Sam curved into his street, into the lobby of his apartment house. He pressed the button of the automatic elevator. The signal glass glowed red. It was very still in the lobby. Sam stared at the red eye. The elevator ascended from the basement, stopped. He pulled the door open. There was a passenger in the elevator, a Negro of medium height with a smooth-shaven face. The Negro’s right hand was in his pocket. “Hello, Miller,” the Negro said, his right hand coming out. “Stick your hands up! This is a stickup!” There was a gun in the fist. Sam raised his arms. The elevator was descending into the basement. Nobody had pushed the button lettered B. Nobody? Somebody in the basement! Sam thought: SOMEBODY.
The elevator stopped. The inside door slid open automatically. The outside door swung open. There was a second Negro standing in the doorway. His face was square and the grey felt he wore was yanked down so low on his forehead, the brim was resting on his ears.
“Get out!” the Negro with the gun said.
Sam stepped forward. The man in the grey felt grabbed Sam’s right arm and frisked him. “No gat,” he said.
“Keep still, Miller!” the man with the gun warned Sam. “Yell and we’ll plug you.” Sam felt a hard point in the small of his back. He swallowed the saliva in his mouth. He swallowed again.
“Move!” This was the gun’s voice. The point was prodding him to go deeper into the basement. The Negro holding his arm flashed a ray of light on whitewashed walls, concrete floor. Sam heard his footsteps and their footsteps scrape on the concrete.
If I yell for help, he thought; if I yell for help, if I yell, will they shoot? They were no muggers, he knew; they had phoned him in the early morning and threatened his life; they had kidnapped Suzy. The flashlight crisscrossed on a wooden door. The man with the light paused. The man with the gun pushed the door open. The light flicked into a windowless room. There were trunks in one corner. The man with the gun said. “Squat!” and he shut the door half-way. Sam sat down on the corner of a big trunk. The Negro who had grabbed his arm, released his hold, marched to the door. His flashlight hurled into Sam’s eyes. Sam blinked, his eyes stabbed with light. The light pierced through his eyeballs into his brain and he felt as if he were back again in the marihuana. Out of the light, the Negroes had spilled. But it wasn’t a marihuana world. It was the real world. It had always been real, always more horrible than the unreal.
“Where’s my girl?” Sam asked.
“Shut up!” said the gun.
“Damn!” said the second voice, the grabber’s voice.
Bright green light danced on Sam’s eyelids. He groaned. Again, he had been too late. Why hadn’t he tackled the gun in the elevator? Always too late, too late.
“Miller,” the gun said. “You got a chance to live if you answer straight. We been after you for days. We followed you everywhere you went. To the coppers. To your home. Everywhere.”
Sam tried to see the face of the man speaking but the light burned out all the features. At last it had come. The trial! He was on trial for his life, the trial begun on the day of Randolph’s death, the trial begun on the naked streets, the jurors, the shouting crowd. Now, the streets were in the basement. The trial had shifted into the station house, to the Silver Trumpet Ballroom, to the Y.M.C.A. and they were all in the basement and they were the same streets.
“Miller,” the gun said. “What you and Clair cooking?”
“Ask Clair,” Sam cried out.
“Don’t lip us, copper!” the gun said slowly. “You went to Clair because you’re a stool pigeon.”
“No.”
“No use lying.”
Sam was silent.
“What’d you go to Clair for?”
Sam was silent.
“Answer me, you bastard!”
“Nothing to answer.”
“What’d you go to Clair for?”
He felt that he had explained his motives to countless men and now there was nothing to explain any more.
“You bastard!” the gun said. “Answer.”
“Let me alone.”
“Why’d you go to Clair for?”
“To sell him out to the cops! I hate Negroes! I hated them from the day I was born. All I want is hate. Clair hates you, too. He’s a white man! You’re all white men! All of you! You’re white men! You’re all white men!”
“He’s nuts,” the grabber said conversationally.
“Ask Rosenberg! He’ll back you up.”
“Who’s Rosenberg?” the gun said.
“I wanted him to find out. That’s me. I want to find out. God, if only I hadn’t listened to her. God, God!”
“Listen to who?”
“You kidnapped Suzy.”
The flashlight lowered. Sam could see them now, two men, two Negroes blacker than coal, like the darkest Negroes in the world. “Listen,” he cried. “Listen. Don’t kill her. Listen, she’s a friend of yours. She volunteered to work for Clair because she wanted to be near me — ”
A third voice spoke. Sam started. The voice came from outside the room, from behind the half-opened door. Sam’s eyes widened and he gasped. The judge was behind the door. “Suzy Buckles? That’s your girl?”
“Yes,” Sam said.
“You didn’t just meet her at Clair’s?”
“She went to Clair to be near me.”
“Why’d you go to Clair?” the third voice boomed.
“To square myself for Randolph.”
“What you mean?”
“I’m no killer.”
“You killed Randolph?”
“Yes, that’s the way it was.”
“Why’d you go to Clair?”
“To run down the crowd calling themselves the United Negro Committee.”
“Jew bastard!” the third voice said.
“My girl doesn’t hate you. She doesn’t hate you. Listen. Listen.”
The voice behind the door didn’t answer. The gun said. “All Harlem saw you kill Randolph. The Inspector sent you to Clair.” The flashlight lifted into Sam’s eyes. “You Jew liar!”
“Listen! Listen! My girl doesn’t hate you.”
“Never mind that,” the gun said. “You killed Randolph. Randolph was a nigger to you.”
“No.”
“Why’d you kill him?” the gun said.
How many times had he testified on this point? And always the judges had hidden behind their doors. “I don’t know. I don’t know any more.”
“Maybe Randolph could’ve been saved?” This was the third voice.
“Maybe,” Sam conceded.
“You killed him. He was a nigger!” the third voice pronounced. “You hate niggers, you Jew bastard!”
“No, no, no, no.” His brain rocked. He screamed. “Negroes, Negroes, Negroes.” Frantically, he rubbed the light out of his eyes, imaged two spectral shapes edged in green in front of him, marihuana men who were real men in a marihuana world that was a real world. They moved out of the room. The door closed and a voice, whose voice he couldn’t guess, he was too excited, pronounced for the last time. “Stay here until we’re gone!”
“My girl?”
“We don’t know where she is.”
“My girl!” he called to the darkness. The marihuana-like glare stayed in his eyes and he remembered what Marian had said. Aden, she had said.
CHAPTER 15
BILL and his wife returned to the St. George in the whitening darkness just before the dawn. Isabelle had fallen asleep almost right away, her arms around him. But he couldn’t sleep. He felt crushed, lost in sleepless caves echoing of Heney, the Heney oratory at the Hotel Maurice, the Heney directives in Suite 23 of the Hotel Pennston, the Heney jokes in the cab that had carried them to the reception from the brownstone where all the patrons were madams, the Heney instructions to meet Darton Saturday afternoon at three o’clock. Blue clean light fingered into the room. Saturday morning had come, was coming. He couldn’t endure staying in bed any more.
He dressed quietly, his eyes on Isabelle. But she ne
ver stirred. He wrote her a brief note on the desk: “Isa, I’ll phone you at noon. Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine. Bill.” As he signed his name, a pang tore through him.
Downstairs in the street he lurched into a white tiled coffee pot on Clark Street, sitting down at the U-shaped counter. “Toast and black coffee,” he told the counterman. “Scrambled eggs. Give me the coffee now.” A big man in a cap took the stool next to his.
“Hello, Gus,” the big man said to the counterman. “Cold for spring, ain’t?”
“Yeah. Warm up later.”
“That’s what I said to a friend of mine. He just got married. Old as me, he is, and he’s already complaining his wife’s cold. His wife’s got a boy in the Army. I said: What you expect with a son in the Army? Shell warm up after the war. Give them time, I said, the weather and the women.”
The counterman laughed. Bill breakfasted hurriedly, rushed out to the street. It was Saturday! he thought. This was an important day, he foresaw. At three o’clock he would meet Darton. And tomorrow was Sunday. Then Monday. Where would he be a week from Monday? Where?
For hours, Bill wolfed up and down the early morning streets, wandering in a great eccentric circle that always brought him back to the skyscrapers on Montague Street. He wasn’t thinking, he wasn’t planning. Again, he fled, this time into the Spanish and Armenian neighborhood on Atlantic Avenue. His bloodshot eyes fixed on Spanish bodegas, Syrian bakeries, men, women with baby carriages and he saw nothing. Onwards, he walked, into the department stores below Court House Square, among thousands of women shoppers entering and coming out of Namm’s, Loeser’s, Abraham and Strauss’s, and he was lost and homeless, retracking his path through all the cities of his life, the city of flophouses, the city of department stores, the city of gaudy movie houses became Atlanta, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Easton, Pa., Slagtown, Pa. The two New Yorks of his life built themselves side by side in his consciousness, the New York of the depression period when he had been a rent collector, and this New York of Harlem and Brooklyn Heights. Christ, he moaned pitying himself; Christ, what am I going to do? He was finished, he, a real American whose people’d founded the country. He was finished. Oh, God damn the organization!
On and on he walked, still escaping somebody, still running from somebody, lost in cities of real estate men and brokers, in cities of dock wallopers on their way to the piers and workers on their way to the factories under the bridges, in cities of bailiffs and lawyers, in cities of shopping women. His twisted face was haggard, his lips mean and wolfish.
Towards eleven o’clock, Bill was in Big Boy Bose’s house in Harlem. He had just sat down. Big Boy seemed as if he had been in his room forever, not moving a muscle, since the first time Bill had called on him. Big Boy’s suit was blue, this morning, his silk shirt, white. On the wooden table, his pearl grey Stetson looked as if just out of a showcase, Misty-eyed, Bill glanced at the round black face. It was featureless to him, a black spinning disk. “That stink bomb job was fine,” he said.
“I ain’t seen you in a long time.”
“Busy. Too busy. About the cop?”
“What about the cop?”
“I spoke to Dent. Dent said you don’t know what you’re going to do.”
“He did?”
“Dent said you’d do him Monday.”
“Maybe. Maybe if I get a chance at him.”
“A chance?”
“What I said.”
“I don’t understand, Big Boy,” Bill said in a mild voice. His smile broadened. He wanted to please Big Boy. He wanted nothing more out of life than to please Big Boy.
“Can’t you read?” Big Boy said insolently. “I hear there’s a heap of white schools where they teach you the A B C.”
“I get you,” Bill said. “This newspaper stuff. I get you. The cops must be all over Harlem. This girl’s started something.”
“There’s a cop for every five people in Harlem.”
“Too risky trying for the cop? I guess so. Big Boy, I’ll give you a tip. Be careful. The dicks are covering you.”
“When ain’t they? I’ll give you a tip. Don’t touch that copper. That copper’s red hot. He’s walking careful. He knows Harlem’s sore at him. His trigger finger’s curly like an eel. That bastard can shoot, too.” In his blue suit, Big Boy seemed like a night club master of ceremonies. His white teeth smiled a master of ceremonies smile.
“Dent thinks the article in the colored newspapers has something to do with it.”
“Do with what?”
Bill hesitated. Christ, what did he have to lose! “With you cooling on the cop.”
“That Clair article? I read it. That’s no news to me. Not the first time those Jesus Christer colored preach to obey the law.”
They gazed at each other, the huge Negro and the white man. “You look you ain’t slept in a week,” Big Boy said.
“I was out last night.” Bill coughed up a laugh. “Out with the wife.”
“A man needs his ten hours good sleep. Sometimes, I figure I got three shifts, dicks, shadowing me. But my sleep’s my sleep. Not the first time they shadow me.” He shrugged his massive shoulders like a business man relating an inconvenience.
“That why’s the cop alive?”
“I operate a long time with the white dicks after me. I operate white dick or no white dick.” He smiled. “I tell you that cop’s red hot. He’s a stool pigeon. He’s got dicks watching him all the time. One of my boys try for him, and wham!”
Bill’s hands tightened on his knees. “You’re right. We’ve got to be careful. You and me — We’ve got to be careful. You and me, we’ve never seen each other. No more chances for us, Big Boy. Nothing doing! I’m going to forget I ever came here. I never came here. You never saw me!”
“What you driving at?”
“We never saw each other. That’s the best out. I won’t talk about you. You won’t talk about me.” Bill glared at the spinning disk. The disk was laughing. “What’s so funny?”
“You don’t trick me, white man.”
“I’m not trying to trick you — ”
“You can go and talk to the Commissioner of Police. You can’t do nothing to me. I get my housekeeper to swear you never been here. I swear you never been here. Chappie, he never saw you. Aden, he never hear of you — ”
“Big Boy — ”
Big Boy lifted a silencing hand. “What you?” he asked contemptuously. “Me, the whole town know me. That’s nothing new. God damn papers after me all the time. Like anybody big, I always got lil craps try to frame me.”
“Big Boy, you don’t understand — ”
“I understand you.”
“Honest to Christ, you didn’t get me!” And a crazy smile, false and thin and trembling glued to his lips.
“I got you the first time I seen you. You aim for a riot. You, South!”
“Big Boy, please. Please. Aden’ll prove — ”
“Lord give me my own eyes,” Big Boy said. All of his bulk seemed to freeze, the eyes freezing tight to Bill’s face. Finished! Bill thought in frenzy. The blood streamed into Bill’s face; a torrent was smashing in him; his head was smashed by that torrent and he gaped at Big Boy’s eyes. Eyes, he raved; the black bastard’s eyes, the eyes! Heney’s, Hayden’s, the eyes …
“Eyes,” he muttered aloud.
“Don’t come here again,” Big Boy said. “Go home and sleep it off.”
In the street, the finger was still pointing at him, and behind the finger were two black pupils. The pupils floated on glassy whitish surfaces streaked with tiny red lines. Now, Bill knew with a drumming conviction that they were all pointing the finger at him. It was a long finger. Maybe, who could tell, as long as a building, a skyscraper. It was everywhere, that finger, and they were all pointing, Big Boy, Hayden, Isabelle. Yes, Isabelle! Why had she gone off with Hayden at the reception? Maybe Hayden had recruited her into the organization and she’d sworn the oath. The oath …
He saw a bright avenue with Negr
oes in bright spring clothes. He saw a cab and stepped into it. He slumped into the seat. Who had ordered the driver where to go? Himself? Who had said: “Get to Brooklyn. Across the bridge.” Across what bridge? Who had said: “across the bridge”? Maybe there wasn’t one of him but two? That sometimes happened in life. Everybody knew that. He gazed at his hands and counted them carefully. One hand, two hands. He lifted his hands close to his face and counted. One. Two. He placed his hands on his knees. “Two,” he said aloud. “I’m two. This is dumb.”
The cab rolled south and he stared out of the window. Nothing was one. Houses were two. People were two. He covered his eyes with his palms and almost sobbed. All the others, yes. But not Isabelle! Yet, Isabelle had done this to him …
Slowly, he came to himself as the cab slanted down on the Brooklyn cobblestones. He was like a man after a drunk. He was flooded with self-recriminations. That was what was wrong with him. That was why he was on the spot. He had been too easy going. Easy going in the organization. Easy going with Isabelle. She’d wasted his energies. It’d been a ticklish job, this Harlem job, and he’d wasted himself squabbling with her. Hadn’t she been in his head all the time? Hadn’t he eaten his heart out because of her? Oh, damn her, damn her!
“Here we are,” said the cab driver. “Over the bridge.”
Bill called out Darton’s address. The cab spun into high gear. Bill leaned back. Christ, he had to look out for himself. No one else would. He was on the spot but maybe it wasn’t as much of a spot as he had thought talking to Big Boy. Dent was no hot head. Dent was cool and if Dent said that Aden’d keep Big Boy in line, he could rely on it. Damn the nigger. Damn them all. Damn Isabelle. And suddenly the last connective tissue between Isabelle and himself seemed to snap. There was a snapping sensation inside of him. Damn her! he thought and he was relieved. The sensation was strange; again, he felt that there were two of him, two Bills of different sizes. It was as if he were whittling down, mutilating into smallness the Bill who had loved Isabelle; smaller, smaller, small as a toy, a tiny man-trinket; the whittler was larger and larger and larger. And one Bill was gone. All that was left was a man with burn scars riding in a cab to meet another man with a brown pompadour. All that was left was a beautiful woman who was living with him at the Hotel St. George.
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