“You are going to catch him by the nose,” Villard speculated.
“And twist a little,” I added.
“May I come with you, Mr. Danger Man?” the president asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Nothing spells trouble like a white man knocking at a black man’s door.”
37
So what did you do during the war, J.P.?” I asked on the way over to Ogden.
“My family is very rich,” he said. “They went to Switzerland and South America. A few went to our plantations in Mali and Congo.”
“And you?”
“I wanted to fight the Nazis. I was young and I wanted to kill the people who were raping my homeland.”
“Is that what you did?”
Jean-Paul was sitting shotgun, and Jackson was in the backseat. The Frenchman’s dark eyes flashed at me and he wondered. I was wondering too. Here I was speaking to a man whose family was old and rich. They owned plantations in Africa, so they had probably been slavers at one time; they might still be today. . . .
“I worked in a small apartment, making radio codes for the Resistance,” he said. “Our little station was across the street from the Gestapo. I never left my post. For three years I went outside only two times. Once when there was a fire in our building and we feared that the transmitter would be found, and once . . . once down in an alley where a German officer would go to have sex with little girls of twelve and thirteen.”
“What you do down there?” I asked, because I didn’t want the son of slavers to think I couldn’t handle his experience.
“I cut his throat and then I cut off his prick and put it in his mouth.”
I glanced up at Jackson in the rearview mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I remembered a conversation we’d had many years before. I had asked him if he thought that a black man and a white man could ever be friends.
“Hell, yeah,” he’d answered. “Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin’ ’fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an’ smell it too before he could really know a black friend.”
Jean-Paul had smelled the shit.
THE OGDEN HOUSE was a small stucco hutlike structure the color of mottled blood orange. It was perched on a raised lawn at the center of the block.
After a few minutes of deliberation, I decided to walk up the driveway as Jackson and Jean-Paul went toward the front.
They were to ring the bell while I made my way toward the back door on light and fast feet.
There might have been barriers to impede me, a locked gate or a guard dog, for instance, but I took the chance.
The backyard was small and barren. It was a paved patio under the dubious shade of a dying pomegranate tree. There were two rusting poles standing across from each other supporting a clothesline that held two shirts and about half a dozen socks.
I stood to the right of the door with my .38 in my hand. It might seem to the layman that a pistol out and at the ready would have been overkill for a situation like that. But when you enter into the occupation of ambush, you have got to go all the way or you will, sooner or later, regret it.
I didn’t have to wait long. Within sixty seconds the back door opened, allowing a short and stealthy man to step outside.
He was the color of a well-used two-year-old Lincoln penny, stubby in his build, with small, strong hands and a green cap. His pants were black and his short-sleeved shirt was brown.
“Hold it, Perry,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you dead.”
I expected to scare him, to keep him still. He went me one better by falling on his knees and putting his hands up above his head. I went around my prisoner with the gun in evidence. His head was bowed.
“Look up at me, man,” I commanded.
His face and body were a hodgepodge of the true Afro-American experience. There were northern European features to his bulbous nose and cheeks, Slavic influence in his Asiatic eyes, serflike economy to his compact bone structure and wide hands. His hair was kinky and his lips full. He was the jambalaya of the New World, a dozen or more European and African races competing for a piece of his body’s geography.
“Who you?” the frightened man whispered.
“Easy Rawlins.”
“What trouble you got wit’ me, man?”
“They say that Raymond Alexander killed you.”
“No, brother. No. I ain’t dead.”
“But the cops think you are,” I argued. “They after Ray.”
“Mouse know where I am, man. He got me this place.”
“You a lyin’ mothahfuckah,” I said, digging deep into the language of the street.
“I could prove it.”
