Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 (10 page)

Jonah was bleeding pretty good from a rupture on his left cheekbone. He was breathing hard, and I was, too. I stood back to catch my breath, counting off the seconds in the back of my mind. Jonah took a staggery step forward and then fell face down into a puddle of glistening gray glop.

My legs were ready to run but I stopped long enough to turn the kid over. It would have probably been saving some innocent’s life to let Jonah die in that alley, but I had my new leaf to consider, and I was feeling some largesse after having won the test of arms.

I
got way too much pleasure out of beating on Jonah. Running down the alleyway behind the bar, I felt giddy over my performance. I still had it. I was still in the game.

Still a fool, was more like it.

I was in my red SUV speeding away in less than the five minutes it would have taken for the Oddfellows to be after me. My knuckles hurt and I was breathing hard to work off the adrenaline that the fight set loose. When the blood pressure began to fall I became aware of the fact that I’d messed up the one clear chance I had of getting to Thurman. My contacts in the city and state police departments of Albany were pretty much useless at that juncture. One man had been murdered and another was missing. I couldn’t make my connection to them public record. The police had to be kept out until I knew more.

The summer sun was still in the sky at six. I made my way to the South End. That part of town looked a bit seedier but was more to my sensibilities. There were black and brown peoples in among the whites, and so nobody would single me out for special treatment.

On Standard I passed a glass-and-plaster hotel named Gray Wolf Inn. It was a modern structure hemmed in by older, nondescript buildings that were neither offices nor warehouses, commercial spaces nor living lofts. These buildings had once been factories where Americans worked to feed their families and pay their bills. My father had spent his life organizing unions in places like this. They broke his bones and sent him to jail more than once, but he kept on organizing. Now the factories were all shut down and the unions reduced to rusty old buttons and yellowing membership cards in forgotten trunks. My father was long gone, as were the vestiges of his blood and hard work.

Gray Wolf had a glass door that opened onto a short hallway ending at a gunmetal elevator. On the right was a clear plastic cage where there sat an emaciated and sallow-skinned white lad whose eyes had seen more years than he had actually lived.

The young man didn’t have a proper desk. He was seated on a swivel stool at a turquoise ledge that jutted from the ochre wall. When I cleared my throat he stood up and approached the plastic barricade that sealed him away from danger. I was thankful for the barrier, certain that if he got a whiff of the sour odor of garbage on my clothes he wouldn’t have given me a room.

“How many nights?” the old-young man asked. He was wearing a blue shirt and blue pants but still the colors managed to clash—with each other and with the dirty yellow walls.

“Let’s start with one,” I said.

“Thirty-six ninety-six a night, including tax,” the impossibly skinny and long-faced kid announced. “Two-night minimum. The second night is a deposit against damages. That’s seventy-three ninety-two. Cash, no check.”

“What if I gave you a credit card?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

“There’s an extra fee of ten dollars,” the kid droned on, getting back into the groove of his spiel, “if you have guests.”

“No guests for me,” I said.

Some feeling must have escaped with those words because the kid gave me a closer look then. He seemed to be gauging me, but I wasn’t concerned.

He opened a sliding panel in front of him and placed a pen and registration form down on the plastic top, closed the panel, pressed a button, and then gestured for me to lift the panel on my side. I filled out the sheet, using the name Carter, with an address in Newark, New Jersey. I placed four twenty-dollar bills on the sheet and slid the panel closed (it locked shut immediately).

“Keep the change,” I told the kid.

He didn’t crack a smile or even nod in thanks, but I didn’t mind.

He passed the keycard over for room 4B and flipped a switch that opened the elevator door. I didn’t even have to push a button to go to the fourth floor. The kid did that, too, from his remote control.

 

 

 

I’VE BEEN IN third-class cruise-ship cabins that were larger than that room. Just one big bed that ended a few inches from a sliding, hollow pine door that opened onto the toilet. Standing at the sink, my butt was in the shower stall. To look out the window I had to get on my knees on the bed.

On the bright side, Jonah’s two blows hadn’t even caused my jaw to swell. It really didn’t even hurt all that badly. I took two aspirin and a shower, lay down on the mattress, which felt hard like rolled canvas, and fell into a light doze.

The dream was oddly altered in that cubicle room. Fire blazed all around me but I wasn’t frantic. My flesh was burning but that was of no consequence. When I got to the smoky glass I just pushed it out, effortlessly. On the other side, standing in blue sky, was the kid from downstairs. He gave me a calculating look and I waited for his request. He opened his mouth but the sound that came out was not in words; it wasn’t even human. It was a kind of electronic static. This sound slowly transformed into an insect-like buzzing. I wondered if the alarm clock was going off, if it was morning and I had slept through the night. But I hadn’t set the alarm. When I sat up I realized that the noise was coming from a telephone that had been left on the window ledge next to my head.

The buzzing stopped and I wondered who could be calling. It started again and I answered, “Hello?”

“Mr. Carter?”

“Who is this?”

“Jimmy from downstairs, sir.”

“What do you want, Jimmy?”

“I was just wondering if you needed some company.”

“What kind of company?”

“You know,” he continued, “a girl.”

A girl. Jimmy had called to offer me a girl. I realized that I had moved from a light nap into deep sleep. I was confused about the material world but quite lucid in my mind.

“How much?” I asked.

“Hundred bucks a half hour,” he said. “Five hundred for the night.”

“Who pays the ten bucks for the visitor?”

“The girl covers that fee.”

I was quiet for a moment or two, wondering about Jimmy being in the dream and at the same time on the phone interrupting the dream.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They’re all clean,” he protested. “I don’t let no junkies up in here.”

I could have asked how he knew if a girl didn’t have tracks between her toes but I didn’t. I didn’t care.

“Okay. All right. But I want someone young and black,” I said. “Pretty if it’s possible, but with a sharp tongue. And she has to be black.”

“I can do that, Mr. Carter,” Jimmy said eagerly. “Gimme twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“Take your time, son.”

“You need anything else?”

“Yeah. You got an Albany phone book down there?”

“I think so. It might be from a couple’a years ago.”

“Send it up with the girl.”

“Yes, sir.”

The thought of Jimmy made me smile. He was an old, corrupt soul bunged into a young, inept body. The only thing that got his motor running was commerce. He didn’t even care about the money, only the method by which he got it. The tip was an insult, but providing me with female companionship made him feel like he was getting something accomplished. I liked that. It had the stink of humanity about it, something akin to the bouquet of Gorgonzola cheese.

I opened my duffel and took out a rolled-up navy-blue suit that was an exact replica of the one that got soiled in the alley. I liked Jimmy’s predictability, and anything else I could count on.

T
he room was barely large enough to accommodate the queen-size bed. I was sitting at the edge, still a little groggy, when a tapping came on the door. I didn’t have to stand up to open it but I did.

The child was young, and even darker-skinned than I. She wore a yellow party dress but no smile. Slender, she was wider below the waistline than above it. She was hugging a well-worn phone book against her chest.

“Come on in,” I said, moving to the side because the bed blocked a courteous retreat.

She walked in, leaving the door open.

“One hundred dollars up front,” were her first words.

I took a fold of four fifties from my shirt pocket and handed them to her. She traded the tattered phone book for the money.

“Two hundred for one hour,” I said.

She counted the bills twice, closed the door, then turned to look at me. Her gaze was clear but not innocent. Those big eyes weren’t worldly but neither were they inexperienced.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Seraphina,” she said.

“S-a-r-a-f ... ?” I asked.

“S-
e
-r-a-
p
-
h
-
i
-n-a,” she said like a third-grade teacher who had lost patience before her current crop of students were ever born.

“Beautiful name,” I said. “Beautiful dress, beautiful skin, beautiful girl. Have a seat.”

I sat on the south side of the bed while Seraphina took the east. If anything she was wary now. Compliments are often camouflage for hidden resentment, and I had just given out four tributes in quick order.

“What you want?” she asked.

“Talk.”

“You could go to a bar an’ buy a girl a drink if you just wanted to talk to somebody.”

“Not with my luck.”

“You unlucky?” she asked, allowing a little gruff friendliness to show.

I grunted a laugh and nodded.

“I’m from Newark,” I said. “And I came here looking for a guy.”

I handed her the business card and she studied it.

“That’s a white man,” she said, handing it back to me. “I cain’t tell ’em apart. Sometimes, if they ask for me more than once, I could tell you about how they smell. But that’s about it.”

She was looking around the room, sneering at what she saw.

Jimmy had certainly delivered the girl I’d asked for.

“What you want him for?” Seraphina asked.

“He hired me to do a job and then didn’t pay me.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I went to a bar looking for this Ambrose guy and a big white dude started a fight with me. I gave him better’n he gave me, but I still need to find this man.”

“Where he hit you?” she asked.

I gestured at the left side of my jaw.

The child leaned over and touched my cheek with four fingers. My heart started thumping. I could feel my nostrils widen.

“Skin is hot but it ain’t swole,” she said.

The last time I’d had sex was about three months before, the night Katrina came back. There was nothing enjoyable about that evening. I had to take a pill to make it. It was the kind of pill that made you hard but not happy. I would have liked to get naked with Seraphina. She was young and I’d already paid for it. I wanted her and there would have been nothing wrong with it, at least not that time. But sex with that child would have been the first step away from the man I intended to be.

“You have a boyfriend, Seraphina?”

“Of course I do.”

“You and him know a lotta people in the clubs and stuff?”

“Yeah?”

“You see,” I said, “I think that this guy I’m lookin’ for might know people. You know, dealers and gamblers, like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So I was wonderin’ if maybe there was somebody somewhere who might know a lot of what’s goin’ on with the gamblers and hustlers around here.”

I was being very careful. Seraphina was a young prostitute. She might not have even been legal. She was still sensitive and therefore, very possibly, on the alert for insults. I couldn’t mention pimps or whores, but I needed a whore’s connections.

“There’s Big Mouth Jones down at Tinker’s Bar and Grill,” she said. “He know ev’rybody, an’ he got big mouth, too.”

“Black guy?”

“Uh-huh. But you better not get in any fight wit’ him. He got a crew down there kill a man just like that.”

I smiled as I almost always do when people suggest that they or someone else might kill me.

“You ain’t scared?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“You want me to take off my clothes?”

“Truth is, Seraphina, when a man is making love to a woman, he’s also makin’ love to himself.”

“What do that mean?” she asked with barely a sneer.

“That he imagines himself powerful and manly next to her beauty.”

“So?”

“You are beautiful. I can see that. But I’m old and chubby, not like some young man that a woman like you would want to see naked and straining.”

“How you know what I wanna see?”

“Is your boyfriend strong and well built?”

“Yeah.”

“And do you like that?”

“Yeah,” she said with a slight smile. “But that don’t mean nuthin’. I might like you anyway.”

“It’s kind of you to say, child. But I know better than to embarrass myself like that.”

“I could make you feel good.” She took my hand.

The words made me dizzy. My tongue went dry.

“You breathin’ hard, Mr. Carter,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t be with you, girl.” I pulled away, gently.

“If you afraida disease I could just use my hands.”

“I’m more afraida you than I am of any bug.”

“Me? I’m just a girl.”

I stood up.

“Thank you, Seraphina. You’ve been a lot of help.”

I handed her a fifty-dollar tip, then took her by the wrist to bring her to her feet. She put her hands flat against my chest and I flinched.