Mum sat next to me and gave me a kiss. It wasn’t as passionate as Loretta’s had been, but it was nice. We did that for a while: kiss and then sip fine liquor from the big glasses, then kiss some more. My hands wanted to feel her orange fabric, but she kept them down.
After our third drink she lifted me by the elbows and brought me to another room. It was a bathroom with a huge freestand-ing, high-collared tub. It was filled with water. She tested it with a bare foot up to the ankle and then turned on the hot.
“I’m going to undress you,” she told me. “Just let me do it.
Don’t help or touch me.”
I didn’t.
The water was hot and the liquor did exactly what it was supposed to. I was very excited sexually, but I would have been happy going to sleep while Mum cleaned me with a sea sponge scrubber.
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. Somewhere between here and there a thought came to me in the form of a question:
But even that didn’t disturb me.
When I opened my eyes Mum had disrobed and was stepping into the tub with me.
•
•
•
137
Walter Mosley
“ Yo u ’ r e a n i c e m a n , Pa r i s , ” Mum said. She had one arm behind my head and the other across my chest. We were in her big bed, enveloped in silk and soft, soft cotton. I was clean and completely satisfied.
“What a man wants to hear is that he’s big and strong and almost scary,” I replied, though I was thinking about a door that had opened in my mind.
Mum giggled.
“I’m stronger than you are,” she said.
“We’ll never find out now, will we?”
“Why were you at Jerry’s with Fearless Jones?” she asked then, and I wondered again why she had lured me over.
“Lookin’ for my cousin Useless.”
“Useless Grant is your cousin?”
“Everybody says that in the same way,” I said. “And I know why. Useless is a motherfucker. Have you seen him?”
“Every once in a while he talks to Ha Tsu. They like to laugh together.”
“They do business together?”
“I don’t know Ha’s business. I’m just a waitress.” She was getting nervous.
“And I’m just a bookseller,” I said. “What can you do?”
“You sell books?” Mum seemed shocked.
“Yeah. Why?”
She jumped up and pulled back the red fabric at the head of the bed. There were eight bookshelves filled with hardbound Chinese texts. I perused them. Most were complete ciphers to me. But on the bottom shelf I saw the names Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Spinoza, and Hegel printed over Chinese cuneiforms.
“I like some’a these guys,” I said. “But I prefer the older generation. Herodotus, Homer, and Sophocles.”
138
FEAR OF THE DARK
“You have read them?”
“Sure.”
“I used to study ancient thinkers. My father sent me to New York to study. But then the Japs came and killed my family.
They destroyed everything and made my country crazy. I came here and Ha Tsu took me in.”
I put my arms around her, and after a while she fell into a deep sleep. I was soon to follow, but before I nodded off I thought about the man looking for the French dictionary, the man who was after Useless.
My dreams were darker than Jerry Twist’s office.
139
22 that was the thought going through my mind when I was almost awake, lying there between floral-scented sheets. And if Hector had been to my place once, he might have been there twice, even three times. He might have been armed and he might have run into Tiny Bobchek.
