‘You disgust me.’
‘Do I?’ Knowingly, with her bitch knowledge.
And I disgust myself, he thought.
‘I suppose I should say something like, “No one ever does that to me.” And vow vengeance.’
He moved to the top of the stairs. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘And I shall go ahead with our little arrangement.’
‘Do what you please.’
He ran down the stairs.
‘Hallo old man,’ said Henry Massingham at the bottom. ‘We were beginning to wonder what had happened to you.’
Zhukov fought a desire to smash his fist into the decent, second-class face. Possibly Massingham was plotting the seduction. Would be there with his camera in a closet in the Statler-Hilton. Such a man as Massingham would not hesitate to use his own wife. Most likely she’d been used before—and had enjoyed it. Such were the people Vladimir Zhukov now mixed with. ‘I’m leaving now,’ he repeated.
‘So soon? I was looking forward to having quite a chat. Everyone else will be disappointed.’
‘You’d better find another performer. I should imagine a Chinese would be quite an attraction.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ Massingham said.
Zhukov took his grey hat, F.B.I. style. ‘Goodbye. Make my apologies to your wife.’
‘But when shall we meet again? I thought we might play a little chess. Although I realize I’m not in your class.’
‘No,’ Zhukov said. ‘You’re not.’
‘But when?’
‘I’ll call you.’
11
WASHINGTON burned. And Vladimir Zhukov bled for it. He wanted to help, he wanted involvement—to exorcise the sickness of his own self-disgust.
He drove his little bug fast through the empty Sunday streets in the direction of the smoke clotting the skyline to the north-east of the city.
He wound down the window and smelled the fires, heard gunfire—puny at a distance. You couldn’t believe distant gunfire until you saw the dead, the dying, and the wounded, clutching at their ruptured flesh. In Leningrad they had shot those beyond help, those with the blood pumping energetically from the inner tubes of their guts, and he had turned away from the eyes of men imploring the executioners of mercy to permit them a few more moments of life.
Despite those memories he still couldn’t believe the distant gunfire crackling like the dripping red and green rockets that celebrated the Great October Socialist Revolution every year in Moscow.
His beetle skidded and rocked and he drove faster. He lost himself and found that he was among the first showcase buildings of Washington. A cop jumped from the sidewalk waving his gun.
Zhukov swerved and scurried on. He heard the cop shouting at him to stop and in his driving mirror saw him take aim. But no shot came; the C.D. plates, unexpected on such an undiplomatic automobile, chaining the cop’s trigger finger.
Ahead were more cops. He still tried to reach the fires but ended up on 7th attracted by the crowds and the sound of plate glass shattering.
At an intersection the lights changed imperturbably. And a dented Chevvy, crammed with Negroes and loot—a coffee-table, a record-player and a plaster display dummy roped to the roof—stopped at the red, its indicator winking left, very law-abiding amid the pillage.
Vladimir Zhukov laughed aloud.
Gunfire nearer. A few pot-shots followed by a crackle of machinegun fire.
Through the streets of Moscow stormed the Bolsheviks seizing what had been denied them since the Czars first wrote the history. Killing exploiters-of-the-masses who stood in their way.
Excitement pulsed in Zhukov’s breast. The beat of a war drum. Yet he wanted to grab the looters, the rioters, the vengeful and tell them, ‘This is not the way. This is the way to lose the dignity you’ve sought.’
Martin Luther King, man of peace, had died and the funeral rites were war.
The Chewy, still winking conspiratorially, turned left crunching broken glass beneath its tyres. No hand signals.
Down a side street three cops stood together watching the grinning looters make their exit. Still, they had observed the red lights.
Daggers of glass lay in the road ahead. Zhukov parked his bug and joined the fun.
One of the cops shouted. ‘Get the hell out of here. You crazy or something?’
Zhukov grinned, waved.
But the hatred came a poor second to pure avarice. It was a carnival of robbery. Grinning, laughing, they sacked the shops. All colour television gone now, stocks of black-and-white dwindling fast.
Clothes, shoes, food, cosmetics, suitcases, boxes of candy and other assorted merchandise were placed in waiting transport.
The cops stared in the opposite direction as if they were watching a baseball game.
Smoke eased its way down from the ghetto fires.
Two blacks wearing ladies’ wigs, one blonde, one brunette, combed with style, came towards him down the sidewalk, sidestepping the glass.
One of them struck Zhukov’s shoulder, fingers digging in hard. ‘Why don’t you grab yourself something, whitey?’
‘Grab yourself a black wig, white man. Grab yourself an Afro.’
‘This is not the way,’ Zhukov shouted.
‘Sure it’s the way, whitey. We’re as good as you, whitey.’
‘Not like this.’
‘Say, you German or somethin’?’
‘Russian.’
‘Shit. Whoopee.’ They hesitated, not too sure what Black Panthers did about Red Russians, then swaggered on.
Afternoon settled into sulphurous evening.
Zhukov passed a store with eight enticing plate-glass windows still intact and the furniture behind it as inviolate as a room at Mount Vernon. Why? Because it was owned by blacks, he guessed.
In Red Square boots smeared the frost on the cobblestones. The rape of the privileged was under way in its first tumescent thrust.
Berlin. And the Fascist oppressors crawling helplessly in the debris. Oppressors such as rheumy old men and skinny girls.
Why do humans desecrate triumph?
Zhukov wended his way through the cheerful robbers towards his patient car. Volkswagens the thieves did not seem to want.
As he backed the car up and turned a squad of troops arrived at the intersection in a jeep. They fired tear gas which was circulated by the spring breeze. The weeping crowds dispersed to find other bargains at rock-bottom prices.
Zhukov drove to Constitution and followed a silver tour bus, bearing the sign ‘Cherry Blossom Festival,’ packed with women peering through cameras.
The bus turned up 14th. Zhukov accelerated, overtook it and waved it down. The driver was small and phlegmatic, withered by gasoline and dust, pot-belly permanently adjusted for driving.
Zhukov climbed out waving his arms like an usher. ‘Don’t go up there. There’s a lot of trouble.’
‘Sure there’s a lot of trouble,’ said the driver. In his white cap was stuck a cardboard badge printed with a cluster of pink blossoms.
‘You can’t take these ladies up there.’
‘They wanna go.’ The driver stuck his thumb over his shoulder indicating the monolith of American womanhood to which, long ago, he had acknowledged defeat.
‘They’ll get hurt.’
‘You tell ’em, buddy.’
The ladies from the midwest directed outraged hostility Zhukov’s way. Tier on tier of middle-aged, self-determination, intent upon emancipation, contemptuous of masculine frailty.
Zhukov shouted, ‘There’s shooting up there.’
One woman wearing baggy trousers and a lumberjack shirt beneath a sweater came to the door. ‘You’re not American,’ she accused beneath bright bouffant hair.
‘I’m Russian.’
‘Ah.’ She turned. ‘He’s a Russian, girls.’
‘The cherry blossom’s that way.’ Zhukov pointed towards the Tidal Basin.
‘Then you go see it.’
The driver chewed with the rhythm of w
heels. ‘See what I mean? I’d back this bunch against the blacks any day.’
The door closed and the bus moved off. Zhukov accompanied as escort.
Up the street bus and car were stopped by police with guns, visors, walkie-talkies, gas-masks, lights flashing on their cars.
The ladies from the midwest poured out of their bus. Combat troops alighting.
A cop came over, stuffing his gun away in respect of their sex. ‘Better go home, ladies. Washington ain’t no place for sightseeing today.’
The ladies disagreed. They moved down F Street commanded by the woman in the red and black lumberjack shirt who had put on glasses shaped like butterflies the better to see it all. The looting blacks paused. The cop shouted, ‘Hey!’
The advance was orderly at first. But within the ranks there lurked a brash spirit. In sensible shoes and sensible skirt, large backside pugnacious, face flushed and perhaps even distracting thirty years ago, she suddenly left the phalanx.
The leader bawled, ‘Florrie, come back here.’
Florrie returned—carrying a Scrabble set. ‘Mine’s worn out,’ she explained.
They broke ranks in orderly fashion. Each to her own.
‘Girls!’ The leader’s authority ebbed like a haemorrhage. ‘Well, watch the glass anyway.’ And, if you can’t beat ’em join ’em, so she helped herself to a handbag.
The ladies took a prize apiece. No more. Getting aggravated with any Negroes who resented their presence. Then formed up, about-faced and returned to the bus.
The cop, Irish face bunched beneath his cap, appealed to Zhukov. ‘What do you do, mac?’
Zhukov said he didn’t know.
The cop looked at the Negroes and the women. ‘Jesus, I don’t know who’s going to take the world over. But it sure as hell ain’t going to be us. And I don’t reckon it’s going to be them either’—pointing at the rioters.
Outside the Press Building Zhukov met the German, Helmut Richter. Still glossy despite it all, Slavonic features always assessing.
‘Want to come up? You’ll get a wonderful view from the club.’
‘Thank you,’ Zhukov said. He left the Volkswagen across the street.
In the elevator Richter said, ‘It’s pretty bad. It’s broken out all over the country. It’s as near as dammit to civil war. They’ve even got a machinegun post on Capitol Hill.’
‘I don’t think it will come to civil war,’ Zhukov said. ‘This is America.’ The phrase hung naïvely in the car.
Richter looked surprised. ‘An odd remark for a Russian.’
‘Not really.’ If you couldn’t explain it to yourself you certainly couldn’t explain it to a German intermediary.
‘It is strange, is it not, that you and I were fighting each other nearly a quarter century ago. Now here we are together in an elevator for ring-side seats of Washington burning?’
From the windows of the elegant bar, the Stars and Stripes limp behind them, the world’s newsmen watched the skyline across the assorted rooftops. Smoke black and white and thick above the ghetto cubes—like an old Negro’s hair, Zhukov thought. And flames bursting high in digestive belches as the fire ate the buildings, then subsiding comfortably. Fatly and thickly, or grey and sparsely, according to the meal, the smoke rolled gently in the evening sky.
Beside them the agency machines punched out bulletins on what was happening a few blocks away.
Richter brought back a scroll of communiqués and gave it to Zhukov.
The report placed flexible borders around the rioting. Fourteenth and New York Avenue up as far as Randolph Street and east on H Street as far as 15th.
And from the window the world watched. Oriental, occidental, Democrat, Republican, Communist, Capitalist, black, brown! white, deep south, far north. All engrossed in the flames.
Who is the enemy?
Zhukov read on, his mind imprisoning facts and statistics.
These were the troops: Third Infantry Regiment, Fort Meyer, Va., 700 men; Sixth Armoured Cavalry, Fort Meade, Md., 2,200; District of Columbia National Guard, 1,300; Marine Corps Schools Battalion, Quantico, Va., 700; 91st Engineers Battalion, Fort Belvoir, Va., 700; First Brigade 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C., 2,000; 716th Transportation Battalion, Fort Eustis, Va., 600; 544th Support and Service Battalion, Fort Lee, Va., 700; 503rd Military Police Battalion, Fort Bragg, N.C., 500.
And the Negro Mayor, Walter E. Washington—such a name—had pushed the curfew back from 5 p.m. to 4.30.
Also a soul singer called James Brown—such a name—had flown to Washington from Boston to make a radio-television appeal. ‘I’m fighting for the black man to have pride. From one brother to another—go home. I’m not a Tom. I’m a man. Nobody can buy me. This is America. A man can get ahead here. Don’t burn. Give the kids a chance to learn. Don’t terrorize. Organize.’
Feeding the scroll through his hands, Zhukov nodded in agreement with James Brown. Don’t destroy the dignity you are seeking. We are all seeking.
An Australian, looking curiously at Zhukov, asked, ‘What will your people make of this?’
‘My people?’
‘Yeah. Tass, Pravda, Izvestia.
‘They will report it,’ Zhukov replied.
‘Sure,’ said the Australian. ‘Sure.’
Richter took the communiqué from Zhukov. ‘Want to go up there and have a look? I’ve got a pass. You should get through all right. At your own risk, of course.’
‘I should like to go,’ Zhukov said politely.
On the skyline the convoluted smoke, the flames brighter in the thickening dust, had obscured the first stars.
It was war. A beleaguered city after the first onslaught awaiting the second wave of shock troops.
Armoured cars lurked down sidestreets, snouting and malicious. Troops and cops in white helmets and visors guarded the corners, stopping Negroes, okaying Zhukov and Richter and telling them it was their own funeral.
Excitement and a desire to participate regrouped in Zhukov’s breast.
‘Let’s take a look at the White House,’ Richter said. As sleekly imperturbable in his suede jacket and black turtle-neck as a Luftwaffe ace; Leica slung round his neck. You had to admire him.
They turned down G, past the Treasury. There stood the White House—‘like an English clubhouse’, as Dickens had once described it. Inviolate and mellow amid its lawns; a lordly colonial sundowner.
‘But if the blacks had mortars,’ Richter mused.
Troops surrounded their commander-in-chief’s home; an armoured car was parked outside a small church crowned with gold which Zhukov hadn’t noticed before.
An officer shouted an order and the troops steadied their guns. Down the street came a gang of blacks whooping, hands clenched in Black Panther salutes. ‘Kill us,’ they cried. ‘Kill us like you killed Martin King.’
They proceeded unkilled.
The troops relaxed.
‘Better get outta here, you guys,’ a young officer said to Richter and Zhukov.
Richter showed his pass.
‘Still better move.’
The troops, Zhukov thought, looked as tough as hell. Any fear hidden behind their armour.
He and Richter struck back towards 14th along New York Avenue. Passing a store called the Spy Shop selling electronic surveillance equipment (bugs), closed circuit TV, self-defensive aerosol dispensers which could incapacitate an attacker for thirty minutes at twenty feet.
Back to the go-go and porno of 14th. ‘A pity they didn’t burn this,’ Zhukov said.
Richter nodded non-committally; perhaps he liked pornography.
The smell of burning was strong now. A few sparks spiralled above them like fireflies. Dusk gave way to night.
Now they were in the portals of the ghetto. They saw a couple of cops kicking and punching a teenager, ignoring the order to use restraint.
Richter said, ‘Are you sure you want to go on?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll go another block. No further.�
��
‘Okay,’ Zhukov said. ‘Another block.’ Pleased that it was Richter who had called a halt first.
Just off 14th they came upon a liquor store almost drained of its juice. Booze ran on the sidewalk as dark as blood in the light of the fires. Propped against the wall were the bodies of those who had passed out, stacked there like empties. Scotch, vodka, gin, vermouth, wine, brandy, mixed on the road, a wild cocktail spiked with broken glass.
The blacks danced, hugged and wept, slicing their shoes on the bottoms of bottles (the tops picked up as weapons).
A hundred yards away firemen jetted water on to a blazing discount store.
Beyond the flames, beyond the fast-flowing booze, the Civil Disturbance Unit waited with lethal sobriety.
‘Time,’ Richter said, ‘to go home.’
A Negro brandishing a bottle of champagne caught them creeping away. ‘You there. Where you goin’?’ He waved the bottle in their faces. ‘You know what this is? It’s champagne. Champagne like you drink, whitey. I ain’t never tasted champagne before. I like it, man. I think it’s wild. You want a drink?’
Zhukov shook his head.
‘Why’s that, baby? ’Cos my big fat lips have been round the bottle?’
He shoved his face near Zhukov’s. He wore a coloured handkerchief knotted around his neck, hair brushed out at the sides, a pair of sunglasses missing one shade so that you imagined nothing but a socket behind the other. The unshaded eye gleamed with bloodshot lights.
‘I don’t like champagne,’ Zhukov said. Excitement and fear breathing together: but you never showed it. Never. His hands hung loosely at his sides; he took a step back.
‘Here,’ Richter said. ‘Give me a drink. I like champagne.
‘Guess you can afford it, whitey. Guess you can just fucking afford it. Who killed Martin Luther King, eh? Who killed that good honourable man?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richter said. ‘Can I have a drink or not?’
‘Sure man. You have yourself a drink.’ He spat on top of the bottle. ‘Go on, baby. Drink up that good black man’s spit at the same time.’
A little more than a good Gauleiter could take. Richter wiped away the spit and tilted the bottle.
‘And now you white trash.’
Zhukov shook his head.
The Red House Page 16