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Harlem, 1943

I’m ready to start up my own hustle. I’m not going to watch and wait anymore. I’ve been schooled by Sammy and by all the hustlers in and around Small’s. I can spot an opportunity as well as the next guy. I’m a man of action.

I approach the lone black serviceman at the far end of the bar. “Hey, mister,” I say, real low. “You thinking about finding a woman?”

He cuts his gaze to me. Says nothing. Just fixes me with the kind of glance that invites me to keep on talking. I’ve seen Sammy do it a hundred times. It’s all real subtle, and you both just know.

“This is where you wanna go,” I tell him. And I write down the intersection. “Building on the corner.”

After a beat, the soldier reaches into his wallet and pulls out a dollar. Puts it between two fingers and offers it to me as a tip.

I almost take it, but for a strange tug in my gut. I wave off the tip. “Nah,” I say. “Just helping out, you know?”

I walk away, and he leaves a minute later. No doubt off to find a girl, but as he goes out the door, he looks over his shoulder, back at me. I get a shiver down my back off that look. There’s something in the way he pauses and turns.

Mistake
. That’s my next thought. I’ve made a mistake, approaching him. My mind rolls forward and backward, running over the things I’ve been told. Servicemen are always looking to get laid, I know. So what’s the problem?

Like a flash, I remember the problem. The uniform is also an easy cover for cops. Cops in plain clothes are easy to spot, because they still walk like cops and talk like cops, no matter how much they try not to. You don’t notice it as much when cops dress like soldiers because real soldiers carry themselves kind of like cops — the buttoned-up style, that righteous sort of edge.

I’m shivering now. Not just a quick wave down my spine, but my whole body. Like I’ve just stepped out into the cold.

I might have just blown my whole life in one shot. I might have just sent a cop into a handful of prostitutes. He might be back for me.

I set down my tray and walk to Charlie’s office in the back.

He looks up from some paperwork when I cross into his line of sight. “Hey, Red.”

“I screwed up,” I tell him.

Charlie’s forehead wrinkles. “What happened?”

I blurt out the story. Charlie listens to my confession, then sets down his pen and folds his hands.

“Yeah,” he says. “You screwed up.”

He sends me back to work without further ado. An hour later, the front door pops open, bringing with it a gust of winter and a uniformed detective, the combination of which curdles my stomach.

He marches straight toward me. “They call you Detroit Red?”

My voice is small. “Yes.”

I recognize him. He’s Joe Baker. A hard-ass detective who has it in for every pimp and prostitute in Harlem. I’m neither, but today’s events don’t exactly support my case.

“Come with me,” he says. “We have some questions for you down at the station.”

Swallowing hard, I pull off my work apron. I glance at the bartender, like he’s going to back me up, but he’s studiously wiping down the bar. Acting indifferent.

I have no choice. I follow the cop. He puts me in the back of his squad car and drives off down the block.

It’s a short, tense ride to the precinct. I’ve walked by the building before, although I prefer to skirt this block altogether for obvious reasons. Sammy’s convinced they photograph everybody who walks by. I can’t imagine what would be the point of that, but Sammy says cops don’t always make a lot of sense. They just make a lot of trouble.

I’ve never set foot inside this building. Hoped never to have to. Detective Baker leads me into a room with a small table and sits me down.

Through the wall I can hear someone else being questioned. Someone who did something way worse than what I did — or at least I hope so. I hear thumps and groans and scrapes. The sound of someone not cooperating.

It feels like forever. The pounding next door. The silence in my own room. The nervous slick of sweat that covers me head to toe. What are they going to do to me?

“It’s just a misunderstanding,” I tell the detective as soon as he comes back. “I’m just a waiter.”

“You understand what you did wrong?”

“Oh, sure,” I promise. “I just thought, I mean — I won’t do it again.” I’m tripping over myself to appear innocent.

No money changed hands, so it wasn’t really a hustle. It was just a little information dropped. The cop must realize that, too. “Consider this a warning,” he says. “We’ll have our eye on you, you hear?”

I nod. He opens the door and I split, quicker and slicker than a banana.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I report to Charlie. “They just gave me a warning.”

He riffles the edges of his paperwork and gazes at me sadly.

“What?” I say. “It’s fine now.”

“You’re banned from the bar, Red,” Charlie says. “Just so you know, I’m real sorry to have to do it.”

It’s like I’m hearing static. “What?”

“Banned,” Charlie repeats. “I don’t want to see you back in here again.”

I expected I might be fired, but . . . banned?

“It was just one time. I’m never going to do anything like that again.” I thought being hauled into the police station was the worst thing that could happen to me.

“Once is all it takes,” Charlie says. “You’re going to be on a list now. Someone’s going to be watching you. I don’t need that kind of heat on me.”

“It was just a warning,” I insist. “I’m not in any real trouble.”

“Doesn’t matter, Red. Like I said, I’m sorry.”

The streets outside are colder today than usual. I’m utterly flattened by the knowledge that one stupid moment could bring down this kind of curtain. One impulsive thought. One whisper.

I tuck my coat tighter and walk. Shivering. My skin is like ice, while the core of me burns and trembles. I’m mad at Charlie for being unreasonable. Mad at myself for being so stupid. Hustling is always a risk, I know. But how could I have ever imagined this? Kicked out of Small’s, the hustler paradise incarnate, for hustling? It had to be some kind of joke. Except it wasn’t.

I go over to Sammy’s place. Returning to my own rented room seems too frightening, too lonely. Too much of a dead end. I explain to him what happened, but he just smiles.

“Now,” Sammy says, “this is your chance. You’re out from under that job, so you can get your hustle together.”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “That’s what I’ve gotta do.” It’s the only piece of Small’s I can carry with me.

“What’s it going to be?” Sammy asks. “You’ve got options, you know?”

“Numbers, I think.” I’ve been playing numbers for two years. Big amounts and small, though I’ve only ever won a little. I usually play my tips, which might be ten dollars or up to twenty-five on a good night.

Sammy sort of shakes his head. “You don’t want to start there,” he says. “Takes a while to get yourself going with that.”

“How come?” It seems easy enough. You just have to connect up with one of the runners who control a space of blocks, and then you can take bets. Because the runners own their territory, you have to pay them most of the bets you collect, but you get to keep a cut. Out of Small’s, I already know some of the big-time runners in the area: Bub Hewlett, King Padmore, and West Indian Archie. “It’s just numbers. You don’t think they’d stake me?”

“Sure, sure. Thing is, it takes a while to build a client base.”

“Why?” Isn’t it as simple as going out and taking bets?

“Let me put it this way. You like numbers, right? You want to lay a bet with me right now?”

“No,” I say.

“Why not?”

“I lay my bets with Carl.”

Sammy smirks knowingly at me. “See? Everyone who plays has got a guy already. You can’t just walk into it unless the time is right.”

“What am I going to do?” I ask.

“You like reefer, right?”

I laugh. Who doesn’t like reefer?

“I’ll front you twenty bucks,” Sammy says. “Just to get you started.”

“Thanks.”

He tells me where to go to get the reefer. He’s not about to start supplying me direct, but he vouches for me with one of his guys. The next day, I walk across the park to the place Sammy tells me. Sure enough, the guy’s waiting.

I pick up some papers on my own and get to rolling. Sammy says the way to start is dealing stick by stick. I know a little something about this, from back in my shoe-shine days at the Roseland. Back then, though, I would move a couple of sticks a night, at best, because most people already had a place to get reefer, and they came to the parties already stocked. If I’d been caught with my five or ten sticks at a time back then, it woulda been nothing. Cops would figure it was my own stock to smoke. I was small-time.

This is the big time.

I walk into the Braddock bar with fifty slender sticks up my sleeve. First thing I do is take note of my friends in the room. People I’ve smoked with. I walk up to some musicians, members of the band that played at the Cotton Club last night.

“Hey, Red,” they say. “What’s shaking?” We slap some skin.

I chat with them for a minute. Sit down around the table. A few glasses of bourbon make their way around, and I don’t turn one down.

After a bit, I ask them. “Anyone need a stick?”

“You selling?” one of them asks me.

“If you’re buying.” I pull five sticks out.

They all but cheer me, falling over themselves to hand me the cash. “Thanks, Red.”

It’s easy as breathing. They all know me. Already trust me. I’m not a cop, and they know it for sure. I like to smoke as much as the next guy. More.

I move from table to table. Same deal. I marvel at how quickly the cash fills my pockets. Where has this gig been all my life? Before I know it, my sleeves are empty.

I’ve moved all fifty.

Harlem, spring 1943

I quickly learn a hard lesson about being so well known.
Keep a low profile
, Sammy had warned. Now I know why.

I hadn’t done anything quiet. I’d walked right in and made the deals I needed to. The reefer flowed freely out of my fingers, and the cash flowed freely in. For the time being, that was all I cared about. But a windfall like that can’t last. At least not without the wrong someone picking up the scent.

Cops start coming around to me. Checking in. Real casual at first, but more and more, and sometimes they frisk me. I’ve been lucky. The first few times, just by chance, I’m not carrying any reefer. All luck, no accounting for it, except for the fact that I always sell my stock fast. That makes it harder, perhaps, for them to keep up with me.

I get good at dropping the loot when I see something suspicious. When anyone crosses the street toward me, I turn a corner, drop the pouch.

I’m carrying my stash up in my armpit, headed over to the Braddock, when a guy comes toward me. He has his head low, and when he tilts his neck in just this certain way, I get a feeling. Like I’ve seen the move before.

Cop!

I pick up the pace as I round the corner onto the next block. Run toward the steps of the first brownstone. It has a potted plant on the stoop. I relax my arm and let the pouch of reefers fall to the ground, over the fence. I hope the leaves of the fern or whatever will conceal the package. I keep walking at a good clip, putting space between myself and the point of the drop.

Soon enough, hands on my shoulders. “Detroit Red?”

“Some say,” I answer. “What’s it to you?”

The rough hands spin me around and begin frisking me but come up empty. “We’re gonna get you, Detroit,” he says, shoving me off. “Sooner than later.”

Thing is, I believe it. They’ll get me. It’s only a matter of time.

Not long after that, returning home to my boardinghouse room, I catch a strange whiff in the air. I stand stock-still in the middle of the room, wondering what seems off. My bed is messily unmade, just as I left it. My side table drawer’s about an inch ajar. That seems normal. But something’s not quite right.

Clearly, I’m alone. It’s a very small room. Four walls, one door, one window. Bathroom down the hall. And yet I have a feeling that the space has been violated.

I’ve heard of this. Cops finding out where you live, knowing that you sell but unable to prove it. Planting seeds, planting dope, or something worse. All so they can burst in on you in the middle of the night, “find” the stash in “your” secret hideaway, and bust you. All that. Just to get you.

Without another thought in my head, I start packing. Walk out the door of the boardinghouse and start working out in my mind where to go stay instead.

I wander the streets alone. I can’t go to Small’s. At this point, it wouldn’t be smart to go back to the Braddock, either, where I’m so well known.

I slip into a quiet, out-of-the-way bar in the lower floor of a brownstone just off of Seventh Avenue. It’s on a calm tree-lined block that looks like the sort of place nice families live. Not hustlers. Or pimps. Or numbers runners. Or ladies of the night.

The bar is full of plain ordinary folk, some looking down on their luck, some looking to celebrate. I stay quiet, slide to the back. I fold in real nice.

Over the bar hangs a calendar showing a beach view from a faraway someplace. It has each day up until today crossed out with a thick red
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