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She was right.
“You wanna lie back down a little while?” I asked her.
“No, baby,” she said. She stood up too. “I got to get up early to get to work.”
“What am I gonna do about this?”
“Either take care of it yourself,” she said with a sympathetic smile, “or wait till tomorrow afternoon when I get home with BB’s numbers.”
“You don’t have ’em in your room?”
“Uh-uh. No. But I know somebody prob’ly know where he is.”
She looked down on my hopeless excitement and issued a deep grunt of appreciation. Then she walked out the door, leaving me to the foolishness of manhood.
23
I LAY BACK IN THE BED afterCharlotta left. It had been a good night’s work. Even if it was only loving that young woman, it would have been worth it. She was right, I hadn’t been with a woman in over four months. I didn’t like the clubs because they were too loud, and I couldn’t keep a girlfriend because I didn’t make much money selling books and my favorite pastime was sitting alone and reading. Women lived with me the same way that they’d go on a vacation: after a week or two they were ready to get back to the lives they knew and loved.
The truth was that I had become a man of moderate means after my last adventure with Fearless. I owned my building and had money in the bank, but I never bragged to anyone about it. I loved my little business and I would have been selling books for a nickel profit even if I had to do it off the back of a truck. That being true, I thought that any woman who wanted to be with me had to believe in the man she saw.
Sometimes I went out to a few nightspots with Fearless. Women gathered around him, and so if I was somewhere in the neighborhood there was always the chance that some lonely girl would take me in for the ride home.
But going out with Fearless often turned out to be a dangerous undertaking. There were always rough men in the bars around Watts. Rough men often do things that might be seen as rude or intimidating. And Fearless would not suffer a bully. So what might have been a night of drinking, laughter, and women often ended up as a ride in the back of a police wagon.
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN in the morning, so I decided to search the room while I had the chance. I went through every drawer and looked under the bed. I searched the closets, cabinets, and windowsills, and crawled around on my hands and knees looking for a loose board or nail. I pulled down the window shades, thinking that he might have taped some note somewhere on the roll. I did the best job of searching that any detective would ever execute. And the only thing I could say when I was finished was that Kit Mitchell didn’t hide a thing in his rented room.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER I WAS STILL THINKING of Charlotta’s sweet kisses. I considered easing the pressure by pleasuring myself, but after being with a real woman for the first time in months I didn’t have much heart for it.
It was almost one A.M. when I remembered the bookcase downstairs.
Nobody was awake in the big, rambling house. They were all working people who were up before the sun each morning. And when they worked they worked hard. Even Charlotta had to go off to bed before eleven.
I TURNED ON A SMALL LAMP and pulled a burgundy hassock up to the double shelf.
Most of the books were romances and westerns. There were a few magazines stacked on the bottom shelf, Life and Men at War made up the most of them. A lot of the books were old and smelled of decaying paper. I loved that smell. Ever since I was a child that odor meant excitement and knowledge.
I found one interesting novel written by a man with the unlikely name of Amos Amso. The book was called Night Man. It was the story of a man who conducted his life only at night. He slept in the daytime and kept all of the shades and curtains in his house tightly drawn during the daylight hours. He’d had many jobs. Once he worked for the phone company as an emergency technician, then as an operator. Later he got a job as a cook in a twenty-four-hour restaurant in a downtown San Francisco hotel. Whenever any employer tried to change his position to some hour that bordered on morning or sunset, he’d quit and look for something else. He rarely saw his family or made professional appointments. He hired a man to impersonate him when he had to show up for important meetings that could only be scheduled during the day. When he wasn’t working, he took long walks in the wee hours, noting the furtive and feral life that lived beyond the hell of the sun.
Finally the main character, who was also called Amos, came across a woman who was attempting to throw herself off of the Golden Gate Bridge in the early hours of the morning. He saved her and talked to her. He convinced her that her life was worth living. Her name was Crystal Limmer and she was a painter, a watercolorist.
That was about the first hundred and fifty pages of the book. I’m a fast reader, but I never finish a book if I don’t see a reason for it. Mr. Amso’s book would either have the hero being pulled out of darkness by this bright gem of a woman or he would lose himself to a gloom he’d never known before finding love. Either way I wasn’t interested, so I put the book back on the shelf.
At least I tried to return it. The books had been packed so tightly that Night Man no longer fit in the space I took it from. I pride myself in organizing space on bookshelves, so I took out a few other books in order to accommodate the full complement.
I removed three Zane Grey westerns. But before I could do anything else, I noticed that there was something behind the first row of books. The shelves were quite a bit deeper than I thought. They were actually set deep into the wall. There was a good six inches of space behind the first row of books.
There was another book back there. A thick book with a hard leather cover that had an embossed design but no writing on it. It was thicker than a bible and the pages were not made of paper but of animal skin. The cover and back were wood with cow’s leather stretched over it. And each page was scrawled on with handwriting from various hands in differing kinds and colors of ink.
The first line of the first page read:
I am Gheeza Manli daughter of Menzi and Allatou born into slavery in the year of the devil seventeen hundred and two . . .
Much of what Gheeza wrote was difficult to make out, while many sections were completely impossible for me to read. She wrote in extraordinarily small script. Her entries went on for about forty pages, telling something of her impossible tale and interrupting that story now and then to tell of births, deaths, and smaller or larger crimes committed against her or that she committed against her masters. Gheeza had a daughter named Asha. Asha took over the duty of maintaining the entries on page forty-two.
Asha was called Mary by her slave masters, as her mother Gheeza was called Tulip by the same owners. The book was their story, kept secret from the world of their masters. The book was bound by Tellman, who had been from a long line of binders of prayer books for the people of the kingdom of Ethiopia.
A floorboard creaked somewhere in the rambling rooming house. I pushed the westerns and Mr. Amso’s book back into the shelf any way they would go, hugged the handmade book to my chest, and covered it with a pillow from the sofa. Then I hurried down the hall and up the stairs with the treasure clutched so tightly that my arms ached from the effort.
Once in my room I wedged a chair against the doorknob, remembering for a moment that I had done the same thing in Lance Wexler’s apartment. I turned on the overhead light and pored over the three hundred pages of animal skin that had been scrawled upon by more than a dozen hands. Now and then there were drawings of plantation houses and slave quarters, of agricultural machines and torture devices used on slaves. From 1781 to 1798 Moses, the only male diarist, also drew and painted pictures of his parents, grandparents, his wife and children. He entered twenty-three colorful pictures in all, and while they were crude there was still something poignant and dignified about the dark faces in their slave clothes and quarters.
The last entry was in 1847 by Abathwa, daughter of Elthren, daughter of Moses. All of these names were secret appellations given in private ceremonies when the masters were sleeping. On the last page Abathwa referred to another book that would be used to continue the memories of the kinfolk of Africa.
At first I thought that the book was some kind of fiction, that it was created by some artist, or more probably artists, trying to create a history out of the tragedy of slavery. But there was no questioning that the book was at least over a hundred years old. And there was no reason to doubt that it went all the way back to the eighteenth century as it claimed.
But what was it doing in a boardinghouse library in black L.A.?
It couldn’t belong to Miss Moore. She wouldn’t have left such a treasure in a public room. Maybe the house belonged to someone else, or maybe the previous owner had inherited the book from a long line that stretched all the way back to the ancient African kingdoms.
As the hours passed I put together what I felt was the probable history of the book. It was definitely an artifact from the days of slavery, though possibly not as old as it seemed. It had been passed down with subsequent volumes to some man or woman who came into possession of Miss Moore’s house earlier in the century. This man or woman had hidden the book and then grew old and senile. So the book sat there in its hiding place behind the ever-changing row of popular novels until I came upon it.
So if it wasn’t Miss Moore’s book then it was fair game for me.
It was nearly five in the morning when I closed the covers and still I hadn’t worked out ten solid pages of text. I imagined spending the next year in my little shop deciphering the entries of those long-ago slaves.
I forgot all about Fearless and Milo, about the murderous Mr. Timmerman and the dead Wexler siblings. I forgot about the Watermelon Man and the strange Fine sisters who lived in luxury and in squalor. That’s what a good book will do for me. It doesn’t make me into a brave man exactly but just erases all vestiges of fear.
24
I FELL ASLEEP WITH THE SUNRISE, amid the sounds of the tenants getting ready to go off to work. The smell of coffee wafted up into my room, but I was too tired to climb down the stairs. And even if I hadn’t been so weary I wouldn’t have left my book. It was the most precious thing I had ever seen or touched.
I slept until after nine o’clock. When I had to go to the bathroom I took the book with me, wrapped in a pillowcase. I didn’t go out of the room except for that one time.
Thieves are the people most afraid of being robbed.
I put the book under the bed and sat at the window, waiting and planning. I figured out how I was going to smuggle my treasure out of Miss Moore’s rooming house, and where I could hide it until Fearless’s problems had been solved.
After that I started to think about Bartholomew Perry. If I could find him what should I do? Milo would want me to report to him. Winifred L. Fine would also expect an accounting. Of course, there was Leora Hartman, Kit Mitchell, and, most of all, the Los Angeles Police Department that I had to be concerned with.
I needed BB to talk to me, and that meant I needed Fearless. Fearless to keep BB from running away and Fearless to help me understand. That was because even though I knew the majority of words in the English dictionary, it was Fearless who understood the twists and turns of the human heart.
But before any of that came to pass I needed Charlotta.
She came to my door at three. I gave her a weak kiss. That’s because my passions weren’t under the covers but under the bed with my book at that particular moment.
“Did you find out where he is?” I asked her.
“Don’t you wanna kiss me some more, baby?” she replied.
“After I get my fifty dollars I’ll kiss you from your toes to your ears and everywhere in between,” I said. “But let me get this pistol from out my back first.”
“You promise?” she asked.
“You got skin like honey,” I said, “only it taste better’n that. I just need to make sure I live long enough to enjoy it.”
She gave me a small piece of paper that had an address and phone number on it.
“I had to lie to a man to get that,” she said.
“To whom?” I asked, falling a little bit out of character with my language.
“Well, you know Kit told me that BB loves Sister Sue’s Chicken and Ribs. An’ they deliver. I went over there an’ told Rooney, the delivery man, that BB had made me pregnant and I had to get to him to help me fix it before it was too late.”
“And he believed that?”
“You got his numbers in your hand.”
“Well, it’s gonna be worth it,” I replied. “But can you do me one more favor?”
“What?”
“You got a suitcase in your room? Just a small one, or maybe a hatbox?”
“Yeah. How come?”
“I’ll make your cut twenty dollars if you let me borrow it.”
I once read a book that claimed mathematics is the universal language of mankind—but I never believed it. Money is the talk of the world. Charlotta ran down to her room and got back with a small powder blue suitcase that had red heart decals along the side.
I kissed her and hurried her off. Then I packed my bound booty under one of Miss Moore’s spare sheets.
MY EFFORTS WERE NOT WASTED. The landlady was waiting at the front door when I got there.
“Are you just getting out of bed, Mr. Hendricks?” She used a sweet voice to ask her question, but I could tell from the way she spaced her words that it was a test of my moral fiber.
“I spent the whole day writing wedding invitations on paper I borrowed from that nice Charlotta Netters,” I said, “one hundred and nineteen. She let me use her suitcase to take ’em down to the post office.”
“She already started her mess on you, huh?” Miss Moore asked and answered.
I knew that bringing up Charlotta would keep the landlady from questioning my suitcase. No older woman would ever like Charlotta. She was like an overripe peach on your favorite tablecloth—bound to leave a stain.
I CALLED AMBROSIA’S HOUSE from a phone booth a few blocks away and got Fearless after only a few curses. I told him where to pick me up. He was there in less than ten minutes.
“Open up the trunk, Fearless.”
“What for?”
“I need to keep this suitcase back there while we runnin’ the streets.”
“What you got in there?” Fearless asked.
“A book I picked up for my antiquarian collection.”
“Your what?”
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