The Black Hearts Murder (16 page)

“By calling the pigs?” Rawlings said. Somebody behind him laughed, and Rawlings grinned in response. “Well, why not? We'll get ourselves some pig meat, too.”

McCall heard the rattle of the chain. He thrust with his shoulder and bulled his way past Rawlings. He was very careful to keep his empty hands in plain sight.

It was one large room, with peeling paint that had once been yellow and was now a streaky mustard brown. Graffiti decorated the walls. There were large posters of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. The floor was sagging, scuffed, uncovered. There was a six-inch dais at the far end, with a rickety table and three chairs. The front end of the room, where the windows were, bristled with guards. About twenty other men, all wearing uniform jackets with the Black Hearts insignia, were loading and checking carbines, shotguns, submachine guns. Boxes and clips of ammunition lay in heaps on the floor. There was no conversation.

Each face in the room was swiveled McCall's way.

He became very conscious of the color of his skin.

“Who invited the honky in?” demanded a light-skinned man; he had a handkerchief bound round his head and he was peering along the barrel of a .30-.30 which happened to be pointed at McCall.

“I did,” Rawlings said. “This here is the governor's boy,
Mister
McCall. He wants to call the pigs to protect us from the honkies. A real big-hearted white man is what
Mister
McCall is. I say we let him. More targets.”

“Do you have a bullhorn?” McCall asked.

“No,
sir
, Mr. McCall.”

“Do you know where I can get one fast?”

“No,
sir
, Mr. McCall.”

“No sound system, p.a., anything?”

“We po' black folks, suh. Ain't got nothin' but guns.”

Everyone laughed.

“Where's your phone?”

“Why, suh, it's right over theah on that theah wall,” the black leader said. “You got a dime, suh? 'Cause if'n you ain't, you's out o' luck.”

Somebody spat an obscenity.

There was a pay phone on one of the walls. McCall had the dime out before he reached the wall. He jammed the dime in the dime slot and dialed Operator. Out of the corner of his eye he saw LeRoy Rawlings relatch the door and turn a key in the lock.

“Operator, this is a police emergency. Get me radio station BOKO, and get it fast.”

He got the BOKO switchboard in twenty seconds.

“Ben Cordes. Emergency.”

He looked around as he waited. He was in a cage of armed blacks, silently listening.

“Cordes speaking.”

“Mike McCall. You said I could call on you if I needed help to head off a white-black explosion in this town. You know where the Black Hearts headquarters is, Mr. Cordes?”

“I've been there.”

“How fast can you be here with amplifying equipment? I've got to address a mob. I want to sound like the voice of God.”

“A white mob?”

“Your friends Rozak and Zablonski are leading it. My guess is they'll be here in ten minutes—they're forming a marching unit only a block from here.”

“I couldn't possibly make it that fast,” the station manager said. “Maybe fifteen. Have you called the police?”

“No. They should have broken up that posse, and they didn't. That tells me where your police force stands in this. Bring them in and there will be a slaughter. Our best chance is to talk the mob into going home. I'll try to hold them off till you can get here.”

“On my way,” Cordes said, and hung up.

McCall replaced the receiver and turned to the silent semicircle. The black faces remained expressionless.

LeRoy Rawlings said, in an altogether different tone, “We took you up in a meeting and voted not to cooperate with you, McCall.”

“I know,” McCall said. “I stopped by your house looking for you, and your wife told me. Look, men, I've got to head off this war. That's what Governor Holland sent me here to do, It's not only my job, it's a job I happen to believe in. Those whites out there are confused, afraid. They're as confused and scared as you are—as everybody is. They think one of your people murdered one of theirs. In their confusion and fear they're out for blood. I can't believe you people want to commit suicide. They're five hundred of them out there, each one with a gun.”

“I would like to make the point,” Rawlings said, “that it's them coming after us, not us after them. All we mean to do, McCall, is defend ourselves.”

“Maybe it won't come to that,” McCall said rapidly.

“You want to take the chance getting caught in a crossfire, that's up to you.” Rawlings shrugged, but McCall thought he saw a very slight eagerness on the otherwise impassive black face.

“How come there are so few of you here? I was told you have several hundred active members.”

LeRoy Rawlings smiled. He nodded toward the windows. Some guards moved aside, and McCall followed him over for a look.

The windows were covered by Venetian blinds, slanted to let the light in, but with the slats angled so that the men could not be seen from outside.

“Mainly they're two-story buildings in this block,” Rawlings said. “Look close at the roof across the street.”

McCall at first saw nothing. It was a flat-topped building with a low parapet around the perimeter of the roof. The usual small shops occupied the street level, and there were apartments on the upper floor.

Then a movement caught his eye. A dark face appeared briefly above the parapet. It turned in the direction of the white mob, then disappeared.

“You've got armed men on that roof?”

“A lot of roofs,” Rawlings said. “The word went out just a couple minutes ago, but us Black Hearts are trained to react fast. When those honkies get here, they're going to have a hundred or more riflemen looking down their sights on them from roofs on both sides of the street.”

McCall's stomach dropped. He had been trying to ward off a massacre of blacks. Now it appeared that the massacre was more likely to be of whites.

The tramp of marching feet came from the east. McCall saw a column of men, four abreast, advancing down the middle of the street. It was a ragged army. Some of the men had their weapons shouldered, others carried them at trail position; no one was keeping in step. At their head marched Joe Rozak and the man called Zablonski. Why they had ordered a column of fours seemed to McCall significant. It was a military formation, a symbol of discipline. Rozak or Zablonski—probably Rozak—therefore had qualms, if only unconscious ones, about what they were doing and sought the cover of legality for their illegal and dangerous operation.

“You know those two at the head of the column?” McCall asked Rawlings.

“Joe Rozak. Veech Zablonski.”

“Veech? I never heard a name like that.”

“A quarter of the honky guys in my high school were from Polish families. Veech is short for Vechek. Polish for Vincent.”

“Veech Zablonski,” McCall said thoughtfully, looking down at the blond rabble-rouser.

The man at his side grunted. “It may be carved on a tombstone in a couple days.”

“Not if I can help it, Rawlings.”

LeRoy Rawlings shrugged.

The column reached Black Hearts headquarters. Rozak and Zablonski fell out and stood aside, watching their army march by. As the vanguard neared the corner, Zablonski bawled, “Column—halt!”

The men came to a disorderly halt and, without waiting for another order, wheeled to face the building. Immediately they lost all semblance of order, dissolving their ranks and converging on the wooden building in their eagerness. Their two leaders screamed themselves hoarse, but the men paid no attention. In a few seconds all five hundred white men were crowded about the front of the Black Hearts headquarters.

A duck shoot, McCall thought, feeling sicker. All the black men had to do was lean over their parapets and empty their guns into the mass of whites below.

There was a rifle shot, and McCall jumped. Zablonski had fired his gun into the air to shock the men back to discipline.

In the mutter that followed, the blond man jumped on a trash can and waved his rifle.

“
Be quiet!
” he roared. “How we talk to the niggers when you act like bunch women at bargain sale?” He jumped down. “Okay, Joe. You take it.”

Rozak climbed on the trash can. The red-veined face had paled to a sickly pink; his voice was unsteady. He shouted bravely, “LeRoy Rawlings! We want you! Come on down or we'll come up and haul you down!”

McCall said to Rawlings, “Any chance of your men opening up in a panic?”

The black leader shook his head without taking his eyes from the scene below. “They have their orders. They're no undisciplined mob, like those stupid honkies down there. We shoot only in self-defense.”

“Good,” McCall said. “Now let me out.”

“Out?”

“That's right. I'm going down to talk to them.”

“Don't let him, Roy,” a voice said behind them. “We got him, we can keep him for a hostage. Governor's boy. He's worth a lot.”

“Not to those honkies down there,” Rawlings said with contempt. “You want to die, Jesse?”

“I just as soon. What have I got to lose?”

“The only life you got. You're as dumb as they are. Let McCall out.”

“You hear me, LeRoy?” Rozak was yelling. “You got just about sixty seconds!”

One of the men unlocked and unlatched the door. McCall stepped out on the landing. Zablonski spotted him from below and shouted something, pointing up.

Rawlings said from inside the room, “What you aiming to do, McCall?”

“Hold those jokers off till somebody they may listen to can get here. You're positive your men won't shoot unless they're shot at?”

“I told you, didn't I?”

“Better relock the door.”

He started down the steps. He heard the door slam, and the sound of the lock and chain.

McCall halted at the foot of the stairs. The mob gaped; apparently the last thing they had expected was a white man. Rozak and Zablonski were glaring.

“Well, if it ain't McCall!” Rozak said. “You sure get around, McCall. What you doing in the Black Hearts headquarters? This here is Governor Holland's boy Friday, Veech.”

“You leave Mr. Brown-Nose to me,” Zablonski growled.

“Wait, wait,” Rozak said. He shouldered his way a little past Zablonski, standing half between them. McCall noted almost with amusement, Rozak was a big bluff, a loudmouth adherent of popular causes who seized them in order to lead. It was Zablonski who was dangerous. “Why d'ye keep shoving your nose in, McCall?”

“I'm trying to keep a lot of people from getting killed,” McCall said in an unexcited voice, but giving it a little extra projection to be sure to reach the whole listening crowd, “and you men from making damned fools of yourselves. This is a matter for the authorities, not a bunch of self-appointed vigilantes. I just talked to the police on the phone. In case anybody stops a bullet today, I wanted them to know whom to arrest for inciting to riot and murder. So I named you, Rozak, and you, Zablonski, as the ringleaders of this mob. You'll be the first they'll arrest.”

Zablonski barked a laugh. “You hear that, boys? This bleeding heart, this snoop do-gooder, he didn't do his homework good. You think the cops give holler in hell what we do to a bunch of niggers, McCall? Have yourself a look. There.”

He made a sweeping gesture toward the east with his gun.

McCall looked.

Two squad cars were halted at the intersection, facing toward them. The officers in the cars, unless they were wearing blinders, could hardly avoid seeing the weapons in the hands of the mob, or misunderstand the significance of the confrontation before the Black Hearts headquarters.

“They pick us up on other side of town, McCall,” Zablonski said derisively. “Didn't stop us for spit. All they do over there is get ringside seat.”

Stupid, it was all stupid. The officers must know that he, at least, would not hesitate to testify to their deliberate failure to act. Or—and McCall felt the chill again—was he slated to be silenced, too?

Zablonski shoved Rozak out of his way. “Okay, McCall. Get your butt out of here, or you just might stop slug with it.”

McCall found himself working up to one of his rare rages. There was something about Zablonski that suggested an SS uniform and jackboots. He had to fight himself back to sanity.

“If you think you can get away with shooting an unarmed man in full view of hundreds of people, Zablonski, you're a bigger idiot than I think you are. I'm here with the authority of the governor of this state—it's the same as if Governor Holland were standing where I am. Go ahead and try your luck—I guarantee it will be all bad. Like the gas chamber, say?”

NINETEEN

The man showed his brown teeth. “We ain't going kill you, McCall, we just going walk over you if you don't get out of way.” He turned his head and yelled, “Come on, boys! Don't let this crumb scare you!”

Gripping his weapon with both hands, he lunged for McCall and the stairway. McCall set himself. To retreat up the stairs would only heat the crowd's already steaming blood, the fuel of weakness that fires every pack hunting the kill. He had to stop Zablonski in his trucks.

“Veech Zablonski!”

It sounded like the voice of God, all right, rolling and echoing against the puny architecture. McCall thought, the U.S. Marines; and he let his breath out like an escape valve. A panel truck with a brace of amplifiers on its roof had charged up to the edge of the crowd. Lettered on its side was the legend
RADIO STATION BOKO
—
1410 On Your Dial
.

The driver of the panel truck was the redheaded station engineer and maintenance man, Andy Whalen, and Whalen was scared. But the other door was open and little Benjamin Cordes stood there, above the crowd, one foot on the seat, the other braced on the sill of the open window. McCall noticed that the hand gripping the microphone was white at the knuckles. He was as scared as Whalen, but the difference was that the little guy had guts. Maybe he'd make a good mayor at that.