Every Man a King

3

In order to get to Rikers Island, a part of the Bronx, you have to go through the borough of Queens. So, at 10:00 the next morning I was driving across the Francis R. Buono Memorial Bridge. Mingus played on the boom box. His smoother jazz compositions provided calm when my heart refused to slow down. And that morning it felt as if the blood pump wanted to jump out of its cavity.

I had a good deal to be worried about. Alfred Xavier Quiller, an icon of the alt-right, was being held without legal accord, by some shadowy authority, in New York City’s very own prison — the last place in the world I’d volunteer to visit. Roger had assured me that he’d greased the way for me to get to Quiller, but what if he was wrong? What if I was swallowed by shadow when I made my visitor’s request?

At the Rikers Island Visitor Center, uniformed minders took my name, looked it up on an old desktop, had a little discussion among themselves, and then sent me to a special waiting room not much bigger than Roger Ferris’s work cube. The walls were dirty gray. The blue linoleum floor was scuffed and gritty underfoot. There were three chairs and the mild scent of tobacco smoke on the air. The fluorescent lighting put me on edge, but at least it was quiet in there.

There’d been no body search, no camera monitoring my behavior. No one looked in on me. The closed door to the waiting room wasn’t even locked. These nonevents were strange for an island dedicated to the submission of its residents, their visitors, and the very concept of freedom. I could have had a weapon. I could be smuggling contraband. They didn’t know.

When the door finally opened, my watch, given me by a man named after the devil, said it was 11:07.

Two guards came in, one white and the other Black. Their uniforms were reminiscent of the NYPD. This bothered me because I was once a cop, still liked things about that job, but I hated everything about Rikers.

“Joe Oliver?” the Black guard asked.

“Yeah?”

Neither man appreciated my lack of respect.

“Come with us.”

I considered a moment and then stood.

“Where to?”

“Just follow us,” the white guard sniped as he turned to go back out the door.

They led me to a sickly green metal door, worked the locks with three keys, and then ushered me down a steep stairwell that descended the height of at least three floors to an underground tunnel. The passway was wide and well lit. We passed a door now and then, but there were no other denizens.

“How come you guys didn’t make me go through the metal detector?”

“You want us to give you a cavity search down here?” the Black guard asked.

It was the wrong thing to say. From that point on I started coming up with plans of how to disarm, disable, and kill my official chaperones. Rikers Island had made me a murderer even if I had not yet fulfilled that potential.

Before my fantasies could work their way into the real, we came to an iron door that was no more than six feet high and only about a yard in width. The door’s age was evocative of a medieval knight that might at any moment come to life, reinvigorated by some ancient incantation of evil.

The white guard worked a key in the lock, then pushed the door inward. I expected a horrendous whine of metal sparking against stone, but the portal’s moving parts were well oiled.

My left hand was shaking slightly and my feet felt as if they were growing toe roots. I took a deep breath.

A strong and warm yellow light flowed out from the inner chamber. The room was large and well appointed; it seemed more like a hunting lodge than a prison cell.

“Go on in,” one of the guards said.

I wanted to step forward but my feet wouldn’t hear of it.

The other guard pushed hard, making me stumble across the threshold. The sweating started when the iron door slammed shut. I closed my eyes.

This was the nightmare that had plagued me for many years: being thrown in a cell on Rikers Island with the door banging behind.

A few seconds passed before I could force myself to look. The extra-large cell was luxurious compared to anything I’d ever seen in that prison. A couple of oil paintings in frames on the wall, a real bed, and throw carpets here and there. The centerpiece was a grand oak desk behind which sat a high-backed chair, its back turned toward the entrance.

There was someone sitting in the chair. I could see his head and shoulders.

“Mr. Quiller.”

From the chair rose a very tall, gaunt, and quite palpably clean-shaven man with a long, coarse brown mane. He wore walnut-colored wool trousers, a dark brown waistcoat sewn with golden threads, and a long-sleeved yellow shirt that veered close to the buttery hue of a Dutch tulip.

The man turned the chair and sat again, placing his hands flat on the desktop. Tattooed on the back of his left hand were the words neque receptus, non deditio — never give up, never surrender.

“Are you?” he asked as if it were a complete question.

“Am I what?” A singing and dancing seven-year-old Shirley Temple couldn’t have lightened my mood.

The inmate was just as frightened.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“Roger Ferris sent me.”

“What?” Fear turned to fury on the gaunt man’s face. “He dares to send a Black man in here after I ask him for help? Doesn’t he know what I could do to him?”

“You mind if I sit down?”

There was a three-legged stool set before the master’s desk.

“You’re not staying,” he said.

I lowered onto the stool.

“Get your ass up and go tell your master to try again,” he commanded.

“Fuck you.”

A note of surprise shone on Quiller’s face.

“I don’t know who you are—” he began.

“Joe Oliver,” I said, cutting him off. “Here to hear your story.”

I could tell by the surprise in his eyes that he didn’t know how to respond. For a long moment he considered.

And then, finally, he speechified, “I’m a patriot; a white man in a white land where, one might say, too many shades clutter the landscape.”

Amazingly, I was beginning to enjoy myself in the bowels of Rikers prison.

“That’s a bastardization of Ezra Pound,” I said on a smile. “He was likely a genius but more crazy than smart.”

My captive host now took a moment to review his expectations of me.

While he considered, I noticed a huge gutter cockroach making its way along the wall to my left. The creature’s carapace was broken, letting one wing flare out behind. It moved slowly, dragging its big body forward on three bent legs rather than walking upright on all six. I had more sympathy for that bug than for most inmates I’d come across in prison.

“Where were you educated?” Quiller asked, turning my attention from the dying thing.

“Two years at City College,” I said, “and the rest right here in Rikers.”

There was heat underneath the gray of his eyes, hot coals still alive under the ashes.

“I haven’t had a conversation of substance with a Black man in a dozen years,” he said.

I wondered how much substance he had shared with Black women.

“Think of me as a potential lifeline thrown from the shadows above,” I suggested.

“I’ve reason to be suspicious of men in shadow.”

One of the reasons Quiller was despised in so many communities was that he had said, publicly and on many occasions, that niggers, redskins, chinks, slits, and beaners should only be counted as three-fifths of a person, and their votes should be tallied thusly.

“Look, man. Like I said, I’m here on behalf of Roger Ferris. He has asked me to find out if you’re being set up and, if you are, to prove it. You asked him for help. Here I am.”

“Show me.”

It was in my shirt pocket. I’d warned Ferris that they’d take it away from me when I passed through the metal detector at the visitor center.

“I doubt that,” Roger had replied.

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. But I know the game.”

The token was to prove that I did come from Ferris. It weighed about an ounce and was an inch and a half in diameter. I fished the medallion out of its pocket and tossed it on the desktop.

Quiller picked up the old coin and smiled.

“The one time we ever met, Roger showed me this. Did he tell you what it was?” His question had the tone of a man who was just about to lay down a royal flush in a high-stakes game of poker.

“No, but I know how to look things up.”

“And you still brought it here to me?”

“I know,” I said. “It’s old, worth five million dollars on the open market. But I wouldn’t steal it anyway. A handshake from Roger Ferris is worth more than that, even on an off day.”

Quiller nodded, then flipped the Brasher Doubloon back to me. I caught the proof with my left hand and bundled it away.

That was the turning point. Quiller stared at me, equal parts hope and despair. He brought a hand to his mouth and started crying, silently.

A white man weeping over a gold coin. If it wasn’t the tragic history of the modern world it would have been funny.

It took maybe three minutes for the silent sobbing to come to an end. In that time the dying roach pressed forward about an inch and a half.

Quiller composed himself, rubbed his nose with an open hand, and said, “They want me on my knees because of the truth.”

“Who does?”

He looked down at the desk.

I waited again. After the roach crawled another inch or so I said, “Mr. Quiller.”

Still looking at the desk, he said, “I killed a man who was an agent of the Deep State. It was midnight and he was standing in the kitchen putting something in my buttermilk. Later analysis revealed that the carton was laced with enough poison to kill a hundred men.”

“What kind?”

“Excuse me?”

“What kind of poison?”

“Ricin.”

“Who examined the milk?”

“You’re not going to sit here and interrogate me,” Quiller said.

“I am if you want my help.”

We experienced another spate of silence. Quiller’s hot gray eyes moved around furiously, trying to get the upper hand in his mind.

Finally he said, “I have an advanced chemical lab in a town called Peanut in southern Kentucky.”

When I didn’t say more Quiller started up again.

“I drink buttermilk every day. I have it here in the cell.”

“Did you know the man?”

“No, but the wallet he carried said that his name was Holiday, Curt with a C Holiday. The man who grabbed me out of Belarus told me that his name was Thad Longerman, another agent of the fucking Deep State.”

“He told you his name?” I was incredulous.

“He told me a name.”

“Where did this conversation take place?”

“It was in some kind of house on the outskirts of Paris. They were waiting to get all the ruse in play before depositing me in the pensione.”

“And how did that work?”

“They drugged me. Just when the drug was wearing off the French police arrested me and turned me over to agents of the United States.”

“No extradition process?”

Quiller sneered.

“So you killed Curt Holiday in Belarus?” I asked.

“No. Togo.”

“And then you fled to Belarus?”

“First I went to Cape Verde. I went to Europe later.”

“How’d you kill Holiday?”

“Why?”

“Details are important,” I said. “You never know when some small fact might rear its head.”

Quiller nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I shot him with a Walther PDP.”

I asked some more questions. He answered without much feeling.

He gave general descriptions of the man he murdered and the one who kidnapped him, nothing I’d recognize or remember.

After a while he ran out of details.

I asked, “Is there anything you need from me?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something I can bring to Ferris or do to get you out of here?”

Quiller’s gaunt face seemed almost to fold in on itself. I’d seen that helplessness many times before. As a cop I’d chased down and arrested many a man and woman who saw in me the worst fate they could imagine. They knew it was the end for them.

“Is there anyone you want me to talk to?” I asked. “Any message you want me to deliver?”

There was, but he still wasn’t sure if I could be trusted. The muscles in his face bunched up and his eyes became slits.

Finally his visage relaxed and he said, “My wife has an assistant. Her name is Minta Kraft. Her number is listed under the name Gloriana Q, just Q, the letter. She’s out on eastern Long Island. I don’t want you bothering my wife, but Minta will pass along any information and provide answers to questions you might have.”

“Minta Kraft, aka Gloriana Q,” I said.

“Yes. If she asks you for some kind of proof, tell her I said that you are the eclipse.”

“The eclipse,” I repeated. “Is there anything you want Ms. Kraft to tell your wife?”

Quiller’s face hardened, to hold back another round of tears, I believed.

“She,” he said and then stopped. “She has to stay strong, stay strong.”

I let those words fade before saying, “I’ll tell her. I will.”

He nodded and I stood up from the stool.

There was a question in the white man among white men’s eyes. I stopped moving and waited to see if his gaze would don words.

“Is that all?” he asked at last.

“For now.”

“Isn’t there anything else?”

“You want the coin?”

Again I had become a conundrum in the prisoner’s gaze.

“I have a memory device that contains many thousands of gigabytes detailing damning information about political leaders, military analysts, public figures... and the rich. The reason the government hates me so is because I can bring the world down around their heads.”

“So what?”

“The name Ferris appears on that device.”

“I don’t know a thing about that.”

Quiller didn’t know whether to believe the claim, but that didn’t matter. For me it was time to go.