My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

by Tananarive Due

  Frightened, the men leap to their feet and huddle in the back of the room. Khaldun looks like a slaughtered cow. He sits for a moment, watching his own innards escape through his wound, and then he crumples in a puddle of blood on the floor.

  Instantly, two men break their promise and flee up the stairs. Dawit and Mahmoud watch them go, then they gaze at each other. They have promised to stay. With weak legs, they walk to the bench closest to Khaldun’s corpse and sit before him, watching. Slowly, uncertainly, the others follow their example.

  For hours, nothing happens. The torch is burning low.

  “Look,” one of the men whispers at last, pointing.

  When did the bloody wound begin to close itself? Have they imagined this? Dawit leans close. He can see that, although Khaldun’s innards and blood still lie around him, the long wound across his abdomen has sewn itself into a sealed, bloody scar.

  “What Devil’s work is this?” a monk mutters.

  They wait, but still Khaldun does not stir. Dawit, like the others, dozes to sleep shortly before dawn, his chin resting against his chest. He awakens after someone places a warm hand on his shoulder.

  Dawit opens his eyes to find Khaldun standing before him, wearing the smile of a father. His bloody scar is gone, his belly healed with barely a trace of the knife’s treachery.

  “Will you accept the Life gift, Dawit?” Khaldun whispers.

  How can this be? A man can die and yet live again? And all wounds will heal as though by miracle? An army of such men would rule for eternity!

  His mouth open with amazement, Dawit can only nod.

  9

  “Her name is Rosalie Tillis Banks. The nursing-home lady. I have a case number,” Jessica said into the telephone receiver, trying to sound patient with the police clerk in Chicago. “I’d love to swing by, but I’m in Miami. If someone could just fax it to me …”

  With their book deal signed and four days to go before her scheduled leave, Jessica wanted to get as many long-distance calls out of the way on the Sun-News’s tab as she could. Sy was livid about losing two investigative reporters with only two weeks’ notice, and she and Peter felt guilty, but it couldn’t be helped. There was so much to do. They were trying to decide if Chicago should be one of their trips, and red tape had prevented her from getting the police report, which would have the names and telephone numbers of people she needed to talk to. Someone had supposedly mailed her a copy, but it never arrived.

  Jessica had a sister on the phone. She’d have to play that card now, slipping into a more down-home vernacular. “Can’t you hook me up? I see what you’re saying about procedure, but it’s a long way to Chicago. Sister, please.”

  The clerk, who sounded honestly harried, relented. “You better mention me in your book,” she said.

  Within an hour, the eight-page fax transmission began, and the old woman’s death took shape. Banks, a widow, had no next-of-kin except an Indianapolis cousin who’d sent for her things. She’d suffered from advanced pancreatic cancer. Died January twelfth. The regular night nurse hadn’t come in because of a storm the night of the murder, so the wing had been unattended for several hours longer than usual. (Made sense, Jessica thought. David had been in Evanston lecturing at Northwestern University that week,and he called home every night to complain about the snow.) Body wasn’t discovered until morning. Only clue at all was an unfamiliar black male who’d asked about her the day she was murdered. Composite sketch to follow, the report said.

  “Hey, Jessica, congrats on the book,” a female reporter called to Jessica, walking past the wire room, where she hovered over the whirring fax machine.

  “Thanks, Em.”

  Page eight was the composite sketch. The image on the fax was too dark and splotched to be helpful. All Jessica could see of the man was the curly outline of his hair and the whites of his eyes.

  It figured the suspect was supposed to be black, she thought. That could be some staffer’s convenient lie, like the white guy years ago who’d made up a story about a black attacker after he had killed his pregnant wife. That crazy woman who’d drowned her own sons, Susan Smith, had tried the same ploy. Pretty cozy, having a mystery visitor.

  “The thing I like about Banks,” Peter said, scanning the report over Jessica’s shoulder at her desk, “is that her father was a legend in Chicago. Didn’t the Trib say he was a jazz artist? Split, or vanished, when she was a kid. It’s just interesting to me. The father vanishes, one of the great mysteries in jazz lore, and now the daughter is murdered.”

  “I don’t know …” Jessica sighed. “This isn’t Unsolved Mysteries. The question is, Do we think this was abuse? We don’t want to include her and then have some nutcase step forward and say spacemen told him to do it.”

  “We can pin it on neglect, then, at the least. No night nurse. Someone comes in off the street and murders a patient.”

  Jessica still wasn’t convinced. They’d heard about some heinous cases of long-term abuse in the past few weeks, and suddenly the Chicago incident seemed pretty mild. She scrawled the woman’s name on a folder, slid the report inside, and dropped it on top of the pile of papers on her desk. “I don’t think this is for us. Too many loose ends.”

  Peter shrugged, walking away. “I’ll let you call it,” he said. “By the way, would you please take those damn flowers home?”

  “I’m saying,” the courts reporter who sat behind her spoke up, “you’re stinking the whole place up.”

  Jessica had two dozen purple-hued roses on her desk, awash in baby’s breath, delivered Monday from David to commemorate her last week until her book leave. A cynical part of her told her it wasn’t coincidence that David sent the flowers after he saw the troll Peter had given her, but the gesture was thoughtful anyway.

  He was being a good sport. Today, he was out pricing computers for her. He’d already cleared enough space in their tiny bedroom—how, she didn’t know—to furnish it with a small computer table. They would both be working at home, out of each other’s way. He joked about erotic midafternoon “work breaks,” when they could explore new areas of the house to ravage each other. The thought of it made her smile even now.

  Her phone bleeped, and she expected it to be David. Their telepathy was frightening sometimes. But it wasn’t him.

  “Hey, Miss Wol-dee. This is Boo.”

  Boo. For long seconds, Jessica’s brain was dumb with a lack of recognition. This man didn’t sound like one of her usual sources, and she didn’t recognize the street nickname.

  The man lowered his voice slightly. From the hollow echo, she guessed he was at a pay phone. “Evergreen Courts projects. You don’t ‘member me?”

  Boo. Evergreen Courts, Like microfilm, it all came into focus. He was a small-time crack dealer who’d called months earlier with a tip that the county’s housing maintenance staff was involved in trafficking and dealing in the projects. He’d given her one lead that turned out to be good and promised more, but she never heard from him again.

  Jessica couldn’t believe the bad timing. Here she was on her way out the door, and a potentially great story had reappeared.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I’m just chillin’. I still got that stuff for you. You know, what we talked about.”

  “You mean names?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah. One of ‘em just went up on a possession tip. But I don’t trust the phone, if you know what I’m sayin’. I got it all wrote down for you. Then you can check and see if I’m lying.”

  “I know you’re not lying. Everything you said panned out, but then you disappeared.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that, you know? But these muthafuckers don’t play, so I gotta watch my back. ‘Scuse my language. When we gon’ get together?”

  Jessica looked up at the newsroom clock. It was three. She wanted to tell him to forget it, she was about to go write a book, but she couldn’t resist the easy lure of written information. She could make a few calls while she was on
leave. If nothing else, she could file it away and have a great story waiting for her when she got back. That would be a nice peace offering for Sy.

  “Now’s good for me,” she said.

  He breathed hard. “Uh-uh. Bag that. I can’t have you comin’ ’round here. They already think I narced on ‘em ‘cause I went clean. I got a job now, a security gig at the mall, the one on Hundred Sixty-Third Street.”

  “You’re out of drugs?”

  “I been out. I got a little boy to worry ‘bout, and he’s old enough to start figurin’ out shit for himself, Daddy standin’ on the corner. I ain’t raisin’ him up like that. You know?”

  “I hear you,” Jessica said. “Good for you.”

  “I go on at eight. Meet me up there, if you want. I’ll be at the gameroom ‘til it closes, ‘bout eleven. Then I patrol the lot.”

  Uh-oh. Another late night. David wouldn’t like it. And if he knew where she was going, he’d insist on escorting her. But she’d been to that mall a hundred times, and there were plenty of people around at that time of night.

  “Can I bring a tape recorder?”

  “Bring what you want,” Boo said.

  They agreed to meet at eight o’clock. Jessica called David and told him she’d have to work late, covering a meeting of elderly residents in Miami Beach. It sounded a hell of lot safer than saying she was meeting a drug dealer at his night job. She considered her story an exaggeration rather than a lie, since sometimes she had to stretch the truth with David just to be free to do her job. He still grilled her on how late it could go, whether there would be any security, where she would park. Then he reminded her that Kira had asked to sleep over at Bea’s because a teacher planning day had liberated her from school. With Kira gone, David had planned to come by to help Jessica load up some boxes from her office later that night.

  “Tell you what, honey,” she said, “I’ll call you when the meeting lets out, then I can meet you at the paper. ‘Kay?”

  Reluctantly, still not sold on her safety, he agreed.

  Peter, too, was finishing up some loose ends, she discovered. She found him sitting in the newspaper’s library doing a property records check on the computer. He said he was in for a long haul.

  “So maybe I’ll see you and Mr. Perfect later?” he said. “I have some boxes that need loading too. Ha, ha.”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “What are you working on?”

  “Mob stuff. The usual. You?” he asked.

  “Drug dealers.”

  He laughed. “All in a day’s work, right?”

  “That’s for sure.” She paused, watching his fingers at work on the keyboard as he typed names onto the screen. Not knowing why, she drank in every detail about him that night: his white shirt, his Warner Brothers Sylvester and Tweetie tie, his gray slacks. Even the fine hair on his neck, just below his hairline. She felt a pull toward him that was not romantic, but as natural and bittersweet as could be. Like saying goodbye too soon.

  She felt an impulse, as she had at O’Leary’s, to hug him.

  “Peter? Don’t you ever get afraid of pissing them off?” she asked instead.

  He chuckled, not looking up at her, his fingers tapping away. “You and David have watched those Godfather movies once too often,” he said. “This isn’t personal. It’s business.”

  “That’s what I’ll tell my drug dealers,” she said, laughing.

  It was seven-thirty, an hour after a blazing sunset beckoned five reporters, all on deadline, away from their computers to the window facing the city’s skyline. The cafeteria downstairs was serving carved roast, a staff favorite. There hadn’t been any shootings on the police scanners all day, and there were no accidents on any major expressways.

  All the signs indicated it would be an extraordinary night.

  10

  Dawit didn’t make the decision right away. And when it came, it wasn’t even a decision, really. It was a realization of what was to follow, a gently flowing current beneath him.

  By ten o’clock, Jessica hadn’t appeared at her office or left a message for him on the machine at home, and Dawit was anxious and more than a little frightened. The plate of beef stew and cornbread he’d brought her, wrapped in tinfoil, was only slightly warm now as it sat on her desk beneath the canopy of roses.

  Her section of the newsroom, away from the commotion and light of the Metro section across the aisle, was deserted. The elite reporters don’t work after dark, he surmised. He’d sat for a half hour undisturbed, unattended, growing more fretful as he watched the minutes pass on the clock overhead, and no sign of his wife.

  He’d already exhausted the drivel in the U.S. News and World Report on her desk; the only thing that remotely interested him was a brief about Eritrean conflicts with Ethiopia, which made him marvel at how age-old quarrels could linger. But news of Ethiopia disturbed rather than comforted him. Recent signs of the Searchers told him that Khaldun wanted him back there, and soon he must go. He put the magazine away.

  He didn’t want to start moving Jessica’s unmarked boxes without her instructions, so his eyes began wandering over her desk for lack of anything else to do. Her stack of folders was in front of his eyes, but he hadn’t noticed them before. And he read, with the impact of a gunshot, Rosalie Tillis Banks.

  Khaldun had said Mark me this: All words and deeds will find you, as a tightening noose finds the neck.

  The sensation, at first, was like being yanked from the chair by his hair and flung headfirst into another existence. The Chicago world had never before crossed the Miami world, and yet his daughter’s name was written before him like an indictment—and in his own wife’s bouncy, feminine handwriting. For a full minute, as his mind lurched, he forgot to breathe.

  He didn’t touch the folder at first, fearing it was a hallucination, some visage conjured by Khaldun from his underground sanctuary. Khaldun was all-knowing, but all-powerful too? Was he a true sorcerer, as he and the others had always speculated? Was he even God himself, as more and more of his brothers, calling themselves Khaldunites, believed?

  Dawit blinked several times, but Rosalie’s name was still there. No, this was not Khaldun, he realized. This must be the work of a Searcher, intended as a cruel warning. Dawit’s insides swelled with anger as he snatched the folder into his hand.

  He was not prepared for what he found. Jessica herself had requested this document from Cook County Police, according to the handwriting on the cover page. His lips grew dry as he read. This was the actual police report written after his daughter’s murder, detailing the evening and all its events. The report mentioned a stranger, a black male, who asked for her the day she died. (His own fault; he’d only planned to visit Rosalie then, so he had not been careful.) He nearly dropped the papers when he read that a composite sketch was included—his face, his own face—and he expected his senses to flee, leaving him faint, when he flipped to the page.

  This was him. He could see it. A crude drawing, and too dark to readily recognize his features from a facsimile, but he could make out the angles of his jawline and his tufts of hair. The original, somewhere in Chicago, would certainly damn him.

  Again, he wondered if sorcery was at work. How had this come to be? Why would Jessica know anything at all about Rosalie?

  The answer was so simple, it was nearly fiendish. He’d killed Rosalie at a nursing home. Of all ironies, Jessica was writing about nursing homes. Was this not all the evidence he needed that Khaldun was a master of prophecy?

  Sure enough, his deeds had found him. The noose.

  Jessica’s book would lead her to the truth. If she went to Chicago and found the report, wouldn’t she certainly recognize her own husband’s face? Might she already have seen enough traces to stimulate her curiosity? She might remember he had been very near Chicago, at the university, when Rosalie died. How would he explain this? How?

  The Covenant, Dawit’s mind screamed. No one must know. Dawit could not, under any circumstances, allow Jessica to continue
her research. He closed his eyes, shutting out the inner voice that threatened, at any moment, to rip his life asunder.

  “David? Jessica still not back?”

  Peter. He knew the voice before he opened his eyes. Instinctively, he tried to shield the folder from Peter’s view by closing it and resting his elbow on top of it.

  “Not yet. You’re working late.” Dawit couldn’t smile.

  “I’m doing some record checks back in the library. Think I’ll have to go soon, though. It’s after ten. What smells so good?”

  “I brought Jess some dinner. I wanted to surprise her.”

  Peter smiled in a way Dawit didn’t understand, a nearly smug smile that infuriated him. This man, here, was the cause of his trouble. Yet, even at this time, the decision had not come.

  “You’re really too much,” Peter said, walking to his own desk. He grabbed a notebook and began striding down the darkened aisle past him. “Oh, well. Back to work. Promised myself I could go home in ten minutes. You might try calling Jessica at your place. It’s so late, maybe she decided to head straight there.”

  Did this mortal think he was a fool, stationed at Jessica’s desk with a blind faith that she would appear? “I’ve been checking,” Dawit said instead, keeping his tone even.

  “I’m sure she’ll be back soon. ‘Night, David.”

  “Good night, Peter,” Dawit said. He forced the pleasantry from his unhappy throat.

  Once Peter was out of sight, Dawit once again picked up the telephone to check his messages at home. This time, thankfully, he heard Jessica’s voice: “David? Baby? Are you out in the shed? I hope you haven’t left yet. Listen, I’m so sorry. My meeting is running way late. Let’s forget about the boxes tonight, okay? I’m getting some great stuff. I’ll be home by eleven-fifteen, I promise. At least we can have a night alone, right? See you soon.”

  Dawit stood, surveying the empty section of the newsroom once again. Certain he was not being observed, he took the folder bearing Rosalie’s name to a large yellow trash bin in the hallway and buried it there. Then he grabbed the dinner plate from Jessica’s desk and made his way through a winding hallway to the service elevator. The main lobby was closed this late at night.