Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

Jurgen paused to make sure he understood.

“You’re his father.”

“Don’t say it too loud now.”

“You support him?”

“Twenty dollars every month. I told his mama, ‘You see he behaves. He’s going to that nigger college in Atlanta, Morehouse, when he’s of age.’”

Joe Aubrey looked off and then turned to watch Bo talking to Dr. Taylor.

“My goodness, will you get a load of Bo-Bo, finally showing he’s a girl at heart. Look, he even stands like a girl, one that’s kinda lazy.”

Now he was walking across the Oriental carpet in the middle of the sitting room to join Bo and Dr. Taylor, Aubrey saying, “Hey, Bo-Bo, you had knockers you wouldn’t be a bad-lookin’ broad, you know it?”

Now the doctor was telling Aubrey to leave him alone. “Why do you have to be so crass? Bohdan isn’t bothering you, is he?”

Joe Aubrey turns on the doctor, Jurgen thought and watched him do it, Aubrey saying, “What’re you, Doc, on the fence? Tired of looking up the old hair pie all day, so what’s the alternative? How ’bout a boy dresses like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like one . . . Doc, I know you have a wife name of Rosemary. How’s it work, you go either way?”

Dr. Taylor was saying something about his wife Jurgen couldn’t hear. He felt someone come up next to him. Vera.

“Why can’t he behave himself?”

“He holds Negroes in disdain,” Jurgen said, “but fathers a child by a Negro woman.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“He called the woman high yellow. If ‘yella’ means yellow.”

“You know what a mulatta is, or a quadroon?”

“Ah, I see.”

Vera started to move away and he touched her arm.

“Are you afraid Joe Aubrey will give you up?”

“Joe talks without hearing what he’s saying. He could give me up without realizing it. And Dr. Taylor . . . Dr. Taylor the drug addict.”

Jurgen listened, but now was distracted. He said, “Let me speak to your guests,” and walked across the room to join Vera’s spies: Bohdan with the palm of his hand to his mouth; Walter frowning with all his heart. Frowning when he told Jurgen he was being moved to Vera’s so Walter could concentrate on what he planned to do for the Führer. Still frowning as he admitted yes, Carl Webster had come to see him and lied, saying Jurgen and Otto had been caught and put back in the prison camp. Why? Jurgen said, “To confuse you. Get you to say no, we’re still free.” Jurgen could feel Carl coming closer in his cowboy boots, with each stride. He remembered Carl saying, “I like to hear myself walk.” Hardly ever saying what Jurgen expected. He missed talking to Carl, missed his company, this federal lawman from Oklahoma who believed Will Rogers was the greatest American who ever lived because there wasn’t ever anyone as American as Will Rogers. He was funny and dead-on accurate when he took shots at the government, and he was always a cowboy. Carl said, “You could tell he was the real thing by the hundred-foot reata he carried around, could do tricks with, throwing his loop over whatever you pointed to and never had to untangle it. Jurgen was thinking that if he ever saw Carl Webster again, even if Carl had him handcuffed, he’d ask him how one became a cowboy.

He heard Joe Aubrey telling the doctor, “The reason you don’t talk much ’less it’s about Jew boys, you know you sound like a woman. You use words like lovely and precious you never hear men saying. Or you come off creepy having all those drugs in your medicine cabinet.”

Jurgen reached them.

He said, “Gentlemen, Walter Schoen is ready to give his address. He’s going to tell you about all the women he’s been screwing for the past five years or so and give you their names. Vera will introduce Walter in a moment. Dr. Taylor, have a seat, please. Bohdan, if you’ll turn these chairs around . . . And, Mr. Aubrey, come with me, please. I want to see how you make your mint julep.”

“With rye? Are you kiddin’,” Joe Aubrey said, “and no mint? I swear, Vera’s the cheapest rich broad I ever met.”

Vera began with a quote from her predecessor assigned to Abwehr’s Detroit station, Grace Buchanan-Dineen.

“You will recall that when the Justice Department threatened Grahs with acts of treason, and she allowed them to plant a recording device in her apartment, Grahs said, ‘I was technically involved in the spy ring, yes, but I never considered myself morally guilty.’”

The statement made no sense to Vera. If turning in her spy ring wasn’t an immoral act, what was? It was a cheap out, getting the woman twelve years instead of a rope around her neck. Still, Vera used the quote. She made herself say to the group seated in her living room, there was no reason for any of us to feel moral guilt, fighting the good fight, working for the cause of National Socialism. But, she said, as the end of the war draws near, our efforts have proved to be, well, insufficient, despite the Führer’s inspiration, Vera said, wanting to bite her tongue. Even our brave saboteurs, two months from the time U-boats put them ashore, were tried by a military court and convicted. Six of our fellow agents were hanged, the remaining two, the informers, languish in prison. Vera had to pause and think before telling them the indictment against the thirty defendants last year for sedition ended with prison terms. We are told we have a right to free speech, but when we stand up for the truth, say that Communists control the American government, that Franklin Roosevelt, the cripple, gets down to kiss the ass of the midget Josef Stalin, we are imprisoned.

“I recall one of the defendants in that trial,” Joe Aubrey said, “invented what he named a ‘Kike Killer,’ a short round club that came in two sizes, one for ladies.”

Maybe she could get him to write the check and not have to kiss him or do anything else.

“This evening,” Vera said, “could be our last meeting. There are no recording devices in my house, or any one of us likely to inform on the others, despite the ruthless efforts of the Justice Department. Let’s refill our glasses, toast our future”-looking at Walter now-“and hear what our Detroit version of Heinrich Himmler is so anxious to tell us. Walter?”

They had turned off Woodward and were creeping along Boston Boulevard, the street divided by a tree-lined median and big, comfortable homes on both sides.

Honey said, “I can’t read the house numbers.”

“The one with two cars parked in front,” Carl said. “The Ford belongs to Walter,” the cars shining in the streetlight, “and a Buick.”

“That’s all?” Honey said. “What about the one we’re coming to?” Another Ford, three houses from Vera’s on the same side of the street.

“That’s FBI surveillance.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s where you’d park to watch the house.”

They crept past the car, Honey sitting taller to have a look at the black four-door sedan.

“There’s no one in it.”

“I’ll bet you five bucks the house is under surveillance.”

“Okay, turn around, and we’ll go back.”

Now she was telling him what to do. At the Paradiso, the restaurant, she kept telling him what to order, like the collards. In charge now since he’d chickened out. Would not jump on her when she showed him her bare breasts, Jesus, using them like a buck lure, and they’d gone out to eat instead of falling in bed. She didn’t act pissy or disappointed, she was making fun of him by giving him orders. Carl turned at the next opening in the median and started back toward the house. Now she told him, “Park behind Walter’s car.”

“What’re we doing?”

“I thought we’d drop in on the meeting.”