Every Man a King

33

Strong sunlight illuminated the shaded window. I didn’t remember opening my eyes.

“You awake?” she asked.

I turned and kissed her. She caressed my jawline with three gentle fingers.

“I hope I’m not pregnant.”

I didn’t have a reply.

“Don’t you?” she asked.

I sat up and looked down on her. She grinned.

“You’re a fool, King Oliver.”

“That why you like me?”

She climbed out of the bed. I watched her long brown body sashay toward the bathroom and sighed, the venal forest surrounding Mel’s country home a million miles away.

She came out of the bathroom and I went in. Then we reconvened on the bed, sitting in half lotus and facing each other.

“Is this what you came down here for?” Mathilda Prim asked.

“Hoping for this, but I had other intentions too.”

“Like what?”

“The answers to a few questions.”

“Let’s get dressed and go down for breakfast.”

“They serve this early?”

“For me they do.”

The breakfast room had twelve round tables, each with four chairs. We were the only customers and so sat in the far corner next to a window overlooking a stand of dogwood trees.

The waitstaff, made up of two women servers and a cook, all called Mathilda Miss Prim with great reverence.

“You own this hotel?”

“Alfie did. Now, I guess, it falls to me.”

“So you’re the one who told Big Wilma to come runnin’ after me?”

“She called the mayor because you mentioned him. Then she called me.”

The fare was simple enough. Soft scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, and black coffee.

“So, King, what else did you want?”

“I called your assistant looking for you.”

“And what did Minta have to say?”

“That you had disappeared and to tell her if I found you.”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“No. What’s her story?”

“She’d been seduced by Alfie’s earlier theories.”

“The three-fifths rule?”

“Uh-huh. That’s why she came to work for him. She’s much more on the side of the Men of Action than she is with me.”

“Then why would you have her as an assistant?”

“Her self-appointed job was to guard me and to keep an open eye. It was easier to let her and hers think I was oblivious than to try and make it on my own.”

“That’s playin’ a little close to the bone, ain’t it?”

Mathilda flipped her right hand, dismissing my question.

“Alfie set up a plan for me to get away from them when I got the message you sent.”

“How long ago did you come up with that?”

“When we were in Togo—”

“You were with him when he was running from the government?”

“We got together at least once a month.”

“You were there when the guy tried to poison him?”

“Yes.” Her expression turned hard, even unrelenting. “That white man was on the floor with the blood and buttermilk all over.”

“Damn.”

Mathilda had told me about her rough upbringing; this story cemented the tales.

“Okay,” I said. “What about the Big Nickel?”

She sighed and reached across the table to hold my hand.

“I know we have to talk about these things, that you have a job to do. But it was really wonderful to have a smart boyfriend and not have to rip out my heart over it.”

It was, I thought, a wonderful thing when, unbidden, a smile comes to your lips.

“I needed to be with you last night,” she said as an apology. “It’s been hard bein’ around those crazy hateful people hopin’ they could set Alfie free.”

“We can talk later if you want. I mean, my job was to find out why they had Alfred in stir. I haven’t got the full story on that yet, but that’s another thing. I just wanna know what’s goin’ on.”

“Like what?”

“All kinds of things. That big building, for instance.”

“The Big Nickel is a spider farm,” she said.

“That thing about their webs replacing steel?”

“More than that. The strength of the webbing plus their light weight makes a material that could be the new plastic. Space-age stuff. When Alfie told me he was going to build a factory I said I wanted it in my town.”

“I was under the impression that this town doesn’t like you very much.”

“Maybe not. But this is where I came from and so we built it here. Anything else?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your husband.”

Mathilda’s head reared back like a creature that felt threatened. Her eyes seemed to darken. There was definitely violence in that stare. And then, suddenly, it was gone. She smiled slightly and shook her head.

“We were living the kind of life that made about as much sense as an ostrich chick in a sparrow’s nest,” she said. “I mean, we were rich and knew all kinds of right-wing revolutionaries, bankers, and politicos. They didn’t like me, but Alfie could do anything and they’d just have to grin and bear it.”

“But all that changed,” I supposed.

“One time he went to a rally that the Men of Action and maybe half a dozen other groups held. I went. I mean, there was a smattering of Black and brown people there too. All of ’em thinkin’ that the problem was what they called the Left and the Deep State. I listened for a while, and then, when Alfie was headed for the stage, I left. Went out to California and got a job at a diner in Venice usin’ my cousin Bernice MacDaniels’s ID and social security number. I didn’t care about bein’ rich and famous. I didn’t need it if I had to listen to people bein’ fools.”

“What happened?”

“Two months went by. I met this car thief named Lido. We were seein’ each other kinda and I was thinkin’ about goin’ back to school for a PhD in literature. Then one night, after Lido had gone, there was a knock on my door. Lido had given me a pistol and usually I would’a grabbed it, but for some reason I wasn’t worried and opened up. Alfie was standin’ there in a jean jacket and jeans. He’d given a private detective Bernice’s name and finally found me.

“We talked for six hours. I told him that I will not suffer fools, that his people didn’t understand a damn word of what they were sayin’, that not one’a the people I heard onstage could’a passed his suffrage test. He knew it was true. He knew. When I told him that I wouldn’t come back he said that if I would he’d change. Then he said that he’d change anyway and I wrote a good-bye note to Lido and went back with him.”

“How long was that before he fled the country?”

“Six months, maybe seven. By then his friends had started to turn on him. They wanted to use his blackmail file and he said no, that some people didn’t need their lives destroyed by a knife in the back.”

“I thought they said that he ran because the government was on him about secrets he shared with the Russians?”

“Oh yeah, right. Uh. Can you imagine my Alfie givin’ secrets to the Russians? But he didn’t have any friends left. Bein’ with me didn’t cut the cord — it hacked it off.”

“Speaking of birth, what about your son, Claxton Akim?”

“What about him?”

“Where is he?”

For the first time I felt suspicion coming from her. She had to swallow her maternal instincts before saying, “There’s a woman I met in school who lives in Wyoming. Claxton is with her until he can be safe with me.”

“Will that be soon?” I asked.

“With Alfie gone,” she admitted sadly.

“And now you control everything that was his?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I have something to ask you for.”

“What?”

“Could I get the specs on the space cannon?”

“For what?”

I explained, in brief, about Antrobus, adding, “It’s purely business and I’m quite sure that he won’t give the secrets away.”

“I trust you, King. But you’ll have to do something for me.”

“Of course.”

“Alfie left me three things of value: a fortune in a Swiss bank account, our son, and a fat suitcase.”

“What’s in the suitcase?”

“A special-built computer attached to a ten-thousand-gigabyte memory drive.”

“The blackmail file?”

“The password is Ten Thousand Things.”

“Oh... kay.”

“I want you to take the suitcase.”

“And do what with it?”

“Destroy it, sell it, read about the people in it, condemning those you think deserve damnation.”

“I thought I heard that Alfred had a guy that was going to release all the information to the world if something happened to him.”

“There was a man,” Mathilda said, nodding. “But he was from the way Alfie was before he met me. We were both pretty sure that he’d attack the Left and left-leaning people on the Right. At the end there we didn’t even know what to do with the files.”

“So does this guy expect you to turn over this database?”

“Years ago Alfie told him that there was an automatic code that would send him the files seventy-two hours after he was unable to cancel the delivery system.”

“He was in jail more’n three days,” I speculated.

“Yeah. But I’m pretty sure he had one of the guards making the call for him.”

“But,” I said, “I mean, wouldn’t whoever had him in there have figured out what the guard was doing and either pay him off or monitor him or something?”

That was the one and only time that Mathilda had what I’d call a haughty look on her face.

“Alfie was a genius,” she said. “He had the answer terminal send out a thousand random phone calls with the same abort message. Nobody would be able to find the guy that should get the message.”

“So what happens now?”

“Doesn’t matter. Alfie’s man no longer has a connection to the real files. I’m the only one that has it.”

It was a head scratcher, to say the least. But it really brought up only one important question.

“Who was it that had your husband captured and imprisoned here?”

Looking at me, Mathilda smiled.

“A while before things got crazy, Minta told me that she’d gotten a message from Alfie that he wanted me to meet someone. She drove me to a building on Seventh Avenue and brought me to an office. There Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite was waiting.”

“Whoa.”

“You know her?”

“Yes, I do. What did she want?”

“She offered me one percent of MDLT stock if I would grant her access to Alfie’s files.”

“Eight billion dollars,” I equated.

“I told her that my husband did not share that information with me. I said he had a man that was in charge of distributing that data.”

“Did she believe you?”

“After that was when Alfie was hunted down and brought here. But I’ve had that suitcase over a year now. And when Alfie had you reach out to me, he was saying that you were the man that could handle it.”

“How many files are on it?” I asked my temporary lover.

“I don’t know exactly. Thousands. Tens of thousands.”

“Where’d they all come from?”

“Official files from all around the world. You know Alfie never slept and his mind was always sharp, no matter how hard he was thinking. He broke computer codes in every nation, for dozens of police departments, government agencies, and databases of the rich. Then he’d hire individual agents to research the things he found.”

“Knowledge is power,” I said, more to myself than to her.

“When he told me about it I asked him how he would feel if somebody exposed him like that.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t ask that question himself.”

“We had a special connection. It was like if we looked into each other we saw ourselves. I mean, just because I was with you last night don’t mean I didn’t love him. I did. I do.”

It was what one might call an impossible moment. With the potential information on the giga-drive I could have built myself an empire — for good or evil. I could have become a modern-day Talleyrand. A puppet master.

“What do you say, Joe?”

“You wanna go upstairs and lie down for a while?”

We spent hours together in my tiny room. There was a good deal of temporary romance and erotic derring-do. But much of the time we spent talking and sharing little pieces of our lives that wouldn’t matter to anyone, not even our solitary selves, unless they were there — with us.

By the time I fell asleep I couldn’t have imagined anything, anywhere else in the world.

When I awoke again, at around 3:00 a.m., Mathilda was gone.

On the floor next to the bed was a fat brown suitcase. It didn’t have a lock. What good would that have done? I set up the contrivance on the cheap desk and sat, naked, on the red plastic chair.

When I turned on the computer, the first screen asked for the password. I entered Ten Thousand Things. The second screen asked for search parameters.

In the morning I packed up my car and drove to the Blue Grass Airport. There I made a deal with the manager of the car rental service to buy the Volkswagen.

It was a sixteen-hour drive. I stopped twice for gas and food, and once to make a call to Melquarth.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mel.”

“Where are you?”

“Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

“What can I do you for?”

“You in town?”

“Just about to leave for a watchmakers’ convention in Chi.”

“Mind if I stay at the place in Staten Island for a minute?”

“You know the codes. I kenneled the dogs so all you got to do is relax.”