He unscrewed the cap and smeared the white cream thickly over his acid burns.
“Hank shouldn’t have done that,” Imabelle said.
“Shut up yourself!” Slim grated. “Don’t you know this old nun’s a stool pigeon?”
Goldy felt Imabelle looking at him curiously, and bowed his head over the gold cross as though absorbed in devout meditation.
“You suspect everybody,” Imabelle said to Slim. “How is she going to know what we talking about?”
“If you keep on talking you gonna make me have to cut her throat.”
“All of you is knife-happy.”
“Woe is past,” Goldy said prayerfully.
“It’s a good thing she’s hopped,” Slim muttered.
An ambulance came screaming up the street.
No one spoke again until they reached Knickerbocker Hospital. Slim stopped the taxi in front of the main entrance instead of having it circle the ramp to the emergency entrance. He followed Imabelle out and took her by the arm and hurried her up the stairs without stopping to pay the fare.
Goldy ordered the driver to circle the block. When they came back Slim and Imabelle were getting into a taxi ahead.
Goldy ordered his driver to follow them. The driver grumbled.
“I hope us ain’t getting in no trouble, ma’am.”
“ ‘There were four and twenty elders,’ ” Goldy quoted, giving the driver a prediction for the day’s number.
He knew that most folks in Harlem believed that holy people could look straight up into heaven and find the number coming out that day any time they wished.
The driver got the idea. He twisted his head and gave the nun a toothy grin. “Yas’m, four and twenty olders. Which one of them olders going to get here first, you reckon?”
“Four of the elders will lead the twenty,” Goldy said.
“Yas’m.”
The driver resolved to put five bucks on four twenty in each of Harlem’s four big books before noon that day as sure as his name was Beau Diddley.
They followed the taxi of Slim and Imabelle until it stopped before a dark cold-water tenement on Upper Park Avenue. But they’d stuck so close they had to go on past when the taxi stopped. Goldy crouched out of sight in the back seat. He knew they hadn’t got hep to his trailing them because they hadn’t tried to lose him, but he wasn’t sure whether they had recognized the taxi when it passed or not. It was a chance he had to take.
By the time they’d circled the block again, the other taxi was gone. Goldy watched the front of the tenement building, wondering whether he’d have to go inside and search for the flat.
But after a moment a light showed briefly in a front window on the third floor before the curtain was pulled. He was satisfied with that. He had the driver take him to the tobacco store on 121st Street.
Jackson was nowhere in sight. Goldy began to worry. He let himself into the store, went back to his room, lit the kerosene stove and cooked a C and M speedball over his alcohol lamp.
He had told Jackson to return there in case there was a rumble. But he had no way of knowing whether Jackson was dead or alive. And it was too early to ask at the precinct station. If anything had happened to either Grave Digger or Coffin Ed, the white cops might get suspicious and dig him too.
When the dope started working on his imagination, he could see everybody dead. He banged himself again to calm his fears.
14
When Jackson emerged from the narrow passageway, a crowd had already collected in the street. He looked like something the Harlem River had spewed up. His overcoat was torn, the buttons missing, the sleeve slashed, he was covered with black muck, dripping dirty slime; his mouth was swollen, his eyes were red, and he looked half dead.
But the other people didn’t look much better. The sound of pistol shooting and the screaming of the patrol car sirens had brought them rushing from their beds to see the cause of the excitement. It sounded like a battle royal taking place, and shootings and cuttings and folks dead and dying were a big show in Harlem.
Men, women and children had piled into the street, wrapped in blankets, two and three overcoats, pyjama legs showing over the tops of rubber overshoes, towels tied about their heads, draped with dusty rugs snatched hastily from the floor. Alongside some of the apparitions, Jackson looked like a man of elegance.
Most of them were milling about the police cordon that blocked the entrance to the alleyway on the other side of the Heaven, leading back to the shack where the shooting had taken place. Necks were craned, people stood on tiptoe, some sat astride others’ backs trying to see what was happening.
Only one man wrapped up in a dirty yellow blanket like a black cocoon saw Jackson slip from the hole. Two cops were approaching, so all he did was wink.
The cops were looking at Jackson suspiciously and preparing to question him when a fist fight broke out among the crowd on the other side. They hurried to join the group of harness cops converging on the fighters.
Jackson followed quickly, squeezed into the crowd.
“Let them niggers fight,” he heard somebody say.
“Start one fight and everybody wanna fight,” someone else said.
“Everybody in Harlem’s a two-gun badman anyway. All they need is some horses and some cows and they’d all be rustlers.”
Jackson couldn’t see the fighters, but he kept worming toward the center of the crowd, trying to get lost.
A man looked at him and said, “This joker’s been fighting too. Who you been fighting, shorty, yo’ old lady?”
Somebody laughed.
Jackson noticed a cop looking at him. He started moving in another direction.
“They done croaked a copper,” a voice said. “That’s what they done.”
The mob rolled back toward the cordon. The fist fight seemed to have been quelled.
“White copper?”
“Yeah, man.”
“They gonna be some ass flying every whichway in Harlem ’fore this night’s over.”
“You ain’t just saying it.”
Jackson had wormed to the edge of the crowd and found himself face to face with the two cops who’d first noticed him.
“Hey, you!” one of them called.
He ducked back into the crowd. The cops started plowing after him.
Suddenly the attention of the crowd was attracted by the sound of enraged dogs growling. It sounded like a pack of wolves battling over a carcass.
“Hey, man, look at dis!” someone yelled.
The mob surged in a solid mass toward the sound of fighting dogs, sweeping Jackson away from the pursuing cops.
On the other side of the Heaven, directly in front of the passage where Jackson had escaped, two huge dogs were rolling, snapping, growling, and slavering in a furious fight. One was a Doberman Pinscher the size of a grandfather wolf; the other a Great Dane as big as a Shetland pony. They belonged to two pimps who had been walking them at the time the shooting broke out. The pimps had to walk them two or three times every night because the flats they lived in were so small they had to keep the dogs chained up all the time, and the dogs howled and kept them awake. They’d taken them off the chains to let them run. The dogs were so vicious they’d started fighting on sight.
They rolled back and forth across the sidewalk, into the gutter and out again, fangs flashing in the dim light like mouths full of knives. The pimps were flailing the fighting dogs with their iron chains. Others scattered when the dogs rolled near.
“I got five bones says the black dog wins by a knockout,” a man said.
“Who you kidding?” another man replied. “I takes a black dog any day in the year.”
The cops neglected Jackson momentarily to separate the dogs. They approached cautiously with drawn pistols.