UNLOCKING the door of the apartment on Columbia Heights, Bill switched on the light. He was standing in a small kitchen with walls painted buff; he took a drink of water at the sink, locked the door and entered the living room. The two windows on the street reached from the floor to the white-scrolled plaster ceiling. The fireplace and mantel were marble, carved with stony cherries. Once this room had been the front parlor of some Brooklynite’s mansion, a huge room that stayed full of shadows as Bill turned on the floor lamp near the fireplace. Bamboo shades covered the windows and green portieres almost covered the shades. Bill sat down in a Morris chair, stretched his legs and glanced at his wrist watch. It was almost midnight. Hayden was due any minute and he better look alive, he thought; better shine up the old face with that success and confidence smile. Sitting there, worried and frowning, he hated this meeting place. It was a morgue house in a morgue street in a morgue part of the city, he brooded.
Below Columbia Heights were the warehouses of Forman street. When the wind blew west, pepper and vinegar smells would eddy up into the apartment. Brooklyn Heights was a pepper and vinegar neighborhood, preserved almost intact out of the horse and carriage era. West of the warehouses, the docks fingered out into the scummy rainbow-oiled waters of the Harbor. Even now as he strained to hear Hayden’s footsteps on the echoing sidewalk outside the windows, the sirens of tugs bumping the freighters out to sea sounded mournful, yet menacing and always challenging. He hated it all, hated the towering St. George, where he and Isabelle had a room, and which seemed to be dropped into the middle of Brooklyn Heights, gigantic above the five-story houses, all modern plumbing and a swimming pool and subways moving in its depths like steel mice in a steel building. The St. George was of the new city, a mighty fragment that seemed to have been detached from the Wall Street skyscrapers across the Harbor in Manhattan. Every time Bill came to this apartment from the St. George, he had to wait for Hayden; he was always waiting; Hayden was always late.
The door bell rang. Bill hastened to press the ticker in the kitchen. Downstairs, he heard the hall door click click click and then Hayden’s shoes ascending on the groaning stairs.
Hatless, a short pipe in his mouth and wearing a brown sport jacket and a thin sleeveless white sweater, Hayden bounced lightly into the living room. He put his pipe on the mantel, dropped into the Morris chair. Hayden’s outfit for the night, Bill noted, was as usual, semi-countryish. “It’s a wonderful evening,” Hayden said, his long blond eyelashes almost meeting together, his eyes invisible. They were both sitting in the light of the floor lamp near the fireplace.
“Yes,” Bill said and waited for Hayden to make his usual remark about the neighborhood. Hayden always did. Hayden liked Brooklyn Heights as Bill had discovered with astonishment, Hayden, this emotionless plotter for a new future, liked to live among the artists, the old men in brown derbies, the grey ladies subsisting on the increment of dusty real estate deals and who shopped by taxi, the wives of the Navy officers, the schoolteachers, the Wall Street secretaries.
“On my way here I saw a troopship come by under Brooklyn Bridge,” Hayden said. “They’re always coming by.”
He had said his usual remark, Bill realized but it hadn’t been one of the more customary Norris Hayden footnotes on Brooklyn Heights history. “I met Big Boy this morning after I left here,” Bill said. “He wants more money.”
“How much more?”
“Five hundred.”
“For what?”
“For Aden again. He wants it at eleven tomorrow morning.
“Give it to him.”
“The damn nigger’s milking us. He’s only done one job. He’s pocketing the money, Hayden.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Aden reports directly to Dent and Dent reports to me. I assure you that Aden will receive the five hundred.”
Aden-Dent, Bill thought bitterly: the fixer and the nigger.
Hayden continued, “The morning newspapers carry all the confirmation we need of Bose’s reliability. The Italian bar owners are sending a delegation to protest to both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner.” He stood up, retrieved his pipe, knocking the ashes into the fireplace and filling the bowl with brown stringy tobacco. “Coming here tonight, I have been thinking of how eager Bose was to undertake this Italian assignment.”
“Some of them tie up with the white numbers crowd. That’s why.”
“What do you think of a stench bomb attack on a dozen or so of the larger bars?”
“Now?”
“Wednesday night if possible.”
“It’s too soon, Hayden.”
“We have an excellent chemist in the organization, Lester Darton. Lester can supply us with the stench bombs. An invaluable man, Lester — ”
“Excuse me, Mr. Hayden, but I think it’s too soon.”
“I must warn you about Lester, Bill. He is a reckless sort of individual, an anarchistic type. He is an excellent chemist, his work among the splinters is invaluable but his temperament — ”
Bill was listening intently like an eager salesman who hoards every scrap of gossip about the personnel of the corporation for whom he works. He knew that keeping in touch with the splinter remnants of the one-time large groups disbanded by publicity, by the F.B.I. or other Government action was an important job.
Hayden was saying, “Darton’s background is rather checkered. He comes of solid middle western farming stock but you wouldn’t know it. He worked in the Chicago stockyards and went through college at night. He was recruited into the Communist Party — ”
“Really?”
“Subsequently, the organization recruited him.” Hayden smiled. “He was doing a good job for us until the Communist Party caught up with him, expelling him. A very useful man, although he still has some radical ideas. He’s an American equivalent of the left-wing black fronters Hitler was compelled to purge.”
“I consider myself warned.”
“One other point. We have found out that Miller spoke to Deputy Inspector Coombs this morning at Police Headquarters. Miller wanted to resign but finally accepted a leave of absence from active duty. Later, he showed up at the office of the Harlem Equality League and volunteered to work for them.”
One by one, Bill enumerated the sources of information Hayden was so casually lumping together: Some contact at Police Headquarters. Some contact in the Harlem Equality League. Leg-men, ear-men all over, he thought. How was Hayden getting the facts? The bastard was too big to risk a sweat. Christ, how was Hayden getting the facts? It was Dent! Dent was the intermediary collecting the dope and shooting it to Hayden.
“Miller,” Hayden said, “has set himself the task of discovering the authorship of our leaflets. His initiative presents a minor complication.”
“He’ll be out of the way by Wednesday.”
“That isn’t the point. We must always be prepared to exploit every potential. Bose’s competition with the white numbers people and their henchmen among the Italian bars is an example of what I mean.”
“That’s true. But I can’t see how the Jew’s important?”
“Everything is important!” Hayden contradicted him. “Miller will make the headlines this week. His murder will have repercussions throughout the city. Those headlines will reach millions. Isn’t it important for us to influence those headlines?”
“Of course. How smart’s the Jew?”
“We know Miller is a college graduate — ” Bill thought, you know he’s a college graduate, you bastard! “ — A City College product. The standards are fairly high there. Miller should be above average.”
“If he’s smart, there’s a chance, not much of a chance that he might dig up a few facts.”
“Precisely.”
“It’s Monday night now. He’s got one full day or a day and a half to dig up something. Not very likely. But suppose we got somebody to phone him Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, too, somebody pretending to be a nigger, an outraged nigger griped at Jews and who’ll threaten Miller’s life? Miller, being a kike and yellow’ll tell the police. Then, when he’s wiped, nobody’ll be too surprised. We’ll influence the headlines: NIGGERS REVENGE DEAD NIGGER and we’ll also scare the kike so yellow he won’t get anywheres investigating us.”
Hayden took the pipe out of his mouth. “I congratulate you, Bill,” he said formally.
Bill smiled. Christ, he’d prove to Hayden that he was a brain guy, too. He’d prove that he’d make a good assistant exec.
“How well can you imitate Negro speech?”
“What?”
“You are going to be the Negro telephoning Miller.”
“Me!”
“Phone Miller early.”
Bill stared at Hayden. By Christ, that was his place in this Harlem job. He was somebody to do the two-by-four chores, a two-by-four operative. Dent was ten times more important. Even the nigger Aden was more important. Oh, this bastard Hayden, this pipe-smoking bastard, this cool fish, this blue-blooded bastard stepping on him like dirt! The gall to use him as nigger lips, nigger lips on a phone. Assistant exec? A bastard pipedream, that’s all it was. He’d never be anybody, never get anywheres. “I’ll phone Miller,” he said, racked by the need to demonstrate to Hayden that he had more to him than an operative. “Mr. Hayden, I may be wrong but Big Boy’s a slimy bastard if there ever was one. I don’t know if the organization is shadowing him or not but if it isn’t, I think we ought to.”
“Bose won’t trick us.”
“The report you read me doesn’t report a hundredth of how much that nigger hates whites. He isn’t just uppity. He’s a crazy nigger, as psychopathic as the nigger the Jew shot. We can’t be too careful about niggers. That goes for Aden, too!” he blurted.
“I didn’t ask your opinion concerning Aden. You put your case vehemently but I refuse to accept it. I’ll meet you here tomorrow night at nine.” He stood up. “By the way, this will interest you. Governor Heney will fly north in a few days. We will have a reception for the Governor and perhaps I will meet your wife then. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” Bill said. When Hayden was gone he thought wearily that soon he would be with Isabelle. Only with her, there were no worries, no fears, no frustrations. He grinned sourly, suddenly struck by the fact that Hayden never said ex-Governor Heney. It was always Governor Heney. Governor Heney, Bill mocked: Governor and Grand Kleagle of the South; Governor Hayden, Grand Kleagle of the East, Kleagle of the new American empire in the making. And what about himself? Spittoon cleaner, messenger boy, lowest of the low, another op, a jerk, a son-of-a-bitch, lower than a nigger.
The next morning he was in a phone booth, gazing through the booth door at the subwayites trooping into the United Cigars Store where he was and buying their day’s supply of tobacco. Their coins jingled on the glass counter. They pocketed their change and hurried out to the turnstiles in the Hotel St. George. Fervently, Bill wished he was one of them, a clerk, a real estate collector as he had once been. To be some lousy nobody on his way to some lousy nowheres. A voice buzzed in the receiver he had pressed against his ear. “Hello,” the voice said. “Who is dis?” It was the kike’s mother, he thought.
“I’d like to talk to Sam Miller,” he said.
“He’s sleeping.”
“I’m calling from the Harlem Equality League. Will you please wake him up?”
“What you say?”
“Harlem Equality League.”
“Oh, them. One minute.”
Bill tapped at his teeth with the fingernails of his left hand. So the kike was sleeping, he thought; what was the kike like; he had nerve anyway running to the Harlem Equality League; a real united kike-nigger front.
“This is Sam Miller,” a man’s voice said.
Bill covered the mouthpiece with his hand and through the screen of his fingers mumbled. “Sam Miller?”
“Yes. Speak louder please. I can hardly hear you. Is this Mr. Clair?”
“I got a message for you, you God damn white bastard. You dirty Jew kike. Get out of Harlem if you’re aimen to live. We gonna kill all you white bastards.” He hung up, walked out of the booth into the store, purchased two packs of Dunhill cigarettes for Isabelle.
Outside, on Henry Street he blinked up at the blue sky whipping in the morning breeze and yawned. He had forgotten his earlier wish about being a clerk.
The elevator in the St. George lifted him up to his floor. He strode down the corridor, unlocked his door. In blue and gold sunshine Isabelle was sleeping on the double bed. She was curled up on his side, her head on his pillow, the sun gilding the curved line of her body, specking her black hair. Her face was in shadow, her lips swollen a little from sleep. He smiled at her, glad he wasn’t due at Big Boy’s until eleven o’clock. He stretched both arms and when he looked at her again she was awake. She hadn’t stirred a finger but her eyes were open. “Good morning,” he said.
“Where were you?”
“Out for a morning walk. How about breakfast?”
“Since when do you indulge in morning walks?” She lay motionless as a cat. Only her sleepy coral-colored lips moved, only her eyelids fluttered.
“Since this morning. I’m getting too fat, Isa.”
“You were getting fat but that was before we came to New York.”
“Think I’ve lost weight here? We’ve only been here since Friday.”
“Since Friday,” she said sullenly.
He stalked to the mirror and peered into his grinning face. He pinched his cheek, poked out his stomach and patted it.
“Bill,” she called.
“At your service.”
“Don’t behave like some grotesque fool.”
He walked to the windows. “You can’t start a quarrel with me, sweet. Aren’t you happy we left the Commodore? What a view.” Below, far below the blue sun-shot air, the green bluish Harbor waters ran with light and he remembered Colonel Bretherton’s speech to him in the A.R.A. offices that first day in New York. He saw water and sky and the red ferries to Staten Island and the coal barges from the tidewater Jersey towns and the New Jersey shore and the puffing smokestacks of the factories and the spring-green hump of Staten Island like a whale on the water and Bowling Green in Manhattan and the skyscrapers white with light, cliffs of ice with a million burning windows and the Hudson River and the East River converging together in the Harbor. “Wonderful,” he said. “I feel optimistic every morning. Unusual, isn’t it?” He ran to the bed, flopped down and bent his face over her to kiss her lips. Her lips were cold and unresponsive and a chill circled his heart for he recalled how sensual her lips had been only a minute ago when she had been sleeping. “Isabelle,” he pleaded with her.
“You!”
Angered, he swept the covers from her, shouting raucously. “Wake up, old girl. Get some life into you.”
She lifted the blanket and sheet back over her body. He had seen her full breasts and upper body behind her filmy green nightgown. She wasn’t alluring to him now. He felt that he could have smashed both fists into her breasts, beaten her with a club, screamed like a maniac at her, anything to change the distant expression in her eyes. “Don’t you want to get up?” he forced himself to speak calmly.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t annoy me.”
“Isabelle, for Christ’s sake, don’t start in sulking on a day like this.”
“What will I do on a day like this? Wait for your highness to get in when and if he does get in.”
“I’ve told you a dozen times to be patient. As soon as we leave this town — ”
“ — you’ll bare your heart to me.”
“I will. Honest, Isabelle.”
She sat up in bed. “What is your schedule for today if I may ask?”
“You got up on the wrong side.” He straddled the chair at the desk, facing her, smiling wistfully. “You were sleeping so snugly on my side of the bed as if you loved me, even asleep.”
“What is your schedule?”
“Oh, Christ, what’s the use. I’ve got an appointment at eleven. I may have to be busy all evening.”
“Bill, why did you bring me to New York?”
“Oh,” he groaned.
“Why did you?”
“I love you. What would I do without you?”
“What you are doing now.”
“Isabelle — ”
“I suppose you needed some woman and I’m it. Somebody to be kept in a hotel room. A hotel woman with whom you can fornicate at your convenience.”
He glared at her. In all their three years together, she had never spoken in such a tone and in such words to him. “You’re completely unfair to me. Damn unfair. Damn, I know where I heard that gem you just used. Theresa! Your cousin Theresa. That damn old maid, that spinster nun! I know. At that wedding Sunday back home. There was talk of what would the young girls do with the boys in Army.” He saw she wasn’t listening to him, pretending not to listen, and his fury was black in his eyes and the black was riven by Theresa’s face, her silver crucifix around her neck. “Theresa! She and her Saviour Lord Jesus! She said something about it being better to burn than to fornicate. That’s where you got the gospel message.” He chose his words deliberately, anything to make her acknowledge that she was listening to him. “Damn good we left home! The holy Carreaus, damn ‘em all!”
“You contemptible person,” she lashed out.
“Hah hah, contemptible. Damn you with ‘em, you bloody Catholic bitch!” White and stricken, he lifted his hand before his lips as if he would snatch back what he had said. Then his hand dropped and he staggered backwards until the desk hit him. Staring at her, he chewed on his lips. “Isabelle — ” Tears were streaming from her eyes but she didn’t wipe them away. Through the tears she stared at him and piercingly, their life together, all the goings and comings, the weekends on the old Carreau mansion owned by her lawyer brother with its pecan and banana trees but no more sugar acreage, all the Carreaus and their relatives, and his prestige with a few of them who suspected the nature of his work, ex-Governor Heney visiting in New Orleans with the local A.R.A. arranging intimate parties in his honor, and always Isabelle with him, Isabelle on his arm, Isabelle smiling at him, Isabelle loving him — everything flickered in his brain that second, all the years and all the days, a host of candles in a darkness. For a darkness was upon him for now he knew that she had loved him truly and he had never given her what her love demanded. That was the darkness at last acknowledged, at last admitted into the most secret coil of thought. Still she stared at him and he felt his guilt, he who had made her childless.
Her mouth twisted open like a drowning woman’s and she flung herself over on her side, burying her face in his pillow. And again he lifted his hand before him as if to give her at long last what she had long wanted and again his hand dropped.
Downstairs, Bill bought a newspaper, folded it under his arm and stepped out to the bright street. The sun was yellow on the cab rank and he climbed into the lead cab. He gave the driver One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street as an address in a flat morning voice as if he had travelled there for years. He spread the newspaper across his knees, refusing to think about Isabelle. The black war headlines danced in front of his eyes but he didn’t focus on them, turning to the second page, to the third and a small headline attracted his restless eye: PROMINENT SOUTHERNERS DENOUNCE LATEST LYNCHING. He read through the story quickly. The organization was busy all right, he thought and wondered why Heney was coming north? Hayden hadn’t said. Heney, of course, wanted to be on the scene when things were breaking in Harlem. But why? There must be some connection with the lynchings South and the riot planned for Harlem? Heney would return to D.C. and in a week or so somebody would rise up in Congress and make a speech about the North. Bill knew what would be said. It would be something about the North minding its own business; the North ought to stop all these protest meetings and sending delegations to Washington; the Negro problem was a serious problem and nobody on God’s earth had a right to tell the people of the South that their policy of racial exclusiveness was not a proper principle; et cetera. Christ, Bill decided; that was the real reason the organization was working in Harlem. To rub the niggers into Northern noses. That was the insider’s strategy, Hayden, that secretive bastard, hadn’t bothered to reveal to him. A Harlem race riot’d be a blow not only to all the nigger-lovers up north, the kikes, the Reds, the New Dealers, but to all those turncoat Southerners who were shouting against lynching these days.
He glanced at another headline: ITALIAN BAR BOYCOTT BEGINS IN HARLEM; on the same page there was another headline: TWO WHITE MEN BEATEN BY MUGGERS. He read both stories almost simultaneously. The first story reported that forty-two owners of bars and grills, all Italians, had notified the police of the beginning of a boycott movement and had appealed to all responsible Negro organizations to protest such a boycott in the interest of national unity. National unity, Bill thought bitterly; up in this bastard North, niggers’d soon be eating with whites and taking out white women. The second story reported that two white men had been beaten during the preceding night. One attack had taken place on One Hundred and Thirty-First Street and Eighth Avenue, the other on One Hundred and Forty-Sixth Street and Lenox Avenue. The names of the beaten men were given. Meyer Gershoff. Max Witkin. Bill gripped the newspaper with tightening fingers, reading: “The shooting of Fred Randolph by Officer Samuel Miller may have something to do with these mugger outrages. Officer Miller is of Jewish faith and both Mr. Gershoff and Mr. Witkin stated that they were called a number of insulting epithets.”
The damn kikes, Bill thought, reading with satisfaction that Meyer Gershoff had been attacked on the same street where Randolph had been killed. Both of Gershoff’s eyes had been blacked, his nose broken and he had been stabbed repeatedly in the arms and legs. At the hospital, he had informed the police that six or seven Negroes had jumped on him as he was coming home from his grocery, that he thought that a Negro in a blue slipover jersey had been loitering in front of his store all day. The muggers had ordered him to get out of Harlem. As for Max Witkin, he, too, like the grocer was accustomed to closing up late at night. Bill folded up the newspaper. The damn kikes should’ve been killed, he considered. But who’d done the job on them? Was it the work of muggers? Was Big Boy operating on his own? Big Boy! It was Big Boy, that damn nigger ape, sly as an animal. Bill slumped into the cab’s leather seat. How in hell was he going to do business with Big Boy? Wasn’t he a white man? How could any white man know what a nigger’d do next?
As the cab drove Bill across Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, the Negro delegated to do the synagogue job was strolling down Lenox Avenue on his way to a side-street poolroom. His name was Fleming. He was a short squat man of thirty-two, by profession a number book in Big Boy’s organization. His face was scarred on the left cheek. Five years previous, a girl Fleming had tricked into prostitution with the old marriage act — he had promised to marry her but first he had to pay off some debts or go to jail and he knew how she could help him get the money from some friends — had slashed him with his own razor. Fleming was whistling as he walked. His suit was gabardine, his felt hat white as snow and wide-brimmed as a sombrero. In his wallet he was carrying three of the A.R.A. twenty dollar bills. Under his arm, he clasped a bundle wrapped in brown papers. He swung his shoulders as he walked, admiring the better cars. Some day, he would have a big Packard with an octoroon in the driver’s seat. Fleming alternated in his dream life between an octoroon and a white blond.
He entered the poolroom; even now at noon the ivories were clicking at the three tables. The proprietor nodded, “Dey waitin’ for you.” The number book’s eyes had narrowed after the sunlight. Here in this poolroom, his felt hat seemed whiter than ever. He waved his hand at the pool players, thin Negro adolescents in old basketball sweaters, and swaggered across the cigarette-stub spotted boards to the back room. Four boys, none of them over sixteen, were sitting on Coca Cola boxes and two chairs. “Git up,” one of the kids on the Coca Cola boxes said to the kids on the chairs.
He smilingly accepted a chair vacated by a small boy in black sneakers. He had been instructed by Big Boy’s right-hand man, Chappie, to get kids without previous arrests or police records. Chappie had said that there was a chance the dicks might be on the prowl for fingerprints. It hadn’t been an easy job getting kids with clean slates but neither would it be easy getting that Packard with the octoroon in the driver’s seat.
“Fellers,” Fleming said. “Les waste no time. Who knows where the Jews got their church?” One of the kids said there were two Jew churches. “I mean the Hundred Fifteenth Street church,” Fleming continued. “This here night, fellers, you gonna bust in. It’s a wooden door the Jews got there and it’ll bust easy like a cherry. You fellers go into the middle of that church and you gonna see that Jew altar and that altar got Jewish writin’ all over it. It’s the writin’ like on the winders of the kosher butcher stores. It’s Jewboy writin’. In that altar they got their bibles.” He pulled his hands wide apart as if playing a concertina. “They open like this. They got that kosher writin’ all over ‘em. You fellers gonna have scissors to cut it up. Those bibles, they gonna be like feather pillers that got busted when you get through.” He showed them the brown paper bundle. “Scissors in here and a jimmy in here.” One of the kids said he didn’t know how to use a jimmy. Fleming explained. “It’s like usin’ a crowbar. Anybody can use a jimmy. That don’t need no sense.”
He took off his white felt hat, inspected it for spots of dirt. He pulled out a white silk handkerchief and flicked it across the crown. “That’s all there is to it,” he said. The boy who didn’t know how to use a jimmy, asked if the Jews kept their money in their churches like people said. Fleming led the laughter of the three other boys and then put on his felt. “You fellers remember!” he said. “That white cop killed a nigger. Piss all over that church. That Jewboy cop, he goes to that there church. Shit all over it.” He gave each of the boys two dollars. “Do like I done say and you each gets a piece in the best house in Harlem.” He swaggered to the door. “O’ course, them that ain’t man enough to tear off a piece jive, I’ll give another buck or two. You got it straight, fellers?” They laughed and they said they got it straight.
As the cab drove Bill across Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, a Negro preacher in a wooden church in the South was preaching over a pine board coffin. “Brethren, an’ sisters of this congregation. He’s gone from us. He’s gone from us, a loss to his wife Dora, to his two daughter, Lena an’ Rose, to his son, Charley, ‘an’ to his other son, Dick. He’s a grebous loss to all of us people for he was a good hard wukkin’ man, a good husban’ an’ a good friend. The white folks took an’ lynch him an’ all we got of our dear brother is what’s in that there coffin an’ that ain’ much. That ain’ a man. That ain’ a husban’. That ain’ a father. That ain’ a friend. That jus’ a lynch poor colored slave. The white folks say he run out from under that bridge an’ that he grab that white woman an’ that he drug her under that bridge an’ that he there attack her. He done no such thing not that there ain’ some ‘mongst us full of evil an’ wickedness like there’s some ‘mongst all the chillen of the Lawd. For we all born in sin an’ the days of our lives, they full of temptation. They full of sufferin’. They full of the hate the white folks got for us an’ sometimes the temptation, the sufferin’ an’ the hate they make some amongst us crazy wild like a tiger or wolf in a trap. That wasn’ the man the white folks took an’ lynch. He come of staunch Christianized people. He carry his burden like the slave in the old time. He carry an’ carry like that slave an’ then he say he want to be free. That’s why the white folks took an’ lynch him. In the old time, the slaves had to steal out an’ go north an’ they stayed out of the way of the ole marsters so they could get away. They had to be whipped an’ be killed. In this state, now, in this whole South now, it seem they want as much slave now as I can git out of the histories. The white people runnin’ the Negroes like the robins an’ the birds. That bad. They have all the pribileges an’ the slave he have nothin’ but the tongue to keep quiet in his head. Our brother, he use his tongue the Good Lawd gave him. He not want to perish away. In the time back, they was leaders astin’ for the people to be free. Moses grew in the home of Pharaoh an’ he had the right God give him to lead a people. The white folks took an’ lynch our brother, for he, too, like Moses try to loose the people. Brethren an’ sister, we goin’ to be loosed or else the whole world be wound up an’ perish.”
After talking with Big Boy Bose and Bose’s lieutenant, Chappie, Bill drove out of Harlem in another cab. His face was flushed and he only wished it was evening so he could prove to Hayden that niggers couldn’t be trusted. His visit to Big Boy was the final proof. He was already rehearsing what he would say to Hayden. “Bose had a nigger with him, a nigger called Chappie, a big bone-dry coon. Chappie was there to cross-examine me. I thought Bose hated whites but that other coon was worse. All he did was keep on saying that Big Boy ought to pull out of the Miller job. He said if Miller was killed, every white dick in Harlem’d be after Big Boy. This coon acted as if I weren’t in the room. When Big Boy mentioned Aden vouching for me, Chappie said he didn’t give a damn for Aden. He said Aden was just a goofy Haile Selassie nigger in a red fez and lived nobody knew how. Big Boy got sore at that and said Aden was preaching for the black man to fight the white and not take everything lying down. But, hell, he couldn’t convince that other coon….”
Bill wiped his sweating face. Christ, it was too bad he had met Chappie. Soon every coon in Harlem’d know what the hell he looked like. If anything went wrong, a million niggers’d be able to point their fingers at him. Nervously, he was again monologuing. “Hayden, take my advice. You can’t trust those niggers. Not any of them. You should’ve heard Big Boy cursing the whites out for stealing his business. And that other coon agreed with him all the way through. He even had the nerve to ask me what kind of a white man I was. Before I could answer, he was grinning one of those slow nigger grins and said he meant, what kind of a white crook I was. He said Dent was a Tammany grafter. He said Aden was the only nigger he knew who didn’t work for living. He said porters did porter work, ministers did preaching work, that he and Big Boy did numbers work but Aden lived on graft, collecting from his followers. Mr. Hayden, if you don’t take my advice you’ll regret it. I’m not rabid either from living in the South. I’m a Northerner and open-minded but you can’t work with niggers on any terms of equality. It won’t work, Mr. Hayden. Big Boy, that lying black bastard, he claimed that the attacks on the two kike storekeepers was the work of muggers. He’s lying, the slimy black bastard. We have to shadow him immediately, Mr. Hayden. He’s pursuing some independent role of his own. For God’s sake, Hayden, you can’t trust any of them because no white man can tell what’s going on in a nigger’s brain.”
Bill felt heated as if he had been talking as fast as he could to somebody who wasn’t listening. Christ, how was he going to break this new development to Hayden without making himself look more like an errand boy than ever? An errand boy chasing his tail off between Hayden and those bloody nigger big-shots. How was he going to tell Hayden, that bastard, that although Big Boy’d agreed to stink-bomb the wop bars Wednesday night, the nigger was getting cold feet about the Miller job? Best, he decided, not to drag Miller in. The chances were that the nigger’d go through with the kike. Maybe, the whole idea of having Chappie there was to put the squeeze on for more cash. Those wise-guy coons, those bloody apes! The day was coming when they’d sweat back every last dollar.
As the cab drove Bill south out of Harlem, Big Boy Bose, up in his flat, was drinking the glass of bourbon Chappie had just handed him. “You’re right,” he said. “We kill the cop and all the papers’ll yell for an investigation and one more white man investigation’ll push us out of business maybe. But here’s the way I see it, Chappie. That white who was here, he don’t fool me. He Klan, he Christian Destiny and he wants a riot here in Harlem but maybe that’s what we want, too.” Chappie asked what good would that do them? Big Boy explained. “A riot show all them God damn white trash to leave us alone. Show them we men and no God damn Mississippi niggers they can lynch every time they want some fun. Chappie, I’m sick bein’ pushed around by the dicks and sarges and vice squad trash, sick bein’ raided and ‘rested. The whites pressin’ us to the wall and we don’t fight back, they’ll finish us. Back in prohibition when we was starting big, remember? Some niggers said let’s get in no trouble with the whites. Let’s not fight the wop gangs over east Harlem. Let’s get in no trouble with Dutch Schultz and all the other white big-shots. We listen to them niggers, we be niggers now. We fight them whites and we somebody.”
Big Boy waddled over to the bowl of ice cubes on the table.
He picked up a cube, placed it between his teeth like a lump of sugar and polished off the rest of his bourbon. Chappie said that fighting the whites was all right for the Jesus Christ niggers but not for them. “I’m in business,” Big Boy answered. “I’m in no Jesus Christ business to save niggers. I’m no Paul Robeson goin’ around battling for every dumb nigger there is. But it’s like that prohibition time, Chappie. We got to do something or throw the towel into the whites. All Harlem’s on the move, holy Jessus niggers and the Red niggers, and all them politicians and the soft soap boys. The churches’ prayin’. Didn’t Councilman Vincent pack six thousand into that ballroom Sunday? When that happen before? All Harlem’s standin’ up to the white.” Chappie asked if that wasn’t just what that white Klan guy wanted?
Big Boy smiled. “He don’t outsmart me, Chappie. I know he wants me to kill the Jew so it’ll hurt the Councilman and all the colored Assemblymen and Judges. That scar-face white wants a riot so the white papers got something more to hate us for, so they can blame all the trouble on the colored when they run for election in the fall. Chappie, I know all that. From the first time that scar-face white bastard come here I been thinkin’. I know all them whites out to make us Mississippi niggers.” He spat the shrunken ice cube on the Turkish rug. “I been thinkin’ I got to be careful or the white outfox us. But I see that if we don’t fight back, you and me be investigated out of business. The white papers out to lynch us. I read in coupla them that I’m the one who beat up the two Jews. It was muggers but they don’t care about that. They out to get us. Chappie, we got to fight back and take our chances like we done prohibition or we finished.”
As the cab drove Bill south out of Harlem, Johnny Ellis and a fellow warehouseman, a short white man with a big handkerchief tied around his neck pushed a loaded wooden box towards the freight elevator. The box’s destination had been crayoned in big black letters. It was bound for Atlanta, Georgia. They waited side by side for the freight elevator to climb to them. The white warehouseman asked Johnny what the hell was going on in Harlem anyway? “All these things,” Johnny said, “they’re like sparks. Maybe, it’s some Negro people getting mad at the way they’ve been shoved around. Maybe it’s some subversive outfit at work? But they’re sparks and where there’s sparks maybe there’ll be a fire.” The white warehouseman asked what the hell did he mean by sparks? “It’s this way,” Johnny said. “Negroes get the worst deal in the whole country, you know. They live the worst, they get the worst jobs. They’re all burning up at the way they’re treated. The only bright spot’s the unions and the other white organizations working with Negroes against Jim Crow.” The elevator came up and the white warehouseman said did Johnny remember that saying about “Old Jim Crow got to go.” “Yes,” said Johnny. The white warehouseman said okay and not to forget it and to keep it on top of the agenda until it was scratched out. The two pair of hands pushed the box into the freight elevator.
Bill saw Hayden at nine o’clock. At nine thirty he was on his way to Lester Darton’s. Bill’s cab rolled down Fulton Street past the old-fashioned Post Office, the Brooklyn Eagle Building and Court House Square with its statue of Harriet Beecher Stowe standing benignly in bronze near a grateful Negress in bronze. It had been one hell of a day all around, he thought. He still hadn’t patched things up with Isabelle although they’d had dinner together. Five days he recapitulated to himself. Who’d have thought five days ago that it was in him to call her a Catholic bitch? It was Hayden’s fault, Hayden and his fancy plans for using niggers.
Hayden had informed him that Ahmed Aden, not Big Boy, had organized the attacks on the Jewish storekeepers. It was the bloody damn nigger in a red fez. But always it was Hayden, the bloody spider, the bloody conniver with his dirty high-toned speeches who was spinning them all into his schemes. The niggers would do their share; the sucker ops’d do their share; the friends out in the open like the giant newspapers would do their share. The thousands of spinning words, multiplied a million times whirled in his consciousness.
JUNGLE LAW IN HARLEM.
WAVE OF TERROR SWEEPS WHITE CITIZENS.
GROWING ANTI-WHITE FEELING IN HARLEM.
HARLEM LEADERS HELPLESS BEFORE
RISING TIDE OF NEGRO LAWLESSNESS.
POLICE DEMAND MORE PATROLMEN
TO PROTECT WHITES IN HARLEM.
It was unbelievable to him that this Norris Hayden, so collegiate and youngish in appearance, a stick-like figure in a sport sweater and a pipe sticking out of a featureless face was able to manipulate them all. It was unbelievable that this Norris Hayden should be the top man in the New York organization. Norris Hayden? This gutless bloodless zero? But it was true. The milky front was a mask, a mask as deceiving as the “research” mask of the organization itself. There was a real Hayden, the manipulator who’d given him the big glad-hand, promising him the sky, and at the same time was probably glad-handing Dent and Aden and Christ knows who else. There was a real Hayden, the God damn sadist who’d read his history out at the Chez Marie like a police captain talking to a mug, who’d quizzed him about Isabelle, knowing all the time that she was a Catholic. Christ, if only he could pay the bastard back some day. “I can!” he muttered half aloud.
The solution grew in him and he felt as if he were in a nightmare in which there was a courtroom and a judge sitting up front, and all the seats were gone, every one, and there were multitudes of listening people, and the F.B.I. was in the courtroom, and the newspaper reporters, and the police, and a voice, a hard sarcastic voice was talking and everybody was listening and the voice was saying: “You God damn bunch of suckers. War against fascism? Don’t make me laugh, you damn suckers! Going without coffee, you lousy suckers, and all for the four freedoms. What a bunch of suckers. There isn’t going to be any four freedoms or any other freedoms and nonsense. There’s an organization, there’s an organization, there’s an organization working to take the country over and that bastard Hayden’s the head in New York….”
“Can you beat it!” he exclaimed aloud in a low shocked voice, appalled at his thoughts, and the voice was the same voice that had spoken before. It was his own voice. Christ, he’d go crazy if he had another day like today. He gazed out at the night-time streets of flatland Brooklyn and he was travelling, not through some recognizable place on the earth but through the strange fevered streets of his thoughts; for whole seconds he would be whizzing down streets flaring with light, Isabelle with him, and he was the assistant exec. in Mobile, in Atlanta, he was an executive in the organization, Hayden’s superior, the top man, the super brain guy; and then he saw himself in that courtroom denouncing Hayden; saw himself dead in an alley without light, saw Isabelle dead, too, and blood pouring from her womb and her aunt Theresa brandishing a silver crucifix over Isabelle; saw himself on some vast sunlit square full of banners and military bands playing the march of victory, all power seized by the organization, the President and Congress arrested, and himself hurling up and down the square; saw himself at the head of the marching men, saw the great splendid day of power, the breaking, tearing, smashing day with the niggers, kikes, Reds, foreigners, unionists whipped into the ground; saw Isabelle dead in a street covered with the corpses of nuns and priests. Oh, Christ, Christ, he’d go crazy.
He looked out of the window. The cab was speeding under some elevated structure spanning a wide desolate avenue. On both sides, empty lots alternated with blocks of darkened two-story houses and cemeteries with headstones in long white rows. So this was Queens, he thought numbly. He’d be meeting Lester Darton soon.
When he got out of the cab, he glanced at the cab driver leaning towards him, a thin face under a cap with a thin curved nose. The hackie was a kike, he classified mechanically and remembered Sam Miller. He paid his fare, avoiding contact with the hand that took his bill and returned his change. He spun on his heel and started walking to the address he had. Above him was the platform of the elevated. He had travelled to one of those semi-suburban crossroads typical of the city’s outlying boroughs, a subway elevated station and four corners, occupied here by a drugstore, a delicatessen, a cigar store, a tavern. Following Hayden’s directions, he cut into a residential street. The black houses were spotted with yellow light. In the gutter, a boy pedaled by on a bike, a girl on the handlebars. Giggling, they swooshed ahead of him. He reached the corner, paused to light a cigarette, turned his head slowly towards the stores. Nobody. He flipped the match away and half way down the street he came to an isolated store front among the brick houses.
The plateglass was like a sheet of tar but he knew the lettering on it: Wheelock Printing Company. He approached the door. It was open. He entered, shutting the door behind him and smelled a strong vinegary-like breath and heard a voice say: “I will light a match so you can see where things is.” Those were the words Hayden had told him he would hear and he answered the words he had been informed to answer. “Close the cover before striking.” He listened to the tearing sound a match makes when struck. And light gleamed and a man’s face was smiling. “This way,” the smiling face said. They walked into the interior, the match illuminating a printing press, huge stacks of cardboard. The match burned out. “This way,” his guide said. “Turn right around.” Bill bumped into his guide, stopped, blundered forward again. He heard knuckles rapping on a door. He felt as if they had somehow passed through the cardboard mass he had glimpsed.
A door creaked open, light flared, light impenetrable as the blackness, then condensing, receding and Bill could see where he was. He and the guide strode into the light, into a small back room; sitting at a flat table was a stocky man in a white shirt. The stocky man lifted arm and hand in the fascist salute. “Heil Hitler,” the stocky man said.
Surprised, Bill lifted his arm and hand in the salute but he didn’t return the “heil Hitler.”
“Sit down, Johnson. I’m Lester Darton.”
Bill smiled into a good-looking face topped by a brown pompadour haircut, a face that was square and compact with wide-apart brown eyes and a mouth with a thin upper lip wedged into a full lower lip. It was a sailor’s face, the face of a man who did things with his hands and liked doing things. The hands, too, were square, big-knuckled and furred over with thick brown hair.
“You found us, my friend,” Darton remarked. “Meet Herb Baumgartner, that big hulk over there.”
Bill smiled at his guide. Baumgartner was standing at the door, a burly middle-aged man, one of those dark-haired Germans who seem in many ways more Germanic than the blond types. His nose was exaggeratedly pug, his mouth wide and very thin like the mouths of some of the Nazi leaders Bill had seen in magazines.
Darton waved at the whitewashed walls. “We print calendars, Johnson. Calendars with oomph. If you know any girls who’d like to get in pictures, send them to me.” He laughed. “All they’d have to do is what they do for the Hollywood hebes.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Bill said, sitting down.
“I’m not one for ceremony. Hayden only gave me the Johnson end of your name. Who the devil wants to call you Johnson?”
“Bill Johnson.”
“Bill, I’ve got the bombs for you. All ready! I always keep a supply on hand. Otherwise, how the devil could I have filled Gauleiter Hayden’s order on such short notice? Some of our Gauleiters believe all they have to do is pick up a phone and bombs make themselves.” His mouth curved into a mocking U-shaped smile, the smile of a clown and as false. “How is Gauleiter Hayden? Herb, show the customer the bombs.”
Bill watched Baumgartner walk over to a box in the corner of the room. Baumgartner’s arm scooped into the box and he lifted up a cheap drugstore valise which he brought over to the table, setting it down between Bill and Darton. Darton unlocked it. A white layer of cotton filled the top of the valise. Darton pried up the cotton and underneath, Bill saw a tightly corked glass vial about five inches long. “How many are there?” Bill asked.
“Fifty,” Darton said. “Fifty stinkeroos.”
“Why’d did you pack them into one bag?”
“No complaints, Bill. Save them for the complaint department. Herb’s packed them satisfactory so don’t you drop them. Have your cab drive slow. Tell him you’re fresh from an operation. Sterilization,” he laughed, “or something like that.”
“You’re a card,” Bill said.
“I would have liked to have used asafoetida,” Darton continued, ignoring him. “As a chemist, I have a fondness for asafoetida. It’s a product of Asia and it stinks like garlic. Garlic stinkeroos breaking in the wop bars would have, my dear sir, certain propaganda values. All the niggers would have a good laugh. Garlic to stink out the garlic eaters. My dear sir, I suggest you pass on this idea to the Gauleiter.”
Bill smiled, silent. Lester Darton was too cute, he thought; that “heil Hitler” greeting; the snotty way he spoke of Hayden; too damn cute. “What did you use?”
“Valerian. Valerian consists of the rhizome and the roots of Valeriana officinalis. We get our supply from New Jersey. It makes a pure white powder, zinc valerate. All you have to do is dissolve it in a small quantity of alcohol, put it in a container, cork and seal with wax.” He locked the valise and Baumgartner returned it to the box. “Bill, as you no doubt see, I am a learned man. And it’s all for the cause. How long have you been in the organization?”
“That’s not your business.”
“He’s worried, Herb,” Darton said to Baumgartner.
“I’m not worried.”
“Friend, I can read that scarred but handsome pokerface as easily as I concoct stinkeroos. A good chemist, friend, can tell what’s in a man, chemically speaking. You don’t know me but a bottle of beer will fix that. Herb, bring us some beer. Too damn dry talking without wetting the hatch. And Herb have Jesperson make us up some sandwiches.” As Baumgartner, smiling, left the room Darton said, “Jesperson is the Dane on the corner. He makes good sandwiches. I wish I could offer you some good German beer. Later on, when the war’s over.”
“I didn’t come here to drink beer but talk business.”
“Get off the high horse for Pete’s sake! Who do you think you are? A movie agent in some Hollywood hebe spy story. For Pete’s sake, that’s what’s wrong with the organization. The blood’s running dry, chemically speaking. It’s getting to be another corporation!” he shouted, pounding the table with the flat of his palm. “Do you think we’re winning the struggle from a row of desks?”
“You’re drunk, if you don’t mind my saying so, without your German beer.”
“I can get drunk without touching a drop.”
“I believe that.”
“I’m funny to you? All because I’m not a corporation lawyer who needs a quart of Scotch before he can even imitate a man. I’m natural so you’ve got be afraid of somebody like me. Hayden warned you, did he?”
“About what?”
“About me. I’m not one of the Gauleiter’s male stenographers. Tell him that from me but without any regards. Let him transfer me out of his district! Think I’d be the first who can’t stomach the Gauleiter?” He threw up both hands. “Damn him, he won’t transfer me!” His eyes fixed balefully on Bill and his upper lip seemed to have disappeared, his mouth was so knotted. “He needs me too much, chemically speaking. He needs what I’ve got because he hasn’t got it. Hayden,” he sneered, “H20 for blood and gas for ideas.” His forefinger darted to within an inch of Bill’s face. “Where’d you get those scars?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Come, come.”
“A tear gas riot,” Bill said in a constrained uneasy voice.
“Doing what?”
“Breaking a strike.”
Down smashed Darton’s hand on the table. “I thought so! You’re marked with the signs of the struggle. But what’s the Gauleiter marked with except the dollar sign? You’re a fighter like me. They’re lots of our kind in the organization but too many of the other kind — ”
“I’m not getting into a debate with you, Darton.”
“Lester, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Bill shrugged.
“Don’t trust me?” Darton questioned. “How long have you been in this district?”
“Since Friday.”
“Why didn’t you say so? That’s why you don’t know about me. Where from?”
“The South.”
“Stay there. If you work up here you’ll have a hebe accent in no time. Who have you met up here?”
“Just yourself.”
“That’s the Gauleiter.” Darton shook his head. “Up from the South, a stranger in town and he introduces you to nobody. It’s all business with him. If he didn’t need zinc valerate you’d never have met me.”
“I met a man called Dent but I’m not sure if he’s in the organization.”
“He’s in. A Hayden man. You’ve met the Colonel?”
“Bretherton? Yes, once.”
Darton sprang from the table, agile and muscular as a gymnast. He strode up and down, his eyes on Bill. “You’ve met Hayden men. That’s one thing the Gauleiter can do well. Surround himself with his handpicked ass-lickers. I’m not one. Never was as you’ll find out if you’re north any length of time. I’m in their hair where it’s short but they need me.” He was boasting openly like a small boy. “I was more important than Kuhn in the Bund or McNaughton in the Destiny Party. I took Kuhn and McNaughton and a dozen others their orders from the organization. I was the ambassador from the organization, you might put it.”
Bill grinned. “His honor, the ambassador.”
“Son-of-a-bitch, don’t take me up on it. It’s true just the same. You stay in New York, Philly, Boston, you’ll hear of me. What are you up for?”
Bill hesitated, remembering Hayden’s warning. “You’ll hear about it sooner or later,” he grinned, “that is if you stay in New York or Boston. I’m here on the Harlem job.”
“Is that where the stinkeroos are going?”
“Yes.”
“A nigger job. That’s the business coming out of the shooting last week?”
“Mr. Hayden wants two of your men to shadow Big Boy Bose.”
“All he told me was that you’d be here for valerate and you’d be needing two men, the Gauleiter! When do you want them?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Darton flipped his hand up in the fascist salute. “Okay. Heil Hitler.”
“Heil.”
“Speaking seriously, where the hell’s Herb?” He sat down again at the table. “Speaking seriously, we can learn from Hitler.”
“Hitler’s finished business.”
“We will be able to learn from Hitler for generations to come.”
“Hitler arrived on the world scene last,” Bill agreed, quoting Hayden. “Because he was last, he took advantage of all that had preceded him.”
“Dead wrong.”
“Why?”
“Hitler’s main contribution to the struggle was his appeal to the emotions of the plain man.”
“Mussolini appealed to the emotions.”
“The wop was effective but Hitler was genius. All the dictators followed Mussolini into the aristocratic past for their appeal. The Japs. And Franco with his dream of reviving the Spain of the Inquisition. All these Mannerheims and Horthys sniffed at the dead bones like Mussolini. The glories of Rome. What a mistake! The past is dead with all its Caesars.”
“But how about Hitler glorifying the Teutons, the Baltic barons?”
“Fundamentally he went forward. Forward to a new Europe, a new world order, a new master race. No Roman togas for Hitler but the new Nazi super race.” Darton’s eyes were burning and he was breathing hard, his mouth open. “Hitler has made one mistake,” he said after a pause.
“Sure, the Russians.”
“No. He relied too much on the Krupps, the Thyssens, too much on capitalists and capitalists’ sons. It’s true he kept the money bags in the background, the new men in the foreground, the men of action and daring. Men like me!” Darton bellowed in a self-intoxicated voice. Spittle flecked his lips and his eyes were as unwinking as a bird’s in a cage.
Bill stared, thinking that Darton was unbalanced but hadn’t even Hayden admitted the chemist was invaluable?
“That’s the trouble with the organization,” Darton said hoarsely. “The Haydens are the gauleiters and men like us the operatives.”
“What do you want? A revolution from Moscow?”
“Hitler learned from Moscow that only a new society would attract the herd. I’ll tell you something. I was a Red myself in Chicago, or did you know that? What are you, some bastard agent provocateur?”
“No kidding, comrade?”
“I know my Marx and Engels.”
“No kidding? You’re the first C.P. I’ve ever met in the organization. I met some ex-union men in training school in Chicago but never a Red — ”
“I didn’t have to go to training school,” Darton laughed. “The Reds schooled me and all that was needed was to turn it upside down.”
“How’d you get out of the C.P.?”
“They threw me out. Called me a wrecker, a deviationist, a leftist. The usual C.P. patter.”
“Ever take their patter seriously?”
“For about a year, I did.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I saw they would never get anywheres. For all their crap about men being equal, they had their leaders, too, like everywhere else. Leaders and followers. I realized the only world idea with any future was the leadership idea of fascism. Those Reds always preaching that the herd ought to act together! Dumb, isn’t it? If one of those city hebes would’ve gone out to the country and looked at a flock of sheep or a herd of cows he might have found out that the herd only moves when a leader leads them. Ever see cattle marching into the slaughter pen?”
“No.”
“I have. Dumb beasts smell their own blood, their own death, but a billy goat leads them and they have to follow. No, I couldn’t get along with the Reds. I was sick and tired of calling every hebe tailor and nigger pigsticker comrade. What is communism but the herd idea at its lowest, all men in one common herd, Jews, niggers, Polacks, Chinese, Russians — and the Russians are white Chinese racially; ever notice their wide cheekbones and the shapes of their eyes? There was nothing for me in communism. Heil Hitler.”
“They certainly taught you to spiel it from a soap box,” Bill said maliciously. Darton wasn’t kidding him, he thought; he was still a God damn Red at heart.
“Bill, you’re another American damn fool.”
“Aren’t you an American?”
“Yes, but not an American damn fool. There’s Herb. Where were you, you hulk?”
“Jesperson was busy,” Baumgartner said, depositing two brown paper bags on the table and taking out quart bottles of beer, paper cups, cardboard containers of potato salad, mustard, pickles, sandwiches in waxed paper.
“I better go,” Bill said. “The sooner I get those bombs over — ”
“They for tonight?” Darton asked, uncapping a beer bottle.
“No.”
“Then what’s the rush?” He poured the beer into the cups. “Got a whore somewheres? Let her wait.”
“No.”
“Get yourself one, a whore that won’t talk. Me, I like a Jewish whore. Don’t know why. I hate the race but the women are different. I had one in Chicago before the C.P.’s threw me out. I lived with her almost six months.” He drank his beer noisily. “Another thing we can learn from Hitler is Gemutlichkeit; I mayn’t be saying it right but the idea’s to relax, drink beer and have fun.”
Baumgartner said. “What about your sheeny sweetheart? I never heard that one?”
“Her? Her name was Florence. She had Jewish eyes. You’ve seen them, Bill. A little bulgy, brown as a spaniel’s, like wop eyes. She had fleshy ears and her tits were big although she was kind of small herself. All the time she was interested in my future. That’s a Jewish disease. They have no future so they’re always interested in it.” He lifted his beer. “To Florence. She screwed like a rabbit.”
Baumgartner roared. Bill drank his beer slowly. He ought to get the bombs over to Big Boy and go home to Isabelle.
“Drink up,” Darton smiled. “We’ve got four more bottles to kill and the organization’s paying for it anyway.” He lifted one of the uncapped bottles to his lips and took a long drink from the neck.
“Would you live with a sheeny girl now?” Baumgartner asked.
“Why not? I’d live with anybody I want. I’d live with a nigger.” He lit a cigarette, blew smoke out of his nose. “You’ve got to squeeze the juice out of life, you hulk Herb. To hell with the conventions. Sometimes, I wish I was a Nazi. They’re already living like the master race. Strong and daring! They take over a country and crush out the laws of the past. The men? Into the work battalions. The women? Whores.” He made a circle out of his thumb and forefinger and bursting with laughter, poked the forefinger of his other hand through the circle. “Whores! Suppose the Polack twist’s devout and the mother of a lot of brats? To hell with all that! Suppose the Russian girl’s a virgin, fourteen years, and no tits and instead of praying to Jesus the hebe, she prays to that bastard Stalin. To hell with her! Into the whorehouse with them all! Rape them and throw their crucifixes and Karl Marxes into the shithouse. All these ideas of courtship, of honor! Didn’t starvation fix the French and Norwegian women? Didn’t they screw when their brats cried for food. Rape them all! They’re only two breeds worth a damn in the whole world. The Nazis and we Americans. All the others are jackal peoples.”
“The Fuehrer,” Baumgartner said, “he is for the Herrenvolk princip. One Herrenvolk for Europe and one Herrenvolk for America.”
“Each with their jackal peoples,” Darton amended. “Hitler’s got his Italians and Rumanians and Finns. We’ve got the Gold Shirts in Mexico, others.” He started another bottle. “The main thing to remember is that the enemy is always the idea of the herd, whether it’s a bolshevik herd or a democratic herd.”
“Not fight each other like now,” Baumgartner said sadly, chewing on a turkey sandwich. “I have many in my family lost on the other side.”
“We’ve made too many mistakes in the organization,” Darton said, banging on the table with an empty bottle. “What’s in that suitcase? Valerian. You should be picking up hand grenades, Bill. Our mistakes are nauseating. In ‘36, weren’t we ready to seize the Government?”
“Who, you and the Reds?” Bill said. He had decided to stay on; he guessed that Baumgartner was also in the organization or Darton wouldn’t have been talking so freely.
“No, you bastard. We were ready. We had munitions shelters ready all over the country but then the Haydens — Hayden wasn’t in the organization then, thank God — got cold feet. They were bankers. Cold feet, cold heart, cold peckers!” Darton ranted. “Can you imagine Hayden sleeping with a woman, any woman? You can’t. He’s got a dollar sign where his pecker ought to hang. ‘36, the crucial year. But the bankers won. The bankers were afraid. There had been some leaks. The crazy Quaker Smedley Butler wasn’t our man, never had been our man. He was for the herd, always had been. And the leaks, the exposes in the Red press, the liberal press! The bankers began to fidget about the popular pulse. Popular pulse, God! Everything was ready. The majority of people would’ve followed like cattle. Didn’t Hitler demonstrate in the Reichstag Fire that all that was needed at the right time was daring? But since when have bankers been daring?”
“I built three munitions shelters in Chicago that year,” Baumgartner said.
“We had secret radio code books,” Darton said. “Dynamite, not valerian planted in the walls of key buildings in New York and Chicago. In Washington, D.C., too!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that we could’ve blown out the walls and our munitions shelters would’ve commanded all the Government buildings. Bankers, bankers! All during ‘35 I’d been organizing cells. Six men with rifles, hand grenades, pistols, one submachine gun — that was a cell. That was something! Fifty men were a unit, two hundred men a battalion.”
“And our people reading Goebbels’ book from the other side,” Baumgartner said.
“Goebbels’ book?” Bill asked.
Darton explained. “It was a manual on street fighting. It was called ‘Communist Party Instructions For Guerilla Fighting’ in case any copies got lost.” His eyes had reddened from the beer and the smoking, his head jerking from side to side on his neck, the blue cigarette clouds billowing on all sides of him, so that Bill, staring at Darton felt as if he were listening, not to some ordinary operative, but to someone full of smoke and fury. Darton sat his chair as if on a horse. “Now we are making stinkeroos. Bankers’ bombs. Bankers’ careful strategy. Penny by penny and compound interest if you live long enough.” He stared up at the ceiling. He had lost interest in the discussion. Bill drank another beer and another beer. They emptied the bottles and Baumgartner went out for more; they emptied those bottles, too, and gradually Bill’s tongue loosened. He told Darton about Big Boy Bose and Aden. Darton listened as Bill shouted that the niggers were the lowest of the low, and that he believed that it was always a mistake to use niggers in any job. And after awhile Darton hinted that if somebody were to write a letter, attacking Aden and Big Boy and send it to the respectable nigger organizations that would eliminate those niggers. Darton rambled on about what he knew of Big Boy, and of Aden. Aden’s wife was a whore and Aden himself was on a salary basis for the A.R.A. Yes, Darton declared, banging the table, the organization needed a purge and there’d be a purge too some day. Beerily, Bill listened to Darton thundering on the subject of purges. The idea of a letter, Bill reflected as the room became dense with cigarette smoke; that wasn’t such a bad idea; Hayden’d made him a nigger phoning the kike; and why not be a nigger writing a letter about Aden; who’d ever find out; and besides it wouldn’t be selling out the organization; Aden was a nigger bastard, wasn’t he, and putting the nigger bastards in their place was important, wasn’t it.
Bill felt as good as he had early in the morning before his fight with Isabelle. Put all the niggers in their place, he thought, belching; Hayden was no real white man working with niggers the way he was; Darton was right even if he was a Red bastard; the nigger men, slaves, the nigger women, whores, if they had any looks; slaves and whores and that was where Aden belonged; Christ, he’d never do anything against the organization, never, not in a thousand years; not if they threw him in jail; silent as a grave, that’d be him; silent as the grave.