Blood Count
Reggie Nadelson
Until last week the Red Cross, acting on orders from the services, refused to accept blood from Negro donors, although there is no physiologic difference between Negro and white blood plasma. Negroes, proud of Dr. Charles R. Drew who headed the Blood for Britain service, protested. Negro blood donations are now accepted, but the plasma will be segregated for exclusive use of Negro casualties.
Harlem, November 4, 2008-
Election Night
On a dark side street in Harlem, a silver van suddenly appears out of nowhere. Its wheels spinning, it seems to move with a life of its own, down the empty street, past the quiet brownstones and the old trees shedding their leaves.
I’ve been driving around for a while, looking for a place to park. Election night. A balmy Indian summer night in November. The sounds of the city getting ready to explode with joy, especially here in Harlem. Overhead, long beams from the arc lights on 125th Street play on the sky, the night lit up like day.
From somewhere close by comes the noise of celebration: shouting and laughter, fireworks, sparklers, music. From someplace, music-R amp;B, rap, Dixieland, all-enveloping-drifts through the open window of my car as I turn into 152nd Street, see an empty spot, cut across the street to grab it.
It’s tight. I back in sharp as I can, trying to fit my ancient Caddy, big boat of a car, into the space, and it’s only then I notice the van.
It comes from around the corner, comes up behind me after I’ve parked, I think. Gathering speed, it passes me, rolling down the hilly street toward Harlem River Drive.
Up here in Sugar Hill, on good days, if you’re high up in a tall building, you can see down the broad boulevards to the midtown skyline, almost down to Ground Zero, the hole in the city that’s still empty after seven years.
If I hadn’t found a spot to park that night, if I’d just given up, gone home, watched the election returns on TV, maybe none of it would have happened-not what happened then, not what followed six weeks later.
Parked now, I watch the van roll, seemingly out of control, as in a dream.
It’s new, a slick new Ford just out of a showroom, probably bought cheap now everything’s hitting the skids, car dealers selling off what they can, waiting for letters from Ford or Chrysler, or GM, telling them it’s all over, the good days gone, you’re done for, forget the ten, twenty, thirty-seven years we’ve been in business together.
Stop!
Why doesn’t the driver stop?
I can’t see a driver. It’s as if the van’s driving by itself, nobody in it, just a silvery box on wheels hurtling down to the river.
Maybe it’s the booze. I’ve been out drinking all evening, getting up enough nerve to come here, find a place to park, go over to the club on St. Nicholas Avenue. Is it the booze, a hallucination, this driverless ghost van that rolls by me faster and faster, in and out of the white pools cast by streetlights on a dark Harlem street?
But I know it’s real. I watch until it disappears around a corner as fireworks explode overhead.
S A T U R D A Y
CHAPTER 1
Who died?”
The night when I finished a case, closed it up, got the creep who killed pigeons in the park for pleasure-and the homeless guys who liked to feed them, I went to bed early, spent a luxurious hour in the sack drinking beer and watching a rerun of the Yanks’ 2000 World Series win on TV.
As I tipped over into sleep, I realized I’d forgotten to turn off my phone. When it rang a few hours later, still mostly asleep, I ignored it, until the voice on the answering machine crashed into my semiconscious brain.
“We got a dead Russian. Get yourself over here,” said the voice, and I wasn’t sure at first if it was real or I was trapped in that nightmare where you’re buried alive, pushing up on the coffin lid, hearing a phone ring, unable to get to it.
At the foot of the bed, the TV was still on-pictures of Obama in Chicago-and I realized I was safe at home in downtown Manhattan, and then the phone rang again. It was only Sonny Lippert.
“Who died, Sonny?” I was pissed off.
“Didn’t you get my message? I told you, a Russian,” he said. “Get your ass over here, man.”
“Not now.”
“Now,” he said. “Right now. My place.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Listen. Friend of mine uptown in Harlem, he needs some help, right? One of his detectives found a dead guy up in his precinct with some kind of Russian document stuck to him, skewered with a knife, like a shish kabob. He’s asking can I get it translated. Asked if I could call you.”
“Where is it?”
“What?’
“This document?”
“I have it.”
“So fax it over.”
“I want to do this in person,” said Sonny, and suddenly I knew he was lonely and wanted company.
“He’s white?”
“Who?”
“The dead guy.”
“Why?”
“You mentioned Harlem.”
“I told you, man, he’s Russian. Probably Russian.”
Still naked, I went and looked out the window and saw the light on in Mike Rizzi’s coffee shop. “I’ll buy you coffee, OK? Rizzi’s place,” I said.
I was surprised when Sonny said OK, he’d come over, couldn’t sleep anyhow. Sonny Lippert had been my boss on and off for a long time, right back to the day when he picked me out at the academy because I could speak languages, or at least that’s what he always says.
These days I humor him because of the past. He still drives me crazy some of the time, but we’re close now. He helped me with some really bad stuff last summer. When Rhonda, his wife, is away, he sits up alone until dawn reading Dostoyevsky and Dickens, listening to Coltrane, drinking the whiskey the doctor says will kill him.
Shivering, I went back to my bedroom. I yanked on some jeans and a sweatshirt, shoved my feet into a pair of ratty sneakers, grabbed a jacket and my keys, and headed downstairs, where it was snowing lightly, like confetti
