The Right Mistake (11 page)

Socrates heard the front door open behind him. Cassie Wheaton stood up; the autumn colored bale of hair on her head made her taller than any man in the room.

When Socrates turned he was not really surprised to see Martin Truman, known to the Thinkers as Maxie Fadiman.
“Maxie.” Mustafa Ali also rose, but he was greeting the man he had brought from his soup kitchen to the Thursday night meeting.
“Hi, everybody,” the undercover cop said sheepishly.
“Hey, Max,” Socrates said. “Billy, will you move down and let Maxie sit here next to me?”
The gambler eyed the ex-con suspiciously. No one but Socrates and Cassie knew about Maxie. People came and went from the meetings freely. Some members showed up only once; a few had never missed a week.
Billy moved down near Chaim Zetel. Maxie/Marty nodded awkwardly and took a seat. The silence from Mark Sail’s suggestion turned into a hush over Maxie’s odd reception by Socrates. He’d never asked Billy to move before. The little gambler had always sat to Socco’s left.
While Maxie’s shy gaze wandered around the room Socrates stared at him.
“What about my idea?” Mark Sail asked.
Socrates raised a silencing hand, still staring at Maxie’s profile.
The quiet became uncomfortable.
In his heart Socrates praised the silence. He remembered moments when he awoke late at night in his cell and there was no sound coming from the cellblock. In those moments he almost felt free.
Maxie looked down the center of the table straight into the eyes of Cassie Wheaton.
“I haven’t been here for a while,” the police spy said. “In a way I guess you could say that I never was really, truly here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Maxie?” white bearded Mustafa Ali asked.
“My name ain’t Maxie, Mr. Ali. My mother named me Martin but my police handlers said to use the name Maxie. It starts with the same letter and sounds a little like Marty which is what my friends call me.”
“Police?” Ron Zeal said.
“Yeah,” Maxie replied. “I was a … I am a cop. I came from outta town, up in the Bay Area, and so they made me a spy…”
“A traitor?” Mustafa said, all the friendliness drained from his voice.
“A traitor,” Maxie agreed. “It was my job to join in with people and to report to the police who was the bad apple.”
“Why?” Leanne Northford asked.
“Because he’s a Benedict Arnold,” Mark Sail said.
Socrates wondered then if it was Mark who planted the gun in his accounting office.
“Because I thought it was right,” Maxie said. “I thought the same thing you talk about here. I wanted to stop the gangbangers and drug dealers and thugs from runnin’ the streets. I thought that the police were meant to protect honest people and so I . . . I spied on you.”
“And so then you saw that you were wrong and that’s why you left?” Darryl asked.
Socrates smiled at the son of his heart. It was one of the few times that the boy articulated a full thought that was also a question. It didn’t matter that he was wrong.
“No,” Maxie said. “No. Socco sniffed me out and found where I lived at and came to my house. I quit because I thought that
he
would betray
me
. I was afraid of what he’d do so I took my family and left Los Angeles. I went to another city and kept on being a spy.”
Maxie lost steam and brought his hands to the table. Everyone, even Luna Barnet, was staring at him.
“Why did you come back?” Chaim Zetel asked.
“Because . . .”
It was then that Socrates understood the Thinkers’ Meeting had gotten away from him, and not just tonight. He had wanted a place of safety where men and women of all kinds could come and say what was heavy on their hearts. They could complain and plan and see themselves as important. But what he got was the opposite from what he wanted. Leanne was right. The room he created was as dangerous as a prison yard. Every word brought them closer to action. And action in this world went hand in hand with pain.
Socrates hoped that Maxie would maintain his silence, stop with a confession, but he knew this was not to be.
“Because I remembered somethin’ that Socco said to me before I, before I left.”
“What?” Wan Tai asked.
“I moved to San Diego,” Maxie said. “I told them that I wouldn’t do any more political work and so they put me with drug dealers. One day they said to tell this guy who was about to leave the business and go to Morocco that they had one final buy for him. I did what they asked and then, the night I was supposed to go to the meet, they called me and said that it had been called off.
“Robert, that was the drug dealer’s name, Robert had told me that he was tired of the life in the street. He told me that he was gonna get away from it. He had a girlfriend from Morocco. They were gonna get married and he was gonna have a new life in a new country.
“In the morning the radio said that Robert had been shot down on the corner where the meeting was supposed to take place. There was no mention of the police. The cops that came said it looked like a drug buy gone bad.
“After that I remembered that Socco had said that I should come here and tell you what I was, what I did for a livin’. He said that you’d learn something from my experience. Hey . . . maybe he’s right.”
Socrates had no questions for Maxie, neither did Billy, Ron Zeal, or Cassie Wheaton. But many of the members of the Thinkers’ table had never realized that they lived among people like Maxie. They had questions that went way into the night.
Had he committed crimes in the name of the law?
Yes.
Had he framed people innocent?
...Yes.
Had he tortured men, sold women into prostitution, taken drugs, robbed honest people, lied under oath, lied to criminals, killed men who he might have saved?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
He explained each situation, named names and even gave dates and places.
“I thought I was doin’ right,” he said whenever someone would ask why. “I was the law protectin’ my people from themselves.”
Mark Sail’s idea hadn’t made it to discussion that night. Maxie and his confession dominated the talk. Some people shouted at him; others shook their heads. Maxie said that he and his wife were moving again. This time they were leaving the country.
“I cannot atone for my crimes,” he said. “And there is no court for me. Just talkin’ here tonight might get me killed when the word gets back to the others.”
“You got a spy in here wit’ us now?” Ron Zeal asked.
“Maybe not at this table tonight but they got people watchin’, people comin’ in. They want Socco to go down. Nobody wants the gangs to get together. Nobody wants the peoples down here to unite . . .”

Socrates asked Luna to go back to her place with Marianne Lodz that evening.
“No,” the young beauty replied. “I’ma stay right here wit’ you.”
“I thought we had an agreement?”
“We do. I’ma go home when you need me to. When you need to be alone or wit’ Darryl. When you need to take care of business. But tonight you need your woman wit’ you. I cain’t be leavin’ when I know that there’s police spyin’ on you, tryin’ to bring you down.”
Socrates didn’t want to laugh but he couldn’t help it. There was no humor or good will to his hilarity but something deeper, something darker but not bad.
“My woman?” he said, still laughing.
“What else am I if not yours?”
The question cut off his humor like a faucet slammed shut.
Luna stared at him and he looked back, blankly. His heart was gripping like a fist on a tennis ball in the prison yard from early morning until the horn blew.
“They been tryin’ to kill me for more’n half a century, girl.”
“An’ now they got to go up against the both of us.”
Nothing in his years of dark defiance had prepared Socrates to resist this claim. He had thought that it was the flattery of a young woman’s body that broke through his defenses, made him prey to her desires, and his. He thought that she would lay with him awhile and then move on to another man who better suited her needs.
He thought that this affair was just another way for him to learn what he needed to know to bring out the truth from his soul—but he was wrong on all counts.
“Socrates,” Luna said.
“What?”
“Why you just standin’ there?”
“Uh . . .”
“Socrates.”
“What?” he asked, almost shouting.
“You gonna talk?”
“Where did you learn how to do that?” he asked.
“What?” she asked. “I mean how to do what?”
“How to jerk my head around when I’m tryin’ my best to look the other way.”
“What you talkin’ about, Socrates?”
“They separated us, girl.”
“Who?”
“Them. The slave masters.”
“Slaves? Slavery over, Socco.”
“It is and it isn’t,” he said, recalling the nervous feeling in his toes the first time he wandered to the far end of the public pool. The ground was no longer beneath his feet and suddenly he forgot how to swim. “But that’s like Iraq.”
“Iraq? What’s Iraq got to do wit’ us?”
“Everything. The war’s gonna be ovah one day, right?”
“I guess.”
“An’, an’, an’ when it is that’s what people gonna say, ‘It’s ovah.’”
“All right,” Luna said. She reached out gently and touched his bulging forearm with three fingertips.
“But what if somebody you knew had been walkin’ patrol the day before the pullout? What if he stepped on a mine and lost his left leg and lost his left arm?”
Luna moved close enough to kiss the fabric of his blue work shirt. She gazed up and his arm came around her shoulder blades.
“I guess his war wouldn’t evah be ovah,” Luna said.
“They separated us,” he said again. “They made sure that slaves came from different tribes and spoke different tongues so they couldn’t plot against ’em. That’s how we learned to be black people—alone, even in a crowd.”
Luna blinked.
“And then,” Socrates said, “and then you come up just as easy as you please an’ say, ‘now they got to go up against the both of us.’”
“So?”
“Don’t you see? I only know one way.”
“Ain’t you nevah had a woman before?” Luna asked. “Not really. I been in prison. They ain’t no women in there.”

Just before he awoke, on some mornings, Socrates got the notion that he was still in prison—locked away and forgotten. When this thought entered his mind his heart would skip and he’d jolt into consciousness with the electric feeling of desperation in his hands and feet.

That morning Luna Barnet was sound asleep next to him; mouth open and hair wild. She was wrapped up tightly in the sheet.

Socrates thought that she was like an island that a lost ship found itself next to in the early morning after days of nothing but flat seas and no rations. Not just an island but a great sheer cliff that dwarfed his small ship and its journey.

He had been lost and now he was somewhere with no idea of how he’d gotten there. There were no breadcrumbs or footprints behind him in the shifting sea; no possibility of any landmark, or footpath, not even any clear memory of passage or arrival.

“Why din’t you wake me up?” she asked hours later when he was almost finished making breakfast.
“I like to watch you sleep.”
“You wasn’t watchin’ me.” She wore only a T-shirt because she knew how much he liked to look at her legs in the morning. “Oh yes I was,” he said. “I could see you through the ceilin’.”
She was going to continue the banter, but the woman inside, and the child too, drew her into his arms.

“Where are you? ” Luna asked in the early afternoon when the sun shone on the other side of the meeting house.
They were two spoons in the bed.
“Inside you,” he said.
“Where?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even consider saying the word.
“Do you wanna make a baby up inside me, Baby?”
There was nothing to say; not yes and not no and not that he didn’t know.
“’Cause if you don’t you bettah move back.”
“I love you,” he whispered so softly that she did not hear it.

That evening he made fried chicken and an avocado, onion, and tomato salad. They sat at a small table in the kitchen because Luna didn’t like to eat at the Big Table.

“I always feel like we got to be talkin’ ’bout sumpin’ important at the Table,” she said. “An’ you know sometimes I just wanna eat.”

“They prob’ly gonna try’n kill me, girl,” Socrates said at the end of their meal.
She twisted her lips and shook her head.
“We ain’t at the meetin’ table,” she said.
“This is serious, Luna.”
“I know.”
“I cain’t be upstairs tryin’ t’make babies when people down here wit’ knives and guns.”
“Who better’n you?”
“What if I die?”
“Ain’t no
if
to it, honey. We all gonna die one day.”
Socrates was reminded of the great cliff of his early morning vision. He smiled and shook his head.
“Don’t die,” she said. “Don’t let ’em do that to you.”

He didn’t tell her about the note he found shoved under the office door in the early morning. Maxie must have put it there before coming into the meeting the night before.

Dear Mr. Fortlow,
I am the one who called you and said about the pistol in
your office. When they told me about it I knew right away
that I had to warn you. I came back to L.A. after Robert
was killed. I pretended to be on their side but I wasn’t. I
thought that I could watch over you and in that way make
up for the wrong I had done. But I was wrong.
The man in charge of your case is named Telford
Winegarten. He has an office at the municipal building
on Alvarado. He’s got an office but he’s acting like he’s not
a cop.
By the time you read this I’ll be gone to Canada. I’d
appreciate it if you’d tear up this letter.
Maxie

Socrates tore the note into tiny pieces and then flushed them down the toilet. Then he waited for the tank to refill and flushed it again.
The next afternoon he got on a bus that deposited him three blocks from the Alvarado Municipal building. He went through the metal detector and presented his identification to the freckled Hispanic woman at the front desk.

His outer door had a small removable plate fitted in its nameslot that read: Telford Winegarten—Community Relations.
Winegarten was of medium height and build, maybe fortyfive and well groomed, if balding.
“Took the bus,” Socrates replied. “Mind if I sit down?”
Winegarten nodded with neither fear nor confusion showing on his face. But Socrates knew he had upended the white man’s plots and schemes. He knew that Winegarten had used the fifteen minutes Socrates waited outside, across from the pretty young secretary, to hide the maps and flowcharts he used to decipher the information they had to bring down the Big Nickel.
Sitting across from each other the two men gathered themselves.
“What can I do for you?” Winegarten asked.
“Just answer one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why you wanna frame me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay.”
“Is that all?” Telford allowed himself a smile that showed no teeth.
“No . . . I mean in a way it is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m what you call a reformed killer, Mr. Winegarten . . . or should I say Captain Winegarten of the LAPD?”
The policeman said nothing, made no gesture.
“I got to get this right now,” Socrates said, pressing two fingers of his left hand against his brow. “Cassie Wheaton is filing papers against the LAPD that name you, Captain Harvey Jamal, and Lieutenant Jerry McCann for violating my rights and the rights of everyone in my organization.”
“What?” It was the first honest word uttered by the cop.
“We gonna put it all out on the table,” Socrates said, using the words that had been spoken many times at the Thursday night Thinkers’ Meeting. “Your spies and plants and conspiracies. We gonna put together a petition to get you up off’a us and we gonna bring every one of your secret agents into court.”
The shadow over the policeman’s face came from inside.
“You’re threatening me?” he said.
“No, sir. No threat here. I used to be like that. I used to bully and intimidate. But now I just lay it out. Let the courts and the newspapers know what you doin’ an’ what I’m doin’. Let’em see in the light’a day what’s what.”
“I could crush you like a bug,” Telford said.
Socrates could remember using the same words in the prison yard when someone questioned his authority. He smiled, recognizing this affinity with the offensive man.
“Not right now you couldn’t, boss,” Socrates said. “Later on maybe, when you’re miles away and your hatchet men come up from behind. But right now you couldn’t lay a hand on me.”
Telford Winegarten sat back in his chair and laced his fingers. He wore a tan suit and a dark green shirt. His tie was golden with a metallic sheen. The shadow lifted from his countenance and he nodded and smiled. Behind his eyes were a general’s calculations. He was weighing his opponent and maybe even enjoying the process.
“What do you want?” the policeman asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“We all want something.”
“Oh? Tell me, Captain, what do you want?”
“I’d like to know what the gangs are saying. I’d like to hear about the prostitution ring being run out of Compton.”
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that.”
“What do you know?”
“What I said, Captain. You are my nemesis, you and all your spies and agents. Like you said, I’m a bug compared to you. But this bug is goin’ to federal court.
“Now if you wanna talk to gangbangers and street walkers I’ll ask ’em to meet ya. If you wanna come down an’ find out what’s happenin’ I will make the room. There ain’t secrets. The gangs want peace. The street walkers and call girls and call boys want peace. Damn, the whole United States wants peace. It’s you don’t see it, Captain.”
“I don’t want this court thing, Fortlow.”
“I know. And believe me I don’t want it either. When it come to me that I was gonna sue a cop I almost shit my pants. My lawyer’s scared and you know Cassie Wheaton ain’t scared’a nuthin’. But we are goin’ to court.”
“If you’ve already made up your mind then why are you here?”
“There wasn’t nowhere else to go, Captain. I’m the kinda man wanna stand up to my enemy and say where it is I stand. I ain’t no drive-by shooter, no hit man come up behind your back. I’m a fighter.
“I come here to tell you that I’m comin’ for you. You could frame me or beat me or have me shot down dead in the street. But I’m still comin’ for you. The papers are in the court’s hands and in the newspapers’ hands. Marianne Lodz talkin’ to a entertainment magazine about it right now and Leanne Northford tellin’ all of her friends down at social services.
“I come here to tell you that I’ma come down on you like a ton ’a mothahfuckin’ brick. That’s why I’m here. I’m here right in front’a you. I’m here to tell you that I’ll be in my house and at the Big Nickel, with my girlfriend and maybe even I’ma bring a life into this world. And I ain’t runnin’ or hidin’ neither. I come here to let you know that I know and to see if you ready to fight a man who see you as good as you see him.”
Socrates stood up. He felt the veins pulsing in his temples.
Telford Winegarten sat back further.
“You’re making a mistake,” the policeman-in-disguise said as Socrates blundered out the door.