BEN BUFORD’S VOICE WAS A MAGNIFICENT THING. It could crackle with the lightning of anger, keen with the sorrow of exhortation and spiritual need, thunder with the depth of profundity and meaning. It was a thing apart from the man, who stood Watusi-tall and warrior-fierce in his stance. So tall and lean with a great bush of tight black curls surrounding his slender ascetic face. His arms and legs so slim and long that even the suits he affected were not quite enough to cloak the angularity of the body. He did not look at all like his voice. A warrior or an inflamed divinity student with gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. But when the chorus of his voice sounded, his audiences saw something more than the man who was evident to them outwardly. They heard and saw the man who was there in Detroit when it was burning, in Watts when it was burning, in Bedford-Stuyvesant when it was burning. They heard and saw the man who was out front for them when the time came to light the fires, to pick up the guns, to go to the rooftops, and let it happen. And Buford knew exactly what he was, too, what the voice meant, and what he meant.
There were four men with him in the room over Amsterdam Avenue in the middle ground of Manhattan. Three of them were very much like himself. Tall, perhaps a little more muscular, crowned with the black Afro-bushes of hair. Stern, pure, intense. The fourth was a short, flashily dressed black man whose hair was straight, pomaded, whose suit was Italian, and whose shoes were sixty-dollar alligator loafers. He was frightened and he wasn’t sure why. The police didn’t frighten him. The Narcs didn’t frighten him. His own customers (who were capable of killing a man for a lot less than he usually carried) didn’t frighten him either. But Ben Buford did. The tall angular man who had suddenly pointed a long bony finger at his face, the voice that was now thundering at him:
“Goddamn you, you motherfucker! I’m dying for you! Now you get your ass out of here and you get me what I need and you get it back here by four o’clock. That’s when I need it. You go!”
Frightened, still not sure why he was frightened, he got up to leave the room.
“I’m going to try, Ben. I’m going to try.”
His assurance was as shaky as the knotted muscles in his gut.
“You try. You do that. You get back here by four.”
The man left. The eyes of the others were on Buford. They watched his frozen mask of authority melt into a smile. “You want to bet he gets back here with the shit?” They smiled. It was no bet. The man, the pusher, would be back and would have what Ben Buford needed and wanted before he set off again on another of his tours through the country.
Ben took a chair at the head of the battered red maple table that was just about the only furniture in the small, drab room. The others took places around him. They did not defer too obviously. It was much too cool for that, but when he moved they also moved—about half a second afterward, always to a place just a few inches behind or below. He was the leader, they were the corps. This was the Revolution.
“What did the lawyer say?”
“He want you to call him, Ben.”
“What the hell for?”
“He says you probably got to go down to Atlanta and go to court yourself this time.”
“Shit.”
“Maybe it’s not so bad, Ben, you could hit maybe six, eight, even ten schools along the way. The brothers need to hear you, to see you.”
That was Lonnie Dotts. Always pushing him into the clutch of some fool students who thought the barricades were made of books, thought they were going to drown Whitey in their cans of beer, figured they could back his play just by listening, yelling, crying out, “Tell it like it is, Ben!” It was a drag. It was better here in the ghetto. Here they knew what it was all about. They lived with it. It ground them down. They paid the fucking dues just to stay alive. It wasn’t an intellectual adventure; it was the bedbugs that got you in the night and the garbage stink that singed your nostrils in the heat of day. Atlanta. That judge wanted to send his ass to jail as soon as possible, as long as possible, as legal as possible.
“Cat’s coming up here to see me.”
The others looked a little surprised. They had had the room only four days. They had been convinced that no one knew of it or that Ben Buford was using it. That was the scheme. Three days here, four days there, never sit still. Keep finding places for Ben. Keep the FBI moving, keep the CIA moving, keep Ben moving, all in different directions. Sometimes he needed a good rest and women. They would check into a Statler-Hilton for four or five days without any attempt to hide. Then he could meet the press, give interviews, get his picture taken, talk to the magazine people, do everything in a big, flashy, public way. So everybody would know he wasn’t trying to hide and that he was really out front. Then he would disappear back into the little rooms, ever changing but always the same, with a few rickety pieces of furniture, a raw bulb glaring out of a dangling socket that hung like a noose from the aged, stained ceiling. This was where the work was done.
The three young men sitting with Ben Buford were his praetorian guard, his administrative council, his friends and the very closest of his associates. Longford Dotts, who was called the Minister of Information. Beyman Newfield, his program director. Preston Peerce, who was known as field secretary of the organization and who spoke for Ben Buford when he wasn’t there. His second in command. They had locked themselves together into a struggle they called the Revolution and were inseparably bound by the consequences of the decision. Actually, they did not trust each other very much in general and, specifically, his three associates did not trust Ben Buford and he was not entirely open with them. They were all working on the knowledge that messiahs come and go with frequency in revolutions. This one, a small fire attempted in a heavy rain, used them like stick matches. Each one striking a brief flash of fire before it sputtered out and grew cold. Buford could see ambition in the others, ambition and envy. They could see something of the same in him although not much of the envy. He held the chair and had the
presence. It was a clear unmistakable stamp, that capacity of Buford’s to express authority and leadership. He worked with it, used it and had been uplifted by that recognition when he spoke to the sea of faces in a university audience. He had the presence, he was the man and they had no alternative at the moment. Buford had said he would die for them, for all of them. He meant it, to stand with him meant the same aspiration for the rest of them. That was the price of the revolutionary’s power. Those were the dues and you paid them.
“Who’s this cat coming up here?”’ Lonnie Dotts asked.
“Told you. Cat I used to know.”
How Buford had arranged the meeting was unknown to them. He had stopped in a pay telephone booth about two or three hours earlier and made about fifteen or twenty calls, a number of them long distance. He had told them of some of the calls he had made, some of the arrangements he had agreed to. But he had not told them of all the calls and not the ones that had arranged his meeting with John Shaft. In this spotted, stained center of their struggle it was not the place of a follower to ask the leader what he did not care to divulge. They just looked at him and tried to pry it out of him with the hard pressure of their eyes. They failed.
How could the leader of a revolution explain that he had called his mother from the barricades—or that he called her every night and told her not to worry. Fuck the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and all their phone bugs.
“Ben?”’ Her voice was warm and full of pride. “Ah almos’ forgit to tell you. ‘at nice Johnny Shaft you used to play with, he called here lookin’ for you. He say he have to talk with you. He such a nice boy. I ‘member how you and he always together. He say he ridin’ around in a taxicab lookin’ for you ‘cause he got to find you about somethin’ important. I knows you wouldn’t min’ my tellin him you was in town.” She paused, uncertain of his reaction. He said nothing. “I guess you wants to see him as much as he wants to see you, bein’ as how you two was such good frien’s. He going to call back in about ten minutes. Where should I tell him to meet you?”
How, also, could he tell his mother that he no longer had any friends? Being gone, being in the papers all the time, calling at these crazy hours. That was enough for her. She knew of no revolution. He gave her the address to give John Shaft. And damned the smart motherfucker to a private hell for knowing him so well. But what the hell did he want? Shaft had no business with them. Shaft was . . . what? Shaft was one of the opportunists, the bastards who could hustle both sides of the street. Now there was a sonofabitch who couldn’t be trusted. Shaft was a pimp for the whores of whiteness. And smart. He would have to be careful. More careful than with Lonnie Dotts, Beyman Newfield, or Preston Peerce, who were ready to crack open those crates, take the pieces and go to the rooftops to die with him.
The object of Buford’s anger and suspicion was at that moment asleep. Shaft lay jammed into the rear right corner of a battered taxicab rolling up Amsterdam Avenue past the empty shells of streets. He was wedged into the corner, his legs out along the seat, and across to the other side behind the back of the driver, his head askew, bent to one side against the glass, the chin down on his chest. Shaft pouted when he slept. He looked like a truculent nine-year-old squeezing his eyes shut in protest. But not to the driver of the cab. To him, Shaft was a menace, a nut spade he’d picked up in Times Square and wished he had never seen.
The cab rolled up one of the last hills of Washington Heights at the north end of Manhattan past Yeshiva University and came to a stop at the comer of 198th Street, where the driver paused under a street light, turned to Shaft and puzzled over the sleepy Negro for a moment.
“Hey, buddy.” He said it pretty loud. He didn’t have to. Shaft’s eyes were open the moment the rhythm of the cab’s movement along the shattered pavement of Amsterdam had stopped. He was awake and completely aware. But he didn’t move. He didn’t want to frighten the cab driver any more than he already had. The meter showed $6.35.
“This One hundred ninety-eighth and Amsterdam?”
“That’s right, buddy. This is where you wanted to go.”
Relief in the cabbie’s voice. Maybe the spade would get out here. Maybe the black man would go away without robbing him and he could go back to hustling short hauls in Times Square and the upper East Side and maybe a trip to La Guardia or Kennedy, and he could just forget about going into neighborhoods like this at this hour of night with a black passenger. What the hell did he pick him up for, anyway? He could kick himself in the ass.
Shaft wasn’t going anywhere. He caught a piece of light shining into the cab from the blue street arc and held it on his watch. Three o’clock. Still an hour. He could still use more sleep. “How long do you think it would take to get from here down to Battery Park and then back to One hundred thirty-ninth Street and Amsterdam?”
“Oh, come on, mister, is this some kind of game? You want to just go for a ride why don’t you take a bus?”
“Too much light. You think it would take an hour?”
“What?”
“Driving to Battery Park then back to One hundred thirty-ninth and Amsterdam?”
“It would take about an hour.” Resigned. He was going to Battery Park. He wondered if this character would hold him up down there or wait until they got back to Harlem. Should he risk his life attempting to attract the attention of a cop, or just go along quietly and attempt to hide his watch under the seat along the way.
Shaft felt a little sorry for the driver. He was an inoffensive man in most ways except that he was a Jew. Shaft could reason about the Jews and he knew full conviction what his reason told him, but he still did not like them. They were in his Harlem childhood, in the candy store, in the clothes store, in the little grocery store, in the little liquor store and in the hock shop. The money store. He hadn’t liked them at all in any of those places or the way they had treated him or the way they had treated anyone else. They were the merchants of misery and the feeling would not leave him, no matter how many Jews he now knew and liked. But the cab driver’s offense of being Jewish was hardly enough to inspire Shaft’s desire to torment him. He disliked Jews, but he hated cab drivers. The fact was simply that he had an hour to kill and the back end of the taxicab was the place to kill it. The best possible place he could think of to sleep.
“Okay,” he said. “First to Battery Park and wake me up so I can see the Statue of Liberty. I want to wave at the old whore.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“I know it. Drive.”
Shaft refolded his arms across his chest and went back to sleep. The driver of the cab sighed, put the car in gear and turned up 199th Street to pick up St. Nicholas Avenue and eventually the West Side Drive. He might as well take a nice ride down the river before the black bastard cut his throat and took his money. He was too preoccupied to notice the black Pontiac sedan that moved behind them and followed through the empty street and the vacuum of the night, carefully but definitely.
It was a long night for Victor Anderozzi. Time lost its continuum for him now and then. He was getting old or getting bored. He would be finishing up a report, come to the point where it demanded the date and the time, and glance at his watch. “Jesus Christ it’s three o’clock in the morning.” A moment ago it was only seven in the evening and he had lost most of the hours in between. He should be grateful for reports that demanded the date and time. It made him keep track, or they kept track of him. Years ago he had wondered about his wife and children in those broken hours of darkness. Now he assumed they were all right or that somebody would tell him if they were not. He felt now as if that part of his life did not exist, as though it had vanished along with the sequence of time. Christ, it was three-thirty in the goddamn morning and he had to go see the Commissioner of Police. He reached for the telephone.
“Have Charlie get the car. Going downtown.”
What, Anderozzi asked as he pulled on his short, brown raincoat, was a Police Commissioner in a city this size doing out of bed this time of night? He also thought of the answer. He was sitting in his office at that moment, a bald little bundle of melancholia and frustration about his own authority and the thirty thousand men who were supposed to be in his charge, the unrest of the community, and the limits of his capacity to apply one to the other. There were departments within departments, wheels within wheels. Who was actually in charge of the Police Department might be a matter of conjecture from day to day. The Commissioner represented the political control of the department. He spoke for the Mayor. The Mayor spoke for the people. Yet the Mayor represented himself, a man trapped in a sea of urban agony by his ambitions for public office, his current one being the least of them. The Mayor spoke for himself and his ambitions insofar as public acceptability made it possible. Oh, hell, it was all garbage. Anderozzi was annoyed with himself for thinking about it. The cops were for the cops. The politicians for the politicians. The people for themselves. That’s how it broke down, pulverized. Everybody for himself. They were all caught in this whole screwed-up period of testing and rejecting authority, of everybody trying to kill his old man in one way or the other. It was no surprise to him that people left the country to go live in France or the Caribbean Islands. He wished he could. It was no wonder so many cops bought chicken farms out in the sticks. They were dismal failures as farmers but at least they had a few years of escape from the constant struggle. He had no escape. He was honest. That would keep him poor. And he hated chickens.
The Commissioner’s secretary was there, too. A nice-looking woman of about forty. Jewish. Anderozzi liked dark women. Like his wife. Even the faint shadow of mustache was intriguing, sensual to him. He liked hair. Dark hair. Black hair. Black eyes. He liked this woman.
“Get him a cup of coffee. How do you take it? Black?”
“Black,” Anderozzi said, thinking about the secretary and not the coffee.
The Commissioner was there at four o’clock, she was there at four. She wasn’t his secretary; she was his wife, the Jewish mother of them all. Why shouldn’t she be there? He needed her, didn’t he? Dark women were like that. You needed them, goddamnit, they were there. His wife was like that.
She put the old-fashioned white pottery mug down on the coaster in front of him on the edge of the Commissioner’s desk. Anderozzi picked it up and let the hot fragrant fumes reach up his hawk-beak nose. He sipped tentatively.
“What does it look like, Vic?” Peering at him over his own steaming mug. The Commissioner had great eyes. They nailed you to the wall. They looked right through you, punching holes as they went. Eyes. He had spikes for eyes. He could cut you with them. Short. Bald. Mean. Tough little sonofabitch.
“I’m not entirely sure this is a race thing,” Anderozzi said, assuming they both knew why the Commissioner had summoned him. “Not the kind of race thing I’ve seen before. There’s something different.”
“Well,” the Commissioner suggested happily, “maybe they are off on a little internecine warfare of their own?”
“I’m not sure, but let me tell you what I think and let me tell you what I know. Maybe somewhere between those are the facts that we are working with here. Maybe we’ll have some of the answers when City Hall starts throwing some of the questions.”
“I better have all the answers.”
“You’ll have all that I have.”
“I know that, Vic. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. But I don’t want to be the Police Commissioner in a city that has to spray tear gas on the streets from helicopters, where the National Guard is shooting up old broads who are looking out the window to see what is going on. Go ahead and tell me. Tell me what you know, then tell me what you think.”
“I know . . . we know that the militants up there are about six months from being ready. They already have the guns, or they soon will have. The estimates are that at least one hundred weapons a week have been accumulated, stored, made ready at various points over the last four years. I think that estimate is low, very low. Well, at any rate that’s the estimate we got. FBI, CIA, NSA. That many guns is a hell of a war. In this city, I’d quit trying to count them. There’s plenty to go around. So they have a sufficient number of guns. Ammunition, too. This disappeared in greater variety and amount in the last two years than at any time in history of the records we keep. This is being stockpiled somewhere or the North Vietnamese must have been stealing it.”
“How does it break down?”
“In military terms it’s fairly unsophisticated. One third in hand guns, one third in rifles, the remaining third of it in shotguns, grenades, a few bazookas, some machine guns, maybe a mortar.”
“Who the hell will care about military terms when that hits the streets? The day when we react so that we speak in military terms, it’s going to be a war, not a community crisis.”
The Commissioner was desperate for a definition of the problem. Tanks would roll down the streets of this town. There would be a war, not a shootout.
“What a fucking mess,” the Commissioner conceded.
“Yes,” Anderozzi said. “Yes.”
“What’s the best guess on how much of that can be located? Do we know where it is?”
“We don’t. But the others figure they can get about half of it. Pick it up instantly. Grab it, seal it off and blow it to hell and make it unusable. The other half is in mattresses, in the back of television sets, in lamp bases, in the flour cans, in toilet tanks, in the earth, in the walls, in every goddamn place you can possibly imagine.”
They sat for a moment in silence and the Commissioner stabbed angrily at one of the buttons on his desk. The door behind Anderozzi opened silently with a push of air against the back of his neck.
“Get us some coffee, will you, Sylvie?”
“You, too, Lieutenant?” she said, bending over his coffee cup, smiling warmly, subtly, comfortingly.
All the dark ones had that compassion except the screwed-up career ones. But he liked them, too. Just on the basis of the look.
“Me, too.”
“I want to tear out every goddamn room north of Fifty-ninth Street!” The Commissioner slapped a fat little fist down on the blotter top of the big mahogany desk that was once occupied by Theodore Roosevelt, who would have and could have searched every goddamn room north of Fifty-ninth Street.
“You’d need an army for that, too,” Anderozzi remarked.
“Okay. What else do you know?”
“Commissioner, if you don’t mind, what the hell are you doing up at four in the morning?”
“I’m up at four o’clock because the goddamn Mayor didn’t get home till two o’clock this morning and decided it was a good time to pick up the telephone and call me. He heard talk at the party where he’d been dancing that things in Harlem were on the way up and he wanted to know what I knew. And he said he wanted to know in detail again in the morning.”
“We also know,” Anderozzi went on, “that the major problem is recruiting, that they just don’t have enough fingers for all those triggers. That’s at least one area where we get total agreement from Federal people who give it about six months when everybody figures to be ready, that’s when the Muslims, the Panthers, the militants, the whole collection of them will come to a sufficient number of angry, organized and partially trained force to at least attempt a revolution.”
Anderozzi had never said those words before. He had thought them. So had the Commissioner but they never had been said straight without the cloak of euphemism, conjecture, doubt. Having said them, Anderozzi realized how much he believed and had believed them during the months of investigating, probing, attempting to penetrate. He was not afraid; he had been too long in the business for that. But he felt so frustrated and sorrowful at his knowledge of the events to come.
“What kind of informers do you get on a rap like this?” the Commissioner asked, leaning back in the big brown leather chair, his gleaming bald head barely touching the plump top of it.
“The same kind as on anything else. The people who don’t want it to happen, the frightened ones, the people who want to be on the side that wins. The rotten ones, the people we plant there. The working ones. The same bunch. The same ones you get on anything else.”
“All right, now tell me what you think.”
“I think we’re lucky to have made a connection with Shaft, as tenuous as it may be.”
“He’s that spade private eye?”
“Yes, he’s that spade private eye. He’s also a kind of friend of mine and a very ruthless, ambitious guy. I put a lot of faith . . . or maybe I put sixty or seventy per cent faith in the information he’ll give. What I also think,” Anderozzi said, “is that this thing is more racket than racial. I mean it’s more our problem, strictly a cop problem, than we think it is. More our problem than a social one.”
“Why?”
“Knocks Persons. He doesn’t figure to be the focal point or even a peripheral figure of anything racial.”
“Why not? He’s rackets. But he’s black. And anything black is racial now.”
“Agreed. But he’s never been involved in anything that so much as suggested that he wanted to change Harlem, or the white community, or anything else. His whole life, his whole world is built on the attitudes that made the opportunity for him to function. If anything, Persons would have to be a reverse racist. He probably has a deeper appreciation of the status quo than Lester Maddox or George Wallace. He couldn’t prosper in anything but a tight black community, with its corruptible white cops on the take, and the whole feeling that it’s all right to go ahead and do those black things like shoot craps, drink gin, play the numbers, just so you do them on that side of the line. So his presence negates the racial angle.At least to me.”
“But you don’t know what is involved and what isn’t.”
“No, not yet, but if Knocks is part of a threat to bloody up the street it would figure that somebody is trying to take something away from him, to crack open that tight little community of crap shooters and gin drinkers.”
The red telephone on the desk began to ring. The hot line. The Commissioner’s hand streaked out and he scooped it from the cradle and up to his ear with the speed of a frontier gun slinger. “Talk,” he commanded.
His eyes jumped to Anderozzi and back to the phone box as he listened. There was another phone just like that beside the Commissioner’s bed. Their only caller was epic disater in all the forms of it New York contains. The Commissioner listened for a minute and said exactly one word: “Right.” He dropped the receiver back on the red plastic box and looked at Anderozzi with a grim smile of a man who might be watching his own funeral procession go by.
“So much for conjecture. There’s a gun battle going on at One hundred thirty-ninth and Amsterdam and they’re fighting it with machine guns.”
Anderozzi felt gray all over like a bag of unemptied vacuum dust. He almost forgot to put down the Commissioner’s coffee cup as they hurried out of the room together.
Shaft got to the building at about four o’clock, just as he had figured he would. It was a long drive down to the Battery and back. Now this place was about what he had anticipated. A scabrous slattern of a building, held together with an old mortar of dirt and decay, propped up by the buildings on each side, both in the same clutch of disrepair. Some of the windows had been covered over with sheets of tin and were blank gray eyes on the night. A few of the uncovered frames held no glass and were just wind holes for the swirling puffs of soot that would drift in from the incinerators in better buildings of the area. But people lived behind some of the windows, if you could call them people and if you could call that living. For Harlem, Shaft thought, you could call it the lower middle class. Ben Buford was on the fifth of the five floors in there behind the last door down the dark hallway toward the rear.
He flashed almost immediately on the three—or was it four?—figures in the darkness of adjacent doorways. Fools! Anybody who knew enough to look would pick up on them. They were about as inconspicuous as he might be at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Biloxi. Why didn’t they get up in the blank windows? Were they guarding Buford or advertising his presence? Or trying to get arrested as loiterers? Shaft gave no sign of spotting them. He waited for the frightened cab driver to get out of sight, then sauntered slowly across the street toward the entrance he had been told to seek.
Shaft had anticipated the look of the place. Buildings like it . . . they had been his life until he had gone to soldier, not so much because Uncle Sam wanted him but because a Juvenile Court judge and a probation officer wanted to get rid of him. He had lived in these buildings, slept in them, hidden in them, fled through them, lobbed the missiles of street warfare from their parapets. He remembered them well. Shaft had never felt nostalgia, at least never for anything of his childhood and youth, although he sometimes had a sad feeling that he thought must be like nostalgia over fantasies or thoughts of things he had not known. He remembered, yet he was still surprised when he went up the chipped concrete steps and pushed open the door that was hanging like a broken arm on the entrance to an unlighted hallway. He was surprised at the smells. He had forgotten their assault waves against the senses. You never got that in Scarsdale, Greenwich, Westport, or in any of those little towns out on the Island like Jericho. You didn’t even get it in Manhattan unless you stumbled over a slum en route from antiseptic home to air-conditioned office.
Urine. That was dominant. The peculiar, soft, mushy smell of rats. Nesting, mating, scrabbling through the plaster. Age. Age has a rotten tone. Blended with dust and the smoke of old fires that may have eaten away at mattresses or the insulation on wiring or just the debris of paper and garbage in the corners of the basement. Finally, fear. Fear had an aroma, a light but pungent scent that pinched the sinuses as well as the spirit. How could he have forgotten all that when he had lived with it so long?
Shaft went up the broken-back stairwell slowly, carefully. Somewhere above him there was a light, a single bulb glimmering into all this treachery of decay. Only the barest flicker of it reached him. He could not even see his own feet in the murk. They found their way up the stairs. Shaft avoided putting weight against the banister and tried to avoid brushing against the wall. When he stumbled on a loose board and his foot went through the backing that was missing from one tread he grumbled half aloud: “Why in the fuck don’t they burn them down?”
He went to the recollection of an old corner friend named Jimmy who had harassed the white cop on the beat along 125th Street between Lenox and Fifth. Jimmy went to the cop every day panhandling for just a penny. “Gimme a penny, gimme a penny, gimme a penny,” he would chant. “Why?” the cop asked once and only once. “Why do you want a penny, Jimmy?”
“Penny buy some matches, penny buy some matches.”
Shaft smiled in the darkness. That door should be it.
He considered giving the door a solid whack, a blow against the nerves of Ben Buford and his people. But he wasn’t sure how edgy they would be. They had been bugged and rebugged. Bugged in so many places by so many fools that this might be the moment when somebody answered the door with a .45 or a .30-30. So he knocked. Rap, rap. In the way one neighbor might rap on another’s door. It’s me, John Shaft, come to borrow a cup of tea. He bet Ben Buford had a cup of tea in there, too. A pound of it, if he had been still long enough to make connections.
Lonnie Dotts opened the door. Shaft did not know him. He saw Ben Buford over Dotts’ shoulder. Thinner, more elegant in his clothes than Shaft remembered him. A couple of other figures looking very much like Ben Buford stood with him. Shaft figured he better do the old-friend routine. They all looked suspicious and nervous.
“Hey, man,” he said in Ben Buford’s direction. “How you doing?” Shaft moved into the room without waiting for Dotts to get out of the way. That was the man’s choice. He either moved or got trampled. Dotts moved. Shaft was into the room and extending his hand to Buford. “Hey,” he repeated, smiling widely, hoping without confidence that it was going across sincerely. “What you been doing?”
Ridiculous. Everybody in the world knew what Ben Buford had been doing. He had been throwing molotovs of words on people, watching them ignite, seeing them explode in the fury of his indictments. Maybe the Florida swamp Indians didn’t know what Ben Buford was doing, but that was all.
“I have been doing just fine.” Buford’s voice was cold, precise, negative. The hand he permitted Shaft to shake was strong, but there was no warmth or welcome in the grip. There was rage and embarrassment in Buford’s eyes. Shaft thought there might also be insanity. Hell, why not? Buford had to be insane to be doing what he was doing, putting himself on the line to get his head blown off. For what? For the Revolution that wasn’t going to work in this way, Shaft was convinced, but only in the total and eventual reorientation of a whole society. The other side was just as crazy in its way as Buford was in his. You couldn’t bomb it out of them any more than you could shoot it out of Buford.
Shaft marveled at the arrogance of their manner toward him. He wondered what they had read, what homework they had done to gather all that hip shit about revolution they urged on the black proletariat. They weren’t going to lead him to the barricades looking like that. But they were certainly moving many others. Goddamn if he didn’t almost expect Ben Buford’s sweet, suffering mother to have a carbine under her mattress. And these cats? They were going to tell her who to burn with it. Shit! He checked out their faces one by one. Hostility. Doubt. Anger. Their clothes were too pretty. Shaft leaned against the window sill and thought with a twinge of embarrassment that his own suit must look like hell. Like in the morning spilling coffee on himself, and now closing out the night leaning against a filthy window sill about three thousand hours later. In between he had done just about everything but have a dog fight in the gray flannel single-breasted number that came from Paul Stuart’s on Madison Avenue. Buford and the others were waiting.
“Listen, all I want is to buy some information about a little girl that’s missing,” he said. “I figure you get around more than most people, so maybe you know this chick or heard about her.”
He was being honest, as honest as a man with three walnut shells. And a round bean. They looked even more suspicious.
“With Whitey’s money?” Lonnie Dotts asked. Shaft’s threshold of annoyance was about three degrees lower than normal, probably because he was so tired.
“You know,” he said, “you pretty goddamn stupid.” That was a wet towel across the face. “’The money is green and why in the fuck don’t you find out what I’m buying before you say you’re not selling?”
Ben Buford came back at him hard with that great voice he threw out at college audiences. “You can’t come up here talking like that, man!”
Shaft wasn’t sure he could take all four of them but he was sure he could mess up their clothes, those fine suits, trying to find out. They bored him with all this wasted hostility. He wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover. His temper flashed and he sneered: “Why, you silly mother . . . ”
Sound roared up the stairwell with a sudden thunder of doom. There were four or five quick shouts, curses, then the shooting. The choppy prattle of machine-gun fire, just like in the movies. Rat-a-tat-tat. Just like in a war. Pop-pop-pop. The others jumped to their feet.
“Fuck this,” Shaft mumbled. He looked out the window behind him to see if there was anything he could swing from, climb down or hang onto. Nothing but five flights of suicide. They were firing in the stairwell now. More curses. Feet running up the stairs, then stopping. Then more firing. He didn’t know how many pieces were in action. But it sure the hell was more than two. That was such a mad sound, such a bad sound. He looked back again. There was still nothing out the window but window. Shit.
He had to get out and take them, too, if he could.
“Where’s the heat?” he demanded in a shout. Four heads turned to him, questioning, surprised.
“Where’s the goddamn guns?” he roared.
“Got no guns here,” Newfield said.
The silly bastards could run around and get beat up and arrested, smoke a lot of shit, make a lot of noise, but when it came right down to it, and it was coming right down to it this minute, they hadn’t figured on how to lay a hand on a decent piece and save everybody’s ass from getting shot off. Those people who were coming up the stairs, they knew where to get a piece.
“Let’s get the hell out of this cigar box!” Shaft commanded, moving toward the door. The door suddenly moved toward him. It flew open with a bang and Shaft was staring into a collection of plumbing that looked like a commando machine gun out of old World War II movies, a piece of pipe, an elbow joint and a clip of .45 cartridges feeding into it. He stopped in mid-movement, hanging over the muzzle on the balls of his feet. Holding the gun in trembling hands was a nineteen or twenty-year-old cat in a leather jacket and black beret. His eyes were wide, near panic.
“Get the hell out of here,” the young man shouted. Shaft wished the kid wasn’t using the gun as a pointer, waving it toward the door, passing over his middle on the way.
“What’s going on out there?” Buford asked.
“I don’t know. They just came in. They wouldn’t stop; somebody said stop and they started to shoot.”
“Motherfuckers! Goddamn CIA,” Newfield said.
Shaft checked them out for panic. Ben Buford looked calm enough. His eyes were bugging and his face was filled with anger. But he was calm. Newfield looked scared. Sweat covered his forehead and would soon be rolling around that pudgy face to the black goatee that covered the chin. Lonnie Dotts looked the same but angry. He had the appearance of being permanently pissed off at the world. It wouldn’t change if he were buying a pack of cigarettes or if, as now, he was buying a piece of death. The sonsofbitches who were out to get him were all the same and they were everywhere. Preston Peerce, a little shorter, wider than the others, looked more like himself, looked like the most reliable of them. Hooded eyes, showing nothing, not moving, just standing there waiting to decide or for somebody to decide for him what the play should be. There wasn’t any time left for thinking. Shaft reached out and grabbed the kid by the shoulder of his jacket, spun him around and said, “Go, goddamnit!” The kid went out the door, either under his own power or Shaft’s push, the gun up and ready to work.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Newfield said.
“The roof!” Lonnie Dotts said. “Up the roof.”
They looked to Buford for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “The roof.”
Dotts, Newfield and Peerce ran past Shaft to the door. Buford started out after them. Shaft grabbed him.
“Wait a minute. Wait,” he said. “Not the roof.”
Buford turned on him, snarling. “Let go of me, you crazy bastard. We can get over the buildings and the hell out of here.”
Shaft’s hand tightened on Buford’s arm. Ben would have to tear it out of the socket to get away.
“No, come on.” He virtually dragged Buford out of the room toward the stairs. The gunfire was two, maybe three flights down. And it was one hell of a gunfight, too. The machine guns on and off for both sides were almost a steady roar. But that was the way to go. He started down the stairs pulling the unwilling Buford after him. Buford struggled to free his arm.
“No!” he cried. “You’re taking me down there to get me killed. No!”
Shaft was off balance at the top of the stairs. But he didn’t have time to stop and argue. He turned to Buford, let go of his arm with his left hand and turned it into a fist. He brought it up as hard as he could against Ben’s chin. Even over all that gunfire, Shaft could hear the crunch of flesh on flesh, bone on bone. Buford’s face danced across his skull, his entire body lifted up about an inch and then began to settle. Shaft pulled him forward and caught him over his shoulder. Then with a grunt of exertion he turned down the stairs as quickly as he could move with one hundred seventy pounds of anger over his shoulder.
Ben Buford was his connection into an entire community within a community of the black world Shaft had to prowl to answer the questions that Knocks Persons asked of him. He wasn’t going to let that connection go up on an open roof top to be chopped down like a pigeon. Even if he had to carry Ben Buford through hell he was going to keep the Revolution alive. He started down the rickety stairs.
“Silly sonofabitch,” he muttered.