“You accepted the story about the drugged coffee too easily. But you know as well as I do that drugging people with any certainty is no easy task. If they used enough to make sure you wouldn’t wake up, you would have tasted the difference. Or, even if you didn’t, you’d have been knocked out before you could climb two flights of stairs.”
Junie is fingering the trigger of the Walther. The Lecturer watches her do it, and knows she knows he is watching.
“You can relax,” he says. “There’s nobody here but us.”
“How did I do it?” she asks. “When? The diversion—the trash can being knocked over—I was upstairs asleep when that happened. And if Kimberly didn’t do it, then Kimberly can vouch for me.” She considers. “And before that, I was miles away. Sharon can vouch for me.”
“I thought about that. And at first I reasoned that the two of you were working together. If you and Sharon snuck back to the house, naturally she would vouch for you. But then I decided the idea was ridiculous. Sharon was after your job. She would have no reason to cooperate. As for Kimberly, she was little more than a hanger-on. She would have betrayed you in a second, and you know it.”
“From which you conclude—”
“That you acted alone.”
“But how? When could I have done it? Before we left, the prisoner was guarded. After we got back, the prisoner was guarded. When could I possibly have killed him?”
“You told me yourself. When you got back with Sharon. Just before you told Hammie and Paul to guard the basement all night. Remember? You told me that you unlocked the door and went downstairs to make sure he was all right. You came back up and told the group that he was. But that was a lie. You had killed him, right under their noses. And you knew you would get away with it, your reputation for nonviolence unsullied.”
They lapse into silence again, almost as companionable as by the lake that night in Chicago.
“Wow,” she finally says.
“Wow indeed.”
“So what happens now?”
“Nothing. You go off to find your children, and I sit here and wait for the feds.”
“You mean the pigs.”
He smiles. “Sorry.”
“You’re getting soft in your old age.”
“All the more reason.”
They stand. Face each other. Hug. Briefly, then fiercely.
“What’s your real name?” she asks. “I’m tired of calling you Jeremy.”
“It’s just a name,” he says. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He tells her. There is no reason not to tell her. In a day or two she will read it in the papers anyway.
“That’s a nice name,” she says.
“My parents thought so.”
“I bet they were great people.”
“Quite excellent, in fact.”
For some reason they both laugh.
“Come with me,” she says again.
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. Everything’s arranged. Transport out of here. We’ll be gone before the FBI gets here. I can promise you that.”
Frederick again, he is thinking. But maybe not. Maybe this strange, brilliant woman has contacts of which he knows nothing.
“I have to stay,” says the Lecturer. “I’ve done terrible things. I have to pay for my sins.”
“I’ve done terrible things, too.”
“They don’t compare. Not even close.”
“I killed a helpless old man.”
“You executed a vicious, murdering Klansman. A man for whom you actually had compassion. I imagine that you stood there, you took the tape off his mouth to ask if he needed anything, and he said something foul. You lost control for an instant. That’s all.”
“That’s what you imagine.”
“Yes, Junie. That’s what I imagine.”
“You didn’t say ‘Commander.’ ”
“You’re not the commander anymore.”
They have drawn apart now but their hands are still linked.
“He was still a human being,” she says.
“I know.”
“He didn’t deserve . . .”
She trails off. At first the Lecturer thinks that she has tired of her own argument. Then he realizes that she has heard something that he missed.
“It’s time to go,” she says. “Right now.”
“Goodbye, Junie.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the best thing,” he says, “for the revolution.”
She smiles at that, gets up on her toes, kisses him lightly. Then, without a look back, she slips out the door and is gone.
The Lecturer remains in exactly the same spot, unmoving, hands outstretched as if reaching for hers. He is still standing there, unarmed, when they blow three holes in the roof and come pouring in.
STEPHEN L. CARTER is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught for more than thirty-five years. He is the author of six bestselling novels, including The Emperor of Ocean Park, New England White, and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. He has published dozens of articles in law reviews and many hundreds of op-eds, as well as eight acclaimed works of nonfiction, including The Culture of Disbelief and The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. His next book is a biography of the first black woman prosecutor in New York, who battled the Mob in the 1930s.
LEE CHILD
* * *
New Blank Document
This all was about ten years ago, back when I didn’t get many cold calls at all. Maybe I would get two in a month. Sometimes three. Random assignments, because I was cheap, and I was always available. I was a new freelancer making his name, fully aware that for a long time pickings would be slim, so I was also always willing. I was happy to go anywhere and do anything. A couple thousand words here or there would pay my rent. Another couple thousand would put food on my table.
My phone rang and I answered it and heard faint whistling and scratching. Not a local number. Turned out to be a magazine editor in Paris, France. A transatlantic call. The first I ever got. The guy’s English was accented but fluent. He said he had gotten my name from a bureau. The place he mentioned was one we all signed up for, in the hopes of getting a little local legwork for a foreign publication. Turned out my hopes had come true that day. The guy in Paris said he wanted to send me on just such an assignment. He said his magazine was the biggest this and the biggest that, but in the end what it boiled down to for me was he wanted sidebar coverage about some guy’s brother.
“Cuthbert Jackson’s brother,” he said, reverently, like he was awarding me the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I didn’t answer. I pecked out Cuthbert Jackson one-handed on my keyboard, and the search engine came back with an obscure American jazz pianist, an old black guy, born in Florida but for a long time permanently resident in France.
I said, “Cuthbert Jackson the piano player?”
“And so much more,” the Paris guy said. “You know him, of course. My magazine is attempting a full-scale biography. We plan to serialize it over thirteen weeks. Recently, for the first time ever, Monsieur Jackson revealed he has a living relative. A brother, still in Florida. Naturally we need to include his point of view in our story. You must go see him at once. Am I correct you live near Florida?”
As a matter of fact he was correct, which I guess explained how he picked me out of the bureau’s list. Simple geography. Less mileage.
I said, “Florida is a big state, but yes, I live right next to it.”
“Ideally you should obtain biographical detail about their family situation. That would be excellent. But don’t worry. Worst case, we can use anything you get, as purely sidebar coverage if necessary, as if to say, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing.”
“I understand,” I said.
“This is very important.”
“I
understand,” I said again.
• • •
Ten years ago the net was not what it is today. But it was far enough along to give me what I needed. There were message boards and fan forums, and websites with old photographs, and jazz history sites, and some political stuff, mostly in French. Long story short, Cuthbert Jackson was born in 1925 in a no-account shit hole in the Florida Panhandle. There was one piano in town and he played it all the time. He was such a prodigy that by the time he was four people were so used to it they stopped mentioning it. At the age of eighteen he was drafted by the U.S. Army and trained up as a support engineer. He was sent to Europe with the D-Day invasion. He was sent to Paris to march in the GI parade after liberation. He never left. At first he was listed as AWOL, and then he was forgotten about.
He played the piano in Paris, all through the grim postwar years, sweating in tiny downstairs clubs, for people desperate for something new to believe in, who found part of it in American music played by an exiled black man. He would have said he was evolving the music, not just playing it, perhaps faster and more radically because of his isolation. He wasn’t in L.A. or Greenwich Village. He wasn’t really hearing anyone else’s stuff. Which made some folks call his direction a school or a movement, which led to existential disputes with devotees of other schools and movements. Which led to growing fame, which in an adopted French way made him more and more reclusive, which made him more and more famous. What little he said, he considered plain common sense, but when translated into French he sounded like Socrates. His record sales went through the roof. In France. Nowhere else. It was a thing back then. There were black writers and poets and painters, all Americans, all living in Paris, all doing well. News weeklies did a couple of stories. Cuthbert Jackson’s name came up.
Because of the political stuff. France was moving right along. It had aerospace and automobiles and nuclear bombs. Everyone was doing pretty well. Except Americans were doing better. Which led to a heady mixture of disdain and envy. Which led to criticism. Which led to a question: Why do your black people do better when they come over here?
Which was kind of smug, and totally circular, because it wasn’t really a question, but a move in the game. Either way it was buried by the gigantic storms already brewing at home. By contrast it seemed quaint and civilized. People agreed a movie could be made. People wondered if a State Department memo could be optioned.
Cuthbert Jackson himself generally ignored the issue, but if asked a direct question, he would answer, with what he considered plain common sense, though as he got older and terser the French translations came out more and more weird and philosophical. One guy wrote a whole book about Jackson’s five-word answer to a question about the likely future of mankind.
His most recent CD was with his regular trio, and it had sold pretty well.
His most recent public statement was that he had a brother.
• • •
On my map the address everyone seemed to agree on looked to be in hardscrabble country, most of a day’s drive away, so I left early. I was sure there would be no motels. I figured I would sleep in the car. Anything and anywhere. I had rent to pay.
The town was as bad as I had expected. Maybe a little meaner. It was all low houses, grouped tight around what looked like the archeological ruins of a previous civilization. Some kind of an old factory, maybe sugar, and the stores and the banks that followed, some in decent buildings, even handsome, in a modest, three-story kind of way, all abandoned decades ago, now overgrown and falling down. I got out of the car where I saw a group of men gathered. They were all waiting for something. There was a mixture of impatience for it and certainty it would arrive.
I asked a guy, “What’s coming?”
He said, “The pizza truck.”
It showed up right on time and turned out to be their new version of a bar, since their last real bar fell down. The pizza guy had cans of beer in a cooler, which might or might not have complied with county ordinances, but which either way turned eating pizza into a standing-around event, like the best kind of place, with the beer playing the role of the beer, and the pizza standing in for the potato chips and the salted peanuts. I counted twenty people. I told one of them I was looking for Cuthbert Jackson’s brother.
He said, “Who?”
“Cuthbert Jackson. He played the piano. He had a brother.”
Another guy said, “Who?”
And then another. They all seemed interested. Maybe they ran out of things to say about pizza.
I said, “He’s famous in France.”
No reaction.
I asked, “Who is the oldest person here?”
Turned out to be a guy aged eighty, eating a pepperoni pie and drinking a High Life.
I asked him, “Do you remember World War Two?”
He said, “Sure I do.”
“Cuthbert Jackson went in the army when he was eighteen, which would make you sixteen at the time. Prior to that he could play the piano real well. You probably heard him.”
“That kid never came back.”
“Because he stayed in France.”
“We thought he was killed.”
“He wasn’t. Now he says he has a brother.”
“Is he still a musician?”
“Very much so.”
“Then maybe it’s a metaphor. You know what it’s like, with artistic people. Maybe he had some kind of spiritual epiphany. All about the brotherhood of man.”
“Suppose he didn’t?”
“Are you a reporter?”
“Proud to be,” I said, like I always planned to.
“Who do you work for?”
“Anyone prepared to pay me. Right now a magazine in France.”
The guy said, “We thought he was killed. Why would he stay in France? I don’t see how that’s natural.”
I said, “Do you know his brother?”
“Sure,” he said, and he walked me a couple of steps, and waved the pointed end of his pepperoni pie at the last house on the next street.
• • •
I knocked on the door, and it was opened by another guy who looked about eighty. Which was about right. Cuthbert himself was eighty-two. His long-lost brother would be plus or minus. The old guy said his name was Albert Jackson. I told him a guy from these parts named Cuthbert Jackson had become very famous in France. Recently he had added to his bio that he had a brother.
“Why would he say that?” Albert asked.
“Is it not true?”
“On the television shows they want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I’m just a reporter asking a question.”
“What was the question?”
“Are you Cuthbert Jackson’s brother?”
Albert Jackson said, “Yes, I am.”
“That’s good.”
“Is it?”
“In the sense that the new bio is proved correct. Future historians will not be misled. In France, I mean. A guy wrote a whole book about five words he said.”
“I haven’t seen him for more than sixty years.”
“What do you remember of him?”
“He could play the piano.”
“Did you think he was killed in the war?”
Albert shook his head. “He told me many times. He was going to let them take him all over, and he was going to pick out the best place he saw, and he was going to stay there. He said if the war lasted long enough for me to get drafted, I should do the same thing.”
“Because it would be better somewhere else for a black man?”
“Who plays the piano, I guess. Although plenty of piano-playing folk are doing pretty good right here.”
“Did you ever hear from him?”
“One time. I wrote him about something, and he wrote me back.”
“Were you surprised he never came home?”
“I guess a little at first. But later, not so much.”
“Would you help me out with background in
formation about your family situation?”
“I guess someone needs to.”
“Why’s that?”
“You think the bio is correct, but it ain’t. Historians will be wrong. I don’t know why he said what he said, that he had a brother. I’m not sure what he meant. I might want some time to figure it out.”
“I don’t understand. You just told me you and he are brothers.”
“We are.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The bio should say he had two brothers.”
We sat down and I took out my computer, and Albert started to tell me the story, but as soon as I saw where it was going I paused him momentarily, and saved the French file, and opened a new blank document, for what I felt was going to be the real story. I remember the moment. It felt like journalists ought to feel.
A black farmer named Bertrand Jackson had three sons and three daughters, all thirty months apart, all perfectly interlaced in terms of gender, Cuthbert first, the eldest boy, who grew up playing the piano, then went to war, then stayed overseas. The middle boy was Albert, sitting right there telling me the story, and the youngest boy was Robert. The girls in between were delightful. Their mother was happy. The land was producing. Things were pretty good for the farmer. He felt like a man of substance. Altogether a success. He had only one problem. His youngest son, Robert, was slow in the head. He was always smiling, always amiable, but farm work was beyond him. Which was okay. The others could carry him.
Then the farmer made a mistake. Because he felt like a man of substance, he tried to register to vote in the presidential election. He felt it was his civic duty. He kept on going a good long time before he gave up. Afterward a county guy told him never to try again. Things got chilly. They were jealous, he figured. Because his farm was doing well. Maybe a little disconcerted. November rolled into December.
Meanwhile the farmer had gotten Robert a job sweeping up in the dry goods store where he bought his seed. The owner was a white guy. Sometimes his daughter worked the register. Christmas was coming, so Robert made her a card. He labored over the writing. He put, I hope you send me a card too. Her daddy saw it, and he showed it to his friends, and pretty soon a lynch mob was coming for Robert, because of his lewd interracial suggestion. He was made to stand on a riverbank, tied hand and foot. His daddy, the farmer, was made to watch. Robert was told he had a choice. He could fall off the riverbank by himself, or they could shoot him off. Either way he was going in the water. He was going to drown. Nothing could be done about that part. Robert said, Daddy, help me, and the farmer said, I’m sorry, son, I can’t, because I have four more at home, and a farm, and your mother. Robert fell in by himself. Afterward the same county guy came by and said, now you see what happens. He said, voting ain’t for you.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 9