Dark Stain (27 page)

Cashman said that hate and racial prejudice could only be met successfully with a positive anti-hate campaign; to merely deplore recent events was stupid; to pass resolutions was almost as stupid; hate could not be combated in a negative unimaginative way. It was his opinion, and he expressed it vehemently, that all progressive organizations had to be moved into positive actions; they needed a sense of timing, too, to combat the sense of timing the other side had shown.

Johnny warned that they had to be careful; Suzy’s kidnapping might have been caused by somebody’s loose talk in the union. Otherwise, he declared that Negro criminals were in it up to the hilt. Negroes had passed out leaflets, had beaten up the Jewish storekeepers, had attacked the Italian bars. A Negro had fooled Suzy. He felt that it was possible that it was a Negro mob, a one hundred percent Negro mob at work in Harlem. Sam mentioned the phone call Clair had received about a white man with a scarred face. Vine said that screwballs would burn up the wires with false tips. Cashman then had suggested that they return to the subject of cops. He, Cashman, knew cops from A to Z. A cop had to be up on the mechanics of his trade, the different ordinances, the criminal law, the practices of professional criminals, patrol and traffic duty; yet most cops didn’t know a single thing about crime prevention; there was a culture in being a cop, a cop culture; it was his opinion that Sam had graduated. Then, Cashman had asked Sam to speak to the Warehousemen Union tonight. Sam said he would have accepted but he had to meet somebody at eight o’clock. In fact, he better say good-night.

Vine and Cashman stayed on in the cafeteria but Johnny walked out with Sam. “I couldn’t admit it back there,” Johnny said. “My own wife! I asked her last night if she’d told anybody about you and me being in this together — ” Johnny grinned shamefacedly. “Show you the way it is. My own wife! She told me she was too ashamed to tell folks I was mixed up with you. I’ve got a lot of talking to do with that wife. What sense is there being a good union man if your wife’s on the outside?”

They neared Eighth Avenue, the Franklin Savings Bank on the corner, two men among the hundreds of workers, clerks, dock wallopers, salesmen, soldiers. Sam was thinking that Johnny was with him and Clair and Cashman and Suzy’s mother. And maybe Vine and Wajek and Rosenberg. They were all links to the hundreds on the sidewalks, to the thousand unknowns in the city. This great city with its arterial crosstown streets, its Forty-Seconds and One Hundred and Twenty-Fifths was, and could be, many cities. It could be a stone and steel fortress that no one man could storm. Yet, there were people in every fortress. Many men, acting together, could reach down to the people’s heart.
They
had done so.
Their
communications (Johnny’s phrase was always in Sam’s mind) led down into the city’s heart. The city was worried about Harlem. The city was worried about Negroes.

The city was furious about Suzy Buckles.
They
had succeeded. Why couldn’t the people, through their organizations and leaders, also build communications down to the city’s heart? For the city’s millions were only human beings, hoping for security and a better life, a better future. This was basic in the people, deep in the people, despite the front of black skin or white skin, Jewish ritual or Christian ritual, despite all the confusions, hates, frustrations. Deep down all the millions wanted the same thing. Johnny Ellis, Hal Clair, Butch Cashman, Wajek, Vine, Rosenberg were the names of some of the people. The names intermeshed outwards, names into names, the name of the people. Sam didn’t have the vocabulary to express these ideas to Johnny. He didn’t try.

“Boy,” Johnny was saying. “Those dicks gave me a rub-down this morning.”

“Who? Wajek?”

“He wasn’t so bad. But Maddigan! That Maddigan’s a pip.”

“What’d he do?”

“Me, I was swell, a good Negro. I’ll walk you to Thirty-Fourth if you got time, Sam?”

“Okay.”

“Maddigan’s a Christian Fronter for my dough. He kept on saying that the mass meeting started all the fireworks. Me, I was swell but there were other Negroes not so swell and with no sense. I can imagine that pip handing out the same line to Clair and Clair’s secretary.”

“Clair got the same line. Well, here’s my station.”

Johnny smiled. “So long. Let me hear how you make out with Marian? I’ll go back to the cafeteria.”

Opening the door, Marian smiled a hello at him. She was wearing black lounging pyjamas trimmed with orange. “Step right in,” she invited. “Have a drink.” Her whiskey breath rolled into his nostrils. Her full red lips pouted. He entered but she didn’t move out of his path. She stood in the doorway of her sister’s apartment, eyes gleaming. He smelled her perfume mingling with the whiskey. Her light brown face showed her teasing grin, a grin like a call girl’s. “Come on in and have a drink. Got our troubles, you and me. You lost your sweet and I’ve got every cop after me.”

She preceded him into a room that was both living-room and bedroom. A red and green Mexican serape was flung over the studio bed. The walls were covered with the framed tinsel photographs of movie stars the big stores sell, frame and photograph complete for fifty and seventy-five cents. Sam dropped onto a chair and glanced at the white faces of the Hollywood stars.

“My sister’s,” she remarked scornfully. “I wouldn’t have them in my place. My place is Harlem Court! Isn’t it too bad about Suzy?”

“Where is your sister?”

“Out.”

“When do you expect her?”

“Who knows, who cares?” She slumped to the serape, her hand drooping out of her black sleeve to a tall highball glass on the rug. “How about a drink?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it too bad about Suzy?”

“Yes.” He was thinking she was regretting Suzy a shade too much. She was drunk of course into the very marrow, all her movements hypnotic and slow-motion. He knew that drunks often harped on one idea over and over again. So did the guilty. The thoughts of guilty people always revolved around their guilt. And Marian was the last person to have seen Suzy! Was she a drunk? Was she guilty? Did she, had she…. He spoke softly with conscious relentless purpose. “You must’ve had a rotten day?”

She smiled at him over the rim of her glass. Then, she deposited the glass back on the rug.

“Clair had it tough, too,” he said.

“Oh, him.”

“Detective Maddigan spoke to Clair, to my friend Johnny Ellis, too.”

“Johnny’s your friend?”

“Yes, he’s my friend.”

“Did he know Suzy?”

“He’s met her. Did Maddigan talk to you?”

“Who didn’t?”

“Was Wajek among them?”

“Who wasn’t?”

He realized she was even drunker than he had thought; her plump brown hands kept undulating on the serape, her smiles flashed on and off her lips.

“Clair, your friend?” she asked.

“I can call him my friend now.”

“Why now?”

“He didn’t trust me before.”

“What are you now?”

“A friend.”

“Whose friend?”

“Of the Negroes. I was a white cop before.”

“What are you now?”

“A friend.”

“Of Randolph’s folks, his mother?”

“Of hers too.”

“You can’t kid me. You came here to ask about Suzy. Go on and ask.”

“You were the last person to see her. Maybe you can remember more about the man who — ”

“Wrong number. A white folks’ world, that’s what it is. Always was.” Her eyes were on him.

“What was that man wearing?” He would ask her questions of what she had seen and heard; it would be hard for her to continue lying consecutively and logically — if she was lying.

“Any kind clothes.”

“But what kind?”

“No, you don’t!”

“I don’t understand.”

“You want to trip me up.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Have a drink.”

“No, thanks.”

She tossed herself upright. “You won’t drink with people who aren’t white?”

“It isn’t that, Marian.”

“What is it?”

He stared, smiling falsely, for he didn’t feel like smiling. “I’ll have a drink if it’ll please you.” He had been blind not to have realized it; she hated whites as some whites hated Negroes. She got to her feet, walked to the kitchen. Over her shoulder she said.

“I’ll be right back.”

He heard her fixing a drink for him in the kitchen. What did he know about Marian Burrow? She had been on the make for him and yet she hated him. Earlier today, Clair had told him something of Marian’s background. She came of a good family; she had attended N.Y.U. for one year; she had tried to go on the stage; she belonged to Harlem’s cabaret and theatre society; the well-known Negro actor, Redding, famous for his occasional Broadway parts, was a friend of both Marian and Clair. Redding had got Marian her job at the H.E.L. But what was significant in this mass of details? He recalled that both Marian and her sister had broken with their family; both girls had hung around the fringes of hotcha Harlem. This explained Marian’s Hollywood swagger, her polo coat. It didn’t explain why she had tried to make him when she hated him as a white.

She returned, his drink in her hand. He took the highball and emptied a fourth of it. In her other hand, she held a half empty quart of rye. “Where were we?” she laughed, sitting down on the serape.

“The man who came to the office for Suzy.”

“Oh yes.”

“What do you think about that man?”

“Me?”

“You’ve got a head on your shoulders.”

“Thanks.”

“Who could have done it?”

Her nostrils flared. “That’s what you are, a cop!”

“I’m here because I’m crazy at what’s happened.”

She shrugged and her shrug knifed into him. He knew now that she was absolutely indifferent to anything that might happen to Suzy.

He said, “With the cops hounding you, you must be tired.”

“That low police trash.” She poured rye straight into her empty glass. She giggled. “Know why I drink?”

“Why do you drink?”

“To forget.”

“To forget what?”

“Everything.”

“What’s everything?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You got your nerve all right.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You kill that Randolph, kill him for a nigger and you got nerve to come to that Clair.”

“I tried to save Randolph.”

“Haw haw,” she said raucously. “Haw haw.”

“I didn’t want to kill him.”

“Haw haw. Don’t give me that corn. Play it for Clair and the other goodies. You’re a cop. A cop’ll do anything. You know my opinion?”

“What’s your opinion?”

She laughed. “I don’t believe you’re crazy about that Suzy. You’re a cop!”

He began to comprehend how utterly deep her hate was, how far apart he, any white, was from her. It was as if the rug had dropped into an endless hole and he was on one side, and she on the other. He gazed at her. Her hate kindled fire in him. She was the last person to have seen Suzy, he remembered vindictively. The damn bitch! The fire smoked and flamed in him, primitive and consuming. This damn bitch had tipped off the kidnappers! Even Johnny’d said it was a hundred percent Negro job! They were after him, the bastard muggers! He glared at Marian across the rug, the impulse in him to seize her by the throat and shake the truth out of her. “Marian — ”

“What do you want?”

“God, what do I want.” He rubbed his eyes. “Marian, all I want is Suzy back.”

“Go find her. I haven’t got her.”

“I know you haven’t.” He sobered a little. “Marian, Suzy wasn’t a cop. Suzy had no prejudices. You worked with her. You could see she was a decent person.”

“Washed pure in the blood of the lamb. Who wants to hear about her?”

“You’ve got to.”

“That girl, she come to Clair because she heard of me. She jealous of me.”

He looked at her in silence. His eyes slowly lost their shocked hardness and became sober and still in their sockets. She was diseased, he thought. She was sick, rotted from the inside. Somewhere, some time, he guessed the whites had struck the first hate and the hate had cancered. He sensed that it wasn’t only the violent externals of fascism that were dangerous, the beatings, the stink bombs, the kidnappings. There were other pus-like phenomena, the day-by-day drip-drip of small incidents and small words bloating the human being finally into a grotesque horror, the racist, the fascist with no allegiance to humanity. He said, “You’re wrong, Marian. So wrong — ”

“Haw haw,” she mocked him. “Wouldn’t you like to have me? Sure, you would. That’s why you’re afraid of me. There isn’t a white man alive who wouldn’t lay us and then kill us.”

She leaped from the couch as if the liquor heaviness was gone out of her plump limbs. In a second, she half-ran half-staggered across the rug. He expected her to stop, to say something. She reached him. Her arms tangled around his neck and she pulled his head forward against her body and her voice screeched. “Come on, white man! Don’t be a holy Moses!”

He pushed her away and stood up but still she clung to him, her hands strong with the rye, her whiskey breath and the woman breath of her body in his nostrils. He struggled, seized her wrists and forced his way clear. Hands on hips, she laughed uncontrollably. Her pink tongue showed between her teeth and her round cheeks had moistened with a fine almost invisible sweat. “The joke,” she gasped, laughing. “The joke — On me, the joke. You’re no stool pigeon — ”

“Who said I was?”

“No stool pigeon for the cops! The joke’s — ”

He understood now. She had thought he was a stool pigeon from the day he had come to Clair’s; and the way to confirm it was to make a play for him; a stool pigeon would never refuse her. But the play’d been real, real. And he didn’t understand after all. His brow knitted and he stared at her. What else was there? And the answer shouted at him from the photographs of the Hollywood stars on the walls. Everyone in Harlem had known of him, the white cop, the killer cop. He was a celebrity and she wanted to make him, to be inside the sensation, the spotlight of sensation. Oh, God, he thought; she’s sick.

On the subway home, Sam thought of Suzy. All that day he had disciplined himself not to remember. With Hal Clair, with Rosenberg, with Vine and the others, with Marian he had been like a man feverishly engaged in building bridges that might lead to Suzy. But now he was alone in the subway.