“No.”
“Did you know this Philmont Castle? The lawyer who got himself strangled?”
Eddie barely hesitated. “We never met.”
“They worked together, Eddie. Castle and Belt. And it wasn’t just the two of them, Eddie. We’re trying to figure out who else might have been in on it. Maybe Castle’s wife.”
“I’m sorry, Agent Stilwell. There is no way in which I can be helpful.”
“What about Aurelia?”
Despite the ache in his neck where Stilwell had elbowed him, Eddie sat very straight. “I beg your pardon.”
“Aurelia Garland. Your little chippy. Loose thing like that. Was she part of Belt’s scheme?”
Eddie tried to hit him. Stilwell was federal, and the car was cramped, but still he tried. His fist barely flickered. The agent had his arm pinned before he could get any energy behind the punch.
“Naughty, naughty, Eddie. Assaulting a federal officer is a year in prison, minimum.”
“You’re a sick bastard, do you know that?”
Amusement in those devil’s eyes. “Job’s a job, Eddie. But I guess you know that, don’t you?”
The car had stopped on a side street three blocks from his apartment, and the man from the front seat had the door open for him.
“Goodbye, Eddie.” Stilwell handed over a card. “Call me when you change your mind.”
“About what?” said Eddie, rubbing his neck.
Stilwell winked, and shut the door.
CHAPTER 9
The Fine Old Truth
(I)
MEANWHILE, Aurelia was betraying her husband. Not with another man—she had not yet fallen that far from the wife she had always imagined she would be—but she was betraying Kevin’s trust all the same. She had chosen today because Kevin was in London. She knew he was because she had the telegram confirming his arrival. So here she was, on her knees in his private office in the suite kept by Garland & Son in the Thirties off Park Avenue, not far from the Morgan Library. She was twirling the dial of the huge safe, manufactured, the door proclaimed, by the Mosler Safe & Lock Company of Cincinnati and New York. This was where her husband kept his secrets. If anything ever happened to him—so Kevin frequently told her—everything was there.
Everything.
An hour ago, Aurelia had never dreamed she would get so far: it was not as though Kevin had entrusted her with the combination. She had arrived at the firm with no clear plan, other than to stand in her husband’s office and will the answer from the air. At first it had seemed she would not even make it over the threshold. She had tried to talk or bluff or scold or tease her way past Thrush, the unctuous white assistant whose job was to keep his master’s secrets, but she had failed. Fortunately, Kevin’s father, Matthew, was in today, one of his rare visits from his palace on the Hudson River near Dobbs Ferry. Matty Garland was possibly the wealthiest Negro in the United States. The investment firm he had founded, a gnat by the standards of Wall Street, had nevertheless achieved remarkable success. Garland & Son employed thirteen clerks, all but one of them white, and the other was the son of a South American land baron. Matty Garland was not an easy man to charm, but he adored Aurelia. And so, when he came out to investigate the commotion and found his daughter-in-law sobbing, and Mr. Thrush ineffectually fluttering his hands, Matty waved everyone away, slipped a powerful arm around her, and led her into his own capacious office. He sat her on the sofa, offered his handkerchief, and asked her what in blazes was going on.
The story poured out, and Aurelia found, to her surprise, that her tears were now entirely unfeigned. When she was done, Matty considered. He leaned against his cherry desk, strong arms crossed, barrel chest ready to burst through the braces.
At last he said, “Do you know what I like about you, Aurelia?”
She only stared. Wasn’t it obvious? She was married to his son. But this seemed not to be his meaning, so she shook her head.
“You’re like me. You started with nothing, and you were determined to get whatever you could.”
Aurelia hardly knew what to say. “You didn’t start with nothing—”
“Why? Because my name is Garland? Where do you think the Garlands came from? My father was a preacher in Hartford, Connecticut. Not a very good one. He never had a dime, but he sent his boys to college. My late brother Mark—he graduated. He was a professor for a while. I dropped out, because I wanted to do this.” Flipping a hand to indicate the office, and what it symbolized. “I saw which way the economy was pointing. I knew what the war would do. I moved to California. I made some good guesses, I had some good luck, but, mostly, I worked my tail off. Same as you.”
“I don’t understand, Matty.”
“You think I didn’t have you looked into?”
Silence.
“Come on, Aurelia. I know why your parents didn’t come to the wedding, and if he has half a brain in his head, so does Kevin. You don’t have any parents. You’re not from some big colored family out there in Cleveland. You’re an orphan, and the nice Catholic sisters put together the money to send you to college because you’re smart. Don’t start crying again. I don’t have another handkerchief, and you ruined the first one. You think I care about any of that Negro-royal-family crap up in Sugar Hill? Who went to what school, who’s married to whose son? Why the fuck do you think I live in Westchester? Excuse my French. I’m nobody.” He pinched his skin. “Look at me. Dark as a field hand. That’s what those Harlem biddies would say about a man like me if I didn’t happen to have a few million in the bank. And if not for all those hints you kept dropping about your parentage, and your buddy Mona vouching for you in colored society, they’d say the same about you. I’m nobody and you’re nobody, so now there’s a pair of us so don’t tell, or however the fuck it goes. If those biddies knew the truth about you, they’d throw Kevin out of society for marrying down. Me? I’m happy, because I know he married up. Kevin always had it easy. He needs a striver in his life. You’re better than he is, Aurie. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t you dare settle for being Mrs. Kevin Garland and going to the parties and the salons, raising a bunch of kids who are gonna care about skin color and where somebody’s parents went to school. Don’t you dare, Aurelia. Those Catholic sisters expected more from you, and so do I.”
He buzzed for a clerk, took the startled man’s handkerchief, gave it to his daughter-in-law, kicked him out. Aurelia did not know why she could not stop crying.
“Tell you something else. I don’t know what’s going on with Kevin, any more than you do. He comes in when he wants to come in, he leaves when he wants to leave. He’s a lazy so-and-so, and he always was, but I figured, a new wife, a new baby, he’s busy. So I left him alone. Now you tell me he’s overseas half the time, and I don’t even know about it. Probably traveling on my dime, too. I’ll have to find out. Maybe dock his pay. Now, Kevin’s my only boy, and I love him. No matter what he’s up to, I’ll always love him. But you’re worth ten of him, Aurelia. Twenty. You want to check and see what’s going on? Be my guest. Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know. Just fix it. That’s the girl.”
(II)
TELLING THE STORY LATER, Aurelia could never quite remember how she wound up alone in her husband’s office, the combination to the massive safe in her hand.
She had to do the numbers three times before she got them right. She kept expecting Kevin to burst in, his shoe in his hand, demanding to know if she was ready to give him an heir. Finally, she heard the tumblers click. She thought she would never be able to budge the heavy steel door, but it swung easily on its hinges.
The safe was almost tall enough to walk into. Hunching over, she could slip inside. There was a small ledge for sitting, and even a light switch. She found file cabinets, but they were full of financial papers. One of them disclosed her husband’s net worth, a detail he carefully kept from her, and her eyes goggled at the figures. Others related to transactions for the firm, and she could not make head or tail of them, b
ut the amounts of money involved were large—larger even than Kevin’s funds. She wondered just how much Matty had. She wondered if white people even knew there were Negroes this rich. She wondered if Harlem did. When she was finished with the last drawer, she had found nothing to suggest what Kevin was doing. She sat on the ledge and pondered.
She could stop now. She could put the files back, close the vault, go home, raise this child and the next and the next, go to the parties, live in luxury, spending her husband’s money. She could do all the things Matty Garland had just warned her against. All the things the Catholic sisters had not raised her for.
She thought about her imaginary family, the one all Harlem thought had bred her: the jazz-singing aunt in Paris, the uncle who owned hotels. If only they existed, they would tell her to relax, to enjoy the life she had sought and married into.
She imagined the nuns looking over her shoulder. Check your answers one more time, dear, Sister Dorcas used to tell her, tut-tutting whenever Aurelia finished her test before the other children. Check them again, dear. You want to be sure you have them all exactly right.
All right. Fine. Check the answers one more time.
Aurelia delved into the records again, and, as if in reward for her renewed labor, she found at once what she had overlooked. The bottom drawer of the second cabinet. The file folders were higher than in the other drawers. Once she realized that, the reason was apparent.
There was a false bottom.
A sheet of steel exactly the size of the drawer. It was not attached in any way, just weighted down by the files themselves. The casual observer would never notice. Aurelia took a peek out into the office. In for a penny, in for a pound. She emptied the files onto the floor. Several tries and two broken nails persuaded her that she could not pull up the false bottom with her fingers. She scrounged in her husband’s desk, finally took the letter opener, and pried up the steel without difficulty. Beneath, she found a small cloth sack and a thick manila envelope.
The envelope was sealed with cellophane tape, and Kevin had signed his name over it, so that he could tell if anyone got in. But Aurelia, at her husband’s instruction, had been forging his name on checks from the day they returned from their honeymoon, and by now she was willing to bet that not even Kevin could tell the difference. She peeled off the tape, pulled out the documents inside, studied the first, glanced at the second, and had to admit that she understood none of it:
34—Term 1—Resistance (probably war, see 27–29, 41)
35—Term 2—Palace Council to reconsider timing
36—Day 20—Shake the throne (tentative—per Author) (“6 mo” + F : ix, from 1010)
37—Pandemonium on inside? (tentative—per Author)
On and on in that vein, for several pages. The words were typewritten, and mimeographed, and could have meant anything. Terms 1 and 2. Terms of the academic year? Presidential terms? Congressional terms? Terms in an equation? Aurelia shook her head. Who or what was the Palace Council? And Day 20. A date of a month? Was the reference to war metaphorical or literal? She played around with abbreviations and anagrams and found nothing.
Behind the mimeoed pages was a note, scribbled in an unfamiliar hand on stationery from a famous Florida hotel that admitted no Negroes:
After PC, problem. Too soon. Ask KG to find testament. He can have
And there it stopped.
Well, KG was obviously her husband, and PC had to be Philmont Castle, and here again was the testament mentioned in the note delivered to their London hotel. She was right. That was why Kevin was running around the country: he was searching for the testament. But why would anyone who could get into a fancy segregated resort—that is, anyone white and rich—care about the testament? And what was it that Kevin could “have”? A reward? Assistance in the search?
Puzzled, Aurelia crossed to Kevin’s desk, took paper and pen, and copied the pages. There were eight altogether. She sealed them back up, retaped the flap—which had plainly been taped many times—and, letting her fingers relax, signed her husband’s name across the cellophane.
She put the envelope back, then opened the bag.
Inside was a single item of jewelry—a man’s signet ring—and set into the ring was an inverted cross.
Memory brushed her.
Eddie, sitting with her at Chock full o’ Nuts on Seventh Avenue a few weeks before the wedding, his thin face determined as always, asking if she had ever seen anything around Harlem bearing what he called the Cross of Saint Peter, then showing her a drawing he had made. And Aurie, after telling him, no, she had never seen anything like that, had rebuked him for looking so sour. Cheer up, she had told him. Cheer up and go find somebody to love.
“Already did,” Eddie had said, judging her with those gentle eyes.
Not sure whether to slap him or kiss him, Aurelia had settled for instructing him to grow up. Then she left in a huff.
Now, sitting on the ledge inside her husband’s office safe, holding in her hand a cross just like the one in Eddie’s drawing, she wondered. Eddie had never told her where he had seen the cross, and she had never asked. Did he have some kind of connection with her husband, some secret the men shared and she did not? Men were like that, and Harlem was chockablock with clubs and societies with passwords and symbols and odd names. Perhaps Eddie and Kevin were members of one. Maybe Eddie wanted to join Kevin’s.
Closing the massive door, Aurelia laughed mirthlessly at her own pretensions. She knew nothing. That was what Sister Dorcas used to call the final truth, except that a much younger Aurie always thought she was saying “the fine old truth.” And the fine old truth was this: She had all but broken into her husband’s safe and found his secret compartment—and still she knew nothing. But she was surer than ever that there was something to find.
(III)
“FOUND WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR?” said Matty, ushering her out, beefy arm around her shoulders once more. “Good girl. That’s the way. I’ll clear up the evidence, don’t worry.”
“There wasn’t anything,” she said, faintly.
“Lying for the cause. Don’t blame you, really. Done it a time or two myself. Keep the secrets, that’s the thing.” His voice was booming, as if he didn’t care who heard him. As they crossed the open, airless room where the firm did its trading, the clerks all managed to turn the other way. “Don’t worry, my dear. Things will work out. Husbands, well, we get up the damnedest nonsense from time to time. I do. My sainted Daddy did. My sainted brother did. I bet even my sainted nephew Oliver does. Wives, well, job is to understand us. Civilize us, my Daddy used to say. You’re a good woman. Better than my boy deserves. Things will work out,” he thundered. At the elevator, Matty kissed her forehead. Only later did it occur to her that he was helping establish an alibi for her visit.
Aurelia sat up smoking half the night, and spent the next day with her slender fingers creeping toward the phone, then curling back. She wanted to talk about it. She thought of Mona Veazie—Mona, who had known Aurie’s secrets since college, and come up with the imposture that allowed her to be introduced to society—but Mona would demand every detail and then laugh her head off. She thought of Claire, but Claire would tell her to be patient because husbands need time. She thought of Eddie, the person most likely to take her seriously, but she was a married woman and part of society and could no more call her former beau than she could fly to the moon.
Wait. She remembered something in the mail, went to her writing desk, tracked it down. An announcement of a lecture.
Yes.
Maybe she could talk to somebody after all.
CHAPTER 10
Friendly Advice
(I)
EDDIE DECIDED to tell Gary Fatek. Gary might have been a man of the left, but the Hilliman family was solidly the other way, on excellent terms with hard-line Red-baiters from Walter Winchell and Joseph McCarthy on up. Or so the newspapers insisted. Even if the stories were exaggerated, Eddie was confident that his classmate would nu
mber among his close relations people who knew the people who could call off the dogs.
They met not in Harlem but at Gary’s home, the top two floors of a three-story brownstone in Greenwich Village, not far from Washington Square. Mona, who was doing her graduate work at nearby New York University, hung around most evenings, but tonight was off somewhere with her parents. They sat on mats in the back room, overlooking the garden, because Gary, having recently visited Japan, had decided that furniture was a decadence. He listened to his friend’s tale, glassy eyes blinking owlishly because he was smoking a bit of genuine Harlem mezzroll. He offered some to Eddie, who declined.
“This whole thing is pretty funny,” said Gary when Eddie was done.
“How so?”
Gary unlimbered himself, striding around the empty space, one hand holding the cigarette, the other tousling his own hair. “You’re thinking you just have a practical problem. How to get this Stilwell character off your back. Well, that’s nothing.” Waggling his fingers to dismiss this triviality. “My aunt can make him go away. She can make anybody go away.”
“She would do that for me?”
“Of course not. She hates Negroes.”
“I see.”
Gary, quite stoned, offered the boyish grin the privileged learn young. “Don’t worry. She’ll do it for me. I’m her favorite nephew.”
“I see,” Eddie repeated. Gary wanted Eddie to understand that She’ll do it for me meant I’ll do it for you. That was life. If he did not want to owe Gary another favor, there was no reason to have come.
“We’ll make him go away,” Gary repeated, examining the fingers he had been waving. “Far, far away.”
“Wonderful.”
“But that’s just the practical problem. You have a bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Belt is dead,” said Gary, his glance sly.
“Yes,” said Eddie after a moment. “They said he shot himself.”
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