Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“So you got taken off to jail an’ that devil girl took off with Hearts?” Nadine asked us.

“We couldn’t help gettin’ arrested,” I said.

“Hm.”

“Does my aunt have your phone number?” I asked then.

“Of course.”

“And she haven’t called?”

“Wouldn’t I tell you if she did?”

“Nadine,” I asked. “Could you stay home from work today?”

“What?” she gasped. You would have thought I’d asked her to take off her clothes and lie out on the bed.

“My aunt may call you,” I said calmly. “She might be in trouble. If you aren’t here when she calls, we might miss the only chance we have to help her.”

“I use my job to pay the rent,” Nadine explained.

“You have sick days.”

“But I’m not sick.”

I’m so used to people who steal and cheat and lie that when I’m faced with someone like Nadine I’m thrown off balance. Nadine would have walked a city mile to return an extra nickel she got in change from a fifty-dollar transaction. Her idea of life was to look back over all the decades of work and play and be able to say that she never did a wrong thing or took advantage of a single soul. She’d turn on Jesus if he broke a commandment, wouldn’t have a choice.

“Call them,” I said. “Tell them you need a personal day — that there’s a family emergency and you need to stay home to man the phone.”

No lie there.

But still Nadine hesitated.

“You know I don’t live no fast an’ loose life like you, Paris Minton. I have responsibilities.”

I could have told her that running a bookstore was a responsible position. I could have told her that trying to save Three Hearts’s life was something important. But instead I said, “Please. For my auntie.”

Nadine never did say yes, but we left with the tacit understanding that she would stay home. She even let us borrow her red Rambler.

The ride out to the country would have been nice if it wasn’t for our mission. The old pines seemed sage and peaceful. The grasses waving in the breeze were lovely. We climbed out of the Los Angeles basin, leaving the dirty yellow miasma of smog beneath. There was fresh air and wild birds and blue sky behind billowy white clouds.

“There’s the honey sign,” Fearless said, pointing at the rude painting of a beehive leaning up against an exit sign.

We took the exit and the turn, drove seven miles to the Bear Pond Lane turnoff, and went two more miles to the red house with a weather vane in the shape of an airplane.

There was no driveway or lawn, just a large square of dirt in front of the house. Behind stood tall, dirty green pines.

My car was parked in front of the house. When I looked in the window I saw that the key was in the ignition.

The thing I remember most about that country cabin was the quiet. It wasn’t that there was no noise but that each sound was particular, as if it were waiting its turn: Fearless’s door slamming, a robin’s cry, the wind through a welter of leaves and pine needles. Even though I was tense and worried, I recognized the beauty of the moment.

“Nice, huh?” Fearless said. Then he took the pistol out of his belt and made sure the safety was off.

I followed him to the front door.

He knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again. I tried the door, but it was locked.

Fearless motioned for me to follow him around the back.

There was a well-swept dirt path leading around the side of the house, marked off from the wild by a white lattice fence. Big white flowers bloomed here and there.

The back door was unlocked.

The cabin was just one big room with a thirteen-foot ceiling and rustic furniture. There was a cast iron woodstove against one wall — that was the kitchen. Other than that the left side was a living area with couches and chairs. The right side had a big bed with a thick mattress and animal furs for blankets.

Everything was neat and tidy, which told me that Useless had probably not been around very much. The only things out of place were one turned-over chair and a good deal of half-dry blood in the center of the pine floor.

Without a word we searched the house. Actually, I searched while Fearless moved around. He didn’t have the kind of concentration to look for clues.

It was all a waste of time. There wasn’t a personal item in the cabin. Not a name or bus ticket, not a photograph or letter. All there was was a drying pool of blood and a fallen chair.

I followed Fearless on the ride back to Los Angeles. We dropped Nadine’s car off at her house and went in to see if Three Hearts had called.

She hadn’t.

Things had gotten a little more serious, and I was forced to take a chance.

Mad Anthony was probably dead, probably murdered. I wanted to stay away from Katz and Drummund, the men the murdered man had beaten. I wanted no connection with a murder, and so Mr. Friar, at United Episcopal Charities, became the object of our labors.

The office was in a three-story brick building on Olympic, about a mile west of downtown proper. There was a small park across the street that had on permanent display a cast iron statue of a woman wearing a Spanish veil. She was crying, and her hands were held out about a foot from either side of her face. There was no plaque for explanation, no reason for or account of her pain. The statue made me like the small recreation area. The mystery of the sculpture allowed casual viewers to come up with their own reasons for such powerful emotions.

At the edge of the small patch of green was a bench that gave us a good view of United Episcopal Charities.

“What’s the plan, Paris?” Fearless asked me.

“You still got that chauffeur’s uniform you used to wear?” I replied.

“Uh-huh.”

“You wanna go and get it and put it on?”

“Sure.” He stood up.

“While you at it, you could stop by that Western Union office on Manchester and pick me up a blank form there, maybe three or four.”

“Sure thing, man. What you gonna do?”

“I just wanna sit for a while, Fearless. This next step gonna be a big one, an’ I wanna clear my head. You know?”

My car was parked two blocks down. I walked there with Fearless and got a book out of the trunk before he drove off. Then I went back to my park bench and pretended that I was just an everyday Joe hanging out in the park.

The title of the paperback book was Aelita, written by Alexei Tolstoy and published by Raduga Publishers, Moscow. I had gotten the newly printed copy from a socialist librarian who worked in Santa Monica. He’d told me that this was a translation of a Russian novel by a guy who had been through the early days of the revolution. Most of the books he had written were naturalist novels, but this was science fiction. He thought I’d find it interesting.

I did.

At that time I, and most other Americans, believed that Russia didn’t allow for any kind of independent thinking, that all Russians lived in similar barrack-like rooms and were brainwashed so that they couldn’t really have an imagination. But the first few pages of this book brought this belief into question. There was nothing overtly political about the story. It was more about adventure and love and men seeking their destiny among the stars.

I was amazed that any Russian could have such thoughts.

“You there,” someone said in a loud, unfriendly voice.

It was a policeman hailing me from the passenger’s side of his patrol car.

“Yes, Officer?” I was determined not to stand and walk toward him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Reading a book,” I replied. I held up the Communist-condoned fiction in case he didn’t believe it.