I walked most of the way to my bank before deciding I didn't have enough of Kim's advance left to necessitate formal financial transactions. I went to my hotel instead and paid half of the coming month's rent on account. By then I had only one of the hundreds intact and I cracked that into tens and twenties while I was at it.
Why hadn't I taken the full thousand in front? I remembered what I'd said about an incentive. Well, I had one.
My mail was routine— a couple of circulars, a letter from my congressman. Nothing I had to read.
No message from Chance. Not that I'd expected one.
I called his service and left another message just for the hell of it.
I got out of there and stayed out all afternoon. I took the subway a couple of times but mostly walked. It kept threatening to rain but it kept not raining, and the wind got even more of an edge to it but never did get my hat. I hit two police precinct houses and a few coffee shops and half a dozen gin mills. I drank coffee in the coffee shops and Coca-Cola in the bars, and I talked to a few people and made a couple of notes. I called my hotel desk a few times. I wasn't expecting a call from Chance but I wanted to be in touch in case Kim called. But no one had called me. I tried Kim's number twice and both times her machine answered.
Everybody's got one of those machines and someday all the machines will start dialing and talk to each other. I didn't leave any messages.
Toward the end of the afternoon I ducked into aTimes Square theater. They had two Clint Eastwood movies paired, ones where he's a rogue cop who settles things by shooting the bad guys. The audience looked to be composed almost entirely of the sort of people he was shooting. They cheered wildly every time he blew somebody away.
I had pork fried rice and vegetables at a Cuban Chinese place onEighth Avenue , checked my hotel desk again, stopped at Armstrong's and had a cup of coffee. I got into a conversation at the bar and thought I'd stay there awhile, but by eight-thirty I'd managed to get out the door and across the street and down the stairs to the meeting.
The speaker was a housewife who used to drink herself into a stupor while her husband was at his office and the kids were at school.
She told how her kid would find her passed out on the kitchen floor and she convinced him it was a yoga exercise to help her back. Everybody laughed.
When it was my turn I said, 'My name is Matt. I'll just listen tonight.'
Kelvin Small's is onLenox Avenue at127th Street . It's a long narrow room with a bar running the length of it and a row of banquette tables opposite the bar. There's a small bandstand all the way at the back, and on it two dark-skinned blacks with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed sunglasses and Brooks Brothers suits played quiet jazz, one on a small upright piano, the other using brushes on cymbals. They looked and sounded like half of the old Modern Jazz Quartet.
It was easy for me to hear them because the rest of the room went silent when I cleared the threshold. I was the only white man in the room and everybody stopped for a long look at me. There were a couple of white women, seated with black men at the banquette tables, and there were two black women
sharing a table, and there must have been two dozen men in every shade but mine.
I walked the length of the room and went into the men's room. A man almost tall enough for pro basketball was combing his straightened hair. The scent of his pomade vied with the sharp reek of marijuana. I washed my hands and rubbed them together under one of those hot-air dryers. The tall man was still working on his hair when I left.
Conversation died again when I emerged from the men's room. I walked toward the front again, walked slowly and let my shoulders roll.
I couldn't be sure about the musicians, but aside from them I figured there wasn't a man in the room who hadn't taken at least one felony bust.
Pimps, drug dealers, gamblers, policy men. Nature's noblemen.
A man on the fifth stool from the front caught my eye. It took a second to place him because when I knew him years ago he had straight hair, but now he was wearing it in a modified Afro. His suit was lime green and his shoes were the skin of some reptile, probably an endangered species.
I moved my head toward the door and walked on past him and out.
I walked two doors south on Lenox and stood next to a streetlamp. Two or three minutes went by and he came on out, walking loose-limbed and easy. 'Hey, Matthew,' he said, and extended his hand for a slap. 'How's my man?'
I didn't slap his hand. He looked down at it, up at me, rolled his eyes, gave his head an exaggerated shake, clapped his hands together, dusted them against his trouser legs, then placed them on his slim hips.
'Been some time,' he said. 'They run out of your brand downtown? Or do you just come toHarlem to use the little boy's room?'
'You're looking prosperous, Royal.'
He preened a little. His name was Royal Waldron and I once knew a black cop with a bullet head who rang changes through Royal Flush to Flush Toilet and called him The Crapper. He said, 'Well, I buy and sell.
You know.'
'I know.'
'Give the folks an honest deal and you will never miss a meal.
That's a rhyme my mama taught me. How come you uptown, Matthew?'
'I'm looking for a guy.'
'Maybe you found him. You off the force these days?'
