Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

He got to his feet without arthritic pain in his joints. He took a deep breath and went back to his bed, where he could recall history and change it slightly—an old man deified by the whim of evil.

What we doin’ here, Uncle?” Robyn asked after they had gotten off the bus at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive a few minutes after ten the next morning.

“Goin’ t’see see Mr. Mossa. He a Jerusalemite, a Palestinian he calls it, but he was born in Jerusalem, same place that Christ our Lord was born.”

“This place is full’a rich white people,” Robyn argued. “We shouldn’t be up around here.”

The girl was looking about her, a severe frown etching her lovely dark features. Ptolemy smiled. There was a bench across the street, at the foot of a steep cobblestone road that didn’t allow cars. An old white woman was sitting there. Ptolemy brought his adopted daughter across the street and sat her down at the opposite end.

“I been afraid’a white people my entire life,” the old man said, holding the glowering girl’s hands.

“I ain’t afraid,” she said. “It’s just that we don’t belong up here. My mama told me that.”

“Your mother made you sleep on the floor behind a couch so that her boyfriends didn’t see you,” Ptolemy said.

“So?”

“She didn’t think she was wrong doin’ that, now, did she?”

“No.”

“But she was wrong, wasn’t she?”

“Papa Grey, I just don’t like it up here. I ain’t scared’a no body , but I’m scared I’ll do sumpin’ wrong.”

“I know. That’s why we here together. I’m helpin’ you.”

“If you helpin’ me, then take me home.”

“Did you like bein’ a child?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn wanted to look down, but she forced herself to gaze into her guardian’s eyes.

“I was happy when my mama died, Papa Grey.” A tear came down her left cheek. “I wanted to be sad an’ lovin’ but I knew that Mama had worked it out for me to go to Aunt Niecie if she died, and I hoped in my heart, even though I didn’t want to, that my mama would pass and I could come out heah. I’m the one you should call the Devil.”

Ptolemy noticed that even though the right eye filled with water it was only the girl’s left eye that shed tears. He thought this must have been an important sign, but the meaning escaped him.

“Then I come to stay wit’ Niecie an’ she put me on a couch in the livin’ room an’ Hilly was always tryin’ to fuck me—excuse my French.”

“I got you on a couch in the livin’ room,” Ptolemy said gently.

“But that’s my couch, an’ it’s a proper bed too. An’ it have drawers like a dresser, an’ you bought me some clothes. An’ anyway you offered me your room an’ all your money an’ you trusted me to do right. An’ you try an’ protect me too. I love you, Papa Grey. I don’t evah want anything to happen to you.”

“Did some’a the men in yo’ mama’s house mess wit’ you?” he asked.

“I don’t wanna talk about that.”

Ptolemy smiled and said, “Okay. But you gotta know that the money I offered you is only a small part’a what I got an’ that we up here today so that you can know how to take care of what I’ma leave to you. So I won’t aks you no questions hurt your heart, but you got to trust me with the rest.”

Her left eye streaming, lips apout, Robyn nodded just barely and Ptolemy smiled. He pulled her up by her forearms until they were on their feet again, walking up to the top of the pedestrian roadway lined with fancy boutiques and stores.

There they came upon a gleaming white and gold store where, above the entrance, the name Mossa in red letters was inlaid across a band of sky-blue mosaic tiles.

“Mr. Grey!” an older man exclaimed.

At first Robyn assumed that he must be a Mexican.

“Mr. Mossa,” Ptolemy replied with equal enthusiasm, “long time no see.”

“How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

The shop was crowded with glass cases crammed full with jewelry, coins, and small objects that were from other times and other places. The rest of the room was overflowing with rows of statues, sculptures, paintings on wood, wall hangings, ancient carpets, and large items of gold and silver, marble and jade.

The white stone bust of a small child caught Robyn’s attention. The face seemed so innocent and wise.

“Julius Caesar,” Mossa said to the girl.

“Excuse me?”

“That is a bust of Caesar as a boy.”

“How they know how he looked when he was a kid?”

“He sat for the sculptor, of course,” Mossa said, and then he turned to Ptolemy again.

It slowly dawned upon Robyn what the aging Muslim had said.

“You mean, this thing was made when Caesar was just a little boy?” she asked his back.

“Yes,” Mossa said, turning again. “Everything in my shop is very, very old. I have a room filled with treasures from ancient tombs of Kush and Egypt.”

“This is Mr. Mossa, Robyn,” Ptolemy said. “Mossa, this is my adopted daughter, Robyn Small.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mossa said. “Your father is a great man with a long history. He understands beauty and the past. And of course his name has been legend for thousands of years.”

“Thank you,” Robyn said, not quite knowing why. “Your store is very beautiful.”

The Palestinian was short, like Ptolemy, and a bit stooped over, round but not fat; his smile was both beneficent and inviting. He wore a large yellow diamond on the index finger of his right hand and a ruby embedded in onyx on the pinky of his left. Robyn had never met anyone like him, had never been in a place like his shop .

“It has been a long time, Ptolemy,” the store owner said. “Fifteen years?”

“Maybe more,” Ptolemy agreed.

“I’ve never seen you in a suit before.”

“Bought it for a funeral,” Ptolemy said lightly.

“Whose?”

“Mine,” the old man said.

The men stood there for a moment, Ptolemy smiling and Mossa wondering about that smile.

“I think of you on the first day of every year,” Mossa said to break the silence. “I send up a prayer for you and hope that you are alive and well.”

“That must’a been what done it,” Ptolemy replied. “’Cause you know there ain’t a reason in the world a man’s bones should get as old as mine is. I’m ninety-one, be ninety-two soon—maybe.”

“There are trees that don’t live so long.”

Ptolemy took two dull gold coins from his pocket.

“I know you don’t have much interest in things only a hundred or so year old, but I thought . . .”

The antiquarian took the coins from Ptolemy’s hand and held them in his palm. With his other hand he took out a jeweler’s lens and studied the metal disks.

“I belong to a coin guild now,” he said, still staring at his palm. “We trade, back and forth. Sometimes an American dealer will come across ancient treasures that he cannot sell. Sometimes we trade.”

Mossa looked up at Ptolemy and both old men smiled. To Robyn it seemed that they were talking without words, communing like monks being passed messages from God.

“Thirty-six hundred each,” Mossa said.

“Cash,” Ptolemy added.

The antiquarian put the CLOSED sign on the front door and brought Ptolemy and the girl into a yard that was filled with flowering plants that Robyn could not identify. There Mossa made tea and brought out strange-tasting pastries.

Mossa asked Robyn about her college aspirations, and even offered to give her a recommendation for school.

“I’m only goin’ to junior college,” she said.

“But you will transfer one day.”

“Yeah,” she said, surprise coming through in her voice, “I might.”

“This is my daughter, Mossa,” Ptolemy said at one point. “Give her your card and do business wit’ her fair an’ square like you always done wit’ me.”

Mossa did not speak. He smiled, took a business card from his vest pocket, and handed it to the girl. The white card was engraved with golden letters. She placed it in her bag next to the knife—her mother’s only gift.

On the street again, waiting for a westbound bus, Robyn and Ptolemy sat side by side, holding hands.

“How you get to know Mr. Mossa, Uncle?”

“Every once in a blue moon I’d get a part-time job at a restaurant they used to have around here called Trudy’s Steak House. If they had a big weekend and one’a their people got sick they’d call me ’cause I was a friend of a guy worked there called Mike Tinely.

“I always took the early bus because the boss wanted you there on the minute. One time I saw Mossa’s place and I wondered if he could cash my coin. A week aftah my job was ovah I went in the store. It was him there, an’ he walked up to me and said, ‘Can I help you, Father?’

“That was twenty-four years ago. He was in his fifties and I was already retired. We talked for a while and then he put up the CLOSED sign and took me to his garden for some tea. I nevah met anybody like that. My skin didn’t mean nuthin’ to him. I knew what the coins were worth from books, but I didn’t tell him that. He paid me top dollar and we been friends evah since.”

“Where you get them coins?” Robyn asked.

“Later, child. Let’s get out to Santa Monica first.”

An hour later they were walking on a street in Santa Monica. They came to a slender brick building between a women’s clothes store and a shop that sold leather goods in all forms and shapes. Robyn stopped at the window of the clothes store, gazing at a dress that was diaphanous and multicolored. Ptolemy stood back, watching her turn slightly as if she had tried on the frock and was checking her reflection in the glass.

Abromovitz and Son Legal Services was on the fourth floor of the slender building. There was an elevator but it was out of order, and so the young girl and the old man took the stairs, half a flight at a time. Ptolemy counted the steps, seven and then eight three times, with one-minute rests between each.

The door was open and Ptolemy led the way into the dimly lit room.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black woman asked. She was sitting behind an oak desk that blocked the way to a bright-green door that was closed.

Ptolemy smiled at the woman, who was maybe forty-five.

Half my age, he thought, and twice my weight.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’d like to speak with Abraham,” he said, echoes of Coy’s blasphemous Bible lessons resounding in his mind.

“He,” the woman said, and then winced. “Mr. Abromovitz passed away five years ago.”

“Oh,” Ptolemy said, “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. I liked him very much.”

The black woman, whose skin was quite dark and whose name-plate said Esther, nodded and smiled sadly.

“Yes,” she said. “He always asked how I was in the morning, and he would listen too.”

“Moishe still here?” Ptolemy asked.

The receptionist registered surprise at the question.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Mr. Ptolemy Grey.”

Mr. Grey,” a middle-aged, paunchy white man was saying a few moments later, after Esther had made a call on the office line.

Robyn followed her adopted father into the small dark office. There was a window but it only looked out onto a shadowy air-shaft. Bookcases lined every wall. Along with law books, there were novels, piles of magazines, and stacks of typing paper held together by old brittle rubber bands. The room reminded Robyn somewhat of Ptolemy’s home before she had cleaned it out, and a little of Mossa’s rooms filled with ancient treasures.