Walter Mosley: Known to Evil

I DIDN'T REMEMBER LYING down on the daybed, much less falling asleep. But I was up before the sun. The boys hadn't come in-I would have heard Dimitri's racket if they had.

I was still clad in the dull-yellow suit.

I disrobed, hanging the ugly clothes on a standing rack near the door. Then I put on a checkered robe that was older than Dimitri and went down to take a cold-water shower.

I start out each case with a cold shower. I find that it modulates my depressive mood and makes up for the sleep I miss almost every night. It hurts down to the bone, but I rarely yell. I just shiver like a wet dog and clench my teeth hard enough to bite through a circus strongman's thumb. After that, nothing seems so bad or insurmountable.

As Gordo used to tell me, "Life is pain… unless you beat it to the punch."

WE LIVE ON WEST Ninety-first Street. My office is a few miles south, on Thirty-ninth between Sixth and Seventh avenues. I walk to work more days than not-to get out of the house before the false domesticity drowns me. I find that thinking comes easily while moving through the city streets where I had come to manhood.

The November sun was just threatening to rise when I, once again wearing that yellow suit, turned south on Broadway. The homeless night people were still out, going through the detritus of the night before: searching paper bags and collecting bottles, hording unfinished cigarettes and the odd coin.

"Hey, brothah," a hale black man dressed all in gray rags said in greeting on Sixty-third and Amsterdam. The street had tempered his body-and cooked his brain.

I nodded in passing.

"You know they comin', right?" he said.

"Who's that?" I asked, slowing.

"Gubment men with their guns an' fake black skins. You know they take white men and use needle dyes to make 'em look like us and then they loose 'em all up and down here wit' guns an' say we doin' it to ourselves."

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes they don't even need the needles and dyes."

The street messiah smiled at me. His teeth were all there and healthy, yellowed ivory in color and strong. I passed him a twenty-dollar bill and moved along, on my own misguided way.

MY FATHER'S LESSONS, as long as he stayed around, were good ones. He was a sophisticated man, even though he'd been born in an Alabama sharecropper's shack. Self-taught as he was, he had an outsider's take on knowledge.

"People in the Party will tell you to ignore Sigmund Freud," he once told me, a ten-year-old boy. "They say that he's just a bourgeois apologist. Problem is, they're right about a whole lot of what he has to say. All that sex and nuclear-family crap is mostly nonsense. But when he talks about the unconscious, you have to listen to him. Just walk down the street and you can see that most people don't know what they're doing or why. That's the impact of the Economic Infrastructure, but it's still in the living human brain. The ledger informs us but it doesn't make us what we are-not physically.

"So when you decide to do something, anything, you have to wonder what frame of mind brought you to that decision. More times than not it will be a part of your mind that you hadn't considered."

I HATED MY FATHER for many years after he'd abandoned me and killed my mother by walking out on her.

I hated my father for leaving, but his lessons never left me.

Why would I walk downtown so that I'd arrive at the Tesla Building at exactly seven in the morning? I knew that was when Aura got there, that's why. My mind set me up for a supposedly chance meeting with the woman I loved and denied.

And so when I was across the street from the lovely aqua and green Art Deco entrance to the Tesla, I shouldn't have been surprised to see Aura walking arm in arm with a white stranger. He was wearing a dark-blue pinstriped suit which didn't seem to fit him all that well, and carrying an oxblood briefcase. They stopped before the door and kissed.

It was a languorous kiss. The kind of osculation one has after a long night of satisfying intercourse. My unconscious brain told my living heart that I had been running full out for a quarter mile. A cold sweat sprouted across my forehead and down my neck.

The lovers separated, took a step or two, and then, helpless, started kissing again.

I knew I was bound for trouble when I found myself in the middle of the street, heading straight for the pair. My fists were balled and my state of mind was what it was when the bell would ring in my club-fighting days.

I was ready to tear off that sucker's head.

I couldn't stop moving, so I changed direction. I veered off to the left, storming down the street, lucky that no innocent got in my way.

I was on Thirty-fourth a little west of Eighth Avenue before I knew it. Gordo's Gym had always been my refuge. I stood in front of the downstairs door breathing hard, unable to move now that I had come to a stop.

I'm fifty-four years old. At this advanced age I shouldn't go crazy like some teenager. My own lack of control, even more than that kiss, humiliated me. If I were another kind of man I might have fallen into a heap crying-after downing a fifth of bourbon.

It was at that exact moment that I realized the depth of my love for Aura. Before then I might have confused my feelings for attraction or deep friendship. But I knew, there on Thirty-fourth Street, that real love had emerged out of my subconscious-and I had waited too long to recognize it.

The all-purpose bear growled in my breast pocket. I suspected that it was Sam Strange. I had regained enough control to know that I couldn't talk to Rinaldo's legman right then. I would have cursed him and, in doing so, damned myself. So I let the call ring itself out and pushed the door open.

Halfway to the fourth floor a lion roared. That was Twill's assigned ring.

"You just about gave your mother an ulcer last night," were my first words. I was relieved to have someone I cared for to talk to.

"Sorry, Pops," Twill said. "Me an' Bulldog run into these two girls from Belarus and things got kinda hot and heavy."

"Belarus?"

"Yeah. That's part a' Russia. I told my girl I was nineteen. Sorry if we worried Moms."

"Have you called her?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because they knew this artist guy out in Southampton and we came out here to spend a couple'a days."

"Southampton? What about school?"

"You wanna talk to D?" was his reply.

"Dad?" Dimitri said on the line.

"Listen, son," I said, "your brother is on probation. It's against the law for him to leave the borough of Manhattan. What's gonna happen when the school reports him truant?"

"You could call 'em an' say that he's sick. Tell 'em he got the flu or something. I mean, that would really help us out. And, and, and you could call his social worker, too… and explain why he's not at work."

I couldn't remember the last time my blood-son had used more than a few words when speaking to me. All the rage and shame I felt sunk down under Dimitri's uncharacteristic behavior.

"You're asking me to lie for you and your brother?"

"It wouldn't be the first time you lied."

"What's going on with you, D?"

"I'm just asking you for this, all right?"

What could I say? Dimitri hadn't so much as shown a smile in my direction in five years.

"When are you two coming back home?"

"Just a few days. I swear."

"Are you in trouble? Do you need me to come out there and help?"

"No. It's nuthin' like that. It's just this girl… I like her."

"Okay. I'll make the calls for Twill, and I'll talk to your mother, too. But I need you two to keep in touch with me. You hear?"

"Uh-huh."

"I mean it, D. You've got to call me every day."

"I will. I promise."

It was the longest conversation I'd had with him since the birds and bees.