"I've got to get to Raisin," Remo said.
The leader of URGE stood on the front steps of Longworth Hospital. He was wearing a short white hospital gown tied by two bows in the back, revealing a pair of red and green striped shorts. Before him, a dozen demonstrators similarly attired sprawled across the expanse of marble steps reading comic books and passing marijuana joints. Ahead of them, television cameras recorded the proceedings.
"My fellow freedom fighters," Raisin intoned into the microphones in front of him. A breeze shimmied through the thin gown he was wearing, causing it to ripple at his knees. "I stand before you today in the cause of justice." He turned aside and hissed, "Sheeit, brother, it cold out here. Go get me my robe."
A white man whose hospital gown was adorned with buttons advocating peace, the abolition of nuclear power, the execution of the Shah of Iran, the expulsion of whites from South Africa, the elimination of noise from urban centers, and a very old one demanding the death of anyone over thirty years of age, shuffled into the hospital to get Raisin the robe.
"I urge you to join us here at Longworth Hospital to help us meet our demands for equality in the medical profession. I urge you to participate in our call to action. I urge you to answer that call with us. Because, fellow supporters of this nation's oppressed Block Mon, the URGE must be met."
He pointed his finger in the air and scowled ferociously at the cameras. "And I tell you now as I stand before you, that I have more than a dream. I tell you, with four hundred years of black servitude echoing these words through the ages: I'VE GOT THE URGE!"
The people on the steps stirred. A young couple groped each other. Several of the pot smokers lay snoring. A tall black man wearing mirrored sunglasses shook a tambourine in time to disco music playing on his trunk-sized portable radio. "And you know, all of you who seek to break the chains of inequality, that when you've got the urge, you've got to do your duty!"
Remo walked up to Raisin. He wore a hospital gown untied over black chino pants and a tee shirt. He offered Raisin his robe. "Someone's going to try to kill you soon," Remo whispered, his back to the cameras.
"Who you?"
"Never mind. Get back inside the hospital."
"Fellow freedom fighters," Raisin shouted into the microphones. "I have just been informed that an attempt is being made on my life."
The groping couple squeezed closer together, their lips parted in ecstasy. The tambourine player rolled off to sleep.
"Would you shut up?" Remo said.
"And I say to you. I do not fear death from the hands of an assassin."
"Be quiet, will you? Just get inside."
"For what does a life signify without the full achievement of freedom for the Block Mon? I stand ready to die. And every Block Mon, woman and child stands ready to die in the cause of freedom." Raisin's chest puffed out. His chin jutted forward. One shoulder rose higher than the other and he planted one foot out in front of him as though he were a mold for a bronze statue. "Freedom now," he shouted.
The young couple began to copulate and rolled into the range of the cameras. "Cut!" somebody yelled from behind the TV equipment. "Get those two screwers out of here, will you?"
As the couple was being rolled out of sight, Remo once again requested that the director of URGE return to his hospital bed where he could be protected while Remo searched out his assassin.
"Thank you, boy, but nobody going to kill me 'fore the Lord do hisself. Besides, they all these TV cameras around. Ain't nobody going to do nothing serious on TV." He patted Remo on the shoulder. "You just go about your business. I'll get inside quick as I can. And thanks for the tip. It make a good speech. Freedom now!" he repeated into the cameras, which had been turned on again, the screwers having been removed.
Remo walked through the sparse crowd. No sign of Daniels. If Barney hadn't come directly to Calder Raisin, Remo reasoned, he must have gone back to see Gloria X for instructions. He would be back in Harlem.
Barney eased himself out of the taxi, his head pounding. Eight o'clock in the morning, and not one drink since before dawn.
Some protectors, Barney thought, remembering Remo and Chiun. They might be able to fight, but nobody who would refuse a drop of tequila to a thirsty man was any friend of his.
He pounded on the door to Gloria X's house. The Grand Vizier Malcolm opened it at once. Obeying orders, Malcolm stepped aside to allow Barney to race to the bar in the living room.
Perched on top of the bar was a silver hip flask of tequila with a note attached. It read: "I'm yours whenever you want me."
He unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The welcome aroma of fine tequila filled his nostrils and coursed down his throat, beckoning for more. "Oh, baby, do I want you," he said to the flask.
He let the glory gallop down his throat. Then he filled it up again after locating the tequila bottle.
"Dat's all, whitey," the Grand Vizier said, striding across the white room. "You coming with me now."
"Hold it, Baby Huey," Barney said. "I am to be admitted to the bar anytime I feel like it. Your massa told me."
The Grand Vizier lifted Barney over his head and carried him aloft out the door and into a black automobile, where two Peaches of Mecca snorted awake. Barney would have slugged it out with all of them were it not for the fact that he still held the cap to the hip flask in one hand and had to screw it back on so that the tequila in the flask would not be spilled.
As soon as he was tossed into the car, Barney was enveloped in a rough wool burnoose and handcuffed.
"I realize I ought to be getting used to this, but do you mind telling me where we're going?" he asked.
"We going to the Mosque," one of the Peaches said reverently. "You keep that hood over your face when we go in, else you get killed."
The Afro-Muslim Brotherhood mosque, about twenty minutes from Gloria X's, was identifiable by a hand painted sign on unvarnished plankboard nailed over another sign reading: Condemned Building. Do not enter.
"Open, doors of the faithful," the two Peaches cried in unison. The doors swung open heavily. Awfully heavily, Barney noted, for a condemned building that looked as though it would crumble to dust at a touch. And the doors were new. Fragments of steel shavings still clung to the hinges.
Barney was led through a maze of hallways, stairwells, past closed doors and giant empty rooms. The building had evidently been some kind of public building at one time, abandoned after Harlem ceased to be a quiet suburban retreat for middle-class white professionals and became the black Harlem it was today.
Barney could tell by the sound of his feet against the flooring that he was walking on a steel base. He bumped a wall with his elbow. Again steel. There were no windows.
The mosque was as well fortified as Gloria X's house.
Flanked by his two bodyguards, Barney ground to a halt in front of an enormous hall where a speaker, wrapped in purple swaths of silk, entreated his audience.
"Who keep you down?"
The answer was a soft grumble from five hundred black throats: "Whitey."
"Who kill our kids in these dirty slums?"
"Whitey."
"Who rob you, rape you, steal your bread?"
"Whitey."
"Who plan to wipe out the black man?"
"Whitey."
The speaker roared on, his voice rising above women in purple scarves on the left side of the old amphitheater, and above the dark, clean-shaven heads of the black-suited men on the right.
The speaker yelled. He pleaded. He cried put in the tradition of the black preacher. The temperature inside the old theater rose with the speaker's volume, manufacturing waves of perspiration. It flowed from black foreheads, black backs, black cheeks. It swamped brown armpits. It trickled down tan legs and tan spines. Yet no one moved. They sat rigid as soldiers, a theater full of zombies. Their only sign of life was the movement of their mouths as they murmured "Whitey."