“You think you’ll like it down in Savannah?” I asked the child.
“Uncle Clark’s got a swimming pool and a big tree where I can have a tree house.”
Ida glanced at me. She seemed embarrassed that she’d allowed her daughter to be bribed with material promises.
“What are you doing in Atlanta?” the newlywed asked me.
“I’m working for a company that builds and operates private prisons.”
“Oh,” Ida uttered. “I see.”
“You don’t like the idea of private prisons?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in prisons — period.” There was backbone there.
“Even for murderers and molesters?”
“Prisons criminalize,” she said. It was a welcomed rebuke.
“My daddy went to prison,” Florence offered. “They beat him up and then they killed him.”
I took the passenger train to baggage and then looked around until I found carousel 3. The lady with the pink carry-on was there. She waited patiently, glancing around now and then. Looking for Rags, I’d bet. But my cousin hadn’t checked a bag. He’d told me that anything special we’d need he’d send overnight.
My suitcase was the last one out of the chute. It was a gag bag that Aja gave me for a birthday one year — jet black with a big red eye painted on either side.
“Now everyone’ll know you’re a PI, Daddy.”
“Won’t that just be peachy,” I said, and she laughed and laughed.
The Airbnb was in an apartment building on Marquee Street in the Bankhead neighborhood. It was a lively Black enclave with music pouring out of windows and from passing cars. Men and women talked and laughed on the streets.
The studio was on the sixth floor amid a crowd of trees that housed an aerie of birds that, I later learned, sang both day and night. It had a small terrace that looked down on Marquee. I pulled a padded chair out there and looked down upon my new environs. Working-class and down-market, it was a lively place. I saw two men get into a fistfight toward late afternoon. They hadn’t been loud or boastful before engaging so I figured they must have had a deep disagreement. When one of the men got the upper hand, he kept on beating his opponent as the poor man lolled against a wire fence.
I saw that the loser was in danger of losing more than the fight, but I was too far away, and besides, I had a job to do and couldn’t afford getting mixed up with the APD. I was considering going into the apartment so as to not be identified as a witness when...
“Back it up!” a woman’s loud voice commanded.
The victor kept hitting his victim until the large Black woman advanced on him armed with a baseball bat. She went right into the sphere of the fight and hit the aggressor hard on the shoulder — to get his attention.
He looked up from the bloody loser and said, “I’m’a—”
What cut him off was the woman swinging the bat like a National League pro. It only missed because the man ducked. By the time he raised his head again she was ready for strike three.
Other older, and some younger, Black folk had come out to back the slugger up.
“You beat him,” the woman said. “Now get the fuck outta heah.”
Back in the studio I put on a pair of eight-year-old blue jeans and donned a white T-shirt. I wore a gold pinky ring festooned with an onyx square that had a tiny, glittering diamond at the center. Finishing the ensemble with a pair of Air Jordans, I made my way down to Big Bob’s Barbecue on Arthur. There I ordered a slab of ribs with extra spicy sauce on the side.
Waiting for the meal to arrive, I happened to be looking at the front door when a young Black woman came in. Five-three or four, she weighed maybe 138 filled out just right. She had a lazy eye and one gold-capped upper canine. At first glance she looked like a young office worker, but then you noticed the coarseness of the cloth and the subtle dissonance of greens and blues that made up her outfit. One lime pump had a deeply scuffed toe.
She was beautiful.
I made no gesture toward her, however. I was in Atlanta working beyond hope to finish a job before it did me in. So it seemed almost mystical that as she looked around the room that wandering eye settled on me.
She waved as if she knew me and then walked up to my table.
“You mind if I sit here, mister?”
“I’d mind if you didn’t.”
“I don’t wanna give you the wrong idea or nuthin’. There’s a man out there lookin’ for me and I don’t wanna talk to him.”
“Have a seat.”
She smiled and pulled out the chair.
“This man mad at you?” I asked.
“Uh-uh. He think he in love.”
“Thinks?”
“He likes a woman with my kinda figure and he broke up with his girlfriend just last week. Now he got his eye on me.”
“So? Just tell him no.”
“Yeah, I know, but I like the way he look too. I know if we talk he gonna make me do something I’ll be sorry for.”
“Like what?”
The waiter came up with my ribs. He eyed my date with definite suspicion.
“You want something to eat?” I asked the woman wearing the lime-colored shoes.
“I like their brisket,” she said.
“Bring it with everything,” I told the server.
Her name was Lula McKenzie and she was born on the living room floor of an apartment not seven blocks from that restaurant. She was twenty-seven years old January last.
“What do you do for a living?” I asked for no reason in particular.
“Why?” she asked me, an edge to the tone.
“I just want to get to know you better.”
“Why?” The hard tone was gone.
“Because I was sitting here alone when the prettiest girl I’ve seen down here walks through the door. Not only that, she walks up to me.”
“I told you that I was tryin’ to hide from Alfonso.”
“That don’t change a thing.”
Lula took a sudden intake of breath and I told her that I was staying two blocks away.
We started kissing on the stairs. It took maybe twelve minutes to make the five flights. She told me that she liked it when her boyfriends kissed her down there and I moved to oblige. She returned the favor and then we got down to it.
When I awoke the next morning, just about sunrise, Lula was gone. She’d only taken two of the seven hundred-dollar bills from my wallet so I knew she liked me.
Atlanta is my kind of town.
16
I spent the next few days walking around the southern city. Atlanta’s a good-looking town even when it’s hot and sticky. It’s very southern down there, so people talk to you and seem to really mean what they say. They look in your eyes with a greeting on their lips.
The other two things about ATL were that it is modern and also Black with a deep progressive culture. A town that awakened one morning with the realization of who and what it was with no regrets or antipathies.
I spent long nights in the Airbnb asking questions of the Internet. There were few solid answers. No connection between Zyron International and Rembert Cormody, the Men of Action, or any other alt-right or nationalist group — at least no connection that I could find. Alfie Quiller hadn’t been public about prisons, private or otherwise, and the U.S. government hadn’t said anything new about him for months.
Mathilda Prim graduated summa cum laude in information studies from Syracuse University in 2011 and was not heard from again until 2019, when she was granted a master’s degree from Harvard in something called theoretical chemistry. It was just a name on a list of Ivy League accomplishments. There was no evidence that that name was my Mattie, but I thought it might be.