OUT on the street again, Bill speculated about Hayden’s “details of a personal nature.” To hell with Hayden, he thought. He had work to do. He tapped his hand on the wallet in his rear pocket with its two thousand dollars of A.R.A. money. Dent was first on the agenda. He stepped into the first drugstore, thumbed the fat telephone book’s pages and memorized Dent’s number, dialing it in one of the booths. A girl’s voice singsonged: “Frank R. Dent, Insurance. Good afternoon.”
“I want to speak to Mr. Dent.”
“Who’s calling?”
“The Judge asked me to call. Judge Nuhnen.”
“One minute please.”
Bill bit on the edge of his thumb. Through the glass door of the booth, he stared at women whose makeup seemed to have been applied with a spray gun. He would have to ring Isabelle and tell her he wouldn’t be back for dinner tonight; she’d love to hear that on their first day in this God damned town.
A man’s voice said. “Frank R. Dent speaking.”
“Hello. I want to talk to you right away, Mr. Dent, about some Harlem insurance.”
“I’ve been expecting you. Can you wait until tonight?”
“No.”
“Come right up.”
He stalked out of the booth. He still hadn’t phoned Isabelle.
In Dent’s private office in the Times Square district, Bill watched the insurance man scrutinize his scarred face. The whites of Dent’s eyes weren’t white any more but pinkish; Dent, himself, looked as fatigued as his eyes. He had a wrinkled skin like a not too fresh office towel. His suit was blue serge and in his stiff celluloid collar he could have been a court bailiff. He and his office reminded Bill of the time he had been a real estate collector in New York during the depression 30’s; the green metal files, the ugly furniture might have been the property of his old boss.
“Look here,” Bill said. “I want to meet Big Boy Bose. The sooner the better.”
Dent picked up a paper clip from his desk and set it down again. “How soon?”
“This afternoon. Tonight.”
“That’s short notice.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve got to see the nigger right away.”
Dent rolled the tip of his tongue along his lower lip. “I don’t know you, mister. You come well recommended but it’s plain you don’t understand some things. Take my advice. When you see Big Boy, don’t you go behaving like he was a nigger shining your shoes. That stuff don’t go with Big Boy. He’s a very influential person and not only in Harlem.”
“Thanks for the tip. Here’s your money.” He counted out five hundred dollars in twenty dollar bills.
“And thank you. You drop by here or ring me at six and I’ll know definitely when you can see Big Boy. And if you have any trouble with him, you can always reach me at my home up to half past eight, and after nine I’m at the Mohegan Club.”
“What trouble?”
“The police investigations’re still on, mister.”
“The Mohegan Club? Okay.” He stood up, flipped his hand goodbye to the insurance man, clattered out of the office and down the elevator to the street. Trouble with Big Boy? That washed-out rag of a Dent could have saved his advice. He didn’t intend to behave like Louisiana up here in Harlem. And what about Dent? Was he in the organization or was he just one of the sympathizers who could always be relied upon if the job involved niggers? No, Bill decided. This Dent was in the organization. Five hundred bucks worth. No sympathizer’d ever dream of asking such a price. The God damn sympathizers were all too hot about the communists and the kike labor lawyers ruining the niggers to ever think of snatching any of the big change for themselves.
He passed under the red and gold sign of a drugstore to the booths in the rear. He rang the Hotel Commodore, asked for his room number. His nerves tingled as Isabelle answered. It was as if her hands had suddenly stroked his eyes. “Where are you, Bill?” she asked. “Why don’t you come on to me?”
“Can’t. I’ve got some things to do.”
“Bill,” she pleaded.
“I’ll make it up, sweet. But this next day or so I’ll be busy. I don’t know when I’ll be home tonight. You go to a movie.”
“You don’t know when you’ll be home — Bill, it’s only the afternoon — ”
“Darling, you have a good dinner and go to a movie. I’ll see you later. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Bill.”
He hung up and glanced at his wrist watch. It was a quarter of three, a hell of a long time before he phoned Dent at six. He could have easily walked east to the Hotel. Her mournful goodbye echoed inside of him and he scowled. But, Christ, she would’ve asked him a hundred questions and he wasn’t getting wound up over her on his first day in town. Bill left the booth and sat down at the ice cream counter. “Chocolate soda,” he said. He consumed it slowly like a little boy early on a Sunday. Then he straightened his tie in the mirror opposite. At a distance, the scars weren’t noticeable. Maybe, he thought vainly; they’ll go away in a few more years.
He strolled out of the drugstore over to Forty-Second Street, his eyes reading the bills announced on the marquées of the double row of cut-rate movies that stretched between Eighth and Seventh Avenues. He turned north at Broadway into the sunlight, into the bright-colored throngs. He felt optimistic now; the A.R.A. money in his wallet seemed to be his own; this trip to the Big Stem’d be the beginning of a new kind of life for Isabelle and himself; even Hayden wasn’t such a bad guy; he and Isabelle’d leave New York in a few weeks and they’d move to some Southern city where he’d have a desk job for the organization; they’d live a normal life and join the golf club and go to parties and maybe they’d even have the kid that Isabelle’d always wanted. Who knew? It was all in the cards. Or was it all another pipedream and he, himself, another sucker like one of these thousands of Broadway suckers? Why did Hayden want to discuss “details of a personal nature” and what details? Bill swerved into a news-reel theatre on Broadway.
Slumped in a seat, he stared apathetically at a horse race on the screen, at exploding enemy battleships, at the enlarged giant countenance of the President exhorting the nation to weld itself together more firmly in democracy. Democracy, the new sucker slogan, he pondered, and watched a beautiful blonde in a bathing suit strutting before him. She had been voted Miss War Worker. R.A.F. airplanes took off from an undisclosed air field. Six men and three women, arrested by the F.B.I. for sabotage, paraded in front of Bill’s eyes. His pulse pounded, his blood roaring in his veins. But those six men and three women were only small fry, he assured himself. They’d come and go, these Vierecks, Pelleys, and their followers. Only the organization’d continue and he along with the organization. By God, wasn’t he slated for an assistant executive’s job? He’d be sitting pretty inside some skyscraper like Hayden, passing on the orders to the operatives. Bill wasn’t watching the screen people now. Deep lines had cut themselves from the corners of his nostrils to the corners of his clenched mouth. Yeh, sitting pretty, he mocked himself. Why had he been imported out of the South? Weren’t there plenty of operatives in the New York area who could’ve been assigned to the Harlem job? Why himself?
He rose from his seat. He wanted a drink right away.
At eight o’clock, Bill met Hayden at the Chez Marie in the east Fifties. The white cloths, the waiters, the laughing women, the puffs of cigarette smoke rising from all the tables had relaxed his nerves. The subdued lighting like some omnipresent surgeon’s knife softened the worry lines on Bill’s face. Over his highball, he smiled at Hayden. “I’m meeting Big Boy at ten thirty tonight,” he said. “What a town this is. What a town.” He thought that Hayden looked like a college man, one of those professional college men who attend all the football games. It was hard to believe that Hayden was in his forties. It was hard to believe that this was only his first day in New York.
Hayden sipped at his highball. “Suppose you drop over to Brooklyn tonight after you’re through with Big Boy?”
“Over to the apartment?”
“Yes. You ought to be finished by midnight.”
“Could I phone you?”
“You could. But it would be advisable for me to see you.” He nodded his blond head decisively and offered Bill a cigarette from a silver case.
“Okay. It’s liable to be late.” Bill’s collar felt like a hot band around his neck. God only knew when he’d get back to the Commodore; she’d be sitting up for him and there’d be a scene sure as fate. This God damn Hayden. “I’m flattered to be chosen for the job,” he began, his voice thickening. “But I’d like to know why I was chosen?”
“We have many men,” Hayden answered. “But too many of them are opportunists.” Again, Bill recognized the lofty tone he had heard and resented earlier in the day, a tone of judgment, irritatingly self-complacent. “I’ve always been disgusted, Bill, by the opportunists. They’re necessary at this stage of the game but the historic mission of restoring America to the Americans isn’t just another racket. And that’s just what it is to some of our salesmen patriots.”
Was he sincere, Bill wondered. Could he be sincere? The man he’d attended school with in Chicago offered no clue to this phase-maker; the Walter Tynant of Chicago had been reserved, friendly with only two or three others in their class of twenty, men similar to himself, the sons of industrialists; “the cream of the crop” they’d been called contemptuously.
“Bill, I intend to be completely candid with you. Your question as to why you were picked is directly related to this dinner of ours. In my pocket, I have a report on you that I want you to read.” He took out a folded typewritten sheet and smilingly offered it to Bill.
So they knew all about him, Bill thought with a pang. He glanced down at the typewritten sheet and read: “William Trent or William Johnson. Born in Easton, PA., 1907 of Scotch-English parentage. Educated at Lafayette College, Easton, PA….”
Bill’s lips puffed out and his good looks were suddenly overlaid by a sagging despondency; the hollows under his eyes deepened, the burn scars whitened as the highball flush receded from his cheeks. The restaurant changed into a whirling cloud out of which snatches of conversation sheared off into his hearing. He wasn’t in the Chez Marie any more but far away in the years he had hoped to forget. Forget? There was no forgetting with the organization. They had typed him down on a piece of paper as they’d typed down Big Boy Bose.
“After graduation from Lafayette, he was employed by the Stanger Real Estate Company in New York City. Lost job for petty grafting. Became involved with prohibition period gangsters. Won control of a petty mob. Set up headquarters on Sixteenth Street in New York City and called his mob ‘Young Hamilton Democrats.’ Up to the loss of his job, his record shows no intimate contact with non-American elements …” His heart was laboring as he read and the sheet blurred in his vision. From somewheres, the Big Boy Bose report streaked across his brain and he had an intuition that the same man’d written both reports. “Lafayette College is Presbyterian in its affiliations. The Stanger Real Estate Company is a Protestant concern. But with Trent’s control of the ‘Young Hamilton Democrats’ he assumed the leadership of a motley group of Irish and Italian elements. Affiliated this group to the political-racketeering organization dominated by Jim Kerrigan. He became involved in various of Kerrigan’s rackets. He also specialized in activities that first brought him to the attention of the organization in New York City. He won control of a waiters’ union local, wresting control from its Jewish-Red president, Nate Sigmund. He broke a strike for the Continental Baking Company, using his ‘Young Hamilton Democrats’ as strike-breakers. He was engaged by the Ajax Steel Company at Slagtown, Pa., to check union activities. He was well on his way to success when he was accidentally teargassed in a melee between his men and union thugs. Remarks: Up to this point, Bill Trent had displayed a natural if untrained understanding of fundamental issues. He rightly attributed the Ajax Steel troubles to the activity of the Communists. He successfully recruited the support of the Slagtown police, the Mayor, the newspapers and the responsible citizenry. Other remarks: After his recovery from his burns, Trent was contacted by our organization and enrolled in its training school. His record as a student was excellent. He was sent South — ” That was all. The report had obviously gone on to a second page which Hayden hadn’t chosen to show him. Bill glanced up. He said in a shaky voice. “It seems to me it was written in a hurry.”
“It was. It’s an abstract after all. What I can’t understand is why the organization sent you South to work among the Negroes after your experience in the North. However, why do you suppose I let you see this?”
Bill shrugged. This half-baked bastard, he cursed despairingly: this imitation of a Gestapo chief. He wanted to leap from this table, to get outside. He felt as if he had been locked inside bars by the sentences he’d read. He was deadly afraid of Hayden. What did Hayden’s preliminary remarks about opportunities hide? And this report? Hayden’d practically called him an opportunist.
Hayden sighed, twirling his empty highball glass. “When you’re an assistant executive, you’ll appreciate how I feel now. Before we promote an operative — Well, you understand. It’s always painful raking over old coals. I went through it. So did the Colonel. Let’s have another highball. Waiter! Waiter, two highballs.”
They were silent until the waiter had gone. “Well, Bill,” Hayden said. “I wish I were finished but there are several questions I have to ask you about your wife.” He smiled genially and Bill stiffened. Christ Almighty, he thought: what next, what next?
“Does your wife know of your activities, Bill?”
“No. That is — Only in a general way.”
“Please be specific. Has she any specific knowledge of the organization?”
“No.” They were leaning towards each other, their elbows on the table, their voices low.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“How do you describe your activities to your wife?”
“She thinks I’m connected with a patriotic society of a semi-secret nature. The Klan. I’ve never said so but that’s what I’ve led her to think.”
“How did you explain your trip to New York?”
“I said I came to contact a friend of ex-Governor Heney.”
Hayden placed the tips of his fingers together. “That was careless. I’m not censuring you. It’s characteristic of the organization in the South. Here come the highballs.”
The waiter set the drinks before them. Bill stared at the brown liquid in his glass shuddering, a strange sensation flickering through him. He wasn’t drinking highballs with a man but with the shell of a man. That small chin, those blond manicured hands masked a machine, an adding computing machine and the long-lashed eyes were as humanless as the electric seeing eyes in a factory. Ex-Governor Heney had eyes like Hayden. Eyes! Bill’s senses reeled. He was surrounded by their eyes; everywhere the eyes of the organization observed him, weighed him, noted him in reports, followed him out into the field, peeped after him in the privacy of his bedroom. Apprehensively he watched Hayden’s lips open.
“What nationality is your wife?”
“American.”
“We’re all Americans as the Jews are continuously propagandizing.”
“My wife’s family have been in this country two hundred years.”
“That describes most Negro families.”
Bill flushed. “My wife’s of Southern French descent. But I know what you’re driving at. Yes, she’s a Catholic. Didn’t you get a report on that?”
“No need to become angry, Bill. Thank you for your confidence.”
Bill stared at him with glazed eyes. It was as if he had read Isabelle’s history, with religion underlined — Catholic. “Hayden, I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve heard anti-Catholic feeling exists in the top circles of the organization?”
“I’m sure your wife’s faith won’t be a bar to your promotion. I personally have no anti-Catholic prejudices. As a matter of fact, I have no feelings against the Negroes or the Jews, either. Let me see if I can explain. I view our present day society, let’s say, as some jigsaw puzzle put together by children, or by morons. Morons is better. Pieces don’t fit; other pieces are missing. It just isn’t right. Our organization will have to re-arrange the pieces correctly. Certain races, certain groups will, of course, be eliminated. Others will be correctly adjusted to their new positions. History has given us our path. But too many cannot read the lessons of history. We know that German capitalism was more effective than British Empire-ism simply because it arrived later on the world scene; German fascism was more efficient than the Italian or Japanese brands because it also arrived later and had profited by the experience of its predecessors. We will go beyond them all. We will go beyond the Brown House in Munich!” His voice burned in Bill’s hearing, not that Hayden had spoken with emotion. As always, Hayden’s voice was quiet and without fanaticism, like a draftsman explaining a blueprint, detail after detail. What was exciting was the knowledge that the blueprint under discussion was the blueprint of the future. The future! And what about Isabelle? How did she fit, how did their common life together fit into the blueprint? Deep inside of his consciousness, he was asking this question as Hayden still in that emotionless voice, a voice that might have been released by a lever, charted the mechanics of the world to be.
He didn’t get to see Big Boy Bose at ten-thirty. A Negro woman had answered his ring and informed him that he was to come back the next morning at eleven sharp. He descended the stoop of Big Boy’s house and picked up a cab on Lenox Avenue. As he entered his room at the Commodore, Isabelle had come running.
He held her tight, the flats of his hands clamping her body to him. Underneath the thin silk of her red housecoat, he could feel her nakedness. He buried his face in her thick black hair and the scent of her rose perfume filled his dilated nostrils and he began to forget that Big Boy had cold shouldered him. She was dark rose in his nostrils and rose-fleshed in his arms. He smiled at her oval face in which the lips seemed like bits of red cloth stitched onto her olive skin.
She pushed him away at last and her black eyes were withholding of herself. He knew that there was going to be a fight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Believe me I’m sorry.”
“You wouldn’t come to me before,” she said, her eyes lifting to him from beneath black enamel-like eyebrows. In her red housecoat she looked unnaturally beautiful, too tall, too slender, too immaculate to be real, a doll somebody had left behind in this hotel room. He went to her and hugged her passive body.
“You’ve unpacked,” he said with a pretended heartiness. “Did you go to a movie? What did you see?”
“I’ve been here ever since you phoned me.”
“What did you have for dinner?”
“Food.”
“Don’t be like that. I’ll make it up. I didn’t want to stay away. Let’s sit down. It would work out this way, the first day in this stinking town.”
They sat on the edge of the bed and he leaned his head on her shoulder. He felt himself softening inside as if she had somehow passed into his blood and heart; he’d only felt such a closeness with his mother and father and his brother Joe, but that was long ago before his parents had died, before he and Joe’d drifted apart. He kissed her hands. “You’ve no idea how glad I am to be here, Isabelle. I wish we could just stay this way forever.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Isabelle, don’t start in.”
“You’re the one who started it. You didn’t come to me. You deserted me — ”
“Deserted you? That’s a hot one. I don’t want to fight. I couldn’t — ”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“My work.”
“Your work didn’t interfere with us back home.”
“Spoken like a true woman,” he flared. “We’ve been in this stinking town just about eighteen hours and I’ve had so many bastard things to do. Oh, what’s the use.”
“What things, Bill, if you can express yourself without your usual vulgarity?”
“I’ll be vulgar or any damned thing else.”
She confronted him, her lips sullen. “That’s one promise you’ve always kept. In all our years of married life, you’ve only thought of yourself.”
“That’s a lie.”
“When did you ever think of me? Have you ever really thought of me or my feelings, Bill?”
“Suppose I say I have.”
“That’s all it would be, the saying. I’m nobody to you, somebody you keep around. That’s all. Have you ever bothered about what I’m thinking or feeling?”
“I have, I have. Many times. What the hell have I got but you?”
“No! It isn’t me.”
“It’s you,” he cried bitterly. “Nobody but you.”
Her head tilted back on her shoulders. “Nobody but you! You sound like the radio. Why did we leave home for Washington and what happened there? Didn’t you desert me the one night we stayed there? Don’t mumble to me about Heney either. I’m not impressed. That cheap specimen of the new South, God protect us from his like. Why do you have anything to do with a man like that poor white trash? I’d sooner you did business, whatever your mysterious business is, with a good nigger than with trash like Heney.” She walked away from the bed and over her shoulder stared at him with proud gleaming eyes.
“Isabelle Carreau,” he mocked. “Of the sugar plantations, the ex-sugar plantations, the ex-mansions.” He compelled himself to stop taunting her, suddenly oppressed by Hayden’s warning. “Isabelle, I apologize. Forgive me. Isabelle, I want you to forget I ever mentioned Heney to you. Isabelle, please listen to me. I want you to forget all about Heney.”
“Why?”
“It’s better so. Please let’s not quarrel. For God’s sake, let’s stop it. I’m dead on my feet.”
“You’re dead. What about me? I’m dead, too. Or is that of no account? I’ve been dead for three years ever since I married you. Bill, Bill, why don’t we live a normal life like other folks?”
“Don’t exaggerate. This trip’s exceptional. Damn, any other woman but you’d be happy to travel to New York. Why didn’t you go shopping this afternoon instead of brooding like a ghost in this hole? You could’ve walked on Fifth Avenue, bought yourself a hat, seen a movie — ”
She shook her head violently. “Movies! I’d rather have children.”
He started to lift his hands to her and then dropped them, his lips nailed. Children, he thought furiously: children; it was the Catholic in her, the holy damned Catholic: the Carreau in her. It was the compulsion to perpetuate her breed. “We will some day,” he said.
“Some day.”
“It’s being alone all day in a hotel room, in this stinking city. That’s the trouble with you. In this city! It’s the loneliest city in the world. God, let’s go to sleep.” Sleep, a voice repeated inside his head, a voice like Hayden’s. He remembered that he still had to phone Hayden about Big Boy Bose. He rubbed his eyes and all the compressed events of that long day unrolled in his brain: the golden feeling of success as he had walked to the A.R.A. address; the shock of seeing Tynant-Hayden; the visit to Dent; the dinner at the Chez Marie; the futile cab ride north into Harlem. And now night had come, the night for sleeping and forgetting, and Isabelle was against him. “Christ,” he groaned, tearing off his jacket and flinging it on the floor. He pulled off his necktie and hurled it after the jacket; like a snake the tie curled on the rug. She picked up his jacket and hung it in the closet. She stooped for the necktie and he gazed at her lithe movements. “I wish we’d never left Baton Rouge,” he said.
“So do I.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll get out of this hole. We’ll take a room in some quiet neighborhood. The St. George in Brooklyn.”
“I don’t care where we go.”
“Come to bed, Isabelle.”
“I thought you were tired,” she smiled suddenly, kissing him.
He kissed her eyes shut. Then, he finished undressing and switched off the light, returning in darkness to her shape, a shape of darkness. He was returning to her body but more than her body; he was returning to himself, to the Bill that had once been on the earth, to the time of parenthood and brotherhood, to faith and trust and security, to all the warm glowing harvest of emotions without which man cannot sustain himself on the earth. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks and got into bed with her. “Isabelle,” he said, his arms reaching for her. “You’re not sore at me?”
“Not any more, Bill.”
“What a day it’s been.”
“What did you do?”
“As soon as I can I’ll tell you,” he promised recklessly.
“All I know is that you’re in the Klan, Bill. It’s not fair to me — ”
“Give me a break. Once, we leave this town I’ll tell you anything. Everything!”
“You will?”
“Yes.” He felt her lips press against his neck and he quivered with his need for her. His heart pumped and he opened her housecoat. He stroked her belly and squeezed closer to the warmth she had for him. A pleasant dizziness whizzed through his veins as if he had been injected with a drug. He kissed her collarbones and his kisses moved in hot tight circles down to her breasts.
“Billy,” she whispered.
“What?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” But even as he was assuring her, he felt the warm soft woman darkness lift and he heard Hayden questioning him and he trembled. Her fingers grazed his lips and he kissed them automatically. He thought that he’d never make good, not with Hayden, not with Big Boy Bose. The white man and the black man, whom he had never seen, whirred at him, apparitions in the night. He grabbed Isabelle to him as a beaten child grabs at its tattered doll in the dark. To hell with them, he defied the apparitions! His face contorted. He wouldn’t be cheated out of his life with Isabelle for any of Hayden’s gold bricks. He kissed her wildly and her arms slid around his neck and her breath shaped into words that weren’t words but sounds heard on the wind. Her voice descended all around him, scented with the smell of her hair and her perfumed breasts and armpits.
When she was asleep he reached for the telephone on the side table. In a strained muffled voice, he gave the operator the phone number of the Brooklyn meeting-place. He watched her stir and held his breath until she was sleeping soundly again. As Hayden’s voice came to him, he said. “Our Harlem friend wouldn’t see me tonight.” “Why not?” “Too busy. I’ll see him in the morning. No need for me to see you tonight or tomorrow morning, is there?” “No. I’ll see you tomorrow night here at ten.” “Goodnight.” “Goodnight.” Bill hung up and saw Isabelle sitting up in bed.
“Who was that?”
“The big-shot. I had to call him. I’d forgotten. Let’s go to sleep, darling.”
“Was that Heney?”
“No.” He stretched out, shutting his eyes but he knew that he wouldn’t sleep just yet. Wearily, he waited for her to begin.