Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“They think I’m an old lady listening to rock and roll or something.”

“Damn.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” she said.

“The guy she was waiting for?”

The gray head bobbed and gave me her best serrated grin. “You could tell when Fantu was flirting with her that she was just mouthing her answers. She just needed a place to sleep and a few bucks in her pocket. Soon as she found something better she was gone.”

“How did you hear the name of the guy she was looking for?” I asked more from habit than anything else.

“He came into the class one day,” she said, triumphant. “He was short. Not so much as you, and skinny. He wore a silly suit and bow tie and his hair was too long for a man of his age. Fantu asked him what he was doing here and he said his name was Paulie DeGeorges and he was there to talk to Coco. He said something about her brother but somebody sneezed and I couldn’t make that part out.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” I said aloud.

“That’s right.”

“And what’s your name?” I asked.

For a moment there was suspicion and fear in the matron’s round brown eyes. But then she came to some kind of internal resolve. “Irene Carnation. Carnation like the flower.”

“You have my card, Irene. If Coco comes back you should call me. And maybe if you get tired of classes and street corners one day, you might want to call a real detective. I might could give you some work from time to time.”

“This little jigger only cost forty-nine ninety-five,” she said. “You could buy one yourself.”

“It’s you that’s the jewel, Irene. Somebody sees me and they know to worry. You... that’s money in the bank right there.”

A look of wonder came over Irene Carnation’s face. A door was open and she was wondering if she had the courage to walk through.

Early afternoon found me uptown at a high park along the Hudson River looking down on a concrete wall. The barrier was a blank slate except for a door-sized hole thirty feet below, almost at the waterline. There’s a very official-looking iron ladder that leads down to the hole but neither that opening nor the ladder is supposed to be there.

I made my way down to the water, maybe two hundred yards from the wall. From there I could keep a watch on the portal and use the fishing pole I’d picked up from home to give anybody looking a reason for why I was there.

Clarence had left by the time I got home. He’d taken the keys and so I expected to see him in less than a year.

I threw my line pretty far out. My secret for fishing was learned from an old guy named Cranston. He taught me that you needed a heavy weight, at least eight ounces, on your line and that the best bait was a giant gutter cockroach. I had both bug and pyramid-shaped lead weight and so I sat down on a craggy concrete plank that had been dumped there to maintain the shoreline. After I had my hook in the water and the pole between my knees I took out the Canadian socialist paper The People’s Voice . Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was once associated with a paper by the same name, and I think it was out of a soft spot I had for him that I kept up the subscription.

From time to time a young boy or girl climbed down the ladder to the hole and then scrambled inside; a few minutes later they’d clamber back up again. They looked like ants filled with a purpose laid down in their DNA millions of years ago. Watching them come and go, I remembered the man named Tusk who came from Australia and fabricated an underground pied-à-terre deep within the man-made wall.

Tusk was more of an artist than a survivalist. There was running water and electricity in the cave. I’d shown the place to Twill when he was no more than fourteen.

I sat there for hours reading about dreams that my father had taught me and then abandoned. I caught two good-sized flounder and an American eel that was more than a yard long. I cleaned the flounders and put them in a pink plastic bucket I’d brought along. I let the eel go.

At twilight Twill, replete in blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, came scrambling out of the hole. I picked up my bucket and pole and climbed to the street. From there I followed my wayward son until he was headed east from Broadway on Seventy-second.

“Twitcher! Hold up,” I called from maybe ten feet back.

Twilliam McGill, as usual, was unflappable. He turned and smiled as if to say, “What took you so long, old man?”

“What you got in the bucket, Pops?” my son asked as we walked.

Twill is five-ten, slender, handsome, and dark as our West African ancestors before the slave ships came. There was a small scar just under his lower lip; a reminder of folk heroes like Achilles and Cain. Twill didn’t have an evil bone in his body but he knew no laws except for Family, Friends, and Free Will.

I held up the bucket for him to see my catch.

Looking at the fish as if they were a calculus equation on a college blackboard, he said, “You musta heard my other name on that phone call, huh?”

“What were all those kids doing climbing in and out of Tusk’s place?” I asked. Tusk had migrated back to Australia after he’d gotten into trouble and I got him out again, but I always thought of the illegal apartment as his domain.

“Jones don’t see everybody,” Twill said. “A lotta the kids get written orders that he has somebody older pass out. Today was my turn.”

“The kids read?”

“He has most of them go to school. That way they get smarter and hear stuff that might be some help.”

“Like burglary jobs?” I asked.

“Like that.”

“Let’s sit on that bench,” I said, pointing to a pedestrian stopping point near the Seventy-second Street subway station.

We perched and I put the fish under the concrete seat. And there we sat side by side, father and son with nary a gene in common. Both of us were under threat of mortal danger, but our demeanor was more like two women friends taking a break after an afternoon of window shopping.

“Regale me,” I said to my boy.

Twill shook his head slowly and did not smile.

“This dude Jones is the real thing,” he said. “He like the black plague and almost no one knows about it. He deals in underage prostitution, got a bigger burglary ring than I ever heard of, uses little kids and young women who pretend they’re the mothers for international smuggling, murders anyone who goes against him, and has underground public floggings for even if somebody steal somethin’ the wrong way. It’s like living in the Middle Ages here today in twenty-first-century New York.”

Somehow Mardi had gotten Twill to start reading. He used the knowledge he gained to further his understanding of the flaws of humankind.

“How many people work with him?” I asked.

“I only seen a dozen or so at one time but it’s got to be hundreds. He been doin’ it more than twenty-one, twenty-two years and the ones that grow up still do things his way. Fortune says that there’s at least two dozen dead in a graveyard below the tunnels.”

“What about the police?”

“Nobody seems worried about the law. Kids get grabbed sometime but Jones got a law firm called Bedford-Rule that gets them out. There’s a lotta talk among the kids, say that if somebody turns on Jones he’s not safe even on Rikers Island.”

“You believe that?”

“That man got a system, Pops. He got some serious people in his pocket.”

“And you couldn’t figure all that out before you got yourself this far in?”

“I just didn’t believe it, man,” Twill, my peer, railed. “I mean how you gonna have some crazy dude with a false beard only come out in the tunnels under the city and run a crime syndicate made mostly of children?