Known to Evil (Leonid McGill #2)

by Walter Mosley

I’d given up worrying about my mortality a long time before. The first good body shot I took in the ring cured me of that fear.

Crime revealed itself in different manifestations throughout the various terrain of New York and, probably, the rest of the world. Many groups had very organized systems of criminals: The Russians and Italians, Irish and Chinese had their mafias, gangs, and tongs. These were what you might call highly developed organisms like tigers or flies. There were such groups in the African-American community, gangs and blood brotherhoods that paid allegiance to some central figure or ideal. But the black community also had an impressive number of wildcards and jacks-of-all-trades. Luke Nye was one of these.

you know, boy, even though you about as crooked as one’a them curly bamboo plants, I figure even they grow toward the sun.”

I was also thinking that love never seems to last—except where there’s blood involved.

A man can get used to anything. If one day he found himself coming awake in a lion’s den, any sane man would be petrified. Absolute fear would govern his mind for many minutes—possibly for hours. But if the lion didn’t attack him, and enough time passed, normalcy, or its near cousin, would return. If days were to pass and some kind of truce were evident, the man might learn to communicate with the king feline. Given time, his fear might abate completely. But he’d still be in close proximity to a murderous carnivore.

There was no friendliness in his tone. I remembered the first time I’d heard a lion in the zoo roaring at feeding time. The fear I felt was something preverbal, older even than the human breast in which it resided.

Me on my tightrope and him in his turret. That line from a poem I’d never write flitted through my mind.

I was born in the lion’s den, a fool in spite of my sensible fears.

So I got up, went down to the number 1 train, and rode in a car full to brimming over with commuters going from

the jobs that they didn’t want back to the lives they hadn’t bargained for.

Twill was slight of build but he left a footprint like Tyrannosaurus rex.

That was what I had been looking for, the turn in the road. It wasn’t some clue or confession, threat by the police or flash of intuition about what exactly the crime or who the culprit was. It wasn’t even a revelation about my feelings for Aura. I already knew that I loved her. My problem was the crack that had been opened when she told me about Toller. The pain I felt there was what was throwing me off. It was a deep ache and it wasn’t going away, but that didn’t matter because now I knew what I was dealing with and I could negotiate a path toward my revival.

Her lipstick was dulled from the pressure of a dozen hello and goodbye kisses.

You couldn’t pay for the kind of kisses she was giving him.

“I know you try to stay away from me, LT,” he said. “I know you want a different kind of life. But once you’ve seen the battlefield you can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

That night spent on the slanted roof was peaceful. The November chill was bracing and the threat of the man below was like a promise. He, too, felt that Angie was near.

“Down where Indian blood runs pure and often.”

NOT FOR THE FIRST time, I wondered about my commitment to leave the criminal life behind. I worked among killers and thieves, made my livelihood from the fact of their existence. I breathed their air and shared their stench. How could I ever stay on the straight and narrow with a length of chain behind me that would put Dickens’s Marley to shame?

Diego and Hush (who was retired but not reformed), and Alphonse Rinaldo, for that matter, were all part of the dark matter that was the glue holding together the known, and unsuspecting, world. I was a free-floating radical that sometimes tended the connection between the lightness and this dark.

Even the money added to my fabricated despair. That was the water that the Hard-Hearted Hannah of song poured on a drowning man.

mendicants,

A shiver went through my body and I sat back down, realizing, or maybe re-realizing, that I was my own worst enemy. The rage in me couldn’t be tamped down for long.

reminding me exactly why I was trying to find the off-ramp to redemption from the dark highway I was on.

STANDING STRAIGHT, AN OLIVE duffel bag on the floor next to him, Diego was an image of something not of this world. His collarless jacket was black, as were his shapeless trousers. His shoes were of woven red-brown leather, and the straw hat he wore was an ancient ancestor of the Guatemalan-made Panama variety. Diego’s skin was the dusky color of dark-red brick that they made factories from when children still worked fourteen hours a day. His face was wide and filled with empathy for something long gone—or maybe just hidden.

“Not one of them men is over thirty. That tree is two hundred years old, maybe three. It’s been there since before their grandparents were born, but they still come at it with their axes and saws. Somebody said it’s in the

way. Somebody paid somebody, and life is torn from the ground.” That’s the reason I called on Diego. Hush was like those axmen. He lived by a logic that was completely of the modern world. Hush had the sensibility of a long history of conquerors. His laws were man-made, while Diego’s came from a deeper place.

Diego looked into my eyes, seeking my response. Then he grinned. The light in his face spoke of innocence and strength, something that maybe I knew at one time, before the roots of New York had gotten tangled in my soul.

Something about the preceding silence kept me from any emotional attachment to the extreme interrogation. It didn’t seem like torture, so long as the men were equals in silence.

We clasped hands and Diego smiled, his broad face expressing friendship combined with something like pity.

“No one is safe from anyone else in this world.”

Nobody paid much attention to small patches of street blood. That was just a now-and-then occurrence in a city with so many people living and dying in such a small space—you had to bleed somewhere.

One thing I was certain about—at least most of the time—my death would sneak up on me, a master thief that I’d never see coming.

The bodyguard’s face had a tan complexion. His intelligent eyes gave the impression of education—both formal and from the street. He had seen a lot of struggle in his life but did not expect it in this rarefied atmosphere.

“New York’s like a boiling cauldron,” I said, only dimly understanding why. “We are all consumed therein.”

I stood up on boxer’s pins. I might have been wobbled, but I was going to end that round on my feet.

“How deep do you plan to dig this hole before you gonna let ’em bury you in it?”

“Nothing wrong with fear. It keeps the eyes open and your feet ready to run.”

I couldn’t help but think that this utterance was the bedrock foundation of all philosophical inquiry. I gave no answer and she expected none. “What did you do with the gun?” I asked after the proper interval. She turned back to the window and fiddled with her hair. “Come on, now,” I said. “If I can figure it out you know the cops can, too.” “I left it at John’s. He said that he’d get rid of it the next time he goes out to Long Island.” “Why didn’t you toss it into a river?” “I was afraid that somebody’d see me.” I thought that we should drop by Prince’s apartment and pick up the weapon. That was a loose end that needed to be tied. But I was very tired. So much so that any detour seemed beyond comprehension. WE TOOK THE STAIRS to the seventh floor of the nondescript downtown office building. I walked

avuncular

I wasn’t scared, though. That was the business. Sometimes you lost. Hush would protect Katrina and the kids. He’d settle any recurring problems with Dimitri and the pimp; and if he didn’t, Twill certainly would. Katrina would honor my commitment to Gordo. There was a lot of unfinished business in my life, but that was okay, too. At times, when faced by Death or imprisonment, I was reminded of when I was a child and President Kennedy had been assassinated. There had been twenty-four-hour coverage of the tragedy on television and radio. And then one afternoon I saw the image of a very tall man standing next to the First Lady—Jacqueline Kennedy. “Who’s that man?” I asked my father. “That’s their president, son.” “No, Dad. The president’s dead.” “The minute he died this new one took his place.” “That fast?” “No one is so important that somebody else can’t take his place,” he told me. I never forgot it.