Walter Mosley: The Long Fall

Bernard screamed again and then flew somewhere else in his private multimillion-dollar aviary.

“Come on,” the woman-child said.

She led me down a wide hallway that was more like a gallery in an art museum. The paintings here were Impressionist and Post-impressionist masterpieces. There was a Cézanne that I had never seen before, also a Modigliani that was new to me.

I’d spent a lot of my adolescence in art museums—there and the boxing gym with Gordo. I couldn’t draw to save my life but I appreciated the stylized chaos that artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrought.

At the end of the hall, in a little recessed area on the left, was a very small painting by Paul Klee. It was composed of red and yellow and gold boxes, with defining lines of cobalt here and there. On the right side, in the lower corner, there was a scribble done in a slightly lighter blue that might have been a squiggle becoming a man, or vice versa, and on the upper-left-hand side there was an oval, bisected face that maybe the squiggle-man had lost, or maybe it was the sun. It was the most arresting painting I had ever seen. While I stopped and stared, Hannah waited patiently.

“It’s beautiful, huh?” she said after a minute or so of appreciative silence.

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you want it?”

Yes, I did, but I didn’t say so.

“You can have it,” she offered in an offhanded way.

“It’s priceless.”

“No. My mother bought it for me for my twelfth birthday. I’d be happy to give it to you.”

I believe that her slamming me in the head with a Louisville Slugger would have made less of an impact.

Material things never mattered much to me. My Communist father had made sure of that. Even though I was not a Marxist or an adherent of anarcho-syndicalism, I simply never gave much thought to possessions. Money paid the rent but it didn’t drive my desires like it did for so many other property-hungry people in the West. I didn’t have a favorite ring or watch. There was nothing that I saved up for that didn’t have a practical use. I had been like that my entire life, but there I was in that hallway, on the outskirts of old age, and Hannah’s offer made me feel like a child who still had everything to learn.

“Wow,” I said. “You know, that might be the best offer I’ve ever had.”

“So you want it?”

“Can we go sit down now, Hannah?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging lightly as if her responsibilities and that mausoleum of a house did not weigh on her at all.

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49

Three Hispanic women in black-and-white maid uniforms were working in the big kitchen that we traveled through. The women were different shades of brown and of various ages, heights, and sizes. The only thing that they had in common was that they all spoke Spanish. If I were more sensitive to foreign intonations I might have discerned different accents among them because they certainly were not all from the same country.

The ladies shot worried glances at us, obviously wondering if I was some kind of threat to the child or them. I have that effect on people often.

Hannah was oblivious to the servants’ concerns. She brought us to a swinging aluminum door and ushered me through. This led to a short hallway, which ended at a small, lavender-colored oval room that had a bay window looking out over a small vegetable garden, another anomaly for a Manhattan home.

The room was furnished with two stuffed chairs covered in well-worn and cracked brown leather. The floor was pine, pitted, and somehow fitting for a room where the masters were never meant to be. I sat in one chair while Hannah settled across from me, in half-lotus.

It took me a moment or two to get my head back into the investigation. I had taken the past few minutes for myself. I was very happy in the presence of the child bearing precious gifts, in that small room, under the only sun that any one of my ancestors had ever known.

“How’s Fritz?” I asked.

“He stayed upstate.”

“Did he recover okay from that spell?”

“He’s walking and talking again, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t remember what happened. He didn’t remember you. And no, I didn’t tell anyone that you had been to the house. I thought that you wanted to talk to my father and I didn’t want to get in the way. Though I would like to know more about what it is that you want.”

“Do you really own that painting?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever offered to give away anything like that before?”

“You mean something so valuable?”

I nodded.

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Hannah’s face was long and pretty in its youth, but when she concentrated, it took on a more handsome cast. I liked her in spite of all my upbringing.

“No,” she said finally. “Never. But what does that have to do with my question?”

“A guy from Albany hired me to find four men,” I said. “I found them. One was dead, another one was in prison, one was awaiting trial for burglary, and the last guy was living the life of an honest citizen. I turned over the information and the three survivors were attacked. Two are dead and the other might be soon. After that, somebody, or maybe two different somebodies, tried to kill me.

“I don’t want to be used in that manner. I don’t want people to die because of me, and I myself do not wish to be killed. And so I have been investigating, trying to find out who was using me. The detective who hired me doesn’t seem to exist, but I’m good at what I do, and I came up with a name.”

“What name?” Hannah asked.

“Roman Hull.”

“My grandfather?”

I nodded again.

“I’m telling you this because you offered me that painting, and also because it’s true. I may have left out a detail or two but you have the gist of why I’m here.”

Hannah brought her fingers to her temples and traced little circles there.

“Are you going to kill my grandfather?”

“People like me don’t kill people like him,” I said. “I just want to get to the truth. I want to know what happened and I want it to stop.”

“Grandfather Roman used to pinch me and Fritzie when we wouldn’t do what he told us to,” she said. “It got so bad that Dad wouldn’t let him see us until we were teenagers.

“They say he murdered this race car driver a long time ago and then he married the driver’s widow. They didn’t stay together long, though.”

“I’ve heard the stories.”

“He’s upstairs,” she said.

“Right now?”

It was her turn to nod.

“Can I go see him?”

“I will take you,” she said solemnly, as if the words were a vow.

WE MADE OUR way back through the kitchen. The domestics were gone.

I glanced at the painting I coveted as we passed through the hall of masterpieces. The yellow parrot screeched somewhere when we came into the grand entrance hall but I didn’t see it.

“He’s on the third floor,” Hannah told me as we mounted the stairs.

Upon reaching the second floor we had to walk around the outer hall to get to the next stairway up. There were doors and other entrances along the hallway leading into rooms and down corridors. At the door closest to the next set of stairs a woman wandered out.

“Wandered” is the right word. She stepped from the doorway, moving at an odd angle with her head turned as if she were looking behind. It seemed as though she had gotten lost in her own home.

“Mother,” Hannah said.

Startled, the woman turned to regard us. She was a creature of exceptional beauty. From the form of her face to the deep blue in her eyes this woman, who was my age, would always be plagued by the petty desires and jealousies of others. Her form was slender and graceful. The pastel violet of her diaphanous robe struggled to match such beauty. Her hair was blond, becoming ethereally light with the white that had begun its encroachment there. When she gazed into my eyes I felt the need to swallow.