Palace Council (2 page)

Eddie, however, even if on their lips, had just barely scratched his way onto their lists. In those days, everything in Harlem was divided into tiers. Prestige mattered, and multiple layers separated the top from the middle, to say nothing of the bottom. Some addresses were better than others. So were some clubs, some spouses, some friends, and some parties. The social distinctions mattered little to the great mass of Negroes, but Eddie had been raised, in spite of himself, to an awareness of who was who. Although his father, the great preacher, pretended not to care about such trivialities, his mother had filled Eddie's head with stories, and he supposed some of them must be true. All through his childhood, Marie Wesley had spoken of Harlem drawing rooms so exclusive that it would not be unusual to see George Gershwin and Duke Ellington playing a piano duet. Of homes as expensively furnished as the high-rise apartments on Park Avenue. Once his short story began to open doors, Eddie could not bear the thought of not walking through them. Given the chance, thanks to his erudition, he glittered. He traveled upward. He could quote Shakespeare and Dante by the yard, but also Douglass and Du Bois. He could tease. He could charm. He could flatter. On a frigid evening in February of 1955, he attended a grand party at a palatial townhouse on Jumel Terrace, a fancy little cobblestone enclave near Saint Nicholas Avenue between 160th and 162nd streets. The party had been called to announce a royal engagement. The prince of one of the senior Harlem clans was to wed the princess of one of the darker nation's Midwestern kingdoms. Everyone who mattered was there, including several white politicians, and a number of men and women too famous for Eddie to dare approach. One of the toasts was offered by Robert Wagner, the mayor of New York. Frank Sinatra offered another. Everyone was buoyant but Eddie, who usually limited himself to a single glass but tonight drank quite a bit more. Eddie attended out of duty, and wished he had not.

He was in love with the bride-to-be.

Eddie watched the happy couple, listened as glasses were raised to Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland. His usual geniality faded. He began to seethe. People were surprised. Eddie Wesley was always so placid, and so much fun. Tonight he argued belligerently with other guests. Finally, a young man with whose family Eddie's had summered on Martha's Vineyard in the old days was delegated to pull him aside and calm him. Eddie broke free. Harry Belafonte tried. Eddie broke free. Langston Hughes tried. Eddie broke free. A grim phalanx of Harlem men then offered courteously to put the fool out on the street, but the bride-to-be intervened. In full view of everyone, she grabbed Eddie by the arm and dragged him into the kitchen. He did not break free. People whispered excitedly. The kitchen was busy with hired help, everyone in smart, sparkling uniforms, eyes on the princess as they pretended to look the other way.

Aurelia was furious.

“This is just the way it is. This isn't your world, so I can't expect you to understand. But I have responsibilities to my family.”

“And to yourself?” Eddie demanded. “Have you no responsibility to yourself?”

Aurelia was unfazed. She remained schoolmarm-stern. “How can we preserve what matters if we all keep on putting ourselves first?”

“I don't put myself first. I put you first.”

“You put your writing first.”

“I love you,” he said, the words like ash in his mouth. “I'll always love you.”

For a moment Aurelia softened. She touched his cheek. “Maybe if you'd taken that job with my uncle.” Then, as if by force of will, the schoolmarm was back. “Some things we can't do anything about. That's the way life is.” To this credo, Eddie had no answer. “Now, behave yourself,” she added.

Aurelia rejoined her admirers, and her glaringly unamused fiancé. Eddie decided the time had come to depart. A friend or two offered to accompany him, but Eddie shook his head. In consequence, he was alone when, thirty minutes later, he found the body.

CHAPTER
2

The Cross

(I)

E
VERY CORPSE
on which Eddie Wesley had ever laid eyes had belonged, once, to someone he knew, for his familiarity with the species flowed entirely from encounters at funeral parlors and what were called “homegoing services” at his father's church. His term in the Army had been served entirely within the nation's borders, and even during his months working for Scarlett he had never touched what Lenny called the happy end of the business. It was past midnight when Eddie came upon his first-ever unknown body. He was wandering among the lush trees of Roger Morris Park, across Jumel Terrace from the party, talking himself down, remembering how his father always warned against treating desire as implying entitlement. The park was closed to visitors after dark and haunted besides, but Eddie was a doubter of conventions and rules, except in literature, where he accepted them entirely. The park had once been the grounds of the most famous mansion in all of Manhattan, the ornate Palladian palace that had been home, a century and a half ago, to Madame Jumel, perhaps the wealthiest woman in the land. This was back around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, when the Haarlem Heights had been a distant, rural enclave for the white and well-to-do of the polyglot city. Harlem of Eddie's era, after sixty years of Negrification, possessed few genuine tourist attractions, and the Jumel Mansion was among the few, although its principal lure was probably the ghost of Madame herself, occasionally spotted leaning from the upper windows to shush unruly visitors and, now and then, crossing the hall before your eyes, perhaps searching for the fortune that her second husband was said to have stolen. Most of Harlem pooh-poohed the ghost stories by day, and avoided Roger Morris Park at night.

Eddie did not think much of the supernatural, considering that more Wesley Senior's realm.

He stumbled over the body in the shadow of a dead elm very near the wrought-iron fence, where a passerby would no doubt have spotted it from the sidewalk early the next morning. The stumbling was literal, for Eddie, pained eyes on the townhouse where every moment drew Aurelia further from him, was not looking down. He tripped, and his chest hit crusty mounded snow. He turned and, spotting a man lying behind him, spun, catlike, to his feet, remembering the boys who had mugged him in Newark. Even when he crept closer and took in the elegant suit and watch chain, the lack of an overcoat despite the February chill, the white skin, the well-fed jowly face, the closed eyes, and the unmoving hands, he was certain the man must have tripped him on purpose, because—on this point, years later, he was firm—five minutes ago, on his previous circuit along the fence, the man had not been there.

“Hey,” said Eddie, anger fading as he got a good look. He shook the man's shoulder. “Hey!”

A fresh night snow was by this time brushing the city, and tiny twirling flakes settled on the stranger's forehead and lips as well as on the hands folded across his substantial chest. Still the man made no move.

“Are you okay? Hey. Wake up!”

But by that time Eddie had guessed that the man would not be waking. A white man, dead in Harlem. The press would have a field day. Not afraid but, for once, uncertain of his ground, Eddie knelt on the frozen ground and unfolded the man's pudgy hands, intending to check the pulse, although he had no idea how it was done. When he separated the fingers, something gold glinted and fell to the snow. Eddie picked it up. A cross, perhaps an inch and a half long, ornately worked, with an inscription on it he could not read in the faint glow of a streetlamp outside the fence. Then he realized that the words were upside down. Inverting the cross, twisting it to catch the light, he could make out “We shall,” and, in the dark, no more. Maybe the next word was “overcome”? But the light was too dim.

The cross dangled from a gold chain, threaded oddly through an eyelet at the bottom rather than the top, so that, had the dead man been wearing it around his neck, the cross would have been upside down, the words right side up. Eddie wondered why he had been clutching it at all. Seeking protection, perhaps. But from what? Leaning closer, squinting, Eddie had his first hint. Around the plump neck, digging into discolored flesh, was a leather band. The man had been garroted.

Eddie shot to his feet, senses woozily alert. If the body had not been here five minutes ago, then the killer must be nearby. He listened, but snow crunched in every direction. He peered, but in the trees every shadow swayed. Eddie was no fool. A garrote meant Scarlett, or somebody like Scarlett, and the Scarletts of the world had a thing about witnesses.

He wiped off the cross, tucked it back into the cold, lifeless hands, and hurried away. Crawling through the gap in the fence gave Eddie more trouble than usual, maybe because he was trembling. Struggling toward the sidewalk, he kept waiting for the garrote to slip around his own neck. He looked up at the townhouse but could not face the humiliation of return. He plunged south. Fat Man's, the famous bar and grill on 155th Street, was open late, packed as usual with Negro celebrities. If you could get in, Fat Man's was the place to be seen, and right now Eddie wanted to be seen, as far as possible from Roger Morris Park. He called the police from the pay phone in the back, not troubling to share his name. He had a drink, but everybody seemed to be looking at him. Maybe because he did not belong. Maybe because he was trembling and sweaty. Maybe nobody was looking, but Eddie took no chances. He threw money down without counting: it must have been enough, because the bartender thanked him and even said “sir.”

Home was a narrow walk-up on 123rd Street, noisy and airless, an address he seldom admitted outside his tiny circle, for the Valley, as it was called by the cognoscenti, was far from the most desirable corner of Harlem. For letters from his relatives he had invested prudently in a post-office box. Two flights up, in his claustrophobic flat, Eddie sweated the night away, perched on his lumpy but carefully made bed, journal in his lap, baseball bat by his side, watching the fetid alley they would use to gain entry to the side door when they came for him.

(II)

B
Y MORNING,
the city was abuzz. The dead man was a lawyer named Castle. Eddie had never heard of him but read every obituary he could get his hands on. Philmont Castle was evidently a titan of Wall Street. Corporations across the country issued condoling statements. So did several film actors. Eddie turned the pages. It seemed there was nobody the lawyer had not befriended. President Eisenhower said the whole nation would miss Phil Castle. He promised federal assistance in tracking down whoever had committed this loathsome outrage—or words to that effect. The lawyer had been a major Republican fund-raiser. And a devoted husband and father. And a pillar of his church. And a guest last night at “an engagement party in Harlem.”

Eddie put the newspaper down with a snap.

Try as he might, he could not correlate the smiling face on every front page with any of the Caucasian faces from last night. But there had been so many, and Eddie, if the truth were told, had stared mainly at the bride-to-be. He turned more pages. No mention of the cause of death, except that it was murder. Castle's wallet was missing. The police called it a robbery, not exactly an unknown event in Harlem, although the white newspapers seemed unaware that crime of any kind was relatively rare in those days along the nicer blocks. No speculation anywhere on exactly what a Wall Street lawyer might have been doing on the grounds of Jumel Mansion. Nothing about a cross clutched in Castle's dead hands, whether right side up or upside down. And no whisper of anybody's having noticed an angry, half-drunk Negro writer leaving the party around the same time the dead man did.

The authorities never questioned Eddie. Days passed. He could not get the cross out of his mind. He wished he had had time to read the rest of the inscription. He risked a rare letter to Wesley Senior, inquiring but not saying why. The pastor answered by return post. His tone for once was patient. He enjoyed being didactic. The upside-down cross was often called the Cross of Saint Peter, because tradition held that the leader of the Apostles had been crucified that way. The Roman Catholic Church considered the symbol sacred. Over the centuries, he added, the upside-down cross had been adopted as an object of veneration by the worshipers of Satan, or, as Wesley Senior put it, quoting Scripture, the followers of “the devil and his angels.”

Eddie decided it was just coincidence.

CHAPTER
3

Emil and Belt

(I)

P
ROBABLY
E
DDIE SHOULD HAVE FORGOTTEN
the whole thing. The cross might have been a mystery, but it was in no sense his mystery. He did not know the family; none of the responsibility rested on his shoulders. He had a career to pursue, a father to impress, and a relationship to mourn. He should have and very likely he would have forgotten the whole thing, but for three events, seemingly disconnected, which only with the benefit of hindsight fell into a pattern.

The first of the three events began by chance, two months after he found the lawyer's body, in a barbershop on Amsterdam Avenue. It was an April Saturday, unusually sultry for a Manhattan spring. The women of Harlem brought out their pastels. The men carried their jackets over their shoulders but did not forgo their hats. The darker nation needed this warm relief from a difficult winter. The Southern states had announced their “rejection” of the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions. All over Harlem, people shivered, whispering of a second Civil War. Then, just days ago, at the end of March, Walter White, legendary head of the NAACP, had died. The race had lost its leader. At the barbershop, everyone was lamenting. Eddie was there to have his hair cut, but others glided in and out of the door because the barber was known to supply mezzroll, Harlem slang of the day for high-quality marijuana. You slipped the barber's assistant a couple of bills, and another assistant met you near the filthy men's room in the back. Eddie had no interest in the shop's sideline. He went for the history. The head barber, Mr. Pond, would fill your head with stories, some of them possibly true, of the jazz joints where he used to play piano before he cut hair—the Exclusive at 136th and Lenox, the Yeah Man on Seventh, even the world-famous Rhythm Club—and the celebrities he claimed to have barbered in the old days, from Lonnie Johnson to Willie “The Lion” Smith to Fats Waller to Jelly Roll Morton. Maybe. Maybe not. Today Eddie wore brightly colored billowing pants with a wide belt, not really to his taste, although his friends assured him they were the latest fashion. A famous writer, they said, should keep up with the times, and Eddie, although not yet famous, ruefully conceded the point. Sitting in the barber chair, characters from his next story shuffling and reshuffling through his head, Eddie heard a couple of men behind him laughing about a belt and for a terrible second burned with embarrassment. When he listened more closely, he realized that the joke was not about his clothes but about somebody whose name was Belt.
Doctor
Belt, the men said: the title emphasized and drawn out in the wonder typical of those times, especially down in the Valley, where educated Negroes were less common. Doctor Belt had come to Harlem, the men were saying, to general guffaws from the shop, and the bartenders better look out.

Eddie was not, really, a man who hung out in bars, for he had been bred, much against his will, to a disdain of a certain kind of Negro. He did his drinking in the nicer clubs and the salons instead. But so did Doctor Belt. The name was familiar. Eddie had saved the stories about Castle. Flipping through them later, he found a list in the
Amsterdam News
of prominent Negroes the lawyer had numbered among his friends. There it was, Doctor Joseph Belt, identified as a “government official.” Eddie learned over the next few days that Belt was a physicist, a former assistant professor at Stanford, who now earned a nice living at a laboratory out west. Eddie was intrigued. He had not met many Negro scientists, although he himself had once hoped to be one. Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of them all, had died in Princeton, New Jersey, the other day, and periodicals everywhere were running stories on “the technological century.” Scientists had become heroes. Technology was everywhere. Polio had been cured. A new invention not only washed your dishes for you but dried them. There was serious talk of putting a man on the moon. It had become possible to incinerate a hundred thousand people in a heartbeat. The darker nation was caught up in the excitement. There was an editor at the
Amsterdam News
who now and then still published Eddie's essays. It occurred to Eddie that he might track down Doctor Belt for a quick interview, a black take on the technological century.

But Belt was uncooperative. He refused Eddie's entreaties. He would not meet. Eddie was the sort of man who took rejection as a challenge. From Wesley Senior, past master of politics as well as preaching, he had learned that connections existed to be used, that people of power enjoyed doing favors to place you in their debt. So he approached Langston Hughes, who was owed by everyone. Hughes came through, persuading Doctor Belt to meet Eddie for a drink at the Savoy. The physicist refused to talk about his work, and told Eddie that, had he known this was the subject, he would never have accepted the invitation. Eddie said, no, no, he just wanted to hear what it was like to be a Negro scientist. Belt eyed him disdainfully from behind thick glasses. Science was science, he said, missing the point. There was not Negro science and white science, there was good science and bad science. Belt signaled the waiter for another Scotch. He was a distant, paunchy man, soft and dark like a chocolate Santa. Belt drank heavily but not sloppily. He drank the way men drink to forget their burdens, not to unload them. He was in town to visit friends, he said. He had missed Phil's funeral. He would pay his respects to the widow before she returned to South Carolina. Eddie kept trying to ask about science. Belt ignored him. He spent a lot of time looking at the door, as if expecting a friend, or perhaps an enemy. The Savoy was one of the most famous music halls in New York. There were as many white guests as black. A couple of movie stars had a table near the band. Smoke hung heavily in the air. The waiters did you a favor by fetching your order. Belt said people were nicer back home, but never said where home was. Somebody dropped a tray of dishes and Belt was on his feet, shaking. He looked around, embarrassed, and headed for the door.

“What are you afraid of?” Eddie asked in the lobby, where Belt was buying cigarettes at the stand. The scientist said nothing. Eddie tried again. “Does it have to do with what happened to Philmont Castle?”

Belt focused on him at last, the eyes moist and rejecting behind the thick glasses. “I'm not afraid of anything,” he said, then glanced over his shoulder.

Eddie tried again. “Does it have something to do with the cross?” He tried to remember his father's letter. “The Cross of Saint Peter?”

A flicker in the dark, constrained face. Nothing more. But the physicist definitely reacted. Then he snickered, and the disdain was back. “What is this, some kind of test? The devils are really scraping the bottom of the barrel if they had to send somebody like you.”

“Which devils are these?”

Doctor Belt said nothing. He turned contemptuously away, then swung, briefly, back. “Tell them to stay away from me,” he said, and left.

(II)

T
HE SECOND
of the three events that set Edward Wesley Junior upon his path occurred in July of that same year, 1955—in the larger history, a few days after Disneyland opened its doors for the first time out in California; and, in Eddie's personal history, on the day of Aurelia's fabulous wedding to Kevin Garland. Eddie at first planned not to attend, but his younger sister, Junie, persuaded him. Junie was a law student at Harvard, the only woman of the darker nation in her class. From the time they were small, Junie had been her big brother's frequent muse.

“What are you trying to say by staying away?” she demanded, when he called her long-distance on a neighbor's phone. “That you love Aurelia? Everybody in Harlem knows you love Aurelia. So all you're really saying is you're too much of a cad to wish her well.”

Eddie, feeling trapped, took refuge in silly humor. “What if I lose control and punch Kevin?”

“Don't even joke about that.” He could feel his sister's shudder over the telephone. She had always hated every form of human violence. Back in high school, in the thick of the war, Eddie had teased her, the way big brothers do, demanding to know if she would shoot Hitler if given the chance. Junie had said she might, but would have to kill herself next.

“I'm sorry,” he said now, and meant it.

“Go to the wedding,” she instructed. “Give the best toast.”

So he laughed, and went. For that matter, so did Junie, who did not want to leave her nervous brother without an escort. It had been a while since she had seen New York, she said, and it was time. Although the bride was from Cleveland, her family wanted to marry off their daughter in the heart of well-to-do Harlem. The wedding was at Saint Philip's Episcopal Church on 134th Street. Kevin Garland was a vestryman, and, indeed, the Garlands, grandest family in all Harlem, practically owned the place. Alas, at the last minute Aurelia's parents were unable to make the trip: her father had taken a nasty tumble, and was hospitalized. Eddie sat stoically, dying a bit inside, wondering how Aurie could marry into the kind of family who would insist that the wedding go on as planned, bride's parents or no; and wondering, too, whether Aurelia was really being pressured by her family to marry into a senior clan, or if Eddie had been only a last fling: perhaps this storybook marriage was what Aurie had planned all along. When the priest invited the groom to kiss the bride, Eddie shut his eyes, trying and failing to remember who had written that every true novel is about the love you lost.

Junie, who never missed a thing, poked his ribs and told him to stop mooning. “It's their day, not yours,” she hissed.

The reception was in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel, transformed at enormous expense to resemble the interior of a Venetian palace, right down to the painted ceiling, frieze-covered walls, and gilded pilasters. This was the style of the times. The matrons who ran Harlem society—“light-skinned Czarinas,” Adam Clayton Powell had dubbed them, meaning anything but a compliment—made frequent jaunts to Europe, and returned bubbling with obsolete ideas. A good quarter of the guests were white. Eddie fumbled his toast, but Gary Fatek, his rich friend from Amherst, spoke brilliantly. Gary was tall and graceful and impressive. Even his unruly red hair commanded attention. When he opened his mouth, choirs sang. He kept the room laughing, and worked into his remarks the fact that he and Eddie had met Aurelia at the same college mixer, in November of their freshman year. Thus the celebrants were able to acknowledge the eight-year love affair now at an end, without anyone's actually mentioning it. This was Gary's element: not only speaking, but speaking in Harlem. On other days he could be found, by his own description, rabble-rousing in libraries and church basements, urging the glorious alliance between students and workers but Negroes in particular. The Czarinas sniffed that Gary had time for this silliness because he was half a Hilliman and did not have to work for a living. If the question ever arose, Gary, laughing, said he did it to pick up girls.

When the toasting finally ended, the drinking began. With Junie on hand, Eddie consumed less alcohol than he had at the engagement party. Clear-headed, he watched uneasily.

“Smile.”

“I am smiling.”

“Not like that. A real smile.”

Eddie did his best, but he was remembering the last time he had sat among strangers celebrating the couple, and how that night had ended. He had yet to tell even Junie or Gary about finding the body.

“Get out there and have some fun,” Junie commanded, refusing to allow her brother to mope. She wore him out, forcing him to dance one number after another, most of them with a young woman named Mona Veazie, Aurelia's maid of honor. Mona, at this time considered one of the most desirable Harlem bachelorettes, had been eyeing Eddie half the night, but grew annoyed at the way his glance kept following the bride, and finally switched to Gary. Rumor said she preferred white men anyway. As for Junie, she mostly sat at the table. A couple of the more daring young fellows invited her to dance, but she smiled shyly and dipped her head and declined. People pointed, and whispered. But, then, the senior clans of Harlem found her odd to begin with. The Czarinas did not know what to make of Junie, who studied law and showed no interest in marriage. Family ties might have rescued another young woman from similar strangeness: Mona Veazie, for example, was rather peculiar herself, pursuing a doctoral degree, but the Veazies, architects for six generations, enjoyed a social prominence that excused eccentricity. On the other hand, for all the respect in which Wesley Senior was held for his civil-rights activism, his family was not really—

And then the whispering stopped, because Junie, too, was dancing, not with a nobody like herself, but with Perry Mount,
the
Perry Mount, Harlem's golden boy, the young man every clan hoped its daughters might snare. A roomful of beautiful debutantes of the darker nation, and Perry was dancing with Junie. The Czarinas looked at each other in perplexity. Eddie glared. He had never really liked Perry, perhaps because of the golden boy's ill-concealed crush on Junie, stretching well back into their shared childhoods. Nowadays Perry went after everybody. Eddie was determined to protect his sister from heartbreak. It did not occur to him that Perry might, at this moment, be making her happy.

Gary Fatek, back at Eddie's side, handed his friend a club soda, then, for a while, watched him watching Junie.

“Look at the bright side,” he said after several minutes. “At least you're not staring at Aurie any more.”

(III)

T
HE BAND PLAYED
a fanfare. Flurry on the dance floor as the guests parted, forming an aisle. Bride and groom were departing the palace, hand-in-hand, wearing their traveling clothes, and Eddie was cheering along with everyone else, because that was what one did; besides, Junie's fingers were digging into his arm. The bandleader announced that the dancing would continue until midnight for those so inclined. Eddie was not inclined to do anything but lead the charge to the exit. Gary and Mona were very cozy in a dim corner. Eddie looked around for his sister. Perry, bowing like a cavalier, delivered her to his elbow. Junie was glowing.