"Then I'll be back," Remo said coldly.
He found Raisin first, crumpled in a heap with his head bashed into bloody mush. On the pier, the silhouette of Daniels's body, doubled over, stood out starkly against the horizon.
There was an odd smell about him as Remo rolled him over to look at the knife wounds in his back. A familiar smell, but faint in the musky night air of the waterfront.
Remo held two fingers to Barney's temple. The weakest trace of a pulse remained.
Then he spotted the knife. Still holding Barney, he picked it up. Toward the base of the blade a blue stain shone in the moonlight. Remo lifted it near his face.
Curare. That was the blue on the knives of the well-dressed black men around Gloria's house. This was the scent they carried.
The pulse was fading fast. Too late for a doctor. Too late for anything now. "Looks like your last binge, sweetheart," Remo said to the unconscious form in his arms. He picked up Barney's silver flask lying on its side a few feet away, and knew it didn't matter any more. "Have a drink, buddy."
He raised the flask carefully to Barney's parched lips. He would wait with him until the end came. He would wait, because he knew that one day it would be Remo lying alone on a pier or in a street or behind a building in some place where he would be a stranger, since their kind were always strangers. He would wait because when that day came, perhaps there would be someone — a casual passerby, maybe, or a drunken derelict who made his home nearby — who would hold him as he now held Barney Daniels, and who would offer him the warmth of human contact before he left his life as he had lived it. Alone.
Barney's lips accepted the last of the alcohol. He stirred. One hand moved slowly toward Remo's and clasped it weakly.
"Doc," Barney said, so softly that normal ears could not have heard it
"Barney?" Remo asked, surprised at the restorative powers of the drink. "Wait here. I'll get a doctor."
"Listen," Barney said, his face contorted with the effort. Remo leaned closer. Barney whispered a telephone number.
Remo left him on the pier as he ran into Battery Park to reach a pay phone.
"Jackson," a man's bass voice answered.
Remo gave the man directions to the pier, then went back to Barney, whose breathing was so labored that, even in the chilly night, drops of sweat dotted his upper lip and forehead. "Hang on," Remo said. "Doc's coming."
"Thanks... friend," Barney said, the muscles in his neck straining.
As the gray Mercury skidded to a halt by the pier, Barney's head dropped backward and he slumped unconscious again in Remo's arms.
A tall black man, elegantly dressed, approached them with a stride faster than most men's at a full run. "I'm Doc Jackson," he said with authority. "Get him in the car."
"I don't think he's going to make it," Remo said.
"I don't care what you think," Doc answered, his lips tightened in grim determination as they sped away. Behind them, rolling to a stop at the pier, Remo could see the flashing red lights of police and emergency vehicles and the carry-all vans of New York's television stations.
Chapter Nine
Robert Hansen Jackson was born on a little island off the Carolinas in 1917. His father ran the only hotel there. His mother was a seamstress.
"Your daddy can read, Robert. He's a man," his mother would say often. And then she would tell him about the Blessed Virgin and say the rosary and make him say it with her.
Robert Jackson would move his mouth and pray that the session would soon be over.
One day, his mother told him that the Spanish priest would leave the island because San Sendro was now an American possession. It had been for years, since what she called the big war over Cuba, but now they would be getting an American priest because San Sendro had belatedly become part of the Archdiocese of Charleston.
The island turned out with bright banners and cleanest dresses and shirts for the American priest.
Robert's father was to give the welcoming address. The mayor would present a silver bowl of newly picked fruit. The mayor's wife and the town's leading ladies, including Robert's mother because she was married to a man who could read, would escort the Americano priest to Maria de Dolores Church.
Everyone had a part in the welcome, even little Robert. He and seven other boys, four on each side, would push open the doors as the priest entered the church.
Father Francis X. Duffy seemed impressed with his greeting. That's what everyone said. He said it was the most welcome greeting he had ever seen.
Then Father Duffy, who had been born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, gave the island some Americanizing. He told them San Sendro was now part of the land of the free and the home of the brave. And he proved it by establishing another church, St. Augustine's, and made all the dark-skinned people go there.
That was when Robert discovered he was a Negro. Father Duffy told him so.
San Sendro had been wallowing for decades in Spanish decadence, unaware of the importance of racial purity. One of Father Duffy's earliest and most difficult tasks in setting this straight was to determine who was black and who was not.
In their backwardness, the people had failed to sustain the purity of their blood lines. But Father Duffy kept at it. Church registration dwindled, not only from the newly discovered Negroes but from whites, too. Still Father Duffy persevered. And by the time of his death, a visitor couldn't tell the difference between San Sendro and Charleston.
He knew he had done right, even though some meddling foreign priests expressed surprise. The previous pastor, whom Father Duffy suspected of having Negro blood himself, cried when he saw his island again.
He cried before the altar, and he cried while saying mass. And he cried when he tried to tell Father Duffy that what he was doing was wrong. Father Duffy so lost his temper that he called Father Gonzalez a nigger.
Then, making an act of contrition, he apologized to Father Gonzalez the next day.
"You need not apologize to me," Father Gonzalez answered. "In this parish, in your world, if I had a choice, I would be nothing but a nigger. For I tell you, if your world should prevail, and if it were bound in heaven as it is on earth, in separation of people by the color of their skins, then I would dread the last judgment if I had lived my life in a white skin. You have done more than separate people. You have decided who can be rich and powerful and who must be poor. And I tell you, just as it is difficult for a rich man to enter heaven, so will it be for a white man in your parish. It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I do not pray so much for the blacks here. I pray for the whites. And I pray most of all, and I weep, for you, Father Duffy."
The trouble with some priests, Father Duffy thought, is that they take things too literally. They might as well become Baptists if they weren't going to use their reason.
Robert Hansen Jackson used his reason. He never set foot in a Catholic church again. His mother, however, continued to pray the rosary and attend mass, even when St. Augustine's Church showed a leak in the roof. She sat beneath the dripping water in the church, calling it God's sweet rain, and the holiest water of all.
And when she died, she was buried in the new Negro cemetery, never having missed mass a day in her life. Robert Jackson left the island. He was fourteen.
He floated around the Charleston docks for a year, but breaking his back for survival was not his game. One night, by himself, he climbed into a window of a doctor's office where he knew a large supply of morphine was kept. He could sell it big in New Orleans, while the police would undoubtedly look for a black man traveling north.
He was caught. An elderly white man with a pistol interrupted the thrust of a bottle into Robert's brown paper bag. He did it with a bullet.