Bobby sounded like another Jardi.
“A brave man. A soldier, this brother Bobby?”
“Oh, Bobby, he was somethin’. He won the West Virginia High School four-forty-yard dash in ’fifty-seven. My baby brother, oh, he was somethin’. White people say he robbed them. He got sent to prison, up in Morgantown. Somebody stick a knife in him. He wasn’t in that place no more than three weeks when they killed him.”
“A terrible thing,” said Ulu Beg. He had been in a prison in Baghdad for a long time, and knew what things happened in prison. “God have mercy on him.”
“Mamma died after that and I came to Dayton and here I been ever since. I been at Rike’s twenty years now. It ain’t the life I wanted, but it sure is the life I got.”
“You must be strong. You must make them pay.”
“Make who pay, Jim? Can’t make nobody pay nothin’.” She took some more wine.
The apartment was small and dark, in an old building with garbage and the smell of urine in the halls. The lights had all been punched out and people had written all over the bricks. Ulu Beg had recognized the English word for freedom scrawled in huge white letters. Everybody who lived there was black; when he looked out the window he could only see black people, except occasionally in the police cars that prowled cautiously down the street.
“Don’t worry none about them, baby,” she had said. “They ain’t comin’ in here.”
“Say, Jim,” she said now, “just who are you? You white? You look white, you walk white, you talk funny white. But you ain’t white. I can tell.”
“Sure, white.” He laughed now himself. “Born white, die white.”
“But you ain’t no American.”
“Many peoples come to America. For a new life. That’s me — I look for the new life.”
“Not with no gun, Jim. I looked in your bag.”
He paused a second. “Leah, you shouldn’t have.”
“You on the run? Running to or running from, Jim? It don’t matter none to me. Have some wine. You going to waste somebody’s ass? It don’t matter none to me. Just don’t get caught, you hear, because they put you away in a bad place forever and ever, Jim. You the strangest white man I ever did see.”
He stayed a long week. He made love to her every night. He felt full of power and freedom with the black woman in her small apartment in a ramshackle city in the fabulous country of America. He rode her for hours. He lost himself in the frenzy of it, sleeping all day while she worked, then taking her when she returned. He had her once in her kitchen.
“You a crazy man. I’m pushing the damn broom ‘round Old Man Rike’s store all day thinkin’ ’bout crazy Jim.”
“You’re a fine lady, Leah. American ladies are fine. They are the best thing about America.”
“You know another?”
“A long time ago,” he said. “A real fighter, like you, Leah.”
“A white girl?”
“White, yes.”
“No white girl know nothin’ ’bout no fighting.”
“Oh, this one did. Johanna was very special. You and Johanna would be friends, I think.” An odd vision came to him — he and Leah and Jardi and Johanna and Memed and Apo. They’d be at a meadow, high in the mountains. Thistles were everywhere, and the hills were blue-green. Amir Tawfiq was there too; they were all there. His whole family was there; everybody was there. His father, also Ulu Beg, hanged in Mahābād on a lamppost in 1947, he was there too. There were partridges in the trees, and deer too. The hunting was wonderful. The men hunted in the day and at night the women made wonderful feasts. Then everybody sat around in the biggest, richest tent he had ever seen and told wonderful stories. Jardi talked about his own crazy father, the Hungarian doctor. Johanna told of her sister Miriam. Leah told of her brother Bobby, and even as these people were mentioned they came into the tent also and had some food and told some stories and raised a great cheer. Kurdistan ya naman, they cheered, Kurdistan ya naman.
“Jim? Jim?”
“Ah?”
“Where you been? It sure wasn’t Dayton.”
“It’s nothing. Tomorrow I will go. I have to go. I stay too long; I must move on.”
She looked at him, her eyes furious and dark.
“You go off someplace with that gun, they kill you. No lie, they kill you, like my brother Bobby.”
“Not Jim,” he said.
“Baby, don’t go. Stay with Leah. It’s nice here. It’s so nice.”
“I have to go on. To meet a man.”
“To the bus station? Cops catch you sure.”
“No cops catch Jim.”
“Sure they do. Where you going?”
“Big city.”
“Big-city cops catch you in a bus station sure. I know they will.”
“I have to go.”
“Jim,” she said suddenly, “take my car. Go on, take it. It just sit there.”
An awkward moment for him.
“I cannot drive an automobile,” he said.
She threw back her head in laughter, sudden and light and musical.
“You some dude, baby, you some old dude.” She laughed again. “Hon,” she said, “you the strangest white man I ever heard of. You so strange you almost ain’t white.”
And so she said she’d drive him.
26
To Trewitt the world seemed considerably more attractive with a full meal in his belly, a shower, a night in a decent place — the Hotel Fray Marcos de Ninza, not exactly Howard Johnson’s, but it had TV and running water, hot if you waited long enough. And locks on the door. So a little confidence had returned to Señor Trewitt with the arrival of Chardy’s money; not that a sudden shadow, the report of a car backfire, a hard set of Mexican eyes flashing his way didn’t still wreck him, but he was at least done with cowering in a barn.
Look at me. Look at me! So pleased he thought he might burst, in love with this new image, for he was a clandestine operator now; he was an agent. He felt he’d finally joined a fraternity that had been blackballing him these many years.
Look at me. Look at me! And he did, too. He could not keep his eyes off himself in shopwindows, in the mirror of his room — lean young man, quiet, willful. The eyes deep and quick. The hand never far from his weapon.
For Trewitt was now an armed man.
He’d sent the boy out with $50 of Chardy’s money and specific instructions.
“An automatic. Not some ancient Colt or Remington or Pancho Villa special. An automatic, short-barreled if possible, but I’d settle for one of those Spanish nine-millimeter Stars or even a Llama from Spain if it’s big enough, nine mil at the least. Can you do it?”
“Sure I can.”
“Don’t screw me now.”
“I’m no screw you.”
“Just don’t.”
The boy returned with a worn yellow box, its faded label displaying a pale square of print. In, of all unlikely things, Italian.
“Italian?” wondered Trewitt, much concerned, and ripped the box open greedily. “Jesus, a Beretta.” he said in wonder. “Must be fifty years old.”
The small blue pistol glinted up at him, antiquated and stubby. It had an odd prong flaring off the butt-stock to give it an Art Deco look. Ten oily rounds stood upright in a tray along the box’s edge.