But Coffin Ed thought better. He pushed open the toolroom door and leaned inside, reaching for the light switch.
He never knew what hit him. Lights exploded in his head as though his brain had been dynamited right behind the eyes.
Grave Digger had just gotten the dial tone and had stuck his right index finger on the figure 7 when he heard the flat whacking sound made by the impact of a blunt instrument against a human skull. There could be no mistaking the sound; he had heard it often enough. He was moving, his head wheeling and ducking, before the sound of the following grunt reached his ears.
He never got around but his head had moved enough so that the bullet intended for his temple struck the guttapercha receiver in his left hand, shattered it but was deflected so that it merely burned a blister across the back of his neck.
The gunman was a marksman with a pistol. He was using a derringer with a sawed-off barrel and a silencer attached, similar to the one used by the gunman whom Uncle Saint had killed. At the sound of Coffin Ed opening the toolroom door, he had stepped from the boiler room into the corridor and had taken a bead on Grave Digger"s head, resting the meat side of his trigger hand in the crook of his raised left arm. But even the best of marksmen could miss with a one-shot gun, so he also held a .38-caliber police positive in his left fist as insurance.
Grave Digger"s left hand and the whole left side of his head went numb and he felt as though he had been kicked in the head by a mule. But he was not stunned. He erupted into motion like the snapping of a clock spring. He went down into a rolling plunge toward the open door of the janitor"s suite.
He wasn"t looking toward the gunman; his eyes, his mind, his straining muscles, and all his five senses were concentrating on escape. But somehow his mind retained the impression of a face-- a dead-white, death"s head face with colorless lips pulled back from small yellow teeth and huge deep-set eyes like targets on a pistol range: black b.a.l.l.s rimmed with a thin line of white about which were large irregular patches of black -- a hophead"s face.
The gunman straightened out his left arm and fired the police positive.
The bullet caught Grave Digger in his spin as he was turning on a long slant, almost horizontal to the floor. It went in underneath the left shoulder blade and came out three inches above the heart.
Grave Digger grunted once like a stuck hog and was knocked flat on his face. But he didn"t lose consciousness. He felt his face skidding across the slick cool surface of linoleum and he knew he had got inside the room. With a quick convulsive movement which consumed the last of his strength, he rolled over on his back like a cat turning in midair and kicked with his left foot toward the door, trying to close it. He missed it and his foot was in the air. His stabbing, desperate gaze went across it, and he found himself looking straight down the barrel of the police positive.
He thought fleetingly, without fear or regret, Digger, your number"s up.
That"s the last he knew.
Hopped to the gills, the gunman stalked forward on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet to place another slug in the absolutely motionless body, but the second gunman, standing by the toolroom, door, shouted, "For chrissakes, c.u.mmon, G.o.ddammit! Did you have to use that sonofab.i.t.c.hing cannon?"
The hopped-up gunman paid him no attention. He was intent on pumping another slug into his victim.
But suddenly a woman let out a scream. It was a scream of unbelievable volume and immeasurable terror. You could tell it was a colored woman screaming by the heart she put into it. It was the loudest screaming the hopped-up gunman had ever heard and it shattered his control like gla.s.s breaking.
He started to run blindly and without direction. He ran headlong into the second gunman, who grappled with him and they struggled furiously for a brief moment.
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, nerveshattering 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sed 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, Pithy knew if he acted stupid enough the average white man would pa.s.s him off as a harmless idiot.
The guard looked at Pithy 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 pa.s.senger luggage; porters don"t work here," the guard said.
"Ya.s.sah," 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 truth 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 antic.i.p.ate any difficulty in locating him among the throng. He gonna look like a fly in a gla.s.s of b.u.t.termilk, 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed. Pithy"s mind was cool and sharp from the four speedb.a.l.l.s he had loaded his veins with that morning.
He read the advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 Pica.s.so_
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 b.u.m from Hoboken.
He cut across the traffic lane and approached the old b.u.m.
"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 b.u.m looked up at him from rheumy eyes.
"Is what true, S am?" he said in a whiskey voice.
Pinky licked his purple lips with his big pith tongue. "Is it true all them white women shows theyself mother naked?"
The old b.u.m 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," Pithy said.
That gave the b.u.m an idea. He had been down there all morning hustling up trade among the truck drivers and longsh.o.r.emen, 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," Pithy said, helping the old b.u.m pull the boards up over his head.
The old b.u.m 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.
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 "licemen 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 cr, tensed and ready to take off.
"They"s plainclothes d.i.c.ks," 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 d.i.c.ks 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 13 7th 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 gla.s.ses. 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?" Pithy said angrily. "You going blind? Can"t you see I is Pithy?"