Every Man a King

26

A little later in the morning Oliya and I headed back to New York. The pace felt leisurely compared to the night before. The beauty of the day was still contrasting with the darkness of the tasks I would have to perform.

“Where does your friend come from?”

“From bad parents with a strong church background.”

“He seems very capable.”

“Strong words from a woman who can kill two assassins without breathing hard.”

“I... am capable too.”

Crossing the border of New York State, I called in to my electronic answering service.

“This is Winston Halbreadth,” an officious voice said on the third message, “speaking on behalf of Roger Ferris. There’s been a breach at Silbrig Haus.”

“Daddy,” Aja said on the next call, “Grandma B’s been shot.”

I disconnected the service.

“What’s wrong?” Oliya asked.

She was looking at me, wondering, offering.

When I didn’t answer, she turned away.

“My grandmother’s been shot.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know.”

The next call I made was answered on the seventh ring.

“Forthright.”

“It’s me, man.”

“She’s okay,” Forthright Jorgensen said.

“She’s shot.”

“One ball of a shotgun in the left buttocks. Didn’t even hit bone.”

“What happened?”

“Hit squad. I tried to call you but the phone was offline.”

“How many?”

“Six. Four dead and two in police custody. I lost one. Two others were wounded.”

“My grandmother in the hospital?”

“Ferris brought in a team of specialists.”

“They good?”

“What do you think?”

Finishing the call, I felt, once again, at sea.

“How is she?” Oliya asked.

“They say okay.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess. I mean, how does a ninety-three-year-old woman get shot in the safest place in New York?”

“Is this the job I was hired for?”

“It is now.”

“Okay then. Let’s get on with it.”

We arrived at the mansion in the early afternoon. There were two uniformed guards at the glittering steel gate this time. They each carried a sidearm and compact assault rifle. They checked us out and passed us in.

Two more guards stood by the front door. One of them led us through the entryway into a large sitting room where nurses and doctors tended to the two wounded security guards and frightened domestics.

“Daddy!”

Aja ran up and hugged me tightly. She put her head against my shoulder and pressed as hard as she could.

“Where’s Grandma?”

“In her bedroom.”

After maybe a minute I pulled away, turning to Oliya.

“This is my daughter. I want you to stick to her.”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Honey.”

“Uh-huh?”

“This here’s Oliya Ruez. You stay with her. She’ll protect you.”

Aja looked at the compact bodyguard, a dozen questions in her eyes. But all she said was “Okay.”

The curtains were drawn in my grandmother’s bedroom. Extra-powerful lighting stalks had been brought in. A male nurse and Dr. Lucille Leon were in attendance. In the corner of the room sat Roger on a wicker chair that my grandmother had owned since before my father was born.

Roger was staring at Brenda, bereft but brave — for her.

She looked even smaller than usual in the big bed, receiving blood from an IV. There was some kind of electronic medical device, the size of a small dresser. This machine displayed her bodily functions on a broad screen. She looked distressed but not as bad as Roger.

“Grandma?”

She turned and smiled.

“Baby.”

Dr. Leon turned in my direction. She’d been my grandmother’s primary physician for two years. Her skin was mahogany brown under straightened, and shocking, white-gray hair. The mature woman was about to say something when my grandmother interceded.

“Leave me and my grandson for a minute, Lucy.”

“I’m not finished with the examination.”

“It’ll only be a few minutes.”

Roger got up and approached us. The nurse was already leaving.

“I’ll be back in five minutes,” Lucille Leon told us.

“Ten,” Brenda corrected.

Roger moved close to me and said, “I’m sorry, son. I never thought they’d pull an all-out assault.”

“She’s alive,” I said. “That’s the best either of us could ask for.”

I pulled the rattan chair up next to the bed. She smiled and gave me her dry hand.

“Ain’t we sumpin’,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Dropped from a helicopter! Six of ’em. A goddamned helicopter! Could you imagine that? Forthright and his people were movin’ as soon as the whirlybird come over the river. Me and Roger was havin’ afternoon tea and two of ’em bust through the windah. One fired this shotgun, then they was both cut down. Roger wasn’t hit at all and I was shot in the butt.”

She started laughing. It wasn’t hysteria, just the dark humor at the trials of being a Black woman in an inhospitable world.

“You look scared like you’d get when you was a boy, King.”

“What you expect? They told me you were shot.”

“In the butt.”

“Butts bleed.”

“That they do.”

For maybe two minutes we sat quietly holding hands.

“Is this the mess Roger got you into?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m on a case got nothing to do with his kids.”

“What kinda case? Is it safe?”

I told her about Alfred Xavier Quiller and the work Roger wanted me to do.

“Is that safe?” I asked after finishing.

“I know, baby. It’s your job. And people die in pillow factories. Ain’t nuthin’ assured.”

“But you’re alive and that’s all that matters right now,” I told the woman I had known longer than anyone else.

“I’m gonna buy me a shotgun as soon as I can get outta this bed. Livin’ with this rich white man have done made me soft.”

I smiled and kissed her.

Aja and Oliya were standing just outside the door to the bedroom.

“How is she?” Aja asked.

“She’ll be better after talking to you.”

“It was so scary. They jumped out of a helicopter.”

“I’m sorry, baby. I thought you’d be safe here.”

“It’s okay,” she said, squashing down the fear. “I mean how am I ever going to work with you if I don’t see what it’s like?”

Over my daughter’s shoulder I could see a smile flitting across Oliya’s lips.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked Aja.

“In the kitchen.”

“Cooking?”

“You know how she is.”

“I better go talk to her.”

“Glad’s here too, Daddy.”

“He is? Where?”

“I dunno. Somewhere,” she said with a shrug.

Monica was down in the kitchen making some kind of vegetable medley. Green and red peppers, broccoli, and onions mixed with garlic and mascarpone, hot peppers, and soy.

“Hey, Monica,” I said from behind her.

“They shot at your grandmother,” she said, not turning.

She splashed a little water into the sauté and clapped a domed lid on the pot.

Then she turned.

“Is this the kind of situation you put us in?”

“You’re welcome to leave.”

There had always been a choreography to the way we spoke to each other.

“You’re a bastard,” she twirled at me.

“Then why do you keep asking me for shit?” was my boogaloo reply.

“Coleman says that you came to his place and took his gun,” she dipped and twisted.

“I did,” I said, dropping her to the floor.

“How’s he supposed to protect himself in that terrible place?”

“Terrible, yes. But maybe the safest building in New York City. Nobody gets past L and M.”

“I want him here with me.”

“You can move into his room in Brownsville if you want. I’m not adding one more target on this house.”

Monica turned back to her comfort cooking. After a minute or so I left.

“Hey, boyo,” Gladstone Palmer greeted. He’d been waiting outside the kitchen door.

“NYPD send ya?”

“Your grandmother’s boyfriend wants to keep this all quiet. Don’t ask me why. Seems like publicity would be a good shield.”

“They’re his kids,” I explained.

“You sure it’s them did this?”

“Zyron wouldn’t get much from attacking a man like Ferris. And they think they have better ways to get at him.”

“Maybe you’re right. But you know there’s no profit in bein’ too smart.”

“You got bodies on this?”

“Twenty-five officers, twenty-four hours a day.”

“That’s a whole lotta taxes.”

Glad laughed.

“You’re the best cop I’ve ever known,” he said.

“And I’m not even on the force.”

“I’ll be around. Call me if you need anything in the city.”

My last stop was Roger Ferris’s pared-down business room.

He ushered me in and closed the door. I sat but he had too much nervous energy to stay that still.

“You need to calm down, Rog. All that worry is hard on the heart.”

“How are you going to worry about me when I got your grandmother shot?”

“You didn’t shoot her. And she knew what was happening. She could have gone somewhere else.”

“I’m going to send her away to someplace safe.”

“You must know by now that nobody sends Brenda Naples anywhere. Best thing you could do is buy her a twelve-gauge shotgun with a six-round clip.”

The old man took in a deep breath and then went to the folding chair behind the pressboard desk.

“Your grandmother is amazing to me,” he said. “I realized after she got shot that I’ve never seen her shed a tear.”

“You ever been hungry, Roger?”

“Sure. Everybody knows hunger.”

“I don’t mean it’s time to eat hunger. What I’m talkin’ about is when you need to eat but there ain’t nuthin’ in the cabinet; when all you got is three stale crackers and four hungry kids looking up at you.”

Roger empathized with my words. He shook his head slowly and then said, “No. I have not.”

“Where Brenda come from, a smoked turkey leg would be cause for celebration. Could you imagine what would happen to the poor fool tried to take that leg from her?”

Roger chuckled.

“Okay,” I said. “We had the soft talk, now it’s come to Buddha time.”

Roger sat back and I leaned forward, putting an elbow on either knee.

“Who is George Laurel?” I asked.

Betraying barely a falter he asked, “Where’d you hear that name?”

“I heard it looking around for information on Quiller.”

“From who?”

“Who is he?” I insisted.

Roger stood up from the chair and sat on the desk. He turned his head away, looking at the blank wall as if it were a vast field of dying crops.

“A long time ago, almost fifty years, he was a student at Yale.”

There was power behind these memories. So much so that the recent events in both our lives receded into the background.

“What he die of?” I asked after a spate of seconds.

“Slaughtered.” Roger’s tone was almost matter-of-fact.

“By whom?” I get correct when talking about death.

“Some student at school. A scholarship kid, I think.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“I’m an alumnus of the school. I give them money. The death was a big deal.”

“Did you know Laurel?”

“No, never met him.”

Like silver in the ground, there was more to be mined. But I knew the old white man well enough to see that there’d be no more answers that day.

“Quiller was kidnapped,” I said. “I’m pretty sure of that. Maybe the rest of his story is true too.”

Roger’s eyes and heart were concentrated on that dry field.

“What do you want me to do next?” I asked.

Roger was quite limber for a nonagenarian. Grandma B said it was because he did a regimen of yoga exercises every morning. He crossed the left leg over the right and looked at me.

“I love your grandmother, Joe.”

“I know.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that about someone that wasn’t blood. And even with relatives it’s more a sense of duty than what I feel about Brenda.”

There was really nothing to say about this admission.

“Look,” he said. “You’ve done what I asked. Maybe you should take Aja and your grandmother someplace safe while I deal with what’s happened here.”

“Now you got the cops and all these extra hands, I can’t think of anywhere safer than this house.”

“Okay. You have enough on your plate with your ex-wife’s problems. Leave dealing with Quiller to me.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

Roger stood up before saying, “It is.”