weeks off that ten. Sure I could.
“Yeah. Papa said it would be.”
Doo-Wop motioned grandiosely, and the bartender loomed up like a ghost ship at the bar’s horizon.
“Double brandy. And one for my friend here-whatever he wants.”
“Where is this man, Doo-Wop?”
“Papa said you’d ask that.”
“Right.”
“Papa says come see him.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“He’s one of mine, Lewis.”
The Oak Leaf looks like something that dragged itself, by brute force of will, out of the thirties into present time. Cypress walls, pressed-tin ceiling, rooms so narrow that people turn sideways to pass. Makes you think how the city itself is a kind of sprawling memory. A few blocks away, the Mississippi waits to flood all this. Only the Corps of Engineers,
“You have to understand,” the old mercenary said. “None of us ever belonged-here, or anywhere else. We’re a society to ourselves.”
“I know a little about that, Papa.”
He picked up his beer and looked through it at the meager light pushing its way through the bar’s front window.
“Probably more than you realize, Lewis.”
He swirled beer around the bottom of his glass, maybe looking to see if any of the light had remained there, and finished it off. I did likewise. The barkeep brought us two more.
An Irish ballad, “Kilkelly,” started up on the jukebox.
“He stopped being a soldier when he started his own war,” I said.
“It’s not his war, Lewis. Soldiers always fight other people’s wars. That’s what makes them soldiers. You should know something about that, too.”
“But the people he’s killing aren’t soldiers, Papa. This isn’t abstraction and theory, some pure idea you kick about the classroom or discuss over civilized martinis, white pawns here, black there. When these pawns fall down, they don’t get up for the next game. They don’t ever get up.”
“Hard for an old man to change.”
“Not easy at any age, Papa.”
He sat looking at me, finally spoke. “You understand so much more than you have any right to, Lewis, young as you are.”
“I don’t think I understand much of anything.”
“Then you’re wrong.”
He looked away again.
“Going on forty years now, I always said ideas don’t matter. Democracy, socialism, communism-all the same. Like changing your shirt between dances. Who the hell can tell any difference? One half-bad guy goes out and another half-bad guy slips into his place. No one even notices. You think any of them care about human rights, social progress? I tell my men: You’re soldiers. Professionals. These people contracted for your services. The money matters. That, and doing a good job, doing what you were hired to do. That’s all.”
It was a Hemingway moment. I understood that he wanted me to assure him somehow that violating his code was okay. And I couldn’t do that. I could only wait.
Papa put his glass on the bar. It was still half full.
“I think I’ve had enough beer today. Enough of a lot of things.”
He stood.
“You need a ride, Lewis? Van’s out back.”
“Think I’ll stick around for a drink or two.”
“Lewis?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Was I wrong, too? All these years?”
“I don’t know, Papa. How can we ever know?”
He stood there a moment longer, then told me where the shooter lived.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The address he’d given me led to a partially converted warehouse on Julia. A walk-through florist’s-and- gardening shop occupied the ground floor. Above that was a quartet of luxury apartments. The third floor represented a kind of industrial-residential Gaza Strip.
To this day I have no idea how Papa knew. I asked him once, years later, not long before he died. He grinned and settled back, wearing the robe one of the sitters had bought for him and the booties another had knitted. The entire nursing-home staff loved Papa.
“Soldier doesn’t learn how to do good recon, he and his men don’t last long out there, Lewis. Something I always had a particular knack for, though. Man always likes doing a thing he’s good at.”
I handed him a beer then and asked why he’d done it. Why he had decided to help me, someone he scarcely knew, and betray one of his own.
“Long time back, there was a young man I purely believed in. Knew things he didn’t have any right to, understood even more. Kind of man that, he sets himself to it, he might even change his little corner of the world, make it a better place.
“That was me.
“Then years go by, my life goes on, and eventually this young man shows up again. A different young man, you understand-but the same in a lot of ways. How do we ever know what’s right or wrong, he tells me. And I know him better than a mother knows her child. I have to hope he’ll do better than I did with what’s been given him. And I see him standing there at that same crossroads.”
Papa settled back against his cushions.
“I think I want to watch television now, Lewis. Will you switch it to channel eight for me? And turn up the sound?”
Gaining entry was easy. I’d dressed in tan work clothes from Sears and carried both a yellow hardhat and clipboard. People seldom pay attention to generic black men going about work
My feet rang as I went up them thinking of suspense movies I’d seen, climactic scenes set in towers, lighthouses, factories, submarines. That Hitchcock movie where Jimmy Stewart’s afraid of heights and the mannequin (he thinks it’s a person) gets thrown off the tower. One Sunday when I was twelve, when we were supposed to be in Sunday-school class, my friend Gerald and I had set a chair on a table and, pushing aside a section of ceiling, begun a twenty-minute, disappointing climb into the belfry of Zion Baptist.
The door at the top of the steel stairs had a Yale pin-tumbler lock. State of the art back then. I shimmied in the tension bar and cranked the cylinder hard right. Then I slipped the snapper in among the pins, thumbing it. One by one, pins rebounded and settled, fell into place.
The door opened.
A vast, unfinished room with late afternoon’s light coming through multiple windows of poor-quality glass. Bubbled and arun with fissures, each pane distorted in its own particular fashion the world outside. Ten frames of
