Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

There was not much feeling in Carlinda’s words but John could glean her passion by the slight sneer on her lips.

“And so you and I are through?”

“Yes.”

“What if I told you I loved you, needed you?”

Carlinda sat up straighter. There was actual fear in her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said softly. “We had what we had but that’s over. Even if it wasn’t what could we do about it?”

She sighed audibly. Her shoulders relaxed.

“Thanks for the notepad,” John said. “But tell me, why did you come?”

“Are you going to tell what you know about those broadsides now that... you know?”

“If that’s what you’re worried about why not tell me you love me, that you’ll wait for me?”

“Because it wouldn’t be right.”

“No,” John said. “I won’t tell. I probably would if it was just you but I don’t want to hurt the others. I’d do it if it was only you but I’m faithful to my friends.”

Again he suppressed a smile. The delicate wording of his assurance would allow Carlinda to believe she had bested him in their affair while at the same time feeling safe because of John’s fealty to others.

“I don’t mean to hurt you,” she lied. “It’s just my connection to Arnold is all.”

“I think you should leave now,” John told her, though he would have been happy to spend the afternoon playing their game.

Carlinda’s visit had lightened John’s spirit. She was the blue door in his dream. Through her lay a new world where he didn’t have to quote Hegel and Doc Ben, Herodotus and the unnamed scribes of ancient China’s successive empires.

She was the heart of his rebellious lectures, the revelation of his ridiculous name. She did not love him, was not there for love. Carlinda Elmsford was the perfect woman for the man who had given everything to Lucia Napoli and Herman Jones. She was his pack-mate baying side by side with him at the full moon with fresh blood on their snouts and tongues. She was warmth in the cold, the yipping intelligence as they moved with their gang hunting down prey.

By moonlight he had licked her bloody wounds and now she was gone.

Sitting in the metal chair he wondered why no one had come to retrieve him. Marle should have opened the blue door, chained him and then guided him back to his hole.

The suit that Willie Pepperdine wore was the red-brown color of ancient brick. His shirt was white and his tie scarlet. No guard accompanied him. The door he’d come through merely closed.

John stood to shake the moneyman’s outstretched hand.

“You look very relaxed for someone who’s been in solitary confinement the last two weeks,” Willie said.

“Gives me time to think,” John replied.

“Sit,” was Willie’s riposte.

“How did you know I was in solitary?”

“The same way I knew you’d probably murdered Chapman Lorraine and that you were born Cornelius Jones.”

“The Platinum Path?”

“How do you think Carlinda, Tamala and their friends could dig up so much dirt on your fellow faculty members?” Willie asked.

John waited a moment gazing into the too-perfect face of Pepperdine.

“You’re responsible for the notes on my table,” John said.

Willie nodded.

“And all the professors you accept you investigate first to make sure that you have something over them,” John continued.

“Not all of them,” Willie admitted. “All you need is something on about a third of the faculty. But you were a special case, John.”

“Special how?”

“At any given moment we have between ten and twenty candidates who might be admissible to the Path. Special testing and certain public and private records bring them to our attention, mostly. One day we might approach them to work for us directly or for one of our subbranches.

“These are, or might one day be, our rank and file. But you, my friend, you we are grooming for a much higher purpose.”

“Grooming?”

“Yeah. Those in the upper echelon of the Path see you as material for a senior position. You’re a freethinker in a world weighed down by the chains of history. A man like you could be a leader.”

“Leading where?”

“To change the course of history,” Pepperdine announced. “The human world is on a path toward self-destruction. The leaders are filled with inner conflicts and greed. They pretend to be sophisticated and then tear at each other like rabid dogs. No matter the religion, political theory or lineage — the entire world teeters on the edge of annihilation.

“It is our intention, our destiny, to avert this eventuality. In order to do that we need people like you.”

John thought about being an element in the transformation of humanity.

“I’m just living my life, Willie. That has nothing to do with you, no matter what you think.”

Saying this John stood. He almost turned away but thought of a question.

“How did you know about Lorraine?”

“We bought the Arbuckle when you joined the university.”

“But you waited until now to let people know?”

“There was no rush. He was dead. And you weren’t ready to be tested back then.”

“What test?”

“The one you’re taking right now.”

I am not now nor have I ever been Cornelius Jones, your honor, he scribbled on the pad Carlinda had given him.

No.

No, your honor, that is not my name.

Maybe.

I was born John Woman and I will die the same.

After penning twenty-three possible responses to the query, Are you the Cornelius Jones named in the state of New York’s extradition request? John decided that he’d wait until the judge had spoken, answering the question when it was freshly worded. Maybe his lawyer would answer for him.

The rest of the night John worked on writing a letter to his mother. He could fit only four or five words to a line on the small sheets. He used his fingernails to bare enough graphite lead to keep on writing. At the end he was manipulating the stub with his fingertips.

He told his mother he loved her, forgave her, and that his father loved her too; she had to do whatever she did because she was an emotional being and what better kind of mother could a son hope for?

He wrote a lot more, careful not to name Filo Manetti in case the judge or Captain Anton made Marle search his cell for evidence. He told her not to worry about him, and that he finally felt free of troubles he’d brought upon himself.

“John Woman,” Marle Josephson said just as John signed your son at the end of his eleven-page epistle.

They passed down many corridors, through seven locked doors, up three flights of stairs and then out into an alley where the marshals’ van waited.

“Good luck, John,” Marle said as he threaded a chain through the prisoner’s handcuffs securing him to a stainless steel eye attached to the floor in the backseat of the van. “See you tonight.”

The two marshals did not speak. One was white, the other black; both were men. They brought John to a room so small that it could contain only the chair he was chained to.

This was a new restriction. He could not move from the chair and, even if he could, the room was not large enough to take a single step. Tremors ran between the wrists and elbows of both his arms. This jittering frightened him. It felt as if there was some creature trying to claw its way out of his body.

To distract himself from his anxiety John slowly reconstructed Cicero’s description of the death of Caesar. His Latin was still strong. Herman had been a good teacher.

His father cried at the recitation of the last moments of the great general and tyrant written by a man who both loved and hated the self-appointed dictator.