A Rage in Harlem (5 page)

“I ain’t never going to own you as my brother,” he said.

“Well, Bruzz, that goes for me too. Now what’s on your mind?”

“What I wanted to ask is do you know a colored United States Marshal here in Harlem? He’s a tall, slim colored man, and he’s crooked too.”

Goldy’s ears perked up. “A colored U.S. marshal? And crooked? What you mean by crooked?”

“He’s always trying to get bribes out of people.”

Goldy smiled evilly. “What’s the matter, Bruzz? You get shook down by some colored marshal?”

“Well, it was like this. I was having some money raised –”

“Raised?” Goldy’s eyes popped.

“I was having ten-dollar bills raised into hundred-dollar bills.”

“How much?”

“To tell the truth, all I had in the world. Fifteen hundred dollars.”

“And you looked to get fifteen thousand?”

“Only twelve thousand, two hundred and fifty, after I paid off the commissions.”

“And you got arrested?”

Jackson nodded. “During the operation the marshal broke into the kitchen and put us all under arrest. But the others got away.”

Goldy burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. The C and M speedball had taken hold and the pupils of his eyes had turned as black as ebony and had gotten as big as grapes. He laughed convulsively, as though he were having a fit. Tears streamed down his face. Finally he got himself under control.

“My own brother,” he gasped. “Here us is, got the same mama and papa. Look just alike. And there you is, ain’t got hep yet that you been beat. You has been swindled, man. You has been taken by The Blow. They take you for your money and they blow. You catch on? Changing tens into hundreds. What happened to your brains? You been drinking embalming fluid?”

Jackson looked more hurt than angry. “But I saw him do it once before,” he said. “With my own eyes. I was looking right at him all the time. A man has got to believe his own eyes, ain’t he?”

It hadn’t been too hard for him to believe. Other people in Harlem believed that Father Divine was God.

“Sure, you saw him do it when he was sucking you in,” Goldy said. “But what you didn’t see was when he made the switch. That was when he turned to put the money into the stove to cook. What he put into the oven were just plain dummies along with a black-powder bomb. He put your money into a special pocket in the front of his coat.”

“Then Imabelle got fooled, too. She was watching him, just the same as me. Neither of us saw him make the switch.”

Goldy’s eyelids dropped. “Who’s Imabelle? Your old lady?”

“She’s my woman. And she believed it even more than I did. It was her who first talked to Jodie, the man who told her about Hank. And Jodie looked like an honest, hardworking man, too.”

It didn’t surprise Goldy that Jackson had been trimmed on The Blow. Many smart men, even other con-men, had been stung by The Blow. There was something about raising the denomination of money that appealed to the larceny in men. But with women it was different. They were always suspicious of anything that was scientific. But he didn’t know how Jackson felt about his woman, so all he said was,

“She’s a trusting girl, she believe all that.”

Jackson puffed up with indignation. “Do you think she’d let them cheat me if she didn’t believe it, too?”

“What’d she do when the stove blew up? She try to help you save your money?”

“She tried all she could. But she ain’t no Annie Oakley, carrying around two pistols. When that marshal bust into the kitchen waving his gun and flashing his badge, she ran like all the rest of us were trying to do. I was trying to run, too.”

“They always catch the sucker. How else are they gonna blow with their sting? And you gave the marshal some more money to let you off?”

“I didn’t know he was a crook. I gave him two hundred dollars.”

“Where’d you get two hundred dollars, if he’d already taken all the money you had?”

“I had to take five hundred from Mr. Clay’s safe.”

Goldy whistled softly. “You give me the three hundred you got left, Bruzz, and I’ll find those crooks and get all your money back.”

“I haven’t got it,” Jackson confessed. “I lost it playing the numbers and shooting dice trying to get even.”

Goldy pulled up the hem of his skirt and studied his fat black legs encased in black cotton stockings.

“For a man what calls himself a Christian, you’ve had yourself a night. Now what you goin’ to do?”

“I got to find that man who posed as the marshal. After he took my two hundred dollars he arrested Imabelle so he could shake her down, too.”

“You mean he worked another bribe out of your old lady after he got yours?”

“I don’t know exactly what happened. I haven’t seen her since she ran out of the kitchen with the rest of them. All I know is that when I telephoned my landlady she said a United States marshal brought Imabelle back into the house and that she was under arrest. Then he confiscated her trunk and took her away somewhere. And she hasn’t been back since. That’s what’s got me so worried.”

Goldy gave his brother an incredulous look. “Did you say he took her trunk?”

Jackson nodded. “She’s got a big steamer-trunk.”

Goldy stared so long at Jackson his eyes seemed fixed.

“What has she got in her trunk?”

Jackson evaded Goldy’s stare. “Nothing but clothes and things.”

Goldy kept staring at his brother.

Finally he said, “Bruzz, listen to me close. If all that broad has got in her trunk is clothes, she has teamed up with that slim stud and helped him to swindle you. How long is it goin’ to take you to see that?”

“She ain’t done that,” Jackson contradicted flatly. “She got no need to. I’d have given her all the money if she’d asked for it.”

“How you know she ain’t sweet on the stud? Might not be your money she’s after. Might just be a change of sheets.”

Jackson’s wet-black face became swollen with anger.

“Don’t talk like that about her,” he said threateningly. “She ain’t sweet on nobody but me. We’re going to get married. Besides, she ain’t seen nobody else.”

Goldy shrugged. “You figure it out yourself then, Bruzz. She’s gone off with the man who beat you out o’ your money. If she don’t want the man and if she don’t want the money –”

“She ain’t run off, he taken her off,” Jackson interrupted. “Besides which, if she’d wanted money she got her own money, herself. She can put her hand on more money than either you or me have ever seen.”

Goldy’s fat black body went dead still. Not an eyelash flickered, not a muscle moved in his face. He seemed not to breathe. If she had more money than either of them had ever seen, it was getting down to the nitty-gritty. Those were facts he understood. Money! And she had it stashed in her trunk, else why did she and the slim stud come back for it? She couldn’t have had any clothes in there worth taking, not after living with a low-paid flunky like his twin brother.

His huge black-pupiled eyes lingered trance-like on Jackson’s wet, worried face.

“I’m goin’ to help you find your gal, Bruzz,” he whispered confidentially. “After all, you is my twin brother.”

He took a small bottle from his gown and handed it to Jackson. “Have a little taste.”

Jackson shook his head.

“Go ahead and take a taste,” Goldy urged irritably. “If the devil ain’t already got your soul after all you done last night, you is saved. Take a good taste. We’re going out and look for that stud and your gal, and you is goin’ to need all the courage you can get.”

Jackson wiped the mouth of the bottle with his dirty handkerchief and took a deep drink. The next instant he was gasping for breath. It had tasted like musty tequila flavoured with chicken bile, and it had burned his gullet like cayenne pepper.

“Lord in Heaven!” he gasped. “What’s that stuff?”

“Ain’t nothing but smoke,” Goldy said. “There’s lots of folks here in the Valley won’t drink nothing else.”

The drink numbed Jackson’s brain. He forgot what he’d come there for. He sat on the couch trying to get his thoughts together.

Goldy sat across the table, silently staring at him. Goldy’s huge, black-pupiled eyes were hypnotic. They looked like glinting black pools of evil. Jackson tried to tear his gaze away but couldn’t.

Finally Goldy stood up and put on his wig and bonnet. He hadn’t said anything yet.

Jackson tried to stand too, but the room began to spin. He suddenly suspected Goldy of poisoning him.

“I’ll kill you,” he said thickly, trying to spring toward his brother.

But the walls of the little room were spinning like a million buzz saws rotating about his head. He couldn’t defend himself when Goldy took him beneath the armpits and laid him on the couch.

Goldy lived with two other men on the Golden Ridge of Convent Avenue, north of City College and 140th Street. They had the ground floor of a brownstone private house that had been cut up into apartments.

All three impersonated females and lived by their wits. All were fat and black, which made it easy.

The biggest one, known as Big Kathy, was the land-prop of a house of prostitution in the Valley, on 131st Street east of Seventh Avenue. His house was known far and wide as The Circus.

The other had a flat on 116th Street where he worked the fortune-telling pitch, billing himself as Lady Gypsy. There was a card on his door that read:

LADY GYPSY
Fortune Telling
Prognostications
Formulations
Interpretations
Revelations
Numbers Given

An old woman known as Mother Goose cleaned and cooked for them. At home they always acted with decorum. All of them were on junk, but they never used it in their house. They never entertained. At night a shaded floor-lamp shone in the front window, but no one was ever seen. That was because no one was ever there. They had the reputation of being the most respectable women on a street where the colored folk were so respectable they’d phone the sanitation department to remove cat droppings from the sidewalk. People in the neighborhood knew them as the Three Black Widows.

Goldy had a wife who lived in a flat in Lenox Avenue next door
to the Savoy Ballroom. But she worked in domestic service for a white family in White Plains, and was home only on Thursdays and every other Sunday afternoon. On those days Sister Gabriel was missing from his customary haunts.

When Goldy left Jackson he went home to have breakfast with Big Kathy and Lady Gypsy. They were having baked ham, lye hominy, stewed okra and corn, Southern biscuits, and finished with sweet-potato pie and muscatel wine. Mother Goose served them silently.

“How does it look ouside?” Big Kathy asked Goldy.

“Cool and clear,” Goldy said. “No one has been killed, carved up, robbed, or run over this morning, to my knowledge. But there’s some new studs in town cooking with The Blow.”

“That old hick-town pitch!” Lady Gypsy exclaimed. “Here in Harlem? Who’re they going to get with that?”

“There’s fools everywhere,” Goldy said. “It’s the Christians full of larceny who fall for that.”

“Hush man! Don’t I know it?”

“Well, if they’d made a sting I’m sure I would have seen them,” Big Kathy said.

“They made a sting all right,” Goldy said. “Fifteen C’s.”

“That’s strange,” Big Kathy said. “They ain’t been in my place yet to get their ashes hauled. They must be on the lam from somewhere.”

“I hadn’t thought of that angle,” Goldy said.

Before leaving, Goldy telephoned Jackson’s landlady.

“I’m the United States Federal Attorney, and I’d like some information about a couple who lived in your house by the name of Jackson and Imabelle Perkins.”

“You mean you is the DA?” she asked in an awed tone.

“No, I’m the FA.”

“Oh, you is the FA. Lawd Almighty, they’s in big trouble, ain’t they?” she said happily.

She told him everything she knew about them except where to find them.

But he got the name of Imabelle’s sister and telephoned her next.

“This is Rufus,” he said. “You don’t know me but I’m a friend of Imabelle’s husband back home.”

“I didn’t know she had a husband back home.”

“Sure you know she’s got a husband back home.”

“If he’s the same kind of husband she got here then she got two husbands.”

“I don’t want to argue about that. I just want to know if she’s still got the stuff in her trunk.”

“What stuff?”

“You know –
the
stuff.”

“I do not know what stuff you are talking about, whoever you might be. And I do not know anything about my sister’s husbands, wherever they might be,” she said, and hung up.

Next Goldy telephoned Imabelle’s white employers, but they said she hadn’t been to work for three days.

So he put on his gray wig and white bonnet and went down to the Harlem branch post-office on 125th Street to study the rogue’s gallery of wanted criminals.

There were pictures of three colored men wanted in Mississippi for murder. That meant they had killed a white man because killing a colored man wasn’t considered murder in Mississippi. Goldy studied the faces a long time. No one looked twice at the black-gowned Sister of Mercy studying the faces of wanted criminals.

Instead of returning to his stand beside the entrance to Blumstein’s Department Store, Goldy made a round of the bars and joints where they were most likely to hang out. He went up Seventh Avenue to 145th Street, east to Lenox Avenue, south on Lenox to 125th Street again. He jangled his coin box and murmured in his husky, prayerful voice, “Give to the Lord. Give to the poor.” Whenever anyone looked at him suspiciously he quoted from
Revelation
, “ ‘That ye may eat the flesh of kings.’ ”

“If that’s what you’re goin’ to buy with the money, Sister, here’s a half a dollar,” a colored woman said.

There were more bars on his itinerary than on any other comparable distance on earth. In every one the jukeboxes blared, honeysuckle-blues voices dripped stickily through jungle cries of wailing saxophones, screaming trumpets, and buckdancing piano-notes; someone was either fighting, or had just stopped fighting, or was just starting to fight, or drinking ruckus-juice and talking about fighting. Others were talking about numbers. “Man, I had twelve bones on two twenty-seven and two thirty-seven came out.” Or talking about hits and misses. “Man, I saw that chick and hit. Man, I struck solid gold.” Or talking about love. “That was when my love came down, sugar, and that was
the bitter end.”