The Man in My Basement (15 page)

That was what was different about my image in the mirror.

“How are you, Clarance?”

“Can’t complain. Athalia had a
Playgirl
magazine at school and they kicked her out. Can you imagine that? Here they had lawyers holding up the president’s dick on TV every night and they wanna suspend a girl for buyin’ a magazine off the rack.”

“Sorry if I was rude when I saw you at the train station,” I said.

That raised Clarance’s eyebrows a notch. It might have been the first apology that I ever gave without being forced into it.

“That’s okay,” he said. “You okay?”

“Been thinkin’. Been thinkin’.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, Clarance. I guess I’m wondering why I’m out here doin’ what I do. You know, there’s nothing to it.”

“What you mean?”

“It’s like I’ve been asleep my whole life,” I said. “And even now it feels like I’m still asleep, or almost out. I wake up for a minute and then three days go by and I wake up again.”

“You mean you been up in your bed all this time?”

“Naw, man. Not sleeping—sleepwalking. I wake up and I’m in a store buying pot roast. Or somebody’s talking to me, I mean I’m in the middle of a conversation, and I don’t even know what the person just said. I don’t even know what we’re talking about or how I even got there. You know?”

I could tell that Clarance was concerned because he stopped eating.

“Like you black out?” he asked.

“No. If I think about it, I remember, but it’s hard to concentrate. It’s like nothing is important enough to think about.”

What I was saying to Clarance had always been true for me—my whole life. Not a single day went by that I wasn’t lost in daydreams. Teachers talking at you, my mother or father telling me what was right or wrong. The reason I didn’t watch TV was because I couldn’t sit still for a movie or sitcom. Halfway through a war film I still wasn’t sure which side was which. I could read books, fun books, and I could follow an animal through the woods for hours. A blaze in the fireplace could keep my attention for a whole night. But anybody telling me anything was just a waste of good breath, as my uncle Brent used to say.

“Maybe you drinkin’ too much,” Clarance said.

“Maybe.”

“You want a job, Charles?”

“What kind of job?”

“Driving a taxi. I could hook you up there.”

I looked at Clarance, feeling like I had just come awake again. His act of kindness felt like the gentle nudge my mother used to give me when I was too tired to get up the first time she called.

“I got money,” I said.

“How’d you get that?”

“Cat introduced me to Narciss Gully. She has an antique business. She specializes in quilts, but she’s helping me sell the stuff that was in my cellar. It’s a lotta money.”

“How much?”

“Enough for the mortgage and a couple’a years or so.”

Clarance didn’t have much money. He worked hard at the taxi business, and his wife, Mona, was a nurse at the hospital in Southampton. Their families had nothing to give them. They spent everything on their kids. And so when Clarance still had concern on his face for my dilemma, I understood that he was a real friend. We’d known each other for thirty-three years, my whole life, and that was the first moment that I knew he really cared for me.

“I got to go, Mr. Mayhew,” I said.

“You just got here. Stay for a while. Maybe we could go pick up Cat after work and go to some bars.”

“No,” I said. “But thank you. Thank you. And I’m sorry if I ever made you mad, man. You know I was just jealous. See ya.”

I stood up from the iron chair and walked out past the teenager on the front porch. I glanced at her and realized that she was thumbing through the naked photographs in the
Playgirl
magazine that got her suspended.

“Bye, Thalia.”

“Bye, Mr. Blakey. You come on back, okay?”

B
ennet was dressed when I returned. Seated in the red chair, he wasn’t reading or doing anything else as far as I could see.

“Mr. Dodd-Blakey,” he said in greeting.

“Mr. Bennet,” I replied.

It was an acknowledgment, the beginning of an understanding.

I pulled the trunk up to his cell and sat.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To serve out my time. To pay my debt.”

“Pay who?”

“Every minute I’m in here costs me something, Charles. May I call you Charles?”

“It’s my name,” I said.

“My business relations are delicate, Charles. My attention is needed sometimes within moments of certain events. When my phone rings I’m supposed to answer. If I fail to respond there are consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“That depends on the event.” He shrugged and crossed one leg over the other. “Money might be lost, a political player could be discredited. Someone might die.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Later on I’ll be held responsible.”

“By the law?”

“By the rules.”

“Are the rules different than the law?”

He smiled in that knowing way. “The rules don’t need a judge’s interpretation. There’s no defense. When you’re absent you’re dealt out. And then no one recognizes you but your enemies.”

“All that’s going to happen, but you still want to stay in here?”

“No.” His impossible eyes looked straight into mine.

“Then why?”

“Have you ever been in love?” was his reply.

I stalled, not wanting to. I would have liked to have said
Of course. Everybody’s been in love.
But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true and I didn’t want to lie to my new mentor.

I’d never been in love. Never even for a moment. I adored, idolized, lusted after, and cared for many women. I dated, kissed, had sex with; I waited for, stood by, and wanted. But I’d never been like those deer that moved together through the woods, keeping each other company as a matter of course. I’d never been attached by the sense of smell and warmth and security. I once read in a novel that love and gravity are the same thing, that natural attraction in nature is also the passion of man. I thought then that I was like a weightless astronaut, locked in a protective shell and floating in emptiness.

“Me neither,” Anniston Bennet said, addressing my silence. “I’ve always done what I wanted to do or what I believed I needed. But I’ve never been brought to an action because of my heart.”

It was almost ludicrous, listening to the
reclamations expert’
s talk about the heart, but I was moved anyway. The contradiction of emotions rattled around in my head.

“What’s that got to do with you sitting down here locked up in a cage?”

“That’s why I asked if you had ever been in love, Charles. Because love isn’t a short skirt and shapely legs. It’s not a clap of thunder or a chance meeting with a prostitute in a library in Paris.”

“How would you know what it isn’t if you’ve never been there yourself?” I felt dizzy and precarious on my trunk.

“I’ve never felt love, but I’ve studied it,” he said. “In my line of work you pay attention to every human emotion the way doctors examine their patients. The desperation borne from hunger, for instance, is a powerful force that will turn the victim in on himself. It’s the desire to devour the source of the pain. The pang of nationalism can make a man as blind and dense as a stone. He will cut off his own arm, kill his children, for a flag and a ten-cent song.”

“But what about love?” I really wanted to know.

“Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don’t know until you’re ready to go that you can’t move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That’s the feeling. It doesn’t last, at least it doesn’t have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I’ve seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.”

“And so you love somebody?” I asked. “That’s what brought you here?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t have that affliction. I’m here alone and there’s no one waiting or gone.”

“So then why are you talking about love then?”

“Because that’s the closest thing to what forced me into this cage. Everything else is immediate and measurable, pretty much. Fear, desperation, greed. I’m fifty-six years old, Charles. My first job was as an accountant in Saigon at the age of twenty-one. From there, on a forged Swiss passport, I got a job doing the same work for higher pay in Hanoi. My employers worried after accepting me that I was a spy. In order to test my loyalty, they brought me to a holding cell where there was an American sergeant held captive. They told me to kill him. They said that he had been sentenced to death anyway and that this was my first duty. And I shot him. I didn’t hesitate or flinch. I didn’t enjoy it or feel remorse. I just shot him.”

“Killed him?”

“Scared the shit out of the officer who brought me down there. He expected me to balk. But I took the pistol and shot the man in the head. I saw the lay of the board immediately. The man had been tortured. He was skinny and bloody and miserable. They would have killed him anyway.”

“Was it a black man?” I asked, wondering at the words even as I spoke them.

“I don’t know” was his reply.

“How can you not know?”

“It was a dark cell and he was filthy. His skin wasn’t black, but whether it was tanned or negroid I don’t know. I didn’t spend any time wondering about him. I took the pistol and shot. Then I left. The next seven years I worked back and forth across the borders of Communism and the West. That’s where I made my nest egg. I had two million dollars by the time I came back home. On top of that I had connections with millionaires, intelligence agencies, and political leaders. I even had a code name. They called me Sergeant Bilko because of my bald head and the fact that I could procure almost anything.”

“Are they after you?”

“Who?”

“The Americans. I mean, you were a traitor.”

“They don’t care about that. They dealt with me too. I got three prisoners out from captivity for a fee. Asian communists are far more practical than the European variety.”

“You still haven’t explained why you want to be here.”

“I don’t want to be here, Charles. I have to be.”

“Because you shot that man?”

“No. I mean, that’s part of it. A small part. I’ve done a lot of things. Too many things. Sometimes it was that I did nothing. And now it’s too late. Like with love, it’s grown up all around me and I can’t get away.”

Again there was a break in Bennet’s armor. He became distant and misty. Not near tears but vulnerable.

“And you think being down here will help make up for it,” I said.

“No.”

Through the diamonds of his cell Bennet took on the quality of a martyr. He was like one of those death-row inmates that they interview just before the sentence is executed. You see all the evil that they caused, but you still feel like death is not the answer—that killing this man would in some strange way take away his victims’ last hope.

But Bennet wasn’t going to die. He was on vacation. He was in the Hamptons for the summer. He was a thief and a murderer taking time off from his trade. This made me angry. I began to resent the arrogance of Bennet. How dare he think that by pretending to punish himself that he would somehow have answered for his crimes.

“Why here, Mr. Bennet? Why my house?”

“There’s lots of reclamations in Africa, Charles. Diamonds and oil, slave labor to cobble tennis shoes and assemble fancy lamps. They have armies over there who will strip down to the waist and go hand to hand with bayonets and clubs. They have tribal factions and colonizers. The streets, in short, are paved with gold.”

“My house isn’t in Africa.”

“But you are a black man. You come from over there. I need a black face to look in on me. No white man has the right.”

“Suppose I was crazy? Suppose I hated white people and I decided to torture you in here and kill you?”

He shrugged again. “Killing is hard work, Charles. Children have the stamina for that kind of labor, but most mature men do not. Not unless there’s something to gain—or if they’re in love.”

“You’re supposed to leave here in two days,” I said.

“Unless you change your mind.”

“Is this some kind of trick?” I asked. “Are you playing some kind of game on me?”

“No. I’m not, Charles. I’m simply executing a punishment. A repentance.”

“You don’t seem to be suffering to me.”

“You wouldn’t know,” he said. “But living locked up with no out, with no control over food. Most of the time you won’t even talk to me. And the world I live in is moving on while I sleep. No one knows where I am. When I get out of here, it’s going to be hard on me.”

In a flash of intuition I asked, “Is somebody after you now, Mr. Bennet?”

He was struck and smiled to show it.

“No more than they’re looking for diamonds in Montana.” He laughed.

I laughed too.

“So you’re a reclamation?” I asked.

“Can I have
The Alexandria Quartet?
” was his response.

“No. Tonight it’s lights out and no book. Tonight you start your sentence for real and then we’ll see how much you really want to be here.”

A spasm twisted Bennet’s face for half a moment. Hardly long enough for me to be sure of it. But I believed my sudden assertiveness frightened the smug assassin. I knew that he was afraid of the locked door and the dark.

T
hat night I dreamed that there were agents of some malevolent power prowling around on my porch. I woke up at 3:00
A.M
. wondering if I had really heard something. I found an envelope lying just outside the front door.

“She was here about five minutes ago,” a voice said.

I yelped and jumped like a frightened eight-year-old.

Irene Littleneck was standing at the foot of the stairs, grinning at my little-girl shriek.