Fear of the Dark fjm-3

by Walter Mosley

  His partner was taller and deadly handsome but with nearly the same features. The contrast of like images intrigued me, but this wasn’t my show.

  I stood up, holding my book like a talisman.

  “What are you doing here?” the handsome man asked me.

  “Reading my book,” I said.

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  FEAR OF THE DARK

  “What are you doing reading here?”

  “I like the literary quality of the statuary.”

  That bought me three seconds of silence.

  “Let me see your book,” the handsome speaker said.

  I handed it over. He flipped through the pages, looking for contraband, no doubt. If he had read the frontispiece, he might have decided that I was a Communist; he might have arrested me for espionage. But his imagination wasn’t at all intellectual.

  He was looking for swag, for small packets of heroin. He was looking for the kind of contraband he thought someone like me would be carrying.

  “Let’s see your wallet,” he asked when the book search turned up nothing.

  I obliged.

  After fumbling through my well-ordered documents, he said, “Tell me something, Mr. Minton. Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I am,” I said. “My book.”

  “Your job is reading?”

  “In a way. I own a bookstore on Florence. I’m considering ordering a dozen copies of this book. But since it’s a translation, I’m trying to see if it’s of a quality to justify such an investment.”

  Three seconds more.

  “Why don’t you go to a park near your store?”

  “I like this park,” I replied.

  “Turn around and lean against the bench,” was his answer to my flippancy.

  He searched me down to the cuffs in my pants.

  When I turned around again, he was still looking for a way to invade me.

  “How much longer do you plan to be here?” he asked.

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  “I don’t know, Officer. I’m readin’ a book. Haven’t you ever read a book? It takes time.”

  If he were a soldier and I were the enemy, the look in his eyes would have told me that he intended to kill me the next chance he got.

  “We’ll be driving by in an hour,” he told me.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”

  I t r i e d t o g e t b a c k into my book but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the words the police and I had spilled. It was a complex meeting, what with the Communist publication, the racist miscomprehension, and my barely conscious desire to be put back in a cell.

  This last detail was very important in light of the other two.

  I was a black man seeking incarceration because I felt comfortable in that state. If I were a braver individual, I would have become a revolutionary at that very moment. But as it is, I only remember it because of Useless and his determination to share his bad luck with family and friends.

  F e a r l e s s r e t u r n e d i n forty-five minutes or so. He looked very dapper in his charcoal-colored chauffeur’s uniform. I took a blank Western Union form, scribbled down a note, folded it so that it appeared to be sealed, and addressed it.

  Fearless carried the dispatch to do its work.

  •

  •

  •

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  H e c a m e b a c k o u t and sat there with me. I was a little worried that the cops might return, but I suppose they had found some real police work to keep them busy.

  I tried to explain to Fearless about Communism and the American police state, and about me playing my part in the farce, but he didn’t understand.

  “That’s just the way it is, man,” Fearless said. “Cops wanna mess wit’ you, you got to put ’em in their place.”

  I looked at my friend, not for the first time thinking that even though we were as close as two men could be, we didn’t live in the same world — not at all.

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  N o t l o n g a f t e r F e a r l e s s returned from his mission at United Episcopal Charities, 32 a man came out the double glass doors. The white man had once been young, and hale, and handsome. He had probably been over six feet tall twenty-five years ago. Now he was five ten with silver hair and a gray blue suit that almost made up for the ravages of time.

  The man carried a yellow slip of paper in his left hand. He transported this paper across the street, jaywalking toward me and my friend from another world.

  I wasn’t worried because I was buoyed with the kind of synthetic confidence that Fearless inspired.

  As Martin Friar approached, Fearless stood up to make room for him on the bench. Realizing, whether right or wrong, who was in charge, Friar waved the Western Union note page at me and asked, “What is the meaning of this?”

  His once-handsome features were still rugged and, in certain circles, no doubt, awe inspiring. But there was a glaze of uncertainty over his pale blue eyes.

  “Sit down, Mr. Friar,” I said.

  He obeyed, and Fearless took a perch on the other side.

  “Well?” the vice president in charge of investments asked.

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  “You know a young black woman named Angel?” I asked.

  “Do you mean Monique? Monique Dubois?”

  I took out the 3 × 5 I had got from Man. When the steely-faced white man saw it, his colorless lips trembled for a moment.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s Monique.”

  “She was your lover?” It was meant to be a question but came out as an accusation.

  “We love each other,” he said.

  This present-tense reply threw me off a bit.

  “You say you love the woman who set you up and then made you the victim of blackmailers?”

  “It wasn’t her fault. She was coerced into fooling me. But we, we . . .”

  I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in part of his mind Friar felt that he was being a fool and so was ashamed to divulge further intimacies of his heart.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s true. Hector and Sterling were using her. I was just wondering what you thought.”

  “Where is she?” Friar asked, leaning toward me.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I told the heartbroken executive. “She’s with a friend’a mine, a guy named Maurice.”

  “What’s he to her?” Friar asked, without waiting for even a second to pass.

  This worried me. I had hoped to find someone who was feeling hate for Angel. Hate is a good source of energy. It makes your allies blind and eager. Love is a much stickier form of fuel. It burns unevenly and often causes internal damage.

  “He used to be her lover too,” I said. “But no more. Now they’re just friends.”

  The tension easing a little, Friar asked, “What can I do to help?”

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  He was moving too fast. I needed time to dicker with him, to figure out where he was coming from. Here he wanted to jump right in with both feet, and I still didn’t have a good understanding of his part in the puzzle.

  “I, I need some information before I could tell ya that,” I said.

  “What kind of information?”

  “How did Sterling get to you?”

  “I don’t know any Sterling or that other name — Hector, you said?”

  I told him about Hector and the little I knew about Sterling, the man in charge.

  “I know the Negro is Paul Dempsey. He was the one who ran the game,” Friar told us on that overexposed park bench.

  “But I don’t know anything about a man named Sterling. I’ve only met black people since Monique and I have been together.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Monique?” I asked.

  “Two weeks ago,” he said, choking a bit. “She called me and said that she was going away. She said that she was free of Paul Dempsey and that I didn’t h
ave to worry about her anymore.”

  “Was she gonna call you again?”

  “No. She said that it would be better if I never saw her again.” Friar looked down at his expensive Italian shoes with bitter regret.

  There was a very thin gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. The ring had probably always been that slender, but the way I read this man, I imagined that it had once been a big thick gold ring that had worn away over time like a Lifesaver confection under a dripping tap.

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  “How did you meet her?” I asked him.

  “It was a church function. I got a note from a man I know telling me that there was a young Negro woman who had come into a modest sum and wanted some advice on how to make that work for her church.”

  “Really? What’s this man’s name?”

  “Brian. Brian Motley.”

  “A white man?”

  “Why . . . Yes, he is.”

  “And how did Mr. Motley come into contact with a young Negro woman?” I asked, trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “He said that he had a friend who had done work with the church, that they didn’t really have a good system set up for their investments, but that this girl really wanted to help out.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “I . . . Well, I met her. She called and suggested a restaurant on Olvera Street. We, we met.”

  “I’ve only met her once myself,” I said, feeling every word.

  “Her eyes are somethin’ else.”

  Fearless grunted in agreement.

  “I fell in love,” Friar admitted. “Completely.”

  “Was that your first time?” I asked.

  “I’m married, after all,” he replied. “We have two children.

  I love my family.”

  “I’m sure you do, Mr. Friar. But I’m not asking you if Monique or Angel, or whatever her name really is, was your first lover. What I wanted to know was, was she your first black girl?”

  That stopped him for a second. His outpouring of feeling coagulated there, just behind his eyes.

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  “I don’t see what race has to do with love,” he stated.

  “But most people do,” I said. “Most people feel that love is a question of race. I mean, how many interracial couples you see walkin’ down Olympic, goin’ hand in hand?”

  “I’m not like that,” he said. “I care for people for what’s on the inside, not the outside.”

  “So Monique wasn’t your first?”

  “The question is crass, but the answer is no.”

  It took me a moment to disentangle that sentence. Once I had it, I asked him if his friend Brian Motley knew about his racial liberalism.

  This question brought suspicion to Friar’s gaze; suspicion but no immediate answer. Fearless turned to regard Friar —

  intrigued, I suppose, by the man’s silence. White Men Loving Black Women, that’s the title of a book someone should write one day.

  A pale blue vein appeared on Friar’s milk white forehead.

  “This has nothing to do with Brian,” Friar said. “He didn’t even know anything about Monique.”

  “Angel,” I said, correcting him. “Just like she didn’t know that this Paul guy was going to blackmail you.”

  “I was a fool,” Friar said dramatically. “But that doesn’t change how I felt, how I feel. It has nothing to do with race.

  Monique is a beautiful woman. She’s sophisticated and well-spoken. She understands how a man thinks.”

  “She sure do,” I said, appraising her effect on this man.

  “Tell me about your boy Motley. How does he fit in this?”

  “I once saw Brian at the racetrack with a lovely young black woman. It was obvious that they were intimate. When he saw me he got very nervous. To assuage his fears I made a joke. . . .”

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  “What kinda joke?”

  “I asked him if, if she had a sister.”

  Fearless and I both grinned.

  “Maybe I was foolish, but I had been married for many years. My wife and I love each other, but a man has needs well past the time a woman is done with such things.”

  I liked the way he worded it.

  “The women that Brian introduced me to were of another world. They would never run across my wife or her friends.

  They wouldn’t want to marry. . . . Not until Monique, anyway.”

  “She wanted to marry you?”

  “I wanted her. I told her we could go to the Caribbean, make a new life down there. . . .”

  He reminded me of my own desire to run away to Jamaica.

  “. . . We could have children and love each other. I got down on my knees.”

  It was a wonder how getting down on begging knee was a sign of pride for the powerful white man. For people like me it was getting up to an erect posture that was difficult.

  “So you say this Brian introduced you to more than one sister of his girlfriend?” I said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Friar said.

  “I hope not. ’Cause it sounds like prostitution. That could be blackmail lettah numbah two.”

  “They were young women looking for a good time. We went to clubs and restaurants. Every now and then we’d take a weekend on the beach in Ensenada.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he lied. “Five.”

  Or fifteen.

  “And did money ever pass hands?” I asked.

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  Friar moved his head to the side like cocking the hammer of a gun. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

  “But that wasn’t the way it was wit’ Monique,” I said. “Oh, no. Monique came to you bringing money with her. Thousands of dollars. And when you asked her where she got it, she took you through private jazz clubs and into back room poker games. She raked in thousands of dollars and spent the rest of the night whispering in your ear.”

  Martin Friar’s gaze had moved to his hands, which lay helplessly in his lap.

  “You don’t make a lot of money, do you, Mr. Friar?” I asked. “You manage the rich people’s cash that flows into the church. You visit them at their big houses and drink tea from china cups older than your mother’s mother’s mother. But at home you sweat ovah the bills like all the rest of us. Got a gray-haired wife, and kids in college. Car payments for a car spends half the time in the shop. You got three good suits an’ nobody to wear ’em for, and so when Monique came into your life, you just about changed religions.

  “All it would take was ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand.

  You saw her make twice that in the time you’d been together.

  She never lost. Never.”

  “It was eight thousand dollars,” he said through a severely constricted throat.

  “Shall we go visit your friend Brian?” I suggested.

  “Stay where you are,” a familiar voice countermanded.

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  Th e p i m p l e o n t h e c o p ’ s forehead had burst since the last time we’d met. In its 33 place was a fleshy red sore. Maybe his hat had broken the strained skin, or maybe he’d been in a brawl with some poor soul who didn’t want to vacate his bench.

  The cops came over to us, their hands hovering at their billy clubs and pistols.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the handsome white policeman asked Martin Friar.

  “What’s your name?” was his reply.

  “Officer Arlen,” the cop said, his voice developing a defensive tone as he spoke.

  “Do I look like I’m in danger, Officer Arlen?”

  “I’m asking the questions,” Arlen said, bringing his shoulders up the way a boxer does when he’s forced against the ropes.

  “My name is Martin Friar,” Angel’s mark said. “I’m a vice president of UEC there across the street. These two gentlemen have co
me to consult with me. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “This man here,” Pimple Face said, “told us that he was reading a book.”

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  “Was he reading a book?”

  “He, he didn’t say anything about meeting some vice president guy.”

  “Would you two like to come with me across the street?”

  Friar offered. “There you can ask about my position and my prerogative to have a private meeting with anyone I wish.”

  “We’re sorry, Mr. Friar,” Officer Arlen said. “This man just looked suspicious to us.”

  “Why?”

  “He was, uh, you know . . . hanging out with nothing to do.”

  “Isn’t this a city park, Officer?” Friar asked.

  I liked what he was doing, but I was beginning to get nervous. I had never seen a policeman getting browbeaten by a civilian before. I suppose I had never thought it possible.

  “Yes, sir,” Arlen replied, “but —”

  “But because these men are Negroes you decided that they were up to no good,” Friar said, cutting him off. “This is a free country, Officer Arlen. Men like these have rights just as much as you and I. And if you take away this man’s rights, you are hurting all of us. Do you understand that?”

  Two minutes earlier I would have sold Martin Friar down the river for an extra carton of Lucky Strikes. But now I would be more likely to help him than I would Useless.

  “Excuse us, sir,” Arlen said. “We didn’t understand.”

  The policeman didn’t apologize to Fearless and me. He didn’t really care, but I wasn’t bothered by that. As Arlen and his bad-skinned partner climbed into their prowl car, I had to strain to keep from grinning at them.

  Pimple Face glowered at me as they drove off.

  “Damn,” Fearless said. “Damn.”

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  “Maybe we should go someplace private,” Friar suggested.

  “I got the car parked up the street,” Fearless said.

  M a r t i n F r i a r t o o k u s to a very nice one-bedroom apartment on a small street called Bucknell a few blocks from his office. It was on the third floor of a solid brick building and very well appointed. The maroon carpeting was plush and the white walls were bright backgrounds for the real oil paintings that hung from them. There were landscapes and still lifes, tasteful nudes, and even one abstract painting of nested quad-rangles in differing hues of crimson.