I was so angry that I started hitting myself in the head so that my mother would look at me and both of them would agree on the rules of conversation. But they didn’t notice and so I kept on hitting myself until it began to hurt.
That’s when I woke up. I couldn’t have been hitting myself, because my hands and feet were tied. The reason I couldn’t speak was because of the gag in my mouth. My nose was partially stuffed up, and so I found it extremely difficult to breathe. I tried to spit out the gag but it was tied tight around my head. There were rags stuffed into my mouth. I got so frightened that breathing became even harder. That’s when I started kicking and flailing around. I was in a tight space. There was the smell of gasoline and rubber around me. I was in the trunk of a car. This new bit of knowledge brought on my first-ever attack of claustrophobia. The word went through my mind, its definition and Latin root claustrum, a closed space, but that didn’t keep the level of anxiety from rising to the color of red in my mind. I kicked and bucked and screamed silently.
The trunk came open and a tall man with thick glasses that had round lenses smiled down at me. I was writhing like an earthworm freshly exposed to air. The man grinned. All of his teeth had spaces between them. His lips quivered with amusement at my plight.
“Stuck?” he asked, and I stopped struggling.
He took out a large pistol and pointed it at my head.
“I’m going to untie you and take the gag out. But if you run or raise your voice I’m going to kill you with this here howitzer. You understand?”
I nodded as best I could and he pulled the gag from my mouth.
I gulped in air, realizing that it was the most precious commodity in all the world. Air. More valuable than gold or sex. It was delicious, rich. I lay there almost happy in spite of my predicament.
The white kidnapper had a thick mop of brown hair that seemed to grow only from the top of his head. He wore a blue suit on a long and elegant body that didn’t belong to the big head and ugly face. He dragged me from the trunk and untied me. Then he pushed me so hard that I fell to the floor. He yanked me up and pushed me again, just as hard. I didn’t fall that time because I was ready.
“Get moving, nigger.”
The word brought back my dream.
We were in a cavernlike garage. The thug in the blue suit shoved me toward an external staircase that must have gone up at least two-and-a-half floors. At the top was a door. The goon pressed a jury-rigged button but I heard no ring.
“Louis?” a voice asked from the other side.
“Yeah.”
The door opened inward. A small man was standing there. I say small because he was an inch or two shorter than I.
“You got somebody?” the short man said.
“Come on, Eric. You see him don’t ya? He was sneakin’ around the bitch’s front door. I threw him in the trunk and brought him over. He up?”
“I woke him when you called. He’s in the big room.”
“Lead the way,” Louis said.
Eric rubbed his hands together and led us through a maze of short hallways and across nondescript little rooms. We finally came to a broad corridor with thick burgundy carpeting and gold-and-yellow walls. This led into an antechamber whose only purpose was to bring many different hallways into the presence of a large, unfinished oaken door.
Eric allowed Louis and me to go ahead. I noticed that Louis hesitated before raising his knuckles to rap out our request for entry.
I was in a world that was completely strange to my experience. I understood men like Louis and Eric. I understood petit bourgeois pretenders like Bartholomew Perry. But that lobby was the largest room I had ever been in in a man’s home, and it was just the appetizer for what was to come.
I realized that the main course in a house like this might well be a human life.
27
THE ROUGH-HEWN DOOR opened inward. The man standing there surprised me. He was a timid-looking guy in a shabby green suit. He looked like a bookkeeper or a door-to-door salesman—certainly not the monster that I felt must lay beyond that great door. The timid man stood aside and we entered a room that any king in Europe would have been at home in. There were rows of red velvet-covered chairs along the walls and an incredibly long and wide table, cut from a single great tree, down the center of the chamber. Above each chair hung an antique tapestry, each one depicting a different hunting tableau. At the far end of the table sat a throne. That’s the only thing I can call it. You had to ascend three steps to get to it, and it was plush with golden velvet and ornately carved wood.
The man who sat there had a lean, leonine face and long, thick brown hair that flowed backward. He wore a red shirt and white trousers, no shoes or socks, rings or glasses. He was over forty and under sixty.
His eyes were mad.
“Who is this?” the king asked his vassals.
“The driver’s license in his wallet says Paris Minton,” Louis said.
“Where did you find him?”
“Checking out the mailbox at the Faison girl’s house. I figured since it’s niggers in this that you’d wanna see him.”
The king looked at his lackey with something like disdain in his nutso gaze.
I wanted to scream.
“What’s your name?” the king asked me.
“Paris, like the man said. What’s yours?”
Louis’s hand, which still gripped my biceps, tightened. The man on his throne sat up straighter. He frowned for a moment and then he laughed.
“They call me Maestro,” he said, and my heart sank. “What were you doing at my daughter’s sublet, Paris?”
“I don’t know anything about your daughter, sir. All I knew was that it’s an address that a man I’m looking for had left behind in his hideout.”
“What man is that?”
“Young Negro name of Bartholomew Perry,” I said as bravely as I could.
“And where was he?”
I gave the address, certain that the bookkeeper or Eric would write it down.
“But,” I added, “he was already gone from those premises. We got there maybe three hours too late.”
“We?”
“Me and Fearless. Fearless Jones.” Just saying the name gave me hope and maybe even a tiny bit of nerve.
“And why were you and this Fearless looking for Mr. Perry?”
“A man named Milo Sweet was looking for him. He’s a bail bondsman but sometimes he agrees to look for missing persons. Me and Fearless work for him now and then.”
“What did he want with Perry?”
“He said that it was a missing person case. We figured that it was family lookin’ for him.”
I was walking a tightrope with the make-believe king and his subjects. I didn’t know what they knew, so I decided to lie by leaving out any direct involvement we might have had with the Wexler clan. Fearless knew how to take care of himself and Milo was tucked away with Fearless’s mother. The only person I had to worry about was Loretta Kuroko. But all I had to do was call her. That would be easy, if I lived to dial the number.
“How did you find Perry’s hiding place?”
“Milo called me at my house and told me. He said that one of his informants had given him the tip.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Didn’t you wonder why he’d call you if he knew where his quarry was?”
“I was just happy to stay on the payroll, Maestro.”
Louis’s hand tightened again.
“Do you know who I am, Paris?”
“No sir. I mean, I figure you’re rich and all, but I never heard’a you that I know.”
“My last name is Wexler.”
I squinted and then shrugged.