I love my daughter.
“I gotta work on this job your great-grandmother’s boyfriend gave me. Unless somebody really important calls, can you just take a message?”
“Sure. What’s the job?”
I told her about Quiller, my visit with him in hell, and that we’d get paid enough for this one job to take it easy for the rest of the next quarter.
“Maybe we could take a vacation with a couple of your girlfriends.” I made the offer because I could see how serious she became while listening to me.
In my office I turned my swivel chair to stare through the window down on Montague. Pedestrians strolled along talking broadly with friends or silently passing alone. Some talked on their phones while others studied the small screens. If there is such a thing as passive ecstasy, I was feeling it right then. I had walked into the lion’s den and come out again — more or less whole. That was a joy unequaled in my dreams.
“Daddy?” the intercom blurted.
“Yeah?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay. Come on in. Make sure the front door is locked.”
She was wearing a floral dress of blues and reds with a white background and a choke chain comprised of deep red beads, each carved into the form of a rose. The hem of the dress flared out at the knee. All that beauty, and yet she strode in like a prosecuting attorney ready to seek the death penalty.
She took a chair before the desk and I gave a smile that had not the slightest hope.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Quiller is a killer,” she rhymed. “Maybe he hasn’t shot anybody, but his words are deadlier than a fully loaded assault rifle.”
“Are we forgetting the freedom of speech?”
“He’s still a killer.”
“So am I.” That was the first time I made such a confession to my daughter. She knew, of course, that I often went armed in the world. She even knew that I’d been in gun battles where people had died. But I’d never been so blasé as to admit to my culpability with a shrug.
A.D. looked as if she wanted to spit on the ground at my feet.
“He’s a murderer,” she said.
“You have, I suppose, heard of the burden of proof?” If she was going to prosecute, I was going to show that I could lawyer too.
“How can you sit there and defend him like that? He spews poison in his books and on TV appearances and, and, and he shits on our rights.”
Aja knew how much I hated it when she cursed. I was old-school. In my heart I held women to what used to be called a higher standard. But the world had changed and if I wanted a relationship with the new order I had to at least be aware of its expectations.
“Sure,” I said. “All that’s true. But Roger asked me to do a job and I work for a living.”
“But Quiller,” she sputtered and then was lost for a second or two. “He’s a racist.”
“So am I and just about every other dark-skinned person that lives in America. This whole country got the poison of racism in its marrow. You know that.”
“But he hates Black people, Daddy. He hates you and me and Mom and everybody like us. If you help him you’ll be helping what he believes in.”
It was a day of many deep breaths.
I gazed into the anger of my daughter’s eyes, feeling pride for what she was saying. I was happy that she was still pure in her mind, absolute in her expectation of what was right.
“Do you hate anybody, honey? I mean without a good reason — a damn good reason.”
Aja was smarter than I and quicker too. She saw where my argument would lead and so slowed her accusatorial roll.
“Mr. Ferris could hire somebody else to take this case,” she offered.
“Sure he could. But he asked me.”
“You’ve turned down potential clients before.”
“Roger’s more than a client.”
“Yeah, he’s rich.”
“No. It’s not that. He makes your great-grandmother very happy. Happier than she’s been since your great-grandfather died. And one time, when he didn’t have to, he helped a client of mine, a Black man, escape the injustice of the criminal courts.”
She knew what I was talking about.
“But Quiller has said such terrible things and, and he preaches that everyone who is not a white male is less than human.”
“Forty percent less,” I added.
“How can you laugh at this?”
“I’m not laughing, Aja. I’m trying to prove to you that I know what I’m doing. And I’m not working for Quiller. I’d never take his money. But I owe Roger. I’m going to look into the case, and if I find that the forty percenter is being railroaded I’ll turn that information over to the man who hired me. If I find out that Quiller is guilty... I’ll just walk away.”
Aja’s eyes gauged my worth. It looked as if she found me lacking. That’s a moment that all fathers have to face.
After her interminable silence Aja said, “I’m going back to my desk.”
She stood up and walked out. If someone had asked me at that moment to explain my emotional state I would have said, Everything good and everything bad that makes me human.
5
The vacuum Aja left in the office and in my chest did not feel good. She was right about Quiller, but even though I agreed with her politics, I was bound to take his case, so it felt right to feel bad about what had to be done.
Alfred Xavier Quiller enrolled at MIT at the age of fourteen. He graduated in twenty-one months and then designed a car engine that ran on oil derived from the seeds of a weed that grows mostly in Utah. He’d begun plausible research on a Malaysian spider that lives and works with others of its kind. He’d made a theoretical model that would increase the tensile strength of the webs of this species and proposed to farm them for a viable alternative to steel. Before he came up on the government’s bad list he’d begun work on a cannon that could, literally, shoot a spaceship to the moon and beyond.
Quiller was a landscape painter and a passable poet. He served as an intelligence interpreter in the army for three years before receiving an honorable discharge. He’d also been a freehand rock climber of some renown among the advocates of that sport.
On the other hand, Quiller had started the three-fifths movement when he was only fifteen, positing that so-called white men had proven throughout history that they were at least 40 percent more productive and therefore more valuable to the human species than any other group or gender. Because of this truth, he said that all the colored races and white women should be limited to 60 percent of full voting rights unless they took a test proving their equivalence, or, as some have said, their whiteness. Because of an extremely long, and yet still bogus, statistical equation white men would not be required to take this test. Quiller proved to himself that he wasn’t a misogynist because he believed in the evolution of the hyena, which made the female the superior.
The race-baiter continually misinterpreted Darwin, like so many others have, by replacing the word fittest with strongest in the survival dictum of that great thinker.
In short — he was a man of towering intelligence fueled by a zealot’s ignorance.
Recently, while on the run from the Justice Department, Quiller stopped long enough to create an hour-long Quiller-Talk explaining further ruminations on the place of women in the modern polity. He claimed, vehemently, that even though women were inferior to white men in the political realm, they were actually more important as citizens. Further research, he revealed, had discovered that women were 79 percent more influential in child-rearing than men. Because of this lopsided social advantage, Quiller felt it necessary to apologize for his deprecatory diatribes on femininity in the past and also to say that women should always be given the benefit of the doubt in any constitutional question that didn’t concern the vote.