Till You Hear From Me: A Novel (25 page)

Mr. Eddie nodded. “None braver. I remember speaking to her afterward and telling her I couldn’t think of nothin’ anybody could do to make me beat her like that, but she wouldn’t say a bad word about those men. She said nobody knew the conditions they were livin’ in and that they just didn’t have no choice.”

He swallowed the last of his cognac. “Now, I didn’t argue with her. Lord knows I didn’t have the right or even the inclination, but I always thought she was wrong about that.” He looked up then to meet his friend’s eyes. “Everybody always got a choice.”

THIRTY-ONE

T
ONI GOT IN AT NOON
. W
ES BOOKED HER A ROOM AT THE
F
OUR
S
EA
sons and told her to call him from the hotel. She was ordering room service when he arrived and she came to the door with the phone in her hand. She was wearing beautifully cut navy blue pants and a white silk shirt. Her jacket was flung across the bed, but she was still wearing her pumps and a double strand of pearls. She looked good and smelled even better. Anybody who thought a man could work with a woman fine as Toni and not think about fucking her was a faggot or a fool.

“Do you have Pellegrino?” she was saying. “Yes, the big one. And some lime. How long will it be? Fine. Thank you.”

She closed the door behind him and put the phone down, wagging a reprimanding finger.

“What?” he said, smiling back. Five minutes to flirt and then they had to get down to business. Oscar was being a hard-ass about time all of a sudden and Wes didn’t want any shit.

“I’m here to save the day,” she said. “I thought you’d meet me at the gate with an armload of roses and a marriage proposal.”

“I told you I’m not a marrying man,” he said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. But he had to admit, if he was, she would definitely have been in the running for wife number three. “You look great.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “But I plan to clean up real nice later.”

She walked over to the small couch, sat down, and crossed her legs. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

That’s one of the things he liked about this woman. She could tell the difference between work and play time.

“We’ve got permission to go by and take a look at the Rev’s closet tomorrow.”

“The closet at his house?”

“That’s what he said. Floor to ceiling. Nothing but cards.”

“Would it be rude for me to ask him what century he’s livin’ in?”

“You have to wait until Monday. Right now he’s in Albany with my dad.”

She wrinkled her nose slightly and did his favorite movie star hair toss. “Is that really a place? It sounds like the fuzz that grows on top of old Chinese takeout.”

“Don’t be so bourgie. Your folks haven’t been in Connecticut that long.”

She grinned at him. “Four generations long enough for you?”

Wes let that slide. He wasn’t in any position to win the whose family’s been free the longest contest. His ancestors probably greeted the news of their emancipation with deep panic. Who was going to look out for them now?

“His daughter’s going to let us in so we can get a better idea of what we’re up against.”

She looked at him. “Why are you tripping on this so hard? It’s time-consuming, sure, but otherwise it’s nothing but data input. Straight up typing, okay?”

“How long you figure it will take?”

She shrugged. “Can’t say until we actually see the cards. Are they written in pen or pencil?”

“What the hell difference does it make?”

“Pencil is a lot harder to read, especially if these are old people. They don’t press down hard enough.”

Out the window, he could see traffic snaking down 14th Street. There was a siren in the distance, getting closer. He sighed. “I don’t know what they’re written in, okay? All I know is Oscar’s all up in my ass about getting everything done by the first of March instead of the first of April.”

“That still gives us a little more than two weeks, right? Hand me a piece of paper.”

Wes passed her a legal pad and a pen. She started scribbling numbers. “Okay. Let’s say we get twenty girls.”

“Twenty girls from where?”

“From a reputable secretarial service. Where do you think? We’re not transcribing military secrets, Wes. It’s not illegal.”

“Go on.”

“Twenty girls and one hundred thousand cards. That’s five thousand cards per girl. Let’s say they work eight hours a day, give or take …”

Wes took that to mean Toni would allow them a few minutes for lunch. She scribbled a little more.

“They could probably do five hundred a day easy.” She drew a line and turned the scribbles in his direction triumphantly. “We should be able to have it all done in ten days, leaving you plenty of time to meet your deadline even if some of the typists are a little slow.”

He was impressed. Sometimes Toni’s fineness made him forget how good she was at her job. She could, of course, be counted upon to remind him. He felt his stress level receding.

“What if we get more girls?”

“More girls, more cards per hour. Do the math, Einstein.”

“So how long will it take you to put together the secretarial pool?”

“I’ll line it up this afternoon.”

“Get a price on round-the-clock security while the cards are in our possession, too, will you?”

“Nice touch, boss,” she said, made another quick note and tossed the legal pad aside. “Feel better?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Good,” she said. “Now can we have sex?”

Before he could answer, there was a light tap on the door.
“Room service.”

He grinned at her and stood up. “No time, babe. I’m having drinks with Oscar’s contact in the registrar’s office. I’ll call you later.”

“My offer to christen your boyhood rec room is still good,” she said, standing up, too.

“We don’t have a rec room, remember?”

“There was something else I wanted to tell you,” she said, reaching for the door.

“What’s that?” He could smell her burger through the door and realized he was hungry, too.

“Oscar offered me a job,” Toni said, opening the door to the young waiter who was holding her lunch aloft on a big silver tray. She smiled and stepped aside.

“What job is that?”

“Spying on you,” she said, watching the waiter putting down her meal carefully.

“Did you take it?” he said as she reached for the check, added a generous tip, and scrawled her signature.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

THIRTY-TWO

I
WAS STUDYING THE
G
ROWER’S WEBSITE WHEN
J
OE
C
ONNER CALLED
me back from D.C. So far, I’d counted five full-time jobs under Flora’s personal umbrella along with several others she farms out to her dedicated cadre of volunteers. Unlike most of the nonprofits I’ve ever worked for, WEGA doesn’t have a budget problem. They have an organizational problem. If all I did for Flora was write up each job description separately so she could see exactly what she was up against, that would be a good start.

“Professor,” I said. “How goes it in the academic world? You keeping current?”

“I could ask you the same question, my far-flung friend.” He laughed. “You are woefully out of the loop.”

“Which is the reason I’m calling you,” I said. “Enlighten me.”

“Well, there might be something to the purging voters thing, but that targeting the icons plot is yesterday’s news. Political urban legend.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” I said. “You don’t think there’s any truth to it at all?”

“Not a scrap. It came up about a month ago, right after the inauguration, and I checked it out all the way back to the heart of darkness.”

That’s what we always called the Republican National Committee.

“I came up with nothing, nada, zip, zilch. It only sounded plausible for its fifteen minutes because nobody could believe the way these brothers kept going off on Barack. Andy Young said he wasn’t as black as Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson wanted to cut his balls off, and Jeremiah Wright almost did.”

He chuckled, although how that could ever be amusing is a mystery to me.

“Black folks would rather believe it was part of an evil Republican plot instead of a bunch of angry, egotistical old men without a new battle plan.”

He had reduced the lives of three courageous, if recently somewhat confused, race men to four scornful words: angry, egotistical, old men. He had also dismissed the idea of an ongoing race-based plot as naïve. They deserved better, and so did I.

“Well, I’m going to be down here until Monday,” I said. “If you hear anything else, let me know.”

“Sure, kid, but this Obama train is picking up speed. You need to get back up here as fast as you can.”

Kid?

“Take care, Professor.”

But as I hung up the phone I knew that what I needed was a new contact.

THIRTY-THREE