“You’re not going to sit here and interrogate me,” Quiller said.
“I am if you want my help.”
We experienced another spate of silence. Quiller’s hot gray eyes moved around furiously, trying to get the upper hand in his mind.
Finally he said, “I have an advanced chemical lab in a town called Peanut in southern Kentucky.”
When I didn’t say more Quiller started up again.
“I drink buttermilk every day. I have it here in the cell.”
“Did you know the man?”
“No, but the wallet he carried said that his name was Holiday, Curt with a C Holiday. The man who grabbed me out of Belarus told me that his name was Thad Longerman, another agent of the fucking Deep State.”
“He told you his name?” I was incredulous.
“He told me a name.”
“Where did this conversation take place?”
“It was in some kind of house on the outskirts of Paris. They were waiting to get all the ruse in play before depositing me in the pensione.”
“And how did that work?”
“They drugged me. Just when the drug was wearing off the French police arrested me and turned me over to agents of the United States.”
“No extradition process?”
Quiller sneered.
“So you killed Curt Holiday in Belarus?” I asked.
“No. Togo.”
“And then you fled to Belarus?”
“First I went to Cape Verde. I went to Europe later.”
“How’d you kill Holiday?”
“Why?”
“Details are important,” I said. “You never know when some small fact might rear its head.”
Quiller nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I shot him with a Walther PDP.”
I asked some more questions. He answered without much feeling.
He gave general descriptions of the man he murdered and the one who kidnapped him, nothing I’d recognize or remember.
After a while he ran out of details.
I asked, “Is there anything you need from me?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something I can bring to Ferris or do to get you out of here?”
Quiller’s gaunt face seemed almost to fold in on itself. I’d seen that helplessness many times before. As a cop I’d chased down and arrested many a man and woman who saw in me the worst fate they could imagine. They knew it was the end for them.
“Is there anyone you want me to talk to?” I asked. “Any message you want me to deliver?”
There was, but he still wasn’t sure if I could be trusted. The muscles in his face bunched up and his eyes became slits.
Finally his visage relaxed and he said, “My wife has an assistant. Her name is Minta Kraft. Her number is listed under the name Gloriana Q, just Q, the letter. She’s out on eastern Long Island. I don’t want you bothering my wife, but Minta will pass along any information and provide answers to questions you might have.”
“Minta Kraft, aka Gloriana Q,” I said.
“Yes. If she asks you for some kind of proof, tell her I said that you are the eclipse.”
“The eclipse,” I repeated. “Is there anything you want Ms. Kraft to tell your wife?”
Quiller’s face hardened, to hold back another round of tears, I believed.
“She,” he said and then stopped. “She has to stay strong, stay strong.”
I let those words fade before saying, “I’ll tell her. I will.”
He nodded and I stood up from the stool.
There was a question in the white man among white men’s eyes. I stopped moving and waited to see if his gaze would don words.
“Is that all?” he asked at last.
“For now.”
“Isn’t there anything else?”
“You want the coin?”
Again I had become a conundrum in the prisoner’s gaze.
“I have a memory device that contains many thousands of gigabytes detailing damning information about political leaders, military analysts, public figures... and the rich. The reason the government hates me so is because I can bring the world down around their heads.”
“So what?”
“The name Ferris appears on that device.”
“I don’t know a thing about that.”
Quiller didn’t know whether to believe the claim, but that didn’t matter. For me it was time to go.
4
I banged on the iron door with my fist but there was no response. After waiting nearly two seconds, I got the milking stool and used it to pound heavily on the barrier.
“Take it easy!” the Black guard shouted through iron. “We have to get the key.”
“Let me out of here!” was my reply.
It felt like years had passed between the time I crossed the bridge of the damned to Rikers and when I was safe in my Bianchina again. My violent outburst against the cell door frightened the salt and pepper guards. They knew an out-of-control con when they saw one. They knew the malice harbored in my heart.
I made it to the Montague Street office a few minutes before 1:00.
I considered going to my third-floor apartment first, but there was a lot of work to do, a lot of fearful energy to work off.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Aja was sitting behind the reception desk working on something that took both the computer and a few stacks of paper to deal with.
“What’s all this mess?” I asked.
“I was just trying to get your quarterly statements together to send to the accountant. Some of these expense checks make no sense at all.”
“Like what?”
“Like this one here,” she said, taking a crumpled piece of paper from the open pencil drawer. “It says that you paid for a dinner with somebody named the letter B for six hundred dollars at a restaurant called Butts and Things.”
“So?” I said, perching on the edge of the desk. “That sounds pretty straightforward.”
“A six-hundred-dollar dinner at a strip club in Newark? And the bill, no details, just a total of six hundred three dollars and forty-eight cents.”
“Well, um,” I uttered. “You see, ah, the waitress was an informant. You know?”
“Your snitch,” Aja said, unable to hide her smirk.
“Yeah. I paid her six hundred for an address of a guy, another informant.”
“What about the three forty-eight?”
“I had a Coke.”
“Why not just say you paid six hundred dollars for information?”
“Because then I’d need to file a ten ninety-nine and Boomba would have to pay taxes, only she wouldn’t, pay taxes that is, and I’d end up spending a thousand dollars for an address that the subject had vacated three weeks before.”
“Boomba? What kind of name is that?”
“The kind of name that an informant who works in a strip club might have.”
“Okay,” she sighed.
“You don’t have to do this, sweetie. I usually just send Maxie a box with all the papers and he makes sense out of them.”
“How am I ever gonna be your partner in the business if I don’t know how the business works?”
“You’re not gonna be my partner,” I said pointedly. “You’re gonna be a doctor of liberal arts in California selling art to billionaire deep-sea colonists and married to a nonbinary polymer surgeon whose specialty will be increasing the human potential.”
“It was almost a year ago I said that.”
“Really? Seems like only six months.”
“You know everything isn’t a joke.”
“No,” I agreed. “Did you finish that paper?”
“Fanon is hard.” Aja-Denise’s eyes knitted into something like worry.
“To understand?”
“No. Just his talk about how Black people have given up their identities because of what white culture has done to us.”