Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

The street’s breezy vignettes divert Lila Mae on her stakeout outside Pompey’s tenement. The man in the red hat who leans against a lamppost on the corner, his quick hands. The average time it takes for a shopper to complete transactions at the corner grocery (seven minutes). He does not leave his house. She knows he’s in there because he answered the phone. (She let him hear her breathe.) She spends hours gathering herself: imagines vaulting up the gray stone steps, ringing the buzzer for apartment 3A.

A stickball game erupts out of nowhere, quick as a summer shower, in the time it takes her to glance from Pompey’s stoop to her pocket watch. Ten screaming kids, half a broom, a stained canvas ball. Apparently her car is third base, she discovers when one of the boys slaps her trunk, safe. Startled, she turns in her seat and his round, dizzy face is in the window: “Sorry, lady!” he squeals. Your mama’s so black she, you throw like a girl, nuh-uh he didn’t tag me I got there first.

The stickball game disappears as fast as it came, the boys skid off to some new and suddenly pressing pastime. Lila Mae has decided, now , when the door to 327 opens. Pompey holds the door for a squat, round woman in a bright blue dress and two young boys who swat each other noisily. The Family Pompey. She’d assumed he was married — Pompey has a good city paycheck and is not the type to raise hell of any kind, adulterous or alcoholic or what have you — but hadn’t factored in the kids. They look about five or six, short-limbed kinesis. Mrs. Pompey is in the unfortunate habit of dressing her loins’ issue in the same-colored clothes, just one size apart. Perhaps that is why they beat at each other, slapping each newly undefended quarter on his antagonist’s tiny person. Pompey looks down, scowls and clenches his sons’ shoulders. In unison their heads incline toward his hands, a common response to shoulder pinching, Lila Mae has noticed, instinct ushered in aeons ago by the opposable thumb of some slope-browed hominid patriarch. They stop fighting, stop squirming once their father releases his grip and instructs them to behave. The boys make it down the stoop to the sidewalk without incident as Pompey kisses his wife goodbye on the lips. She hadn’t considered that either, a tender side to Pompey, her prey today. It affects her somehow, she pushes the image aside. She has business with the man.

While his family makes their way around the corner, Pompey sits on the front stoop and withdraws a cigar from his shirt pocket. She allows him two blue drags, then eases out of the Department sedan and climbs the steps before he can notice her approach. She’s standing over him when she interrupts his unknowable petty meditations with a terse “I know what you did.”

“Watson? What are you doing here?” He chokes on the smoke, as surprised by the sight of Inspector Watson at his front door as by the unlikely image of her in a dress. (Her mother made it years before. Large roses float on white fabric, tight on her body without a single unseemly curve. She hasn’t worn it in years, never had occasion to. Never met someone like Natchez, whom she will meet later this evening after they have finished their missions. If she presses her nose to the dress, Lila Mae imagines she can smell her mother’s sweat, deep in the cotton.)

“I know what you did to the Fanny Briggs stack. I know Chancre ordered you to do it,” she says flatly.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, girl.” His face curdles. “Now why don’t, you get away from my stoop before I get on the phone to IAB and tell them that their public enemy number one has finally shown up?” He glances quickly up and down the street to see which of his neighbors is cataloging this incident.

She thinks, he’s probably wondering if he has time to sneak inside his door and slam it behind him. Nope. “Now you listen to me, old man,” leaning over him, “I’m the one in control here now. I saw you go into Shush’s clubhouse and I saw you in your little repairman’s uniform go up to 366 Eighth Avenue. You’ve been cleaning up after Shush’s maintenance gang, making sure they pass inspection so that Shush’s criminal activities don’t attract any undue attention from the Feds.” Pompey leans back beneath this barrage, and Lila Mae leans even closer, tart smoke scoring her nostrils. “I know Shush owns 366—and the shoddy work his boys do on elevators would be just the FBI’s perfect excuse for a raid if he’s not taking care of Department citations.” She drops the pictures of him leaving Pauley’s Social Club, entering and leaving 366 in the Growley Elevator Repair uniform, into his lap. “You’re Chancre’s boy. Now if you don’t give it up on what went down at Fanny Briggs, I’ll be the one calling IAB. And the Feds.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Fanny Briggs,” he says, head shaking furiously, trying to shake away what he sees in the photographs. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You know what, Pompey? I’m really tired of people telling me lies. I’m through kidding with you people.”

“ ‘You people’? And just what people would that be?”

“You don’t have to shuffle for me, Pompey. I know your game.”

“I didn’t do nothing to Number Eleven. I don’t know what happened. If you want to call IAB or the police, you go ahead and do it. Because I didn’t do anything to Fanny Briggs.”

She pulls back. This man is incredible. “You’d cover for them? You’d go to jail to protect them, after all they’ve done to you?”

He pulls his suspenders off his flesh as if they were chains, lets them snap back. Pompey holds his cigar in front of his eyes and stares at the smoldering red tip. “This is one of Chancre’s cigars,” he says. “Chancre’s. They taste like shit but they got a Spanish label so no one says anything. We all know they taste like shit but we smoke them anyway because he gave them to us.” He looks up at her now. His eyes are cracked with red lines. “I do his work. We all do. Three months ago, the man calls me into his office. I don’t know what he wants. I’ve never spoken to him even though I been there longer than most of those white boys. He asks me if I need money. I tell him, sure — he’s the boss, maybe he’s going to give me that raise I been asking for. He asks me if I heard anything about his friendship with Johnny Shush. ‘Friendship’ he calls it, with his big feet up on the desk like I don’t know what’s going on. Like I’m some dumb nigger. I say yeah, there are rumors, the boys talk about it. Then he asks me again if I need any money and how I could make some looking after Shush’s maintenance crews, because they always do a bad job — none of them seen a machine room in their lives before they became repairmen — and Shush’s got to keep a low profile because of this federal probe. He can’t afford to bribe anyone in the Department, not now. All I got to do is look after the buildings that have been red-coded and make sure they make muster when the Department does the follow-up. If Shush’s boys have messed up, which they usually do, I clean it up because I know what the Department is going to be looking for. I needed the money, so I took the job. Been three months I been doing it. Chancre says just three more months and things will have cooled down. So I did it.”

“It’s against the law,” Lila Mae barks. “You took an oath.”

“Don’t talk to me about oath,” he spits. “I got two boys. One five, the other seven. I was raised in this neighborhood. It’s changed. You’ve been watching me all day, I figure. You see them kids play ball? Ten years from now half of them be in jail, or dead, and the other half working as slaves just to keep a roof over they heads. Ten years from now they won’t even be kids playing ball on the street. Won’t be safe enough even to do that. Walk down this street, you can smell the kids smoking that reefer. Right out in the open like they got no shame. You see that young man on the corner in that red hat? He sells it to them. A few years from now, it won’t be reefer he selling but some other poison. My kids won’t be here when that happens. I need money to take them out of here.”