Odyssey (23 page)

Sovereign saw the words she spoke written out in a single line. In the jagged horizon the letters made he saw a long and slender key to the questions he had been asking for days.

“You gettin’ hard again, daddy.”

Sovereign wondered if Lena Altuna’s brown hair was dyed. It looked to be the same color it had been when they were at school. But that was a long time ago. He’d had some short, curly gray hairs grow out in the past five years. These silver ghosts had also appeared on his chin and chest.

“We need to know every person’s name who can testify to your blindness and your character,” she was saying.

“Like doormen and doctors?” James asked.

“Neighbors, store clerks, and anyone else who saw you on a regular basis,”
Altuna added. “We have the medical reports, and the prosecution might even bring in the group suing you at your job if they think that it speaks to your trustworthiness. Do you have any family who might shed light on your condition?”

“I haven’t seen my family in years.”

Lena sat up straight and away from the high back of her chair. They were in a fifty-fifth-floor conference room, the exterior wall of which was made from a thick sheet of glass. Through this he could see half a dozen jets circling in a holding pattern over the eastern airports.

“What about Toni Loam?” Altuna asked.

“We’ve become lovers, I guess.”

“The prosecution is pressing her to testify against you.”

“I know.”

“Maybe your relationship will muddy the waters of her testimony.”

“I want you to argue with the judge that we should be tried together,” Sovereign said.

“Why?”

“Because the only way there could have been a crime is if we planned it together. But we didn’t, and I want to be guilty or not based upon what I did or didn’t do. And I don’t want to be exonerated if Toni isn’t also released.”

As the jets went through their slow-motion waiting dance over Queens, Long Island, and Brooklyn, Lena frowned. Sovereign identified with the aircraft, thinking that his whole life had been one long holding pattern after another. He was waiting right now—for clearance to enter yet another queue: If he was shunted down the path to the right he would be convicted and sent to a prison, where he would be locked away, periodically pummeled, and bored to tears by purposelessness and mental inactivity; to the left he would be free, probably unemployed, occupying a life that no longer had meaning or direction. Either way, happiness and satisfaction were improbable. He’d leave the courtroom looking for another line to wait in—and another after that.

“I understand it,” Lena said. “But what do we say when the prosecution tries to make it seem like you were going to turn over your lover to get out from under the crime you planned together?”

“But I’m not indicting her.”

“She brought Johnson into your house, at least with the intent of mischief and theft.”

“I always told Toni that my house was hers. Even if she felt that she was doing something wrong it doesn’t matter. She had the key, the access, and the right to do whatever she wanted. She can’t be responsible for a friend who decided to attack me.”

“You would have made a good lawyer, Sovereign.”

“I hardly even make a patchwork human being.”

That afternoon James made it back to his office. Shelly Monteri—wearing a
clamshell-colored square-cut dress and a locket made from pure gold—was at her station, talking on the phone and examining her dark blue nails when Sovereign came upon her.

“I have to go, Mom,” the young woman said, hanging up. “Hello, Mr. James. How are you today?”

“Anybody looking for me?”

“No, sir. But the applicant files are piling up in your in-box.”

“Send them over to Ms. Malloy. Tell her that I’ve been preoccupied with my trial and that I didn’t think I could give this batch the proper attention.”

He could see that the receptionist wanted to ask about the upcoming court case but couldn’t find the words in their professional relationship to bring it up. Sovereign smiled at her dilemma and went by her post into his office.

The red plastic folding chairs were still arrayed before his desk. In them he could see the young, and not so young, black faces that he had confessed to. He perched at the edge of his chair, elbows on the desk. There he imagined a longer conversation with the unofficial Black Workers’ Union. They discussed the discontinuity between generations and the intangible nature of psychic disruptions. They talked about slavery and prisons, Bosnia and Rwanda. They tried to place their experience and his actions into an acceptable mode of behavior, and even though they failed at this, the imaginary process retained some innate value. After sitting in that position, having that pretend conference for an hour or more, he got up and left the office, passing Shelly but not speaking to her.

Six weeks passed. Sovereign did not return to his office. Seventeen days after he left Techno-Sym for the final time he received a letter informing him that he’d been placed on indefinite, and paid, medical leave. The forms were signed by Martin LeRoy and Seth Offeran.

Every second or third day Toni Loam would come over. She’d been given a full-time position at the beauty shop and moved to a room on 128th Street near Morningside Park. They made love and watched television, went out to eat and had sex. She learned that he became excited when she talked about what they were doing, especially when she would tell him what he was seeing.

“You like that ass?” she’d ask when she found him looking, or knew it. “Say it and you can have it all night long.”

“You know you don’t have to talk to me the way you do sometimes,” he said to her at an outside table at an Italian restaurant on 6th Avenue.

“You don’t like it?” she asked, tilting her head doubtfully.

“I don’t want you to think that I only see you as an object.”

“I don’t object.”

“I mean that it’s not just the sex why I like you, Toni.”

“You don’t like havin’ sex with me?”

“I love it.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Sometimes I think you’re just doing it and saying it because you know that’s what I like—what I need.”

“So? You don’t think I need this dinner? You don’t think I need to see your eyes bright up when you look at me in them tight purple panties?”

“It seems so … so primitive.”

“Primitive like animals?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t you a animal, Sovereign?”

“I’m not going to win this argument, am I?”

“You could win it and lose me.”

“No, thanks.”

That was on a Tuesday evening. Toni left the next morning near noon for her job at the hairdresser’s. Sovereign spent the afternoon exercising and listening to a collection of Chopin piano concertos, took a cab up to 86th Street, met with Offeran, and came home.

It was a little before five when the buzzer from the downstairs doorman sounded.

“Yes?”

“A Drum-Eddie to see you, sir.”

Sovereign’s mind went blank for a few moments. He stood there holding the phone with one hand and pressing his chin with the middle finger of the other.

“Mr. James?” the doorman said.

“Send him up, Jolly.”

His fists were clenched again. Sovereign waited in the hallway, holding the door open with his shoulder. The wait seemed interminable. There was a thrumming in the muscles of his back and a return of the ache between the knuckles of his hands.

He knew, was sure, that this was not his brother coming up the elevator. Maybe the FBI had sent an agent, or it could have been another personal representative like Monte. The moth and the bumblebee vied over control of his chest. He was hoping that Toni would come over and protect him.

Protect him?

The man coming down the hallway was tall, slender, and bald. Clad in a dark shirt and trousers, he wore a white waistcoat and had a festive scarf hanging loosely about his neck.

He had the right coloring for Eddie.

The mustache wasn’t evident until he was only a few feet away. It wasn’t
razor-thin but well trimmed. His smile almost annihilated the meager swath of lip hair.

“You look exactly the same, JJ.”

“Drum … is it really you, man?”

The taller, more slender man embraced Sovereign and whispered, “You never did see it comin’, bro.”