The Sleepless (53 page)

When Edgar Bedford had left, Michael stood in the twilit copying-room for two or three minutes, and thought of Raymond Moorpath climbing into the air.
That’s how we did it,
Edgar Bedford had said.
We made the right friends.
 

He called Patsy. He didn’t tell her about Raymond Moorpath. She was finding it difficult enough as it was, with his prolonged absences, and Joe being killed, and Dr Rice being injured (he hadn’t yet told her that Dr Rice was dead, too). What was more, the television news channels were making a meal of the Boston race riots, and every bulletin was crowded with live footage of firefights and ambushes and buildings burning, and terrified children running for their lives. 

The mayor had called in National Guard reserves and SWAT squads, but every new initiative seemed to fuel the rioting more. Decades of anger and malice and alienation were stacked up like a bonfire, and every attempt to suppress them was like throwing on canfuls of gasoline. 

‘You’ll be happy to hear that Edgar Bedford has told me to wrap this whole thing up,’ said Michael. ‘I should be finished by the weekend. Then I’ll come on home.’ 

‘Jason misses you,’ said Patsy. ‘And I miss you, too. I know what I said about the money ... but somehow it doesn’t seem so important any more.’ 

Michael didn’t know what to say. He thought about Megan, sliding down from her wheelchair. He thought about wiping her face. He could have cried, he felt so ashamed of himself. 

‘Plymouth might give me more work later. I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’ 

‘Maybe you could finish that board game you were working on.’ 

He swallowed. He had tears in his eyes. ‘Yes, sure. Maybe I could.’ 

At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. He sat up in bed, sweating, frightened. He had been dreaming again. The same dream, with the President walking toward him, smiling, his hand held out. And his own voice, very slow-motion,
Nooooo Mr Pressiddennnt doonnnn’t coommme neaaaarrr mmmeeee –
 

The phone kept on ringing and it took him a while to realize where he was, and where the phone was, and to pick it up. 

‘Michael?’ said a harsh, Boston-Irish twang. ‘This is Giraffe.’ 

‘Giraffe? Do you know what time it is?’ 

‘Three-oh-three. Can you get yourself around to my apartment – like directly?’ 

‘You mean
now
?’ 

‘The sooner the better. This is important, Mikey. This is what we’ve all been looking for.’ 

He wasn’t confident of finding a taxi at that time of night, so he drove himself to Thomas Boyle’s apartment and parked across the street. The night wind was warm, and there were still a few night owls strolling on the sidewalks. A man was standing next to the mailbox on the corner, his face shaded by a hat. He stood with his arms by his sides and he didn’t move. Michael hesitated for a moment, and thought about accosting him, but then he decided that it was probably safer not to. What, after all, could he say? ‘You look like one of the white-faced men that my friend thinks are responsible for assassinating famous people since way back when? What are you doing here?’ 

He rapped at Thomas’s door with his knuckles in case Megan was asleep and the doorbell woke her; but it was Megan who answered. ‘Hallo, Michael, how are you?’ 

He took her hand and squeezed it. It was an acknowledgement that what they had done together had been induced by ‘Mr Hillary’, and not by any lust for each other. But it was important for them both to stay friends. 

Thomas and Victor were sitting at the dining-table, drinking coffee and talking to a huge, handsome black man in a green djellaba. He rose up when Michael came in, and held out both hands. 

‘Mikey, this is Matthew Monyatta, of the Olduvai Black Consciousness Group.’ 

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Michael. ‘I think I’ve seen you on television.’ 

Matthew grinned. ‘I expect you have. Now and again they need a black revolutionary to give their programmes some political balance.’ 

‘Do you want some coffee?’ asked Thomas. ‘Matthew has something pretty important to tell us.’ 

‘It’s a little early for me,’ Michael told him. ‘And, by the way, I think we’re being followed and watched. There’s a guy hanging out across the street ... I can’t be sure, but he looks like the same guy who was watching my apartment, too.’ 

Matthew said, ‘Oh, yes, you’re being watched, all right. Everybody who threatens the white-white men is being watched. Twenty-four hours of the day.’ 

‘The white-white men?’ asked Michael. 

‘That’s what people call them in Africa and the Middle East. It’s because of their faces. Once seen, never forgotten. White, with their eyes shaded.’ 

‘What did you say the other evening?’ Michael asked Victor. ‘Something about the lily-white boys?’ 

‘The lily-white boys, they’re one and the same people,’ Matthew nodded. ‘It’s what you might call an irony. Their faces are white, their skin is white, but their souls are as black as night.’ 

‘Do you know who they are?’ asked Michael. He could hardly believe what he was hearing. 

Matthew nodded. ‘I surely do. That’s why I telephoned Lieutenant Boyle here, as soon as I saw his news conference on the television.’ 

‘Tell Michael what you told me,’ said Thomas. ‘Tell him about the bones.’ 

Matthew reached into the neckline of his djellaba and produced a soft grey leather bag. He loosened the drawstring that kept it fastened, and spread a dozen small white bones onto the tabletop. 

‘These are the bones. Witch-doctors used them in Kenya to foretell the future and to divine the secrets of the past. Three weeks ago I cast the bones and the bones warned me that the white-white men were restless.’ 

‘How did they do that?’ asked Michael, trying not to sound too sceptical. But it was only four o’clock in the morning, and he had expected something more believable than bones. 

Matthew drew the palm of his hand across the bones and they rolled over and changed their pattern. ‘I know what’s going on in your mind, Michael. You think the bones are primitive; and you think the bones are nothing but black man’s superstition. Who can tell the future from a dead rooster? Who can tell the past from bones alone? But I was taught how to use these by a witch-doctor who lived close to Olduvai, and this witch-doctor had been taught to use them by the witch-doctor before him, and so forth, and so on, right back, over a thousand years, the same knowledge, the same psycho-kinetic skill, even before they had a scientific name for it. 

‘The bones are the same as dowsing-rods; but they don’t sense water. Instead, they sense a person’s spirit – and when a person’s spirit is disturbed, or restless, the bones twitch, and jump, and shift of their own accord. The white-white men have very powerful spirits, spirits which affect the whole of human society, so when the white-white men are restless – well, the bones pretty soon warn you about it.’ 

‘And this is what happened three weeks ago?’ asked Thomas, making notes in a springbound notebook. 

‘This is what
started
three weeks ago,’ said Matthew, ‘and the bones have been getting more twitchy ever since. I knew that something wicked was coming this way, I knew that somebody important was going to die. But the bones didn’t give me no clue as to whom it might be, they were real confused; and so when Mr O’Brien’s helicopter came down like that, and everybody was killed, there was nothing I could do but mourn. I couldn’t be sure that it was the white-white men who had done the deed, although I had my suspicions, because the bones were literally
leaping
that day, dancing on the table like little dead men. And then, of course, I saw them.’ 

‘You saw them?’ asked Thomas. ‘You saw the white-white men?’ 

Matthew hesitated, and lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was much more subdued. ‘I saw them down at Patrice Latomba’s.’ 

Thomas’s pencil paused over his notepad. ‘Was this before Verna Latomba was murdered, or afterwards?’ 

‘I saw them there, I saw them with Verna. She was all tied up, and they’d been hurting her. Dropping candlewax on her, cutting her with knives.’ 

Thomas stared at him. ‘You saw them with Verna, you saw them doing that, and you didn’t call the police? Matthew – you could have saved her life!’ 

Matthew looked back at him defiantly. ‘The white-white men told me to mind my own business. Don’t you think that hurt, walking out like that? Don’t you think that I was ashamed? Ashamed of myself, ashamed of my race, ashamed of my cowardice?’ 

‘But, Jesus, Matthew –’ 

Matthew banged his fist on the table. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with! These aren’t mafiosi, or Yardie gangs, or Chinese tongs!
These are the white-white men
!’ 

Michael looked away. He was embarrassed by Matthew’s outburst, but he was also embarrassed by his own thoughts. The white-white men? For Christ’s sake. Was this what Thomas had dragged him out of bed for? To listen to all of this superstitious babble? Yet Matthew seemed like such a proud man, a man of such strength and character. 

Thomas said, with great gentleness, ‘Come on, Matthew, tell me. What makes the white-white men so much worse than the Mafia?’ 

Matthew took a deep breath. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? The Mafia have honour, the Mafia have religion, the Mafia have codes of conduct. Maybe they’re killers, maybe they deal in drugs and prostitution and gambling. But they have pride, they have family loyalty, no matter how perverted that pride and that loyalty may be. The white-white men have none of that. The white-white men are guilty of every sin that it’s possible for anyone to be guilty of. Every excess. Every cruelty. And that’s what they are – the most cruelest creatures on God’s earth, the very personification of all evil.’ 

‘And you saw Verna Latomba in the hands of these men, and you didn’t make any attempt to save her?’ 

‘No, I didn’t.’ 

‘Are you proud of that?’ 

‘No, I’m not. But there was nothing that I could do; and nothing that anybody else could have done. And if I’d crossed them, believe you me, they would have been coming after me, too, like sharks out of hell, for ever and ever, until they got me. I tried to kid myself that it was nothing more than a little bit of drug business between Patrice and Luther Johnson and the white-white men. I don’t know whether you even know this, but the white-white men, they’re heavily into drugs, not because of the profit, mind, but because of the social disruption that drugs cause. That’s why they like to sell to MIT students and Ivy Leaguers ... that’s what your Ivy Connection is all about. You sell crack to a kid on Blue Hill Avenue, what real difference does it make? He doesn’t have no social influence, he’s just one more sad statistic. But you sell crack to a physics major or a would-be lawyer or an up-and-coming young politician – then you cause some damage. Then you start destroying hundreds of lives, thousands, for the price of one.’ 

Victor said, ‘What made you call Lieutenant Boyle tonight?’ 

‘Guilt, I guess. And the facts you put out in that press conference of yours, which made me one hundred per cent sure that it was the white-white men who killed John O’Brien and Elaine Parker and that insurance friend of yours. You said that they were all marked in the same identical way, with the puncture holes deep in their backs – well, my blood just turned to ice-water. Because nobody does that, except the white-white men – just like Count Dracula leaving the famous fang holes in women’s necks.’ 

Michael said, ‘Where do they come from, these white-white men? I mean, who exactly are they? Are they aliens, or what?’ 

Matthew gave a loud bellow of bitter laughter, and banged the dining-table with his fist. ‘You could say that! You could say that! Aliens, I like that!’ 

‘Come on, Matthew,’ said Thomas. ‘This isn’t a joke.’ 

‘Oh, yes it is,’ Matthew retorted. ‘It’s a joke on you. If you thought that your white Western civilization was free of all of its obligations from times gone by, then it’s a joke on you. How many Jewish Americans go back to Israel, to meditate and to pray? How many black Americans go back to Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, to think about their roots? How many Irish go back to Ireland, and Germans to Germany, and Neapolitans to Naples? We are all inextricably entangled, every one of us, in what we are, and what our ancestors were – and that’s the fine thing about humanity, and race, and we should all be proud of it, and not ashamed.’ 

‘But what about the white-white men?’ Thomas insisted. 

Matthew took a sip of espresso and then a sip of plain water. He leaned forward on the table and his face was serious. Michael thought that his face was almost like a landscape – broad and pitted, with veldts for cheeks and high sierras for cheekbones and caverns for nostrils – and above them all, a tableland that formed his forehead. 

‘The white-white men go back to the days of Leviticus, which was the third book of Moses, and that was written sixteen hundred years ago. The book of Leviticus shows the way in which men could be separated from their sin, and its consequences, and do you know how? 

‘The Lord ordered his high priest Aaron to “select a goat for Azazel” on the Jewish Day of Atonement. “Aaron shall lay both of his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the sons of Israel, and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins; and he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who stands in readiness.” And when they talked about sins in those days, they meant every kind of sin ... from touching a menstruating woman, to uncovering the nakedness of your brother’s wife, to lying with a male as one lies with a female, which is an abomination, and you’d better believe it.