LIEUTENANT VICTOR ANDEROZZI SAT on the edge of his bed, gazing down on the pond of darkness in which he dangled his slender, almost delicate feet. His body called for him to topple back into the rumpled scramble of sheets and blankets to seek out the indentation that had been molded by the weight of his body. His conscience told him to get up and get dressed. He wasn’t sure who was going to win. He wasn’t sure he cared. Shaft had ripped it good this time and the silly bastard deserved whatever was going to happen to him. The only trouble with that was it might be the last thing that ever happened to Shaft and he, Anderozzi, would be partially responsible for it.
His wife was snoring. Goddamnit, everybody in the world was snoring except Victor Anderozzi. Even half the midnight-to-eight shift was cooping in discreetly parked patrol cars or snoozing on desks in the back end of the precinct houses. The other half was trying to keep John Shaft alive through the night. He thought briefly of waking up his wife to do her part in that effort by making him some coffee. He also thought briefly of waking up the Police Commissioner to see if he wanted to do his part. In fact, he wished he had the button to the biggest goddamned siren in the world, so he could push it and wake up everybody in the whole fucked-up city of New York to have them do their part in it. Instead, he reached for another cigarette, struck a tiny torch that hurt his eyes and made grotesque shadows of the life he lived and the way he lived it.
Leaning over his knees in the darkness, Anderozzi tried to puzzle out Shaft’s movements. He had been sitting on the edge of the bed since the first phone call, informing him that the black man was running loose among the swamp guineas of the Village. What the hell was he doing? They didn’t know; he was just out of his apartment and running. Well, goddamnit, was he out jogging in the middle of the night? Don’t get mad at us, Lieutenant, he’s just running down the streets. Watch him, then. Okay. Four minutes later they called again. Shaft was running from bar to bar. What the hell was he doing? Robbing them? They didn’t know. Goddamnit, find out! Fast! The next call came seven minutes later. They had found out what Shaft was doing. Anderozzi let them hang onto the silence while he thought. He was resented in the department for his position as neither cop nor commander, but the man who worked for the Commissioner. When he thought for the Commissioner, both cop and captain waited for the results. And what did he think? That Shaft was finally going to get killed. The phone call after this one would be to say that the meat-wagon crew was scraping the pieces of him off a wall someplace.
“All right,” he said finally, “if they make contact with him, if there’s a legitimate approach to him by anybody, let it happen and stay out of it. Is that clear? Stay out of it. But until it’s certain, stay with him every inch of the way. He’s unpredictable and smart.”
Anderozzi might have added stubborn, largely unpleasant in the extreme toward any form of authority, momentarily independent and violent in his response to abuse, real or imagined. But why bother to tell them? The only thing worse than a dumb cop who knew nothing was a smart-ass who knew too much. They would find out what Shaft was like if they didn’t follow instructions. So he just hung up the receiver.
“How about a cup of coffee?” Anderozzi said to the inert form of his wife. There wasn’t the slightest interruption in the pattern of her snore. He hadn’t expected one. He got up, groped for his robe on a chair and headed for the kitchen, fighting to get his arms through the rayon tubes of sleeves without ripping them. It was four forty-two and apparently his day was beginning. The coffee pot was clean and empty, sitting on a cold burner of the white gas range. At least he didn’t have to screw around getting rid of the grounds. He almost forgave her for sleeping through his anxiety about Shaft. One spoon, two spoons, three spoons, Shaft spoons. Shaft. What in God’s name are you going to do next?
“Who the hell are you anyhow?” Shaft asked.
“What the hell difference does it make?” the man
replied. “You wanted to see somebody. I’m here.”
“You got the girl?”
“You always drink coffee with your left hand?”
Shaft smiled. So did the man. He felt a little foolish. He put the .38 back in his lap and brought his right hand out on top of the table.
“You got the girl?”
“Sure.”
“How do I know?”
“I’ll show you. Come on.”
He started to get up from the bent-steel ice-creamparlor chair, scraping it back along the tiles a couple of inches.
“Wait a minute,” Shaft said. “You’ll show me when I want to see her.”
“Okay.” The man shrugged. He couldn’t care less. He greeted the arrival of the waitress with a bright, hard smile. “Hello, sweetheart.” She responded with a twitching at the corner of the mouth. “Give me whatever my friend is having.”
The girl was upset. It was closing time and she had eight grown men and three ungrown hippies to deal with. She wanted to go home, not back and forth to the hissing espresso apparatus.
He turned the hard, dying smile on Shaft.
“Girls like that,” he said. “Soft, but they got good muscles. I used to like to take a girl like that, kid who maybe needed a couple of bucks or a square meal, or maybe she was just lonely, and run her through every position she ever dreamed about, you know? All in one night. Fuck their brains out. They been fooling around with these fags and spades around here and they think that’s sex. But each time you make it a little rougher, a little stranger. They go out of their minds. Pretty soon they’re screaming when they get it and screaming when they don’t get it. They don’t know the difference. They’re begging, but they don’t know what they’re begging for. You got the picture. She’s rolling around the bed screaming, ‘Please, please, please.’ So you give it to her as hard as you can and all the time she keeps screaming. ‘Please, please, please.’ When you stop, when you get done, she keeps right on going. ‘Please, please, please.’”
Charles Caroli, whose brother’s bottle-broken head lay uneasily on a rubber-covered pallet in the city jail, turned his dark and sharply etched face toward the waitress. She was leaning back against the counter, simultaneously resting her feet, staying ready for the next summons from one of the tables and toting up checks on a green-lined pad with the stub of a pencil. He waited until she looked up, motioned her to the table.
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, you want to catch the show at the Gate some night? Nina Simone . . . ”
He was a vital-looking young man, somewhere around thirty, the carefully tailored pin-stripe suit in muted gray working quietly off a gray shirt and darkly crimson tie. No jewelry showing, but a gold Patek Phillippe with a gold mesh band glistened somewhere beneath the cuff on his left wrist. Shaft glanced up at the girl. He caught a fragment of her uncertainty.
“I’m usually so tired I just . . . ” The apology trailed off into indecision. She really wanted to go. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Charles Caroli. What did he want of her that he couldn’t find elsewhere? Shaft felt her bend toward the flattery of the invitation. She fielded a thousand propositions in a week. but this was the first invitation. A good-looking young man had invited her to a nightclub three blocks away, not to his bed, whatever that may be.
“Think about it,” Caroli said, letting her off the hook. “We’ll be here awhile.”
Please, please, please. Shaft thought of Beatrice. He had never so much as seen the girl. His vague idea of what she looked like came from Knocks’ description and a small snapshot that the mountainous gangster had given him. Shaft had left it on his desk. He didn’t need it. The picture Charles Caroli had given him was clear. A small, black body writhing on a bed, sobbing, “Please, please, please.”
Caroli he could kill. It would be simple. The man was hard, cold and sure under the soft gray suit. Prison hard. Mob hard. Gutter hard. Killer hard. A different kind of tempering than most people understood. But Shaft felt harder. He was sure he could kill Caroli with his hands, as soon as they got out of this place and walked down the dark tunnels of the Greenwich Village streets. One shot with either hand would take him out. Then he could stand on his throat and kill him. For a second, it was all he could think, a wish superimposed on the vision of the black girl on the bed. A vision of all the bodies on all the beds. Please, please, please.
And then what would he do? Kick the corpse into somebody’s hallway and go back to his apartment content, satisfied—and wondering where Beatrice was and how to get her back. Sometimes, it was so easy to kill. Sometimes, it was so hard to think. Caroli was smiling at him. Caroli was that smart. He knew what was happening in Shaft’s head.
“Where is she?”
“Like I said, I’ll show you. Right around the corner. Whenever you’re ready.”
“You want to deal?”
“With you?” He let his head roll back in a short, sharp laugh. “Christ, you’re a messenger boy. What kind of a deal can I make with you?”
Shaft’s right hand fell off the table, back into his lap.
“You can make one right now to stay alive, you silly motherfucker. I just got to the limit of you.”
Caroli’s world was crowded with psychopaths. The possibility that Shaft was one of them penetrated his arrogance. His smile slid off the side of his face like a rejected panhandler shuffling across cold concrete.
“That won’t get you anything,” he said.
“Don’t ever be sure. It’s all we’re talking about right now.”
“All right. All right. So we talk about what we want. It isn’t much. We want Harlem.”
“Spanish Harlem,” Shaft said.
“Harlem,” Caroli corrected.
“You ain’t going to get it.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. But that’s the deal”
“Do you know what’s going on up there? With the people?’’
“I don’t want to. We know how much there is and how it’s moving. That’s enough to know.”
“Not anymore, it isn’t.”
There was an edge of impatience, boredom in Caroli’s voice. “I told you what the deal was.”
“For Beatrice.”
“Is that her name? We call her . . . ” He glanced to Shaft’s arm, resting in his lap. He reconsidered. “For Beatrice.”
It was very simple. Most basic things are, Shaft thought. When you scraped away the complexities and looked at them, you realized that they had been added to the basic issues between men by their fears, greeds and maybe lusts. But the issues remained the same. Simple. All you had to do was get down to them. They had Beatrice and they wanted Harlem. One for one. Knocks Persons had Harlem and he wanted Beatrice. One for one. What about the five men who had died in the thunderstorm of bullets that fell on Amsterdam Avenue? Well, what about them? What about the fact that the attempt had been to kill Shaft? Well, what about it? Those things happened. They had some reasons, maybe good reasons at the time and bad reasons now, but reasons. What difference did these make now? As men, they were down to the issues at last. A realist could see that the rest of it was meaningless, pointless.
“You consider the possibility,” Shaft asked, “that maybe there is no room to deal, that maybe we just turn it over to the law?”
“Sure,” Caroli said. “We’re ready to handle it that way. Like you can call them right now. Or so can I. Like we can call over those six bastards on either side of us and ask them to sit in on this . . . ”
They had to be police, the clusters at the tables in the opposite comers. He had been concentrating so hard on Caroli, his own wild plan for making the contact, that he hadn’t picked up on them. How goddamned stupid he could get sometimes. He had wondered if they were mob, not law.
“ . . . and I’ll give them the address. They go up there and what do they find? They find this black broad stoned out of her head with about six needles in the place and eight, ten decks of horse sprinkled around. Oh, yeah, she’s got needle marks all over her arms and ass. We do that and they make a great score. Maybe pack this broad off to the pan for about twenty, thirty years. You want to call them or you want me to do it?”
Of course they were cops. But how did they get there? He was angry and embarrassed at their lumpish presence. Anderozzi, or somebody, didn’t bust him to bring it off. So they sent help. Unrequested, unwanted and unneeded help. Most likely, they had been told to watch Shaft, he thought. That was the limit of the imagination.
His mind went back to the acid Caroli was dripping on him. Beatrice. Goodbye, Beatrice. You are going to the can for a twenty-year Federal narcotics rap. And Knocks will sit in his leather bathtub weeping over you until the hippo bulk of him has been squeezed dry by the weight of pain. What then?
Who will have won? They will. They will have weakened and worried him and in that found the flaw. Shaft decided then, sitting in judgment on the unlikely bench of a marble-top table in a Greenwich Village coffee house, that the empire of Knocks Persons was finished. As huge and powerful as it might be, now it had to topple. It was human. And all things human could perish.
“You got him pretty good,” Shaft said. “Either way.”
Caroli was smart enough not to show his pride about the concession.
“It looks that way,” he said.
The .38 in Shaft’s hand weighed a hundred pounds of futility. He slipped it back into the folds of the oilskin jacket and the waistband of his pants. The muzzle pinched the flesh of his groin and the inflexible steel made him sit up straighter. It, too, was an unwanted, unneeded embarrassment now. What the hell good was it?
“I’ll see what Knocks says,” he agreed. “But I think you got a deal.”
“I think we have.”
“But let’s keep the game honest. Let’s go see Beatrice. If she’s alive, if it’s like you say it is, that’s the way it’ll be. If she’s not, if it’s something else, I’m going to put six buttonholes up and down your spine.”
“I got to make a call first,” Caroli said, ignoring the threat, glancing around for the pay phone that hung like a big, black bug on the wall near the restrooms. He started to get up. Shaft stopped him with a shake of his hand.
“No calls,” he said. “We just get up and go.”
The racketeer hesitated, then nodded, pushing back the chair.
“All right, we just go.”
Shaft thought about saying goodbye to the six cops, maybe sending his regards to Anderozzi. But they were such humorless bastards. Most of them could only laugh at the sight of blood. He thought also of stopping to tell them to stay the hell out of what was happening. That, too, would be futile. They did what they were told to do and some of what they were expected to do. Shaft had no influence over that and knew it. So he could only follow Caroli out of the Borgia, tossing a couple of dollars on the table top for the girl. He glanced at the three hippies sitting in the window booth. They were probably cops, too, he thought.
Caroli held the door for him, waved to the left, up toward the Gate. Shaft was glad the sonofabitch hadn’t been able to make the girl agree to a date. Probably he never wanted one. But just in case, Shaft was just-in-case glad. It was about five o’clock. Even these streets, these last of all New York streets to become empty in any night as the wound of the day closed, were at last deserted. The two men were almost an intrusion into the new quiet of them. They walked quickly, without talking, the white man in the business suit slightly in the lead of the black man in his black uniform. At Thompson Street, they turned right, more or less south as the gerrymander streets of the Village wander. This was even quieter, emptier. A street with the feeling of loss behind the crabbed, crinkled facade of small windows set in blotched red brick, grated with steel and iron like the windows of a jail.
“Here,” said Caroli. A building distinguishable from all the others in the block only by the Chinese laundry on the sidewalk level, curtained and hidden from the street by dark, loosely hanging material on bamboo rods and a cluster of ferns in one corner. It occurred to Shaft as he turned into the building that Chinese laundry windows were always full of ferns because they were so dark and damp.
The lobby door was unlocked, without a buzzer system to control hallway access. The tenants must have made some exciting discoveries from time to time, Shaft thought. Or maybe the tenants were all like Caroli—and the hallway lurkers wished they had lurked elsewhere. The thought amused him. He visualized someone attempting to mug a man who had grown up mugging the world, maiming it, killing it. In hallways as these, in the alleys around the corner.
But Shaft was thinking mostly of where they were and how the building was situated in the middle of Thompson Street, what the inside layout would be. There was at least some light in it, a glare thrown by an uncovered bulb in a cockeyed fixture dangling from the high ceiling of the entrance hall. It glared on a long, narrow set of stairs rising to the gloomy darkness of the floors above, while the downstairs hall, a sliver of cracked and dirty tiles, ran past the stairway toward the rear of the building. There were plain brown doors with enameled tin numbers nailed to them—one and two—on either side of the hallway. Presumably there were similar doors for three and four down the dark hall. Shaft couldn’t tell in the darkness. But it was likely. The owners of these old cakes of decay and filth cut them into as many slices as possible. It was the way to beat the overhead, it was the way to get rich. Harlem or Greenwich Village, landlords were all the same. Like wolves everywhere. The people they were devouring tasted just as good.
He couldn’t see down the hallway and he had to follow Caroli, who took off up the stairs quickly, half running, one at a time. Like one of those prancing faggots who dance up the stairs in the old musicals on television. Shaft kept up, yet not too close. He wanted to see more than Caroli’s back against the smoothly tailored pinstripe. But all he saw was hallway and more doors, all he heard was the grating of his shoes and those of the man in front of him as they quick stepped up the wooden staircase. The only difference between this tenement and all the others he’d seen, he thought, was that this one smelled a little better. Not much, but nobody had pissed in the hallways recently and the owner apparently had sense enough to collect the garbage or make the tenants cart it down to the cans in front of the building. But it was still what it was: a place where trouble lived, where the poor lived, where fear lurked in large lumps behind each door.
Behind one of them, on the third floor of what Shaft had guessed to be four, was that lump of fear for which he had searched. Caroli stopped there, pulled out a set of keys on the anchor line of a slender gold rope chain.
“One thing,” Caroli said, slipping the key into an obviously new brass lock that apparently locked both inside and out with a key and only a key. “She may not look so hot, but she’s okay. She’s just stoned.”
Caroli was bending over the lock as he spoke. When he turned the tumbler and finished the sentence, Shaft shot him square in the side of the head, just above the right ear. The dark, narrow hallway exploded in a flash of flame, thunder and blood. Caroli’s body flew down the hall like a candy wrapper in a high wind and floated to the floor. The key chain ripped loose and dangled from the lock in the rickety door.
At that range with that gun there was no doubt. Half of Caroli’s head was sprayed onto the wall next to the door. Shaft moved before the body settled. He sprang at the door with the muscles of his left shoulder and arm bunched into a battering ram. He felt so tight he could have gone through bricks. It was more force than he needed. The old door shattered, shook and flew back against the inside wall of the room with a report that came so quickly it could have been an echo of the blast that ended Charles Caroli’s life.
It was a lunge that put Shaft almost in the center of a small, dark room, crouched, black on black, the gun pointing nowhere and everywhere, weaving in his hand like a dancing cobra with five deadly fangs left to kill.
There was nothing there to kill. It was a bare room, rented as an efficiency apartment probably, with a bed, dresser, a couple of chairs and a small stove and sink set into a recess of the wall as a kitchen, a tub and a toilet jammed into a closet as a bathroom. Nothing there to kill, only the form, the small and delicate form stretched out on the bed, casting a blob of shadow against the wall in the light from a lamp on the dresser beside the bed.
Beatrice. Knocks Persons’ “baby.” Neither the shot nor the crashing of the door had disturbed her. Or if they had, her shock was spinning off into some narcotic spiral of her dreams.
Shaft never stopping moving. He jerked open the closet door and poked at the emptiness with the pistol, ripped aside the shower curtain of the tub, even bounced into a crouch and looked under the bed, put them all under the gun before he looked a second time at the girl on the bed. Time was telescoped. It all had to happen so fast. He bent over her to make sure she was breathing. It was hard to tell. She lay twisted into the folds of a sleazy light blanket. She was breathing. He picked up a corner of the gray wool rag to see what she had on. Nothing. Where were the fucking clothes? There was nothing in the closet, nothing on the chair.
He turned to the dresser. The top of it was littered with the cooking-shooting equipment of the heroin addict. Two hypos lay there, beside a candle, the bent and flame-blackened spoon, eight or nine glassine envelopes of white powder.
Shaft yanked the handkerchief out of his back pocket, poked it into a small four-corner bag over the cup of his left hand. He used the muzzle of the .38 as a tool to flip out the comers of the linen square and then poke the depression in the center of it. He also used the gun again as a prod to push all the narcotics paraphernalia off the scarred veneer of the old oak dresser into the kerchief. He was moving carefully but very quickly. The ugly, filthy hypos. They drew an involuntary shudder across his skin as they fell onto the handkerchief. People stuck those things into their skin. Somebody, probably Caroli, had been sticking them into Beatrice as she twisted across the bed.
He had thought it all out on the stairs. There was nothing to do but go as far as he could with Caroli and then reverse the direction of his action. He didn’t know what was at the top of those stairs, behind the scab of a door on the sick plaster walls. He expected there would be one man, maybe two, in the room with the girl, if the girl was there at all. He expected it to be a trap of some sort for whatever reasons they chose to put him in one. There’s nothing you can do with a trap except tear the motherfucker apart before it falls on you, clamps down on you, begins to squeeze the life out of you.
The lock, he thought. It was the lock in the door that told him Beatrice was probably inside, unable to get out even if she could grope through the quagmire murk of narcosis. When the lock turned under Caroli’s key, Shaft decided to tear the trap apart. He killed Caroli as openers, then went plunging through the door.
But there had been no trap. At least none that he could see. He overestimated them. There had just been the three of them involved on this level—the two he had taken out at the No Name and the dead one out in the hallway. They actually had been coming up here to see Beatrice. The man really did want to deal. But the man was dead. There was no deal. There was only setting this up and getting Beatrice the hell out of there as fast as possible.
He spun around with the bag of narcotics equipment and stepped into the hallway. Caroli bled a lot for a man with only one hole in his head. There was a deepening pool of it around the body, seeping under the hallway railing. Shaft emptied the handkerchief bag over the dead man’s chest. One of the needles stayed there, the second rolled off onto the floor. A glassine packet of heroin landed on Caroli’s cheek and stayed there. The others spilled on the front of his shirt.
“Get you some flowers later,” he whispered, charging back into the room.
There were three men waiting for him beside Beatrice’s bed. They had guns just like his. And their presence raised a number of questions. Where did they come from? Who the hell were they? And why didn’t they kill him?