“IF WE DO NOT HAVE THE CAPACITY to deal with these problems today and the courage for a confrontation with our mistakes of the past, then we might as well abandon this city to the chaos that will befall it. I cannot let this happen, either as your Mayor or as a citizen of a metropolis that is great in all things, even its sorrow over these tragic, shameful, wasteful deaths. Nor can you permit this to happen if you hope to live in peace, in the assurance that we are not plunging headlong toward an irretrievable condition of despair and disruption. Therefore, as your Mayor, I propose . . . ”
Knocks Persons flicked a button on the television control panel. The big blue eye in the wall went dark. He touched another control and a brow of wood and matching fabric panel drooped over it, settled on bearings in the wall and hid its presence. He rubbed the ash off the even-burning end of the cigar in his left fist and raised it from the big crystal ashtray to his lips. He thought about the Mayor. What they forgot after they got there to being Mayor and things like that was where they’d come from, what the city meant and how it worked. They used to know. He remembered men who knew and made it work. They paid their dues. They used it. Some good, some bad. But they knew. This one didn’t know except how to look on that box on the wall. Too many of them only knew that, nothing more. Too many of the young ones knew how to look, how to talk. But they didn’t know how anything worked.
These were Knocks Persons’ thoughts when the soft summons of the telephone twisted his huge body around in the vertical leather bathtub and informed him that Shaft was there with Ben Buford. Shaft. Did he know? He had to gamble that Shaft did. But there was doubt in the gamble. Maybe they hadn’t let Shaft know enough as he went into their world. Maybe just enough to get by until he got himself killed. Maybe until they decided to kill him off. A touch of fear and remorse penetrated the hulk of him. Beatrice. Goddamn those motherfuckers. Let them give Shaft enough life to find her. They’d kill him sure. But let him find her first. They’d kill him sure. That was how things worked. It didn’t have anything to do with the bright blue faces on the wall.
“Knocks, this is Ben Buford,” Shaft said as he came through the door at the far end of the room and waded through the pool of white carpeting.
Knocks nodded at the tall beige bag of angles and degrees. He didn’t get up or offer a hand. Buford wasn’t bending either. He silently assessed the big black man through the shimmering ovals of the wire bound spectacles, then granted a nod in return.
Hey, Shaft thought, these bastards really picked up on each other fast. They were so goddamn cool but their minds were tearing at each other, ripping and smashing at each other like a couple of studs hungry for the same woman. Power was the woman and they were both after her. He caught Persons’ almost imperceptible gesture toward the two chairs that had been set in front of the glass desk. He also caught Buford’s vibrations of hostility. Shit. They weren’t going to talk to each other. Not unless he forced it. He didn’t give a fuck if Persons reached right over that glass lake and pinched Buford’s head off with two big fat fingers. And he didn’t give a good goddamn if Buford sank his teeth into the meaty column of brown flesh that rose like a bridge abutment out of Knocks’ frosty white shirt. But he wasn’t going to get killed simply because he was caught between them.
“This cat knows where Beatrice is,” he said blandly, pointing a thumb at Ben, watching the bomb land on both of them, flare in the sudden ignition of shock, then blossom into a cloud of rage. He was watching it happen to Persons when Buford hit him. Stupid. He had underestimated the black nationalist. The long, lean body struck him in the side of the head like a screaming spear from a catapult hidden in the forest of the white rug. A spear screaming “You sonofabitch!” and with all the ugly thunder of Buford’s anger, surprise and outrage.
The left side of Shaft’s head went numb under the impact. He felt himself lifted out of the chair, spinning to the right. He tried his feet and they weren’t there. They were going out sideways kicking at nothing. Shaft had a sliding, blurred image of Persons getting out of the leather bathtub with more speed than his bulk allowed. But he lost the focus in the spinning room. He had deliberately unleashed a maniac upon himself and he had about half a second to get ready for the consequences. He pulled his body together as tightly possible and twisted to land rolling on his left shoulder. Come on, Persons, get your ass around here and grab this mad bastard.
Buford remembered the streets. He didn’t stand there and weigh the damage of his blow and the satisfaction of it. He was right with Shaft all the way, on top of him, around him, the angles and points of his body flying in a quick squall of blows. Hurtling toward the carpet, Shaft thought he’d be going right through the floor under the hammering if Buford had forty or fifty more pounds of flesh to spend on his rage. He pulled up a knee to cover his groin and threw his right arm in front of his face, to push when he landed and to cover his chin and eyes. He held the left close to his side, feeling, rather than thinking, that he would throw it once into the center of Buford’s storm. He didn’t want to hurt him, just bring him under control now. He hit the carpeting, twisted. All right, now! He swung. Nothing. The fist sliced through empty air and filled the vacuum of Buford’s sudden absence.
Persons had him. That was power, Shaft thought, the big, ham-big hands, holding Buford by the arms but containing the entire writhing length of the man in a double vise. The strength of the grip went all the way down through the hard core of Persons’ bulk. Shaft lay on the floor for a moment, watching Buford lash and lunge like a marionette hanging on steel strings. Buford’s glasses had twisted off in the fray. He looked about five years younger and a lot dumber. A foot lashed out and caught Shaft in the hard muscle of the calf of his left leg. That sonofabitch had the longest legs in the world. He was screaming out of his mind.
“I’ll kill you, you rotten faggot cocksucker,” Buford shouted.
That was the language he wanted to hear from Buford. Down to the basics. Never mind all that revolution shit. This was the only level where he would get what he wanted from Buford. Shaft started getting off the floor, careful to stay out of range of the big flying feet.
“Fuck you!” he shouted at Buford.
Persons was bellowing, too.
“Stop it, goddamnit!”
Good. Persons was mad, too. Beneath that ton of lard and muscle, there was a place where it was possible to get to Persons. Shaft let them roar. It was doing them all good. Buford was raging out of an almost catatonic blankness that had cloaked his reactions since the shooting and the flight to Marvin Green’s apartment; Persons was forced to feel and react with more than his massive imperturbability, a man forced to deal with a dog fight in the middle of his carpet. And he, Shaft, was in control.
There was a moment’s lull, as there is in the eye of a hurricane. A dead, dramatic calm. He used it to pull the still unopened envelope of Knocks Persons’ money out of his jacket and throw it down on the glass desk. Persons and Buford were ludicrous figures, standing before him in a dance of lunge and restraint.
It was an outrageous gesture. Shaft was slightly apprehensive himself; he wondered with a twinge if he would ever get his hands on the envelope again. It depended on how they reacted next, these two angry black men who were so distinctly apart from both his own anger and his own blackness.
“I’m going to get the fuck out of here and let you two eat each other,” he snarled. “You, you sonofabitch,” he leveled a finger at Buford, “are the biggest goddamn phony in the world. Revolution, my ass. You just found a new way to chase pussy. How much homework you ever done? How many dues you paid? Shit, you just found something to do besides go to jail for being stupid. Four o’clock this morning, some cats came around to show you how much you didn’t know.”
He had to cut deep, get to the core of Buford and split him open. He hoped Persons was hanging on.
“There’ll be statues to you all over Mississippi one of these days, with big letters all over them saying, “This here is the nigger who led the sheep to slaughter.”
His eyes burned into Buford’s with every word. He had not looked at Persons. Now he did, saying, in a softer, slower voice, “And you, you’re worse. He’s a crazy Judas, but you got maybe a couple thousand dollars in the bank for every piece of brain and bone that’s sprayed around on that roof. You got the silver. Yeah . . . you got the silver and . . . you’d . . . lie . . . every goddamn . . . one . . . of . . . us . . . into . . . hell . . . for . . . more . . . of . . . it . . . including . . . your . . . own . . . daughter . . . including . . . every . . . black . . . man . . . in . . . the . . . world . . . ”
Shaft turned and strode toward the door. He wasn’t sure he could get out of the building alive. But he wasn’t going to act like he couldn’t. Halfway across the room, he stopped to finish it
“You know what I mean?” he asked, turning to them, noting that Persons no longer held Buford, that they simply stood there watching him. “I mean neither one of you bastards is worth a damn to me, to the black people, to Beatrice, wherever the hell she is right now.”
He turned and left them. There were the men outside the door. They looked at him but said nothing. Shaft walked evenly but not quickly along the gleaming oak-paneled hallway to the elevator door. The black plastic button was set in a brass plate. Or maybe it was gold. Christ, Persons could have a platinum elevator if he wanted.
One the edge of his peripheral vision, Shaft was watching the two men at the gates to Knocks’ sanctuary. He pushed the black button with a fat thumb and heard the machinery of the small lift begin to whirr. He was counting. He was up to 120, 121, 122 . . . The guards at the door stiffened slightly, their slouching suits rising out of the creases of inactivity. The door opened. Shaft concentrated on the elevator button.
“Shaft,” Persons rumbled at him. He turned his grim face to the man whose bulk filled the doorway. The guards also looked to Persons, their faithful eyes wanting to know if they should run retrieve Shaft like a stick on the beach, a ball in the field. Persons ignored them. So did Shaft. “You want to come back and talk this out?”
Shaft looked at him with what he hoped to be disdain or at least indifference.
“What?” he pretended deafness.
“You want to come back here and talk . . . a little?”
He had the bastards. It was in the pause, in the modification of the request. He probably had Buford, too. He would have paid one hundred dollars for a transcript of the conversation that followed his departure from the room. The one hundred twenty-second exchange, spoken or shouted, in which the two of them had decided that the bullshit was over and they would now get down to it with Shaft—provided Shaft could be brought back to do it.
“Straight?” Shaft asked. The guards at the door must be wigging over the dialogue. They had probably never heard Persons involved in an equal exchange. He got reports and gave orders. Who was this cat in the rumpled gray suit, torn out at the shoulder a little, who was treating Knocks Persons like something else?
Straight, Shaft asked. Were they going to level? There was no alternative now. They had forced him into the position and had to accept it.
“Straight,” Knocks promised, reaching into a back pocket for the handkerchief about the size of a schooner sail, dabbing at the perspiration across his heavy brow. The elevator door hissed aside. Shaft glanced from Persons to the small chamber that would carry him down to the street—and he knew now that he could make the journey without interference—and then looked back to Persons. Waiting. Let the man take one more measure of the importance of his decision.
“Straight,” he repeated, turning back toward the room, again walking evenly but not quickly.
Ben Buford had apparently picked up the chrome and leather side chairs they had knocked over in the outburst and was sitting slumped into one of them, gnawing on the knuckle of his left thumb. His right hand was resting on his thigh and the fingers diddled nervously in a rippling drumbeat of anxiety or exasperation. He didn’t look up.
Shaft took the chair beside Buford. Persons immersed himself in the leather bathtub.
“What do you want?” the big man grumbled. The envelope of money still lay on the glass. It had not been moved from the spot where Shaft dropped it. The question was implicit with Persons: did he want more money?
Shaft ignored the nuance for the substance of the moment. Of course he wanted more money. He wanted money and money and money. But there was a line he had to draw for them.
“Two things,” Shaft said. “From you, I want to know who the hell is after you and why. From him—” he turned his head to nod at Buford—”I want straight answers on what he’s after as far as you’re concerned and what he’s willing to do to get it. You first. Where’s your trouble?”
Persons had more guts than the rhino he resembled.
“Heroin,” he said matter-of-factly. “Spanish Harlem. Over around One Hundred Sixteenth Street and Broadway.”
“Why there? That’s all over.”
Persons seemed almost to be smiling at his ignorance.
“About seven, eight years ago, the Italians decided to let the retail business go. There was all this pot and pill shit goin’ and everybody was pushin’. It was like a kid in school didn’t have to go look for a pusher in the playground. He just go to his teacher and make a connection. It was all amateurs. Everybody was doin’ it. Everybody was the pusher, everybody was the connection, everybody was the user.”
“What’s that got to do with heroin?”
“Well, it was all confused. It got so nobody could keep track of what was going on, coming in, going out. All like that. Everybody was carrying. So the Italians, they decided it was too much for them to keep track of. They couldn’t do it.”
“Why not? They always kept track of it before.”
“That was before. They had people, lots of people, the young ones to train and move in with them. But where the young ones now? They goin’ to some college, they goin’ into the real-estate business, they goin’ into keepin’ track of the books and the figures instead of the pushers and the heads.”
Of course, Shaft thought. If a Mafia don was breaking his kid into the business today, he would break him in through the Harvard Business School rather than the college of the streets.
“Instead,” Persons went on, warming to his lecture, “they figure they would just let the small stuff go to the Spanish coming in, the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans, and they’d just get theirs in moving it in and out of the country.”
“So what’s that mean in trouble for you?”
“It means,” Buford interjected in his angry, preachy voice, “that the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans didn’t get a goddamned thing. He did!”
Buford meant Persons.
“You took over heroin in Spanish Harlem?” Shaft asked.
Persons gazed silently at them for a moment, then nodded.
“What’s the difference?” Shaft persisted.
Again it was Buford who answered.
“About eight . . . ten million dollars a year the way he took it and expanded it. That’s the guess. Only he can tell you for sure.”
It was funny as hell to Shaft. Only he couldn’t laugh just yet. The Mafia had gotten out of the Spanish Harlem heroin trade because it was suffering a personnel shortage. They thought they were throwing a scrap to the Spics who could be controlled at the sources. But it didn’t work that way. Crime and profit, basic to nature, won’t tolerate the vacuum either. Persons had moved in. It was very funny. He had probably even absorbed the Spaniards without much difficulty. What the hell, half of them were black—and getting blacker through the integration of poverty and ghetto isolation. The Italians were no longer the lower class of crime, at least on that level. They were the aristocracy. He supposed Anderozzi knew all this. Why hadn’t he mentioned it? Was he so busy looking for angry niggers under the bed with molotovs that he was forgetting the basics? That wasn’t likely. The sonofabitch just wasn’t leveling with him. His thoughts turned swiftly back to the money, the prize of this game.
“Eight to ten million,” Shaft said.
Persons may have considered trying to get away from the economics of it. But he couldn’t get away from Buford. “You don’t count it that way,” Knocks said.
“The hell you don’t!” Ben said, straightening up in the chair. “You count every goddamn penny of it.”
“Hey, man,” Shaft said. “No speeches.”
Buford twisted and looked at him for the first time since he had tried to smash Shaft’s head from its moorings. The insane eyes were lighted anew with anger. But his voice was controlled and even.
“Maybe you need speeches Shaft,” he said. “Maybe you should listen sometime to what’s happening. What that sonofabitch is saying is that he controls the source of more fucking misery for the black people of Harlem than Whitey ever dreamed of holding.”
Shaft couldn’t help himself. “What’s the matter with you, fool, don’t you believe in equal opportunity?”
“One day,” Buford said, “it’s going to be a crime for a sonofabitch like you to call himself black. For you, for him, for everybody else who stands for and with the corruption of the community. You’re going to see the day when a black man doesn’t suck the blood of his brother and give it back in junk and gin and drive his Cadillacs on the difference in the price. You’re going to see . . . ”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Shaft tried to protest. Buford rode right over it.
“Not for Christ’s sake, for the brothers sake . . . if we have to destroy every motherfucker in the world like that pig over there or half-honky pimp like you who doesn’t give a shit for anything but himself. I want to be there when they throw your body in the fire.”
“You’ll never see it,” Shaft said.
“I’ll see it! We’ll all see it because the whole goddamn country will be burning down!”
“Well, good!” Shaft shouted. Buford had climbed half out of the chair to bellow at him. He was poised now in a crouch that made him seem about to leap toward the sky where he could grasp thunderbolts to hurl down at these infidels. “Well, good! At least I know how crazy you are. Before I only suspected.”
He turned to the imperturbable mass of Knocks Persons.
“Now we both know where this is all at,” he said. “I figured you knew all the time. I hope you know this cat wasn’t talking to me. That was for you.”
“I can say for myself who I’m talking to,” Buford snapped.
“Shut up,” Shaft ordered. There was finality in it, the threat that the conversation would either go Shaft’s direction or end in sudden, swift violence. Buford’s mouth opened slightly, then closed. Shaft was angry. Not at Ben or anything stirred by Buford’s rhetoric. He had been told all that before, one way or another. He was pissed off at himself for the time that had been wasted.
“You heard what he said,” Shaft told Persons. “It ain’t me he’s after. It’s your ass or his. You smart enough to see what he’s doing?”
There was no sign from Persons.
“I said he knew where Beatrice was. You knew, too, you dumb bastard.”