the finest burgundy I’d ever tasted. Rich, fruity, almost smoky.
“Cheese?” Lawless asked.
“In a minute,” I said. “Is this your apartment?”
“I own the building,” he said blandly. “Bought it when the prices were still depressed.”
“You’re a landlord?”
“Building manager is the title I prefer. I collect a certain amount of rent from my tenants until they’ve paid for the cost of their unit. After that they pay whatever maintenance is necessary for taxes and upkeep.”
I must have been gaping at him.
“It’s the way Fidel does it in Cuba,” he said.
“Castro’s a dictator.”
“And Bush is a democratically elected official,” he replied.
“But . . .” I said.
Lawless held up his hand.
“We’ll have enough time to discuss politics on slow days at the office,” he said. “Right now we have some more pressing business.”
I’d drunk the half glass and he replenished it.
“I left you a message,” I said. “Did you get it?”
“Tell me about the murder,” he replied.
“But I quit.”
“No.”
The wine felt good in my belly and in my blood. It warmed me and slowed the fear I’d felt since being taken by the police. I was safe, even hidden, with a man who seemed to be a force of nature all on his own. His refusal to accept my resignation made me tired. I took another swig, sat the glass down on an antique wooden crate used as a table, and let my head loll backward.
“I’m not working for you,” I said. And then my eyes closed. I forced them open but couldn’t keep focus. I closed my eyes again and I must have fallen asleep for a while.
The next thing I knew there was somebody whimpering somewhere . . .
“Ohhhhh the wolverines. The maggots and the ticks. Blood suckers and whores . . .”
The voice was high which somehow fit with the headache threaded behind my eyes. I sat up and regretted it. My stomach was still unsteady, my tongue dry as wood.
“. . . whores and pimps and teachers sticking sticks in your ass . . .”
Lawless was rolling on the floor, whining out these complaints. At first I thought he must have had too much wine. I went to him, touched his shoulder.
He rose under me like the ground in a terrible upheaval. Grabbing me by my hair and right shoulder he lifted me high above the floor.
“Don’t you fuck with me, mother fucker!” he shouted.
His small eyes were almost large with the fear.
“It’s me, Mr. Lawless,” I said. “Felix. Your scribe.”
He lowered me slowly, painfully because of his hold on my hair.
“I’m sick,” he cried when he’d released me. “Sick.”
He swayed left then right and then fell in a heap like a young child in despair. I looked around the room for something that might help him. I didn’t see anything so I took a doorway that led me into a master bedroom painted dark blue with a giant bed in the center. There was a skylight in this room. Light came in from an outside source somewhere. There was a white bag on the bed made from the skin of what seemed to be an albino crocodile. You had to open the mouth
and reach in past the sharp teeth to see what was inside. Therein I found a knife and pistol, an English bible and an old copy of the Koran in both English and Arabic. There was a clear plastic wallet filled with one-dollar bills and a small amber vial which contained a dozen or so tiny tablets.
There was no label on the glass tube.
Archibald Lawless had stripped off his clothes by the time I returned to the living room. He was squatting down and rocking not unlike the man in the police station.
I knelt down next him, held up the small bottle, and asked, “How many do you take, Mr. Lawless?”
His eyes opened wide again.
“Who are you?”
“Felix Orlean, your scribe. You hired me yesterday.”
“Are you killkill?”
“I’m not on any of Red Tuesday’s lists.”
For some reason this made him laugh. He took the bottle from me and dumped all the pills in his mouth. He chewed them up and said, “I better get into the bed before I go unconscious—or dead.”
I helped him into the bedroom. I think he was asleep before his head hit the mattress.
For the next few hours I hung around the big bed. Lawless was unconscious but fitful. He talked out loud in his sleep speaking in at least four different languages. I understood the Spanish and German but the other dialects escaped me. Most of his utterances were indistinct. But his tone was plaintive enough that I could feel the pain.
Now and then I went back into the living room. I had some cheddar and a sip of burgundy. After a while I started putting the food away in the kitchen, which was through a door opposite the bedroom entrance.
I stayed because I was afraid to leave. The police might still be after me for all I knew. Delgado seemed to owe a debt to Lawless but that didn’t mean that Perez and Morganthau wouldn’t grab me again. And somehow I’d been implicated in a murder. I had to know what was going on.
But there was more to it than that. The self-styled anarchist seemed so helpless when I’d come to. His mental state was definitely unstable and he did get me out of jail. I felt that I should wait, at least until he was aware and able to take care of himself.
There was a bookshelf in the bathroom. The books were composed of two dominant genres: politics and science fiction. I took out a book entitled Soul of the Robot by the author Barrington J. Bayley. It was written in the quick style of pulp fiction, which I liked because there was no pretension to philosophy. It was just a good story with incredible ideas.
I’d been reading on the bear or beaver couch for some while when there came a knock on the front door. Five quick raps and then silence. I didn’t even take a breath.
I counted to three and the knock came again.
Still I didn’t make a sound.
I might have stayed there silently, breathing only slightly. But then the doorknob jiggled.
I moved as quietly as I could toward the door.
“Who is it?” I called.
The doorknob stopped moving.
“Who is that?” a woman’s voice asked.
“I’m Felix. I work for Mr. Lawless.”
“Open the door, Felix.” Her voice was even and in charge.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Maddie. I need to see Archie.” A sweetness came into her voice.
I tried to open the door but there were three locks down the side that required specialized attention. One had a knob in a slot shaped like a simple maze. The next one had a series of three buttons that needed to be pressed.
“Are you going to let me in, Felix?” Maddie asked.
“Trying to get the locks.”
The last lock was a bolt. The knob was on a spring that allowed it be pushed in. I squashed the knob inward but the bolt refused to slide. I tried pulling it out but that didn’t work either.
“Felix?”
“I’m trying.”
The hand on my shoulder made me jump into the door.
“What’s wrong?” Maddie asked from her side.
“Nothing, M,” Archibald Lawless said from behind me.
“Archie,” the woman called.
“Meet me at Sunshine’s at noon,” Lawless said to the door, his hand still on my shoulder.
“Will you be there?” she asked.
“Absolutely. I can’t let you in right now because I’m in the middle of something, something I have to finish.”
“You promise to meet me,” the disembodied woman said.
“You have my word.”
He had on camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, black motorcycle boots and a giant green inlaid ring on the point finger of his left hand.
“Okay,” Maddie said.
I inhaled deeply.
“You’ve got the job,” he said.
10
Lawless drank a glass of wine, said, “Sleep on the couch,” and stumbled back toward his bedroom.
I lay down not expecting to sleep a wink but the next thing I knew there was sunlight coming through a window and the smell of food in the air. There was a small table at the far end of the narrow kitchen. The chairs set there looked out of a window, down on the playground of an elementary school. He made griddle cakes with a sweet pecan sauce, spicy Andouille sausage, and broiled grapefruit halves with sugar glazed over the top, set off by a few drops of bourbon.
I tried to ask him questions while he was cooking but he put them all off asking me instead about parts of New Orleans that I knew well.
I loved talking about my city. The music and the food, the racial diversity and the fact that it was the only really French city in the United States.
“I used to go down there a lot,” Lawless told me while flipping our cakes. “Not to the city so much as the swamplands. There’s some people out around there who live like human beings.”
When the breakfast was finally served he sat down across from me. There was a girl in the asphalt yard calling up to her mother in some apartment window. I couldn’t discern what they were saying because I was studying the madman’s eyes.
“I have a few disorders,” he said after passing a hand over his food.
“You mean about last night?”
“Bipolar, mildly schizophrenic,” he continued. “One doctor called it a recurring paranoid delusional state but I told him that if he had seen half the things that I have that he’d live in Catatonia and eat opium to wake up.”
His laugh was only a flash of teeth and a nod. Everything Lawless did seemed pious and sacred—though I was sure he did not believe in God.
“Are you under a doctor’s care?” I asked him.
“You might say that,” he said. “I have a physician in New Delhi. A practitioner of ancient lore. He keeps me stocked with things like those pills you fed me. He keeps the old top spinning.”
Lawless pointed at his head.
“Maybe you’re addicted,” I suggested.
“Tell me about the murder,” he replied.
“I’m not working for you.”
“Are you going to work for yourself?” he asked.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it would be in your best interest to give me the information you have. That way I can make sure that the police and anybody else will leave you alone.”
He was right of course. But I didn’t want to admit it. I felt as if I had been tricked into my problems and I blamed A. Lawless for that.
“First I want you to answer some questions,” I said.
Lawless smiled and held his palms up—as in prayer.
“Who was that guy in the green suit talking about in your office yesterday?” I asked.
“A diamond dealer named Benny Lamarr. He was from South Africa originally but he relocated to New York about five years ago.”
“Why did you want to know about him?”
Lawless smiled. Then he nodded.
“I have a friend in the so-called intelligence center here in New York. She informs me when the government takes an interest in the ar
rests, detainments, deaths, or in the liberation of citizens, aliens, and government officials.”
“This is someone in your employ?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking. I maintain Nelly, but she only gives me information that is, or should be, public record. You know, Felix, the government and big business hide behind a mountain of data. They hide, in plain sight, the truth from us. I tease out that truth so that at least one man knows what’s going on.”
“What did this Nelly tell you?” I asked.
“The diamond dealer died in an automobile accident. There was no question of foul play on the local level but still the death was covered up. His files were sealed and sent to Arizona.”
“Arizona?”
“There’s a government facility outside of Phoenix where certain delicate information is handled.”
“Did you know this Lamarr?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you so concerned with him?”
“When I looked into Lamarr’s past I found that he had recently been seen in the company of a man named Tellman Drake. Drake had also moved to New York and changed his name to Kenneth Cornell. When I looked into both men together I found the other names on our list.”
“So what?”
Archibald Lawless smiled.
“What are you grinning about?” I asked him.
“You’re good at asking questions,” he said. “That’s a fine trait and something to know about you.”
“You’re only going to know me long enough to get me out of this trouble you started.”
Lawless held up his palms again. “Lamarr was in diamonds. Valerie Lox leases expensive real estate around the world. Tellman Drake—”
“Kenneth Cornell,” I said to make sure that I was following the story.
“Yes,” the anarchist said. “Kenny Cornell is a world class demolitions expert. Henry Lansman was an assassin when he lived in Lebanon, and Lana Drexel . . . Well, Lana Drexel learned when she was quite young that men, and women too, would give up their most guarded secrets in the light of love.”
“And the government was looking into all of these people?”
“I’m looking into them.”
“Why?”