Palace Council

by Stephen L Carter

  “My family has certain expectations of me,” she began. “I’m an only child. My future matters to them. A lot.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “Because it’s true.” The brow crinkled. “You know, Eddie, my uncle’s hotel business is—”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “They own hotels in seven different—”

  “I cannot do it.”

  “He makes good money. He’ll always make good money. I don’t care what the Supreme Court says. We’ll need colored hotels for the next fifty years. Maybe more.” Eddie stroked her cheek, said nothing. “I wanted to ask you one last time, because—”

  He covered her mouth. Gently. They had been arguing the point for years. Both knew the outcome in advance. Like tired actors, they recited the same old lines. “I have to write, Aurie. The muse sits upon me. It is not a matter of choice. It is a matter of necessity.”

  “Then you should have kept the newspaper job.”

  “It was not real writing.”

  “It was real money.”

  Later that night, as Eddie left the train station in Newark, a couple of thugs tripped him, kicked him, snatched the parcel in its neat brown paper, ran. They had marked him down weeks ago and bided their time until he got careless. He was told by one of Scarlett’s people that the boys had admitted the crime. Not to the police. To Scarlett, who was said to have a way of loosening tongues. Eddie believed it. Maceo Scarlett’s nickname was the Carpenter, a reference, it was rumored, to the unfortunate fate that had befallen his predecessor, whose right-hand man Scarlett had been, back when the poor gentleman possessed a right hand: something to do with nails and saws. A neighbor named Lenny, the dark, skinny imp who had tempted Eddie in the first place over to Scarlett’s side of the street, assured him that he was in only small trouble, not big, for losing the package: nothing would happen if he got out now. And so, when Scarlett’s people offered him a second chance, Eddie respectfully declined. For a month thereafter Eddie did not read the papers. He did not want to know what happened to the boys.

  (III)

  AFTER THAT Eddie went back to washing cars and sweeping floors. He earned little money, and saved none, for what he did not spend on Aurelia he shared with friends and neighbors. He developed a reputation as a soft touch. You had but to ask, and he would turn over his last dollar. This was not generosity in the usual sense, but neither was it calculated. He simply lived so thoroughly in the moment that it would never occur to him to hold on to a quarter because he might need it tomorrow. The most intensely political of his buddies, Gary Fatek, playing on Lenin, liked to say that when the revolution arrived Eddie would give the hangman cash to buy the rope; but Gary was white, and rich, and hung out in Harlem to prove his bona fides. Aurie found Eddie’s lightness with money endearing, even though it called into question—she said—his ability to support a family.

  “In the fullness of time, I shall be successful.”

  “In the fullness of time, I shall be married. So watch out.”

  As it happened, Aurie made this comment, to embarrassed laughter all around, at a small dinner party hosted by a young couple named Claire and Oliver Garland at their apartment on West Ninety-third Street. The occasion celebrated Eddie’s transition to published writer. One of his stories had at last been accepted by a serious literary magazine. Ralph Ellison sent a note. Langston Hughes proposed a toast to Eddie’s grand future. Eddie had never met the famous writer, and was nervous. But Hughes, the greatest literary light in Harlem, put the young man at his ease. Hughes was broad and smiling, a spellbinder of the old school. Over brandy and cigars, he shared tales of a recent sojourn abroad. Eddie was enthralled. Langston Hughes lived the life Eddie coveted for himself. Running hotels with Aurelia’s uncle could not possibly compare. Oliver Garland, the only Negro lawyer on Wall Street, seemed to have been everywhere, too: he and his cousin Kevin and Langston Hughes compared notes on restaurants in Florence. Eddie, child of a preacher and a nurse, knew little of Negroes like this.

  Gary Fatek was also at the party, along with a couple of other Caucasians, because members of the younger, educated set in white America prided themselves on ignoring the cautious racialism of their parents. Afterward Gary pulled one of his cute political tricks, summoning a cab, climbing in with Eddie and Aurelia, then directing the driver to drop his friends in Harlem first and only then head to Gary’s own place in the Village. Everybody knew that a New York cabbie would otherwise never go north of Columbia University. Eddie, always a proud man, would never have cooperated with this nonsense had Aurelia not been present; and Gary probably would not have tried. White friends were important, Wesley Senior had long preached to his children: That is where the power lies, he warned them, and where, for the foreseeable future, it will. Eddie and Aurelia sat together on the bench. Gary folded down the jump seat, and clutched the handle as the driver bumped angrily uptown. He lectured them about revolutionary politics. He was red-haired and gentle and certain. He said Eddie’s short story showed the glimmering of consciousness, but only the glimmering. Aurelia, feigning a cold, giggled behind her white-gloved hands. Even back in college, where the three of them first met, everybody had known that Eddie was entirely unpolitical.

  Eddie did not consider his short story revolutionary. He did not consider it anything, except finished. Entitled “Evening Prayer,” the tale had been published in The Saturday Evening Post. It was expected to win prizes. The story recounted a single day of segregation, viewed through the eyes of a small boy watching the daylong humiliation of his proud father, a stern deacon of the church who worked as a hotel doorman. At the end, the boy got down on his knees, folded his hands, and vowed that, whatever he turned out to be when he grew up, he would never be a Negro. Eddie’s mother wrote to say she cried for an hour when she read it. Aurelia had praised the story in the Sentinel, referring to its author as “Harlem’s most eligible bachelor”: her way of teasing from afar. Eddie’s literary agent was negotiating a deal for his first novel. This was the story in which Eddie invented the term “darker nation” to describe Negro America—capturing, he thought, a sense of solidarity and distinctiveness. And although later the term “black” would come into wider usage, for a time “darker nation” was on upper-crust Harlem’s lips.

  Eddie, however, even if on their lips, had just barely scratched his way onto their lists. In those days, everything in Harlem was divided into tiers. Prestige mattered, and multiple layers separated the top from the middle, to say nothing of the bottom. Some addresses were better than others. So were some clubs, some spouses, some friends, and some parties. The social distinctions mattered little to the great mass of Negroes, but Eddie had been raised, in spite of himself, to an awareness of who was who. Although his father, the great preacher, pretended not to care about such trivialities, his mother had filled Eddie’s head with stories, and he supposed some of them must be true. All through his childhood, Marie Wesley had spoken of Harlem drawing rooms so exclusive that it would not be unusual to see George Gershwin and Duke Ellington playing a piano duet. Of homes as expensively furnished as the high-rise apartments on Park Avenue. Once his short story began to open doors, Eddie could not bear the thought of not walking through them. Given the chance, thanks to his erudition, he glittered. He traveled upward. He could quote Shakespeare and Dante by the yard, but also Douglass and Du Bois. He could tease. He could charm. He could flatter. On a frigid evening in February of 1955, he attended a grand party at a palatial townhouse on Jumel Terrace, a fancy little cobblestone enclave near Saint Nicholas Avenue between 160th and 162nd streets. The party had been called to announce a royal engagement. The prince of one of the senior Harlem clans was to wed the princess of one of the darker nation’s Midwestern kingdoms. Everyone who mattered was there, including several white politicians, and a number of men and women too famous for Eddie to dare approach. One of the toasts was offered by Robert Wagner, the mayor of New York. Frank Sinatra offered another. Everyone was b
uoyant but Eddie, who usually limited himself to a single glass but tonight drank quite a bit more. Eddie attended out of duty, and wished he had not.

  He was in love with the bride-to-be.

  Eddie watched the happy couple, listened as glasses were raised to Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland. His usual geniality faded. He began to seethe. People were surprised. Eddie Wesley was always so placid, and so much fun. Tonight he argued belligerently with other guests. Finally, a young man with whose family Eddie’s had summered on Martha’s Vineyard in the old days was delegated to pull him aside and calm him. Eddie broke free. Harry Belafonte tried. Eddie broke free. Langston Hughes tried. Eddie broke free. A grim phalanx of Harlem men then offered courteously to put the fool out on the street, but the bride-to-be intervened. In full view of everyone, she grabbed Eddie by the arm and dragged him into the kitchen. He did not break free. People whispered excitedly. The kitchen was busy with hired help, everyone in smart, sparkling uniforms, eyes on the princess as they pretended to look the other way.

  Aurelia was furious.

  “This is just the way it is. This isn’t your world, so I can’t expect you to understand. But I have responsibilities to my family.”

  “And to yourself?” Eddie demanded. “Have you no responsibility to yourself?”

  Aurelia was unfazed. She remained schoolmarm-stern. “How can we preserve what matters if we all keep on putting ourselves first?”

  “I don’t put myself first. I put you first.”

  “You put your writing first.”

  “I love you,” he said, the words like ash in his mouth. “I’ll always love you.”

  For a moment Aurelia softened. She touched his cheek. “Maybe if you’d taken that job with my uncle.” Then, as if by force of will, the schoolmarm was back. “Some things we can’t do anything about. That’s the way life is.” To this credo, Eddie had no answer. “Now, behave yourself,” she added.

  Aurelia rejoined her admirers, and her glaringly unamused fiancé. Eddie decided the time had come to depart. A friend or two offered to accompany him, but Eddie shook his head. In consequence, he was alone when, thirty minutes later, he found the body.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Cross

  (I)

  EVERY CORPSE on which Eddie Wesley had ever laid eyes had belonged, once, to someone he knew, for his familiarity with the species flowed entirely from encounters at funeral parlors and what were called “homegoing services” at his father’s church. His term in the Army had been served entirely within the nation’s borders, and even during his months working for Scarlett he had never touched what Lenny called the happy end of the business. It was past midnight when Eddie came upon his first-ever unknown body. He was wandering among the lush trees of Roger Morris Park, across Jumel Terrace from the party, talking himself down, remembering how his father always warned against treating desire as implying entitlement. The park was closed to visitors after dark and haunted besides, but Eddie was a doubter of conventions and rules, except in literature, where he accepted them entirely. The park had once been the grounds of the most famous mansion in all of Manhattan, the ornate Palladian palace that had been home, a century and a half ago, to Madame Jumel, perhaps the wealthiest woman in the land. This was back around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, when the Haarlem Heights had been a distant, rural enclave for the white and well-to-do of the polyglot city. Harlem of Eddie’s era, after sixty years of Negrification, possessed few genuine tourist attractions, and the Jumel Mansion was among the few, although its principal lure was probably the ghost of Madame herself, occasionally spotted leaning from the upper windows to shush unruly visitors and, now and then, crossing the hall before your eyes, perhaps searching for the fortune that her second husband was said to have stolen. Most of Harlem pooh-poohed the ghost stories by day, and avoided Roger Morris Park at night.

  Eddie did not think much of the supernatural, considering that more Wesley Senior’s realm.

  He stumbled over the body in the shadow of a dead elm very near the wrought-iron fence, where a passerby would no doubt have spotted it from the sidewalk early the next morning. The stumbling was literal, for Eddie, pained eyes on the townhouse where every moment drew Aurelia further from him, was not looking down. He tripped, and his chest hit crusty mounded snow. He turned and, spotting a man lying behind him, spun, catlike, to his feet, remembering the boys who had mugged him in Newark. Even when he crept closer and took in the elegant suit and watch chain, the lack of an overcoat despite the February chill, the white skin, the well-fed jowly face, the closed eyes, and the unmoving hands, he was certain the man must have tripped him on purpose, because—on this point, years later, he was firm—five minutes ago, on his previous circuit along the fence, the man had not been there.

  “Hey,” said Eddie, anger fading as he got a good look. He shook the man’s shoulder. “Hey!”

  A fresh night snow was by this time brushing the city, and tiny twirling flakes settled on the stranger’s forehead and lips as well as on the hands folded across his substantial chest. Still the man made no move.

  “Are you okay? Hey. Wake up!”

  But by that time Eddie had guessed that the man would not be waking. A white man, dead in Harlem. The press would have a field day. Not afraid but, for once, uncertain of his ground, Eddie knelt on the frozen ground and unfolded the man’s pudgy hands, intending to check the pulse, although he had no idea how it was done. When he separated the fingers, something gold glinted and fell to the snow. Eddie picked it up. A cross, perhaps an inch and a half long, ornately worked, with an inscription on it he could not read in the faint glow of a streetlamp outside the fence. Then he realized that the words were upside down. Inverting the cross, twisting it to catch the light, he could make out “We shall,” and, in the dark, no more. Maybe the next word was “overcome”? But the light was too dim.

  The cross dangled from a gold chain, threaded oddly through an eyelet at the bottom rather than the top, so that, had the dead man been wearing it around his neck, the cross would have been upside down, the words right side up. Eddie wondered why he had been clutching it at all. Seeking protection, perhaps. But from what? Leaning closer, squinting, Eddie had his first hint. Around the plump neck, digging into discolored flesh, was a leather band. The man had been garroted.

  Eddie shot to his feet, senses woozily alert. If the body had not been here five minutes ago, then the killer must be nearby. He listened, but snow crunched in every direction. He peered, but in the trees every shadow swayed. Eddie was no fool. A garrote meant Scarlett, or somebody like Scarlett, and the Scarletts of the world had a thing about witnesses.

  He wiped off the cross, tucked it back into the cold, lifeless hands, and hurried away. Crawling through the gap in the fence gave Eddie more trouble than usual, maybe because he was trembling. Struggling toward the sidewalk, he kept waiting for the garrote to slip around his own neck. He looked up at the townhouse but could not face the humiliation of return. He plunged south. Fat Man’s, the famous bar and grill on 155th Street, was open late, packed as usual with Negro celebrities. If you could get in, Fat Man’s was the place to be seen, and right now Eddie wanted to be seen, as far as possible from Roger Morris Park. He called the police from the pay phone in the back, not troubling to share his name. He had a drink, but everybody seemed to be looking at him. Maybe because he did not belong. Maybe because he was trembling and sweaty. Maybe nobody was looking, but Eddie took no chances. He threw money down without counting: it must have been enough, because the bartender thanked him and even said “sir.”

  Home was a narrow walk-up on 123rd Street, noisy and airless, an address he seldom admitted outside his tiny circle, for the Valley, as it was called by the cognoscenti, was far from the most desirable corner of Harlem. For letters from his relatives he had invested prudently in a post-office box. Two flights up, in his claustrophobic flat, Eddie sweated the night away, perched on his lumpy but carefully made bed, journal in his lap, baseball bat by h
is side, watching the fetid alley they would use to gain entry to the side door when they came for him.

  (II)

  BY MORNING, the city was abuzz. The dead man was a lawyer named Castle. Eddie had never heard of him but read every obituary he could get his hands on. Philmont Castle was evidently a titan of Wall Street. Corporations across the country issued condoling statements. So did several film actors. Eddie turned the pages. It seemed there was nobody the lawyer had not befriended. President Eisenhower said the whole nation would miss Phil Castle. He promised federal assistance in tracking down whoever had committed this loathsome outrage—or words to that effect. The lawyer had been a major Republican fund-raiser. And a devoted husband and father. And a pillar of his church. And a guest last night at “an engagement party in Harlem.”

  Eddie put the newspaper down with a snap.

  Try as he might, he could not correlate the smiling face on every front page with any of the Caucasian faces from last night. But there had been so many, and Eddie, if the truth were told, had stared mainly at the bride-to-be. He turned more pages. No mention of the cause of death, except that it was murder. Castle’s wallet was missing. The police called it a robbery, not exactly an unknown event in Harlem, although the white newspapers seemed unaware that crime of any kind was relatively rare in those days along the nicer blocks. No speculation anywhere on exactly what a Wall Street lawyer might have been doing on the grounds of Jumel Mansion. Nothing about a cross clutched in Castle’s dead hands, whether right side up or upside down. And no whisper of anybody’s having noticed an angry, half-drunk Negro writer leaving the party around the same time the dead man did.

  The authorities never questioned Eddie. Days passed. He could not get the cross out of his mind. He wished he had had time to read the rest of the inscription. He risked a rare letter to Wesley Senior, inquiring but not saying why. The pastor answered by return post. His tone for once was patient. He enjoyed being didactic. The upside-down cross was often called the Cross of Saint Peter, because tradition held that the leader of the Apostles had been crucified that way. The Roman Catholic Church considered the symbol sacred. Over the centuries, he added, the upside-down cross had been adopted as an object of veneration by the worshipers of Satan, or, as Wesley Senior put it, quoting Scripture, the followers of “the devil and his angels.”