"Whitey own this world," the speaker continued, "and he hate you. He hate your pure blackness which remind him of his own ugly white skin. He hate your strength and your courage and your wisdom. That why he want to kill you."
He paused a moment and smiled, a gold-toothed smile, a smile that cost him $4,275, from a white dentist in the Bronx, a smile he had bought while preaching for the Pentacostalist Gospelry Church. And that had paid well. But this paid unbelievably. That white woman with the blonde hair sure knew how to get his oratory moving.
"Whitey want to kill you, but we not gonna let him. You know why?" The hall was tomb-silent. "Because we gonna kill him, dat's why. We gonna end this blue-eyed tyranny over our lives.
"What we gonna do?" he asked. After a dramatic pause, he answered himself in a stage whisper. "We gonna kill, kill, kill." And then to the audience: "What we gonna do?"
Men stood to scream, released at last from the torture of their hot wooden seats. Women clapped their hands joyously. They all screamed, "Kill, kill, kill!"
"What ya gonna do?" the speaker asked again.
"Kill, kill, kill!"
"Say it again, children!"
"Kill, kill, kill!"
"Let Whitey hear you tell it."
"Kill, kill, kill!"
"Nice to see a community working together," Barney said to the two men at his sides. He reached for his hip flask, forgetting that his hands were cuffed together. As he was entangling himself in the folds of his burnoose, a figure veiled thickly in white tulle passed by, leaving a scent of lilacs in her wake. The Peaches of Mecca followed her, pressing Barney between them.
She led them through another maze, up a concrete stairway, down a long hall, through an empty room, and up another staircase. The stairs ended at yet another stairwell, this one a spiral of precision-made structural steel.
"You may wait here, gentlemen," the woman said, her voice dripping with plantation charm. The two Peaches nodded impassively. One of them handed her the key to Barney's handcuffs.
He followed her into an apartment of sparkling white, identical to her house in every detail except for a world map on a wall behind a white desk. There she removed her voluminous veil and white cloak. As Barney watched, she pulled off her opera-length white gloves. She untied a white rope belt around her waist. The dress she wore draped over one of her creamy shoulders and cascaded in Grecian folds to the floor, clinging to her curves all the way down. Smiling into Barney's hungry eyes, she pulled at the clasp over her shoulder with her manicured nails and let the dress fall to her feet.
She was naked beneath. Slowly, she stretched her arms over her head so that her breasts lifted beguilingly. Then she brought her hands down over the length of her body, caressing herself, her hips undulating, as Barney looked on, his hands chained together. It was a strangely familiar motion. Had he seen it before?
"I'm going to free your bonds now, Mr. Daniels," she purred.
"Allah be praised," Barney said. He was sweating hard in his woolen monk's robe.
She pressed one of her breasts into Barney's mouth as she unlocked the handcuffs. He did not take his lips from her as his hands searched out and found the treasure they were looking for. Then he moved his mouth away from her shiny wet nipple and wrapped it over the opening of the hip flask he had raised and was now emptying into his gullet. "Great stuff," he said appreciatively.
Gloria pulled him over to the bed and sated herself on him. As she came, screaming, Barney's hand fumbled over the surface of the nightstand for the bottle of tequila she had waiting for him. He took a swig, careful not to knock the bottle on Gloria's still thrashing head.
"That was great," she said dreamily.
"Best tequila I've ever had," Barney said.
"You don't care for me at all, do you?" Her voice grew suddenly cold.
Barney shrugged. "As much as I care for anything else," he said.
It was the truth. He would sit on Gloria's white Disneyland bed and fake love with her and let her dictate the part he would play in her little drama, because he had no other part to play. Barney's part had been left in Puerta del Rey a lifetime or two ago, and what he had now was his tequila, and nothing more.
He had gotten into this on a drunken whim and now he was a prisoner as sure as if he were in jail. It was a plush prison, to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, and Barney knew the sentence would be death, either from Gloria X and her trained seals or from the two men who had tried to help him.
He didn't want help. He didn't care if his death came soon or late. It was already long overdue. He had already been dead for a long, long time.
So why was he thinking about Puerta del Rey again? There was no answer to that most elementary question, the only question he ever asked: What happened? What happened? He forced his mind away from it. He made himself concentrate on the satin cushions around him on the bed, and on the tequila, and the tequila and the tequila.
And before the bottle was empty, the world was good and fine with Bernard C. Daniels.
Then he smelled the lilac perfume. "Wake up," Gloria said, shaking him. "It's night."
"Hell of a time to wake up."
"It's time."
"Time for what?"
"For killing Calder Raisin." She smiled, her lips stretched tight across her teeth. Blurred through Barney's drunken vision, her face appeared to him like a grinning death's head skull through a misty fog. "I had you moved here when I heard you'd made contact with your CIA friends."
"Don't have friends in the CIA," he said, his mouth still fuzzy.
"Those two on the corner. My men saw you. But now they don't know where you are, so they won't be able to help you, poor baby. You're going to have to kill poor Calder all by yourself." She patted his cheek. "Get up now. You have an appointment with Mr. Raisin at the Battery."
"What if I don't kill him?" Barney asked.
"Then you don't get the thousand dollars, darling," she said sweetly. "And you lose your life very painfully in the process. You know what 'painfully' means, don't you? Do you remember the pain, Mr. Daniels, or has the scar on your stomach healed completely?"
He leaped at her. "What do you know?" he demanded. "Tell me!" But her bodyguards were in the room, and pulled him away from the woman as she shrieked laughter as cold and shrill as the wail of a banshee.
There were no television cameras on the pier, as the two black reporters dressed in neat black suits had promised Calder Riaisin back at the hospital. Nor were there any microphones on the creaking boards of the deserted place where a group of demonstrators was supposed to be waiting for him.
As soon as the limousine filled with overly friendly reporters deposited Raisin at the pier and sped away into the darkness, he knew the black reporters were fakes and he had been brought to this isolated spot to be killed.
Calder Raisin shook his head. He had been warned.
A man was waiting for him, sitting on the planks, his back resting against a barnacle-encrusted dock support.
Only one man, thought Calder Raisin. But then it would only take one man to kill him. It was his own fault, Raisin reprimanded himself, for not listening to the young white man at the hospital rally. Well, there wasn't much he could do now. He would just try to get it over with as fast as he could.
"What you want?" Raisin asked, turning up the collar of his bathrobe to protect himself from the wind. He shifted his weight from one hospital slipper to another to fend off the chilly wind. His hands were stuffed deep inside the pockets of the robe from which, at the bottom, a half-inch of hospital gown protruded.