He reached out and grabbed Shaw by the shoulder.
Shaw swung round. “Just one moment,” he said calmly.
“White trash!” The Negro’s lips pulled back over discoloured teeth and he spat. The result hit full in Shaw’s face and phlegm dribbled down his cheek. Shaw brought up his knee, hard, right into the man’s groin; and as the Negro doubled up he straightened him again with a skin-splitting jab in the mouth. The Negro went backwards into the moving mob, clawing at his face, bringing two more men down with him. The blood-lust was up and all three men were trampled into the sidewalk.
The police sirens had come in close by this time and Shaw grabbed Flame again.
“This is where we get out and we do it fast,” he snapped. “Come on!” He brought out his gun and pushed her into the open and they ran for the corner of the block, pushing through the mob, stumbling over screaming, bloodied bodies. A big Negro came for Shaw, who used the butt of the Browning. The man flopped backwards, blood pouring from his head. Then they saw a patrol car coming in and heard the sirens of more cars closing from the opposite direction, pressing into the fighting men and women. They were hemmed right in now.
Shaw stopped, breathing hard. He snapped at Flame, “If the police pick us up, they’re going to say we caused this riot.” He shielded his eyes from the glare of headlights, made out behind those lights the figures of the policemen jumping out with guns in their fists. Just then the mob, pressured from the other end, began to sway back in their direction and they found themselves overtaken. They kept their feet with difficulty as the mob carried them backwards and forwards; police were coming in now from both ends of the street and there was more firing. The patrolmen were swinging nightsticks, hitting out hard to right and left. There was a Negro woman close to Shaw, a young girl who was crying in terror as the police battered a way through. Her white dress, splashed with blood, had been ripped to shreds and she was almost naked. She was shaking badly and seemed about to fall and Shaw did what he could to shield her as well as Flame from the rampaging, maddened fighters. Then he saw a tall White patrolman close in and lift his nightstick and start to bring it down on the Negro girl’s shoulder.
Shaw yelled but his voice was lost in the mob’s blood-lust din. As the stick came down he made a grab for it. The blow was deflected and the patrolman didn’t like it. The girl, after a swift glance of astonished gratitude at Shaw, moved away, still crying. Then the policeman went down, slugged from behind, and a moment later Shaw himself felt something like a brick wall hit the back of his head, there was a sudden burst of red fire in his brain, and he went out. The last thing he heard was Flame’s scream.
Chapter Eight
When Shaw came round it was daylight and there was wetness on his forehead; Flame was bathing his wounds. He heard something like a sigh of relief when the girl realized he’d come round. She suspended bathing operations and mopped his face dry. “How’s the head?” she asked.
He moved his limbs experimentally and found that he was lying on something soft. It was, in fact, a divan bed. He tried to grin up at the girl. The effort hurt and he stopped trying. “Bloody,” he told her truthfully. “There’s a cat on the floor above… stamping its feet, hard.”
“There’s no room above,” she told him. “We’re in a penthouse. It’s luxury. Take a look around when you feel fit enough.”
“I will,” he promised, “just as soon as I’m able to appreciate such things.” He closed his eyes again for a while, then asked, “Where are we, Flame, and why? What happened after I was mugged?”
She said, “Plenty happened and I did a lot of fast talking, which is why you’re here at all. I hope you’re grateful.” She bent and kissed him on the forehead. The touch of her lips was light as thistledown.
“I am,” he said. “But just answer the question, there’s a good girl.…”
“Right.” She stood back and flipped her bag open, took out a gold case and lit a cigarette with a snap of a gold lighter. Smoke wreathed into an early sunbeam, reached Shaw and almost made him gag. “Cigarette?”
He shuddered. “Don’t tempt me to violence.”
“Okay,” she said off-handedly, pushing back a strand of ash-blonde hair. “Now the story. You were slugged by a White cop who’d taken a dislike to you after you stopped his pal smashing a Negro girl’s shoulder for life. Now, that slugging from a White cop did you one hell of a lot of good — seeing you got it for helping the Black kid. If it hadn’t been for that, sonny boy, I doubt if all my talk’d have helped.”
“I see. So where are we, currently?”
She sat down on the bed beside him and said, “We’re still in Harlem and we’re in the apartment of one of Harlem’s big boys. The name’s Josephson and he’s a buddy of Omofouloo’s. Which, I need hardly add, is the prime reason we were picked out from that mob the way we were—”
Shaw butted in. “Kiss me,” he said loudly.
She looked surprised. “Sure you feel like it?”
“Never more so.” When her face was close to his own he whispered, “Bugs, Flame. A thousand to one this apartment’s bugged. Go on with what you were saying, but whisper it right in my ear.”
“Okay,” she said. She was lying right beside him now, in the crook of his arm with their heads together. She went on, “Us being with each other, the boys reckoned you could be a pal of Big Pete’s too, and they weren’t leaving you to chance. Naturally, Josephson checked that, but by that time he knew what you’d done and I’d gone into my eulogy for the defence as well.”
“Why?” he asked curiously. “Why did you do that, Flame?”
She gave him a funny look, right into his eyes. “God knows,” she whispered back, “and that’s honest. Let’s just say I don’t exactly hate your guts, sonny boy! I guess no woman in her senses ever would do that. Want to know what I told them?”
“Very much, I do.”
“Well, I told this Josephson I’d known you once in Britain — I’ve been in London, that’s genuine — and you were okay. You’d come over here, I said, quoting what you’d all but told me yourself, to eye the rackets and see what fitted you best, and you’d naturally contacted me. I said you had no feelings against the Negroes. To you all men were equal, except cops… or words to that effect.”
“Uh-huh. And what racket was I in, back in London?”
“I said I didn’t know, that you always kept your trap shut tight like any sane guy in a racket should.”
He nodded; he was feeling a shade better now and was able to take in his surroundings. Flame had said it was luxury; it was. There was a french window that looked out over the Hudson and beyond to New Jersey, and this window had drapes of a thick gold material; the carpet was so deep with pile it curled around the feet of an armchair covered with flowered brocade. The sheets on the superbly comfortable divan were purest silk. There was a television and a radio and a lacquered Chinese cabinet that looked as though it might contain drinks. Shaw stopped looking and instead concentrated on Flame. He said, “I’d better tell you about my work, though as a matter of fact I’d find it easier to tell you what I didn’t do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it was pretty general. Anything that turned up and could show a profit. I live on my wits, as they say.”