Every Man a King

9

I finished the whiskey, Blanton’s I think, while trying to get Ms. Prim to tell me what more there was to learn about her husband. She probably had little light to shed, but Mathilda Prim was a force of nature the way those calm waters were — extraordinary power at rest. I found myself wanting to sit above the Southampton sand and sea working out the muddled logic of her foot in the bear trap of that life.

After a while she said, “I have some things to see about, Mr. King Oliver. Is there anything else?”

“When I came here I was under the impression that Ms. Kraft would be the go-between, that I wasn’t to meet you.”

“Yes. That was the intention.”

“And yet, here we are.”

She smiled and said, “It was very nice to meet you.”

It was the friendliest dismissal I’d ever experienced.

The four mercenaries that made up at least part of the manor’s security force were standing around my car when I exited the rambling mansion. I actually considered running, but four hundred years of truly public education stopped me.

I walked toward the car door but found Rudolph standing in the way.

“We’re giving you a ride,” he stated.

“What about my car?”

“Give Adam your keys.”

As a private detective I rarely experienced intimacy with the subjects of my investigations. I was on the other end of a monocular, on the other side of the wall, or listening in on phone calls — illegally. Maybe I was on the World Wide Web sifting through bits and bytes for precious clues. The closest I got to most people like Rudolph was through a telephoto lens. But the cases I was becoming steeped in, the tragic study of Alfred Quiller and the stupidity of my ex-wife’s husband, brought me up uncomfortably close with the subjects.

For instance, Rudolph’s depthless eyes were a flat tan and he had an odor neither sweet nor savory. He smelled like a lunch-bucket worker in wood scented by varnishes and wax, sawdust and powerful soaps.

I handed the man named after the worst sinner my key chain.

“Where we goin’?” I asked Rudolph.

At that moment a large van, painted darkest blue, drove up. The sides had no windows.

“Get in,” Rudolph said.

The four custodians and I huddled into the van. The seating was laid out like the back of a stretch limo: a long banquette on the driver’s side with a love seat across, where I was installed. The only window in the vehicle was the windshield and it was mostly occluded by a jury-rigged barrier constructed of panel wood and painted a garish red.

There was no talk in the car. No communication whatsoever.

I suppose one might see my predicament as dire. After all, I was a Black man bunged into a windowless van surrounded by the acolytes of a rabid racist sect. But that wasn’t nearly as frightening to me as was Rikers or the MCC. I could fight back against those racists with at least a whisper of a chance of success on my side. There I had a shot, but you learned on the street that you would always lose against the system. The men and women who ran the institutions of incarceration had the right to kill me, whereas the men in that van had to have the will — and even then I stood a chance.

Instead of worrying, I thought about Mathilda. Her dark skin and unwillingness to adhere to any kind of expected norm intrigued me. Thinking about her brought me, of course, to her husband. Was she his prisoner, his dirty secret, or maybe a human doorway to a new man?

The ride lasted for just about an hour. The last fifteen minutes were tempered by the stop-and-go of street traffic. I imagined station wagons and stop signs. From the front of the van came hints of soft rock music and flashes of light.

At one point a man’s voice from the wheel said, “A cop’s behind us.”

One of the nameless sentinels pulled out an automatic. I gauged my odds of disarming him and shooting another. I might have tried it if Rudolph wasn’t studying my face.

A tense minute later the driver said, “They’re gone.”

A few minutes more, by my devil-spawn watch, and we came to a stop where the engine cut off. When the side door to the van slid open I saw that we were parked in a closed garage. I was feeling optimistic about my chances at survival because my escorts hadn’t felt it necessary to restrain or brutalize me.

It was an attached one-and-a-half-car garage used by a vehicle that had bled a copious amount of oil. There was a closed blue door that led into the house. Rudolph used a key to get this door open.

“Go on in,” he said.

The garage door led first to a very domestic laundry room the size of a janitor’s storage closet. There a small and boxy washing machine was set directly underneath a dryer of the same size. A largish utility sink took up the remaining free space. The doorway leading into the house proper opened on a dark hallway that was only three paces long. Beyond this was a lighted space that turned out to be a modest kitchen lit by a quartet of electric bulbs shining inside a rose-colored glass bowl that was screwed into the ceiling.

I stopped in the kitchen to reevaluate my predicament.

Sitting in the car, surrounded by young and hale zealots, I was like a swaddled infant, unable to make my own moves. But in the kitchen I might be able to arm myself, find another exit or hiding place.

“In here,” a man’s tenor voice called.

I followed the words through another doorless doorway, into another cramped hall, then through to a small living room decorated with an inadequate sofa, an old-time TV tuned to a newscast, Fox I think, on at a very low volume, and a recliner chair where sat a smallish, balding white man in a green suit. The shoeless man wore light blue socks festooned with dark blue diamonds.

“Mr. Oliver,” the tenor greeted behind a perfectly welcoming smile.

“Mr. Cormody.”

The beaming lips morphed into the expression of a bad taste.

“Did one of the men tell you my name?”

“It’s my job to know potential players in any investigation. You’re the so-called war secretary for the Men of Action.”

Relaxing, Rembert Cormody sat farther back, bringing the big knuckle of the pointer finger of his left hand to his lower lip.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

I shrugged and, without invitation, sat on the less-than-ideal couch.

“You’re investigating Alfred Xavier Quiller?” Cormody asked.

“If you say so.”

“No benefit being coy, son. I’m alone right now, but them that brought you here are watching; be sure of that. This is what you would call a serious meeting.”

“If you hired me to do a job I’d tell anyone asking about that job the same thing.”

“And who hired you?”

“My clients expect anonymity.”

“Good for them. But I’m not sure how it is for you.”

“What am I doing here, Mr. War Secretary?”

Cormody, a small and slight man, sat up in the recliner without engaging the mechanism, looking like a wrinkled green chick in its nest.

“We feel that Mr. Quiller and his family should be protected from unwanted scrutiny,” he said.

“Has somebody complained that I’ve made them feel unsafe?”

“We have eyes.”

“And mouths too. Maybe you should use those to ask Al or his wife if they feel they’re being harassed by me.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m the one asking the questions. You are the one standing on the gallows with the rope around your neck.”

Even if Rembert was an expert in some Eastern exercise system I believed I would have been able to incapacitate him before he could stop me. I suspected that he had a weapon secreted in the folds of the mechanical chair. I could snap his neck and come up with the probable firearm before the other white men ran in to be slaughtered.

I could taste their blood. It was this tang that calmed me.

“Look, man,” I said. “I’m not gonna give you anything. Okay?”

“Do you have anyone that might speak for you?”

I understood the question but asked, “Meaning?”

“Is there anyone that might sway us from disciplining you?”

In order to be a cop, or a PI who takes on criminal cases, you have to live just a little bit outside of the normal fear responses of the average Joe. My body had made the decision to kill Rembert. The only thing holding back my hands was a thought, a memory of the man I once was; the man who colored inside the lines for so very long.

“My uncle,” I said, “but he’s in prison for some kind of crime so convoluted that the prosecutors had to fudge the evidence at his trial. If he was a white man they would have found him not guilty.”

Cormody gave that non sequitur answer serious consideration. He even laced his fingers trying to work out the informational knot of my reply.

I smiled mercifully and said, “Melquarth Frost.”

Cormody’s head pulled back and then swiveled from one side to the other, making sure that there was no one else in the room. Melquarth, even just his name, had that effect on certain people.

Having made sure of temporary safety, Cormody looked back at me. This time his eyes doing God’s honest research.

After maybe two and a half minutes of this fruitless investigation, Cormody said, “Excuse me a moment.”

He hopped up from the nest of the reclining chair and moved quickly from the room.

Sitting on the hard-cushioned couch I reviewed my assets. I didn’t have a weapon or any way to make a call. My wallet was of little use. I wanted to kill somebody, I truly did, but there was no profit in that. I might have made it outside, and once there, I might have found some foliage in which to hide. It all seemed a little much. There was already a plan in motion. Might as well have confidence in myself.

Seeking distraction from the deadly situation, I began to wonder again about Mathilda Prim.

I couldn’t imagine what she was doing with Quiller or, for that matter, what connection there was between the odd couple and the extremists who had taken me. Prim was a lover, Quiller a thinker, and the MoA a people who, at least, coveted violent action.

Having these thoughts, I was preoccupied when Cormody came back to the room. He was climbing into his recliner when I became aware of his return.

“Mr. Frost says that you are a good friend and associate,” he said.

I smiled, sure that my sociopath buddy had said a lot more than I was all right — though he probably used fewer words.

“What’s your interest in Quiller?” I asked the secretary of war of the MoA.

“This meeting is for your interrogation,” he said pointedly. I noticed that he didn’t call me son this time.

“I need to go,” I said. “I have appointments to keep.”

“Look, Mr. Oliver, we are a valid, benevolent society that’s only trying to make sure that the government doesn’t try to suppress a great man’s theoretical work. You know, the government is the enemy of all freethinking men.”

I was nigger-no-doubt when I entered the house, but now I was a fellow freethinker with a common enemy to boot.

“We don’t like each other, Mr. Cormody, we both have that right. But I’m not trying to hurt, subvert, or expose anything about your great thinker. I’m working for a third party who merely wants information.”

“What information?” The war secretary was nervous.

“I’m not gonna tell you that.”

“How do you know Frost?”

“If you asked him that question he’d tell you I was a scarlet bird. I’d say that despite his whiteness, he is my darkest sin.”

The little white man with the big aspirations evaluated me again, this time for about a minute.

“You can go out the way you came,” he told me. “Nobody’ll mess with you.”