Little Green (20 page)

Before being allowed through to the elevators you had to pass a minor inquisition at a counter behind which labored at least a dozen young clerks, receptionists, and other, less definable preprofessionals. That day a young man with almost alabaster white skin, coarse red hair, and pale blue eyes was my corporate magistrate.

“Yes?” he said.

The fact that he didn’t say
sir
reminded me that I was black and hadn’t worn a jacket and tie—all while toting a tan-and-black-striped laundry bag.

“Jackson Blue,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Jackson Blue. Tell him that it’s Mr. Rawlins calling on him.”

The young man was my height and gave the appearance of physical fitness gained from tennis or maybe golf. He hesitated and then asked, “Do you have an appointment?”

A pretty young woman with black hair and pale eyes looked up from a nearby table where she was typing on a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter.

“If I said no would you turn me away?” I asked, knowing that I was wasting my time.

“I can’t let you in without an appointment.”

“What if you called Mr. Blue and he said, ‘Sure, send him up’?”

The young man, nameless as far as I was concerned, raised his right hand and gestured somewhere behind me. I didn’t need to look to know what was coming. I might have taken a glance if I wanted to see how many, but that was of no concern either.

The young woman was now talking on the phone. I wondered if she was calling for additional backup. I imagined that she and the redhead were lovers and her attentiveness was instinct for her man.

The feeling rising in my breast was at once familiar and alien, not unlike my identification with Evander’s fears. Along with anxiety and fear my people had inherited spite and rage for the centuries of oppression that we were reminded of almost every day of our lives. To experience the malice of generations in a moment is a taste so bitter that it could make an otherwise healthy man retch.

I saw this emotion in my imagined reflection in the young man’s blue eyes, but I didn’t feel a thing. I had died and there was nothing that anyone could do to match the experience of my semiresurrection.

“Yes, Mr. Graham?” a man asked.

There were two of him, tall and in gray uniforms, hatless but armed. Both of them were white men, though that didn’t matter; enough Negroes protected the property of men like the receptionist Graham.

“I was trying to explain to this gentleman,” the redhead said, “that you can’t go in without an appointment.”

“Okay, guy,” one of the two said.

“Pardon?”
French is a lovely language. It was the black-haired young woman. “Monsieur Rawlins, non?”

“Oui,”
I replied, and she smiled.

“Parlez-vous francais?”

“Pas vraiment, un peu.”

She smiled at my feeble attempt and said, “Monsieur Blue’s secretary,
Crystal,
non?
She says that ’e is in the building but not in ’is office. She says to bring you up.”

“What are you saying?” the talking security guard asked.

This question was also on Graham’s face.

“If someone asks to see somebody you should call,” the young woman said to Graham. “It is not for us to question them like Nazis.”

This last word told a whole story. There was a generation of French men and women who understood, however briefly, what it was to be treated like a dog in your own home.

“So he can go up?” the guard asked Graham.

“I … I guess so.”

“Come,” the young Frenchwoman said to me.

“It is so beautiful in California,” she said as we waited for the executive elevator half a block or so away from the front desk. “Too bad people like Loring Graham cannot count their blessings instead of trying to be bosses all the time.”

The silvery doors slid open.

One thing I liked about Proxy Nine was the interior of the elevators; they were utilitarian, floored with linoleum and encased by walls of dull chrome.

“What’s your name?” I asked as she pushed the button for the thirty-first floor.

“Asiette,” she said. Her light eyes were violet—strikingly so.

“Beautiful name.”

“Merci.”
Her annunciation contained a pert curtsy.

“Do you know Jackson?”

“We are supposed to call no matter ’oo comes,” she replied.

“Yes, you said that, but do you know him?”

She grinned and I felt like part of the family.

“Oui,”
she admitted. “Monsieur Blue comes down to the employee cafeteria a few times each week and sits with us. Most of our officers ’ave never
seen the basement—except for Monsieur Villard, but that is different. ’E really is the boss.

“But because I ’ear you say ‘Jackson Blue’ I look and I see that you are ’ere and I think maybe Loring should just call but ’e does not and so I do.”

She was wearing a close-fitting black-and-white herringbone skirt that came down to her knees and a thin, dark blue woolen sweater, proof against the air-conditioning. I smiled because she was dressed the way her mother did when she was the same age.

“Something is funny?” she asked.

“No, just thinking about Paris during the war.”

“You were there?”

I nodded. “The people were so happy to have us. I really felt like a hero.”

“I was in Dijon then, too young to remember.”

“You are a child of that country, though.”

The elevator doors opened and I gestured for Asiette to go first.

“Merci, mais non,”
she said. “They didn’t ask me to come, only to make sure that you got ’ere. Do you know where you are going?”

“Yeah. Pleasure to meet you, Asiette,” I said, and we shook hands before the doors closed on her smile.

I looked at the elevator for a few seconds before turning. I had been raised to be wary of change in the world.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
, people had always told me. But maybe that wasn’t so.

I stopped at the threshold of Jackson’s secretary’s door and said, “Knock, knock.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” the elder white woman said. Crystal was gray-haired, wearing a rose-colored dress suit. He accent was mildly English. This might have been her birthright or her education. Either way it took me another step away from America. “Come in, come in. Mr. Blue is with the technicians working on some computer matter.
I don’t pretend to understand what they do. If it was up to me I’d do everything with pencil and paper, maybe a typewriter now and then. I mean, what’s the big hurry?”

“I completely agree. Can I have a seat?”

“Please.”

There was a burgundy sofa set across from her mahogany desk. I set my laundry bag on the floor and sat back comfortably. It was as good a place as any to wait. Crystal’s office was big enough for most vice presidents, certainly larger than my little detective’s room down on Central.

I sat back and she said, “Nice weather outside?”

“A little hot.”

She nodded and went back to whatever project she was working on before I got there. That was fine by me. I needed a moment to think about why I was there. Talking to Jackson was always a pleasure. He was a genius, the smartest man I ever met. He could see patterns connecting the sunshine and a child’s laughter with nucleic acids and the theory of relativity.

Jackson’s province at P9 was its worldwide computer system. He was also a confidant to Jean-Paul Villard, president and CEO of the insurance giant. The amount of money I had in that laundry bag wouldn’t mean much to somebody like Jean-Paul. I needed a pair of eyes that would be unimpressed by Evander’s lucre.

“Easy?” Jackson was standing in the hallway outside Crystal’s door looking at me with the most frightened eyes I had seen since before my untimely demise.

He wore a medium gray suit, bright white shirt, and a burgundy-and-blue tie topped off with spectacles that I knew were just clear glass. Jackson worked hard to give the appearance of a nonthreatening black man. The craziest thing about his charade was that it seemed to work.

“What is it, Jackson?” I asked with only a hint of the exasperation I felt.

I realized one day that Blue and I were friends simply because I
knew him so well. I understood him better than his girlfriend or his mother. Jackson’s fears were more profound than the greatest intelligence. I often felt that he had to be as smart as he was just to keep his head above the waters of continual and needless anxiety.

“Say,” he commanded, “ ‘forgive me my sins,’ and then say, ‘lived.’ ” He was so frightened that he sputtered a little.

“Forgive me my sins. Lived.”

When I pronounced this nonsense he relaxed—some. After a minute he came into the receptionist’s chamber. Crystal and I watched him peering at me as if he expected the words I said to cause spontaneous combustion.

When I didn’t burst into flame he knitted his eyebrows in concentration and then, finally, made his decision.

“Come on in, Easy.… Yeah. Come on.”

Jackson’s office was immense, wider than five tall men laid down head to foot and longer than ten. Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t have touched the ceiling on his best jump. One wall was a library’s worth of bookshelves, filled to overflowing, and the opposite wall was replete with oil paintings of famous jazz musicians who had, at one time or another, been to France. The Oriental carpet was royal blue, almost metallic gold, and bloodred. Half the way through the room, before his ebony wood desk and the picture window beyond, sat two canary yellow sofas facing each other over a big glass box used as a coffee table.

In contrast to his workspace, Jackson was skinny, tar black, and shorter than most women he ever dated.

“I understand the ‘forgive me my sins,’ ” I said, sitting next to my friend on a yellow cushion. “I guess that’s something Lucifer, or his minions, can’t say, but why
lived
?”

“That’s like a backwards signature.”

“Devil …”

“You got it, brother. The devil spelled backwards is
lived
.”

I laughed heartily and slapped Jackson’s shoulder. He was still wary of me, but that was a natural state for him with almost everyone.

“I got a problem, Jackson. Mouse hired me to find this kid named Evander Noon.…”

“Timbale’s son.”

“How’d you know … Oh, right, Raymond got you to hire her.… But she won’t talk to him, so how did she know to apply for the job?”

“Lissa MacDaniels,” Jackson proclaimed.

“That’s her friend?”

“Yeah. Mouse had me hire Lissa, and then Lissa told Timbale about the security job.”

“So you know about Evander?” I asked.

“Only that he’s her son. I never met the woman.”

“Mouse went through all that just to get her a job?”

“Yep.”

“Did he tell you why?”

Jackson shook his head. “I’idn’t ask. You know doin’ a favor for Mouse is like money in the bank, like your own personal block’a gold in Fort Knox. And as you well know—you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Jackson, I need to talk to Jean-Paul.”

Without hesitation the skinny little man jumped up and walked back toward his broad black desk. I followed and gazed out of his window while he worked the dial on his phone.

The farthest mountains south and east of the city were snowcapped, and the sky was as blue as it gets.

“Jean-Paul?” Jackson said. “I got Easy ovah here, man. He said he needs to talk to you.… Huh? No, I don’t know what he wants, but you know he almost died, so it’s got to be serious. And I was thinkin’ that he might be able to help us wit’ that thing I was tellin’ you about.… Yeah, yeah … Okay. See you in a minute then.”

Jackson looked up at me with conspiracy in his eyes. That look said,
For a dead man you sure can get into mischief
.

Still looking at me, Jackson got up from behind his desk.

“Let’s get comfortable, Easy,” he said. “You know I don’t like bein’ stuck behind a desk; makes me feel like I’m my own worst enemy sittin’ in that chair.”

Back on the yellow sofa Jackson kicked off his black shoes, revealing blue, green, and yellow argyle socks. He pulled these dressy feet up under him, settling into half lotus, his back resting against the window-ward armrest of the office couch.

He took off his useless glasses to scrutinize me.

“I’m not a ghost, Jackson, just a very lucky man who survived a hellacious car crash.”

“Then why you ain’t in bed?” he asked, flinching a little at his own question.

“Like a shark.”

“Got to keep movin’,” he agreed tentatively. “You wanna drink?”

“You know I don’t drink.”

“They said you went off that cliff drunk. Now you back on the wagon?”

“Either that or the bottom of the hill.”

That got Jackson to smile.

“And you just come by to say hi to me and JP?” he asked.

“Evander’s in trouble and I promised Ray that I’d dig him out.”

“Uh-huh.”

The light knocking on the half-open office door announced Jean-Paul Villard. The Frenchman was olive-skinned with dark, dark
brown eyes, almost black. The little mustache he’d sported the last time we met had been shaved off. His hair was longish compared to the crew cuts of his corporate American counterparts. If the police asked me to describe him I would have said that he was about five-nine, welterweight and wiry.

That day Jean-Paul was wearing a black suit designed for a slight build. His shirt was slate gray with no tie, open at the neck.

Seeing the understated French CEO I understood what my old friend and I were doing—or, more accurately, what Jackson was doing. The whole act, from half lotus to his honest questions, was a holding pattern until his boss arrived. Jackson was born to be another man in another country, where his worth would have been realized from the start. When Jean-Paul hired him at P9, Jackson felt not only friendship but a kind of patriotism for the man and his company. Black men of our day were never told,
The sky’s the limit
. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin. Our potential was purely physical and necessarily short-lived. We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.