Blonde Faith

“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”

“No company. I’m a one-man operation.”

“And what is the purpose of your call?”

“Purpose? I want to speak to my friend.”

“Does he know you?”

The woman wasn’t stupid, I knew that. What I was experiencing was just another example of the world changing while I sat sulking in place.

“Very well,” I said. “We’ve been friends since before the war.”

“Oh.”

I could almost hear her trying to think of some other way to more closely identify me before passing the call on to Jackson. It was her job to protect the uppity-ups at Proxy Nine, the French insurer of international insurance companies and banks, and Jackson was as uppity as you could get. He was the vice president in charge of data processing.

“One moment, please,” the operator said.

There was a series of clicks and then a ring.

“Jackson Blue’s office,” another woman said.

“Easy Rawlins for him.”

“What company do you represent, Mr. Rawlins?”

It was at that moment that Jackson changed in my mind. He had two secretaries protecting him from outside calls. From now on our relationship would be at the whim of his largesse. Somehow the cowardly genius had managed to circumvent the machinations of racism. He had more power and access, protection and esteem, than most white men.

“Hello,” he said into my ear.

“Hey, Jackson,” I said. “I need to come by.”

“Kinda busy, blood,” he said with barely a stammer.

“Listen, Jackson. I’m sittin’ here on a bed in a woman’s house. I broke in here and now I’m afraid to leave. It’s like if I went outside there’d be an ambush just waiting.”

This was not a continuation of my confessional with Tourmaline. Jackson and I had had one foot on the criminal side of things since we were kids. Admitting to a break-in was no big thing. And fear was Jackson’s native tongue.

“Okay, brah,” he said. “All right. Come on by.”

Jackson’s words were like an incantation that served to break the spell Pretty Smart’s house had cast over me. I walked out the front door, closing it carefully as I left. I walked to my car and headed for the Proxy Nine building downtown.

THE OFFICERS OF THE COMPANY were all on the thirty-first floor. I remembered that because Jackson had called me when he found out where his desk would be situated.

“I asked ’em t’change it, Ease,” he told me at Cox Bar on a Sunday afternoon, “but they said that I gotta be there ’cause Jean-Paul wants me close at hand.”

“Jean-Paul?”

“Jean-Paul Villard. He’s the president’a the company,” Jackson said, as if he were talking about a distant cousin rather than the master of a multibillion-dollar operation. “So I’m thinkin’ I should quit.”

“Quit? Why you gonna quit over somethin’ like that?”

“Thirty-one, man,” he screeched. “Thirty-one. That’s thirteen backwards.”

It took me and Jewelle and Jewelle’s minister to keep Jackson from resigning. It was amazing to me. Jackson was the only man I knew personally who understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, and he was still more superstitious than a room full of four-year-olds.

AFTER THREE PHONE CALLS and four receptionists, I finally got to Jackson’s oaken door. The woman who brought me there had a French accent, brown hair, and a parsley-colored dress that clung tightly to her Jayne Mansfield–like figure. She tapped on the door, listened for something, heard a sound that I did not hear, and then stuck her head in.

When her head came out from the crack of Jackson’s door, the young woman had an impressed look on her face.

“He wants you to go right in,” she said, not believing her own words.

“Is that a surprise?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” she said. “Monsieur Villard is in there with him.”

JEAN-PAUL VILLARD was an olive-skinned man with dark eyes and a dark finely trimmed mustache. His hair was black. He was wiry but not skinny, tall, wearing black trousers and a herringbone jacket over an iridescent apple green shirt, which was open at the collar. He was lounging on one of the two yellow sofas that faced each other in front of Jackson’s huge ebony desk.

I hadn’t visited Jackson’s work since before the move. The size of his office was monumental. Fifteen-foot ceilings above a room that was at least twenty feet wide and thirty long. His picture window looked out at the mountains north of the city. On the walls were original oil paintings of famous jazz musicians.

Jackson and his boss rose to meet me.

“Jean-Paul,” Jackson said, “this here is Easy Rawlins.”

The Frenchman smirked at me and shook my hand.