A Red Death er-2 Read online

  “What he say when you bring it to ’im?”

  “Who said I did?”

  “Com’on, man, I ain’t got time fo’this play shit.”

  “His eyes got all wide an’ he asked me where I got it from. I told’im. He said that stealin’ that document was a fed’ral charge. He told me t’disappear.”

  “That’s it?”

  “All I gotta say, man.”

  “But there’s one more thing,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where’s what you stole?”

  It was then that I noticed the sweat on Andre’s upper lip. Maybe it was there the whole time.

  “You gotta swear you ain’t gonna tell where you got this from.”

  “Where is the shit, man?” I was losing patience with Andre’s fears.

  “You know the brick-walled car graveyard down at the far end of Vernon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We went down there. They got this emerald-green Dodge truck down along the back wall. We put the papers ’hind the seat.”

  “Wenzler go with you?”

  “Yeah, man, we went there together. I said that we was lookin’ fo’a muffler and then we snuck back there an’ hid it.”

  “What if they sell it?”

  “Shit, man, that ole thang is just a wreck. It’s been back there fo’years.”

  When we got back in the car I told Andre that I’d try to help him.

  “I work for a guy named Mofass. He manages a few ’partment buildin’s,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ma call him an’ ask him to put you up in one of his Mexican buildin’s. I’ll call Juanita too, send her over there.” I took the three hundred dollars from my shirt pocket and handed it to Andre. “Use it slow, man. You might have to be gone for a while.”

  I let Andre off at a hotel on Buena Vista Boulevard. When I got home I called Mofass and told him to prepare a room somewhere for Andre.

  “Who gonna pay me?” Mofass asked.

  “I will.”

  “Ain’t good business, Mr. Rawlins. Landlord should never pay nobody’s rent.”

  Then I called Juanita.

  “That you, Easy?” she said, softening when she heard my voice.

  “Andre’s in a hotel downtown, honey,” I said, and then I gave her the address. “He got a little money an’ he pretty scared too.”

  “You want me to go to him?” she asked, as if I had a say in how she spent the rest of her life.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And, Juanita?”

  “Huh, Easy?”

  “Maybe you could go easy on the boy an’ not tell’im ’bout us.”

  “Don’t worry, honey, I’ma keep that secret right in here.”

  I couldn’t see her but I could imagine where her hand was.

  18

  I came home to loud hammering. There were three men on my porch. Two of them were doing the carpentry. Boards had already been laced over the windows; there were bright yellow ribbons of paper across them. Right then the men were driving nails into fresh timbers across my front door.

  “What the fuck you think it is you doin’ here!” I shouted.

  All of the men were white and wore dark suits. When they turned around I recognized only one of them, but that was enough.

  Agent Lawrence said, “We’re sealing the house against the threat of you liquidating property that may rightfully belong to the federal government.”

  “What?”

  Instead of talking Lawrence tore off a sheet of paper that had been tacked to the wall. He handed me the federal marshal’s warrant. It said that my property was temporarily confiscated by the federal marshal until such time that my tax responsibility had been determined; I made that much out. Two judges had signed the document; also the tax agent involved, Reginald Arnold Lawrence.

  I ripped the warrant in half and pushed my way past the tax man. I went up to the closest marshal and said, “Brother, I don’t know what you’d do if a man threatened to take your house, but I’ve been told by the FBI that I don’t have to worry ’bout this until I done some work for them.”

  The marshal was short. He had blue eyes and thinning sandy hair that lay down and stuck to his scalp because of the sweat he’d built up driving nails into my walls.

  “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Rawlins. All I know is that I got this warrant to execute.”

  “But this is my house, man! All my clothes are in there. My shoes, my address book, I don’t have anything.”

  The two officers looked at each other. I could see that they sympathized with me. Nobody likes to kick a man out of his home. Nobody decent, that is.

  “Come on, Aster,” Agent Lawrence said. “I have to get home.”

  “He’s got a right to hear something,” Aster complained. “I mean, here we are locking up his house and he doesn’t have anything but what’s on his back.”

  “This is the law, mister,” Lawrence said. “All we have is the law, that’s why I’m here. I’m doing my job. And that’s what I want from you.”

  Lawrence gave the men a hard stare and they turned back to their hammers.

  I watched them for a minute. And while I did my breath came up short. Something started shaking in my chest.

  “You cain’t do this, man.” I said it because I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t talk.

  Lawrence ignored me, though. He took the two halves of the warrant and tacked them back up against the wall.

  “I said, you cain’t do this, man!”

  The tone of my own voice in my ears reminded me of Poinsettia; her crying to Mofass that she needed another chance.

  The marshals were almost done with their job, so I put my hand on Lawrence’s shoulder.

  He didn’t bother with the hand. He drove his fist into my temple and followed with an uppercut that I managed to avoid. The adrenaline was already pumping, so I hit him somewhere in the chest and then in the side of his head. When he doubled over I pushed him down the stairs.

  I was just ready to go after him when I remembered the two men behind me. I was about to turn but then they grabbed me by both arms.

  As they dragged me down the stairway Lawrence cried, “He hit me! He assaulted me!” He said that over and over. He didn’t sound outraged, though. It was more like he was glad that I had assaulted him.

  The marshals wrestled me to the fence and forced me to my knees before handcuffing me to one of the metal posts. I was struggling and fighting, and maybe screaming a little. There may have been tears in my eyes and my voice as I warned those men to stay away from my house.

  A small crowd of my neighbors gathered at the front gate. A few men even entered and approached the white peacekeepers.

  The marshal who had talked to me approached the men. He had a calmness about him and was holding up his identification. As I watched him I felt a blow to the side of my head. When I looked around I saw the other marshal holding Agent Lawrence back.

  “Stop it!” the black-haired, Mediterranean-looking man ordered.

  “… we’re just doing our job,” Marshal Aster was saying to the men. He was backing them up. No guns were drawn. “Everybody go on home. Mr. Rawlins will explain himself after we’re gone…”

  “I want him arrested for attacking a federal agent!” Lawrence shrieked. His lips stuck straight out and he shook as if he were freezing.

  “Next time I’ll kill your ass!” I shouted from my knees.

  The black-haired marshal dragged Lawrence out to the gate and the other man came to my side.

  “You cain’t do this to me, man!” I said to him. “I ain’t gonna lose my house, my clothes…”

  “Shut up, man!” he ordered. He must have been an officer somewhere, because the tone of his voice demanded obedience.

  He knelt there beside me and reached for the cuffs.

  “We’re going off duty after this, Mr. Rawlins. If you break the seal we’ll have to come by tomorrow and arrest you, if you’re sti
ll here, that is.”

  He took off the cuffs and I jumped to my feet. I advanced on the two men at the gate with Aster at my heel.

  “What’s goin’ on, Easy?” Melford Thomas, my across-the-street neighbor, asked.

  “I want you to arrest him,” Lawrence said again.

  “Why?” Aster asked. “All I saw was you fall on your ass.”

  “I won’t take this!” Lawrence said, spitting over all of us.

  Aster wiped his face. “We’re going home now. You want to come with us you better get in the car, or else you can stay here and arrest him yourself.”

  Lawrence looked as if he might try it. But when he saw all of my angry-looking black neighbors he backed down.

  “Don’t break that seal, Rawlins,” he said. “That’s an official barrier.”

  And then they were off in their car.

  I had the planks pulled off my door before they turned the corner.

  Craxton was working late that night. Maybe he worked late every night, sitting up in some vast office plotting strategies against the enemies of America. I didn’t need to worry about communists, though-the police were enough for me.

  “What’s that?” he laughed. “He had the federal marshal out there?”

  “I don’t find it too funny. He kicked me upside the head.”

  “Sorry, Easy. It’s just that you’ve got to admire a man who wants to do the job right.”

  “What about me? I’m supposed to work for you and I don’t even have a place to sleep or clothes to wear.”

  “I’ll make some calls. You just climb into your bed, Easy, and get ready to work tomorrow. Agent Lawrence will not bother you again.”

  “Okay. Just as long you keep that man away from my house.

  I don’t want him in here again.”

  “You got it. I thought Lawrence had more sense than that. My request for your help was informal. I didn’t want to have to step on him. But I’ll do that now.”

  I was satisfied with that much. There was a moment when we were both quiet.

  Finally I asked, “So you still want me to look into this Wenzler thing?”

  “Certainly do, Easy. You’re my ace in the hole.”

  “Well then, I was thinkin’…”

  “Yes?”

  “About this, um, Andre Lavender guy.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, I asked a couple’a guys I still know down there about him. They said that he got in trouble with the law down there and disappeared.”

  “What kind of trouble was that?”

  I was pretty sure that he already knew the answer, so I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Easy, I don’t know about any trouble he had. I know that he’s working with Wenzler and we’d like to talk to him. If you get a line we’d sure appreciate it. As a matter of fact, if you could lead us to Lavender we might not need you anymore at all.”

  It was a tempting offer. Andre didn’t mean anything to me. But he was innocent of anything but being a fool and Craxton wasn’t promising me anything anyway. So I said, “Nobody seems to know where he’s gone to, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

  I paced the rooms of my tiny house all night. I walked and cursed and loaded all my pistols. When the sun came up I sat out on the front porch, waiting for marshals.

  They didn’t come, though. That was better all the way ’round.

  19

  My life was pretty crazy in the days I worked for the FBI. I spent most of my late evenings in the arms of EttaMae. Those nights I spent exploring Etta’s body and her love; either one was worth dying for. Being with EttaMae was the most exciting and dreadful time I ever had. I had to overcome my guilt and my fear of Mouse to be with her. I’d come to her apartment in the late evening looking all around to make sure that no one saw me. LaMarque would be sleeping in his little room and Etta would come to me slowly like a horse trainer trying to tame a skitterish buck. My heart was always racing from fear when I got there, but the fear soon turned to passion. Sometimes in the middle of our lovemaking Etta would hold me behind my neck and ask, “Do you really love me, Easy?” And I’d cry out, “Yeah, yeah, baby!” in a powerful surrender to the forces that built in me.

  In the daytime I worked with Chaim Wenzler. He was a hard worker and a good man. We’d go from door to door in Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. I’d wait in the car and Chaim would go beg for clothes and other items. I offered to go up with him once but he said, “These people wouldn’t put it in your hand, my friend. They wanna give maybe, but not direct. Give it to the kike and then he could give to the schwartze, that’s what they’re thinking.” Then he spat.

  We always went to coffee-shop restaurants for lunch. Chaim paid one day and I would pay the next. The people running the restaurants were willing to take our money, but you could see that they were bothered by us. It was probably because we were so boisterous and intimate.

  Chaim liked to tell stories and laugh, or cry. He told me about his childhood in Vilna. I had heard about Vilna because I had gone through Germany liberating the death camps. When I told Chaim about my experiences he talked to me about his times among the Germans, Poles, and Jews. In that way we grew close. We shared experience through memories that, although we were never in the same place, had the very real feelings of desperation and death that consumed us both during World War Two.

  Chaim had been part of the communist underground during the German occupation of Vilna. He organized and fought against the Nazis. When the frightened Jewish population denounced the underground, he and his comrades fled the city and formed a Jewish platoon that slew Nazis, blew up trains, and liberated every Jew that they could.

  “We fought side by side with the Russian guerrillas,” Chaim told me once. “They were soldiers of the people,” he said, and he touched his chest with one hand and my arm with the other. “Like you and me.”

  I knew that the Russians abandoned the Warsaw Ghetto and I was sure that Chaim knew it too, but I couldn’t say anything because I never knew a white man who thought that we were really the same. When he touched my arm he might as well have stuck his hand in my chest and grabbed my heart. Agent Craxton might have liked what I was doing for him, but he didn’t think I was on his level.

  Chaim carried a steel hip flask full of vodka. He liked to chip at it during the day. His high was pleasant and his friendliness was real. Sometimes he’d bring up his “organizing” at Champion. Once he even mentioned Andre Lavender. But whenever he did that I changed the subject. I acted like I was afraid to know about politics or unions. And I was afraid; afraid of what I might do to save myself from jail.

  “What you do for money, Chaim?” I asked him one day. We were sitting at a tiny strip of park that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.

  He looked out over the blue air and blue water for a long time before saying, “They won’t let me work.”

  “Who?”

  “America. They come and they tell the weak boss that I’m a bad man and he fires me. They wouldn’t let me wash shit from the floor. So my friends help me, and my family.”

  “Who you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “The Cossack,” he spat. “The Nazi, the FBI.”

  “You mean they come out to yo’ job an’ tell the boss that you did sumpin’?”

  “They say I am not American. They say I am communist.”

  I found myself shaking my head. “Don’t you know that’s some shit.”

  “That is why I work for charity, for First African. The white people don’t understand being treated like this. They think that they are free because nobody comes to their job. They see that I am bad because the police follow me. They have no idea.” Chaim pointed at his head. “In here they are stupid with what they are told.”

  “You could say that again. You all the time hearin’ ’bout how free America is, but it ain’t.”

  “No. But they are free. They have a job and they keep it. When things get bad, my friend, it is you and I that
are out of work.”

  I nodded. There had been many a time I’d seen the Negro staff of a company laid off when money was tight. It didn’t always happen like that, but it did often enough.

  Chaim grabbed my hand in viselike grip. There were tears in his eyes. We sat there holding hands and looking at each other until I got a little uncomfortable. Then he said, “I saw them hang my brother when I was a child. He was accused of spitting in a soldier’s path. They hung him and burned down my mother’s house.”

  I won’t say that those few words alone made us friends, but I understood Chaim Wenzler then.

  I talked to agent Craxton later that same night. He asked all sorts of questions about where we picked up clothes and who handled the money. He was looking for spies everywhere. If I hadn’t talked to Andre Lavender I would have thought the FBI man was crazy.

  But even though I had the proof I needed to set myself free I balked at bringing down Chaim Wenzler.

  “What is it that you want on the man?” I asked Craxton.

  “I’ll know it when you tell me, Easy. Has he invited you to any meetings?”

  “What kinda meetin’s?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Uh-uh, no. All we do is collect clothes and then give ’em away.”

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Rawlins, he’ll slip up. And then we’ll have him.”

  There wasn’t much consolation for me in that.

  “I talked to your friend the other day, Easy,” Agent Craxton said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Lawrence. He’s singing a new tune now that Washington called his boss. He says that everything’s okay and that he would be happy to process a schedule of payments when this thing is over.”

  “You not gonna let him do that, are you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I told him that Washington should have your paperwork by the end of next week.”

  I sighed, “Thanks.”

  “You see, Easy, we’re helping each other.”

  I could still feel that powerful grip on my hand.