The Man in My Basement (21 page)

“Chastity, look what little Charles Blakey brought us,” Irene Littleneck said. “He brought us your favorite pie. And he didn’t even know that you liked it. Did you, Charles?”

I shook my head.

“Speak up, Charles,” Irene ordered. “Chassy doesn’t hear so well.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know you liked the pie, but I hope you like it.”

“Isn’t that nice?” Irene asked her sister.

The dying woman’s fingers got a little more agitated. Irene held her sister’s wrist and peered down into the half-closed eyes. “He’s a godsend, don’t you think?”

The one-sided talk went on for a while. Then Irene turned to me and said, “We better let her get some rest. You know, she hasn’t had a guest in more than three years.”

“Mr. Bennet.”

“Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”

Anniston Bennet was sick by this time. His eyes had trouble keeping their focus even after they had become accustomed to the light. Only half a loaf of bread had been eaten and he was unwashed. If I had not just seen Chastity Littleneck, I might have broken down right then.

“Why do you torture me?” he asked.

“Why don’t you just leave?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’m supposed to be down here. Trapped by a Negro, a black man, until the bubble in my brain passes. Until the itch in my heart goes away.”

He said all of that staring down at my feet. Again I didn’t believe him. Anytime he showed weakness I thought it was a trap.

“That’s no answer,” I said. It was a phrase my father used when I avoided his questions.

“I swear it is,” Bennet said. “There’s a bubble in my brain, not a tumor but I can feel it. And I want to tear my chest open. Did you know how far a woman would go to save her babies from starvation?”

The last question took me by surprise.

“Say what?” I asked.

“That’s what you want to know,” Bennet said. “There was a rich man somewhere on the Mediterranean who wanted to experiment on a child. A thousand miles south of him, there was a political campaign of famine being waged. And among the population there were many mothers who would have jumped at the offer of feeding the rest of her family at the cost of one son. I was just a conduit, a wire making the circuit. If one child had not died, the whole family would have perished.”

“You could have saved them all,” I said.

“That time maybe. And maybe I did once in a while. But the power is drained away if you never meet your obligations. The rich man I aided gave me power that some presidents wouldn’t have understood.”

“Is it the guilt over that child that brings you here?”

“No. I don’t think so. Can I have some oatmeal?”

I made his afternoon meal of porridge and returned to watch him eat.

“Can I have light tonight?” he asked me.

“You could go home and sit next to a fire.”

“I don’t want to go. I have to wait out the time.”

“Then you can stay, but I want to hear everything. No more games.”

N
o matter what it might sound like, I hadn’t become heartless. For the next three days, I fed Bennet porridge, bananas, and other soft foods that would strengthen him. I sat with him for hours just talking and keeping him company. We played chess (which he always won) and talked about stock investments that I should consider.

He got back some of his color and gained a pound or two.

One afternoon I went to an electronics store and bought a long-play tape recorder that was small enough to strap to my back. The tape had a two-hour capacity and I could pin the microphone to the sleeve of my shirt.

“Okay,” I told my prisoner on the fourth day, the secret tape recorder running, “let’s go over everything you’ve done.”

“Why do you want this?” he asked.

“Because you forced your way down here and got all in my life. You know everything about my crimes and misdemeanors. You tell me that my cellar is your prison. Well all right, fine, what are you in here for? What have you done?”

He smiled slightly. That’s how it began.

I have his confessions on tape in a secret place in the basement. I keep it hidden behind a stone in the wall. The crimes he detailed to me were fantastic and sick. He robbed Peter to kill Paul. He was at the center of much suffering that I never even knew existed.

“You think that you can have the easy life of TV and gasoline without someone suffering and dying somewhere?” he asked me. Then he told me about the execution of three hundred loyal officers that one dictator realized might turn against him one day. He had nothing to do with the killings, but he was in that Central American country at the time, making liaisons with that government for a fruit concern in the Midwest. He knew the plan before it was executed but did nothing to stop it.

“It was not my business,” he said.

“But could you have stopped it?” I asked.

“Not without killing every man, woman, and child in this world,” he answered. “And it’s not really worth it, you know. Saving lives.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I saved a man once,” he said. “He was a journalist in the south of Africa. For the crime of writing against a mineral conglomerate, he was framed, arrested, and sentenced to death. I went to him on behalf of his sister. She worked in an office I kept in Rhodesia. She begged me to help. I liked her a lot so I told her that he was doing what he had to do, but she still begged me. I went to him and told him what would happen after he died. How the rest of his friends and his loved ones would suffer. When he refused me I told him that I would have to give his sister’s name to the army because she was working against them too. All he had to do was agree to keep silent and the mineral company would forget him and give him money to migrate off the continent.”

“Did he agree?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So you saved him.”

“He died from drink in Morocco in just two years. You can’t save fools and you can’t save victims. That’s why I’ve got this bubble in my head. It’s like every step is planned from the beginning.”

Weeks passed. Every day I spent down in the basement with my prisoner and my secret tape recorder. That’s how I began to think of him. My prisoner. As long as he was in that basement, I figured that the world was a little safer place. I was also his confessor, the chronicler of his sins.

After hearing about hundreds of crimes, I decided to ask about Bennet’s own past.

“Did you ever find out who your father was?” I asked.

“I’d rather not talk about that.”

“Would you rather four days in the hole?”

Bennet was afraid of the dark by that time. He had experienced something down in the darkness that scared him. I knew he wouldn’t refuse my questions. I had dominated him with the fear of isolation.

At that time I felt that my actions were justified.

“I don’t know who my father was. Except that he really was from Turkey and that he was murdered after making my mother pregnant.”

“How do you know that?”

“I hired a detective to search for him. He found that a Tamal Hikmet was murdered in Harlem buying heroin eight months before I was born. Tamal was a Turkish illegal. He was an addict and a playwright. No one could have saved him. No one can save anyone, not even themselves.”

“But maybe they can be redeemed,” I suggested. To my knowledge that was the first time in my life that I had ever used a derivative of the word
redemption.

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe they can make amends for their crimes. Maybe they can make a stand. Tell the world what is right.”

“You ever read
Moby Dick,
Charles?”

I had not and shook my head to say so.

“There’s a cook in that book,” my prisoner said. “A cook who lectures to sharks about their nature. He tells them that they could be angels if they just mastered their appetites. He preached to them, but they didn’t understand. Our hearts are like those sharks. There’s no curbing the appetite of a hungry heart.”

“Maybe he was talking to himself,” I said, not thinking really, just making up words.

But Mr. Anniston Bennet, Tamal Knosos, aka Hikmet, looked up at me with something like wonder in his face. He wrestled with the words that I had already forgotten and then repeated them and then wrestled some more.

“Talking to himself,” he said a third time.

Anniston Bennet was a murderer if you went by his words. He had people killed, and he killed with his own hands four times. Never in self-defense—he was a predator with no natural enemies. But he never killed without the say-so of officials in the government; he never killed for passion—at least that’s what he said.

When his time in my cellar was almost up, he became jaunty. He made jokes with me and said thank you every night before I left him.

I was happy then too. I had three girlfriends, money in the bank, and plans for my future, and I was friends with Clarance and Ricky again. Some weeks earlier I told Narciss that I wanted my family heirlooms back so I could make a museum out of my ancestry in the house where that family throve.

Every now and then Bennet would say to me, “The cook was talking to himself, huh, Charles?”

“I don’t know,” I’d say to him. “I just said it. You’re the one who read the book.”

He’d smile at me and sit back in his red chair. He had a full beard by then, and he never wore his blue contacts at all.

It was his last Thursday in my home when I came down to see him. I opened the hatch and was greeted by silence. Usually I could hear the rustle of his movements, his standing or rising from his cot. But that Thursday he did not rise. He stayed sleeping in his bed.

“Mr. Bennet,” I said, but he made no motion.

I said it louder with no more effect.

By the third time I was frightened.

By the fifth I went back to my house to find the key to his cage.

Anniston Bennet was dead. Peaceful and placid, lying with no blankets, dressed only in his self-styled prison pants. Under his bed was a neat stack of envelopes that were sealed, stamped, and addressed to different people, including me.

There was no wound or other sign of trauma. He had just gone to sleep and drifted off to death. I never even considered calling the hospital. His body was already stiff.

The letters were addressed mainly to people in New York City and Washington, D.C. But there were envelopes destined for Europe and Africa, Asia and South America too.

I opened only the one addressed to me.

Dear Charles:
Or should I say Warden? You have found me now, dead, in your basement. I wonder what you will do with my corpse? I have left letters for my business associates and the two friends I have. There are also notes for two wives and children. I have said good-bye to all of them. It would be nice for you to send them.
But I know you may not be inclined to let out the news of my death in your custody. There may be those who will feel uncertain about your part in my death. And though no one will hold you responsible, they might worry about what I told you, seeing how crazy this suicide might seem.
There is one pill left in the glass on the floor. It is a fast-acting poison called Sleeper that was designed to be painless. I leave one for you in case you one day feel at an end.
I had the pills, but I wasn’t sure when I came to you that I wanted to die. I mean, I’ve wanted to die for a long time now, but I could see no reason until you left me in the dark. In the dark they all came back to me. The dead people and the fools. The women who gave themselves for money and the men who gave themselves for women. The old men who couldn’t even get it up anymore who gave themselves for power. And me like a sheepdog keeping them in line, leading them to slaughter because it was what I was asked to do.
I smelled blood in the darkness. I heard the silence of death. And then a light would come and you would walk down the stairs asking if the ones I killed were black men just as if death had a race. I began to like you. Even though you turned on me and beat me with the darkness and silly questions.
When the confessions were all through, I knew there was no more to say. You left just a few minutes ago. I will take the Sleeper after this one last letter (the rest I’ve written over the past two weeks).
I want to die telling you something, Charles. I want to pass something on, but I can’t think of a thing. Now that death is coming the bubble is gone, the itch in my heart has subsided and there’s nothing left to think.
The only words I have to pass on are the ones to a story I never told you.
I once had to kill a man (a white man)—my boss. The man who brought me into reclamations after I was finished with government work. His name was Stewart Tellman and he was from Greenwich too. He taught me everything that I tried to tell you. I learned from him and we did good business. But one day his grandson was killed by a falling beam at a construction site. A hydraulic lift went out of control.
Stew had the man working the lift murdered. Then he started making crazy decisions on the job. He took chances and left clues of our coming. He spent hours sitting in the dark like you made me do for days.
I went to his home one night while his wife was away visiting their daughter. I came in a window and shot him in the head. He was napping. His head was down on a mahogany desk in the study. I shot him and it wasn’t murder. He had killed himself as far as I was concerned.
I sat with him all night watching his blood congeal and his skin tighten. I knew then (seventeen years ago) that one day I would have to die like that. I decided to do it myself rather than leave it for someone else.
But I couldn’t have done it without you, Charles. You gave me the time to say good-bye. The rest of your money is in a false bottom of my book trunk.
Tamal

The next few hours were the hardest I ever knew. The man in my basement was dead. A corpse that I could never explain. I sat with him all day and into the next night. When it was late I went out into the graveyard and dug a hole between my great-great-grandfather William P. Dodd and my aunt Theodora. I dug all night long, wondering if Miss Littleneck was hiding in the bushes, spying on my crime.