The Black Deb shrieked and exploded with laughter. Boys and girls all over the street shrieked and exploded with laughter.

  Mooning!

  Mooning!

  He was mooning the very Piedmont Driving Club itself!

  Roger Too White, encased in his fancy Lexus and his $2,800 custom-made suit and $125 shirt and crêpe de chine necktie, was appalled. He wanted to cry out: “Brothers! Sisters! Is this why you’ve become the jeunesse dorée of Black America? Is this why we’ve finally scaled the heights educationally and professionally? Is this why your parents struggled to accumulate the capital to give you those cars you’re cruising around Atlanta in tonight? Is this why they made sure your generation went to college? So you brothers could act like this? Wearing ghetto rags and snorting and squealing like rutboars and turning that beautiful sister into a common Ellis Street hootchy and throwing money at her? And you sisters—why would you do something like this? You veritable flowers of black womanhood—why would you let the brothers turn you into the very same stereotypes that the hip-hop videos make you out to be? Why don’t you say no to such sexist disrespect? Why don’t you insist, as you should, as you easily could, upon the love, affection, and genuine respect you deserve? Brothers, Sisters, listen to me—”

  At the same time another feeling entirely was sweeping through his loins. Deep inside he was … exhilarated. The freedom of these young brothers and sisters, the abandon, the Dionysian fearlessness on the very threshold of the Piedmont Driving Club—

  Oh my God, oh my God—

  Oh, Chocolate Mecca!

  Miraculously, the traffic started moving again, and the girls and boys popped back into their cars as fast as they had ejected from them, and the Freaknic traffic began inching up Piedmont Avenue once more. Not a moment too soon, either. The Black Deb had managed to take advantage of the brief interlude of mocking the stuffed white shirts on the terrace of the Driving Club to scramble back down into the Camaro, alongside her fat moon-happy friend, and now the traffic was moving again, and it was all over.

  Roger Too White’s heart was still pounding, from a fear of what the scene might have turned into—and from a sexual stimulation that made him wonder all over again about his proper forty-two-year-old self—but he managed to keep his wits about him long enough to peel off from Piedmont Avenue at Morningside Drive.

  He sped over to Lenox Road and then headed north and made a big loop around the Lenox Square area, which he knew would be clogged with Freaknickers. By driving much too fast, he managed to get over to Habersham Road, near West Paces Ferry, only eleven minutes late.

  Aw, man … Habersham Road … It was dusk, but it was still light enough to see what Habersham Road was … Georgia Tech was treating Coach Buck McNutter like a king. The Stingers Club, the new group of alumni football boosters, had raised enough money to top off the university’s regular football coach’s pay enough, and guarantee the great McNutter $875,000 a year, thereby wooing him away from the University of Alabama. As a bonus on a bonus, they guaranteed him a house in Buckhead, gratis. Not only that, Habersham Road was obviously in the very best part of Buckhead. The lawns rose up from the street like big green breasts, and at the top of each breast was a house big enough to be called a mansion … Trees everywhere … reaching up so high it was obvious they were virgin timber … boxwood bushes so big and dense and well clipped, you could hear all those gardeners snickersnacking away just by looking at them … and, above all, the dogwood. It was a late spring, for Georgia, and the dogwood had just burst out in all their glory. Here in the gloaming, the white blossoms, arranged in their distinctive planes, swept from green breast to green breast, from mansion to mansion, estate to estate, as if some divine artist had adorned the heavenly air itself with them to show that the residents of Buckhead, off West Paces Ferry Road, were the elect, the anointed, the rightful white hard grabbers of whatever Atlanta, Georgia, had to offer. In Cascade Heights and at Niskey Lake, where Roger Too White lived, way down in Southwest Atlanta, he and a lot of other successful black people, the lawyers, the bankers, the insurance company executives, had big houses—some with white columns—and big lawns and, for that matter, dogwood. But it just wasn’t the same. Niskey Lake didn’t have those big green breasts, and the dogwood blossoms didn’t seem to exist in such divine clouds …

  Roger Too White drove his Lexus up a driveway that ascended the lush swell of the lawn McNutter. As seen through the planes of dogwood blossoms, the house appeared to have been done in the French Maison Lafitte style, with lofty casement windows from which came a soft, mellow light, upstairs and down. At the top of the hill, the driveway made a showy loop, bordered with liriope, in front of the house. Roger Too White parked near the front door. As he walked toward it, he remembered all the stories he had heard of the black men who had been hassled and detained by not only the police but also the Buckhead private security patrols … just for being black and setting foot on this hallowed earth near the holy white corridor of West Paces Ferry Road.

  The doorbell was answered by Coach Buck McNutter himself. Oh, there was no mistake about that. Roger Too White had never met the man before, but he knew that face. He had seen it God knew how many times on television and in the pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was the real loose-sausage-eating, brown-liquor-drinking Southern face of a white athlete turned forty and covered with a smooth well-fed layer of flesh. His neck, which seemed a foot wide, rose up out of a yellow polo shirt and a blue blazer as if it were unit-welded to his trapezius muscles and his shoulders. He was like a single solid slab of meat clear up to his hair, which was a head of hair and a half, a strange silvery blond color, coiffed with bouncy fullness and little flips that screamed $65 male hairdo. Not a single cilium was out of place. Amid the vast smooth meat of his head and neck, his eyes and his mouth seemed terribly tiny, but they were both going all out to register pleasure at the sight of Counselor Roger White, this black man who had arrived at the door at 7:42 on Freaknic Saturday night.

  “Hey, Mr. White!” exclaimed Coach Buck McNutter. “Buck McNutter!”

  With that, he extended an enormous right hand. Roger Too White put out his own hand and felt it disappear, knuckles and all, inside a grip that made him wince.

  “Sure do ’preciate you doing this! Particularly”—P’tickly—“on a Saturday night!”

  “Not at all,” said Roger Too White. There was something so desperate about the man’s show of gratitude, he didn’t bother apologizing for being twelve minutes late.

  “Come on in and make yourself comfortable!” Then, over his shoulder: “Hey, Val, Mr. White’s here!”

  Val turned out to be a blond woman, in her late twenties, if Roger Too White was any judge. Everything about her, especially the provocative way she lowered her eyebrows when she smiled, gave off whiffs of frisky trouble. She came into the entry hall from some side room with the same desperate delight in her eyes as the coach.

  “Hi!” She really sang it out.

  “Mr. White, I want you to meet my wife, Val!”

  So they shook hands, too. There was so much frenzied grinning going on that Roger Too White couldn’t help grinning himself. He understood part of it. He saw this type of prominent white person all the time in Atlanta. Buck McNutter was a prototypical Southern white boy, from Mississippi, which was an even harder case than Georgia, a real hardtack Cracker in his heart but one who had decided that if he had to deal with these nigras, then the better part of valor was to put on a good show of being civil about it. (Proving Booker T. absolutely right, of course.)

  “Let’s go on in the library, Mr. White,” said Buck McNutter.

  With this, he dropped the grin. In fact, his beefy face grew long, verging on sad. Obviously the pertinent part of Counselor White’s house call on Habersham Road was about to begin.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” said young Mrs. McNutter. She said it with such an animated grin that for an instant it looked like a leer and made Roger Too White wonder what on earth she had in mind.

  “Oh, no thanks,” he said.

  “You sure? Then I’ll just let you two take care of yourselves.”

  The library was paneled in a dark wood, mahogany or perhaps walnut, and lined with shelves that seemed to contain far more silver bowls, trophies, and pieces of blown-glass sculpture than books. The combination of the dark wood, the soft light, and the gleaming objets was such that at first Roger Too White failed to notice the figure sprawled back on a tufted leather sofa. The long legs were utterly ajar. The long arms rested slackly on the sofa’s seat. The milky-white eyes, set in a dark brown face beneath the brow of a shaved head, stared with utmost sullenness. Roger Too White knew that face immediately because it was even more famous in Atlanta than Coach Buck McNutter’s. It was the face of Georgia Tech’s all-American football star, a running back named Fareek Fanon, constantly referred to in the newspapers and on television as Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon, a local boy, the proudest product of one of Atlanta’s most run-down areas, the Bluff, in a neighborhood known as English Avenue. Even slouched back the way he was, with dreadful posture, in this dim room, the young black man radiated physical power. He wore a black polo shirt with red stripes on the collar, wide open at the throat, revealing the long, thick pair of muscles that came down the sides of his neck and inserted at the clavicle. Adorning his neck was a gold chain so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch. In his forearms and in his elbows and wrists you could see the dense muscles and cable-like tendons of the real ghetto boy (not to mention a massive gold Rolex watch with diamonds set in the face), and above all, you could see that wary, hostile look through the eyes. The polo shirt hung out over his hips, which were engulfed in a pair of ridiculously voluminous black homey jeans that bunched up at his ankles where they met a pair of black Frankensteins, just like those the college boy had been wearing on Piedmont Avenue. In each of his earlobes, which seemed small for so big a man, was imbedded a tiny diamond-bright gem. They may have been diamonds and they may have been rhinestones, but Roger Too White wouldn’t have put it past a kid like this to insist on diamonds.

  “Mr. White,” said Buck McNutter, “I want you to meet Fareek Fanon.”

  Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon didn’t budge. He waited a couple of beats, then gave Roger Too White a barely perceptible nod and a little shrug of the lips that seemed to say, “So you’re here. So what?”

  McNutter glowered, clenched his teeth, mouthed the words “Get up!,” then pantomimed Get up! with his chin.

  The Cannon gave McNutter the little lip shrug, which now seemed to say, “Why’ve I got to put up with this Good Manners shit?”

  Slowly, with a great show of world-weariness, the Cannon got up. Even with his abysmal posture he towered over Roger Too White. Roger Too White extended his hand, and the Cannon deigned to shake it, albeit with a gloriously bored limpness.

  “Fareek is a member of our football team,” said Coach McNutter.

  “Oh, I know that very well,” said Roger Too White, smiling, looking the young man in the eye, hoping to establish some rapport with this hard case. “I expect everybody in Atlanta knows that. I’ve been following your adventures, along with everybody else.”

  The Cannon said nothing. Instead, he gave Roger Too White a quick look up and down, a dubious look, as if to say, “Why would I care what some bitch in a suit like you thinks about me?”

  There was an awkward silence, and then McNutter said, “Mr. White, I’ve asked you to come over here tonight because Fareek has a problem. I have a problem. Georgia Tech has a problem. It happened last night, at a Freaknik party. Fareek’s being accused of—he’s being accused of rape. Actually, it’s a kind of a date-rape thing, I suppose you might say. Fareek swears he didn’t do anything improper, but he’s in a real bind. So am I. So is Georgia Tech.”

  The Cannon looked away and did that little disdainful shrug with his lips again. This time it looked almost like a smirk.

  McNutter’s eyes blazed with reproach. He’d had enough of this ghettoboy cool attitude. “All right, Fareek—tell Mr. White who the young woman is!”

  In a bored, barely audible voice the Cannon said, “Some white girl goes to Tech.”

  “‘Some white girl goes to Tech’!” said McNutter. “Tell Mr. White what some-white-girl-goes-to-Tech’s name is, Fareek! Tell him her name!”

  “I ’unno.”

  “In a pig’s eye you don’t know!” roared McNutter. Then he turned to Roger Too White. “I’ll tell you who it is, Mr. White. Her name is Elizabeth Armholster. She’s Inman Armholster’s daughter, that’s who she is.”

  “You’re kidding!” said Roger Too White, in spite of himself, realizing too late that this was not a very professional response from anyone who fancied himself a high-powered lawyer.

  “I’m not kidding,” said McNutter, “and he wants Fareek’s ass, and he wants Georgia Tech’s ass, and if we lose Fareek, then it’s my ass, too.”

  Inman Armholster. Inman Armholster was one of the first five names you’d think of if the subject was the White Establishment in Atlanta. He was in every network worth networking with in this whole town. He was Old Family and Piedmont Driving Club all the way, and he was rich as Croesus. He could have been up on that terrace tonight, and even if he wasn’t, you could be sure he was invited. Inman Armholster.

  Roger Too White looked at McNutter and then he looked at Fareek Fanon. Questions came flooding into his mind faster than he could sort them out, but the first one was obvious enough. Why had this big white side of beef, McNutter, called him in? He wasn’t a criminal lawyer, and he wasn’t a negligence lawyer. He wasn’t even a litigator. He was a corporate lawyer, and his specialty was contracts. Inman Armholster wasn’t going to be out for money. He was going to be out for blood.

  Roger Too White looked at the young athlete again, standing there behind his smug shield of coolness, clad in his ridiculous ghetto rags, the little jewelry in his ears and the big jewelry on his neck and wrist catching the light. The football star. Roger Too White had never seen one of these people up close before, but here stood an example of one of the worst role models black youth could emulate: the big-time athlete, the mercenary for hire who assumes that the world owes him money and sex, and lots of both, whenever he wants it, and that he will be immune, whatever happens. The code of the mercenary! Rape, pillage, and loot! With no one to answer to! And this sucker has to pick Inman Armholster’s daughter. Whether he knew it or not, and he didn’t seem to know much, the Cannon was now a stick of dynamite.

  Oh, Chocolate Mecca.

  chapter II

  The Saddlebags

  ALMOST EXACTLY THIRTY-SIX HOURS LATER, WHICH IS TO SAY, AT 7:30 a.m., Monday, it was one of those brutally bright April mornings you sometimes get in Atlanta. Even up here on the thirty-second floor of the PlannersBanc Tower, behind a sealed inch-thick thermoplate glass wall, with a ten-ton HVAC system chundering cold air down from the ceiling, you could sense the heat that would soon oppress the city. The conference room faced east, making the glare from the sun unbearable. There was nothing in front of all that plate glass to reduce it, either, no curtains, no blinds, no screens, not one shred, not one slat. Oh no; the whole thing had been carefully thought out, and everybody at the PlannersBanc end of the table knew exactly what the game was.

  Everybody, not just the senior loan officer Raymond Peepgass, knew this breakfast meeting was an elaborate practical joke, starting with the word “breakfast.” Peepgass had made sure the whole lot of them had been advised that if they wanted breakfast, they had better attend to it before they got here. And that they had done, apparently. Nobody was even looking at the “breakfast.” They were all settling back and eyeing the mark, the quarry, the prey, or whatever you should call the butt of a practical joke involving half a billion dollars. It was the old man at the other end of the table, the Croker Global Corporation’s end. To Peepgass, who was a mere forty-six, any man sixty years old was an old man, even a man as burly and physically intimidating as Charlie Croker was.

  Obviously Croker did not realize he was it. He was reared back confidently in his chair with his suit jacket thrown open. The fool seemed to think he was still one of those real estate developers who own the city of Atlanta. He was grinning at the underlings on either side of him, his lawyers, financial officers, division heads, his aging Banking Relations preppies, and his so-called executive assistants, who were a couple of real numbers with skirts up to … here …

  Christ, he was a brute, for a man sixty years old! He was an absolute bull. His neck was wider than his head and solid as an oak. (Fleetingly it occurred to Peepgass that he, a member of the first Amped-Up Audio generation, raised in a treeless spec-house development outside of San Jose, California, had never, so far as he knew, seen an oak, much less a bull.) Croker was almost bald, but his baldness was the kind that proclaims masculinity to burn—as if there was so much testosterone surging up through his hide it had popped the hair right off the top of his head.

  Look at him … the way he’s beaming at the two numbers with the legs. They’re standing, hovering over him … so gorgeous! … a pair of real model-girls! … Miles of blond hair, both of them, down to their shoulder blades … long legs glistening with youth, lubricity, and panty hose … That one … the taller one … such a lovely long neck … pale skin … a slender face, a full-budding lower lip, a demure high-necked silk blouse with a floppy bow tie of the same wan and vulnerable fabric …

  Croker looks up at her with a broad grin and says something, and Peepgass can make out only one thing clearly, a name: “Peaches.” Peaches. He couldn’t believe it. Only in Atlanta would you actually come across some blond bombshell named Peaches.