It was after six when Felix got back to the compound inside the San Antonio Village housing project, otherwise known as The Ville. Levon looked up at one of the security camera monitors as Felix was buzzed through the first electric gate—the same system used in jails. You go through the first gate, which swings back and locks again, trapping you in the corridor between gates until you’re buzzed through the second one. At a glance, Levon saw how upset Felix was, waiting for the second gate to buzz open. The police frequency radio scanner in another room was barely audible.
As soon as Felix had started making money he’d moved five families to better housing, torn down the houses where they’d been living, and built a fenced, fortified compound in the middle of The Ville. He’d had to pay off two officials in the Oakland Housing Authority and an OPD police captain—through his lieutenant, actually giving the money to a patrolman—even though The Ville wasn’t covered by the official police beat map, in a kind of limbo between the freeway and the bay.
Levon closed the book he’d been reading, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, using a dog-eared playing card—king of clubs—for a bookmark, when Felix came through the steel-sheathed front door wearing an off-white Italian suit.
“Everything down, fucked up,” Felix said, “like you told me and worse besides.”
Tyree and Quintus were in the other room, listening to calls on the police radio frequency, laughing and high-fiving each other.
Felix tilted his head toward a windowless hallway and said, “Let’s go talk in the business room.”
The business room was in the windowless reinforced-concrete bunker in the center of Felix’s compound, surrounded by the project, deep inside East Oakland. No bigger than the waiting room outside a lawyer’s office, it looked like a bomb shelter but one that was furnished with an expensive leather couch, a deluxe model La-Z-Boy recliner, a floor lamp, a bookcase, and, on the walls, framed black-and-white photographs of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Felix’s grandfather, Solomon Maxwell, taken when he was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Felix lay down on the sofa, and Levon took his chair. A yellow legal pad lay on the floor next to the sofa. Felix reached inside his coat and pulled out a pair of octagonal rimless glasses, picked up the legal pad, and began to make some notes. “You see those lights in the sky last night?”
“What lights?”
“They out there every night. Look like stars, but they’re not.”
“Those glasses make you look more intelligent,” Levon said, putting down his book.
Felix snorted, laid the tablet flat on his chest and the glasses on top of that. “Somebody’s taking corners away from us, again, all along High Street. I got the feeling, whoever it is owns somebody, maybe a captain upstairs at the Justice Center. I got to stay home and pay better attention.”
“The so-called Muslims are all over San Pablo and north of there. Beating up our people, taking their money and drugs, selling the drugs. The cops are fine with that, they say.
“I talked to my lieutenant downtown, and I don’t believe a word he says. I never believe anything he says. And now I’m paying him five hundred dollars a month more than I used to. How smart is that? Maybe I should wear my glasses when I talk to him.”
Levon looked up. “Tyree and Quintus ran into that cop today down at Lake Merritt.”
Felix rolled his head over on the arm of the sofa and looked at Levon.
“The one who came up to the car because we were double-parked in front of the liquor store.”
Felix studied the ceiling. “That’s a real coincidence.”
“He was running. Down at that lake. Tyree didn’t recognize him at first. Asked him to spot him on the weight bench, just to mess with a white boy, but turns out he came over and was messing with Tyree. Wasn’t carrying a gun. Said he lives in Oakland.”
“I’ll check with my lieutenant—did you know lieutenants wear solid gold badges—see what he says.” He started to put his glasses back on, then said, “Maybe that’s why nobody ever sees a lieutenant on the street out here. Maybe they’re worried somebody will steal their badge. When he finally pisses me off enough so I kill him, I’m gonna remember to rip that badge off his white little chicken chest for a souvenir.”
Felix wasn’t a tough guy—he was a killer, though, and fearless. He thought of himself as already dead, and that’s how he looked at everyone else too. He was ruthless and merciless in a brutal white man’s world. He knew they’d kill him sooner or later. He’d written up a will and funeral arrangements, gave a copy to Levon each time he modified them.