Night of Power, page 3
While musing thus, Russell phoned ahead on the car phone; the rental agent was waiting to meet them on the corner of 23rd Street. A short thin fussy man with a phony British accent, who had obviously had a few drinks recently, he greeted them with a harassed air and directed them back uptown to 31st between First and Second.
“Really, you’re quite fortunate, Mr. Grant,” he said. “It’s donkey’s years since I’ve had an apartment as nice as this one to let. I think you’ll be pleased.”
At twenty-two hundred U.S. a month, Russell thought, I’d better be. “So my father tells me, Mr. Shaw. He refused to describe the flat, but he insisted that if I didn’t like it he’d refund my money. I must admit I’m intrigued.”
When they reached 31st, Russell could not find a parking space anywhere near the address he wanted.
“Oh good luck,” Shaw cried, adjusting an invisible monocle. “Look there: a parking space.”
“Where?”
“There. A good omen, what?”
“But that’s a fire hydrant.”
Shaw looked uncomprehending—then suddenly laughed, just a bit too loudly to be polite. “Mr. Grant, you obviously have been away from New York for some time. This city has not had the resources to chase down unpaid tickets for years. I use my own for bookmarks.”
Russell involuntarily touched his jacket over the inside pocket which held his own tickets. “But won’t they tow me away?”
“They haven’t the trucks or drivers. Those they have they tend to concentrate in business districts. I can’t guarantee you’ll be safe—but I would park there. Of course, my nephew is a detective.”
Russell parked there. “Why do they still give out tickets?”
“You know, there’s been considerable speculation about that. My nephew’s theory is that the police officials want to keep their men from more serious mischief. But the prevailing theory is that the Borough President’s brother-in-law owns the company that prints the tickets.”
The neighborhood seemed okay, Russell saw as he locked up the car. Pedestrians were well-dressed; the buildings were, for New York, in excellent shape—which was to say that they would probably have been tolerated in Halifax’s worst slum areas. He adjusted his expectations for the new apartment accordingly—and was therefore pleasantly startled when Shaw led them inside.
In the first place, it was on the ground floor. Such treasures are rare in New York, and out-of-towners seldom get a crack at one. Second, he saw when Shaw unsnapped the third lock and let them in, it was enormous—fully the size of the living room-dining room of the Grants’ Halifax home. So big, that is, that he began to believe that a family of three could really live there for three months without going insane. There were indeed two bedrooms, and the master bedroom actually had space for a bureau and a small night-table in addition to the bed. The apartment was furnished adequately if tastelessly, in a style which Russell immediately dubbed Space-Age Public Washroom.
The location and size were enough to persuade him that twenty-two hundred U.S. was a good deal—with the dollar conversion it was only twice the amount of his monthly mortgage bite back home. But then Shaw, with the air of a runty pseudo-British Santa Claus, unlocked and opened a door at the far end of the room which served as living room, dining room, kitchen and study, and Russell’s jaw dropped. Dena and Jennifer both cried out.
There was a garden out there.
All three Grants clustered round while Shaw unlocked the security-gate and slid it back, then hurried outside together. “By the chamber-pot of the Buddha,” Russell breathed.
“Jennifer,” Dena said, “tell me what you see.”
“Like a garden.”
“Thank God. If you see it too, it must be there. I thought my software had dropped a byte.”
“As you can see,” Shaw said smugly, “it wants tending. But I think you’ll find it agreeable on hot nights.”
Anywhere else in the world, the garden—qua garden—would have been a bad joke. It comprised three brick-lined islands of earth defining a T-shaped path which led from the concrete patio on which they stood. The soil was sandy and miserable; it supported assorted knee-high weeds and three twisted, forlorn and self-conscious looking trees of a species that Russell, an experienced woodsman, could not identify.
But it existed. It contained as much square footage as the apartment itself, and the sun shone on it, and cool breezes blew through it, and green things lived in it. It was well fenced off from similar courtyards on all three sides, and better than half of it could not be observed from the balconies of the apartments stacked above this one.
Russell murmured, “Dena, remind me to tell Dad the apartment is adequate.” He turned to the agent. “Mr. Shaw, remind me not to play poker with you. I never saw this coming.” Shaw preened. “What immortal fool gave this place up?”
The little neat man coughed discreetly. “The previous tenant was a gentleman of Peruvian extraction. He, uh, paid the first six months’ rent in advance, in cash, if you follow my drift. That was the last I ever saw of him. When the rent had gone two weeks unpaid and my letters and calls elicited no response, I entered the place. He had been gone for at least a month by then, I estimate. I have no idea how to locate him. I had to leave it for two more weeks before listing it—applying his security deposit against the rent, you see, in case he should return—but that was used up three days ago. I happen to owe a friend of your father’s a number of favours, and when he mentioned your situation to me…”
Russell smiled and shook his head. Given the rent asked, Shaw must owe Russell’s father’s friend some large favours indeed.
“You’ll be requiring the place for three months, am I right? Mrs. Grant, I understand you’ll be dancing here in New York?”
“Dena. Yes, at the Joyce, with Lisa Dann’s company.”
His right eyebrow rose, and his manner became subtly more respectful. “With Lisa Dann? Oh, I say! Really.” He squinted suddenly. “By God! May I ask, Mrs.—Dena—do you by any chance perform under the name ‘Dena St. Claire’?”
“Why yes, Mr. Shaw. My maiden name.”
“Oh do please call me David. Why then, I’ve heard of you. You worked with Miss Dann in the past, did you not?”
“A long time ago, yes,” Dena said, plainly tickled to death. “We studied together at Julliard.”
“I look forward to the opportunity to see you perform,” Shaw told her, and she thanked him.
Russell noticed that Jennifer looked just as proud as he was.
“Well,” Shaw said, “I expect that the first priority is to remove Mr. Figueroa’s belongings and have them put into storage.” The doorbell rang. “Oh good, that will be José. I told him to meet us. He’s your super—a very competent man.”
José turned out to be a short dark handsome seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican with long unruly curls and an air of cynical amusement. He measured Russell as they shook hands, and plainly decided to reserve judgment. His eyes went from Dena to Jennifer and back to Russell. “Please’ to make your acquaintance, Mist’ Grant.”
“Russell, José. Good to know you. Do you live in the building?”
“Up the street, I’ll give you the number. During the day I work in a discount place around the corner.”
They began packing up the previous occupant’s gear, while Shaw looked on and made helpful noises. Dena tackled the worst part, a fridge full of fungal cultures which had once been Peruvian foodstuffs. Jennifer attacked the bathroom, while José and Russell took the bedrooms.
“Nice clothes this bastid had,” José said, opening a closet and shaking out a large garbage sack. Russell glanced over; everything in the closet looked hideous to him. José seemed to be waiting for something. Suddenly Russell twigged. “Looks like he was about your size.”
“Yah.”
“The place where you’re going to store all this—”
“The basement.”
“—yeah. Junkies ever break in there, steal things?”
José grinned broadly. “All the time, man.”
“I can dig it.” Fascinating, Russell thought, the street talk, the inflections, all come back effortlessly. I sound like I never left the city. “I’ll decoy Shaw when you leave with the stuff.”
“Solid, man. You all right.”
“No sweat.” He began boxing up small items, radios and books and such. “You could maybe help me unload my ride?”
“You got it.”
Russell opened the top dresser drawer, and froze. José sensed it and came over. In the drawer, amid the expected items, was a Smith & Wesson 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, complete with a hundred rounds of ammunition.
“Motherfucker,” José whispered.
“Peruvian, you say he was.”
“Bet your fuckin’ A, man!” José was so excited he could barely keep his voice down. “Hey, that’s the steel-frame 559! That’s a good fuckin’ piece, man! Look here, he’s loadin’ hunner’twenny-fi’ grain hollow points in this bastid.”
“Heavy ammo?”
“Hey man, like it’s only nine millimeter, you know, but wit’ that hollow point you hit a stud and the slug blows up to about 70 fucking caliber, dig? Look, he had this fucker customized, see here? Hey, wit’ this piece you could kill a Buick down on the corner, no shit.”
“My.” Russell was not sure what to do.
“You found it, man, it’s your piece as far as I’m concerned. You want to sell it? I’ll give you five hundred cash, tonight.”
Russell owned no gun, had never expected to want to. But his drive through Harlem was on his mind. “No, José. I think I’ll hang on to it awhile.”
“That’s what I’d do, man.” José paused, undecided. Then: “Hey man, can I say something to you?”
Russell braced himself. “Go ahead.”
“Look, your wife, she’s black. I’m part black, all right? What I’m trying to say, there’s black people and there’s niggers, you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“I can see that little girl of yours is offa some other lady. But niggers see you walk by wit’ a black lady and a white kid, an’ it don’t look like she’s your housekeeper or somethin’, you gonna need that cannon, fuckin’ A.”
“Is it really that bad now, José? Last time I lived in New York, it was okay downtown anyway.”
“Some places, fine. Right on this block, no problem. A couple blocks in either direction, maybe. But you wanna see a play, maybe you better go there in a cab, all right? You wanna walk careful. This is a town full of angry niggers. They didn’t bust all of them Mau Maus, you know what I mean?”
“I’m hip.” Russell briefly narrated the story of his day’s events in Harlem.
“Woo-eee,” José said when he finished. “That Michael, he’s somethin’ else, you know?”
“You’ve heard of him.”
“Man, everybody that ain’t white is heard of that stud. You don’t see him on TV, he ain’t in the papers, but since he showed up, niggers don’t take no shit no more. Even black people don’t. You must be okay if Michael passed you. Man, you got shit-lucky, an’ that’s fuckin’ A.” He shook his head. “You better hide that piece before Shaw Nuff comes in.”
Russell barely had time to comply when Shaw did open the door. “Find anything interesting?”
“Yes,” Russell said, sifting through the rest of the top drawer. “Two passports in different names. Each with the same picture. A confirmation for a flight to Lima in a third name, two months ago.” He palmed the ammo box while Shaw was examining these. “Business cards for three different massage parlors.” He opened a bottom drawer. “Bingo.”
An attaché case, strong enough to withstand sledge or ax or even airport baggage handler, triple-locked.
José’s eyes lit up. Shaw blinked rapidly.
“José,” Shaw said, “that case had better not be missing from storage the next time I look for it.”
José tried to look wounded, and sensibly gave it up. “Mist’ Shaw—that guy prob’ly got himself shot down there. You know them Peruvians.”
Shaw looked tempted, but Russell’s presence clearly inhibited him. “No. What if he comes back?”
“Ah, shit. All right,” he added hastily. “You the boss.”
“Perhaps I’d better take charge of it personally. Junkies sometimes steal things from that cellar, don’t they?”
José shot Russell a disgusted look which Shaw did not see. “Yeah, well, you know, it been known to happen.”
“Yes. I’d better, uh…” He held out his hand, and reluctantly José gave him the case. He left the room with it.
José was angry. “Motherfucker gonna rip off what’s in there,” he whispered. “Then if the stud does come back he’ll lay it on me, you watch. I know him, man.”
Russell reached a decision. “José, look,” he murmured. “You’ve treated me right, and I’m driving Shaw home when we’re done here. In ten or fifteen minutes, could you come up with a case just like that one?”
José looked puzzled, and then his face split in a broad grin. “I told you, I work in a discount place. Lemme see, I gotta put something inside it for weight…”
“Epsom salts,” Russell said, and José’s grin got even bigger. “Maybe he’ll try and sell it,” he added, and the youth laughed out loud.
“You’re my man, Russell. You need anything, you got trouble, you come see me. I got a lot of friends.”
“You’ve got three more than you thought you had.”
After José had left, Russell examined his decision with mild astonishment. What in hell had possessed him to enter into a conspiracy to steal something of great value, probably drugs, with a Puerto Rican boy he had known for less than an hour? Russell was a law-abiding citizen of a law-abiding country. He did not so much as smoke pot. He filed honest tax returns. The most significant item he had stolen since adolescence was a kiss. It was not as though he had any reason to dislike Shaw. The man was a phony and a closet lush, but those were not grounds to steal what looked like being a sizable sum of money from the man. Why, Shaw had been particularly gracious to Dena, made her smile. And God knew that Russell, eight years retired at age forty-eight, did not need or especially want the money.
It was exactly the sort of puzzle which should have fascinated Russell; the inexplicable was, for him, one of life’s greatest delights. Whenever he caught himself behaving inexplicably, it was his custom to sit down and play with the mystery until he had it solved, like a child with a new Rubik’s Cube.
Got to get moving if I’m going to have a bed to sleep in tonight, he thought, and had forgotten his puzzle within ten seconds.
CHAPTER TWO
“Between 1900-1930, two and a quarter million Blackamericans left the farms and plantations of the South. Most of them emigrated to selected urban areas of the north—New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit being among the most popular destinations…[from 1910 to 1920], the black population in the North increased from a mere 75,000 to 300,000, an increase of 400%…
“One hundred Blackamericans were lynched during the first year of the Twentieth Century. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the figure stood at 1,100…
“Many industries sent agents into the South to lure the blacks north with promises of good jobs…it was a common practice for the agents to purchase tickets for whole families and to move them en masse for resettlement in the great industrial cities. The war had drained away the white manpower needed to build the ships, work the steel, pack the meat, and man the machines; and it had also cut off the normal supply of immigrant labor from Europe.
“After the war was over, the black man’s welcome wore thin…”
— C. Eric Lincoln,
The Black Muslims in America
“New York City’s population shifted as dramatically during the decade of the 1970’s as at any time in the history of the city.
“That is the conclusion of demographers…who have now had several months to study the first reports from the 1980 census.
“The figures provide a profile of a shrinking populace that nevertheless includes more old people and young adults, but markedly fewer children and teenagers.
“The figures show what may have been the largest exodus of New Yorkers in the city’s history…
“And they show a city where the traditional ‘minority groups’ are now close to being—if they have not already become—a majority of the population.”
— Michael Oreskes,
New York Times, Sept. 20, 1982
* * *
Dena turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Jennifer, honey, I think it’s time that you and I had a little talk.” I always knew we’d have to have this talk someday, she thought. Why didn’t I prepare?
“Mother,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose and pulling the blankets up to her chin, “we had that talk. Ages ago.”
“Not that talk. This one we’ve never had. Time we did.”
“Oh. That talk. About race, you mean.”
“Yes. After what happened uptown this afternoon, something has to be said.” Dena shifted uneasily. “I just don’t know what.”
“Me either.”
“Do you understand why those four boys were mad at us?”
“Because you’re married to a white man.”
“And because you’re white, and they thought you were my daughter.”
