Every Man a King

4

I banged on the iron door with my fist but there was no response. After waiting nearly two seconds, I got the milking stool and used it to pound heavily on the barrier.

“Take it easy!” the Black guard shouted through iron. “We have to get the key.”

“Let me out of here!” was my reply.

It felt like years had passed between the time I crossed the bridge of the damned to Rikers and when I was safe in my Bianchina again. My violent outburst against the cell door frightened the salt and pepper guards. They knew an out-of-control con when they saw one. They knew the malice harbored in my heart.

I made it to the Montague Street office a few minutes before 1:00.

I considered going to my third-floor apartment first, but there was a lot of work to do, a lot of fearful energy to work off.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Aja was sitting behind the reception desk working on something that took both the computer and a few stacks of paper to deal with.

“What’s all this mess?” I asked.

“I was just trying to get your quarterly statements together to send to the accountant. Some of these expense checks make no sense at all.”

“Like what?”

“Like this one here,” she said, taking a crumpled piece of paper from the open pencil drawer. “It says that you paid for a dinner with somebody named the letter B for six hundred dollars at a restaurant called Butts and Things.”

“So?” I said, perching on the edge of the desk. “That sounds pretty straightforward.”

“A six-hundred-dollar dinner at a strip club in Newark? And the bill, no details, just a total of six hundred three dollars and forty-eight cents.”

“Well, um,” I uttered. “You see, ah, the waitress was an informant. You know?”

“Your snitch,” Aja said, unable to hide her smirk.

“Yeah. I paid her six hundred for an address of a guy, another informant.”

“What about the three forty-eight?”

“I had a Coke.”

“Why not just say you paid six hundred dollars for information?”

“Because then I’d need to file a ten ninety-nine and Boomba would have to pay taxes, only she wouldn’t, pay taxes that is, and I’d end up spending a thousand dollars for an address that the subject had vacated three weeks before.”

“Boomba? What kind of name is that?”

“The kind of name that an informant who works in a strip club might have.”

“Okay,” she sighed.

“You don’t have to do this, sweetie. I usually just send Maxie a box with all the papers and he makes sense out of them.”

“How am I ever gonna be your partner in the business if I don’t know how the business works?”

“You’re not gonna be my partner,” I said pointedly. “You’re gonna be a doctor of liberal arts in California selling art to billionaire deep-sea colonists and married to a nonbinary polymer surgeon whose specialty will be increasing the human potential.”

“It was almost a year ago I said that.”

“Really? Seems like only six months.”

“You know everything isn’t a joke.”

“No,” I agreed. “Did you finish that paper?”

“Fanon is hard.” Aja-Denise’s eyes knitted into something like worry.

“To understand?”

“No. Just his talk about how Black people have given up their identities because of what white culture has done to us.”

I love my daughter.

“I gotta work on this job your great-grandmother’s boyfriend gave me. Unless somebody really important calls, can you just take a message?”

“Sure. What’s the job?”

I told her about Quiller, my visit with him in hell, and that we’d get paid enough for this one job to take it easy for the rest of the next quarter.

“Maybe we could take a vacation with a couple of your girlfriends.” I made the offer because I could see how serious she became while listening to me.

In my office I turned my swivel chair to stare through the window down on Montague. Pedestrians strolled along talking broadly with friends or silently passing alone. Some talked on their phones while others studied the small screens. If there is such a thing as passive ecstasy, I was feeling it right then. I had walked into the lion’s den and come out again — more or less whole. That was a joy unequaled in my dreams.

“Daddy?” the intercom blurted.

“Yeah?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Okay. Come on in. Make sure the front door is locked.”

She was wearing a floral dress of blues and reds with a white background and a choke chain comprised of deep red beads, each carved into the form of a rose. The hem of the dress flared out at the knee. All that beauty, and yet she strode in like a prosecuting attorney ready to seek the death penalty.

She took a chair before the desk and I gave a smile that had not the slightest hope.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Quiller is a killer,” she rhymed. “Maybe he hasn’t shot anybody, but his words are deadlier than a fully loaded assault rifle.”

“Are we forgetting the freedom of speech?”

“He’s still a killer.”

“So am I.” That was the first time I made such a confession to my daughter. She knew, of course, that I often went armed in the world. She even knew that I’d been in gun battles where people had died. But I’d never been so blasé as to admit to my culpability with a shrug.

A.D. looked as if she wanted to spit on the ground at my feet.

“He’s a murderer,” she said.

“You have, I suppose, heard of the burden of proof?” If she was going to prosecute, I was going to show that I could lawyer too.

“How can you sit there and defend him like that? He spews poison in his books and on TV appearances and, and, and he shits on our rights.”

Aja knew how much I hated it when she cursed. I was old-school. In my heart I held women to what used to be called a higher standard. But the world had changed and if I wanted a relationship with the new order I had to at least be aware of its expectations.

“Sure,” I said. “All that’s true. But Roger asked me to do a job and I work for a living.”

“But Quiller,” she sputtered and then was lost for a second or two. “He’s a racist.”

“So am I and just about every other dark-skinned person that lives in America. This whole country got the poison of racism in its marrow. You know that.”

“But he hates Black people, Daddy. He hates you and me and Mom and everybody like us. If you help him you’ll be helping what he believes in.”

It was a day of many deep breaths.

I gazed into the anger of my daughter’s eyes, feeling pride for what she was saying. I was happy that she was still pure in her mind, absolute in her expectation of what was right.

“Do you hate anybody, honey? I mean without a good reason — a damn good reason.”

Aja was smarter than I and quicker too. She saw where my argument would lead and so slowed her accusatorial roll.

“Mr. Ferris could hire somebody else to take this case,” she offered.

“Sure he could. But he asked me.”

“You’ve turned down potential clients before.”

“Roger’s more than a client.”

“Yeah, he’s rich.”

“No. It’s not that. He makes your great-grandmother very happy. Happier than she’s been since your great-grandfather died. And one time, when he didn’t have to, he helped a client of mine, a Black man, escape the injustice of the criminal courts.”

She knew what I was talking about.

“But Quiller has said such terrible things and, and he preaches that everyone who is not a white male is less than human.”

“Forty percent less,” I added.

“How can you laugh at this?”

“I’m not laughing, Aja. I’m trying to prove to you that I know what I’m doing. And I’m not working for Quiller. I’d never take his money. But I owe Roger. I’m going to look into the case, and if I find that the forty percenter is being railroaded I’ll turn that information over to the man who hired me. If I find out that Quiller is guilty... I’ll just walk away.”

Aja’s eyes gauged my worth. It looked as if she found me lacking. That’s a moment that all fathers have to face.

After her interminable silence Aja said, “I’m going back to my desk.”

She stood up and walked out. If someone had asked me at that moment to explain my emotional state I would have said, Everything good and everything bad that makes me human.