“Naturally you’re cautious,” Laurace said. “Do you think I’m not? We’ve both had to be, or die. But look around you. Would something like this belong to any criminal such as you ever knew?”
“N-no... Unless the prophet of a cult— But I never heard of you, and I would have, as rich as you must be.”
“I’m not. Nor is the organization I lead. It does require me to maintain the appearance of, m-m, solidity. As to your questions, though;” Laurace sipped of her wine. Her voice grew slow, almost dreamy:
“I don’t know when I was born. If any record was made, I couldn’t tell where to find it, and probably it’s long lost. Who cared about a pickaninny slave? But from what I remember, and what I deduced after I began to study, I must be about two hundred years old. That isn’t much, set against your age. Fourteen hundred, did you say? But of course I wondered, more and more desperately, whether I was quite alone in the world or not.
“Any others like me must be hiding the fact like me. Men can go into a variety of occupations, lives. Women have fewer opportunities. When at last I had the means to search, it made sense to begin with the trade that a woman might very well, even most likely, be forced into.”
“Whoredom,” said Clara starkly.
“I told you before, I pass no judgments. We do what we must, to survive. One such as you could have left a trail, a trail often broken but perhaps possible to follow, given time and patience. After all, she wouldn’t expect anybody would think to try. Newspaper files, police and court records, tax rolls and other registers where prostitution had been legal, old photographs—things like that, gathered, sifted, compared. Some of my agents have been private detectives, some have been ... followers of mine. None knows why I wanted this information. Slowly, out of countless fragments, a few parts fitted together. It seemed there had been a woman who did well in Chicago back in the nineties till she got into some kind of trouble, curiously similar to one in New York later, in New Orleans later still, again in New York—”
Clara made a slicing gesture. “Never mind,” she snapped. “I get the idea. I should have remembered, in fact. It happened before.”
“What?”
“Back in Konstantinopolis—Istanbul—oh, Lord, nine hundred years ago, it must have been. A man tracked me down pretty much the same way.”
Laurace started to rise, sank back, leaned forward. “Another immortal?” she cried. “A man? What became of .him?”
“I don’t know.” Belligerently: “I wasn’t glad to be found then, and I’m not sure I am now. You are a woman, I guess that makes a difference, but you’ve got to convince me, you know?”
“A man,” Laurace whispered. “Who was he? What was he like?”
“Two. He had a partner. They were traders out of Russia. I didn’t want to go off with them, so I shook them, and never heard anything since. Probably they’re dead. Let’s not talk it about it yet, okay?”
The rain-silence descended.
“What a horror of a life you have had,” Laurace finally said.
Clara grinned on the left side of her mouth. “Oh, I’m tough. Between the times I work, when I live easy on what Fve earned and saved—or sometimes, yeah, I’ve married money—it’s good enough that I want to keep going.”
“I should think—you told me you’ve mostly been a, a madam since you came to America—isn’t that better than it ... used to be for you?”
“Not always.”
2
She hated sleeping where she worked. In Chicago she had an apartment five blocks away. Usually she could go home about two or three A.M., and the afternoons were her own; then business was slack enough for Sadie to manage. She’d go shopping downtown, or enjoy the sunshine and flowers in Jackson Park, or visit one of the museums built after the Columbian Exposition, or ride a trolley out into the countryside, all sorts of things, maybe with a couple of the girls, maybe by herself, but always ladylike.
Gas lamps flared. Pavement stretched ash-gray, empty as the moon. Lightly though she walked, her footfalls sounded loud in her ears. The two men who came out of an alley were tike more shadows until they fell in on either side of her.
She choked down a gasp. Fear chilled and keened. He on the right was a hulk, bristle-chinned and smelly. He on the left was hardly more than a boy. He had no color in his face except for the pus yellow the lamps gave it, and from time to time he giggled.
“Hello, Mrs. Ross,” the big man said. His voice was gritty. “Nice evening, ain’t it?”
Fool, she raged at herself, fool, I should have been careful, I should have spent what a bodyguard would cost, but no, I couldn’t be bothered, I had to save every cent toward my next years of freedom— In a way that was ancient with her, she killed the fear. She couldn’t afford it.
“I don’t know you,” she said. “Let me be.”
“Aw, we know you. Mr. Santoni, he showed us on the street when you was passing by. He asked us we should have a little talk with you.”
“Go, before I call a policeman.”
The boy tittered. “Shut up, Lew,” said the big man. “You get too impatient.” To her: “Now don’t be like that, Mrs. Ross. All we want to do is talk with you a while. You just come along quiet.”
“I’ll talk to your boss, Mr. Santoni, I’ll speak to him again if he insists.” Buy time. “Later today, yes.”
“Oh, no. Not so soon. He says you been real unreasonable.”
He wants to add my business to his string, he wants to end every independent house in the city, we’re to do his will and pay him his tribute. Christ, before it’s too late, send us a man with a sawed-off shotgun!
It was already too late for her. “He wants Lew and me should have a little talk with you first. He can’t waste no more of his time arguing, you got me? Just come along quiet now, and you’ll be all right. Lew, put that goddamn shiv back.”
She tried to run. A long arm snapped her to a halt. The way they pinioned her was effective; further resistance could have led to a dislocated shoulder. Around the next corner waited a cabriolet and driver. The horse hadn’t far to go before it reached a certain building.
Several times the big man-must restrain the boy. Afterward he would sponge her, speak soothingly, give her a smoke, before they resumed. Drawing on past experience, she avoided damage that would be permanent, on her if not on a mortal. They actually let her out of the cab in front of a doctor’s house.
The hospital staff were amazed at how fast she healed, quite without marks. While they did not interrogate her, they understood more or less what had happened and expected it would be a very meek, obliging, frequently smiling person who left them. Well, a body so extraordinary might generate a personality equally jesilient.
Just the same, Carlotta Ross cut her losses, sold whatever she could and dropped from sight. She had never heard of the rival who later bushwhacked Santoni. She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually. She was content to start over elsewhere, forewarned.
3
“I get along, though. I’m used to the life. Pretty good at it, in fact.” Clara laughed. “By now, I’d better be, huh?”
“Do you loathe all men?” Laurace asked.
“Don’t pity me! ... Sorry, you mean well, I shouldn’t’ve flared up. No, I’ve met some that I guess were decent. Not usually hi my line of work, though, and not for me. I don’t have to take them on any more myself; just take then-money. I couldn’t have anybody for real anyway. Can I? Can you?”
“Not forever, obviously. Unless someday we find others of our kind.” Laurace saw the expression before her. “Others we like.”
“Mind if I have a refill of this drink? I’ll help myself.” Clara did, and took a cigarette from her purse. Meanwhile she asked, no longer aggressive, almost shy: “What about you, Laurace? How do you feel? You were a slave once, you’ve said. That must have been as bad as anything I ever knew. Maybe worse. Christ knows how many slaves I’ve seen in my life.”
“Sometimes it
was very bad. Other times it was, oh, comfortable. But never free. At last I ran away. White people who were against slavery got me to Canada. There I found ‘ work as a housemaid.”
Clara studied Laurace before murmuring, “You don’t talk or behave like a servant.”
“I changed. My employers helped me. The Dufours, they were: kindly, mildly prosperous, in Montreal. When they saw I wanted to better myself, they arranged schooling for me—after working hours, and servants worked long hours in those days, so it took years—but I’ll always be grateful to the Dufour family. I learned correct English, reading, writing, arithmetic. On my own, consorting with habitants, I picked up French of a sort. I turned into quite a bookworm, as far as circumstances allowed. That gave me a patchwork education; but as the years went on, I gradually filled many of the gaps in it.
“First I had to master memory. I was finding it harder and harder to pull whatever I wanted out of such a ragbag of recollections. It was becoming hard to think. I had to do something. You faced the same problem, I daresay.”
Clara nodded. “Awful, for maybe fifty years. I don’t know what I did or how, can’t recall much and everything’s jumbled. Might have gotten into real trouble and died, except—okay, I fell into the hands of a pimp. He, and later his son, they did my thinking for me. They weren’t bad guys, by their lights, and of course my not growing old made me special, maybe magical, so they didn’t dare abuse me, by the standards of the, uh, eighth century Near East, it must have been. I think they never let on to anybody else, but moved me to a different city every few years. Meanwhile, somehow, bit by bit, I got myself sorted out, and when the son died I felt ready to strike off on my own again. I wonder if most immortals aren’t that lucky. Somebody insane or witless wouldn’t last long without a protector, most times and places. Would she?”
“I’ve thought that myself. I was luckier still. By the early twentieth century we had a science of psychology. Crude, largely guess work, but the idea that the mind can be understood and fixed makes a huge difference. I found autohyp-nosis did wonders— We’ll talk about this later. Oh, we have so much to talk about.”
“I guess you never got too badly confused, then.”
“No, I kept control throughout. Of course, I moved around. It hurt to leave the Dufours, but people were wondering why I didn’t age like them. Also, more and more I wanted independence, true independence. I went from job to job, acquired skills, saved my money. In 1900 I moved back to the States. There a colored person was less conspicuous, and here in New York you can go as unnoticed as you care to. I opened a small cafe. It did well—I am a good cook—and in time I was able to start a larger place, with entertainment. The war boomed business. Afterward Prohibition made profits larger yet. White customers; I kept another, less fancy den for blacks. One of my white regulars became a friend. At City Hall Be saw to it that I didn’t pay off exorbitantly or have to worry about the mob muscling in.”
Clara considered her surroundings. “You didn’t buy this with the proceeds from two speakeasies,” she said.
Laurace smiled. “Shrewd, aren’t you? Well, the truth is that presently I took up with a pretty big-time rumrunner. White, but—”
4
Donald O’Bryan loved wind and water. At home he filled shelves with books about sailing ships, hung pictures of them on the walls, built models of them whose exquisite detail seemed impossible for such large hands. Besides the power cruiser he used in his business, he kept a sloop on Long Island Sound. When he started taking his black “housekeeper” on day trips, she went unchallenged by members of the yacht club. Everybody liked Don but nobody who was smart messed with him.
Heeled over on a broad reach, the boat rushed through swoosh and sparkle. Gulls soared white above.the wake, into which he had merrily cast scraps from lunch. When you ran before the wind, its booming was hushed to a cradle song and the air grew almost snug, so that you caught the live salt smell of it.
Reaching, a steersman must be careful. Don had secured the boom against an accidental jibe, but control remained tricky. He managed without effort. His body belonged where he was. His being had turned elsewhere.
Between watch cap and pea jacket, the snub-nosed face had lost its earlier cheerfulness. “Why won’t you marry me?” he pleaded. “I want to make an honest woman of you, really I do.”
“This is honest enough for me,” she laughed.
“Flora, I love you. It’s not only that you’re grand in bed, though you are, you are. It’s ... your soul. You’re brave and dear and a thousand times more bright than me. It’s proud Fd be to have you bear my children.”
Humor died. She shook her head. “We’re too different.”
“Was the Queen of Sheba too different from King Solomon?”
“In this country she would be.”
“Is it the law you fret about? Listen, not every state forbids marriage between the races, and the rest have to respect it once it’s happened where it’s allowed. That’s in the Constitution.”
The same Constitution that says a man can’t take a glass of beer after a hot day’s work, she thought. “No, it’s what we’d have to live with. Hatred. Isolation from both your people and mine. I couldn’t do that to our children.”
“Not everywhere,” he argued. “Listen, you’ve heard me before, but listen. I won’t keep my trade forever. In a few more years I’ll have more money piled together than we could -spend in a hundred. Because I am really a careful, saving man, in spite of liking a good time. I’ll take you to Ireland. To France. You always wanted to see France, you’ve said, and what I saw made me want to go back, during the war though it was. We can settle down wherever we like, in some sweet country where they don’t care what the color of our skins may be, only the color of our hearts.”
“Wait till then, and we’ll talk about this.” Maybe by then I can bring myself to it, to seeing time eat him hollow. Maybe I’ll be sure by then that he won’t grow bitter when I tell him—because I can never deceive him, not in any way that matters—and will even be glad to have me there in my strength, holding his hand as he ties on his deathbed.
“No, now! We can keep it secret if you want.”
She stared across the dancing waves. “I can’t do that either, darling. Please don’t ask me to.”
He frowned. “Is it you fear being the wife of a jailbird? I swear to God they’ll never take me alive. Not that I expect they’ll catch me at all.”
She looked back at him. A lock of hair curled brown from beneath the cap and fluttered across his brow. How like a boy he seemed, a small boy full of love and earnestness. She remembered sons she had borne and buried. “What difference would it make whether a justice of the peace mumbled a few words over us, if we aren’t free to stand together in sight of everybody?”
“I want to give you my vows.”
“You have given them, dearest. I could weep for the joy of that.”
“Well, there is this too,” he said, rougher-toned. “I don’t plan on dying, but we never know, and I want to make sure I leave you provided for. Won’t you give my heart that ease?”
“I don’t need an inheritance. Thank you, thank you, but I don’t.” She grimaced. “Nor do I want more to do with lawyers and the government than I can possibly help.”
“Um. So.” He gnawed his lip for a minute. “Well, I can understand that. All right.” His smile burst forth like the sun between clouds. “Not that I’m giving up on making you Mrs. O’Bryan, mind you. I’ll wear you down, I will. Meanwhile, however, I’ll make arrangements. I don’t trust bankers much anyway, and this is a profitable time to liquidate my real estate holdings. We’ll put it in gold, and you’ll know where the hoard is.”
“Oh, Don!” The money was nothing, the wish was the whole world and half the stars. She scrambled to her knees in the cockpit and pressed herself against him.
He bent over. His left arm closed around her shoulders, his mouth sought hers. “Flora,” he said huskily. “My beautiful strange
Flora.”
5
“—We loved each other. I’ve never been afraid to love, Clara. You should learn how.”
The other woman stubbed out her cigarette and reached for a fresh one. “What happened?”
Voice and visage grew blank. “A revenue boat intercepted him in 1924. When he bade fair to outrun them, they opened fire. He was killed.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Laurace shook herself. “Well, we’re familiars of death, you and I.” Once more calm: “He left me a quarter million in negotiable instruments. I needed to get away, sold my night clubs and spent the next four years traveling. First Ireland, England, France. In France I unproved my French and studied about Africa. I went there, Liberia, then the colonies along that coast, hoping to discover something about my ancestors. I made friends in the bush and added to what I’d learned from books, more of how those tribes live, what they live by, faith, ritual, secret societies, tradition. That caused me to return by way of Haiti, where I also spent a while.”
Clara’s eyes widened. “Voodoo?”
“Voudun,” Laurace corrected. “Not black magic. Religion. What has sustained human beings through some of the crudest history on earth, and still does in some of its most hideous poverty and misrule. I remembered people here at home, and came back to Harlem.”
“I see,” Clara breathed. “You did start a cult.”
Momentarily, Laurace was grim. “And you’re/ thinking, ‘What a nice racket.’ It isn’t like that in the least.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean—”
“You did.” Laurace sighed. “Never mind. A natural thought. I don’t blame you. But the fact is, I had no need to prey on superstition. Investments I’d made before going abroad had done well. I didn’t like the look of the stock market, and pulled out in time. Oh, by myself I’d be quite comfortably off.” Seriously: “There were my people, though. There was also the matter of my own long-range survival. And, now, yours.”
The Boat of a Million Years Page 32
