“All right,” said Clair. “Copy my list. I’ll see you in the morning, Miller.” It was the first time he had discarded the “Mr.”
Sam wrote down the addresses of the bars, stood up, said goodnight and shut the door behind him. “Goodnight,” he said to Marian Burrow.
“One minute, Sam,” she said easily, smiling.
He paused, feeling giddy. The partition divided not only two offices but two emotional whirlpools and now it was as if he had plunged, without taking a breath, deep into the thoughts he had been thinking about her and had almost forgotten. “Yes?”
“I neglected to tell you when you came in. A Miss Buckles phoned while you were out. Said to be sure and ring her at her office. Said she’d be expecting your call.” The black eyes confronted him, one corner of the red mouth dimpling up slyly into the rounded cheek. “You can use the phone here.”
“Thanks. I’m busy. Goodnight.” Descending the stairs, he tried to come to some definite opinion about Marian Burrow. Was she on the make? Or was she just friendly? If she’d been a white girl would he have thought her on the make? But she wasn’t a white girl. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing about Negroes as human beings like himself. Absolutely nothing. All he had known were the statistics of a people: So many lynched. So many millions in tenements and cabins. So many in the spot news: Robeson, Yergan, Wright, Davis, Randolph, Louis. But what went on inside their hearts? They were like the inhabitants of a city he had never seen, a city read about, and now he had come to the gates. Downstairs, on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth, he stared at the passing Negroes, stirred by a tremendous groping curiosity. What were they all thinking of, hoping for, praying for?
He went into an ice-cream parlor, phoning Johnny at his place of work (for he had promised to ring Johnny about how he had made out with Clair) and then Suzy. He arranged to meet both of them in front of Grant’s Bar on Times Square. Johnny was working over-time and he told Sam that eight o’clock suited him fine; Sam told Suzy to go on home but she said he wasn’t getting rid of her as he had on Sunday; her voice was anxious when he mentioned the Italian bars; she said he ought to be careful. Sam hung up finally, rushing out of the ice-cream parlor. He could have picked some better mid-way point than Times Square, he thought. But it was too late now.
He walked west, never noticing the white faces in the going-home crowds, the Harlem Finns and Swedes, the Irish, Italians, Jews. There were only black faces; black women with linoleum shopping bags, roller-skating kids with bruised brown knees, laborers in work shoes crusted with plaster. He had boarded the crosstown street as a man gets on a subway, shuttling now between these Harlem flats and stores. And all these people? What did they want? How did they feel about the war when they were among themselves and no whites were listening?
On Seventh Avenue, Sam pushed into the Aventine Grill. He stepped to the bar, ordered a beer from a big Italian bartender with bushy black eyebrows. It was a small place, the walls painted olive green and decorated with the lithographs distributed gratis by the whiskey manufacturers. He was the only white customer, he observed. A half dozen or so Negroes were leaning on the bar, glasses at elbow. Sam winked at the bartender, who wiped his hands on his apron and slowly, his shoulders swinging, eased over. Sam said. “I want to talk to Mr. Carlucci.”
The bartender looked him over. “I’m him.” He spoke out of the corner of his mouth as if he had been reared in some Irish neighborhood.
“Are you the boss?”
“Who wants to know?”
Sam jerked his thumb towards the rear. Beyond a pinball game, there were a half a dozen tables with wire legs; at one of them a middle-aged man was sitting. “Is that the boss?”
“I ast you who wants to know?”
“The Harlem Equality League sent me over.”
“I guess it’s okay, mister. That’s the boss. He’s my uncle so we got the same name.” The bartender’s face, wooden and impersonal as a beer barrel suddenly opened two worried eyes. “Maybe you guys can do somethin’?”
Sam hurried over to Mr. Carlucci’s table. “You phoned the Harlem Equality League and they sent me over.”
Mr. Carlucci was thin and bald and he had a toothpick between his teeth. Without removing it, he said, “Yes?”
“We want to help you.”
“Yeh?”
“What happened?”
“You don’t look colored.”
“I’m not. I’m white.”
“You look like a wop like me?”
Sam smiled. “What happened, Mr. Carlucci?”
“But you work for the colored?”
“You could say that.”
“They must pay you good money?”
“What happened?”
“I don’t expect nothin’, mister. I don’t expect a single thing from nobody. Not from you, not from the cops. Didn’t I phone the station house and the desk sarge sends a cop over who guzzles three beers which I mark down on his account — ” He wrote on air with his forefinger. “Then, he blows out so a colored man here a good customer o’ mine, good as a white man, lemme tell you, he sees the cop guzzlin’ my beer and when the cop blows out, he says why don’t I get the Harlem Equalities.” He pronounced the name swiftly like the name of a ball team. “And I says who are they and he says they can help me. I don’t take his word, see. I’ll tell you the unvarnished, mister. I don’t take nobody’s word in Harlem so I call the desk sarge and I ask him about the Harlem Equalities and he say you’re Reds. See, mister, I tell you just how it is. But the desk sarge tells me you got influence among the colored and that’s good enough for me.” He had removed the toothpick and now glared up front at the Negroes at the bar. They would drink a beer or two or a small whiskey and leave and other Negroes would come in. It didn’t seem to Sam as if there had ever been any trouble. “I don’t expect a single thing, mister. That’s Harlem for you. Don’t I know how the colored feel about the wops? It’s been n.g. since the Doochay jumped on Selassie so they take it out on me. I’m Mussolini! A hell of a Mussolini I am! Maybe the colored gotta right with the big bars where there’s a dozen guys workin’ and all of ‘em white except maybe the porter who cleans out the can and all the dough, colored dough. But I’m a small joint like you see. The barkeep’s my nephew. Just the two of us. So what the hell they want of me?”
“Who started the trouble today?”
“Who you think? The colored.”
“I’m trying to get at the facts, Mr. Carlucci. What time was it?”
“About five o’clock it was. In comes this big nigger — ” He glanced at Sam. “It slipped the tongue, mister. You ain’t gonna hold it against me?”
“Go on.”
“There was about six guys at the bar like now. I never got it busy. This big colored begins to holler like a son-of-a-bitch. ‘Call yourself colored,’ he says or somethin’ like that. ‘Some colored you are,’ he says or something like that. ‘Drinkin’ in a wop dive.’ He calls this place a dive, the big bastard.”
“How big was he?”
“A six footer. Maybe bigger.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Like nothin’ much. A big face and he was wearin’ a dark suit.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said they wasn’t real Negroes but yellows — that was his wisecrack and he hollers about the killing of that nut Randolph last week. And me here, you know what I was doin’, of all the lamebrains! I was askin’ that guy to ack like a gennelman. Should’ve listened to my nephew who wanted to give’m the bottle. But what the hell, who wants to be the first to start a riot? Not me. He hollers some more that I gyp ‘em. I gyp ‘em! I keep the best beer. You don’t catch me givin’ the customer rubbin’ alky out of a bottle with a fancy label. I sell good stuff.”
“Was this Negro alone?”
“Yeh.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary before he showed up?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Was there an
y sign that you were going to have trouble before he showed up?”
“No.”
“Have your customers been talking much about Randolph? Or the meeting or about the different leaflets?”
Mr. Carlucci looked up at the ceiling as if to say: That’s all they do talk about. “I’m neutral,” he declared. “I know from nothin’. I mind my own business. When some guy grouches heavy maybe I say it’s too bad the nut got himself bumped, only I don’t say nut to them. They’re awful touchy, the colored. They’re like the Jews. One for all and all for one.” He leaned his head on both elbows and muttered. “I been here, you wouldn’t believe it, eighteen years and I can tell that feelin’.”
“What kind of a feeling?”
“Mister, ever hear of a riot? Get twenty more like that big bastard who come in here and you get yourself a riot. Think he listened when I tell’m I can’t hire a colored man. What’ll I do with the nephew? Five kids and a wife. But that big bastard keeps on hollerin’ until the customers walk out except two guys and one of ‘em tells me to call the Harlem Equalities so I done it.”
“Thanks for the information, Mr. Carlucci.”
“Okay. Have a drink on the house.”
In the next two hours, he spoke to a whole series of proprietors. Only a few wouldn’t talk to him. Mostly, they had a this-is-what-happened attitude. It was after eight o’clock before he took the downtown subway. Hanging on a strap, he asked himself what he had found out? The corpus delicti, he answered himself wearily. The good old corpus delicti, the body of the crime, only there was no body. He had a collection of miscellaneous facts about as valuable as his Kalb-Manders-Congressman Patton-Rodney facts; he was a great detective and he’d be an encyclopedia of useless information before he wound up.
The subway thundered into Seventy-Second Street station, into yellow light and new passengers entering between the rubber-edged doors that slid back into metal like blades into their sheaths. He had accomplished nothing the whole long day. Those bars now? The motive had been to pull Negroes out of the Italian bars. He could have stayed in Clair’s office and been as well off. The time? From one p.m. right into the evening. Number of bars? More than the eleven Clair had known of. Several of the proprietors had mentioned other Italian bars not on Clair’s list. Twenty-five bars, approximately. But this wasn’t another Monday in another week. It was the Monday after mass meeting. Sam’s head felt hot as if he were on the verge of a cold. All the facts, half-facts, prejudices and curses he had heard from bar owners and bartenders tumbled inside his brain. All of them had agreed that the hit-run Negroes were big men. Estimated heights went from five feet ten to over six feet. To Sam, this detail, better than anything else, illustrated white Harlem’s pulse beat. From his experience as a policeman, he knew that people reporting the height of a burglar or a mugger usually exaggerated by five inches; five inches added on by the ruler of intense emotion. That was a fact, important not as court evidence, but as a searchlight playing upon the witnesses themselves. Perhaps, the whole city would react in the same way when the story broke in the morning papers.
One other detail had also barbed itself into his consciousness. After his interview with Mr. Carlucci, he had begun asking the others whether any out-of-the-ordinary acts had been committed by the hit-runners. It was a question derived from his professional knowledge of criminals and what a police interrogation should consist of; often malefactors would eat, drink, smoke or commit other acts at the scene of a crime which might serve as guideposts to their identities. The proprietor of the Four Flags Bar and Grill had shown Sam a crumpled leaflet that had been thrown into his face. It was the leaflet put out by the All-Negro Harlem Committee. Was it a plant? Why hadn’t the other leaflets been thrown? Why just this one? Who, anyway, was behind all these “big Negroes”? And how could they be apprehended? There was no evidence to speak of. There had been no arrests as far as he knew. Sam stared at the pale reflection of himself in the rattling subway glass. Suppose the All-Negro Harlem Committee were secretly behind the anti-Italian agitation? How did he know they weren’t? Maybe, that was why Clair had been so reluctant about having him work for the Harlem Equality League?
Sam pushed through the turnstile at Times Square. He hurried through the electric underground of stores situated near the tracks, the drinking places, shooting galleries, gardenia stands, all a little macabre like a living waxworks in the glaring light. He climbed to the street level. The red and blue neons of Grant’s Bar glowed softly in the twilight, and among other people waiting for sweethearts and husbands, he saw Suzy and Johnny. They weren’t together and Sam realized they had never met; they didn’t know each other. He waved his hand, darted through the crosstown automobiles as if he were playing football again. “Suzy, hello.” He grabbed her hand and half-pulled, half-guided her over to where Johnny was standing. “Hello, Johnny. This is my girl, Suzy.” Hungry people with eyes fascinated by Grant’s hot dogs charged like horses after a day’s work between Sam and Suzy and Johnny. From the doors, a smell of pickles, mustard, weenies and beer rolled out.
“This is Johnny, Suzy,” Sam was saying. “I forgot you two were strangers. Boy, I’ve got lapses of memory these days. I’ll make some detective.”
Suzy smiled. “Glad to meet you, Johnny.”
“Same here.” Johnny had a folded evening newspaper under his arm.
Suzy took Sam’s hand. “What a lug you are. I don’t know about your friend but I’ve been here since eight. Eight sharp!”
“Did you eat?” Sam asked her.
“Not too much. My appetite’s weak when I eat without you, dear.”
“How about it, Johnny?” Sam said. “I’m starved.” Johnny nodded and the three of them swung inside. Sam stared at the huge counter with its rows and rows of sizzling hot dogs. “Just look at ‘em.”
“Why were you so late?” Suzy said.
“There’s a time and a place,” Sam said, trying to catch the eye of the girl in charge of the counter. Suzy poked her elbow into his ribs and he twisted his head sideways, smiling down at her tilted chin. “Why, it’s you.”
The neon light polished her light brown hair so that she almost seemed blond. A round black hat like an inflated beret was on her head and she was wearing a black dress with a red block S stitched under her right shoulder. She placed one finger on the S. “A new dress and with your initial.”
He laughed as the girl behind the counter took his order and slapped three hot dogs on a plate. He paid the girl fifteen cents and said to Suzy, “My initial’s M.”
“M as in mutt,” Suzy said. The girl behind the counter stared at Suzy dispassionately; at Grant’s Bar you heard all kinds popping off all day long. Sam noticed that stare as the three of them squeezed over to the mustard pot. He was glad they had come to Grant’s, to this subway rush of gulping eaters. The interior stretched before him busy as Grand Central Station. There were hot meat stands on both ends, chefs in white hats perched high above the clamoring customers. Everywhere men were standing about, nickel beers in their hands, sucking up clams at the seafood bar, leaning on the brass rail. Near Sam, a woman with an elegant marcel was chewing away on a red pepper. High school kids, clerks, soldiers, sailors were gobbling up french fries, hamburgers, roast beef sandwiches. A continuous flow of eaters surrounded the tables set like islands in the middle of the floor. “Know why I picked this place?” he asked Suzy.
“Why?”
“I can’t hear your wisecracks above the noise.”
“Did you resign?”
“No. But I’m working with Clair.”
Johnny wiped a mustard stain from his lips with his handkerchief, his eyes meeting Sam’s. “I’m glad to hear that. How about another hot dog?”
“Not for me,” Suzy said. “Got to watch my complexion. My boss is particular.” As Johnny left them to get the franks, Sam pinched her cheek.
“Well, old spitfire, I’m glad to see you.”
“Without the hands, caveman, especially when you’
ve got them covered with mustard.”
“I have not.”
“Anyway, don’t be so glad to see me.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t heard what you’ve been up to.”
“The Deputy Inspector!”
“Does Johnny always look so sad and quiet?”
“I didn’t notice — ”
“Sh. Here he comes.”
With the second round of hot dogs they each had a beer, and then Sam and Johnny had a second beer while Suzy puffed on a cigarette and read off the whiskey specials listed behind the bar. When they pushed out to Forty-Second Street and over to Broadway, the avenue once as vivid as fireworks, was dimmed out; the huge Wrigley swimming fish neon and the liquor signs dead for the duration. It depressed Sam a little, this living darkness of dancehall girls, side-street Broadwayites walking off their dinners, movie fans, New Jerseyites, stenos, out of towners, tourists from the outlying boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Boys in khaki, Australian pilots, Canadian soldiers. De Gaullists, Russian merchant marine men would loom up as if washed onto the beach of the dark avenue from all the oceans and continents. He peered at the fighting men and wondered if any of those soldiers and sailors had noticed Suzy with her arm through Johnny’s as well as through his own. He was disgusted with his own self-consciousness. Those men in uniforms had come from all the lands; they had fought in the Coral Seas, in the Solomon Islands, in the Libyan desert, in the mountains of the Caucausus, in the Norwegian fjords and in the vast fjord of air over all the cities. They were something and he was definitely a lug, as Suzy called him. He thought that maybe he would be better off in the armed forces. Maybe if he met the enemy head on with bayonet and bullet that would strip him of his stupid ideas? He felt that he had spent the whole day in a cave blacker than any dim-out, searching for a light that wasn’t there.
He circled his arm around Suzy’s waist, sighing. “Just to keep you from being knocked away.”
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