Dark Stain (13 page)

“Your block haunts me. You know, Suzy, after the hearing last Monday I walked and walked and I walked, without thinking of it, down Columbus Avenue.”

“We better not stay here,” she said. “Somebody’ll come in.”

“Goodnight — ”

“I didn’t mean for you to say goodnight.”

“What? Suzy — ”

“Let’s go.”

“Look,” he said and stopped.

“I know,” she said.

They climbed the tiled stairs to the third floor and stood in a tiled corridor with walls painted a greenish blue. All the locked doors were numbered in faded gilt and empty milk bottles stood on guard. “Look,” he said, reaching for her. Without waiting for him to pull her forward, she swayed towards him and into him and he gasped. He kissed her on the neck and then gently poked her round black hat from off her forehead. “Look,” he said.

“Darling.”

“I better go. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” She seized his arm and they kissed again.

“No fooling, we’ll get married soon.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t either but — ”

“Don’t go.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Don’t be nuts.”

“I’m nuts about you.”

He trembled. “It’s good to know.”

“Don’t go.”

“Don’t make it tough for me.”

“I’m not trying to make it tough for you.”

“Suzy.”

“Suppose you were leaving for the Army?”

“I’m not in the Army. I’m not leaving.”

“We’d be together. We’d — we’d see all we could of each other, make all the love we could if you were leaving.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Suppose something happens to you?” She pressed her cheek against his chest and he heard her sob convulsively.

“Suzy.”

“I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go.” She looked at him and her eyes glittered and her voice had a hysterical sing-song tone. “I don’t want you to say goodnight. I don’t want to hear your shoes going down the corridor and down the stairs until I can’t hear your stupid old leather heels and run to the window and watch you on the sidewalk, always leaving me.”

“Look here, Suzy.”

“Sam, don’t leave me.”

“Your mother. All she’ll need! To know!”

“Mother’s sleeping. She won’t know. I’ll get you up in time. You’ll go before Mother wakes. Oh, damn you for making me think of you going.”

He took her hand and it seemed that this was the first time in his life that he had held her hand, or known her hand, small and warm and clinging. And he thought that it was no use talking any more for the time for talking and saying goodnight was over between them and suppose something did happen to him in Harlem. He looked at her steadily and this was the first time in his life that he had so seen her, as if the tin latticework of wisecracks had melted away and never been and all that was clear to the eye was her love for him. She was beautiful to him then in her awry black hat, her hair fluffing over her forehead, in her black dress with the monogrammed “S” that now was truly both their names, her face dreamy as it had been downstairs in the lobby but also tense with passion, her lips protruding a little and her face flushed so that her skin seemed alive, so alive, her livingness poured into him and a vision of her body pounded in him, white and sweet-meated, and he felt dizzy.

“Come,” he said.

Without another word they walked to her door. She took the key out of her pocketbook and smiled at him. “Lug,” she said.

“You think your mother’ll be up?”

“No. You tiptoe down the corridor into the living room.” She inserted the key, unlocked the door, pushed it open. The corridor was a black square in his eyes. She took his hand and led him into the living-room. “Stay here,” she whispered and kissed him. He hugged her and she seemed to collapse against him and then she was squirming out of his grip. She left him and he listened to her, sure-footed in the darkness. Light exploded. He saw Suzy at a maple end table at the head of the studio couch. On the end table, a lamp with a maple base and a parchment shade was glowing. Her mother had already made up the studio couch for sleeping. The pillow shone in his eyes like a mound of snow. She smiled at him and hurried out of the living room. He watched her until she was gone and then tiptoed over to the windows. Both windows were open and he looked out on the street. Singing tipsy voices drifted up to him and he knew that they belonged to the furnished roomers staggering home from the taverns on Columbus Avenue. Suddenly, he yanked down the window shades, one after another, and sat down in the green soft chair opposite the studio couch and the white pillow. He thought he had pulled down the shades for no reason at all. In this street, there were no neighbors; nobody cared what anybody did. In the furnished rooms were cafeteria girls and machinists and laborers; in the tenements the large families; it was a street like a train onto which people were always coming and going and only a few families like the Buckles lingered on in the shabby genteel apartment houses. Restlessly, aching for Suzy to return to him, his eyes roamed about her room. Under the end table, he noticed a pile of cheap white paper magazines, the radical weeklies she was always reading. Near the lamp were a few newspapers. He crossed over and picked up the top newspaper: REDS KILL 12,000 NAZIS. God, he thought, dropping the paper and returning to the soft chair. He sank into its depths and glared at the points of his shoes. His eyes again shifted to the magazines but he didn’t feel like reading about the war and the fascists and copperheads in the land. He wanted Suzy to come back to him. He repeated her name to himself over and over. He tried variations: Soozy, Suzy, Sussy, Soo-zy. He heard the shower in the bathroom and a picture of Suzy sloshing water on her naked body made him tremble. He wondered how he would be able to use the bedroom. He would be in the bathroom, washing and the door would open and Mrs. Buckles in a nightgown would come in and what would he say then. “How do you do Mrs. Buckles? I’ve come to make love to Suzy and you’re going to be my mother-in-law. You see I’m liable to get hurt or killed next week so I hope you don’t mind.” He grinned in a sick way. And what would Mrs. Buckles say? She would hold herself straight and her eyes would be hard behind her glasses and she would say, “I might have expected something of this sort from one of your kind.” Oh, God, Sam thought; come on back Suzy. He dug out his pack of cigarettes, smoked one through and was lighting a second from the coal of the first when Suzy returned. She was smiling as when she had left him but now she wasn’t in the black trim dress and the black lizard-skin shoes. She was wearing green pyjamas and she was wide awake, her face glistening from hot water and soap, and it was morning, bright early morning, that was also and at the same time night, in her eyes. He extinguished the cigarette in an ash tray and leaped out of the chair. Her hair was brushed back straight from her forehead and she seemed to flow towards him like a wave. He held her tight and felt her breasts flatten against his chest and remembered how he had pressed them on the bus ride but they were free now, out of slip and dress, and the sensation that he had already felt several times that night, of having never seen her before, hummed through him and he touched her wide cheekbone and said, “Hello.”

She pushed him away. “Get washed. I’ve left the light on in the bathroom. One minute.” She laughed a little. “Take your shoes off first. Those leather heels,” she giggled and kissed him.

He took off his shoes and rushed out of the living room to the bathroom. He closed the door. The old-fashioned tub, high off the floor on four legs shaped like lions paws, reminded him of Mrs. Buckles. Sleep on, old woman, he thought madly. He inhaled the scent of Suzy’s powder and thought: Sleep on for I love her, old woman.

Suzy was under sheet and blanket when he came back. “Come here,” she said, “and I’ll put the light out.” He walked over to the couch and her hands slid up out of the green full pyjama sleeves and she clasped him around the neck. “You put out the light,” she whispered.

Blackness. He sat on the edge of the studio couch and felt her body against his thigh. He got out of his clothes and piled them on the floor and slid under the sheet. His hands found her and he said, “I used your towel in the bathroom.” He felt her lips find his and they locked together. “Sam,” she said. “You won’t take any chances?” “What do you mean?” he said. “I’ve taken precautions.” “I don’t mean that.” “Oh, Harlem.” “Yes, Harlem. You won’t take any chances?” “No.” Her body moved closer into his body and she said in a shaking voice, “You’ll be careful, darling?” “Sure.” “You will?” “Sure, don’t worry, I love you.” “I love you.” “When’ll we get married?” “Soon,” and with a flicker of humor she added, “Soon as you help me out of these pyjamas.” Fumbling, he helped her and then crushed her between his arms, his lips on her neck. “I love you,” he whispered, his lips on her neck. “It came to me tonight, next week — I’ll need a week to break it to mother about us getting married,” she murmured. “Wait’ll she meets my folks,” Sam said laughing.

They smothered their laughter, kissed and between their lips there was nothing any more, no families, no problems, and he kissed her eyelids and kissed her breasts and his hands stroked down the line of her waist and out on the broadening hips, and his lips and his hands weren’t enough to feel and to hold all the beauty of her. His head was burning as if there were a flame inside his head and the flame was in his lips and surged into the ends of his ten fingers, and his lips and his hands weren’t enough for feeling and holding the soft curve of her neck and the round swell of her belly and the angle of her knee and the coolness of her arms and the warmth of her thighs. His breath fanned in and out, and his lips stayed on her burning hot lips and he lifted his body onto her body, trying to hold all of her under him and within him, to feel and to hold forever, and he swelled with passion and the burning seized him and he was fire leaping into a burning darkness and heard her moaning and clutching him with slipping hands and he descended into her, deep into her as if he had climbed slowly and endlessly up into some automatic elevator with her, an elevator a thousand stories high and the cables had snapped and he was falling, falling, falling, a pole of fire down through the shaft and the shaft was on fire, faster, faster, faster, and she was with him and down they were falling together, one together, through the burning shaft, through the endlessness forever with her and with her, with her …

They lay together quietly for a long time, her head in the crook of his arm.

“I better go soon, Suzy. It must be near dawn.”

She bit playfully at his ear. “You heel, you can’t leave me like this. Oh, God, if I think of those leather heels of yours I’ll burst.”

He smiled. “But your mother.”

“A fine time to think of my mother.” Her voice was full of laughing even though it was only a whisper. “A fine time to think of my mother. A fine time to — ” She clutched her mouth with her hand and shook with suppressed laughter. “A fine — ”

“You’re crazy,” he whispered and suddenly caught her fit. He buried his mouth in the pillow.

“Sam.”

“Stop,” he choked, his sides splitting. “St — ”

“The leather heels.”

“St — stop,” he pleaded.

“Then go to sleep.”

“Who’ll wake me?”

“I will. I promise.” She kissed him swiftly. “Sam, I promise,” she said and her voice was serious and intense and eager.

“Oh, I promise, Sam.”

U
NLOCKING
the door of the apartment on Columbia Heights, Bill switched on the light. He was standing in a small kitchen with walls painted buff; he took a drink of water at the sink, locked the door and entered the living room. The two windows on the street reached from the floor to the white-scrolled plaster ceiling. The fireplace and mantel were marble, carved with stony cherries. Once this room had been the front parlor of some Brooklynite’s mansion, a huge room that stayed full of shadows as Bill turned on the floor lamp near the fireplace. Bamboo shades covered the windows and green portieres almost covered the shades. Bill sat down in a Morris chair, stretched his legs and glanced at his wrist watch. It was almost midnight. Hayden was due any minute and he better look alive, he thought; better shine up the old face with that success and confidence smile. Sitting there, worried and frowning, he hated this meeting place. It was a morgue house in a morgue street in a morgue part of the city, he brooded.

Below Columbia Heights were the warehouses of Forman street. When the wind blew west, pepper and vinegar smells would eddy up into the apartment. Brooklyn Heights was a pepper and vinegar neighborhood, preserved almost intact out of the horse and carriage era. West of the warehouses, the docks fingered out into the scummy rainbow-oiled waters of the Harbor. Even now as he strained to hear Hayden’s footsteps on the echoing sidewalk outside the windows, the sirens of tugs bumping the freighters out to sea sounded mournful, yet menacing and always challenging. He hated it all, hated the towering St. George, where he and Isabelle had a room, and which seemed to be dropped into the middle of Brooklyn Heights, gigantic above the five-story houses, all modern plumbing and a swimming pool and subways moving in its depths like steel mice in a steel building. The St. George was of the new city, a mighty fragment that seemed to have been detached from the Wall Street skyscrapers across the Harbor in Manhattan. Every time Bill came to this apartment from the St. George, he had to wait for Hayden; he was always waiting; Hayden was always late.

The door bell rang. Bill hastened to press the ticker in the kitchen. Downstairs, he heard the hall door click click click and then Hayden’s shoes ascending on the groaning stairs.

Hatless, a short pipe in his mouth and wearing a brown sport jacket and a thin sleeveless white sweater, Hayden bounced lightly into the living room. He put his pipe on the mantel, dropped into the Morris chair. Hayden’s outfit for the night, Bill noted, was as usual, semi-countryish. “It’s a wonderful evening,” Hayden said, his long blond eyelashes almost meeting together, his eyes invisible. They were both sitting in the light of the floor lamp near the fireplace.

“Yes,” Bill said and waited for Hayden to make his usual remark about the neighborhood. Hayden always did. Hayden liked Brooklyn Heights as Bill had discovered with astonishment, Hayden, this emotionless plotter for a new future, liked to live among the artists, the old men in brown derbies, the grey ladies subsisting on the increment of dusty real estate deals and who shopped by taxi, the wives of the Navy officers, the schoolteachers, the Wall Street secretaries.

“On my way here I saw a troopship come by under Brooklyn Bridge,” Hayden said. “They’re always coming by.”

He had said his usual remark, Bill realized but it hadn’t been one of the more customary Norris Hayden footnotes on Brooklyn Heights history. “I met Big Boy this morning after I left here,” Bill said. “He wants more money.”

“How much more?”

“Five hundred.”

“For what?”

“For Aden again. He wants it at eleven tomorrow morning.

“Give it to him.”

“The damn nigger’s milking us. He’s only done one job. He’s pocketing the money, Hayden.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aden reports directly to Dent and Dent reports to me. I assure you that Aden will receive the five hundred.”

Aden-Dent, Bill thought bitterly: the fixer and the nigger.

Hayden continued, “The morning newspapers carry all the confirmation we need of Bose’s reliability. The Italian bar owners are sending a delegation to protest to both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner.” He stood up, retrieved his pipe, knocking the ashes into the fireplace and filling the bowl with brown stringy tobacco. “Coming here tonight, I have been thinking of how eager Bose was to undertake this Italian assignment.”

“Some of them tie up with the white numbers crowd. That’s why.”

“What do you think of a stench bomb attack on a dozen or so of the larger bars?”

“Now?”

“Wednesday night if possible.”

“It’s too soon, Hayden.”

“We have an excellent chemist in the organization, Lester Darton. Lester can supply us with the stench bombs. An invaluable man, Lester — ”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hayden, but I think it’s too soon.”

“I must warn you about Lester, Bill. He is a reckless sort of individual, an anarchistic type. He is an excellent chemist, his work among the splinters is invaluable but his temperament — ”

Bill was listening intently like an eager salesman who hoards every scrap of gossip about the personnel of the corporation for whom he works. He knew that keeping in touch with the splinter remnants of the one-time large groups disbanded by publicity, by the F.B.I. or other Government action was an important job.

Hayden was saying, “Darton’s background is rather checkered. He comes of solid middle western farming stock but you wouldn’t know it. He worked in the Chicago stockyards and went through college at night. He was recruited into the Communist Party — ”

“Really?”

“Subsequently, the organization recruited him.” Hayden smiled. “He was doing a good job for us until the Communist Party caught up with him, expelling him. A very useful man, although he still has some radical ideas. He’s an American equivalent of the left-wing black fronters Hitler was compelled to purge.”

“I consider myself warned.”

“One other point. We have found out that Miller spoke to Deputy Inspector Coombs this morning at Police Headquarters. Miller wanted to resign but finally accepted a leave of absence from active duty. Later, he showed up at the office of the Harlem Equality League and volunteered to work for them.”

One by one, Bill enumerated the sources of information Hayden was so casually lumping together: Some contact at Police Headquarters. Some contact in the Harlem Equality League. Leg-men, ear-men all over, he thought. How was Hayden getting the facts? The bastard was too big to risk a sweat. Christ, how was Hayden getting the facts? It was Dent! Dent was the intermediary collecting the dope and shooting it to Hayden.

“Miller,” Hayden said, “has set himself the task of discovering the authorship of our leaflets. His initiative presents a minor complication.”

“He’ll be out of the way by Wednesday.”

“That isn’t the point. We must always be prepared to exploit every potential. Bose’s competition with the white numbers people and their henchmen among the Italian bars is an example of what I mean.”

“That’s true. But I can’t see how the Jew’s important?”

“Everything is important!” Hayden contradicted him. “Miller will make the headlines this week. His murder will have repercussions throughout the city. Those headlines will reach millions. Isn’t it important for us to influence those headlines?”

“Of course. How smart’s the Jew?”

“We know Miller is a college graduate — ” Bill thought,
you
know he’s a college graduate, you bastard! “ — A City College product. The standards are fairly high there. Miller should be above average.”

“If he’s smart, there’s a chance, not much of a chance that he might dig up a few facts.”

“Precisely.”

“It’s Monday night now. He’s got one full day or a day and a half to dig up something. Not very likely. But suppose we got somebody to phone him Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, too, somebody pretending to be a nigger, an outraged nigger griped at Jews and who’ll threaten Miller’s life? Miller, being a kike and yellow’ll tell the police. Then, when he’s wiped, nobody’ll be too surprised. We’ll influence the headlines: NIGGERS REVENGE DEAD NIGGER and we’ll also scare the kike so yellow he won’t get anywheres investigating us.”

Hayden took the pipe out of his mouth. “I congratulate you, Bill,” he said formally.

Bill smiled. Christ, he’d prove to Hayden that he was a brain guy, too. He’d prove that he’d make a good assistant exec.

“How well can you imitate Negro speech?”

“What?”

“You are going to be the Negro telephoning Miller.”

“Me!”

“Phone Miller early.”

Bill stared at Hayden. By Christ, that was his place in this Harlem job. He was somebody to do the two-by-four chores, a two-by-four operative. Dent was ten times more important. Even the nigger Aden was more important. Oh, this bastard Hayden, this pipe-smoking bastard, this cool fish, this blue-blooded bastard stepping on him like dirt! The gall to use him as nigger lips, nigger lips on a phone. Assistant exec? A bastard pipedream, that’s all it was. He’d never be anybody, never get anywheres. “I’ll phone Miller,” he said, racked by the need to demonstrate to Hayden that he had more to him than an operative. “Mr. Hayden, I may be wrong but Big Boy’s a slimy bastard if there ever was one. I don’t know if the organization is shadowing him or not but if it isn’t, I think we ought to.”

“Bose won’t trick us.”

“The report you read me doesn’t report a hundredth of how much that nigger hates whites. He isn’t just uppity. He’s a crazy nigger, as psychopathic as the nigger the Jew shot. We can’t be too careful about niggers. That goes for Aden, too!” he blurted.

“I didn’t ask your opinion concerning Aden. You put your case vehemently but I refuse to accept it. I’ll meet you here tomorrow night at nine.” He stood up. “By the way, this will interest you. Governor Heney will fly north in a few days. We will have a reception for the Governor and perhaps I will meet your wife then. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Bill said. When Hayden was gone he thought wearily that soon he would be with Isabelle. Only with her, there were no worries, no fears, no frustrations. He grinned sourly, suddenly struck by the fact that Hayden never said ex-Governor Heney. It was always Governor Heney. Governor Heney, Bill mocked: Governor and Grand Kleagle of the South; Governor Hayden, Grand Kleagle of the East, Kleagle of the new American empire in the making. And what about himself? Spittoon cleaner, messenger boy, lowest of the low, another op, a jerk, a son-of-a-bitch, lower than a nigger.

The next morning he was in a phone booth, gazing through the booth door at the subwayites trooping into the United Cigars Store where he was and buying their day’s supply of tobacco. Their coins jingled on the glass counter. They pocketed their change and hurried out to the turnstiles in the Hotel St. George. Fervently, Bill wished he was one of them, a clerk, a real estate collector as he had once been. To be some lousy nobody on his way to some lousy nowheres. A voice buzzed in the receiver he had pressed against his ear. “Hello,” the voice said. “Who is dis?” It was the kike’s mother, he thought.

“I’d like to talk to Sam Miller,” he said.

“He’s sleeping.”

“I’m calling from the Harlem Equality League. Will you please wake him up?”

“What you say?”

“Harlem Equality League.”

“Oh, them. One minute.”

Bill tapped at his teeth with the fingernails of his left hand. So the kike was sleeping, he thought; what was the kike like; he had nerve anyway running to the Harlem Equality League; a real united kike-nigger front.

“This is Sam Miller,” a man’s voice said.

Bill covered the mouthpiece with his hand and through the screen of his fingers mumbled. “Sam Miller?”

“Yes. Speak louder please. I can hardly hear you. Is this Mr. Clair?”

“I got a message for you, you God damn white bastard. You dirty Jew kike. Get out of Harlem if you’re aimen to live. We gonna kill all you white bastards.” He hung up, walked out of the booth into the store, purchased two packs of Dunhill cigarettes for Isabelle.

Outside, on Henry Street he blinked up at the blue sky whipping in the morning breeze and yawned. He had forgotten his earlier wish about being a clerk.

The elevator in the St. George lifted him up to his floor. He strode down the corridor, unlocked his door. In blue and gold sunshine Isabelle was sleeping on the double bed. She was curled up on his side, her head on his pillow, the sun gilding the curved line of her body, specking her black hair. Her face was in shadow, her lips swollen a little from sleep. He smiled at her, glad he wasn’t due at Big Boy’s until eleven o’clock. He stretched both arms and when he looked at her again she was awake. She hadn’t stirred a finger but her eyes were open. “Good morning,” he said.

“Where were you?”

“Out for a morning walk. How about breakfast?”

“Since when do you indulge in morning walks?” She lay motionless as a cat. Only her sleepy coral-colored lips moved, only her eyelids fluttered.

“Since this morning. I’m getting too fat, Isa.”

“You were getting fat but that was before we came to New York.”

“Think I’ve lost weight here? We’ve only been here since Friday.”

“Since Friday,” she said sullenly.

He stalked to the mirror and peered into his grinning face. He pinched his cheek, poked out his stomach and patted it.

“Bill,” she called.

“At your service.”

“Don’t behave like some grotesque fool.”

He walked to the windows. “You can’t start a quarrel with me, sweet. Aren’t you happy we left the Commodore? What a view.” Below, far below the blue sun-shot air, the green bluish Harbor waters ran with light and he remembered Colonel Bretherton’s speech to him in the A.R.A. offices that first day in New York. He saw water and sky and the red ferries to Staten Island and the coal barges from the tidewater Jersey towns and the New Jersey shore and the puffing smokestacks of the factories and the spring-green hump of Staten Island like a whale on the water and Bowling Green in Manhattan and the skyscrapers white with light, cliffs of ice with a million burning windows and the Hudson River and the East River converging together in the Harbor. “Wonderful,” he said. “I feel optimistic every morning. Unusual, isn’t it?” He ran to the bed, flopped down and bent his face over her to kiss her lips. Her lips were cold and unresponsive and a chill circled his heart for he recalled how sensual her lips had been only a minute ago when she had been sleeping. “Isabelle,” he pleaded with her.