It sang me a song I’d forgotten, about how a knife and a mystic liked to sit together in the grass beside the river when half-blown dandelions would catch his eyelashes and her flyaway hair. Silent for an hour, he would turn to her and, smiling, trace the V of cotton curls on her neck. Phyllis, he’d call her, sweet pea, all he ever needed to say.
And so, unwilling, I turned from the light.
Knives, knives, knives, wherever you look. But here, you got a heart and your lover does too and a spare one besides, to patch up the ones you’ve broken between you.
5
And then you’re twenty-one. It’s that dinner, Phyllis, that dinner we won’t let you forget. Victor’s invited you to some sort of parlay between him and the Barkley twins, heads of a smaller Harlem numbers bank. You know the Barkley brothers. You spent the summer of ’23 collecting single plays for them on 130th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenue. Bo Barkley had called you “Yellow Pea” and taught you memory tricks so you wouldn’t get caught with the incriminating strips under your garter. He liked our skills but he didn’t want to use you for them. Back then, you saw the value in that.
Bo recognizes you, though he plays it off. He doesn’t need no oracle to see what you’re doing, dressed up real fine, your stiff hair bobbed short, among all these white mobsters. He sees the knives you haven’t bothered to hide, strapped to the inside of your wrists, and his eyes say, clear as your mommy’s: “What do you think you’re up to, Phyllis Green?”
Victor and his gang only know Phyllis LeBlanc, nominally white and creole if pressed. The day they find Phyllis Green is the day they make her go for a swim in the East River. You know this, so you break Bo’s gaze and pretend to get a good look at Vic’s new place. Victor has bought this old gentlemen’s club in the West Village, the kind of joint filled with old Russian men smoking Cuban cigars and playing poker for pennies. He said he was going to make it the neatest blind pig in the Village. The Pelican, he’s calling it, a long bird that can hunt in high water. Tonight the place is half-gutted, an open surgery of exposed pipes and brick walls and thick beams they had to clear of cockroaches. But he has a table set up near the back, where he says his office will be.
Victor brags that his mother has made you all a real Russian home-cooked meal as you sit down. You’re across from Red Man, who looks bored in that way he has, so that no one around him can so much as slouch. You and Red Man are the same, though back in Harlem they like to say you pass and Red Man doesn’t pass for anything but terrifying. He’s part Cherokee and not particularly red, but different enough that folks have to mark it somehow. His real name is Walter Finch—you asked the first time you met—but it’s hard to call him plain Walter at times like this, when you are all tight and wired with violence.
The Barkley brothers are in their fifties but look twenty years younger, especially now, impeccably tailored in wide-legged and high-waisted suits of blue and sage green. They have matching silk in their pockets and Bo has a feather in his hat. Quentin and Bo aren’t identical, but it’s hard to tell when they’re tricked out like a matching set. You don’t get very far in the Harlem policy racket without a keen sense of style. Something that Victor, sadly, lacks. But then, white men always get twice the reward for a quarter of the work.
Which is why, it turns out, he’s invited them here tonight: Russian Vic’s had a good look at the money that “Negro pool” brings in, with its thousands of penny bets a day, and he wants in. The Barkleys have a respectable bank but it isn’t as big as Madame Stephanie’s or Casper Holstein’s. Victor wants it for the numbers, then, but also for the hookers, which it turns out is Quentin’s side of the business. You didn’t know that.
You feel, for a moment that is not nearly long enough, as young as you are.
After Mrs. Dernov has served you all her dumpling soup and scurried out like a rat from a sinking ship, Victor places his hands flat on the table with a force that startles everybody.
“So here’s how I see it. You fine brothers keep a percentage and run the operation, and I take my cut for protection. I also get my pick of the girls to set them up down here. There’s always a market for the mulattoes … I believe you people call them high yellow?”
You think—you’re not sure—that he glances at you as he says this. Just for a moment, a barely malicious slide across your freckles and wide nose, but it’s enough to make us clench and ease the knife from the left wrist holster. We’re ready to defend, but you’ve always been careful, and Victor’s gaze is now steady on Quentin and Bo. They are silent with outrage and fear. The brothers don’t have the experience to play with Vic, and he knows it. The numbers might be illegal, but they’ve never been mob business. Until now.
“Your cut,” Bo says, at last, in his best white-people voice. “And how much would that be?”
Victor fishes out a dumpling with his fingers and drops it in his mouth whole and chews, smiling all the while. Red Man shifts, very slightly, to his left. The knife slides the rest of the way out of your holster before you realize it. We know, even if you don’t, how this will end.
“I’m feeling generous,” says Russian Vic, around a half-chewed mouthful of stewed pork and beef. The brothers haven’t done
