“I’m a Sister of Mercy,” he said in a moaning wail. “I’m in the service of the Lord.”
“Don’t hand us that crap, we know who you are,” Hank said.
“She’s that nun who stools for them two darky dicks ain’t she? How you reckon she got in this deal?”
“How the hell do I know? Ask her.”
Jodie looked down into Goldy’s ash-gray face. There was no mercy in Jodie’s muddy brown eyes.
“Talk fast,” he said. “ ’Cause you ain’t got much time.”
The sound of the approaching train, transmitted by the iron tracks on the iron trestle, slowly grew louder.
“Listen—” Goldy whined.
A short sharp blast of the train whistle, signaling that it had crossed the river into Harlem, cut him off.
“Listen, I can help you get away with it. You’re strangers here, but I know this town in and out.”
Hank’s eyes narrowed. He was listening intently.
Jodie pulled his hand from his overcoat pocket, gripping the handle of his switch-blade knife. It had a push-button on the top of the handle, worked by the thumb, and when he pressed it a six-inch blade leaped forward with a soft click, gleaming dully in the dim light.
Goldy saw the blade from the corners of his eyes and scrambled to his knees.
“Listen, I can hide it for you.”
His instinctive fear of cold steel made his eyes run tears.
“Listen, I can cover for you—”
Jodie showed his hatred for a stooly by slapping off Goldy’s cap. The gray wig came off with it, leaving the round head exposed.
“This black mother-raper is a man,” he said, moving around behind Goldy.
“Listen to him,” Hank said.
“I got a hideout can’t nobody find. Listen, I can take care of you-all. I can cover with the cops. I got ins at the precinct. You know my secret now. You know you can trust me. Listen, I can hide all of you, and there’s enough for—” His voice was lost in the thunder of the approaching train.
Hank bent down to hear him better, staring into his face.
“Who else is with you?”
“Ain’t nobody, I swear—”
The Diesel locomotive of the train was rumbling overhead. The trestle shook, shaking the stanchions. The street shook, the building shook, the whole black night was quaking.
Goldy knelt as though in prayer, knees planted on the wet, dirty-black shaking street, his fat body shaking beneath the flowing folds of the robe, shaking as though praying in a void of pure terror.
Jodie leaned forward quickly behind him. He was shaking too.
“Lying mother—,” he said in a voice of rage.
Goldy realized instantly his mistake. Somebody had had to help him bring down the trunk, it was too heavy to handle alone.
“Ain’t nobody but—”
Jodie reached down with a violent motion, clutched him over the face with the palm of his left hand, put his right knee in Goldy’s back between the shoulder blades, jerked Goldy’s head back against the pressure of his knee, and cut Goldy’s taut black throat from ear to ear, straight down to the bone.
Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the ancient bones and the aching muscles and the t.b. lungs and the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls. Shaking plaster from the ceilings, mortar from between the bricks of the building walls. Shaking the rats between the walls, the cockroaches crawling over kitchen sinks and leftover food; shaking the sleeping flies hibernating in lumps like bees behind the casings of the windows. Shaking the fat, blood-filled bedbugs crawling over black skin. Shaking the fleas, making them hop. Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets, the sleeping cats, the clogged toilets, loosening the filth.
Hank jumped aside just in time.
The blood spurted from Goldy’s cut throat in a shower, spraying the black street, the front fender and front wheel of the hearse. It gleamed for an instant with a luminous red sheen on the black pavement. It dulled the next instant, turning dark, fading into deep purple. The first gushing stream slackened to a slow pumping fountain as the heart pumped out its last beats. The flesh of the wide bloody wound turned back like bleeding lips, frothing blood.
The sweet sickish perfume of fresh blood came up from the crap-smelling street, mingled with the foul tenement smell of Harlem.
Jodie stepped back and let the dying body flop on its back to the pavement, jerking and twisting inside the black gown in death convulsions as though having a frantic sex culmination with an unseen mate.
The thunder of the train diminished into the brackish sound of metal grinding on metal as the train braked for a stop at the 125th Street Station.
Jodie bent down and wiped his knife blade on the hem of Goldy’s black gown. The stroke had been executed so quickly there was blood only on the knife blade.
He straightened up, pressed the button releasing the catch. The blade dangled loose. With a twist of his wrist he snapped the knife shut. The lock clicked. He put it back into his coat-pocket.
“I bled that mother-raper like a boar hog,” he said proudly.
“Talked himself into the grave.”
As though by speechless accord, Hank and Jodie looked up and down the street, up at the window of the third-story flat, into the dimly lit hall, examined the windows of the surrounding tenements.
Nothing was moving.
18
The short, sharp blast of a train whistle when it had crossed the river into Harlem awakened Jackson in a pool of terror.
He jumped to his feet, overturning the chair. He sensed someone striking at him from behind, ducked, and knocked the table aside. Wheeling about, he snatched the pipe from the table to knock Slim’s brains out.
But there wasn’t anybody.
“I must have been dreaming,” he said to himself.
He realized then that he’d been asleep.
“There’s a train coming,” he said.
His wits were still fuddled.
He noticed his chauffeur’s cap had fallen to the floor. He picked it up and brushed it off. But there was no dirt on it. The floor was spotlessly clean and still damp.
The scrubbed floor made him think of Imabelle. He wondered where she could have gone. To her sister’s in the Bronx, maybe. But they were sure to find her there. The police were looking for her too. He’d have to phone her sister as soon as he got the gold ore checked in the baggage room at the station. He wasn’t going to leave it at Goldy’s, no matter what anyone said.
Suddenly he was filled with a sense of haste.
He searched his pockets for some paper to write Imabelle a note in case she came back there looking for him and didn’t know where to find him. In his inside uniform pocket was a soiled sheet of stationery with Mr. Clay’s letterhead containing a list of funeral items. He found a stub of pencil in his side overcoat pocket and unfolded the paper onto the kitchen table. He scribbled hurriedly:
“Honey, look for my brother, Sister Gabriel, in front of Blumstein’s. He’ll tell you where I am at...”
He was about to sign his name when it occurred to him that Slim was coming back with Hank and Jodie.
“I ain’t thinking at all,” he muttered to himself, balled up the sheet of stationery and threw it into the corner.
The rising thunder of the approaching train brought back his nameless terror. He thought of a blues song his mother used to sing,
Suddenly he was running without moving. He was running on the inside. He didn’t have any time left to wonder where Imabelle had gone. Just time left to worry. Anyway, he’d gotten her away from Slim.