“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”
Silence.
“John?”
“Hunh?”
“I asked where you were going.”
“Oh.”
Shaft sat in the middle of the living-room floor legs folded under each other in an Indian squat.
“I dunno,” he said. “Away.”
He studied the bi-level plastic device on the floor carefully. The kid had beaten him four games out of five in three-dimensional tic-tac-toe and he had actually been trying. It was embarrassing. Helen Green gazed affectionately at the hulk of him against the beige carpet with her son, the two of them concentrating fiercely. Her son’s hand moved quickly to the game.
“I win!” he shrieked.
“Damn!” Shaft said.
“I win, I win, I win, I win! You’re lousy.”
The little bastard didn’t have to be so cocky about it.
“I never saw this game before tonight,” Shaft defended himself. “You had practice.”
“That’s enough,” Helen said. “Pick that up and take it to your room.”
“I want to beat him again,” the boy protested.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to be beat again,” she said. Shaft was twice stung.
“Mind your mama,” he said. “I’ll get you next time.”
“No you won’t, no you won’t, no you won’t,” the boy chanted. “I win, I win, I win.”
He grabbed up the plastic shelves of the game and scooted out of the living room, chanting all the way. Shaft reached out and swatted him on the tail as he went past. Then he continued to stare at the rug where the game had been played and lost. Next time. He’d get it next time because his mind would work on it and he’d beat the kid. Then he’d have to start throwing the games so he wouldn’t feel bad.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Huh?”
“You aren’t hearing me,” she said.
“Yeah. Well,” he sighed, getting up of the floor, still favoring the right leg a little where the ligament had been torn and was still mending, under heavy strapping. “Yeah.”
Shaft walked over to the heavy crystal decanters that Marvin Green found in those good little Second Avenue antique shops like Eris on his lunch hour, haggling with some nice young guy with a funny mustache. What was his name? Harris. Harris something.
“What’s the name of that antique dealer where Marvin gets these things?”
“Harris Diamant,” she said. “A shop called Eris.”
“I know that. Just couldn’t remember the man’s name. Nice man.”
“Yes,” she said, watching the glass in Shaft’s hand glow amber as he poured almost two inches of Scotch into it. “How did it go today?”
He was sipping the Scotch straight, without ice. He wasn’t hearing anything she said. He took a long pull at the whisky and looked at the glass, frowned at it.
“How long did Marvin say he would be?” he asked, as if her husband was lurking somewhere in the bottom of the liquid in the tumbler.
“An hour or so. He said a client was being audited and had panicked. He had to get it straight for the Internal Revenue people.”
“Yeah. Well.” He drank some more.
“John,” she insisted. “Listen to me a minute.” He turned his face to her, if not his attention. There were new scars, still red and angry scars, as companions for the saddle stitching of the bicycle chain. “What went on with the grand jury today?”
He snorted.
“Not much,” he said. “’They decided I wasn’t a murderer. They come out with something they call a no bill. Prosecutor chewed on me hard.” He paused to think of the district attorney’s anger. “But what the hell, I been chewed on before, will be again. Just reminded me what the rules are about being a detective. Said I violated about a hundred seventy-seven laws.”
“What laws?”
“Well, there’s a lot of gun laws, for one thing. Then there’s some shooting laws. And then there’s some killing laws. And some setting-fires laws. All kinds of laws. It figured out to be about hundred seventy-seven I broke. Technically.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“No.” He drank deeply again, reached back for the decanter. “I had some help.”
“Who?”
“Police Commissioner, for one.”
He thought about the short, bald and direct little man who had the balls to tell a grand jury that the four men who died on Thompson Street were the worst, the very worst of men, police records down to the floor, killers every one of them. Kidnappers, drug peddlers. Gangsters in the act of holding a nineteen-year-old girl for extortion, feeding her heroin. They happened to die while a licensed agent was performing a service for a client. They were very violent men. Violence surrounded them. They attracted it and lived by it. This time, they did not survive it. He went on to say that they had previously killed the five Negroes in the Amsterdam Avenue shooting. But he did not say that the dying may have prevented the deaths of hundreds. Nor did he say anything at all to Shaft. He glared at him as he entered the grand-jury room and glared at him as he left. Only later did Shaft learn what he had done in the rarest of appearances by a Commissioner before a grand jury—in payment for the tanks that would not roll the streets.
“Him and some others,” Shaft said. “Listen, there’s no point in my hanging around. I think I’ll get down to my pad and get some things done.”
“But Marvin wants to see you.”
“Yeah. Well.” He sipped the Scotch. “I got to get out of here before I drink all this whiskey. Listen, that brown envelope there . . . uh . . . it’s got like fifteen thousand dollars cash in it—”
“What?”
“—so I wouldn’t let the kids play with it. It’s…uh…a fee. But you tell Marvin that nobody’s going to report it being paid to me and he’s to do what he thinks best about the taxes and things and putting it in the bank. I mean, he wants to just salt it away somewhere, that’s all right. Tell him the fee was . . . Never mind. I’ll tell him sometime.”
Shaft had nearly five thousand more in his pocket. He put the glass down on the Ladies’ Home Journal to protect the veneer of the coffee table.
“Listen, I’ll be in touch,” he said, limping toward the closet, finding his belted, brown raincoat and plunging arms into it impatiently. She followed him toward the door, reaching up to fix the collar.
“Why don’t you wait and tell him?” she persisted.
“That’s alright,” he said “I’ll give him a call.”
He had to get the hell out of there. His nerves were as ragged as the old gray suit he pushed down the incinerator that morning. If anybody could look at nerves, they’d probably see old gray suit threads, torn at the shoulder, coffee- and water-stained, rumpled and weary and worn. He couldn’t stand women fussing with his clothes. Her hand at his collar made him twitch.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll give him a call when I get back. Week or so. ’Bye.”
He leaned over to let her kiss him on the cheek. She held the lapel of his raincoat for a moment, then moved her hand to his arm.
“John,” she said, “please take care of yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said automatically, not caring, feeling so sad about not caring and wondering why he did not feel and why he was sad. “Well . . . ”
He turned and limped down the hallway, found the elevator mercifully waiting at the floor when he pushed the button. He looked back. Helen Green was standing at the door. He waved a little flip of fingers and got in.
Some others had spoken for him. Knocks Persons for another. He had put the whole of Harlem rackets on the line for the grand jury. That and the story of Beatrice and how she was in a place called Gracie Square Hospital, getting off the horse, getting her head turned around. Knocks didn’t tell them about Ben Buford and that this was the price he paid to get her there. He just told them enough about what he did for a living and what Shaft did for him. Enough. And some others spoke.
Shaft shrugged deeper into the raincoat and felt cold, even in the spring afternoon that was making promises about summer. Cold, lifeless, drained. The motherfuckers had taken it out of him. He had to get it back.
“Hey, John!” the voice called from the Plymouth sedan.
Oh, shit! Couldn’t he go anywhere, do anything without this?
“Want a ride downtown?” Anderozzi asked from the front-seat window of the unmarked police car.
Shaft walked up to the side of the vehicle.
“No,” he said. “I’m going to get a cab.”
“Give you a ride to a cab stand.”
“No,” said Shaft.
“You all right?”
“Getting there.”
“It was a rough one.”
Shaft bent over with a twinge in his chest to see who was driving. Nobody he knew.
“It was rough,” he agreed.
“Okay, John,” Anderozzi said. “Here.” The hawk-faced lieutenant handed a brown paper bag out the window of the car. Shaft took it. The package was heavy. He opened it and looked inside. It was the .38 from the hook under the No Name bar, the gun that had taken out Charles Caroli.
“Put that back where it belongs,” he said.
“Will there be a kick later?”
“No. No kicks later. It’s all taken care of. You sure you don’t want a ride?”
“No,” Shaft said. “One thing.”
“Yes?”
“When the fuck can I start moving around without being followed?”
“Right now,” Anderozzi said with a wave. The car moved away from the curb. “See you.”
“Not if I see you first,” he said to the departing license plate.
He turned to hunt a cab. Done, done, done. It was over. Knocks was paying the dues, Buford was collecting them. The silly sonofabitch would think he cleaned up Harlem after a while. Maybe he had. There were some cars. None of them cabs. Buford wouldn’t know what to do with a clean Harlem now that he had it. Making speeches to retired pushers? Shit.
There was a cab with its dome light on. Shaft waved. It wasn’t going to stop. He stepped off the curb and walked directly into the path of the car and stood facing it with his hands on his hips. He watched the dome light switch to the off-duty signal. But he stood there and the driver climbed on the brake and stopped, a goggle-eyed driver poking his head out the window.
“Off duty,” he said.
“Police business,” Shaft responded, reaching for his wallet and his identity card.
“Oh,” the driver said. “Okay.” He reached behind him and unlocked the door. Shaft got in, putting the wallet back without showing the driver anything. To hell with him.
“Where to, mister?”
“Kennedy.”
“The airport?”
“Yes.”
“Christ,” the driver protested, setting the car in motion.
Shaft folded his arms across his chest and wriggled back into the corner of the cab. He would go to sleep. When he got to the airport he would buy a ticket. The first name that came to his head. San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo. The first name that came out. He’d go there. He’d get out of this city, out of these people, out of his own skin someplace. Stockholm, he thought. Rio de Janeiro. He played with names and continents. Nobody would know him, nobody would want him. He would lose himself. He would let the smell of death wash away with each mile, each strange place, each new person he encountered. He wouldn’t even give them his right name. They wouldn’t know who he was or what he was. And that would make them even.