Every Man a King

21

The next address on my list was on Fifth Avenue but not so far that I needed a taxi, or a trip in the dreaded subway that reminded me so much of Rikers. I walked to Central Park, crossed over to Fifth Avenue, and then to a slender, modern-looking building on Sixty-Sixth and Fifth.

I hadn’t been there in a couple of years, and, on top of that, when last there I had been in disguise. Back then the doorwoman was a man.

She had straightened blond hair the texture of dry straw but was still rather fetching. Her eyes were light brown and, at half the blackness of Lamont Charles, she was still dark-skinned — around my color.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?” she asked through a leery half grin.

“Nigel Beard for Augustine Antrobus.”

Her auburn eyes tightened around that questioning sneer. She waited a moment, maybe giving me a chance to change my mind.

Maybe I considered leaving.

“A Nigel Beard for Mr. Antrobus,” she said into the microphone attached to her right ear.

Then the blond Black woman pursed her lips and nodded to some inner melody that took up the space of waiting. I remember wondering if she was a dancer or musician.

“You can go on up,” she said, shifting her gaze to me.

The three women office workers were all different but still young, beautiful, and of various so-called races. Lyle was the only actual remnant from my last visit. Pixie-like and thin, smelling of rose water and deadly as Cleopatra’s asp, he wore a lime-colored suit and leaned against the doorjamb that led to his master’s domain.

“May I help you?” the apparently Native American woman receptionist asked. All eyes were on me.

“You can show me in to see Augustine.”

“And you are?”

“Nigel Beard.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of you and there is no meeting set on the schedule.”

If somebody asked me I would have said she’d been educated somewhere in the Ivy League.

“I don’t have an appointment, true, but he does know me.”

“Maybe it’s time for you to leave,” slight Lyle suggested.

He was armed, I was sure, and he probably had other tricks.

At a corner desk sat a very tall, very thin, very black-skinned woman. She had an earphone anchored to her left lobe. Her head and shoulders jerked up suddenly and she said, “He wants to see him.”

The nervous energy in the room evaporated.

“I know the way,” I said.

Pushing himself up and away from his post, Lyle countered, “I’ll take you.”

He led me down the slender outer hall with its window slits that looked down on Central Park.

It took nineteen steps to get to Augustine Antrobus’s office / man cave with its autumnal colors and dark wood furnishings.

That day the big, big man wore a three-piece maroon suit with a pale blue dress shirt and a tie that seemed to be derived from the colors of the dark rainbow that adorns a shallow oil slick.

“Mr. Beard,” Antrobus allowed. Even his voice was muscular.

“It’s good to see you again, Augustine.”

Lyle stiffened.

Antrobus smiled and then said to his death-dealing Passepartout, “You may leave us.”

Lyle sneered at me and moved from the room, a wraith being exorcised but at the same time infusing the atmosphere with his spite.

“Sit down, Mr. Beard,” Antrobus bellowed.

There were two wide-bottomed walnut chairs set at the outer orbit of a three-foot-wide globe of the moon. I took the closest seat while Antrobus moved his bulk from around his grand piano — size desk. When he sat it was with a satisfied sigh.

“Most people have globes of the Earth,” I observed.

“That’s like having a picture of yourself doing the job you’ve done your entire life. I’d rather think about the future.”

“Luna in your future?”

“I’m an investor in an international conglomerate that means to start colonization within the next ten years.”

“Then why not have a map of Mars on the wall?”

“I have that in my son’s room in Southampton.”

The demon master’s dark eyes were on me. His words were some kind of test, though I couldn’t discern the subject.

“The last time you were here you were bald with a beard and an extra forty pounds,” he said.

“There were a few people after me at that time — including you.”

“You cost me a very good agent.”

“If he was that good you two would have never parted company.”

Antrobus laughed. It was a loud sound — cannon-like. But it was also, in its own way, forgiving.

When the crashing mirth ended he said, “Tell me your name.”

“Joe Oliver.”

“What can I do for you, Joe Oliver?”

“Talk to me about illegal oil trafficking in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

“I don’t understand.” The words felt intimate, like a good friend trying to give advice.

“What I’m asking?” I wondered aloud.

“No. It’s just that you don’t seem to be a strike-it-rich kind of fellow.”

“I’m not. I just represent people like that — sometimes.”

Again that punishing and yet merciful laugh.

“Diesel fuel is modern-day hooch and the criminals that sell it are today’s bootleggers,” he said, still smiling. “They buy the heating oil for homes at a government discount and then sell it for vehicular fuel. The markup makes billions of illegal dollars every year, in every part of the globe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that much.”

“Did you know that some of the smaller international oil cartels are up to their elbows in this trade?”

“I suspected it. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“So, Joe Oliver, what you need from me is the only thing in the world more valuable than illegal petroleum. Information.”

“Yes.”

Antrobus’s eyes might have been long-range heat-seeking missiles and I was the test target, far out at sea. Seeing this revelation in my eyes — he smiled.

“You really planning to populate the moon?” I asked.

He nodded, Sydney Greenstreet on steroids.

“What if,” I speculated, “I could maybe get the plans, at least some of them, based on Alfred Xavier Quiller’s space-exploration cannons?”

The puppet master’s brows went up so far that his whole fat face smoothed out, making him look like a baby would to a gnat.

“How would you do that?” he asked.

“I got a way to get to him.”

“If you were to provide me with that way, then I would be happy to help you with the problems your client is having.”

“Come on, Augustine. Be for real, man. What I’m asking you for might be worth a gold coin, but it ain’t all the way to the goose that laid it.”

“You can’t blame me for trying.”

“So, will you help me?”

“Yes. But you will owe me the information.”

“Okay.”

“I will also need some kind of down payment.”

Another test.

What to get for the man who has, literally, everything?

Gift giving is one of the most challenging conundrums of the modern age. Most people don’t know how to ask for what they want; most don’t even know what it is. They spend entire lifetimes looking for, finding, and then leaving behind what they’ve been told they wanted by everything from sacred texts to television. Some want children but realize, too late, that kids often don’t want them. Men and women search for love, find it, and then wake up one morning to the harsh reality that the cap was left off and the precious passion has dried up. Monks meditate on consecrated mantras, hoping for enlightenment, then realize that awareness doesn’t change a thing.

On the other hand, in ancient, and modern, tribal cultures, everything given is already known by everyone you know. Manhood, womanhood, your first trinket, your last rite. Back then, and over there, they expected happiness and therefore achieved that state.

The trick to gift giving in the modern world is either real need or surprise. If you can’t pay the rent and someone covers it with no strings, you are going to smile and feel edified. Warm socks during a subzero season, food in an empty stomach... a snifter of cognac when your heart is broken; these are real and perceived needs for us when we are most vulnerable.

But Augustine Antrobus was not the vulnerable kind. He was apex. His hungers would always be satisfied, and even if he were captured and caged, his nature would always be dominant, even supreme.

So what AA needed was wonderment, something to make him smile.

Me having access to the secrets behind Quiller’s Cannon was such a thing, but I had yet to deliver on that front.

“Do you play Go?” I asked.

And there it was. Something I couldn’t have, or at least shouldn’t have, known.

“Yes,” he ventured. “Why?”

“I just wondered if you wanted to sharpen your skills on a novice.”

When he pulled out the Go board from a bottom drawer, I knew I’d hit the right note. Made from oak, it was old and battered, with pitted stone disks that had rattled around in their lambskin sack for at least half a century.

He could see in my eyes the appreciation for a history in an object and for one of his few weaknesses.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll discuss your problem between moves. You have until I defeat you to get what you need.”

We played.

I lost.

“Another game?” He was having a good time.

By 11:07 p.m. I had all I needed to at least try to help Coleman.

“Another?” I asked the grizzly bear dressed up like a man.

“I think you’ve learned enough for one day.”

“You talkin’ ’bout Go or oil?”

He stood, extended a hand, and said, “I hope we remain friends, Mr. Oliver.”

The sirens of the front office were gone but Lyle was still there. He was sitting in the tall Black woman’s chair with his feet up on the blotter, staring into the void of dead men he’d left behind — at least that’s what I imagined he saw in solitude.

His eyes flicked upward the instant after I entered the room.

“Still here?” I asked.

Sitting up and then standing he said, “You should show more respect.”

“Never yielded much profit in my experience.”