The Empress File

streets. Her black eyes were tilted and large as the moon, her face a perfect oval. She was five-five or five-six and moved like a dancer. She was wearing a thin olive-colored blouse of crumply cotton with epaulets, the kind fashion people think the Israeli Army might wear. She stepped back when she saw me, startled, and turned to John.
    “Who is he?”
    “Bobby’s friend,” John said. She kept backing up, looking from John to me and back to John.
    “He’s white,” she said.
    “You Commies really got it taped,” John said wryly.
    “I’m a social democrat,” Marvel said, momentarily distracted.
    “That’s what I said,” John answered, showing some teeth.
    “Maybe we don’t need you,” she said. She was in her early thirties and wore round gold-rimmed glasses like John’s. You hardly saw the glasses because of the eyes.
    “You’ve been sitting here for a month. There’s been nothing but talk and whining and bullshit and more bullshit,” John said. “If you think it’ll ever be more than that, we’ll get back in the car and let you handle it. But I think you need us. You need something.…”
    Their eyes locked as she considered him, and John watched her with the gravity of a Jesuit. After a few seconds of the deadlock a man eased out of a back room into the living room behind Marvel. He was short, thick, and looked as if he could break bricks with his face. He stepped close behind her and muttered something. She nodded.
    “We’ll talk,” she said. “Then we’ll see.”
    W E TALKED until four in the morning. John stated the proposition as baldly as he’d given it to me: We’d wreck the machine and the town administration.If possible, we’d leave it permanently in the hands of Marvel and her friends.
    “A pipe dream,” Marvel said flatly.
    “That’s why Kidd is here. He knows about politics, and he knows about wrecking things. He’ll do us a plan,” John said.
    I tried to look modest.
    “I’ll believe it when I see it.” She deliberately looked me up and down again, not impressed, and John grinned. The thick man, whose name was Harold, watched me impassively.
    “He’s a technician,” John said, letting the grin die. “If you called somebody to fix your telephone, you wouldn’t care if the repairman was white as long as he fixed your phone.”
    “I’d rather he be black, even to fix the phone,” Marvel said.
    John said, “Right on, sister,” and gave her a sarcastic black power salute.
    Marvel waved him off. “OK.” Then she looked at me and asked, “Why don’t you say something?”
    “’Cause you’re pissing me off.” It came with an edge, and Marvel glanced away, embarrassed. She’d been rude to a guest, a cardinal sin anywhere in the South.
    “I try to be civil,” she said. “But I can’t help wondering what outsiders can do.…”
    “The town is corrupt,” I said. “John says it’s inthe hands of a voting minority. If that’s right, there may be some way to take it.”
    “How?”
    “I don’t know yet. I have to know about the place to figure that out. I have to know about the people who run it. What they’re up to.”
    “We can tell you that, all right,” Marvel said. She was looking straight at me with those incredible liquid eyes, and I thought of the Empress card in the tarot. “Anything you want to know. The question is, If you wreck the machine, who runs things afterward?”
    I shrugged. “Not me.”
    “I’ve got a job and an… organization… in Memphis,” John said. “I don’t have any interest in moving in.”
    She pursed her lips. “I heard about your organization. Bunch of old lame-ass ex-Panthers, is what I hear.”
    “Maybe our asses are lame, but they’re not getting kicked by a bunch of Delta peckerwoods,” John snarled. I was thinking uh-oh. They were knocking sparks off each other, in the angry, confrontational way that tends to lead directly to the bedroom. Harold felt it, too, and was looking back and forth between them.
    “How about this?” Marvel suggested, turning to me. “You figure something out. A plan. If we don’t like it, we can get out anytime.”
    John looked at me, and I shook my head. “Wecan’t have key people bail out at a critical moment. That could kill us.”
    “How do we handle it?” he asked.
    “We lay out a proposal,” I said, turning to Marvel. “If you like it, you’re in. If you don’t, we go home. But you tell us up front.”
    She thought about it for a moment, then said,