The Twelfth Card (50 page)

Sachs said ominously, “If you’re lying, if something happens to her, we can make sure the rest of your life’s totally miserable.”

“How?” Boyd asked, genuinely curious, it seemed.

“You killed the librarian, Dr. Barry. You attacked and tried to kill police officers. You could get consecutive lifetimes. And we’re looking into the death of a girl yesterday on Canal Street. Somebody pushed her in front of a bus near where you were escaping from Elizabeth Street. We’re running your picture past witnesses. You’ll go away forever.”

A shrug. “Doesn’t hardly matter.”

“You don’t care?” Sachs asked.

“I know you people don’t understand me. I don’t blame you. But, see, I don’t care about prison. I don’t care about
anything
. Y’all can’t really touch me. I’m dead already. Killing somebody doesn’t matter to me, saving a life doesn’t matter.” He glanced at Amelia Sachs, who was staring at him. Boyd said, “I see that look. You’re wond’ring what kinda monster is this fella? Well, fact is, y’all made me who I am.”

“We did?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, ma’am . . . You know my profession.”

“Executions control officer,” Rhyme said.

“Yes, sir. Now something I’ll tell you ’bout that line of work: You can find the names of every human legally executed in these United States. Which is a lot. And you can find the names of all the governors who waited up till midnight or whenever to commute them if the inclination was there. You can find the names of all the victims the condemned murdered, and much of the time the names of their next of kin. But do you know the one name you won’t find?”

He looked at the officers around him. “Us people
who push the button. The executioners. We’re forgotten. Ever’body thinks ’bout how capital punishment affects the families of the condemned. Or society. Or the victims’ families. Not to mention the man or woman gets put down like a dog in the process. But nobody ever spends a drop of sweat on us executioners. Nobody ever stops and thinks what happens to us.

“Day after day, living with our people—men, women too, course, who’re gonna die, getting to know ’em. Talking to ’em. ’Bout everything under the sun. Hearing a black man ask how come is it the white guy who did the exact same crime gets off with life, or maybe even less, but he himself’s gonna die? The Mexican swearing he didn’t rape and kill that girl. He was just buying beer at 7-Eleven and the police come up and next he knows he’s on Death Row. And a year after he’s in the ground they do a DNA test and find out they
did
have the wrong man, and he was innocent all along.

“Course, even the guilty ones’re human beings too. Living with all of them, day after day. Being decent to them because they’re decent to you. Getting to know ’em. And then . . . then you kill ’em. You, all by yourself. With your own hands, pushing the button, throwing the switch . . . It changes you.

“You know what they say? You heard it. ‘Dead man walking.’ It’s supposed to mean the prisoner. But it’s really us. The executioners. We’re the dead men.”

Sachs muttered, “But your girlfriend? How could you shoot her?”

He fell silent. For the first time a darkness clouded his face. “I pondered firing that shot. I’d hoped maybe I’d have this
feeling
that I shouldn’t do it. That she meant too much to me. I’d let her be and
run, just take my chances. But . . . ” He shook his head. “Didn’t happen. I looked at her and all I felt was numb. And I knew that it’d make sense to shoot her.”

“And if the children had been home and not her?” Sachs gasped. “You’d’ve shot one of them to escape?”

He considered this for a moment. “Well, ma’am, I guess we know
that
would’ve worked, wouldn’t it? You
would’ve
stopped to save one of the girls ’stead of coming after me. Like my daddy told me: It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”

The darkness seemed to lift from his face, as if he’d finally received some answer or come to some conclusion in a debate that had been troubling him for a long time.

The Hanged Man . . . The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is.

He glanced at Rhyme. “Now, you don’t mind, I think it’s time for me to get back home.”

“Home?”

He looked at them curiously. “Jail.”

As if, what else would he possibly mean?

*   *   *

Father and daughter got off the C train at 135th street and started east, toward Langston Hughes High.

She hadn’t wanted him to come but he’d insisted on looking after her—which Mr. Rhyme and Detective Bell had insisted on too. Besides, she reflected, he’d be back in Buffalo by tomorrow and she supposed she could tolerate an hour or two with him.

He nodded back at the subway. “Used to love to write on C trains. Paint stuck real nice . . . I knew a lot of people’d see it. Did an end-to-end in 1976. It was the Bicentennial that year. Those tall ships were in town. My ’piece was of one of those boats, ’long with the Statue of Liberty.” He laughed. “The MTA didn’t scrub that car for at least a week, I heard. Maybe they were just busy but I like to think somebody liked what I painted and kept it up for longer than normal.”

Geneva grunted. She was thinking that
she
had a story to tell
him
. A block away she could see the construction scaffolding in front of the same building she’d been working on when she’d been fired. How’d her father like to know that her job had been scrubbing graffiti
off
the redeveloped buildings? Maybe she’d even erased some of his. Tempted to tell him. But she didn’t.

At the first working pay phone they found on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Geneva stopped, fished for some change. Her father offered her his cell phone.

“That’s okay.”

“Take it.”

She ignored him, dropped the coins in and called Lakeesha, while her father pocketed his cell and wandered to the curb, looking around the neighborhood like a boy in front of the candy section in a bodega.

She turned away as her friend answered. “ ’Lo?”

“It’s all over with, Keesh.” She explained about the jewelry exchange, the bombing.

“That what was goin’ on? Damn. A terrorist? That some scary shit. But you okay?”

“I’m down. Really.”

Geneva heard another voice, a male one, saying
something to her friend, who put her hand over the receiver for a moment. Their muted exchange seemed heated.

“You there, Keesh?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody. Where you at? You not in that basement crib no more, right?”

“I’m still where I told you—with that policeman and his girlfriend. The one in the wheelchair.”

“You there now?”

“No, I’m Uptown. Going to school.”

“Now?”

“Pick up my homework.”

The girl paused. Then: “Listen, I’ma hook up with you at school. Wanna see you, girl. When you be there?”

Geneva glanced at her father, nearby, hands in his pockets, still surveying the street. She decided she didn’t want to mention him to Keesha, or anybody else, just yet.

“Let’s make it tomorrow, Keesh. I don’t have any time now.”

“Daymn, girl.”

“Really. Better tomorrow.”

“Wha-ever.”

Geneva heard the click of the disconnect. Yet she stayed where she was for some moments, delaying going back to her father.

Finally she joined him and they continued toward the school.

“You know what was up there, three or four blocks?” he asked, pointing north. “Strivers Row. You ever seen it?

“No,” she muttered.

“I’ll take you up there sometime. Hundred years
ago, this land developer fellow, named King, he built these three big apartments and tons of town houses. Hired three of the best architects in the country and told ’em to go to work. Beautiful places. King Model Homes was the real name but they were so expensive and so nice, this’s the story, the place was called Strivers Row ’cause you had to
strive
to live there. W. C. Handy lived there for a time. You know him? Father of the blues. Most righteous musician ever lived. I did a ’piece up that way one time. I ever tell you about that? Took me thirty cans to do. Wasn’t a throw-up; I spent two days on it. Did a picture of W. C. himself. Photographer from the
Times
shot it and put it in the paper.” He nodded north. “It was there for—”

She stopped fast. Her hands slapped her hips. “Enough!”

“Genie?”

“Just stop it. I don’t want to hear this.”

“You—”

“I don’t care about any of what you’re telling me.”

“You’re mad at me, honey. Who wouldn’t be after everything? Look, I made a mistake,” he said, his voice cracking. “That was the past. I’m different now. Everything’s going to be different. I’ll never put anybody ahead of you again, like I did when I was with your moms. You’re the one I should’ve been trying to save—and not by taking that trip to Buffalo.”

“No! You don’t get it! It’s not about what you did. It’s your whole goddamn
world
I don’t want any part of. I don’t care about Strivers whatever it is, I don’t care about the Apollo or the Cotton Club. Or the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t
like
Harlem. I hate it here. It’s guns and crack and rapes and people
getting fiended for a cheap-ass plated bling and drugstore hoops. It’s girls, all they care about is extensions and braids. And—”

“And Wall Street’s got insider traders and New Jersey’s got the mob and Westchester’s got trailer parks,” he replied.

She hardly heard him. “It’s boys, all they care about is getting girls in bed. It’s ignorant people who don’t care how they talk. It’s—”

“What’s wrong with AAVE?”

She blinked. “How do you know about that?” He himself had never talked ghetto—his own father had made sure he’d worked hard in school (at least until he dropped out to start the “career” of defacing city property). But most people who lived here didn’t know that the official name for what they spoke was African-American Vernacular English.

“When I was inside,” he explained, “I got my high school diploma and a year of college.”

She said nothing.

“I mostly studied reading and words. Maybe won’t help me get a job but it’s what drew me. I always liked books and things, you know that. I’m the one had you reading from jump . . . . I studied Standard. But I studied Vernacular too. And I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“You don’t speak it,” she pointed out sharply.

“I didn’t grow
up
speaking it. I didn’t grow up speaking French or Mandingo either.”

“I’m sick of hearing people say, ‘Lemme axe you a question.’ ”

Her father shrugged. “ ‘Axe’ is just an Old-English version of ‘ask.’ Royalty used to say it. There’re
Bible
translations that talk about ‘axing’ God for mercy. It’s not a black thing, like people say. The combination of saying
s
and
k
next to each
other’s hard to pronounce. It’s easier to transpose. And ‘ain’t’? Been in the English language since Shakespeare’s day.”

She laughed. “Try getting a job talking Vernacular.”

“Well, what if somebody from France or Russia’s trying for that same job? Don’t you think the boss’d give them a chance, listen to ’em, see if they’d work hard, were smart, even if they spoke different English? Maybe the problem’s that the boss is using somebody’s language as a reason
not
to hire him.” He laughed. “People in New York damn well better be able to speak some Spanish and Chinese in the next few years. Why not Vernacular?”

His logic infuriated her even more.

“I
like
our language, Genie. It sounds natural to me. Makes me feel at home. Look, you’ve got every right to be mad at me for what I did. But not for who I am or what we came out of. This’s home. And you know what you do with your home, don’t you? You change what oughta be changed and learn to be proud of what you can’t.”

Geneva jammed her eyes closed and lifted her hands to her face. The years and years she dreamed of a parent—not even the luxury of two, but just
one
person to be there when she came home in the afternoons, to look over her homework, to wake her up in the morning. And when that wasn’t going to happen, when she’d finally managed to shore up her life on her own and start working her way out of this godforsaken place, here comes the past to yoke and choke her and drag her back.

“But that’s not what I want,” she whispered. “I want something more than this mess.” She waved her hand around the streets.

“Oh, Geneva, I understand that. All I’m hoping for is maybe we have a couple of nice years here,
’fore you off into the world. Give me a chance to make up for what we did to you, your mother and me. You deserve the world . . . . But honey, I gotta say—can you name me one place that’s perfect? Where all the streets’re paved with gold? Where everybody loves their neighbors?” He laughed and slipped into Vernacular. “You say it a mess here? Well, damn straight. But where ain’t it a mess one way or th’other, baby? Where ain’t it?”

He put his arm around her. She stiffened but she didn’t otherwise resist. They started for the school.

*   *   *

Lakeesha Scott sat on the bench in Marcus Garvey Park, where she’d been for the past half hour, after she’d come back from her counter job in the restaurant downtown.

She lit another Merit, thinking: There are things we do ’cause we want to and things we do ’cause we gotta. Survival things.

And what she was about now was one of those had-to things.

Why the fuck didn’t Geneva say that after all this shit she was booking on out of town and never coming back?

She was going to Detroit or ’Bama?

Sorry, Keesh, we can’t see each other anymore. I’m talking forever. Bye.

That way, the whole fucking problem’d be gone for good.

Why, why, why?

And it was worse than that: Gen had to go and tell her exactly where she was going to be for the next few hours. Keesh had no excuse to miss the girl now. Oh, she’d kept up her ghetto patter when they’d
been talking a while ago so her friend wouldn’t hop to something going down. But now, sitting alone, she sank into sorrow.