Walter Mosley: Fear Itself

“Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”

He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.

“Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.

I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.

“I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”

“Me?”

I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.

“Did you jump bail, Fearless?”

“No.”

“Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”

Fearless shook his head.

“He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”

Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.

“He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”

The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”

“Probably not.”

“Why you say that, Paris?”

“He called you Fearless, not Tristan. Seems to me that anybody care enough about you to leave you fifty thousand dollars would at least know your legal name.”

“Fifty thousand. Damn. I hope you wrong, Paris. You know I been lookin’ for fifty thousand dollars my whole life.”

That made me laugh. Fearless joined in. I pulled a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf on the wall and some milk out of the ice chest that stood in for the refrigerator I planned to buy one day.

After we sat down to breakfast I started asking questions in earnest.

Questions is what I do. I read my first book two weeks after learning the alphabet. It wasn’t that I was smarter than anybody else, but it’s just that I wanted to know anything that was hidden from me. My mother used to offer me candy if I’d be quiet for just ten minutes. But I could never stop asking why this and why that, not until I learned how to read.

Somebody might think that a man who’s always probing— putting his nose where it doesn’t belong, as my mother says—would be somewhat brave. But that couldn’t be further from the truth about me. I’m afraid of rodents and birds, bald tires, fire, and loud noises. Any building I’ve ever been in I know all of the exits. And I’ve been known to jump up out of a sound sleep when hearing a footstep from the floor below.

That’s why I own a bookstore full of books, so that all my questioning can be done quietly and alone. I didn’t want to ask questions about Fearless’s whereabouts or activities. But after that big white man showed up at my door, I needed to know if my friend’s problems were going to spill over onto me.

5

“. . . NO, PARIS,” FEARLESS SAID. “I told you all I know about it. Leora and Son were lookin’ for Kit, and the next thing I know the cops are askin’ around about me.”

“And you haven’t talked to Milo in two months?”

“Maybe three,” he said. “Last time I saw Milo was at The Nest. He was there with a nice-lookin’ woman. I think her last name was Pine.”

“What about Kit?” I asked. “Did you find out anything else about him?”

I had asked it all before, but I’d learned from long experience that Fearless didn’t have a straightforward way of thinking. He never remembered everything all at once. I asked him questions the same way the police questioned a suspect: with the hope of finding what wasn’t there rather than what was.

Fearless rubbed his hand over the top of his head. His ideas, though often deep and insightful, came from a place that he had very little control over. If you asked him, “How did you know that man was going to pull out a knife?” he might utter some nonsense like, “It was the way he lifted his chin when he saw me walk in the room.”

“Somebody said about the Redcap Saloon,” Fearless said.

“O’Brien’s Bar?”

“Yeah.”

“Who said about it?”

“It was that man Pete.”

“Dark-colored guy?” I asked.

“Naw. Yellah. High yellah at that. Him an’ Kit was friends. At least I seen ’em together more’n once. Pete’s got a hot dog cart over in MacArthur’s Park. I asked him if he’d seen Kit and he said about the Redcap Saloon.”

“Maybe we better go over there and see what we can see.”

Fearless grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Paris. We connected at the hip, you an’ me.”

“Unless they put you up on the gallows, unless that.”

“It ain’t gonna go that far, Paris. Naw, man. It’s probably just some questions them cops want answerin’. ’Cause you know I ain’t even broke a sweat in over a month.”

“What about that white man lyin’ an’ lookin’ for you?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe he don’t have nuthin’ to do with it.”

“Anyway,” I said. “Let’s be careful. You go out and climb the back fence. I’ll pick you up in five.”

Fearless just nodded. He went out the screen door, which I latched behind him.

***

MY FORD WAS A SICKLY BROWN COLOR that might have gone well with Theodore Timmerman’s suit. But that was all right, because the poor paint job helped cut down on the price. It was a used 1948 model and only cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It ran well and gas was cheap, so transportation was no problem at all. I pulled around Mace and drove up the alley between Seventy-first Place and Florence. Fearless was nowhere to be seen as I approached, but when I got to the back of my place he jumped out, opened the passenger’s door, and hopped into the seat like an eel gliding into a resting place between stones.

After a few blocks Fearless said, “It’s nice to be ridin’ again. You know it took me so long to get to your place last night ’cause I had to walk.”

“You don’t even have bus fare?”

“Not right now, Paris. You know the day Kit skipped out was my payday.”

“I can’t believe it. Don’t you have a bank account?”

“What for? I make money and I spend it.”

“But you don’t have anything.”

“I got as much as any other man, more than many.”

If anybody ever wrote a book about our friendship they would have called it The Businessman and the Anarchist. Fearless lived from day to day and here to there. His life in California was the dream that so many others had been shattered by. One night he slept on the beach, snoring by moonlight, and then he’d spend a week lying in some pretty girl’s bed. If he had to work he could swing a twelve-pound hammer all day long. And if work was scarce he’d catch a dozen sand dabs from a borrowed canoe, come over to my house, and trade that succulent entrée for a few nights on my front room sofa.

O’BRIEN’S WAS UP ON COCKBARROW, a few blocks from the train station. The entrance was no wider than a doorway, and the sign could have been for a professional office rather than a bar. But once you got past the short hall you entered a large room built around the remnants of a large brick oven that had once been used to make bread for Martinson’s Bakery in the twenties.

The oven had been twelve feet in diameter. Hampton James, the bar’s owner, cut the bricks down to waist level and installed a circular mahogany bar around the inside. On busy days he had as many as four bartenders working back to back, serving the colored employees of the railroads.

O’Brien’s was the place that colored train professionals patronized. All porters, waiters, restroom attendants, and redcaps went there when the shift was finished or when a layover began. There were a dozen cots in a back room where, for three bucks, a porter could get a nap before heading off on the next outbound train.