“Who are you?”
Malcolm whispered this to the woman. She was sitting on the floor behind him, her feet duct-taped together and her hands duct-taped behind her to the crossbar of Malcolm’s chair. Pym and McLarty were paying them no attention. They stood a few feet away, excitedly bringing each other up to date.
“What the fuck happened to you?” McLarty had asked, pointing to the angry red slash on the left side of Pym’s face.
“I could ask you the same question,” Pym had said, pointing to McLarty’s swollen and empurpled jaw.
“Yeah,” McLarty had said, “but I asked you first.” So Pym had dutifully, if somewhat reluctantly, shown McLarty the body of the little drunk who tried to save Malcolm and explained how he had no choice but to kill him.
“I didn’t want to,” he’d said in a soft voice, “but I had to.”
“You didn’t ‘want’ to?” repeated McLarty in a mocking, prissy little voice.
“No,” admitted Pym.
Whereupon McLarty stretched on tiptoes and roared in his face.
“Stop being such a pussy, for Chrissake! What did you expect, Sergeant? What the fuck kind of soldier are you, anyway? We are at war with these people. In war, people get killed.”
“I know that!” shouted Pym. “You don’t have to yell at me, Dwayne! Stop yelling at me!”
“I’m Janeka,” the woman whispered back. “You’re Malcolm?”
He was surprised. It struck him that she had not used his full name, as she would’ve if she were just someone who recognized him from television or the newspaper. She spoke with a familiarity he didn’t understand. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Bob Carson is…” And here, there was a tiny hesitation. Then she rephrased it. “I know Bob,” she said. “We were having lunch when this guy grabbed us from the restaurant. He gave Bob some computer disk. He told him he would kill me if Bob didn’t take it to his newspaper and make them put it online.”
“It’s a video,” said Malcolm. “These two are some sort of half-assed white supremacist group. They kidnapped me this morning and recorded some kind of manifesto they want to put out to the world.”
“But why?”
“They say they have a bomb and they’re going to blow up Grant Park tonight. They want to kill Obama.”
Malcolm had his head turned to the left, trying to glimpse the woman on the floor behind him. So he didn’t even see the pistol butt that came down from the right, clouting him hard on his temple. Then McLarty was in his face, his eyes burning with fever fire, his spittle spraying Malcolm’s cheek like a garden hose. “Shut the fuck up!” he thundered. “Shut up shut up shut up! No talking. Do you hear?”
Malcolm nodded. “Yes,” he told the maddened face that filled his vision. “Yes, I hear.” He was a 60-year-old man with a prostate the size of a grapefruit and a bladder the size of a walnut, and he’d had no access to a bathroom since before dawn. So Malcolm Toussaint was horrified but not truly surprised to feel sudden warmth spreading in his crotch, to look down and see the front of his pants grow dark.
He closed his eyes. He could have died, then.
McLarty staggered backwards, cackling with laughter. “He pissed himself! Did you see! This nigger pissed himself! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Clarence, get the camera! Get a picture of this!”
Pym did not reply. There was a silence. His humiliation subsumed by curiosity, Malcolm opened his eyes and brought his head up a fraction. Pym stood there with his arms folded, facing his friend. “You used,” he said.
McLarty turned. “Oh, Clarence, come on.”
“You used,” said Pym again. “You said you wouldn’t. You said you were done with that shit.”
McLarty threw his hands out, one of them still clenching a pink pistol. “Yeah, I used,” he said. “So the fuck what so the fuck what so the fuck what? Who cares? In a few hours, we’ll both be dead and mission accomplished. What does it matter if I have a little fun one last time?”
“You said you were done with it,” Pym said again. “You promised me.” He turned and walked away.
McLarty’s hands came down and he gave a great sigh of exasperation as he followed his friend. “Come on, Clarence. Don’t be that way.”
The argument continued over near the door.
After a moment, Malcolm heard the woman’s voice whisper, “Are you okay?”
It was a moment more before he could bring himself to answer. “I’m sorry,” he said, through the pain drumming in his temple, the trickle of blood on his face. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. It’s just…I’ve been sitting here for nine hours. No bathroom breaks, you know?”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she said.
Malcolm did not reply.
“You don’t,” she insisted.
And this, of course, made it worse.
“So anyway,” he said, needing to change the subject, “they’re crazy and they want to blow up Grant Park to kill Obama.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “That will never work. The police barricades, the Secret Service, the crowds…”
“Did you miss the part where I said they’re crazy? And you’re right. They’ll never get to Obama. But how many people will they kill in the trying? Starting with us?”
“Jesus,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m frightened,” she told him. “I don’t mind telling you that.”
“I don’t mind telling you that I am, too.”
“That little one is just plain mean. He reminds of me some nasty, rabid dog. What about the other one?”
“His name is Clarence Pym. I don’t know how to figure him at all. He’s got some nasty in him for sure. I called him fat and stupid a few hours ago, trying to get a rise out of him. My ears are still ringing from how hard he smacked me. But then right after that, he brought me a cup of water. I’m not sure he’s all there. Sometimes, he acts like this is all just a game or like he doesn’t get what they’re doing here. You heard him. He’s all torn up because he killed some poor homeless guy who tried to save me, but then he can turn around and talk about blowing up a park full of people like it’s no big deal.”
“Do you think he’s developmentally delayed?”
Malcolm thought it over, then shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “In some ways, he seems intelligent. I mean, he can rattle off the box score from any Bulls game you name, especially during the Jordan era.”
Behind him, the woman—Janeka—made a dismissive sound. “That’s just memorization, not intelligence.”
“It’s more than that,” said Malcolm, impatient with her for being right. “It’s just…the way he puts things together, I don’t think his problem is a developmental delay. If anything, he’s emotionally delayed. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but that’s how he comes across to me. It just seems like there’s a lot of stuff that a normal person would get that maybe he doesn’t.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Malcolm lifted his arms to the rattle of chains and cuffs. “What can we do?” he asked.
“Where’s the key?”
“On the table,” said Malcolm. Pym had left it there after recuffing Malcolm and dragging the homeless man’s body out of sight. The table was six feet away. It might as well have been on the moon.
“You can’t reach it?” she asked.
“Maybe Plastic Man could,” he said. “I can’t.”
Malcolm glanced warily to make sure McLarty was not coming up again on his blind side. The two men were still standing near the roll-up door arguing.
“Goddamn it, Clarence, you act like my fucking mother sometimes. It was just one hit, okay?”
“No. Not okay,” replied Pym, voice taut with anger. “We have work to do and how are you going to do your share if your head’s all messed up with that crap?”
Clearly they were engrossed in their disagreement.
“If I could get my hands on something to cut this duct tape,” Janeka said in a low voice, “maybe I could get it. Or maybe go for help.”
Malcolm shrugged. “If,” he said.
“So it’s up to Bob, then.”
There was no humor in Malcolm’s chuckle. “Wonderful. We need an action hero. We got Bob.”
“You’ve got something against Bob?”
Malcolm turned back and spoke over his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said. “No, I have nothing against Bob.”
“I doubt you could convince him of that,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bob was fired this morning because of you.”
Malcolm was shocked. “What? Why?” Then he answered his own question. “I used his security code to plug that column into the paper.” He paused. “They fired him for that.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Shit,” said Malcolm. “I knew I was torpedoing my own career. I really didn’t care. But I didn’t intend for anything to happen to Bob. They’re just looking for a scapegoat. They shouldn’t blame him for what I did. He doesn’t deserve that. I mean, we had our disagreements, but he was a decent guy. Better than most of them, at any rate.”
“Them?”
“White people,” said Malcolm.
“I see,” she said.
The reserve in her voice angered him. “Come on, sister. I get that he’s your friend, but don’t act like you don’t know.”
“Oh, I know,” she assured him. “Believe me, I know. But I try not to think of them as, you know…‘them.’ Seems to me that just exacerbates the problem. Doesn’t really solve it.”
Malcolm sighed his concession. “Yeah,” he said, “Martin Luther King once told me the same thing.”
“Seriously?” she said. “We’re tied up here, maybe going to be killed by these two lunatics, and you’re name dropping?”
God, but she was exasperating. “I wasn’t name dropping,” he said. “I was—”
She cut him off. “You were name dropping. You were reminding me that you are the famous Malcolm Toussaint, author of ‘A Stone of Hope,’ the so-called last interview with Martin Luther King.” The reference was to a story Malcolm had published in the Atlantic Monthly two years after King’s assassination, recounting his encounter with the great man the week before he was felled. It was the piece that had launched Malcolm’s career.
“I was just saying—”
Again she cut him off. “I wonder what Dr. King would think of what you wrote in the paper this morning?”
Malcolm blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Janeka. “I agreed with your main points and Lord knows I understood your anger. But your blanket condemnation? ‘America can go to hell?’ You didn’t sound like—what was it Rolling Stone called you?—‘the conscience of America.’ You just sounded like some old crank venting.”
Malcolm breathed consciously, working to control his anger. “Lady,” he said in a hiss, “who the hell are you to lecture me? You don’t know me.”
“No,” she said, and anger brimmed in her voice as well, “but I know Bob Carson and he’s a good man, even if he’s one of ‘them.’ He did not deserve what you did to him.”
Malcolm struggled to hold onto his fury, but he felt it deflate, growing soft beneath him. He could not deny the truth of what she had said, could he? That realization wrenched a sigh out of him. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you that.”
“Thank you,” she told him, still angry. “That’s mighty white of you.”
He let the gibe pass. “How do you know Bob?”
“I knew him in college. We were very close. For awhile we were…well, at the time, I thought maybe we were even going to get married.”
“What happened?” asked Malcolm.
She did not answer immediately. Indeed, the silence stretched so long Malcolm wasn’t sure she had heard him. In the corner by the door, McLarty and Pym were still going at it. Malcolm was about to apologize for asking what was obviously too painful a question. Then Janeka said, “You’re from Memphis, right?”
“Yes,” said Malcolm.
“So you remember the march Dr. King held there. The march he tried to hold, at any rate. And you remember what happened.”
Now it was Malcolm’s turn for silence, guilt tumbling in his heart, memories of what he didn’t say and didn’t do. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I remember. I was there.”
Behind him, the woman sighed. “So was I,” she said. “So was Bob.”