Chapter 3: The Collateral Clause

 Zariah

The door to the Sunday-school room opened without a knock.

I felt it before I saw it, the way you feel a storm cell change the pressure in a room, a low animal recalibration in the base of my skull. Deacon Freeman had been standing in the corridor a moment ago, I'd heard him there, the shuffle of his good shoes, his willingness to hover as long as I needed hovering. He was gone now. Something had moved him. And into the yellow light, filling the doorway from jamb to jamb, ducking his head an inch to clear it, came the man from the tree line.

Except now I saw all of him.

Six and a half feet of him, easy, in a black suit that had never in its life touched a rack, the shoulders of it fell like water. Dark skin. A beard trimmed to a blade's edge along a hard jaw. And eyes that did the thing the man under the oaks had done, the thing nobody at a funeral was supposed to do: they didn't look at me the way men looked at a pretty girl, or the way mourners looked at the bereaved. They looked in. Like I was a document he was reading for the clause that mattered.

"Miss Brooks." His voice was low and unhurried, a man who had never once in his life needed to raise it to be obeyed. "I'm sorry for your loss." A beat, deliberate, laid down like a card. "I'm sorrier for the timing."

Voss came up out of the little red chair so fast it tipped over behind him and clattered against the felt board. "Mr. St. James. I was just, I was walking Miss Brooks through the terms of the-"

"You were." It wasn't a question and it wasn't thanks and it wasn't quite a threat, but it lived in the same neighborhood as all three. The man, St. James, my mind supplied, the Lender line, the name Voss never got to say, didn't take his eyes off me while he said it. "You can go now, Gerald."

Voss went. He gathered his portfolio and his too-big suit and his hunched shoulders, and on the way past me he pressed a business card into my hand with a pressure that was almost pleading, murmured call me, please, any hour, and then he was gone down the corridor and it was the two of us and the loaves and the fishes and thirty little plastic chairs.

I stood up out of the child's chair, slowly, so it wouldn't look like fleeing, because there was no version of this conversation I'd have folded up on the floor while this man loomed over me like weather. Standing didn't help as much as I'd hoped; he had a foot on me and then some. I lifted my chin and made him meet my eyes from a woman's full height, and thought, absurdly, he's used to people looking up at him. Don't.

"Let me save us both an afternoon," I said. "I'm not paying you two million dollars. I don't have it. My father, apparently, didn't have it either, which is how everybody I've ever met ended up eating chicken in a Baptist church on a Tuesday afternoon. So whatever collection speech you rehearsed in that beautiful car I'd bet money you left running out front, save it. There's nothing here to take."

Something crossed his face. Not anger. Worse than anger. Interest. The specific, unhurried interest of a man who had walked into a room expecting one thing and found another and now had to rebuild the whole afternoon around the surprise. He stepped in. Once. It shrank the cinderblock room to the size of the space between us, and the smell of him reached me, cedar and something darker under it, clean and expensive and entirely out of place among the collards and the Fabuloso. I hated that I noticed it. I filed the hating away with everything else.

"You think I came to a funeral to collect money," he said, slow, tasting the idea like it faintly amused him. "Your father was my bookkeeper for nine years, Miss Brooks. He sat at my table. He held my accounts in his own hand. He knew where every dollar I have ever touched sleeps at night." The faint amusement went out of his voice, and something colder came in behind it. "In the last year of his life, he took things that weren't his, and he gave away things that could get people killed. And then his heart -" the smallest pause, a hairline fracture in the smooth surface of the man, a fraction of a second I would think about for weeks, "gave out. Very conveniently. So, no. I did not drive to a church in West End to collect two million dollars from a girl with four hundred in the bank." His gaze dropped from my face, slow, deliberate, a hand I could feel without being touched, down the line of my throat, and back up. "I came for what he left behind."

"He left four hundred dollars and a Buick."

"He left you."

The animal behind the glass put its face right up against it.

"You don't own me," I said. Level. I was good at level; I'd built my whole self on level. "I don't care what my father signed. I read the clause, Mr. St. James, I read it three times, and I understand it better than the man who drafted it, because unlike him I passed the bar in a state that recognizes the concept of consent. I didn't sign that contract. I'm twenty-four years old. I have a law degree that isn't dry yet, and I know exactly how enforceable an instrument is when one party never agreed to it and the other party is -" I let my eyes go, deliberately, to the scars ridged white across his knuckles, to the stillness of him, to everything the beautiful suit was politely declining to say, "whatever you are. So you can take your condolences and your two million dollars and your beautiful car, and you can get out of my church."

For a moment I thought I'd won it. I'd said the words in the order I'd have said them to a judge, and they were true words, correct words, and in a courtroom correct words carried the day.

This was not a courtroom.

"There's a man in the tree line," Malik St. James said.

I stopped.

"White shirt. No jacket, in this heat, which means he didn't dress to blend in with mourners. Reading glasses in his breast pocket he doesn't need, a prop, so his hands have something to do. He watched you shake forty hands today, and he's watched you the whole time you've been in this room with Gerald, which he shouldn't have been able to do, which means he's got a sightline you haven't found." His voice did not change at all as he said it, and that flatness was the most frightening thing I'd encountered in a day full of frightening things. "He does not work for me. He works for a man named Isaiah Crowe. And Isaiah Crowe put a great deal of careful thought into your father's very sudden heart. He is going to put that same thought into you, Miss Brooks, because your father left something in this city with your name attached to it, and Isaiah Crowe cannot afford, cannot survive, for you to be the one who opens it."

The heat of the room swam. The smell of the collards turned in my stomach. I locked my knees so I would not, would not, sit back down in that child's chair in front of this man.

"And I'm just supposed to believe you," I said. "A stranger who bought my father's casket without telling me and walked into his funeral like he owned the ground. You could be Crowe. You could be worse than Crowe. You could be the one who-"

"You buried your father today thinking the worst was already over," Malik said, tilting his head, studying me the way I'd studied the casket, doing his own private arithmetic on me that I couldn't read the sum of. "That the bad thing happened three weeks ago in a kitchen, and today you close the ground over it, and tomorrow you go back to being a girl with a law degree and a hard-luck story and a whole clean life in front of her." Something in his eyes, not warmth, but its distant cousin, something like regret worn smooth by long practice. "It started this morning. When you put on that dress. You've been the most valuable object in Atlanta since the sun came up, and you're the only person in the city who didn't know it. Until now."

Behind him, through the doorway, down the corridor, I heard tires crush the church parking-lot gravel. Slow. Unhurried. The particular slow roll of a car that did not belong.

My whole childhood stood up in me at the sound of it.

"There it is," Malik said, without turning around, reading my face instead of the window. He knew what the sound meant to me; I could see that he knew, and I hated that he knew. "That's not my car, Miss Brooks. Mine's the one running out front, like you said." He reached down without hurry and picked up my purse from the tiny table where I'd set it, and held it out to me across the little plastic chairs, and it was such a small, ordinary, courteous thing, a man handing a woman her bag, that I'd taken it before I'd decided to. I hated that too, the reflex of it, the way my hand had trusted him a half-second ahead of my head. "You have a choice to make, and you have about ninety seconds to make it, so I'll make it simple. You can walk out that front door to whatever just parked, and take your chances, and I promise you that you will not see Wednesday. Or you can walk out the back with me."

"Those aren't choices," I said. My voice had gone thin. I hated that too. "That's a man handing me a gun and a man handing me a different gun."

Malik St. James looked at me for a long moment, down that hard read of his, and something at the very back of his black eyes warmed by a single degree, which was, I'd learn, more frightening than the cold.

"No," he agreed. "It isn't a choice. It only looks like one." He turned his head, finally, toward the corridor, toward the sound of two car doors opening into the June heat. "But if you want to keep pretending it is, you should decide fast. They're already getting out."