SHAFT REGARDED his office with sympathy, sorrow, and some anger. An old friend had been murdered in his sleep. It was the same thing. The orange daybed shrieked all over the corner where it was supposed to wait quietly until he needed a place to crash. The bright blue carpeting was committing violence from wall to wall as well as end to end of the color spectrum.
“Oh, Jee-zus,” he muttered, spinning his chair around, away from the see-through plastic desk that was a special agony to his senses, but almost lost in the abundance of his pain.
Turning away didn’t help. En route, Shaft had been forced to take in another startling assessment of the stark white filing cabinets, the polished aluminum frame around his license as a private investigator, the pale blue telephone with its attached (and color-coordinated blue-gray) memo pad, the polished-steel abstraction that seemed to be lurching drunkenly across the small sidetable next to the daybed . . . Even the window that looked out on the honky-tonk of Times Square at Forty-sixth Street was no help. The neon splatter out there, enhanced by the darkness that seemed to descend right after lunch in November, was almost lost in the reflected glare of the disaster behind him.
Why, John Shaft wondered, had he let her talk him into this?
“Listen,” he could have said, “I’ll fuck the faggot and you redecorate the office. You know, have the walls painted or the floors swept or something . . . Maybe you could get the cheap bastard who owns the building to clean out the crapper down the hall. I’d rather piss in a Tennessee gas station than go in there . . .”
He hadn’t. Instead, he had made the mistake of accepting her pretensions. It was the price of pussy. And now he was paying it in an atmosphere that jangled the nerves he was supposed to have assuaged with three weeks of stringing them out on the sands in Jamaica.
He turned the brown-black, oval face away from the window to scowl over his shoulder at the awfulness of it, and the blue and orange began playing tricks with his eyes, flicking the focus of his retina back and forth like an optic switch.
“Goddamn,” he said aloud. How did he get into such shit?
“Hello . . . I understand you’re a private eye,” she had said in that soft, whispery voice that sounded like a child play-acting at being very nice. It was no child attached to the sound, though. She was tall, blonde, and slender, with a face that might have been carved carefully out of golden beeswax. She had spent a lot of the summer in the sun and it was still there.
“Yeah,” he said. His eyes had done the normal thing before responding, counting the long legs, the slope of her breasts, and the lean and even turn of her arms and neck. It didn’t bother her; she wasn’t self-conscious about anything she had, and it was there to look at.
“Killed anybody lately?” she asked, hiding the smile with the rim of a highball glass.
One of those. They opened the wrong door someplace about six-eight years ago and all these goddamned game players came out.
“Only my appetite by coming to this collection of assholes,” he said.
That got a nice flicker out of the back of her gray-blue eyes. Now she’d either figure him for decent competition and turn on the heat or run like hell for some less suspicious prey on the other side of the room, that store dummy type over there in the dark blue Cardin suit who wouldn’t even feel the incision as his balls were being removed.
But she didn’t do either.
“If you think you can breathe some life back into it,” she said, “why don’t we split for something more pleasant, then?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, following her lead as she turned and began to move through the small crush of cocktail drinkers and gossip merchants who had gathered for this bash at the apartment of his actor friend, Rollie Nickerson. She had a nice ass, he thought, as she moved two or three people ahead of him. A great ass.
“Hey, brother, you goin’ already?” Rollie asked as they snaked past the bar at the entrance of the kitchen. Nickerson, a tall, angular man who hadn’t done much in the theater since Abraham Lincoln and basketball players went out of style, could peer over the tops of assorted heads to the object of Shaft’s attention.
“Yeah, John baby,” he answered his own question, “you gone.”
That’s how he got into these things. Just like that. It was maybe the damnedest night of all the strange ones in his thirty years of them. And it wasn’t over yet.
They had walked east through the West Side’s smudgy, smelly middle Fifties—where Rollie Nickerson and virtually every other unsuccessful actor in New York lived. There was none of the hesitant pause of new acquaintances between them. She took his hand as soon as they hit the sidewalk. They stayed linked together that way until they fell into the San Marco, a small Italian place just west of Sixth.
“I don’t know it,” he said, holding the door.
“I’ve only been for lunch,” she said. “But they really care about food.”
He went through a steak and a pasta something on the side. She had anchovies and peppers, gave him a bite, and toyed with a salad. They talked about some things. What? He never remembered, exactly, except the idea came through that she wasn’t playing games with him. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t afraid of him or wanting to screw his head around for a variety of neurotic reasons. Maybe that was it; she was coming on straight. And there weren’t many like that. They were so rare, in fact, that it took some doing to come back at them straight.
“Do you have any good music we could listen to?”
“Yeah,” he said, ‘’but . . .”
“Your apartment’s a godawful mess, right?”
John Shaft had smiled. There was a disarming quality in the way it lighted the usually cold and noncommittal mask, deceptive as the smile of a man built on such wide, powerful lines along a six-foot frame. And there was a demoniacal cast to the smile provided by the scars he had accumulated . . . the bicycle chain stitching above the right eye, the knicks and slashes of the pistol-whipping he had taken in the search for Beatrice Persons a year ago . . . no, almost two now.
“It’s not a mess,” he defended the apartment. “It’s just . . . confused.”
“Mine’s probably closer, anyhow. I’m on Sixty-fourth, between Madison and Park.”
“That’s a lot closer.”
It kept occurring to Shaft that he should find out what her name was somewhere along the line. But the conversation never got there. She knew his. And he wasn’t going to say anything like, “Okay, I’m John Shaft and I’m a private eye, now who and what are you?” It wasn’t his style. There were too many things happening between them. What difference did the name make? He’d find out eventually or never. It still wouldn’t make any difference. The reality of it was that she was sitting there, he was sitting here, and they were getting up to go to her apartment over on Sixty-fourth Street between Madison and Park because his apartment was . . . confused.
He had a momentary flash of the “confusion.” He hadn’t made the bed for three girls and two weeks. There was a Chemex filter full of three-day-old grounds on the stove. Every ashtray in the place was strangling in the debris of spasmodic tensions. Smudged, smeared glasses containing the last drops of yesterday’s celebrations were glued to the small tables and even the top of the refrigerator, and a Hindu firewalker probably wouldn’t go across the floor in his bare feet without complaining bitterly.
They had walked to her place. It was nothing like his own, sitting on the relatively calm corner of Jane Street and Hudson, on the western frontier of Greenwich Village. Her building probably used to be a private home, converted fifteen or twenty years ago into a sandwich stack of small apartments squeezed between two huge slices of sandstone, one of them an elegant hotel, the other taken over as an embassy that had more meaning than the millionaire who built it.
The name on her door was A. Taylor-Davis.
“Which one are you?’’ he asked, in the heartland of the new marriage that consists of two people and one mailbox hyphen, following her into a large, high-ceilinged room that seemed to be all dark browns and golds with red and pink fabric splashes in pillows and draperies.
“All of them,” she said over her shoulder, moving through the room and straight back to another that he could see to be a small bedroom when she touched on a light. “Amy Taylor-Davis. There’s a hyphen between Taylor and Davis.”
He was looking around the room. There was a circular table in the far corner diagonally opposite the door, covered with a bright gold tablecloth and holding a glob of ceramic that made a nice lamp, a collection of small silver photo frames of faces he couldn’t see and wouldn’t recognize. There was a long, heavy-looking couch of dark brown suede on a stainless steel frame, and in front of that a low glass and stainless steel table, and under it a rich gold-colored Oriental rug that seemed to pull it all together. There was a big leather wingback chair with bright brass tacks trimming all its edges, and on the cream-yellow walls . . .
“John?”
He had been thinking that it was a rich room, a tasteful and expensive room. You see a room like that in a magazine sometimes. People wanted to know the difference between the rest of New York and the Upper East Side, tell them it was a room like this, because it said who the people were and what they were like. And he had also been thinking that if he sat down on the big brown couch and she sat down next to him, they were going to talk for an hour or so and he was going to try to score. Oh, yes, he was. Because she had one hell of an . . .
“John?”
It startled him. And he didn’t startle easy. Did she want him in the bedroom? Didn’t she know he was busy trying to figure out how to ball her on the brown couch two hours from now? He tossed the tan, belted raincoat on the couch and moved toward the sound of her voice.
She was standing in front of a dressing table mirror next to the bed, shadow-lighted in the dim light from the single small lamp, twisted around trying to see the back of her neck in the mirror. Her arms were raised and both her hands were around at the back of her neck at the catch of the zipper, a position that lifted her breasts and thrust the slopes in rising peaks against the fabric of the light wool dress.
“Help me with this damned thing,” she said.
Man, what the hell am I into? he wondered. Only briefly. The catch on the zipper really was stuck, and his fingers felt as big as bananas as he pulled and twisted at it for two minutes. Nothing.
“Force it. Tear it apart.”
“l’ll ruin the . . .”
“Rip the goddamned thing open,” she said.
Shaft ripped. The stubborn zipper and the fabric parted at their mutual seam and the light wool slashed open on peach pink flesh to the beginning shadow of her bottom’s round cheeks.
“I’ll, uh—” The only thing to do was get out of there and let her repair the shambles.
She interrupted his apologies and his movements, turning toward him with a soft smile of shared conquest of the zipper, and began shrugging out of the remains of the dress as they spoke.
“Thank you.” She was not wearing a brassiere. Her breasts were small, but perfect, firm cones. The nipples were dark, but not very dark, and he knew that they would be large in his hand or against his lips if and when she were aroused. “The dry cleaners do that to clothes.” Her body was lean, and there was only the ripple of flesh, not fat, as she bent to lower the remains of the dress to the floor and step out of it. And her belly was flat, almost concave, in the pelvic hollow behind the brown-toned top of the pantyhose. She kicked the mound of torn wool toward a wastebasket that stood beside the dressing table and hooked her finger in that last garment. He hadn’t noticed until then that she had slipped out of her shoes. “There’s a suit hanger in the armoire there. On the right. Why don’t you hang your suit there?” Gauzy, clinging nylon went smoothly, silently down long columns of legs. He was startled on the level of astonishment: he thought for a moment that she had no pubic hair and then saw, when she straightened to toss the hose on a small chair in front of the dressing table, that it was so golden light as to be almost invisible against the light skin. “Over, there.” Nodding toward the cupboard, and turning away. She walked away from him toward the bed. A truly incredible ass, tilting upward toward him as she bent over the bed and pulled back the rich blue coverlet-comforter on butter-yellow sheets and pillows, raising a knee and climbing into the bed that way to settle back against a pillow. She found a cigaret in a small silver box on a stand beside the bed, lit it, and looked at him. Smiling. “Whenever you’re ready, John.”
Why should he feel slightly embarrassed? Ready? He was so ready he would probably have difficulty getting his tightly tailored trousers down over his royal readiness. “In the armoire there.” She nodded toward it again. He went across to it, away from her, and opened the right-hand door and found the hanger. He took his jacket off, looking back at her, maybe to make sure she was still there. Well, fuck it. If that’s the way it was, that’s the way it was. “I didn’t want to rush or charge into this or do a lot of groping or grabbing. “ He hooked the red silk tie on the armoire key temporarily, unbuttoned the shirt and slipped it off. His easy, almost time-dislocated pace puzzled him. He felt under a control, a governor on the racing engine of what he wanted, what he desired. Each foot rose with a slow heaviness to his hands, for a flicking of the laces and slipping out of them. “I want every detail of this with you, John—and I want you to have it, too, to savor it, drink deeply of it.” Oh, Jesus, yes, he needed a drink. Of it, of anything. The trousers and the shorts came off with the slight difficulty he expected, and he stood there with them in his hand for a moment, trying to make sure the change didn’t fall out of the pocket as he turned them upside down for hanging. “Mr. Shaft, did anyone ever tell you you are built like a brick shithouse?”
Did he walk to the bed? Or run? Or float? He floated. Never touched the floor at all, in the dreamy, creamy waves of movement that carried him to the bed. And there . . .
She moved a few inches away to make room for him. He felt the stallion surge of demand that has torn asunder civilizations for its immediate gratification. But he couldn’t reach for her. She wouldn’t let him.
“Don’t fondle me, darling. I don’t need it. I’ve been wet for you since I looked at you at the party. And thought of you inside me.”
He would go insane. His eyes would pop and his brain would explode. His flesh would disintegrate under the pressure. There was no standing this. What was she doing? What did she want?
“Here. Get here on your knees.”
Soft hands, fire-trailing exposed wires guided him to his knees before her as she drew up her long slender legs. Ankles, knees and thighs continued to rise and she held them toward the ceiling and then parted them slightly. He was entranced by the ritual, man kneeling at his altar. Her ankles lowered to his shoulders softly, easily.
“You have a beautiful penis,” she said. Cold, clinical, educated word. It was his cock, his jalop, his meat, his licorice stick, it was 735 dirty words of humping, fucking, balling, making it. But it might never again be anything but this that she had called. And now touched. And now guided.
“Slowly, John,” she said in caution to the first fire of the open flesh. “And look at us. Look at your strength entering me, penetrating. ls it sweet? Is it warm? ls it beautiful to behold?”
He groaned. Every tissue, bone, and muscle of his strong body had been refined and focused to this one place, this one thing.
“Try not to come, darling. Not yet. I want to suck you into me, centimeter by centimeter of your sweet black flesh. And let us feel each other and see each other so that this will always be a part of us.”
And somehow, the flesh walls of the valley of ecstasy began to contract and draw him deeper. Deeper until the golden floss and his black strands were touching and entangled and he was in a place, in such a way, as had never happened before. The bottoms of her thighs were against his chest and she was curled cruelly beneath his weight, the mouth open and inches from his own.
“Oh, l wanted to fuck you,” she whispered, relinquishing control and unleashing the rhythmic frenzy into which they then struggled.
Well, that’s how he got into an orange couch with a blue rug and a plastic desk and all the rest of the shit that was probably going to drive him up the wall or out on the window ledge, hanging like a mad monkey over a frayed and frazzled world in which he was at least comfortable. Goddamnit, he thought, why’d he ever brought her up to the office in the first place? Because, his awareness answered truthfully, she was in charge and had been right from the first.
Herzel was angry, disillusioned, and bitter. It so filled his small, old body—bent under the weight of years and the lifelong habit of leaning over the microscope and the laboratory table—that his sleep had been destroyed long before dawn, and he had come awake with a curse on his lips. He apologized immediately to God and arose to read and pray. There was some relief in it, but no solace. He was fully aware now that they regarded him as a fool. A brilliant fool, perhaps, who had stumbled upon a dream. But still a fool.
After he had prayed, Herzel permitted himself the warmth and succor of tea. He moved very quietly on crushed felt slippers through the kitchen of the small white house. His daughter slept only twenty or thirty feet away in the only room of the house that could be called a bedroom. And he did not want to discuss his problems with her. She was a loving girl, a beautiful girl, but there was about her that certain arrogance he had both encountered and sensed in the last several weeks of his dealing with the ministries and officials. Their bright, hard faces and their bright, hard minds would not open to the premise of his proposal. He had not told them everything. He had told her nothing. And now he sighed with the lonely weight of those decisions and sipped at the tea. In the cold and silent hours of the morning, he thought of his wife. Gone so many years in the final flight from his sorrows, yet still so close that the invocation of her presence was the warmth of a shawl across his bony shoulders. He could have spoken to her of this and she would have understood. There would have been some practical suggestion, for she had been an immensely practical person, or some insightful word or two about the way of things and the people he had encountered in the government offices. “Avrim, you know . . . ,” she would remind him deferentially of something he did not know at all until she propounded it. And the way would be clear.
Avrim Herzel sat nodding and bent on the straight-backed chair, wisps of white hair brushed neatly beneath the black yarmulke, and reached a hand into the inner pocket of the plain gray-black suit he wore over a white shirt, its collar open, and brought forth the small folded square of tissue paper. His slender, age-whitened fingers unfolded the paper carefully until the contents of the packet lay bare in the first sharp shock of dawn that assaulted the window on his kitchen. The four stones lay glittering almost obscenely rich in such a simple place, a seven-carat diamond flashing blue fire, a five-carat emerald of green depths from the very bottom of the soul, the round and bloody fury of a ruby of ten or eleven carats, and the second diamond, larger than the first, perhaps nine carats of cold, fierce flame.
“See? “ he implored. “Do you see the beauty of this work I have done?”
He spoke, as he spoke to his God or the memory of his wife, as he spoke to them both at least once each day, with the hope but not the expectation of an answer.
Morris Blackburn felt as if his skin had been set afire. Even the backs of his small, pudgy hands blazed. It was like nothing he had felt since his childhood in Europe, when he had somehow become infested with vermin and had undergone a hideous but thorough cleansing at the hands of his father. His small, squirming body had been doused then with kerosene, an icy brutality that quickly turned to flame even though the old man set about almost instantly to scrub away this foulest of antiseptics with laundry soap and hot water. His skin had burned for days then with what seemed to be a hundred embarrassments. As it burned now, and the voice on the telephone continued to drawl on in the merciless nasal condescension of the American rich.
“. . . wa-al, Morris, we’ve been friends for such a long, long time, Eye-yum really, really just incredulous that a thing-a of this mag-a-na-tood could happen, bu-ut . . .”
The “but” was $160,000 worth of black pearl. Morris Blackburn’s flaming flesh began to sweat. He wanted to rip off all his fine clothes and flee into the street and the cold November wind pushing soot clouds up Fifth Avenue. Only the rock-hard, gem-hard discipline of his world, the world of the precious stone, held him there, grasping the telephone, his mind racing at incredible speed on three levels—to control his intense discomfort, to think of a solution to this ghastly situation, to find a way of protecting his position.
Morris Blackburn was beautiful, truly beautiful. He was tall and slender, with dark and tightly curled hair that bushed gray at the temples and forelock. Not too gray, but just gray enough for a man who was vigorously fifty, but might have been forty until the lines around the eyes and under the chin deepened in laughter or concentration or fatigue. His suit was beautiful, too. It was designed for him by Marc Bohan of Dior, a chocolate brown gesture of distinguished softness into which a cream stripe had been woven. He wore it with a vest and, under that, a beige shirt of the softest, silkiest cotton, with a massively knotted tie of yet another shade of brown, and red-brown English boots on his smallish, narrow feet.
“Morris is so goddamned beautiful, I feel vulgar paying his bills,” the widow of a broadcasting corporation executive announced one night in noting his exquisite presence at a party they both happened to attend. “He looks more like an Eye-talian he-whore than a jeweler.”
But he was a jeweler, and his beauty was both his success and his affliction. With Tiffany, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Harry Winston, David Webb, and a few others dangling their glittering enticement all around them, the very rich were most likely to buy the imagination of the salesmanship with their baubles. And Morris, for example, could sell a small pearl-and-diamond tiara to a young duchess of Grosse Pointe’s grease-pit aristocracy while they burrowed into the coverlet (and she giggled self-consciously at the canopy) on his quite authentic Louis XIV bed. But he would also have to agree, several weeks later on the afternoon after they had found an unusual but highly rewarding position involving the top of his desk, that she did not have to tell her husband just how much it cost, not until he was through with the strain of exercising all those stock options, or whatever they were. Of course, Morris could wait. Financial patience was as much a part of Morris Blackburn’s sales approach as the black velvet against which he liked to display both his merchandise and himself in all their naked brilliance.
Waiting, waiting. For the once-royal of a democratized, socialized, aggrandized world to commit their remaining resources to the extravagances they were trained to indulge. For the wives of politicians to see their husbands in power again, profiting again, settling the grocer’s, the jeweler’s, and all other accounts again. Waiting, as the men who deal in precious stones have always waited, first for the discovery in the earth, the slow cutting and faceting, the setting and selling, and, most finally, the paying. It was very expensive to wait. The waiting was half the price paid for any of it. And for an impatient man like Morris Blackburn, who loved the taste of success, it was the highest price to pay. He had no choice except to cheat.
If the fat sow had not been so incredibly clumsy as to drop one of the earrings on a marble floor. If she had not been so unbelievably blind as to step on it in the hysteria of her search. If she had not been so impossibly stupid as to take it to a Palm Beach dime store jeweler for repairs instead of shipping it back to him immediately. And if the jeweler in Palm Beach had not been so vicious, unconsciously vicious, as to express deep admiration for the quality of “such a realistic piece of fakery.”
“My dear Edward,” Morris Blackburn said into the telephone, his face suddenly as warm and ingratiating as the voice. “Calm yourself. Our little deceit has made you much too angry. Smile. You must have beautiful weather there . . . and let me explain. You remember how terribly impatient Julia was for the earrings. Of course you do. Well, a small, time-consuming problem developed in the safety lock on the pin of one of the pearls . . . a problem that we have just now solved . . . and let me assure you that it is right here in the vault, if you need such assurance.”
“Wa-al, Morris, Eye-yum . . .”
“But Julia couldn’t wait, could she? So I simply substituted our design model for the problem earring until such time as . . .”
He talked very quickly, very smoothly. He had been told that he looked like an actor; perhaps he should have been one. There was no black pearl in the vault. But he was racing for the curtain of the first act. Morris Blackburn knew he could play it to the end if he had just a brief intermission.
Max Lishkin felt as relaxed as he ever got as soon as the lousy piece of junk he got from the car rental agency moved out of the business area and onto the open highway to the Miami airport. He reached out with his left hand and rolled down the window, eye on the road, tight one-hand hold on the wheel, letting the soft coolness of the Florida night flush out the ashtray odor he had been closed in with since he left the garage. Lishkin did not smoke, and the ashtray smell was one of the annoyances he bore whenever he was closed up in a car or even a room where the housekeeping had not been quite to his fastidious standard.
There were many other small conditions of this sort that annoyed this short, round man who wore a plainly cut dark gray suit, a light blue shirt that had been starched into a state of endurance for his travels (he carried no extra clothes with him, occasionally buying a shirt, generally washing out his socks and underwear in the bathroom basin of his hotel room). He never expressed these individual annoyances, but sometimes complained lightly that the only thing wrong with people was their habits. Their bad habits.
For Max Lishkin had no habits, except the habit of having no others. It had been almost thirty years in which he had never done the same thing in the same place for two consecutive days. It led to this sort of dialogue between his closest associations.
“So where’s Max?”
“Who knows?”
“Max knows.”
“So ask Max.”
He was not to be expected anywhere at any given time.
Home? He had two small rooms, one in Brooklyn, the other in his sister’s large apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan. He slept in one or the other on alternate nights, when he did not check into a small hotel or the Sloane House YMCA on far West Thirty-fourth Street or a health club in which he maintained a membership. He traveled to them by subway, bus, cab, foot, and sometimes rented car, which was also the nonpattern of his travels throughout the country and occasionally abroad. While he would have saved what could have amounted to years of time by flying, Max Lishkin had seen Dallas through the window of a Greyhound bus, the outskirts of Tulsa from the diner of a train, the route from San Francisco to Denver through the windshields of various cars, and a lot the Atlantic Ocean through a porthole.
Now he was going to fly back to New York, after a reasonably successful three-day trip to Miami, because he had been summoned, through the double and triple relays of answering services and message drops, to an important meeting the following morning. But no one really knew for sure that he was coming, or how.
Thus he was considerably surprised in the airport parking lot when he bent over his belly to pull up on the emergency brake and felt the very cold muzzle of a small-caliber pistol pressed against the side of his head.
Who, he wondered, dying.
Max Lishkin’s worn and inexpensive-looking black attaché case caught the next plane for New York. It contained $97,000 worth of loose diamonds, which was a very meager and disappointing haul. But as one of the world’s great diamond salesmen, Max had disposed of more than $2 million worth during his three days of making the rounds of jewelers in the Miami area—a sale that was his custom as the resort season began, if not his habit.
Well, fuck it, Shaft thought, pushing out of the new black leather chair. He had his fill of the office. He had that about three minutes after he had unlocked the door and scooped the accumulated mail off the floor. At some time during the afternoon, he should have called her office and said that he was back, that they could have dinner that night, that they could proceed immediately to bed or the nearest clearing in the traffic, vehicular or pedestrain, and start catching up on his three weeks’ absence.
But he was in no mood for that. He felt like the victim of an obscene practical joke. Mr. Cinderella or whatever the hell his name was had showed him some sketches and twittered at him about colors, but Shaft had apparently closed his ears in either the rush to get out of town or maybe some inner resentment at having agreed to let an aspect of his life-style go to some external command.
Shaft got his raincoat from the windowsill where he had thrown it in sulky defiance of the white porcelain wall hooks and fought the wool of his blue blazer past the fabric liner of the coat, with the passing thought that raincoat linings must undergo some special treatment to make them difficult to get into. With both big, meaty hands, he began picking up stacks of mail and stuffing the envelopes into the coat’s saddlebag pockets. He wasn’t sure where he was going. Maybe some quiet bar down in the Village, except there weren’t any quiet bars in the Village, or maybe to his apartment.
Maybe he ought to call the answering service. He started to reach for the telephone. Fuck that, too. Whatever, whoever, it could wait another day. The only family he ever had was the Welfare Department and they hadn’t been in communication since the judge had let him join the army and go to Nam instead of the street hoodlum’s postgraduate classes behind bars. And that was a long time ago. Friends? Who did he know in the friendless, detached, and survival-focused New York out there who could pause long enough to wonder if Shaft was back in town?
He got ready to leave, grabbing up the cigarets and matches, and for some reason thinking momentarily about the lifeguard on the beach at Montego Bay. The big, muscular black man, bigger by thirty pounds than Shaft, had said that Americans didn’t know how to roll a joint, proceeding to take out a ditty bag of native ganje, roll a big fat one, and blow it right there in the Caribbean sunshine.
“Hello?”
Cowboys and Indians. The disembodied head that peered around the door from the third-floor hallway was wearing a heavy black beard and a big black sombrero. Well, there were funnier-looking things swimming around in the dark waters of Times Square. No reason he should be surprised that one of them came into his old building.
“Yeah?”
The cowboy’s response was just to look around the office slowly and carefully, then back to Shaft.
“I know how you feel,” Shaft said, pushing down the envelopes in his pockets, beginning to button the coat.
“Shaft?”
“Just like on the door.”
“We would like a few words with you.”
We?
“You want to talk in here or out there in the hallway?”
The cowboy came into the office then.
“Excuse me,” he said, turning to look back over his shoulder with a nod of approval.
There were seven of them. All cowboys. Except they weren’t cowboys. But they were something. In assorted shapes, sizes, and ages, the seven men who filed into his office were identical in dress—each one wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, long and dark outer coat, dark suits with vests, white shirts, and black, old-fashioned-looking shoes. They all had beards and curls hanging down around, in front of, or over their ears.
Shaft remembered meeting a writer in the No Name Bar across the street from his apartment house one night and the guy’s telling him his next book would be Great Jewish Gunfighters of the Old West, beginning with Coward Cohen in Cimarron and ending, in a puff of gunsmoke, with Rapid Rabinowitz in Dodge City. The memory made him smile. Nobody smiled back. The men crowding into the office, standing closely together like visitors to an alien, unsafe land, continued to inspect him and his surroundings. He became aware, of course, that they were not cowboys, that he had seen the darkly suited and heavily hatted men and their beards crossing his path briskly, brusquely, always quite vigorously, on a number of occasions.
He had assumed that they were Jewish simply because they appeared to be Jewish, assumed without really thinking it out that their more formal attire signified some special position or purpose. Rabbis, perhaps. The thought occurred to him now that seven rabbis had come to see him. And it troubled him because Shaft did not believe in God or organized religion, or anything much except himself, and he wasn’t sure how to act toward people who did. Especially people who believed so much that they worked at it nine to five.
“You want to find some places to sit down?” he asked. At least the distribution of their somber clothes around the room would cover part of the color scheme. As they found places on the couch and in two black chairs that matched his own, and two, the youngest of them, remained standing against the wall, Shaft speculated that maybe one of their associates had disappeared with the collection plate and they didn’t want to cause a scandal by blowing the whistle on him publicly. Well, if God didn’t know where this cat was, how could . . . ?
“Thank you,” said the leader of the group. “We wish to inquire into your services on our behalf.”
“Doing what?”
“An investigation. An inquiry which must be extremely fast yet very discreet, and so, of course, we must first know what you do.”
Shaft thought at first that they knew what he did or they wouldn’t be there, crowded into his office like a new rock band looking for the bread to get their guitars out of hock. Someplace in one of the file cabinets on the side of the room, he had all the clippings from the Daily News and the others about who he was and what he had done.
“Well, maybe you read about one of my cases in the paper . . . ,” he began. They looked horrified. “I mean, how did you pick up on . . .”
“We read about you in the Yellow Pages,” the lead vocalist said. That was a kick in the ass. And it got worse. “You were the closest one.”
That was almost as depressing as the discovery that his office had become a setting for a Halloween party, with everything except pumpkins. It gave him the status of, say, the nearest men’s room on a cold day. He wished he had left the office five or ten minutes before they had decided to come into it.
“Yeah, well, like it says there in the Yellow Pages, I’m a private investigator. I handle some things that the police don’t do, some things the police can’t do . . .’’
That seemed to please them. They all nodded. He wondered why they didn’t take off their hats.
“. . . and, like in places where there’s no proof of a crime having been committed, but some suspicion, maybe I can find out if that suspicion is worth turning over to the police before somebody gets all involved and hurt without it being necessary.”
They continued to nod. So he went on and told them about divorce cases (at which they all frowned), how he sometimes had posed as a porter in big stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Gimbel’s to look into pilferage problems (they stopped frowning), and got into a lot of things where nobody would expect a black man to be, which made it easier for him to operate and gather information quietly without raising the barriers of suspicion (which was very pleasing and he thought he felt a breeze raised by the up and down movement of seven wide hat brims).
“And how much does this cost?”
“The rates vary, but mostly I get fifteen dollars an hour now . . . and expenses.”
“Expenses?” Big frowns all around.
“Phone calls, taxi fares, maybe I have to buy some information . . .”
“Why do you have to buy information if you get fifteen dollars an hour to find out yourself?”
Now Shaft frowned.
“Because sometimes it’s the only way, the fast way. There’s people who have information who don’t understand anything, who can’t even hear anything, except the rustling noise that money makes when you rub a handful of it together right in their ears.”
That they understood. There was a generous round of nods. Shaft noticed that a couple of them were inspecting the office very closely, as if they were estimating the cost of such outrageous frippery in a business place. One, on the far end of a couch, picked up a green-gray ashtray from the little table beside him and looked at the bottom of it. Shaft wished he’d steal the goddamned thing, slip it into the folds of the long black coat.
“Okay?” he asked. “Would you gentlemen like to discuss something specific with me?”
“Please excuse us for a moment,” the spokesman said, turning around in his chair to face the others, then looking back to ask, “Do you understand Yiddish?”
“What?”
“Yiddish?”
“No.”
The elder nodded and turned to the others again to begin. Shaft expected it would be a few exchanges that would decide whether they wanted to tell him what it was all about and then maybe a request that he handle their problem, whatever the hell it might be. What he got, or felt he was getting, was a debate on the beginning and end of mankind with serious review of the causes—and all of it in a language he could not understand.
Each one of the seven men in the room apparently had a speech to make. And each one had a strong counterproposal and counter-counterproposals.
Shaft sat back in his chair and listened for a while. He couldn’t understand a word. He thought he caught the name Schwartz being fired back and forth several times and speculated that perhaps a man named Schwartz was their big problem. It was going too fast for him to decipher it as shvartze, the Yiddish for Negro, and realize that they were discussing him. He lit a cigaret, turned to look out the window at Times Square. When the cigaret was done, he turned back. They were still at it. He lit another and started to look through the mail he had in his pockets. They argued through twenty-seven advertisements, fourteen bills, two postcards, a note from a cat he knew in the army who was now in the federal penitentiary at Danbury and wanted help, and a notice from his landlord that he was in trouble for repainting without permission. It was such a terrible thing he had permitted to be done that his rent would probably be raised in keeping with the bright, new look of the premises. Landlords thought that way. Shaft looked at his watch. Twenty minutes at least. And still they talked. He thought about dinner, drinks, unpacking his bags, taking a shower, getting laid, trying a taste of the Jamaican boo he had smuggled back with him. He was tired. Then he thought of throwing them the hell out of there. This was turning into one huge pain in the ass.
“Okay, okay,” he interrupted a vigorous declamation from a man about thirty with a bright red beard and what seemed to be the stamina for several hours more of this. They all turned to him, but he spoke to the leader. “I’m splitting, man. I’m tired and I’m dirty and I’m hungry. Why don’t you just take Dopey, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Grouchy out of here and go see if you can find Snow White and maybe figure out what the hell you want. I’ll be back in the morning. Give me a call . . .”
“Of course,” the leader said. “More talk is unnecessary, but we are a committee and everyone must participate fully. We have decided.”
“Decided what?”
“That we wish to retain you to find out what is happening in our business. The diamond business.” “What’s wrong with it?”
“No one knows, except something unusual is happening.”
“That’s nothing to think about.”
“Not in your business perhaps. Not in all the others. But in the diamond business, there is never . . .”—and his voice sounded stern and filled with righteousness—”. . . there is never, ever the slightest whisper or suspicion of something unusual but that concern, even fear, does not rise in the hearts of a thousand men. Something ‘unusual’ does not happen more than once in a century. And it is happening now.”
Shaft paused over that a moment.
“But how or what do you want me to do, what do you want to know?”
“Everything, from the movement of the smallest speck of dust to the cutting of the largest stone, that is not done today as it was yesterday, as it was the day before that.”
“Everything? That’s impossible. You need a hundred people like me for that.”
“No. Just one . . . with the minds and eyes and ears of the rest of us . . . and you will do the work of a hundred men.”
“Hey, man,” he started to protest, thinking that he couldn’t get that tied up for fifteen an hour and tokens, that they were all crazy, anyhow, and would cramp his style.
“Your payment for this will be realistic and honest, since we cannot function any other way. There will be an extremely small percentage of the total gross for all of us . . . we are just a committee representing many more . . . if you are able to provide a solution to our problem.”
There was an interruption in Yiddish from the couch.
The leader acknowledged the reminder. “But no expenses,” he said.
Shaft’s quick resentment reminded him that he didn’t like Jews. He was tired, annoyed, and hardly rational about what he resented. The chiseling bastards.
‘’Yeah, well, you just collect yourselves and get the fuck out of here,” he said. “I’m gonna count the ashtrays and go home.”
They didn’t mind his anger.
“Let me tell you what the figures for the last year were before you decide not to help us.”
In two or three scribbles on his memo pad, a door was opened for John Shaft, black private eye, on a world he could not and dared not conceive of ever knowing. His fee, if he did everything he was supposed to do, would come to something just over five hundred and seventy-four fucking thousand dollars.
He went into a state of financial shock that lasted maybe a second before his imagination began spending it.