The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Page 17

“You cain’t give up your life for me, child.”

  “You my father-like, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah right.”

  “A girl got to respect her father, Uncle.”

  The old man noticed an intimacy and a knowledge in the girl’s tone that he hadn’t known since the days that he lived with Sensia. His heart clenched like a fist trying in vain to crush a solitary walnut.

  “Are you okay, Uncle?”

  “It’s a shame, the feelin’ I got for you, Robyn. If I wrote it down in a letter the police would come in here an’ take me off to jail.”

  “We cain’t help how we feel,” she said in a modest tone that reminded Ptolemy of the way Sensia would sometimes shrug and her dress would fall to the floor.

  “The Devil came to see me tonight,” he said.

  “Dr. Ruben? What he have to say? Did he leave you his numbah? Did you tell him about your fevah?”

  “He the Devil, baby. He know all about fevah. Fevah’s what keep him in business.”

  “He just a man, Uncle. A man playin’ with your life.”

  “Tomorrow we gonna go up to Beverly Hills,” Ptolemy said, changing the subject so effectively that Robyn didn’t frown, much less complain.

  “To do what?”

  “To talk to a man named Mossa.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You’ll see.”

  That night the fever roused Ptolemy from a moment in his past when he saw Corporal Billy Knight, a Negro from South Carolina, kill a white man, Sergeant Preston Tooms, with his bare hands in a back alley in Paris. After four days Ptolemy was called to report to the commander of his and Knight’s division, a white colonel named Riley.

  “It has been reported to me that certain people feel that there was bad blood between Corporal Billy Knight and Sergeant Preston Tooms.”

  Ptolemy thought that Billy had probably bragged about the crime amongst his black brothers. He was used to his neighborhood down in Alabama, where no Negro would ever turn in another. But the U.S. Army had black soldiers from Chicago, San Francisco, and even New York City. Some of them thought it was their responsibility to follow the white man’s law.

  Billy probably bragged, and everyone knew that Billy and Ptolemy were close.

  “Well, soldier?” the colonel asked.

  “I wouldn’t know nuthin’ about anything like that, sir.”

  “Are those tears in your eyes, Sergeant Grey?” Riley asked.

  “Must be the smoke, sir.”

  “Does doing your duty hurt that much?”

  Riley was a good man; tall and proud, he never insulted his soldiers because of their race. He respected every man according to one standard. And so when he asked Ptolemy that question, the soldier froze, unable to speak. But in the vision, not a dream but a trancelike memory, Ptolemy inhabited his former self and spoke up.

  “Sir, that sergeant said a word to Preston that stung him in his heart. Aftah all we been through, Preston heard in that white man’s one word that he would come back home to the same sorry situation that our mothers and grandmothers and great-great-great-grandmothers suffered under. Preston couldn’t help himself, but still that don’t wash away the blood.”

  Ptolemy opened his eyes because the fever was burning his face. He sat up, remembering that Colonel Riley “volunteered” Billy Knight for duty at the front lines when the casualty rate was over ninety percent. He didn’t press charges, because that might have caused a riot among the soldiers.

  Billy died a week later. His mother and father received his Purple Heart posthumously.

  Ptolemy wondered if his memories were the cause of the fever. Was it hell calling for him?

  Running his fingertips along the sheet, he felt a thrill of excitation. He had not experienced so much or so deeply since he was a child. The bottle given to him by Satan, or maybe one of Satan’s agents, sat on the bureau across from his big bed.

  His temperature was rising quickly and the strength was draining from his limbs.

  He got to his feet and took two quick steps. He had to grab on to the bureau not to fall. He opened the bottle, spilling a dozen tiny pills across the top of the chest of drawers. He had to suck his tongue four times before drawing out enough spit to swallow even one small pill.

  Slumping down to the floor, Ptolemy thought about Billy. He was betrayed but did not know it. He was sentenced to death but thought that he was being chosen to fight because of his valor and bravery. He had murdered a man but felt that he was vindicated by his people’s suffering and shame. Ptolemy imagined Knight grinning while he was killing, about to die himself. The executioner’s hand was disguised, and the battlefield substituted for justice.

  Ptolemy smiled and opened his eyes. He was on his back on the floor in a room that was once teeming with insects and rodents. A frigid river flowed over his fevered skin and now he was strong and able.

  He got to his feet without arthritic pain in his joints. He took a deep breath and went back to his bed, where he could recall history and change it slightly—an old man deified by the whim of evil.

  What we doin’ here, Uncle?” Robyn asked after they had gotten off the bus at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive a few minutes after ten the next morning.

  “Goin’ t’see see Mr. Mossa. He a Jerusalemite, a Palestinian he calls it, but he was born in Jerusalem, same place that Christ our Lord was born.”

  “This place is full’a rich white people,” Robyn argued. “We shouldn’t be up around here.”

  The girl was looking about her, a severe frown etching her lovely dark features. Ptolemy smiled. There was a bench across the street, at the foot of a steep cobblestone road that didn’t allow cars. An old white woman was sitting there. Ptolemy brought his adopted daughter across the street and sat her down at the opposite end.

  “I been afraid’a white people my entire life,” the old man said, holding the glowering girl’s hands.

  “I ain’t afraid,” she said. “It’s just that we don’t belong up here. My mama told me that.”

  “Your mother made you sleep on the floor behind a couch so that her boyfriends didn’t see you,” Ptolemy said.

  “So?”

  “She didn’t think she was wrong doin’ that, now, did she?”

  “No.”

  “But she was wrong, wasn’t she?”

  “Papa Grey, I just don’t like it up here. I ain’t scared’a nobody, but I’m scared I’ll do sumpin’ wrong.”

  “I know. That’s why we here together. I’m helpin’ you.”

  “If you helpin’ me, then take me home.”

  “Did you like bein’ a child?” Ptolemy asked.

  Robyn wanted to look down, but she forced herself to gaze into her guardian’s eyes.

  “I was happy when my mama died, Papa Grey.” A tear came down her left cheek. “I wanted to be sad an’ lovin’ but I knew that Mama had worked it out for me to go to Aunt Niecie if she died, and I hoped in my heart, even though I didn’t want to, that my mama would pass and I could come out heah. I’m the one you should call the Devil.”

  Ptolemy noticed that even though the right eye filled with water it was only the girl’s left eye that shed tears. He thought this must have been an important sign, but the meaning escaped him.

  “Then I come to stay wit’ Niecie an’ she put me on a couch in the livin’ room an’ Hilly was always tryin’ to fuck me—excuse my French.”

  “I got you on a couch in the livin’ room,” Ptolemy said gently.

  “But that’s my couch, an’ it’s a proper bed too. An’ it have drawers like a dresser, an’ you bought me some clothes. An’ anyway you offered me your room an’ all your money an’ you trusted me to do right. An’ you try an’ protect me too. I love you, Papa Grey. I don’t evah want anything to happen to you.”

  “Did some’a the men in yo’ mama’s house mess wit’ you?” he asked.

  “I don’t wanna talk about that.”

  Ptolemy smiled and said, “Okay
. But you gotta know that the money I offered you is only a small part’a what I got an’ that we up here today so that you can know how to take care of what I’ma leave to you. So I won’t aks you no questions hurt your heart, but you got to trust me with the rest.”

  Her left eye streaming, lips apout, Robyn nodded just barely and Ptolemy smiled. He pulled her up by her forearms until they were on their feet again, walking up to the top of the pedestrian roadway lined with fancy boutiques and stores.

  There they came upon a gleaming white and gold store where, above the entrance, the name Mossa in red letters was inlaid across a band of sky-blue mosaic tiles.

  “Mr. Grey!” an older man exclaimed.

  At first Robyn assumed that he must be a Mexican.

  “Mr. Mossa,” Ptolemy replied with equal enthusiasm, “long time no see.”

  “How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

  The shop was crowded with glass cases crammed full with jewelry, coins, and small objects that were from other times and other places. The rest of the room was overflowing with rows of statues, sculptures, paintings on wood, wall hangings, ancient carpets, and large items of gold and silver, marble and jade.

  The white stone bust of a small child caught Robyn’s attention. The face seemed so innocent and wise.

  “Julius Caesar,” Mossa said to the girl.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That is a bust of Caesar as a boy.”

  “How they know how he looked when he was a kid?”

  “He sat for the sculptor, of course,” Mossa said, and then he turned to Ptolemy again.

  It slowly dawned upon Robyn what the aging Muslim had said.

  “You mean, this thing was made when Caesar was just a little boy?” she asked his back.

  “Yes,” Mossa said, turning again. “Everything in my shop is very, very old. I have a room filled with treasures from ancient tombs of Kush and Egypt.”

  “This is Mr. Mossa, Robyn,” Ptolemy said. “Mossa, this is my adopted daughter, Robyn Small.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Mossa said. “Your father is a great man with a long history. He understands beauty and the past. And of course his name has been legend for thousands of years.”

  “Thank you,” Robyn said, not quite knowing why. “Your store is very beautiful.”

  The Palestinian was short, like Ptolemy, and a bit stooped over, round but not fat; his smile was both beneficent and inviting. He wore a large yellow diamond on the index finger of his right hand and a ruby embedded in onyx on the pinky of his left. Robyn had never met anyone like him, had never been in a place like his shop.

  “It has been a long time, Ptolemy,” the store owner said. “Fifteen years?”

  “Maybe more,” Ptolemy agreed.

  “I’ve never seen you in a suit before.”

  “Bought it for a funeral,” Ptolemy said lightly.

  “Whose?”

  “Mine,” the old man said.

  The men stood there for a moment, Ptolemy smiling and Mossa wondering about that smile.

  “I think of you on the first day of every year,” Mossa said to break the silence. “I send up a prayer for you and hope that you are alive and well.”

  “That must’a been what done it,” Ptolemy replied. “’Cause you know there ain’t a reason in the world a man’s bones should get as old as mine is. I’m ninety-one, be ninety-two soon—maybe.”

  “There are trees that don’t live so long.”

  Ptolemy took two dull gold coins from his pocket.

  “I know you don’t have much interest in things only a hundred or so year old, but I thought . . .”

  The antiquarian took the coins from Ptolemy’s hand and held them in his palm. With his other hand he took out a jeweler’s lens and studied the metal disks.

  “I belong to a coin guild now,” he said, still staring at his palm. “We trade, back and forth. Sometimes an American dealer will come across ancient treasures that he cannot sell. Sometimes we trade.”

  Mossa looked up at Ptolemy and both old men smiled. To Robyn it seemed that they were talking without words, communing like monks being passed messages from God.

  “Thirty-six hundred each,” Mossa said.

  “Cash,” Ptolemy added.

  The antiquarian put the CLOSED sign on the front door and brought Ptolemy and the girl into a yard that was filled with flowering plants that Robyn could not identify. There Mossa made tea and brought out strange-tasting pastries.

  Mossa asked Robyn about her college aspirations, and even offered to give her a recommendation for school.

  “I’m only goin’ to junior college,” she said.

  “But you will transfer one day.”

  “Yeah,” she said, surprise coming through in her voice, “I might.”

  “This is my daughter, Mossa,” Ptolemy said at one point. “Give her your card and do business wit’ her fair an’ square like you always done wit’ me.”

  Mossa did not speak. He smiled, took a business card from his vest pocket, and handed it to the girl. The white card was engraved with golden letters. She placed it in her bag next to the knife—her mother’s only gift.

  On the street again, waiting for a westbound bus, Robyn and Ptolemy sat side by side, holding hands.

  “How you get to know Mr. Mossa, Uncle?”

  “Every once in a blue moon I’d get a part-time job at a restaurant they used to have around here called Trudy’s Steak House. If they had a big weekend and one’a their people got sick they’d call me ’cause I was a friend of a guy worked there called Mike Tinely.

  “I always took the early bus because the boss wanted you there on the minute. One time I saw Mossa’s place and I wondered if he could cash my coin. A week aftah my job was ovah I went in the store. It was him there, an’ he walked up to me and said, ‘Can I help you, Father?’

  “That was twenty-four years ago. He was in his fifties and I was already retired. We talked for a while and then he put up the CLOSED sign and took me to his garden for some tea. I nevah met anybody like that. My skin didn’t mean nuthin’ to him. I knew what the coins were worth from books, but I didn’t tell him that. He paid me top dollar and we been friends evah since.”

  “Where you get them coins?” Robyn asked.

  “Later, child. Let’s get out to Santa Monica first.”

  An hour later they were walking on a street in Santa Monica. They came to a slender brick building between a women’s clothes store and a shop that sold leather goods in all forms and shapes. Robyn stopped at the window of the clothes store, gazing at a dress that was diaphanous and multicolored. Ptolemy stood back, watching her turn slightly as if she had tried on the frock and was checking her reflection in the glass.

  Abromovitz and Son Legal Services was on the fourth floor of the slender building. There was an elevator but it was out of order, and so the young girl and the old man took the stairs, half a flight at a time. Ptolemy counted the steps, seven and then eight three times, with one-minute rests between each.

  The door was open and Ptolemy led the way into the dimly lit room.

  “May I help you?” a middle-aged black woman asked. She was sitting behind an oak desk that blocked the way to a bright-green door that was closed.

  Ptolemy smiled at the woman, who was maybe forty-five.

  Half my age, he thought, and twice my weight.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I’d like to speak with Abraham,” he said, echoes of Coy’s blasphemous Bible lessons resounding in his mind.

  “He,” the woman said, and then winced. “Mr. Abromovitz passed away five years ago.”

  “Oh,” Ptolemy said, “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. I liked him very much.”

  The black woman, whose skin was quite dark and whose name-plate said Esther, nodded and smiled sadly.

  “Yes,” she said. “He always asked how I
was in the morning, and he would listen too.”

  “Moishe still here?” Ptolemy asked.

  The receptionist registered surprise at the question.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Mr. Ptolemy Grey.”

  Mr. Grey,” a middle-aged, paunchy white man was saying a few moments later, after Esther had made a call on the office line.

  Robyn followed her adopted father into the small dark office. There was a window but it only looked out onto a shadowy air-shaft. Bookcases lined every wall. Along with law books, there were novels, piles of magazines, and stacks of typing paper held together by old brittle rubber bands. The room reminded Robyn somewhat of Ptolemy’s home before she had cleaned it out, and a little of Mossa’s rooms filled with ancient treasures.

  The only free space on the wall held a painting of a naked white goddess standing in the foreground with a medieval village behind her. The people of the village seemed unaware of the voluptuous maiden passing before them.

  “I haven’t seen you since I was a young man,” Moishe Abromovitz was saying. “I think I was still in school.”

  His face was young but his hair had gone gray and the backs of his hands were prematurely liver-spotted.

  Ptolemy pressed Robyn toward one of the four visitors’ chairs and then took one himself. Moishe remained standing next to a pine desk that was probably older than he was.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father,” Ptolemy said. “I didn’t know.”

  “I thought we sent you a notice,” the fortyish man in the aged body said. “I hope we didn’t forget you.”

  Ptolemy wondered if the letter had come in and Reggie had read it to him. Remembering himself as a feebleminded old fool was painful and frightening; next to that memory, Death didn’t seem like such a bad fellow.

  “You still got that file on me?” Ptolemy asked.

  “My father had sixteen clients that he wanted me to take special care of after he was gone. You were one,” Moishe Abromovitz said as he went to a wooden file cabinet behind the elder desk. He drew out an old manila folder, about three inches thick, and placed it on the pine desk. “He said that you were a gentle man with a good heart and that I should handle your estate when the time came.”