Friday was much like Thursday. Eighty-six customers with 216 transactions, a zero balance, and a trip to the vault to install his cashbox.
On Saturday Laertes had lunch with his ex-wife, Bonita, and their eleven-year-old daughter, Medea. Bonita and Laertes had met at the Twenty-Third Street branch of Maritime Merchants Bank when they were both tellers. Now she was a senior vice president at National Trust Investments and Loan. They divorced because she claimed, and he agreed, that he had little ambition in his banking career.
“How’s history coming?” the father asked his daughter after the first few awkward moments amongst the three at Jammy’s Diner on Eighteenth Street.
“It’s great,” the child said. She was a deep brown color and had big eyes and an infectious smile. “I just read everything three times like you told me to, and then I know it without thinking.”
“You always have to think,” Bonita corrected.
Fifteen years younger than Laertes, Bonita was slender, tall, and strong. He was still attracted to her, even though she’d married Hero Martin, a German-American from Pittsburgh. He had nothing against Martin except for the fact that Medea called him Daddy.
“There’s nature, second nature, and thought,” Laertes said, in response to his ex-wife’s criticism. “The first is physical, the last of the mind, and the middle is something you know so well that it’s just there, like a sleeping fish in calm waters.”
Medea’s big eyes seemed to be fixed on her father’s words. At moments like this he liked to think that she saw something worthy in him.
“Are we going to order?” Bonita asked. “Medea promised her father that they’d go to the Met together this afternoon.”
On Sunday, Laertes went to the All Saints Rest Home in Nyack to visit Helena Havelock-Jackson, his mother.
“Pompey!” the ninety-one-year-old matriarch exclaimed. For the past five months or so, Helena had seen Laertes’s father’s face when looking at him; another kind of fish in a different depth of water, Laertes thought.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You look so tired, honey. I’ll make us some marrow soup, and we’ll go to bed early.” She placed four fingers on her son’s left hand, and a sigh came unbidden from way down in his throat.
“How are you, Mom?”
“You know nothing’s wrong with me,” was her rote reply. “Are you having trouble at work?”
“No.”
“Are you gonna get that promotion soon?”
“They went with somebody else.”
Helena’s skin was dark like her son’s and similar to long-deceased Pompey’s. Her eyes were both assertive and vulnerable.
“What do you mean?” she asked, pain tucked in with the words.
Holding her hands, Laertes explained to her about his harebrained scheme to get a job at MMM. And though she thought she was talking to her late husband, Laertes knew that she heard and mostly understood his words.
“That’s always been your problem,” Helena Havelock-Jackson said to her son through the medium of her husband. “You think bigger than the people believe they already big. That’s why you called our children by them Greeks and why your daddy named you for a general to freedom.”
On Monday afternoon at 4:21 p.m., Laertes Jackson departed Maritime Merchants Bank. He left behind a zero balance and a cashbox containing $6,627.14. He had executed in excess of four hundred transactions that day.
“Excuse me, sir,” someone called. “Mr. Jackson.”
Laertes turned and saw a short man in a muted maroon suit trundling toward him. There was something familiar about the man, but because he saw people all day long, Laertes had learned to disregard faces, features, and names.
But now he was shaking hands with someone who at least knew his name.
“Uh?” Laertes said.
“Howard Sansome,” the small but powerful man said.
“Um?”
“Last Thursday. You told me that I had to go to Fort Greene to update my account.”
“Either that,” the teller said, “or send it by mail.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” the man with the wide face asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I know,” Sansome said, with an air of confidentiality. “It seems kind of odd for someone who just knows you from a single encounter through a window of bulletproof glass to act like we’re friends.”
“Yeah.”
“But we have a lot more in common than that.”
“And what is it we have in common?” Laertes asked. In spite of himself, he was intrigued by Sansome.
“Martin, Martin, and Moll,” the man said, a glimmer of conspiracy in his eye.
“What?” Laertes said. “What do they have to do with you?”
“My title is VP in charge of investigations at Triple-M.”
“Investigating what?”
“Right now, you.”
“Me, for what?”
“Can we get a drink? There’s a bar down the street called The Dutchy. They serve a great Manhattan all afternoon for half price.”
Half an hour later, the drinks had been served to the short white man and his much taller black guest.
“This is very good,” Laertes agreed after his second sip.
“They use bourbon instead of rye, and the vermouth they got isn’t nearly as sweet as most.”
“So,” Laertes said, hoping to prime the explanation of why they were there.
“You know the cards are stacked against just about everybody in America,” Sansome said instead of complying.
“You including all of North and South America, or do you just mean the United States?” Laertes couldn’t help himself.
“So, is that your thing, Jackson?” the pickup host asked. “You need to argue with every word the bosses or their representatives say?”
“No, not at all.”
“You told Ms. Rodriguez that you weren’t African-American,” Sansome offered.
“Is she Mexican?” Laertes asked. “Either that or any other kind of New World so-called Hispanic?”
Howard Sansome downed his drink and gestured at the bartender, a sallow woman of middle age who had the look of having lived hard. He told her to bring two more.
Then the man turned to Laertes and said, “No.”
“No to what?”
“Rodriguez is not any kind of New World anything. Her people are French, but her ex-husband was Puerto Rican.”
“So it just happens that she’s Triple-M’s drive for integration?”
“I doubt it.”
The drinks came, and Howard asked the haggard mixologist to keep them coming.
“So it’s like a, like a capitalist conspiracy,” Laertes said. “They put somebody there who will represent their needs and fuck mine.”
Sansome sipped and thought. After a minute or so he almost said something but then decided to drink a little more.
Finally he said, “I believe that the head of HR thinks that Rahlina really is Puerto Rican. The only thing that matters to Mr. Hawthorne is that all the employees dance to the same beat. So it’s kind of like a conspiracy, but one that nobody is quite aware of.”
Laertes felt as if a light had been turned on in his chest, casting a brilliance that traveled everywhere.
“That’s what I mean when I say that I’m not arguing with everything the bosses say,” Laertes averred. “If you told me that the sky was blue or that this drink was good, I wouldn’t argue. But if you tell me that the word American only meant US citizens or that I am in any way the cultural outcome of the continent of Africa, that I’m African-American before I’m Slave-American, well then, I’d have to argue.”
Two more drinks came.
“So,” Sansome said. “You’re on a quest for justice and not a job.”