KNOCKS DIDN’T. He opened the door without a sound and rolled into the office as quietly as a coasting locomotive. And almost as big. They had agreed on midnight. It was midnight. Shaft was impressed that anything, anybody, so huge could move so quietly. It was an art form in the world where menace was your neighbor who came knocking at odd hours to borrow a cup of blood. But it was an art in which the masters were usually small, tight men, set closely upon the ground they wished to cover. Shaft knew that he couldn’t do it. He was fast, faster than almost anyone he knew, and strong, stronger than almost anyone he had tried. But he wasn’t quiet. He envied Persons the capacity of it.
That was all he felt as the black giant of Harlem racketeering made one of the straight-back wooden chairs disappear by lowering the hulk of his body upon it. There was an overpowering sense of authority about the man, but no threat to Shaft. Persons wouldn’t be there on the chair, wouldn’t have tolerated his call or the killing of the intruder that morning, if he did not want Shaft alive for one reason or another. Now what was it?
“You alone?” Persons asked.
“I’m alone.”
He did not have to ask about Persons. Somewhere in the night, in the dregs that remained after the theatergoers had been poured out of Times Square, were Persons’ men. In the hallway, on the street, probably even in the fire alley behind the building. Persons was like a Pope or a king; he could never be alone in his lofty eminence. Too many people wanted him or something he had.
Shaft looked for Persons’ eyes, which were tucked away in folds of flesh. So we all look alike, do we? The head of the man was shaven, glistening, the jaw around the full, firm mouth was heavy-boned and hard. Nature had structured Knocks Persons to drive through immovable objects and beat back irresistible forces.
“I got you mad without us ever meeting,” Persons said. “That was a mistake. Mine.”
“A lot of people I never met make me mad.”
“You so mad you couldn’t work for me?”
“If it pays and you’re coming in here like any other client, I don’t get that mad.”
“It pay. And that’s how I’m here.”
“Okay, what do you want?”
Shaft still couldn’t find the man’s eyes. They lurked there beneath the heavy ridge of skull at the start of his forehead, shadowing the area between the brows and the large, appropriately strong nose. But while he wondered, he was relaxed. Confronted with the figure of Persons, his abstract anger was pointless.
“What I want? I want my baby back.”
And Shaft discovered why he couldn’t find the eyes. Persons had been squeezing them tight to fight back the tears that now came trickling down the face of the man. Shaft had a feeling of history along with some embarrassment. He was watching an epic event in a sordid context. Knocks Persons, who got his name from the community because he had taken all the knocks and bumps that anybody could give him without stopping or even slowing down, was crying. That surprised Shaft. It shocked him.
“Mr. Persons . . . ”
One of the bear paws waved aside the words and plunged into the folds of the black suit for a crisply white handkerchief that seemed to be about the size of a twin bed sheet. Persons wiped away the tears; stuffed the handkerchief away and found a long, green cigar in an inside pocket. The ritual of the cigar fascinated Shaft. He watched Persons strip off the cellophane, remove the band that said Havana Upmann, one of the pre-Castro cigars that are still around in private humidors of the very wealthy. He knew Persons wouldn’t bite the end and he was pleased to see a hand dip into the change pocket in his suit and come out with a small gold cigar clipper. Shaft also felt an impulse to lean over with a match and light the cigar. He didn’t. Persons wasn’t fishing for the gesture. He got his own matches, lighted the Havana and dropped the bit of tobacco and the wrapper into Shaft’s ashtray while the curl of smoke rose around his bald head in a carcinogenic halo.
“You a young man, Mr. Shaft,” Persons said. “But you been aroun’. I’d just as soon you forget you saw that.”
Shaft nodded. He’d never forget it. But he’d never mention it. He knew the price of pride.
“You know me and you know what I do. Maybe you even know my baby.”
It was a question. Shaft knew Persons had a wife since he had talked with Anderozzi about the pay telephone in the closet. But he didn’t know Baby. Was it a showgirl Persons was keeping? The old bastard looked up to it.
“No, I don’t know Baby.”
“Maybe you do but don’t know she’s mine. She don’t often admit to me. I don’t say anything about her. She use her mother’s name mostly. Beatrice Thomas is what she call herself. But she’s mine.”
Shaft’s memory circuit made no connections to the name. He was about to jot it down on the legal pad at the right of his desk blotter, but stopped himself. Not with Knocks Persons. Write nothing down. Give them nothing to read about what you know, what you do. He tapped his teeth with the ballpoint instead.
“I don’t understand. Is this a girlfriend of yours?”
There was pride, as well as concern in the rumble.
“Beatrice is my daughter. Even if she don’t like to admit it. She’s my baby.”
She was nineteen now. A pretty one, from what Knocks saw of her and what they told him about how she looked. She had grown up so fast. And so furiously. Why, Knocks said, he could remember when she actually was a baby, not like he just called her that now. About as big as a button when she was born and she never seemed to be wanting to grow much bigger. In those early days, Knocks Persons remembered, he could almost hold her in one hand. He had been holding her, in fact, when the law came busting through the door and said he had to go away with them for questioning. He got back five years later and she was a sassy, bright little girl easily frightened by strangers. Baby was going to school with the nuns and her name was Beatrice Thomas because that’s what her mother said it was.
“No little girl of mine going to school with no jailbird name on her,” she said.
But she was his little girl, too, wasn’t she?
“Not anymore, Mr. Persons,” she had said. “You got your business and your po-leece and your jails and there’s no room in that for a little girl like her.”
Maybe that woman was right. Maybe she wasn’t. But the day she told him, he left their apartment just east of Amsterdam Avenue to go back to repairing the battlements of his empire. He turned the ignition key and saw the front end of his new Coupe de Ville disappear in a roar that left him deaf for two days, bleeding for three, dedicated for all time to having a chauffeur turn the key for him.
If that was the way it was going to be, little Beatrice Thomas had probably best go on being just that.
There were many things to do for Knocks Persons as he took control of the policy racket, the bookies, the floating action for the high-rolling crapshooters, the hustlers and the men who hustled them. He even went so far as to take one of the women, a beautiful light-skinned dancer, under his widening sphere. But there was only one baby. He kept further away from her than he did from legality. He sent money, clothes, presents and he even saw that her mother’s companions were respectable, gentlemanly, abstemious — and terrorized of saying or doing the wrong thing in the girl’s presence.
Once a week, he went into the closet to pick up the phone and get a dime’s worth of information about Baby. It was all he could stand.
She was fourteen he said, when she learned who she was and what he wasn’t The words that described him were only on the periphery of her vocabulary as a child guided carefully through the ghetto streets to parochial schools, her mother’s idea of the best possible insulation. But Beatrice was smart and learned their meaning quickly. With it, she discovered that she was not just an upper middle-class Negro girl whose widowed mother had investments that supported them. Not just a girl faced with the identity conflicts of the place and time in which she found herself. She was the child of the worst of men . . . and even he had rejected her.
“She just went wild,” Persons said. “She wouldn’t go back to school. Too shamed. Her mama tell me she wouldn’t even talk. Just cry or look out the window.”
All his presents failed to touch the hidden horror of her discovery, which had come as simply as a schoolmate’s bit of teasing. Her mother’s entreaties failed, too. A visit from the monsignor in charge of her school evoked only hysterical weeping.
“I finally went to see her myself. I had to. She screamed when I told her who I was. She screamed a lot of things. The only one that made any sense was she kept calling me the devil, devil, devil. Over and over. And when I couldn’t look or listen anymore, she said one more thing. She said she was going to join me in hell.”
She did. By the time she was sixteen, Beatrice was known in every bar Persons owned and many he didn’t. By seventeen, she knew every pusher on his payroll. By eighteen, she had undergone two abortions, the drying-out procedure in private institutions in four different countries. Now she was nineteen.
“And I can’t find her,” Knocks Persons said. “Anywhere.”
It took the big man an hour to complete his doleful recital. Shaft interrupted rarely. Then with a simple question.
“Where’d that happen?”
“Rome.”
“Who was the man?”
“That Brazilian fighter, boy named Luis Pinari or something like that.”
“The one who died in the car?”
Persons would nod. And go on.
His was a business of harsh realities, Shaft knew, and he had the feeling that he was being involved in two private nightmares that had no connection with his life. There was a measure of how far he had come from Harlem in the fact that he had not heard any of this before, none of the underground whispers about the private shame and sorrow of big Knocks Persons. Who the hell had he been talking to, he asked himself? Shit, if she did half of what Persons said she did, he had probably run into her two or three dozen times at parties . . . while he had been pursuing somebody like Ellie. He tried to recall freaked-outlooking Negro girls who had caught his attention. He remembered too many. They were all over the place, like the fat-thighed Bronx bagel babies who shaved off their mustaches on Saturday night and flocked down to MacDougal Street. He had tried a taste of both. Who could remember the faces and the bodies, let alone the names? She could have been one of them.
“You had her watched, didn’t you?”
Persons dropped the dead butt of the cigar into the ashtray and reached into the folds of the suit for another.
“As much as I could.”
“That makes her a hard girl to lose track of, even in a crowded city.”
Persons was repeating the ritual of the cigar. It occurred to Shaft that the Havana was about the size of a large corncob. It just looked normal in Persons’ hand.
“I thought so, too.” He puffed and looked at the coal end of the smoking length of hawser. “But there’s some places my people don’t go.”
“How long has she been out of sight?”
“Two weeks.”
“No word, no hint?”
“Nothing. When I say my people looked, they looked.”
Shaft could imagine every rock in Harlem being turned over. What they must have found along the way! One of those nice, well-meaning social workers once asked him what he wanted to be in the world. “Alive,” he told her. The only place to stay that way was frequently under one of those rocks at the bottom of the swamp. Survival was a dark place, a black place.
“That’s why I sent for . . . that’s why I come to you.”
A nineteen-year-old Negro girl in a frenzy of drink, drugs and sex. And beautiful, too. Or so he said. She should be easier to find than a cigarette in Winston–Salem, N.C.
Shaft did not quite understand what had happened between Beatrice Thomas and her father. Persons might have screwed the little girls head on straight with just one swipe of those huge paws. At least it would have told her that her father was a man—which is more than many little girls in Harlem know about their fathers by the time they are in high school. At least it would have showed her that he cared enough to be hurt by her, so deeply that he had to strike out at her. Shaft also wondered why the old man had continued to tolerate the relationship of pain and punishment between himself and his daughter. Why hadn’t he just cut her off? Persons should have been capable of that. He was probably harder, inside and out, than anyone Shaft knew or cared to know. And Shaft considered the possibly fatal course of telling Persons that the best thing he could do was say good riddance to Beatrice, to thank his good fortune that she was gone to whatever private hell she sought out.
Shaft also considered sending Persons on his way. The hate that came with most of his cases, husbands and wives hating husbands and wives, insurance companies hating claims, stores hating thieves, all of that was relatively simple and clear. But this one had too many elements of love to be at all precise and clear in the route from A, the problem, to B, the solution. Beatrice Thomas was bad news. She was not likely to be anything else to John Shaft, investigator of her disappearance, especially since her father, with all his connections and contacts, had not been able to find a trace of her.
“Mr. Persons, the first thing that an honest private detective has got to tell you is that the best place to go right now is to the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department. They know who’s been carried into the hospitals . . . who’s been carried into the morgue. With them, it’s a system, something they do every day. If anything has happened to Beatrice they’ll know about it. Next, if you push them a little to find out if she has been seen, who she’s been seen with, and if there is anything to follow in that direction . . . ”
Shaft let the words trail off. He must be out of his mind suggesting that Knocks Persons go to the police. All Persons had to do was lift the corner of the carpet and he’d find the police sitting there taking notes. Listening. Watching. He would get about as much sympathy from them, as much help and understanding as a housewife wastes on a bedbug swimming across a clean sheet. The police had been trying to get Knocks Persons in a vulnerable position for three decades. They would only welcome this discomfort and possibly attempt to use it. No, he knew Persons couldn’t go to the police. Knocks knew it, too. That’s why he was there with Shaft.
“I tell you, Mr. Shaft. I tell you, if there was another way, I’d go. The last thing I want is somebody, anybody, anywhere poking around my business. And it’s all right for you to sit there and think it shouldn’t matter that much, that I should just go on my way, do what I have to do while the little girl is gone. Well, it don’t matter. It don’t matter who understands. All I know is now that she’s gone like this, I can’t think of anything else and l can’t do anything else except try to get her back. Get her back where I can kind of watch over her in my own way, until she gets all this straightened out. And you. You’re a black man. Somewhere inside of you, you know what this girls feeling and what she’s thinking. But you’re also part a white man because of what you do and where you been. And you smart enough to go back and forth between black and white man. That’s what I’m asking you to do. I want you to think for me about this little girl and I want you to go back and forth between being a black man and a white man, and find her for me. It ain’t going to hurt you none. And I got some ways to make it help you a whole lot to do that for me.”
Shaft had been called many things, even Tom by some belligerent separatists. He had never been called a white man before. But he knew. Persons, so black in his own way, understood the dichotomy. And, yes, Persons also had many things he could do for Shaft. Most of them had Benjamin Franklin’s picture engraved on them and were stuffed into his wallet. Yet Shaft felt uneasy about becoming involved with Persons. It was a healthy attitude. Persons was an impossible man to control. He was a figure standing alone on a foundation of corruption. His identity could become part of Shaft’s identity, at least in the eyes of the police with whom Shaft dealt. Yet his power would also become part of Shaft’s power. Realistic about its seductive quality, wary of the chains, he was fascinated by the idea. He was also intrigued by the idea that Beatrice could disappear and all the king’s men couldn’t find her. Could he? Why not? Better than they could, he could do what was necessary.
“If I decide to give it a try, I need two things from you.”
“How much?”
“Not money yet. We’ll get to that in a minute. What I need is your promise that there won’t be any more shit like this morning, with you sending people after me. People with guns. If I work for you I’ll work for you, and you’ll get the same straight, ethical deal that any other client gets when he walks into this office. But there can’t be anybody behind me or waiting in front of me where I can trip over him or have him mess up my play. I’ll just tell you right now if you ever send anybody after me again I’m going to kill the motherfuckers and then come looking for you.”
The old man didn’t even blink his hooded yellow eyes. He may even have nodded slightly in agreement. Shaft wasn’t sure.
“The other thing is you have to tell me the truth about everything I ask. It’s never going beyond this room or this head but I have to know everything I can that seems necessary to doing this thing whether you want to tell me or not. I won’t write anything down and nobody’ll know that I know. And it may seem crazy to you that I want to know. But it’s part of it. It’s one of the tools of the job. It’s one I have to have if I’m going to do it right.”
Persons might well have been disturbed at the suggestion that he would have to open some of the dark corners of his mind to Shaft’s probing as the price of regaining communication with his daughter. But he did not debate it very long. He looked at Shaft in silence for a few moments and dispensed with the matter, moved on to the next.
“How much money you want?”
How much money did Shaft want? It was a beautiful question. He wanted all the money. He wanted every fucking penny that had been minted or printed. He wanted all the money he could possibly use. All the money he could luxuriate in. Knocks Persons had it and Shaft could probably get at it. It wasn’t like any other case. These weren’t real people. Goddamn. There was only one way to go. There never was more than one way to go, even now.
“My rate will figure to be about twelve dollars an hour, which is about the average. Maybe a little under the average for a private eye in New York. You’ll have to take my word for all expenses. What I mean when I say expenses is if I have to rent a car, I’m just going to go ahead and do it without worrying about it. When I do it’s on a twenty-four-hour basis and maybe I’ll have to abandon the damn thing someplace and there’ll be a charge for bringing it back to the garage. Things like that. If I have to buy information for a hundred dollars or so, I’m going to have to use my own judgment on how much it’s worth and how badly we need it. Beatrice has been a lot of fancy places. If I have to go there for one reason or another, I have to go there first class. That’s part of the expenses. I can’t go anywhere looking like a cop and it may cost a few dollars keeping me from looking like one . . . ”
Knocks interrupted him. “I don’t care about any of that,” he said, reaching into the left inside pocket of his coat for a fat yellow envelope. He flipped it casually, with hardly a movement of his huge body, onto the desk blotter in front of Shaft. It was casual, but it was not insulting. Just the Persons way. “When that’s gone, you let me know what you need.”
Shaft picked up the envelope, hefted it for a moment in his right hand and frowned at it. He considered opening it, writing Knocks Persons a receipt in the customary manner and putting its contents aside for deposit in his bank account. But that would not be to Persons’ liking, writing numbers and names on paper. There was enough there. There would always be enough there when Persons stuffed the envelope. Shaft stuck it into his own coat, feeling it bulge and nestle against the flat muscles of his chest. It felt even larger there than it had in his hand. It probably made him look as if he were carrying a cannon, a piece, heat.
“All right,” he said. “When that’s gone I’ll let you know. Now I need some facts. Without emotion. Now I need the truth.”
Shaft was starved. The fact that he had not eaten struck him when he walked out of the building and into Times Square. The glitter of Persons’ Cadillac limousine, a black Fleetwood, had already vanished among the sequins of the night. It was another sparkling dot among a million or two just like it, somewhere speeding the big man back to his castle.
Damn, but he was hungry. He barely looked at the worn wax faces that Times Square was wearing. He wanted a hot dog. He also wanted to sleep. He turned south toward Forty-third Street and Benedict’s stand over on the Seventh Avenue side of the Square. There were three or four hustlers there, a couple of pimply kids with scraggly mustaches, two or three black cats in hip-length black leather coats and bopper hats. They didn’t pay any attention to him; he returned the compliment of acceptance.
The orange juice was ice-cold and tasted of rind. The hot dog was hot and tasted of the garlic that had been added to obscure the meat. He had to go to Harlem. He had to go but he didn’t want to. Shaft had not really considered the two faces on the coin of his world until Persons had put it to him with the astuteness of his own black identity. Shaft was black, Persons had said, but he was also white. Was he, really? His world was both worlds. He wondered how well he had made the transition and, in fact, what changes had come to him that made it so simple for Persons to label him a mutation. He had to go to Harlem. He had to go find some of the people who hated Knocks Persons and ask them just how badly they hated.
“That’s a dollar ninety, mister.”
“A dollar ninety for what?”
“That’s seven hot dogs at twenty cents a hot dog and fifty for orange juice.”
“What seven hot dogs?”
“Mister, you ate seven hot dogs.”
Seven hot dogs? Shaft felt the bulge of his stomach muscles at the belt. He had been standing there thinking and apparently he had gorged on seven of the long red cylinders of meat and miscellany off the greasy grill. Seven hot dogs. That was pretty good. For a second, he felt rather proud of himself. He was full but he wished he could remember eating them. He handed the nervous Puerto Rican counterman two dollars.
“Okay,” he said, “what’s so unusual about seven hot dogs?”
The Puerto Rican smiled at him, rang up the dollar ninety. Shaft belched. Whoosh. Seven hot dogs. He wished he could remember eating them. He wondered if people ever actually exploded. He’d never read about it happening.