Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  “First I got to settle,” I said. “But I’ll be there by tonight.”

  I parked the SUV at an underground garage in Midtown. I exited, trying my best not to be recorded on their security cams. After that I climbed down into the hole in the ground.

  At the best of times I don’t like subways. All those people, and many of them, I knew from thirteen years on the force, were armed. Buskers, pickpockets, madmen and women, and then all the potential victims, whom no police force on earth could protect.

  My breathing in the crowded southbound car was erratic, and I could feel my heart beating. That cellar had been my grave for some hours, but it was just now that the terror was settling in.

  Six times I decided to leave the country. Canada and then maybe Mongolia or Lithuania, Cuba or Chad. Jackie Robinson’s son made a new life for himself in Tanzania. Six times I steadied myself and thought of how I could dig my way out of a grave with no name on it.

  The worst part of that leg of the journey was that I didn’t have a book on me. I needed to read something. It didn’t matter what.

  A woman across the aisle got off at Thirty-Fourth Street leaving a throwaway newspaper on the seat next to her. I literally leapt out of my seat and grabbed the rag before anyone else could. Then I went to the chrome pole set between the center doors of the car and read all about Chinee Love, a black-skinned, yellow-haired New Age singer whose band played pots and pans behind her performance-art songs.

  I climbed out of that hell at the West Fourth Street station and walked nine blocks to Name-it Storage facility. Their records knew me as Nigel Beard. I had a pretty big space on the thirteenth level.

  It was a crowded room, twenty by twenty-five feet. There were boxes of books, papers, weapons, and other, more particular, tools of my trade.

  But before I did anything else I sat down in the stuffed chair that I kept dead center of the secret workspace.

  There was electricity, so I had light. There were a thousand books, so I didn’t have to read.

  Over the next hour or so my breathing normalized and my heart gave up its drumroll. I was innocent of any crime. Those men had kidnapped me. I had every right to defend myself.

  And then there were the simple pleasures of life: a comfortable chair and air to breathe, no chains or chimeric criminals who would kill you just for wanting to reveal the truth.

  After calming down I used bottled water, bar soap, and a disposable razor to shave my head.

  Against the south wall of the storage room stood a rosewood armoire that was eight feet high and six wide. From this I took a makeup case I bought while taking a class called Hollywood Makeup Techniques.

  I studied that particular facet of cosmetics for one reason—to be able to don convincing fake facial hair when I needed anonymity. I realized over the years that a mustache made my face look different. Something about my nose, the distance between my eyes, and the shape of my skull.

  After attaching the natural-hair lip wig and sideburns to hide my telltale scar, I waxed my bald pate and then studied myself in a hand mirror, as Lamont Charles had done.

  I was pretty well satisfied with the results.

  There was a dull ochre trench coat hanging from the closet pole of my wardrobe. It was stuffed with wadded material so that when I put it on I looked forty to fifty pounds heavier.

  I then spent a good while looking at myself in the full-length mirror that lined the inner left-side door of the armoire. While checking out my disguise, I was considering a next move.

  The disguise was solid. Scar, size, face, and hair all altered enough. On any other job I would have stopped there. But this was a situation where I couldn’t afford a mistake. My visage was still too cop-like.

  So I reached into the armoire and took out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with clear, thick, nonprescription lenses. The transformation was now complete. Rather than a Cro-Magnon cop I was a Neanderthal nerd.

  One thing I had learned in high school was that in sports you always had to move in a direction that your opponent did not expect. From Ping-Pong to prizefighting, the man with the unexpected moves was the player most likely to win.

  Police work is a kind of intellectual sport, like Go or chess. And sometimes you have to make a move to fool yourself, a move that will keep you from putting yourself in the enemy’s line of fire.

  That’s why I decided to pay a visit to Augustine Antrobus.

  Antrobus Limited was listed on Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties. It was a tall and slender building plated with shiny brown stone with slit-like windows that made an odd pattern like a modern painting composed of matchsticks.

  “May I help you?” a guard asked. He was standing behind a chest-high station made from see-through yellow plastic.

  “Antrobus Limited.”

  The security man looked ten years younger than he was, and appeared to be forty. His blue eyes took in my bulky coat, shiny pate, and geeky glasses. Though unrecognizable, I did look odd.

  “Name?” he said after this brief moment of hesitation.

  “Nigel Beard.” The ID in my wallet said the same.

  There was a computer in front of the guard; I could see it through the yellow plastic.

  “I don’t see a Beard here,” he said after a moment or two.

  “Call them and see.”

  Security didn’t like the command, but he picked up the phone and hit some numbers.

  “I have a Beard down here says he wants to come up.” A few words passed, and he held the phone down and said, “The girls in his office don’t have any record of you either.”

  “Tell them that it’s about William James Marmot. Something I think they’ll want to be apprised of.”

  Again that natural hesitation and then a few more words through the wire.

  He put the phone down and looked me in the glasses.

  “Floor twenty-two.”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said, experimenting with my new, disposable personality.

  It wasn’t a crowded building. Only a young woman in a black skirt and white blouse and I waited for the elevator. The doors of car 8 opened, and I gestured for her to go first. She was multiracial, with a broad, friendly nose and brunette hair that strained toward red.

  I hit the 22 button and she the number 2.

  She must have noted me looking and said, “They lock the stairwells because they’re afraid of terrorists coming in through the exit doors. Otherwise I’d be walking.”

  “When I was a kid,” I said, “I thought that if I worried about every way I could possibly die, then none of them would happen and I’d live forever.”

  The doors opened, and she gave me a big gap-toothed grin, then walked out.

  For the next twenty floors I turned my thoughts to Stuart Braun, A Free Man, and a fat man whom I almost decided to let die. There was a definite parallel between me in that Queens basement and the Staten Island Underground Railroad station where I passively participated in the torture of Simon Creighton. There was almost a karmic balance there.

  The doors to the elevator slid away like the curtains to a very small stage, and I was on.

  A short and slender man in a violet suit was there to meet me. The guard downstairs hadn’t said anything about a man working in the office, so I decided that this guy was security. Olive-skinned white, he had eyes that were a pale blue. His hair was brown at the root and blond thereafter. He was somewhere between the ages of thirty-six and sixteen and smelled of rose attar.

  I wondered if the water fountains in that building were fed by an earlier, slightly flawed version of the Fountain of Youth.

  “Mr. Beard?”

  “Yes.” Even if he was a hired gun, I figured I still had the advantage; the wadding in my coat was laced with Kevlar.

  “Follow me.”

  He turned and gestured for me to go before him. I ran point down a useless hallway, finally coming to an opulent room that had three desks with a beautiful woman behind each one.

  You can t
ell a lot about an employer by the makeup of her or his staff.

  From the feminine bodyguard to the three office workers (all of whom were of a different race), I could tell that Antrobus was a sensualist.

  There was a small oil painting of a bathing nude above the central desk, where a broad-faced and striking Asian woman sat. I would have given even odds that that canvas was an original Degas.

  “Mr. Beard?” the woman said. Her name tag read HATIM.

  “Yes.”

  “What is your business, sir?”

  “Private between me and him.”

  “You must tell me or you won’t be meeting him.”

  “Then,” I said with a shrug, “I guess I won’t be meeting him.”

  I turned and the young-like lad in the violet suit got ready to block my exit. I decided that I’d have to shoot him if bad came to worse. My disguise was solid. I doubted if anyone would be able to identify me in a lineup.

  “Mr. Beard,” a markedly masculine voice boomed.

  I turned and saw a man who fit this voice like a fist in a Siberian mitten.

  He was tall with broad shoulders and a big belly, wearing a three-piece bright green suit that had gray pinstripes. His shirt was pearl gray and the clasp at his throat was a bright red-and-green garnet. The mane of hair was gray, but the drooping “oilman mustache” was white, almost blue.

  Augustine Antrobus’s face was a granite bunker, big with squinty eyes that might have been green. This was the sensualist who had hired the fay violet thug and the women of beauty.

  “Mr. Antrobus,” I announced.

  “You have something to tell me?”

  “The buffalo have come back from extinction and soon there will be pioneers raping the fields of Mars.”

  Antrobus’s laugh was a weapon. In it was all the strength of some wild creature.

  “Come on in,” he demanded.

  I took a step and the violet thug did too.

  “Not you, Lyle,” the master said. “Mr. Beard and I will meet mano a mano.”

  The corridor behind the room of women was set between a wall and a series of slender windows that looked down on Central Park. The striation of shadow and light made me feel as if I were on a safari behind an as yet unsuspecting lion.

  Antrobus’s office was all dark wood and royal blue fabric, bookshelves with only hardbacks, and no computer in sight. There were two plush chairs set side by side in front of his grand piano–size mahogany desk. The chairs were turned ever so slightly toward each other, like old friends sharing cognac and confidence.

  “Sit,” the master ordered.

  I did as I was told.

  When his bulk was situated, he put his hands on the clawed armrests and snorted.

  “You talk about buffalo and dress like a buffoon,” came his first salvo of words. “You were obviously christened in America but go by the name Beard, which means you have a sense of humor and are anything but a buffoon.”

  “I appreciate the attention, Mr. Antrobus. Most of the time I spend hidden…even in plain sight.”

  “You are even now.”

  “I come to you with intelligence and maybe a chance to do a little business,” said the man I was pretending to be.

  “I like the word intelligence,” Augustine said. “Even a fool can bring intelligence if he’s been given the right words.”

  I could feel my heart beating again. This larger-than-life man scared me. He came out of one of the storybooks of old, designed to frighten children into understanding how the world really worked.

  “I’m a private agent who does work for those who need to stay in shadow,” I said. “Somebody representing a man named Stuart Braun hired me to bring him hopefully incriminating information on another man—William James Marmot.”

  The masculine chatter stopped then. Antrobus studied me with his slitty eyes and nodded ever so slightly.

  “For what purpose?” he asked when my question was almost forgotten.

  “He said that Marmot was leaning on him and that he needed leverage.”

  “What kind of leverage?”

  “That I do not know. I met a man named Porker who told me that he knew another man who said Marmot worked for you.”

  “A man who knows a man who knows about me?”

  “That’s the way it is in my business.”

  After a fair length Antrobus asked, “And so why come here just because a man told a man that the man you’re stalking might have something to do with me?”

  “I wanted to see if you were as serious as I heard.”

  “And am I?”

  I smiled, wondering what my new face looked like with that expression on it.

  “I don’t need to do any more stalking if you and I can come to an agreement.”

  “You say,” Antrobus parried, “that someone representing Braun hired you.”

  I nodded without smiling.

  “Who is that?”

  “Someone calling themselves Lacey.”

  “A lacey beard?” he asked.

  I refrained from smiling again. You can often identify a man by his grin.

  “What do you want, Mr. Beard?”

  “Six thousand dollars in cash and Mr. Marmot falls off my radar.”

  “Hardly a fair business practice,” Antrobus observed.

  “I’m not applying for a position.”

  Antrobus roared with laughter.

  “Do we have a deal?” I asked.

  24.

  Sunset came before 5:00 at that time of year. The ferry moved peacefully through the dusk toward the Saint George dock. I was standing in my bulky and bulbous costume at the front of the boat, enjoying the stiff breeze and thinking that I had done a good job of putting myself off the scent for an afternoon.

  I had killed a man that day, and the amoral stench of that action hung about me. There were sixty-six hundred-dollar bills in my right front pocket, proof that Stuart Braun was going to have to deal with me sooner or later—if he survived.

  A short man with a broad chest came out on the mostly abandoned deck and stared at me for all of forty-five seconds; then he turned away.

  Maybe I looked like someone he knew.

  In Saint George I made a pay phone call, then boarded the commuter train and sat at the south end of the center car, looking back and wondering why I felt so calm. Life was coming down on me like grain filling up an empty silo, but there I was moving backward in a modern marvel of technology. Life was like the miracle of a tiger on the hunt, only no one around me seemed to appreciate this fact.

  Then the door at the far end of the car slid open, and the short white guy with the broad chest who had eyed me on the ferry came through. He wore jeans and tennis shoes, a maroon wool sweater under a loose pale green sweatshirt—its hood thrown back.

  He saw me and moved with purpose toward my throne of wonder.

  “You the niggah they call Cueball,” he said when he was maybe three steps off.

  The other people around me moved away. All except for an older gentleman directly across the aisle. He was also white, wearing a dark blue pea coat, black work boots and pants.

  I noticed the brave older gentleman while feeling a little stunned by the short stranger’s language.

  I tried to remember the last time someone had called me nigger. Even my black male acquaintances had mostly given up that tag.

  I put my right hand in a yellow pocket and stared.

  “You heard me?” my antagonist asked. He was powerful, no doubt. And he was as mad as hell about something; probably had been most of his life. The only thing left to know was if he was a fool or not. There was a gun in that pocket, and I’d already proven to myself that I was unafraid to use it.

  Usually when a man reaches in his pocket to threaten a would-be attacker he’s bluffing. But I have found that if you don’t say anything the threat seems more real.

  “Well?” the short man said.

  I said nothing.

  He took a step.

>   “Junior,” the older man said.

  The racist turned his head and saw the older man, maybe for the first time—that day.

  “Ernesto,” he said, his voice trying and failing to express both anger and respect.

  “You see the man doesn’t know you,” the brave oldster explained. “You see he’s about to kill you. Leave him alone. He’s not Cueball.”

  The man’s words carried weight, and after a moment of contemplation, Junior decided to retrace his steps back to some other car.

  When he was gone I asked Ernesto, “What was that?”

  “Boy lost his girl to a black man named Cueball,” he said. “Bald, you know? Junior thinks the guy took her from him. He don’t see that the last time he put her in the hospital was the day she stopped bein’ his friend.”

  “Well,” I said, “thanks for gettin’ him off me.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about you, man. Junior too stupid to understand you got a real gun in there. I could see his death in the corner of your eye.”

  Pleasant Plains was seventeen stops from Saint George. Ernesto went the whole way and beyond. We didn’t talk anymore, and I was on the lookout then for others who didn’t celebrate the Underground Railroad of Staten Island.

  Mel was waiting at the station. Pay phones still had some use.

  We walked up to each other and shook hands.

  “Almost didn’t recognize you in that getup,” he observed.

  “Looks like you got a friend. Can’t be too careful these days.”

  I turned and saw the angry young white man whose fists were still crying out for satisfaction.

  I gave Mel an abbreviated account of what had happened.

  “Wait here,” he said, and then he strolled over to Junior.

  A few sentences passed between them, and Mel took out a cell phone. He entered something, said something, and then handed Junior the phone. The younger man had a brief conversation at the end of which he shook his head as if indicating to whomever he was speaking that he did not wish whatever had been suggested. Then he gave Mel back his cell, turned, and hightailed it to whatever bar he used to assuage his feelings of inferiority and loss.