Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“That’s not the first time I’ve heard something like that tonight.”

“I’m sorry, Trot. I was wrong.”

When listing my problems on the way back home from the Hotel Brown I had forgotten about my father and the anger he called up in me. I wanted to answer him but the only words that came underscored the fury that he’d already identified. It galled me that I was little more than a child in his presence, that every misstep I had taken in life could be traced back to him.

He was just an old man, an old black man that could have been a train porter or the Martiniquean ambassador to Cuba or Italy. He was a fool and I had been his fodder. The beast that Marella called up in me wanted to rend Tolstoy McGill. This simple truth made me smile.

“What?” my father asked.

“I’ll make you a deal, old man.”

“And what is that?”

“You agree to be a grandfather to my kids and a father-in-law to my wife and I’ll put away the grief.”

“Grief?”

The ex-sharecropper might have been a fool but he was sharp. I had meant to say that I would put away the anger and the rage but instead my tongue said “grief.” Grief. It was at that moment I realized that my entire life had been spent grieving the loss of my father and the death of my mom. Anger was just a shield; the rage simple background music for a child who had pitied himself for decades.

Was I really that shallow and self-involved?

“So what do you say, Clarence?” I asked, using my father’s given name — what he called his sharecropper name.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Answer my question.”

“Your children are my grandkids. Your wife is my daughter-in-law.”

I sat back in the spindly and surprisingly strong dining chair. I took in a deep breath and then exhaled, feeling with that outbreath that I was released from the custody of grief.

“Okay,” I said, “now tell me about Nicky.”

“Don’t you ever relax, son?” my father asked. “I mean are you always on some case, some job? Don’t you ever just sit back and watch the TV or jerk off or something?”

Free from sorrow, I laughed and shook my head.

“You know, I killed my first man when I was fourteen,” I said for the first time ever in my life. “If anybody had found out and brought me to trial they would have probably called it self-defense but it was murder for me. I strangled him with my hands. I watched him die and then I burned his body with gasoline fire.

“You live a life like that and the Beverly Hillbillies jokes lose their appeal.”

I had never even imagined that my father’s face could hold compassion for anything except the worker and the Revolution.

“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Clarence. I had to kill that man or he would have done it to me. You had to go off and fight your wars. I accept that now. Just don’t sit judgment on me. That’s all I ask.”

My father finished his snifter and I poured him another dram. He drank half of that before speaking again.

“Nikita didn’t start off as an armored car robber, as I’m sure you know,” he said. “He dealt with hijackers and smugglers for years before deciding to rob that one tank and then retire to Tahiti.”

“Do ants retire?” I said, quoting a question my father would ask the straw-man capitalist he so often imagined.

He grinned, showing me his white teeth.

“Nicky never learned his lessons as well as you, Trot,” he said. “Anyway, like I was saying, your brother had been involved with certain smugglers that from time to time intersected with other smugglers who from time to time intersected with so-called terrorists. For a modicum of information on these people, and the promise to reinvolve himself in their business, the feds erased Nikita from their system and freed him to steal, spy, and smuggle, incriminate, and enjoy freedom.”

“Nicky’s a snitch?”

“He likes to say that he’s a government agent but yes, he’s a snitch.”

“Damn. Damn.”

“We all cross the line on a daily basis, Trot. It only took me forty years to realize that.”

“And what about you, old man?” I said as I poured my fourth drink. I was beginning to feel the alcohol in my fingertips and my lips.

“What about me?”

“Why you stayed in the shadows while me and Nicky roved in the street?”

Tolstoy, who I would almost always from that moment on think of as Clarence, looked at me with apologetic eyes.

“In my years in the Revolution,” he said, “I, more than once, was implemental in damaging, destroying, and sometimes assassinating American military and corporate interests and their staffs. I’m on a very special top ten most-sought-after list.”

“Because of the people you killed,” I concluded.

“Because of the knowledge I have. If I was ever brought to trial the prosecution would be forced to reveal things that no American president, military general, or corporate CEO would like to have made public. I’m a threat and so I try to maintain a low profile.”

“Then why come back at all?”

“You and Nicky needed a guardian angel. I watched over you.”

I didn’t say anything to that. If we talked about him playing the role of father-from-the-shadows I might have rediscovered the anger that I had so recently given up. But I really didn’t care about what he thought he was doing or who he feared was after him. I had just solved the most important case of my career. I knew what had happened to me. I knew what he had done and why. So what if there was no pot of gold, no happy ending — truth is its own reward.

I told Clarence he could sleep in my daughter’s bed. She wouldn’t mind. Shelly was away at college living with a man thrice her age.

It was early morning when I awoke in the emperor-sized bed that I’d shared with a woman who hadn’t needed love when anyone wanted it with her. But that didn’t mean we didn’t make a durable team. Katrina and I worked together like a machine constructed from indestructible parts and supplied with an infinite power source. We’d never stop functioning but we were terribly out of alignment. We clattered and struggled, twirled and fell down — but we never stopped working and we couldn’t turn off.

I missed Katrina, loved Aura, and wanted Marella so badly that I could taste her in my sleep.

So there I was at 5:47 with the father that had abandoned me down the hall, the women I needed jostling around in my mind, and a cognac hangover from my head to my gut and through every nerve of my body. It wasn’t until I made it to the bathroom, standing next to the tub where I had found Katrina in bloody suicide-water, that I remembered Hiram Stent.

As bad as I felt, he had got it worse.

When ice-cold water from the shower hit my skin I wanted to scream; three minutes later the shiver had made it to the bone; from that point I counted to a hundred and then came out of the glass box shower stripped of fear, lust, love, self-pity, and most importantly my hangover.

Leaving a key, automatic lock-release, and note for my father, I began the long walk down to Fifty-seventh Street and the first stop of my investigation.

There was a fancy diner across the street from the art school where Fontu Belair taught life drawing at a late morning class from 10:00 to 12:00. My watch read 7:14 and so I ordered an omelet with jalapeños, goat cheese, and merguez sausage. The fancy young waitress wore a pink miniskirt and a white silk T-shirt so short that it revealed her sapphire navel ring. Her nametag read MIDGE and her lips were painted apricot. When Midge went to deliver my order to the kitchen I took out my phone and made a call.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez said, answering before I could hear the first ring.