Palace Council (21 page)

And maybe he had done both.

A quick trip two days later to the Library of Congress confirmed what he already suspected: when Derek Garland and Alphaeus Hunton and Dashiell Hammett and Frederick Vanderbilt Field had all gone to prison in the early fifties for refusing to turn over the lists of those who had contributed to their defense fund, one of their fellow resisters, now deceased, had been a retired Harvard professor named Hamilton Mellor, whose son, Benjamin, had succeeded his father on the law faculty, and confessed to fathering Junie's baby.

The next morning, Eddie sat in a booth in the basement of the fortresslike Riggs Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the Treasury Department. Here, in a safe-deposit box, he kept the most important records from his search. He opened the appropriate folder and slipped in the jottings from his trip to the Library of Congress. Before putting the file away, he glanced for perhaps the thousandth time at a peculiar note his sister had left up at Harvard Law School:
Thanks for everything. You're a good man.

Eddie returned Junie's note to its place. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he withdrew for another look a two-month-old news clipping from the front page of the
Boston Globe
about the tragic loss off Cape Cod of Professor Benjamin Mellor when his boat capsized in a storm.

CHAPTER
31

Attica

(I)

I
N
J
ANUARY
of 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as governor of Alabama. Addressing the cheering throng at the State Capitol, he promised to get rid of the state's liquor agents, improve education, and bring in new jobs. He then went on to his main subject, promising to “toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,” and adding “Segregation now!…Segregation tomorrow!…Segregation forever!” In the salons of the darker nation, everyone thought the sky was falling. In March, Eddie published another essay in
The Nation,
quoting the part of Wallace's speech the press had omitted. The governor, he pointed out, had drawn attention to the hypocrisy of liberals who “fawn” over school integration but live in segregated neighborhoods. Eddie, whose view of his country still glimmered but was growing grimmer, had a different take. Wallace had not identified hypocrisy. He had identified humanity. None of us lived up to our ideals, he wrote, remembering another of his father's sermons. The hypocrite was not the man who failed. The hypocrite was the man who did not believe he was required to try.

“So are we liberals hypocrites or not?” demanded a young man he met at a party in Georgetown, a rather decrepit neighborhood that had become fashionable after the Kennedys moved in during the 1950s. “What are you saying?”

“That's not the point of the story,” said Eddie.

But innocence dies nearly as hard as ignorance. “I'm for all kinds of integration,” the man insisted. “Education, housing, you name it.”

“Is that your wife over there?”

“Yes.”

“And how many Negro women did you date before you married a white one?”

This was an unfair shot, and Eddie knew it, but he was angry at most of the world just now. The man stalked away. Somebody else came over with a question about the gangster novel. Eddie felt hemmed in. As it happened, he was attending the party with Torie Elden. They had managed to remain friends. They had set boundaries. Sometimes Torie told him stories about the men she dated, but most of the stories made her cry. More people crowded him. He was notorious. They all wanted to be able to say that they had talked to him. Eddie had never liked crowds. He told Torie they were going. As usual, he drove her to her apartment on Capitol Hill. As usual, she invited him in for coffee. He usually declined, but tonight he accepted. He woke around midnight and realized the scope of his error. He slipped out of bed and collected his things. Torie told him to be careful driving home in the snow. Evidently the blond man had expected Eddie to stay with her all night, because when Eddie got home his occasional watcher was ransacking the place. He ducked Eddie's wild swing and put him on the floor with a single punch. It was like being punched by an anvil. When the stars cleared, Eddie was alone.

A careful search disclosed nothing missing. Either the search had been interrupted too early, or the blond man had decided that what he sought was not there.

The police report was a formality. He filed it only because not filing would seem suspicious. Alas, he told the officers, he could not offer a description. He had not seen the man's face. Not in any detail. He remembered only the blond hair.

They told him he should get himself a dog, the way things were these days.

Almost everything Eddie had told the police was true. He had not seen the man's face. He did not think he would know the intruder if he saw him again. What Eddie had omitted to tell them was that he now remembered where he had seen the blond man before.

(II)

T
HE VISITING ROOM
of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York was painted a bright yellow-green and apparently whitewashed regularly by trusties, because, aside from the indelible stink of the sweat of powerful but frustrated men, it lacked the grimy prison smells he expected. Eddie sat on a folding chair, watching the empty space on the other side of the shatterproof glass. It was an April morning of delicate loveliness. Three days ago, Martin Luther King and his associates had been jailed for contempt when they defied a court order forbidding them to march in Birmingham on Easter Sunday. Six different magazines had asked Eddie to go down and cover the story. But it had taken him weeks to arrange this meeting, and he was not going to miss it.

On the way to Attica, he had stopped in Manhattan, spending several nights at Convent Avenue, for the benefit of anyone who might be, at this late date, still dogging his steps. He found Harlem increasingly sad. Not depressing—merely sad. The salons were mostly gone. The Czarinas had scattered. Shirley Elden was dead. Enid Garland was sick, and had moved to midtown. Amaretta Veazie still held forth from her townhouse on Edgecombe Avenue, but word had it that Mona, who lived up in New Hampshire with her young twins, was trying to get her mother to move in with them.

Eddie visited Langston Hughes, whose health had deteriorated but who gamely hung on in his 127th Street home. The two men talked of old times, and Eddie felt again, as he had years ago, that the great man was intentionally shying away from the subject of Junie. Indeed, hardly anybody spoke of Junie any longer, and not only because most people assumed she was dead. Even those who remembered Jewel Agony and Commander M had been forced to readjust their thinking, for America of the mid-sixties was chock-f of ragtag sects proclaiming with timid pride the primacy of the radical alternative, some of them violently. At lunch with Aurelia the other day, Eddie had wondered aloud what it was about America that drove children of privilege to demand the culture that had given them everything be burned to the ground.

“Ennui,” answered Aurelia, who lately had taken to speaking aloud the same hifalutin words that she wrote. She was now editor-in-chief of the
Seventh Avenue Sentinel
—given falling circulation, very likely the last editor the paper would ever have. She had also started work on a novel, which Eddie had promised to show to his agent.

“You think young people are bored?”

“I think young people have idle hands,” she said sternly. In the background, the restaurant was playing “Please Please Me” by the Beatles, but this new-style music was not to Eddie's taste, or Aurelia's.

“The entire civil-rights movement is built on nonviolence,” he reminded her.

“It's going to die of nonviolence, too,” said Aurelia, paraphrasing one of the big black radicals of the day.

After that she became sullen. Probably they were really arguing about something else. When they parted, Aurie asked him not to call her any more. When he tried to frame a protest, she told him he was a fool, letting life surge past while he paddled in circles, refusing to let himself love anyone he had not loved ten years ago.

(III)

T
HE BOOTH
across from his was no longer empty.

Prison life had been kinder than Eddie expected to Maceo Scarlett. He had somehow imagined confronting a broken man, but the Carpenter, three years into a double life sentence, was broad and hulking and confident even in his prison grays. He sat comfortably, as if Attica was simply another corner of his kingdom. His good eye glared through the wired glass with a clever malice. He knew Eddie must want something, or there would be no reason for the visit.

“Read your gangster novel,” Scarlett said without preamble. The huge teeth gleamed. The bad eye wandered. “That spozed to be me, boy? Cause your man Redd didn't get up to nearly enough badness. You tryin to mock me?”

“No,” said Eddie, reminding himself that he was on the safe side of the glass.

“Cause I can reach you anywhere.”

“I'm sure you can.”

“Good.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, but instead of lighting one, put it on the table. Perhaps he was trying to quit. The sign forbade smoking, but at this moment Eddie would have believed Scarlett capable of anything. “Now, tell me what you want, boy, and I'll tell you what it's gonna cost you.”

Eddie hesitated. But he had come here to ask a single question, and if he chickened out the visit was wasted. “I'd like to talk about the night you threatened to break my hand.”

“Ain't never threatened nobody. All of this”—his thick, circling finger took in the prison—“is some kind of frame-up. The white man hates a powerful black man.”

“We were in your club,” Eddie persisted. “This was 1959. You asked me what I picked up on my visit to South Carolina. I told you nothing, and you threatened to smash my hand with a hammer.”

“Don't remember no night like that.”

“The truth is, I did get something in South Carolina. I'm willing to tell you what, right now, and you can tell—well, I'm sure there's somebody who'd like to know.”

“I don't know nothin bout no South Carolina.”

“And in return,” Eddie continued, throwing as much earnestness into his face as he could, “I'd like to get one piece of information from you. Just one.”

The Carpenter had stopped smiling. The bad eye continued to bounce and juke. The good eye drifted to a spot over Eddie's shoulder. Eddie turned around. In a glass-walled office, a guard sat holding an earphone to his head, pushing buttons. Eddie realized that he could listen in on any conversation of his choice.

“I don't know nothin bout no night like that,” said Scarlett. “You up here botherin the wrong nigger.”

“I would have thought—”

“I gotta get back to work.” He was on his feet. “Got me a sweet job. I give out the toilet paper. Every nigger in here gets zactly one roll every month, so it isn't the hardest job in the world.”

“Yes, but—”

“One roll.” A snort. “Gonna be trouble over that one day, boy. All kinds of trouble.” For a moment, both eyes seemed to focus on the same spot, and that spot was Eddie's neck. “Gonna write another novel about me?”

“Ah, it wasn't about you.”

“Bullshit.” A savage smile. “Not for those years you worked for me, you wouldn't never have gotten nothin to write about. You remember that, boy.”

“Weeks.”

“That spozed to mean?”

“I worked for you a couple of weeks. That's all.”

Eddie thought the gangster might lose his temper, but he laughed instead, so hard that the guard looked up from his desk and pushed the button. “So—what's in it for me?”

“I'm sorry?”

The good eye went shifty and speculative. “Say there was some way I could help you out.”

Eddie nodded. He had thought this over before making the drive. “I work for the President,” he lied. “I'll talk to him.”

“President of what?”

Eddie took out his wallet, held his White House pass up to the glass, hoping the gangster would not notice that it had expired. Scarlett hardly gave it a glance. He was reading Eddie's face. He smiled. Savagely. “You seen my brother lately?”

“Your brother?”

“You seen him lately or not?”

“No.”

“You go see him.” Scarlett laughed. “Tomorrow night.”

He left.

Driving south from the village of Attica, Eddie turned the problem over in his mind. Maceo Scarlett had no brother. He had no living relatives of any kind. Eddie knew because of the detailed files he had created while writing his novel, carefully timed to be published only after the Carpenter began serving his sentence. Therefore, when the gangster referred to a brother, Eddie guessed he meant his right-hand man, the one who had succeeded him, briefly, as king of the Harlem rackets. That would be Lenny Rouse, Eddie's old friend, the same Lenny Rouse who had drawn him into Scarlett's gang, and presided over his beating in the alley behind Scarlett's nightclub—and to whom Eddie had not spoken since.

And this led to a fresh problem.

Lenny Rouse no longer existed—but he was now, undeniably, a brother.

(IV)

T
HE CHURCH HAD BEEN BUILT
out of several connected storefronts on Broadway near 125th Street, looking up at the IRT tracks. The windows were whitewashed. The sign read
HOUSE OF HOLY REDEMPTION
, and, in much smaller letters,
BROTHER H. LEONARD PEACE, FOUNDER AND PRESIDER
. The sidewalk outside was trash-strewn, but when Eddie walked inside he found the place clean. The furnishings were spartan. A bored woman at a desk peeked inside an office and said Brother Leonard would see him momentarily.

Brother Leonard. Leonard Peace.

Amazing what a religious conversion could do.

Just three years ago, Lenny Rouse had been one of the scariest men on the streets of Harlem. Now Brother Leonard was one of the most admired. He ran two soup kitchens, walked around with other concerned men at night to keep women safe, preached the Gospel to snoring winos. He had put on weight, shaved his head, grown a beard, and declared to all the world that he was starting anew.

Anything to stay out of jail, said the wags. Some whispered that “anything” might even have included informing for the feds.

He greeted Eddie with a hug, as if they were old friends, as if the last time they had actually spoken to each other he had not helped beat Eddie senseless. He was not trying to make up for his life of sin, Brother Leonard explained when they were seated at the aged wooden table that did duty as a desk. You could not make up for your sins, he said. You could only ask the Lord's forgiveness. He had asked forgiveness on his knees, and the Lord had forgiven him, then told him what to do.

“But not until after Scarlett was behind bars,” said Eddie.

The preacher smiled. “I came late, but I came all the way.”

They foxed around a bit, they talked about old times, and Brother Leonard tried several times to get Eddie talking about his own faith. Finally, they got to the point. Eddie told him that Scarlett suggested he come.

“A simple trade,” said Eddie. “I have some information that Scarlett might be able to use to his advantage. And you have information that I need.”