He waited in the foyer and the girl was dead on time.
She was wearing a dark red dress now, tight fitting all the way down. She took his arm and they went out into the street, the hostile street that in the night-time gave Shaw the feeling it was a kettle about to boil over into the fire of riot.
He said, “I know it’s asking for the moon, but watch out for a cab.”
She laughed. “The moon’s right! Even in daytime, they drive through with their flags down and doors locked. Anyway, I like the walk. After being in that atmosphere, I need it, too!” She gave her shoulders a shake and Shaw caught her perfume. “I don’t live far.”
He asked in surprise, “You live in Harlem?”
“No,” she said, laughing again. “Of course not. But home’s only just outside the ghetto limits, just the same.”
“They tell me it’s risky, walking around Harlem at night.”
She looked up at him and he caught the sardonic gleam in her eyes as they came below one of the district’s few neon signs. “Scared?” she asked mockingly.
“I’m thinking only of you, my love!”
“Then don’t,” she told him, “because it just is not necessary. It so happens I’m a valuable property to the big boss of the Sex Kitten and he has made darn sure that fact is very widely known around town. The audiences are like dummies mostly, on the surface — they feel they’re above it or something, it’s psychological — but underneath they love it and they pay a lot of dollars to see me degrade myself. Anything happens to me, the boss sees to it someone’s carved up within two-three hours or sooner.” She grinned. “I’ve gotten me protection!”
“Useful, isn’t it, to have contacts,” Shaw said smoothly. “Who’s the boss, then?”
“No-one you’d know,” she told him, keeping step along the sidewalk and keeping disturbingly close. “Big Pete Omofouloo’s the name, all the way from Mississippi — and West Africa, way back. Descendant of the original blackbirds. Says his ancestors were chiefs or something. Maybe they were too. He acts like they were, anyway.”
“And you?” Her tone had been full of feeling and his hand tightened on her arm. “I don’t even know your name, yet.”
“Flame,” she said. “Flame Delaney. All the way from Portland, Oregon — and Ireland, way back.”
“Any chiefs in the pedigree?”
She laughed. “I’d doubt it. My great-great-grandfather blazed the Oregon trail, though, or so the family tell me.”
“How did you come,” he asked casually, “to work for the Sex Kitten?”
“That’s a long story and I guess it can wait. What about you?”
He shrugged. “That’s an even longer story, I expect. The bare essentials are name, David Layton, country of origin, Britain.” He’d checked in at the Vanderbilt as David Layton. “Occupation… that depends.”
“On what?”
“On the pickings.”
“What’re you doing over in the States?”
“Looking for the pickings,” he told her with a grin. “Call it — prospecting, if you like. I’m easy.”
“Do I take it,” she asked, giving him a wicked look under a street light, “that you don’t necessarily earn your living the honest way, David boy?”
He grinned again. “That depends, too — on what you mean by honest and necessarily. Let’s just say I’m not all that particular.”
“And you’ve come to Harlem looking for easy money, right?”
“Wrong,” he said promptly. “Quick money, perhaps. That doesn’t have to be synonymous with easy money.”
“You’re right there!” She wrinkled her nose. “I reckon you’re thinking I might be able to help you, and that’s why you waited.…”
“That’s not the whole reason, but I admit the thought did cross my mind. Would you?”
She shook her head, but slowly as if reluctant. “I don’t have that much influence. Big Pete likes me all right, but he’s no White lover. Not of White men, anyway. Besides,” she added, “I don’t know a darn thing about you, do I?”
He said, “That’s something we can rectify, Flame dear.”
“Listen,” she said firmly, and stopped, and turned to face him outside an all-night drug store. “Let’s keep this strictly between you and me and the bedpost. I’m somewhat out on a limb as it is, doing strip in a jig dive. I’m not sticking my neck out any more than that, not for you or the President.”
“President?” he asked, looking into her eyes.
Her puzzlement was entirely genuine. “We don’t have a king and queen, or didn’t you know?”
“Sorry,” he said. “My mind was wandering. So — you won’t help a poor limey to get a start in a new land, h’m?”
“No,” she said.
“All right, I won’t press the point,” he murmured. “Now let’s go.” They moved on towards the corner of the block. The sidewalks were dead and dreary, empty but for occasional Negro youths and their girls, or drabbles of aged and decrepit men and women with no hope in their eyes, and always the policemen, patrolling in pairs. There were no lights behind the largely uncurtained windows in the tenements farther along, but a few fat Negro women stood about arguing, huge fleshy arms crossed below drooping breasts, waiting perhaps for their menfolk to come back from the drug stores and the bars and the bowling alleys. A handful of skinny, wizened children played, babies bawled, a young woman showed off her body and gave inviting smiles and comment to men passing along the block. Farther on a gang of lithe, animal-dangerous youths roamed, silent, menacing, black hoodlums elbowing the White man and his White girl off the sidewalk.
Shaw quickened his pace, pulling Flame along with him. She wasn’t in the least worried, putting her trust in the boss of the Sex Kitten. But Shaw knew that patrolman earlier had been so right and he wasn’t as confident in the omnipotence of Big Pete Omofouloo as the girl. Things could go wrong, and though Big Pete might certainly exact vengeance, he couldn’t exact it until after the event and it wasn’t particularly comforting to his protégés to be under his aegis if they had been carved up in the meantime.
They walked on towards the Harlem limits.
They still had too far to go by the time they heard the sudden burst of gunfire and then saw the man running down the sidewalk behind them, coming fast in their direction.
Shaw snapped, “Cover — quick!”
Pushing the girl ahead of him he ran for a darkened shop doorway a few yards farther on and he had just flung Flame inside when more bullets zipped along the street. The man on the run was abreast of the shop doorway when he gave a wild, animal scream and went down smack on the sidewalk. There was no more shooting after this but Shaw heard running feet closing in. The man who had been shot was trying to drag himself clear, pulling his body painfully along the road, legs sliding after the trunk through a widening pool of blood, like a dog that had had its hindquarters run over. He didn’t get far before he died, and he died when a man raced up the street behind and jumped him, landing heavily with both feet on the bullet-riddled base of the spine.
Then the real trouble started.
Some twenty dark forms flitted, coming swiftly from the direction of the earlier firing. Street lights glinted on steel as they went past. The knives were out. Shaw kept dead still, hiding Flame with his body, pressing her back and feeling the rapid beat of her heart, the warmth of her breath on his neck.
She said, “This is outside Big Pete’s jurisdiction, I guess.”
He silenced her. “Listen…”
They heard the other mob, coming in from the opposite end of the block. There were women among them, as he saw a few moments later. Within seconds the fighting had started on a big and vicious scale, within seconds after that the street seemed to be filled as reinforcements for both sides came in from the tenements. And soon after that the urgent wail of sirens announced that the patrol cars were coming in. Figures rushed past the doorway where Shaw stood. He turned away again, went into a fresh clinch with Flame, hiding their White skins, but it wasn’t long before they were spotted. A running figure, glancing sideways, checked and came back on his tracks.