George Pelecanos (34 page)

Dr.
Rex knocked on the double doors leading to the Messenger's meditation chamber
and waited for the word. Upon hearing it, he removed his shoes, entered a large
room with a gurgling fountain in the center, and bowed to the figure in white
who sat divining the wisdom of Olodumare with cowrie shells.

"May
our Lord and Father be with you," said Rex.

"And
He unto you, my son," answered the Messenger, without looking up. He counted
several shells and moved them around. "It's been written that you have received
some wisdom."

"Yes,"
said Rex, who walked over to the old man's desk and pressed a button. Water
ushered forth from the fountain more loudly.

[FBI
Agent 1: Damn it, that smart-assed nigger turned up the volume again.

FBI
Agent 2: Hoover is going to have our butts if we bring in more flushing
toilets!]

Rex
placed himself in front of the man who had made blackness a badge of honor. For
untold minutes the master and teacher uttered not a word, letting the sound of
water wash over them and empty their heads.

Rex
slowly opened his eyes and presented a koan to the Messenger: "Why?"

The
old man said nothing at first, his dried lips unparted. The student knew
something was coming by the way the old man's Adam's apple began to move above
his collar.

"Because the Blackman has to become a man of respect."

Man
of respect, thought Rex as he crossed U Street, stopping by Brother's Shoe
Shine Shop to pick up a copy of the Evening Star.

"Good
seeing you, brother minister," said Herman, the legless newsie, looking up to
Rex from his platform affixed to four wheels. Herman had always considered
himself
half a man until he met Dr. Minister Mallory Rex,
the only black man in America who truly confronted the devils. He and the
denizens of Soulsville, while most of them God-fearing Christians, had welcomed
back the black prince from exile after his intemperate remarks brought the
Kingdom scorn and opprobrium during the nation's mourning of the white devils'
fallen leader. He had been cast aside for nearly a year, watching lesser men
attempt to claim his position, "trying to rap like Rex" but falling flat on
their faces. The Kingdom's numbers were down. Recruitment had flattened, and
the coffers were less than full. It was Rex who added a kind of severe glamour
and dash to the humorless black men in white robes who preached Izlam on the
street corners of America's urban
bantustans
while
Uncle Tom ministers called for reconciliation and integration. It was the
"mighty Rex" who the brothers proclaimed "cool and slick," and who the sister
women, O.K.A. and not, wished would park his shoes beneath their beds.

Rex
understood his new mission: He was on a test. Would he do the dirty work of the
Kingdom?

"Peace,"
he said to the half-man.

As
he walked toward his appointment, the prince of Soulsville observed that U
Street was having its streetcar tracks removed--a sign that the sleepy little
city was maturing. The Metropolitan Board was laying down the beginnings of a
subway system like New York's.

This
stretch of northwest D.C., from 11th Street west to 18th, had seen better days.
It was, as one book Rex had read suggested, its own "secret city." Earlier, a
better tone of Negroes had resided there, but the influx of rough-and-umble
Southern blacks had changed the place and driven them away. It now had the odor
of real people; it was a place of beauty parlors, fried hair, and big-hipped
bouffant-do sisters. Men still wore hats but the new looks, the "James Brown"
process and the "Afro," were making barbers anxious. There was a different mood
in the air; the elders called it "funky" and the youths ran with it. Soul
Brother No. 1 had announced a "brand-new bag," and civil-rights cats working
for SNCC hung out at Ben's Chili Bowl, with kids constantly coming in and out
of the three cinemas along the way: the Lincoln, the Republic, and the Booker
T.

D.C.
was different. D.C. was country, and that meant a slower sense of
reality--colored people time, heightened by the lush foliage of the area and its
legendary humidity. The whole city had the feel of a village since the
buildings were no more than three stories high in residential areas and ten or
less in the commercial districts. It was a chocolate city, a city in which over
seventy percent of the population was colored, invisible to the master class
that lived there and ignored by the indifferent tourists visiting the national
edifices.

But
D.C. was also a city of an aspiring middle class that was branching out from Le
Droit Park, Shaw, and U Street, to the tree-shaded "Gold Coast" of upper 16th
Street. There resided the "big-ticket Negroes" that Rex rallied against in the
oasis of Meridian Hill Park, cited in the past as one of the most beautiful
landscaped parks in the country. On a warm spring day, when the heat brought
out the richness in colored people's skin, making them glow, the Original
Kingdom of Afrika would hold its annual Kingdom's Day in this park, creating a
huge Afrikan village in the heart of bourgie D.C. Hundreds of vendors would lay
out their wares in stalls, and it was at the Groove Records pavilion on
Kingdom's Day that Dr. Minister Mallory Rex had first met Sophia Devereaux.

And
he well remembered her when he slid into the booth at Ben's Chili Bowl across
from her brother, Lorenzo Devereaux. Rex told the record
producer
that phase
one had been completed and that the Messenger approved of the
recording that Groove Records was making of his speeches.

Ten
years younger than the man facing him, Lorenzo Devereaux shifted the
conversation to the real agenda for the meeting: the mob's encroachment on all
that his family had achieved. Groove Records had been on a steady roll of soul
and sweaty R&B hit records since the 1950s, and these days even the "legit"
labels were salivating over their work, wondering how they were doing it:
making music and money. Now these wop bastards thought they could just walk in
and take over their company because "niggers ain't shit and had no protection."

Three
days earlier, Lorenzo had met with his step-mother and half-brother, Leon, to
discuss the family crisis. Sophia, his half-sister, had been kidnapped by the
Gambino family of New Jersey, headed by Carmine D'Ambrosio.

"We
need to get some back-up," Lorenzo urged. "We're going to get some black people
who aren't afraid of the mob."

O.K.A.

"Are
you crazy!!
"
Leon had recently assumed the position of
president of Groove Records and did not like the idea at all. He wanted to call
in the police.

"Yeah,
sure," said Lorenzo, stubbing out his Chesterfield in an ashtray. "Go to the
cops, the FBI, the same people who been spying on Daddy and Mama for years! I
say we handle this way. I have a contact with the Kingdom."

"You're
crazy, man!" Leon protested.

But
Leon had no real plan other than calling the police. Either capitulate or ask
the cops to handle it. It wasn't fair, he thought. He was just supposed to
handle record deals, make money, cruise around in his Cadillac, and go to bed
with red-bone lovelies...and show up his bastard half-brother, Lorenzo. In Leon's
eyes, Lo resented the fact that their father had chosen him to run the firm,
despite the fact that Leon's own mother thought the half-brother should be at
the helm. Perhaps Lo was more competent as an executive, but doesn't blood--full
blood--count for something?

Betty
Lou Compton, the legendary jazz pianist and composer, the woman who had rescued
Groove from the dark days of the Red Scare, was silent. This was a gamble. Her
daughter's life, certainly more important than the record company, was in the
balance. Yet she understood, as did Lorenzo, that the kidnapping was a form of
humiliation, that a family such as the Devereaux could not fully protect itself
on its own. The police and the FBI would likely be indifferent, given the
accusations the bureau had made against them in the past. They wouldn't even protect
those poor civil-rights demonstrators who were beaten during freedom rides in
the South. It was rumored that Hoover thought Martha Reeves's "Dancing in the
Streets" was an underground call for riots and demonstrations.

"Mama!"
said Leon, who could see that her slow response to shutting down the crazy idea
meant she was considering it. "We're talking about Sophia. Lo can talk all that
foolishness about the Kingdom, but she ain't his sister."

"Lorenzo
has been just as much of a brother to her as you," defended his mother. "I
don't recall you changing her diapers, mister. When have you ever taken a real
interest in anyone in this family? You got your position as the president of
Groove, but the first sign of trouble...? You're willing to cut a deal with them!"

"We're
talking about the Mafia!" said Leon.

"And
they bleed like anyone else," countered Lorenzo. "I know how we can checkmate
them."

"How?!
How you gonna do that? Huh? We only
have a few days for Sophia--"

The
door opened and in wheeled Rayford Devereaux, the wounded Lear who had retired
as the founding president of Groove Records years ago to work on his book. When
Betty Lou had recently decided to leave the company's helm to return to
composing, that's when the mob had spotted something fat and unprotected for
the taking.

"What
are you two arguing over now?" asked Rayford as he approached them. The very
sight of their father in a wheel chair underscored how his two years in prison
had broken and discouraged him. He had finally given up, after battling for
years to prove that black music was the social glue keeping Negroes together.

No
one had yet mentioned to him that the center of his heart had been stolen.

"Daddy,"
said Lorenzo, "something has happened." Lorenzo peered around the room and his eyes
settled on Leon, who, as the chief executive of Groove Records, ought to be the
bearer of bad news. Leon looked away.

"Sophia
has been kidnapped," said Lorenzo.

Their
father's white eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead as he turned to his
wife, who only nodded yes.

"Who?"

"The mob.
Carmine D'Ambrosio,"
replied Betty Lou. "They have given us seventy-two hours to make a decision.
They want to be our, uhm, partners."

"You
mean our masters," corrected her husband. He turned to the CEO of his
patrimony. "What's your plan, son?"

"Plan?
Uh..." Leon stammered.

"You
got something up your sleeve or not?!"

"Daddy,
it's the mob," explained Leon. "They just want the company--parts of it."

"I'll
give them every bit of money we have to get my baby girl back, but they ain't
getting their hands on this firm! No deal."

"They'll
kill her..." started Leon, shocked at his father's ruthlessness. He thought it
had been drained out of him.

Rayford
Devereaux looked at his son and realized at that very moment that he had made a
terrible mistake. Leon saw Groove Records only as a business, not an empire or
dynasty, certainly not a way of life, a trust. He himself may have been a tired
old nigger in the eyes of many, but he had become such the old way: arrested by
the government and beaten in jail because he refused to denounce some of his
artists as Communist. He spent two years in jail for Contempt of Congress, and
many a patriotic Negro had stomped his ass in bids for early release.

"Son,
this is a ship, the USS Groove, and we're officers. We go down with the ship.
Money?
Let them Italian crackers have it, but they will not
get this company. Not even over Sophia's body! This is our heritage."

Leon
gaped at his mother.

Betty,
however, saw a miracle: Her husband was back. The old Rayford Devereaux, who
won her heart forty years before when she was a college student under his
tutelage, had empowered her to defy her blues-hating, preacher-crazy father.
That man had re-emerged...but at the price of her daughter?

"Lorenzo
has an idea, Ray," said Betty. "It's risky."

"Hell,"
said Rayford, "if Kennedy could risk the goddamn world over Cuba and make the
Russians pull their missiles out of Dodge, I'll take a chance."

"Yeah,
for your record company," muttered Leon.

Lorenzo
told his father the idea: Call in the Original Kingdom of Afrika. Seeing that
the new chief executive of Groove Records had no other idea or plan, Rayford
Devereaux dispatched Lorenzo to the temple immediately. Time was tight.

"WHAT?"
said Jimmy
Falco.
"Are you sure
?...
Damn
. Okay...Yeah, I see...I understand...Right.
Gotcha."

Jimmy
"the Hydrant" hung up the pay phone at a Maryland rest stop just outside of the
District line. He watched the cars along the highway and couldn't shake off
what he'd heard. He had to whack the bitch. It was fortunate that he had
brought along Ricci, the sick bastard. It was one thing to follow orders, but
Ricci was the kind of sick fuck who actually enjoyed hurting people.