The cop smiled. “We all got to go when the wagon comes. Isn’t that what they say here in Harlem?”
“Yes, sir, the wagon of the Lord.”
“Whose body is it?”
“Nobody can claim it now,” Goldy said. “We just take it and bury it.”
The cops were tired of trying to get any sense out of the nun. They shrugged and got back into their patrol car and drove away.
16
Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.
That is Harlem.
The farther east it goes, the blacker it gets.
East of Seventh Avenue to the Harlem River is called The Valley. Tenements thick with teeming life spread in dismal squalor. Rats and cockroaches compete with the mangy dogs and cats for the man-gnawed bones.
The apartment where Slim and Imabelle lived was on Upper Park Avenue, between 129th and 130th Streets. That part of The Valley was called the Dusty Bottom of the Coal Bin.
The trestle of the New York Central railroad, coming from Grand Central out of ground at 95th Street and crossing overtop at the 125th Street Station, runs down the center of the street in place of the park in the downtown section from which the avenue derives its name.
It converges onto the trestle of the Third Avenue Elevated line, then curves across the Harlem River into the Bronx and the big wide world beyond.
Up there in Harlem, Park Avenue is flanked by cold-water, dingy tenement buildings, brooding between junk yards, dingy warehouses, factories, garages, trash-dumps where smart young punks raise marihuana weed.
It is a truck-rutted street of violence and danger, known in the underworld as the Bucket-of-Blood. See a man lying in the gutter, leave him lay, he might be dead.
The fat black men in their black garments in the creeping black hearse were part of the eerie night. The old Cadillac motor, in excellent repair, purred softly as a kitten. Snow floated vaguely through the dim lights.
“That’s it,” Goldy pointed out.
Jackson looked at a doorway to one side of the dirty broken plate-glass windows of a hide shop. A moth-eaten steer’s head stared back at him through mismatched glass eyes. His skin sprouted goose pimples. He had come to the end of the trail and he was so scared he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.
“Just park right here,” Goldy said. “Makes no difference.”
Jackson brought the hearse to a stop and doused the lights.
A truck rumbled past, headed downtown toward the Harlem Market beyond 116th Street, leaving a darker gloom in its wake.
He and Goldy peered up and down the deserted street. Jackson felt his flesh crawl.
“Can they see us?” he asked.
“Not if they ain’t looking.”
That wasn’t what Jackson meant, but he didn’t argue. He reached beneath his overcoat for his iron pipe.
“It ain’t time for your club yet,” Goldy cautioned.
Jackson was reluctant to get out of the hearse.
“I’m going to leave the motor running,” he said.
“What for? You want to get it stolen?”
“Nobody’d steal a hearse.”
“What you talking about? These folks over here’ll steal a blind man’s eyes.”
Goldy alighted to the sidewalk noiselessly. Jackson took a deep breath and followed. They went across the sidewalk, entered a long, narrow hall lit by a dim fly-specked bulb. Graffiti decorated the whitewashed walls. Huge genitals hung from crude dwarfed torsos like a harvest of strange fruit. Someone had drawn a nude couple in a sex embrace. Others had added to it. Now it was a mural.
It was a long hall, diminishing into shadow. At the far end stairs climbed steeply into pitch darkness.
Goldy led the way, tiptoeing, the hem of his long black gown sweeping the dirty floor. He went noiselessly up the wooden stairs, disappeared so suddenly in the overhead dark that Jackson’s scalp twitched. Jackson followed, his fat flesh running with ice cold sweat. He took out his pipe again and gripped the taped handle.
The dark hallways above smelled of stale urine and neglected dirt.
Goldy climbed to the third floor, went down the hall to the door at the front. When Jackson caught up he saw the dull blue gleam of Goldy’s revolver in the dark.
Goldy knocked softly on the scabby brown door, once, then three times rapidly, once more, then twice rapidly.
“Is that the signal?” Jackson asked in a whisper.
“How the hell do I know?” Goldy whispered in reply.
Silence greeted them.
“Maybe they’ve left,” Jackson whispered.
“We’ll soon find out.”
“Then what we going to do?”
Goldy gestured for silence, knocked again, softly, changing the signal.
“What are you doing that for if you don’t know the signal?”
“I’m crossing ’em up.”
“You think more than just Slim is here?”
“What the hell do I care? As long as the gold is here.”
“Maybe they’ve taken it.”
Goldy waited and knocked again, softly, giving another signal.
From behind the door a cautious voice asked, “Who there?” It sounded like the voice of a woman with her mouth held close to the panel.
Goldy poked Jackson in the ribs with the muzzle of his revolver, signaling him to answer the voice. But it gave Jackson such a scare he bolted like a wild horse and his pipe flew out and hit the door with a bang that sounded like a gunshot in the pitch-black, silent hall.
“Who there?” a high feminine voice asked in panic.
“It’s me, Jackson. Is that you, Imabelle?”
“Jackson!” the voice said in amazement. It sounded as though it had never heard of Jackson.
Silence reigned.
“It’s me, honey. Your Jackson.”
After a moment the voice asked suspiciously, “If you is Jackson what is the first name of your boss?”
“Hosea. Hosea Exodus Clay. You know that as well as me, honey.”
“What a square,” Goldy muttered to himself.
A lock was turned, then another, then a bolt was slipped back. The door opened a crack, held by an iron chain.
A dim droplight was burning in a squalid bedroom. Jackson stuck his shiny black face into the crack of light.
“Oh, sugar!” The chain was unhooked and the door flung open. “Lawd, is I glad to see you!”
Jackson had just time to see that she was dressed in a red dress and a black coat before she fell into his arms. She smelled like burnt hair-grease, hot-bodied woman, and dime-store perfume. Jackson embraced her, holding the iron pipe clutched against her spine. She wriggled against the curve of his fat stomach and welded her rouge-greasy mouth against his dry, puckered lips.
Then she drew back.
“Lawd, Daddy, I thought you’d never come.”
“I came as soon as I could get here, honey.”
She held him at arms’ length, looked at the pipe still gripped in his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full, cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red, and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled bedroom-eyes.
The man drowned.
When he came up, he stared back, passion cocked, his whole black being on a live-wire edge. Ready! Solid ready to cut throats, crack skulls, dodge police, steal hearses, drink muddy water, live in a hollow log, and take any rape-fiend chance to be once more in the arms of his high-yellow heart.