“You look for Al Rive?” Ha Tsu asked.
“No. Why?”
“I hear Milo want him.” Ha hunched his shoulders and opened his mouth. He was missing some teeth.
“No. For my cousin,” I said. “Useless Grant.”
“He your cousin?”
“Uh-huh. And I have never been thankful for that fact.”
Again Ha laughed.
“You should come work for me, Paris,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Then I laugh all times.”
“Have you seen Useless?”
“Five days.”
“Really? How was he?”
“He okay, I guess,” Ha said. “Talking ’bout how he gonna get rich.”
“How?”
“Off of white devils.” Ha smiled a smile that would frighten a child of any age.
“How’s he gonna do that?”
“I don’t know. But he tell me that if you got a man by his dick, even if he white he gonna go where you say. Your cousin funny too.”
At the end of the counter was a doorway covered by a black-and-white-checkered curtain. Behind the curtain was a steel-bound door to some stairs that led up to Jerry Twist’s pool parlor. Only certain people were allowed up into Jerry’s place.
If you were Van Cleave or Fearless Jones, or with somebody of 117
Walter Mosley
that stature, you could go up any time you wanted to. But a schlub like me didn’t have a chance without an invitation.
“You think I could go up that way?” I asked my host.
Ha grimaced at the fabric. His left eye enlarged and he said,
“It’s a magic carpet. Only open for men with power.”
“Open sesame,” I said.
Neither the curtain nor the restaurant owner moved.
Abracadabra, Shazam, hail hail. I said all these words, but the fabric did not flutter.
Ha shrugged and walked away from me.
I went into my pocket and came out with a dollar.
“Hey, Mum,” I called to the waitress.
She came over to me with a dazed and innocent look on her face. Mum was dressed in the black-and-white uniform of half the waitresses in America. But she carried it off with more elegance and beauty than Jayne Mansfield could have imagined.
“Yes, Paris?” she asked, but I heard another question.
“You got change for a dollar?”
“For you.”
When I think back on my youth, remembering moments like those, I realize that I have squandered my life.
118
I u s e d m y f i r s t d i m e to call Milo’s office.
When Loretta answered, I felt the hole in my 19 heart.
“Hey, Loretta. It’s Paris.”
“Hello, Paris,” she said in a friendly but professional voice. I could tell that she was going to wait for me to bring up the conversation we’d started the night before — and also that there was no pressure for me to hurry.
“Lookin’ for Fearless,” I said.
“Milo went home to study an argument he’s going to present,” she said. “He’s trying to be readmitted to the bar.”
“Fearless say where he was going?”
“No. He just drove Milo.”
“Thanks.”
