In fifteen minutes I’d gotten into my sport coat and slacks, and combed my hair as best I could, which just means rearranging what resembles a bad wiring job, and slipped on my loafers, and was driving out of the parking lot in my Ford. The gas pains were gone, and no indigestion. Then I thought of Aaron Fishman again, folded over, his gouged head twisted under the puny little body with the big cardboard box on top. But I stopped that nonsense right there, and said, no, no, you won’t haunt my sleep because it doesn’t matter a bit that I made you fall. I was just the instrument of some force in this world that, when the time is right, screws over almost every man, good or bad, rich or poor, and usually does it just when the man can bear it least.
I
T WAS DARK NOW
, and the spring night, and the cool breeze, even the smog, all tasted good to me. I rolled the windows down to suck up the air, and jumped on the Hollywood Freeway, thinking how good it would be at Abd’s Harem with a bunch of happy Arabs.
Hollywood was going pretty good for a Thursday night, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards both being jammed with cars, mostly young people, teeny boppers who’ve literally taken over Hollywood at night. The place has lost the real glamour of the forties and early fifties. It’s a kid’s town now, and except for a million hippies, fruits and servicemen, that’s about all you see around the Strip and the main thoroughfares. It’s a very depressing place for that reason. The clubs are mostly bottomless skin houses and psychedelic joints, but there’re still some places you can go, some excellent places to eat.
I’d come to know Yasser Hafiz and the others some ten or twelve years ago when I was walking my beat on Main Street. One night at about two a.m., I spotted a paddy hustler taking a guy up the back stairs of the Marlowe Hotel, a sleazy Main Street puke hole used by whores and fruits and paddy hustlers. I was alone because my partner, a piss-poor excuse for a cop named Syd Bacon, was laying up in a hotel room knocking a chunk off some bubble-assed taxi dancer he was going with. He was supposed to meet me back on the beat at one-thirty but never showed up.
I hurried around the front of the hotel that night and went up the other stairway and hid behind the deserted clerk’s desk, and when the paddy hustler and his victim came that way down the hall, I jumped inside the small closet at the desk. I was just in time because the paddy hustler’s two partners came out of a room two doors down and across the hall.
They were whispering, and one of them faded down the front stairway to watch the street. The second walked behind the desk, turned the lamp on and pretended to be reading a newspaper he carried with him. They were black of course. Paddy hustling was always a Negro flimflam and that’s where the name came from, but lately I’ve seen white hustlers using this scam on other paddies.
“Say, brother,” said the hustler who was with the paddy. I left the door open a crack and saw the paddy was a well-dressed young guy, bombed out of his skull, weaving around where he stood, trying hard to brush his thick black hair out of his eyes. He’d lost his necktie somewhere, and his white dress shirt was stained from booze and unbuttoned.
“Wha’s happening blood?” said the desk clerk, putting down his paper.
“Alice in tonight?” said the first one, acting as the procurer. He was the bigger of the two, a very dark-skinned guy, tall and fairly young.
“Yeah, she’s breathin’ fire tonight,” said the other one. He was young too. “Ain’t had no man yet and that bitch is a nymphomaniac!”
“Really,” said the procurer. “Really.”
“Let’s go, I’m ready,” said the paddy, and I noticed his Middle East accent.
“Jist a minute, man,” said his companion. “That whore is fine pussy, but she is a stone thief, man. You better leave the wallet with the desk clerk.”
“Yeah, I kin put it in the safe,” said the bored-looking guy behind the desk. “Never tell when that whore might talk you into a all-night ride and then rob your ass when you falls asleep.”
“Right, brother,” said the procurer.
The paddy shrugged and took out his wallet, putting it on the desk.
“Better leave the wristwatch and ring too,” warned the desk clerk.
“Thank you,” the paddy nodded, obeying the desk clerk, who removed an envelope from under the counter, which he had put there for the valuables.
“Kin I have my five dollars now?” asked the first man. “And the clerk’ll take the five for Alice and three for the room.”
“All right,” said the paddy, unsteadily counting out thirteen dollars for the two men.
“Now you go on in number two-thirty-seven there,” said the desk clerk, pointing to the room where the first one had come out. “I’ll buzz Alice’s room and she be in there in ’bout five minutes. And baby, you better hold on ’cause she move like a steam drill.”
The paddy smiled nervously and staggered down the hall, opening the door and disappearing inside.
“Ready, blood?” grinned the desk clerk.
“Le’s go,” said the big one, chuckling as the clerk turned off the lamp.
I’d come out of the closet without them seeing, and stood at the desk now, with my Smith pointed at the right eyeball of the desk clerk. “Want a room for the night, gentlemen?” I said. “Our accommodations ain’t fancy, but it’s clean and we can offer two very square meals a day.”
The procurer was the first to recover, and he was trying to decide whether to run or try something more dangerous. Paddy hustlers didn’t usually carry guns, but they often carried blades or crude saps of some kind. I aimed at his eyeball to quiet down his busy mind. “Freeze, or name your beneficiary,” I said.
“Hey, Officer, wha’s happenin’?” said the desk clerk with a big grin showing lots of gold. “Where you come from?”
“Down the chimney. Now get your asses over there and spread-eagle on the wall!”
“Sheee-it, this is a humbug, we ain’t done nothin’,” said the procurer.
“Shit fuck,” grumbled the desk clerk.
This was in the days when we still believed in wall searches, before so damn many policemen got shot or thumped by guys who practiced coming out of that spread-eagled position. I abandoned it a few years before the Department did, and I put hot suspects on their knees or bellies. But at this time I was still using the wall search.
“Move your legs back, desk clerk!” I said to the smaller one, who was being cute, barely leaning forward. He only shuffled his feet a few inches so I kicked him hard behind the right knee and he screamed and did what I told him. The scream brought the paddy out.
“Is something wrong?” asked the paddy who was half-undressed, trying to look sober as possible.
“I’m saving you from being flimflammed, asshole,” I said. “Get your clothes on and come out here.” He just stood there gaping. Then I yelled, “Get dressed, stupid!” my gun in my left hand still pointing at the spread-eagled paddy hustlers, and my handcuffs in my right hand getting ready to cuff the two hustlers together, and my eyes drilling the dipshit victim who stood there getting ready to ask more dumb questions. I didn’t see or hear the third paddy hustler, a big bull of a kid, who’d crept up the front stairway when he heard the ruckus. If he’d been an experienced hustler instead of a youngster he’d have left the other two and gone his way. But being inexperienced, he was loyal to his partners, and just as I was getting ready to kick the paddy in the ass to get him moving, two hundred pounds falls on my back and I’m on the floor fighting for my gun and my life with all three hustlers.
“Git the gun, Tyrone!” yelled the desk clerk to the kid. “Jist git the
gun!
”
The procurer was cursing and hitting me in the face, head, and neck, anywhere he could, and the desk clerk was working on my ribs while I tried to protect myself with my left arm. All my thoughts were on the right arm, and hand, and the gun in the hand, which the kid was prying on with both his strong hands. For a few seconds everything was quiet, except for the moans and breathing and muffled swearing of the four of us, and then the kid was winning and almost had the gun worked loose when I heard a godawful Arab war cry and the paddy cracked the desk clerk over the head with a heavy metal ashtray.
Then the paddy was swinging it with both hands and I ducked my head, catching a glancing blow on the shoulder that made me yelp and which left a bruise as big as your fist. The fourth or fifth swing caught the procurer in the eyes and he was done, laying there holding his bleeding face and yelling, “YOW, YOW, YOW,” like somebody cut his nuts off.
The kid lost his stomach at this point and said, “Aw right, aw right, aw right,” raising his hands to surrender and scooting back on his ass with his hands in the air until he backed against the wall.
I was so sick and trembling I could’ve vomited and I was ready to kill all three of them, except that the desk clerk and the procurer looked half-dead already. The kid was untouched.
“Stand up,” I said to the kid, and when he did, I put my gun in the holster, reached for my beavertail, and sapped him across the left collarbone. That started him yelling and bitching, and he didn’t stop until we got him to the hospital, which made me completely disgusted. Up until then I had some respect for him because he was loyal to his friends and had enough guts to jump a cop who had a gun in his hand. But when he couldn’t suffer in silence, he lost my respect. I figured this kind of crybaby’d probably make a complaint against me for police brutality or something, but he never did.
“What can I do, sir?” asked the paddy after I had the three hustlers halfway on their feet. I was trying to stay on mine as I leaned against the desk and covered them with the gun. This time I kept my eyes open.
“Go downstairs and put a dime in the pay phone and dial operator,” I panted, still not sure how sober he was, even though he damn near decapitated all of us. “Ask for the police and tell them an officer needs assistance at the Marlowe Hotel, Fifth and Main.”
“Marlowe Hotel,” said the paddy. “Yes, sir.”
I never found out what he said over the phone, but he must’ve laid it on pretty good because in three minutes I had patrol units, vice cops, felony cars, and even some dicks who rolled from the station. There were more cops than tenants at the Marlowe and the street out front was lined with radio cars, their red lights glowing clear to Sixth Street.
The paddy turned out to be Yasser’s oldest son, Abd, the one the Harem was named for, and that was how I got to know them. Abd stayed with me for several hours that night while I made my reports, and he seemed like a pretty good guy after he had a dozen cups of coffee and sobered up. He had a very bad recollection of the whole thing when we went to court against the paddy hustlers, and he ended up testifying to what I told him happened before we went in the courtroom. That part about saving my ass, he never did remember, and when I drove him home to Hollywood after work that night, in gratitude for what he did for me, he took me in the house, woke up his father, mother, uncle, and three of his brothers to introduce me and tell them that I saved him from being robbed and killed by three bandits. Of course he never told them the whole truth about how the thing went down in a whorehouse, but that was okay with me, and since he really thought
I
saved
him
instead of the other way around, and since he really enjoyed having been saved even though it didn’t happen, and making me the family hero, what the hell, I let him tell it the way he believed it happened so as not to disappoint them.
It was about that time that Yasser and his clan had moved here from New York where they had a small restaurant. They had pooled every cent they could lay hands on to buy the joint in Hollywood, liquor license and all, and had it remodeled and ready to open. We sat in Yasser’s kitchen that night, all of us, drinking
arak
and wine, and then beer, and we all got pretty zonked except Abd who was sick, and I picked out the name for the new restaurant.
It’s a corny name, I know, but I was drunk when I picked it and I could’ve done better. But by then I was such a hero to them they wouldn’t have changed it for anything. They insisted on me being a kind of permanent guest of Abd’s Harem. I couldn’t pay for a thing in there and that’s why I didn’t come as often as I wanted to.
I drove in the parking lot in back of Abd’s Harem instead of having the parking lot attendant handle the Ford, and I came in through the kitchen.
“Al-salām ’alaykum, Baba,”
I said to Yasser Hafiz Hammad, a squat, completely bald old man with a heavy gray moustache, who had his back to me as he mixed up a huge metal bowlful of
kibbi
with clean powerful hands which he dipped often in ice water so the
kibbi
wouldn’t stick to them.
“Bumper!
Wa-’alaykum al-salām
,” he grinned through the great moustache. He hugged me with his arms, keeping his hands free, and kissed me on the mouth. That was something I couldn’t get over about Arabs. They didn’t usually kiss women in greeting, only men.
“Where the hell you keep yourself, Bumper?” he said, dipping a spoon in the raw kibbi for me to sample it. “We don’t see you much no more.”
“Delicious,
Baba
,” I said.
“Yes, but is it ber-fect?”
“It’s ber-fect,
Bubba
.”
“You hungry, eh, Bumper?” he said, returning to the
kibbi
and making me some little round balls which he knew I’d eat raw. I liked raw
kibbi
every bit as good as baked, and
kibbi
with yogurt even better.
“You making
labaneeyee
tonight,
Baba?
”
“Sure, Bumper. Damn right. What else you want?
Sfeeha? Bamee?
Anything you want. We got lots of dish tonight. Bunch of Lebanese and Syrian guys in the banquet room. Ten entrées they order special. Son of a bitch, I cook all goddamn day. When I get rest, I coming out and have a goddamn glass of
arak
with you, okay?”
“Okay,
Baba
,” I said, finishing the
kibbi
and watching Yasser work. He kneaded the ground lamb and cracked wheat and the onion and cinnamon and spices, after dipping his hands in the ice water to keep the mixture pliable. This
kibbi
was well stuffed with pine nuts and the meat was cooked in butter and braised. When Yasser got it all ready he spread the
kibbi
over the bottom of a metal pan and the
kibbi
stuffing over the top of that, and another layer of
kibbi
on top of that. He cut the whole pan into little diamond shapes and then baked it. Now I couldn’t decide whether to have the
kibbi
with yogurt or the baked
kibbi
. What the hell, I’ll have them both, I thought. I was pretty hungry now.
“Look, Bumper,” said Yasser Hafiz, pointing to the little footballs of
kibbi
he’d been working on all day. He’d pressed hollows into the center and stuffed them with lamb stuffing and was cooking them in a yogurt sauce.