Page 49 of Safe Enough

“Would you help me out with background information about your family situation?”

“I guess someone needs to.”

“Why’s that?”

“You think the bio is correct, but it ain’t. Historians will be wrong. I don’t know why he said what he said, that he had a brother. I’m not sure what he meant. I might want some time to figure it out.”

“I don’t understand. You just told me you and he are brothers.”

“We are.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The bio should say he had two brothers.”

We sat down and I took out my computer, and Albert started to tell me the story, but as soon as I saw where it was going, I paused him momentarily, and saved the French file, and opened a new blank document, for what I felt was going to be the real story. I remember the moment. It felt like journalists ought to feel.

A black farmer named Bertrand Jackson had three sons and three daughters, all thirty months apart, all perfectly interlaced in terms of gender, Cuthbert first, the eldest boy, who grew up playing the piano, then went to war, then stayed overseas. The middle boy was Albert, sitting right there telling me the story, and the youngest boy was Robert. The girls in between were delightful. Their mother was happy. The land was producing. Things were pretty good for the farmer. He felt like a man of substance. Altogether a success. He had only one problem. His youngest son, Robert, was slow in the head. He was always smiling, always amiable, but farm work was beyond him. Which was okay. The others could carry him.

Then the farmer made a mistake. Because he felt like a man of substance, he tried to register to vote in the presidential election. He felt it was his civic duty. He kept on going a good long time before he gave up. Afterward a county guy told him never to try again. Things got chilly. They were jealous, he figured. Because his farm was doing well. Maybe a little disconcerted. November rolled into December.

Meanwhile the farmer had gotten Robert a job sweeping up in the dry goods store where he bought his seed. The owner was a white guy. Sometimes his daughter worked the register. Christmas was coming, so Robert made her a card. He labored over the writing. He put, I hope you send me a card too. Her daddy saw it, and he showed it to his friends, and pretty soon a lynch mob was coming for Robert, because of his lewd interracial suggestion. He was made to stand on a riverbank, tied hand and foot. His daddy, the farmer, was made to watch. Robert was told he had a choice. He could fall off the riverbank by himself, or they could shoot him off. Either way he was going in the water. He was going to drown. Nothing could be done about that part. Robert said, Daddy, help me, and the farmer said, I’m sorry, son, I can’t, because I have four more at home, and a farm, and your mother. Robert fell in by himself. Afterward the same county guy came by and said, now you see what happens. He said, voting ain’t for you.

Albert said he told Cuthbert all about it, in great detail, in a long letter. About how it didn’t even make the local paper. How the county police wrote it up as a disobedient child warned not to swim. Cuthbert wrote back from Paris, depressed but resigned. And impatient. They had fought in the war. How much longer? After that Albert stopped being surprised his brother didn’t come home.

I drove two hundred miles back the way I had come and took a nap in the passenger seat when I got tired, and then I carried on again. I wanted to get to work. But when I did, I couldn’t. I felt ethically the story belonged to the French magazine. But it was a story I didn’t want them to have. Or any other nation. I wasn’t sure exactly why. Not washing dirty laundry in public, I guessed. United we stand, divided we fall. Clichés were clichés for a reason. I felt like a bad journalist.

Then I realized Cuthbert Jackson had made the same choice. All through the political years. He was Socrates. He could have told a devastating tale. He could have leveraged his exile sky high. But he didn’t. He never said a word about Robert. I wondered if he knew exactly why. I wanted to ask him. For a minute I wondered if the magazine would fly me to Paris.

In the end, I stayed home and wrote it up purely as a sidebar. I put, in effect, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing. I got paid enough to buy dinner for my friends. We talked about Cuthbert’s silence all night long, but we came to no conclusions.

SHORTY AND THE BRIEFCASE

Shorty Malone’s legendary week began on Monday, when he got shot in the leg, just barely, in a sanitation department maintenance facility. His squad went in the front door, and another went in the back door, with a vague plan to outflank a guy they knew was concealed somewhere among the parked garbage trucks. Then someone started shooting, and within a split second everyone was shooting. The official report said ninety police rounds were fired that day. No one was killed, not even the concealed guy. The only casualty was Shorty, from an unlucky ricochet. Later reconstructions showed a fellow officer had fired, and his round had taken a gentle deflection off the sidewall of a tire, and then a violent deflection off the chassis rail of a different truck. After that it was badly misshapen and had spent most of its energy. It hit Shorty on the shin bone no worse than a smack with a ball-peen hammer. It broke the skin and cracked the bone. Shorty was immediately hospitalized.

After that it was awkward. It was hard to work up much enthusiasm. Shorty had been in the detective division about a year, so he wasn’t a brave rookie anymore, but he wasn’t yet a grizzled veteran hero either. He was a nobody. Plus it was technically blue-on-blue. There was even some doubt about whether the concealed guy actually had a gun at all. Plus a rumor it was the wrong guy anyway. Maybe his brother. So the overall feeling was the whole affair would be better forgotten. Which was tough on Shorty. Normally a shot cop would be treated with maximum reverence. Normally Shorty would have been rolling around like a pig in shit. Half a dozen hopeful lowlifes would have started up collections on the internet. Shorty could have been looking at a decent chunk of change. Maybe even college-fund decent.

But he was ignored. On Tuesday we were all reassigned to new duties. Part of forgetting. Sure, way back in history some mistakes might have been made. But that was then. We’ve moved on. Now we’re making progress. We all started learning the new stuff, and as a result, no one went to visit Shorty in the hospital anymore, except his pal Celia Sandstrom, who was another one-year nobody, except better to look at, unless she was wearing her Kevlar vest. Evidently, she stopped by the hospital frequently, and evidently, she kept old Shorty up to date on what was going on. And what wasn’t.

We were assigned to Narcotics, as part of their own forgetting. All kinds of previous strategies had come to nothing. It was time to wall them off. Time to move on. Like we had. So that if someone ever mentioned a prior embarrassment, we could all wrinkle our noses and say, “What, that old thing?” Like your girlfriend, when you tell her she looked good in her sweater yesterday. So their department was starting over, too, the same way ours had, and they swapped us in for their big new redemptive idea, which was to stop following the coke, and start following the money. Which needed manpower. Narcotics was a cash business. Cash was like a river. They wanted to see where it flowed. And how. Some parts they knew. Some parts they didn’t understand. They wanted us out there, watching.

Specifically, they wanted us watching a guy delivering a briefcase from Jersey. He made the trip usually two times a week. The assumption was the briefcase was packed with paper money. A wholesale payment, maybe, or a share of the profits. One level of the pyramid scheme kicking up to the next. They said a regular briefcase could hold a million dollars. They said it was a physical transfer because money wasn’t electronic until it was in a bank. Which cash wasn’t yet. They said there was a clue in the name. They said our job was to evaluate the chances of witnessing a hand-to-hand exchange. Which would be two for the price of one. Plus disruption of a vital link in the chain. It was exciting work. No wonder everyone forgot about Shorty. Except Celia. She must have described the mission, the very same day, because that must have been about when Shorty started thinking.

The guy with the briefcase was an older gentleman. A person of substance. Somehow powdered and expensive. A very senior figure. His very presence a mark of deep respect. With a million bucks in his hand. The briefcase was metal. Some fancy brand. He carried it along the sidewalk, plain as day, all the way to an old-style office building door. He carried it inside. Ten minutes later he came out without it. We saw him do it exactly the same way the report said he always did it.

The office building had a narrow lobby with security. The directory showed twenty tenants. All bland names. A lot of import and export. No doubt a well-developed grapevine. All kinds of early warning systems. No point in asking questions. We wrote it up and sent it in. Our new bosses didn’t like it. They pushed back.

They said, “We need to know which office suite.”

We said, “We can’t get past the desk.”

“Pose as maintenance.”

“They don’t do maintenance.”

“Then use your badge.”

“The bad guys would be down the fire escape before the elevator door even opened for us in the lobby. Probably the security guy controls it with a foot pedal.”

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