“I came to see Detective Knorr,” I said.
“Who?”
“Detective Knorr.”
“You must be mistaken,” Miss Pfennig said. “There’s no one here by that name.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not mistaken, you are. You’re mistaking me for a black radical come here to blow up this building because of the conspiracy within these walls. You’re mistaking me for an angry black militant tired of the lies and attempts to make your claims of our inferiority seem true.”
I smiled, and fear blossomed in the ugly woman’s face.
A man appeared from the shadows. He was tall and chiseled, blond on white wearing a tan suit and black shoes. An undercover cop if I had ever seen one.
“Is there a problem, Miss Pfennig?”
“This man was threatening to blow up the building,” she said.
“No,” I said again. “I said that you thought I was, when really I just wanted to speak to Detective Knorr.”
“What do you want with Vincent?” The light-haired detective would never be a success in his job.
I handed over the card that Vincent Knorr had given me.
“He wanted me to drop by if I had any information.”
The chiseled cop studied the card, turning it over two or three times. He was looking for a trick.
“There’s no name on this card,” he said at last.
“No. I guess you guys got some kinda secret goin’ on around here. Vincent thought that I was the right kind of rat for your purposes.”
“Come with me,” the Aryan dream ordered.
“Hal,” Miss Pfennig said. It was just one word but there was a lot behind it.
Hal ignored her and repeated, “This way.”
We walked in a straight line to a door about sixty-two degrees up the circle from Pfennig’s desk. Hal knocked and then opened the door without waiting for a reply. The room we entered had normal lighting. It also had a mahogany desk and a thickset secretary. She had long hair that would have looked better short and wore a pink dress that should have been battleship gray. Her eyes were round but still uninviting.
“Yes, Sergeant Gellman?” If I were a young man and had heard that deep and sensual voice on the phone, I would call back a few times, hoping for a way in.
“This man has a card he said he got from Detective Knorr. He’s here looking for him,” Hal said.
“And you brought him here?”
Hal’s mouth opened as if he intended to speak, but there were no words in the pipe.
“You couldn’t even leave him at the front desk?”
“He was being belligerent with Doris.”
“Did you frisk him?”
Again Hal Gellman searched for words that did not exist.
Looking back and forth between those two, I began to have heart that change was possible in my lifetime. My enemies were both blind and small-minded, vain and unable to imagine me even though I was standing right there in front of them.
The nameless secretary pressed a button on a walnut box that sat on her desk.
A man’s voice said, “Yes, Mona?”
“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins came to the front door, and Sergeant Gellman brought him here. What should I do?”
Small-minded, maybe, but they did their homework.
A silence followed Mona’s question. Hal stared at the wall above her head.
His glare and his situation reminded me of my father.
My father disappeared forty-two days after my eighth birthday. He went out to work at a lumberjack camp and never returned. I have very few memories of him, but what I do remember is cast in bronze.
He once told me that anything that happened to a man before he was sixty was a good thing.
“Not everything,” I said, testing my own childish knowledge against his.
“Yes,” he said, “everything.”
“Uh-uh, not if you get your arm cut off.”
“Even if you’re right-handed and you get your right arm cut off,” he said. “Even that will turn out to be a good thing if you’re a real man.”
“But how?”
“Because a real man will know that he has to overcome anything that gets in the way of him caring for his family. A real man will study the arm he has left. He will build its strength, learn how to use tools with it. He will make sure that he’s a better man with one arm than other men are with two. And he’ll make it so, no matter how hard he has to try. A real man can be beat only if you kill him. And with his dyin’ breath he will try to overcome Death itself.”
Standing there between those bickering police, I thought of my father and of Raymond Alexander, who never feared Death or her emissaries. Hal Gellman was being given a chance, though he probably didn’t realize it. The deep-voiced Mona was helping him to see something. His boss’s silence was telling him something.
I saw no awareness in his angry glare, though. That was my lesson.
The beech door behind Mona opened and a tall man, about my age, walked into the room. He wore a cheap dark suit with a white shirt and no tie. His shoulders were narrow and his gaze, behind the round wire-rimmed glasses, was intense.
“Rawlins?” he said.
I nodded.
He looked me up and down, decided by some unknown calculations that I wasn’t a threat, and said, “Colonel Lakeland. Come with me.”
He turned and walked back through the buff doorway.
As I followed I experienced a familiar feeling of elation. It’s a reaction that black people often have when going into the slave master’s quarters. In there, we imagine, is the place where freedom resides. And if we get the chance, maybe we could pick up a little of that most precious commodity when the man is otherwise occupied.
I smiled at my silly delight.
Mona mistook my smile as being for her. She sneered at me and I was jarred back to reality.
— 22 —
Lakeland’s office consisted of a large space with a broad desk dead center. There were a dozen chairs or so at various attitudes around the room. A powerful lamp hung maybe five feet above the desktop, illuminating the counter-sized work area and leaving the rest of the office in a kind of twilight. The room smelled heavily of cigarette smoke. That was when I felt my first real twinge of withdrawal.
I noticed that there were half a dozen or so diplomas in frames hanging on the wall near the door. A bachelor of arts from UCLA, a master’s degree from Caltech. I didn’t have time to make out the other degrees but I was sure that Colonel Lakeland was the recipient of each parchment.
“Sit,” Lakeland said as he made his way to a plush swivel chair.
I took a seat off to the left, not wanting to make it seem that I was the subject of our discussion. I was just another one of the guys, sitting on the edge of the project.
The nameplate before me read lt. l. lakeland. I just glanced at it and he said, “I’m a colonel in the army. I was tapped by city hall and Sacramento to run this operation.”
“Intelligence?” I asked.
I guess he heard the sarcasm in my question, and that’s why he passed it over.
“What are you doing here, Rawlins?”
“I could ask you that same question, Colonel.”
Lakeland’s face was also narrow. His lips seemed to belong on a corpse, they were so leathery and thin. His grin was a disgusting show.
“The Seventy-seventh Precinct captain thinks that you might be our man,” he said.
“Your man for what?”
“Didn’t Knorr tell you?”
“He said something about an insurrection. Sounded pretty crazy to me.”
“It’s not,” Lakeland assured me. “They’re stockpiling guns, shadowing the police.”
“With the police following them,” I added.