“What about me? I’m supposed to work for you and I don’t even have a place to sleep or clothes to wear.”
“I’ll make some calls. You just climb into your bed, Easy, and get ready to work tomorrow. Agent Lawrence will not bother you again.”
“Okay. Just as long you keep that man away from my house.
I don’t want him in here again.”
“You got it. I thought Lawrence had more sense than that. My request for your help was informal. I didn’t want to have to step on him. But I’ll do that now.”
I was satisfied with that much. There was a moment when we were both quiet.
Finally I asked, “So you still want me to look into this Wenzler thing?”
“Certainly do, Easy. You’re my ace in the hole.”
“Well then, I was thinkin’…”
“Yes?”
“About this, um, Andre Lavender guy.”
“What about him?”
“Well, I asked a couple’a guys I still know down there about him. They said that he got in trouble with the law down there and disappeared.”
“What kind of trouble was that?”
I was pretty sure that he already knew the answer, so I said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, Easy, I don’t know about any trouble he had. I know that he’s working with Wenzler and we’d like to talk to him. If you get a line we’d sure appreciate it. As a matter of fact, if you could lead us to Lavender we might not need you anymore at all.”
It was a tempting offer. Andre didn’t mean anything to me. But he was innocent of anything but being a fool and Craxton wasn’t promising me anything anyway. So I said, “Nobody seems to know where he’s gone to, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”
I paced the rooms of my tiny house all night. I walked and cursed and loaded all my pistols. When the sun came up I sat out on the front porch, waiting for marshals.
They didn’t come, though. That was better all the way ’round.
19
My life was pretty crazy in the days I worked for the FBI. I spent most of my late evenings in the arms of EttaMae. Those nights I spent exploring Etta’s body and her love; either one was worth dying for. Being with EttaMae was the most exciting and dreadful time I ever had. I had to overcome my guilt and my fear of Mouse to be with her. I’d come to her apartment in the late evening looking all around to make sure that no one saw me. LaMarque would be sleeping in his little room and Etta would come to me slowly like a horse trainer trying to tame a skitterish buck. My heart was always racing from fear when I got there, but the fear soon turned to passion. Sometimes in the middle of our lovemaking Etta would hold me behind my neck and ask, “Do you really love me, Easy?” And I’d cry out, “Yeah, yeah, baby!” in a powerful surrender to the forces that built in me.
In the daytime I worked with Chaim Wenzler. He was a hard worker and a good man. We’d go from door to door in Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. I’d wait in the car and Chaim would go beg for clothes and other items. I offered to go up with him once but he said, “These people wouldn’t put it in your hand, my friend. They wanna give maybe, but not direct. Give it to the kike and then he could give to the schwartze, that’s what they’re thinking.” Then he spat.
We always went to coffee-shop restaurants for lunch. Chaim paid one day and I would pay the next. The people running the restaurants were willing to take our money, but you could see that they were bothered by us. It was probably because we were so boisterous and intimate.
Chaim liked to tell stories and laugh, or cry. He told me about his childhood in Vilna. I had heard about Vilna because I had gone through Germany liberating the death camps. When I told Chaim about my experiences he talked to me about his times among the Germans, Poles, and Jews. In that way we grew close. We shared experience through memories that, although we were never in the same place, had the very real feelings of desperation and death that consumed us both during World War Two.
Chaim had been part of the communist underground during the German occupation of Vilna. He organized and fought against the Nazis. When the frightened Jewish population denounced the underground, he and his comrades fled the city and formed a Jewish platoon that slew Nazis, blew up trains, and liberated every Jew that they could.
“We fought side by side with the Russian guerrillas,” Chaim told me once. “They were soldiers of the people,” he said, and he touched his chest with one hand and my arm with the other. “Like you and me.”
I knew that the Russians abandoned the Warsaw Ghetto and I was sure that Chaim knew it too, but I couldn’t say anything because I never knew a white man who thought that we were really the same. When he touched my arm he might as well have stuck his hand in my chest and grabbed my heart. Agent Craxton might have liked what I was doing for him, but he didn’t think I was on his level.
Chaim carried a steel hip flask full of vodka. He liked to chip at it during the day. His high was pleasant and his friendliness was real. Sometimes he’d bring up his “organizing” at Champion. Once he even mentioned Andre Lavender. But whenever he did that I changed the subject. I acted like I was afraid to know about politics or unions. And I was afraid; afraid of what I might do to save myself from jail.
“What you do for money, Chaim?” I asked him one day. We were sitting at a tiny strip of park that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.
He looked out over the blue air and blue water for a long time before saying, “They won’t let me work.”
“Who?”
“America. They come and they tell the weak boss that I’m a bad man and he fires me. They wouldn’t let me wash shit from the floor. So my friends help me, and my family.”
“Who you talkin’ ’bout?”
“The Cossack,” he spat. “The Nazi, the FBI.”
“You mean they come out to yo’ job an’ tell the boss that you did sumpin’?”
“They say I am not American. They say I am communist.”
I found myself shaking my head. “Don’t you know that’s some shit.”
“That is why I work for charity, for First African. The white people don’t understand being treated like this. They think that they are free because nobody comes to their job. They see that I am bad because the police follow me. They have no idea.” Chaim pointed at his head. “In here they are stupid with what they are told.”
“You could say that again. You all the time hearin’ ’bout how free America is, but it ain’t.”
“No. But they are free. They have a job and they keep it. When things get bad, my friend, it is you and I that are out of work.”
I nodded. There had been many a time I’d seen the Negro staff of a company laid off when money was tight. It didn’t always happen like that, but it did often enough.
Chaim grabbed my hand in viselike grip. There were tears in his eyes. We sat there holding hands and looking at each other until I got a little uncomfortable. Then he said, “I saw them hang my brother when I was a child. He was accused of spitting in a soldier’s path. They hung him and burned down my mother’s house.”
I won’t say that those few words alone made us friends, but I understood Chaim Wenzler then.
I talked to agent Craxton later that same night. He asked all sorts of questions about where we picked up clothes and who handled the money. He was looking for spies everywhere. If I hadn’t talked to Andre Lavender I would have thought the FBI man was crazy.
But even though I had the proof I needed to set myself free I balked at bringing down Chaim Wenzler.
“What is it that you want on the man?” I asked Craxton.
“I’ll know it when you tell me, Easy. Has he invited you to any meetings?”
