Known to Evil (Leonid McGill #2)

by Walter Mosley

I felt that she, Katrina, was my sentence for the wrong I had done in a long life of crime.

It’s always upsetting to see the details of youth on a dead body.

“It’s always easier getting into trouble than it is getting out.”

“THE TRUTH,” MY IDEOLOGUE father once told me, “changes according to what point of view is beholding it.”

“A dictator sees the truth as a matter of will,” he said. “Anything he says or dreams is the absolute truth and soon the people are forced to go along with him. For the so-called democrat, the truth is the will of the people. Whatever the majority says is the law and that law becomes truth for the people.

Often—in books and movies and TV shows—private detectives mouth off to the police. They claim civil rights or just run on bravado. But in the real world you have to lie so seamlessly that even you are unsure of the truth.

Across from the desk, hanging in the center of an otherwise empty white wall, is a small oil painting, Alienated Man, done by the genius Paul Klee. I’d been given the painting, quite recently, by a young woman who taught me, better than my Communist father ever could, that wealth was mostly just a trick of the mind.

I start out each case with a cold shower. I find that it modulates my depressive mood and makes up for the sleep I miss almost every night. It hurts down to the bone, but I rarely yell. I just shiver like a wet dog and clench my teeth hard enough to bite through a circus strongman’s thumb. After that, nothing seems so bad or insurmountable.

“So when you decide to do something, anything, you have to wonder what frame of mind brought you to that decision. More times than not it will be a part of your mind that you hadn’t considered.”

“My father told me that bad news skims over the surface while good deeds sink to the bottom.”

Tragedy either makes or breaks the will of the proletariat.

I was vulnerable, of course—all people are. Innocent or not, anyone can be made to look bad.

Any good boxer can tell you that if you have a sound strategy, and stick to it, you always have a shot at winning the fight. And even if you don’t win, you can make it through to the final bell, throwing at least some doubt on your opponent’s claim to victory.

Small victories are sometimes the hardest earned.

“You can piss on a cardinal in his Easter suit but if the bush starts burning you have to lower your head and pray.”

The stairs are not my only test. There’s the heavy bag at Gordo’s Gym, and how frightened I get, or not, when a man pulls a gun on me. There’s sitting in the same room with Hush, who, if he were to have put a notch in his gun for every man he’d killed, would have whittled off the entire handle in the first half of his career. Life is a test, and the final grade is always an F.

Behind her was the nimbus of my headache, some lost soul haunting me for reasons that put fear into my wife’s eyes.

BEING A BOXER, EVEN an amateur like me, one learns to deal with manifestations of pain and concussion. I walked down the street toward Central Park, dragging the headache and the drug-induced mental bifurcation behind me like the chains of lifelong servitude. That’s why, for so long, black men dominated boxing. That ring encompassed our entire lives. We were in training from the day we were born.

The big white guy read my smile the way Barack Obama read the hearts of the American people. The torch had passed. The old intimidation and fear-mongering had given way to a kind of diplomacy . . . with teeth.

Nine times out of eleven, truth trumps good intentions.

It was the kind of punch that catches up with you as the moments click by.

For me, bourbon was king, while scotch was a mere pretender to the throne.

There are very few rules I adhere to. In my line of work you can’t let something from yesterday keep you from right now. But one thing I never do is talk politics with strangers in bars.

She had a Dominican mother and Moroccan father—lineages, when combined, that gave her dark red-black skin and the kind of look that defines rather than trails after beauty.

At my age this feeling was better than love. It was the moment before you really knew the object of affection.

hermeneutic

With that I lay back on the daybed, a vampire lowering into his coffin, a mummy into dust.

The wonderful thing about knowing you won’t die of old age is that you can enjoy the wrong things in life without trepidation or guilt.

One of the joys of living in New York is that there are so many types of black people here. Africans, Islanders, upper and lower classes, professionals, southerners, and any combination of the aforementioned.

This was one of the small braveries of the modern world: people who were able to remain civil even while they suffered depression, cancer, and losses that could never be recouped.

There’s a special timbre to the truth coming out of one’s mouth. If you mix that in with the lies it helps lubricate the dialogue.

TRUTH IS THE AGREEMENT between me and you about something, anything: the world is flat, all Arabs are terrorists, the future is predicated on the past. It is true if we agree that it’s true.

A certain breed of woman, raised under working-class fathers, is very impressed with hands like mine. It’s a meta-sexual response, not about romance, or even touch.

I come from a long line of slavery, second-class citizenship, revolutionaries, orphans, and crooks. Put all that together in a man’s heart and you make ordinary circumspection look like careless abandon. My face rarely gave away anything that I felt.

The sun was going down again, taking with it, it seemed to me, my tentative connection to Reason.

The government, even in a democracy, has the power to indict and condemn with impunity—below a certain income bracket, that is.

“No man is safe when he’s in love,

I felt about my father the way a spider feels about the dark corner where she is drawn to build her web: he was fundamental and gave me no choice.

There was a lot to be done, but your kids come first. That was a lesson I got in the negative space of my father’s abandonment.

Years of orphanages and foster homes, uneducated teachers and corrupt officials, from crossing guards to the presidents of entire nations, have shown me that Einstein was right: the connection between A and B is questionable at best, and there’s no such thing as a straight line.

People who work within systems can avoid their own shortcomings because they are surrounded by people who are just as flawed.

“Been down so long,” I said, “looks like up to me.”

“Hyperbole,” I said. “Poetic exaggeration,”

His assent was in his eyes, even more subtle than the shifting of a shoulder.

We separated on the street. Him, a boy walking off into a man’s life, and me wondering, What if the Gordian knot was someone you loved?

These prisoners were silent and for the most part motionless. They had been defeated by a system so vast and unresponsive, so utterly powerful, that only suicide could counter the weight of it. The hall smelled powerfully of stagnant manhood, the longtime suffering of the guilty, the innocent, and those who just did not belong.

There was a whole chapter squashed down into those few sentences, things about Jake Plumb that I would never know. But that didn’t matter. He was giving me an opportunity, and I was intent on taking it.

In my experience crazy stories were too often true.

The best and worst lies are when we lie to ourselves.

Any chance you get to risk your life for the cause is as close to a blessing as a modern man can come. My father’s words had no political meaning to me, but their truth outshone their intent.