JED CLAMPETT SMOKED WINSTONS. Granny was reluctant, but he talked her into poking the filter end into the bowl of her corncob pipe and she agreed with him that it tasted good, like a cigarette should.
That was the impression Quincy Springfield got anyway, with the sound turned off on the thirteen-inch set in the corner and the black-and-white images clomping around silently in burlap and gingham and those big scuffed-leather honky shoes that TV people associated with Southern wardrobe. Quincy had been to Alabama once and folks down there wore baseball caps and flannel shirts buttoned to the neck and stiff blue jeans and tenny-grippers, just like in some places in Detroit. Negroes too. But then the only Negro on TV wore a white coat and ironed Jack Benny’s pants, so what did TV people know?
The commercial ended and the show came on, with the same two people conversing over a big smoking kettle that the old lady was stirring next to a swimming pool with statues of naked white people scattered around it. Nobody was lighting up now. Quincy lost interest and turned his attention to the man seated in front of him behind the glass-topped desk.
The man’s name was Devlin, but Quincy was sure he was Jewish. He had the nose, a broad soft face with a hooking chin, and combed his dark hair across his scalp in a way that reminded Quincy of Mr. Rappaport, a pawnbroker he had liked twenty years ago because he always paid a fair price, or did anyway until somebody from outside the neighborhood let out his intestines with a Barlow knife when he didn’t open the cash register fast enough. But Quincy had no affection for Devlin. The man wore highly inflammable suits with loud patterns and ties you could mop your face with and still have enough dry material left over to wipe your hands. People with money who didn’t spend any of it on their appearance wore their contempt for their fellow human beings like a six-hundred-dollar suit. Quincy himself favored colored shirts—it was lavender today—jackets with natural shoulders, peg-top pants, and ostrich half-boots that zipped up inside the ankles. He never wore a hat. Hats were for pimps.
At six-three and 220 pounds, Quincy was a hard fit, which was why tailors received much of his income. The skin of his face was blue-black, almost plum-colored, and stretched tight over thick bones with chiseled edges. His prognathous jaw, which resembled the underslung bucket of a steam shovel, frightened the people he wanted to frighten, but when he smiled—not often—it receded, transforming his features. There was gray in his modest Afro. He was thirty-five.
Devlin removed the last packet from the satchel, stripped off the rubber band, and counted, his meaty thumb separating the bills with scalpel precision. He could have done it much faster, but he obviously enjoyed making Quincy wait. In so far as it was possible for a man like Devlin to enjoy anything. Any other courier would have been dismissed upon delivery, to be recalled later if there was a discrepancy in the count; and in fact the delivery itself would have been handled by a bag man, not by a boss like Quincy. But since the day three months ago that one of his couriers had pocketed fifteen hundred dollars, nothing would do but that Quincy carry the cash himself, one of many humiliations he had had to endure because he was Bass Springfield’s son. It made no difference that Quincy had apprehended the greedy bag man and made him curl his fingers around a doorjamb while Quincy kicked the door shut. If the man had eight broken fingers, his boss had suffered as much in loss of esteem.
When he finished counting, Devlin grasped the arms of his chair, reddened from his hairline to his collar, and stood up. He went out through the door behind the desk without excusing himself.
On the television screen, a blonde in a slippery gown was hanging all over a man who was shaving the way no sane man would ever shave if there were a blade in his razor. Quincy ignored it and looked instead at the view from the forty-third floor of the Penobscot Building. The river glinted in scallops of reflected sunlight between the block buildings of the warehouse district and Windsor on the other side. Quincy had never been to Canada, three minutes away across the Ambassador Bridge or through the tunnel. Despite the similarity of the Windsor skyline to Detroit’s, he pictured the country as a land of moose and snowy mountains and honkies in tight uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats who rode horses and sang to each other in deep fruity voices. He’d seen that in a movie his mother had taken him to see when he was five years old and the images were now more real than many of the other events of his childhood.
Devlin returned and lowered himself derrick-fashion into his chair. His body was bullet-shaped and like his face gave no indication that there were bones beneath. “Patsy wants to talk to you.”
The door behind the desk led into a corner office twice as deep as the one Quincy had just left. The adjoining windows would have presented the same view of Canada and another of downtown Detroit if they weren’t cloaked in blinds and drapes of some heavy green material with gold threads that glittered. There was a moss-green Brussels carpet wall-to-wall—Quincy had made a study of such fine things—and brushed aluminum panels on the walls that made the room look like something seen in a clouded mirror. Neither of its two occupants got up when the visitor entered.
“Your receipts are off six percent this week,” Patsy said.
He was looking at Quincy with both hands resting flat on top of an absolutely bare desk with a deep gloss that reflected the perforated ceiling and its recessed circles of light; a small man with delicate bones who always seemed to be shrinking inside his beautifully tailored suits, his neck overcome by a high collar and the big knot of a silver tie. His black hair, waving back intricately from a straight line across his forehead, was his best feature, but it looked artificial. He had large, glistening, mahogany-colored eyes almost entirely without whites, a nothing nose, and the thickest pair of lips that Quincy had ever seen on a white man, very red against a complexion that ranged from saffron to orange depending upon the intensity of his emotions. Although Quincy knew that the man was several months younger than he, there was something about him that always made Quincy think of an old man in a room in a hospital, waiting.
“Did you Hear me? I said your receipts are off six percent this week.”
Quincy unbuttoned his jacket. Rooms that contained Patsy Orr were always uncomfortably warm. “That’s because five-twenty-seven came up,” he said. “Five plus two equals lucky seven. Every brother with a rabbit’s foot in his pocket plays it. Lydell and me was up till two this morning paying out.”
“They were off four percent last week and eight percent the week before that.”
“Hard times. It’s like the market, only opposite. Next time the Supreme Court hands down a desegregation decision, you watch them numbers climb, Patsy.”
“Mr. Orr,” someone corrected.
The someone, reading a paperback book in a tan stuffed leather armchair by the door, was called Sweets, and he was the only white man who unnerved Quincy as much as Patsy Orr. He was bullet-shaped like Devlin, but stretched out, a .44 long as opposed to a squat magnum round, with a head that came to a perfect point. It was the point that bothered Quincy; he found it impossible not to stare. The condition must have been congenital, as he could think of no mishap that would plane a man’s head on all four sides. Colorless hair grew straight down from the point and curled on Sweets’s forehead, which sloped without a crease to glass-blue eyes and a brief Irish nose and a long upper lip split in the middle like a cat’s. His suit was monk’s-brown and sack-shaped—a dead giveaway that he was carrying—and he wore one of those short diamond-shaped ties Quincy hadn’t seen since the forties, red and blue in vertical halves with a musical clef embroidered on it, red on the blue background, blue on the red. Quincy craned his neck a little to see the paperback’s cover. The Warren Commission Report.
“Times must be especially hard in your neighborhood,” Orr said. “Nobody else’s receipts are off by as much as yours.”
“Hey, what else is new? Hastings Street ain’t Grosse fucking Pointe.”
“Mr. Orr don’t like that kind of language.” Sweets turned a page.
“How long have you known Lafayette?” Orr asked.
“Lydell? We was in school together. They threw us out at the same time. You’re skinning the wrong frog there, Mr. Orr.” He tried the smile.
“Your judgment of human nature hasn’t impressed me in the past.” The small man removed his hands from the desk. They left no patches of moisture on the shiny top as Quincy’s would have; as any man’s would have who had blood in his veins instead of engine coolant. Quincy thought that if someone poked him full of holes with an icepick, the holes would bleed for a second and then stop, just like the radiator in the Zerex commercial. “I’m sending you a man next week,” Orr went on. “He’s what we call a doctor. He’ll look at your organization and suggest changes.”
“That ain’t necessary, Mr. Orr.”
“I wasn’t asking your opinion.”
“Well, is he black or white?”
“His name’s Gallante. Will you make him welcome?”
Another fucking dago. “I got a choice?”
“Everyone has a choice, Springfield.”
Four hundred fifty feet down, a horn squonked in the street.
“Anything else?” Quincy asked.
“Not just now.” Orr went on looking at him.
Sweets said, “That means go.”
Quincy went. Devlin’s extravagant buttocks greeted him in the outer office, where the bookkeeper was bent double in his chair putting the bricks of currency into the floor safe under the kneehole of his desk. The view was entirely in keeping with Quincy’s opinion of the man.
Alone in the office with the bodyguard, Orr made a gesture and Sweets laid aside his book, fished the twin aluminum canes from under his chair, and got up to bring them over. Orr finished securing his leg braces and allowed Sweets to help him to his feet and support him while he clamped the canes to his wrists. The operation was conducted swiftly, with a minimum of efficient-sounding snicks. The small man had not walked without artificial aid since he was four, the year polio struck down four thousand children in Detroit alone. His legs, and in fact his whole body, were little more than bone and withered gristle beneath the padding built expertly into his suits.
“Want the car?” Sweets asked.
“No, I’m just going across the street.”
Sweets, whose brachycephaly didn’t interfere with his intelligence, asked no more questions. Across the street was a public telephone booth where his employer took calls at prearranged times from an exchange in Puerto Rico; the booth contained the only untapped line convenient to the office. The man whose head came to a point left Orr to manage his canes and braces and went ahead to hold the door.
“How’s things?” Lydell Lafayette asked.
Seated at the wheel of Quincy’s candy-apple green Sting Ray with the top down, Lafayette had on a charcoal double-breasted that made him look like a colored banker, the brim of a pearl-gray hat snapped low over his eyes. His concession to color—a sizable one—was a lemon silk hatband and necktie to match. He had a hairline moustache like Little
Richard’s that accentuated the width of his mouth, which threw off the symmetry of his narrow face when he smiled. Which was all the time. His teeth were blue-white, each one the size of a pigeon’s egg.
Quincy walked around the car and leaped into the passenger’s seat without opening the door. “Fine as pine wine,” he said, “if you like spies.” He told Lafayette what Patsy Orr had told him.
“Little gimp. What you say?”
“I said, ‘Feets, do your stuff,’ and shuffled out of there along with what’s left of my balls. What you expect?”
Lafayette turned the key and let the 327 bubble. “When’s the guinea set to show?”
“Next week sometime.”
“Shit, and we run out of olive oil just this morning.”
Quincy slid his knees up above the dash and rested his head on the back of the Naugahyde seat. He grinned, softening his big-jaw profile. “You never guess in a million years what white folks watch on TV.”
“I won’t never ’cause I don’t plans to try.”
“The Beverly Hillbillies.”
“Shiiit,” said Lafayette, and popped the clutch. The Corvette laid glistening black tracks to the stoplight on Fort Street.