Dark Stain (10 page)

She smiled at him from her desk. “As fellow workers here you can call me Marian.”

He wondered if her crack about fellow workers meant that she regarded him as a Red. Her head pivoted towards the closed door in the partition, her throat pale cream brown in color, her shoulders fleshing solidly and handsomely into her neck. “Oh Mr. Clair,” she called. “Mr. Miller to see you.”

“Come in,” Clair said. Sam walked into the inner office and Clair smiled. “Any results? Come in. I have some real news.”

“What news?”

“Take those newspapers from that chair and make yourself comfortable, won’t you? Before I tell you my news, I would like to hear what you have to say.”

“I’m on the track. It’s a pretty broad track, Mr. Clair. First, I broke down the two leaflets and then I tried to see where they came from. Something like that radio program ‘Missing Heirs.’ I found four heirs, four men who had written stuff using the same sort of style.”

“Who are these men?”

“The Nazi Kalb who used to be in charge of Bundist camps. Congressman Patton. Rodney of Iowa. And a newspaperman called Manders who wrote for the yellow press, a brass-checker as Upton Sinclair described them. It’s not much. I’m not as good at research as I used to be in school. But Manders is out. He went to Germany just before Pearl Harbor. Kalb’s been interned quite a while — ”

“I believe you can eliminate the Congressman. Patton is too busy fighting the poll tax and speaking against Negroes for the Congressional Record to engage in any leaflet writing.”

“Eliminate Patton and we’re nowheres. I checked on Rodney and I found he’s still out in the corn belt. All we have is this Kalb-Manders-Patton-Rodney style. Somebody here in New York is copying that style.”

Clair picked up a pad scrawled with pencil notes, read them, put the pad to his left on the desk. He raised one admonishing finger at Sam. “Before I begin, Mr. Miller, I want to warn you against jumping to easy conclusions. We, who have been in Harlem for years are apt to be more cautious. I have been with the Harlem Equality League for eight years and I have a general perspective that you haven’t.” He again picked up the pad and read:

“ ‘Bars and grills reporting disturbances. The Sunshine Bar and Grill. The Lenox Bar. The Paddleford Bar. The Paradise Grill. Celtic Bar. Leone’s Bar. The Happy Hour Bar. Four Flags Bar and Grill.’ “ His phone rang. “Pardon me,” he said to Sam. “Yes, hello. Yes, this is Mr. Clair. Yes, yes. One minute.” He dug a yellow pencil from under a heap of newspaper clippings, pushed the pad in front of him, writing down what the voice on the telephone was saying. When he hung up, he nodded excitedly. “That was another one. The Aventine Grill.” He counted down on his pad. “Eleven Italian-owned bars have had disturbances this afternoon.”

“What kind of disturbances?” Sam asked. Clair wasn’t listening to him. “What kind of disturbances?”

“They were all the same. A Negro would go inside and shout that Negroes should not patronize Italian bars that refused to employ Negro help.”

“How do you know they’re all Italian?”

“They told me so. The names.”

“Who phoned just now?” Sam was sitting on the edge of his chair. He itched to grab the pad from Clair’s fingers and see for himself.

“The owner of the Aventine Grill, a Mr. Carlucci.”

“How come? I hope you don’t mind my questions but what I don’t know about Harlem or the methods of your organization’d fill a book. Why did Carlucci ring you and not the police?”

“He’s probably phoned the police, too. Why do they phone the Harlem Equality League?” He spoke formally as if at a forum. “We have been in Harlem fifteen years. Wide sections of the population are acquainted with our work. Tens of thousands have heard of our platform: ‘Better relations between white and Negro for the common good of the community’.” He tapped the pad with his pencil. “That’s why they phone us, white as well as black.”

“Have you spoken to any of these Italian bar owners?”

“To all of them.”

“I meant have you seen any of them to talk to?”

“Only Mr. Leone of Leone’s Bar. He was here at two o’clock.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Mr. Leone threatened me. He said I ought to stop ‘the bad colored’.” Clair grinned unhappily. And Sam, even though his nerves were tingling and the blood had rushed into his head, noticed that grin and fleetingly sympathized. Clair, too, was a scapegoat.

“We ought to see every one of these men, Mr. Clair. There’s a connection between these disturbances and the leaflets. The first leaflet attacks, to quote from memory, ‘Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes’.”

“I knew you would think that.”

“What else can you think? The first leaflet has two anti-Italian references.”

“I warned you not to jump to conclusions, Mr. Miller.”

“Eleven bars! The timing! It isn’t only one or two bars. But eleven. That’s disturbance organized. That’s fascism!”

“You do not understand Harlem,” Clair reproved him gently. “In addition you are minimizing the possibility of an accidental connection between the disturbances and the leaflets. How can you be positive that there is a direct causative connection? Please let me continue, Mr. Miller. I think that what I have to say may be of help. First of all, there has long existed a great deal of animosity on the part of many Negroes against the Italian-owned bars, who in the majority of cases do not hire Negroes. Many Negro trade union leaders, many ministers have spoken against this practice. Both of Harlem’s newspapers,
The People’s Advocate
only recently, have exposed these bars and their anti-Negro labor policy. Now, Mr. Miller, would you call these people and these newspapers fascistic? Let us not bandy that epithet so casually.”

“I see your point. But eleven grills. Would you mind if I copied your list? I’d like to talk to these people.” As Clair hesitated, Sam realized that this man with the Phi Beta key from Harvard still didn’t trust him completely. He was still a Harlem cop who had killed a Negro only one week ago. Blood was strong, as his father had raved last Monday night, and this white man who wasn’t a white man had no faith in him. “I don’t blame you for being worried about me, Mr. Clair. All you know about me is that Johnny Ellis was once a friend of mine. But I’m still a cop on leave of absence. You don’t know whether I’m on the level and I don’t know how to convince you. All I can say is trust me a little. As for these grills, I’d like to investigate them. I promise not to do anything without your okay.” Still Clair was silent. The late afternoon light poured through the window, flowing down the yellow enamel of Clair’s pencil. “Mr. Clair, it isn’t easy for me to come to you in the first place. It isn’t easy for me to do what I’m doing. A cop has a strong sense of discipline. It isn’t easy to be doing something no other cop has done. It isn’t easy to go after something that you can’t even see.”

“All right,” said Clair. “Copy my list. I’ll see you in the morning, Miller.” It was the first time he had discarded the “Mr.”

Sam wrote down the addresses of the bars, stood up, said goodnight and shut the door behind him. “Goodnight,” he said to Marian Burrow.

“One minute, Sam,” she said easily, smiling.

He paused, feeling giddy. The partition divided not only two offices but two emotional whirlpools and now it was as if he had plunged, without taking a breath, deep into the thoughts he had been thinking about her and had almost forgotten. “Yes?”

“I neglected to tell you when you came in. A Miss Buckles phoned while you were out. Said to be sure and ring her at her office. Said she’d be expecting your call.” The black eyes confronted him, one corner of the red mouth dimpling up slyly into the rounded cheek. “You can use the phone here.”

“Thanks. I’m busy. Goodnight.” Descending the stairs, he tried to come to some definite opinion about Marian Burrow. Was she on the make? Or was she just friendly? If she’d been a white girl would he have thought her on the make? But she wasn’t a white girl. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing about Negroes as human beings like himself. Absolutely nothing. All he had known were the statistics of a people: So many lynched. So many millions in tenements and cabins. So many in the spot news: Robeson, Yergan, Wright, Davis, Randolph, Louis. But what went on inside their hearts? They were like the inhabitants of a city he had never seen, a city read about, and now he had come to the gates. Downstairs, on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth, he stared at the passing Negroes, stirred by a tremendous groping curiosity. What were they all thinking of, hoping for, praying for?

He went into an ice-cream parlor, phoning Johnny at his place of work (for he had promised to ring Johnny about how he had made out with Clair) and then Suzy. He arranged to meet both of them in front of Grant’s Bar on Times Square. Johnny was working over-time and he told Sam that eight o’clock suited him fine; Sam told Suzy to go on home but she said he wasn’t getting rid of her as he had on Sunday; her voice was anxious when he mentioned the Italian bars; she said he ought to be careful. Sam hung up finally, rushing out of the ice-cream parlor. He could have picked some better mid-way point than Times Square, he thought. But it was too late now.

He walked west, never noticing the white faces in the going-home crowds, the Harlem Finns and Swedes, the Irish, Italians, Jews. There were only black faces; black women with linoleum shopping bags, roller-skating kids with bruised brown knees, laborers in work shoes crusted with plaster. He had boarded the crosstown street as a man gets on a subway, shuttling now between these Harlem flats and stores. And all these people? What did they want? How did they feel about the war when they were among themselves and no whites were listening?

On Seventh Avenue, Sam pushed into the Aventine Grill. He stepped to the bar, ordered a beer from a big Italian bartender with bushy black eyebrows. It was a small place, the walls painted olive green and decorated with the lithographs distributed gratis by the whiskey manufacturers. He was the only white customer, he observed. A half dozen or so Negroes were leaning on the bar, glasses at elbow. Sam winked at the bartender, who wiped his hands on his apron and slowly, his shoulders swinging, eased over. Sam said. “I want to talk to Mr. Carlucci.”

The bartender looked him over. “I’m him.” He spoke out of the corner of his mouth as if he had been reared in some Irish neighborhood.

“Are you the boss?”

“Who wants to know?”

Sam jerked his thumb towards the rear. Beyond a pinball game, there were a half a dozen tables with wire legs; at one of them a middle-aged man was sitting. “Is that the boss?”

“I ast you who wants to know?”

“The Harlem Equality League sent me over.”

“I guess it’s okay, mister. That’s the boss. He’s my uncle so we got the same name.” The bartender’s face, wooden and impersonal as a beer barrel suddenly opened two worried eyes. “Maybe you guys can do somethin’?”

Sam hurried over to Mr. Carlucci’s table. “You phoned the Harlem Equality League and they sent me over.”

Mr. Carlucci was thin and bald and he had a toothpick between his teeth. Without removing it, he said, “Yes?”

“We want to help you.”

“Yeh?”

“What happened?”

“You don’t look colored.”

“I’m not. I’m white.”

“You look like a wop like me?”

Sam smiled. “What happened, Mr. Carlucci?”

“But you work for the colored?”

“You could say that.”

“They must pay you good money?”

“What happened?”

“I don’t expect nothin’, mister. I don’t expect a single thing from nobody. Not from you, not from the cops. Didn’t I phone the station house and the desk sarge sends a cop over who guzzles three beers which I mark down on his account — ” He wrote on air with his forefinger. “Then, he blows out so a colored man here a good customer o’ mine, good as a white man, lemme tell you, he sees the cop guzzlin’ my beer and when the cop blows out, he says why don’t I get the Harlem Equalities.” He pronounced the name swiftly like the name of a ball team. “And I says who are they and he says they can help me. I don’t take his word, see. I’ll tell you the unvarnished, mister. I don’t take nobody’s word in Harlem so I call the desk sarge and I ask him about the Harlem Equalities and he say you’re Reds. See, mister, I tell you just how it is. But the desk sarge tells me you got influence among the colored and that’s good enough for me.” He had removed the toothpick and now glared up front at the Negroes at the bar. They would drink a beer or two or a small whiskey and leave and other Negroes would come in. It didn’t seem to Sam as if there had ever been any trouble. “I don’t expect a single thing, mister. That’s Harlem for you. Don’t I know how the colored feel about the wops? It’s been n.g. since the Doochay jumped on Selassie so they take it out on me. I’m Mussolini! A hell of a Mussolini I am! Maybe the colored gotta right with the big bars where there’s a dozen guys workin’ and all of ‘em white except maybe the porter who cleans out the can and all the dough, colored dough. But I’m a small joint like you see. The barkeep’s my nephew. Just the two of us. So what the hell they want of me?”

“Who started the trouble today?”

“Who you think? The colored.”

“I’m trying to get at the facts, Mr. Carlucci. What time was it?”

“About five o’clock it was. In comes this big nigger — ” He glanced at Sam. “It slipped the tongue, mister. You ain’t gonna hold it against me?”

“Go on.”

“There was about six guys at the bar like now. I never got it busy. This big colored begins to holler like a son-of-a-bitch. ‘Call yourself colored,’ he says or somethin’ like that. ‘Some colored you are,’ he says or something like that. ‘Drinkin’ in a wop dive.’ He calls this place a dive, the big bastard.”

“How big was he?”

“A six footer. Maybe bigger.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Like nothin’ much. A big face and he was wearin’ a dark suit.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said they wasn’t real Negroes but yellows — that was his wisecrack and he hollers about the killing of that nut Randolph last week. And me here, you know what I was doin’, of all the lamebrains! I was askin’ that guy to ack like a gennelman. Should’ve listened to my nephew who wanted to give’m the bottle. But what the hell, who wants to be the first to start a riot? Not me. He hollers some more that I gyp ‘em. I gyp ‘em! I keep the best beer. You don’t catch me givin’ the customer rubbin’ alky out of a bottle with a fancy label. I sell good stuff.”