Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

Sovereign reached his front door just as Lemuel was rushing out. He clocked the young man with a blow to the back of his head, but that just propelled his reluctant opponent faster. Lemuel dropped the baton and ran full-out to the end of the hallway where the exit sign redly glowed.

Sovereign ran after him. He chased him to the door and then down the stairs. He had proven himself Lemuel’s better in hand-to-hand combat but the younger man was still the faster. If the exit door on the first floor had not been buckled a bit, making it stick, Lemuel would have gotten away. But he wasted four seconds, no more, pushing frantically against the door. Sovereign came up behind him two steps into the entry area and began to pummel him as he ran.

Lemuel stopped and pushed against James’s shoulders. Sovereign fell back while trying to throw a punch. His legs crossed and he stumbled, giving Lemuel a chance to head for the door.

“Mr. James!” Geoffrey LaMott shouted from behind his counter.

Sovereign righted himself and then barreled after Lemuel, who was slowed by the postman coming in with his wheeled mailbag.

Sovereign leapt from the stairs leading to the exit and tackled Lemuel through the front door and into the street. There he battered Lemuel Johnson with fists, forearms, and elbows. A dreamlike feeling of lightness infused itself into his attack — so much so that he was unaware that people had grabbed him by both arms and were pulling him off of his hapless victim.

It wasn’t until the middle of the interview with Captain Turpin that Sovereign came back to himself and at least partially realized all that had happened.

Standing in front of the huge building — made from rough-hewn, dark brown stone bricks — Sovereign stopped to appreciate a place he had been but not seen. He clenched his sore fists and smiled, feeling neither anger nor mirth but rather a deep, almost religious astonishment.

Passing the outer door he could see through the second, as it was a collection of semiopaque glass squares. The hazy image of a man in red and black stood on the other side. To the left there was an opening in the wall that allowed James to see into an empty dark yellow room.

Sovereign took in a deep breath through his nostrils and felt the continual, recurrent thrumming of anxiety in his chest.

The door before him swung open and there stood a chubby young white man in a streamlined beefeater’s uniform. A look of wonder passed over the freckled face and then the youth smiled.

“Mr. James.”

“Roger?”

“You can see me?”

“You know it.”

Roger held out a hand and Sovereign took it, his knuckles aching from the grip. He was surprised when the young white man leaned forward to hug him and slap his back.

“Congratulations,” the doorman said. “What happened? Did they operate or give you some kind of medicine?”

Shaking his head, he said, “Scare therapy.”

“What?”

“I’ll talk to you about it some other time. Right now I’m five minutes late.”

“You bet, Mr. James. You bet.”

Eight long paces to the wall and a turn to the left, a few steps away stood an entranceway leading into the long dark hall that he’d walked along five days a week for months. Sovereign was impressed that a blind man could negotiate a world like this, a world where sight told you almost everything.

The door was dark wood with three brass tags placed in a vertical row along the upper left-hand side.

Sovereign ran the fingertips of his left hand along the brass tags, noticing the scabs from the fight. He tried to call up a feeling about the wounds — guilt or triumph, he didn’t care which — but nothing would come. He felt nothing but a sense of wondrous paradoxical nostalgia at seeing places that had been concealed.

Striding quickly through the waiting area he knocked on Offeran’s door.

It opened immediately.

Roly-poly, bald, and bespectacled Offeran wore a gray suit, pale blue shirt, and a black-and-white-checked tie. The lenses of his rimless glasses were rectangular and small. His head was egg shaped and his face hairless except for the eyebrows and lashes. The gray-brown brows furrowed and Offeran smiled.

“You can see me?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Come in.”

“... and so you say she screamed and you could suddenly see?” the alabaster-skinned, sixty-something psychoanalyst asked.

“Yes,” black Sovereign replied, looking at the hundreds of books packed in the shelving on the far side of the room. “The office is larger than I’d imagined.”

“And you were arrested?” Offeran went on.

Sovereign noticed a framed etching leaning on the bookshelf. It was the image of a black-and-red bird. This was the bird that entered his reverie about Ellen Saunders in her camel-colored suit.

“For assault, yes,” Sovereign said. “That might change to attempted murder or even second-degree murder if he dies.”

“And it was the girl, Toni Loam, who brought him into your house.”

“You don’t have to say it like that, Dr. Offeran. You don’t have to say it like that.”

“What else am I supposed to think if not that she was conspiring against you? Why would you think any different?”

“It was two o’clock on a weekday, and she was gone when you called to cancel and when Katz’s people called to reschedule. She had no reason to think that I’d be home then. The doorman told me that they had just gotten there.”

“Maybe they went there to lie in wait.”

“Then why would she holler?”

“I don’t know. Maybe... maybe at the last minute she found that she couldn’t go through with it.”

Sovereign grinned.

“Why do you smile, Mr. James?”

“Because we’re sitting here, just two people talking. I like that. I have really benefited from coming here.”

Silence, Sovereign thought, wasn’t the same when you could gaze into the eyes of someone thinking.

“I’d like to keep coming for a while, if that’s okay, Doctor.”

“You’re no longer blind,” the therapist said. “The insurance might pay for a week of follow-up, but after that they’ll stop.”

“I’ve saved money my whole life,” Sovereign James confessed. “I can afford a couple months of you... that and two lawyers too.”

“So you’re really going to pay for her defense?”

“ And her bail. I should have her out of there by tomorrow morning.”

“Won’t the police suspect that the two of you set up this... this Lemuel?”

Sovereign shrugged and smiled.

“So can I keep seeing you?” he asked.

“I think you might need to.”

On Madison at three in the afternoon Sovereign grinned and sighed. The thrumming anxiety was still there inside his breast like an angry bumblebee roused from its winter’s hibernation.

Bumble — he thought about the word — that’s what I’ve done through all my life. There I was thinking I was shrewd and revolutionary and really I was just bumbling through like a blind man, only I didn’t even know I was handicapped .

He walked south to 57th Street, over to 9th Avenue, and then headed straight down. He enjoyed the sights like a starved man eating his first meal in many days. There was a jaunty young woman’s firm butt and a dead rat in the gutter, a trash can full to overflowing on 33rd Street, and two little blond girls walking arm in arm and giggling, their chubby mothers chattering and watching from three steps behind.

While walking he went over the events of the past twenty-four hours.