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Walter Mosley

Every Man a King

1

I drove my tiny cream-colored Bianchina up the FDR to Seventy-First, crossed the park, passing the Strawberry Fields memorial, and then made my way up West End a few blocks until turning left, finally arriving at an imposing gate in the Great Wall — the only entrance to a sprawling estate overlooking the West Side Highway and the Hudson.

I stopped at the thick crisscrossed stainless steel bars and waited. Across a broad, two-hundred-foot-deep lawn could be seen the four-story white stone home. The structure itself occupied half a Manhattan city block.

The owner of this impressive example of opulence was multibillionaire Roger Ferris, called King Silver by international society pages, jealous competitors, and those who liked catchy nicknames that had the ring of truth.

The not-so-reclusive Ferris had moved out of Stonemason’s Rest Home to take up residence in the heavily guarded hall because he was in serious negotiations with his son and daughter over control of MDLT (Mains dans la Terre) Inc. Roger’s children, Alexander Ferris and Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite, had filed suit claiming that their father was no longer competent, arguing that the board of directors of MDLT and the state of New York, among others, were legally bound to appoint them his trustees. If they were successful, they would become executor and executrix of an international conglomerate estimated to be worth north of eight hundred billion dollars.

Sitting in my minuscule Italian car, I considered the siblings’ claim against their father. He was ninety-one years old, an advanced age for a captain of industry. The kids were both past retirement age themselves. The argument that he, Roger, was too feeble to run an international conglomerate made sense except for the fact that anyone who spent more than five minutes talking to the man knew that he was vibrant, vital, and vigilant. He played a mean game of chess, and before the recent pandemic and legal troubles, he still danced every day. I knew of his gamboling because his regular dance partner was my grandmother — Brenda Naples.

Brenda was ninety-three, sharp as a whip, and black as a moonless night on an ancient sea. She met Roger at Stonemason’s and they quickly became three-quarters of an item.

It was an unexpected coupling. Roger had been rich since the moment of his conception, whereas Brenda was born of sharecroppers, the issue of earlier sharecroppers, who were, in turn, born from three centuries of enslavement.

“Hey, King,” intoned a voice I knew quite well.

“Forth,” I replied, turning my head to gaze out the driver’s window at the huge white man who seemed to have materialized from nowhere.

Forthright Jorgensen was six foot five with more muscle than most athletes. His hair was tawny and his eyes a color blue that almost seemed synthetic, it was so bright.

Forthright’s father, Anders Jorgensen, was an anarcho-syndicalist who only believed in The Struggle; one might have said that this was his religion. Forthright became an old-school libertarian and started organizing unions. When he gave up on the American brand of labor coalitions, he published a notice in the Western Worker magazine saying, “I am abrogating my membership in the unions I belong to because of their inability to inspire political change and to fully eradicate sexism and racism from their ranks, and their failure to comprehend the underlying fascist tendencies of modern-day capitalism.”

“You here to see Brenda?” Forth asked me.

“She’s here today?”

“Been all week.”

“Well then, I’ll be happy to say hey.”

“If it ain’t her, then what brings you up here?” Forth was close enough that he could give my small auto a cursory once-over. He was, after all, in charge of security for the mansion and everyone in it.

“Roger said he wanted to see me about something. You know he won’t talk about anything serious over the phone.”

The security guard lifted his head, looking at the sky, and said, “You get that?”

He was talking into a microphone secreted somewhere on his person. There were a dozen security guards sprinkled around the grounds and one in a communications center where pertinent information was transferred to Roger.

When I heard that Forthright had given up on unions because of his stringent beliefs, I told him about the job Ferris had and he took it because in MDLT’s recent incarnation, Roger had instituted a profit-sharing program in which 40 percent of real profit — those monies made before taxes, reinvestment, bonuses, and perks — was divvied up among all employees who had worked three years or more for the company.

“You think you’ll get rain before a hail of lead?” I asked the security chief, killing time while we waited for a reply from on high about my status as visitor.

“It’s no joke, Joe. The kids are really serious about fleecing the old man. They know he wants to turn MDLT over to the employees... and I’m not just talkin’ about the dudes and dudettes in monkey suits. He wants everybody, including the foreign mining staff, to share in ownership. I’m absolutely sure that his kids would kill Roger if they could.”

I felt the chill of fear pass over my shoulders. My grandmother would be in danger if assassins came in to eradicate Roger. I wanted to keep her safe but knew that she wouldn’t have any of that.

I’m over twenty-one, Black, and free, I imagined her misquote. Ain’t nobody gonna make me scared. Nobody but the Lord.

“Go right in,” Forth said over my worries.

The stainless steel gate lifted, and I drove about twenty feet until reaching seven granite buttresses that blocked my way. After the gate lowered behind me, the stone ramparts sank seamlessly into the ground.

I was free now to approach the manor.

Dozens of yellow rosebushes lined the road up to the house. The paved lane formed a semicircle up past the front door. I exited my minicar, leaving the keys in the ignition so one of the security staff could park it somewhere underground.

Up close, the white walls of the house showed underlying veins of faint primary colors. I’d been told that the manor was constructed from the most valuable stone extant.

The front doors occupied an area twelve feet wide and fifteen high. The door to the left was made from pink ivory wood filigreed with gold wire in the shapes of various sinuous flowers. The right-hand door was ebony wood, carved with a bas-relief of dozens of laborers in the process of building a great but undefined edifice.

There was no knocker or doorbell, but that wasn’t necessary, as every visitor was announced well before they reached the threshold.

My grandmother opened the door maybe two and a half minutes after I got there.

“Baby,” she said, and then pulled me down by the lapels of my powder-blue sports jacket in order to kiss my lips — a greeting that was our custom.

Behind her was a vast foyer with five doors. This lobby was painted buttery yellow and sported a vase at the center of each intermittent wall. Each urn contained two dozen roses of either the primary or secondary colors.

“What you doin’ here on a Sunday when you should be in church?” my grandmother asked with feigned suspicion.

Brenda told everyone that she was four eleven, but I was sure that she’d fudged an inch or two. She hadn’t topped a hundred pounds in the decades I’d known her.

“Roger asked me to drop by,” I replied to her semiserious query.

Brenda’s face got a look that I recognized as stern. She let her head dip to the side, then clasped her hands in front of the bright scarlet kimono she wore.

I understood her trepidation but didn’t want to feed that worry, and so said, “You’re looking pretty spry, Grandma.”