Blind Man With a Pistol (20 page)

     
"At his home, I suppose. He's got a wife."

     
"We don't want to see his wife. Where does he hang out by himself?"

     
"Any place in the Village, although this time of night he might be somewhere on St Marks Place."

     
"Where else is there on St Marks Place except The Five Spot?"

     
"Oh, plenty places for the cognoscenti, you just got to know where they are."

     
"All right, you show us."

     
"When?"

     
"Now."

     
"Now? I can't. I got to go home."

     
"You got someone waiting?"

     
He fluttered his lashes and looked coy again. He had beautiful eyes and he knew it. "Always," he said.

     
"Then we'll have to kidnap you," Grave Digger said.

     
"And keep your mother-raping hands away from me," Coffin Ed snarled.

     
"Square!" he said contemptuously.

     
They drove down through Central Park and turned over to Third Avenue on 59th Street, passing first the exclusive high-rent, high-living district around 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and then the arty, chichi section of antique shops, French restaurants, expensive pederasts on Third Avenue in the fifties and upper forties until they reached the wide, black, smooth paved expanse that passed through Cooper Square, and they had come to the end of their journey. They remembered the days of the Third Avenue elevated, the dark cobblestoned street underneath, where the Bowery bums pissed on passing cars at night, but neither spoke about it for fear of distracting John from the strange, glittering excitement that had overcome him. As far as they could see, St Marks Place itself was no cause for excitement. Externally, it was as dreary a street as one could find, unchanged, dirty, narrow, sinister-looking. It was the continuation of 8th Street, which ran between Third and Second Avenues. On the west side, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 8th Street was the heart of Greenwich Village, and Richard Henderson had lived in the new luxury apartments on the corner of Fifth Avenue. But St Marks Place was something else again.

     
Jazz joint on one corner, open for business, The Five Spot. Delicatessen on the other, closed, beer cans in the window. White Mercedes drives up before The Five Spot, white-coated white woman with shining white hair driving. Black man beside her with bebop beard, clown's hat. Kisses her, gets out. Goes into The Five Spot. She drives away. "Rich white bitch. . ."John mutters. On other corner in front of beer cans in delicatessen window, two black boys in blue jeans, gray sneakers, black shirts. Faces pitted with smallpox scars. Hair nappy. Teeth white. Faces scarred from razor slashes. Cotton hair, matted, unkempt. All young, early twenties. Three white girls looking like spaceage witches. Young girls. In their teens. Witches are children in this age. Long unkempt dark brown hair. Hanging down. Dirty faces. Dark eyes. Slack mouths. Stained black jeans. All moving in slow motion, as though drugged. It made the detectives feel woozy just looking at them.

     
"Who was your daddy, blacky boy?" a white girl asks.

     
"My daddy is a cracker," the black boy answers. "But he got a job for me."

     
"On his plantation," the white girl says.

     
"Ole massa McBird!" the black boy says.

     
They all burst into loud unrestrained laughter.

     
"Wanna go to The Five Spot?" John asked.

     
"You think he's in there?" Grave Digger asked, thinking, _If he is, he's a mother-raping ghost_.

     
"Richard goes there sometimes, but it's early for him."

     
"Richard? If you know him all that well, why don't you call him Dick?"

     
"Oh, Dick sounds so vulgar."

     
"Well, where else does he go, by any name?"

     
"He meets people all around. He picks up lots of actors for his plays."

     
"I ain't a damn bit surprised," Grave Digger said, then pointed to a building next to The Five Spot, asked: "What about that hotel there? You know it?"

     
"The Alicante? Home away from it all? Nobody lives there but junkies, prostitutes, pushers and maybe some Martians too from the looks of them."

     
"Henderson ever go there?"

     
"I don't know why. Nobody there he'd want to see."

     
"No _Pretty People_, eh? He wasn't on the shit?"

     
"Not as far as I know of. He just took a trip now and then."

     
"How about you?"

     
"Me? I don't even drink."

     
"I mean have you ever been there?"

     
"Goodness no."

     
"It figures."

     
John grinned and slapped him on the leg.

     
Next to it in the direction of Second Avenue was a steam-bath establishment calling itself the Arabian Nights Baths.

     
"That a fish bowl?"

     
John batted his eyes but didn't reply.

     
"Does he go there?"

     
He shrugged.

     
"All right, let's go see if he's there."

     
"I better warn you," he said. "The markees are there."

     
"You mean maquis," Grave Digger corrected. "M-a-q-u-i-s."

     
"No, markees, m-a-r-q-u-i-s-e. Bite each other!"

     
"Well, well, that is what they do? Bite each other?"

     
John giggled.

     
They went up steps from the street and passed through a short narrow hail lit by a bare fly-specked bulb. A fat, greasy-faced man sat behind a counter in a cage at the front of the locker room. He wore a soiled white shirt without a collar from which the sleeves had been torn, sweat-stained suspenders attached to faded, stained seersucker pants big enough to fit an elephant. His head went down in sweat-wet folds of fat into a lump of blubber with arms. His face was only black-rimmed thick lenses holding magnified cooked eyes.

     
He put three keys on the counter. "Put your clothes in your locker. Got any valuables, better leave them with me."

     
"We just want a look," Grave Digger said.

     
The fat man rolled cooked eyes atJohn's getup. "You got to get naked."

     
John's hand flew to his mouth as though he were shocked.

     
"You don't understand me," Grave Digger said. "We're the law. Policemen. Detectives. See?" He and Coffin Ed flashed their shields.

     
The fat man was unimpressed.

     
"Policemen are my best customers."

     
"I'll bet."

     
They meant different things.

     
"Tell me who you looking for; I know everybody in there."

     
"Dick Henderson," John Babson said.

     
"Jesus Baby," Grave Digger said.

     
The fat man shook his head. The detectives moved toward the steam room.

     
John hesitated. "I'll take off my clothes, I don't want to spoil them." He looked from one detective to the other. "It won't take but a minute."

     
"We don't want to lose you," Grave Digger said.

     
"Which might happen if you show your shape," Coffin Ed added.

     
John pouted. In the familiar scene he felt he could say what he wished. "Old meanies."

     
Naked bodies came out of white steam as thick as fog; fat bodies and lean bodies, black bodies and white bodies, scarcely different except in color. Eyes stared resentfully at the clothed figures.

     
"What they do with the chains?" Grave Digger asked.

     
"You're awfully square for a policeman."

     
"I've always heard it was twigs."

     
"That must have been before the markees."

     
If John saw anyone whom he knew, he didn't let on. The detectives didn't expect to recognize anyone. Back on the sidewalk, they stood for a moment looking down toward Second Avenue. On the corner was a sign advertising ice cream and chocolate candies. But next door was a darkened plate-glass front of some kind of auditorium. Cards in the windows announced that Martha Schlame was singing Israeli Folk Songs and Bertolt Brecht.

     
"The Gangler Circus is generally here," John said.

     
"Circus?"

     
"You got a dirty mind," John accused. "And it ain't the kind with lions and elephants either. It's just the Gangler Brothers and a dog, a rooster, a donkey and a cat. They got a red and gold caravan they travel in."

     
"Leave them to the sprouts and let's finish with this," Coffin Ed said impatiently.

     
Down here the people were different from the people in Harlem. Even the soul brothers. They looked more lost. People in Harlem seem to have some purpose, whether good or bad. But the people down here seemed to be wandering around in a daze, lost, without knowing where they were or where they were going. Moving in slow motion. Dirty and indifferent. Uncaring and unwashed. Rejecting reality, rejecting life.

     
"This makes Harlem look like a state fair," Grave Digger said.

     
"Makes us look like we're from the country too."

     
"Feel like it anyway."

     
They crossed the street and went back down the other side, coming abreast a big wooden building painted red with green trimmings. The sign over the entrance read: _Dom Polsky Nardowy_.

     
"What's this fire hazard, sonny?"

     
"That horror? That's the Polish National Home."

     
"For old folks?"

     
"All I ever seen there was Gypsies," John confessed, adding after a moment: "I dig Gypsies."

     
Suddenly they were all three fed up with the street. By common consent they crossed over to The Five Spot.

                       
_______________

Interlude

     
"I take it you've discovered who started the riot," Anderson said.

     
"We knew who he was all along," Grave Digger said.

     
"It's just nothing we can do to him," Coffin Ed echoed.

     
"Why not, for God's sake?"

     
"He's dead," Coffin Ed said.

     
'Who?"

     
"Lincoln," Grave Digger said.

     
"He hadn't ought to have freed us if he didn't want to make provisions to feed us," Coffin Ed said. "Anyone could have told him that."

     
"All right, all right, lots of us have wondered what he might have thought of the consequences," Anderson admitted. "But it's too late to charge him now."

     
"Couldn't have convicted him anyway," Grave Digger said.

     
"All he'd have to do would be to plead good intentions," Coffin Ed elaborated. "Never was a white man convicted as long as he plead good intentions."

     
"All right, all right, who's the culprit this night, here, in Harlem? Who's inciting these people to this senseless anarchy?"

     
"Skin," Grave Digger said.

                       
_______________

16

     
From where they sat, the rioting looked like a rehearsal for a modern ballet. The youths would surge suddenly from the dark tenement doorways, alleyways, from behind parked cars and basement stairways, charge towards the police, throw rotten vegetables, and chunks of dirt, and stones and bricks if they could find them, and some rotten eggs, but not too many because an egg had to be good and rotten before it went for bad in Harlem; taunting the police, making faces, sticking out their tongues, chanting, "Drop dead, whitey!" Their bodies moving in grotesque rhythm, lithe, lightfooted, agile and fluid, charged with a hysterical excitement that made them look unhealthily animated.

     
The sweating, red-faced cops in their blue uniforms and white helmets slashed the hot night air with their long white billies as though dancing a cop's version of West Side Story, and ducked from the flying missiles, chiefly to keep the dirt out of their eyes; then it was their turn and they chased the black youths who turned and fled easily back into the darkness.

     
Spokesmen from the 125th Street offices of the NAACP and CORE were mounted on Police Department sound trucks appealing to the youths to go home, saying their poor unhappy parents would have to pay. Only the white cops paid any attention. The Harlem youths couldn't care less.

     
"It's just a game to them," Coffin Ed said.

     
"No, it ain't," Grave Digger contradicted. "They're making a statement."

     
While the police were diverted momentarily to a group of boys and girls launching a harassment on 125th Street, a gang of older youths charged from the shadows toward a supermarket in the middle of the block with beer bottles and scraps of iron. The glass shattered. The youths began darting in to loot, like sparrows snitching crumbs from under the beaks of larger birds.