Nathan shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I belong to any one organization. I help out. I’ve known Lou for a long time.”
“Lou?”
“Comrade Fraina,” Nathan said and gestured with his chin. “Would you like to meet him some day?”
“Are you kidding? I’d be honored.”
Bishop gave that a small, private smile. “You have any worthwhile talents?”
“I write.”
“Well?”
“I hope so.”
“Give me some samples, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around the bar. “God, that’s a depressing thought.”
“What? Me meeting Comrade Fraina?”
“Huh? No. Glaviach got me thinking. There really isn’t a good-looking woman in any of the movements. Not a … Well, there’s one.”
“There’s one?”
He nodded. “How could I have forgotten? There is one.” He whistled. “Bloody gorgeous, she is.”
“She here?”
He laughed. “If she were here, you’d know it.”
“What’s her name?”
Bishop’s head moved so swiftly Danny feared he’d blown his cover. Bishop looked him in the eyes and seemed to be studying his face.
Danny took a sip of his beer.
Bishop looked back out at the crowd. “She has lots of them.”
Chapter fourteen
Luther got off the freight in Boston, where Uncle Hollis’s chicken-scratch map directed him and found Dover Street easily enough. He followed it to Columbus Avenue and followed Columbus through the heart of the South End. When he found St. Botolph Street, he walked down a row of redbrick town houses along a sidewalk carpeted in damp leaves until he found number 121 and he went up the stairs and rang the bell.
The man who lived at 121 was Isaiah Giddreaux, the father of Uncle Hollis’s second wife, Brenda. Hollis had married four times. The first and third had left him, Brenda had died of typhus, and about five years back Hollis and the fourth had kind of mutually misplaced each other. Hollis had told Luther that as much as he missed Brenda, and he missed her something terrible on many a day, he sometimes missed her father just as much. Isaiah Giddreaux had moved east back in ’05 to join up with Dr. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, but he and Hollis had remained in touch.
The door was opened by a small slim man wearing a dark wool three-piece suit and a navy-blue tie speckled with white dots. His hair was speckled with white, too, and cropped close to his skull, and he wore round spectacles that revealed calm, clear eyes behind their panes.
He extended his hand. “You must be Luther Laurence.”
Luther shook the hand. “Isaiah?”
Isaiah said, “Mr. Giddreaux if you please, son.”
“Mr. Giddreaux, yes, sir.”
For a small man Isaiah seemed tall. He stood as straight as any man Luther had ever seen, his hands folded in front of his belt buckle, his eyes so clear it was impossible to read them. They could have been the eyes of a lamb lying down in the last spot of sun on a summer evening. Or those of a lion, waiting for the lamb to get sleepy.
“Your Uncle Hollis is well, I trust?” He led Luther down the front hall.
“He is, sir.”
“How’s that rheumatism of his?”
“His knees ache awful in the afternoons but otherwise he feels in top form.”
Isaiah looked over his shoulder as he led him up a wide staircase. “He’s done marrying I hope.”
“I believe so, sir.”
Luther hadn’t been in a brownstone before. The breadth of it surprised him. He’d have never been able to tell from the street how deep the rooms went or how high the ceilings got. It was as nicely appointed as any of the homes on Detroit Avenue, with heavy chandeliers and dark gumwood beams and French sofas and settees. The Giddreauxs had the master bedroom on the top floor, and there were three more bedrooms on the second, one of which Isaiah led Luther to and opened the door long enough for him to drop his bag on the floor. He got a glimpse of a nice brass bed and walnut dresser with a porcelain wash pot on top before Isaiah ushered him back out again. Isaiah and his wife, Yvette, owned the whole place, three floors and a widow’s walk on top that looked out over the entire neighborhood. The South End, Luther discerned from Isaiah’s description, was a budding Greenwood unto itself, the place where Negroes had carved out a little something for themselves with restaurants served their kind of food and clubs played their kind of music. Isaiah told Luther the neighborhood had been born out of a need for servant housing, the servants being those who attended to the needs of the rich old-money folk on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay, and the reason the buildings were so nice — all red-brick town houses and chocolate bowfront brownstones — was that the servants had taken pains to live in the style of their employers.
They took the stairs back down to the parlor, where a pot of tea waited for them.
“Your uncle speaks highly of you, Mr. Laurence.”
“He does?”
Isaiah nodded. “He says you have some jackrabbit in your blood but sincerely hopes that one day you’ll slow down and find enough peace to be an upstanding man.”
Luther couldn’t think of a reply to that.
Isaiah reached for the pot and poured them each a cup, then handed Luther’s to him. Isaiah poured a single drop of milk into his cup and stirred it slowly. “Did your uncle tell you much about me?”
“Only that you were his wife’s father and you were at Niagara with Du Bois.”
“Doctor Du Bois. I was.”
“You know him?” Luther asked. “Dr. Du Bois?”
Isaiah nodded. “I know him well. When the NAACP decided to open an office here in Boston he asked me to run it.”
“That’s quite an honor, sir.”
Isaiah gave that a tiny nod. He dropped a cube of sugar into his cup and stirred. “Tell me about Tulsa.”
Luther poured some milk into his tea and took a small sip. “Sir?”
“You committed a crime. Yes?” He lifted his cup to his lips. “Hollis deigned not to be specific what that crime was.”
“Then with all due respect, Mr. Giddreaux, I … deign the same.”
Isaiah shifted and tugged his pant leg down until it covered the top of his sock. “I’ve heard folks speak of a shooting in a disreputable nightclub in Greenwood. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Luther met the man’s gaze. He said nothing.
Isaiah took another sip of tea. “Did you feel you had a choice?”
Luther looked at the rug.
“Shall I repeat myself?”
Luther kept his eyes on the rug. It was blue and red and yellow and all the colors swirled together. He supposed it was expensive. The swirls.
“Did you feel you had a choice?” Isaiah’s voice was as calm as his teacup.
Luther raised his eyes to him and still said nothing.
“And yet you killed your own kind.”
“Evil got a way of not caring about kinds, sir.” Luther’s hand shook as he lowered his cup to the coffee table. “Evil just muck things around till things go all sideways.”
“That’s how you define evil?”
Luther looked around this room, as fine as any in the fine houses on Detroit Avenue. “You know it when you see it.”
Isaiah sipped his tea. “Some would say a murderer is evil. Would you agree?”
“I’d agree some would say it.”
“You committed murder.”
Luther said nothing.
“Ergo …” Isaiah held out his hand.
“All due respect? I never said I committed anything, sir.”
They sat silent for a bit, a clock ticking behind Luther. A car horn beeped faintly from a few blocks away. Isaiah finished his tea and placed the cup back on the tray.
“You’ll meet my wife later. Yvette. We’ve just purchased a building to use as the NAACP office here. You’ll volunteer there.”