Lester took another bite, a big one, before licking the juice off his fingers, careful to taste every drop. After wrapping the remains of his lunch back up again, Lester fished in his drawers for napkins, used several. Dried, the man folded his hands before him, gave a sigh with a smile chaser.
"I can't tell you how pleased — strike that — ecstatic I am that you've come to me today with such passion, Robert M. Finley. Your talents, your experience, are what make you such an important addition to this community. Particularly during these times, when the Department of Corrections would see fit to build a halfway house in the middle of our historic community, despite our considerable protest." Lester removed a folder from the stack on the side of his desk, slid it over. Bobby picked it up, opened it. There were photocopies of blueprints inside.
"The convicts are expected to pour into the Mumia building this Friday, barring a miracle. These are not hand-picked Horizon men I don't have to tell you what type of men these are. I'm sure you've seen it: corner lot on 121st, sleeps thirty-eight. Those new buildings have such shoddy construction, just drywall and plywood. Like a four-story box of matches, if you ask me. But of course, they're just not built to last, are they?"
Just two guys sitting at the Lenox Lounge, nothing to see here. One beaming, one bowed. One saying hi to a seemingly endless parade of old friends and acquaintances, one wishing the other would just shut the hell up and get drunk so he would give up on murdering for the evening. This was Snowden's plan A: He would get Lester so drunk that nothing more could be done with the night except put it to bed. He would do this before every one of Lester's planned exercises, for a lifetime if need be. It would be like one of those fables, and if that didn't work, plan B was that he would get himself so drunk that he would be incapable of complying. Even though one plan was marked A and the other B, those letters in no way represented a hierarchical order of feasibility or allotted effort.
Snowden's wallet was padded with six twenties to make this happen, and he'd insisted repeatedly that the night was on him, but plan A clearly wasn't working. Lester didn't just baby-sit his drink, he'd adopted it. The contrast grew as the night progressed. Snowden's once broad shoulders evaporated, his neck slumping straight to his elbows in defeat. Lester would have been glowing even if he wasn't wearing neon. "Lester, you ain't changed in twenty years," they said as they passed their table. "Black don't crack, baby," they declared loudly at the sight of him. "Life looks good on you, brother. Good to see you out, back on top again." Lester sparkled — literally, the metallic threads sewn throughout his suit. Snowden's dreary presence beside him just added to the shimmer.
Everyone at the bar either seemed to know who Lester was or pretend they did. He even called their waitress by her first name and she wasn't wearing a tag, either. She smiled and said, "Knob Creek, right?" and Lester said, "Thanks, Maisy," and that's it, not a word to the fact that though she couldn't have been much older than thirty she had teeth missing on the top and bottom of her left side. Not one mention that, despite the clear complexion provided by pancake makeup, parts of her face were so swollen it looked as if there were plums in utero under its surface. Lester took the fact that Snowden was looking up at all to once again try to engage him in conversation.
"Not trying to pry or anything, but your file says your father was a Panther in the early days."
"Oh, OK, so I have a file. And that's in it."
"Yes it is. Well, I've been thinking about that the last couple weeks, about your father, your apprehensions. You know, his involvement in the Black Liberation Army after the Panthers crumpled means your father was one of the few who held on. That's amazing that he was still in the BLA up till his last arrest in the early eighties, hardly anyone was. That's a true believer, you see what I'm getting at? A warrior for the people. That was part of why we selected you: It's in your genes. You really should take pride in that, use it as inspiration. This is your chance for redemption, renewal. You get to make up to the world what it lost when he passed away."
Snowden liked that idea. If the world needed another bitter, drunken Cedric Snowden to sit around and complain about how it and its inhabitants had betrayed him, Snowden felt very capable of taking his father's place.
"To renewal!" Lester toasted, finally lifting his glass and Snowden's hopes, then dropping both back down again, nary the drop of whiskey removed. In disbelief and defiance, Snowden swallowed another double of the same, determined to make himself useless if no alternative presented itself.
"Renewal has to be the most beautiful, the most unexpected thing life has to offer. Things fall into ruin and you think, That's it, it's over. But you hold on long enough and you see that even the worst things fall apart, eventually. This joint we're sitting in, it was closed till last summer. Now look at it. See that mirror behind the bar?"
Snowden was very familiar with the mirror behind the bar. Snowden had been waving a twenty at it for nearly five minutes now in the hopes Maisy would recognize the universal symbol and send replacements for the fallen soldiers standing hollow on the table before him.
"It's hung up there sixty years, since when Billie Holiday played here on the regular. Had a nicotine film on it a centimeter thick; you could barely see through it before they renovated. Had to use razor blades to get it off. Now look at it. So clear you can see the future in it if you look hard enough."
Snowden was rescued. More for the batde. He tried to order reinforcements for his ally, but Lester declined, asked for a glass of water instead since the pretzels made him thirsty. Maisy didn't smile this time and Snowden was immediately awash in regret that he'd been caught registering her condition the visit before. In response, his tip was far, far more than her service merited and still failed to emit more than the rumor of a grin in response. Same drink still full in one hand, Lester pointed toward her receding presence before reaching for his snack.
"Take Maisy. Renewal, that's what she needs. Breaks your heart, doesn't it, seeing decent, polite folk like her walking around like that? It's an affront. Can you believe she's homeless?"
Snowden looked over at the woman making change at the register behind the bar, got excited, "See, that's it! That's where we got to put our energy tonight! We got to hook her up with a place to live. She's decent, you just said, right? She got a job. Right now, couple more drinks, that's what we need to get into tonight."
"Oh no, you misunderstand me. She has a lease. She has a Horizon lease, a lovely fifth-floor two-bedroom with original tile in the bathroom — I cleaned the grout myself. But two weeks ago, I was dropping off some late tenant's clothes at the women's shelter and there she is, Maisy Williams who works at the Lenox Lounge, walking past the lobby to do her laundry in the basement, looking even worse than she does now if you can believe it. See, Maisy has a nigger. He moved in with her this year — so far she's visited the shelter three times since. Three times, and once the year before. Always the same thing. Comes in beat the hell up, heals, goes home, doesn't press charges. At this point, she wants to kick him out but won't because she thinks he'll kill her. He will, of course, if it continues on this tangent."
"She told you all that?" Snowden asked.
"No, no, decent folk like Maisy don't go spreading their pain like that, man. They know it's wrong, see? Not only would they not perpetrate insanity like that, they're ashamed of even being a victim to that mess. The social worker who takes the donations from Horizon told me this info — he wanted to know if I could evict the bastard. See, this nigger, he's got no job, he's just sitting up in her apartment all day, smoking weed and playing video games on her television. Orders pizzas every night, the exact same time too during the opening montage of the Star Trek reruns on Channel Nine. This bully, he even has whores over after that, calls them out the phone book and screws them right there on her bed, doesn't even change the sheets before he passes out."