Anyway, I turned in and walked right down to it without being stopped or questioned, though there were a pair of signs, one on each side, warning you not to do that.
I went up the steps and stopped close to the door and rang. A colored man in a white linen jacket, like stewards wear at country clubs, opened up and looked out at me after a considerable wait.
I said, “Can I see Mr. Roman?”
“What do you want to see him about?”
I’d walked too far just to turn the wallet in at the door. “I want to give him something that belongs to him.”
He closed the door again — sort of scared, I thought — and there was another wait. I had a feeling I was being looked over, but I couldn’t make out from where, nor by whom, so I let it go again.
Then the same colored man came back again. “Come inside a minute,” he said. There was something temporary about the permission, like a sort of tryout or screening. I could tell that by the brief inflection of his voice. He didn’t say Mr. Roman would see me, or anything like that.
I went inside after him. He kept going toward a broad flight of stairs, but before I could get to them somebody suddenly got in front of me, and I found myself stopped. He wasn’t anywhere near the forty-four that the driver’s license had put Roman down for. He came up to about my eyebrows, but he packed a lot more bulk the wide way. His skin was the color of dried lemon peel, and with the same kind of coarse bumps in it. His hair looked like it had been given a shoeshine with one of those flannel polishing cloths the kids use. His eyes looked at you steady enough, but something had been left out of them. Either it had died out behind them, or else it had never been born in them in the first place. I wouldn’t know what to call it; I’m not good at those things. Even dogs have it in their eyes; he didn’t. Soul, I guess. His reminded me of shoe buttons. Or of coffee beans. Smooth, hard-surfaced; just objects.
He had on a black silk shirt and a mustard-color sport jacket hanging open over that. Bare blue-veined feet stuck into straw sandals. But you didn’t feel like laughing.
Something about him gave me the creeps; I don’t know what it was. It was like standing with your face up against a coiled rattlesnake. An inch away, so that the darn thing wouldn’t even have to stretch its neck to fang you. You can’t even back out, because that might bring it on even faster. That was the kind of feeling.
But not because of any hostility or threat he was showing. He wasn’t showing any. His drawl was slow and indifferent, and he acted half asleep on his feet. Even his hands — they kept brushing into me lightly all the time, without his seeming to know it.
“What was that message?”
I didn’t get him for a minute.
He sort of grazed me on the chest, on the left side, with the back of his hand.
He said, “What was that you said at the door?”
“I said I want to see Mr. Roman, to give him something that I’ve got for him.”
“That could mean a lot of things, you know.” But he didn’t say it to me; he said it to the colored man waiting with one foot on the first step, one foot on the second.
His hand had been down at my hip. Or something had — too quick and deft for me to be sure. But then when I looked it wasn’t any more.
He said, “Excuse me, you had a little dust on you.”
I thought about it an hour later. An hour later I knew I’d been frisked. But right then I didn’t.
The colored man who had been waiting on the stairs said, “Okay, Mister Jordan?” He acted like this was nothing new to him; he’d watched things like this many times before.
He said, “Okay, he can go up now.”
I went up the stairs after the butler. I expected to hear that funny buzzing sound a rattler makes behind me any minute, but I didn’t.
He knocked on a door up there and said through it, “Someone for the boss.”
A voice answered through it. “He says all right.”
The first one opened the door for me and said, “Go ’head in.”
It was a big bedroom, and one wall had been practically left out. There was a terrace outside with an awning over it.
There was a man sprawled out in a deck chair out there. I couldn’t see his face at first; there was a barber working over him. There was a white girl crouched on a hassock, holding one of his hands. She was taking little digs under his nails with a little stick with cotton wrapped around the point of it.
I just stood there in the middle of the room and waited.
He said, “Get those sideburns even.”
The colored valet got down on one knee. I saw him take a little spooled tape measure out of the pocket of his jacket and touch it off against one side of the head, then against the other.
He said, “Quarter of an inch down from the top of each ear.”
“And give ’em a little slant. No square corners. I hate these square corners on ’em.”
I stood and waited.
All of a sudden the man in the chair said, “Ow!” and one of his knees kicked up a little. It wasn’t the barber; he was standing back from him.
The girl said, “You moved, Mr. Roman.”
He sat up straight in the chair and gave her a paste in the eye. He left his hand open, but he plugged it home hard. She went off the hassock and sprawled in a sitting position on the floor, with her legs still up over it.
“But you didn’t,” he snarled at her. “Not quick enough!”
She began to cry.
“Get out of here!” he yelled. “Before you get the terrace all damp!”
She picked up her things, and the valet hustled her across the room and out the door, with his arm across her back to keep her moving. He snatched up a bill from the dresser, on the wing, and I saw him give it to her. I think it was a ten-spot. “That’s all right, chile,” I heard him whisper consolingly; “you’ll do better next time. Don’t pay no heed. That’s just his way.”
Some way, I thought to myself.
Roman got up out of the chair and stretched and came into the room. He didn’t look the forty-four the license had him down for, either. Toads don’t show their age. He had on blazer-striped satin pajamas, purple and a very light green, about the color of a fish’s belly when you look at it through the water. That was what they were; the record stands. He had a brocaded robe mercifully covering most of them, except the trouser legs and the chest; of a very intricate pattern — I think they call it Paisley.
He went over and looked at himself in the mirror. Looked at himself good. I kept thinking, You must have a strong stomach, mister. Then he picked up a cigar and clipped it and lighted it. Then he decided the time had come to notice me.
He said, “What can I do for you, Jack?”
I said, “I thought maybe you’d like to have this back,” and held it out toward him.
He looked at it in surprise; didn’t seem to want to believe it was his, even after he’d opened it and conned it. He said, “This ain’t mine, is it? Where’d you get it?”
I told him where I’d found it.
He still had a hard time convincing himself. He said to the valet, “Get out my last night’s. See if the wallet’s missing from it.”
The colored man looked. He said, “It’s gone, boss. Not a sign of it.”
Roman said, “I never even missed it until now!” He was a little taut, I thought. He started to look all through it quickly, but not at the money.
Then he shot open a drawer and took out another billfold, an alligator one this time, and looked through that. “I guess it was in this one,” he said. He looked a little relieved, I thought.