Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

For a moment the young white patrolman didn’t know what to say. So he leaned over to conspire with his partner. They parked, disembarked, and walked over to flank me and block the sun.

“Stand up,” the officer who had spoken to me before said. His only distinguishing characteristic was a red pus-filled pimple on the left side of his forehead. Other than that his brown-eyed, thin-lipped, brown-haired, frowning visage was something I had seen again and again throughout my life.

His partner was taller and deadly handsome but with nearly the same features. The contrast of like images intrigued me, but this wasn’t my show.

I stood up, holding my book like a talisman.

“What are you doing here?” the handsome man asked me.

“Reading my book,” I said.

“What are you doing reading here?”

“I like the literary quality of the statuary.”

That bought me three seconds of silence.

“Let me see your book,” the handsome speaker said.

I handed it over. He flipped through the pages, looking for contraband, no doubt. If he had read the frontispiece, he might have decided that I was a Communist; he might have arrested me for espionage. But his imagination wasn’t at all intellectual. He was looking for swag, for small packets of heroin. He was looking for the kind of contraband he thought someone like me would be carrying.

“Let’s see your wallet,” he asked when the book search turned up nothing.

I obliged.

After fumbling through my well-ordered documents, he said, “Tell me something, Mr. Minton. Why aren’t you at work?”

“I am,” I said. “My book.”

“Your job is reading?”

“In a way. I own a bookstore on Florence. I’m considering ordering a dozen copies of this book. But since it’s a translation, I’m trying to see if it’s of a quality to justify such an investment.”

Three seconds more.

“Why don’t you go to a park near your store?”

“I like this park,” I replied.

“Turn around and lean against the bench,” was his answer to my flippancy.

He searched me down to the cuffs in my pants.

When I turned around again, he was still looking for a way to invade me.

“How much longer do you plan to be here?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Officer. I’m readin’ a book. Haven’t you ever read a book? It takes time.”

If he were a soldier and I were the enemy, the look in his eyes would have told me that he intended to kill me the next chance he got.

“We’ll be driving by in an hour,” he told me.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”

I tried to get back into my book but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the words the police and I had spilled. It was a complex meeting, what with the Communist publication, the racist miscomprehension, and my barely conscious desire to be put back in a cell.

This last detail was very important in light of the other two. I was a black man seeking incarceration because I felt comfortable in that state. If I were a braver individual, I would have become a revolutionary at that very moment. But as it is, I only remember it because of Useless and his determination to share his bad luck with family and friends.

Fearless returned in forty-five minutes or so. He looked very dapper in his charcoal-colored chauffeur’s uniform. I took a blank Western Union form, scribbled down a note, folded it so that it appeared to be sealed, and addressed it. Fearless carried the dispatch to do its work.

He came back out and sat there with me. I was a little worried that the cops might return, but I suppose they had found some real police work to keep them busy.

I tried to explain to Fearless about Communism and the American police state, and about me playing my part in the farce, but he didn’t understand.

“That’s just the way it is, man,” Fearless said. “Cops wanna mess wit’ you, you got to put ’em in their place.”

I looked at my friend, not for the first time thinking that even though we were as close as two men could be, we didn’t live in the same world — not at all.

Not long after Fearless returned from his mission at United Episcopal Charities, a man came out the double glass doors. The white man had once been young, and hale, and handsome. He had probably been over six feet tall twenty-five years ago. Now he was five ten with silver hair and a gray blue suit that almost made up for the ravages of time.

The man carried a yellow slip of paper in his left hand. He transported this paper across the street, jaywalking toward me and my friend from another world.

I wasn’t worried because I was buoyed with the kind of synthetic confidence that Fearless inspired.

As Martin Friar approached, Fearless stood up to make room for him on the bench. Realizing, whether right or wrong, who was in charge, Friar waved the Western Union note page at me and asked, “What is the meaning of this?”

His once-handsome features were still rugged and, in certain circles, no doubt, awe inspiring. But there was a glaze of uncertainty over his pale blue eyes.

“Sit down, Mr. Friar,” I said.

He obeyed, and Fearless took a perch on the other side.

“Well?” the vice president in charge of investments asked.

“You know a young black woman named Angel?” I asked.

“Do you mean Monique? Monique Dubois?”

I took out the 3 ¥ 5 I had got from Man. When the steely-faced white man saw it, his colorless lips trembled for a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s Monique.”

“She was your lover?” It was meant to be a question but came out as an accusation.

“We love each other,” he said.

This present-tense reply threw me off a bit.

“You say you love the woman who set you up and then made you the victim of blackmailers?”

“It wasn’t her fault. She was coerced into fooling me. But we, we...”

I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in part of his mind Friar felt that he was being a fool and so was ashamed to divulge further intimacies of his heart.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s true. Hector and Sterling were using her. I was just wondering what you thought.”

“Where is she?” Friar asked, leaning toward me.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I told the heartbroken executive. “She’s with a friend’a mine, a guy named Maurice.”

“What’s he to her?” Friar asked, without waiting for even a second to pass.

This worried me. I had hoped to find someone who was feeling hate for Angel. Hate is a good source of energy. It makes your allies blind and eager. Love is a much stickier form of fuel. It burns unevenly and often causes internal damage.

“He used to be her lover too,” I said. “But no more. Now they’re just friends.”

The tension easing a little, Friar asked, “What can I do to help?”

He was moving too fast. I needed time to dicker with him, to figure out where he was coming from. Here he wanted to jump right in with both feet, and I still didn’t have a good understanding of his part in the puzzle.

“I, I need some information before I could tell ya that,” I said.

“What kind of information?”

“How did Sterling get to you?”

“I don’t know any Sterling or that other name — Hector, you said?”

I told him about Hector and the little I knew about Sterling, the man in charge.

“I know the Negro is Paul Dempsey. He was the one who ran the game,” Friar told us on that overexposed park bench. “But I don’t know anything about a man named Sterling. I’ve only met black people since Monique and I have been together.”

“When’s the last time you saw Monique?” I asked.

“Two weeks ago,” he said, choking a bit. “She called me and said that she was going away. She said that she was free of Paul Dempsey and that I didn’t have to worry about her anymore.”