“You must tell me or you won’t be meeting him.”
“Then,” I said with a shrug, “I guess I won’t be meeting him.”
I turned and the young-like lad in the violet suit got ready to block my exit. I decided that I’d have to shoot him if bad came to worse. My disguise was solid. I doubted if anyone would be able to identify me in a lineup.
“Mr. Beard,” a markedly masculine voice boomed.
I turned and saw a man who fit this voice like a fist in a Siberian mitten.
He was tall with broad shoulders and a big belly, wearing a three-piece bright green suit that had gray pinstripes. His shirt was pearl gray and the clasp at his throat was a bright red-and-green garnet. The mane of hair was gray, but the drooping “oilman mustache” was white, almost blue.
Augustine Antrobus’s face was a granite bunker, big with squinty eyes that might have been green. This was the sensualist who had hired the fay violet thug and the women of beauty.
“Mr. Antrobus,” I announced.
“You have something to tell me?”
“The buffalo have come back from extinction and soon there will be pioneers raping the fields of Mars.”
Antrobus’s laugh was a weapon. In it was all the strength of some wild creature.
“Come on in,” he demanded.
I took a step and the violet thug did too.
“Not you, Lyle,” the master said. “Mr. Beard and I will meet mano a mano.”
The corridor behind the room of women was set between a wall and a series of slender windows that looked down on Central Park. The striation of shadow and light made me feel as if I were on a safari behind an as yet unsuspecting lion.
Antrobus’s office was all dark wood and royal blue fabric, bookshelves with only hardbacks, and no computer in sight. There were two plush chairs set side by side in front of his grand piano–size mahogany desk. The chairs were turned ever so slightly toward each other, like old friends sharing cognac and confidence.
“Sit,” the master ordered.
I did as I was told.
When his bulk was situated, he put his hands on the clawed armrests and snorted.
“You talk about buffalo and dress like a buffoon,” came his first salvo of words. “You were obviously christened in America but go by the name Beard, which means you have a sense of humor and are anything but a buffoon.”
“I appreciate the attention, Mr. Antrobus. Most of the time I spend hidden…even in plain sight.”
“You are even now.”
“I come to you with intelligence and maybe a chance to do a little business,” said the man I was pretending to be.
“I like the word intelligence,” Augustine said. “Even a fool can bring intelligence if he’s been given the right words.”
I could feel my heart beating again. This larger-than-life man scared me. He came out of one of the storybooks of old, designed to frighten children into understanding how the world really worked.
“I’m a private agent who does work for those who need to stay in shadow,” I said. “Somebody representing a man named Stuart Braun hired me to bring him hopefully incriminating information on another man—William James Marmot.”
The masculine chatter stopped then. Antrobus studied me with his slitty eyes and nodded ever so slightly.
“For what purpose?” he asked when my question was almost forgotten.
“He said that Marmot was leaning on him and that he needed leverage.”
“What kind of leverage?”
“That I do not know. I met a man named Porker who told me that he knew another man who said Marmot worked for you.”
“A man who knows a man who knows about me?”
“That’s the way it is in my business.”
After a fair length Antrobus asked, “And so why come here just because a man told a man that the man you’re stalking might have something to do with me?”
“I wanted to see if you were as serious as I heard.”
“And am I?”
I smiled, wondering what my new face looked like with that expression on it.
“I don’t need to do any more stalking if you and I can come to an agreement.”
“You say,” Antrobus parried, “that someone representing Braun hired you.”
I nodded without smiling.
“Who is that?”
“Someone calling themselves Lacey.”
“A lacey beard?” he asked.
I refrained from smiling again. You can often identify a man by his grin.
“What do you want, Mr. Beard?”
“Six thousand dollars in cash and Mr. Marmot falls off my radar.”
“Hardly a fair business practice,” Antrobus observed.
“I’m not applying for a position.”
Antrobus roared with laughter.
“Do we have a deal?” I asked.
24.
Sunset came before 5:00 at that time of year. The ferry moved peacefully through the dusk toward the Saint George dock. I was standing in my bulky and bulbous costume at the front of the boat, enjoying the stiff breeze and thinking that I had done a good job of putting myself off the scent for an afternoon.
I had killed a man that day, and the amoral stench of that action hung about me. There were sixty-six hundred-dollar bills in my right front pocket, proof that Stuart Braun was going to have to deal with me sooner or later—if he survived.
A short man with a broad chest came out on the mostly abandoned deck and stared at me for all of forty-five seconds; then he turned away.
Maybe I looked like someone he knew.
In Saint George I made a pay phone call, then boarded the commuter train and sat at the south end of the center car, looking back and wondering why I felt so calm. Life was coming down on me like grain filling up an empty silo, but there I was moving backward in a modern marvel of technology. Life was like the miracle of a tiger on the hunt, only no one around me seemed to appreciate this fact.
Then the door at the far end of the car slid open, and the short white guy with the broad chest who had eyed me on the ferry came through. He wore jeans and tennis shoes, a maroon wool sweater under a loose pale green sweatshirt—its hood thrown back.
He saw me and moved with purpose toward my throne of wonder.
“You the niggah they call Cueball,” he said when he was maybe three steps off.
The other people around me moved away. All except for an older gentleman directly across the aisle. He was also white, wearing a dark blue pea coat, black work boots and pants.
I noticed the brave older gentleman while feeling a little stunned by the short stranger’s language.
I tried to remember the last time someone had called me nigger. Even my black male acquaintances had mostly given up that tag.
I put my right hand in a yellow pocket and stared.
“You heard me?” my antagonist asked. He was powerful, no doubt. And he was as mad as hell about something; probably had been most of his life. The only thing left to know was if he was a fool or not. There was a gun in that pocket, and I’d already proven to myself that I was unafraid to use it.
Usually when a man reaches in his pocket to threaten a would-be attacker he’s bluffing. But I have found that if you don’t say anything the threat seems more real.
“Well?” the short man said.
I said nothing.
He took a step.
“Junior,” the older man said.
The racist turned his head and saw the older man, maybe for the first time—that day.
“Ernesto,” he said, his voice trying and failing to express both anger and respect.
“You see the man doesn’t know you,” the brave oldster explained. “You see he’s about to kill you. Leave him alone. He’s not Cueball.”
The man’s words carried weight, and after a moment of contemplation, Junior decided to retrace his steps back to some other car.
When he was gone I asked Ernesto, “What was that?”
“Boy lost his girl to a black man named Cueball,” he said. “Bald, you know? Junior thinks the guy took her from him. He don’t see that the last time he put her in the hospital was the day she stopped bein’ his friend.”
“Well,” I said, “thanks for gettin’ him off me.”
“I don’t give a fuck about you, man. Junior too stupid to understand you got a real gun in there. I could see his death in the corner of your eye.”