He got off at 145th Street and Lenox Avenue. As soon as he came up from the subway kiosk, he took off the sandwich boards. He was in Harlem now and he didn’t need them anymore.
He walked to Eighth Avenue and started to enter a doorway to one side of the Silver Moon Bar.
“Pst, pst,” someone called from the adjoining doorway.
He looked around and saw an old colored woman beckoning to him. He went over to see what she wanted.
“Don’t go in there,” she warned him. “They’s two white ’lice-men in there.”
She didn’t know him from Adam’s tomcat, but it was the rigid code of colored people in Harlem to stick together against white cops; they were quick to warn one another when white cops were around, there was no telling who might be wanted.
He looked around for the prowl car, tensed and ready to take off.
“They’s plainclothes dicks,” she elaborated. “And they snuck up here in that ordinary-looking Ford.”
He gave one look at the parked Ford sedan and took off down Eighth Avenue without waiting to thank her. His real cool brain was thinking up a breeze. He figured the only reason two white dicks could be in that tenement at that particular time was they were looking for the African. That was just what he wanted. The only thing wrong was they were looking for the African too soon. That meant they had got something on the African he didn’t know about.
After covering two blocks he figured it was safe enough to turn into a bar. Then he remembered he didn’t have any money, so he had to keep on down to 137th Street where he had a friend who ran a tobacco shop as a front for a numbers drop and a connection where the pushers dropped by and sold teen-age school kids sticks of marijuana and doctored up decks of heroin.
His friend was an old man called Daddy Haddy who had white leprous-looking splotches on his leathery tan skin. It was choking hot in the small, dark, musty shop but Daddy Haddy wore a heavy brown sweater and a black beaver hat pulled down low enough to touch the rims of his black smoked glasses. He looked at Pinky without a sign of recognition.
“What you want, Mac?” he asked suspiciously in a high falsetto voice.
“What’s the matter with you?” Pinky said angrily. “You going blind? Can’t you see I is Pinky?”
Daddy Haddy looked at him through his smoked glasses. “You is ugly as Pinky,” he admitted. “And you got the size for it. But what is you doing in that skin? You fall in some blackberry juice?”
“I dyed myself. The cops is looking for me.”
“Git out of here, then,” Daddy Haddy said in alarm. “You want to get me knocked off?”
“Ain’t nobody seen me come in here, and you seen for yourself that don’t nobody know me,” Pinky argued.
“Well, say what you want and then beat it,” Daddy Haddy conceded grudgingly. “The way that dye is running you ain’t going to be blue for long.”
“All I want you to do is send Wop up to the corner of 145th Street to look out for a African and warn him not to go back home ’cause the police is looking for him.”
“Umph!” Daddy Haddy grunted. “How he going to know a African from anybody else?”
“This African don’t look like nobody else. He wear a white head rag and a Mother Hubbard dress in four different colors over his pants.”
“What’s he done?”
“He ain’t done nothing. That’s how he dress all the time.”
“I mean done for the police to be looking for him.”
“How I know what he’s done,” Pinky whined irritably. “I just don’t want him to get caught yet.”
“Besides which, Wop is high,” Daddy Haddy said. “He’s so high everything looks like four colors to him and he’s liable to stop some old woman, thinking she’s the African.”
“I thought you was my friend,” Pinky whined.
The old man looked at his purple-dyed face knotting up and gave the matter a second thought.
“Wop!” he shouted.
A coal-black boy, wafer thin, with a long egg-shaped head and slanting eyes, came in from the back room. He wore the white T-shirt, blue jeans and canvas sneakers of any other black boy his age in Harlem. The difference was he had long, straight black hair and there were no whites to his obsidian eyes.
“What you want?” he asked in a gruff, unpleasant voice.
“You tell him,” Daddy Haddy said.
Pinky gave him the picture.
“What if the ’licemens already got him?” Wop asked.
“Then you hightail it away from there.”
“All right,” Wop said. “Press the skin.”
“I’ll see you tonight at Sister Heavenly’s,” Pinky promised. “If I ain’t there I’ll leave a sawbuck with Uncle Saint.”
“All right, daddy-o,” Wop said. “Don’t make me have to look for you.”
He took a pair of smoked glasses from his blue jeans, fitted them to his head, put both hands into his hip pockets and opened the door with his foot and stepped out into the light.
“Don’t bet too much on him,” Daddy Haddy warned.
“I ain’t,” Pinky said and followed Wop outside.
They went off in opposite directions.
12
“I know she got it,” Uncle Saint muttered to himself as he dug up the half-pint bottle of nitroglycerin he had buried in the garage. “Trying to look so innocent that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Think she can con old Uncle Saint. Long as I has knowed that double-crossing bitch.”
He muttered to himself as he worked. He was in a driving hurry, but he had to be careful with the stuff. Only five minutes had elapsed since Pinky left the house, but there was no telling when Sister Heavenly would return and he had to have it and gone by then.
“Don’t believe any more she’s going down to see Gus off than I believe in Santa Claus,” he muttered. “The truth ain’t in that lying bitch. She’s just as soon gone down to sell me to the police for some more protection as she is to have gone to fence the stuff, whatever it is.”
The nitroglycerin was in a green glass bottle filled to the tip and closed securely with a rubber stopper to make it airtight. He had buried it there fifteen years before when she had started thinking about getting rid of him because one of her lovers had objected to having him around.
“She going to get rid of me all right,” he muttered. “But she going to pay for twenty-five years of service.”
He had wrapped the bottle in a section of rubber inner tube, binding it with a roll of adhesive tape. The ground had hardened during fifteen years and the bottle seemed to have gone in deeper. He dug at first with a spade, measuring the excavation with a wooden folding ruler. He had buried it two feet deep. When he got down to twenty inches he discarded the spade and began digging with a kitchen spatula. But he had to go another ten inches before he scraped the top of the package and it had been slow work with the spatula. Time was passing. Sweat poured from him like showers of rain. He still wore the ancient chauffeur’s uniform and cap and he felt like he was inside a coke oven.
But now he worked very carefully, scraping the dirt from around the rotten package with a kitchen spoon.
Both the tape and the rubber had disintegrated and came away from the bottle like rotten cork. He went to extreme pains not to touch the bottle with the spoon.
“Wouldn’t that bitch be happy?” he muttered. “Come home and find me gone. Wouldn’t even have to bury me. Just have to fan away the dust.”
Finally the green bottle was uncovered. When he lifted it carefully, inch by inch from its resting place, the top of the rubber stopper fell away, but a thin layer remained covering the nitroglycerin. He held his breath until he straightened it right side up, then he gave a deep sigh.
The loaded shotgun lay on the ground beside him. Holding the bottle of nitroglycerin in his right hand, he reached out with his left hand and picked up the shotgun, then got to his feet like a weight lifter arising with two tons of steel.