Dark Stain (15 page)

Bill wiped his sweating face. Christ, it was too bad he had met Chappie. Soon every coon in Harlem’d know what the hell he looked like. If anything went wrong, a million niggers’d be able to point their fingers at him. Nervously, he was again monologuing. “Hayden, take my advice. You can’t trust those niggers. Not any of them. You should’ve heard Big Boy cursing the whites out for stealing his business. And that other coon agreed with him all the way through. He even had the nerve to ask me what kind of a white man I was. Before I could answer, he was grinning one of those slow nigger grins and said he meant, what kind of a white crook I was. He said Dent was a Tammany grafter. He said Aden was the only nigger he knew who didn’t work for living. He said porters did porter work, ministers did preaching work, that he and Big Boy did numbers work but Aden lived on graft, collecting from his followers. Mr. Hayden, if you don’t take my advice you’ll regret it. I’m not rabid either from living in the South. I’m a Northerner and open-minded but you can’t work with niggers on any terms of equality. It won’t work, Mr. Hayden. Big Boy, that lying black bastard, he claimed that the attacks on the two kike storekeepers was the work of muggers. He’s lying, the slimy black bastard. We have to shadow him immediately, Mr. Hayden. He’s pursuing some independent role of his own. For God’s sake, Hayden, you can’t trust any of them because no white man can tell what’s going on in a nigger’s brain.”

Bill felt heated as if he had been talking as fast as he could to somebody who wasn’t listening. Christ, how was he going to break this new development to Hayden without making himself look more like an errand boy than ever? An errand boy chasing his tail off between Hayden and those bloody nigger big-shots. How was he going to tell Hayden, that bastard, that although Big Boy’d agreed to stink-bomb the wop bars Wednesday night, the nigger was getting cold feet about the Miller job? Best, he decided, not to drag Miller in. The chances were that the nigger’d go through with the kike. Maybe, the whole idea of having Chappie there was to put the squeeze on for more cash. Those wise-guy coons, those bloody apes! The day was coming when they’d sweat back every last dollar.

As the cab drove Bill south out of Harlem, Big Boy Bose, up in his flat, was drinking the glass of bourbon Chappie had just handed him. “You’re right,” he said. “We kill the cop and all the papers’ll yell for an investigation and one more white man investigation’ll push us out of business maybe. But here’s the way I see it, Chappie. That white who was here, he don’t fool me. He Klan, he Christian Destiny and he wants a riot here in Harlem but maybe that’s what we want, too.” Chappie asked what good would that do them? Big Boy explained. “A riot show all them God damn white trash to leave us alone. Show them we men and no God damn Mississippi niggers they can lynch every time they want some fun. Chappie, I’m sick bein’ pushed around by the dicks and sarges and vice squad trash, sick bein’ raided and ‘rested. The whites pressin’ us to the wall and we don’t fight back, they’ll finish us. Back in prohibition when we was starting big, remember? Some niggers said let’s get in no trouble with the whites. Let’s not fight the wop gangs over east Harlem. Let’s get in no trouble with Dutch Schultz and all the other white big-shots. We listen to them niggers, we be niggers now. We fight them whites and we somebody.”

Big Boy waddled over to the bowl of ice cubes on the table.

He picked up a cube, placed it between his teeth like a lump of sugar and polished off the rest of his bourbon. Chappie said that fighting the whites was all right for the Jesus Christ niggers but not for them. “I’m in business,” Big Boy answered. “I’m in no Jesus Christ business to save niggers. I’m no Paul Robeson goin’ around battling for every dumb nigger there is. But it’s like that prohibition time, Chappie. We got to do something or throw the towel into the whites. All Harlem’s on the move, holy Jessus niggers and the Red niggers, and all them politicians and the soft soap boys. The churches’ prayin’. Didn’t Councilman Vincent pack six thousand into that ballroom Sunday? When that happen before? All Harlem’s standin’ up to the white.” Chappie asked if that wasn’t just what that white Klan guy wanted?

Big Boy smiled. “He don’t outsmart me, Chappie. I know he wants me to kill the Jew so it’ll hurt the Councilman and all the colored Assemblymen and Judges. That scar-face white wants a riot so the white papers got something more to hate us for, so they can blame all the trouble on the colored when they run for election in the fall. Chappie, I know all that. From the first time that scar-face white bastard come here I been thinkin’. I know all them whites out to make us Mississippi niggers.” He spat the shrunken ice cube on the Turkish rug. “I been thinkin’ I got to be careful or the white outfox us. But I see that if we don’t fight back, you and me be investigated out of business. The white papers out to lynch us. I read in coupla them that I’m the one who beat up the two Jews. It was muggers but they don’t care about that. They out to get us. Chappie, we got to fight back and take our chances like we done prohibition or we finished.”

As the cab drove Bill south out of Harlem, Johnny Ellis and a fellow warehouseman, a short white man with a big handkerchief tied around his neck pushed a loaded wooden box towards the freight elevator. The box’s destination had been crayoned in big black letters. It was bound for Atlanta, Georgia. They waited side by side for the freight elevator to climb to them. The white warehouseman asked Johnny what the hell was going on in Harlem anyway? “All these things,” Johnny said, “they’re like sparks. Maybe, it’s some Negro people getting mad at the way they’ve been shoved around. Maybe it’s some subversive outfit at work? But they’re sparks and where there’s sparks maybe there’ll be a fire.” The white warehouseman asked what the hell did he mean by sparks? “It’s this way,” Johnny said. “Negroes get the worst deal in the whole country, you know. They live the worst, they get the worst jobs. They’re all burning up at the way they’re treated. The only bright spot’s the unions and the other white organizations working with Negroes against Jim Crow.” The elevator came up and the white warehouseman said did Johnny remember that saying about “Old Jim Crow got to go.” “Yes,” said Johnny. The white warehouseman said okay and not to forget it and to keep it on top of the agenda until it was scratched out. The two pair of hands pushed the box into the freight elevator.

Bill saw Hayden at nine o’clock. At nine thirty he was on his way to Lester Darton’s. Bill’s cab rolled down Fulton Street past the old-fashioned Post Office, the
Brooklyn Eagle
Building and Court House Square with its statue of Harriet Beecher Stowe standing benignly in bronze near a grateful Negress in bronze. It had been one hell of a day all around, he thought. He still hadn’t patched things up with Isabelle although they’d had dinner together. Five days he recapitulated to himself. Who’d have thought five days ago that it was in him to call her a Catholic bitch? It was Hayden’s fault, Hayden and his fancy plans for using niggers.

Hayden had informed him that Ahmed Aden, not Big Boy, had organized the attacks on the Jewish storekeepers. It was the bloody damn nigger in a red fez. But always it was Hayden, the bloody spider, the bloody conniver with his dirty high-toned speeches who was spinning them all into his schemes. The niggers would do their share; the sucker ops’d do their share; the friends out in the open like the giant newspapers would do their share. The thousands of spinning words, multiplied a million times whirled in his consciousness.

It was unbelievable to him that this Norris Hayden, so collegiate and youngish in appearance, a stick-like figure in a sport sweater and a pipe sticking out of a featureless face was able to manipulate them all. It was unbelievable that this Norris Hayden should be the top man in the New York organization. Norris Hayden? This gutless bloodless zero? But it was true. The milky front was a mask, a mask as deceiving as the “research” mask of the organization itself. There was a real Hayden, the manipulator who’d given him the big glad-hand, promising him the sky, and at the same time was probably glad-handing Dent and Aden and Christ knows who else. There was a real Hayden, the God damn sadist who’d read his history out at the Chez Marie like a police captain talking to a mug, who’d quizzed him about Isabelle, knowing all the time that she was a Catholic. Christ, if only he could pay the bastard back some day. “I can!” he muttered half aloud.

The solution grew in him and he felt as if he were in a nightmare in which there was a courtroom and a judge sitting up front, and all the seats were gone, every one, and there were multitudes of listening people, and the F.B.I. was in the courtroom, and the newspaper reporters, and the police, and a voice, a hard sarcastic voice was talking and everybody was listening and the voice was saying: “You God damn bunch of suckers. War against fascism? Don’t make me laugh, you damn suckers! Going without coffee, you lousy suckers, and all for the four freedoms. What a bunch of suckers. There isn’t going to be any four freedoms or any other freedoms and nonsense. There’s an organization, there’s an organization, there’s an organization working to take the country over and that bastard Hayden’s the head in New York….”

“Can you beat it!” he exclaimed aloud in a low shocked voice, appalled at his thoughts, and the voice was the same voice that had spoken before. It was his own voice. Christ, he’d go crazy if he had another day like today. He gazed out at the night-time streets of flatland Brooklyn and he was travelling, not through some recognizable place on the earth but through the strange fevered streets of his thoughts; for whole seconds he would be whizzing down streets flaring with light, Isabelle with him, and he was the assistant exec. in Mobile, in Atlanta, he was an executive in the organization, Hayden’s superior, the top man, the super brain guy; and then he saw himself in that courtroom denouncing Hayden; saw himself dead in an alley without light, saw Isabelle dead, too, and blood pouring from her womb and her aunt Theresa brandishing a silver crucifix over Isabelle; saw himself on some vast sunlit square full of banners and military bands playing the march of victory, all power seized by the organization, the President and Congress arrested, and himself hurling up and down the square; saw himself at the head of the marching men, saw the great splendid day of power, the breaking, tearing, smashing day with the niggers, kikes, Reds, foreigners, unionists whipped into the ground; saw Isabelle dead in a street covered with the corpses of nuns and priests. Oh, Christ, Christ, he’d go crazy.

He looked out of the window. The cab was speeding under some elevated structure spanning a wide desolate avenue. On both sides, empty lots alternated with blocks of darkened two-story houses and cemeteries with headstones in long white rows. So this was Queens, he thought numbly. He’d be meeting Lester Darton soon.

When he got out of the cab, he glanced at the cab driver leaning towards him, a thin face under a cap with a thin curved nose. The hackie was a kike, he classified mechanically and remembered Sam Miller. He paid his fare, avoiding contact with the hand that took his bill and returned his change. He spun on his heel and started walking to the address he had. Above him was the platform of the elevated. He had travelled to one of those semi-suburban crossroads typical of the city’s outlying boroughs, a subway elevated station and four corners, occupied here by a drugstore, a delicatessen, a cigar store, a tavern. Following Hayden’s directions, he cut into a residential street. The black houses were spotted with yellow light. In the gutter, a boy pedaled by on a bike, a girl on the handlebars. Giggling, they swooshed ahead of him. He reached the corner, paused to light a cigarette, turned his head slowly towards the stores. Nobody. He flipped the match away and half way down the street he came to an isolated store front among the brick houses.

The plateglass was like a sheet of tar but he knew the lettering on it: Wheelock Printing Company. He approached the door. It was open. He entered, shutting the door behind him and smelled a strong vinegary-like breath and heard a voice say: “I will light a match so you can see where things is.” Those were the words Hayden had told him he would hear and he answered the words he had been informed to answer. “Close the cover before striking.” He listened to the tearing sound a match makes when struck. And light gleamed and a man’s face was smiling. “This way,” the smiling face said. They walked into the interior, the match illuminating a printing press, huge stacks of cardboard. The match burned out. “This way,” his guide said. “Turn right around.” Bill bumped into his guide, stopped, blundered forward again. He heard knuckles rapping on a door. He felt as if they had somehow passed through the cardboard mass he had glimpsed.

A door creaked open, light flared, light impenetrable as the blackness, then condensing, receding and Bill could see where he was. He and the guide strode into the light, into a small back room; sitting at a flat table was a stocky man in a white shirt. The stocky man lifted arm and hand in the fascist salute. “Heil Hitler,” the stocky man said.

Surprised, Bill lifted his arm and hand in the salute but he didn’t return the “heil Hitler.”

“Sit down, Johnson. I’m Lester Darton.”

Bill smiled into a good-looking face topped by a brown pompadour haircut, a face that was square and compact with wide-apart brown eyes and a mouth with a thin upper lip wedged into a full lower lip. It was a sailor’s face, the face of a man who did things with his hands and liked doing things. The hands, too, were square, big-knuckled and furred over with thick brown hair.

“You found us, my friend,” Darton remarked. “Meet Herb Baumgartner, that big hulk over there.”

Bill smiled at his guide. Baumgartner was standing at the door, a burly middle-aged man, one of those dark-haired Germans who seem in many ways more Germanic than the blond types. His nose was exaggeratedly pug, his mouth wide and very thin like the mouths of some of the Nazi leaders Bill had seen in magazines.