Tough Lessons

by Chris Freeman

  12

  They brought Eddie back late morning but he was a different man. Gone was the wiseass humor and bantering comebacks of Eddie in a good mood. Gone too was the cantankerous foul mouth of Eddie in a bad mood. Joseph missed that almost as much. In its place was a listless old man who wasn’t interested in anything. He was helped into bed, still wearing the pajamas Marjorie had found somewhere amid the disordered chaos of his bedroom. She had laundered them and Joseph had brought them down to the hospital for Eddie so he would have something clean to wear on his journey home.

  They propped him up with pillows stuffed behind his back and then surrounded him with items at arm’s reach, which he studiously ignored. Books, magazines, candy, and messages from a handful of well-wishers were barely glanced at, even the card from Yomi. He quietly turned down all offers of food and nonalcoholic drink. Instead, he stared off into the middle distance of his apartment window, contemplating the sky intently, as if he was sure something interesting might fall from it at any moment.

  When he communicated with Joseph and Marjorie at all it was only to answer their most direct of questions with a single word.

  “You okay, honey?” asked the concerned old lady.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we get you anything?”

  “No,” pronounced nyaah with strangled Jersey vowels.

  “You want the radio on?” Joseph asked but the question didn’t seem to even warrant a reply.

  Eventually, Marjorie asked, “You sure you don’t want me to fetch some of my soup?” and she finally received a sentence from him.

  “Quit fussing over me, woman, goddammit,” he growled.

  “Normally I’d have torn you a new asshole for that,” she told him calmly, “but you been beat up bad enough already. I’ll come by again later, see if you in a better mood. Come on, Joseph.” And they left Eddie alone with his thoughts.

  “He didn’t badger us once for a sip of Irish whiskey,” said the old woman confidentially in the corridor. “Things must be bad.”

  She was right, thought Joseph. He hadn’t and they were.

  His old Lago friend Cyrus was waiting for him down at the Impala with a huge, toothy grin and a bottle of cold beer. It was an appointment he could do without right now, but Cyrus had said he had a proposition to put to his friend. Joseph thought he’d better turn up to make sure it wasn’t some damn fool idea that would get them both in trouble. Cyrus attracted trouble, like horseshit attracts flies.

  “Joseph, my brother!” he called and waved the bottle of beer at his friend. Joseph waved back and crossed the floor. As always, the Impala was full of off-duty taxi drivers, minimum-wage hotel workers, and barmen on a break, all spending their tips on a little bit of West African food to remind them of the home they had left behind. Joseph hadn’t thought he was hungry when he walked in but that soon changed when he passed a table filled with plates of Ikokore, boiled yams cooked with dried fish in tomatoes and palm oil, and Ewa, the soft beans made with onions and peppers. Oh how the Impala reminded him of home with its bittersweet memories of the meals Apara had prepared for him. That was another life and it seemed so long ago.

  When he reached Cyrus, his friend got to his feet and embraced him. “It’s good to see you, my brother. Tonight we eat together and this time it is all on me, Joseph. I knew you would protest, which is why I have ordered already, so I am very glad you are on time. They are bringing us pancakes and beef Suya with Jollof rice.”

  “That’s generous of you, Cyrus,” answered Joseph doubtfully, “but I don’t think I can let you buy me dinner, unless you finally went on Jeopardy and won.”

  Cyrus laughed. He was always telling everybody that would listen how easy it would be to get rich on American game shows.

  “There’s no need for that, my friend. I’m doing pretty good now and it’s all thanks to my new job, which is why I wanted to speak to you.” Cyrus Agyeman had gone up in the world. No longer a cab driver, these days he liked to refer to himself as the concierge of a small hotel in Mott Haven, though in reality he actually worked for the real concierge. These days, he wore a dark suit and tie, even here in the Impala. He had already explained to Joseph how he was the linkman to out-of-towners and the things they desired from a business trip. “If they want it, I can get it for them,” he would say confidentially. “Except drugs,” he then added quickly for Joseph’s benefit. “Drugs I don’t get for anybody, not ever, but tickets for a show, perhaps even a girl… maybe…” He shrugged and smiled self-consciously. A little over a year ago, Cyrus had almost been sent away for life when the local drug lord tried to frame him for murder. Joseph had managed to get him off the hook and Cyrus had never stopped thanking him for it. He thought he owed his friend, big style. For Joseph it was different. Cyrus had been the only friend he had when he arrived in America with a young son and precious little else. It was Cyrus who had found him a job, got him in front of the right people for the apartment. Joseph reckoned they were about even.

  “The man I told you about, my manager at the hotel, he’s a good guy, not a crook. I mean, maybe he doesn’t pay all of his taxes but he isn’t a gangster, you know what I mean,” confided Cyrus. “Anyhow, he likes me. Why? Because I work hard and we make money together. The hotel pay us to take care of the guests, and then we put them into things, hire cars, cabs sometimes.” He gave Joseph a significant look. “Then there’s restaurants, Broadway shows, gambling, and if they want a little company…we provide all the things men want when they are in town on business. What their wives don’t see…” He grinned at the sheer nerve of some of the hotel’s guests. “Anyway, all this action don’t come cheap. The guests pay good money for these entertainments and since we are the ones who get to send them places, those places pay us for recommending them. This guy I work for, he’s in with all the top managers at the hotels. They trust him. So he gets to put a new concierge in a hotel from our group when one of them leaves and a job becomes vacant and do you know what?”

  “What?”

  “One just left.” Cyrus was smiling again. “Which means he’s looking for a good man. Since there is a shortage of good men in New York City, this isn’t as easy as you might think. My manager wants someone discreet, who will work hard and isn’t too greedy. He needs someone who’ll kick a fair share of the money back to him, not try and keep it all for himself like some guys do. He asked me if I knew anyone and I told him all about my friend Joseph. He is honest, I say. You can trust Joseph. Well, he was very happy to hear that and now he wants to meet you.”

  “I don’t know, Cyrus.” His friend meant well but Cyrus was really asking him to become a kind of pimp, receiving kickbacks from hookers and gambling dens in exchange for a steady stream of customers from his hotel. It wasn’t the job Joseph had exactly dreamed of when he first came to America, but then neither was taxi driver.

  “Why not?” Cyrus was frowning at him like he was a fool. “You know how many hours you got to do in the cab to make the kind of money I’m on? And it’s not illegal, not really. I told this guy I wouldn’t get blow for anyone and he’s cool with it. Anyone wants blow he says get them to call him direct and he’ll send someone down but I don’t get involved in any of that. So who are we hurting, really? Huh?”

  “I’m still working on this NYPD application and—”

  “Aw, come on, Joseph, forget all that,” said his friend wearily. “You know they never gonna let you join their police force. Americans think every Nigerian is involved in a four-one-nine scam.” Cyrus was probably right about that. Their country had become infamous worldwide for all of the wrong reasons, chief among them the 419 advance fee fraud, so called because of the number of its listing as an offence in the Nigerian Criminal Code. The 419 scam had been a form of local irritation to the police and the unwitting victims of the confidence tricksters for years, but the idea really took off only with the advent of e-mail and the Internet. Now, confidence tricksters were free to spam the g
lobe looking for the gullible, who were tricked into advancing money, as a tax on a nonexistent lottery win or to assist in the laundering of a fictitious dictator’s money or the transportation of a US soldier’s booty of foreign gold bullion, from which a huge share was always promised in exchange for just a little assistance. The victims would then either lose the money they’d sent or foolishly open up the details of their bank accounts, which would then be ruthlessly plundered. It was amazing how many idiots there were who would believe these outlandish tales they were sent. How quickly greed turned men into fools. Fortunes were made on the backs of those unthinking idiots and Nigeria had become known as the spiritual capital of the e-mail confidence trick, to Joseph’s eternal shame.

  “In any case,” concluded Cyrus, “you told me you can’t get a reference.”

  Joseph couldn’t deny he was right on that score. It seemed the New York City Police Department was unlikely to be contacting him any time soon and he was becoming mightily sick of driving a cab round the poorer parts of the city, trying to eke out a living. Maybe Cyrus was right. Perhaps it was time to earn some easy money carrying bags for businessmen and having hookers on speed dial. Cyrus continued to extol the virtues of his job, his newfound comparative wealth, and the level of cool his boss exhibited at all times, just so long as the money came in and was kicked back. It seemed there was more than enough for everyone.

  “I’ll have to think about it, Cyrus,” concluded Joseph when their food arrived. “But I will do that, I promise.”

  “Okay, but don’t leave it too long. He’ll find someone else if you do.”

  Cyrus was in a good mood and while they ate, all of the stories of their time in the old country came back to him, to be dusted off and repeated with enthusiasm, complete with wild embellishments. Most of them involved the scrapes Cyrus had got himself mixed up in, many of which he admitted he would have had difficulty extricating himself from if it had not been for his oldest, finest friend, Joseph Soyinka.

  Eventually the talk came round to Yomi, and Joseph admitted the boy was giving him a hard time these days. Cyrus listened carefully while Joseph explained the difficulties he was having with his son, concluding with his surly manner and belligerent attitude of late. To Joseph’s surprise, his friend started to smile and by the end of Joseph’s story the smile had turned into a chuckle.

  “You mind telling me what’s so damn funny?” asked Joseph, a little annoyed at not being taken seriously.

  “You are,” said Cyrus. “The great detective and you cannot see what’s right at the end of your nose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know why Yomi is acting the way he is right now? Seriously?”

  “I suppose you think you do?”

  Cyrus nodded. “Girls,” he said simply.

  “Girls?”

  Was his friend serious? Did Cyrus really think his son was carrying a knife around because of girls?

  “Sure. Have you forgotten what it’s like to be that age? Can’t you remember what we talked about back then?” Joseph had to admit that he could not. “Believe me,” continued Cyrus, “that was pretty much the only thing we talked about as I remember. That and football, maybe, but girls mostly. Who was the best girl in the class, the prettiest girl in the street, the cutest girl in the whole school, our part of Lagos, the whole damn world. Don’t you remember?”

  “No, not really,” Joseph conceded.

  “It was our whole life, man. How do we get to meet them, be alone with them, ask them out, ever get to kiss them. It was everything.” He was laughing at the memory. “Man, we’d have murdered each other to see a bare breast, just one, one would have done. Not even a pair!” Joseph was baffled. Was he really that concerned by the opposite sex at that age? He had vague recollections of wanting to play football or become a racing driver, but he seemed to have airbrushed those early yearnings for the fairer sex out of his memories. Cyrus though seemed to remember everything. “We even talked about drilling a hole in the wall of the girls’ locker rooms so we could watch them change for swimming. We’d have done it, too, if we hadn’t been too damned scared of getting caught. Oh my, I can’t believe you’ve forgotten all that.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I have, Cyrus. But what’s all that got to do with Yomi’s behavior?”

  “Because women do that to you, man. They get you all riled up, so you don’t know what you doing. They get you so you can’t think straight. You do stupid things to impress them, even though they usually ain’t impressed at all. You said Yomi showed his knife to some girls, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “There you go. He was trying to impress them.”

  “But he’s never said a word.”

  “Did you tell your old man when you started liking girls?”

  “I guess not. So you think Yomi’s a little crazy right now because of females?”

  “Yeah, that’s all, but you don’t have to worry so much because he’ll grow out of it. Everyone does.”

  This was some consolation. “You think so?”

  “Sure. I did,” said Cyrus dismissively. “I used to get into all kinds of scrapes when I was his age but look at me now. I turned out all right in the end.”

  This wasn’t the kind of assurance Joseph was looking for. Cyrus had turned out all right in the end by his standards of maturity. Along the way he’d been caught up in troubles that would have given a less-optimistic man gray hair and stomach ulcers. Joseph drained the last mouthful of his drink and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to be going.”

  “Poor old Joseph,” said Cyrus, leaning back in his chair like he had all the time in the world. “Always rushing round and running off somewhere.”

  “Yeah, and this time I’m gonna be late.”

  “Why, you got a hot date or something?”

  “Not exactly.” But he did have an appointment with a woman.

  Joseph put the last tin can up on the middle shelf and stepped back so she could survey his work. He knew she liked everything to be “just-so,” as she called it.

  “You’re an angel sent from god,” said Marjorie. “Everything’s in its place and there is a place for everything.” She smiled at Joseph. The old lady made them some coffee and motioned for Joseph to sit down. “Thank you for getting my groceries, Joseph,” she said. “I don’t know how things’d be without you fetching and carrying for me all the time.”

  “And I don’t know how I’d get along if you didn’t watch over Yomi for me like you do when I need it.”

  “It ain’t like I got anywhere else to be.” The old lady took a moment to lower herself into her chair. “Now when Yomi drops by next time I can make him some of my pancakes. He likes my pancakes.”

  “You spoil my boy, Marjorie,” he told the old lady. “And don’t go thinking he’s hungry when you go feeding him. More than likely he’ll have had his dinner with me just an hour before. Don’t know where he puts all the food he gets.”

  “He’s a growing boy, got to feed him up. He’s growing up fast, too. Won’t be too long before he gets his’self a girlfriend, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “That’s exactly what my friend Cyrus has just been saying but I don’t think so, not Yomi. He’s not shown any interest in girls just yet.”

  “Huh, like he’d tell his daddy if he had. He won’t want you to know in case you make fun of him. And don’t think I don’t hear you and that no-account Eddie Filan teasing that poor boy ’bout all manner of things. I tell you something, if I was a boy and I liked a girl I wouldn’t tell you all till I was growed up and we was engaged!” and she laughed.

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he admitted, “but I don’t think he’s too interested, really I don’t.”

  “How has he been since this teacher of his got stabbed, god rest the poor motherfucker.” Try as he might, Joseph could never get used to the old girl’s foul language, the words coming as they did from the mouth of a lady who
looked like she could be a great-grandmother.

  “He seems okay, I guess,” said Joseph, “and that’s what worries me. He and his friends seem to have just accepted it and moved on. I mean, they’re sorry and all but they’re acting like it’s just one of those things.”

  “Maybe it is round these parts,” she said. “I guess you become hardened to that sort of thing when you live in Highbridge long enough.” Which was exactly what was bothering Joseph. If Yomi could shrug off a brutal murder at the age of twelve then what would he be like by the time he was in his late teens. And, if Highbridge was that bad, how in the hell was he going to get them both out of there before it got any worse?

  “I dropped by on Eddie while you were out, to see how he was managing,” she said. “He told me you’d been thinking a lot about what happened at the school, trying to figure out who’d want to murder that teacher. You know what I think?”

  “No, but I’d be glad to hear it.”

  “Well, now I ain’t no detective,” proclaimed Marjorie, “but I watch a lot of that stuff on the TV.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Oh yeah, always have done. There’s reruns of Kojak and Columbo during the day time and the Rockford Files with James Garner. I like him. He’s tall.” She smiled knowingly. “Then in the night there’s CSI and all those cold-case documentaries about serial killers and shit. A lot of them is fucked in the head. They can’t help it ’cos they born that way. We should pity ’em before we locks ’em away for ever and throws away the key.’ Marjorie then embarked on a massive coughing fit that went on for so long, Joseph began to feel genuinely concerned for her well-being, until she finally cleared her throat and said, “Then there’s the other kind of killer.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “Someone with a reason to kill. That makes it easier for the cops.”

  “How so?” he asked her.

  “You find the reason,” she said confidently, “and you found your killer.”

  He couldn’t deny there was a lot of truth in that. “And what reason do you suppose anyone would have for getting into a school at night and stabbing some poor teacher to death?”