Aaron felt the weight of the graft in the palm of his hand, wet, sticky, unclean. He handed it to O’Malley without looking at him.
“That little cheap son of a bitch,” O’Malley said. “Five? What’d he tell ya, that his wife was sick?”
Aaron stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Yes,” he said, “Mr. Horowitz said his wife was sick.”
“Ah, well, I’ll see him myself tomorrow night.” He held the cigarettes before Aaron’s face, close to his nose. “And you still don’t smoke?” he asked ambiguously.
Aaron turned his face to the sergeant. “No,” he said coldly, not trusting his voice; it had thinned with tension. “No, I still don’t smoke.”
“Well, aren’t I the lucky one then, getting all these nice packs of butts for myself. Drive straight on down the avenue.”
O’Malley leaned comfortably back against the seat and loosened the collar of his tunic. The plaid shirt beneath his uniform was too damn heavy and warm for the weather and the weather was too heavy and warm for the time of year. He would be glad when it turned cold and raw. The hard winds would clear the streets of the damn black niggers, all leaning against the lampposts, sprawled the length of outdoor stairways, leaning and sitting and lounging on garbage cans or on the curb or along the running boards and fenders of cars like they were glued in place. He’d never seen a race for just leaning on things like these people.
As Aaron Levine carefully followed his directions, O’Malley scanned the scene through the side window. A bum hurriedly hid the brown paper bag behind his back, nodded his head toward the patrol car in that funny, silly way they had about them. Ah, the hell with that damn fool. O’Malley was not about to collar some jig for drinking from a common bottle. Not at ten-thirty at night. He glared at the son of a bitch just long enough and hard enough to let him know he had fooled no one, especially not Sergeant O’Malley. Couldn’t let them think you weren’t on to them at all times. Well, they knew him up here at any rate. A hard man. Yeah, watch out for Sergeant O’Malley, he’s a ball breaker. Damn right too they were to think it; it was the only way to deal with them. It was what they expected and what he gave them.
“What the hell is that up ahead there?” O’Malley asked. He pointed to the left side of the street.
“Looks like a jump-rope game,” Levine said. He braked lightly and waited for the sergeant’s instruction.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake, now look at them. All them little girls should be home and asleep. Just pull up here for a minute and I’ll have a word with them.”
There were four of them: two steady enders and two steady jumpers. The steady enders were the smallest, no more than seven or eight years old, with big, dark evasive eyes. The tiniest dropped her hand and the rope dangled from it as she watched, from beneath her lowered face, the police sergeant approach.
“Now what are you little girls doing out this time of night?” Brian O’Malley asked in what he thought was a warm and friendly tone.
The three smallest girls studied the sidewalk intently, then looked up, not at Brian but at the oldest girl. She was a slim light-tan girl with a head full of tiny tight braids which stuck out at all angles from her skull.
She spoke for all of them in a lazy blurred voice. “We just jumpin’. Ain’t doin’ no harm.” She mumbled but her expression was sharp and defiant and her tan eyes met him without wavering.
“Just jumpin’, is it? And do you know what time of night it is? You should be home in your beds asleep.”
The smallest girl turned and ran, dragging the rope behind her. The oldest girl called after her, “You let that rope go, you dum’ Lainie. You drop it, hear? That my rope we wuz usin’.”
She ran forward swiftly and gracefully and snatched the rope from the sidewalk, and as she returned to where Brian and the two other girls stood, she slowly and deliberately wound the rope around her arm and over her shoulder into a loop. She returned her gaze to O’Malley and waited.
“Well, where do you live?”
The second-smallest girl giggled, pointed across the street.
“Well, get going home then. Right now, missy.”
The child grabbed the other girl’s arm and pulled her. “She my sister. She live there too.”
“Well, isn’t that a wonder. Get off home, then, the two of you and quick.” He turned from the sight of them running into their building. This was another matter altogether standing here confronting him. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, she stood, feet wide apart in broken shoes, flimsy sweater and dirty skirt over thin body, head raised slightly, fingers threading the rope over her shoulder restlessly.
“Well, now, what about you?”
“Didn’t do nothin’. Just standing out here. Didn’t do nothin’.”
There was a stretched tension about the girl. Her body, thin and limber, seemed about to spring, either at him or from him. Her voice was tight and challenging. The little bitch didn’t come high as his shoulder, and though she’d said nothing openly defiant, there was nothing but defiance and insolence coming from her.
“You watch that mouth of yours or it’s liable to feel some knuckles,” O’Malley said quietly. “Where do you live, or don’t you have a home? You some little alley cat, or what?”
She seemed to go pale. It was an odd thing but sometimes these yellow ones went pale and it never failed to surprise him.
“Ain’t no alley cat,” she said tightly. “Got a home like everybody else.”
She didn’t flinch or grimace or make a sound when he wrapped his strong hand around the slender arm and squeezed, deliberately inflicting a hard, mean pain.
“Then turn your black ass around and head for your home before I take my nightstick and start knocking some of them braids off a’ your kinky little head.”
He shoved her from him and watched her closely. Her eyes glassed over with stark hatred; her mouth twitched but she raised her head and walked past him slowly, with that deliberateness he had noticed before. The rope hung over one thin shoulder and she rested her hand inside the loop. He watched her walk down the block, a child but not a child. Nearer to a woman; nearer to a black woman. Her backside swayed, high-assed, with that peculiar sway-back that emphasized the hard, lean but rounded buttocks. Christ, it got to him. Made him think of someone else. Some other high-assed black woman with black firm flesh.
He watched the girl turn toward the entrance of a tenement, stop, face toward him. He couldn’t see her clearly, just the dark outline of her slim young body, but the contempt was in the rigid posture and the sudden way she turned, head high, dismissing him by entering the doorway. He ought to follow after her and give her a taste of his nightstick. Right across that high black little ass. Little bitch. Little black bitch.
Brian O’Malley returned to the patrol car. He strained to get his voice normal. “Little bastards ought to be home in bed instead of out on the streets this time of night. Well, what can you expect anyways? Look what they come from. Drive along 118th, give us a right on Lenox.”
O’Malley removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and sleeve. He could feel sweat down his back, under his arms, in his crotch. Memory, moist and hot, flooded him.
The first real attraction had been the over-all darkness of her skin: all over her body, a smooth, even brown, her breasts as dark as her arms, her arms as dark as her stomach, one smooth stretch of color. Rounded, all of her rounded, all of her a wondrous combination of hardness and softness. Firm flesh which was not like any flesh he had ever known: it was flesh which had moved toward him, at him.
O’Malley shoved his hat on, pulled the visor low over his forehead. Levine slowed down, anticipating a red light.
O’Malley turned his attention to the Jew. Who the hell did this long-legged little kike know anyway, to get his ass in a patrol car not even a full year on the job? He should be out pounding his shoes, not resting his behind.
Raucous laughter, female, high and sustained and uninhibited, cut through al
l other street noises and thoughts and brought O’Malley back to the inside of his brain, to contemplation of that despised, degraded and degrading body. His hands rested lightly on his knees, moved, his fingers cupped kneecaps which turned into dark, hard, mysterious breasts. His tongue flicked his lips dreamily.
You wanna taste, baby? Go ahead, baby. Ain’t you never tasted? Man, you ain’t never lived. You poor policeman, think you know everything when you don’t know nothing. But Lola will teach you. Moist, thick, sour, sticky, repellent. But still...
His large hands kneaded his kneecaps but they were not pliant and wildly obscene: she had a marvelous obscenity of flesh beneath the skin, nipples leaping hard at his touch. Belly round and flat at the same time. Muscular. Muscles moving easily, drawing in the flesh so that her whole rib cage seemed to pierce the surface of dark skin when she writhed in a certain way.
You like to see tricks, baby lover man? Ain’t nobody showed you no tricks? Just one, two, three, out and away. Shit, honey, that’s nothin’. That’s not even getting there. Getting there’s the most fun, the ride, the trip on the way. Let Lola show you, take you there. Oh, nice, nice, not yet, slow down, lover man, slow torture, let it be, right to your toes. Feel it, lover, feel it where you didn’t know you could. Lola gonna make you feel. Oh, baby, can’t you just die, what Lola do for you?
There was static on the car radio, a voice spoke some incomprehensible message, but they ignored it since it hadn’t been prefaced by their car number.
“You want me to continue along Lenox, Sarge?”
O’Malley snapped his head around. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, yeah, just move along some. Let’s give Patrolman Fitzgerald a see.”
Patrolman Fitzgerald was where he was supposed to be, clearly visible, clearly on the job.
He saluted casually. “Hot night, Sarge, for the time of the year.”
“Yeah, it is.” He scanned the memorandum book which was presented for his initialing. Fitzgerald had a nice round clear hand. “Here, what’s this all about? Here, at nine-twenty you found Jones’s grocery store opened? What was that all about?”
“The old man is getting a bit absent-minded, Sergeant. He left the light burning and the door on the latch. I sent a neighborhood kid up to his flat to fetch him. He’s getting on to seventy-six or seventy-seven, you know. Just took himself off to bed without locking up. I gave him a talking-to, you know.”
O’Malley peered brightly from beneath his visor. “And what did he give you in return?”
Fitzgerald clutched his breast theatrically. “Oh, now, Sergeant O’Malley, what is it you’re thinking? Would I be accepting anything from the poor old gent?”
“You’d accept his eyeballs if you could sell them to a blind man.”
Fitzgerald said bitterly, “Ah, the old man is so damn old he hasn’t the sense he was born with. Didn’t even have the decency to tell me ‘thank you, officer’ and that’s a fact.”
“It’s facts I go by, Fitz,” O’Malley told him. “And they have a way of making themselves known.”
“Sergeant, you know me.” Fitzgerald spread his hands wide and his nightstick dangled from its leather thong.
“Yeah, I do and that’s the trouble. Well, good night, Fitz. And watch yourself, lad, because you never know who else might be doing just that.”
Again, innocence accused, Fitzgerald’s tone was injured. “Ah, Sergeant O’Malley, I’ve no idea at all what you mean.”
O’Malley didn’t respond. He’d gone through the routine with Fitzgerald automatically. He tried to distract himself with words but the images and memories and flesh-longing encompassed him again as he settled in the patrol car and he could not distract himself from his body. His brain filled with remembered sensuality and he sat, slightly dazed, in the dank, sour automobile.
“Sergeant O’Malley, you want me to take a left on 127th?”
It was the second time Aaron had asked the question, but O’Malley still didn’t answer. Since he could only go right or left and stay within their precinct, Aaron pumped the brake pedal and signaled for a left turn.
“Go straight ahead,” O’Malley said in a strange thick voice.
“But we’re on 127th.”
“Go straight ahead. Do what you’re told.”
Aaron didn’t ask any questions but he felt a slow creeping chill down his spine as they crossed the barrier into the 32nd Precinct. The city was defined by precinct lines: each territory marked out, assigned, defined. He felt as threatened as though he were in a foreign land where an incomprehensible language was spoken. The simple fact was that a radio car from the 28th had no legitimate reason to casually patrol the streets of the 32th. At each corner he hesitated, slowed, waited for the order to turn around and head back.
“Keep going to 129th,” O’Malley instructed.
At 129th, O’Malley directed a right turn. “Pull up here. No, a bit farther down, in back of that Dodge. All right, all right, cut the motor, Levine.”
O’Malley was tense and irritated but more tense than anything else. He blotted sweat from his upper lip, glanced through the windshield, then through the back window. His tension was contagious and Aaron looked around too, afraid of what might be coming.
“I’ll not be gone more than a few minutes,” O’Malley said.
Aaron had to suppress a crazy urge to plead with O’Malley not to leave. What if a precinct car came by? What would he say? What the hell was he doing here anyway?
“I just have to take care of a personal matter,” O’Malley said. “Sit tight and keep your eyes straight ahead. You don’t know nothin’ about this. Just take it easy.”
“But, Sergeant, what if a precinct car comes by?” he couldn’t resist asking.
O’Malley glanced at his wristwatch. A quarter to eleven. Good timing. “There’ll be no precinct car. Relax and keep your trap shut, Levine. And your eyes straight ahead.”
O’Malley disappeared somewhere behind the car. Aaron couldn’t resist the urge to watch him through the rear-view mirror. He entered the second building behind the car before Aaron turned around and stared out the back window.
Swell. Now the stupid Irish bastard was shaking down people outside his precinct. All Aaron needed was for the regular precinct man to come along and start asking questions. He wouldn’t know what to say. What do you say to these crazy dumbbells?
In a whisper loud enough for God to hear, Aaron prayed, “Please, please. Let him come back in a minute. Let him just take a leak in the hallway and come back and let us get out of here before one of those other gonifs comes and starts asking me questions. What do I know about all this? Please!”
TWO
THE STRONG SHARP ODOR of black enveloped Brian O’Malley completely. He filled his lungs in short hard gasps, breathed through his mouth, tried to avoid the repugnant sourness of the tenement hallway but the urine, sweat, grease, body, animal smell encompassed him, clung to him, entered him. He stopped halfway up the wooden staircase and listened, not to the muffled sounds of radios behind the walls or of people moving about.
His hand moved down, gently pressed against the hardness which had, unbidden, throbbed against the fabric of his trousers. It was the first time he had touched himself since the sight of the girl and he was not surprised. The hardness was from within the center of himself, where no resolve or regret could ever penetrate; there was only the one destroying desire for the soft-hard body of the flat-bellied brown woman on the top floor.
He rapped his knuckles sharply on her door, pressed his face close to the fetid wood. He heard a shuffling movement, a sigh, and then her voice, heavy as he remembered it
“Who dere?”
His lips practically tasted the rotting wood. “Open up, Lola, it’s me. It’s Sergeant O’Malley. Open up the door.”
The voice seemed to whisper from within the wood itself into his ear. “What you want?”
His shoulder leaned heavily with a terrible physical awareness of the barrier between them. “Open up befor
e I rip the door off.”
He heard the lock turn, felt the metal doorknob turn within the palm of his hand. She stepped back and watched him as he entered the room.
Added to all the other odors, there now assaulted him the odor of the woman. Beads of sweat stood on her broad dark forehead. There were large wet half-moons under each arm of the shapeless, colorless wrapper. She drank deeply from the glass of gin and that too filtered through her body, came from the pores of the skin, mixed with other smells, blatant, repellent, maddening, mysterious.
She leaned against the table at the center of the small dark room and said without expression, “Ain’t seen you in a long time.” She moved to the sink, poured more liquor into her glass, leaned back. It was a crazy room: a kitchen, but at the same time a living room, with heavy upholstered furniture.
The sink, the fact that she stood there, leaned against the sink, made Brian feel that they were in a kitchen and that, too, added to his growing sense of excitement. There was only one small light in the room, a yellowish bulb which hung from a wire in the ceiling and which moved slightly from side to side, as though she’d brushed it with her hand. It cast shadows over everything, cast her face into ugly shadow. It was an ugly face, wide, placid, unfocused. Her very placidity and ugliness excited him. The richness of her naked arm, the knowledge that beneath the thin fabric of her wrapper was that brown moist mystery of flesh, choked him. His hand moved along the buttons of his tunic; he slid his belt around so that his holstered gun pressed the small of his back.
Watching him, she moved now; she moved her head back and forth slightly, but so slightly he wasn’t sure he had seen it, and if he had seen it, the movement, of denial, only increased his sense of purpose and his growing sense of brutality.
Here, in the kitchen, standing up, clothed, her, pressed against the sink, shaking her head, no no no. His eyes stayed on her full lips as his fingers undid the buttons of his fly.
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