“Just so he’s not shot on the street,” Quinn said. “He did nothing illegal.”
“If he keeps the gun in its case he’ll be all right,” Doc said. “The Chief gave orders today if anybody shoots, burns, loots or rapes, blast ’em. We all got twelve-gauge with twenty rounds of double-aught buck, and if one of the boys sees Tremont flashing that AR-15, he’s one gone gosling. The Chief served five years in the Pacific and he’s tough.” Doc was wearing his 1956 narrow-brim gray straw hat with a black band, his equivalent of a riot helmet. He was natty, as usuaclass="underline" a two-button dark gray suit with slash pockets, black silk tie, cordovan wingtips.
“I’ll have Tremont keep the gun under cover,” Quinn said.
“Then maybe he won’t have a problem. I’ll be somewhere downtown. Page me through the switchboard, I’ll be there in five minutes, unless Albany explodes. White guys in a car threw Molotovs at blacks over on Clinton Square and we hear whites are tooling around with shotguns. I already heard vengance talk for this thing here.”
Quinn had called Jake Hess after his interview with the Mayor about some way of surrendering Tremont, and would Jake represent him if he did surrender?
“Savior of assassins, is this a new facet of your career?” Jake asked.
“My grandfather quoted Montesquieu that the people should be judged by laws, and the lives of the lowest subject should be safe, but that the Pasha’s head should be always in danger.”
“And you want me to represent the man who endangered the Pasha’s head.”
“The Pasha was in no danger from Tremont. I just want him safe and judged by the law. He qualifies as one of the lowest subjects in this republic, and he’s a good guy.”
“I never quarrel with Montesquieu,” Jake said. “Tell me when to show up.”
Quinn could feel the tension in the Palace lobby — it was in the air like pollen. A thirteen-year-old white boy had been hit on the head by a black teen, or maybe he was pushed or fell down some balcony stairs, and he died with his pockets inside out. Doc said this was the third incident in the last hour, in or outside the theater, of menacing black kids asking white kids for money. One white who didn’t ante up was hit with a bottle. Police were looking for witnesses but Palace patrons only wanted their money back. Doc said six blacks had been arrested and one was a Brother, Roy Mason.
“On what charge?”
Doc didn’t know.
Quinn had seen the film Up Against the first day it played the Palace, for he knew Julian Stewart, the film’s star as well as its scriptwriter. Quinn had worked with Julian on the Post in Havana in 1957 when Max was editor. Julian was doing rewrite and copyediting when word came to Max from on high to fire Julian. He was a New York lefty playwright and actor and his Cuban wife, also black, was a communist. Max refused to fire the man for his color and his wife’s politics and so Max was fired. Your shining hour, Max, no matter what else, you son of a bitch.
In the film Julian played a character named Blink, unreliable, a drinker, not bright, ousted from a radical Black Power organization. Angry over the rejection, Blink betrays his friend, the organization’s leader, to the police for money — Judas in a black Chicago ghetto in 1967. Julian acted it well and his story reflected the deadly tension Black Power was now generating in America’s big cities. Quinn saw the film with an audience of a thousand, mostly black. Every time a black revolutionary dissed or shot a white man a cheer went up, and a cry of “black power.” When a black went down the call was “white power,” but not so many voices. Quinn hadn’t known Max was in the film, playing a detective. Obviously Max had kept his connection to Julian after Havana, but he’d been on the showbiz fringe since his Bing days. Max the spy, the editor, the actor, the criminal, the ongoing son of a bitch.
Quinn sat on the aisle in the third row of chairs set up in the First Church’s basement. He heard Claudia’s voice and turned to greet her. She was enormous in a starched pink and white vertical-striped, short-sleeved cotton housedress to her ankles, her hair rolled in thick waves, and Quinn thought her flamboyantly lovely. She took his hand and shook her head at this mess, it never ends, then sat in a chair to the rear of the dais, staring into the crowd, her small smile missing, her lips moving in a silent whisper.
The protest had been conceived by Baron Roland to mount grievances against landlords and police — black youths beaten and jailed as gangs, the Brothers harassed, social agencies punished for helping groups like Claudia’s, riots elsewhere bringing change from City Hall, but not here. Then Matt was silenced and Bobby shot, and Claudia marshaled her troops to raise hell — and here they came — three hundred in a room for two hundred. Three TV stations and both newspapers here to cover it.
Penny, who this afternoon predicted a disaster to Matt, was sitting with a young black man Quinn didn’t know, both talking with Roland who looked roosterish with a forum this large. Quinn counted at least two spies from the Albany machine, plus half a dozen white and black clerics, two Franciscan priests and a cluster of students from Siena supporting Matt, the campus hero, and three College of Saint Rose nuns who supported everything Claudia did, and Father Howard Hubbard, just out of the seminary and grad school, working out of Holy Cross with the neighborhood groups, including Claudia’s. Quinn saw a sizeable number of white first-timers he assumed were Catholics outraged over diocesan toadying to City Hall. Half the crowd was black, mostly women from seven neighborhood groups like Claudia’s, for whom this was a major moment, and — can it be, just inside the door, Tremont, is that you?
Baron Roland spoke first, how great so many are here to stand for Father Matt. Tomorrow morning we picket both the diocese and City Hall, please join us. He gave the latest word on Bobby and said he believed he was shot because he had become a spokesman for the black race, just as Martin Luther King was killed because he had become the black messiah. Women were weeping in Rio de Janeiro, Ralph Abernathy was leading prayers at the Poor People’s Campaign in Resurrection City, Willy Brandt had likened Bobby’s shooting to Greek tragedy, and the president of Chile said it has caused all men in the world to tremble. Roland asked for a silent prayer, then introduced Claudia, the outstanding leader of Better Streets, the group Father Matthew worked with. Claudia stood up so quickly her chair fell backward; but with fervid purpose she moved her great weight to the microphone, made her hands into fists and shook them.
“I’m mad, I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry because when I asked the Mayor to come to the South End and see how bad things were he said he already knew, and I said I hope he chokes. I don’t mean that. When I said that the devil had a hold of me. I also said I’m goin’ up there and throw a brick through his window, but that was the devil again. I don’t wish no bad things for the Mayor. I gotta die myself. S’pose I died with that statement on me. I’d bust hell wide open.
“I’m mad ’cause they’re takin’ Father Matt away from us. They say he can’t come see us no more. When this man walk our streets it’s like he’s blessin’ ’em, like he’s blessin’ us all. He been down here a year helpin’ make those old houses somethin’ we can live in, roofs leakin’, rats runnin’, so cold in winter the water pipes bust. Kids sleigh-ride in the hall and tell their teachers they sleep in a room with diamonds, which is ice. You go out in the mornin’ and gangsters hustlin’ our kids to buy their junk. Wineheads sleepin’ on the street and you can’t leave no clothes on the line ’cause they steal everything.