7

“YOU CAN COMPLAIN TO THE UNION,” he had smart-assed Persons, “but twelve-fifty an hour is only my rate for living. I get a lot more for dying.”

Shaft went out of the brownstone lair with ten thousand dollars tucked into an inside pocket of the gray suit jacket. It was ten times more than had been in the first envelope; he had told Persons that he would expect ten thousand more when and if he could deliver. Take it or leave it. It wasn’t blackmail, he thought, just a reappraisal of the job hazards on the basis of more realistic information. For now the hunt began. Now he knew what he was hunting.

Ben Buford walked out with him, seeming to burn less fiercely with the inner angers. He was like a dog, Shaft thought. It made him feel better to bark and snarl once in a while. Or even bite.

“You want to deal with that man,” Shaft told him as they walked toward the corner through the midnight mist. “Now’s your chance.”

Shaft wished he had his raincoat. He couldn’t remember where it was—the office, Anderozzi’s cubicle, maybe back at the apartment. At Ellie’s? If anything more happened to the suit, he wouldn’t be able to walk the streets in it. He dealt with a nice guy named Burke at Paul Stuart. Burke wouldn’t recognize this rumpled rag bag as the child of his salesmanship. But, then, Burke probably wouldn’t believe where the suit had been in the last twenty-four . . . forty-eight—no, Christ!—almost seventy-two hours since he had gotten into it. The night traffic along Broadway was heavy. Shaft tried to think why. Thursday. The stores had been open late. People stopped to complain about the prices at Bloomingdale’s. The more they complained, the more they ate. Late traffic. A lot of people with headaches.

“But,” he went on when Buford remained silent, “you can’t kill him. You give some and take some. That’s the way he lives.”

Buford glanced up and down the divided avenue and its collection of small, dark shops. He had made two calls from Persons’ coin telephone in the closet. More men would be coming to him from the replacement depot of his underground army.

“It’s not the way we live anymore,” Buford said without the emphasis of contention, just stating it.

“Look, man.” Shaft sighed. “I don’t want to get into this with you again. Not now. Maybe sometime. But not now. I got a job to do and I’m going to do it. That job is to get that man’s daughter back. I don’t and I can’t give a shit if he sells slaves to George Wallace. I’m still going to do it, one way or another.”

He raised his arm at the advancing rooflight of a cab. The turn indicator on the yellow Chevy blinked and the driver pulled over to collect him. A black driver. Sometimes life was so simple.

“I’m going to call you if I need you,” Shaft said, reaching for the handle.

“What if that was the CIA last night and not who you think it was?”

“You talk any Spanish?”

“A little, why?”

“You better go hide your ass in Cuba if it’s who you think it was.”

He got in and began to pull the door shut.

“Ben,” he finished with him, “I’m sorry you lost those cats.”

He jerked the door shut before Buford could reply, if, indeed, there would have been a reply.

“The Village,” Shaft told the driver, who had screwed his head around on rolls of fat and was peering at him under the bill of a plaid cap. “Just go down Ninth Avenue. Past Fourteenth.”

Why, he thought, the dirty bastards had been trying to kill him just because Knocks Persons had come down to Times Square with his problem and dumped it on Shaft’s desk. His mind went weaving through the results and the twists of what had happened like a little old lady doing a broken-field run through the tightly packed outdoor vegetable stands the cab was passing along Ninth Avenue, some of them still lighted and doing business. He marveled with a shake of his head and a wry smile into the darkness at how quickly and coolly they had set up the hit. He had been so convenient for them. They must have been watching every move Persons made since they snatched Beatrice. Knocking off his first contact would have shown Persons how helpless he was, surrounded, alone. And it could have come off as just another race thing. Shaft was certain the police thought that’s what it was, anyhow. He was certain they wanted to think that, rather than pry up the lid on the sewer that ran even lower than the one through which they had to swim each day. What if Buford’s people hadn’t been standing in the doorways with machine guns under their raincoats?

Screw what-if questions, he told himself. It’s strictly what is in this goddamned world. You better know it. The world took what-if questions apart and made you eat them. The cab went past Twenty-second. Ellie’s street. He hadn’t even called her. She would be going to bed now. He wanted to tell the silent, hunched driver to swing down the block and let him off so he could crawl between the soft, smooth sheets with her, let her smooth, soft legs intertwine with his as they curled together to sleep. For all he knew, the bastards were sitting outside her apartment now, waiting to take off the top of his head with a shotgun. Shit! Why did he torture himself this way? His life was on the line and he was thinking about some fox. It didn’t matter what he wanted at the moment. The job was finding out what they wanted in exchange for Beatrice. There was a progressive scale of greed to the rackets. Maybe, like Ben Buford, they wanted all of Persons. White or black, somebody always had.

When the cab ran out of Ninth Avenue and it became Hudson Street, the driver announced, “Here’s Fourteenth.”

“Just keep going. Three or four more blocks.”

The meat-packing warehouses were dull globs of inactivity in the night. In a few hours, they’d light up and bring the West Village to life, getting the stiff, fat­caked carcasses off the hooks and out to the butchers and big restaurants. This part of the Village was like a suburb of the bag of worms squirming over where Bleecker ran into Sixth and went on to Sullivan, MacDougal, Thompson and the bullshit carnival. It was close enough but quiet enough. Now it might be too quiet.

“The street after the next light,” he said. “Jane Street. Turn there. I’ll get off on the comer of the next block.”

Jane Street. He glanced at his apartment building on the corner, a white-painted, four-story brick building that went two apartments deep into Jane, toward Eighth Avenue, but halfway down the block of Hudson Street. His eyes went automatically to the windows of his own apartment in the third-floor corner. Had he left the blinds closed? They were closed now. He usually did that. But sometimes he didn’t. He liked to walk around without clothes, getting coffee, ducking into the shower, shaving, getting another cup of coffee. But it had been so long since he’d been there. He occasionally flicked the blinds open before he left so he wouldn’t be coming back to a dark, gloomy cave. But he couldn’t remember.

The driver made the right on Jane Street, around the entrance to the Cézanne apartments, one of the big, red-brick clusters where girls with roommates, fags with roommates, young couples with dogs as roommates find refuge—with laundry facilities in the basement. The orange globes around the entrance to the No Name Bar opposite his building leered at the street like jack-o’lantern teeth. They might be sitting in there watching his apartment, waiting for the light to go on. He hoped so. There were so many freaks in that joint they’d drive a couple of ordinary, half-sane assassins right up the wall. The music pounding at them, the drunken broads babbling at them, the bummy writers insisting on telling them what they almost wrote that day and might try tomorrow.

Shaft tipped a quarter on the dollar forty-five fare and stepped into the cool, wet air of the night. It was nearly one o’clock. He shrugged against the slight chill that penetrated the suit. Spring pissed around forever getting to New York. Then suddenly it was summer. The long, hot summer. He thought he would get an air conditioner this year. Knocks Persons would buy him a piece of cool. He glanced up and down Jane Street. The Volkswagens were snugged in nose to tail with the Triumphs and Fiats—long rows of oddly shaped dogs exchanging introductions.

To the best of his eyes, there was nobody around or near the entrance to his place. But who was sitting in the cars? Or leaning in an entryway? Or up there behind the venetian blinds in his apartment? He stood at the side door of the No Name for a few moments, thinking of the odds for and against them wanting to take him here. The nice thing about dealing with pure bastards, he thought, is they didn’t waste a lot of time getting between points. They wanted him dead, they’d get him dead, but they would do it at a time and place that was most efficient and least troublemaking for them. It might seem circuitous or illogical to others, but to them it would be direct.

Nothing to it, Shaft, he told himself, all you got to do is put yourself in some crazy guineas head, walk around the scorched hills of Sicily for a hundred years on your way to Spanish Harlem and figure out how and why you want to kill John Shaft, a previously unheard-of spade who’s screwing around with the nice orderly process of organized crime. Then, he let the thought ramble, you come back into the head of John Shaft and figure out how you get to them before they get to you.

“Balls,” he muttered, moving to go into the No Name, opening the side door a slice to let the blast of words and warmth riding over the jukebox rock splash against his face with surf smells of alcohol and bodies. He hoped a couple of them would be sitting at the far corner of the bar, watching his apartment. It would make it so much simpler to get in touch with them.

They were there, all right. Two of them. Shaft’s blackness against a white world was less contrast than their dark evil against the light mood of the drinkers, even the arguers. These had to be the bottom of the barrel, he thought. You figured if those bastards were going to have somebody hit, they sent to Detroit or St Louis for a couple of salesmen­ looking executioners who got into your life, did the job of closing it, and then got out as smoothly as precision parts in the great low-tolerance machine. He acknowledged that this was another cliché, that the two men at the front of the bar could survive as clichés in a society with great traditions of violence and that he might die of its overworked application.

The bar in the No Name runs about thirty feet from back to front, makes a slight elbow to the right and ends there against a dark, oak-paneled wall, about four feet from the window. They had the end seats, looking out into Hudson Street, up onto the windows of Shaft’s kitchen, living room and bedroom on the third floor. The fire escape went right past the living-room window. The front door to the building was in clear view just around the corner, on Jane Street. That was the advantage for people like this. Architects designed the world so killers could sit like fat toads waiting for the next meal to fly by. Zap! the sticky tongue shot out. Blip! the meal was over.

Shaft thought they looked like toads, too. But he wasn’t a mosquito straying out of formation. He started to slip off his suit jacket as he moved into the crowd. They were about thirty or thirty-five, he thought. Old enough to know the business, tough enough to have survived in it, dumb enough to still be taking orders for things like this. He jostled against a threesome of two fat girls oozing out of miniskirts and a seedy young guy in tweeds. Everybody in the West Village looked like a writer. Few of them ever wrote anything except bad checks. But fat girls never complained about bad checks from seedy-looking writers.

There were four big black men bunched around a small blond chick at the near end of the bar where the drop-leaf panel lifted and gave the bartender a way to get in and out. Whoever it was, he had to come around about three times on the average No Name night and throw somebody into Hudson Street, that somebody protesting that he’d never be back to drink in that lousy goddamn joint again—until tomorrow. The black cats would never make out, Shaft thought, as willing as the chick probably was. They still needed the security of numbers in the great pussy hunt when it was the lonely stalker who invariably found the game.

Rollie Nickerson, a tall skinny actor who was usually stoned out of his skull, was working behind the bar, the long spidery arms shooting out like exploding pistons to grab a bottle, swipe the bar, plunge a glass and scoop up ice. Probably on speed. The amphetamines hammering energy out of him and burning up his brain cells. The bartenders at the No Name were either frantically busy or just standing there stoned, smiling into the pleading eyes of the customers. Nobody complained. If it got too bad, they just went up Jane Street to the Bistro or down Hudson to the White Horse. It was part of the circuit. A man was entitled to get stoned.

Shaft pushed against the crowd, rolling up his sleeves over the heavily veined and muscular forearms. His inspection bounced back and forth from Nickerson to the two men at the end of the bar. And everybody else in the joint. There were people there who knew him well enough to call his name, to turn to the men and say, “There’s Shaft. The guy you’ve been . . . ”

But those two couldn’t be dumb enough to tie themselves to the name of a man they planned to knock off. He had to play it strong, anyhow. He got the envelope of cash out of the jacket pocket, opened it close to his face like a poker player trying to squeeze aces out of a queen’s ear. The bills were so damned big. He had to hunt for the fifties, finally found a couple and palmed them out of the envelope before stuffing the package into his left rear pants pocket.

He pushed into the cluster of black cats surrounding the giggling white chick. He recognized at least one of them as being from the neighborhood. The others were strangers and they frowned with hostility on his intrusion. There may be security and confidence in numbers, but who was this sonofabitch come to play in their game?

“It’s cool,” he said to the one he recognized, probably a super from one of the big buildings somewhere around there. Shaft handed him his coat, the tie now pushed into a side pocket. “Hold this a minute, will you?”

The man was smashed enough to take the coat without making a big thing out of it. He wore a beret pulled down over his right ear.

“Who you gonna fight?” he asked.

“Got to get to work,” Shaft said, moving toward the panel that led behind the bar. The others relaxed. Shit, the man wasn’t after the woman. He just had to work. They smiled. “I’ll take it from you when I clean up a place to put it.”

“It look like a good coat,” the drunk said. “If I get three or four dollars for it, I may not be here.”

The others laughed. So did Shaft. He didn’t feel it, but he laughed, still keeping track of Rollie Nickerson and the far end of the bar.

“That’s all good,” he said. “But when you get to the cat I stole it from, don’t ask more than four.”

Everybody except the blond chick thought it was funny. She seemed threatened by his confidence, glibness. She kept her pink nose in some gin drink she was sucking on. The black men around her stood aside as Shaft moved to the small panel, lifted it, and stepped behind the bar. Now all he needed was for some fool to shout, “Hey, Shaft, you the new bartender? How about a drink?”

But they were pretty cool, drunk or stoned. So was Rollie Nickerson. Shaft was counting on the cool with his life. Nickerson was bending over the tub of ice cubes beneath the bar and caught the intrusion with the corner of an eye. He looked up puzzled, the back of his head to the men at the end of the bar, and, recognizing Shaft, smiled. Shaft nodded. The men at the end of the bar hardly noticed. Shaft was just another spade who had come out of a cluster of spades. Just another bartender. They didn’t tap him for the spade. He had business there or he wouldn’t be there. Their man didn’t.

Shaft started straightening bottles at the end of the bar, asked the group of black men and the blond chick if they wanted another drink.

“You buy a round, I’ll give you back your coat.”

“Sure. What you drinking?”

Nickerson was coming his way now, but still cool. Shaft turned and extended his hand in greeting. Nickerson went along with that. His expression changed when the two fifties found a new home. He glanced down, saw the numerals at the corner of the green wad and moved the message casually on to his pocket.

“Why don’t you go around the other side and have a drink?” Shaft said.

“You just bought yourself a saloon,” Nickerson agreed, giving him a familiar slap on the shoulder as he began to move past Shaft to the exit. He should give a shit. For one hundred dollars he could get a cut-rate dentist to start capping his teeth. With a mouthful of glittery, Christ, he could be a star. The owner didn’t come around until three or four to count the money and lock up. All he had to do was back Shaft’s play, whatever it was.

“Where’s the heat?” Shaft asked.

Nickerson paused. A few months earlier—at the height of the Christmas saloon robbery season—he had shown Shaft the snub-nosed .38 Colt that hung by its tigger guard on a small hook screwed into the underside of the bar. He had even asked Shaft, as a detective, what he should do if and when it came time for some random hood to knock off the register.

“Forget you got it,” Shaft said. “Be nice, smile, give the man all the money.”

He had pushed it back across the bar and Nickerson had returned it to the hook, gingerly and respectfully.

“Same place,” he said now. “I never touch the stuff.”

Nickerson went on around the corner, into the small noisy clusters. Shaft went to work. He bought a drink for the four black men and the blond chick. She was drinking vodka, not gin. All the blonds were drinking vodka this year, he thought. He poured about three shots into her highball glass and a dollop of tonic water. Somebody was going to carry her home. He didn’t care who. He spent more time than he should with them. He wanted the men at the end of the bar to notice him, to identify him with the blacks. It was the best and oldest black camouflage. They all looked alike. The gunmen were looking for one who looked different and would show himself by turning up at the apartment across the street.

Shaft checked them out whenever his head was turned in that direction, on the way to the ice cubes, the register. They were sitting, smoking, occasionally touching the glasses in front of them, but barely drinking. They apparently accepted the change in shifts and the new bartender as a matter of course. They were unfamiliar with the bar’s operation. So was Shaft. He hadn’t spent that much time there. The register, the goddamned register. It was a complex, curious collection of keys. He remembered quickly that the black bar down the side was the one the bartender hit with the heel of his hand after punching out the price of the drinks. He hit it and the drawer sprang open. Leave the motherfucker open, he told himself.

“Give us a couple of beers, will ya?”

He gave the voice a couple of beers. He was falling into the rhythm of the work. Goddamn, look at those mugs of beer. Perfect. It made him thirsty for a glass of beer, until he remembered that he didn’t like beer. He was thirsty for the perfection of drawing it. He grabbed a mug from the cluster of them beneath the bar and drew one. Perfect. Then he didn’t know what to do with it. He looked up for a beer drinker, put the mug in front of him and said, “Have one on the house.”

There was a sense of completion in the act of selling a commodity for which the demand seemed endless. That’s why bartenders always looked so happy. For all of the pains in the ass that alcohol inspired, the man who served it was always in demand. He identified with the product. Shaft got a small chaser glass off the drying towels, hunted up the quart of Johnnie Walker Black Label on the high shelf in front of the mirror. He poured an inch of amber into it, raised it and let the golden heat roll down his throat. A toast to nobody, a toast to himself.

He was beginning to sweat lightly and that felt good, too. The phone rang. It startled him, coming so clearly through the noise of the jukebox and the drinkers. The phone was set under the bar, down at the end where the hoods were sitting. He finished squeezing a lime into the quinine water for a tired gin drinker and went down to it. The two men looked up at him. Shaft pointed at their glasses.

“You ready?”

“Not yet,” the older one said.

Shaft reached the phone out of its nook with one hand and held it to his ear. He smiled at the men. They smiled back at him.

“No Name,” he said.

“Is Alex Palmer there?” a querulous, unhappy voice asked. How did anybody in that condition dial a telephone?

He held the mouthpiece away from his lips.

“Either one of you guys named Alex Palmer?” he asked. Their faces were blank and they shook their heads. Shaft turned away from them and pretended to scan the room.

“Not here,” he said into the phone.

“Look, if she comes in will you tell her to call . . . ”

The name was a mumble.

“Sure,” Shaft said. “I’ll tell her.”

He hung up. He enjoyed the feeling of standing close to the men. How does a tiger in the bush feel when the hunter stands two feet away, lighting a cigarette, studying the tracks? A little excited? A little nervous? Or confident, in control. He felt confident, in control. If they knew who he was, they were as cool as he was. They had a system and they didn’t vary it. One of them was always looking out the window, seemingly casual and bored. When he turned back to the bar, the other was automatically turning to look out and maintain the unbroken vigil. They didn’t speak to each other much. Or monosyllables that he couldn’t catch.

He caught up with the demand at the bar, noticed that the crowd was thinning out. They were all really nine-to-fivers at heart. It was almost two o’clock and they had to get up in the morning, put on their straight office clothes and go to work. It was bad enough just being alive. They couldn’t get bombed every night to boot, although a lot of them tried. The phone. The wonderful phone.

He went back to the end of the bar.

“Ready yet?” he asked them.

“Sure,” said the one in a hound’s-tooth sport jacket over a red polo shirt. “Club and water. Both of them.”

The other one looked like a businessman, Shaft thought as he got the bottle of Canadian Club and poured out the shots. He wore a dark sharkskin suit with a white shirt and a narrowish tie with a small pattern. Just a couple of guys having a couple of drinks. He dropped fresh ice cubes into their glasses, tipped the shots in after them and added water from a small pitcher. He suddenly remembered that he didn’t know how much they had been paying a shot for the drinks. He could fake it with the rest of the customers. But not with these two.

“The house buys one,” Shaft said, getting another chaser glass and the Johnnie Walker bottle. He poured an inch and a half in the glass and raised it in a toast. Drink with me, you motherfuckers, his mind roared. They raised their glasses in a toast and sipped with him.

“Thanks,” said the sports coat.

“Sure,” said Shaft. “Happy days.”

The liquor felt warm, strong and positive as it drifted into his stomach. They didn’t know who he was and they were beginning to love him. Shaft smiled. They smiled. He bent down under the bar and reached for the telephone. There was the .38 dangling in a dull blue-black gleam like the head of a snake from a vine. It was as warming and confidence-giving as the Scotch. He smiled at the gun. He could swear the muzzle smiled back.

Shaft made one more circuit of the bar. Rollie Nickerson came giggling away from one of the tables along the wall where he had found a couple of girls without men.

“Three vodka and tonic, my good man,” he ordered.

“Your ass,” Shaft said. “I’m your worst man.”

“Hey, you ever hear that Jelly Roll Morton stuff where he tells Lomax how the old studs used to put each other down?”

“I got those records, man,” Shaft said, pouring vodka into the three glasses, splashing tonic down on them and hunting around for a lime.

Sure he had those records. Anybody who knew anything about music and black men had them. Jelly Roll sitting there at the piano telling Lomax what it was like in New Orleans and all the other places. Jelly’s foot tapping, his voice grinding gravel for the tape. Nickerson meant the scene where Jelly tells how a confrontation was built on a crescendo of threats and outrageous warnings. It was funky, old-fashioned nigger talk that Lomax made part of history by recording for the Library of Congress. Shaft cried when he read Lomax’ book years ago. Somebody at NYU turned him on to it. He laughed when he heard the records. Jelly Roll, so fucking proud and beautiful. Finally stabbed to death in a Washington, D.C., bar by some other cat. Argument over a woman. That was a good way for Jelly Roll to die. The only way. He got the bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured himself another drink and poured a shot of straight vodka for Nickerson.

“Jelly Roll,” Shaft toasted.

“Jelly Roll,” Nickerson chimed, looking glazed and vague. He put the empty glass back down on the bar. “How long you want to stay back there?”

“I don’t know,” Shaft said. “I may never leave.”

“Good. You want me to pay for my drinks?”

“Fuck it.”

“You’re a good bartender.”

Shaft could feel the liquor as he watched Nickerson take the three vodka tonics back to little table. The chicks looked pretty good to him. A little chewed up around the edges, but young, real and what the hell did he expect to find sitting around the No Name at two o’clock in the morning? Vogue models? Or chicks like this, or the blond down there with her pack of hounds in pursuit? Better these than the tight-ass chicks he ran into all day. He was part of their fantasies. Scared hell out of them. Big black man with his big black . . . They all ran home to the mother of a warm, oily bath, to stretch out in the suds and play with themselves while they thought about it. It was better that way. If they tried it, that would spoil everything. It would tum out to be just another piece of ass. The fantasy was much more fun than the fact. He poured himself another shot of Scotch, a little bigger than the others, raised it in a toast to tight-ass chicks and let it funnel down his throat. Women.

He turned and worked his way back up the bar, emptying ashtrays, swiping up the water circles and whiskey spills with a damp cloth.

“How you doin’?” he asked them. They were dark, heavy men, beyond the age of the racket beginners who usually got such jobs as this to prove themselves. They were professionals, he thought.

“Just fine,” one of them said.

“Have another drink,” Shaft insisted, setting up two extra glasses. They had barely touched the last ones. They smiled at his generosity.

“Easy,” the checked sports coat said. “Got to go easy. Got to drive home.”

But he said it jovially, fraternally. This was a good spade. You wouldn’t see this one out starting riots, mugging people, slashing the canvas of your uncle’s new Cadillac convertible. This one bought drinks.

“Can’t drive on one wheel,” Shaft said. He put a glass on the bar for himself and got the Scotch bottle with the Canadian Club. His words sounded hollow in his own ears. Everybody’s words sounded hollow. They were all drunk, he thought. He continued to think about women.

He got the phone out from under the bar and dialed. Then he pushed the disconnect plunger down with a thumb. Wrong number. What the hell was it? He laughed trying to remember. He was getting loaded. He remembered.

“Yes,” she said, a voice drenched in sleep, heavy with the warmth of a lost consciousness.

“It’s me.”

“John? Where are you?”

“Downtown,” he said, slipping his hand over the mouthpiece and remarking to the two hoods. “Got to check in with these women. They get on your ass, man, you got trouble.” The hoods smiled and nodded. They understood. They knew all about black men and black women. They finished their drinks in appreciation of Shaft’s predicament with his black woman.

“Are you coming here?” Ellie asked. “What time is it? Oh, God, it’s nearly two.” She found the illuminated clock beside the bed. Shaft envisioned her reaching out from a burial mound of sheets and blankets to grope for it with one long, slender arm, white against the night. He wanted to feel the sweet touch of the hand. “Darling, what is it?”

“Just checking like you said I should. I’m going to be tied up with these people for a few hours.”’

“John, you sound like you’ve been drinking. Are you drunk?”

“Heyl” He winced at the men. “I had a couple. I ain’t drunk. Just talking business with these people. Just going to be a couple hours late is all.”

“Darling, I don’t understand. I’m going back to sleep. Ring the bell hard and I’ll get up and let you in.” She hung up.

“I’ll ‘splain it all when I get there,” he said into the dead phone. Jesus, but he almost said “gits dere.” “All right, baby, you jus’ get some sleep. Don’t you worry. No. Now you know I ain’t doin’ nothing. Don’t be sitting around there worrying yourself. Jus’ go to bed and get some sleep. Okay. Okay.”

He looked a little crestfallen as he put the receiver in the hook.

“Sheeyut,” he said. “Women jus’ don’t give a man no room at all to play.” He reached for the Scotch bottle again as they smiled in oily understanding.

“Gives you hard time?” the one in the business suit asked.

“Not as hard as I give her.”

They laughed at that. They were still laughing when he dialed another number and let it demand another presence from the night of sleep. He reached for the Scotch with his free hand and sipped at it.

“Anderozzi,” the voice said. Sleepy, too, but hard and ready.

“Hey, baby,” Shaft chuckled as lasciviously as he could. “How you doin’?”

“Who is this?”

“Hey, baby. This is Jelly Roll. I been thinkin’ ‘bout you.”

How quickly would Anderozzi pick up on the voice? Goddamnit, wake up!

“Yeah, well, I been thinkin ‘bout you, too, Shaft. But right now I’m sleeping. What the hell do you want?”

“How ‘bout you comin’ down to see old Big Jim? I got what you want, baby.”

The two men were fascinated. They were forgetting their routine of watching out the window. Listen to this black stud make out with that broad. Listen to him sweet talk her into the compliance that was so sweet and easy for her. They knew all about black men and black women.

Anderozzi was totally awake.

“Okay,” he snapped. “Where are you?”

“Look, honey. I’m down to the No Name Bar right now, but this old bar got to close some time. They gonna throw old Jim out in the cold. How ‘bout you comin’ down here?”

“How many are there?”

“Oh, it’s ‘bout two right now. Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Up front, baby. I’m up front with you.”

The two hoods were excited. They weren’t sure how he was going to make out. They looked eager, warm about it. They wanted him to get the girl in the end.

“We’ll come in on all sides of the place. For Christ’s sake, get down on the floor. Don’t play hero.”

“Hey, baby,” he murmured. “Now that’s the sweet talk I likes to hear. Don’t you worry ‘bout the cab. Old Big Jim gonna take care of that.” He raised his eyes to the leering hoods. “And you, too.”

Give or take a few degrees of tension, he thought it was his coolest moment. He wondered who else he might call as he put down the receiver and shared smiles of male duplicity with the hoods. He discarded the idea of another call. Too foolish.

“Coming across?” one of them asked.

“Yeah, man,” he cackled.

He shook the idea of playing games out of his head. That was the whisky talking; he wasn’t drunk enough or fool enough to be listening. He leaned back against the wood of the back bar, raised one foot up on the low shelf that ran under the bar itself. Nickerson or somebody else had left a package of Marlboros on the shelf. Shaft shook one out of the box, lighted it and blew smoke out his nostrils like a black dragon. In about ten minutes, give or take an eternity, those clowns were going to look up and see a green and white patrol car drive through the front door of the No Name Bar. Maybe the side door at the same time.

He leaned down to look once again at the pistol hanging under the mahogany.

“Almost out of lemons, he said when he straightened up. One of the men glanced at him quizzically. “Use a lot of lemons here,” Shaft added. “Maybe three, four dozen a . . . ”

He had the gun in his hand as soon as he saw what was happening. It was one second before the hoods reacted. The three figures came in the side door. They said nothing. They stood in line with 12-gauge Remington shotguns leveled at the faces of the men at the bar, over and around the few customers who remained.

In that second, Shaft’s hand came up and rested on the bar, the muzzle of the pistol about fifteen inches from either of the two. Two figures glided past the window a few feet away and pushed into the No Name through the front door. Two more shotguns.

“No, no,” Shaft said coldly and clearly. “Just don’t do it. Just sit there.”

They were stunned. Awareness lighted in their eyes. They were trained and practiced at this. They could smell a cop around a corner and down a city block. Now they had five of them around them, moving around them in a circle of riot guns and a big black man at their backs with a cocked pistol.

“Up!” he said when they checked the automatic movement toward their own guns. “Up!” The manicured hands rose above their heads.

One of the cops came forward carefully, quickly, the riot gun still straight out in one hand, still at the middles of the pair. His free hand snaked with professional skill inside the jackets and waistbands and down the pants legs, coming out with three pistols that went into the capacious pockets of his black London Fog raincoat. He handed the riot gun to another one and snapped chrome handcuffs on the hoods.

“All right,” said the cop who seemed to be in charge of the detail, “let’s get ‘em out of here.”

Shaft noticed that the No Name was totally silent, probably for the first time in its history.

“You coming along with us, Mr. Shaft?” the officer asked.

The two hoods turned their outrage on him. Shaft lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“You want one more before you go?” he invited.

The toad in the sports jacket spit in his face. He had only half recoiled, licking his lips, when the bottle broke across his cheekbone in a spray of whisky, glass and blood. A cop cursed. A girl screamed.

“Okay,” the head cop said. “We’ll stop at St. Vincent’s first and get him sewn up. Let’s go.”