Because Arthur made his money digitally, he wasn’t concerned that Serene’s “well-intentioned tantrum” would affect his business. He was definitely concerned for Alicia (“Her father is absolutely involved in whatever happened to her”), but felt like things were at a dead end.
Serene, exhausted from her crazy day, agreed. The whole affair would have concluded right there for Serene had she not received an e-mail from Elroy Biggs, one of the more indolent students in her morning English class. Elroy was a lumpy, overgrown man-child with sad eyes who was skating through school on an athletic scholarship. He wasn’t the type to send late-night e-mails about English class.
His message read: Miss Powers, sorry to get at you at night. I know you have been looking for Alicia from English class. A friend went to the gray house on the corner of Elm and Broadhurst. It was a place where you could get girls. He saw Alicia there, he says. He knew her from the Paradise. She didn’t know him. That’s all he told me. Hope that helps.
Serene figured Elroy’s “friend” was, in fact, Elroy. Guess ho houses don’t have an age limit, she thought. She contemplated going to Elroy’s house and dragging him to the police precinct. But that would expose the kid to embarrassing questions. Or she could call the police herself and pass on the tip. Then a crazy idea got her out of bed. She walked past Arthur in the kitchen on the way to the garage.
“Bae,” Arthur said, “shouldn’t you be gettin’ some rest?”
“Can’t rest,” she said. “Not yet.”
Under a dusty green tarp in the corner was an army locker. Inside were bits and pieces of her warrior life. She pulled out several heavy items and brought them into the kitchen, placing a gun, night-vision goggles, and a small explosive device on the table.
Arthur set down his fork and pushed aside the faux chicken he was preparing. “You,” he said, “are about to propose something crazy.”
Two hours later, Serene was in handcuffs again. So were a motley crew of pimps and thugs, including an outraged DaMagnificent1. A heavily sedated Alicia was on her way to a local hospital. News crews broadcast in front of a once-cute gray home with its front door blown off. The phrases “vigilante,” “explosive device,” “human trafficking,” and “teenage girls” took this event from small-town oddity to viral event.
One website labeled Serene Powers “a real-life Batwoman” and featured a Facebook picture of her in a MMA outfit. The next morning, she was suspended by principal Adams “pending review by the school board.” Arthur’s YouTube cooking channel was flooded with comments, both insulting and amused, that had nothing to do with his culinary experiments. It wasn’t a great day to be Serene Powers.
Yet it was. It would be the day Serene’s life changed. A woman named Mildred Barnes called, identifying herself as “a friend of stolen women.” She invited Serene for tea the next day at one the area’s most expensive restaurants.
Sitting at an outdoor table was a refined-looking middle-aged white woman wearing a white blouse that matched her bright white hair and contrasted nicely with her red jacket, skirt, and pumps. On her right lapel was a small American flag. To any student of history, she resembled the late Texas governor Ann Richards. To Serene, she looked like the chairwoman of a Republican fund-raising event.
When Serene approached, Mildred stood and greeted her with a small hand and a firm grip. “Such a pleasure to meet you, Serene,” she said.
After they sat down Serene asked, “Okay, what is this about?”
Mildred said firmly, “It’s about saving women.”
“You work for some charity?”
The middle-aged woman smiled. “I founded my own little organization.”
“Which is?”
“It has no name,” Mildred said. “There is no public record. I fund it myself. I’ve been looking for someone like you, Serene. A woman with the skills and attitude to hold people accountable.”
“What does that mean?”
“The rich preying on women, children, and the poor is nothing new. The British did it for centuries using their class structure—incestuous bloodlines and all—as an excuse. They suppressed their own poor, their Irish neighbors, and their colonial subjects. The British refined a system of oppression and transported it around the globe, along with all the European colonizing cousins.
“Now the weak and the young are at the mercy of all manner of villain. ISIS and al-Qaeda traffic to buy weapons and use slave labor till the workers drop dead. The Mafia, the Yakuza, MS-13, the Russian mob, and every gang of greedy fucked-up men everywhere, including Wall Street. But it is the lust, greed, and basic depravity of the penis-driven who make all this possible.
“I’m under no illusions, and you shouldn’t be, that our efforts will be anything more than a Band-Aid during brain surgery, a pebble in the ocean. I’m not here to bullshit you, Serene. But each one of these fools we take out saves the life of a girl in Rwanda or Slovenia or Costa Rica or Thailand. That’s something to be proud of. We are not passive. We are not victims. We are holding men accountable when others won’t. The women who are abused are the witnesses and the jury and the judge. We just carry out the sentence. Doesn’t that sound good to you?”
Serene had no idea what to think of this long-winded monologue. Clearly the woman was crazy. “You are some kind of female vigilante?” Serene said.
Mildred didn’t blink. “You can call it that if you want.”
“Look,” Serene said, “I’m not interested in being part of some conspiracy against men. I was searching for one of my students. Look at what that got me.”
“In order to protect Alicia from her father you’ll have to access a lot of lawyers,” Mildred said. “I can fund that effort for you. In return, you will help me help others who are looking for stolen women.”
“And,” Serene said, trying to get a grip on her bewilderment, “what do you get out of this?”
“Justice,” Mildred replied. “A little justice. I’ll pay for everything, Serene. How does that sound to you?”
That was two years ago in the Bay Area. Now Serene was drying off in London before a trip to Berlin. She wasn’t sure if she’d found justice, but she had found a purpose.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHO GON STOP ME
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
—William Shakespeare
Ice rolled out of bed at four a.m. Alone (as usual). Scared (which he didn’t usually admit). Angry (as he often was). He was safe in Atlanta, but the city offered no respite from a heart filled with dread. Too much past. Too much blood.
Would he have to leave ATL too? He’d escaped New York years ago and found a haven. That hadn’t lasted. Nothing would last. He knew that, but the alternative was a state-sponsored cage. Or he could just be dead. As disappointing as life was, death was an unknown he feared. He didn’t see the faces of the men and women he’d killed in his dreams. Even Ice’s subconscious was too damaged for empathy.
What scared him this night was that brief time in Virginia when he’d felt happy, justified, and stupidly safe.
With the cash he’d stashed, Ice had built a false identity, William Brown, and worked as a barber in the shop of old friend, Abdul Rahman, in a small southeast Virginia city. He’d developed this personal witness-protection program as the crack era was ending and folks who’d hired him were getting swept up in RICO investigations. The nature of crime in Brooklyn was shifting. His saving grace had been that he’d always been an independent operator and not a drug dealer. But no doubt his name had come up in connection with various transgressions. It was only a matter of time before someone used Ice’s name to get their sentence shortened.
If he’d tried to make a deal and gone into witness protection, Ice would surely have been shipped to Oklahoma or Montana or some state where no one would know his hard, angular face. Ice knew he had to get away from New York but couldn’t bear to move to a completely new world, even if that w
as truly the best way to stay safe.
Homeboy Abdul had opened a spot near a university with a strong Division II athletic program. That meant a lot of young brothers who had been recruited needed their hairstyles fly and facial hair sharp. Over time, the ballplayers brought their white teammates over to hang and, in turn, more white students and boosters followed. Performers who played the university talked it up to other groups coming across the Virginia/North Carolina border.
Ice was good with his hands, while his essential darkness was catnip to the kids who felt his “real G” quality—though any stories he told were “hypothetical” (wink, wink). Abdul, who’d converted to Islam in prison, was a versatile barber with a thick James Harden beard.
Ice soon developed a humorous story line that he’d share with new customers. “Just hear me out,” he’d start. “A man walks in off the street, someone you’ve never met before, and a few minutes later you’re trimming their mustache close enough to kiss them. You can feel their stress ’cause it jumps right on you. So not only do you get their hair on you, their stress gets on you too. I mean, the minute a man sits down in your chair you can tell by their skin how sick they are. You can see it in their perspiration and in their hair. Day after day, head after head, that adds up.
“Underneath my white jacket I wear thick clothes to work. Sweatshirts. Dungarees. When I get home I never wash my barber clothes with the rest of the wash. I even scrub the machine with a damp cloth when I’m through washing my barber clothes because of all the miscellaneous dust. You have to be careful ’cause people carry all kinds of viruses. But you can’t kick a man out once he’s in your chair—you have to deal with them then. Now, if I dealt with every head that walked in this shop, I could triple my money. If I didn’t care what their skin looked like or how much of a hurry they were in, I could pull in as much as the man who owns this shop and works chair number three, a dude named Abdul.
“Abdul is good. Even in his little town, the man is a money machine. He won’t pass up a head. He cuts it all: nigga, spic, wop, even Jews. He charges the Jews a little extra but he’ll carve a Star of David in a Jew’s head if they ask for it.
“But Abdul pays the price. He’s had foot surgery. He sees a chiropractor for his back. From breathing in all that hair, Abdul has stomach problems.
“Right now, he’s on the first vacation of his life and he only went up to New York to a barber-machine show where they’re gonna demonstrate the world’s fastest clippers. Otherwise, Abdul would be here right now, working six days a week, listening to men worry about their wives, their jobs, and how their daughter screwed up the gears on her new car. He lets his customers drop a load on his head even as he’s cutting theirs. You see, cutting hair is slowly killing Abdul, youngbloods. But the man can’t stop.
“I used to work like that, but not anymore. I learned my lesson. I get my feet rubbed with cocoa butter at this Asian massage parlor over in the next town. I put Johnson’s baby powder in my shoes to absorb the sweat. I take breaks. I turn away anxious men. Unlike Abdul, I’m not gonna let this dangerous game kill me.”
As amusing as Ice found his time at the barbershop, its popularity began attracting unwanted attention. A white cop named Bradley Bowen started coming in. Clearly the congregation of young black men at the shop had caused a lot of conversation around town. Bradley told Ice and Abdul not to worry; he wasn’t there on official business. Bradley was, he said, “a frustrated” record producer who was obsessed with golden-age NYC hip hop like Wu-Tang, Rakim, and A Tribe Called Quest. “Law enforcement is a stopgap,” the cop said. “I got a wife and kid so I needed a nine-to-five. But I love the music and the culture.”
So, for Bradley, the camaraderie of men who’d survived the New York streets his idols rhymed about was more important than snooping too deeply into the background of the barbers. He figured that Abdul and Ice had done time but never gave a thought that his barber might be a cold-blooded contract killer (albeit retired).
One day, one of the ballplayers, having finished his mandatory English class, tossed a volume of Shakespeare’s plays in the barbershop trash. Ice fished it out after work and began thumbing through it. For a Brownsville-educated man, Ice wasn’t a bad reader, though old-time English was not his forte. He’d heard of Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, but most of his reading had been the Daily News.
Then, a bit of dialogue from Aaron in the play Titus Andronicus caught his eye: “O how this villainy / Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it! / Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace; / Aaron will have his soul black like his face.”
Ice grabbed a pen and went through the play, underlining Aaron’s many vicious quips. He googled Titus and found a movie version of it on Hulu. There, Aaron was played by the light-skinned brother from NBC’s The Blacklist. Since Ice had only skimmed the play, it wasn’t until he saw the flick that he realized Aaron had a kid by the blond Queen Tamora. This Aaron was a treacherous motherfucker! It was while watching the light-skinned brother playing Aaron that the first seeds of acting had been planted in Ice’s head. He even began to see his story about Abdul as a dramatic monologue.
It was through Titus Andronicus that Ice began a relationship with Bradley Bowen’s wife Tanya. She started bringing in their son, a towheaded eight-year-old named Baker, who usually wanted a buzzy fade. One afternoon Tanya noticed the volume of Shakespeare’s plays below a poster of Mike Tyson at Ice’s station. She was shocked that the barber was reading the Bard. Turned out, Tanya had studied theater in college, and the idea of having someone, in this case her son’s black barber, to talk to about Shakespeare was very exciting.
She began e-mailing him links to essays on Titus and then the play Othello, the description of which so offended Ice that he vowed never to read it or watch the movie version starring Laurence Fishburne. This communication with Tanya made him uncomfortable. He knew it was a seriously bad idea. Still, he was a straight man (one who had been traveling to Virginia Beach to enjoy escorts), so the prospect of having sex without paying for it was pretty tempting. He wasn’t going to suggest it. But if the opportunity came up, Ice wasn’t going to turn Tanya down.
One evening, she stopped by after closing. Abdul had just cut his last head and was leaving the sweeping-up to Ice, who was surprised that the boy wasn’t with her. Turned out Bradley and Tanya had had a bit of a tiff and, as penance, Bradley had taken their son on a camping trip with A Tribe Called Quest as the soundtrack. Ice was rightfully nervous. The white wife of a local cop was alone with him at his place of business after hours: this sounded like the prelude to a lynching.
However, Tanya’s mission wasn’t a romantic one. Apparently, her husband wasn’t so in love with hip hop that he’d lost his law enforcement instincts. He’d asked her to take a picture of Baker and “Willie” the next time she went to the barbershop. When Tanya asked why, Bradley said he wanted to upload the barbers’ images to some national law enforcement and FBI databases. Tanya shared all of this information freely with Ice. At that moment, he knew his time in Virginia was up. So, when he reached out to hug Tanya in appreciation, he let his hands slide to her hips and let his lips find her neck. After they’d gotten creative with the swiveling barber’s chair and Tanya had cried and laughed about cheating on her husband, Ice sat alone in the shop smoking a cigar, sad that he was going to have to move along.
Ice thought of Aaron’s last lines in Titus: “I am no baby, I, that with base prayers / I should repent the evils I have done: / Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did / Would I perform, if I might have my will; / If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul.”
Ice had recently cried in acting class while performing a monologue based on Aaron’s words in Titus. He thought it would scare the shit out of a roomful of sensitive artistic types. Instead, his soul opened up, making a mockery of his intentions. In Ice’s head Aaron was defiant and proud, an empowered bloody bully. But uttering Shakespeare’s words made him morose as he realized that A
aron was a weakling whose every act of evil was a struggle to overcome his impotence in a world that hated his guts.
When that realization hit Ice on that tiny stage before eight uncomprehending wannabe thespians, he sobbed so hard that snot bubbles popped out of his nose. He stumbled off, victim of an unwanted vulnerability stitched together from the frayed threads of his humanity.
Ice was crying again now, like a moaning bluesman, alone in the night in his ATL bedroom as he contemplated his next move.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BEST PART
Helen told Serene that the second Bourne Identity movie was shot at the Berlin hotel she was staying in. Serene hadn’t seen the flick but would certainly order it on the flight home. The instructions had been slipped under her door the night before. It was chillier in Berlin than London, so she wrapped a scarf around her neck as she exited the hotel and made a right in the direction of the Cold War’s infamous Checkpoint Charlie, where one could cross into Communist-controlled East Berlin. The checkpoint had been a place of espionage—people smuggled in the bottom of trucks, fake IDs, false beards, phony accents. Decades after reunification, the area was a testament to consumerism, with franchised retailers from around the globe lining the street. On this chilly morning, Starbucks beckoned Serene and she grabbed a chai latte before entering the Mitte U-Bahn station.
In the envelope were directions, train tickets, and a small map. These Liberator folks still used paper for a lot of business, being distrustful of the security of digital communications. “You should seem like a wandering tourist,” Helen had advised, which would be easy since that’s what she was. The U-Bahn train reminded her of the BART back in the Bay, but had longer cars connected by accordion-like sections that bent as the trains turned. The Berliners on the U-Bahn were a grim lot, not big on eye contact.
The massive Alexanderplatz station had the buzzy hum Serene recognized as big-city noise, but all the signs were in German and the wall’s light-green tiles were more stylish than anything she’d experienced in US mass transit. Up some steps and past brightly lit shops, Serene followed the station signs to where the lockers were located.
The Darkest Hearts Page 6
