Every Man a King

17

“I’m glad you stayed the night this time,” I said to Lula.

We were sitting on the little terrace eating buttered toast and jam off a paper plate set on a small cast-iron table. I’d made a pot of coffee and Lula was smoking a filterless Camel.

“I figured if I was lucky enough to meet you the second time that maybe we should get to know each other a little better,” she said through a rising screen of exhaled smoke.

“Wasn’t so much luck. I noticed you had a few matchboxes from Wreckless and so I hoped you might drop by.”

“Sorry I’m on my period, then. You would’a been luckier with Nona or Chichi.”

“Why not Roxanne?”

“You don’t like white girls. Not like that.”

“I’m happy with you, Lou. Anyway I was too dizzy to do much after all that champagne.”

The 24/7 birds were chirping in the treetops and the streets were populated by people going to work and school.

“It’s real nice up in here,” Lula said. “I like spendin’ time with you.”

“As much as with Alfonso?”

“That man is just a hard dick and a hard time, like my grandmother used to say. He’d never make me toast and coffee. When Alfonso wake up in the mornin’, the only thing he has to say is it’s time to go.”

We spent the early morning talking about life and how it seems to work, her charms and mine. After that I got dressed in my gray suit, surreptitiously pocketed my gun, and brought Lula down to my rented car. We drove to the affluent Buckhead area, where I bought her a silk dress and a citrine necklace.

“Where we gonna have dinner?” she asked as we exited the boutique.

“Where would you like?”

“Are you rich?”

“Not really. But I can afford a good dinner.”

“Okay, then. I’ll call you at five to tell you where.”

I gave her money for a cab and she kissed me good-bye.

Watching her walk away, I was hoping I would be able to make that date.

My destination was the U-Turn Café, also in Buckhead. I decided to stretch my legs and walked the six blocks to the little espresso bar.

He was sitting at a small round table at the innermost end of the long room, reading a newspaper. The clock on the wall above his head registered 1:47. The news must have been engrossing. It wasn’t until my shadow spread across his table that he became aware that someone was there.

When he looked up, his face at first darkened, but then he smiled broadly.

“Mr. Oliver,” said Ben Ingram, also known as Thad Longerman. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”

The familiarity threw me off a moment. I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a finger with one hand and picked up a cell phone with the other.

Speaking into the phone he said, “Hold my next two,” then disconnected the call. “Sit, sit.”

I obeyed the offer and said, “Tex Bradford must’ve had a hidden camera.”

The affable jailer nodded pleasantly. “Over the front door. Amazing what image software can do nowadays. It should be illegal.”

“Lots of things should be.”

“What can I get for you today, Mr. Ingram?” a young man asked.

He was of medium height with strawberry blonde hair that would have put Roxanne to shame.

“Café con leche for me, Mark. What’ll you have, Mr. Oliver?”

“Sign over the bar says something about pastrami soup? What’s that like?”

“Better than it sounds,” the smiling heir of the Vikings allowed. “It’s a cream soup with pieces of pastrami and bitter greens in it. Pretty good.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You’re the adventurous type,” Ingram noted as Mark went off on his tasks.

“Only with food.”

“If that were true you wouldn’t be sitting at this table.”

The words, the tone of his voice, made me want to reach for the gun in my pocket.

“I’m not here to get in anybody’s way, Ben. I’m just gathering information for a client.”

“What client?” His smile was infinitely patient.

Ben had a round head and close-cut brunette hair. His shoulders looked sturdy and I imagined he was close to six foot.

Mark returned with our orders. Ben thanked him and the boy went off to some distant table.

“I’m prohibited from revealing clients’ names,” I said, answering the prison professional.

“But you expect me to answer you?”

“Expect is a strong word,” I said. “I expect the sun to rise in the east, the sky around it to be blue, the Democrats to believe in their impossible dreams, and the Republicans to revel in their own stink.”

Ingram laughed out loud, turning a head or two in the sparsely populated establishment.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I was involved in the clandestine abduction of a certain gentleman named Alfred Xavier Quiller from an exurb of Belarus called Little Peach. Why, you ask? Because the man in question is an unredeemable idealist.”

I was shocked, truly. In all my years as a cop and then a PI, I had never run across a seemingly sane criminal who would confess so easily.

“What do you mean — idealist?” I asked.

The prison master hunched his shoulders and gave a wan, apologetic smile. “Although he’s a genius, Mr. Quiller doesn’t understand the rough-and-tumble of politics, of power. Ideas in themselves are wonderful things, but the force of will behind these thoughts — that’s what greatness is made of.”

He believed that this answer was coherent. Maybe he wasn’t quite sane.

“I don’t understand you.”

Again that maddening weak smile. It was like a limp-wrist handshake.

“Mr. Quiller thinks that merely saying something is enough to effect meaningful change. He thinks that most human beings are rational creatures that act solely upon logic. On top of that he believes that any and all systems of logic are open to argument, that any accepted truth might be overturned.”

“So if he were to question himself,” I postulated, “that might be disadvantageous to certain interested parties.”

I was beginning to understand. Ingram’s unexpected broad grin told me so.

“Exactly.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Longerman, but you don’t seem to be the kind of person who would be bothered by a man questioning the innate racism of his theories.”

“True.” He didn’t seem to notice me using his pseudonym. “Neither niggers, honkies, nor chinks make a difference to me. Cracker barrel or dark continent — who cares? It is, as I have said, power and politics that rule the day.”

“And Mr. Quiller’s scientific method has derailed him from your truth.”

“It’s a real pleasure talking to you, Joe. You have the ability to understand simple facts.”

“So what’s the problem?” I tried to get the tone of my voice to be that of an interested adviser.

“Not, as you have said — his innate idealism. But the half-assed nature of his approach to change.”

“The file he has on the rich and powerful,” I surmised.

“Got it in one.” Mr. Ingram smiled and nodded.

“You want the file...”

“Out of his hands.”

“Because?”

“You’ve met his wife, I hear.” It was not a question.

“But she’s his wife,” I argued. “Wouldn’t she be protective of him and his beliefs?”

“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is what appears to be true.”

“So because the Men of Action don’t like his love life you kidnap and imprison a man you agree is important?”

“No. The people I’m working for are working with a larger organization that wants to control Quiller’s database.”

Of course they do, I thought. This made me consider Roger Ferris’s reason for hiring me. My grandmother had told me not to trust him, that I was just a crumb on his table.

I needed time to work out my own situation.

“You have him already,” I said. “Why not just get him to turn it over?”

“Well before Mr. Quiller met Ms. Prim, he put conditional access to the database in the hands of a man who also had the ability to move it further along without the originator knowing where. The only thing expected of Quiller is that he has to make a public appearance once a year in certain unpredictable places, along with his wife. If this prerequisite is not met, the information goes public.”

“And there’s a reason you can’t go after the man who took control of the database?”

“So far he’s been beyond our reach.”

Ingram was staring deeply into my eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” I said defensively. “This is the first I’ve heard of the man.”

A hint of disappointment informed Ingram’s bearing. This frightened me.

“So how do you manage to place a wanted man in a public prison without the slightest ripple in the news or on social media?” I asked the question to delay an unknown inevitable.

“Business is business, Mr. Oliver. I know the agents that arrested Mr. Quiller in Paris. I’m on a first-name basis with wardens and their assistants across the nation. Quiller, as I am sure you noticed, is a guest at Rikers, not a convict.”

“That’s a hard place to be in for both you and him.”

“And you,” Ben added.

Exhalation had never given me a problem before that moment, but all of a sudden the air I breathed in seemingly sought refuge in my body. I wanted to deny Ingram’s claim concerning my jeopardy, but that tack was useless. I knew hardly anything, but just that was way too much knowledge. With no other recourse I decided to taste my soup.

It was delicious. The greens were collard and the pastrami was not only salty but flavorful. I was a rat in a man-made maze, but still I’d gotten to the cheese.

Now the only problem was getting out again.

“Me?” I said. “I don’t have anything to do with it. My job was to find out if Quiller was illegally removed from Belarus. The answer is — he was. The question of the murder of an American citizen in Togo seems moot, and so there’s nothing to say about that.”

“Except for the identity of the person or persons that hired you.”

Of course it was. And as much as I suspected my employer, I had no proof that he had me engaged in anything illegal. Roger Ferris was powerful, but even he might not be proof against the machine behind Ingram. It was my duty to protect him.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said with great reluctance.

Ben sipped his coffee.

“I like you, Joe,” he said as the latte mug touched the table. “But you got your nose way up in the ass of some very important people. They need to know who put you in their business. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Of course I can,” I said with nary a quaver. “But what you need to know is that I was a cop before I went private. There’s something tribal about cops. We follow our creed and we never betray our brethren. I will reach out to my employer and ask if I might share his name with you. If he says yes, then I’ll tell you.”

Ingram sat back in his chair, laced his fingers, and looked at me.

“Tribes have gone the way of the nation-state, my friend. Religion, race, gender, age, even parentage no longer carry much weight in the world we inhabit. It is, as I have already said, politics and power — not in that order — that rule us. You have to tell me what I need to know right now, or I won’t be able to trust.”

I was that rat in a maze, a fly with one herky-jerky foot in a spider’s web.

Ingram was not necessarily a bad guy. He was a man who had a job working for an evil so deep that it seemed virtuous. We sat in silence for a few minutes.

The soup was still good and breathing came back to me. I considered Ben Ingram — deeply. The experience of talking with him was astonishing to me. Usually when I met with someone over a case, or in life in general, I had to decipher their meaning. I took it for granted that people lied in order to reach their goals, to maintain their relationships, to survive, and, sometimes, simply to keep in practice.

But not Ben Ingram. I believed every word he said. There were things he wasn’t telling me, but I couldn’t even put the words together to ask about them.

In a way he was a paragon, a state of humanity to emulate.

In Ingram’s sense of the world my fate had already been sealed. I was a dead man, a shadow burned into the concrete by a light a thousand times brighter than the sun.

“I’m sorry that we can’t come to some kind of agreement, Mr. Longerman. You seem like the kind of man that one could trust. You’re educated and confident.”

“Thank you. I’m not very political and whatever powers I have are small. But be that as it may, you’re right about me.”

“How do you mean?”

“You and yours can bleed and die just as well as I and mine can.”