Five Smooth Stones (74 page)

"But, Mr. Champlin—David—isn't that just what this type of program would do? Especially if we could enlist government aid and protection? We could stress the American-way-of-life approach. Surely the Southerners would not retaliate against that? Perhaps we might design an emblem, have banners made and fly them with the American flag over our headquarters buildings or in the windows. After all, the American flag—"

David felt a near hysterical urge to roar with laughter, followed by an equally strong urge to explode with a single four-letter word and walk out. It was like being confronted by a responsible and otherwise intelligent adult who sincerely believed in Santa Claus. Or that the world was flat. He carefully avoided looking at Isaiah while mentally passing the ball to him, praying that he'd get the unspoken signal. Klein was either too stunned and chicken, or too amused to tell her she was nuts.

Isaiah must have gotten the signal, because he picked up the ball and now proceeded to make a few yards with it. "I tell you what, Miz Hubbard. You design that there emblem you talking about and you fly it with the Confederate flag down there and you got something. And you teach just the whites. The whites down there needs education in citizenship worse'n the colored do, anyhow. Ain't no American flag flying over a place where they teaching citizenship to colored going to get you anywheres but in a jail or a grave. But you figure out a way to use the stars and bars and you got yourself a real idea."

David stood and started for the door. "We'll teach 'em all the rebel yahoo—I have to get back to the office. Let us know about the next meeting, Joe?"

Klein said, "Wait a minute, David." He turned to the others. "Mrs. Hubbard will understand, I'm sure, when I say that she hasn't taken into consideration certain conditions of which she could have no personal knowledge. In fact, I have no personal knowledge of them, but I am in a better position to know they exist and that David and Watkins don't exaggerate. But I feel that if we take those conditions into account, and try and circumvent them by as much secrecy as is humanly possible, Mrs. Hubbard's plan has merit."

Mrs. Hubbard brightened visibly. She laughed gently. It was in these moments of capitulation that David discovered he could feel a sort of affectionate warmth toward her. "I know I'm an elderly idiot," she said. "I'm afraid far too few of us are aware of true conditions down there. You honestly think, Joe Klein, some such plan—modified, I realize—might work?"

"Yes. As you say, modified. There must be an approach geared to the general advancement of the civil rights movement. I doubt that it would be possible for anyone to walk into a southern town today and convince any but the younger and more progressively minded Negroes that even a semi-millennium was near. But with concrete evidence of progress the picture might be different. Although apathy born of deep-rooted, generations-old fear isn't going to be an easy obstacle to overcome."

We been frightened people.
Gramp had voted in most elections, but he had never seen his
Tiger, Tiger.
David smiled at Klein. "After we get every Negro on the registration rolls, I'm starting my own campaign to get 'em orchestra seats. Have I your support, Joe Klein?"

"Unqualified, David. See you next week—"

Isaiah left with him, and now, sitting in the coffee shop near the Common, David ate the last mouthful of his pie and looked at his watch. "Gotta go, 'Saiah."

"Hold up there, son. We'd ought to give some thought to
^v
what that woman was saying. 'Out of the mouths of babes'—"

"My God! She's no babe—"

"Sure she is, son. Being a chile's got nothing to do with years. And she ain't nothing but a chile, comes to living."

"Maybe so. Anyhow, what she was talking about sounded to me like recruiting a whole crew of John the Baptists to go crying in the wilderness, prophesying the coining of something that's a long way off—"

"Sure. But mebbe that's good."

"Do you think you could get more than a handful?"

Isaiah nodded. "Yes. You ain't been down there much lately, David. Things is working inside; fermenting, you might say. Young folks are beginning to think. The old folks are still backing away from trouble. But you get some of them young people fired up and we could get something going. Not but what there ain't too many of them looking for the quickest way out, looking to their own future and the hell with us what are left behind. But they's some that are thinking right. It'd take time, David. It'd take time. The old folks'd be a hindrance, but, shucks what else we had all our lives?" Isaiah had turned his chair around so that he was sitting sideways to the table. Now he rolled his eyes toward David, then away again. "Take quite a few people. And they'd have to be educated people what know the score."

"You could be right, 'Saiah." David grinned. "Dead right."

Isaiah grinned back. "That's all right, son. Lots of us going to be dead right before everything over."

"And a lot of them dead wrong. Stone-cold-daid-in-the-market wrong."

"Even your Gramp say that. Way back when you wuz just a chile he said it. Bloodshed."

"I know. Look, 'Saiah, I've got to go back for sure now. I'm way late. But I'll think about it. I'll come up with some ideas and some notes for a plan. At least, it'll be doing something besides yapping."

"That'll be fine, son."

CHAPTER 47

Isaiah was staying with relatives, and the next morning David dropped off at Klein's office the rough outline he had made. Isaiah would pick it up later in the day. When he reached his own office Dora said, "Mr. Willis wants you." She wrinkled her nose at him. "You aren't teacher's pet today, either."

"Can't you protect me any better than that, woman? If I had your gift for gathering scraps of important information, I'd never lose a case. What is it?"

"Go right on in. He's waiting."

Brad looked drawn and tired, the lines from nostril to mouth deeply etched, but when David entered he smiled. "Good morning, my learned colleague."

David grinned. "Just give me the facts. I've been warned."

"Let me give you some background, David. I want you to help a client who was a classmate of mine at Harvard for two years, before he decided to go all out for science. His name is Lloyd A. Litchfield. He looks a most unremarkable man, but he has a most remarkable scientific mind."

David said, "Something about space? There's a bell ringing in the back of my mind—"

"Yes. Research on a totally new kind of fuel. It got a few paragraphs in
Time
a while back. One of these days it will rate a cover story. To get back to the beginning—and don't interrupt. This is your first baptism in corporation law. Several years ago he started, with my help, the research firm of L. A. Litchfield and Associates. It inevitably became known as LaLa. Like a lot of artists, musicians, writers, and scientists with fuzzy fiscal minds, he prides himself on being a good businessman. Actually, he's a lousy one. His two associates aren't much better. One of them is a whiz in the electronics field, and they want to expand into manufacturing. They have already, in a small way, with a resultant foul-up that stood my hair on end. Now they want to go public. No one of them, believe me, knows a share of stock from a debenture, and I'm sure all of them think that 'convertible' is only a name for a car with a top that folds back. I'm turning the spadework over to you. He'll be in this afternoon at two o'clock."

"It might be a good idea if you checked with a man named Benford, my math professor, before turning this innocent character over to me."

"I'm not worrying. Naturally, you'll work closely with Lloyd's accountants. Lean on them whenever you feel at a loss. Just be sure that the firm is in top form for scrutiny to go public. I'll take it from there."

When Brad introduced Litchfield that afternoon he said: "David Champlin is the ideal lad for you, my friend. He has a gift so rare as to be almost nonexistent in young, fledgling lawyers—the gift of keeping it simple. For some reason he was never bitten by the 'whereas' bug. He drew up a complicated will the other day that left me gasping. Even the client understood it. She didn't ask a single question."

Litchfield was a small man, inconspicuously dressed, with shy dark eyes behind plain spectacles, and prematurely graying hair. After Brad had left them together in David's cubicle of an office, David took the top folder of the file Litchfield had brought with him, opened it, looked through its contents, and wondered why his feet weren't throbbing because they, sure as hell, were where his heart had landed. He closed the folder carefully, leaned back, tried to relax, and said: "Mr. Litchfield, suppose you start at the very beginning and give me the history of the firm until now. Then we'll go over these files and then meet with your accountants and your associates."

After two weeks David felt an almost paternal affection for Litchfield and, in a lesser degree, his two associates, protecting them from the occasional acerbity of the accountants, having a quiet drink with them at the firm's expense after the afternoon sessions, and explaining those points on which he felt they were confused. "In Mother Goose language," he told Brad.

On Thursday night of the third week of work on the case, Gramp called him at the apartment. He sensed instantly that Li'l Joe was troubled.

"You busy, son?"

"No, Gramp. Thinking about going to bed in a little bit. Just sitting here working on a case."

"I don't mean now. I means are you busy at your office?" Gramp never said "the office," always "your office" with a barely concealed pride, as though his grandson owned it lock, stock, and building.

"I—yes—well, sort of. What's wrong, Gramp? You sick?"

"It ain't me. It's the Prof. He's real bad."

"Gee, Gramp, I'm sorry—"

"He's been asking about you, son. His brother's here."

"Doc Knudsen? There? In New Orleans?" The Prof must really be sick to get Doc down there just at the start of the school year.

"He came down a couple of days ago. You reckon you could get away? You ain't got money enough to fly I can get it to you—"

"I've got enough, Gramp—"

Litchfield, Brad—the part of the job they were just getting to was the most important, with a meeting scheduled for the next day. And now the Prof—

"How bad is he, Gramp?"

" 'Bout as bad as a man can get. I seen him today."

"Is he in the hospital?"

"He was, but they sent him home. That's—that's what he Wanted. He's got nurses—"

"Stick by the phone, Gramp. I'll call you back."

Brad, when David called, showed neither surprise nor displeasure. "I'll get in touch with Lloyd, David. Go down there. Charge the fare to the firm if you need to and we'll square things up later." It was almost, thought David as he hung up the receiver, as though Brad had been expecting it. Which, obviously, couldn't be true.

The next afternoon Ambrose Jefferson met him at the airport, as David had asked when he called Gramp back. The airport limousines wouldn't carry Negroes, and neither would the white cab companies. He was taking no chances on a two-hour wait for transportation to town such as he had once experienced.

"Li'l Joe says you might as well go direck to the Profs," said Ambrose. "You give a ring when you're ready to leave, and I'll take you home. I'll take care of this here bag."

David opened the wrought-iron gate in front of the Professor's house and stood looking up at the spare, graceful facade that was as familiar to him as the little frame house across the river in Beauregard with its simple front porch built by Li'l Joe's own hands. He limped forward on the bricked path toward the side door. Old habits die hard, he thought; Gramp had cautioned him when he was a child about going to the front door. "It ain't that the Prof cares. Lawd! The Prof wouldn't have no one going to the side door. But we don't want the Prof being given no trouble by his neighbors, getting hisself talked about any more than what he is—"

As he approached the house the door opened and Karl Knudsen hurried down to meet him. The little man did not shake hands; instead he threw his arms around David's shoulders in the European embrace. He said something rapidly in Danish; then, hand on elbow, he guided David up the low steps and into the house, explaining, "I said 'God bless.' And God be thanked that you are here. Bjarne would not ask that we send for you, but he had talked of you constantly. Your grandfather told me you would be here, but I had to see you first before I was sure—"

As they entered, a nurse came down the hall from the rear of the house, a small tray with gauze-protected hypodermic on it in her hand. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, looking at David with shocked surprise. If they had been printed in large, easy-to-read type her thoughts could not have been easier to read: "I didn't know the person my patient talked about so much was colored." She must have been off duty when Gramp had been there, thought David, or surely she would have overheard something that would have prepared her. Suddenly he hated her; he hated the blossom whiteness of her skin, the sleek, neat blackness of her hair under its white cap, the dark coldness of her eyes. She had brought something into this house that had never been there before through all the years that it had been so familiar to him. There was a wall now, a high wall, between him and the man he had come to see, whom he loved greatly, and she was the wall. He knew the hate was in his eyes as he returned her look. And he knew from the sharp edge to Doc Knudsen's voice that, perhaps made sensitive by worry and fatigue, he sensed the situation.

"Mr. Champlin is going up to see my brother."

She looked at Knudsen, carrying the contempt in her eyes to him now. "It's time for his four o'clock injection. He needs the rest." Her upcountry drawl was as cold as her eyes.

"He needs to see this young man. That is what he needs. An extra fifteen minutes of rest does not matter now."

David, one foot already on the lowest stair, turned at the

words. It was one thing to feel fear; it was a cold something else to have that fear made real.