“Yeah, but, um, I thought he was just gonna join us,” Larker lied.
9
I expected to go home after Anzio’s. There to consider what I’d learned and decide whether or not to see Craig Kilian’s mother. Instead I drove farther downtown to an address on Wilshire Boulevard, which was at that time the North American headquarters of P9, the insurance behemoth. In the late sixties P9 owned the second-tallest building in LA.
It was after 5:00 but the company was at least partially open twenty-four hours a day because of the international money markets. The guard came to the locked glass doors and let me in without resistance. I’d been to the offices pretty often because my good friend, Jackson Blue, was senior vice president in charge of both data processing and general planning.
“How can I help you, Easy?” the guard, Philip Channing, asked. A gray-headed white man who was almost retirement age, Phil was part of corporate security and therefore well aware of me.
“Asiette in?”
“Still up in her office, I think.”
When I first met Asiette Moulon she worked in a small office behind the first-floor admissions desk. She was in her early twenties. Now, just a few years later, she had a big office at the end of a long hall on the third floor. She was in charge of all admissions, with more than a dozen people reporting to her.
Asiette stood five three in stocking feet with black hair that further accented her shocking violet eyes. A Frenchwoman from Burgundy, she would be considered lovely in any language or clime, class or time.
That day she was wearing a bright orange minidress that flared out a few inches above the knee.
“Easy!” she squealed, then ran to my arms and kissed me on the lips.
The first time she ever did that I almost pushed her away. I’d known black men in Texas and Louisiana who’d been lynched for even puckering their lips upon seeing a white woman.
But times were changing and Asiette and I had been seeing each other on and off for the past year.
“How are you, honey?” I asked.
“Come on in,” she said.
She led me into her bright yellow office and pulled me until we were both sitting on top of her strawberry-colored desk. She took my hand and laid her head on my shoulder.
“You ’ave come to see me?” she said to our hands.
“I came to see the security boss but I’d never drop by without saying hello to you.”
“Just hello?” she said, pouting only a little.
The late sixties were the cream-filled center of the sexual revolution. Asiette and I had done things together, and with others, that I would never have imagined just five years earlier.
“It’s a job, baby,” I said. “You know we all have to pay the rent.”
“Do you want to take me home after the rent?”
I was forty-nine at the time. And so I knew that a question like that was never just about tonight.
“It might not be till tomorrow,” I said. “I mean, if you’re not busy or anything.”
I expected the reply to get her to smile, but instead she frowned and stood.
“I,” she said to my knee, and then she looked up. “I’ve been seeing a man.”
Like I said, that was the sixties. There was a lot of seeing among a certain crowd.
“And you like him,” I said, trying to help her out.
“His name is Stefano Lombardi.”
“Okay.”
“He’s the head of sales in P9’s Rome office.”
“Good salary. Wonderful country. I passed through on my way to France during the war. Even then you could see the beauty.”
Asiette was looking me right in the eye.
“He has asked me to marry him,” she said.
I felt something. Actually it was quite a few things. I liked Asiette’s company and I’d learned a lot from her. She was young and I cared for her at least partly the way I felt for Feather. These thoughts logjammed in my head and I found that I had no words to say.
“Well?” the Frenchwoman demanded.
“Honey . . . it’s not my call.”
The World War II survivor’s nostrils flared before she said, “You better go on upstairs, Easy. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your job.”
The main office of North American security for P9 was on the thirty-sixth floor.
The president and CEO of the company, Jean-Paul Villard, once offered me the top security position, but I turned him down because of a recent windfall and a lifelong distaste for being answerable to anyone.
I did, however, have a suggestion of whom he might hire.
The double glass doors had the words SÉCURITÉ POUR L’AMÉRIQUE DU NORD stenciled across them in gilt and scarlet lettering. Through the glass I could see the burgundy carpeting and dark wood shelving along the walls of the large reception area. At the center of the room was a big mahogany desk. Behind this sat a young man who was studying the pages of a slender, drab green file.
I didn’t knock but the young man sensed me and jumped to his feet like the soldier he was, ready for action.
I smiled and waved at the hale specimen in the thirty-dollar Sears suit.
He approached the door, took out a large ring of keys, and used one of these on a small silver disk at the far end of the left-side entry. Then he pulled that portal open maybe four inches.
“Yes?” he asked, as if talking to a stranger.
“Is he in, Edmund?”
“Major Black is working.”
“Here or elsewhere?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I don’t need one.”
Resentment filled the veteran’s eyes.
“I’ll check if he wants to see you,” Edmund Lewis said.
He closed and locked the glass door, turned away, and walked to another door at the back of the reception room. There he knocked and then passed through. No more than half a minute later the military receptionist returned and admitted me to his domain.
“He said to show you in,” Edmund informed me.
“I know the way.”
Edmund moved to block my passage and said, “I’m supposed to take you.”
“Did the major actually say that?”
This question stymied Lieutenant Lewis.
“No,” I continued, “he did not. You just think that when I enter your space I have to take your orders, and that’s just not true. So why don’t you step aside?”
I don’t know why I was so angry or, for that matter, why I was trying to pick a fight with a combat soldier who had been active in Vietnam as recently as Craig Kilian. Luckily for me our face-off was interrupted.
“You better listen to him, Ed,” an assured voice said. “You might defeat Easy hand to hand, but he’s like the VC; if you don’t kill him he’ll keep coming back at ya.”
Christmas Black was standing at the back doorway. When I didn’t come immediately in, he understood that our conflicting natures were escalating in the outer office.
“Yes, Major,” Edmund said, standing straighter and yet with greater subordination.
“Mr. Black,” I said, mostly to show Edmund that I wasn’t bound to military nomenclature.
“Come on in, Easy,” the major said.
Without direction we went to our preassigned seats.
Christmas’s office was smaller and more Spartan than Edmund’s room. The floor was light pine and the one painting on the wall was of a black soldier pressing forward against nebulous, seemingly insurmountable odds. His desk was a table made from cherrywood. My chair was crafted from the same material.
Over the years the eternal war hero (retired) had learned to respect me, hence the comparison to the VC. I knew that he respected the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese allies as the greatest soldiers in the greatest army thus far in the twentieth century.
Christmas was a big man; six four in bare feet with the shoulders of a giant. His skin was medium brown and his eyes a lighter brown than you wou
ld have expected them to be. He had scars here and there and no sense of humor whatsoever. His seven-year-old adopted daughter, Easter Dawn Black, was a Vietnamese refugee. Christmas had killed her parents on a secret government raid. She was an infant and so didn’t remember. But that one act made him quit the profession that almost every male member of his family had been in since before the Revolution.
“What can I do for you, Easy?” asked the man I had recommended for the job of North American coordinator of P9 security.
“Corporal Kirkland Larker.”
The name sparked something in the soldier’s eye. He considered me, weighed where the discussion might lead, and then changed the subject.
“You’re looking in pretty good shape, Master Sergeant,” he said. “You been working out?”
“Used to be working out was what I did from the minute I woke up to late that night with my, or my best friend’s, girl.”
There wasn’t a thing I could say that would make Black crack a smile.
“But to answer your question,” I continued. “I have been visiting your martial arts recommendation. Son Chen’s got me doing sit-ups and push-ups and he taught me that it is only a fool who believes they can overcome any foe by direct conflict.”
Christmas smiled at that phrase, which I was sure the eighty-two-year-old Chen had taught him when he was a younger man.
“Larker’s a fuckup,” the government bona fide killer of men, women, and children said. “He drank before missions and stole from the PX.”
“He says that you gave him my name in order to help one of his friends.”
The major looked up at a point somewhere above my head. I took this as a glimpse at something in the past. And, because there was a hint of distaste at the corner of his mouth, I supposed he didn’t like what he was seeing.
This reverie went on for some seconds before he said, “Corporal Larker was in my squad in ’Nam. That was nine years ago, at the beginning of the American intervention. I was going to have him transferred at the first of the next month. We were on furlough for two weeks so I didn’t have to worry about him causing shit in the field.
“But then Lieutenant General Reeves got the report that there was a VC weapons depot that had been set up only twenty miles outside Saigon. They didn’t have an exact location, so an airstrike was out of the question. If Reeves sent out a regiment, the news would travel and the timing for whatever strike had been planned could have been sped up. So . . .”
I was wondering how Black’s account was going to bring me back to a straight-haired black man named Alonzo who might or might not be dead.
“. . . I told my little squad to pack up and we went out on a seek-and-destroy.” There was little joy in Christmas. “I made Larker the radioman.” He looked directly at me for the first time since the tale began. “I mean how much trouble could he cause on a radio no VC could hear?”
I hunched my shoulders.
“We were air-dropped at twenty-four hundred hours and by three hundred we’d located the nest,” Christmas continued. “We had the munitions to take ’em out. All we needed to do was get close enough. You could tell this was the start of a major offensive because they had maybe a hundred men spread out, ready to repulse any attack. But they didn’t reckon on a small group of well-armed men coming in down the middle of the Ben Hai River.
“It was deep jungle so we made it to maybe seventy-five yards from the target. The shoulder-fire missile launchers were setting up when I tripped a net trap. Motherfucker fell on me and set off this gook gong-alarm. Gunfire came from all sides. They had me. I yelled for the rocket launchers to fire. I got hit in the right arm and left leg. Then something, someone fell on top of me and started shooting. He shot everywhere at once. He kept it up till one of the rockets hit the sweet spot in the VC arsenal. The explosion was like a goddamned blockbuster come with his sister the firebomb. When the explosion happened the shooting stopped and my rescuer cut me out of there.”
Christmas was sweating. This was something I’d never seen before.
“It was Larker,” the major said. “He called in an airstrike, then jumped on my back and opened fire, cut me free, bound my wounds, and dragged me back to the river.”
The stillness in the room held the reverberation of explosions and death, the scent of gunpowder with a hint of blood.
“A malingerer and liar, sneak thief, and cheat. Kirkland Larker is everything I despise, but he saved my life that night. His actions were . . . heroic.”
“So he told you that his friend needed somebody to find out what happened after a fight in the woods,” I concluded.
“Not even that, Easy. He said a friend needed to find someone, a black man. I asked him if it had anything to do with revenge and he said absolutely not. So I gave him your name.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I wanted to give the man a chance. He hadn’t gotten in touch with me since I gave up my commission. Maybe he’d changed. Anyway, I knew you would see any trouble he represented for what it was.”
I sighed and stood.
Christmas Black looked up at me.
“Is this going to be a problem for you, Master Sergeant?”
“Probably, but problems are my meat and potatoes.”
“If you need anything, all you have to do is call.”
“Thank you,” I said and then let myself out.
10
I stopped at Edmund Lewis’s desk. He’d returned his attention to the slender file that engrossed him before I entered.
“Yes?” he asked.
“You mind if I use your phone?”
“This is a business line.”
“Okay. Then ask your boss if I can come back in his office and use his.”
I’m not quite sure why Lewis didn’t like me. It wasn’t a race thing because Christmas was black and Lewis idolized him. I’d fought in some of the biggest battles of World War II, so it couldn’t have been disdain for some ignorant civilian.
“Is it a local call?” he asked.
“Probably not.”
He snorted and I picked up the receiver, took a slip of paper from my pocket, and dialed the number.
“Hello?” she said after seven or eight rings. Her voice was what I can only call voluptuous. It also sounded as if I had interrupted her nap.
“Am I speaking to Ms. Lola Thigman-Kilian?” I asked, reading Craig’s scrawl.
“When is it?”
“Say what?”
“When is it?”
“It’s a little after six,” I said.
“No, no, no. What day is it? Tuesday?”
“No, ma’am. It’s Monday.”
“Oh. So this is Mr. Ezekiel Rawlins?” Her clarity was shocking after the fuzzy start to our conversation.
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“CK told me you were calling but then I fell asleep and I thought it was tomorrow already.”
“Well, ma’am—”
“You have my address, right?”
I read the numbers and street name aloud.
“Bring some coffee, will you? I’ll be waiting.”
Driving a bright yellow Rolls-Royce Phantom VI while wearing black skin in the late light of summer—all that through a working-class, mostly white neighborhood—is an experience not meant for the faint of heart.
I parked by the curb next to the three-story, twenty-seven-unit, pink-plaster-coated apartment building. In order to get to apartment 2G I had to go around back and climb a flight of external stairs. People had been watching since I pulled up. As I passed apartments along the way, curtains swayed open and heads appeared behind screens to witness the black man who had pulled up in a Rolls.
I got to 2G and knocked.
A woman of great beauty and shimmering gold hair pulled the door open and said, “Come in, Mr. Rawlins. Come in.”
It was a relief to be away from the gawkers, though I thought that I might be safer with them than with the forty-somethin
g bombshell named Lola.
Five eight or nine, she was swathed in a red-and-black wrap that was something more, and less, than a housecoat. Her face, both heart-shaped and handsome, had reached a level of perfection that had spelled trouble for her since childhood; trouble for her and anyone else she happened upon.
“Come have a seat in the nook,” she offered.
We were standing in one of those modern all-purpose rooms. It was a kitchen, a dinette, and a sitting room all in one. The dinette, which she called the nook, was a small round table set next to the refrigerator with two bright chrome and blue vinyl chairs.
There were two bottles of beer set out for company. I handed her the brown paper bag containing a paper cup of coffee and then sat down.
“Ms. Kilian?” I said.
“Mr. Rawlins,” she replied, rummaging through the small bag. “Didn’t you bring some coffee for yourself?”
“I thought I’d stick with beer.”
She smiled while lowering onto the utility chair with as much grace as any princess or lady-in-waiting. I think I might have been a little too obvious noting this style.
“I used to be a dancer,” she explained.
It was my turn to say something, but every reply that came to mind had nothing to do with my mission.
“Um,” I said and then cleared my throat.
Craig’s mother’s features were of natural, and maybe even a little careless, feminine perfection. Only the slightest details indicated her age. She sipped her coffee and watched me with dark, dark eyes that had a glittering of yellow at their centers.
“Do you need an opener?” she asked.
“What?”
“For the bottle.”
“Um, sure . . . I’m here about Craig.”
The use of her son’s name muted the smile and caused her forward shoulder to shift from left to right, approximating the flow of a wave. This image reminded me of the Ben Hai River, which made a hero out of a malingerer and nearly cost a good soldier his life.
She handed me a bottle opener and said, “Yes. He told me you’d be calling.”
Blood Grove Page 6
