“I have heard many things about you, Monsieur Rawlins.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Jackson tells me that you are the most dangerous man he knows.”
“More dangerous than Mouse?”
Villard’s eyebrows rose at the mention of the diminutive killer. I supposed that Jackson had told him so many stories laced with what had to be hyperbole that he probably thought that Mouse, and the danger he represented, had to be mostly myth.
“He said that Monsieur Mouse was . . . how do you call it? The most deadly, oui, yes, the most deadly man he knows.”
“He’s right about Mouse,” I said, releasing the surprisingly strong handshake. “But I don’t see how I could be more dangerous than that.”
“Raymond just take your life,” Jackson said with a deadly grin on his dark face. “Easy take your soul.”
There was an aspect of pronouncement to Jackson’s words. After a moment of semiprofound silence we sat down. I perched on a cushion next to Jackson, and Jean-Paul squatted down on the edge of the couch across from us.
On the low marble coffee table between us there was a bottle of red wine and two glasses.
“Let me get you a glass,” the French businessman offered.
“Don’t bother, man,” Jackson said. “Easy don’t imbibe.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. Then I looked around the room. “Nice paintings.”
“My lover painted them,” Jean-Paul said with pride. “When she met Jackson she made him take them for his office.”
“Nobody had to make me,” Jackson said. “You know, Easy, Satchmo hisself sat for Bibi to do that one there. She did a whole bunch’a writers too. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes . . .”
This was another new experience for me. Jackson was a coward, but he wasn’t a kiss-ass. He really liked Jean-Paul and the strangely foreign paintings of American musicians. He belonged in that room.
For a while we exchanged pleasantries. The white man poured himself a glass of wine and sat back on the yellow cushions. It became apparent that he had no intention of leaving.
We had just come to the end of a brief discussion about Vietnam and how no white men, American or French, belonged there.
“So what you need, Easy?” Jackson asked.
Jackson and the Frenchman might have been friends, but he and I went way back. We hadn’t been true friends for all that time, but we could read each other in the dark. With those five words he told a whole story. Jean-Paul was fascinated by Jackson and the tales he told. He was hungry to see an America that was not broadcast on TV and the radio. He wanted to experience the Black Life that had given birth to jazz and the blues, gospel and the Watts riots. Jackson was his first real taste of what there might be under the sanguine white-American facade.
Jackson looked up to this man, wanted to impress him, and so he was asking me to allow the president of Proxy Nine some insight into how our lives went. He trusted that if I had killed somebody or found myself in serious difficulty, I’d just roll out some neutral story and come back to the real details later on when Jean-Paul had had his fill.
Every day in the late sixties was like a new day. From hippies to a war America couldn’t win. There were black people rioting for their rights and getting somewhere with it; Playboy clubs and good jobs; black sports heroes and French millionaires hobnobbing with the likes of me and Jackson Blue.
“EttaMae called me,” I said, deciding to kill two birds with one throw.
When Jackson heard Etta’s name his friendly smile paled, but I kept on talking.
“She said that the cops were looking for Mouse. They think he murdered a man named Pericles Tarr —”
“An’ you want me to go speak with ole Etta?” Jackson asked, hoping to end our conversation.
“No, no, no, no,” I said. “Hear me out, brother. Like I said, the cops think Mouse murdered this man and laid him in a shallow grave down in, uh, San Diego —”
“Did they find the body?” That was Jean-Paul. He was all the way into my story.
“That’s just it, J.P.,” I said. “No. They haven’t found a body, and the murdered man’s wife says that Mouse was playin’ loan shark and did her husband in because he couldn’t pay the note.”
“What’s this ‘loan shark’?” Villard asked.
Jackson rattled off an explanation in amazingly fluent French. Even while I was teaching him a lesson, he was showing me that being in his company was sharing the presence of brilliance.
“Oh, yes, quite right,” Jean-Paul said in English learned from an Englishman.
“So you know that this Pericles isn’t dead?” Jackson asked hopefully.
“Right . . .”
I laid out the story, then explained, without admitting to burglary, that I’d gotten information from the girlfriend.
“I’m bettin’ that Perry’s the kinda man slip out the back window when trouble comes to the door,” I said. “So I need you to ring the bell while I wait at the back.”
