The colored maid was standing as she had stepped from the elevator. The basket of soiled clothes lay overturned on the floor where it had fallen from her hands. Her body was rigid. Her mouth formed an ellipsoid big enough to swallow an ostrich egg, showing the chewing edges of her molars, a white-coated tongue flatted between the bottom teeth and humped in the back against the tip of a palate which hung down like a blood-red stalagmite. Her neck muscles were corded. Her popeyed stare was fixed. Screams kept pouring from her mouth with an unvarying, nerve-shattering resonance.
The second gunman got his left arm free and slapped the hopped-up gunman twice across the face.
Sanity returned to the dilated pupils, along with terror.
He holstered the police positive in a right-shoulder sling, dropped the derringer into his right coat pocket, and went up the stairs as though the furies were after him.
“Not so fast, you hophead bastard!” the second gunman called from behind him. “Walk out into the street.”
11
The Queen Mary sailed at twelve noon sharp.
Wharf attendants said they had never witnessed so much confusion at the sailing of a Cunard Line ship.
Two of the tugboats on hand to ease the big ship from its mooring ran together. An able-bodied seaman was knocked into the drink and one of the tugboat captains choked on his false teeth.
Two stout businessmen celebrating the departure of their wives, along with a fat lady seeing off her daughter, fell off the dock and the Queen had to backwater until they were fished out.
The dock police trying to keep the people behind the guard lines were mobbed. Fights broke out; several people were trampled.
Fifteen hundred passengers were on board and five thousand people on the dock to see them off. With the blowing of the tugboat whistles, the shouting of orders, the screaming of goodbyes from six thousand five hundred throats, there was enough noise to arouse the inhabitants of a cemetery.
Authorities said it was due to the excessive heat. The threat of a thunderstorm had passed over and the sun beat down from a cloudless sky.
In the general confusion, no one gave Pinky a second glance. An international atmosphere prevailed; thoughts dwelled on faraway places and people. Those who saw him put him down as either an African politician, a Cuban revolutionary, a Brazilian snake charmer, or just a plain ordinary Harlem shoeshine boy.
Pinky was looking for the trunk.
While everyone’s attention was directed to the confusion on the dock, he looked through the pile of freight inside the shed at the end of the wharf.
One of the guards came back and caught him there.
“What you doing in here, boy? You know you ain’t got any business here.”
“I’m looking for Joe,” Pinky said, ducking and dodging like a halfwit to divert the guard’s suspicions.
Like all colored people, Pinky knew if he acted stupid enough the average white man would pass him off as a harmless idiot.
The guard looked at Pinky and suppressed a smile.
Pinky was sweating and where the dye had run he had big purple splotches across the back of his red jersey silk shirt, down the front, underneath the arms and on the seat of his Palm Beach pants. Sweat was running down his face, collecting on the knot of his chin strap to his hat and dripping to the floor.
“Joe who?” the guard asked.
“Joe the porter. You know Joe.”
“Look upstairs where they keep the passenger luggage; porters don’t work here,” the guard said.
“Yassah,” Pinky said and shuffled off.
A moment later the guard told a co-worker who had come over to join him, “See that darky there?” He pointed. “The one in the white hat and red shirt going upstairs.”
The second guard looked dutifully.
“He’s sweating ink,” the first guard said.
The second guard smiled indulgently.
“I mean it,” the first guard said. “Look there on the floor. That’s where he sweated.”
The second guard looked at the purple blots on the gray concrete floor and grinned unbelievingly.
The first guard grew indignant. “You don’t believe it? Go look at him for yourself.”
The second guard conceded with a nod.
The first guard relaxed. “I’ve heard of darkies sweating ink,” he said. “But this is the first time I’ve ever seen it.”
Pinky saw the trunk the moment he approached the section for the luggage that went aboard ship. All the luggage that had surrounded it had been loaded and it stood by itself.
He didn’t go near it. He seemed satisfied just by the sight of it.
The next thing was to find the African.
He took up a station behind a concrete pier underneath the railroad trestle and watched the people as they left the wharf. He didn’t anticipate any difficulty in locating him among the throng. He gonna look like a fly in a glass of buttermilk, he thought.
But after an hour he gave it up. If the African had been there to see Gus and Ginny off, he would have left by then.
He decided to go uptown and check with the African’s landlady. If he lost the African he was going to be caught holding the bag.
The African had a room at 145th Street and Eighth Avenue. The hell of it was how to get there without getting nabbed by the cops. It had occurred to him that he was beginning to look conspicuous with the dye running all over his clothes. Besides which he didn’t have but fifteen cents, and he couldn’t take a taxi if he had found a driver willing to take him.
While he was giving this some thought an old sandwichman shuffled along the sidewalk opposite the wharves, looking wistfully into all the bars he passed. Pinky’s mind was cool and sharp from the four speedballs he had loaded his veins with that morning.
He read the advertisement on the signboards hanging fore and aft the old man’s shoulders:
BLINSKY’S BURLESQUE
in Jersey City
50 Beautiful Girls 50
10 Glamorous Striptease Artistes 10
6 Zippy Comedians 6
GREATEST DISPLAY ON EARTH
Underneath some wit had written in red drawing crayon:
Beats Picasso
Pinky studied the old man, took in the battered straw hat, the bulbous red nose, the white stubble of two days’ whiskers, the ragged cuffs of baggy pants and the beat-up shoes with one sole flapping loose showing beneath the signboards. He tabbed him as a bum from Hoboken.
He cut across the traffic lane and approached the old bum.
“Is it true what they say?” he asked, shuffling from one foot to another and acting like a natural son of Uncle Tom. “Ah just come from Mississippi and Ah wants to know is it true.”
The old bum looked up at him from rheumy eyes.
“Is what true, Sam?” he said in a whiskey voice.
Pinky licked his purple lips with his big pink tongue. “Is it true all them white women shows theyself mother naked?”
The old bum grinned, exposing a couple of dung-colored snaggleteeth.
“Mother naked!” he croaked. “They ain’t even that. They done shaved off the feathers.”
“Ah sho do wish Ah could see ’em,” Pinky said.
That gave the bum an idea. He had been down there all morning hustling up trade among the truck drivers and longshoremen, and the barmen wouldn’t even let him enter the bars wearing his sign.
“You hold this sign while I go inside and see a friend and I’ll see what I can do for you,” he promised.
“Ah sho will,” Pinky said, helping the old bum pull the boards up over his head.
The old bum beat it for the nearest bar and disappeared inside. Pinky took off in the opposite direction and turned out of sight at the first corner. Then he stopped and hooked the boards over his head. It was a tight fit and the boards stuck out back and front like some newfangled water wings, but he felt covered. He walked toward Columbus Circle to catch the Broadway subway without any qualms.