The Three-Fifths Man
Tuesday, October 9
His face wet with sweat and with tears, the man
runs for freedom, he runs for his life.
“There! There he goes!”
The former slave does not know exactly where the
voice comes from. Behind him? To the right or
left? From atop one of the decrepit tenements
lining the filthy cobblestoned streets here?
Amid July air hot and thick as liquid paraffin,
the lean man leaps over a pile of horse dung.
The street sweepers don’t come here, to this
part of the city. Charles Singleton pauses
beside a pallet stacked high with barrels,
trying to catch his breath.
A crack of a pistol. The bullet goes wide. The
sharp report of the gun takes him back instantly
to the war: the impossible, mad hours as he
stood his ground in a dusty blue uniform,
steadying a heavy musket, facing men wearing
dusty gray, aiming their own weapons his way.
Running faster now. The men fire again. These
bullets also miss.
“Somebody stop him! Five dollars’ gold if you
catch him.”
But the few people out on the streets this early
– mostly Irish ragpickers and laborers trooping
to work with hods or picks on their shoulders – have
no inclination to stop the Negro, who has
fierce eyes and large muscles and such
frightening determination. As for the reward,
the shouted offer came from a city constable,
which means there’s no coin behind the promise.
At the Twenty-third Street paintworks, Charles
veers west. He slips on the slick cobblestones
and falls hard. A mounted policeman rounds the
corner and, raising his nightstick, bears down
on the fallen man. And then –
And? the girl thought.
And?
What happened to him?
Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle twisted the knob
on the microfiche reader again but it would move
no farther; she’d come to the last page on this
carriage. She lifted out the metal rectangle
containing the lead article in the July 23,
1868, edition of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated.
Riffling through the other frames in the dusty
box, she worried that the remaining pages of the
article were missing and she’d never find out
what happened to her ancestor Charles Singleton.
She’d learned that historical archives regarding
black history were often incomplete, if not
forever misplaced.
Where was the rest of the story?
Ah … Finally she found it and mounted the
carriage carefully into the battered gray
reader, moving the knob impatiently to locate
the continuation of the story of Charles’s
flight.
Geneva’s lush imagination – and years of
immersing herself in books – had given her the
wherewithal to embellish the bare-bones magazine
account of the former slave’s pursuit through
the hot, foul streets of nineteenth-century New
York. She almost felt she was back there, rather
than where she really was at the moment: nearly
140 years later in the deserted fifth-floor
library of the Museum of African-American
Culture and History on Fifty-fifth Street in
Midtown Manhattan.
As she twisted the dial, the pages streamed past
on the grainy screen. Geneva found the rest of
the article, which was headlined:
Shame
THE ACCOUNT OF A FREEDMAN’S CRIME
CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN OF THE WAR
BETWEEN THE STATES, BETRAYS THE CAUSE
OF OUR PEOPLE IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT
A picture accompanying the article showed
twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his
Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were
large and the tight fit of the uniform on his
chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips
broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite
dark.
Staring at the unsmiling face, the calm,
piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a
resemblance between them – she had the head and
face of her ancestor, the roundness of his
features, the rich shade of his skin. Not a bit
of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle
was skinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano
Project girls loved to point out.
She began to read once more, but a noise
intruded.
A click in the room. A door latch? Then she
heard footsteps. They paused. Another step.
Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw
nobody.
She felt a chill, but told herself not to be
freaked. It was just bad memories that put her
on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the
school yard behind Langston Hughes High, and
that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St.
Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley then
pounded her so bad that she lost a back tooth.
Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But
it was the girls who made you bleed.
Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch …
More footsteps. Another pause.
Silence.
The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim,
musty, quiet. And there was no one else here,
not at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday morning. The
museum wasn’t open yet – tourists were still
asleep or having their breakfasts – but the
library opened at eight. Geneva had been waiting
here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so
eager to read the article. She now sat in a
cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall,
where faceless mannequins wore
nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were
filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats,
women in bonnets and horses with wack, skinny
legs.
Another footstep. Then another pause.
Should she leave? Go hang with Dr. Barry, the
librarian, until this creepy dude left?
And then the other visitor laughed.
Not a weird laugh, a fun laugh.
And he said, “Okay. I’ll call you later.”
A snap of a cell phone folding up. That’s why
he’d been pausing, just listening to the person
on the other end of the line.
Told you not to worry, girl. People aren’t
dangerous when they laugh. They aren’t dangerous
when they say friendly things on cell phones.
He’d been walking slowly because that’s what
people do when they’re talking – even though
what kind of rude claimer’d make a phone call in
a library? Geneva turned back to the microfiche
screen, wondering, You get away, Charles? Man, I
hope so.
Yet he regained his footing and, rather than own
up to his mischief, as a courageous man would
do, continued his cowardly flight.
So much for objective reporting, she thought
angrily.
For a time he evaded his pursuers. But escape
was merely temporary. A Negro tradesman on a
porch saw the freedman and implored him to stop,
in the name of justice, asserting that he had
heard of Mr. Singleton’s crime and reproaching
him for bringing dishonor upon all colored
people throughout the nation. The citizen, one
Walker Loakes, thereupon flung a brick at Mr.
Singleton with the intent of knocking him down.
However,
Charles dodges the heavy stone and turns to the
man, shouting, “I am innocent. I did not do what
the police say!”
Geneva’s imagination had taken over and,
inspired by the text, was writing the story once
again.
But Loakes ignores the freedman’s protests and
runs into the street, calling to the police that
the fugitive is headed for the docks.
His heart torn, his thoughts clinging to the
image of Violet and their son, Joshua, the
former slave continues his desperate run for
freedom.
Sprinting, sprinting …
Behind him comes the gallop of mounted police.
Ahead of him, other horsemen appear, led by a
helmeted police officer brandishing a pistol.
“Halt, halt where you are, Charles Singleton! I
am Detective Captain William Simms. I’ve been
searching for you for two days.”
The freedman does as ordered. His broad
shoulders slump, strong arms at his sides, chest
heaving as he sucks in the humid, rancid air
beside the Hudson River. Nearby is the tow boat
office, and up and down the river he sees the
spindles of sailing ship masts, hundreds of
them, taunting him with their promise of
freedom. He leans, gasping, against the large
Swiftsure Express Company sign. Charles stares
at the approaching officer as the clop, clop,
clop of his horse’s hooves resonate loudly on
the cobblestones.
“Charles Singleton, you are under arrest for
burglary. You will surrender to us or we will
subdue you. Either way you will end up in
shackles. Pick the first and you will suffer no
pain. Pick the second, you will end up bloody.
The choice is yours.”
“I have been accused of a crime I did not
commit!”
“I repeat: Surrender or die. Those are your only
choices.”
“No, sir, I have one other,” Charles shouts. He
resumes his flight – toward the dock.
“Stop or we will shoot!” Detective Simms calls.
But the freedman bounds over the railing of the
pier like a horse taking a picket in a charge.
He seems to hang in the air for a moment then
cartwheels thirty feet into the murky waters of
the Hudson River, muttering some words, perhaps
a plea to Jesus, perhaps a declaration of love
for his wife and child, though whatever they
might be none of his pursuers can hear.
Fifty feet from the microfiche reader
forty-one-year-old Thompson Boyd moved closer to
the girl.
He pulled the stocking cap over his face,
adjusted the eyeholes and opened the cylinder of
his pistol to make sure it wasn’t jammed. He’d
checked it earlier but, in this job, you could
never be too certain. He put the gun into his
pocket and pulled the billy club out of a slit
cut into his dark raincoat.
He was in the stacks of books in the costume
exhibit hall, which separated him from the
microfiche-reader tables. His latex-gloved
fingers pressed his eyes, which had been
stinging particularly sharply this morning. He
blinked from the pain.
He looked around again, making sure the room was
in fact deserted.
No guards were here, none downstairs either. No
security cameras or sign-in sheets. All good.
But there were some logistical problems. The big
room was deathly quiet, and Thompson couldn’t
hide his approach to the girl. She’d know
someone was in the room with her and might
become edgy and alert.
So after he’d stepped inside this wing of the
library and locked the door behind him, he’d
laughed, a chuckle. Thompson Boyd had stopped
laughing years ago. But he was also a craftsman
who understood the power of humor – and how to
use it to your advantage in this line of work. A
laugh – coupled with a farewell pleasantry and
a closing cell phone – would put her at ease,
he reckoned.
This ploy seemed to work. He looked quickly
around the long row of shelves and saw the girl,
staring at the microfiche screen. Her hands, at
her sides, seemed to clench and unclench
nervously at what she was reading.
He started forward.
Then stopped. The girl was pushing away from the
table. He heard her chair slide on the linoleum.
She was walking somewhere. Leaving? No. He heard
the sound of the drinking fountain and her
gulping some water. Then he heard her pulling
books off the shelf and stacking them up on the
microfiche table. Another pause and she returned
to the stacks once again, gathering more books.
The thud as she set them down. Finally he heard
the screech of her chair as she sat once more.
Then silence.
Thompson looked again. She was back in her
chair, reading one of the dozen books piled in
front of her.
With the bag containing the condoms, razor knife
and duct tape in his left hand, the club in his
right, he started toward her again.
Coming up behind her now, twenty feet, fifteen,
holding his breath.
Ten feet. Even if she bolted now, he could lunge
forward and get her – break a knee or stun her
with a blow to the head.
Eight feet, five …
He paused and silently set the rape pack on a
shelf. He took the club in both hands. He
stepped closer, lifting the varnished oak rod.
Still absorbed in the words, she read intently,
oblivious to the fact that her attacker was an
arm’s length behind her. Thompson swung the club
downward with all his strength toward the top of
the girl’s stocking cap.
Crack …
A painful vibration stung his hands as the baton
struck her head with a hollow snap.
But something was wrong. The sound, the feel
were off. What was going on?
Thompson Boyd leapt back as the body fell to the
floor.
And tumbled into pieces.
The torso of the mannequin fell one way. The
head another. Thompson stared for a moment. He
glanced to his side and saw a ball gown draped
over the bottom half of the same mannequin – part
of a display on women’s clothing in
Reconstruction America.
No …
Somehow, she’d tipped to the fact that he was a
threat. She’d then collected some books from the
shelves as a cover for standing up and taking
apart a mannequin. She’d dressed the upper part
of it in her own sweatshirt and stocking cap
then propped it on the chair.
But where was she?
The slap of racing feet answered the question.
Thompson Boyd heard her sprinting for the fire
door. The man slipped the billy club into his
coat, pulled out his gun and started after her.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Twelfth Card
by Jeffery Deaver
Copyright © 2005 by Jeffery Deaver .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005
Jeffery Deaver
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-6092-9
