Down the River unto the Sea

by Walter Mosley

  “They brought my daughter back last night. She’s unharmed if a little scared.”

  “I know. They found your friend Marmot with a note pinned to his chest that led them to the house of two women in Yonkers. Did you do as I asked?”

  “First I’d like to know what your plans are for Mr. Man.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “The police know that Marmot was trying to pressure you, but they don’t have evidence that you were actually abandoning your client. They don’t know about Johanna Mudd.”

  “I had no idea what they were planning to do,” he claimed. “When I realized what had happened I got sick.”

  “She got dead.”

  That put a cork in the lawyer’s whining.

  “I have enough evidence to put you in deep shit, but that’s not why you’re going to do as I ask.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Marmot was a minnow in the waters around Valence and Pratt. If I suggest to the man who employed him that you know his name, the tables will be turned and Chrissie will be missing an old man.”

  “I do not bend to threats,” he said with a certainty he did not have.

  “Make sure he’s in downtown holding and make plans for five visitors Monday in the morning and afternoon.”

  “What visitors?”

  I listed the people I had in mind. One or two of them surprised him. He asked about them, but I gave him no answers.

  “You do what I ask,” I told him, “and Chrissie will grow up believing she was visiting with her cousins in Yonkers and that you are the greatest man in the world.”

  I went down the rope ladder to my office after bathing in the big iron tub. I had slept eleven hours and the world had moved ever so slightly off its axis. People were milling down the avenue unaware of the mad machinations I was hatching over their heads.

  My time in the prison cell, Gladstone Palmer’s betrayals, even the loss of my shield no longer had a hold on my soul.

  I picked up All Quiet on the Western Front and read without a break until the buzzer of my office door sounded.

  Willa was wearing a blue dress reminding me of the femme fatale of one of my favorite novels. Her hair was up, and seeing her red lips, I realized that she hadn’t worn makeup at our first meetings.

  “Mr. Oliver.”

  “You look gorgeous.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Come on in.”

  I sat at Aja’s desk and Willa took the seat across. She was looking very good and I wondered why. Was this an attempt to make sure that I helped her one-night lover?

  “I read the in-depth article about Mr. Braun in the paper this morning,” she said. “I had no idea that his daughter had been taken.”

  “That’s why he was backing off.”

  “He called and said that he wanted me to meet with Manny on Monday at noon.”

  “That’s what I want. He was just the mouthpiece.”

  Willa got the joke and smiled.

  “I’m going to ask you to go off the reservation,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “In a little while a man will come here and he’s going to give you a note that we want you to bring to Man. There’s an item in the note that is vital to his case.”

  “Vital in what sense?”

  “I can’t answer because of…what do you lawyers call it? Oh yeah, plausible deniability. Just bring him what my friend gives you.”

  “They search you too closely for something like that.”

  “My friend has been smuggling contraband for his entire life.”

  “In prison?”

  I nodded and a hint of concern entered her eyes.

  “I love him,” she said, connecting the fear with this revelation. “I don’t want him hurt.”

  I smiled.

  “You find that funny?” she asked, the woman she’d become echoing in her tone.

  “You got a man with his comrades mostly slaughtered and him sitting on death row for the murder of two cops. His lawyer has betrayed him. Judges in the high court are whispering that he will most certainly die. And here you think I might be the one to bring him pain.”

  “What…what about his wife and child?”

  “What about them?”

  “Shouldn’t they be made aware of your plans?”

  “I will not share my plans with you or anyone else, but if everything works out, Mr. Man will be able to make his own decisions.”

  I could see that she was about to ask another question and many more after that, but then the buzzer sounded.

  I didn’t even look through the peephole.

  Mel was standing there wearing a corn-colored suit with a black shirt underneath.

  We didn’t speak. I walked him over to the desk and Willa stood. She was both fascinated by and afraid of this man. He looked at her like an evolved tiger might, through self-imposed bars.

  Mel pulled up a chair.

  After her usual hesitation, Willa sat too.

  Those few days held the most potent experiences in my life up until that point. It was as if every nerve had the volume turned up and every perception had a dozen meanings—all of which I understood and profited from.

  “This is going to be a short meeting,” I said. Then, turning to Willa: “My friend here is going to give you something and you will take it into that room for private meetings with lawyers. You will give him the packet and say that you got it from a friend. Don’t tell him any names. Do not indicate anything about us, including gender, knowledge we might have, or about any investigation. He will take the item and make up his own mind.”

  “What will the note say?” Willa asked.

  “That has to be between us and him,” Mel said in a surprisingly soothing voice. “That way everyone is protected.”

  “They search you down to your underwear when you go in to visit a death row inmate.”

  Mel reached into his pocket and came out with a small box with the name A Summer’s Day printed over a field of windblown grasses. It was a popular feminine hygiene product—a packet of three tampons. He handed the box to the young lawyer and she took it.

  “The seals are intact and the price is stamped on the bottom,” he said.

  “But I won’t be having my period Monday.”

  “Then it must be coming on,” he said with an irrepressible wolfish tone.

  “Just give him the packet,” I said. “The note is inside.”

  “Tell him to keep it hidden and tear it open when he’s back in his cell,” Mel added. “If you follow these instructions to the letter, he will have a fifty-fifty chance of being saved.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked, looking directly into my friend’s dead eyes.

  “If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

  Her nostrils flared and I wondered if she was turned on by the power pulsating behind those words.

  “Okay,” Willa said to me. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  After she was gone I took out a very old port and served.

  “You think she’ll do what we said?” Mel asked.

  “I’m pretty sure. He’s a man she loves and we’re the only show in town.”

  “The only one,” Mel agreed. “Now, how about this place?”

  “It’s called Treacher Admitting on Maiden Lane just a couple of blocks east of Broadway.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “It doesn’t advertise. They mostly serve rich patients from Wall Street, but they have a deal with law enforcement; free medical attention for certain protections.” I paused and then asked, “What about the powder?”

  “It’s what they call a derivation of the shigella bacteria,” Mel explained. “Targets the appendix but has a short life span, just long enough for our purposes.”

  “Not that I’m complaining,” I said. “But how does a self-educated heist man turned watchmak
er get his hands on something like that?”

  “Whenever I get put away I try for the sentence to be carried out in a prison where there’s a lotta Russians. They always have the most organized gangs and they’re connected to people from the old country and Eastern Europe in general; those people often have ties to intelligence. This little poison comes straight from the defunct laboratories of the KGB.”

  “Damn.” I was impressed. “I’ll give you the plans to the clinic. Their security is not so strong seeing that they rely on the cops and the fact that nobody knows they’re there. Because there’s so many cops I need to stay away as long as I can.”

  “I got that covered.”

  We finished our wines and then poured two more.

  36.

  I spent Sunday morning wondering how I kept my lawless side down for so long. That train of thought brought me to the realization that I no longer missed being a policeman. I’d been a good cop in my own estimation, but that shit nearly got me killed.

  I wasn’t a criminal, not exactly. But those flexible rules of law could not bend as far as I was willing to go; as I needed to go.

  The Internet news told of how William James Marmot had a crazy story of being kidnapped, shot, tortured, and then made to write the confession pinned to his chest. Under the threat of death he merely wrote what his masked captor dictated. He was a victim and not a criminal mastermind. Marmot was put in a hospital, but sometime after midnight, he evaded his police guard and effectively disappeared.

  I went to a reinvented old-time boxing gym in Dumbo at noon. There I lifted some weights and did a dance with the heavy bag for an hour or so.

  When I got back to the office there was a message on my office line.

  “Mr. Oliver, this is Reggie Teegs. I’m an unofficial representative of the parties that you’ve been negotiating with. We would all like to keep this matter outside the legal system, and so if you call me we can meet and I will offer you a settlement on behalf of my clients.”

  He left a phone number that I was sure could not be traced.

  I considered calling Mel but decided that I shouldn’t rely too heavily on him. I thought that maybe it would have been prudent to wait a week or so before responding, but that didn’t feel right either. Something about Teegs’s request sounded like an immediate threat.

  “Mr. Oliver,” he said upon answering.

  I had walked all the way to Park Slope to call him from a phone booth in a small restaurant I frequented. It could have been a call from anybody, but he knew that the only ring that line would be getting had to be from me.

  “So?” I said. “What is it?”

  “We have to meet.”

  “I haven’t been very lucky with clandestine meetings in this century,” I said.

  “You choose the place.”

  “Columbus Circle mall, fourth-floor wine bar,” I said, “in thirty minutes.”

  “Done. You’ll know me because I will be the only man there wearing a herringbone jacket with an orange bow tie.”

  I reached the fourth-floor, inside, open-air wine bar in twenty-eight minutes. He was drinking cognac from a snifter and looking about him like some kind of humanoid alien examining the rituals of an alien species in a forsaken corner of his cosmic domain. Preternaturally thin, he was what passed as a white man, but his coloring was olive and his black eyes were startling, even from a distance.

  I told the hostess that I saw my friend. She smiled and moved aside. As I walked toward him he took no special notice. This told me that he wasn’t armed with a photograph.

  “Mr. Teegs?”

  Due to his slender build and finicky attire, I expected the professional middleman to be shorter than I. But as he unfolded himself from the chair he rose and rose until I was looking up into his void-colored eyes.

  He took inventory of me: my Crayola-blue suit and black canvas shoes (worn in case I had to run). I had to concentrate to keep my hands from writhing nervously. This strange man unnerved me.

  His smile revealed very bright but tiny teeth.

  “Mr. Oliver,” he greeted, holding out a hand. “So glad you decided to come.”

  I shook the hand and took the chair across the small circular table from him.

  The wine bar—it had no name I knew of—wasn’t very crowded. We sat next to the outer wall, looking down the atrium to the entrance hall three floors below. I chose that particular place because no matter the economic state of the nation, or the world, that mall was always crowded because it catered to the upper classes, who, it seemed, were never at a loss for disposable income.

  We were sitting in an isolated corner, so my host spoke clearly and at a decent volume.

  “There was a regrettable decision to end your life,” he said as if talking about a small dog that had taken a shit on my rosebushes. “We apologize for that lapse in judgment.”

  This answered my first question: Teegs worked for whoever it was who used Gladstone to frame me back in the days when I was cop.

  “Whatever happened with that?”

  “The agent, who took the unconsidered decision upon himself, has been dealt with. You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “What about his accomplices?”

  “One has moved on and the other has simply gone away.”

  I liked the way Teegs talked. His references could be either vague or rock solid.

  “Why would you apologize if it was Convert who took it upon himself to do what was done?” I wasn’t as accomplished a conversationalist as Reggie Teegs.

  “If a man represents another man, then the man in charge has to take responsibility. That rule is what Western civilization is based upon.”

  “And are you the man in charge?”

  Showing his small-toothed grin again, he said, “Heavens no. I am merely a fulcrum, the man who attempts to achieve parity among the parties involved.”

  “I could have used somebody like you a long time ago.”

  “As I have said, there have been mistakes made.”

  “You talk about this shit like you stepped on my toe or brought me a black coffee instead of one with cream.”

  “Come on now, Joe,” the Fulcrum said reasonably. “Men have died in this arena. I’m here to offer you recompense.”

  “What kind of recompense?”

  Teegs reached under the table, pulling out a dull buff-colored leather satchel.

  He said, “Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in untraceable bills.”

  If I was still a cop I would have walked away right then. Even if I had just considered myself loyal to the clan that abandoned me I would have said no. As merely a responsible citizen the negation was on the tip of my tongue.

  Teegs saw this and said, “Before you make a rash decision, Mr. Oliver, let me say that the people on the other side would feel quite nervous if you were to refuse their offer.”

  I could send Aja-Denise to college with money like that. And there were the costs that the next day’s jobs would incur. The most I could hope for was some kind of payoff, be it from a judgment or from the conniving of some lawyer like Stuart Braun.

  “Your pain is undeniable,” Teegs said, trying to drive the point home, “but, despite our lapses, you are still alive.”

  “If I take that satchel the people you represent will back off?”

  “Like the darkness at the break of day.”

  “And if I don’t take it?”

  “I have no words for that consequence.”

  I returned, that evening, to my office, with the pigskin satchel and more money than I’d ever had. I put on a duet by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. They played those horns like maniacs finally released from the asylum of humanity.

  I listened to the piece over and over, thinking about the victims whom I’d uncovered and to some degree whom I had avenged. I thought about the truth that undergirded the lies circulated by the institutions of governments, large and small. That was, I knew, my excuse for taking the payoff.


  37.

  Aja called me in the morning. They were back from Florida and she wanted to ditch school to meet me for lunch. I was her father and should have said no, but instead I agreed and called the school, telling them that I was keeping her out for the day.

  We met at noon at our favorite pizza place across the avenue from Lincoln Center. There they made simple pizzas on the thinnest crust imaginable.

  “What happened to your hair?” was the first thing she said.

  “I thought I’d take up track,” I joked. “Cutting off my hair makes me aerodynamic.”

  She wasn’t amused.

  “Are you okay now, Daddy?”

  Instead of answering, I hugged and kissed her; then we sat at a window table.

  “Almost.”

  “Why only almost?”

  “The best thing I can ever teach you, honey, is that the truth will kick you in the ass.”

  She giggled; then the waitress came to take our order.

  “Are you getting kicked at by the truth?” Aja asked me when the server departed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I help?”

  “You know how I was gettin’ on you about how you were dressed?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whenever I do something like that you should listen to what I say but do what you want.”

  “I usually do,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it?”

  “But you’re almost always right, Daddy.”

  The concern on her face made her look older and, in my opinion, even more beautiful.

  “I was real worried about you when we went away,” she added. “I hardly slept at all. One night I woke up and found Mom sitting on the couch in our suite.”

  “You had a suite?”

  “Coleman said that we should have it so that we were together. He was pretty scared.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “I told her how worried I was about you and she said that she was too.”