Dark Stain (7 page)

“How did you explain your trip to New York?”

“I said I came to contact a friend of ex-Governor Heney.”

Hayden placed the tips of his fingers together. “That was careless. I’m not censuring you. It’s characteristic of the organization in the South. Here come the highballs.”

The waiter set the drinks before them. Bill stared at the brown liquid in his glass shuddering, a strange sensation flickering through him. He wasn’t drinking highballs with a man but with the shell of a man. That small chin, those blond manicured hands masked a machine, an adding computing machine and the long-lashed eyes were as humanless as the electric seeing eyes in a factory. Ex-Governor Heney had eyes like Hayden. Eyes! Bill’s senses reeled. He was surrounded by their eyes; everywhere the eyes of the organization observed him, weighed him, noted him in reports, followed him out into the field, peeped after him in the privacy of his bedroom. Apprehensively he watched Hayden’s lips open.

“What nationality is your wife?”

“American.”

“We’re all Americans as the Jews are continuously propagandizing.”

“My wife’s family have been in this country two hundred years.”

“That describes most Negro families.”

Bill flushed. “My wife’s of Southern French descent. But I know what you’re driving at. Yes, she’s a Catholic. Didn’t you get a report on that?”

“No need to become angry, Bill. Thank you for your confidence.”

Bill stared at him with glazed eyes. It was as if he had read Isabelle’s history, with religion underlined —
Catholic
. “Hayden, I’d like to ask you a question.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve heard anti-Catholic feeling exists in the top circles of the organization?”

“I’m sure your wife’s faith won’t be a bar to your promotion. I personally have no anti-Catholic prejudices. As a matter of fact, I have no feelings against the Negroes or the Jews, either. Let me see if I can explain. I view our present day society, let’s say, as some jigsaw puzzle put together by children, or by morons. Morons is better. Pieces don’t fit; other pieces are missing. It just isn’t right. Our organization will have to re-arrange the pieces correctly. Certain races, certain groups will, of course, be eliminated. Others will be correctly adjusted to their new positions. History has given us our path. But too many cannot read the lessons of history. We know that German capitalism was more effective than British Empire-ism simply because it arrived later on the world scene; German fascism was more efficient than the Italian or Japanese brands because it also arrived later and had profited by the experience of its predecessors. We will go beyond them all. We will go beyond the Brown House in Munich!” His voice burned in Bill’s hearing, not that Hayden had spoken with emotion. As always, Hayden’s voice was quiet and without fanaticism, like a draftsman explaining a blueprint, detail after detail. What was exciting was the knowledge that the blueprint under discussion was the blueprint of the future. The future! And what about Isabelle? How did she fit, how did their common life together fit into the blueprint? Deep inside of his consciousness, he was asking this question as Hayden still in that emotionless voice, a voice that might have been released by a lever, charted the mechanics of the world to be.

He didn’t get to see Big Boy Bose at ten-thirty. A Negro woman had answered his ring and informed him that he was to come back the next morning at eleven sharp. He descended the stoop of Big Boy’s house and picked up a cab on Lenox Avenue. As he entered his room at the Commodore, Isabelle had come running.

He held her tight, the flats of his hands clamping her body to him. Underneath the thin silk of her red housecoat, he could feel her nakedness. He buried his face in her thick black hair and the scent of her rose perfume filled his dilated nostrils and he began to forget that Big Boy had cold shouldered him. She was dark rose in his nostrils and rose-fleshed in his arms. He smiled at her oval face in which the lips seemed like bits of red cloth stitched onto her olive skin.

She pushed him away at last and her black eyes were withholding of herself. He knew that there was going to be a fight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Believe me I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t come to me before,” she said, her eyes lifting to him from beneath black enamel-like eyebrows. In her red housecoat she looked unnaturally beautiful, too tall, too slender, too immaculate to be real, a doll somebody had left behind in this hotel room. He went to her and hugged her passive body.

“You’ve unpacked,” he said with a pretended heartiness. “Did you go to a movie? What did you see?”

“I’ve been here ever since you phoned me.”

“What did you have for dinner?”

“Food.”

“Don’t be like that. I’ll make it up. I didn’t want to stay away. Let’s sit down. It would work out this way, the first day in this stinking town.”

They sat on the edge of the bed and he leaned his head on her shoulder. He felt himself softening inside as if she had somehow passed into his blood and heart; he’d only felt such a closeness with his mother and father and his brother Joe, but that was long ago before his parents had died, before he and Joe’d drifted apart. He kissed her hands. “You’ve no idea how glad I am to be here, Isabelle. I wish we could just stay this way forever.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Isabelle, don’t start in.”

“You’re the one who started it. You didn’t come to me. You deserted me — ”

“Deserted you? That’s a hot one. I don’t want to fight. I couldn’t — ”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“My work.”

“Your work didn’t interfere with us back home.”

“Spoken like a true woman,” he flared. “We’ve been in this stinking town just about eighteen hours and I’ve had so many bastard things to do. Oh, what’s the use.”

“What things, Bill, if you can express yourself without your usual vulgarity?”

“I’ll be vulgar or any damned thing else.”

She confronted him, her lips sullen. “That’s one promise you’ve always kept. In all our years of married life, you’ve only thought of yourself.”

“That’s a lie.”

“When did you ever think of me? Have you ever really thought of me or my feelings, Bill?”

“Suppose I say I have.”

“That’s all it would be, the saying. I’m nobody to you, somebody you keep around. That’s all. Have you ever bothered about what I’m thinking or feeling?”

“I have, I have. Many times. What the hell have I got but you?”

“No! It isn’t me.”

“It’s you,” he cried bitterly. “Nobody but you.”

Her head tilted back on her shoulders. “Nobody but you! You sound like the radio. Why did we leave home for Washington and what happened there? Didn’t you desert me the one night we stayed there? Don’t mumble to me about Heney either. I’m not impressed. That cheap specimen of the new South, God protect us from his like. Why do you have anything to do with a man like that poor white trash? I’d sooner you did business, whatever your mysterious business is, with a good nigger than with trash like Heney.” She walked away from the bed and over her shoulder stared at him with proud gleaming eyes.

“Isabelle Carreau,” he mocked. “Of the sugar plantations, the ex-sugar plantations, the ex-mansions.” He compelled himself to stop taunting her, suddenly oppressed by Hayden’s warning. “Isabelle, I apologize. Forgive me. Isabelle, I want you to forget I ever mentioned Heney to you. Isabelle, please listen to me. I want you to forget all about Heney.”

“Why?”

“It’s better so. Please let’s not quarrel. For God’s sake, let’s stop it. I’m dead on my feet.”

“You’re dead. What about me? I’m dead, too. Or is that of no account? I’ve been dead for three years ever since I married you. Bill, Bill, why don’t we live a normal life like other folks?”

“Don’t exaggerate. This trip’s exceptional. Damn, any other woman but you’d be happy to travel to New York. Why didn’t you go shopping this afternoon instead of brooding like a ghost in this hole? You could’ve walked on Fifth Avenue, bought yourself a hat, seen a movie — ”

She shook her head violently. “Movies! I’d rather have children.”

He started to lift his hands to her and then dropped them, his lips nailed. Children, he thought furiously: children; it was the Catholic in her, the holy damned Catholic: the Carreau in her. It was the compulsion to perpetuate her breed. “We will some day,” he said.

“Some day.”

“It’s being alone all day in a hotel room, in this stinking city. That’s the trouble with you. In this city! It’s the loneliest city in the world. God, let’s go to sleep.” Sleep, a voice repeated inside his head, a voice like Hayden’s. He remembered that he still had to phone Hayden about Big Boy Bose. He rubbed his eyes and all the compressed events of that long day unrolled in his brain: the golden feeling of success as he had walked to the A.R.A. address; the shock of seeing Tynant-Hayden; the visit to Dent; the dinner at the Chez Marie; the futile cab ride north into Harlem. And now night had come, the night for sleeping and forgetting, and Isabelle was against him. “Christ,” he groaned, tearing off his jacket and flinging it on the floor. He pulled off his necktie and hurled it after the jacket; like a snake the tie curled on the rug. She picked up his jacket and hung it in the closet. She stooped for the necktie and he gazed at her lithe movements. “I wish we’d never left Baton Rouge,” he said.

“So do I.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll get out of this hole. We’ll take a room in some quiet neighborhood. The St. George in Brooklyn.”

“I don’t care where we go.”

“Come to bed, Isabelle.”

“I thought you were tired,” she smiled suddenly, kissing him.

He kissed her eyes shut. Then, he finished undressing and switched off the light, returning in darkness to her shape, a shape of darkness. He was returning to her body but more than her body; he was returning to himself, to the Bill that had once been on the earth, to the time of parenthood and brotherhood, to faith and trust and security, to all the warm glowing harvest of emotions without which man cannot sustain himself on the earth. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks and got into bed with her. “Isabelle,” he said, his arms reaching for her. “You’re not sore at me?”

“Not any more, Bill.”

“What a day it’s been.”

“What did you do?”

“As soon as I can I’ll tell you,” he promised recklessly.

“All I know is that you’re in the Klan, Bill. It’s not fair to me — ”

“Give me a break. Once, we leave this town I’ll tell you anything. Everything!”

“You will?”

“Yes.” He felt her lips press against his neck and he quivered with his need for her. His heart pumped and he opened her housecoat. He stroked her belly and squeezed closer to the warmth she had for him. A pleasant dizziness whizzed through his veins as if he had been injected with a drug. He kissed her collarbones and his kisses moved in hot tight circles down to her breasts.

“Billy,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” But even as he was assuring her, he felt the warm soft woman darkness lift and he heard Hayden questioning him and he trembled. Her fingers grazed his lips and he kissed them automatically. He thought that he’d never make good, not with Hayden, not with Big Boy Bose. The white man and the black man, whom he had never seen, whirred at him, apparitions in the night. He grabbed Isabelle to him as a beaten child grabs at its tattered doll in the dark. To hell with them, he defied the apparitions! His face contorted. He wouldn’t be cheated out of his life with Isabelle for any of Hayden’s gold bricks. He kissed her wildly and her arms slid around his neck and her breath shaped into words that weren’t words but sounds heard on the wind. Her voice descended all around him, scented with the smell of her hair and her perfumed breasts and armpits.

When she was asleep he reached for the telephone on the side table. In a strained muffled voice, he gave the operator the phone number of the Brooklyn meeting-place. He watched her stir and held his breath until she was sleeping soundly again. As Hayden’s voice came to him, he said. “Our Harlem friend wouldn’t see me tonight.” “Why not?” “Too busy. I’ll see him in the morning. No need for me to see you tonight or tomorrow morning, is there?” “No. I’ll see you tomorrow night here at ten.” “Goodnight.” “Goodnight.” Bill hung up and saw Isabelle sitting up in bed.

“Who was that?”

“The big-shot. I had to call him. I’d forgotten. Let’s go to sleep, darling.”

“Was that Heney?”

“No.” He stretched out, shutting his eyes but he knew that he wouldn’t sleep just yet. Wearily, he waited for her to begin.

B
ILL
breakfasted with Isabelle in their room the next morning, kissed her goodbye and took the elevator down into the lobby. In all his being he felt the new day. He walked across a spotless rug, past the bellboys, looking about him with confident eyes. He had changed into a single-breasted brown suit, a white shirt, a green tie and a brown felt hat. His jaws gleamed from his shave.

He swung through the hotel door and out on Forty-Second Street. Thousands of people were legging it east to Lexington and Third Avenues, and west to Madison and Fifth. As if on escalators, they passed endlessly before Bill. He stepped over to the cab rank on the curb, nodded at the driver in the first cab, guessing automatically at the driver’s race — he was an Italian — and said, “One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street and Lenox.”

“Okay,” said the driver.

Bill got into the leather interior of the cab which wheeled west to Madison Avenue. After the coming-and-going atmosphere of Forty-Second Street, Madison with its luggage shops and hotels almost seemed like a quiet back alley. He lit a cigarette. He wasn’t thinking of Isabelle, of Hayden or even of Big Boy Bose. He was finished burning up energy on useless speculations. Finished. The traffic was heavy and the cab turned east to Third Avenue. The sunlit streets streaked into Bill’s vision. A horse and wagon galloped ahead of the cab. Bill looked out on miles of storefronts, at faces glimpsed on the sidewalks and vanishing as the cab travelled north. It was a city of foreigners, he thought as the cab slanted west again, rolling onto Fifth Avenue at One Hundred and Tenth Street. The people he saw now were dark-faced Porto Ricans, small brown men in suits with padded shoulders, a neighborhood whose plateglass lettering was in a foreign language. The bodegas, the carnicerias petered out before fish-fry places, bar-b-q’s, drug stores, merging with a township of Negroes, men in shirts without jackets and wearing wide-brimmed hats like western stetsons, boys in zoot suits, narrow at the ankle, bagging at the knee, black and bronze women in spring dresses, chatting in front of the markets.

He paid off the driver on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street and Lenox Avenue, omitting the tip because the cab had travelled needlessly to the east and out of his way when they had first set out. He walked two blocks to the north, swerved into a sidestreet. The night before, the street had been like a tunnel but now in the bright eleven o’clock hour it was alive with Negroes on the stoops. The windows swayed the furnished room signs, and tiny gardens grew in the flower pots on the window sills. Big Boy’s address was a three-story brownstone with a narrow vestibule. There were four tarnished letter boxes but only one of them had a name: J. Bose. Bill pressed the black rubber button below the name and waited as he had the night before for somebody to come down. Through the glass of the vestibule door, he peered at a flight of stairs covered with green worn carpeting. He pressed the button again.

Somebody was coming down the stairs. A Negro woman waddled over towards Bill, her broad face frowning. She flung the door open. “Come on in,” she invited him grudgingly. “You the man last night, ain’t you? Big Boy’s waitin’ for you.”

You black bastard, he thought. But at least he had gotten inside the house today. He followed her up the flight to the landing. “Where is Big Boy?”

“That door there. That one.” The woman pointed one black square finger to the rear and left him. He was alone in a corridor whose walls had once been painted oyster white but were now smudged as if patterned over by a hundred dirty hand prints. Up front, there were two adjoining doors and two doors in the rear. His nostrils dilated as he inhaled the musty tenement smell. Nigger stink, he thought, hurrying to the door the woman had pointed out. He knocked, waited for an answer, knocked again, waited again and then tried the knob. The door was open.

He entered the first box room of a rear flat. But where the hell was Big Boy? Maybe that nigger woman’d been mistaken. He strode through a kitchen with a chipped sink and a brand new frigidaire, white and gleaming and surprising in this flat. Beyond the kitchen there was an empty hall bedroom, a shut blue-painted door. He guessed that Big Boy was behind that door and raised his fist to knock and a sudden vindictive smile twisted his lips. Why the hell should he knock? Just because Dent advised politeness? Dent and all the other nigger-lovers who’d heel a nigger ought to be tarred and feathered. He shoved the blue door open.

“Who’s that?” a voice rattled at him. A huge black man was sitting in a brown leather chair. He shot an appraising glance at Bill and then folded up the tabloid he’d been reading as if the pages were made of stone. He was wearing a dark grey suit, the jacket opened on a grey silk shirt. His necktie was grey and green, attached to the shirt by a gold pin. Bill had seen big-shot Negroes before but never anyone like this man with his massive slow movements, his conservative clothes, his black bulldog jowls. Big Boy’s head was a round ball, slightly oversized like the head of a snowman. “You Dent’s man?”

“Yes. You’re Big Boy Bose?”

“Nobody else but.” A Turkish rug covered most of the warped tenement floor boards. A radio as new as the frigidaire in the kitchen glistened on a rickety table that might have been picked up in a junk yard. Big Boy shifted his bulk. “Dent didn’t say what you want to see me about.” He took a pigskin cigar container out of his jacket, selected a cigar and bit off the end which he spat out on the rug. The cigar was a deep brown in color, several shades lighter than the stubby fingers that held it.

Bill searched for a chair. There was a wooden one against the wall. He lifted it over, nearer to Big Boy and sat down. “Now my business,” Bill said, smiling. “I think you’ll be interested.”

Big Boy puffed on his cigar. “Where’re you from? Atlanta?”

“Atlanta? No. I was born in the north.”

“I got a hunch on you guys. You, South. Dent, now, he ain’t South. He just money, that man.”

Bill laughed, fumbled for a cigarette and the Big Boy report that Hayden’d read to him yesterday flipped over in his consciousness like a page in a book. A sudden clear instinct about Hayden signaled through him. Dent was no chance fixer, Big Boy no chance racketeer, and he himself no chance operative; all of them were pieces, he thought in Hayden’s bloody jig-saw puzzle; that damn jig-saw puzzle the super-brain’d crapped about at dinner.

“How long you know Dent?” Big Boy asked.

“Not so long.”

“He give me what you look like good as a fly-ass dick,” Big Boy said. “Scar across the corner of your lip.”

“Is there any ash tray here?”

“Drop ‘em on the floor. Now, I ain’t got all day.”

“Neither have I. I think you’ll be interested. It ties in with the killing of Randolph by that Jew cop — ”

Big Boy’s broad lips parted and his moon face glared. “That bastard. They’ll get a dose of their own lead. The bastards,” he panted, his chest heaving. “All them white bastards. We more’n they but they the boss man. It’s gonna stop some day. We colored’ll wipe ‘em off the face of the earth. What they do to us, we’ll do to them.”

Again the Big Boy report whirred through Bill’s brain but no report could’ve told him what he’d learned now. Big Boy was really crazy on the subject of the white man. He knew from his prohibition-time experience that sometimes a mobster went in for defending his race; he had heard of an Italian beer king who regularly dispatched strongarms to beat up Irish gangsters terrorizing Italian storekeepers; of a Jewish gambler who had privately found out the identities of a synagogue-wrecking bunch of hoodlums and had paid a gang who went in for assault and battery for their systematic punishment. But these cases were exceptional and Bill was positive that the Italian beer king and the Jewish gambler didn’t get too emotionally involved. They weren’t fanatics but hard-headed businessmen. But Big Boy was also a businessman, one of the best in Harlem, and it was incredible to realize that he could get hot with the zeal of a cotton belt preacher.

“The business I have in mind,” Bill said quickly, “ties in with that Jew cop. There’s a kike synagogue here in Harlem on One Hundred and Fifteenth Street. I want that synagogue taken care of. It’s Saturday now. I want it taken care of this Monday night. They’ve got kike bibles in that synagogue. They’re written by hand and the kikes think they’re holy. I want those bibles cut to pieces.” He took a breath, his eyes on Big Boy. He had outlined the first job.

“The idea’s to hurt ‘em in their religion?”

“Cut those bibles to pieces. Use their Jew church for a toilet. But the bibles’re the main thing. Why, the God damn Jews hold a regular funeral every time one of those bibles are ripped. They bury them as if they were dead people.”

“The Jews’ll holler for an investigation,” Big Boy said.

“Let ‘em holler. They’ll never find out who did the job. They won’t suspect you. The cops’ll think Harlem got sore at Miller and took it out on the synagogue.” He studied the big black face eagerly, ready to bargain, to set a price for the job. He discounted Big Boy’s experience at bargaining with night club owners, with detectives, with syndicates who wanted to start up whorehouses. He felt himself a match for the Harlem kingpin, more than a match, because of the glimpse, naked and fearful and baleful that he’d had of Big Boy’s inner spirit. Big Boy? Big Boy was just another nigger afraid that the white man’d slap him down some day and take away his bank accounts.

“You ain’t the first who’s come to me about the Jews,” Big Boy said. “Outfit a couple years ago before the war, they come to me. Call themself the Christian Destiny Party. Man, they hated the Jews. You one of ‘em?”

“No.”

“You somebody like this Christian Destiny?”

Bill hesitated. What could he say to that? “Yes. The kikes’ve got this country into war. It’s a Jew war, that’s all it is. No Christian’ll get anything out of it. That goes for the colored people.”

“It’s a white man’s war,” Big Boy said slowly. “Those leaflets people given out, they say the truth.”

“Yes, but it’s a kike war. That’s what it is. How much do you want for the job?”

“I didn’t say if I take that job.”

“If you took it, how much?”

“Need five, six boys to bust in and do it right. Need to fix the job right so it don’t touch my skirt. Need a deal of money.”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred bucks.”

“That’s too much.”

“Take it or leave it.”

Bill lowered his eyes. “You’ve been hit by the cop raids, haven’t you?”

“What that to you?”

“If you take the job, the publicity’ll shift away from you. That ought to be worth something. You said yourself the Jews’d holler for an investigation. You know and I know that you’ve been raided by the cops because your white competition’s getting stronger. They’re out to raid you and the other colored big boys out of the numbers business. They’re out to make numbers a white man’s proposition. This job’ll do both of us good. And it’s only one job. I got two others lined up. I’ve got three jobs for you — ”

“You’re worse’n a Jew. You want a cut-rate.”

Bill smiled. “Don’t you want to hear what the other jobs are?”

Big Boy grunted.

Bill said. “On Tuesday I want your boys to hit every wop bar and grill in Harlem. All they have to do is raise a holler about wops not employing colored help.”

“Go on.”

“There are one hundred forty-eight Italian bars here in Harlem. I’d like to hit every one of them but I’m afraid your price’ll be too high. Half of them, seventy-five or eighty ought to be enough. All your boys have to do is — ”

“Holler,” Big Boy broke in.

Bill nodded but not so confident any more. It was easy for Hayden to spiel off; wreck the Jewish synagogue on Monday, begin anti-Italian agitation on Tuesday, liquidate the Jewish policeman Miller on Wednesday; easy in the A.R.A. office to spiel orders, big-shot to little-shot, to mouth easy formulas about utilizing Negroes against the Negro cause, to blandly analyze Big Boy’s anti-white phobia. It was more complex out in the field, meeting not names, not reports but the flesh and blood individuals themselves; it had been a queer shocking sensation when Big Boy had cursed Miller and the whole white race; he had felt then like a man who after rowing on a shallow creek suddenly finds himself on a fathomless depth. This room, itself, was disturbing as if it, too, were part of the depth, menacing and unnatural with its broken table and expensive radio, its slum sink and de luxe frigidaire in the kitchen. It, too, pointed to a Big Boy not easily deciphered. “Feeling must be high against that kike cop,” Bill said, uncertain now of himself.

Big Boy just stared at him.

“If I was a Negro I’d be sore.”

“Ain’t the first cop to think he’s Jesus Christ in Harlem. You ain’t no colored man. What’s all this jive you give me. You South.”

“This Miller’s a kike and I’m against the kikes. So are you. He killed one of your people. Maybe we can get together on him? How much do you want to get rid of Miller?”

“I figured that was coming. That’s your parlay. Their church and then the cop.”

“And the wop bars. How much do you want?”

Big Boy was silent, smoking his cigar. Finally, he spoke. “Four hundred for the church. Double for the ginmills and double that for the cop. The Jew son-of-a-bitch.”

Bill was compelled to grin. Big Boy had set a price as if making a series of bets at a racetrack, doubling up each time. “Twenty eight hundred. Hell. That’s too much. You ought to do the Jew for nothing.”

“What do you do for nothin’?”

“He shot down Randolph in cold blood.”

“And you’re the lil feller worryin’ your head off about a nigger. Who sent you here?”

“Dent.”

“You ain’t answered me. You, the Klan.”

“No, I’m not.”

“How I know?”

“Dent’ll speak up for me. He’ll tell you — ”

“Lots of white folks tell you. I don’t trust no tell you.” His eyes rolled furiously and so swiftly he didn’t seem fat any more. “Okay, cop. Get the hell out of my place before I phone my lawyers about this lousy frame.”