Dark Stain (22 page)

“Mrs. Buckles, I’ll be right up.”

“I thought we were disconnected.”

“No.”

“Do you prefer tea to coffee? Suzy never told me.”

“Anything. Good-bye.” He hung up. There was no spine in his body, no bones. He leaned against the phone booth wall, the sweat streaming down his cheeks but he couldn’t lift his hand to get at his handkerchief. Johnny pushed the narrow door wide open and said.

“You did a good thing not to tell her over the phone.”

“Hell!”

“Sam — ”

“I’m not seeing her mother.” With a stupendous effort, he willed bone into his arm and hand, tugging his handkerchief out of his pocket. His fingers were shaking. The handkerchief dropped to the floor. Johnny picked it up for him and then dropped it again.

“Spit. I got a clean one.” Johnny searched in his pocket and held out a clean white handkerchief to Sam. Sam’s shaking fingers reached for the handkerchief. “Let me,” Johnny said and wiped Sam’s face. Then he pushed the handkerchief into Sam’s pocket. “Gee, try and get hold, Sam.”

Sam stumbled forward. Johnny grabbed him and led him out into the street. “Breathe in, Sam.” Automatically, Sam obeyed. “Where does her mother live, Sam?”

“Can’t.” He wanted to die, to forget the sound of Suzy’s mother’s voice.

“Watch out!” Johnny’s voice crescendoed and he yanked Sam backwards. A car swished in front of them, almost on their toes. “Rat don’t care if he kills us! Let’s get a drink.”

“Drink?”

“A shot of booze.”

Sam laughed. “In an Italian grill. In an Italian gr — ” His voice was knocked out of him as Johnny grabbed his coat lapels and shook him up and down.

“Sam,” Johnny shouted. “Who you helping this way? Punchdrunk, this way? Who you helping this way? Suzy?”

SUZY … Her name tore into Sam’s brain. “Let go of me!” he snarled. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“All right. Cool off.”

“Beat it. You’re like the rest of them.”

“Who you helping this way,” Johnny pleaded with him.

“Never you mind. I’ve had enough of all of you. Let me alone, for God’s sake. I don’t want to see another Negro again.”

Johnny flinched. “Don’t you want to help Suzy?” he asked.

SUZY … From where did they come, those thunderbolts in the heart. “Let me alone,” he begged.

“You’re going to snap out of this punchdrunk.”

Sam’s head pivoted towards Johnny and his eyes opened wide. He saw a black man, a Negro like all those other Negroes whom he had spoken to at the “Y,” a Negro like the Negro who had called him a stooge of the Police Department. “No use,” he mumbled.

“What’s no use?”

“Everything. They’re black and I’m white.”

“That’s Klan baloney, Sam.”

“I don’t care what it is.”

“You do care. There’s cracks in us all like Butch says. We’re all cracked but we don’t have to stay that way all our lives.”

“Beat it,” Sam groaned.

“No. I’m your friend. You’re seeing Suzy’s mother. It’s a job you don’t want but it’s yours.”

“Don’t preach to me.”

Bitingly Johnny said. “You wanted the Committee to hand you a bokay of roses. Didn’t you say: ‘I’m with you, boys.’ That meant bokays. Sam, can’t you see it’s too big to be made up by words. You got to prove you’re a friend of the Negro over and over again and some of us’d still be suspicious. It’s too big, Sam. It’s hundreds of years slavery and lying. You’re no ordinary white man. You killed a Negro. You got to prove even more than you’ve done that you’re a friend. And you can’t quit. You are a friend, Sam.”

“Even you said O’Riordan’d swung me along — ”

“So I did. What counts is to keep on plugging. It’s not easy. Can’t expect it to be easy. You’re just at the beginning. You killed Randolph and got all wound up about the poor old Negro and how you were going to help the poor old Negro. But that’s over now. You’re getting the socks so you want to quit. Now, you got to keep on plugging more than ever. You got to have faith. A start’s been made. The Committee gave you the needle but when I spoke to Clair on the phone, he said both Negro papers are running some editorial Clair wrote asking people to be on the alert. That’s a start. Me and you are a start. Our union’s stirring up the other unions about conditions in Harlem. That’s a start. You going to the ‘Y’ tonight even though you were busted up inside, that’s a big start. You’ve shown guts but a man’s got to keep on showing guts over and over again.”

“It’ll fizzle out.”

“Only if you and me fizzle out.”

“What good’s all this talk do? Her mother — ”

“You got to face it the way a Negro would.” Johnny’s voice was bitterly proud now. “Every time they lynch us that’s Suzy, Sam. But we kept on plugging even with our insides busted up.”

“Easy to pass the advice out.”

“You been hit. You got to hit back like all those Chinese, all those occupied peoples, those Russians — ”

“Easy,” Sam said numbly. “All that Cashman Red talk’s easy until it hits you.”

“That’s when the test comes. When it hits you. Anybody can spout nice and handsome when he ain’t hit. But when it hits you, you got to prove whether you’re a man or a toad on two feet.”

Johnny kept on hammering at him as they walked the spring-time Harlem streets, the stores closing for the night, and the stores opening for the night, the ice cream parlors, the cafeterias, the shining windows of small religious societies. They walked among the night-time people, who in the daytime were porters, elevator operators, fur floor boys, domestics in white homes. They passed the night spots where the whites came to dance among the blacks. And the eyes of the night spot Negroes gazed appraisingly at the white man with the black man, for they might be pleasure men with pleasure rolls of bills; the street corner marihuana salesman, the pimp wary of plainclothes bulls and frame-up Vice Squadders, the independent whore in a silk dress under her coat, the pervert, the gambling den puller-inner, the number book. The night opened one vast pocket for the money that flowed in on the night. By degrees, Sam began to listen to Johnny. By degrees he began to speak. He told Johnny to expect a visit from Detective Wajek in the morning. Wajek, Sam said, was going to question him and Clair and Marian Burrow.

“By rights,” Johnny said, “you ought to be seeing her mother this minute but tomorrow’s one of those days from what you say. And this business isn’t only your girl.” His voice momentarily again was biting. “Our union’s meeting tomorrow night. I’m not asking you to come again. But before you go, you ought to give me an idea of what’s been cooking. About Suzy. Everything. We’re going to nail those sons-of-bitches sooner or later. Their communications’re spreading out. Raids on the Italians, the Jews, the leaflets, everything. There must be a weak point somewhere. Somewhere, they’ve exposed themselves.”

Back into the hours vanished forever, Sam reversed himself, reporting on what he had seen and thought that day.

“Go on,” Johnny urged when Sam had finished. “Anything else?”

“Aden.”

“Aden? What about that nuisance?”

“This morning Suzy showed me a letter sent in to Clair. It was unsigned, that letter. I forgot about it until now. It warned Clair against Aden.”

“A gripe letter?”

“I guess that’s all it is. It was about the last thing I spoke to Suzy about — ” Sam swallowed. “I guess that’s why it seemed important. And yet I forgot to tell Wajek. Clair gets them every day, Marian said. Marian was the last person to see Suzy! She’s been on the make for me, Johnny! And Wajek thinks she’s the one to have tipped off the mob who pulled Suzy out. It’s her, Johnny!”

His words tumbled and all his thoughts about Marian poured out of him.

“She was the last person to see Suzy?”

“Yes. It’s her!”

“This Burrow girl sounds like a hot tomato but she’s in Clair’s office. Clair isn’t hiring anybody.”

“It’s her!”

“You can’t be so sure, Sam. Wajek’ll give her the works tomorrow, all right. After he gets through, Sam, you ought to talk to Marian yourself.”

“For what?”

“To check on the story she told you today. To convince yourself she’s got nothing to do with Suzy being gone. And if — But it can’t be! About Aden, that might be a tip. This Saturday night he’s giving a talk, one of his talks on the future of the colored races or something. I’ll take it in. He hasn’t been around in a long time, come to think of it. This is his first talk in a long time. Why now?”

Obsessed, Sam cried. “It’s Marian.”

“Look here, Sam. It might’ve been right in my own union. Look here, that Negro who spoke to Suzy said he come from me. You’re as logical as that. Holy smoke, maybe I’m not kidding! Maybe it is the union! They’re four of us on the Inter-Race Committee. Cashman and Sattenstein, two whites. Me and another Negro, Jones. But it can’t be!”

“How do you know it can’t?”

“You know Cashman. Sattenstein’s a good guy and he’s Jewish. He wouldn’t be working for a riot.”

“I don’t trust anybody because he’s a Jew.”

“I see what you mean.”

“What about Jones?”

“Maybe one of them mentioned it to a friend? And it might’ve gotten around to the guys who kidnapped Suzy?”

“My fault she went to Clair!” Sam cried and the horrors suppressed out of consciousness burst on him. Where was Suzy? In some hole, dead, her throat cut, murdered, raped by a line-up of muggers, grabbed by black hands, black hands on her thighs, God, God … Maddened, he shook his head as if to empty these horrors out on the sidewalk. What was he? A lunatic? He must be a lunatic to be planning out tomorrow’s detective story with Johnny. What was Johnny to him? Who was Johnny but a man with iron for a heart, another one of those inhuman Reds full of advice and slogans and reminders of the brave Chinese and the brave Russians, the brave this and thats, soapboxing that it was larger than Suzy, and he’d fallen for the line, lunatic that he was, listening to a Negro who couldn’t be touched by any white man’s heartbreak. God, if Johnny’s wife were in Suzy’s shoes, Johnny wouldn’t be talking so nobly. And he had listened like a movie dick, repeating ideas out of his
Modern Criminal Investigation
; Authors: Dr. Harry Soderman and Deputy Chief Inspector John J. O’Connell. The textbook of Sam’s training period stood up in his consciousness like a book on a shelf. God, he was a lunatic, making believe Suzy was somebody he didn’t know, another diagram like the diagram of the suicide on the text-jacket. She was Suzy, Suzy! “Let me alone!” he cried, strangled. “Let me alone!”

“Sam, I know how you feel.”

“You can’t.”

“I can’t. Keep your chin up. Don’t let them get you!”

Sam rang the Buckles bell in the vestibule of the Rochambeau Apartments. The door clicked and he pushed inside. The marble bench, the bust of Dante on its pedestal confronted him. Where was Monday night, Tuesday night, where was Suzy? God! he gasped and climbed the stairs to Suzy’s floor. He rang her doorbell.

“Did you lose your key, dear?” a little voice said from behind the door.

“It’s me, Sam Miller, Suzy’ll be up — Later.”

The door opened and Sam attempted a smile. Mrs. Buckles was small, about Suzy’s height, and her crinkled yellowish face resembled Suzy’s as a rose pressed between book pages still bears the shape of the living flower. Two grey eyes, eyes like Suzy’s, were peering at Sam. “Do come in,” Mrs. Buckles said. She was wearing a dark brown dress with a white lace collar and she held the door ajar with a hand so small it seemed more like a paw. The line of her short nose hadn’t altered with the years but the loss of her teeth and faulty plates had pinched her jaws together. “Do come in, please, and we will wait together. Is it her union again?”

“Yes.” Sam said, stepping inside. Behind him he heard her say:

“Go right into the parlor or should I have said the living-room as Suzy wants me to.” The old voice almost warmed, almost laughed.

He thought: How am I telling her? His footsteps boomed in his ears and dizzily he remembered his heels crunching on the fallen autumn leaves at a funeral he had gone to last October, his cousin Charles dead of T.B. at thirty-one, and his heels on the leaves, and the tears of the women, and the leaves, yellow, russet, gold, red, scampering across the cemetery like a multitude of chicks. He pressed his arms against his sides and plunged into the living-room. His eyes darted to the studio couch. It wasn’t made up as yet for sleeping this night. A cry started deep in him. He gritted his teeth, choked the cry silent. In front of his eyes, her belongings added up, precious now, her bed, her magazines under the end table, her two pictures on the walls, the Oroczco reproduction, the Degas print of the two mauve dancing girls. She had itemized their history to him Tuesday night like a new bride reporting to her husband on her dowries and treasures. The Oroczco had been saved for; the dancing girls won at a benefit party for some cause.

“Make yourself at home, Sam. I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

He turned around. “No, thanks, Mrs. Buckles,” and then, reconsidering: Tea was a stimulant and if he told her after a cup or two of tea, she might not be so affected. “All right.” Mrs. Buckles whisked out of the living-room and he walked to the windows as he had on Monday night. There was the street below, he made himself think; there was the street below, the street below …

Mrs. Buckles came in, a lacquer tray between her hands. Sam helped her place the tray on the end table at the foot of the studio couch. She sat down on the couch and daintily, her tiny fifth finger curling politely, she poured him a cup of tea. He took the cup and crossed to the easy chair. Over the studio couch, behind Mrs. Buckles’ shoulder, the two mauve girls, handsome and muscular, were dancing. “How soon do you expect Suzy?” she said.

“Mrs. Buckles — Mrs. Buckles — You ought to know — I love Suzy. We intended to tell you tonight we were getting married.”

Mrs. Buckles blinked and put her cup and saucer down on the lacquer tray.

“We love each other,” Sam said. “You ought to know —

Suzy’s been — ”

Mrs. Buckles craned forward as if she hadn’t seen him until now. “You seemed distrait, I thought, when you came in. Very distrait. Did you say? Married — ”