The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,66

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