The Man Who Cried I Am (55 page)

After that, Mister Charlie and the engineers of King Alfred you will have learned your lesson. There will be, you see, white bodies, too. Once, the
first time
, like this, really (behold, Nat Turner! Look here, “Mad” John. How does that grab you, Denmark? In the balls, Gabriel?) should be enough. Max saw once more:

The chino-covered legs, blurs of white sneakers mixed with heavy country shoes, the uneven drumming of running feet on the grass, the curses
.

And heard:

“
I call now for black manhood. Dignity. Pride. Don't turn the other cheek any more. Defend yourselves, strike back, and when you do, strike to hurt, strike to maim, strike to
—” Kill, Max thought, wearily. I am going to loose those beasts, black and white, and when they are through, and it may take them a long time to get through, perhaps even as long as this farce which has forced us to this has been running, we will know just where we stand. It will be a start.

But remember. Like everything else, you started this too. Today it is the Alliance, it is King Alfred; before that it was something else and something else before that. Lie about it. Cry about it. I know the truth and can do something about it.

Michelle dropped something on the floor above. Michelle, Max thought. She took it well enough. No questions, or not many questions. On a continent where life marched evenly with the tread of armies, the European was attuned to death, expected it in a way, he supposed, and avoided the first suggestion of its coming. So many of them were Negroes in that respect, but didn't know it.

The phone rang and Max's heart began to pound. Was he right? Was he wrong? He moved to the instrument. The international operator had his number. Max began to pull the papers from the case once more. He stacked them beside the phone and listened intently to the hums and sharp clicks on the line. Yes, it
is
right, he told himself. What choice is there? None. He was putting an end to the peace in which Negroes died one at a time in Southern swamps or by taking cops' bullets, the dying from overwork and underpay, praying all the while, looking to the heavens. Max smeared away the sweat that had come to his face and hands.

The voice from New York came through clearly. “Hello, hello?”

Max said, “Hello, you are a dead man. Maybe.”

“Who is this?” The voice across the sea was both amused and impatient.

“Max. Max Reddick.”

“Brother. Well, how are you? Where are we meeting this time?”

“Amsterdam.”

“Holland?”

“Holland, but they prefer to call it the Netherlands.”

“Brother, that's not where the people are.”

“Yes, they're here, too.”

“Really? I always think of the Dutch like the picture on the Old Dutch Cleanser can—blue, white and faceless.”

“No. Not any more.”

“Now, what's all this talk about dead men?”

“Is your machine on?”

“Brother, my machine is always on. That's the life these days. You know it.”

“Good. My friend, Harry Ames, is dead, you know.”

“I read about it. I'm sorry. I looked forward to meeting him.”

“He was killed.”

“Ah-ha. You
know
that he was killed.”

“Yes.”

“I'm listening; I hear you.”

“What I have to say is important—”

“Of course. Otherwise you wouldn't be calling. I understand. Tell it to me, brother. Tell me all about it.”

“Listen, then. Don't interrupt. I'll be reading for about forty minutes: notes, names, addresses, things. You'll know what to do. This material comes from Jaja Enzkwu.”

“Brother Jaja, who is also dead. Go ahead, brother.”

Max read. Once Michelle came into the room and he waved her out. And once he wet his throat with a sip of whiskey, but he read on and asked only once, “How is your tape?”

When he was finished, the voice at the other end of the line, heavy and yet tingling with subdued excitement asked, “Brother, are you armed?”

“Yes.” Max was gathering the papers; it was done.

“You know you'll need it, don't you?”

“I know it.”

“What can I say? Good luck. I
do
know what to do with this. If I don't see you again—the life is like that, brother—take some with you. My prayers to Allah commence at once. Salaam-Alaikum, baby!”

Max paused a moment, then said, “Sure, man, sure.” He heard Minister Q give a deep chuckle which rumbled softly with satisfaction. Max hung up, staring at the phone and thinking, There, it's done.

*
849–899 (?) King of England; directed translation from the Latin of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
.

29

NEW YORK—LEIDEN—AMSTERDAM

One block from Minister Q's office, along a street scaled with grime, crushed gray cigarettes and debris, in a tenement boarded up and condemned by the Board of Health, Department of Sanitation, the City of New York, one man tipped a pair of earphones from his head and swung a practiced eye to his delicate recording machinery.

The room was neat; the adjoining bathroom still smelled of fresh paint. New walls had been put up and the lights repaired. A second man, his earphones off altogether, tapped thoughtfully on the cigarette-scarred naked pinewood table. Both men were in shirtsleeves, for it was May and a heat wave had come unheralded to the city. A small fan hummed quietly, stirring the cigarette smoke and the smell certain law enforcement officials always have about them, as if unable to remove from their persons, like coalmen or slaughterers, the odor of grime that is an integral part of their trade.

The second man, looking at the names he had written on the pad in front of him, said, “Stay with him, Tom; I'm calling the office.”

“Minister's dialing again.”

The second man picked up the phone. “This is Merriman, station 12. We just monitored a call from Amsterdam, Holland, from a Max Reddick. It was close to fifty minutes long. The subject of the call was an organization called the Alliance Blanc—that means the White Alliance, Reddick told the Minister, and something called King Alfred that sounds real crazy, about race riots and emergencies and the President and the Army. I don't know if this is for State, Central or us. I'll give you some of the names to check out, and a list of homicides connected with the White Alliance. Minister Q is calling a meeting for one o'clock, so we're still monitoring. It's going to be about the call he just got from Amsterdam.”

The call had traveled beneath the sewers and subways through one wire which was bound tightly to a thousand others. From the Federal office which the first call reached, still another call was made, this one traveling out of the city, southward to Washington where, in a matter of minutes, the top secret vaults were opened and cross-indexed files traced, one back upon the other. One half hour later, a pipe-smoking official with thinning hair said to an assistant, “Technically, this is now Federal's baby, but since we've carried it this far, and there isn't time to go into details, Central will have to hang on to it. Get me New York.”

At nine forty-five in the morning, the humidity building slowly, three men drove along the littered, battered street in New York and stopped one block from the boarded-up tenement. They walked briskly past the entrance of the building and into a small, flyspecked candy store and vanished.

At the sound of footsteps in the hall, the two men monitoring Minister Q's phone opened the door.

“Hiya, fellas,” the first man through the door said, bending to get his massive body through.

“Hello, Barney, did we strike a mine?”

The man called Barney smiled. “Central thinks so. This is Ted Dallas, African division, foreign operations, and his assistant.” The five men shook hands and the second man in shirtsleeves offered his pack of cigarettes around. “The jigs have really ripped it this time, hey?”

“Just play back the tape and shut your fat mouth,” Dallas said curtly. “I'm a jig.”

The second man opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, and with a drawn smile on his face sat down and said to his mate, Roll it, Tom.”

The man called Tom pressed a lever and the voices of Max and Minister Q, along with telephone cable noises, filled the room.

The first man in shirtsleeves glanced briefly at Dallas and said, “He's still calling people.” He cautiously handed Dallas a list of the names. Some Dallas knew, and some he didn't. The two technicians exchanged glances.

At the moment it was not important whether Dallas knew the people or not. He listened to the voices intently, head bent, pen in hand. He had to get it now and set it in action. He glanced at his watch. It would be about quarter to eleven when he finished listening to the tape. It was going to be a nasty business from here on out. Minister Q would have to be cut down. Federal's watch on the Minister had been increased to five men in just the past half hour, but Central would have to put on the play. The Minister would have to be stopped before the meeting or at the beginning of it. Dallas motioned to his assistant, a surly young blond who wore a straw hat with a bright band. He hesitated before speaking. He wondered now how Max had got into it, then wondered why he was doing it. He'd always had more balance than Harry. Enzkwu had been an ass from the first. When last reported on, Max had been in New York. Some friendship. But it was the habit of men like Max and Harry to be bitter about things here at home, but never to the extent of trying to wreck the country as they could with the information about Alliance Blanc. All the little people they said they cared about in their writing, would be the first to go. “Call Washington,” Dallas now said to his assistant. “I'm going to need two men to complete this job. Shotguns and .45's. Taking no chances. Negroes—”

Suddenly, the larger than life voices, Max's cold and tired, Minister Q's quick and angry, were talking about something called King Alfred. Dallas spun and stared at the loudspeakers. The voices boomed on. The two technicians stared past Dallas to his assistant and Barney, and Dallas now turned slowly to look at his assistant, and, when his eyes locked with the gray eyes beneath the straw hat, he knew that his assistant had known about King Alfred all along. Dallas's thoughts bunched like frightened cattle, then tried to flee down a corridor that was too narrow; they bumped and tumbled into and over each other. Numbly, Dallas watched his assistant reach for the phone. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man called Barney edge imperceptibly to block the door. His assistant was talking softly, staring out at Dallas from beneath the lid of his hat. Dallas crumpled up his paper and, cursing, threw it to the floor. He lit a cigarette and listened to the voices of Max Reddick and Minister Q, and knew they would be the last black voices he would ever hear. He thought of the Negro agents out there who believed their operations had only to do with Alliance Blanc.

The sun was beginning to tilt into late afternoon in Leiden. Gray clouds appeared on the horizon. Max, who had debated but a moment before consigning Jaja's papers to the fireplace, now touched the pile with a match. He watched the flames reflecting from the sides of the copper pots and pans hooked from the brick facing. Now if something happened (and what could happen? Minister Q had been ready for something like this a long time) there would be no papers and the absence would be a sword of Damocles over the head of the Alliance and King Alfred. No papers and therefore no end; the Alliance and King Alfred, whatever happened, would always know that someone else knew. That fact would gnaw at white men in power for as long as they held it.

Michelle was using the telephone now, talking to her husband. Max listened to her voice as it came to him from the other room, now rising, now falling; now pleading, now sad; now promising, now resigned. Max stared out at the canal—the waters were now black. In the sky, gray cloud tumbled over gray cloud, and small trees bent before the rising wind, and flapped their leaves. The long conversation with her husband had ended; now Max heard Michelle talking to the French Embassy. The tone of her voice was different; it was that tone all Europeans use to address those beneath their social level. The tone was not haughty as much as it was sure of itself, sure that the message it conveyed would be followed to the letter.

It was nearly time to go. Max knew fear now. It reached down and dulled the razor-sharp pain that sliced through his lower body. Maybe, even at this moment, he thought in sudden, desperate fright, someone had invented the serum, the pill, the thing that would make cancer obsolete. Now it would do him no good. He took a deep breath. It was done and nobody had invented or discovered anything.
It is done
.

Even so Max snapped shut the lock on the case. It was empty, but he would still take it with him. Let the emptiness, when they discovered it, speak for itself. He wanted to see the expression on their faces. In a minute, as soon as Michelle finished her call, he would kiss her on the cheek and leave the house. He would plod through the courtyard, open the gate he had entered so innocently a few hours earlier, and step into the street. What would be there? Who would be there? If there were nothing and no one, he would get into the little German car, fascism on wheels, now so indispensable to too many people in too many places. You bought a VW and you made peace. It was no good saying you thought long and hard about it first. Once you laid down your money and drove away, the pact to forget the past was made. In the car he would pull out the Llama and put it in his pocket; it would make him feel better.

Alfonse Edwards had waked that morning feeling unusually dull and heavy. He took a cold shower, dressed except for a jacket, then stood looking at the canal, waiting for his breakfast to come up. The night before he had signed for it for seven. In a few moments he heard footsteps thumping over the carpeted steps. He moved to his door and opened it. The boy, bearing his tray, smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Edwards.”