Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

“G-g-guns. It’s guns.”

Walking the six blocks to the parking garage, and then driving back to my place on Montague, I was going over and over recent events. From the college girl to A Free Man. From the old man across the street to Chester.

I was standing right at the edge of a line that had to be crossed sooner or later.

So far Chester was still alive. I was too.

“Hi, Daddy,” A.D. said when I walked through the office door.

“Honey. How you doin’?”

“Fine. You like my dress?” she asked in a bratty tone.

Standing up, she did a half turn. The dress was a dull orange color and the hem was down to her calf. It complimented her figure without broadcasting it. I knew that it cost $87.99 off the rack.

“Your mother let you wear that?”

“You remember this?” Surprise took over the spoiled look on her face.

“I was with her when she bought it. I’m surprised she still has it.”

“Mama don’t throw out nuthin’. I took it outta her back row in the closet.”

In some ways I’d be married to Monica for the rest of my life. At least we did this one thing right.

“Any calls?”

“A man came and said that he would be waitin’ for you at the wine bar.”

“What man?”

“White guy with funny eyes,” Aja said. “He said his name was Mel.”

Before going down the street to Laniard’s Wine Bar I went into my office and put away three shots of whiskey. I wanted a cigarette and lamented giving the pack away.

Wearing a dark cranberry jacket and walnut-brown trousers, he was sitting at a high stool at the window, looking out onto Montague. When he saw me he waved and maybe gave a wisp of a smile; mirth on the face of a demon. I was glad I’d had the whiskey.

I passed the maître d’, a tall man in a black suit and tie. He gestured for me to wait, but I pointed at Melquarth, who, in turn, put up a welcoming hand.

I climbed up on the stool next to him.

“You look like you been workin’,” he said.

“Got paid sixty bucks.”

“Every penny counts.”

“Why are we meeting here, Mel?”

“I didn’t think you’d be too happy with me sitting in the office with your daughter.”

He was right about that.

“Can I get you something?” a young woman asked.

My nostrils flared when I saw the young Asian woman clad in a coral-colored minidress. For ten years I’d held down the passion in me. But that was over. The dog was out.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I’ll have another Barolo,” Mel told her.

“Yes, sir.”

“So?” I asked when the waitress was gone.

“I’ll finish my drink and then we’ll take a ride down to the Verrazano Bridge. We’re going to Staten Island.”

He might as well have added, “Across the river Styx.”

Day turned to night in the time it took us to get Mel’s vintage Ford Galaxie 500 and drive to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. We didn’t talk much; didn’t turn on the radio or play CDs. Wherever we were going it was serious business.

On the south side of the small town, there stood an abandoned church. I say abandoned, but what I mean is deconsecrated. It was surrounded by an eighteen-foot stone wall. The only entrée was through a remote-control iron gate. The rectangular brick structure loomed at a height of at least two and a half stories. Twelve slender stained-glass windows ran from the ground to the eaves of the steeply slanted, dark-green-tiled roof. On one end was a silo-like cylindrical steeple, also made of brick; it rose ten feet above the rest of the structure. There was a satellite dish at the very center of the extreme-angled lower roof.

Mel drove us to the middle of the circular driveway in front of the once holy refuge.

“This is where you live?” I asked as he unlocked the double-door entrance.

When we crossed the threshold, lights snapped on in quick succession. It wasn’t a huge building as far as churches go, but the high ceiling, empty space where there were once pews, and then the raised altar made me feel rather small.

“I stay here sometimes,” Mel said, answering the question that I had forgotten with the light.

“Where do you sleep?”

“In the station house.”

“The what?”

“This way.”

Behind the altar was a small door that led to a cramped spiral stairway going down.

As in the church, the moment we entered the stairs, a series of lights came on. Thirty-seven steps led to a door barely wider than a coffin’s lid. Through this door we entered a desolate room swathed in dim light abutted by a wall-size window behind which sat a bloodied man wearing only a T-shirt and boxers. His wrists were chained to a stone wall and his ankles to the floor.

The man was both pitiful and forlorn, but that’s not what caught my attention. I knew the guy. He was the one Mel called Porker. One of the men Stuart Braun sent to ambush me at the West Village coffee house.

“Can he see us?” I asked.

“No.”

“You been interrogating him?”

“Softened him a little bit. I was waiting for you to come up with better questions.”

Mel went into a small alcove next to the left side of the window-wall. From there he pulled out a pair of folding chairs. He set these up in front of the interrogation cell window as if it were a really big-screen plasma TV.

The room we were in was dark and dusty, but Porker’s room was all light stone and bright light.

“Yep,” Mel said as we looked at his private production. “This is a station house of the Underground Railroad.”

“Say what?”

“There were people on Staten Island who wanted to free as many slaves as they could. Over in Elliotville and under this building they did just that.”

For maybe ten seconds I was distracted from the prisoner.

“I bought this building for a refuge and maybe some other business,” Mel continued. “But then I discovered what had been going on back before the Civil War. I kinda like it. People should break the law if it doesn’t suit them.”

“Can he hear us?” I asked, motioning at Porker.

“Soundproof.”

“What’s his real name?”

“Simon Creighton. He was born in Jersey City. Breaks legs. Beats his girlfriends, but they love him anyway.”

“What have you gotten out of him?”

“I just been beatin’ him. You know... setting up the lexicon for when you got here.”

“You just beat him?” I said, looking at the leg breaker’s bruised, battered, and bloodied face through the slightly green-tinted glass wall.

“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language,” Melquarth quoted. “I read that once in an article on philology. I was looking up poisons but found that instead.”

Mel went back to the little alcove from which he retrieved the chairs and came out with a very long black trench coat, a pair of thick black gloves, and a pure white mask that was reminiscent of Greek marble statuary of the gods. The white face was beautiful and manly, dispassionate and beyond pedestrian human expression.

“I put on this shit,” he told me, “and it scares poor Simon almost to death.”

“You got one for me?”

“Don’t need it.”

“Why?”

“There’s earphones in the mask and an omnidirectional mike too. You just listen to what Porker got to say and tell me if I should be asking something else.”

Mel first donned the trench coat, which came down over his shoes. After that he put on the mask and then the gloves. He turned that motionless and beautiful white face to me, nodded, and then went to a door on the right side of the window. That door led to another. Mel closed the first and then I saw him enter the white stone cage.