A BASS RIDE . . . OR WAS IT VILE?
THE OLD MAN AND THE DOGS HELPED ME SEARCH MY apartment for any obvious intruders or bombs. Mr. Contreras offered to feed me, but I was too tired to eat. As soon as they left, I went to bed and fell deeply asleep. I was so tired, none of my anxieties had the power to disturb me. But when my phone rang at one in the morning, I was instantly awake.
“Petra?” I cried into the mouthpiece.
“Ms. Warshawski, is that you?” The voice on the other end was diffident.
“Who is this?” I choked out.
“I woke you again. I’m sorry. It seems like it’s only in the middle of the night that I have the courage to talk to you.”
I’d been so sure the call would be from Petra, or a ransom demand, that I couldn’t think of anyone else, any other context. I lay back in the bed, trying to calm my pounding heart enough that I could think.
“I saw about your cousin on the news. It’s a terrible worry, when someone you love disappears on you.” The hesitant voice was flat.
Behind the speaker came the sound of hospital pages. Rose Hebert! My skin crawled. She had snatched Petra so that I could understand how bereft she’d been at losing Lamont Gadsden.
“Knowing how you must be suffering, I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t been wholly truthful with you.” She took a breath, the way she had the last time she called in the middle of the night, when she launched into the painful admission of her love for Lamont Gadsden.
“When you asked if I knew another name Steve Sawyer might be using, I said no. But back in the sixties, the Anacondas, they all took African names. Lamont, his code name in the gang was Lumumba.”
There was a long silence, during which I thought I might break into hysterical laughter. Petra had disappeared, perhaps been kidnapped, and the only thing Rose could think of was her long-vanished lover. It was hard to think of a response, but, in the end, I asked what Steve Sawyer’s gang name had been.
“I don’t know, but it was probably African. Like I told you, Johnny Merton, he gave his girl an African name. Johnny was big on all those African independence movements. He made Lamont study up on Lumumba, and Lamont talked to me about Lumumba and the Congo that summer, the summer before he disappeared, when he was trying to persuade me to be liberated with him . . .”
Her voice trailed off, into the confusion of memories of adolescence, where liberation meant sex as well as politics. I wondered why Rose hadn’t told me earlier; what about me would have made her think I would find African nationalism shocking.
She answered in her half-dead voice, “I guess I was afraid if I told you about Lamont and Lumumba, you might be, well, like some folks, like my daddy even, who thought if you called yourself after an African national hero you were next door to being a Communist. And then you’d stop looking for Lamont.”
I managed to thank her, and to tell her not to worry, that I’d see whether I could find Lamont under his nom de guerre. “Is there anything else it would be good for me to know? Something we could cover tonight? It may be hard to reach me for the next week or so.”
She thought about it seriously but decided she didn’t have any more secrets to reveal, at least not this morning. After she hung up, I lay back down, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. My brain started jumping around again among all the confused ideas I’d had yesterday afternoon. Lumumba. I tried to think about Patrice Lumumba, but it wasn’t a good meditation. Instead, visions of his torture and death blended with my images of Sister Frankie’s death, my fears about Petra, my fears for my own safety.
I sat up. I’d heard the name Lumumba recently. It was connected in my mind to my father, which didn’t make any sense at all. It was my mother, not my father, who cared about international politics. She would have talked about Lumumba’s murder. But I would have been too young at the time for the name to stay with me.
I went into the living room and plugged in my laptop. Sitting cross-legged on the couch, I looked up Lumumba. He had died in 1961. I couldn’t possibly be remembering a conversation about him that went that far back into my childhood. Since I was awake and alert, I searched for Lumumba in the databases I use for background checks. I found a singer with the name and a doctor in New York, but deeper looks at them showed that both were too young to be Lamont Gadsden under a new name.