He tried to follow with a looping overhand right, but Mayes stepped in to intercede.
“The man obviously takes his work more seriously than I,” he said, watching Gunner crumple to the floor as the giants behind him released him. “He’s deluded. Not dangerous.”
On his knees, Gunner held his insides in place with an open hand and raised his head, licking blood and perspiration from one corner of his mouth. The Brother with the VCR camcorder was still rolling tape, aiming the instrument’s large convex eye squarely on him, crouching from a short distance for an intimate close-up. Mayes was now as solemn as Mouse, apparently unfazed by this latest of small victories for his Brothers of Volition.
“Let’s go, Cop,” he said, gesturing for his guest to get up off the floor. “If you can make it back to my office, I’ll give you a few minutes of my time. To enlighten you, if you will.”
He walked away, toward the rear of the building. Gunner pushed himself to his feet and followed, slowly, braving the tense gauntlet of the doorman and company, trailing Mouse and the Brothers’ resident cameraman behind him. He moved into the gutted bowels of the failed corner market past identically dressed Brothers of all ages feeding paper to an antiquated printing press and pounding manual typewriters, talking on telephones and painting various placards. The building was a mess, a patched and repatched three-alarm fire hazard, but the floors were clean and the rooms well illuminated, some fresh with the scent of ammonia and disinfectant.
Mayes himself had a small office in a rear corner, not far from the large bay door that had been the former market’s delivery entrance. The room was big enough to hold a desk, three wooden chairs, and a filing cabinet, but little else. A transistor radio sat atop the filing cabinet and a calendar was nailed to one wall. Sharing the surface of the desk with a meticulous arrangement of paperwork was an IBM PC and an electric fan that was only moving hot air more rapidly through the room. A good-sized observation window near the door gave Mayes an unobstructed view of his soldiers at work, hammering, typing, painting away like Santa’s little helpers.
Mayes took his seat behind the desk and waved Gunner into one of the remaining two chairs before him. The detective chose the one to Mayes’s right, farthest from the door, and Mouse grabbed the other, dragging it to the back of the room before sitting down, so that he might observe Gunner without being easily observed himself.
Gunner glanced at him back there, amused, and started to join him, just to get a reaction, but turned around to face Mayes instead. He had an idea the time would come soon enough to have more fun with Mouse.
“Brother Jamaal doesn’t bother you?” Mayes asked Gunner, referring to the Brother now setting the VCR camcorder up on a tripod at the room’s open door.
“Not unless you’re going to ask me to strip,” Gunner said, hurting. He was trying to find a comfortable position in his chair. “That something you do for everybody you ask back here? Or just the most photogenic?”
“It’s merely a toy I like to play with. My way of avoiding any confusion as to what has or has not been said here, by whom and in what context.” Mayes smiled. “Can I get you anything to drink? A beer, some wine—a bottle of carbonated bourgeois water, perhaps?”
Gunner shook his head. “No thanks.”
“We can send Brother M. out, if there’s something you’d like in particular.”
Gunner paused, looked back at Mouse indifferently, then regarded Mayes again. “How about a Red Rooster Ale?”
Mouse stood up, anticipating the order to leave.
To Gunner, Mayes said, “Red Rooster Ale’s an Australian brew. Very big in Johannesburg, I believe.”
“Yeah?”
“They don’t export it to the States, however. Unless you know something I don’t.”
Gunner didn’t. “Is that a problem?”
Mouse sat down again.
Mayes checked to see that Brother Jamaal was again rolling tape. “What do you want, Gunner?” he asked, impolitely.
“I want to know who killed Denny Townsend,” Gunner said, succinctly.
Mayes didn’t flinch. “Who’s Denny Townsend?”
“You need a hint?”
“Please.”
“He was bigger than a breadbox,” Gunner said. “And
white.”
Mayes still didn’t flinch, but this time a certain amount of effort seemed to be involved. “You’re referring to the man you were looking for for Verna.”
“The pale fellow with the scattergun left eye, yeah. Don’t tell me you didn’t know?”
Mayes shrugged. “
I
wasn’t looking for him. Why should I know?”
Gunner answered one shrug with another. “Because you would have wanted to,” he said. “And with more people in the field than UPI, you had the means to get word before the body was cold.”
“Except I didn’t get any word.”
He was looking past Gunner at Mouse, an accusatory glint in his eye. “You’re the first to give the white boy a name. You say it was Townsend?”
“Townsend, right. First name Denny. You want the proper spelling, go down to the morgue and read the tag he’ll have hanging off one of his toes.” Gunner stopped, squinting, and waited for a sharp, sudden pain to subside along his right lower torso. The simple task of breathing was beginning to entail substantial discomfort. “It won’t tell you how he got there, of course, but then, neither will anyone else. Because nobody seems to know. Or cares to say.”
“Including you?”
“What I know about it isn’t worth repeating, but it doesn’t take long to recite, so I’ll bore you with it. Sometime last Thursday someone put a bullet in his liver just north of the family jewels and left him in a conspicuous place to die. The idea, I think, was to make it look as if I’d done it on Verna’s behalf.”
“But you didn’t, of course.”
“No. Which should explain why I’m here, bothering a busy man like you.”
He was watching Mayes’s eyes for signs of disruption, seeing little in them but momentary flashes of reflected light. Mouse was making restless noises from his chair at the back of the room.
With some indignation, Mayes said, “We didn’t kill that white boy, Gunner. Use your head.”
Gunner said nothing.
“Hell,” Mayes said, “who needed him dead? He was a powerful tool for the cause, alive and kicking. It made him easier to hate. Another champion of white American justice, unpunished and unrepentant, free to kill again.”
“Come on, Brother Mayes. Save it. That rationale sounded lame when Verna first quoted you, and it sounds just as lame now. Townsend didn’t send the Brothers an obscene telegram, he murdered Buddy Dorris—the second most influential figure in your organization and, some say, its lifeblood. You wanted him dead, all right. To say otherwise is to insult my intelligence.”
Mayes seemed undecided as to how to react to being called, in essence, a liar. “The prospect of avenging Buddy’s murder intrigued me, of course. As it has a great many Brothers, I’m sure. Buddy was, as you say, a primary factor in our success to this point. But what the Brothers do they do by decree, and the Brothers did not call, officially or otherwise, for Townsend’s assassination. He’d have been dead weeks ago if we had.”
“Maybe one of your boys didn’t feel like he needed to call a vote on it. Surely they don’t all walk the party line infallibly?”
“If that concept gives you trouble, you have my apology, but that happens to be the case with the Brothers of Volition. We’re a unified front. Individuals working as a whole, for the whole. We don’t go in for any of that aimless, disorganized free-lance shit the Panthers tried twenty years ago.”
“The way I remember it, they didn’t exactly plan to be disorganized. It just sort of worked out that way. A dumb recruit here, and a dumb recruit there …”
“We don’t
have
any dumb recruits,” Mayes said. “This isn’t some halfway house for every black man, woman, or child armed with a grudge against Whitey. This is an association of
winners.
People with vision and foresight.”
He was wearing his game face now, setting his forced hospitality aside, at least for the moment. “No bloodsuckers,” he said, leaning forward on his desk, closing the distance between himself and Gunner strategically. “No parasites. None of the spineless opportunists who feed upon the weak among us with one scam after another, thinking themselves adept at what the Man likes to call ‘free enterprise.’”
“You mean scumbags like me,” Gunner said.
Mayes grinned. “Unless I’ve misjudged you. Verna’s been paying you what, forty-five dollars a day, plus expenses?”
“Are you asking as the lady’s friend, or as her financial consultant?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is, if you’re asking as her financial consultant, you can go fuck yourself.”
“And if I’m asking as her friend? As someone who doesn’t care to see Buddy’s sister get the short end of a stick?”
“In that case, you can get fucked. That’s not a big difference, I know. But it’s something.”
Mouse was moving behind him. Gunner started to turn, braced to leave his chair, but Mayes chopped the air with an open hand to wave the young man off, back to his seat in the distance.
“Forget it,” he said, glaring at Gunner. “The man wants to be unreceptive, that’s his privilege.”
Gunner watched Mouse sit down again and grinned. The skin beneath the Brother’s left eye was pink and shiny, stretched across his cheekbone over swollen flesh.
Mouse had a mouse.
Gunner said to Mayes, “You toss him the Milk Bone now, or later?”
“Save the hard-boiled shtick for your morning shave, Cop. You’re funny enough without it. Private Dick Gunner, heavy on the case.”
“That’s me.”
“You have any more questions, Dick, or am I free to go now?”
“The way it works, I don’t ask any more questions until I get an answer to my first one.”
“Shit. I answered it. I’ll answer it again. The Brothers don’t give a damn that your white boy’s dead, and we don’t give a damn how he got that way. His death changes nothing, just as I told Verna it would. Buddy’s still gone and we’re no closer now to the world we seek to build than we were to begin with.”
“For a man who was supposed to be Buddy’s brother—without the capital
b
—your pragmatism is amazing.”
“So I’m pragmatic. What of it? Does my being pragmatic mean I don’t miss the man? Like I’d miss my right hand, or an arm, or a leg if I were to lose any one of those just as suddenly?
“I’d love to raise holy hell over my fallen comrade, I assure you, but I have a revolution to lead. I have responsibilities. And I can’t afford to get caught up in an over-emotional trip that could destroy my focus and set the Brothers back beyond any feasible point of recovery.
“Time marches on, Gunner. Sociopolitical congregations evolve or disintegrate. To survive, we’ve no choice but to begin anew, to lay Buddy to rest and get on with the next phase of our existence. And the sooner we do, the better. For everyone.”
His sudden cool was a natural act, uncontrived and effortless. There was no emotion being suppressed here, no passion taking cover behind a false veil of calm—this was the real thing.
Apathy to the tenth degree.
“I can’t help wondering if Buddy would have been as quick to. dismiss your legacy had Townsend come looking for you and not him,” Gunner said.
Mouse laughed behind him, holding the question in low esteem, and Mayes peered around Gunner to grin at him, sharing the gag. To Gunner, he said, “I think it would be safe to say that Buddy would have taken my loss somewhat harder than I have taken his. At least on the surface.”
“A little harder, yeah,” Mouse said, breaking his self-imposed silence at last. His was the voice of a much larger man, low and short of breath, and now Gunner understood why he so rarely used it. It was as poor a match for his modest build as any voice could have possibly been.
Mayes seemed as surprised to hear him speak as Gunner. He looked at the bony young man like a toy the detective had broken that would never work quite right again. “What he would have done, Gunner, my man, is go
berserk,”
he said finally, distracted. “Off. Strap a harpoon to the hood of his car and lead the troops to battle. Not for me, specifically, you understand. But for the
Brothers.
Any Brother. Townsend could’ve had his pick.”
At the back of the room, Mouse was nodding his head vigorously, laughing his big man’s laugh again.
“You didn’t know him,” Mayes said, sharing yet another fraternal grin with his first lieutenant. “You can’t imagine the damage he would have done, given the chance. Verna can tell you. Buddy had been ready for his emancipation since the age of eight, was tired of waiting for it and sick of pleading for it, and had made up his mind he was going to live to see it, one way or another, even if he had to tow the rest of us shiftless black folk along for the ride.”
“And yet he was never the Brother of mention,” Gunner noted. “You were.”
“Yes. Naturally. I was the Brother who knew how to spell
cat
without a
k
.”
Mouse thought that, too, was funny, but this time his laughter was short-lived.
“Then why kill
him?”
Gunner asked, bluntly. “Why kill Buddy, and not you?”
It was a fair enough question, one a blind man would have asked eventually, but that didn’t seem to help Mayes answer it. He stared at Gunner blankly, with what looked like legitimate bewilderment, and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve wondered about that myself. Buddy was a more accessible target than I, certainly. And I suppose some could have seen his general lack of predictability as a more threatening trait than my intellect and/or communicative skills.”
“But if the intention was to strike a killing blow to your movement,” Gunner said, “you were still the obvious choice. Not Buddy.”
“Yes.”
“And yet Townsend went after him.”
Mayes shrugged, noncommittally. “So you say.”
Gunner had a sudden thought, a buried jewel of the subconscious that chose this moment to come to light. Another late arrival of the obvious. “Could it be that Buddy’s murder had nothing to do with the Brothers? That it was something other than politically motivated?”