Strange Trades (14 page)

WALK DON’T WALK

And the third one said simply:

DON’T

Now they found themselves on Lenox Avenue. Howie scanned buildings for numbers, and spotted the address they were seeking, just a few paces away. He moved toward it, and stopped on the first step of the stoop. A large, crudely painted signboard hung above the door. It read:

THE WELCOME-WHOSOEVER-THIRSTETH-FOR-THE- BLOOD-OF-THE-LAMB-CONGREGATIONAL-ASSEMBLY-OF-THE-LORD CHURCH

Howie scrabbled in several deep pockets until he found the envelope.

“The Reverend Mr. Evergreen. Yeah, I guess this makes sense. Okay, Red, c’mon. It’s nearly time.”

The two messengers went into the church.

Inside they were greeted by a friendly Black woman in a flowered dress, who agreed to conduct them to the Reverend Mr. Evergreen. She brought them through several rooms—one of which was a hall filled with folding chairs—and into an office where many people came and went. A radio playing added its noise to the frenetic atmosphere.

Behind a desk sat a big man in an expensive suit. His skin was the color of a glossy horse chestnut; his short hair was stiff with a mousse of some sort; his fingers were covered with rings. He looked like a cross between a riverboat gambler and a boxing promoter. He was very busy issuing orders.

“Harold, I want you to look into that busted pipe at the soup kitchen. It’s got to be fixed before suppertime. Alvin, you check with the mayor’s office about gettin’ the community pool opened before school lets out for the year. Fred, I want you to call Lieutenant Waverly and find out about increasin’ the patrols around the projects.”

People rushed off to obey, and Howie found himself alone with Evergreen and Herringbone. The minister sized him up and said, “You got something for me, son?”

Howie offered up the envelope, and the minister took it. “Is there some answer expected?” asked Evergreen.

Feeling self-important upon completion of his first mission, Howie said, “I bet there is. I’d better wait.”

Herringbone waggled his carrot-thatched head on his scrawny neck in a violent gesture of negation. He grabbed Howie’s sleeve and tried to pull him out of the office. Howie resisted, and Herringbone gave up and waited with a mournful look by the door.

The Reverend Mr. Evergreen slit open the envelope with a long fingernail.

It was 11:00 a.m.

As Evergreen read the contents of the envelope, the music from the radio suddenly ceased and an announcer came on.

“The jury has just returned its verdict in the Warwick case, which has divided the city for the past month. Officer Warwick, accused of negligently shooting three unarmed Black youths, has been found innocent on all counts. We now return to our regular programming.”

The minister’s face had gone dark as a storm cloud. He looked up ominously at Howie, back to the document, then up at Howie again.

“Son, do you know what this is?”

Howie started to feel nervous. “No, sir.”

Evergreen shot to his feet, upsetting his chair, which crashed to the floor. Howie backed up warily to stand beside Herringbone. People appeared at the door, curious about the commotion.

“This is a photocopy of a secret police report that proves Warwick was guilty!” Evergreen shouted, trembling with righteous indignation.

The people behind Howie began to murmur sullenly.

“Goddamn! Someone’s gonna pay!” Evergreen declaimed. “We’re closing this city down!”

Shouts of agreement arose from the crowd at the door. Howie felt his spine collapse. He knew he was dead.

Suddenly Herringbone threw up his hands and shouted.

“Bountiful! Laggards mean pain! Crazy tides afflict all horses, black and cool and chalk! Light, hell, scalded, brash! Elephants!”

The crowd fell back.

“Tongues! He’s talkin’ in tongues! The spirit’s in him! Let him by!”

Howie, nearly fainting, followed Herringbone down the narrow aisle formed by hurt black faces showing both anger and amazement.

The two men made it back to the subway and managed to get on the last downtown train before the first of the riots began.

3.

Somebody had to lose.

—Graffito seen on the Berlin Wall

Luckily, although power was off in the entire city, leaving it a murky Jungian jungle, Lesley’s boombox had fresh Duracells in it. So Howie was able to listen to the Talking Heads sing about “Life During Wartime,” while Lesley read by candlelight.

The subway had ground to a halt fifteen minutes after Howie and Herringbone had boarded. All passengers had been forced to disembark in midtunnel and find their way in the putrid dusk to an emergency exit, which consisted of a ladder rising into darkness.

The first person to emerge toppled a blind man who was standing on the trapdoor set in the sidewalk and selling pencils. The rest had trampled him until Howie emerged and helped him to his feet.

“Thank you, thank you, stranger,” the blind man said. “Take this, please, as a token of my gratitude.”

Howie took the proffered item without even seeing it, and hurried away from the hole in the sidewalk that was still vomiting up people like disturbed ants from a trodden anthill.

Herringbone had disappeared somewhere. Looking around disorientedly, Howie found himself in a Times Square rendered strangely quiet and less garish by lack of electricity. All around him, chaos was growing like a multicolored paper flower dropped into a glass of water.

Howie was stranded half the city away from his own apartment on the Lower East Side. He was dazed and confused and didn’t know what to do.

Then he remembered that Lesley Wildegoose, his sometime girlfriend, lived nearby.

Howie made his way through the rapidly disintegrating city to Lesley’s building in the Clinton section, formerly Hell’s Kitchen.

Luckily, she was home.

Moving wordlessly past her, Howie dropped weakly to a couch and motioned Lesley to shut the door. Eventually he managed to tell her how he had caused the growing tumult engulfing the city.

“Wow,” said Lesley.

“Wow,” agreed Howie.

This had been several hours ago.

Now, the Heads tape automatically ejecting and silence filling the apartment—save for the muted wail of sirens—Howie contemplated what he was going to do if things ever calmed down. Just as he was wishing Lesley would talk to him, she raised her gaze from her book.

In the candlelight, Lesley’s rather lank hair and plain face looked astonishingly pretty. Howie was overwhelmed by an unexpected rush of affection for her and the sanctuary she offered.

Pushing back the bill of her ever-present Greek fisherman’s cap, Lesley said, “Hey, Howie, listen to this: ‘Mysterious agents, meaningless actions, infiltration, and finally an irresistible attack from nowhere.’ Now doesn’t that sound like the mess you’re stuck in?”

Intrigued, Howie said, “Yeah. Yeah, it does. Who wrote that?”

Lesley, a finger keeping her place, turned the book’s cover up. “Some guy named van Vogt.”

“Well, what’s the hero doing? How’s he gonna solve his problems?”

“I haven’t finished yet, but I think I can guess the ending. Although the guy doesn’t know it yet, he’s somehow the mastermind behind the whole conspiracy.”

Now Howie was disgusted. “Great. Some stupid author’s harassed gimmick. Well, I’m not the mastermind behind anything. But when it’s safe to go out, you can bet I’m gonna confront Wargrave and find out just what’s going on.”

Howie jammed his hands into two of his many pockets for emphasis. He encountered the object the blind man had given him, and took it out.

It was a fortune cookie.

Howie opened it.

In the wavering candlelight the skinny slip of paper seemed to say:

HATE ICE DAY

But on second inspection, it read only:

HAVE A NICE DAY

4

He who controls the agenda controls the outcome
.

—David Gergen

A crowd was gathered in front of the store window. Howie stopped to see what they were looking at.

It was a display of televisions, all tuned to MTV. Right now, Tears for Fears were onscreen playing “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

Howie watched and listened until the song was over. Then he moved off.

As the crowd broke up, Howie was struck once again—not for the first time today—by how embarrassed everyone acted. Now that the riots were over, and most of the damage had at least been hidden behind tarps and scaffolding and sheets of plastic, the citizens of the city—Black, White, and every shade in between— all acted like people who had awakened the morning after a drunken spree only to learn that they had propositioned the boss’s wife, sung a bawdy song off-key, and perhaps ended up face foremost in the gutter with their pants down around their ankles. People carried themselves with a certain tentativeness. There was an overabundance of politeness, of opening doors for strangers and giving up seats on the bus to elderly standees and saying “Please” and “Thank you.” People were treating each other as if the whole city were on its first date with someone it really hoped to impress.

It was really strange, Howie thought, to venture out and find himself in such a place.

He wasn’t sure what he thought about it.

Maybe it was good.

But he wondered if the price paid hadn’t been a bit excessive, in terms of lives and property lost.

Well, Howie shrugged, the city would no doubt be its old rancorous self in a few more days.

The question now was: Would Howie?

As he walked toward the establishment that called itself The United Illuminating Company, Howie considered what he was doing.

Lesley had tried to convince him that he should just cut his ties with the company by not ever showing up there again. Howie had stubbornly resisted this suggestion. He wanted a confrontation. He resented being used, and was bent on getting some satisfaction from Mr. Wargrave.

Additionally, he had to admit, in the back of his mind lay a desire to salvage his job, if he could do so with his pride intact.

Howie had discovered that he no longer had the same enthusiasm he had once possessed for simply hanging around some park all day, watching dope deals go down and pretty women stroll by, while getting a buzz on. True, his job so far at United Illuminating had consisted mostly of just such hanging around, with the single (and singular) exception of his fateful errand to Harlem. But while sitting at his desk in the office of this strange company, he had realized he felt intimately connected to something larger than himself. Although often bored, he had always felt an undercurrent of expectancy that kept him hanging on.

And besides, the money was damn good.

Howie arrived at the building where he had seen the curiously blurred placard with its doubled message a few weeks ago. That day seemed like a page out of someone else’s life, so much had happened.

Nerving himself up, Howie went inside and rode the elevator to the second floor.

He almost expected the office to be closed, to confront a room empty of furniture and people, with only dangling coaxial cables and coffee stains on the carpet to show there had ever been such an organization.

Such was not the case. The attractive receptionist—whose name he had never learned—was at her desk in the anteroom as usual. She smiled at Howie as he went by. Howie, now that the imagined confrontation was so near, felt grim and did not smile back.

All was as before in the big common room, too. Everyone was at his desk, jockeying papers or speaking softly on phones or tapping the keys of terminals. The overhead fluorescents glared as harshly as ever, seeming actually to frighten the sunlight from entering the three windows that looked out upon the street.

Howie saw Herringbone at his accustomed spot. The man seemed oblivious to Howie, his face awash with cathode rays.

Moving toward Wargrave’s door, Howie saw that his own desk was as he had left it: bare except for an irregular pile of cassettes for his Walkman on one corner.

At the door to Wargrave’s sanctum, Howie paused, then knocked and entered without waiting for a response.

Wargrave sat calmly behind his cluttered desk. He looked up when Howie entered. His hard eyes were like marbles, each centered with a black BB. His expression, as always, was unreadable, blank, uncommunicative.

“Ah, Mr. Piper,” Wargrave said quietly, “I am glad to see you have returned safely from your first assignment. Mr. Herringbone could not definitely assure me that this was so, since he became separated from you at one point. And unfortunately, the ensuing events prevented me from contacting you at home.”

Howie was disconcerted by Wargrave’s expression of concern. I wasn’t home anyway,” he replied sullenly.