There is a moment, in the airless gap left by Victor’s dangling verb, in which you think you won’t need us. Bo is too clever to fall for Victor’s jawed traps. Then Quentin speaks for the first time all evening:
“Outrageous. That’s extortion, not protection.”
Bo glances sharply at his brother and puts a restraining hand on his shoulder. “My brother means to say, that we’d like some time to consider your terms, and perhaps negotiate a little, no offense intended for your generous offer.”
Vic slides his greasy fingers into the broth again, puts another dumpling into that gaping maw. And you know. Victor never eats so much as before he gets to killing someone.
You look at Bo, straight at him. “Run,” you whisper.
He stands, he manages that much, but Quentin won’t budge, and so is an easy target when Victor nods and one of the men standing behind them shoots Quentin in the shoulder.
“Now, is that outrageous enough for you?” Victor says. “Because I can do more.”
Quentin roars; there’s no other word for it. He rocks the table as he pushes himself upright and Victor’s soup bowl spills over.
“We came here,” Quentin pants, clutching his arm, “in good faith. In good faith! We run a clean business—”
“Aside from the hookers and the numbers,” Victor says, very mildly. He picks a dumpling, split and leaking, from his lap. You swallow and feel every unchewed morsel of meat and dough in your stomach rise like the Euphrates.
Bo tugs again on his brother’s good arm, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off Victor. “We agree,” he says, and you hear every dirty curse he doesn’t use behind those soft words. “Now let us go home.”
You take a breath to speak into the silence that stretches across the table, but Red Man puts a finger on your knee, soft as a moth, and your voice falls away. You have a sudden vision of Bo as Jesus in an awful white man’s parody of the Last Supper, his brother on one side and his greatest enemy on the other, a man who would sup with him and then kill him, a man who has placed himself beyond God, beyond all covenants. The deal Victor’s offering them is an insult, and he knows it. He also knows they have no choice but to swallow the shit he’s serving them and thank massa for allowing them even half of the empire they built. After all, a black man’s labor is only his until a white man decides he wants it.
Victor breaks the silence. “Sit,” he says. “Sit, please. You haven’t finished your soup.” He smiles. It’s the first time you’ve seen that smile, though you will mark it more often over the years. It’s a smile that will grow sharper the more metal he folds into his jaw, but even now the holster of the five-inch knife is warming in your left palm. You keep your hands ready. We gave them to you for this kind of danger, after all.
But you don’t use our gift—that power. You’re terrified of that moment you defend them and Victor and Jack and the Body and every other white man at that table turns and sees Yellow Pea. Red Man already does, but you’ve always known that your colors are safe with him. So you wait. And we judge you for it, Phyllis, we make the first red mark in your ledger. Not for your first half-dozen kills, not even for pretending to be one of them, but for when you denied us our purpose, stilled our power and allowed great evil to pass on by.
The Barkley brothers sit. They don’t speak, though Quentin grunts occasionally as his blood soaks his fine suit jacket. What a waste of good tailoring, you think. We don’t judge you for this. We all cope in our own ways.
“Now,” Victor says, “I think we ought to make that split sixty-forty, what do you…”
“We agree,” Bo grits out.
“Good!” Victor says. “Let’s shake on it and you can be on your way.” He stands and reaches across the table to Quentin’s bloody right hand. Quentin yelps in pain when he catches it, which turns into a scream when Victor yanks him hard across the table, spilling the rest of your dinners into your laps. Vic pulls out his gun, a nickel-plated Colt .45, and smashes it three times across the back of Quentin’s head. Bone crunches like wet popcorn. Quentin convulses for a few seconds and then goes still. He is dead. Just like that, one of the finest numbers men in Harlem is dead and you did nothing to stop it.
Bo stands just where he is, unmoving, in shock. “Quin?” he whispers. “Brother?” But you know Bo knows he’s gone. “We had a deal,” he says.
Victor makes a show of wiping the wrong end of his gun. “Well, we do, but then you goddamn niggers just had to get up your noses. Now that won’t do. Won’t do for people to think Vic can get disrespected by a pair of know-nothing niggers.”
You and Bo flinch every time he says the word. Beside you, Red Man is as still as glass.
“So let’s say that your brother here is a … lesson? And you go back home about your business?”
Bo nods, nods again, looks at you—just for a second, but he does it, because he knows what you are and he is witness to your silence—and says, “Like hell I will, you ofay devil.”
His bullet grazes Victor’s neck. It’s the only one he has time to get off: first Jack, then Victor, bring him down with five body shots.
Victor walks around the table. Somehow Bo is still breathing.
“Red Man,” Vic says. His voice is shaky, like he’s just climaxed.
“Yes, Vic?”
“Tie him up. I want to take my time.”
You end it, then. Take us up when it’s too late to do much good and sink a three-inch knife precisely into Bo
