'None at all. Reverend O'Malley didn't have anything at all to do with Mr Michaux's group. In fact he didn't even like Lewis Michaux; I don't think he ever spoke to him.'
'Did it ever occur to you that Mr Michaux might not have had anything to do with Reverend O'Malley? Did you ever think that he might have known something about O'Malley that made him distrust O'Malley?'
'I don't think it was anything like that,' Bill contended. 'What reason could he have to distrust O'Malley? I just think he was envious, that's all. Reverend O'Malley thought he was too slow; he didn't see any reason for waiting any longer; we've waited long enough.'
'And you were intending to go back to Africa too?'
'Yes, sir, still intend to — as soon as we get the money back. You'll get the money back for us, won't you?'
'Son, if we don't, we're gonna raise so much hell they're gonna send us all back to Africa.'
'And for free, too,' Coffin Ed added grimly.
The young man thanked them and went back to stand with the others in the rain.
'Well, Ed, what do you think about it?' Grave Digger asked.
'One thing is for sure, it wasn't the syndicate pulled this caper- not the crime syndicate, anyway.'
'What other kinds of syndicates are there?'
'Don't ask me, I ain't the F.B.I.'
They were silent for a moment with the rain pouring over them, thinking of these eighty-seven families who had put down their thousand-dollar grubstakes on a dream. They knew that these families had come by their money the hard way. To many, it represented the savings of a lifetime. To most it represented long hours of hard work at menial jobs. None could afford to lose it.
They didn't consider these victims as squares or suckers. They understood them. These people were seeking a home — just the same as the Pilgrim Fathers. Harlem is a city of the homeless. These people had deserted the South because it could never be considered their home. Many had been sent north by the white southerners in revenge for the desegregation ruling. Others had fled, thinking the North was better. But they had not found a home in the North. They had not found a home in America. So they looked across the sea to Africa, where other black people were both the ruled and the rulers. Africa to them was a big free land which they could proudly call home, for there were buried the bones of their ancestors, there lay the roots of their families, and it was inhabited by the descendants of those same ancestors — which made them related by both blood and race. Everyone has to believe in something; and the white people of America had left them nothing to believe in. But that didn't make a black man any less criminal than a white; and they had to find the criminals who hijacked the money, black or white.
'Anyway, the first thing is to find Deke,' Grave Digger put voice to their thoughts. 'If he ain't responsible for this caper he'll sure as hell know who is.'
'He had better know,' Coffin Ed said grimly.
But Deke didn't know any more than they did. He had worked a long time to set up his movement and it had been expensive. At first he had turned to the church to hide from the syndicate. He had figured if he set himself up as a preacher and used his reward money for civil improvement, the syndicate would hesitate about rubbing him out.
But the syndicate hadn't shown any interest in him. That had worried him until he figured out that the syndicate simply didn't want to get involved in the race issue; he had already done all the harm he could do, so they left him to the soul-brothers.
Then he'd gotten the idea for his Back-to-Africa movement from reading a biography of Marcus Garvey, the Negro who had organized the first Back-to-Africa movement. It was said that Garvey had collected over a million dollars. He had been sent to prison, but most of his followers had contended that he was innocent and had still believed in him. Whether he had been innocent or not was not the question; what appealed to him was the fact his followers had still believed in him. That was the con-man's real genius, to keep the suckers always believing.
So he had started his own Back-to-Africa movement, the only difference being when he had got his million, he was going to cut out — he might go back to Africa, himself. He'd heard that people with money could live good in certain places there. The way he had planned it he would use two goons impersonating detectives to impound the money as he collected it; in that way he wouldn't have to bank it and could always keep it on hand.
He didn't know where these white hijackers fitted in. At the first glimpse he thought they were guns from the syndicate. That was why he had hidden beneath the table. But when he discovered they'd just come to grab the money, he had known it was something else again. So he had decided to chase them down and get the money back.
But when they had finally caught up with the meat delivery truck, the white men had disappeared. Perhaps it was just as well; by then he was outgunned anyway. Neither of his guards had been seriously hurt, but he'd lost one of his detectives. The wrecked truck hadn't told him anything and the driver of the truck that had run into them kept getting in the way.
He hadn't had much time so he had ordered them to split and assemble again every morning at 3 a.m. in the back room of a pool hall on Eighth Avenue and he would contact his other detective himself.
'I've got to see which way this mother-raping cat is jumping,' he said.
He had enough money on him to operate, over five hundred dollars. And he had a five-grand bank account under an alias in an all-night bank in midtown for his getaway money in case of an emergency. But he didn't know yet where to start looking for his eighty-seven grand. Some kind of lead would come. This was Harlem where all black folks were against the whites, and somebody would tell him something. What worried him most was how much information the police had. He knew that in any event they'd be rough on him because of his record; and he knew he'd better keep away from them if he wanted to get his money back.
First, however, he had to get into his house. He needed his pistol; and there were certain documents hidden there — the forged leases from the steamship line and the forged credentials of the Back-to-Africa movement — that would send him back to prison.
He walked down Seventh Avenue to Small's bar, on the pretense of going to call the police, and got into a taxi without attracting any attention. He had the driver take him over to Saint Mark's Church, paid the fare and walked up the stairs. The church door was closed and locked, as he had expected, but he could stand in the shadowed recess and watch the entrance to the Dorrence Brooks apartment house across the street where he lived.
He stood there for a long time casing the building. It was a V-shaped building at the corner of 138th Street and St Nicholas Avenue and he could see the entrance and the streets on both sides. He didn't see any strange cars parked nearby, no police cruisers, no gangster-type limousines. He didn't see any strange people, nothing and no one who looked suspicious. He could see through the glass doors into the front hall and there was not a soul about. The only thing was it was too damn empty.
He circled the church and entered the park on the west side of St Nicholas Avenue and approached the building from across the street. He hid in the park beside a tool shed from which he had a full view of the windows of his fourth-floor apartment. Light showed in the windows of the living-room and dining-room. He watched for a long time. But not once did a shadow pass before one of the lighted windows. He got dripping wet in the rain.
His sixth sense told him to telephone, and from some phone booth in the street where the call couldn't be traced. So he walked up to 145th Street and phoned from the box on the corner.
'Hellooo,' she answered. He thought she sounded strange.
'Iris,' he whispered.
Standing beside her, Grave Digger's hand tightened warningly on her arm. He had already briefed her what to say when O'Malley called and the pressure meant he wasn't playing.
'Oh, Betty,' she cried. 'The police are here looking for — '
Grave Digger slapped her with such sudden violence she caromed off the center table and went sprawling on her hands and knees; her dress hiked up showing black lace pants above the creamy yellow skin of her thighs.
Coffin Ed came up and stood over her, the skin of his face jumping like a snake's belly over fire. 'You're so goddamn cute — '
Grave Digger was speaking urgently into the telephone: 'O'Malley, we just want some information, that's — ' but the line had gone dead.
His neck swelled as he jiggled the hook to get the precinct station.
At the same moment Iris came up from the floor with the smooth vicious motion of a cat and slapped Coffin
