“We don’t know. He might; he might not. If you see him when you go in, you just grab him and yell for help.”
“I won’t need no help,” Roman declared.
“Yes, you will,” Coffin Ed said. “Because we don’t want him hurt. You just grab him and hold on to him and start yelling.”
“What if he tries to draw a pistol on me?” Roman wanted to know.
“If you hold him tight enough he’ll forget it.”
“I’s ready if you is,” Roman said.
“Okay,” Coffin Ed said. “We’re going to back up and park next door. When you hear me blowing on the horn one time long and twice short, you come on out.”
”Yes, sir, but I sure hope to see Mister Baron before that.”
“So do we, so do we,” Coffin Ed said.
Grave Digger leaned over the back of the seat, unlocked the handcuffs about Roman’s wrists and removed them.
“Okay, go ahead,” he said. “Just remember one thing. You might run, but you can’t hide.”
“I ain’t going to run,” Roman said.
They watched him walking in his rolling sailor’s gait back to the bronze door and stand looking at the knocker as though he didn’t know what to do with it. They saw him knock on the door with his knuckles.
“He must have never left his ship,” Coffin Ed observed.
Grave Digger grunted.
They saw the door open; a moment later they saw him go inside; they saw the door close. Coffin Ed started the motor and backed up the car.
Chapter 17
A black Cadillac limousine with scarcely any metal trimmings was parked on 134th Street, a few doors down from Clay’s Funeral Parlor, on the opposite side of the street. It might have been a funeral car judging from its somber appearance.
The motor was idling, but it couldn’t be heard. The defroster was on, the lights were off. The windshield wipers clicked back and forth.
George Drake sat behind the wheel, cleaning his fingernails with a tiny, gold-handled penknife. He was an ordinary-looking colored man of indeterminate age. Even the expensive dark clothes he wore looked ordinary on him. His only distinguishing features were his slightly popping eyes. He didn’t look bored; he didn’t look impatient; he didn’t look patient. He looked as though waiting for someone was his job.
Big Six sat beside him, picking his teeth with a worn whalebone toothpick. He looked enormous in a bright- tan belted polo coat and wide-brimmed black velour hat pulled low over his eyes. His pock-marked face looked oversized; he had big gaps between big stained teeth.
A white drunk staggered past in the ankle-deep snow. A dark felt hat, mashed out of shape as though he had stepped on it in the snow, was stuck precariously on the back of his head. Thick, coarse, straight black hair was plastered back from a forehead as low as that of the Missing Link. The blue-white face with its beetle-brows, high cheekbones, coarse features and wide, thin-lipped mouth looked part Indian. A dark blue overcoat smeared with snow on one side flagged open, showing a wrinkled, double-breasted, unstylish blue serge suit.
The drunk stopped suddenly, opened his trousers and began urinating on the right front fender of the Cadillac, teetering back and forth.
Big Six opened the window and said, “Push off, mother-raper. Quit pissing on this car.”
The drunk turned and peered at him through bloodshot black eyes. “I’ll piss on you, black boy,” he muttered in a Southern voice.
“I’m gonna see you do it,” Big Six said, stuck the toothpick in his change pocket and opened the door.
“Let him go on,” George Drake said. “Here comes Jackson down the stairs.”
“I’m gonna flatten him is all,” Big Six said. “Ain’t gonna take a second.”
In the right side mirror, George noticed two colored men coming from beside the house in front of which he was parked. They were carrying battered Gladstone bags like pullman porters on their way to work. They started across the street. The back window of the Cadillac was coated with snow, and he lost them in the rear-view mirror.
“Hurry up, man!” he called just as Big Six reached out a hand to clutch the drunk by the shoulder.
The drunk swung a long arc with his right hand, which he had held out of sight, and plunged the blade of a hunting knife through Big Six’s head. It went in above the left temple, and two inches of the point came out on a direct line above the right temple. Big Six went deaf, dumb and blind, but not unconscious. He teetered slightly and groped about aimlessly like an old blind man.
“Gooooodammmmm!” George Drake said, pushing open the door with his left hand, while reaching inside of his coat for his pistol with his right.
He had his left foot down on the street, buried in the snow, and his left hand gripping the edge of the door for leverage, when a noose was dropped over his head and he was jerked backward. A knee caught him in the back, and he felt as though his spine was broken. His hat fell off. The sap landed right above his left ear, and lights exploded in his head as he lost consciousness.
“Put him in the back,” the white man said from the other side, of the car. “And put the kiesters in the trunk.”
He turned his head, gave a last look at Big Six and forgot him.
Big Six was walking slowly down the sidewalk, dragging his feet in the snow. The wound bled scarcely any; a thin trickle ran down his cheek from where the point of the knife protruded. His eyes were open; his hat was on his head. But for the bone knife-handle sticking from one temple and two inches of blade from the other, he looked like the usual drunk. He was calling silently for George to help him.
The white man got into the back of the car and took hold of the end of the noose. One of the colored men got behind the wheel; the other was at the back, putting away the Gladstone bags.
A shining black hearse backed carefully from the garage beside the funeral parlor. It straightened up and pulled to the curb. A fat black man in a dark chauffeur’s uniform got out and closed the garage door. He looked across the street toward the Cadillac.
“Blink your lights once,” the white man said from the rear.
The driver hit the bright lights for an instant.
Jackson waved his right hand and got into the hearse.
The snowplows hadn’t got into the small side streets, and the hearse made slow progress until it came to Seventh Avenue. The Cadillac followed half a block behind with the lights dimmed.
The white man turned George Drake over on the floor, placed one foot on his back between the shoulder blades, the other on the back of his head, and drew the noose as tight as it would go. He kept it like that while the Cadillac followed down the cleaned traffic lane of Seventh Avenue and turned into 125th Street.
Scores of colored laborers, willing to pick up a few extra bucks on their off day, were shoveling the piles of snow into city dump trucks.
Cars were out again in the cleaned streets, and gay, laughing drunks were bar-hopping. Jokers were chunking tight, loose snowballs at their girl friends, who ran screaming in delight. A mail truck passed, emptying the boxes.
Big Six kept shuffling slowly toward Seventh Avenue with the knife stuck through his head. He passed a young couple. The woman gasped and turned ashy.
“It’s a joke,” the man said knowingly. “You can buy those things in the toy stores. Magical stuff. You stick ’em on each side of your head.”
The woman shuddered. “It ain’t funny,” she said. “A big grown man like him playing with kid stuff.”
He passed a woman with two children, on their way to the movies to see a horror film. The children shrieked. The woman was indignant.
