Safe Enough, page 15
“Cuthbert Jackson went in the army when he was eighteen, which would make you sixteen at the time. Prior to that he could play the piano real well. You probably heard him.”
“That kid never came back.”
“Because he stayed in France.”
“We thought he was killed.”
“He wasn’t. Now he says he has a brother.”
“Is he still a musician?”
“Very much so.”
“Then maybe it’s a metaphor. You know what it’s like, with artistic people. Maybe he had some kind of spiritual epiphany. All about the brotherhood of man.”
“Suppose he didn’t?”
“Are you a reporter?”
“Proud to be,” I said, like I always planned to.
“Who do you work for?”
“Anyone prepared to pay me. Right now a magazine in France.”
The guy said, “We thought he was killed. Why would he stay in France? I don’t see how that’s natural.”
I said, “Do you know his brother?”
“Sure,” he said, and he walked me a couple of steps, and waved the pointed end of his pepperoni pie at the last house on the next street.
* * *
I knocked on the door, and it was opened by another guy who looked about eighty. Which was about right. Cuthbert himself was eighty-two. His long-lost brother would be plus or minus. The old guy said his name was Albert Jackson. I told him a guy from these parts named Cuthbert Jackson had become very famous in France. Recently he had added to his bio that he had a brother.
“Why would he say that?” Albert asked.
“Is it not true?”
“On the television shows they want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I’m just a reporter asking a question.”
“What was the question?”
“Are you Cuthbert Jackson’s brother?”
Albert Jackson said, “Yes, I am.”
“That’s good.”
“Is it?”
“In the sense that the new bio is proved correct. Future historians will not be misled. In France, I mean. A guy wrote a whole book about five words he said.”
“I haven’t seen him for more than sixty years.”
“What do you remember of him?”
“He could play the piano.”
“Did you think he was killed in the war?”
Albert shook his head. “He told me many times. He was going to let them take him all over, and he was going to pick out the best place he saw, and he was going to stay there. He said if the war lasted long enough for me to get drafted, I should do the same thing.”
“Because it would be better somewhere else for a black man?”
“Who plays the piano, I guess. Although plenty of piano-playing folk are doing pretty good right here.”
“Did you ever hear from him?”
“One time. I wrote him about something, and he wrote me back.”
“Were you surprised he never came home?”
“I guess a little at first. But later, not so much.”
“Would you help me out with background information about your family situation?”
“I guess someone needs to.”
“Why’s that?”
“You think the bio is correct, but it ain’t. Historians will be wrong. I don’t know why he said what he said, that he had a brother. I’m not sure what he meant. I might want some time to figure it out.”
“I don’t understand. You just told me you and he are brothers.”
“We are.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The bio should say he had two brothers.”
We sat down and I took out my computer, and Albert started to tell me the story, but as soon as I saw where it was going, I paused him momentarily, and saved the French file, and opened a new blank document, for what I felt was going to be the real story. I remember the moment. It felt like journalists ought to feel.
A black farmer named Bertrand Jackson had three sons and three daughters, all thirty months apart, all perfectly interlaced in terms of gender, Cuthbert first, the eldest boy, who grew up playing the piano, then went to war, then stayed overseas. The middle boy was Albert, sitting right there telling me the story, and the youngest boy was Robert. The girls in between were delightful. Their mother was happy. The land was producing. Things were pretty good for the farmer. He felt like a man of substance. Altogether a success. He had only one problem. His youngest son, Robert, was slow in the head. He was always smiling, always amiable, but farm work was beyond him. Which was okay. The others could carry him.
Then the farmer made a mistake. Because he felt like a man of substance, he tried to register to vote in the presidential election. He felt it was his civic duty. He kept on going a good long time before he gave up. Afterward a county guy told him never to try again. Things got chilly. They were jealous, he figured. Because his farm was doing well. Maybe a little disconcerted. November rolled into December.
Meanwhile the farmer had gotten Robert a job sweeping up in the dry goods store where he bought his seed. The owner was a white guy. Sometimes his daughter worked the register. Christmas was coming, so Robert made her a card. He labored over the writing. He put, I hope you send me a card too. Her daddy saw it, and he showed it to his friends, and pretty soon a lynch mob was coming for Robert, because of his lewd interracial suggestion. He was made to stand on a riverbank, tied hand and foot. His daddy, the farmer, was made to watch. Robert was told he had a choice. He could fall off the riverbank by himself, or they could shoot him off. Either way he was going in the water. He was going to drown. Nothing could be done about that part. Robert said, Daddy, help me, and the farmer said, I’m sorry, son, I can’t, because I have four more at home, and a farm, and your mother. Robert fell in by himself. Afterward the same county guy came by and said, now you see what happens. He said, voting ain’t for you.
Albert said he told Cuthbert all about it, in great detail, in a long letter. About how it didn’t even make the local paper. How the county police wrote it up as a disobedient child warned not to swim. Cuthbert wrote back from Paris, depressed but resigned. And impatient. They had fought in the war. How much longer? After that Albert stopped being surprised his brother didn’t come home.
* * *
I drove two hundred miles back the way I had come and took a nap in the passenger seat when I got tired, and then I carried on again. I wanted to get to work. But when I did, I couldn’t. I felt ethically the story belonged to the French magazine. But it was a story I didn’t want them to have. Or any other nation. I wasn’t sure exactly why. Not washing dirty laundry in public, I guessed. United we stand, divided we fall. Clichés were clichés for a reason. I felt like a bad journalist.
Then I realized Cuthbert Jackson had made the same choice. All through the political years. He was Socrates. He could have told a devastating tale. He could have leveraged his exile sky high. But he didn’t. He never said a word about Robert. I wondered if he knew exactly why. I wanted to ask him. For a minute I wondered if the magazine would fly me to Paris.
In the end, I stayed home and wrote it up purely as a sidebar. I put, in effect, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing. I got paid enough to buy dinner for my friends. We talked about Cuthbert’s silence all night long, but we came to no conclusions.
SHORTY AND THE BRIEFCASE
Shorty Malone’s legendary week began on Monday, when he got shot in the leg, just barely, in a sanitation department maintenance facility. His squad went in the front door, and another went in the back door, with a vague plan to outflank a guy they knew was concealed somewhere among the parked garbage trucks. Then someone started shooting, and within a split second everyone was shooting. The official report said ninety police rounds were fired that day. No one was killed, not even the concealed guy. The only casualty was Shorty, from an unlucky ricochet. Later reconstructions showed a fellow officer had fired, and his round had taken a gentle deflection off the sidewall of a tire, and then a violent deflection off the chassis rail of a different truck. After that it was badly misshapen and had spent most of its energy. It hit Shorty on the shin bone no worse than a smack with a ball-peen hammer. It broke the skin and cracked the bone. Shorty was immediately hospitalized.
After that it was awkward. It was hard to work up much enthusiasm. Shorty had been in the detective division about a year, so he wasn’t a brave rookie anymore, but he wasn’t yet a grizzled veteran hero either. He was a nobody. Plus it was technically blue-on-blue. There was even some doubt about whether the concealed guy actually had a gun at all. Plus a rumor it was the wrong guy anyway. Maybe his brother. So the overall feeling was the whole affair would be better forgotten. Which was tough on Shorty. Normally a shot cop would be treated with maximum reverence. Normally Shorty would have been rolling around like a pig in shit. Half a dozen hopeful lowlifes would have started up collections on the internet. Shorty could have been looking at a decent chunk of change. Maybe even college-fund decent.
But he was ignored. On Tuesday we were all reassigned to new duties. Part of forgetting. Sure, way back in history some mistakes might have been made. But that was then. We’ve moved on. Now we’re making progress. We all started learning the new stuff, and as a result, no one went to visit Shorty in the hospital anymore, except his pal Celia Sandstrom, who was another one-year nobody, except better to look at, unless she was wearing her Kevlar vest. Evidently, she stopped by the hospital frequently, and evidently, she kept old Shorty up to date on what was going on. And what wasn’t.
We were assigned to Narcotics, as part of their own forgetting. All kinds of previous strategies had come to nothing. It was time to wall them off. Time to move on. Like we had. So that if someone ever mentioned a prior embarrassment, we could all wrinkle our noses and say, “What, that old thing?” Like your girlfriend, when you tell her she looked good in her sweater yesterday. So their department was starting over, too, the same way ours had, and they swapped us in for their big new redemptive idea, which was to stop following the coke, and start following the money. Which needed manpower. Narcotics was a cash business. Cash was like a river. They wanted to see where it flowed. And how. Some parts they knew. Some parts they didn’t understand. They wanted us out there, watching.
Specifically, they wanted us watching a guy delivering a briefcase from Jersey. He made the trip usually two times a week. The assumption was the briefcase was packed with paper money. A wholesale payment, maybe, or a share of the profits. One level of the pyramid scheme kicking up to the next. They said a regular briefcase could hold a million dollars. They said it was a physical transfer because money wasn’t electronic until it was in a bank. Which cash wasn’t yet. They said there was a clue in the name. They said our job was to evaluate the chances of witnessing a hand-to-hand exchange. Which would be two for the price of one. Plus disruption of a vital link in the chain. It was exciting work. No wonder everyone forgot about Shorty. Except Celia. She must have described the mission, the very same day, because that must have been about when Shorty started thinking.
* * *
The guy with the briefcase was an older gentleman. A person of substance. Somehow powdered and expensive. A very senior figure. His very presence a mark of deep respect. With a million bucks in his hand. The briefcase was metal. Some fancy brand. He carried it along the sidewalk, plain as day, all the way to an old-style office building door. He carried it inside. Ten minutes later he came out without it. We saw him do it exactly the same way the report said he always did it.
The office building had a narrow lobby with security. The directory showed twenty tenants. All bland names. A lot of import and export. No doubt a well-developed grapevine. All kinds of early warning systems. No point in asking questions. We wrote it up and sent it in. Our new bosses didn’t like it. They pushed back.
They said, “We need to know which office suite.”
We said, “We can’t get past the desk.”
“Pose as maintenance.”
“They don’t do maintenance.”
“Then use your badge.”
“The bad guys would be down the fire escape before the elevator door even opened for us in the lobby. Probably the security guy controls it with a foot pedal.”
“Give him a hundred bucks.”
“The bad guys give him five.”
“Are you proposing to do any work at all?”
We said, “First day, boss. We’re looking for leadership.”
Afterward Celia said Shorty figured we were missing something. He didn’t know what. He was on his back with his leg up in traction. Not medically necessary, but the union thought it would make for a better photograph in the newspaper. Shorty was fretting about us, Celia said. He was missing us.
“Shorty who?” we said.
* * *
We came in Wednesday morning and as expected found the business with the fancy briefcase already going a little lukewarm. Expectations were being retrospectively downgraded. It was a solid piece of data, another brick in the wall, as intended, nothing more.
Then, even before the coffee was made, it went right back to the top of the agenda. New evidence came in, from a different direction, and it pointed to the same office building. To a specific tenant. They knew for sure the specific guy was sending money out. Now they wanted to square the circle. They wanted to see the same money going in. They wanted eyeballs inside the specific guy’s suite. They wanted eyewitness testimony, about the older gentleman maybe placing the briefcase on a table, and the other guy maybe spinning it around and clicking the latches with his thumbs. If we could get close enough to seize the actual cash, well, that would be the icing on the cake.
Afterward Celia said, “Shorty says obviously that’s all impossible.”
We said, “We don’t need the voice of doom drifting down a hospital corridor to tell us that. Of course it’s all impossible.”
“So what should we do?”
“Nothing. Maybe they’ll move us to Vice. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”
But the mention of Shorty recalled the previous mention, at the end of Tuesday, which no detective liked to hear, that we were missing something. No one said anything out loud, but I know we all surreptitiously and individually checked everything we could, from the beginning to the end, in the original files, from the handwritten notes.
The guy drove from Jersey, just him alone at the wheel, no driver, in a nice but unspectacular car, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and south, to a parking garage in the West Twenties, which was the nearest to the old-style office building. A small man in a black vest and a bow tie parked his car, while he walked out with the briefcase and set out carrying it on his long march down the sidewalk. His journey invariably ended after a block and a half in the office building lobby, where he was nodded past the desk after respectful but not casual inspection. On every occasion he spent ten or so minutes inside, and on every occasion he came back out empty-handed. Those were the facts. That was what we knew.
Celia pretended to have given the matter no thought at all, but later she said, “Shorty is sure there’s something wrong.”
Which was not what we wanted to hear right then, because the stakes had just been raised even higher. A couple more puzzle pieces had fallen into place. Suddenly the folks upstairs realized they could take out the whole chain at once. It would be the bust of the year. Medals for sure. Votes for the mayor. The whole nine yards. But they needed it immaculate. Every link in the chain had to be rock-solid on the witness stand. Evidence was key.
We argued we couldn’t get it. We said instead we should bust the guy on the sidewalk, before he got to the office building, with the money still in the briefcase. Because it was legally justified to assume he was heading for the specific guy in the unknown suite. Where else would he be going? It was as good as eyeballing a transfer. Really the same thing, at an earlier stage. A different snapshot. A previous frame from the same movie.
Nothing was ever more persuasive than having no alternative, so they agreed. We waited in a ready room, for a call from Jersey. The local PD over there was watching the guy’s residence. Any occasion he drove out in the direction of the tunnel, they would let us know right away. Traffic was usually bad. We would get plenty of warning. No rush at all.
But the call didn’t come. Not on Wednesday. Not on Thursday. It came on Friday. Some apple-cheeked trooper out in the burbs told us the guy was on the move in his nice but unspectacular car, and seemed to be heading for Manhattan. Celia was not in the room with us at that point. She came in a minute later and we told her about the call.
She said, “Shorty says we’re thinking all wrong.”
Which was not what we wanted to hear right then, because we were trying to get all pumped up, ahead of taking a guy down on the sidewalk. But she insisted. She said Shorty had been lying there, with plenty of time to think. We should listen. We were torn. On the one hand, Celia was in the squad. She might be a nobody, but she was ours. Shorty too. On the other hand, the bust of the year was at stake. Medals and votes. Not a thing to screw up by taking the initiative. No one wanted to be the guy who blew it.
Celia said, “Do we really believe it’s legally persuasive, if we take him down on the street with a bag of cash?”
“Kind of,” we said. “Somewhat. Maybe. Good enough, probably.”
“Would his lawyer be worried?”
“A little bit. Maybe not slitting his wrists.”
“But whatever, it’s a huge hassle, right?” she said. “It’s a million bucks in cash. The IRS would get involved. Maybe the Treasury Department. Why take the risk? Why carry that briefcase so openly?”
We said, “We know the cash is moving from A to B. We know the guy inside is receiving it. How else would he be getting it, except from our guy? No one else goes in and out. And people carry all kinds of things in this city. They carry briefcases full of diamonds, worth much more than this guy.”
