I took a drink.
“So what information can I give you, Mr. King Oliver?”
A simple question, and the right one to ask, but it made me hesitate. The black sail was still on the water. Minta Kraft was probably on some upper floor practicing yoga.
“I’m here trying to find a reason, an excuse, to want to help your husband. I mean, you are his wife, right?”
That reply was the cause for her first full smile, actually a grin.
“How can I help?” she asked.
“Explain to me how his stance in the world jibes with you... being here.”
Ms. Prim performed a one-shoulder shrug that seemed to render my question meaningless.
“He hates Black people,” I pressed.
“He doesn’t hate me.”
“Do you love him?” I asked, knowing that the question had nothing to do with my job.
She paused, considered, looked into my eyes, and said, “Yes, yes, I do.”
“Do you hate your mother, your children, yourself?”
My question didn’t seem to disturb her. She put away the smile and watched me for a moment, two. Then she rose and went to the door in the window-wall and walked out on the deck.
At first I thought that in this way she was ending the interview. But because she left the door ajar I finally decided to follow.
The deck was at least forty feet wide. I caught up with Quiller’s wife at the four-foot-high weathered pine fence at the far end.
I stood there next to her waiting for some retort to my accusations.
After a long while she said, “When I met Alfie he was all up in his head. He was giving a talk at Syracuse University and the Black Students Union was there giving him shit.” She smiled at the memory. “I didn’t say anything. Al held his own and all the kids got mad.
“Later that night I was working my job as a cocktail waitress at the Copper Hen in DeWitt. He came in and recognized me. When I asked him if he wanted a drink, he asked me why I didn’t have anything to say at the talk. I told him that he and the students were just flexing and not in any way trying to work the arguments through. While we were talking, this big white guy walked up and asked Al if I was bothering him. He said no and when the big guy walked away Al asked me what I would have asked.”
“What did you say?” I wanted to know.
“I asked him if he believed in a pure white race, a bloodline that contained no other racial identifiers. I don’t know what it was, what that question sparked in him, but we had a talk after that, that lasted for three days.”
“You think it might have been because you’re so attractive?”
“Maybe,” she said with a flip of her hand. “On the second day he asked me to marry him. I told him, ‘Hell no.’ On the third day I said yes.”
Water was lapping against the pylons that held up the outer deck and half the house. It sounded like alien whispers about things I will never understand.
“So,” I asked, “did he change?”
“He... learned something, I think. Something about so-called equality.”
“What?”
“I had his child. He played with Claxton Akim all the time. His blood in a Black boy made him, I don’t know, understand.”
“That’s pretty hard to swallow,” I admitted. “I mean, he’s still associated with some pretty awful folks.”
“Look deeper, Mr. King Oliver. See what you find.”
9
I finished the whiskey, Blanton’s I think, while trying to get Ms. Prim to tell me what more there was to learn about her husband. She probably had little light to shed, but Mathilda Prim was a force of nature the way those calm waters were — extraordinary power at rest. I found myself wanting to sit above the Southampton sand and sea working out the muddled logic of her foot in the bear trap of that life.
After a while she said, “I have some things to see about, Mr. King Oliver. Is there anything else?”
“When I came here I was under the impression that Ms. Kraft would be the go-between, that I wasn’t to meet you.”
“Yes. That was the intention.”
“And yet, here we are.”
She smiled and said, “It was very nice to meet you.”
It was the friendliest dismissal I’d ever experienced.
The four mercenaries that made up at least part of the manor’s security force were standing around my car when I exited the rambling mansion. I actually considered running, but four hundred years of truly public education stopped me.
I walked toward the car door but found Rudolph standing in the way.
“We’re giving you a ride,” he stated.
“What about my car?”
“Give Adam your keys.”
As a private detective I rarely experienced intimacy with the subjects of my investigations. I was on the other end of a monocular, on the other side of the wall, or listening in on phone calls — illegally. Maybe I was on the World Wide Web sifting through bits and bytes for precious clues. The closest I got to most people like Rudolph was through a telephoto lens. But the cases I was becoming steeped in, the tragic study of Alfred Quiller and the stupidity of my ex-wife’s husband, brought me up uncomfortably close with the subjects.
For instance, Rudolph’s depthless eyes were a flat tan and he had an odor neither sweet nor savory. He smelled like a lunch-bucket worker in wood scented by varnishes and wax, sawdust and powerful soaps.
I handed the man named after the worst sinner my key chain.
“Where we goin’?” I asked Rudolph.
At that moment a large van, painted darkest blue, drove up. The sides had no windows.
“Get in,” Rudolph said.
The four custodians and I huddled into the van. The seating was laid out like the back of a stretch limo: a long banquette on the driver’s side with a love seat across, where I was installed. The only window in the vehicle was the windshield and it was mostly occluded by a jury-rigged barrier constructed of panel wood and painted a garish red.
There was no talk in the car. No communication whatsoever.
I suppose one might see my predicament as dire. After all, I was a Black man bunged into a windowless van surrounded by the acolytes of a rabid racist sect. But that wasn’t nearly as frightening to me as was Rikers or the MCC. I could fight back against those racists with at least a whisper of a chance of success on my side. There I had a shot, but you learned on the street that you would always lose against the system. The men and women who ran the institutions of incarceration had the right to kill me, whereas the men in that van had to have the will — and even then I stood a chance.
Instead of worrying, I thought about Mathilda. Her dark skin and unwillingness to adhere to any kind of expected norm intrigued me. Thinking about her brought me, of course, to her husband. Was she his prisoner, his dirty secret, or maybe a human doorway to a new man?
The ride lasted for just about an hour. The last fifteen minutes were tempered by the stop-and-go of street traffic. I imagined station wagons and stop signs. From the front of the van came hints of soft rock music and flashes of light.
At one point a man’s voice from the wheel said, “A cop’s behind us.”
One of the nameless sentinels pulled out an automatic. I gauged my odds of disarming him and shooting another. I might have tried it if Rudolph wasn’t studying my face.
A tense minute later the driver said, “They’re gone.”
A few minutes more, by my devil-spawn watch, and we came to a stop where the engine cut off. When the side door to the van slid open I saw that we were parked in a closed garage. I was feeling optimistic about my chances at survival because my escorts hadn’t felt it necessary to restrain or brutalize me.